Not really, service packs don't often release many new features. They just roll up lots of bug fixes.
It will be more like what Apple does. The changes between 10.2 to 10.3, and 10.3 to 10.4 were numerous but incremental. The changes between XP and Vista are huge, more like OS9 to OS10.
I figure in the end it's just about money. They are asking themselves whether it is best to wait 2-3 years and have a huge release, or to have feature releases every year.
I'm not a huge console guy, but the Xbox360 (like the PS3) are huge leaps from their previous generation. The xbox is upgrading from a 700mhz processor to three 3ghz cores. There's also a big bump in memory and a fairly wicked video card. One early example of what is now possible with this hardware -- the devs for Project Gotham Racing tried to test the limits of the Xbox360, and were able to get 35,000 spectators on the sidelines of the race, each performing activities from a range of motion capture audience behaviors, with no slow down in frame rate. Game developers will be able to do a whole lot more with the hardware. Hopefully that translates into good games... That remains to be seen.
Personally, I'm interested in its expanded support for Xbox Live, and its built in media center extender capabilities. Once you've done online gaming on the Xbox, it's hard to go back to the PS2 (even though some of their games do support online... badly). The PS3 may have better online support than the PS2. As of now, the Xbox360 will be providing v2 of a well tested online-gaming platform for developers, while the PS3 may just have good network hardware but each game will still have to implement a custom online gaming platform.
I do see it causing CIOs to review their long-term desktop strategies
The thing to consider is that these CIOs will be wined and dined by slick MS marketeers, who will easily sell the CIO on the value of upgrading to Vista. I'm not sure Novell is anywhere near as good at this as MS is.
Hell, Windows adoption rate in corporate environments remained steady even at the height of the virus outbreaks of '03. I don't know how they do it, but they do. And as much as it gets trashed here, once Vista RTMs it will have quite a long list of features that, put into a few snazzy power point slides, will placate the CIO.
You misunderstand the game. It's not who gets there first, but who grabs the largest market/amount of traffic. Google has been coming out with some sweet services, but at the same time MSN, as it stands now, has many times more users and traffic than Google in those same applications (except for search of course). # of users: hotmail >>> gmail, msn messenger >>> google's chat, my spaces >>> blogger.com.
I'm glad Google is around because it woke up MSN, who was pretty lame and coplacent. And it definitely looks like they are gunning for Google, and have tons of resources all focused on that.
As long as both google and msn keep improving their services, we win, so god speed to both companies.
So, you want explicit criteria for why Mac OS is better? Here's some:
You run as a non-administrator by default, and it works properly
Non-admin works just fine in XP. It can sometimes be an annoying experience because some applications haven't caught up, and still do stupid things that assume admin priv. Apart from that it works as advertised and expected.
there are a bunch of things missing in XP, like desktop search, a decent web browser, a decent text editor (TextEdit is much better than Wordpad), a good PDF viewer, etc.
Yes, but spend 5 minutes on the web and you will find fantastic freeware xp versions of each app-type you mentioned.
XP doesn't have any good scripting/automation stuff, whereas Mac OS has Applescript and Automator
Once again here we have freeware to fill in the blanks (cygwin/perl/etc...). Personally I'm a developer so I can earily whip up a C++ app to automate anything in the OS. For non-devs, well they wouldn't care about this either way, would they?
New Macs come with Garage Band, iMovie, iPhoto, etc.
Granted neat apps, but nothing that doesn't have a handful of XP counterparts (XP even has MovieMaker built in)
The Mac OS interface is better because of the ubiquitous drag-and-drop, Exposé, Dashboard, etc.
I'll give you this -- the OSX interface is prettier.
Communications works better on the Mac because the address book is more integrated with email and IM. Also, iChat supports audio and video
You mean how Outlook/OE Contacts are integrated with MSN Messenger? As I write an e-mail in my To: field it shows if that person is online. Or how Msn Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, and ICQ support audio/video chat? How about this for cool -- in Office Communicator, I can right click on a contact and have my office phone dial up the individual.
Mac OS is more secure, for a bunch of different reasons:
it doesn't have a horribly insecure browser integrated into the system
Firefox
it doesn't have any services turned on by default
Have you even tried XP SP2?
it actually uses permissions effectively (yes, that's already been mentioned)
What exactly do you mean here? XP has an robust ACL system. Run as non-admin and everything in the OS is protected. Or do you know of any vulnerabilities we're not aware of?
Mac OS is UNIX-like, which means I can easily use the command line and that it runs most Free Software (including X11-based apps)
Have you ever heard of cygwin?
Speaking of Free Software, big chunks of Mac OS are Free, including the kernel, Webcore, the BSD subsystem, ZeroConf (aka bonjour), etc. and Apple actually works with outside developers (yes, they do help the KHTML people!)
What do I care if the OS has free/open source components if it works?
And finally, here's the biggie:
Unlike Microsoft, Apple doesn't make it a corporate policy to use every underhanded tactic they can find to eliminate competitors, destroy standards and interoperability, stifle innovation, and gain control over every facet of computing.
Give me a break, you forgot to write Micro$oft... Apple is hardly the company to bring up as an open source hero. Not only do they lock you into their closed OS, but they lock you into their HW and *don't allow you to buy it from anyone but them*. Apple's philosophy is 'use our stuff, only our stuff, and only buy it from us. don't question our prices either'. You would have the moral highground if you chose Linux in this respect, certainly not Apple.
So your diatribe basically comes down to this: OSX is better because it has nominally prettier UI, and has a few apps built in that in XP you'd have to download and install separately. That doesn't quite give me enough of a reason to be locked into their overpriced hardware/OS platform
Yes it does, because you are comparing complete products. Although I would like to see the explicit criteria you use to come to your determination, given that apart from some usability problems when running as a non-administrator in XP SP2, the platforms are fairly evenly matched on all counts (and those things missing in XP can be easily solved by free add-ons, like desktop search, firefox, etc...).
It has been said over and over again here on Slashdot -- Beta 1 has the basic core OS in place for developers to get familiar with the *platform*, not the general OS features or UI. It certainly is unfair to compare OSX to Beta 1 because Beta 1 literally has none of its new features built in (other than core OS). The builds leading up to Beta 2 are a *significantly* different beast than Beta 1.
As a dev I was primarily exposed to my component area, and up until a month ago I was impressed with our work, but was was worried if other teams were up to par because Beta 1 was pretty vanilla (ignoring some awesome core OS work). I can say with certainty now that Vista Beta 2 and RTM will be a significant OS release (similar to a win98 -> win2k move, more than win2k->winXP).
... It's a bit late to jump in this discussion, but it amazes me that someone can write an article like this when most of the things they say are conjectures coming from at most incomplete information... Yes, WinFS isn't in the OS... That's about it when it comes to 'all the features that have been dropped'. I can tell you being on the inside -- there are an unbelievable amount of new features in Vista. People will be very surprised. Just recently my dept had a big celebration because we finished over 150 new features since the release of beta 1 (these were not small changes, mostly new functionaliy, and we're just a small portion of the OS). Over the whole OS each component has been revamped and hundreds of new features are in. It will be interesting to see how this crowd reacts to Beta 2...
The code used in the Zotob worm to exploit the Microsoft PnP vulnerability addresses in MS05-039 relies on NULL sessions to exploit the target system. Default installations of Windows XP SP2 and Windows 2003 do not have NULL sessions enabled, and thus are not affected by the worm.
I apologize, I definitely think the IT departments take these things seriously. My statement was more at the higher levels which put the bureaucracy in place that bogs down the distribution of updates. For non-critical, it makes sense to take it slow since things may break. But for critical issues, like the ones related to this vulnerability, which had known exploits only a day after the announcement, the IT dept should have had a free pass at applying the patch of a handful of test machines on Monday to identify any compatibility issues, and on Tuesday/Wednesday begin the company wide rollout.
Given that all the examples on my list are open source, you have no point.
If you really want to look into your logic, well most commercical sofware companies are guilty since they all drop support for aging versions of their software. When was the last time Apple released a patch for OS 8?
Windows 2000 can be patched for these vulnerabilities as well.
Running Win98/Me at this point is like running ancient versions of Linux, OpenSSH, Apache, Samba, etc... and complaining if your system gets exploited.
Really? Because things like changing system time, or power settings as LUA are mostly hacks, not a nice bit you can change in group policy. And the group policy to install printers is limited to signed drivers.
So yes, functional, but not as extensive (or easy to manage) as one would want.
Vista Beta 1 has about 80 new features, but most of them revolve around the architecture (driver model, LUA, security, display, file system, remote management, system tracing/logging, new task schedulers, etc...). Believe me, they changes are not small at all! But while these things do end up stabilizing/securing the platform further, the features will only really be of particular interest to developers.
If they were to release the OS as-is, it would not create any particular buzz among consumers, since for the most part it still feels and drives like XP/win2k3. But it would be huge in the corporate market. Remote management capabilities have been expanded significantly (and they are pretty good already in xp/win2k3), but more importantly are the security revamp of the core OS. While you currently can have your employees on XP workstations run as non-admin, it is very difficult to give them freedoms to modify the system without giving them full admin access (aka - install a new printer). Now, there is a more robust priviledge system, where (1) even if you are full admin most applications start in lower priviledges, and (2) you can give more granular admin perms on a user-to-user basis. So, employees will have more freedom to customize/configure their system, while the admins can still protect the core OS image from rootkits or the machine in general from spyware.
Additionally, governments are interested in the platform as well. Apart from the security features above, there are content protection schemes on the platform, and features like secure boot (sounds ridiculous for a consumer, but appealing to, say, someone like the CIA).
Will Vista RTM be compelling enough that consumers will fly it off the shelves? I can't really say, to be honest my experience is with the core (which I am impressed with). But lets be honest, MS doesn't make its income through selling software boxes of XP. Vista will follow the same adoption of XP -- corporate/government contracts and OEM bundles will make the first surge of adoptions. But, with things like Avalon and Indigo (actually implemented, believe it or not:}), we could start seeing some killer Vista only apps in the first year or two, driving more generalized consumer adoption. Finally, the OS takes some big security steps so it will be *the* platform for people that really want to stop dealing with spyware/virus problems (who don't want to switch to linux/OSX of course).
Then you've got Microsoft getting pissy at Google and suing because Google is getting an ex-Microsoft employee (rumor has it, they're getting quite a few employees actually).
Just wanted to point out that it MS isn't just 'suing google for getting an ex-employee'. The head of MS research in China left to be head of Google research in China. First, it is a huge conflict of interest. This guy has been privy to company wide strategy and direction, and it's no surprise why google would want him. But more importantly, it is a breach of contract -- when you head a division you cannot join a direct competitor in the same division (for a year). Are contracts void because Google is involved?
MS never interferes with lower level employees leaving for google or other companies (even though our contracts stipulate the same thing as the head of research).
On the uninstall -- I'm personally very upset they set the default to ignore, but the fact is that MSAS still detects all of claria's software, and alerts the user to the fact. The user can still choose 'remove' and clean their system.
It would be a whole other ball game if they *didn't* detect the software at all. Still, believe me a lot of people are asking questions, even within the company.
It's still a ridiculous decision, but I'd like to point out that it's been this way since February. I think people have only noticed now because of the conspiracy theory implications, given the recent talks of acquisition.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't that what "Service Packs" are?
Not really, service packs don't often release many new features. They just roll up lots of bug fixes.
It will be more like what Apple does. The changes between 10.2 to 10.3, and 10.3 to 10.4 were numerous but incremental. The changes between XP and Vista are huge, more like OS9 to OS10.
I figure in the end it's just about money. They are asking themselves whether it is best to wait 2-3 years and have a huge release, or to have feature releases every year.
I'm not a huge console guy, but the Xbox360 (like the PS3) are huge leaps from their previous generation. The xbox is upgrading from a 700mhz processor to three 3ghz cores. There's also a big bump in memory and a fairly wicked video card. One early example of what is now possible with this hardware -- the devs for Project Gotham Racing tried to test the limits of the Xbox360, and were able to get 35,000 spectators on the sidelines of the race, each performing activities from a range of motion capture audience behaviors, with no slow down in frame rate. Game developers will be able to do a whole lot more with the hardware. Hopefully that translates into good games... That remains to be seen.
Personally, I'm interested in its expanded support for Xbox Live, and its built in media center extender capabilities. Once you've done online gaming on the Xbox, it's hard to go back to the PS2 (even though some of their games do support online... badly). The PS3 may have better online support than the PS2. As of now, the Xbox360 will be providing v2 of a well tested online-gaming platform for developers, while the PS3 may just have good network hardware but each game will still have to implement a custom online gaming platform.
I do see it causing CIOs to review their long-term desktop strategies
The thing to consider is that these CIOs will be wined and dined by slick MS marketeers, who will easily sell the CIO on the value of upgrading to Vista. I'm not sure Novell is anywhere near as good at this as MS is.
Hell, Windows adoption rate in corporate environments remained steady even at the height of the virus outbreaks of '03. I don't know how they do it, but they do. And as much as it gets trashed here, once Vista RTMs it will have quite a long list of features that, put into a few snazzy power point slides, will placate the CIO.
Well, I guess that they need all the money they can get with their revenues being stagnant in the past several years.
Lookup Microsoft's quarterly reports, and get back to me on this statement.
You misunderstand the game. It's not who gets there first, but who grabs the largest market/amount of traffic. Google has been coming out with some sweet services, but at the same time MSN, as it stands now, has many times more users and traffic than Google in those same applications (except for search of course). # of users: hotmail >>> gmail, msn messenger >>> google's chat, my spaces >>> blogger.com.
I'm glad Google is around because it woke up MSN, who was pretty lame and coplacent. And it definitely looks like they are gunning for Google, and have tons of resources all focused on that.
As long as both google and msn keep improving their services, we win, so god speed to both companies.
Does this mean i'll have to install an anti-virus on my camera, too?
- You run as a non-administrator by default, and it works properly
- there are a bunch of things missing in XP, like desktop search, a decent web browser, a decent text editor (TextEdit is much better than Wordpad), a good PDF viewer, etc.
- XP doesn't have any good scripting/automation stuff, whereas Mac OS has Applescript and Automator
- New Macs come with Garage Band, iMovie, iPhoto, etc.
- The Mac OS interface is better because of the ubiquitous drag-and-drop, Exposé, Dashboard, etc.
- Communications works better on the Mac because the address book is more integrated with email and IM. Also, iChat supports audio and video
- Mac OS is more secure, for a bunch of different reasons:
- it doesn't have a horribly insecure browser integrated into the system
- it doesn't have any services turned on by default
- it actually uses permissions effectively (yes, that's already been mentioned)
- Mac OS is UNIX-like, which means I can easily use the command line and that it runs most Free Software (including X11-based apps)
- Speaking of Free Software, big chunks of Mac OS are Free, including the kernel, Webcore, the BSD subsystem, ZeroConf (aka bonjour), etc. and Apple actually works with outside developers (yes, they do help the KHTML people!)
And finally, here's the biggie:Non-admin works just fine in XP. It can sometimes be an annoying experience because some applications haven't caught up, and still do stupid things that assume admin priv. Apart from that it works as advertised and expected.
Yes, but spend 5 minutes on the web and you will find fantastic freeware xp versions of each app-type you mentioned.
Once again here we have freeware to fill in the blanks (cygwin/perl/etc...). Personally I'm a developer so I can earily whip up a C++ app to automate anything in the OS. For non-devs, well they wouldn't care about this either way, would they?
Granted neat apps, but nothing that doesn't have a handful of XP counterparts (XP even has MovieMaker built in)
I'll give you this -- the OSX interface is prettier.
You mean how Outlook/OE Contacts are integrated with MSN Messenger? As I write an e-mail in my To: field it shows if that person is online. Or how Msn Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, and ICQ support audio/video chat? How about this for cool -- in Office Communicator, I can right click on a contact and have my office phone dial up the individual.
Firefox
Have you even tried XP SP2?
What exactly do you mean here? XP has an robust ACL system. Run as non-admin and everything in the OS is protected. Or do you know of any vulnerabilities we're not aware of?
Have you ever heard of cygwin?
What do I care if the OS has free/open source components if it works?
Give me a break, you forgot to write Micro$oft... Apple is hardly the company to bring up as an open source hero. Not only do they lock you into their closed OS, but they lock you into their HW and *don't allow you to buy it from anyone but them*. Apple's philosophy is 'use our stuff, only our stuff, and only buy it from us. don't question our prices either'. You would have the moral highground if you chose Linux in this respect, certainly not Apple.
So your diatribe basically comes down to this: OSX is better because it has nominally prettier UI, and has a few apps built in that in XP you'd have to download and install separately. That doesn't quite give me enough of a reason to be locked into their overpriced hardware/OS platform
Yes it does, because you are comparing complete products. Although I would like to see the explicit criteria you use to come to your determination, given that apart from some usability problems when running as a non-administrator in XP SP2, the platforms are fairly evenly matched on all counts (and those things missing in XP can be easily solved by free add-ons, like desktop search, firefox, etc...).
It has been said over and over again here on Slashdot -- Beta 1 has the basic core OS in place for developers to get familiar with the *platform*, not the general OS features or UI. It certainly is unfair to compare OSX to Beta 1 because Beta 1 literally has none of its new features built in (other than core OS). The builds leading up to Beta 2 are a *significantly* different beast than Beta 1.
As a dev I was primarily exposed to my component area, and up until a month ago I was impressed with our work, but was was worried if other teams were up to par because Beta 1 was pretty vanilla (ignoring some awesome core OS work). I can say with certainty now that Vista Beta 2 and RTM will be a significant OS release (similar to a win98 -> win2k move, more than win2k->winXP).
... It's a bit late to jump in this discussion, but it amazes me that someone can write an article like this when most of the things they say are conjectures coming from at most incomplete information... Yes, WinFS isn't in the OS... That's about it when it comes to 'all the features that have been dropped'. I can tell you being on the inside -- there are an unbelievable amount of new features in Vista. People will be very surprised. Just recently my dept had a big celebration because we finished over 150 new features since the release of beta 1 (these were not small changes, mostly new functionaliy, and we're just a small portion of the OS). Over the whole OS each component has been revamped and hundreds of new features are in. It will be interesting to see how this crowd reacts to Beta 2...
The xbox360 will sell with or without wifi. Would you rather
(a) include wifi, take a extra $10-20 hit for each console sold
(b) sell wifi seperately for $50, profit
If it made it through the Slashdot filters, then the study is good enough for me.
I smell a new golden age for the repo business...
The code used in the Zotob worm to exploit the Microsoft PnP vulnerability addresses in MS05-039 relies on NULL sessions to exploit the target system. Default installations of Windows XP SP2 and Windows 2003 do not have NULL sessions enabled, and thus are not affected by the worm.
I apologize, I definitely think the IT departments take these things seriously. My statement was more at the higher levels which put the bureaucracy in place that bogs down the distribution of updates. For non-critical, it makes sense to take it slow since things may break. But for critical issues, like the ones related to this vulnerability, which had known exploits only a day after the announcement, the IT dept should have had a free pass at applying the patch of a handful of test machines on Monday to identify any compatibility issues, and on Tuesday/Wednesday begin the company wide rollout.
Security fixes are free. All this shows is that large organizations don't take upgrading their system seriously.
How many readers won't know what a root kit is, and declare 'ha, see! windowze is insecure, glad I run [alternate]'? :}
Yeah, thank god it is so much more difficult to write root kits of unix/linux/osx!!LOL!1!one! :)
Given that all the examples on my list are open source, you have no point.
If you really want to look into your logic, well most commercical sofware companies are guilty since they all drop support for aging versions of their software. When was the last time Apple released a patch for OS 8?
Windows 2000 can be patched for these vulnerabilities as well.
Running Win98/Me at this point is like running ancient versions of Linux, OpenSSH, Apache, Samba, etc... and complaining if your system gets exploited.
Really? Because things like changing system time, or power settings as LUA are mostly hacks, not a nice bit you can change in group policy. And the group policy to install printers is limited to signed drivers.
So yes, functional, but not as extensive (or easy to manage) as one would want.
Vista Beta 1 has about 80 new features, but most of them revolve around the architecture (driver model, LUA, security, display, file system, remote management, system tracing/logging, new task schedulers, etc...). Believe me, they changes are not small at all! But while these things do end up stabilizing/securing the platform further, the features will only really be of particular interest to developers.
:}), we could start seeing some killer Vista only apps in the first year or two, driving more generalized consumer adoption. Finally, the OS takes some big security steps so it will be *the* platform for people that really want to stop dealing with spyware/virus problems (who don't want to switch to linux/OSX of course).
If they were to release the OS as-is, it would not create any particular buzz among consumers, since for the most part it still feels and drives like XP/win2k3. But it would be huge in the corporate market. Remote management capabilities have been expanded significantly (and they are pretty good already in xp/win2k3), but more importantly are the security revamp of the core OS. While you currently can have your employees on XP workstations run as non-admin, it is very difficult to give them freedoms to modify the system without giving them full admin access (aka - install a new printer). Now, there is a more robust priviledge system, where (1) even if you are full admin most applications start in lower priviledges, and (2) you can give more granular admin perms on a user-to-user basis. So, employees will have more freedom to customize/configure their system, while the admins can still protect the core OS image from rootkits or the machine in general from spyware.
Additionally, governments are interested in the platform as well. Apart from the security features above, there are content protection schemes on the platform, and features like secure boot (sounds ridiculous for a consumer, but appealing to, say, someone like the CIA).
Will Vista RTM be compelling enough that consumers will fly it off the shelves? I can't really say, to be honest my experience is with the core (which I am impressed with). But lets be honest, MS doesn't make its income through selling software boxes of XP. Vista will follow the same adoption of XP -- corporate/government contracts and OEM bundles will make the first surge of adoptions. But, with things like Avalon and Indigo (actually implemented, believe it or not
Then you've got Microsoft getting pissy at Google and suing because Google is getting an ex-Microsoft employee (rumor has it, they're getting quite a few employees actually).
Just wanted to point out that it MS isn't just 'suing google for getting an ex-employee'. The head of MS research in China left to be head of Google research in China. First, it is a huge conflict of interest. This guy has been privy to company wide strategy and direction, and it's no surprise why google would want him. But more importantly, it is a breach of contract -- when you head a division you cannot join a direct competitor in the same division (for a year). Are contracts void because Google is involved?
MS never interferes with lower level employees leaving for google or other companies (even though our contracts stipulate the same thing as the head of research).
That is true.
On the uninstall -- I'm personally very upset they set the default to ignore, but the fact is that MSAS still detects all of claria's software, and alerts the user to the fact. The user can still choose 'remove' and clean their system.
It would be a whole other ball game if they *didn't* detect the software at all. Still, believe me a lot of people are asking questions, even within the company.
It's still a ridiculous decision, but I'd like to point out that it's been this way since February. I think people have only noticed now because of the conspiracy theory implications, given the recent talks of acquisition.