From what I've seen Windows 7 has lower system requirements than Windows Vista did. Also, even cheap computers come with 4GB of memory. Windows 7 runs well on netbooks. You are not forced to build your own computer--you can go out and buy the cheapest laptop or desktop (possibly even most netbooks) and I will guarantee that it will run Windows 7.
You are just full of shit.
Umm it is hugely so. RHEL 7 years (by your figures, I have never looked myself). XP will have security fixes until 2014, placing it at around 13 years. Almost double of RHEL.
I pray to the gods of streaming video that Netflix doesn't follow suit! I hate running flash on my machine, it is such a performance dog. In fact, I and millions of other people regularly click on the view now button, and are rewarded with a stellar viewing experience that is capable of streaming high-quality videos (not that other products aren't capable of such)!
Many millions are able to really enjoy their full netflix service because of their common sense in recognizing that it is OK to install Silverlight on their computers. It does not have a separate updater always running (Flash does) but rather uses the one that comes with Windows. It works in multiple browsers on multiple platforms. If Hulu and the MLB can stream full length movies with Silverlight, I recommend to all of my friends to join in the party! And we all watch more movies on whichever service we want because we aren't fools that don't install Silverlight because of some personal bias against Microsoft!!
I remember turning this feature on in Windows Me. It says it is on by default in Vista, but for some reason not working for me ATM (due to Aero Basic?). Also is present in Windows 7.
How much would it cost to fill a 500GB HDD with $10 small-ISV-built apps at 100MB each? About $4900 more than the HDD. Does that make it OK to pirate software that you don't own?
Think about if people were getting the results of your productivity without paying (assuming you are a programmer in the above example).
Since you are comparing Office 2003 and (I assume) the latest version of OO.o, you are comparing two products that came out 6 years apart from each other. Good job.
Now try something more up-to-date like Office 2007 and we'll talk. Oh wait, you probably won't be able to resist flaming the ribbon like 99% of Slashdot users. I can't wait until OO.o copies it.
If you are installing Steam on a new PC, you can even copy the game data from another PC if you don't want to wait for the download. (I do wish they'd make this a bit clearer/easier though...)
You do know that there's a "Backup" feature, right?
Yes, Outlook does support that craptastic IMAP protocol. And indeed, it is one of the worst IMAP clients of them all.
However, my point was in support of the original post I was replying to, where it was posited that "You will almost never ever be able to get a company to drop Microsoft Exchange/Outlook or Windows Server if they use it currently."
Now your quote: "So his argument to support Exchange proprietary protocol instead of IMAP is that supposedly different clients don't act like Outlook does when talking to Exchange server."
Precisely, that there will be tough time had by all trying to migrate from an Outlook/Exchange solution. I merely added details of why one might find it difficult to make that happen. Because things are different. Because there is a mix of different behaviors. Because the experience is not as "nice".
You will almost never ever be able to get a company to drop Microsoft Exchange/Outlook or Windows Server if they use it currently.
And this is because there isn't an equivalent protocol that is as slick as Outlook connected to an Exchange server. Sure, you have your IMAP, but every mail client is a little different; some mark things as deleted, some move messages to a local deleted messages folder, some move them to a server deleted messages folder, etc.
And then you have Outlook. Everything is kept in server folders, which are synced all of the time (barring settings for the otherwise). E-mail is pushed to you within a second of the server getting it. Send a message and you are instantly done--no waiting for the client to connect to the server--it then sends in the background.
Synced calendars, room scheduling, task lists, delegated mailbox permissions, RSS feeds, damn I love Outlook/Exchange. Even Outlook Web Access 2007 is good...it blows the doors off of ANY webmail client I've ever seen, and a good number of client applications too. Guess what, I don't even have to bitch about it not working in full featured mode with Firefox because I use IE7 all the time.
I've been drinking the Kool-Aid, and MAN IT SURE IS GOOD. Just stop being jealous and enjoy it yourself.
Your Windows list is padded, and your Linux list leaves out security prompts. Here are my lists:
Windows 1. Go to site. 2. Download file. 3. Run file. 4. Next, next, next. (Reboot?) 5. Enjoy.
Linux 1. Open Synaptic, search for program. (If you are experienced you will know whether you need xxxx program or xxxx-dev program, etc...just saying that sometimes it is unclear which one you need, sure Windows can have the same problem too on occasion.) 2. Check program, hit install. 3. To be fair, should probably have downloading time in here too. 4. Enjoy.
Both include security prompts, as UAC is pretty much equivalent to needing to authenticate as root to launch Synaptic.
As for never having problems with dependencies, here is one I had. Installing a driver for an Elo Touch touchscreen, it needs to run a program that depends on LibMotif to install. Now if you have ever tried on Debian Etch to install LibMotif or OpenMotif or whatever it's called, you will know that the package is not listed anywhere as the maintainer went missing or someone decided it wasn't "free" enough or some other shit that I don't really care about when I want to get a touchscreen working. Then someone decided that they should be clever and write lesstif, which is a supposed substitute but didn't work. And I really just want my damn libxm.so.3 or whatever which comes with OpenMotif. So I finally find a place to download if from some other non-free repository, but it's from a different version of Debian so running it from the desktop doesn't work (dependency on libc6 or some other such crap, that version of Debian evidently has some different version of libc6 and can't get the new one, so basically is DLL-Hell all over again, something Windows hasn't had for 8 years). End up getting package to install using dpkg, yet another command to uselessly memorize when I could just be running setups by double-clicking them.
Touchscreen drivers finally install, yay I'm up and rolling. Go to install other package in Synaptic, well wouldn't you know it detects that invalid version of OpenMotif. So now to add any other packages it seems I have to fix my broken OpenMotif thing, and it seems the only way it wants to fix it is to remove it. So I remove it, all seems good. Now reboot a little which later, wouldn't you know my touchscreen isn't calibrated correctly and the screen resolution has changed! Fix screen resolution by rebooting again since it was still "set" in the GUI to 1680x1050 correctly (WTF????) and try to calibrate screen but now OpenMotif is gone so it complains.
Granted I am a Windows "expert" and not that great at Linux, but this is just HELL to figure out. And so is trying to get Anjuta set up to compile GLADE C++ programs. I spent over 2 hours tracking down dependencies and still didn't get a program to compile. Sure it works fine if you know the magic combination of apt-get install GCC++ or some damn package, but there are so many gcc and cpp packages that it is BIZARRE. Sure Visual Studio takes up several gigs and takes 1/2 hour to install, but at least I don't have to go around on hands and knees for 2 hours begging for a bunch of different packages that I don't even know what they are for.
And some people say that Linux has excellent support forums and Windows has crappy support that have to pay Microsoft for. My experience is that Linux is decent forums-wise but Windows is FAR FAR better. Rarely do I have an issue that isn't on Google already, but details on Linux things seem to be much thinner. And the damn linux ones always (mostly) have crappy message navigation, where you have to click "Next in Thread" to see the replies, and I don't even know if I'm seeing every reply...what if there is a reply to a reply?...couldn't they just be setup like a simple forum or something less annoying?
So it doesn't have 2008 year-long profits listed outright, but you can see they are talking ~$15 billion revenue per quarter and ~$15 billion profit per year.
DOS ran fine on a 286 also...maybe we didn't need any fancy toys like a Pentium II 266MHz. (Disclaimer: I was only about 6 years old in the 286 era, so may have missed some minor detail in the prior sentence. Point still stands though.)
Secondly, there ARE applications that can use more than one core. Games, Photoshop, video encoding, damn you are a troll and I fell for it.:(
You ever buy anything from Red Hat, Novell, IBM, Intel, Oracle, Google, HP, or Cisco? Those are some the companies doing a lot of the Linux kernel development (https://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/linuxkerneldevelopment.php). Someone is giving those companies money to pay the people that write kernel code.
So in the end you are paying for it. What's that? Your total spending on that sort of thing is insignificant? Well when Coca-Cola goes down to IBM and buys some servers, they are spending your money to buy those servers. And so it goes with virtually any product.
Linux costs money to build too, and someone has to pay for it.
So IE7, which has been out for 2.25 years. Also, I actually had to install Silverlight on a new Windows 7 machine today and it took less than 10 seconds and did not even require a page refresh. YMMV.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_7 should help you find something of value. Fact is there are hundreds of new features, and adding features in SPs is rarely done due to application compatibility issues. Oh yeah, and because it costs money to develop new features, so they have to make some money by selling a new OS.
There is no reason. Use what OS you want to, and I will use what OS I want to. If I believe Windows is worth the money, then I can pay it. You are free to think it's not worth the money and not use it.
It sounds like you have a very special use case and things which don't affect normal users are causing problems for you. Due to this it might be worth some customization effort by you, including turning off Superfetch and indexing services.
It only took ~6GB when I installed it. 7 ran quite well on 512 MB RAM. Turns off defragmenter for SSDs More efficient SSD formatting Boot from VHD CableCARD and H.264 support built-in MP4, MOV, 3GP, AVCHD, ADTS, M4A, and WTV multimedia containers, with native codecs for H.264, MPEG4-SP, ASP/DivX/Xvid, MJPEG, DV, AAC-LC, LPCM, AAC-HE UAC is way better--less prompts Windows Biometric Framework DNSSEC support Powershell built in Can burn ISOs Wordpad supports OOXML and ODF Libraries Federated Search via OpenSearch Re-arrange things on taskbar...yes you can make it look almost exactly like the Vista taskbar if you want. Jump Lists WinKey+Arrow Key for moving applications to one half of the monitor or the other Touch integration
Yes a lot of these things can be had on Linux/through 3rd party programs. But now they are included in the OS, which 99% of the time means less problems/slowness/crashes. And developers can count on them to be there.
Well I'm not sure what policy they were using, but I would suggest that locking down the desktop by running a script every time a user logs in to change the NTFS permissions on their newly created profile (or roaming profile or whatever) would ABSOLUTELY prevent them from writing to the desktop.
Unless you got admin privileges to change those permissions I doubt you would have much success writing to that folder. And any computer can be hacked given physical access and time, so your ERD Commander point is irrelevant.
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From what I've seen Windows 7 has lower system requirements than Windows Vista did. Also, even cheap computers come with 4GB of memory. Windows 7 runs well on netbooks. You are not forced to build your own computer--you can go out and buy the cheapest laptop or desktop (possibly even most netbooks) and I will guarantee that it will run Windows 7. You are just full of shit.
Umm it is hugely so. RHEL 7 years (by your figures, I have never looked myself). XP will have security fixes until 2014, placing it at around 13 years. Almost double of RHEL.
I pray to the gods of streaming video that Netflix doesn't follow suit! I hate running flash on my machine, it is such a performance dog. In fact, I and millions of other people regularly click on the view now button, and are rewarded with a stellar viewing experience that is capable of streaming high-quality videos (not that other products aren't capable of such)!
Many millions are able to really enjoy their full netflix service because of their common sense in recognizing that it is OK to install Silverlight on their computers. It does not have a separate updater always running (Flash does) but rather uses the one that comes with Windows. It works in multiple browsers on multiple platforms. If Hulu and the MLB can stream full length movies with Silverlight, I recommend to all of my friends to join in the party! And we all watch more movies on whichever service we want because we aren't fools that don't install Silverlight because of some personal bias against Microsoft!!
I can't beleive this...
I remember turning this feature on in Windows Me. It says it is on by default in Vista, but for some reason not working for me ATM (due to Aero Basic?). Also is present in Windows 7.
How much would it cost to fill a 500GB HDD with $10 small-ISV-built apps at 100MB each? About $4900 more than the HDD. Does that make it OK to pirate software that you don't own?
Think about if people were getting the results of your productivity without paying (assuming you are a programmer in the above example).
So maybe each employee that is affected should vote. Clearly Microsoft would win, and clearly this is fair representation.
Look, people are using an 8 YEAR OLD OPERATING SYSTEM and saying it rocks instead of switching to A BRAND NEW FREE OPERATING SYSTEM.
Yes, Microsoft is on it's last knees indeed.
Since you are comparing Office 2003 and (I assume) the latest version of OO.o, you are comparing two products that came out 6 years apart from each other. Good job.
Now try something more up-to-date like Office 2007 and we'll talk. Oh wait, you probably won't be able to resist flaming the ribbon like 99% of Slashdot users. I can't wait until OO.o copies it.
Lucky for them, there will likely be more support calls for help with Linux than there ever was with Microsoft.
I keep around a copy of the Unix Hater's Handbook. http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf
If you are installing Steam on a new PC, you can even copy the game data from another PC if you don't want to wait for the download. (I do wish they'd make this a bit clearer/easier though...)
You do know that there's a "Backup" feature, right?
Yes, Outlook does support that craptastic IMAP protocol. And indeed, it is one of the worst IMAP clients of them all.
However, my point was in support of the original post I was replying to, where it was posited that "You will almost never ever be able to get a company to drop Microsoft Exchange/Outlook or Windows Server if they use it currently."
Now your quote: "So his argument to support Exchange proprietary protocol instead of IMAP is that supposedly different clients don't act like Outlook does when talking to Exchange server."
Precisely, that there will be tough time had by all trying to migrate from an Outlook/Exchange solution. I merely added details of why one might find it difficult to make that happen. Because things are different. Because there is a mix of different behaviors. Because the experience is not as "nice".
Few who are close to the size of Microsoft or have been around for so long.
You will almost never ever be able to get a company to drop Microsoft Exchange/Outlook or Windows Server if they use it currently.
And this is because there isn't an equivalent protocol that is as slick as Outlook connected to an Exchange server. Sure, you have your IMAP, but every mail client is a little different; some mark things as deleted, some move messages to a local deleted messages folder, some move them to a server deleted messages folder, etc.
And then you have Outlook. Everything is kept in server folders, which are synced all of the time (barring settings for the otherwise). E-mail is pushed to you within a second of the server getting it. Send a message and you are instantly done--no waiting for the client to connect to the server--it then sends in the background.
Synced calendars, room scheduling, task lists, delegated mailbox permissions, RSS feeds, damn I love Outlook/Exchange. Even Outlook Web Access 2007 is good...it blows the doors off of ANY webmail client I've ever seen, and a good number of client applications too. Guess what, I don't even have to bitch about it not working in full featured mode with Firefox because I use IE7 all the time.
I've been drinking the Kool-Aid, and MAN IT SURE IS GOOD. Just stop being jealous and enjoy it yourself.
Your Windows list is padded, and your Linux list leaves out security prompts. Here are my lists:
Windows
1. Go to site.
2. Download file.
3. Run file.
4. Next, next, next. (Reboot?)
5. Enjoy.
Linux
1. Open Synaptic, search for program. (If you are experienced you will know whether you need xxxx program or xxxx-dev program, etc...just saying that sometimes it is unclear which one you need, sure Windows can have the same problem too on occasion.)
2. Check program, hit install.
3. To be fair, should probably have downloading time in here too.
4. Enjoy.
Both include security prompts, as UAC is pretty much equivalent to needing to authenticate as root to launch Synaptic.
As for never having problems with dependencies, here is one I had. Installing a driver for an Elo Touch touchscreen, it needs to run a program that depends on LibMotif to install. Now if you have ever tried on Debian Etch to install LibMotif or OpenMotif or whatever it's called, you will know that the package is not listed anywhere as the maintainer went missing or someone decided it wasn't "free" enough or some other shit that I don't really care about when I want to get a touchscreen working. Then someone decided that they should be clever and write lesstif, which is a supposed substitute but didn't work. And I really just want my damn libxm.so.3 or whatever which comes with OpenMotif. So I finally find a place to download if from some other non-free repository, but it's from a different version of Debian so running it from the desktop doesn't work (dependency on libc6 or some other such crap, that version of Debian evidently has some different version of libc6 and can't get the new one, so basically is DLL-Hell all over again, something Windows hasn't had for 8 years). End up getting package to install using dpkg, yet another command to uselessly memorize when I could just be running setups by double-clicking them.
Touchscreen drivers finally install, yay I'm up and rolling. Go to install other package in Synaptic, well wouldn't you know it detects that invalid version of OpenMotif. So now to add any other packages it seems I have to fix my broken OpenMotif thing, and it seems the only way it wants to fix it is to remove it. So I remove it, all seems good. Now reboot a little which later, wouldn't you know my touchscreen isn't calibrated correctly and the screen resolution has changed! Fix screen resolution by rebooting again since it was still "set" in the GUI to 1680x1050 correctly (WTF????) and try to calibrate screen but now OpenMotif is gone so it complains.
Granted I am a Windows "expert" and not that great at Linux, but this is just HELL to figure out. And so is trying to get Anjuta set up to compile GLADE C++ programs. I spent over 2 hours tracking down dependencies and still didn't get a program to compile. Sure it works fine if you know the magic combination of apt-get install GCC++ or some damn package, but there are so many gcc and cpp packages that it is BIZARRE. Sure Visual Studio takes up several gigs and takes 1/2 hour to install, but at least I don't have to go around on hands and knees for 2 hours begging for a bunch of different packages that I don't even know what they are for.
And some people say that Linux has excellent support forums and Windows has crappy support that have to pay Microsoft for. My experience is that Linux is decent forums-wise but Windows is FAR FAR better. Rarely do I have an issue that isn't on Google already, but details on Linux things seem to be much thinner. And the damn linux ones always (mostly) have crappy message navigation, where you have to click "Next in Thread" to see the replies, and I don't even know if I'm seeing every reply...what if there is a reply to a reply?...couldn't they just be setup like a simple forum or something less annoying?
End Linux/Microsoft rant.
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/microsoft-profit-boosted-vista-office/story.aspx?guid={46D585CE-B7D5-4F18-A19F-7EA2202FC200}
So it doesn't have 2008 year-long profits listed outright, but you can see they are talking ~$15 billion revenue per quarter and ~$15 billion profit per year.
DOS ran fine on a 286 also...maybe we didn't need any fancy toys like a Pentium II 266MHz. (Disclaimer: I was only about 6 years old in the 286 era, so may have missed some minor detail in the prior sentence. Point still stands though.)
Secondly, there ARE applications that can use more than one core. Games, Photoshop, video encoding, damn you are a troll and I fell for it. :(
You ever buy anything from Red Hat, Novell, IBM, Intel, Oracle, Google, HP, or Cisco? Those are some the companies doing a lot of the Linux kernel development (https://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/linuxkerneldevelopment.php). Someone is giving those companies money to pay the people that write kernel code.
So in the end you are paying for it. What's that? Your total spending on that sort of thing is insignificant? Well when Coca-Cola goes down to IBM and buys some servers, they are spending your money to buy those servers. And so it goes with virtually any product.
Linux costs money to build too, and someone has to pay for it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Silverlight#Compatibility
So IE7, which has been out for 2.25 years. Also, I actually had to install Silverlight on a new Windows 7 machine today and it took less than 10 seconds and did not even require a page refresh. YMMV.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_7 should help you find something of value. Fact is there are hundreds of new features, and adding features in SPs is rarely done due to application compatibility issues. Oh yeah, and because it costs money to develop new features, so they have to make some money by selling a new OS.
There is no reason. Use what OS you want to, and I will use what OS I want to. If I believe Windows is worth the money, then I can pay it. You are free to think it's not worth the money and not use it.
It sounds like you have a very special use case and things which don't affect normal users are causing problems for you. Due to this it might be worth some customization effort by you, including turning off Superfetch and indexing services.
It only took ~6GB when I installed it.
7 ran quite well on 512 MB RAM.
Turns off defragmenter for SSDs
More efficient SSD formatting
Boot from VHD
CableCARD and H.264 support built-in
MP4, MOV, 3GP, AVCHD, ADTS, M4A, and WTV multimedia containers, with native codecs for H.264, MPEG4-SP, ASP/DivX/Xvid, MJPEG, DV, AAC-LC, LPCM, AAC-HE
UAC is way better--less prompts
Windows Biometric Framework
DNSSEC support
Powershell built in
Can burn ISOs
Wordpad supports OOXML and ODF
Libraries
Federated Search via OpenSearch
Re-arrange things on taskbar...yes you can make it look almost exactly like the Vista taskbar if you want.
Jump Lists
WinKey+Arrow Key for moving applications to one half of the monitor or the other
Touch integration
Yes a lot of these things can be had on Linux/through 3rd party programs. But now they are included in the OS, which 99% of the time means less problems/slowness/crashes. And developers can count on them to be there.
Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_7#Core_operating_system
Well I'm not sure what policy they were using, but I would suggest that locking down the desktop by running a script every time a user logs in to change the NTFS permissions on their newly created profile (or roaming profile or whatever) would ABSOLUTELY prevent them from writing to the desktop. Unless you got admin privileges to change those permissions I doubt you would have much success writing to that folder. And any computer can be hacked given physical access and time, so your ERD Commander point is irrelevant.