the problem with one of them was that whenever the laptop was plugged into a projector, the machine would act as if a key was stuck, so that in Outlook the font view size would quickly ramp up to the max, and in Powerpoint the slides just flew by and stuck on the last page.
That was, unfortunately, a common problem with Latitudes for several years now. I've had it happen on two different generations of Latitude 8x0's.
I seem to remember it being fixed by BIOS or driver updates in both cases.
How so? On my vista box its exactly the same as on XP.
To be a client of a remote network printer.... type \\print-server-machine-name\ in explorer, then double click on the printer. Done. Exactly the same as in XP.
To host a network printer.... Escalate, Printers, Server Properties, Ports, New Port, etc. Install Drivers, turn on sharing. Done. Just like XP, except using Vista's RunAs admin instead of XP's RunAs.
Now, maybe VirtualBox might mitigate some of their drivers issues, and give you and your IT staff and the company a reason to brag about Linux.
You're making an awful big assumption that the machine wouldnt have driver issues with Linux. Thats very rare, in my experience.
What I like in KDE Control/Kcontrol is turning off the vendor them, changing the login icon image, adding pics to the changing background, and letting the login screen do its thing. Or, turning on and locking the screen saver, showing off kdesktop....
Maybe I'm confused... but isnt that pretty much what every desktop/windows manager on every OS on the planet does?
My frustration comes about because, if I've just installed Windows Server fresh, I can't go to the Internet and download drivers that I might need. I can't go download my backup software and install it. I basically can't do much of anything without reconfiguring the security settings first, even if I'm the administrator. And it doesn't just prompt, "This might be bad, do you really want to do this?" I doesn't allow it.
Look, its really simple. Add the site you want to download from to Trusted Sites. Download your files. Remove the sites from trusted sites.
Or even easier, grab firefox as the very first thing, and then leave IE for nothing except when you need to hit Microsoft Update.
Great, so i should go mucking around in list of random poorly-labelled security settings in order to do things I should be able to do by default, and hope that I'm disabling the right things, and not doing something even dumber? Why not just have reasonable security settings from the outset?
If the settings appear to be 'random poorly-labelled' settings, then you're just not very experienced with the platform. Thats okay, but dont go complaining about that, spend some time getting up to speed on the platform.
There's a reason that IE on Server has such locked down settings. IE has a history of being as strong as swiss cheese. Even that legitimate website you're getting drivers from could easily be compromised and have an injected javascript exploit stuck at the bottom of the page. It's quite common, even for legitimate, big sites.
So the security settings default commensurate to risk. In many situations, if your server gets owned, its likely that your entire company could be owned. Therefore the security settings are cranked waaaaaay up.
If you dont like it, grab firefox or opera as the first thing, and get on with your life.
The fact that the time-to-pwn has not fallen over the past four years despite "security fixes" and security engines that inconvenience users and break applications is proof that the security methods employed by Microsoft are a failure.
It's fallen hugely.
Most windows boxen since XP SP2 are completely safe to put out on the internet in default config.
Now you wouldnt want to go browsing anything except MS update with IE before you patch, but thats different than an 'auto-own' scenario being described here.
That's $200 per year for the developer who self-publishes, plus $200 per year for each user who exercises the right to "installation information" under section 4(e) of the LGPLv3. That can add up quickly.
I dont have a clue what that means.
But its not accurate. It's $200 per BUSINESS per year. (or replace software distributor with business).
So you're giving us another excuse for software to fall unmaintained: "my cert ran out".
I'm not giving anyone an excuse. Thats not at all what I said. I said you dont need to keep renewing your cert for old signings to continue working. You only need to renew if you need to sign new software after your old cert has expired.
VeriSign certificates have special privileges over other CAs' certificates in Windows. Only VeriSign certificates work with the Windows Logo program (including "Games for Windows")
Certificates dont have 'privileges'.
What you're talking about is the qualification testing for higher levels of the logo program (ie, certified for Vista, rather than 'works with vista').
And you dont need a verisign cert to distribute your code, you need one to submit for winqual testing.
You DO need (just like software) a verisign cert for winqual testing, if you are doing winqual testing. But you can get your authenticode cert from someone else for cheaper.
Now it turns out that recently (at least its new to me), MS worked out a discounted cert from Verisign, who now offers a combo cert that works for authenticode and winqual testing (if you need the latter), for $399.
It's still more expensive than you need for just an authenticode cert, but its not too bad.
I'm confused then. If what you say is so, and Microsoft's firewall is rock solid, then how could an unpatched Windows installation be pwned in less than four minutes as the summary says? I guess I need to RTFA (grumble mumble).
RTFA.:)
Seriously though, if you read it, the testing was done using a honeypot that _emulates_ many different OS's.
It's not clear from the writeup whether this also emulates the windows xp firewall.
My guess from the reading is that its effectively emulating a windows box WITHOUT a firewall, so is a fairly useless measure for real world use.
Signed by whom? The end user acting as his own root CA? Or a major software publisher who can afford $$$ per year for an Authenticode certificate?
An Authenticode script costs under $200 per year. And you dont need to renew it every year unless you're doing new releases that you need to sign anew.
The only way anyone pays $$$ for an authenticode cert is if they go to verisign.
Looking on my box, 4 of the top 5 memory consumers are web browsers (Firefox3, then Safari, then Opera, then IE). Whereas Eclipse (!!) and MySQL (for development) are far below the browsers. Its sad when the brand new gen of Firefox with all the new fancy memory optimizations uses more memory than Eclipse for java development.
The ones that complain the loudest are those that picked up a brand new computer to replace their old one only to find out the new one runs much slower. I have 'upgraded' many vista laptops and desktops to XP in the last year each charging the same as a virus/rootkit removal plus MS license. Laptops are the worst, especially HP, it is like they are intentionally hiding XP drivers for things as simple as a sound cards. I'm still able to find workarounds but in all my years working with PCs I have never seen support for a predecessor OS being unsupported so quickly. Even with the push for 2k/XP there were several years of support for 9x users.
This suggests to me that you're having your clients buy consumer level garbage from HP.
We only buy laptops from HP. And every single one comes with: Vista Business x86, Vista Business x64, Vista Drivers disc (32 & 64-bit), XP Pro x86, XP Pro driver disc. 5 Discs with every machine. Some we have using XP, some with Vista.
You need to buy their corporate level equipment, like my Compaq 8710w.
If you can buy it in Best Buy or Costco, then its crap and you should steer your clients away from it.
I have yet to see with my own eyes a power user that is happy with vista. So far I only hear about it on the internet from fanboys. By power user I mean someone that runs multiple applications in a productive environment and are able to do so at the same speed or better than XP without having to know how their computer works.
I own my own business, and am the lead developer and 3rd level IT support person for the really nasty issues.
My laptop is fairly hideously overpowered (C2D 2.4, 4GB ram, Quadro 1600FX w/ 512mb, 7200rpm hdd, Vista Business x64), but it runs Vista like a charm. Right now I've got Outlook, Thunderbird, Pidgin, Acrobat Reader with a couple books open, Eclipse, MySQL, Firefox3 w/ 30+ tabs open, IE with ~5 tabs open, Safari w/ 2 tabs, Opera w/ 20+ tabs open, Textpad, Notepad++, Macromedia Dreamweaver.
With all these running, I have almost half my ram free, the processor sits at 99% idle, and the thing is rock solid stable. In fact, its been in this state for ~2 weeks with this exact environment up while I work on a project. And this is while dragging the laptop all over town, and 3-10 standbys per day.
One of the things that I have found better with Vista is how stable it stays after weeks of many many standbys & hibernates. XP had real problems with that.
I realize that alot of this is drivers, but HP seems to be doing a great job on these Compaq corporate class laptops. The drivers all come in 32-bit and 64-bit versions, and everything is really solid.
I keep trying vista myself as it is my business to do so, but I haven't seen any compelling reason yet to recommend it to anyone. To me it is still a downgrade. I'll keep trying it as future updates come out.
For the vast majority of people, there is no compelling reason to upgrade. And thats just fine.
The only reason I'm on Vista is to be the guinea pig for our business, because I've got the most ability to work out the problems and find solutions/workarounds for others.
There are still some real problems around networking. Wifi is flakier on this machine than any XP box I've ever had. CIFS/SMB wont work over a VPN 2/3rds of the time, even though that problem was supposedly fixed in SP1 (it wasnt). And God help you if you want to share files with a mixed network of XP boxens.
NVidia needs to get their shit together and make a video driver that doesnt crash WDM every week. Fortunately, Vista recovers from this VERY gracefully, and I just see a screen flicker and the message popup.
You've got to stop talking like you are an expert on this platform. The statements you are making are showing quite clearly that you're not up to speed on many aspects of it.
The drivers are issued officially by Microsoft, and Microsoft didn't do the work necessary to attract hardware makers to submit their code to Microsoft so that they could be 'certified'.
This is just not true.
There is no requirement for drivers to be certified by MS. You do NOT need to get certified or 'made for vista' labelling to create and publish signed drivers that are stable and Vista will accept.
The whole certified thing is a marketing bit for IHV's, meaning they can slap the sticker on the box. Yes, as part of the process, they submit their drivers/products to a 3rd party testing facility, but that testing doesnt catch things like leaky memory or many other stability problems.
I'm not even going to try to explain to you why MS made the right choice with UAC in the long run.
If there was another way that you can think of to force 3rd party developers to get their asses in gear, then I'd like to hear it.
the DRM is truly miserable; Microsoft took the worst parts of Apple's stance and made them worse. Intellectual property at its worse.
What DRM is this?
I dont own a blu-ray player, and I dont buy DRM media. And I dont see a single bit of DRM running on this machine.
If there is, its so low level that its not even detectable, and it doesnt stop me from playing anything I want to.
If wanting a baked operating system with real drivers is being a troll, then that's what I am.
Thats a reasonable thing to want, but as a company like Microsoft, how do you force 3rd party IHVs to make them?
Microsoft absolutely did the right thing with their driver re-architecture. That was the right path for the future.
But you realize that if they waited longer to release Vista, that the IHVs would have just waited that same amount longer to release good drivers, right? Most companies were specifically waiting until the release until they did major development on drivers.
Part of this WAS Microsoft's fault for making some major driver architecture changes late in the release cycle. But even so, there's no magic wand to wave and force other companies to do things.
Windows 2000 professional did not 'fail to capture the home market'.
It was never marketed to or sold to the home market. It cost like $250 back then.
99.9% of home users did not even know that something called 'windows 2000 professional' existed, unless they used it at work.
The only people using it at home were techies or developers or other people in that industry, akin to people who run windows server on their desktop/laptop now.
I smell a rat behind the entire thing. Windows 7 might be a hypervisor with plug-ins for whatever. I think Microsoft is floating trial ballons to see what might be marketable after the enormous and embarrassing mistakes found in Vista.
*sigh*
Windows 7 is not a hypervisor. Alpha builds are already out. It's based on the VistaSP1/Server2008 codebase.
This is all well known information.
It's an actual, along with a PR nightmare for them and justifiably so. Were I a stockholder, I'd have their heads.
Were you a stockholder (which you almost certainly are indirectly through a pension or retirement program), you might be uncertain over the future, but you wouldnt be too concerned with current financials. MS' financials look good, they're making money.
They're spending a bunch of their cash reserve, but the stockholders demanded that they do so, and invest that money in future things.
What I really wonder is when they will drop their file system and start using an implementation closer to unix/linux/osX. That will be a good day for the windows community.
Why?
Out of all the things you could have picked that is less than perfect on windows, you go for NTFS? It's fast, stable, journalled, handles arbitrary metadata, and automatically manages fragmentation in most scenarios (despite the hand-waving of entry-level techs that think defrag is the solution to everything).
The ONLY file system out there that is even remotely worth considering replacing NTFS for is ZFS. Reiser, XFS, and NTFS are all more or less in the same league. Ext3 is a fairly weak attempt at a journaling file system, but is 'good enough' for typical desktop situations.
ZFS trumps them all, but is still very young, and not globally available.
Other than that though, you can give or take any of the others. The differences between them are not material for most use-cases.
Microsoft has just done the same thing. OS + database + proprietary networking.
Would you care to explain what you're talking about? Because I have no idea.
SQL Server doesnt come bundled with the system, or are you talking about ESE/JetBlue?
If the latter, its just a C library that is very well documented. It's what Exchange and AD run off of.
And what with the proprietary networking? Exchange uses MAPI which was reasonably well documented before, and much more so now. SMB/SMB2/CIFS is all well documented nowadays, though for many years it wasnt. Maybe thats what you're talking about.
In any case, all that stuff runs on top of TCP/IP.
If they did a better job on the kernel and drivers, they could continue to sell operating systems.
This also doesnt make much sense to me. The NT kernel is very reasonable. Most of things people complain about are in win32 and associated libraries, not the NT kernel.
And MS doesnt make drivers. They include drivers in their OS, but they generally dont write many drivers.
On the other hand, Apple managed to rehost their gui on top of bsd userland on a microkernel. Why can't Microsoft do the same.
Two reasons.
1. It would take 10 years.
2. The problems most people encounter with Windows arent kernel problems, its stuff in win32 and similar. So re-hosting win32 on top of BSD would solve precisely nothing.
Oh, and whoever decided to toss the menu in favor of the ribbon should be canned right now.
Thats very much a personal opinion and not a generally shared sentiment. Nearly everybody I've seen use it who didnt make a drama-event/emotional-issue out of it liked the ribbon once they got over the change curve, which only takes a couple hours of use for most folks.
The first time I confronted the menu-less "word", I couldn't figure out how to save a file with a name.
Thats extraordinarily rare, in my experience. Most people find the office button fairly quickly, either because it sits there and throbs at you, or because the startup orientation/training stuff told them about it.
Now they have their cake, they toss the menu because they don't care about the comfort of the user.
Now thats just silly. You may not personally like it, but the ribbon change was quite clearly a result of a tremendous amount of user-testing. Companies dont make random changes to their cash-cow (and invest huge amounts of money on that change) just to make things difficult for people. They make changes because they have very strong belief that it will make things better for the majority of the users.
What most folks at/. seem to forget is that they are very very different from the other 80% of the user base of software products. The way you respond to things is NOT representative of the general population.
As I always point out, the computers today are 1000 times faster than the IBM-PC, memory is 1000 times larger, and the disk is 1000 times larger. Why is the machine sluggish?
Well, I dont know, maybe because the current gen of things is either: 1) doing 1000x more things, or 2) written in a higher level language that trades performance/memory-footprint for developer productivity, or 3) both.
If they are so smart, why can't they answer this question in the form of an operating environment where they don't use the majority of the cycles and there is something left for the users programs.
You mean like just about every windows operating system ever made when running on recommended hardware? An XP Pro install on current gen hardware is insanely fast. Vista on current gen runs quite nice.
On the box I'm typing this from (Vista Business x64), the only thing using any processing po
You know, thats real easy to say things like that when you dont run your own software business (I'm assuming, correct me if not).
You may not like what they did from a purist perspective, but what they did WORKED. And it worked fabulously, as measured by the ridiculous success of the company.
Most software businesses fail or just trundle along barely surviving.
I'll take a business that makes software that works and makes money, but may have some questionable engineering, over one with perfect code, but no sales.
If someone here on/. really cant figure out what MS is referring to by the context then the problem is with them, not the text.
And whats with the 'under 30' deal? I'm over 30, but dont have a clue what you're talking about.
Do you really have a problem when reading about windows and operating systems and IT issues confusing MS/Microsoft for MS/Multiple-Sclerosis?
Thats hard to imagine. The context alone would make it pretty damn clear in the vast majority of cases.
Re:I understand why you`d want to go pre-built
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What NAS To Buy?
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The current headless Windows box drives me nuts due to NTFS limitations
This strikes me as an odd statement.
Could you elaborate on this? I ask because windows has lots of limitations, but cant think I've ever heard of anyone (knowledgeable) complaint about NTFS itself.
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the problem with one of them was that whenever the laptop was plugged into a projector, the machine would act as if a key was stuck, so that in Outlook the font view size would quickly ramp up to the max, and in Powerpoint the slides just flew by and stuck on the last page.
That was, unfortunately, a common problem with Latitudes for several years now. I've had it happen on two different generations of Latitude 8x0's.
I seem to remember it being fixed by BIOS or driver updates in both cases.
How so? On my vista box its exactly the same as on XP.
To be a client of a remote network printer .... type \\print-server-machine-name\ in explorer, then double click on the printer. Done. Exactly the same as in XP.
To host a network printer .... Escalate, Printers, Server Properties, Ports, New Port, etc. Install Drivers, turn on sharing. Done. Just like XP, except using Vista's RunAs admin instead of XP's RunAs.
Now, maybe VirtualBox might mitigate some of their drivers issues, and give you and your IT staff and the company a reason to brag about Linux.
You're making an awful big assumption that the machine wouldnt have driver issues with Linux. Thats very rare, in my experience.
What I like in KDE Control/Kcontrol is turning off the vendor them, changing the login icon image, adding pics to the changing background, and letting the login screen do its thing. Or, turning on and locking the screen saver, showing off kdesktop....
Maybe I'm confused ... but isnt that pretty much what every desktop/windows manager on every OS on the planet does?
My frustration comes about because, if I've just installed Windows Server fresh, I can't go to the Internet and download drivers that I might need. I can't go download my backup software and install it. I basically can't do much of anything without reconfiguring the security settings first, even if I'm the administrator. And it doesn't just prompt, "This might be bad, do you really want to do this?" I doesn't allow it.
Look, its really simple. Add the site you want to download from to Trusted Sites. Download your files. Remove the sites from trusted sites.
Or even easier, grab firefox as the very first thing, and then leave IE for nothing except when you need to hit Microsoft Update.
Great, so i should go mucking around in list of random poorly-labelled security settings in order to do things I should be able to do by default, and hope that I'm disabling the right things, and not doing something even dumber? Why not just have reasonable security settings from the outset?
If the settings appear to be 'random poorly-labelled' settings, then you're just not very experienced with the platform. Thats okay, but dont go complaining about that, spend some time getting up to speed on the platform.
There's a reason that IE on Server has such locked down settings. IE has a history of being as strong as swiss cheese. Even that legitimate website you're getting drivers from could easily be compromised and have an injected javascript exploit stuck at the bottom of the page. It's quite common, even for legitimate, big sites.
So the security settings default commensurate to risk. In many situations, if your server gets owned, its likely that your entire company could be owned. Therefore the security settings are cranked waaaaaay up.
If you dont like it, grab firefox or opera as the first thing, and get on with your life.
The fact that the time-to-pwn has not fallen over the past four years despite "security fixes" and security engines that inconvenience users and break applications is proof that the security methods employed by Microsoft are a failure.
It's fallen hugely.
Most windows boxen since XP SP2 are completely safe to put out on the internet in default config.
Now you wouldnt want to go browsing anything except MS update with IE before you patch, but thats different than an 'auto-own' scenario being described here.
Windows users can choose to trust any arbitrary cert as well.
It's not as user friendly as with Mac, but it can be done without too much trouble, as long you can google about it.
That's $200 per year for the developer who self-publishes, plus $200 per year for each user who exercises the right to "installation information" under section 4(e) of the LGPLv3. That can add up quickly.
I dont have a clue what that means.
But its not accurate. It's $200 per BUSINESS per year. (or replace software distributor with business).
So you're giving us another excuse for software to fall unmaintained: "my cert ran out".
I'm not giving anyone an excuse. Thats not at all what I said. I said you dont need to keep renewing your cert for old signings to continue working. You only need to renew if you need to sign new software after your old cert has expired.
VeriSign certificates have special privileges over other CAs' certificates in Windows. Only VeriSign certificates work with the Windows Logo program (including "Games for Windows")
Certificates dont have 'privileges'.
What you're talking about is the qualification testing for higher levels of the logo program (ie, certified for Vista, rather than 'works with vista').
And you dont need a verisign cert to distribute your code, you need one to submit for winqual testing.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsvista/bb981198.aspx
Winqual testing for the 'certified' logo program is NOT the same as signing for distribution.
Signing for distribution can be done with any of these vendors:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms995347.aspx
and the kernel mode code signing that hides the ugly "Test Mode" warning in Windows Vista 64-bit.
This is also not true for hardware. YOu do NOT need a verisign cert for this.
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/winlogo/VistaLogoFAQ.mspx#title110
You DO need (just like software) a verisign cert for winqual testing, if you are doing winqual testing. But you can get your authenticode cert from someone else for cheaper.
Now it turns out that recently (at least its new to me), MS worked out a discounted cert from Verisign, who now offers a combo cert that works for authenticode and winqual testing (if you need the latter), for $399.
It's still more expensive than you need for just an authenticode cert, but its not too bad.
Those USB things are very rare, at least in my experience.
I havent actually seen on in use in many, many years.
And every residential internet package I've ever seen in the past 2-3 years includes a nat/firewall/router combo unit (combo'd with the modem).
Business packages you often get it without a router/firewall because they all run their own equipment.
And its not even really that.
If you RTFA, you'll see that its a honeypot machine (not a windows box) that 'emulates' typical windows vulnerabilities.
It is effectively running like an unpatched (wont say which sp version) windows with no firewall.
In other words, its only a meaningful article in the sense that it tells you how much auto-scan/auto-exploit traffic there is out there.
The article says nothing about how long an actual windows machine will stay alive on the network.
I'm confused then. If what you say is so, and Microsoft's firewall is rock solid, then how could an unpatched Windows installation be pwned in less than four minutes as the summary says? I guess I need to RTFA (grumble mumble).
RTFA. :)
Seriously though, if you read it, the testing was done using a honeypot that _emulates_ many different OS's.
It's not clear from the writeup whether this also emulates the windows xp firewall.
My guess from the reading is that its effectively emulating a windows box WITHOUT a firewall, so is a fairly useless measure for real world use.
Signed by whom? The end user acting as his own root CA? Or a major software publisher who can afford $$$ per year for an Authenticode certificate?
An Authenticode script costs under $200 per year. And you dont need to renew it every year unless you're doing new releases that you need to sign anew.
The only way anyone pays $$$ for an authenticode cert is if they go to verisign.
Sad but true.
Looking on my box, 4 of the top 5 memory consumers are web browsers (Firefox3, then Safari, then Opera, then IE). Whereas Eclipse (!!) and MySQL (for development) are far below the browsers. Its sad when the brand new gen of Firefox with all the new fancy memory optimizations uses more memory than Eclipse for java development.
The ones that complain the loudest are those that picked up a brand new computer to replace their old one only to find out the new one runs much slower. I have 'upgraded' many vista laptops and desktops to XP in the last year each charging the same as a virus/rootkit removal plus MS license. Laptops are the worst, especially HP, it is like they are intentionally hiding XP drivers for things as simple as a sound cards. I'm still able to find workarounds but in all my years working with PCs I have never seen support for a predecessor OS being unsupported so quickly. Even with the push for 2k/XP there were several years of support for 9x users.
This suggests to me that you're having your clients buy consumer level garbage from HP.
We only buy laptops from HP. And every single one comes with: Vista Business x86, Vista Business x64, Vista Drivers disc (32 & 64-bit), XP Pro x86, XP Pro driver disc. 5 Discs with every machine. Some we have using XP, some with Vista.
You need to buy their corporate level equipment, like my Compaq 8710w.
If you can buy it in Best Buy or Costco, then its crap and you should steer your clients away from it.
I have yet to see with my own eyes a power user that is happy with vista. So far I only hear about it on the internet from fanboys. By power user I mean someone that runs multiple applications in a productive environment and are able to do so at the same speed or better than XP without having to know how their computer works.
I own my own business, and am the lead developer and 3rd level IT support person for the really nasty issues.
My laptop is fairly hideously overpowered (C2D 2.4, 4GB ram, Quadro 1600FX w/ 512mb, 7200rpm hdd, Vista Business x64), but it runs Vista like a charm. Right now I've got Outlook, Thunderbird, Pidgin, Acrobat Reader with a couple books open, Eclipse, MySQL, Firefox3 w/ 30+ tabs open, IE with ~5 tabs open, Safari w/ 2 tabs, Opera w/ 20+ tabs open, Textpad, Notepad++, Macromedia Dreamweaver.
With all these running, I have almost half my ram free, the processor sits at 99% idle, and the thing is rock solid stable. In fact, its been in this state for ~2 weeks with this exact environment up while I work on a project. And this is while dragging the laptop all over town, and 3-10 standbys per day.
One of the things that I have found better with Vista is how stable it stays after weeks of many many standbys & hibernates. XP had real problems with that.
I realize that alot of this is drivers, but HP seems to be doing a great job on these Compaq corporate class laptops. The drivers all come in 32-bit and 64-bit versions, and everything is really solid.
I keep trying vista myself as it is my business to do so, but I haven't seen any compelling reason yet to recommend it to anyone. To me it is still a downgrade. I'll keep trying it as future updates come out.
For the vast majority of people, there is no compelling reason to upgrade. And thats just fine.
The only reason I'm on Vista is to be the guinea pig for our business, because I've got the most ability to work out the problems and find solutions/workarounds for others.
There are still some real problems around networking. Wifi is flakier on this machine than any XP box I've ever had. CIFS/SMB wont work over a VPN 2/3rds of the time, even though that problem was supposedly fixed in SP1 (it wasnt). And God help you if you want to share files with a mixed network of XP boxens.
NVidia needs to get their shit together and make a video driver that doesnt crash WDM every week. Fortunately, Vista recovers from this VERY gracefully, and I just see a screen flicker and the message popup.
Also, I can't be root on my system. The administrator account doesn't have full authority over the system! What the fuck was that?
Thats not quite true.
By default, the administrators group doesnt have some rights (log in as a service, etc), and doesnt have some ACEs (System Information ,etc).
But its just a mild measure to keep the idiots off the grass.
If you really want to do any of those things, just change the permissions to give you access to them.
There's NOTHING you cant do as admin, but there are many things that you dont have perms for 'by default'.
You've got to stop talking like you are an expert on this platform. The statements you are making are showing quite clearly that you're not up to speed on many aspects of it.
The drivers are issued officially by Microsoft, and Microsoft didn't do the work necessary to attract hardware makers to submit their code to Microsoft so that they could be 'certified'.
This is just not true.
There is no requirement for drivers to be certified by MS. You do NOT need to get certified or 'made for vista' labelling to create and publish signed drivers that are stable and Vista will accept.
The whole certified thing is a marketing bit for IHV's, meaning they can slap the sticker on the box. Yes, as part of the process, they submit their drivers/products to a 3rd party testing facility, but that testing doesnt catch things like leaky memory or many other stability problems.
I'm not even going to try to explain to you why MS made the right choice with UAC in the long run.
If there was another way that you can think of to force 3rd party developers to get their asses in gear, then I'd like to hear it.
the DRM is truly miserable; Microsoft took the worst parts of Apple's stance and made them worse. Intellectual property at its worse.
What DRM is this?
I dont own a blu-ray player, and I dont buy DRM media. And I dont see a single bit of DRM running on this machine.
If there is, its so low level that its not even detectable, and it doesnt stop me from playing anything I want to.
If wanting a baked operating system with real drivers is being a troll, then that's what I am.
Thats a reasonable thing to want, but as a company like Microsoft, how do you force 3rd party IHVs to make them?
Microsoft absolutely did the right thing with their driver re-architecture. That was the right path for the future.
But you realize that if they waited longer to release Vista, that the IHVs would have just waited that same amount longer to release good drivers, right? Most companies were specifically waiting until the release until they did major development on drivers.
Part of this WAS Microsoft's fault for making some major driver architecture changes late in the release cycle. But even so, there's no magic wand to wave and force other companies to do things.
Windows 2000 professional did not 'fail to capture the home market'.
It was never marketed to or sold to the home market. It cost like $250 back then.
99.9% of home users did not even know that something called 'windows 2000 professional' existed, unless they used it at work.
The only people using it at home were techies or developers or other people in that industry, akin to people who run windows server on their desktop/laptop now.
I smell a rat behind the entire thing. Windows 7 might be a hypervisor with plug-ins for whatever. I think Microsoft is floating trial ballons to see what might be marketable after the enormous and embarrassing mistakes found in Vista.
*sigh*
Windows 7 is not a hypervisor. Alpha builds are already out. It's based on the VistaSP1/Server2008 codebase.
This is all well known information.
It's an actual, along with a PR nightmare for them and justifiably so. Were I a stockholder, I'd have their heads.
Were you a stockholder (which you almost certainly are indirectly through a pension or retirement program), you might be uncertain over the future, but you wouldnt be too concerned with current financials. MS' financials look good, they're making money.
They're spending a bunch of their cash reserve, but the stockholders demanded that they do so, and invest that money in future things.
You've got it all wrong.
There was no 'merge point at server' because there was never a non-NT server.
Windows 2000 DID take some technologies from 9x for the userspace, but the two lines merged at XP.
Windows 2000 Professional was never marketed or intended for anything but business customers.
When 2000 Pro came out, 98 was still out and selling, and ME didnt exist yet.
ME came out ~6 months after 2000, then XP followed ME by about a year.
This stuff is all trivially available at wikipedia.
What I really wonder is when they will drop their file system and start using an implementation closer to unix/linux/osX. That will be a good day for the windows community.
Why?
Out of all the things you could have picked that is less than perfect on windows, you go for NTFS? It's fast, stable, journalled, handles arbitrary metadata, and automatically manages fragmentation in most scenarios (despite the hand-waving of entry-level techs that think defrag is the solution to everything).
The ONLY file system out there that is even remotely worth considering replacing NTFS for is ZFS. Reiser, XFS, and NTFS are all more or less in the same league. Ext3 is a fairly weak attempt at a journaling file system, but is 'good enough' for typical desktop situations.
ZFS trumps them all, but is still very young, and not globally available.
Other than that though, you can give or take any of the others. The differences between them are not material for most use-cases.
Microsoft has just done the same thing. OS + database + proprietary networking.
Would you care to explain what you're talking about? Because I have no idea.
SQL Server doesnt come bundled with the system, or are you talking about ESE/JetBlue?
If the latter, its just a C library that is very well documented. It's what Exchange and AD run off of.
And what with the proprietary networking? Exchange uses MAPI which was reasonably well documented before, and much more so now. SMB/SMB2/CIFS is all well documented nowadays, though for many years it wasnt. Maybe thats what you're talking about.
In any case, all that stuff runs on top of TCP/IP.
If they did a better job on the kernel and drivers, they could continue to sell operating systems.
This also doesnt make much sense to me. The NT kernel is very reasonable. Most of things people complain about are in win32 and associated libraries, not the NT kernel.
And MS doesnt make drivers. They include drivers in their OS, but they generally dont write many drivers.
On the other hand, Apple managed to rehost their gui on top of bsd userland on a microkernel. Why can't Microsoft do the same.
Two reasons.
1. It would take 10 years.
2. The problems most people encounter with Windows arent kernel problems, its stuff in win32 and similar. So re-hosting win32 on top of BSD would solve precisely nothing.
Oh, and whoever decided to toss the menu in favor of the ribbon should be canned right now.
Thats very much a personal opinion and not a generally shared sentiment. Nearly everybody I've seen use it who didnt make a drama-event/emotional-issue out of it liked the ribbon once they got over the change curve, which only takes a couple hours of use for most folks.
The first time I confronted the menu-less "word", I couldn't figure out how to save a file with a name.
Thats extraordinarily rare, in my experience. Most people find the office button fairly quickly, either because it sits there and throbs at you, or because the startup orientation/training stuff told them about it.
Now they have their cake, they toss the menu because they don't care about the comfort of the user.
Now thats just silly. You may not personally like it, but the ribbon change was quite clearly a result of a tremendous amount of user-testing. Companies dont make random changes to their cash-cow (and invest huge amounts of money on that change) just to make things difficult for people. They make changes because they have very strong belief that it will make things better for the majority of the users.
What most folks at /. seem to forget is that they are very very different from the other 80% of the user base of software products. The way you respond to things is NOT representative of the general population.
As I always point out, the computers today are 1000 times faster than the IBM-PC, memory is 1000 times larger, and the disk is 1000 times larger. Why is the machine sluggish?
Well, I dont know, maybe because the current gen of things is either: 1) doing 1000x more things, or 2) written in a higher level language that trades performance/memory-footprint for developer productivity, or 3) both.
If they are so smart, why can't they answer this question in the form of an operating environment where they don't use the majority of the cycles and there is something left for the users programs.
You mean like just about every windows operating system ever made when running on recommended hardware? An XP Pro install on current gen hardware is insanely fast. Vista on current gen runs quite nice.
On the box I'm typing this from (Vista Business x64), the only thing using any processing po
I'm not sure why this keeps getting repeated here, its not true.
Commercial products CAN use these, they just have to purchase a patent license from MS.
Open Source products dont have to, and are covered (albeit with very convoluted wording) by a 'wont sue' clause.
You know, thats real easy to say things like that when you dont run your own software business (I'm assuming, correct me if not).
You may not like what they did from a purist perspective, but what they did WORKED. And it worked fabulously, as measured by the ridiculous success of the company.
Most software businesses fail or just trundle along barely surviving.
I'll take a business that makes software that works and makes money, but may have some questionable engineering, over one with perfect code, but no sales.
Actually it does represent the standard that MS was pushing.
It does NOT represent the ISO OOXML 'strict' that was developed by the ISO groups (not microsoft).
It does almost perfectly represent the ISO OOXML 'transitional'. There are a couple minor issues, but they're very minor.
What MS proposed to ISO is not even remotely the same as the ISO OOXML 'strict' version that the iso working groups developed.
The ISO working groups took what MS proposed and evolved it quite a bit, till it was incompatible with Office 2007 shipping.
Or just use 'MS'?
If someone here on /. really cant figure out what MS is referring to by the context then the problem is with them, not the text.
And whats with the 'under 30' deal? I'm over 30, but dont have a clue what you're talking about.
Do you really have a problem when reading about windows and operating systems and IT issues confusing MS/Microsoft for MS/Multiple-Sclerosis?
Thats hard to imagine. The context alone would make it pretty damn clear in the vast majority of cases.
The current headless Windows box drives me nuts due to NTFS limitations
This strikes me as an odd statement.
Could you elaborate on this? I ask because windows has lots of limitations, but cant think I've ever heard of anyone (knowledgeable) complaint about NTFS itself.