I agree with you that, for example, it doesn't make much sense for a average consumer to upgrade from office 2000 to office 2003. And obviously they haven't had a bump on consumer OS sales, given that Longhorn is still off in the horizon.
That said, these same product lines are still quite succesful in the corporate world. I'm talking the large companies with thousands of employees to deal with. In this envirnoment windows 2003 is attractive, even when linux is free, because it is jam packed with things to help in enterprise wide server administration. Let's not kid ourselves, it takes alot to be a good linux/unix system admin, and you guys can wear that badge with pride. Since the market is not exactly flooded with experts like yourselves, companies like it that a less experienced person can still keep a win2k3/XPSP2 network up and running, and can apply rules to machines company wide, using tools like active directory with pretty UI. Thanks to win2k3 and SP2, which turn off most services by default, and generally are more solid secure products, disasters like code red are much less likely.
Plus win2k3 and Office 2003 both have a slant towards collaboration, which isn't that attractive to consumers but intriguing for businesses. win2k3 has share point, and office has lots of collaboration tools (which will probably expand significantly thanks to the groove aquisition). They are also doing big pushes into the small business market with retail management systems, point of sales products, and even an accounting software in the works.
So it seems that while Longhorn has been in it's long development, MS has concentrated their vision towards the corporate world. This makes it easy to think they are absent from the consumer market, and hence somehow failing. But they still seem to be raking in the dough.
They only missed their quarterly projection by 1%. They brought in 9.6 billion dollars. Revenue is up by 5%. People are still obviously buying MS products in droves.
Why does not Microsoft not release their OS, but hold it for a few months, have a large beta group of testers. Fix the bugs. Have their own in house hackers try and break in, make more fixes. Load it with lots of different kinds of software and fix whatever problems they have.
Uhm... that's exactly what they've been doing this with Longhorn for 4 years. More so since the security push of 2003, after which every single line of code is inspected by groups within the company that specialize in security. They are not rushing anything, at the chagrin of slashdot users who love to think MS will never release Longhorn.
The site loads fine on my Gentoo box running firefox, just as it does for the other millions of people hit microsoft.com every hour, from every kind of OS and browser combination you can imagine.
You seem to be the only one whose whole system freezing when loading the site; hence, the problem is on your piss poor setup of your machine.
On the otherhand, MS may have some scripts in there to target you directly. That's always a possibility.
Oh, so your firefox browser takes down your non-Windows system when you visit the MS page? Who does this reflect badly on, again? I'd say you just don't know how to administer your system.
I'll go ahead and tell my manager to pass the word up the chain that suezz has told MS to "piss off". Bill will surely cry!
Sigh... I'm asking for more detailed information, given that the scenario you supposedly went through wouldn't cause any of the systems you've described to interfere with your action. Activation, if it did come up, would give you ample time to do whatever you needed. Any error messages? Where did it fail? Or are you just making it up?
"Microsoft has unlimited resources so they can "throw hardware at the problem"..."
Where do you get this idea? Are you talking from experience, or from some preconcieved notion not based on any actual data?
Remember that even though MS has billions of dollars, the end result of their projects is to be profitable. As such, and I can tell you from past experience, MSN is under budgetary constraints just like any other project would be. It wouldn't make any sense for them to throw unlimited amounts of money and hardware at MSN.
While the same may not have been as true for win2k, the fact is win2k3 is a solid server platform. It may not pump as many pages per second as apache (are there benchmarks on this anywhere? I'm just assuming this is the case), it's certainly the case that they see pretty impressive performance numbers. Coupled with the ease of maintenance of the platform, it explains why they are making some pretty big inroads into the server market. Either that or our sales people have some pretty powerful jedi mind tricks.
Uhm... why are you going to microsoft.com to look for drivers? You should be going to.com.
Also, XP x64 is only available to OEM, MSDN subscribers, and MS employees... So through which channel did you get the copy? Or are you running a probably-beta pirated copy?
Because driver developers don't give a damn about the user interface. They aren't getting a copy of Longhorn to demo new UI features. They are getting the build to make sure their hardware will work with Longhorn.
Not sure where your problem came from... You hooked up the old drive to an existing system, as a slave? That should not cause activation to reset itself... If you swapped in a new master drive with a different XP install, then the install on the new master drive would probably ask to be activated again. But again you'd have 30-60 days (depending on the license) to activate, so where was the problem?
Are you saying that you booted the drive on another machine? How did activation limit you in pulling the data out? You are given a 30-60 day grace period where the OS is fully functional without activation.
This feature isn't necessarily intended for the home user. And it certainly won't be turned on by default. Many corporations, MS' bread and butter when it comes to the OS, see a lot of value in being able to protect their hardware configuration from tampering. You'd be surprised at how positively companies received the idea.
Agreed. I'm not sure what they were thinking giving this much exposure to such a stripped down build. The only justification I've gotten back is that it had what was necessary for the intended audence.
I try to sprinkle the suck generously. Sometimes my stuff can't help but be useful, and that's when I sit down and put some serious thought as to whether I'm working on the right project.
Build 5048 is not a beta. It is a stripped down version of Longhorn that contains enough of the system framework for hardware developers to being writing their drivers. This is WinHEC, remember?
Beta is planned for August. The features I work on, and most of the features I've seen in other group's demos, were not merged into this build. This includes most of the UI work.
Apart from the underlying kernel driver system, this doesn't come close to reflecting where Longhorn is internally. Sit tight, trash the OS in August when you get the real preview.
Build 5048 is not a beta. It is a stripped down version of Longhorn that contains enough of the system framework for hardware developers to being writing their drivers. This is WinHEC, remember?
Beta is planned for August. The features I work on, and most of the features I've seen in other group's demos, were not merged into this build.
Build 5048 is not a beta. It is a stripped down version of Longhorn that contains enough of the system framework for hardware developers to being writing their drivers. This is WinHEC, remember?
Beta is planned for August. The features I work on, and most of the features I've seen in other group's demos, were not merged into this build.
Slashdot Mirror
Options > Preferences > uncheck 'Run Windows Messenger When Windows Starts'
I agree it's a pain in the ass that it is turned on by default, but it's not exactly rocket science to turn it off.
Messenger patched the vulnerability a few weeks ago.
x
http://www.microsoft.com/security/incident/im.msp
LOL. You will not believe how much time I waste now using the Ink functionality on MSN Messenger 7.
The user needs to click on a link in the IM message, and needs to click on 'yes' on the XPSP2 warning about running unkown executables.
If I'm not mistaken, didn't this vulnerability get fixed a while ago on MS/MSN Messenger?
Crap, now I have to show the picture on the site to someone else, otherwise I'll be visited by Einstein's ghost.
:)
I agree with you that, for example, it doesn't make much sense for a average consumer to upgrade from office 2000 to office 2003. And obviously they haven't had a bump on consumer OS sales, given that Longhorn is still off in the horizon.
That said, these same product lines are still quite succesful in the corporate world. I'm talking the large companies with thousands of employees to deal with. In this envirnoment windows 2003 is attractive, even when linux is free, because it is jam packed with things to help in enterprise wide server administration. Let's not kid ourselves, it takes alot to be a good linux/unix system admin, and you guys can wear that badge with pride. Since the market is not exactly flooded with experts like yourselves, companies like it that a less experienced person can still keep a win2k3/XPSP2 network up and running, and can apply rules to machines company wide, using tools like active directory with pretty UI. Thanks to win2k3 and SP2, which turn off most services by default, and generally are more solid secure products, disasters like code red are much less likely.
Plus win2k3 and Office 2003 both have a slant towards collaboration, which isn't that attractive to consumers but intriguing for businesses. win2k3 has share point, and office has lots of collaboration tools (which will probably expand significantly thanks to the groove aquisition). They are also doing big pushes into the small business market with retail management systems, point of sales products, and even an accounting software in the works.
So it seems that while Longhorn has been in it's long development, MS has concentrated their vision towards the corporate world. This makes it easy to think they are absent from the consumer market, and hence somehow failing. But they still seem to be raking in the dough.
They only missed their quarterly projection by 1%. They brought in 9.6 billion dollars. Revenue is up by 5%. People are still obviously buying MS products in droves.
You do know that Microsoft has a ton of other software that isn't Windows or Office, right?
v iew=22&type=all
http://www.microsoft.com/products/info/list.aspx?
Why does not Microsoft not release their OS, but hold it for a few months, have a large beta group of testers. Fix the bugs. Have their own in house hackers try and break in, make more fixes. Load it with lots of different kinds of software and fix whatever problems they have.
Uhm... that's exactly what they've been doing this with Longhorn for 4 years. More so since the security push of 2003, after which every single line of code is inspected by groups within the company that specialize in security. They are not rushing anything, at the chagrin of slashdot users who love to think MS will never release Longhorn.
The site loads fine on my Gentoo box running firefox, just as it does for the other millions of people hit microsoft.com every hour, from every kind of OS and browser combination you can imagine.
You seem to be the only one whose whole system freezing when loading the site; hence, the problem is on your piss poor setup of your machine.
On the otherhand, MS may have some scripts in there to target you directly. That's always a possibility.
Cheers!
Oh, so your firefox browser takes down your non-Windows system when you visit the MS page? Who does this reflect badly on, again? I'd say you just don't know how to administer your system.
I'll go ahead and tell my manager to pass the word up the chain that suezz has told MS to "piss off". Bill will surely cry!
Sigh... I'm asking for more detailed information, given that the scenario you supposedly went through wouldn't cause any of the systems you've described to interfere with your action. Activation, if it did come up, would give you ample time to do whatever you needed. Any error messages? Where did it fail? Or are you just making it up?
"Microsoft has unlimited resources so they can "throw hardware at the problem"..."
Where do you get this idea? Are you talking from experience, or from some preconcieved notion not based on any actual data?
Remember that even though MS has billions of dollars, the end result of their projects is to be profitable. As such, and I can tell you from past experience, MSN is under budgetary constraints just like any other project would be. It wouldn't make any sense for them to throw unlimited amounts of money and hardware at MSN.
While the same may not have been as true for win2k, the fact is win2k3 is a solid server platform. It may not pump as many pages per second as apache (are there benchmarks on this anywhere? I'm just assuming this is the case), it's certainly the case that they see pretty impressive performance numbers. Coupled with the ease of maintenance of the platform, it explains why they are making some pretty big inroads into the server market. Either that or our sales people have some pretty powerful jedi mind tricks.
Uhm... why are you going to microsoft.com to look for drivers? You should be going to .com.
Also, XP x64 is only available to OEM, MSDN subscribers, and MS employees... So through which channel did you get the copy? Or are you running a probably-beta pirated copy?
Because driver developers don't give a damn about the user interface. They aren't getting a copy of Longhorn to demo new UI features. They are getting the build to make sure their hardware will work with Longhorn.
Not sure where your problem came from... You hooked up the old drive to an existing system, as a slave? That should not cause activation to reset itself... If you swapped in a new master drive with a different XP install, then the install on the new master drive would probably ask to be activated again. But again you'd have 30-60 days (depending on the license) to activate, so where was the problem?
Are you saying that you booted the drive on another machine? How did activation limit you in pulling the data out? You are given a 30-60 day grace period where the OS is fully functional without activation.
This feature isn't necessarily intended for the home user. And it certainly won't be turned on by default. Many corporations, MS' bread and butter when it comes to the OS, see a lot of value in being able to protect their hardware configuration from tampering. You'd be surprised at how positively companies received the idea.
Insightful? I love you guys!!
Agreed. I'm not sure what they were thinking giving this much exposure to such a stripped down build. The only justification I've gotten back is that it had what was necessary for the intended audence.
I try to sprinkle the suck generously. Sometimes my stuff can't help but be useful, and that's when I sit down and put some serious thought as to whether I'm working on the right project.
Build 5048 is not a beta. It is a stripped down version of Longhorn that contains enough of the system framework for hardware developers to being writing their drivers. This is WinHEC, remember?
Beta is planned for August. The features I work on, and most of the features I've seen in other group's demos, were not merged into this build. This includes most of the UI work.
Apart from the underlying kernel driver system, this doesn't come close to reflecting where Longhorn is internally. Sit tight, trash the OS in August when you get the real preview.
Build 5048 is not a beta. It is a stripped down version of Longhorn that contains enough of the system framework for hardware developers to being writing their drivers. This is WinHEC, remember? Beta is planned for August. The features I work on, and most of the features I've seen in other group's demos, were not merged into this build.
Build 5048 is not a beta. It is a stripped down version of Longhorn that contains enough of the system framework for hardware developers to being writing their drivers. This is WinHEC, remember?
Beta is planned for August. The features I work on, and most of the features I've seen in other group's demos, were not merged into this build.
I'd like to see this supposed tool bithacker has that can automatically own a machine and delete hard drives.