Because Mom and Pop or Grandma, or even Joe BusinessOwner when he finds that he has zero restrictions for playing any non-DRM media (ie, divx, mp3, xvid, etc), and can also play blu-ray or HD-DVD, is going to call you right up demanding that you fix that.
I think you need to take a closer look at their SEC filings if you think they're "bleeding money".
The only conceivable place you could get that is that they've chosen to spend some of their huge cash savings on investments and dividends to shareholders. But thats not bleeding money, thats investing for the future.
As far as operating income goes, they make quite a tidy profit each year.
Hunting down options in the ribbon is not my idea of usable.
Again, thats the whole point of the Ribbon. It's hugely more discoverable than menus. Menus are deeply nested, small, and are easy to mis-fire when you're 3 levels down in submenus and move your mouse just-so wrong, and the 3-level deep submenu disappears. Ribbons are bigger, and much shallower (ie, no deep nesting).
You may not personally like them, but I'd guess its mostly because they're different, rather than on their inherent qualities.
I also turn off the stupid feature of "personalized" menus in everything for just this reason. I like seeing all the options available instead of being spoon fed a short list that are most common.
There is no such thing as the personalized menus on the ribbon, so you'll be happy there.
You'll have to tell the 40 or so developers I work with that Linux doesn't support the devices in their Latitude D & E series laptops (various models from over the last 3 years).
How did they deal with the problems I wrote about? On the Dells on Ubuntu, I never was able to get wifi working. Ever.
Did you have a bad experience installing on one machine and decide to exaggerate a bit?
Hardly. In every case I was excited to see how the Linux world was coming along for desktops/laptops, but my excitement was quashed pretty quickly when the things would lock up on the standard install. Thats a common enough issue that it returns a lot of results when googling for just that problem.
Heck, when moving to my new fancy HP Compaq laptop, I was hoping things would be different, but nope. Exactly the same problem.
These are quite common problems.
The D series laptops have "Windows Vista Capable" stickers on them, but if you install Vista, the wireless, the sound, and Aero don't work.
Cant comment on that, we were only using XP when we were using the Dell's. The HP laptops ship with XP, XP-64, Vista Business x86, Vista business x64, and drivers for all. It's been nearly flawless with Vista x64 so far. Slower on equiv hardware than XP, but hugely more stable.
First, Windows 7 is a marketing name, and not meant to indicate anything besides 'sounds good'.
Second, you're mixing together two largely unrelated lines of operating systems (ie, win9x and NT). It is not meaningful or accurate to list them in a sequential order the way you have.
Third, Windows 7 is NT6.1, as in its an evolutionary version past 6.0 which was Vista.
So dont assume the name 'Windows 7' has any inherent meaning. It doesnt. No more than important ibex or humping heron or any of the other crazy marketing names companies come up with.
The NT6.1 is semi-meaningful, as in its the 6th major version (though the NT line started at NT3 IIRC), and the second minor version of NT6.
It makes it even more insulting when you keep getting the annoying reminders which eventually have the "reboot later" option greyed out, giving you no choice but to stop what you're doing for a few minutes.
This is a configuration option your IT department made. Windows Vista doesnt ship that way. Your complaint is with your company.
Even then, what happens if that latest "critical update to IE" breaks a driver and your system won't boot?
This is extraordinaly rare. Extremely, extremely rare.
And even then, its your IT department making the choice of balance between risk and time-to-patch.
Given that this has been happening (ie, patches) monthly for years now, if your IT folks dont have a quick-response plan to the very rare failure like this, then they're not doing a very good job.
Your first complaint is absolutely right though. It's ridiculous they havent fixed that issue yet, considering how many other operating systems have figured it out.
Wow, way to completely make up something random that supports your world view, but has nothing to do with reality.
The file copying bug while playing audio was comprehensively explained (and fixed) quite a while ago.
It was a rookie mistake by a developer who used a magic-number in his code, and always assumed that the environment would be similar enough that the number he used was globally applicable.
It turned out that it wasnt. So they fixed it to be dynamic.
The bug was the audio prioritization system being incorrectly tuned in some configurations, which caused it to hugely monopolize system interrupts at the expense of things like network transfers.
This is all well documented and has nothing to do with DRM.
We tried installing the 64bit XP Pro. Horrible failure because while we experienced increased stability and productivity at our workstations, we couldn't get that data off our machines. both our large format printers and our computer controlled machining equipment could not play nice with 64bit.
So why not do your cad/cam work in xp-64 or vista x64, and then print from a vm running x86 windows, or another $800 machine running 32-bit windows.
The only ways this will really be solved is with Autodesk and Windows accurately managing memory without the current gaping leaks.
I cant speak to AutoDesk, but the problem with windows isnt leaking memory, its with the fundamentals of the x86 instruction set and driver problems with PAE on x86 desktop machines. You could also run windows server on the desktop, even the x86 version has full PAE support (whereas the desktops dont).
Again, I dont see why you didnt just build machines with 4-16GB of memory, run XP-64, and then print from a different x86 box (or from windows in an x86 vm), if printing was the only problem with x64. Of course, it could be more complicated. But I know some CAE shops have been doing that for a number of years now.
I would strongly bet on the 64-bit differences. Due to drivers.
Basically, many hw manufacturers could get by hacking their old drivers for the vista x86 version, but they largely had to start from scratch for x64 drivers.
The result is, in my experience, that machines that ship with Vista x64 (even if only as an option) tend to be far far superior, especially when running in x64 install.
unless you're the sort that leaves their PC on 24 hours a day to cut down boot times on the 30 minutes you do want to use it.
Other than my older parents and similar 'grandparent' types, why would you ever turn off the computer?
I never did get that. As long as you have the machine configured to shut off the monitor and possibly spin down the drives after a few hours of idle, you're only consuming a few watts.
WinFS will never happen. It was a good idea back in the day before ubiquitous search. It's fairly pointless now.
Hardlinks for files & folders (and soft links for folders only) have been part of NT for many many years since win2000, and softlinks for files are present in vista.
Alot of the file-based soft link stuff is restricted by default in vista because a _lot_ of software will choke on it.
Try mklink at an admin command propmt on a vanilla vista or 2008 install.
stable system, secure system
Vista is there in spades, compared to XP. There were alot of driver-based stability issues in the first year after vista release, but thats hugely better nowadays. Of course, many OEMs still load up the systems with so much crap that they're heavily degraded.
While Vista is ~10% slower than XP at many single threaded tasks... its vastly improved in things like: how long between needed reboots, shell responsiveness under heavy IO, etc.
Basically, its much more stable, lasts longer, and performs far better under load than XP ever did.
inutitive interface
Windows Explorer is freaking terrible, and I swear it gets worse with every release. My current top complaint is it randomly deciding that my programming project directories are media directories and not showing timestamp or size, only a star rating.
in the case of a lot of retail and restaurant systems) Windows 3.1.
Thats a bit misleading. That specific market doesnt run an OS at all. They run the POS they like from the vendor they like. They never see nor care about the underlying OS.
The fact that so many vendors are still using that old of an underlying platform speaks to shitty vendors, more than anything else.
As is the way with MS , they update all the eye candy first to get the drooling masses interested , then they get down to the core stuff where it really matters later on - ie the exact opposite way round to the way it should be done.
You've got it backwards.
Vista was MS making a ton of kernel, scheduler, window manager, io subsystem, and security improvements, along with almost no polish or finish of the UI or pretty finishing stuff. This is why so many things broke. But the UI/UE stuff was largely unfinished, and the big bugs were almost all in the explorer.exe shell, rather than deep in the kernel (ie the file copy bug).
W7 is building on the core kernel work done with Vista, but focusing almost exclusively on UI and interface polish and finish and experience.
So they did as you would like them to do. Focused on fundamentals at first, but released it before the UI/UE work was done (ie, eye candy). With W7 the core is there, and they're focusing on eye candy and UI/UE polish.
Ubuntu: Insert DVD. Power on. Double click "install". Choose your timezone. Choose the hard drive. Press Next.
Vista: Figure out which edition you need. Insert DVD. Power on. Click Install. Enter product key. Select Hard drive. Select timezone. Configure firewall. Reboot. Perform activation.
What self-serving silliness.
I notice that with Ubuntu, you've already selected amongst the 3-4 major unix variants, then within Linux you've selected amongst the 50+ distros, then within the Ubuntu distro you've selected amongst the 3 or so Ubuntu variants. Yet you complain about having to make a single choice amongst the vista versions? Your choices to get to ubuntu are at least an order of magnitude more complex.
And dont get me started on how easy the ubuntu installs are supposed to be. Try installing on a modern laptop. You have to start with the alternate install disc (because the gui one hangs every time), then get into the grub editor before it launches the installer (otherwise it will hang the box), then modify the grub launcher to suppress the splash screen.
That gets you to a command-line only install.
Now you have to use wget to get nvidia binary drivers from the command line with a ridiculously long URL that you have to eyeball-copy from one machine to the other. Then run that and configure X. Now you can finally load gnome or kde. Then you can try to spend a few more hours getting the intel wifi card to work.
This (or a similar variant) has been my experience for the last few years on a variety of Dell and HP high-end corporate laptops (Dell Latitude D's and E's, HP Compaq 8710w and 8510w).
Maybe its easier on a desktop, or something with a more generic video card.
Linux supports more devices than any other operating system on the market
You know thats a nice statistic to trot out, but it doesnt really work like that in the real world in a corporate or home setting.
And a large percentage of those devices that 'work' are missing large portions of their functionality (webcams, printers, multi-function devices, bluetooth, laptop keys, etc).
How is replacing drop-down menus with ribbons making Notepad/Wordpad/Paint more complicated?
For most folks, its making it less complicated. Thats the whole point of the Ribbon, its alot easier to use than deeply nested drop-down menus. If they do like Office 2007 did and retain all the old keyboard shortcuts, then its a win-win even for the tool power users.
Sounds like they're now changing it again for Windows 7, so I don't see Microsoft doing very well at all over the next few years.
You didnt RTFA.
The whole point of these missives from MS is that the driver architecture is NOT changing between Vista and W7. Drivers that work on Vista will work on W7.
They have added some new, optional features in the driver space, but no breaking changes.
Because sometimes, in the real world, when you've had products and architectures out that are 10+ years old, you sometimes have to make breaking changes to ensure you have a good architecture for the next 10 years.
If they have to change designs/apis, it just shows you their previous designs are crap, which goes to show you the the rest of the designs are crap, so why then buy MS?
Wow. Just. Wow.
Thanks man, that was one of the most insane feats of (a)logic I've ever seen.
So let me get this straight. In your universe, if something isnt created to absolute, utter perfection in the first version, then its all crap since they didnt have the talent to get it right the first time.
Can you name anything. Ever. That meets your criteria?
Install Ubuntu 7.10 onto a modern laptop, and it'll run just out of the box.
Hardly. I've actually never seen that happen. There is ALWAYS a problem with the Nvidia video card, and often you get zero video at all out of the box, and you have to use the alternate installers and edit grub to suppress the splash screen, just to get to a freaking terminal.
And then of course the wireless never works. Ever.
Why can't Microsoft just package the most popular drivers with their OSes anymore?
Define popular. This is a bigger set of drivers than you seem to think it is.
I don't think the certification causes the quality of drivers to raise even the slightest bit.
For those that certify, it does. Many dont certify.
For example they could have published free testbenches which test the whole API of the driver.
There's tons of this stuff available on the website. The certification process is one end-result of this path.
Slashdot Mirror
lol yeah, right.
Because Mom and Pop or Grandma, or even Joe BusinessOwner when he finds that he has zero restrictions for playing any non-DRM media (ie, divx, mp3, xvid, etc), and can also play blu-ray or HD-DVD, is going to call you right up demanding that you fix that.
I think you need to take a closer look at their SEC filings if you think they're "bleeding money".
The only conceivable place you could get that is that they've chosen to spend some of their huge cash savings on investments and dividends to shareholders. But thats not bleeding money, thats investing for the future.
As far as operating income goes, they make quite a tidy profit each year.
Hunting down options in the ribbon is not my idea of usable.
Again, thats the whole point of the Ribbon. It's hugely more discoverable than menus. Menus are deeply nested, small, and are easy to mis-fire when you're 3 levels down in submenus and move your mouse just-so wrong, and the 3-level deep submenu disappears. Ribbons are bigger, and much shallower (ie, no deep nesting).
You may not personally like them, but I'd guess its mostly because they're different, rather than on their inherent qualities.
I also turn off the stupid feature of "personalized" menus in everything for just this reason. I like seeing all the options available instead of being spoon fed a short list that are most common.
There is no such thing as the personalized menus on the ribbon, so you'll be happy there.
You'll have to tell the 40 or so developers I work with that Linux doesn't support the devices in their Latitude D & E series laptops (various models from over the last 3 years).
How did they deal with the problems I wrote about? On the Dells on Ubuntu, I never was able to get wifi working. Ever.
Did you have a bad experience installing on one machine and decide to exaggerate a bit?
Hardly. In every case I was excited to see how the Linux world was coming along for desktops/laptops, but my excitement was quashed pretty quickly when the things would lock up on the standard install. Thats a common enough issue that it returns a lot of results when googling for just that problem.
Heck, when moving to my new fancy HP Compaq laptop, I was hoping things would be different, but nope. Exactly the same problem.
These are quite common problems.
The D series laptops have "Windows Vista Capable" stickers on them, but if you install Vista, the wireless, the sound, and Aero don't work.
Cant comment on that, we were only using XP when we were using the Dell's. The HP laptops ship with XP, XP-64, Vista Business x86, Vista business x64, and drivers for all. It's been nearly flawless with Vista x64 so far. Slower on equiv hardware than XP, but hugely more stable.
I just wanted to understand how they evolved from Windows 3 to Windows 7.
They didnt. You're conflating two separate products, each with their own naming schemes.
As long as Vista contains 47+ programs
Yeah, damn MS for giving people what they want. How rude.
First, Windows 7 is a marketing name, and not meant to indicate anything besides 'sounds good'.
Second, you're mixing together two largely unrelated lines of operating systems (ie, win9x and NT). It is not meaningful or accurate to list them in a sequential order the way you have.
Third, Windows 7 is NT6.1, as in its an evolutionary version past 6.0 which was Vista.
So dont assume the name 'Windows 7' has any inherent meaning. It doesnt. No more than important ibex or humping heron or any of the other crazy marketing names companies come up with.
The NT6.1 is semi-meaningful, as in its the 6th major version (though the NT line started at NT3 IIRC), and the second minor version of NT6.
It makes it even more insulting when you keep getting the annoying reminders which eventually have the "reboot later" option greyed out, giving you no choice but to stop what you're doing for a few minutes.
This is a configuration option your IT department made. Windows Vista doesnt ship that way. Your complaint is with your company.
Even then, what happens if that latest "critical update to IE" breaks a driver and your system won't boot?
This is extraordinaly rare. Extremely, extremely rare.
And even then, its your IT department making the choice of balance between risk and time-to-patch.
Given that this has been happening (ie, patches) monthly for years now, if your IT folks dont have a quick-response plan to the very rare failure like this, then they're not doing a very good job.
Your first complaint is absolutely right though. It's ridiculous they havent fixed that issue yet, considering how many other operating systems have figured it out.
Wow, way to completely make up something random that supports your world view, but has nothing to do with reality.
The file copying bug while playing audio was comprehensively explained (and fixed) quite a while ago.
It was a rookie mistake by a developer who used a magic-number in his code, and always assumed that the environment would be similar enough that the number he used was globally applicable.
It turned out that it wasnt. So they fixed it to be dynamic.
The bug was the audio prioritization system being incorrectly tuned in some configurations, which caused it to hugely monopolize system interrupts at the expense of things like network transfers.
This is all well documented and has nothing to do with DRM.
We tried installing the 64bit XP Pro. Horrible failure because while we experienced increased stability and productivity at our workstations, we couldn't get that data off our machines. both our large format printers and our computer controlled machining equipment could not play nice with 64bit.
So why not do your cad/cam work in xp-64 or vista x64, and then print from a vm running x86 windows, or another $800 machine running 32-bit windows.
The only ways this will really be solved is with Autodesk and Windows accurately managing memory without the current gaping leaks.
I cant speak to AutoDesk, but the problem with windows isnt leaking memory, its with the fundamentals of the x86 instruction set and driver problems with PAE on x86 desktop machines. You could also run windows server on the desktop, even the x86 version has full PAE support (whereas the desktops dont).
Again, I dont see why you didnt just build machines with 4-16GB of memory, run XP-64, and then print from a different x86 box (or from windows in an x86 vm), if printing was the only problem with x64. Of course, it could be more complicated. But I know some CAE shops have been doing that for a number of years now.
I would strongly bet on the 64-bit differences. Due to drivers.
Basically, many hw manufacturers could get by hacking their old drivers for the vista x86 version, but they largely had to start from scratch for x64 drivers.
The result is, in my experience, that machines that ship with Vista x64 (even if only as an option) tend to be far far superior, especially when running in x64 install.
XP Pro will continue to receive security updates and support from MS through 2014.
I'm tired of lookup up the URL for everyone on here, so you'll have to find it for yourself if you want the written proof.
unless you're the sort that leaves their PC on 24 hours a day to cut down boot times on the 30 minutes you do want to use it.
Other than my older parents and similar 'grandparent' types, why would you ever turn off the computer?
I never did get that. As long as you have the machine configured to shut off the monitor and possibly spin down the drives after a few hours of idle, you're only consuming a few watts.
WinFS will never happen. It was a good idea back in the day before ubiquitous search. It's fairly pointless now.
Hardlinks for files & folders (and soft links for folders only) have been part of NT for many many years since win2000, and softlinks for files are present in vista.
Alot of the file-based soft link stuff is restricted by default in vista because a _lot_ of software will choke on it.
Try mklink at an admin command propmt on a vanilla vista or 2008 install.
stable system, secure system
Vista is there in spades, compared to XP. There were alot of driver-based stability issues in the first year after vista release, but thats hugely better nowadays. Of course, many OEMs still load up the systems with so much crap that they're heavily degraded.
While Vista is ~10% slower than XP at many single threaded tasks ... its vastly improved in things like: how long between needed reboots, shell responsiveness under heavy IO, etc.
Basically, its much more stable, lasts longer, and performs far better under load than XP ever did.
inutitive interface
Windows Explorer is freaking terrible, and I swear it gets worse with every release. My current top complaint is it randomly deciding that my programming project directories are media directories and not showing timestamp or size, only a star rating.
in the case of a lot of retail and restaurant systems) Windows 3.1.
Thats a bit misleading. That specific market doesnt run an OS at all. They run the POS they like from the vendor they like. They never see nor care about the underlying OS.
The fact that so many vendors are still using that old of an underlying platform speaks to shitty vendors, more than anything else.
As is the way with MS , they update all the eye candy first to get the drooling masses interested , then they get down to the core stuff where it really matters later on - ie the exact opposite way round to the way it should be done.
You've got it backwards.
Vista was MS making a ton of kernel, scheduler, window manager, io subsystem, and security improvements, along with almost no polish or finish of the UI or pretty finishing stuff. This is why so many things broke. But the UI/UE stuff was largely unfinished, and the big bugs were almost all in the explorer.exe shell, rather than deep in the kernel (ie the file copy bug).
W7 is building on the core kernel work done with Vista, but focusing almost exclusively on UI and interface polish and finish and experience.
So they did as you would like them to do. Focused on fundamentals at first, but released it before the UI/UE work was done (ie, eye candy). With W7 the core is there, and they're focusing on eye candy and UI/UE polish.
Ubuntu: Insert DVD. Power on. Double click "install". Choose your timezone. Choose the hard drive. Press Next.
Vista: Figure out which edition you need. Insert DVD. Power on. Click Install. Enter product key. Select Hard drive. Select timezone. Configure firewall. Reboot. Perform activation.
What self-serving silliness.
I notice that with Ubuntu, you've already selected amongst the 3-4 major unix variants, then within Linux you've selected amongst the 50+ distros, then within the Ubuntu distro you've selected amongst the 3 or so Ubuntu variants. Yet you complain about having to make a single choice amongst the vista versions? Your choices to get to ubuntu are at least an order of magnitude more complex.
And dont get me started on how easy the ubuntu installs are supposed to be. Try installing on a modern laptop. You have to start with the alternate install disc (because the gui one hangs every time), then get into the grub editor before it launches the installer (otherwise it will hang the box), then modify the grub launcher to suppress the splash screen.
That gets you to a command-line only install.
Now you have to use wget to get nvidia binary drivers from the command line with a ridiculously long URL that you have to eyeball-copy from one machine to the other. Then run that and configure X. Now you can finally load gnome or kde. Then you can try to spend a few more hours getting the intel wifi card to work.
This (or a similar variant) has been my experience for the last few years on a variety of Dell and HP high-end corporate laptops (Dell Latitude D's and E's, HP Compaq 8710w and 8510w).
Maybe its easier on a desktop, or something with a more generic video card.
Linux supports more devices than any other operating system on the market
You know thats a nice statistic to trot out, but it doesnt really work like that in the real world in a corporate or home setting.
And a large percentage of those devices that 'work' are missing large portions of their functionality (webcams, printers, multi-function devices, bluetooth, laptop keys, etc).
How is replacing drop-down menus with ribbons making Notepad/Wordpad/Paint more complicated?
For most folks, its making it less complicated. Thats the whole point of the Ribbon, its alot easier to use than deeply nested drop-down menus. If they do like Office 2007 did and retain all the old keyboard shortcuts, then its a win-win even for the tool power users.
Like PDC, there isnt a WinHEC every year, just when there's a need.
If Vista isnt the answer for you, then W7 probably wont be either.
W7 is just a maturation, stabilization and speed-up of Vista. Plus a few years of hardware makers getting used to writing drivers.
So what is the question for which Vista isnt the answer, but you think W7 might be?
It's not 50%, but its not a very good picture either.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080325-vista-capable-lawsuit-paints-picture-of-buggy-nvidia-drivers.html
Sounds like they're now changing it again for Windows 7, so I don't see Microsoft doing very well at all over the next few years.
You didnt RTFA.
The whole point of these missives from MS is that the driver architecture is NOT changing between Vista and W7. Drivers that work on Vista will work on W7.
They have added some new, optional features in the driver space, but no breaking changes.
Because sometimes, in the real world, when you've had products and architectures out that are 10+ years old, you sometimes have to make breaking changes to ensure you have a good architecture for the next 10 years.
If they have to change designs/apis, it just shows you their previous designs are crap, which goes to show you the the rest of the designs are crap, so why then buy MS?
Wow. Just. Wow.
Thanks man, that was one of the most insane feats of (a)logic I've ever seen.
So let me get this straight. In your universe, if something isnt created to absolute, utter perfection in the first version, then its all crap since they didnt have the talent to get it right the first time.
Can you name anything. Ever. That meets your criteria?
Install Ubuntu 7.10 onto a modern laptop, and it'll run just out of the box.
Hardly. I've actually never seen that happen. There is ALWAYS a problem with the Nvidia video card, and often you get zero video at all out of the box, and you have to use the alternate installers and edit grub to suppress the splash screen, just to get to a freaking terminal.
And then of course the wireless never works. Ever.
Why can't Microsoft just package the most popular drivers with their OSes anymore?
Define popular. This is a bigger set of drivers than you seem to think it is.
I don't think the certification causes the quality of drivers to raise even the slightest bit.
For those that certify, it does. Many dont certify.
For example they could have published free testbenches which test the whole API of the driver.
There's tons of this stuff available on the website. The certification process is one end-result of this path.