Let me guess. It works perfectly fine in IE 9 but they will say go buy our product again at version x and it will mysteriously work! I see double dipping on this as it gives a financial incentive to lie and claim you need to purchase again in order to use the latest browser etc.
Its free to play in November. Of course that means you need to pay for certain gear. But try it again then? They added to new dungeons too in the end. Mid level not so much though
PVP still bites ass. For example every class has the ability to knock someone down. Tanks should have resistance to that and not every class should have that ability. But it is improving little by little.
The whinners take issue is it was not as good as wow on opening day nor as mature so they left. EA then fires everyone and forces the 2 co owners out. The fact that the servers now can handle much more people show that it was not optimized yet. The merging was done quick as name conflicts happened and caused more people to leave.
The question is will these users go back or did 65% of the people leave and hate it and never will come back. I still feel mid level lag in SWTOR is better than in WOW. However, it was fun to see new lands and places in Wow. In swtor it didn't matter as your ship could take you anywhere. They should have limited this to systems nearbye and hyper drive improvements could have you go further and further when you level but it is still the same old crap.
Dude if I had $5 million I would probably not work again. Maybe do things for fun or get a PHD for the hell out of it, but with that kind of money it is best to sit back in your new mansion in Vail and play them all day long with tons of hookers around by the swimming pool serving you cavier.
SWTOR still has over a million subscribers and those who wine played for 1 week and noticed it did not have 8 years of tuning that Wow had and left. It is a new game for crying out loud and it does have new things like storylines, companions, and feels more like an interactive movie than pointless quests to grind in wow. My imperial agent wants to hunt down The Eagle for killing Darth Jadas, my Sith Jaguarnut wants to find this new apprientice who can discover spies fast! That is just chapter 1 stuff.
In wow, its kill 12 boars for a liver pie... (What does taht have to do with my storyline?) Oh thats right wow characters have no storyline at all until WOTLK. No goals. Some may disagree and do not find that appealing and that is fine but give SWTOR for being different.
SWTOR now has a dungeon finder and is balancing out in pvp. It is improving just like early wow did and I highly encourage slashdotters reading this to try it out for free again?
You can say this about wow if you arleady invested the 100 hours in pvp gear. If you were starting from scratch it would be the same story. I love SWTOR. It just is like early wow. It was not until after Burning Crusade that things started to go right. BC was buggy as fuck too when it came out. WOTLK was great with the main protagnist. I started growing tired of Wow and fell in love with it again during WOTLK. I soo wanted Artharas's ass on a stick! It had qualities that were gone in catacylsm and are there in SWTOR and that is the storyline and being part of something. Not just grinding pointlessly and not even reading the quest texts.
EA rushes shit and did so with SWTOR but it is now improving. SWTOR has things not done in MMOs with the storyline and companions and was hoping it would win. I do not blame the founders of bioware for leaving after this. I would be infuriated too.
I hope with server mergers and balancing that it improves further. You should try it again? The flashpoint finder is a godsend.
I disagree with Blizzard got it right. I love SWTOR but I do admit it was released before it is ready and they are balancing and adding things to it now like a dungeon finder. It seems development came and then was rushed without the tunning.
Why I no longer play Wow is because the quests are boring as fuck, the characters have no personality, You have to grind grind grind to get to 85 and then what?!
SWTOR you can have storylines, companions, and a co-op mode too if you do not want to play with other players. I mean check this shit for storyline. A whole hour of history integrated into the game. After watching this the questing makes more sense.
Sure SWTOR came out unbalanced, bugs, pvp meh, full servers or no pop servers, etc. Wow had these same problems too when it was new. SWTOR is getting better and EA just released it before it was ready. I love SWTOR and it is getting better every day.
The idea of a cloud is it works in every browser for the portal. IE 6 was proprietary and we made fun of it here 10 years ago on slashdot but never could we have imaged we are still talking about it and using XP 11 years later! If you told me this I would be laughing at you like you are nuts a decade ago. Likewise I would be in disarray if in 10 years businesses are still using Windows 7... sadly that maybe true unless something unforeseen happens in Windows 9/10 or we all use IPADs by then.
I am in favor (even though it affects my job security) for using portal sites and HTML 5 as businesses can focus on getting things done and not have to worry about being tied down with obsolete platforms. The web frees it and thank god for Firefox and then Chrome. IE is now standards complaint after admitting defeat starting with IE 9.
Could integration will be part of Office 2013 and Server 2012. This is a great thing and lets hope this decade will be different as many corporations are learning their lessons now with their crappy IE 6 intranet apps that will be just tied to IE 8 for the next decade. What a clusterfuck
You know employers have been cheap using the great recession as an excuse to set the clocks back by getting ahead of the competition by staying behind and driving costs to the bottom.
You can't do this forever and while the cited costs seem high to us it is nothing for a large organization. Part of the problem (with IE in particular) was MS making incompatible changes to standards. There are benefits to upgrading and they will become apparent as Office 2013, Server 2012, and Exchange 2013, and HTML 5 salesforce, SAP, Seibel, and cloud services start integrating into all of these products in the coming years.
I understand both arguments and laughed when Windows 7 was announced 3 years ago and slashdotters were shocked XP still gained marketshare for the first several months. Why upgrade to something they already have when their share price is being cut in half with the financial crises? But it is 2012 now and the costs of having your IT guys spend weeks hacking.ini Windows 7 drivers and using Gub/Linux to boot back into XP due to the bios not even supporting it! This year all the new hardware just does not work at all or is flakey with XP. The costs are going up and will go even higher the longer you wait as the world moves bye.
I am sick of these bean counters too so I laugh at this stupidity. It is time to put IT as a savings center and not a cost center.
This is corporate america we are talking. Consumers are slowly upgrading to Windows 7 according to statistics and only a small amount will be using it by 2014 if the rate keeps up.
In corporate America there is IE. No other browser. So this hits corporate customers hard as Chrome and FF are inacceptable due to the lack of AD integration and the fact they change every 6 weeks and break. IE is now on an accelerated path too but its annual and the big corps can skip every other release every 2- 3 years which is a good compromise with some HTML 5 support yet can effective be up to date and target.
I know you hate IE but face the facts it no longer sucks and ESA of Mozilla himself said screw corporate users! Go petition or write some AD code for firefox if you want this to change. In the mean time this may kill XP since IE is the only browser in the office.
Have you or your IT colleagues at work tried getting XP installed on a new ultrabook? If so your opinion would change quite drastically. It is difficult and you need to hack ini files and things like power management just are not compatible. I noticed the change this year as Dell will only semi certify laptops that are very expensive for XP and still they have crappy XP drivers that are buggy and barely work while the Windows 7 ones are stable.
There are benefits to upgrading as teh world switches to HTML 5 probably next year as IE 8 is depreciated. Office 2013/Exchange 2013 have salesforce.com and social network integration, your Windows phones/tablets can even get their corporate apps uploaded, your malware infections get cut in half, power costs go down as power management and sleep just work and are enalbed by default, Server 2012 has cloud and VM support for your domain controllers and data compression with AD for your WAN offices so traffic usage goes down, etc.
Windows 7 has a lot of features that not everyone is using yet so they see no point of upgrading. But bluetooth and other features make it a decent upgrade from XP. With Office 365 and sharepoint on the web Doris and Fred can work from home or check things on vacation or on the road too:-)
Its 2014 and if you are such a large behemoth then you need to get on the bandwagon YESTERDAY as it will take a year or longer to upgrade. If you have 30 apps on intranets or desktops scattered across the world you need to update, migrate it, or replace it. The replacement will not be easy as old data needs to be migrated. You need VM solutions like Citrix to run on the desktops and you need expensive consultants etc. This could take a year easily.
Worse Exchange 2010 is not compatible with Outlook 2003. The workload is tremendous but this also means not putting it off and hoping the problem will go away. When a huge task needs done the best thing is to jump into it early. Not 3 months before EOL and go OH SHIT.
The good news is with IE being a good browser again your IE 9 ready intranet apps should run on IE 19 just fine in 10 years (Oh you didn't get the memo that IE is on an annual release cycle?!).
Do you have any apps that wont run on IE9? Really IE 9 is a HUGE improvement that brings it up to Firefox 3.6 functionality. You do know you can set IE 9 to run in IE 8 mode right? There are policies with IE that you can use to have certain sites use that IE 8 engine if you have one or two intranet sites.
Something to consider and you have basic HTML 5 support too. That means you can remove flash as half the videos in youtube can run in IE 9 with h.264. IE 8 is going to be depreciated soon which is good. It is dangerous to get the corps used to updating their browser every 10 years as it fucks everyone else who wants new things up.
Not on my machine! XP is a dog. I own a phenom II hex core, 8 gigs of ram, 1 TB drive, and a decent graphics card. Here are the problems for power users: 1. SATA is not natively supported and the drivers have no command que support. No ASYNC I/o! Maybe your vendor has a nice driver to enable this but on my Asus system it uses the default XP driver which really blows and is ssslloowwww 2. No Firewire 800 support 3. No USB 3/Thunderbolt support. If your power users use external drivers to run virtual machines or video editing then they are in a world of pain! With USB 2 I can only get one or 2 writes to go before it lacks up. eSATA and Firewire are all crippled due to the 10 year old kernel. 4. Power usage buggy or not supported at all. Windows 7 can save a fortune in enterprise tasks. 5. XP paging file rapes the hell out of the hard drive when ram is being used. Double penalty if you have a SATA drive using the default XP driver. That is what slowed my computer down even though I had 8 gigs of ram. 6. No bluetooth 7. No trim SSD support
The lost goes on and on as hardware starts shipping bad XP drivers or none at all anymore. Sure you could google used blue tooth dongles from 2007 and pray they work but that one in the new intel ultrabook?! HA good luck buddy. With EFI coming out it this is going to become more and more of a problem.
A secretary using a 5 year old desktop that works fine under XP is one thing, but it is rude to give a power user such a device. On my system I put W7 back on and it was a relief. It didn't like XP one bit. The fact it uses less ram does not make it faster at all. The fact that W7 pages much less and uses the GPU for many tasks and has other improvements make a big difference. At this stage it is time to move on.
In the coming years your investment in W7 will start paying off. Lower energy bills, salesforce.com, sap, and other integration in Office 2013, and your executives and folks on the road getting their corporate apps uploaded on their Windows 8 devices by Outlook 2013, as well as HTML 5 intranet and business sites will offer much better functionality. The only reason we can't get this right now is because of XP users with ancient versions of IE who refuse to upgrade. It is worth the cost.
Hairy you are being logical again. Stop that! The bean counters need to have that foot on the $20 bills so the can grab those nickels in savings off the floor.
But in all seriousness if you are struggling to keep the lights on it makes sense to keep XP and just shut the machines down at night. The economy still is not good. What is odd is the fortune 1000 companies who are stitting on mountains of cash since the recession started by firing people who are doing odd things like this.
Why would any sane businesses want to spend money replacing something that works perfectly well? Well, you and I know a few good answers to that
Out of interest what are those answers? I've been through a few Win7 business cases and none of them got accepted. The current place is upgrading purely because we are being forced to my MS as support reaches EOL. Planned obsolescence. Right now we still use XP and it does everything we need it to. Sure 7 might do more, but we don't need more, we just need a stable platform to run our business apps. XP does this and now costs us nothing. The same can't be said for Win7 (or any other OS alternative).
There are many hidden costs. Scroll down to the poor sap who has to edit.ini files in driver installations to get half assed Win 7 drivers to play nice to XP in some notebooks! He spent a whole week trying to get XP installed on the notebook! Vendors are not certifying their systems for XP anymore except for the most expensive units and corporations are shunning the costs as secretaries do not need FireGL graphics, icore7s, 8 gbs of ram, etc that are XP certified.
How much money did it cost for that sap to waste a week hacking installations and these units still have no ACPI support and waste energy because XP can't support EFI?
IE 8 is now a liability too. I know your employer probably spent tens of thousands just upgrading to it recently from IE 6 (typically on average in 2012), but your google docs will stop working, then next year HTML 5 will take off and websites will stop working or your business ones will go into a craiglist like crippled ugly mode as they gear towards CSS 3.
Sure they run ancient versions of Office fine, but your little appliances that work just fine in your book need to connect to others and they are moving along. IE also is moving to an annual release cycle. IE 11 will be out next year and then IE 12 when XP is depreciated. What are your plans? Still with IE 8 until 2020?! HA.
There are features like power management, a better browser, a version of office where people can find things and not have to go into menus, and in the future tablet integration for your executives, corporate app and profile support with Exchange 2013 for Win 8/9 devices/tablets for your sales people, and CRM and social media integration for things like salesforce in Office 2013. Its time to get with the times. In the good old days corporate America used to first to innovate and bring new technologies first and compete by being cutting edge. Not by staying behind and racing to the bottom to save short term costs.
They rushed Star Wars the Old Republic and caused over half the users to leave because the top 5% of features in Wow were not there.
It is so frustrating as SWTOR now has a dungeon finder, sever consolidation, user population support that matches wow per realm, and other things that match it with wow today but most refuse to go back and it frustrates me.
If only EA didn't want to slaughter the goose to meet Christmas sales and released it today the number of subscribers would double. EA also fired a lot of good employees and implemented budget cuts so they can't fix the problems and work on the next patch easily.
They sold their souls and got rich. Go buy a yatch and play the games for the rest of our lives. They do not have to work again
He mentioned something insane like +20,000 users. Ok Peroxy? Explain how to setup dual browsers in an environment like this without MSI or GPO support? What about tickets to help desk where someone uses the wrong browser for a task and it doesn't work?
You and that mobi guy never worked professionally in any moderately complex environment. Just be honest? This isn'[t like your college dorm where people troubleshoot themselves and do not need speciality apps so every site works regardless of browser. This is real life stuff where IE 6 and 7 break with standards compliant code. So the logical alternative is to use MS code because 90% of hte market used it during the time of development and everyone assumed we would still be using IE 6 standards today in 2012 back in 2003. I surely did as there was no firefox and phoenix was a hacker thing and not a serious business browser.
Guess what? These old apps are REQUIRED. Perhaps they use a proprietary database backend too that can't be updated? Now you have 8 year old data that employees need/ THen what?
Yes IE 8 is here to stay and yes as a web developer YOU WILL support it or we will take our business elsewhere. Office 365 sounds better every day. I am not saying this to start a flamewar. But the realities are that Finance and accounting set the IT budget and label it as a cost center. If upgrading IE does not raise the shareprice it doesn't get implemented and upgrading to a modern and better browser is expensive or impossible.
My guess is by 2020 we will see Citrix terminals running IE 6,7, and 8 apps and offie 365 and Hotmail will still support it. I made my IE 6 sig as a joke after encountering the idiosyncracies but it makes economic sense. Unless you are an IT company your customers are not paying you to upgrade browsers. They are paying you to get work done. It is time and money to switch
Actually there have been 30+ exploits in Firefox between 3.6 and the current release over the year and a half!
They are everywhere and nupen came to fame earlier this year from cracking Chrome. It is not a design flaw per say as IE 9 is sanboxed. It is hard when you have JIT javascript, flash, and java which job is to ACTUALLLY EXECUTE on the given platform.
According to the exploit it needs flash or java to spray the sandbox heap until the sandbox eventually gets compromised. So that is the problem right there
MS sucks in many areas in their browsers but recently they have redeamed themselves in this area. Firefox is a joke in comparison and was so bad adobe had to make a custom version of flash taht was sandboxed. Chrome already had both sandboxed
Java sucks goatballs. Old java especially but it used heavily in intranet apps and with IE I can use that POS java with 30 exploits only on the intranet so they wont get 0wned on the internet. That is one thing IE has that the others do not.
The question is why you need to manage a browser so much.
Quick real-world answer. Java! Not modern java, but the insecure 30+ security hole java 1.4.1, not java 1.4.0, or 1.4.2, but 1.4.1. Kronos requires it and therefore leaves these HR payroll specialists wide open with a bulls eye target. Solution? Create a special GPO just for the HR payroll group with java 1.4.1 only accessible for the intranet kronos site.
Scenario 2, in the same orgamization java is required for Bank of Montreal for some line of credit apps. Java 7 which is more secure wont work. However, if Java 6 is running on all machines from the image then HR payroll can't get their crappy Kronos app work. Same scenario etc.
IE can allow to specify things like this while keeping java off everyone elses version of IE. Other use cases include security, site blocking, and giving more lenient options to executives.
Actually IE 9 is not a bad browser. Yes it has an exploit, but it is sandboxed like Chrome in which Firefox is not! I wont use FF that much for this security reason. HTML 5 in IE 9 is there at a basic level and IE 10 which is done in Windows 8 and almost in Windows 7 scores over 300 on html5test.com and has 92% of the support of Firefox 14!
You can still hate it from its past, but at least MS is trying to improve it. Until Mozilla goes back to an anual release cycle with GPO tools we are sticking with INternet explorer. Especially since it is at least tolerable now unlike IE 6 and 7
Not where I have seen. School districts still use IE 6 and do do hospitals because the medical equipment that outputs MS css costs $300k each!
So now you are an average website catering to children. This means they can't view it as you no longer support IE 6. That is a problem. It is dying slowly but still millions support it. In the UK the whole goverment still uses IE 6 on new images for all its computers as they are in austerity. That means if you have a british audience you still need to support it.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me guess. It works perfectly fine in IE 9 but they will say go buy our product again at version x and it will mysteriously work! I see double dipping on this as it gives a financial incentive to lie and claim you need to purchase again in order to use the latest browser etc.
Maybe I am just cynical?
Its free to play in November. Of course that means you need to pay for certain gear. But try it again then? They added to new dungeons too in the end. Mid level not so much though
PVP still bites ass. For example every class has the ability to knock someone down. Tanks should have resistance to that and not every class should have that ability. But it is improving little by little.
The whinners take issue is it was not as good as wow on opening day nor as mature so they left. EA then fires everyone and forces the 2 co owners out. The fact that the servers now can handle much more people show that it was not optimized yet. The merging was done quick as name conflicts happened and caused more people to leave.
The question is will these users go back or did 65% of the people leave and hate it and never will come back. I still feel mid level lag in SWTOR is better than in WOW. However, it was fun to see new lands and places in Wow. In swtor it didn't matter as your ship could take you anywhere. They should have limited this to systems nearbye and hyper drive improvements could have you go further and further when you level but it is still the same old crap.
Dude if I had $5 million I would probably not work again. Maybe do things for fun or get a PHD for the hell out of it, but with that kind of money it is best to sit back in your new mansion in Vail and play them all day long with tons of hookers around by the swimming pool serving you cavier.
Mod up!
SWTOR still has over a million subscribers and those who wine played for 1 week and noticed it did not have 8 years of tuning that Wow had and left. It is a new game for crying out loud and it does have new things like storylines, companions, and feels more like an interactive movie than pointless quests to grind in wow. My imperial agent wants to hunt down The Eagle for killing Darth Jadas, my Sith Jaguarnut wants to find this new apprientice who can discover spies fast! That is just chapter 1 stuff.
In wow, its kill 12 boars for a liver pie ... (What does taht have to do with my storyline?) Oh thats right wow characters have no storyline at all until WOTLK. No goals. Some may disagree and do not find that appealing and that is fine but give SWTOR for being different.
SWTOR now has a dungeon finder and is balancing out in pvp. It is improving just like early wow did and I highly encourage slashdotters reading this to try it out for free again?
You can say this about wow if you arleady invested the 100 hours in pvp gear. If you were starting from scratch it would be the same story. I love SWTOR. It just is like early wow. It was not until after Burning Crusade that things started to go right. BC was buggy as fuck too when it came out. WOTLK was great with the main protagnist. I started growing tired of Wow and fell in love with it again during WOTLK. I soo wanted Artharas's ass on a stick! It had qualities that were gone in catacylsm and are there in SWTOR and that is the storyline and being part of something. Not just grinding pointlessly and not even reading the quest texts.
EA rushes shit and did so with SWTOR but it is now improving. SWTOR has things not done in MMOs with the storyline and companions and was hoping it would win. I do not blame the founders of bioware for leaving after this. I would be infuriated too.
I hope with server mergers and balancing that it improves further. You should try it again? The flashpoint finder is a godsend.
I disagree with Blizzard got it right. I love SWTOR but I do admit it was released before it is ready and they are balancing and adding things to it now like a dungeon finder. It seems development came and then was rushed without the tunning.
Why I no longer play Wow is because the quests are boring as fuck, the characters have no personality, You have to grind grind grind to get to 85 and then what?!
SWTOR you can have storylines, companions, and a co-op mode too if you do not want to play with other players. I mean check this shit for storyline. A whole hour of history integrated into the game. After watching this the questing makes more sense.
Sure SWTOR came out unbalanced, bugs, pvp meh, full servers or no pop servers, etc. Wow had these same problems too when it was new. SWTOR is getting better and EA just released it before it was ready. I love SWTOR and it is getting better every day.
Dude your sig is as old as XP itself! Appropriate for the story however new slashdotters wont get it
The idea of a cloud is it works in every browser for the portal. IE 6 was proprietary and we made fun of it here 10 years ago on slashdot but never could we have imaged we are still talking about it and using XP 11 years later! If you told me this I would be laughing at you like you are nuts a decade ago. Likewise I would be in disarray if in 10 years businesses are still using Windows 7 ... sadly that maybe true unless something unforeseen happens in Windows 9/10 or we all use IPADs by then.
I am in favor (even though it affects my job security) for using portal sites and HTML 5 as businesses can focus on getting things done and not have to worry about being tied down with obsolete platforms. The web frees it and thank god for Firefox and then Chrome. IE is now standards complaint after admitting defeat starting with IE 9.
Could integration will be part of Office 2013 and Server 2012. This is a great thing and lets hope this decade will be different as many corporations are learning their lessons now with their crappy IE 6 intranet apps that will be just tied to IE 8 for the next decade. What a clusterfuck
You know employers have been cheap using the great recession as an excuse to set the clocks back by getting ahead of the competition by staying behind and driving costs to the bottom.
You can't do this forever and while the cited costs seem high to us it is nothing for a large organization. Part of the problem (with IE in particular) was MS making incompatible changes to standards. There are benefits to upgrading and they will become apparent as Office 2013, Server 2012, and Exchange 2013, and HTML 5 salesforce, SAP, Seibel, and cloud services start integrating into all of these products in the coming years.
I understand both arguments and laughed when Windows 7 was announced 3 years ago and slashdotters were shocked XP still gained marketshare for the first several months. Why upgrade to something they already have when their share price is being cut in half with the financial crises? But it is 2012 now and the costs of having your IT guys spend weeks hacking .ini Windows 7 drivers and using Gub/Linux to boot back into XP due to the bios not even supporting it! This year all the new hardware just does not work at all or is flakey with XP. The costs are going up and will go even higher the longer you wait as the world moves bye.
I am sick of these bean counters too so I laugh at this stupidity. It is time to put IT as a savings center and not a cost center.
This is corporate america we are talking. Consumers are slowly upgrading to Windows 7 according to statistics and only a small amount will be using it by 2014 if the rate keeps up.
In corporate America there is IE. No other browser. So this hits corporate customers hard as Chrome and FF are inacceptable due to the lack of AD integration and the fact they change every 6 weeks and break. IE is now on an accelerated path too but its annual and the big corps can skip every other release every 2- 3 years which is a good compromise with some HTML 5 support yet can effective be up to date and target.
I know you hate IE but face the facts it no longer sucks and ESA of Mozilla himself said screw corporate users! Go petition or write some AD code for firefox if you want this to change. In the mean time this may kill XP since IE is the only browser in the office.
Now this is why you do not save anything with XP. If hardware support wanes then it is time to do your dues and say goodbye and move on.
Have you or your IT colleagues at work tried getting XP installed on a new ultrabook? If so your opinion would change quite drastically. It is difficult and you need to hack ini files and things like power management just are not compatible. I noticed the change this year as Dell will only semi certify laptops that are very expensive for XP and still they have crappy XP drivers that are buggy and barely work while the Windows 7 ones are stable.
There are benefits to upgrading as teh world switches to HTML 5 probably next year as IE 8 is depreciated. Office 2013/Exchange 2013 have salesforce.com and social network integration, your Windows phones/tablets can even get their corporate apps uploaded, your malware infections get cut in half, power costs go down as power management and sleep just work and are enalbed by default, Server 2012 has cloud and VM support for your domain controllers and data compression with AD for your WAN offices so traffic usage goes down, etc.
Windows 7 has a lot of features that not everyone is using yet so they see no point of upgrading. But bluetooth and other features make it a decent upgrade from XP. With Office 365 and sharepoint on the web Doris and Fred can work from home or check things on vacation or on the road too :-)
Its 2014 and if you are such a large behemoth then you need to get on the bandwagon YESTERDAY as it will take a year or longer to upgrade. If you have 30 apps on intranets or desktops scattered across the world you need to update, migrate it, or replace it. The replacement will not be easy as old data needs to be migrated. You need VM solutions like Citrix to run on the desktops and you need expensive consultants etc. This could take a year easily.
Worse Exchange 2010 is not compatible with Outlook 2003. The workload is tremendous but this also means not putting it off and hoping the problem will go away. When a huge task needs done the best thing is to jump into it early. Not 3 months before EOL and go OH SHIT.
The good news is with IE being a good browser again your IE 9 ready intranet apps should run on IE 19 just fine in 10 years (Oh you didn't get the memo that IE is on an annual release cycle?!).
Do you have any apps that wont run on IE9? Really IE 9 is a HUGE improvement that brings it up to Firefox 3.6 functionality. You do know you can set IE 9 to run in IE 8 mode right? There are policies with IE that you can use to have certain sites use that IE 8 engine if you have one or two intranet sites.
Something to consider and you have basic HTML 5 support too. That means you can remove flash as half the videos in youtube can run in IE 9 with h.264. IE 8 is going to be depreciated soon which is good. It is dangerous to get the corps used to updating their browser every 10 years as it fucks everyone else who wants new things up.
Not on my machine! XP is a dog. I own a phenom II hex core, 8 gigs of ram, 1 TB drive, and a decent graphics card.
Here are the problems for power users:
1. SATA is not natively supported and the drivers have no command que support. No ASYNC I/o! Maybe your vendor has a nice driver to enable this but on my Asus system it uses the default XP driver which really blows and is ssslloowwww
2. No Firewire 800 support
3. No USB 3/Thunderbolt support. If your power users use external drivers to run virtual machines or video editing then they are in a world of pain! With USB 2 I can only get one or 2 writes to go before it lacks up. eSATA and Firewire are all crippled due to the 10 year old kernel.
4. Power usage buggy or not supported at all. Windows 7 can save a fortune in enterprise tasks.
5. XP paging file rapes the hell out of the hard drive when ram is being used. Double penalty if you have a SATA drive using the default XP driver. That is what slowed my computer down even though I had 8 gigs of ram.
6. No bluetooth
7. No trim SSD support
The lost goes on and on as hardware starts shipping bad XP drivers or none at all anymore. Sure you could google used blue tooth dongles from 2007 and pray they work but that one in the new intel ultrabook?! HA good luck buddy. With EFI coming out it this is going to become more and more of a problem.
A secretary using a 5 year old desktop that works fine under XP is one thing, but it is rude to give a power user such a device. On my system I put W7 back on and it was a relief. It didn't like XP one bit. The fact it uses less ram does not make it faster at all. The fact that W7 pages much less and uses the GPU for many tasks and has other improvements make a big difference. At this stage it is time to move on.
In the coming years your investment in W7 will start paying off. Lower energy bills, salesforce.com, sap, and other integration in Office 2013, and your executives and folks on the road getting their corporate apps uploaded on their Windows 8 devices by Outlook 2013, as well as HTML 5 intranet and business sites will offer much better functionality. The only reason we can't get this right now is because of XP users with ancient versions of IE who refuse to upgrade. It is worth the cost.
Shh!
Hairy you are being logical again. Stop that! The bean counters need to have that foot on the $20 bills so the can grab those nickels in savings off the floor.
But in all seriousness if you are struggling to keep the lights on it makes sense to keep XP and just shut the machines down at night. The economy still is not good. What is odd is the fortune 1000 companies who are stitting on mountains of cash since the recession started by firing people who are doing odd things like this.
Why would any sane businesses want to spend money replacing something that works perfectly well? Well, you and I know a few good answers to that
Out of interest what are those answers? I've been through a few Win7 business cases and none of them got accepted. The current place is upgrading purely because we are being forced to my MS as support reaches EOL. Planned obsolescence. Right now we still use XP and it does everything we need it to. Sure 7 might do more, but we don't need more, we just need a stable platform to run our business apps. XP does this and now costs us nothing. The same can't be said for Win7 (or any other OS alternative).
There are many hidden costs. Scroll down to the poor sap who has to edit .ini files in driver installations to get half assed Win 7 drivers to play nice to XP in some notebooks! He spent a whole week trying to get XP installed on the notebook! Vendors are not certifying their systems for XP anymore except for the most expensive units and corporations are shunning the costs as secretaries do not need FireGL graphics, icore7s, 8 gbs of ram, etc that are XP certified.
How much money did it cost for that sap to waste a week hacking installations and these units still have no ACPI support and waste energy because XP can't support EFI?
IE 8 is now a liability too. I know your employer probably spent tens of thousands just upgrading to it recently from IE 6 (typically on average in 2012), but your google docs will stop working, then next year HTML 5 will take off and websites will stop working or your business ones will go into a craiglist like crippled ugly mode as they gear towards CSS 3.
Sure they run ancient versions of Office fine, but your little appliances that work just fine in your book need to connect to others and they are moving along. IE also is moving to an annual release cycle. IE 11 will be out next year and then IE 12 when XP is depreciated. What are your plans? Still with IE 8 until 2020?! HA.
There are features like power management, a better browser, a version of office where people can find things and not have to go into menus, and in the future tablet integration for your executives, corporate app and profile support with Exchange 2013 for Win 8/9 devices/tablets for your sales people, and CRM and social media integration for things like salesforce in Office 2013. Its time to get with the times. In the good old days corporate America used to first to innovate and bring new technologies first and compete by being cutting edge. Not by staying behind and racing to the bottom to save short term costs.
They rushed Star Wars the Old Republic and caused over half the users to leave because the top 5% of features in Wow were not there.
It is so frustrating as SWTOR now has a dungeon finder, sever consolidation, user population support that matches wow per realm, and other things that match it with wow today but most refuse to go back and it frustrates me.
If only EA didn't want to slaughter the goose to meet Christmas sales and released it today the number of subscribers would double. EA also fired a lot of good employees and implemented budget cuts so they can't fix the problems and work on the next patch easily.
They sold their souls and got rich. Go buy a yatch and play the games for the rest of our lives. They do not have to work again
He mentioned something insane like +20,000 users. Ok Peroxy? Explain how to setup dual browsers in an environment like this without MSI or GPO support? What about tickets to help desk where someone uses the wrong browser for a task and it doesn't work?
You and that mobi guy never worked professionally in any moderately complex environment. Just be honest? This isn'[t like your college dorm where people troubleshoot themselves and do not need speciality apps so every site works regardless of browser. This is real life stuff where IE 6 and 7 break with standards compliant code. So the logical alternative is to use MS code because 90% of hte market used it during the time of development and everyone assumed we would still be using IE 6 standards today in 2012 back in 2003. I surely did as there was no firefox and phoenix was a hacker thing and not a serious business browser.
Guess what? These old apps are REQUIRED. Perhaps they use a proprietary database backend too that can't be updated? Now you have 8 year old data that employees need/ THen what?
Yes IE 8 is here to stay and yes as a web developer YOU WILL support it or we will take our business elsewhere. Office 365 sounds better every day. I am not saying this to start a flamewar. But the realities are that Finance and accounting set the IT budget and label it as a cost center. If upgrading IE does not raise the shareprice it doesn't get implemented and upgrading to a modern and better browser is expensive or impossible.
My guess is by 2020 we will see Citrix terminals running IE 6,7, and 8 apps and offie 365 and Hotmail will still support it. I made my IE 6 sig as a joke after encountering the idiosyncracies but it makes economic sense. Unless you are an IT company your customers are not paying you to upgrade browsers. They are paying you to get work done. It is time and money to switch
Actually there have been 30+ exploits in Firefox between 3.6 and the current release over the year and a half!
They are everywhere and nupen came to fame earlier this year from cracking Chrome. It is not a design flaw per say as IE 9 is sanboxed. It is hard when you have JIT javascript, flash, and java which job is to ACTUALLLY EXECUTE on the given platform.
According to the exploit it needs flash or java to spray the sandbox heap until the sandbox eventually gets compromised. So that is the problem right there
IE 7 and above are sandboxed!
MS sucks in many areas in their browsers but recently they have redeamed themselves in this area. Firefox is a joke in comparison and was so bad adobe had to make a custom version of flash taht was sandboxed. Chrome already had both sandboxed
I like having intranet and internet zones.
Java sucks goatballs. Old java especially but it used heavily in intranet apps and with IE I can use that POS java with 30 exploits only on the intranet so they wont get 0wned on the internet. That is one thing IE has that the others do not.
The question is why you need to manage a browser so much.
Quick real-world answer. Java! Not modern java, but the insecure 30+ security hole java 1.4.1, not java 1.4.0, or 1.4.2, but 1.4.1. Kronos requires it and therefore leaves these HR payroll specialists wide open with a bulls eye target. Solution? Create a special GPO just for the HR payroll group with java 1.4.1 only accessible for the intranet kronos site.
Scenario 2, in the same orgamization java is required for Bank of Montreal for some line of credit apps. Java 7 which is more secure wont work. However, if Java 6 is running on all machines from the image then HR payroll can't get their crappy Kronos app work. Same scenario etc.
IE can allow to specify things like this while keeping java off everyone elses version of IE. Other use cases include security, site blocking, and giving more lenient options to executives.
Actually IE 9 is not a bad browser. Yes it has an exploit, but it is sandboxed like Chrome in which Firefox is not! I wont use FF that much for this security reason. HTML 5 in IE 9 is there at a basic level and IE 10 which is done in Windows 8 and almost in Windows 7 scores over 300 on html5test.com and has 92% of the support of Firefox 14!
You can still hate it from its past, but at least MS is trying to improve it. Until Mozilla goes back to an anual release cycle with GPO tools we are sticking with INternet explorer. Especially since it is at least tolerable now unlike IE 6 and 7
Not where I have seen. School districts still use IE 6 and do do hospitals because the medical equipment that outputs MS css costs $300k each!
So now you are an average website catering to children. This means they can't view it as you no longer support IE 6. That is a problem. It is dying slowly but still millions support it. In the UK the whole goverment still uses IE 6 on new images for all its computers as they are in austerity. That means if you have a british audience you still need to support it.