I upgraded to Vista, and downgraded as soon as I discovered the the DirectSound HAL was history and had taken EAX with it.
Only two of my friends upgraded to Vista, they both downgraded. One did go to XP x64, however.
I run a small-business network of around 20 PCs. You will *never* see Vista on it. I know Microsoft don't care about a small-business network, but still, its more likely that you'll see Kubuntu in the near future.
I remember XP's release. At the time, I was running 2000 and all my friends were running 98SE. They all jumped on XP because it was a move from the '95 branch of Windows to the NT branch - it offered a dramatic improvement. I swore by 2000 and promised never to upgrade. In the end, I did upgrade because XP booted faster, ran faster, didn't require petabytes of service packs (at the time) and provided a few new features.
Compared to 98, XP offered a whole new operating system. It was built on the NT fork of Windows, it featured *real* user accounts, it supported NTFS.
Compared to 2000, XP was a marked improvement. It booted incredibly fast, it ran fast. It featured some genuinely useful improvements in the U.I. It even offered a nice visual refresh (which we all disabled).
Compared to XP, Vista offers nothing more than Aero. It boots incredibly slowly, it runs slowly, it requires awesome hardware. It is a "regression" in many senses of the word - i.e. features have been removed. One of them is EAX, my pet gripe. Instead, it offers security-by-multiple-annoying-padlocks: UAC and defender. (Not real security but you hope there's enough layers to annoy any crooks into leaving.) It offers an *interesting* visual refresh: Aero.
Microsoft *should* have taken XP and removed the cruft: everything that's not the operating system. (Firewall, IE, MSN apps, messenger, etc.) They should have optimized some code to give it a performance boost and added Aero, which is a nice idea. Their new, controversial memory manager could, arguably, have found its way into the OS. DirectX 10 should have been added, but the regressions from DirectX 9 should not. Basically, they should have made a good, bare-bones OS: Windows + notepad + calculator + nothing else.
Once they had polished up their bare-bones OS, they should have taken the features that were removed from the OS and turned them into bolt-on applications: Microsoft Firewall, Microsoft Antivirus, MSN Suite, Microsoft Internet Explorer etc. These should be bought separately. Each of these should be fully-functional applications that can only be used as a bolt on to the bare-bones OS.
Consider a corporate: they would buy lots of OS licenses. A corporate would probably be running hardware firewalls, so they wouldn't buy the firewall. They would buy the antivirus, if it was good. A home user might buy the firewall in addition to the other two. I would only buy the bare OS. This product structure would be perfect for everyone. It would even satisfy the competition courts.
It's entirely possible that 2008 *will* be the year of the Linux desktop. Here's why:
1. KDE 4.0.
2. Resolution (hopefully) of the ongoing Open XML vs. ODF debate will (hopefully, again) lend some might to the OpenOffice.org front, thus removing the last remaining hurdle in the Linux-in-the-office track.
3. Ubuntu 8.4 *will* be influential. It will either sink the distro or cement its position as the most usable Linux distro - ever.
4. Windows Vista will continue to hurt Microsoft by annoying big corporates. Phasing out XP will do untold damage.
I'm really interested in Firefox 3, but ZDNet's review is weak.
Firstly, it's mainly screenshots - OF THE INSTALLER.... and Amazon.com. Anyone qualified to review a top browser would know that people want to see Web 2.0 applications and web standards tests, not Amazon.com!
Secondly, this guy chooses IE 7 over Firefox 2.0 - that immediately casts doubt on his judgement and tells me that he knows absolutely *nothing* about web standards or web development.
Lastly, he writes his article trying to explain what's NEW in Firefox 3 and proceeds to list several features that have always been there, like efficient text search within a page, zooming and download resuming, not to mention the security features and warnings.
If his ramblings do actually have a point, why hasn't he given any details of the new or changed features, instead of just enumerating features that were already there?
In my opinion, he saw Firefox 3.0 as a cheap trick to earn some reads. Verdict: Publicity Whore.
One has to wonder why the publishers didn't release the book under the GNU FDL in the first place. The book is a printed material. The GNU FDL doesn't change that. Copying physical books is not a common activity and, when it does occur, is usually done by penny-less students who only need a few pages to study for a test. I doubt that many people who fall into the intended target market for this book would bother to stand over a photo-copier for hours, even if it were legal - they'd just buy a copy.
Perhaps the publisher didn't *read* the license and assumed that the material was "free as in free beer." If that's the case, they deserve to pay for their ignorance, let alone the insult to the free community of the intarweb.
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I upgraded to Vista, and downgraded as soon as I discovered the the DirectSound HAL was history and had taken EAX with it. Only two of my friends upgraded to Vista, they both downgraded. One did go to XP x64, however. I run a small-business network of around 20 PCs. You will *never* see Vista on it. I know Microsoft don't care about a small-business network, but still, its more likely that you'll see Kubuntu in the near future. I remember XP's release. At the time, I was running 2000 and all my friends were running 98SE. They all jumped on XP because it was a move from the '95 branch of Windows to the NT branch - it offered a dramatic improvement. I swore by 2000 and promised never to upgrade. In the end, I did upgrade because XP booted faster, ran faster, didn't require petabytes of service packs (at the time) and provided a few new features. Compared to 98, XP offered a whole new operating system. It was built on the NT fork of Windows, it featured *real* user accounts, it supported NTFS. Compared to 2000, XP was a marked improvement. It booted incredibly fast, it ran fast. It featured some genuinely useful improvements in the U.I. It even offered a nice visual refresh (which we all disabled). Compared to XP, Vista offers nothing more than Aero. It boots incredibly slowly, it runs slowly, it requires awesome hardware. It is a "regression" in many senses of the word - i.e. features have been removed. One of them is EAX, my pet gripe. Instead, it offers security-by-multiple-annoying-padlocks: UAC and defender. (Not real security but you hope there's enough layers to annoy any crooks into leaving.) It offers an *interesting* visual refresh: Aero. Microsoft *should* have taken XP and removed the cruft: everything that's not the operating system. (Firewall, IE, MSN apps, messenger, etc.) They should have optimized some code to give it a performance boost and added Aero, which is a nice idea. Their new, controversial memory manager could, arguably, have found its way into the OS. DirectX 10 should have been added, but the regressions from DirectX 9 should not. Basically, they should have made a good, bare-bones OS: Windows + notepad + calculator + nothing else. Once they had polished up their bare-bones OS, they should have taken the features that were removed from the OS and turned them into bolt-on applications: Microsoft Firewall, Microsoft Antivirus, MSN Suite, Microsoft Internet Explorer etc. These should be bought separately. Each of these should be fully-functional applications that can only be used as a bolt on to the bare-bones OS. Consider a corporate: they would buy lots of OS licenses. A corporate would probably be running hardware firewalls, so they wouldn't buy the firewall. They would buy the antivirus, if it was good. A home user might buy the firewall in addition to the other two. I would only buy the bare OS. This product structure would be perfect for everyone. It would even satisfy the competition courts.
It's entirely possible that 2008 *will* be the year of the Linux desktop. Here's why: 1. KDE 4.0. 2. Resolution (hopefully) of the ongoing Open XML vs. ODF debate will (hopefully, again) lend some might to the OpenOffice.org front, thus removing the last remaining hurdle in the Linux-in-the-office track. 3. Ubuntu 8.4 *will* be influential. It will either sink the distro or cement its position as the most usable Linux distro - ever. 4. Windows Vista will continue to hurt Microsoft by annoying big corporates. Phasing out XP will do untold damage.
I'm really interested in Firefox 3, but ZDNet's review is weak.
Firstly, it's mainly screenshots - OF THE INSTALLER.... and Amazon.com. Anyone qualified to review a top browser would know that people want to see Web 2.0 applications and web standards tests, not Amazon.com!
Secondly, this guy chooses IE 7 over Firefox 2.0 - that immediately casts doubt on his judgement and tells me that he knows absolutely *nothing* about web standards or web development.
Lastly, he writes his article trying to explain what's NEW in Firefox 3 and proceeds to list several features that have always been there, like efficient text search within a page, zooming and download resuming, not to mention the security features and warnings.
If his ramblings do actually have a point, why hasn't he given any details of the new or changed features, instead of just enumerating features that were already there?
In my opinion, he saw Firefox 3.0 as a cheap trick to earn some reads. Verdict: Publicity Whore.
One has to wonder why the publishers didn't release the book under the GNU FDL in the first place. The book is a printed material. The GNU FDL doesn't change that. Copying physical books is not a common activity and, when it does occur, is usually done by penny-less students who only need a few pages to study for a test. I doubt that many people who fall into the intended target market for this book would bother to stand over a photo-copier for hours, even if it were legal - they'd just buy a copy. Perhaps the publisher didn't *read* the license and assumed that the material was "free as in free beer." If that's the case, they deserve to pay for their ignorance, let alone the insult to the free community of the intarweb.