explorer is unresponsive (its just like on windows 98 when some program in the co-operative multitasking would flake out and take the system with it.. except command prompt windows continue to run just fine) It's interesting that you bring this up.
In my experience, also on Vista business x64 (on an hp compaq 8710w laptop), the explorer issue where it hangs if anything (including the network) hangs, is completely fixed in vista.
I've actually never seen the shell/explorer hang and go unresponsive on Vista. Not once. Individual apps that hang degrade gracefully, by getting 'faded' out when you try to interact with them.
Hopefully what you're seeing is a hardware/software specific issue... as thats the thing I've been most happy about on Vista so far. The shell is just bulletproof, and never hangs. At least for me.
and they ship a lousy 2gb-capable only 32 bits yesteryear system called vista with it? So many things wrong with that statement.
First, x86 (32-bit) windows can use somewhere between 3.1 and 3.5GB of memory, depending on other hardware. Technically, it can go to 64GB with PAE turned on, but MS (for better or worse) decided that the support cost for poorly written drivers that failed under a PAE environment wasnt worth it, and disabled it on 32-bit windows.
So its not 2GB, its 3.something.
Second, if your laptop/desktop is an HP, then the OS disk it came with asked you when you first booted whether you wanted to install the 32-bit or 64-bit version of Vista. The retail versions also ship with both 32 and 64-bit.
It's possible you got into some crappy consumer level stuff that HP wont support 64-bit on... but that also means it cant be advertised as Vista premium ready (or whatever the up-level one is).
Volume Shadow Copy service is really only used when a system restore snapshot is being taken or you kicked off a backup (either manually or through a scheduled task), so turning off VSS isn't really going to buy you much. On Vista, VSS makes a copy of every file in the OS that changes, and keeps some number of these old versions on disk and available. This is one of the things on Vista that slows down file access somewhat. It's alot more intrusive than VSS on prior versions was.
Now mind you, if thats a valuable feature (roll back to previous version of a file without going to backups), then its a great feature. But it does come with a cost.
Both windows and linux use exactly the same technology to go beyond 3-4GB on 32-bit OS's. It's PAE.
PAE has been in use on windows for many years.
In XP sp2 32-bit, they disabled PAE from being used on the desktop OS, because many drivers misbehave if they werent designed to possibly run in an PAE environment.
So the limitation isnt technical on the windows side, and at various versions its worked.
In the case of both XP and Vista, if you run the x64 version, you can use all the ram you can afford.
It's a corporate tool for controlling access to corporate documents. MS isnt running RMS servers that you connect to. CEIP is pretty boring vanilla instrumentation. You may not want to release the info, but it is one of the things you can do to help make the product better.
Script components are a tiny niche piece of SSIS. SSIS works in general quite well.
And then your rant about reliability. Well, if you think its reasonable to run production database ETL processes on a desktop (ie, Vista), and that causes reliability issues for you, then I think you may not have the best thought out environment.
If you want something real to complain about... pick something real. For example, it's ridiculous that VS2005 has as many issues as it does on Vista. You basically need to be running VS 2008 if you want everything to work right on Vista. Thats a shame, and how long it took them to deal with it was a shame.
Thats a real issue. Your multi post on a tiny little issue of mssql 2005 is not.
Microsoft SQL Server (both 2005 and 2007) MS SQL Server 2005 works just fine on Vista. I'm on Vista Business x64 and am running MS SQL 2005 right now. It works great.
There is no such thing as SQL Server 2007. There is a SQL Server 2008.
For goodness sake how does Microsoft make an OS incompatible with any flavor of Intel NIC? By changing the driver model, which requires the hardware vendor to release new drivers (or not, as they choose). This isnt hard stuff to understand.
You say that like all Intel NICs are great. They're not. There are a whole series of them that end up in cheapy corporate kit that are basically NIC winmodems. They're garbage and they're tremendously sensitive to driver quality.
Who doesn't save files from a share to a pendrive, or upload pictures from their camera? I do both of these things on my Vista laptop, it works fine.
iTunes? It won't work with iTunes? You don't think people are going to consider that a deliberate failure? Or a fatal flaw? You say that like its even physically possible for MS to fix iTunes. iTunes is a fairly unstable, poorly written piece of software. Remember how when it first came out, it took Apple months to stabilize it enough where it wouldnt BSOD a significant percentage of computers. And why a media playback device needs to install driver level software I'll never understand.
But even if you love iTunes, can you propose an alternative? What exactly could MS have done to make iTunes work on Windows without apple having to do any work?
iTunes is just another piece of 3rd party software. They had a long, long time after late betas and RCs were released to fix iTunes on Vista. They chose not to. They chose to wait until the GA release of Vista, and then START working on stabilizing iTunes.
FWIW, there's something else wrong going on there, or you've got that one in a million configurations that exposes a bug that causes this.
I'm on a new HP Compaq 8710w laptop, 2.4GHz core2duo, 4gb ram, massive 512mb graphics card, running Vista Business x64. It's very very fast, and has been absolutely rock solid for the first few months I've had it so far.
File copying is fast for me.
UAC is superior to all the runas.exe you were forced through on XP.
The desktop doesnt hang and tear when apps hang, or when there are network glitches (big bennie of the new desktop manager).
The whole desktop doesnt lock up when there are network holdups (finally!).
Start menu is better, shutdown controls are worse.
Explorer file manager is much more stable, but has some stupid defaults, and for the love of God, no UP folder button. I cant comprehend why they ditched that.
I'm convinced that Vista is even more ridiculously dependent on drivers for experiences and performance than before. It's the only way I can reconcile the wildly different experiences, where the only difference is hardware.
Overall, other than some of the bad choices I think they made in the explorer file manager, the overall desktop is a better experience. Aero is just smooth and nice. The desktop never gets hung up or slows down because of other things hanging, which was always a big problem in xp and prior.
They also are approaching a sane file-structure and names. In other words, c:\users\ is soooooo much better than c:\documents and settings\, and so forth.
It's a mixed bag, but other than the DRM garbage.... there are some really solid improvements in the underlying technology. Most of it you wont see though, it'll just work better overall (once we're past the driver teething issues).
The utility he's referring to, robocopy, is basically rsync, or very similar. Allows continuous mirroring of directories, a large number of configuration points, etc.
It also does a very good job of retrying failed transfers a configurable number of times, with a configurable delay.
It's really too complex to be embedded into explorer. Though I do wish they'd do a better job of it in explorer.
Mostly because the Xbox360 is a pretty darn nice console. XBox Live is quite excellent, other than downtimes like around the holiday.
There are a number of great exclusives, and nearly all the big sellers.
It's a good platform, and MS is standing behind the failures they have with them, so you're out a little inconvenience, rather than money (ie, red ring of death).
Mind you, the PS3 looks like it'll probably be a workhorse, and last 5+ years. Not sure if the 360 will.
But its a good platform, good games, great online. No need to bring religious stuff into it.
And its not like the sony consoles dont have a history of hardware failures as well. We'll see how the PS3 lasts, though it looks like they did a better job on this than the PS2.
You technically need CALs for each server. Not at all. You only need CALs for each type of server. For example, for most shops that will have an MS infrastructure, you just buy per-user or per-desktop core CALs, once. That covers you for an unlimited number of windows server, exchange, sharepoint, etc.
You still have a per-server cost to buy the exchange server, etc. But the CALs cover all servers in your organization, as long as you're working in per-seat mode.
I'm sure there are some situations where you'd want to do per-server licensing (as opposed to per-seat), but I've never seen it.
If it is a per device model, then you will need on for each server your connecting to simultaneously and both models require version specific CALs. Not at all. For example, if you have 100 users/desktops, and 10 windows 2003 servers, 2 exchange servers, and 5 sharepoint servers.
You only need 100 Core CALs. If you then double the amount of servers, as long as they're in this set of servers, then you dont have to buy any more CALs.
Nowadays, the Core CAL and Enterprise CAL suites are versionless, since unless you're in education, they all include SA.
http://www.microsoftvolumelicensing.com/userights/ProductPage.aspx?pid=109
Of course both of those statements could be invalidated by some Software assurance or upgrade assurance program or something I haven't accounted for. I'm speaking of the plain licensing requirements, not special programs that get more friendly the larger the organization you are. Okay, so in the small business scenario, where you're buying retail or off the open license, then I think you're partially right. The cal's are versioned. But you still only need one per-employee or per-desktop, no matter how many servers you have (assuming you're using per-device or per-user).
I can understand Exchange being painful if you're not up to speed and experienced with it. But in what way is Outlook a 'constant source of woe'?
It pretty much just works. Every once in a while when flipping between a bunch of different vpn connections on wifi, it'll get stuck, and I have to force it to reconnect, but thats about the only trouble I've ever seen.
Also, if you own Exchange, then you own Outlook. You dont have to buy anything additional. Thats why you get the Outlook CD with your Exchange packaging. You get one license to Outlook for every CAL you pay for on Exchange.
So if you've got an MS installation, as long as this isnt your first server, and you've been doing it right, then you already own the CALs.
It's the MS way... there is a cost, but once you're in the door, if you stay within their world, the marginal price for each additional piece is very small.
And combine it with how well all their stuff works together, it can make it very compelling for some shops.
What in the world would lead you to believe that Microsoft Office will ever generate a document, except perhaps for the most trivial, that actually conforms to the spec they're pushing as MSOOXML? Why do you think they haven't? Have you created files, opened them up and looked at them, and compared them to the spec? I've opened them up, took a look at how nice it was that this was finally in a textual format, but have never compared to spec.
Oh, and it isn't all text-based, there's some binary crud in there too, as hex, neatly wrapped in appropriate equivalents to tags. You mean like embedded images? Or other embedded binary objects? How would you prefer they store those? The base64-encoded (or whatever) stuff inside these documents are not the smoking gun you think they are.
I'm not the one you were responding to, but I think a couple points need addressing here.
If I have a binary.doc file and a complete copy of the OOXML spec, I've got nothing. Sure you do. Open it in the current version of the product and save it as the current version of the format. Now you have full access.
MS didnt document the 2-major-generations-old format, they documented the current format.
What advantage to anyone (except MS) is there in adding another? Everyone benefits. A previously undocumented format is now documented. Thats a good thing.
Is there something OOXML can do that ODF can't? Document the format used by the vast, vast majority of office-productivity software users on the planet.
As far as I can see, a document format simply needs to specify how data goes on a page; as long as the right text goes in the right place in the right size, there should be no problem, Why do we need two standards to accomplish this? It's alot more complicated than that and you know it. Spreadsheets do alot more than just say what text goes where. And the whole 1900-is-a-leap-year business is one of those things brought up as a complaint with the original version put out.
Is this all just because ODF doesn't specify that documents should change randomly whenever you select a different printer?:) You know, thats a good question. How does OO or the other ODF reader/editor/writers handle when the capabilities of a printer changes?
Anyway, I'll give you partial credit for the ties-MS's-hands theory. I seriously doubt that MS will feel their hands are tied, but I suppose it's possible, even if unlikely. Aside from that, I'm still not seeing any technical reasons to support OOXML as an ISO standard. But I am happy to be having an actual dialog. Got any more? Having it in a standards body will likely be 'a good thing', as it will tend to keep the MS implementation alot closer to a 'perfect' implementation of the standard.
So all in all, this whole process will probably be a good thing for the world at large and MS customers in general. Is it the best of all possible situations? No, of course not. But its an improvement, and a change of direction to a better one.
The technical good in OOXML is that its a codification of something that's incredibly widely used, but has never been codified before.
If you go with the assumption that MS isnt going to throw away their existing products and write a new ODF reader/editor/writer, at least not in the short term, then this seems perfectly reasonable.
Given that assumption, there are only two choices. To codify the de-facto standard that is ms office, or not.
I think its fair to say that to do so is unqualifiedly the better choice.
So from their point of view... you can have nothing (the status quo) or you can have something (OOXML). Dumping MS Office and building a new product around ODF just isnt going to happen in the near term. Even companies with the cash of MS can only hire so many truly talented software engineers. And I bet you that very few of the good ones want to work on Office.
Have you even seen Microsoft's support? Staying on the telephone for hours on corporate support to report a serious bug, only to get a idiot who doesn't seem to even grasp Microsoft's own products (and this has been on every occasion I have tried to do anything with the enterprise support). Microsoft does not even provide direct support options to consumers, never mind small-time developers. This is not the comon experience, at least not in mine.
I've personally talked to the developers of windows components on support issues.
Small time developers get excellent support, just register as an ISV partner. You get quite a bit of free support.
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In my experience, also on Vista business x64 (on an hp compaq 8710w laptop), the explorer issue where it hangs if anything (including the network) hangs, is completely fixed in vista.
I've actually never seen the shell/explorer hang and go unresponsive on Vista. Not once. Individual apps that hang degrade gracefully, by getting 'faded' out when you try to interact with them.
Hopefully what you're seeing is a hardware/software specific issue
First, x86 (32-bit) windows can use somewhere between 3.1 and 3.5GB of memory, depending on other hardware. Technically, it can go to 64GB with PAE turned on, but MS (for better or worse) decided that the support cost for poorly written drivers that failed under a PAE environment wasnt worth it, and disabled it on 32-bit windows.
So its not 2GB, its 3.something.
Second, if your laptop/desktop is an HP, then the OS disk it came with asked you when you first booted whether you wanted to install the 32-bit or 64-bit version of Vista. The retail versions also ship with both 32 and 64-bit.
It's possible you got into some crappy consumer level stuff that HP wont support 64-bit on
Now mind you, if thats a valuable feature (roll back to previous version of a file without going to backups), then its a great feature. But it does come with a cost.
Both windows and linux use exactly the same technology to go beyond 3-4GB on 32-bit OS's. It's PAE.
PAE has been in use on windows for many years.
In XP sp2 32-bit, they disabled PAE from being used on the desktop OS, because many drivers misbehave if they werent designed to possibly run in an PAE environment.
So the limitation isnt technical on the windows side, and at various versions its worked.
In the case of both XP and Vista, if you run the x64 version, you can use all the ram you can afford.
Hopefully this guy gets modded to obvlivion.
For those of you falling for this nonsense, there is no such thing as he's describing.
The 32-bit version of windows has the same limitation as all non-PAE 32-bit operating systems have.
But x64 Vista does quite fine with 4GB or more of memory on install and use.
RMS isnt what you think it is.
It's a corporate tool for controlling access to corporate documents. MS isnt running RMS servers that you connect to. CEIP is pretty boring vanilla instrumentation. You may not want to release the info, but it is one of the things you can do to help make the product better.
You're really reaching here, arent you?
... pick something real. For example, it's ridiculous that VS2005 has as many issues as it does on Vista. You basically need to be running VS 2008 if you want everything to work right on Vista. Thats a shame, and how long it took them to deal with it was a shame.
Script components are a tiny niche piece of SSIS. SSIS works in general quite well.
And then your rant about reliability. Well, if you think its reasonable to run production database ETL processes on a desktop (ie, Vista), and that causes reliability issues for you, then I think you may not have the best thought out environment.
If you want something real to complain about
Thats a real issue. Your multi post on a tiny little issue of mssql 2005 is not.
There is no such thing as SQL Server 2007. There is a SQL Server 2008. For goodness sake how does Microsoft make an OS incompatible with any flavor of Intel NIC? By changing the driver model, which requires the hardware vendor to release new drivers (or not, as they choose). This isnt hard stuff to understand.
You say that like all Intel NICs are great. They're not. There are a whole series of them that end up in cheapy corporate kit that are basically NIC winmodems. They're garbage and they're tremendously sensitive to driver quality. Who doesn't save files from a share to a pendrive, or upload pictures from their camera? I do both of these things on my Vista laptop, it works fine. iTunes? It won't work with iTunes? You don't think people are going to consider that a deliberate failure? Or a fatal flaw? You say that like its even physically possible for MS to fix iTunes. iTunes is a fairly unstable, poorly written piece of software. Remember how when it first came out, it took Apple months to stabilize it enough where it wouldnt BSOD a significant percentage of computers. And why a media playback device needs to install driver level software I'll never understand.
But even if you love iTunes, can you propose an alternative? What exactly could MS have done to make iTunes work on Windows without apple having to do any work?
iTunes is just another piece of 3rd party software. They had a long, long time after late betas and RCs were released to fix iTunes on Vista. They chose not to. They chose to wait until the GA release of Vista, and then START working on stabilizing iTunes.
FWIW, there's something else wrong going on there, or you've got that one in a million configurations that exposes a bug that causes this.
.... there are some really solid improvements in the underlying technology. Most of it you wont see though, it'll just work better overall (once we're past the driver teething issues).
I'm on a new HP Compaq 8710w laptop, 2.4GHz core2duo, 4gb ram, massive 512mb graphics card, running Vista Business x64. It's very very fast, and has been absolutely rock solid for the first few months I've had it so far.
File copying is fast for me.
UAC is superior to all the runas.exe you were forced through on XP.
The desktop doesnt hang and tear when apps hang, or when there are network glitches (big bennie of the new desktop manager).
The whole desktop doesnt lock up when there are network holdups (finally!).
Start menu is better, shutdown controls are worse.
Explorer file manager is much more stable, but has some stupid defaults, and for the love of God, no UP folder button. I cant comprehend why they ditched that.
I'm convinced that Vista is even more ridiculously dependent on drivers for experiences and performance than before. It's the only way I can reconcile the wildly different experiences, where the only difference is hardware.
Overall, other than some of the bad choices I think they made in the explorer file manager, the overall desktop is a better experience. Aero is just smooth and nice. The desktop never gets hung up or slows down because of other things hanging, which was always a big problem in xp and prior.
They also are approaching a sane file-structure and names. In other words, c:\users\ is soooooo much better than c:\documents and settings\, and so forth.
It's a mixed bag, but other than the DRM garbage
The utility he's referring to, robocopy, is basically rsync, or very similar. Allows continuous mirroring of directories, a large number of configuration points, etc.
It also does a very good job of retrying failed transfers a configurable number of times, with a configurable delay.
It's really too complex to be embedded into explorer. Though I do wish they'd do a better job of it in explorer.
Mostly because the Xbox360 is a pretty darn nice console. XBox Live is quite excellent, other than downtimes like around the holiday.
There are a number of great exclusives, and nearly all the big sellers.
It's a good platform, and MS is standing behind the failures they have with them, so you're out a little inconvenience, rather than money (ie, red ring of death).
Mind you, the PS3 looks like it'll probably be a workhorse, and last 5+ years. Not sure if the 360 will.
But its a good platform, good games, great online. No need to bring religious stuff into it.
And its not like the sony consoles dont have a history of hardware failures as well. We'll see how the PS3 lasts, though it looks like they did a better job on this than the PS2.
You still have a per-server cost to buy the exchange server, etc. But the CALs cover all servers in your organization, as long as you're working in per-seat mode.
I'm sure there are some situations where you'd want to do per-server licensing (as opposed to per-seat), but I've never seen it. If it is a per device model, then you will need on for each server your connecting to simultaneously and both models require version specific CALs. Not at all. For example, if you have 100 users/desktops, and 10 windows 2003 servers, 2 exchange servers, and 5 sharepoint servers.
You only need 100 Core CALs. If you then double the amount of servers, as long as they're in this set of servers, then you dont have to buy any more CALs.
Nowadays, the Core CAL and Enterprise CAL suites are versionless, since unless you're in education, they all include SA.
http://www.microsoftvolumelicensing.com/userights/ProductPage.aspx?pid=109 Of course both of those statements could be invalidated by some Software assurance or upgrade assurance program or something I haven't accounted for. I'm speaking of the plain licensing requirements, not special programs that get more friendly the larger the organization you are. Okay, so in the small business scenario, where you're buying retail or off the open license, then I think you're partially right. The cal's are versioned. But you still only need one per-employee or per-desktop, no matter how many servers you have (assuming you're using per-device or per-user).
You can buy upgrade packs that translate your SBS licenses to win2003 licenses & cals.
It's usually quite a bit cheaper than standalone win2003 licenses plus cals.
I can understand Exchange being painful if you're not up to speed and experienced with it. But in what way is Outlook a 'constant source of woe'?
It pretty much just works. Every once in a while when flipping between a bunch of different vpn connections on wifi, it'll get stuck, and I have to force it to reconnect, but thats about the only trouble I've ever seen.
Also, if you own Exchange, then you own Outlook. You dont have to buy anything additional. Thats why you get the Outlook CD with your Exchange packaging. You get one license to Outlook for every CAL you pay for on Exchange.
It's even more complex than that.
... there is a cost, but once you're in the door, if you stay within their world, the marginal price for each additional piece is very small.
You only buy the CALs once, for all your servers.
So if you've got an MS installation, as long as this isnt your first server, and you've been doing it right, then you already own the CALs.
It's the MS way
And combine it with how well all their stuff works together, it can make it very compelling for some shops.
On the system being discussed, thats not true.
The web-server edition of windows server doesnt require any CALS.
Thats its primary purpose for being.
Everything I've seen ... they felt they were forced to do that for anti-competitive purposes.
They wanted to make it free, but feared to run afoul of the monopoly issues, by undercutting/bundling the product that competes with vmware, etc.
This way, its nearly free, but not really free.
Although they both share a line of kernels, its not accurate or useful to say that Server 2008 is the server version of Vista.
That's like saying that Server 2003 is the server version of XP.
In addition, the article is about the licensing model of the web-server version of server 2008. No cals, just a flat fee, etc.
There's no concept of an 'ultimate version' on the web-server version of the server 2008.
The web-edition is what version it is.
MS didnt document the 2-major-generations-old format, they documented the current format. What advantage to anyone (except MS) is there in adding another? Everyone benefits. A previously undocumented format is now documented. Thats a good thing. Is there something OOXML can do that ODF can't? Document the format used by the vast, vast majority of office-productivity software users on the planet. As far as I can see, a document format simply needs to specify how data goes on a page; as long as the right text goes in the right place in the right size, there should be no problem, Why do we need two standards to accomplish this? It's alot more complicated than that and you know it. Spreadsheets do alot more than just say what text goes where. And the whole 1900-is-a-leap-year business is one of those things brought up as a complaint with the original version put out. Is this all just because ODF doesn't specify that documents should change randomly whenever you select a different printer?
So all in all, this whole process will probably be a good thing for the world at large and MS customers in general. Is it the best of all possible situations? No, of course not. But its an improvement, and a change of direction to a better one.
The technical good in OOXML is that its a codification of something that's incredibly widely used, but has never been codified before.
... you can have nothing (the status quo) or you can have something (OOXML). Dumping MS Office and building a new product around ODF just isnt going to happen in the near term. Even companies with the cash of MS can only hire so many truly talented software engineers. And I bet you that very few of the good ones want to work on Office.
If you go with the assumption that MS isnt going to throw away their existing products and write a new ODF reader/editor/writer, at least not in the short term, then this seems perfectly reasonable.
Given that assumption, there are only two choices. To codify the de-facto standard that is ms office, or not.
I think its fair to say that to do so is unqualifiedly the better choice.
So from their point of view
Because its not a new standard.
It's a codification and documentation of an existing de-facto standard.
They didnt design a brand-new blue sky format. They codified their existing one, warts and all.
I've personally talked to the developers of windows components on support issues.
Small time developers get excellent support, just register as an ISV partner. You get quite a bit of free support.
Are you seriously saying that you were running these important databases on systems that:
1. Are managed so poorly that you could have hardware failures in the raid controllers and no one dealt with it.
2. Are operated without ANY FORM OF UPS!
Both of those things are just inconceivable for any reasonable production shop.