Okay, maybe Windows 7 will be the best OS that MS have ever released - but that will be proven or disproven over the next few weeks or months, but what's the reason to upgrade now?
My XP desktop is working hunky dory at the moment and with months of trouble-free service, it's blue-screened a couple of times after I installed iTunes on it the first time due to my missus giving me her iPod Touch after she upgraded. Still, the Touch is a neat little gadget, I buy my own CDs and rip them so I don't need the Apple Store that much - no biggie.
My PCs are fast enough, I have a couple of Linux boxes and a couple of XP boxes for gaming, I'm a happy chappie with all my computing needs fulfilled.
So here's my view on what Windows 7 will give me:
1. A version of DirectX greater than 9 - I don't MMORPG, I play Fallout 3, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Left 4 Dead, the Half-Life's and a few others. No PC games title in the past few months has made me want to buy it and I'm not expecting that to change anytime soon. The games I do play run nice and prettily on my trusty nVidia 8800GTS graphics card and 1680x1050 monitor. No, I don't feel I need even more pixels to look at, or indeed that the existing ones need to be any prettier.
2. Eye candy - well, I'm sure there are Windows people out there suffering penis envy whilst looking over the shoulders of some OS X users but, in my case, my desktop looks the way ***I want it***, not how ***I want others to see it.*** I have a clock in the corner of a Windows Classic desktop, a few apps telling me things in the taskbar and a few more addons in Firefox telling me when there's a new email, what the weather outside is and what the £ to exchange rate is. I'm sure there's all kind of animated dockicons I can plaster on a Vista or Windows 7 desktop that look nice but just tell me the same information whilst burning more CPU cycles. Big deal...
Sure, I'm mostly Linux guy but Linux doesn't do everything I need an OS to do and XP plugs those gaps pretty well - but I am wondering what all the fuss is about and if I'm missing something because, good OS or bad OS, I cannot see a reason to upgrade to Windows 7.
I wouldn't randomly change crap in/etc in much the same way I wouldn't randomly change crap in the Registry.
But if I make a typing error in a text file in/etc, I can probably recover it quite easily - if I do it in the Registry, I could knacker the system completely. (And no, I don't claim to be a Registry expert so let's not go there.)
The fact is, if I want to save my personal settings in Linux, I just back up my home directory and just copy them to a new machine to have it mostly configured the same.
If I want to do the same in Windows, I can back up parts of my directory under "Documents and Settings" but it won't let me do all of it because of certain files being in use and certainly won't let me take "my" chunk of the registry and import it piecemeal onto a new machine.
When I said "Hoo-hah", I meant the "hoo-hah" about having to *rush* to install Windows 7, not Windows 7 itself.
I find XP is good enough for what I need Windows to do, found no reason to upgrade to Vista but maybe with Windows 7, I'll find a reason at some point. Until then, I'm happy to sit back and see what others make of it first and learn a bit more.
By all accounts, MS do seem to be learning some lessons from the UNIX and Linux world, if they're incorporating better support for open protocols like SSH then that's a big plus - but none of it sounds like stuff you couldn't do with free or Open Source software (like Putty or VNC) on XP anyway - but I'm open-minded so will watch with interest.
Incidentally, I installed the MS PowerShell upgrade in XP and quite liked the fact you can use UNIX commands like "ls" in it - but as a mainly Linux guy, I use Windows for GUI apps and games so couldn't find a real use for PowerShell (in much the same way I rarely drop to the CMD prompt).
The advantage for me is that I can ask Portage to compile an application with the correct support (e.g. I might want OGG support compiled into a media player on Gnome for example) or with particular compiler optimization flags set (that makes sure certain CPU features are used) and I can instruct it to do a "deep" compile so any dependencies and libraries are compiled at the same time.
It's not perfect for everyone by any means - using Portage it's easier than doing a completely manual compile, but there's still a steep learning curve and stuff still goes wrong occasionally.
And I'm that used to Gentoo now that I don't (and haven't) used any binary packed distros for some time now so I can't really give you any comparisons to binary packaged distros. But it is very stable, there's enough customisability to get Gentoo running nicely on low-end older platforms as well and I get fewer problems with it than when I was using Red Hat around the 5.2/6.0 days about 8 or 9 years ago.
I'm no lover of Microsoft, more Linux than Windows user but you are still wrong.
DLLs are Microsoft's way of saying "libraries" and libraries exist so that programmmer's can write applications easier.
If an application needs a specific library version and that library get's upgraded or downgraded, then the app will probably screw up - whether it's on Windows, Linux or countless other OSes out there.
Yep, there were lots of DLL issues during the days of Windows 3.11, NT4 and 9x, just like there was lots of library "dependency hell" in Red Hat and other Linux distros also. Since then, I've seen vast improvements in both.
As other posters have already said, there's often good reasons to criticize MS and Windows but this isn't one of them.
I don't claim to be a Windows expert but on at least two occasions I hacked about in the Registry, killed a system and had to basically rebuild it from scratch. (Yes, possibly if I'd known more about Windows, I could have gone back to a system restore point or something like that.)
But the same thing won't ever happen to me in Linux because I'll back up the original config file before I start editing it. So if I make some changes in, say, xorg.conf that kills X-Windows, I just put the old config file back and start again.
Yes, I'm a Gnome user and have messed about with the some of the settings in there that are "registry-type" changes (I've not yet looked closer as to how these settings are actually stored) but presumably, if I knacker Gnome because of messing about too much, then the change I've made is probably held somewhere in my home directory, so worst possible case is I delete what's under ".gnome" and start again (maybe even restore an older.gnome directory).
I just know from experience that it's easy for an inexperienced user to knacker a Windows machine by hacking about in the registry, but if you hack about in a Linux config file, then you just have to make sure you can always put the original config back.
I've used Ubuntu very little, I think it's a great distro for those new to Linux and I know it has a lot of longer-term users as well, had it been around about 10 years ago when I first got into Linux, then maybe I would have used it more and stuck with it.
But any long term Linux user will remember "dependency hell" with packaged distros like Red Hat and (as it was) Mandrake Linux when updating applications that resulted in countless other system libraries having to be dragged in for upgrade as well (and possibly resulting in other apps breaking due to new library versions). At the time, the way I personally escaped from that was to go to back to basics and use "roll your own" distros, firstly I went to Linux From Scratch, then finally settled on Gentoo and never looked back.
So I accept that I'm not an expert on package management in modern Linux distros and the situation now is probably much improved than when I was using "Red Hat Linux 5.2", but distros have got more complex and a package manager still has to trawl its way through countless dependencies in order to upgrade stuff without causing problems.
If a package manager is to do it's job well then it needs to be able to parse configuration text files in order to understand how an application is configured already on the system.
As you probably know well yourself already, there's no real restrictions in UNIX or Linux for additional whitespace files and if you're manually writing a config file in vi, there are some rules for some apps as to where you can put certain parameters but otherwise it can be fairly freeform.
What this means is that you can have a config file that is formatted very strangely but works perfectly fine, and the package tool has to make some sense of it - consequently there is some scope for error here. (Incidentally, when you use Gentoo's Portage to do updates, it *tells* you that it can install a new configuration file but ultimately leaves it down to the user to choose whether to keep the old one or use the new one.)
Like it or not, update managers are a boon to new users but they do add additional complexity meaning that there is more to potentially go wrong.
That's one reason I moved away from distros that used pre-compiled binary packages.
I use Gentoo Linux now - it's not perfect, has a steep learning curve and there's some truth to the quips about always waiting for a Gentoo PC to finish compiling stuff. But because it has very little in the way of custom apps for package management and administration, you're always at the "lowest common denominator" of editing a text file in vi which means there's less to go wrong in an upgrade.
Even so, as I commented elsewhere, the Portage packaging/installation application does suffer from creep over time if you're upgrading regularly, so even with Gentoo it's good to do a fresh install every so often.
With all respect, you are completely missing the point.
The people who are at this moment buying and installing Windows 7 are mostly going to be desktop users upgrading from an earlier Windows release.
However, desktop PCs are entirely different to servers because invariably a desktop is going to be upgraded a lot more regularly than a server is, and probably by a person who is less experienced than one tasked with upgrading a server - not to mention all that good stuff like testing server upgrades in pre-production first before rolling it out.
And in my 25+ years experience in OSes, telecoms and now system security, I've learnt that those people that need to refer to others as "junior" are usually those lacking the knowledge and experience to occupy those high-up thrones they elevate themselves to.
Just because YOU know how to wipe and install a new OS, it doesn't mean the whole world does....which is precisely why newbie PC users probably buy a laptop or pre-built desktop that comes with a system restore disk that builds their machine from scratch by doing not a lot more than putting it in the CD/DVD drive.
Incidentally, when I first got into Linux around 10 years ago, I started off with Mandrake Linux and one of the reasons I stopped using it and went to Red Hat (and now Gentoo) was of it's vastly overstated claims when it came to ease of upgrades.
Yes, Mandriva is a long way from Mandrake but please don't try to educate me about Linux - I was using SCO and RSX-11 on PDP-11s when your mother was probably changing your nappies, my friend.
I have a Windows XP desktop that takes a lot of care and attention but hasn't Blue Screened or crashed once in about 18 months.
Last week, my missus upgraded her mobile phone and gave me her iPod Touch. For the first time ever, I installed iTunes on the XP box (and upgraded the Touch firmware to 3.1) and have installed nothing else apart from updates to my virus checker.
Since that time, iTunes has locked up about half a dozen times and my XP box has Blue Screened twice.
The Touch is a nice little gadget and iTunes is a reasonably intuitive and nice piece of software as long as you stay well away from Apple's AAC DRM-ed nonsense - but let's not pretend Apple is perfect because they're not.
As I responded to the other poster, I'm actually mostly a Gentoo Linux user, which (if you don't know already) uses rolling "compile it yourself" upgrades rather than physically different releases.
I wouldn't change Gentoo for any other Linux distro but even I use it with the expectation that if I keep constantly upgrading to "bleeding edge" package versions, within the space of a year to 18 months, there are probably going to be so many compilation errors to fix in Portage (= Gentoo's packaging architecture) that it will be simpler just to download the latest boot disk and do a scratch rebuild. It doesn't worry me, I just set aside a day to do it and just get on with it.
Face facts - if you keep ugrading stuff on any OS, it's going to get some creep problems meaning the occasional fresh install.
I'm mostly Linux guy and when Vista came out, there were huge arguments between (some of) the XP and Vista people with (some of) the OSX and Linux people throwing in crap from the sidelines.
I'm guessing this must have amused the Slashdot admins at the time because given that, by all accounts, Windows 7 is being received far more favourably than Vista was, those same admins are deliberately trying to stir things up on the basis that Windows 7 probably won't cause as much furore as Vista did, and therefore not generate as much amusement for them.
I can't comment on OSX because I've never found a reason for using it, but I think you will find that Linux upgrades easier because user configuration is held in flat text files which are far easier to parse by an installation script than the Windows Registry is. So provided that Linux upgrades any associated libraries when it upgrades an application, the worst that can happen is that maybe an app won't run properly because of an invalid parameter in an old configuration file.
Incidentally, I fail to see what all the hoo-hah is about anyway, quite frankly. Unless you're one of these "I need to get Windows 7 installed first because my todger is bigger than your todger" types, then you just do the upgrade when you have time to back the disk properly, format it, install the new OS from scratch and then copy your old files back across.
It's not as though it's something that needs to done weekly and if you've not got the common sense to set aside the time to do it properly anyway, then you probably shouldn't be doing it in the first place.
I've no plans to upgrade to Windows 7 from XP whatsoever but if people are being asked to remove iTunes and Google Toolbar, this implies they are using an "install over the top" upgrade method, rather than "backup, format and install from new".
And if these people **REALLY** believe that upgrading any OS in this fashion, let alone MS Windows, will end up giving them a nice clean install afterwards, then they probably shouldn't be anywhere near a computer in the first place.
Having said that, given that I was planning to watch Hannah Montana and dreary sequels to classic Disney movies precisely zero times, having that viewing restricted to just, say, 1% of media players under this new format makes bugger all difference to me anyway...
I often think that those people who try put some kind of rationale behind everything are the same people who miss the point entirely.
Why do they feel the ***NEED*** to give some kind of justification for stuff that's just there to entertain?
Last night I played Fallout 3 for a couple of hours, the night before I fired up the MAME emulator and played Mr. Do, Pacman and Space Invaders for an hour or so. In both cases, when I ended my playing, did I ask myself is one was a more "immersive experience" than the other? Nope, because I couldn't actually give a toss... in both cases, I thought "That was a lot of fun" and then went and found something else fun to go and do.
So there's no point in analysing why they just talked about FPSs and not strategy or adventure games because ***IT DOESN'T MATTER***. All that matters is when you pick up a book, sit down and watch a movie, listen to a piece of music, play a computer game, etc. etc. is that you ***ENJOY*** it while you do it.
I also find it odd that if you are currently running Windows XP quite happily on, say, a single core Pentium 4 CPU with 1GB RAM and a 400W PSU, why this would be a power saving when you probably need a dual-core CPU with 4GB RAM running a 500W CPU to get Windows 7 running equally as fast?
It's a very clever tactic used by evil corporations and evil politicians who pay vast sums to infinitely more evil marketing people to come up with these ideas in the first place.
You get everyone worrying and complaining about some doom scenario you predict will happen, then actually bring in something only half as bad... resulting in the mindless majority breathing a huge sigh of relief and accepting it.
Sir Frank Whittle (British) and Dr. Hans Von Ohain (German) - indepently invented the jet engine. Sir Alexander Fleming (Scottish - discovered penicillin. Leonardo da Vinci (Italian) - inventor, artist, mathematician, painter, etc. etc....... etc.
I fully support what the EFF do but innovation is not simply limited to America - can I suggest in future they use the adjective "human", rather than "American", in similar statements? Otherwise, they're just affirming the stereotype that many of we non-US residents have, namely that Americans have no interest in the world outside their own shores.
Slashdot Mirror
Those are "dot" releases, they don't count. It's no different to saying XP Service Pack 3 installed flawlessly over XP Service Pack 2.
Okay, maybe Windows 7 will be the best OS that MS have ever released - but that will be proven or disproven over the next few weeks or months, but what's the reason to upgrade now?
My XP desktop is working hunky dory at the moment and with months of trouble-free service, it's blue-screened a couple of times after I installed iTunes on it the first time due to my missus giving me her iPod Touch after she upgraded. Still, the Touch is a neat little gadget, I buy my own CDs and rip them so I don't need the Apple Store that much - no biggie.
My PCs are fast enough, I have a couple of Linux boxes and a couple of XP boxes for gaming, I'm a happy chappie with all my computing needs fulfilled.
So here's my view on what Windows 7 will give me:
1. A version of DirectX greater than 9 - I don't MMORPG, I play Fallout 3, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Left 4 Dead, the Half-Life's and a few others. No PC games title in the past few months has made me want to buy it and I'm not expecting that to change anytime soon. The games I do play run nice and prettily on my trusty nVidia 8800GTS graphics card and 1680x1050 monitor. No, I don't feel I need even more pixels to look at, or indeed that the existing ones need to be any prettier.
2. Eye candy - well, I'm sure there are Windows people out there suffering penis envy whilst looking over the shoulders of some OS X users but, in my case, my desktop looks the way ***I want it***, not how ***I want others to see it.*** I have a clock in the corner of a Windows Classic desktop, a few apps telling me things in the taskbar and a few more addons in Firefox telling me when there's a new email, what the weather outside is and what the £ to exchange rate is. I'm sure there's all kind of animated dockicons I can plaster on a Vista or Windows 7 desktop that look nice but just tell me the same information whilst burning more CPU cycles. Big deal...
Sure, I'm mostly Linux guy but Linux doesn't do everything I need an OS to do and XP plugs those gaps pretty well - but I am wondering what all the fuss is about and if I'm missing something because, good OS or bad OS, I cannot see a reason to upgrade to Windows 7.
I wouldn't randomly change crap in /etc in much the same way I wouldn't randomly change crap in the Registry.
But if I make a typing error in a text file in /etc, I can probably recover it quite easily - if I do it in the Registry, I could knacker the system completely. (And no, I don't claim to be a Registry expert so let's not go there.)
The fact is, if I want to save my personal settings in Linux, I just back up my home directory and just copy them to a new machine to have it mostly configured the same.
If I want to do the same in Windows, I can back up parts of my directory under "Documents and Settings" but it won't let me do all of it because of certain files being in use and certainly won't let me take "my" chunk of the registry and import it piecemeal onto a new machine.
When I said "Hoo-hah", I meant the "hoo-hah" about having to *rush* to install Windows 7, not Windows 7 itself.
I find XP is good enough for what I need Windows to do, found no reason to upgrade to Vista but maybe with Windows 7, I'll find a reason at some point. Until then, I'm happy to sit back and see what others make of it first and learn a bit more.
By all accounts, MS do seem to be learning some lessons from the UNIX and Linux world, if they're incorporating better support for open protocols like SSH then that's a big plus - but none of it sounds like stuff you couldn't do with free or Open Source software (like Putty or VNC) on XP anyway - but I'm open-minded so will watch with interest.
Incidentally, I installed the MS PowerShell upgrade in XP and quite liked the fact you can use UNIX commands like "ls" in it - but as a mainly Linux guy, I use Windows for GUI apps and games so couldn't find a real use for PowerShell (in much the same way I rarely drop to the CMD prompt).
The advantage for me is that I can ask Portage to compile an application with the correct support (e.g. I might want OGG support compiled into a media player on Gnome for example) or with particular compiler optimization flags set (that makes sure certain CPU features are used) and I can instruct it to do a "deep" compile so any dependencies and libraries are compiled at the same time.
It's not perfect for everyone by any means - using Portage it's easier than doing a completely manual compile, but there's still a steep learning curve and stuff still goes wrong occasionally.
And I'm that used to Gentoo now that I don't (and haven't) used any binary packed distros for some time now so I can't really give you any comparisons to binary packaged distros. But it is very stable, there's enough customisability to get Gentoo running nicely on low-end older platforms as well and I get fewer problems with it than when I was using Red Hat around the 5.2/6.0 days about 8 or 9 years ago.
I'm no lover of Microsoft, more Linux than Windows user but you are still wrong.
DLLs are Microsoft's way of saying "libraries" and libraries exist so that programmmer's can write applications easier.
If an application needs a specific library version and that library get's upgraded or downgraded, then the app will probably screw up - whether it's on Windows, Linux or countless other OSes out there.
Yep, there were lots of DLL issues during the days of Windows 3.11, NT4 and 9x, just like there was lots of library "dependency hell" in Red Hat and other Linux distros also. Since then, I've seen vast improvements in both.
As other posters have already said, there's often good reasons to criticize MS and Windows but this isn't one of them.
I don't claim to be a Windows expert but on at least two occasions I hacked about in the Registry, killed a system and had to basically rebuild it from scratch. (Yes, possibly if I'd known more about Windows, I could have gone back to a system restore point or something like that.)
But the same thing won't ever happen to me in Linux because I'll back up the original config file before I start editing it. So if I make some changes in, say, xorg.conf that kills X-Windows, I just put the old config file back and start again.
Yes, I'm a Gnome user and have messed about with the some of the settings in there that are "registry-type" changes (I've not yet looked closer as to how these settings are actually stored) but presumably, if I knacker Gnome because of messing about too much, then the change I've made is probably held somewhere in my home directory, so worst possible case is I delete what's under ".gnome" and start again (maybe even restore an older .gnome directory).
I just know from experience that it's easy for an inexperienced user to knacker a Windows machine by hacking about in the registry, but if you hack about in a Linux config file, then you just have to make sure you can always put the original config back.
I've used Ubuntu very little, I think it's a great distro for those new to Linux and I know it has a lot of longer-term users as well, had it been around about 10 years ago when I first got into Linux, then maybe I would have used it more and stuck with it.
But any long term Linux user will remember "dependency hell" with packaged distros like Red Hat and (as it was) Mandrake Linux when updating applications that resulted in countless other system libraries having to be dragged in for upgrade as well (and possibly resulting in other apps breaking due to new library versions). At the time, the way I personally escaped from that was to go to back to basics and use "roll your own" distros, firstly I went to Linux From Scratch, then finally settled on Gentoo and never looked back.
So I accept that I'm not an expert on package management in modern Linux distros and the situation now is probably much improved than when I was using "Red Hat Linux 5.2", but distros have got more complex and a package manager still has to trawl its way through countless dependencies in order to upgrade stuff without causing problems.
That still leaves a lot of room for error.
Actually it does.
If a package manager is to do it's job well then it needs to be able to parse configuration text files in order to understand how an application is configured already on the system.
As you probably know well yourself already, there's no real restrictions in UNIX or Linux for additional whitespace files and if you're manually writing a config file in vi, there are some rules for some apps as to where you can put certain parameters but otherwise it can be fairly freeform.
What this means is that you can have a config file that is formatted very strangely but works perfectly fine, and the package tool has to make some sense of it - consequently there is some scope for error here. (Incidentally, when you use Gentoo's Portage to do updates, it *tells* you that it can install a new configuration file but ultimately leaves it down to the user to choose whether to keep the old one or use the new one.)
Like it or not, update managers are a boon to new users but they do add additional complexity meaning that there is more to potentially go wrong.
That's one reason I moved away from distros that used pre-compiled binary packages.
I use Gentoo Linux now - it's not perfect, has a steep learning curve and there's some truth to the quips about always waiting for a Gentoo PC to finish compiling stuff. But because it has very little in the way of custom apps for package management and administration, you're always at the "lowest common denominator" of editing a text file in vi which means there's less to go wrong in an upgrade.
Even so, as I commented elsewhere, the Portage packaging/installation application does suffer from creep over time if you're upgrading regularly, so even with Gentoo it's good to do a fresh install every so often.
With all respect, you are completely missing the point.
The people who are at this moment buying and installing Windows 7 are mostly going to be desktop users upgrading from an earlier Windows release.
However, desktop PCs are entirely different to servers because invariably a desktop is going to be upgraded a lot more regularly than a server is, and probably by a person who is less experienced than one tasked with upgrading a server - not to mention all that good stuff like testing server upgrades in pre-production first before rolling it out.
And in my 25+ years experience in OSes, telecoms and now system security, I've learnt that those people that need to refer to others as "junior" are usually those lacking the knowledge and experience to occupy those high-up thrones they elevate themselves to.
Just because YOU know how to wipe and install a new OS, it doesn't mean the whole world does. ...which is precisely why newbie PC users probably buy a laptop or pre-built desktop that comes with a system restore disk that builds their machine from scratch by doing not a lot more than putting it in the CD/DVD drive.
Incidentally, when I first got into Linux around 10 years ago, I started off with Mandrake Linux and one of the reasons I stopped using it and went to Red Hat (and now Gentoo) was of it's vastly overstated claims when it came to ease of upgrades.
Yes, Mandriva is a long way from Mandrake but please don't try to educate me about Linux - I was using SCO and RSX-11 on PDP-11s when your mother was probably changing your nappies, my friend.
I have a Windows XP desktop that takes a lot of care and attention but hasn't Blue Screened or crashed once in about 18 months.
Last week, my missus upgraded her mobile phone and gave me her iPod Touch. For the first time ever, I installed iTunes on the XP box (and upgraded the Touch firmware to 3.1) and have installed nothing else apart from updates to my virus checker.
Since that time, iTunes has locked up about half a dozen times and my XP box has Blue Screened twice.
The Touch is a nice little gadget and iTunes is a reasonably intuitive and nice piece of software as long as you stay well away from Apple's AAC DRM-ed nonsense - but let's not pretend Apple is perfect because they're not.
As I responded to the other poster, I'm actually mostly a Gentoo Linux user, which (if you don't know already) uses rolling "compile it yourself" upgrades rather than physically different releases.
I wouldn't change Gentoo for any other Linux distro but even I use it with the expectation that if I keep constantly upgrading to "bleeding edge" package versions, within the space of a year to 18 months, there are probably going to be so many compilation errors to fix in Portage (= Gentoo's packaging architecture) that it will be simpler just to download the latest boot disk and do a scratch rebuild. It doesn't worry me, I just set aside a day to do it and just get on with it.
Face facts - if you keep ugrading stuff on any OS, it's going to get some creep problems meaning the occasional fresh install.
I'm mostly Linux guy and when Vista came out, there were huge arguments between (some of) the XP and Vista people with (some of) the OSX and Linux people throwing in crap from the sidelines.
I'm guessing this must have amused the Slashdot admins at the time because given that, by all accounts, Windows 7 is being received far more favourably than Vista was, those same admins are deliberately trying to stir things up on the basis that Windows 7 probably won't cause as much furore as Vista did, and therefore not generate as much amusement for them.
I can't comment on OSX because I've never found a reason for using it, but I think you will find that Linux upgrades easier because user configuration is held in flat text files which are far easier to parse by an installation script than the Windows Registry is. So provided that Linux upgrades any associated libraries when it upgrades an application, the worst that can happen is that maybe an app won't run properly because of an invalid parameter in an old configuration file.
Incidentally, I fail to see what all the hoo-hah is about anyway, quite frankly. Unless you're one of these "I need to get Windows 7 installed first because my todger is bigger than your todger" types, then you just do the upgrade when you have time to back the disk properly, format it, install the new OS from scratch and then copy your old files back across.
It's not as though it's something that needs to done weekly and if you've not got the common sense to set aside the time to do it properly anyway, then you probably shouldn't be doing it in the first place.
Actually, I prefer "emerge -vuDN world" as whilst I'm part XP user, I'm more Gentoo Linux user.
...that your State Governor will activate Skynet and nuke the site from orbit.
I've no plans to upgrade to Windows 7 from XP whatsoever but if people are being asked to remove iTunes and Google Toolbar, this implies they are using an "install over the top" upgrade method, rather than "backup, format and install from new".
And if these people **REALLY** believe that upgrading any OS in this fashion, let alone MS Windows, will end up giving them a nice clean install afterwards, then they probably shouldn't be anywhere near a computer in the first place.
Having said that, given that I was planning to watch Hannah Montana and dreary sequels to classic Disney movies precisely zero times, having that viewing restricted to just, say, 1% of media players under this new format makes bugger all difference to me anyway...
...a company that was renowned for giving us stuff to watch is now going to start telling us how we can watch it?
I often think that those people who try put some kind of rationale behind everything are the same people who miss the point entirely.
Why do they feel the ***NEED*** to give some kind of justification for stuff that's just there to entertain?
Last night I played Fallout 3 for a couple of hours, the night before I fired up the MAME emulator and played Mr. Do, Pacman and Space Invaders for an hour or so. In both cases, when I ended my playing, did I ask myself is one was a more "immersive experience" than the other? Nope, because I couldn't actually give a toss... in both cases, I thought "That was a lot of fun" and then went and found something else fun to go and do.
So there's no point in analysing why they just talked about FPSs and not strategy or adventure games because ***IT DOESN'T MATTER***. All that matters is when you pick up a book, sit down and watch a movie, listen to a piece of music, play a computer game, etc. etc. is that you ***ENJOY*** it while you do it.
I also find it odd that if you are currently running Windows XP quite happily on, say, a single core Pentium 4 CPU with 1GB RAM and a 400W PSU, why this would be a power saving when you probably need a dual-core CPU with 4GB RAM running a 500W CPU to get Windows 7 running equally as fast?
It's a very clever tactic used by evil corporations and evil politicians who pay vast sums to infinitely more evil marketing people to come up with these ideas in the first place.
You get everyone worrying and complaining about some doom scenario you predict will happen, then actually bring in something only half as bad... resulting in the mindless majority breathing a huge sigh of relief and accepting it.
in the best tradition of American innovation.
Sir Frank Whittle (British) and Dr. Hans Von Ohain (German) - indepently invented the jet engine. ... ...
Sir Alexander Fleming (Scottish - discovered penicillin.
Leonardo da Vinci (Italian) - inventor, artist, mathematician, painter, etc. etc.
etc.
I fully support what the EFF do but innovation is not simply limited to America - can I suggest in future they use the adjective "human", rather than "American", in similar statements? Otherwise, they're just affirming the stereotype that many of we non-US residents have, namely that Americans have no interest in the world outside their own shores.