Really? What was the gap between Win95 and Win98? Between Win98 and Win2k? Between Win2k and XP? Let me give you a clue.
I'm not debating that Vista has taken a metric shit-load of time to drag itself to RTM (we didn't use to call Longhorn Longwait for no reason), but your assertion that each release takes longer than the last is demonstrably false.
there is really very little motivation for the average user to upgrade from XP to Vista
There's very little motivation (beyond not wanting to feel that their computer is old and out of date) for the average user to upgrade from any given OS to any other. Most people do not upgrade their OS, they upgrade their PC and use whatever OS comes with it. They upgrade their PC as and when they feel that their current one is too old and slow for their needs; that varies from person to person. Even some gamers are still using Win 98 (see Valve's survey, scroll down to/search for "Windows Version"), and gamers are the group most likely to upgrade their OS.
Is anyone else convinced that this will be the last version of Windows as we know it?
I'm not convinced that it will be, but I concede that it might be. Don't expect Windows to go anywhere any time soon though, it's far too popular (as much as we might hate it) and makes MS far too much money for that to happen.
Oh, wait, then MS forces you to upgrade your system if you want to maintain system security and stability...
Security I'd almost give you, if I wasn't sat behind a hardware firewall and savvy enough not to use IE or Outlook and to not download and run untrusted executables, but stability? You think my XP install gets more unstable with passing time and the only way to stabilise it is with a patch?
Sure, some people's installs do, but that's not due to a lack of patches...
We have machines at work running NT server that are stable and that have never been compromised, despite that being several generations out of date. By your logic, they should be permanently rooted and crashing all the time.
Software isn't like people, it doesn't get progressively more infirm the older it gets. I'll forgive you not realising that, given your high uid...;)
if we're going to get editorial comments, can they at least make sense?
I'd settle for them being made down here with the rest of us commoners, where they can live or die on their own merits, rather than being made up there, in the lofty heights of The Summary, untouchable and unaccountable.
Will Vista really use IPv6, or an "extended" IPv6-like protocol with patented MS extensions?
How the hell would they do that? This is something that routers and other networking hardware needs to support, they can't just lock it up tight and sit back laughing at everyone. Unless they plan on selling their own networking gear, you wouldn't even be able to setup local networks of Vista machines, let alone connect them to the Internet (which is the whole point of this).
I really enjoy when morons talk about Slasdhot as though it were a single entity, rather than a group of distinct people, with different opinions, and different viewing habits.
And I really don't enjoy it when "morons" speak as though there aren't clearly identifiable, often-repeated themes in accepted article submissions, comments and moderation.
No, there is no single, coordinating intelligence behind any of this. But when you see essentially the same comments posted to every story, always moderated up to +5, you have to admit that there is a large degree of common consensus at work. There must be - by your own assertion, it is likely different people doing it each time.
There is no single Slashdot entity, but there most certainly is a high degree of groupthink here.
Yeah, I'd noticed that. Also, almost every article about MS is tagged fud, notfud, itsatrap and notatrap, most of the political articles are tagged fud and notfud. Nice to see I'm not the only one getting annoyed that people seem to be using tags as comments. Mind you, is it really surprising? The "editors" have been using the article summary to make comments for years.
But stated as is, it too easily implies an immoral component to the act of downloading per se
I'm not sure I agree with that. Yes, of course that's one interpretation of it, but there's also the fact that porn use tends to be a private and (for many people) embarrassing thing; thus, not the sort of thing that most people would want to do in public. More than that, though, most workplaces explicitly disallow it; in that sense, given that viewing porn at work may well result in you being disciplined or even fired, I'd say that "porn at work == bad" is perfectly valid (apart from the typical programmer's misuse of "==")
The GDP is the Gross domestic product. The grand total. The maximum.
Yes, the maximum current product. The actual one. Not what is theoretically achievable if all able-bodied persons were working; as you yourself mention, they're not.
So, you shut down all non-essential industries, disband the police, reduce the armed forces to a minimum level required to keep civil order and conscript every single available able-bodied person (including the unemployed, students, prisoners, etc) to work on this grand project. Money is irrelevant, you don't pay these people with anything but the essentials to survive and remain healthy and able to work. Likewise those working in the essential support services are paid similarly.
I freely admit that I'm economically naive, but I wasn't taking about economics, I was talking about turning every able-bodied person to the service of this one, great work. Given that in any community there is a percentage of the population that is capable of working but doesn't for some reason (prisoners, the unemployed, students, etc), it should be possible to devote greater than the GDP to the project.
I'll grant you that such a situation is unlikely, but assuming the will and the need are there, there's nothing impossible about it. It also requires a self-sufficient community (as you have no money to import goods you yourself cannot produce), but the OP spoke of the global GDP, and the planet is clearly self-sufficient in this respect.
You're thinking too small, and are clearly too set in your money-driven ways. That's not an insult, incidentally; money is such a pervasive aspect of our society that you're no different to any of us (myself included - it would have to be one hell of a project to convince me to join in willingly).
you'd spend more than the world GDP, i.e., it's impossible
That doesn't make it impossible, that just means that people would be unwilling to do it. If you could somehow persuade or coerce them into doing it, it could be done. You just wouldn't be able to pay for it.
There's a ton of non-violent crimes out there. If we are not to imprison these folks how else are we to deal with them?
Fine them? Make them do a stint of unpaid community work? Subject them to a curfew? If appropriate, compel them to attend some sort of rehabilitation/education course? (eg force someone who is habitually drunk and disorderly to attend Alcoholic's Anonymous)
A dozen or so big corporations can not come up with a PC, sold now, that will be adequately functional/exciting with the operating system sold next year.
Oh rubbish. Vista Beta 2 ran just fine on the PC I built myself from components in February.
unfortunately, this is "brit-think" like the TV Tax.
It's a licence, not a tax, and a lot of people over here don't like it either. I actually don't mind; it's only about a tenner or so a month, and personally I think it's almost worth it for Dr Who, let alone the rest of the BBC's output.
Slashdotters are murderous genocidal maniacs in that book;-)
They're worse than that - the amusica virus is a work of pure evil if you ask me. Personally though, I found the slashdot name-dropping to be somewhat grating. (Also, "an alliance of progressive thinkers"? Has Reynolds ever actually read slashdot?)
it must be fairly difficult to venture out in public without being "ON CAMERA"
Utterly trivial in rural areas, pretty easy even in the large cities - for example, I live in London (just), and there are no CCTV cameras in my area at all. Go 10 miles west, into the centre of London, and sure, there are loads; I used to pass about 14 on the 5 minute walk from the Tube station to my office (then the office moved, and the number dropped).
Being infected by spyware and adware, however, relies on the security of the browser
No it doesn't; plenty of trojans install spyware and/or adware, no exploits required. (Remember Kazaa?)
I've read that Internet Explorer 7 has been decoupled from the shell
I don't know all the details, but certainly if you type a URL into Windows Explorer after installing IE 7, rather than handling it itself (and morphing into IE), it launches the system default browser to handle it. So if I type "http://slashdot.org" into Windows Explorer, Firefox opens the page.
this "virus" proof-of-concept that does nothing more than show that it can be appended to a file. It doesn't spread, and has no vector for propagation.
No vector for automatic propagation, perhaps. I'm old enough to remember viruses back in the days before the Internet and email, though, when they were spread via infected floppies. Hell, just the other week there were stories here about a McDonalds flash-based mp3 player that shipped with a virus, and another about an infected batch of iPods.
No vector for propagation? I wouldn't be so sure if I were you.
I can't comment on that, as I didn't reassign.xml on my home machine (where I have installed IE 7 but use FF 2.0), and I don't think it's reassigned.htm[l].
On the other hand though, after installing it if you type in a URL to the address bar in Windows Explorer (eg http://slashdot.org/ rather than morphing into IE as it did with IE 6, it launches your default browser (so in my case, the URL is opened in a new tab in my existing FF browser, or a new FF browser window if I didn't have one open).
No, I would rather they download FireFox or Opera than use IE.
So would I, but IE's rendering engine is used by a lot more than just IE itself, and so an IE vulnerability is potentially exploitable via other applications. Given that it's hard to imagine how IE 7 could be less secure than IE 6, I'd much rather people used FF or Opera *and* installed IE 7.
And we all know how honest companies like MS are in pointing facts like that out.
As are we. Every time a story is posted on slashdot about FF download numbers, there's a huge bunfight about whether or not downloads equals users, with lots of people arguing about how people download it once and install it on many PCs versus people who download it and never install it versus over-counting of reinstalls and upgrades as unique installs, etc.
I doubt very much that MS will say "IE 7 has X million users"; they'll say "IE 7 has been downloaded X million times" and leave the "but that doesn't really say a lot about how many people are actually using it" unsaid, just as the article summaries for FF download numbers here do.
What reason do you have to believe that this version will be more secure?
None at all, and I made no such claim. However, it has been demonstrated time and again that IE 6 is not secure, and given that IE 7 is being pushed out as a high priority upgrade, we can expect updates for IE 6 to cease at some point in the not too distant future. I'd say that upgrading is the least bad option.
And how am I, an experienced IT engineer, going to tell them that they need to install every other high-priority patch except this one? Am I gonna tell them Microsoft is lying in just this one case?
Slashdot Mirror
it takes more time for a release
Really? What was the gap between Win95 and Win98? Between Win98 and Win2k? Between Win2k and XP? Let me give you a clue.
I'm not debating that Vista has taken a metric shit-load of time to drag itself to RTM (we didn't use to call Longhorn Longwait for no reason), but your assertion that each release takes longer than the last is demonstrably false.
there is really very little motivation for the average user to upgrade from XP to Vista
There's very little motivation (beyond not wanting to feel that their computer is old and out of date) for the average user to upgrade from any given OS to any other. Most people do not upgrade their OS, they upgrade their PC and use whatever OS comes with it. They upgrade their PC as and when they feel that their current one is too old and slow for their needs; that varies from person to person. Even some gamers are still using Win 98 (see Valve's survey, scroll down to/search for "Windows Version"), and gamers are the group most likely to upgrade their OS.
Is anyone else convinced that this will be the last version of Windows as we know it?
I'm not convinced that it will be, but I concede that it might be. Don't expect Windows to go anywhere any time soon though, it's far too popular (as much as we might hate it) and makes MS far too much money for that to happen.
Oh, wait, then MS forces you to upgrade your system if you want to maintain system security and stability...
;)
Security I'd almost give you, if I wasn't sat behind a hardware firewall and savvy enough not to use IE or Outlook and to not download and run untrusted executables, but stability? You think my XP install gets more unstable with passing time and the only way to stabilise it is with a patch?
Sure, some people's installs do, but that's not due to a lack of patches...
We have machines at work running NT server that are stable and that have never been compromised, despite that being several generations out of date. By your logic, they should be permanently rooted and crashing all the time.
Software isn't like people, it doesn't get progressively more infirm the older it gets. I'll forgive you not realising that, given your high uid...
like, say... microsoft windows... you start using it and then you are locked in and have to pay taxes to the software company for the rest of time
Damn, so that's where all my money's going - I've been paying a fee to MS all these years!
Oh, wait, no I haven't, it's a one-off payment...
How can they? The whole point is that he's not a Windows user, and was claiming a refund as he had no intention of using it.
if we're going to get editorial comments, can they at least make sense?
I'd settle for them being made down here with the rest of us commoners, where they can live or die on their own merits, rather than being made up there, in the lofty heights of The Summary, untouchable and unaccountable.
Will Vista really use IPv6, or an "extended" IPv6-like protocol with patented MS extensions?
How the hell would they do that? This is something that routers and other networking hardware needs to support, they can't just lock it up tight and sit back laughing at everyone. Unless they plan on selling their own networking gear, you wouldn't even be able to setup local networks of Vista machines, let alone connect them to the Internet (which is the whole point of this).
I really enjoy when morons talk about Slasdhot as though it were a single entity, rather than a group of distinct people, with different opinions, and different viewing habits.
And I really don't enjoy it when "morons" speak as though there aren't clearly identifiable, often-repeated themes in accepted article submissions, comments and moderation.
No, there is no single, coordinating intelligence behind any of this. But when you see essentially the same comments posted to every story, always moderated up to +5, you have to admit that there is a large degree of common consensus at work. There must be - by your own assertion, it is likely different people doing it each time.
There is no single Slashdot entity, but there most certainly is a high degree of groupthink here.
Yeah, I'd noticed that. Also, almost every article about MS is tagged fud, notfud, itsatrap and notatrap, most of the political articles are tagged fud and notfud. Nice to see I'm not the only one getting annoyed that people seem to be using tags as comments. Mind you, is it really surprising? The "editors" have been using the article summary to make comments for years.
Like that's ever stopped anyone here.
But stated as is, it too easily implies an immoral component to the act of downloading per se
I'm not sure I agree with that. Yes, of course that's one interpretation of it, but there's also the fact that porn use tends to be a private and (for many people) embarrassing thing; thus, not the sort of thing that most people would want to do in public. More than that, though, most workplaces explicitly disallow it; in that sense, given that viewing porn at work may well result in you being disciplined or even fired, I'd say that "porn at work == bad" is perfectly valid (apart from the typical programmer's misuse of "==")
The GDP is the Gross domestic product. The grand total. The maximum.
Yes, the maximum current product. The actual one. Not what is theoretically achievable if all able-bodied persons were working; as you yourself mention, they're not.
So, you shut down all non-essential industries, disband the police, reduce the armed forces to a minimum level required to keep civil order and conscript every single available able-bodied person (including the unemployed, students, prisoners, etc) to work on this grand project. Money is irrelevant, you don't pay these people with anything but the essentials to survive and remain healthy and able to work. Likewise those working in the essential support services are paid similarly.
I freely admit that I'm economically naive, but I wasn't taking about economics, I was talking about turning every able-bodied person to the service of this one, great work. Given that in any community there is a percentage of the population that is capable of working but doesn't for some reason (prisoners, the unemployed, students, etc), it should be possible to devote greater than the GDP to the project.
I'll grant you that such a situation is unlikely, but assuming the will and the need are there, there's nothing impossible about it. It also requires a self-sufficient community (as you have no money to import goods you yourself cannot produce), but the OP spoke of the global GDP, and the planet is clearly self-sufficient in this respect.
You're thinking too small, and are clearly too set in your money-driven ways. That's not an insult, incidentally; money is such a pervasive aspect of our society that you're no different to any of us (myself included - it would have to be one hell of a project to convince me to join in willingly).
you'd spend more than the world GDP, i.e., it's impossible
That doesn't make it impossible, that just means that people would be unwilling to do it. If you could somehow persuade or coerce them into doing it, it could be done. You just wouldn't be able to pay for it.
There's a ton of non-violent crimes out there. If we are not to imprison these folks how else are we to deal with them?
Fine them? Make them do a stint of unpaid community work? Subject them to a curfew? If appropriate, compel them to attend some sort of rehabilitation/education course? (eg force someone who is habitually drunk and disorderly to attend Alcoholic's Anonymous)
But copyright infringement isn't; just being non-commercial won't necessarily save it, if infringement is indeed taking place.
A dozen or so big corporations can not come up with a PC, sold now, that will be adequately functional/exciting with the operating system sold next year.
Oh rubbish. Vista Beta 2 ran just fine on the PC I built myself from components in February.
unfortunately, this is "brit-think" like the TV Tax.
It's a licence, not a tax, and a lot of people over here don't like it either. I actually don't mind; it's only about a tenner or so a month, and personally I think it's almost worth it for Dr Who, let alone the rest of the BBC's output.
Slashdotters are murderous genocidal maniacs in that book ;-)
They're worse than that - the amusica virus is a work of pure evil if you ask me. Personally though, I found the slashdot name-dropping to be somewhat grating. (Also, "an alliance of progressive thinkers"? Has Reynolds ever actually read slashdot?)
And don't forget, would-be Conspirators, they don't even hang, draw and quarter people any more!
it must be fairly difficult to venture out in public without being "ON CAMERA"
Utterly trivial in rural areas, pretty easy even in the large cities - for example, I live in London (just), and there are no CCTV cameras in my area at all. Go 10 miles west, into the centre of London, and sure, there are loads; I used to pass about 14 on the 5 minute walk from the Tube station to my office (then the office moved, and the number dropped).
Being infected by spyware and adware, however, relies on the security of the browser
No it doesn't; plenty of trojans install spyware and/or adware, no exploits required. (Remember Kazaa?)
I've read that Internet Explorer 7 has been decoupled from the shell
I don't know all the details, but certainly if you type a URL into Windows Explorer after installing IE 7, rather than handling it itself (and morphing into IE), it launches the system default browser to handle it. So if I type "http://slashdot.org" into Windows Explorer, Firefox opens the page.
this "virus" proof-of-concept that does nothing more than show that it can be appended to a file. It doesn't spread, and has no vector for propagation.
No vector for automatic propagation, perhaps. I'm old enough to remember viruses back in the days before the Internet and email, though, when they were spread via infected floppies. Hell, just the other week there were stories here about a McDonalds flash-based mp3 player that shipped with a virus, and another about an infected batch of iPods.
No vector for propagation? I wouldn't be so sure if I were you.
Who cares why they're doing it? Newsflash - few if any companies do anything out of the goodness of their hearts, everything is profit motivated.
I can't comment on that, as I didn't reassign .xml on my home machine (where I have installed IE 7 but use FF 2.0), and I don't think it's reassigned .htm[l].
On the other hand though, after installing it if you type in a URL to the address bar in Windows Explorer (eg http://slashdot.org/ rather than morphing into IE as it did with IE 6, it launches your default browser (so in my case, the URL is opened in a new tab in my existing FF browser, or a new FF browser window if I didn't have one open).
No, I would rather they download FireFox or Opera than use IE.
So would I, but IE's rendering engine is used by a lot more than just IE itself, and so an IE vulnerability is potentially exploitable via other applications. Given that it's hard to imagine how IE 7 could be less secure than IE 6, I'd much rather people used FF or Opera *and* installed IE 7.
And we all know how honest companies like MS are in pointing facts like that out.
As are we. Every time a story is posted on slashdot about FF download numbers, there's a huge bunfight about whether or not downloads equals users, with lots of people arguing about how people download it once and install it on many PCs versus people who download it and never install it versus over-counting of reinstalls and upgrades as unique installs, etc.
I doubt very much that MS will say "IE 7 has X million users"; they'll say "IE 7 has been downloaded X million times" and leave the "but that doesn't really say a lot about how many people are actually using it" unsaid, just as the article summaries for FF download numbers here do.
What reason do you have to believe that this version will be more secure?
None at all, and I made no such claim. However, it has been demonstrated time and again that IE 6 is not secure, and given that IE 7 is being pushed out as a high priority upgrade, we can expect updates for IE 6 to cease at some point in the not too distant future. I'd say that upgrading is the least bad option.
And how am I, an experienced IT engineer, going to tell them that they need to install every other high-priority patch except this one? Am I gonna tell them Microsoft is lying in just this one case?
Why do you say they're lying?