Except that moving to linux is a more long term option... Sticking with what you have makes a lot of sense in the short term, but long term it isn't sustainable as you will end up with terribly obsolete unsupported technology. Moving to linux makes less sense in the short term, but long term will save you money and give you far more freedom when it comes to future updates.
Sooner or later your current technology will no longer be supportable, meaning you will have to change it wether you like it or not. You can pick the quick fix of vista, or the long term solution of linux.
Unfortunately short term thinking is all to prevalent, governments only care about the next election, and business only cares about short term profits, and don't consider how their short term profiteering could make the whole business collapse a few years down the line.
So your basically screwed... MS has you locked in, and they arbitrarily crippled the software you were using to make you buy new stuff...
For the obligatory car analogy, it would be like Ford coming and smashing up your old car and forcing you to buy a new one.
MS have you over a barrel, and this will probably only be the start. I would suggest you look seriously at replacing the software keeping you locked in, before MS pulls a few more stunts like this. Your business is in an extremely weak position, utterly beholden to the whims of one company.
Would you put up with treatment like this from anyone else, or would you ditch them and go elsewhere?
I believe DEC were doing a lot with ipv6 early on too, they had ipv6 support in digital unix and even had an ipv6 enabled version of altavista available.
The support in win2k was an experimental addon published by microsoft research, it was never an official feature. It was XP which first introduced support in the base distro, but it was not turned on by default and if autoconfig didn't work you had to use the cli tools to configure it. Also it wouldn't do DNS over ipv6 so you still need ipv4 connectivity for your dns at least.
Linux had support a lot earlier as you pointed out, as did digital unix (aka tru64 unix), the bsd's got support fairly early too. It was only market experimental because there was really no other reason to use it, you could pretty much only get tunneled ipv6 from a free tunnel broker with no guarantee you would keep the addresses etc. In terms of functionality, the stack worked great even in the 2.2.x kernel, ipv6 has long been popular on IRC because you can create more vanity hostnames more easily, and its a little harder for some of the script kiddies to dos you.
Linux had IPv6 long before either MS or Apple, it was present by default in the 2.2.x kernels which came out last century, and was probably available as patches long before that.
DirectX is middleware between the hardware and software, there's no reason you couldn't implement the frontend side of things, regardless of how it's actually handled on the back end... Just look at wine.
Which is why a single general purpose OS isn't good from a user perspective... Complain all you like about the multitude of linux distributions, but there can easily be one that caters to the 1% of users who need a particular configuration.
No, windows server still needs a video card, and it still loads the graphics layer.. All you can do is have a copy of cmd.exe running in a window instead of explorer.exe.
It's a far cry from linux/bsd/solaris/etc, which boots in text mode, doesn't load any video drivers and can run over a serial console on a machine which doesn't have any video capability whatsoever.
I think the virge was the first consumer level 3d accelerator... And software rendering worked differently in those days, most code was specifically written for software rendering because thats all the majority of users had.
Nowadays games are written for hardware 3d, and software rendering is just unusable despite massively faster processors. For a comparison, try running original quake in software mode, and compare it to glquake running in software mode... glquake will usually be massively slower.
Although, OpenGL/X11 has always supported remote displays, and it will do the rendering on the workstation's GPU instead of the server... Give it a try, it's surprisingly quick.
Amusing, so in many cases vista now has inferior driver support to linux...
I have an older pci soundblaster 128 card that doesn't work in xp64 or vista (xp32 picks it up out of the box), and dec tulip ethernet cards which also wont work on 64bit xp or vista. All of these devices work fine on 64bit linux.
I don't see why i should stop using them, the soundblaster produces better audio than the onboard chipset and the tulip is a perfectly fine ethernet controller, doesn't support 1gb but neither does my switch.
A GUI on a server should be entirely optional, and never the default... Serial consoles enable me to rebuild my servers without traveling to the location where they are hosted. Even if the OS is screwed to the point i can't login using it's existing remote logon features, i can get on via serial and fix it or do a complete reinstall. I've never found a need for a GUI on any of my servers, because everything i've ever needed to do was possible from the CLI. I would try to avoid any server software which required a GUI, as you pointed out poorly coded, and failing that i would install it locally and copy the configuration if possible. Having to install GUI libraries and the like would end up doubling the footprint on most of my machines, and therefore double the patching requirements.
The performance is very poor, and all it takes is for a new version of windows to use a slightly different format and you're screwed until the changes can be reverse engineered again. The only reason NTFS is even considered is because MS won't bother implementing any filesystems other than their own.
There are already common filesystems, to an extent... Virtually all of the OSS platforms support ext2/3, ufs, etc... The problem is that proprietary platforms tend to ignore any filesystem other than their own. Even OSX 10.5 doesn't seem to support UFS out of the box anymore. FAT32 is about the only common FS, and it's garbage... And MS have intentionally crippled FAT32 support to force people to use NTFS.
I agree with you about modal dialogs... I absolutely despise anything that automatically focuses itself, especially when it's not a sub dialog of the program you are currently using. It's shear arrogance that the authors of these programs felt that the message their program has is more important than whatever you may already be doing.
I want configuration, i want the dialogs to come up in the background or the same workspace as the parent app (ie in the same place as the app generating them), perhaps beep at me to let me know something has happened and perhaps highlight the icon in the dock or taskbar. Then i will deal with the dialog at a time of my choosing, not when the app forces me to.
Teaching people exactly where a particular option is in a particular program is entirely the wrong way to teach someone, they will end up reliant on that version and very resistant to change. So in your case, even tho office 2007 works a lot better, there are still people who refuse to move from 2003 because that's all they know.
And of course, teaching one version of one app is no long term solution, especially in schools, as people will be using something completely different by the time they start work. We learned wordperfect for dos in school.
Instead, you should teach users what the options they want are called, what they do, and how to look for help if they can't find them... A lot of users don't even know what many options are called, they just know what the icon looks like and if you changed the icon they wouldn't be able to do it.
But you are right on the tidyness and consistency, simplicity really is key, too many options cause confusion and those who need the more advance functions tend to be more advanced users and therefore better able to look for them.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that moving to linux is a more long term option...
Sticking with what you have makes a lot of sense in the short term, but long term it isn't sustainable as you will end up with terribly obsolete unsupported technology.
Moving to linux makes less sense in the short term, but long term will save you money and give you far more freedom when it comes to future updates.
Sooner or later your current technology will no longer be supportable, meaning you will have to change it wether you like it or not. You can pick the quick fix of vista, or the long term solution of linux.
Unfortunately short term thinking is all to prevalent, governments only care about the next election, and business only cares about short term profits, and don't consider how their short term profiteering could make the whole business collapse a few years down the line.
So your basically screwed...
MS has you locked in, and they arbitrarily crippled the software you were using to make you buy new stuff...
For the obligatory car analogy, it would be like Ford coming and smashing up your old car and forcing you to buy a new one.
MS have you over a barrel, and this will probably only be the start. I would suggest you look seriously at replacing the software keeping you locked in, before MS pulls a few more stunts like this. Your business is in an extremely weak position, utterly beholden to the whims of one company.
Would you put up with treatment like this from anyone else, or would you ditch them and go elsewhere?
I believe DEC were doing a lot with ipv6 early on too, they had ipv6 support in digital unix and even had an ipv6 enabled version of altavista available.
The support in win2k was an experimental addon published by microsoft research, it was never an official feature.
It was XP which first introduced support in the base distro, but it was not turned on by default and if autoconfig didn't work you had to use the cli tools to configure it. Also it wouldn't do DNS over ipv6 so you still need ipv4 connectivity for your dns at least.
Linux had support a lot earlier as you pointed out, as did digital unix (aka tru64 unix), the bsd's got support fairly early too. It was only market experimental because there was really no other reason to use it, you could pretty much only get tunneled ipv6 from a free tunnel broker with no guarantee you would keep the addresses etc. In terms of functionality, the stack worked great even in the 2.2.x kernel, ipv6 has long been popular on IRC because you can create more vanity hostnames more easily, and its a little harder for some of the script kiddies to dos you.
Linux had IPv6 long before either MS or Apple, it was present by default in the 2.2.x kernels which came out last century, and was probably available as patches long before that.
No, it's to provide eyecandy so that windows doesnt look ugly and dated when compared to OSX and linux based machines.
DirectX is middleware between the hardware and software, there's no reason you couldn't implement the frontend side of things, regardless of how it's actually handled on the back end... Just look at wine.
Which is why a single general purpose OS isn't good from a user perspective...
Complain all you like about the multitude of linux distributions, but there can easily be one that caters to the 1% of users who need a particular configuration.
No, windows server still needs a video card, and it still loads the graphics layer..
All you can do is have a copy of cmd.exe running in a window instead of explorer.exe.
It's a far cry from linux/bsd/solaris/etc, which boots in text mode, doesn't load any video drivers and can run over a serial console on a machine which doesn't have any video capability whatsoever.
Trying to watch video at that resolution will just saturate the PCI bus, it might even suck worse than the integrated card.
I think the virge was the first consumer level 3d accelerator...
And software rendering worked differently in those days, most code was specifically written for software rendering because thats all the majority of users had.
Nowadays games are written for hardware 3d, and software rendering is just unusable despite massively faster processors. For a comparison, try running original quake in software mode, and compare it to glquake running in software mode... glquake will usually be massively slower.
Although, OpenGL/X11 has always supported remote displays, and it will do the rendering on the workstation's GPU instead of the server... Give it a try, it's surprisingly quick.
And if the CPU is pegged rendering the GUI, what effect is this going to have on whatever the user is actually trying to do?
Amusing, so in many cases vista now has inferior driver support to linux...
I have an older pci soundblaster 128 card that doesn't work in xp64 or vista (xp32 picks it up out of the box), and dec tulip ethernet cards which also wont work on 64bit xp or vista. All of these devices work fine on 64bit linux.
I don't see why i should stop using them, the soundblaster produces better audio than the onboard chipset and the tulip is a perfectly fine ethernet controller, doesn't support 1gb but neither does my switch.
A GUI on a server should be entirely optional, and never the default...
Serial consoles enable me to rebuild my servers without traveling to the location where they are hosted. Even if the OS is screwed to the point i can't login using it's existing remote logon features, i can get on via serial and fix it or do a complete reinstall.
I've never found a need for a GUI on any of my servers, because everything i've ever needed to do was possible from the CLI. I would try to avoid any server software which required a GUI, as you pointed out poorly coded, and failing that i would install it locally and copy the configuration if possible. Having to install GUI libraries and the like would end up doubling the footprint on most of my machines, and therefore double the patching requirements.
More importantly, you might actually want to use your CPU for other things....
For all but gamers and people doing heavy graphics work an old 2d-only videocard is more than adequate.
When windows 95 came out a 486DX4/100 with 64mb ram was quite high end and ran comparatively well.
Interesting, i wonder if anyone has done any benchmarks with intel graphics comparing linux/windows/osx?
The performance is very poor, and all it takes is for a new version of windows to use a slightly different format and you're screwed until the changes can be reverse engineered again.
The only reason NTFS is even considered is because MS won't bother implementing any filesystems other than their own.
A proprietary filesystem you have to reverse engineer and which is subject to undocumented changes isn't really the best choice...
UFS would make a good portable filesystem, in that every OS except windows supports it out of the box...
There are already common filesystems, to an extent...
Virtually all of the OSS platforms support ext2/3, ufs, etc...
The problem is that proprietary platforms tend to ignore any filesystem other than their own. Even OSX 10.5 doesn't seem to support UFS out of the box anymore.
FAT32 is about the only common FS, and it's garbage... And MS have intentionally crippled FAT32 support to force people to use NTFS.
I agree with you about modal dialogs...
I absolutely despise anything that automatically focuses itself, especially when it's not a sub dialog of the program you are currently using. It's shear arrogance that the authors of these programs felt that the message their program has is more important than whatever you may already be doing.
I want configuration, i want the dialogs to come up in the background or the same workspace as the parent app (ie in the same place as the app generating them), perhaps beep at me to let me know something has happened and perhaps highlight the icon in the dock or taskbar. Then i will deal with the dialog at a time of my choosing, not when the app forces me to.
Teaching people exactly where a particular option is in a particular program is entirely the wrong way to teach someone, they will end up reliant on that version and very resistant to change. So in your case, even tho office 2007 works a lot better, there are still people who refuse to move from 2003 because that's all they know.
And of course, teaching one version of one app is no long term solution, especially in schools, as people will be using something completely different by the time they start work. We learned wordperfect for dos in school.
Instead, you should teach users what the options they want are called, what they do, and how to look for help if they can't find them... A lot of users don't even know what many options are called, they just know what the icon looks like and if you changed the icon they wouldn't be able to do it.
But you are right on the tidyness and consistency, simplicity really is key, too many options cause confusion and those who need the more advance functions tend to be more advanced users and therefore better able to look for them.