Myth #3: the more people have an OS that supports DRM, the more likely the entertainment industry is to use it.
Ok, lets say this is the basic trend. But most people don't watch movies on their PC, they watch them on a stand alone player.
And since EVERY stand alone player has the HDMI/HDCP DRM in it, the market is already encouraged as much as it can be.
Vista is the just the only PC OS that allows HD content using this DRM to play currently, but considering most people other than laptop users or media center users don't freaking use their computer to watch HD-DVD or Blu-RAY, how do you think this is going to affect the market at all?
All PS3s also come with this DRM built in, are you going to tell everyone the PS3 is DRM filled crapware too?
People forget that even DVDs have DRM built into them, just because it is easy to subvert them today does not mean it is not there, and yes even Linux Distributions have region codes and their players decode regular DVDs DRM, so should we yell at Linux for supporting the DRM industry?
With good 'old' 802.11 antennas you can shove wireless 15-25 miles. Look for someone within that range that has access to Cable or DSL and work out a deal.
The antennas are going to be about $200 each, but the APs should be pretty cheap by now. You can use a tower/pole to get the antenna up high enough to shoot it down, and then it is just a bit of tweaking so you are getting a bounce or reflection.
(This is using the older 1-3mbps 802.11, but it works well, and is faster than some broadband anyway.)
WGA is dead and being shut off, go read the news please...
DRM in Vista is NO FREAKING different than DRM in XP, with the exception of the protected Video pipeline that allows for DRMed HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. Which all HD-DVD and Blu-RAY players on the market ALSO FREAKING HAVE. So next time you see a Toshiba HD-DVD player at Wal-Mart, yell to everyone it is crap because it is full of DRM.
Geesh. Are people really stupid enough to believe people like the idiot writing papers on Vista DRM that hasn't even used Vista, when technical people and developers have continually refuted it over and over and over and over again...
Vista locks you out of NOTHING, and can lock you out of NOTHING. I can even go in and change and remove any aspect of the OS, as you do have FULL CONTROL over the OS. People yelled about XP for the same reasons because it didn't let 'average' users or crap 3rd party software overwrite system DLLs without permission, everyone yelled that XP took away their control. Guess what, they were also freaking idiots, and have been proven wrong and wrong again countless times. Heck even look up old XP articles on SlashDot, you will hear the FUD of XP and why it is evil and restricts users, blah blah blah. Same crap, just insert Vista inplace of XP...
This gets tiring, why can't people do research on something they care to comment on beyond 'SlashDot' or 'SlashDot' mentallity?
I don't care if Vista will run "extremely well", it will take up far more resources than any other option, and I'm running very CPU and memory intensive applications. I'm getting a powerful machine to run my applications, not just to run a lumbering OS.
Myth #1, Vista's CPU footprint is virtually the same as XP, and RAM is not a big difference with today's systems. Vista will allocate more 'free' RAM for Smart Caching, but only if it is 'free' RAM. The only real difference between Vista and XP here is the RAM usage, where XP can hold at a 128mb footprint with lots of system RAM available, Vista holds at about 256mb footprint. So you would be loosing 100mb by using Vista. (Hence why Vista on 512mb is tight and 1GB is faster than XP.)
I have a bunch of peripherals and don't want to risk driver problems.
Myth #2. Vista, even Vista 64 has more driver support than any other OS in history, including better support than XP, and when it comes to 64bit, the best driver support out there. The crap our test labs have threw at Vista 64 and 32 has often even shocked our techs in driver availability as XP 64 sucked for driver support.
I do not want to be encumbered with DRM and other "trusted computing" issues with basic system configuration, troubleshooting, and software development, nor in my media recording, archives, and playback.
Myth #3, if you don't buy or use DRM product, no DRM mechanisms are EVER used on Vista. It is just like freaking XP, if you don't buy a DRM song, then DRM is NEVER used.
I run a lot of not-very-mainstream software that doesn't explicitly support Vista yet, but does support Win32 and Linux.
Vista is Win32, even Vista 64bit has a full Win32 subsystem. I am not sure what software you are talking about, but we run a lot of open source and 'odd' utilities, and to date nothing major has yet failed to work properly on Vista.
In the little that I've played around with doing simple things on Vista on store display boxes, it has either crashed or thrown security exceptions at me. I think it reflects a lot of the negative responses I've seen here from Vista users here and elsewhere as consistent usability, stability, and access problems.
The OMG Myth. Well we know how well demos in stores are cared for. Ok, Vista is more stable and crash proof than even XP, which has a pretty good record at this point.
Even past that, 3D applications that are prone to stressing hardware or crashing the OS, don't even phase Vista, where they would drop XP to its knees. For example, running a high-end Game or MMO, if the Video card drivers screw up or the Video card starts to overheat, etc. Vista will simply shut down the Video and restart it, in a fraction of a second. You could even remove your Video card while Vista was running, and put it back in and Vista would say, oops Video stopped working and continue on as nothing had happened. NO OTHER OS can do this, especially when running 3D applications, and not only recover the GUI in full, but even the 3D game recovers.
As for other performance.
Vista for gaming is even faster than XP now, there is no longer th 10% hit with the early NVidia/ATI drivers. Vista is now about 5-10% faster than XP in 99.9% of all gaming. Go read a 'revisted' review of Vista, go to Tomshardware or about any place that has test Vista and gaming recently. (Vista also loads games faster, which is nice to have your load screen times cut to 1/10th in MMOs especially.
Desktop applications are faster under Vista, especially applications that write a lot to the screen because of the pass-through composer in Vista. This includes simple stuff from a web page or spreadsheet to Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw or AutoCad, the redraw of vector is not only accelerated at the GDI/GDI+ layer, but the composer makes the drawing updates instant. Scenes in Corel or AutoCad that take over 20secs to fully render (yes complex ones) on XP, take less than a second to render on Vista.
I have to sometimes wonder how, when security is considered so important, how Microsoft has been allowed to take so long.
You have to consider the product's market and the legacy of some of the products.
When you had NO NETWORKING or DOS/Win95 based OSes that were NOT designed with ANY security, the hardest part has been moving the industry and 3rd party developers to even 'respect' or code for security. Vista is the first Version that 'requires' developers to code for security that are coming from the Win9x era of computing.
Mac System users faced the same challenges, and Apple took the road to virtualize the System9 portion of the OS.
Microsoft screwed up with XP and allowed everyday people and developers to write software that assumed it or the user had admin rights. This was a 'usuability' decision so it didn't break all the Win9X applications, but it also was a 'security' mistake in trying to compete with *nix, and even original NT itself that was all about security.
So questioning the 'bar' you also have to have perspective. Consumer based OS models from the 90s had little to no security. And sadly this does include non-MS OSes from the same timeframe like OS/2, BeOS, System7-9, and even early Linux and other *nixes. (To make this point, put the 1997 Linux kernel and distribution on a server and put it on the Internet and count the seconds until it can and will be exploited.)
I think it is strange that people seem the lack of security from the early 00s in MS products as a result of MS being inept in doing secure OSes, when they already had a good track record with NT until they moved it to be the next consumer version of Windows, and 'lightened' the security for application compatibility.
I also realize though that a 'lot' of SlashDot users stopped using Windows or 'seriously' using it around the Win9x/ME era, and this is also sad, as the OS from that era is as far from XP and Vista as DOS is from Linux.
Just like Vista, it in itself it not drastically more secure than XP SP2, but it does start the 'force' of getting 3rd party application and driver developers to take security seriously.
Windows itself has not ever been a poor performer or horrible with security, but because the model from the 90s allowed 'too much' program access and customization (ie changing core system files) it left a lot of doors open that were not inherently insecure in the base OS, but as software from 3rd parties strapped into or replaced portions, stability and reliability became a nightmare for a lot of users.
This is just like the debate in 'why' to upgrade to Vista, if none of the other features or reasons MS offers makes sense to a person or business, six months down the road the chance it will have reduced reliability or security due to 3rd party application bloat is virtually non-existent even in comparison to XP which started to do a pretty good job around SP2.
So it sounds like they are saying, this is Windows only. Lots of Mac and Linux users are going to be disappointed.
For now maybe, but Silverlight plays WMV files, will eventually become the standard web based video client instead of WMP.
As this happens, flipping channels on the net or NBC will be available for all OSes and be a heck a lot better quality than current offerings. Even the 'new proposal' for flash video still lacks behind WMV (VC-1) and SilverLight.
Although the NBC is an independent offering, eventually all broadcast will be available live or later streaming on the web, or available via IPTV as Vista users already have access to instead of having to purchase Cable service just to get your latest fix of Heroes or House. (BTW Heroes was available online last year after the show aired and was 'very' successful for viewers that missed the original airing.)
So now that hackers know there exists a backdoor to the windows update which will let them update a stealth patch to anything they want in the system because it runs with admin rights, this isn't a big deal to you?
So explain to everyone how a hacker without prior access will get the machine to go to their server instead of the MS server, present the correct authenication, which still has not been broken, and then forge security certificates for every file they want to download?
A system would already have to be compromised to even attempt to use or subvert this system and would be a lot harder than just taking control of other areas of the OS...
That's the problem, it updated even when disabled.
Um, No...
Can't SlashDot trolls read now? It was set to notify me of updates, it was NOT disabled. So this means it HAD TO BE IN COMMUNICATION WITH MS SERVERS TO NOTIFY THE USER.
Since the notification 'services/system' changed, it HAD to update itself or the user wouldn't get their 'NOTIFICATIONS'...
I have never heard of anything this evil before. An OS that updates it Update Notification system if it is turned on.
Holy cow, let's get the torches and head to Redmond...
Oh wait, maybe the few thousand idiots that never update Windows will get BETTER notifications and actually not leave their systems open to 5 year old exploits.
a) MS doesn't keep Windows Secure enough (No longer True - Damn) b) MS doesn't supply updates fast enough (No longer True - Damn)
New Flame, plan (c)... c) MS updates Windows too often and keeps it too secure!
Why has Slashdot turned into kool-aid drinkers instead of the rational 'open' community it use to be when I first started coming here? This is like when AOL opened the gates to the internet to all users, the idiot masses of success lowered the IQ of the Internet ten fold.
Now SlashDot has courted enough fringe idiocy and OS zealots that it is about as informational or interesting as Page Six.
Use another product. Creative Zen (especially Ms) are very nice, have better screens and natively play XVid, MP3, WMA, etc without having to convert.
Nothing better than just dropping songs or movies on a Zen and going, instead of using an iPod with iTunes and waiting for and hoping it can convert your movies or audio to the crApple format...
Where are the Apple hates DRM posts? Oh wait, Apple is just once again proving they are the King of DRM, hardware, software, and even their store.
So glad they are so 'open' and accepted on a OSS site like SlashDot.
Strange that the Zune and Windows Plays for Sure technology doesn't have any inherent required DRM, and only uses it if the online provider requires it, letting users drag and drop audio and movies to their devices via the File System or any program the user chooses. So where is the MS OSS love for their more 'open' device formats?/gag
Of course, since I haven't heard a word that's very common in the midwestern USA I must never leave my basement. Right. Ever consider that there are places outside the midwest?
Well, considering the last time I was even in freaking Belgium the non-native english speakers there 'knew EXACTLY' what the colloquialism meant, I would say that it more common than just where it originated from.
Please don't continue to defend your lack of knowledge, just go, "Ok, I learned something." and move on.
This will cause flames, but it is the best advice.
Since your TabletPC has 1GB of RAM and a very capable Intel 950 Video. The first thing you need to do is pick up a copy of Vista Ultimate or Premium. The pen and TabletPC support in Vista is years ahead of XP running TabletPC Windows. (You might want to upgrade to 2GB of RAM, even with XP the performance difference for TabletPCs is noticeable when it is doing voice or handwriting recognition.)
Next get a copy of Office 2007 OneNote. It will be your new best friend for writing, preparing notes, animations, videos, web content and even doing math in the application as you write.
It is like Windows Journal on crack, as you can even voice record your lectures and include a copy of the Audio and notes in standard web formats for you students to download or even OneNote formats if you want the audio and writing to be in sync for your users.
Office 2007 Word also works well with properly formatting equations and converting hand notes to type forms without losing your equation or notation formats.
Since you are a teacher, you can get the Education versions of all this software cheap, and just Vista and OneNote 2007 will transform what you are doing with your TabletPC into a whole new direction.
Also check out the Microsoft Education software constucts and Forums. There are lots of bright people doing what you are wanting to do and will have been suggestions for other software specfic to what you are teaching than the answers you will find on SlashDot, as most people posting here couldn't even give you 5 changes between Vista with built in TabletPC features and XP TabletPC, as most here run from MS technology.
Yes I know I will get flamed on this, but for Tablet technology MS is the 'best' provider of an OS and basic software that makes the technology shine and work effortlessly.
The problem is liability. If we tell a user to change a registry setting and it breaks the OS, we're liable to fix it. If you've ever worked in tech support you probably already know how something as simple as "change 0 to 1" can get messed up sometimes.
This is bullcrap...
If you truly work in a network or ISP industry, then you know that ISPs distribute software that 'extensively' modifies users systems to the point of being insane.
From the old days, ISP I worked with would bundle crap Netscape suites for users to even modern ISPs like Yahoo that completely override all user settings on the system.
And GUESS WHAT, every FREAKING one of the 'installs' changes TONS OF REGISTRY KEYS.
This could be a simple utility your company provides to your users, so they don't mess it up. PERIOD.
BTW, I have been in the tech support industry since before you were probably still pissing yourself. I currently work with companies that are tech support and infrastructure like EDS.
If EDS or an uplink provider is using a BAD or OUTDATED switch/server/etc it is their responsibility to keep the customers systems working. This usually involves a patch application that they can send to support sites that MODIFY these types of registry changes for the customer automatically, as it takes about 10 min to write an application to make a change like this.
Just this last week working with an Europe based telco they could not get the relay to the customer's site to hold consistently at normal packet size. Guess, what, we issued a freaking application patch that updated the client's servers so the packet size was able to handle the inconsistent uplink and keep services from failing.
This IS CALLED technical support, and if you think you have liability by HELPING your customers, just wait until they FORCE you to update the equipment or FIX you network architecture to support their client OSes. You are already hitting into liability by NOT helping your customers, and they could FORCE you to make things work, as technically it is you failing to provide a basic service that you contracted to provide without any exemption for users running Vista.
Also if you are in a competitive market, all your competitor has to do is call your bluff and fix your client's Vista installations to work properly and make a full mockery of your company's ability to provide a service with adequate support.
I think it is great that you and the company you work for will just sit back and blame MS and blame Vista for something you have control over. Let me know how this works for you and your company in about six months.
In fact I should do a bit of research and look up you and your company and make sure your competitors know of your ignorance, and if you have a local monopoly invest in your area so your customers have a choice that doesn't leave them locked out because of your company's arrogance.
Not only is what you are saying something that is borderline insane, I find it freaking amazing you are 'proud' to post and announce your incompetence for all the public to see.
Ok, I get that you can blame MS for changing a specification, even if it is 'technically' allowed, and I also understand that Vista's network stack was written from the ground up, so cleaning up legacy or possible vulnerbilities does seem plausible.
However, what I DON'T understand is why your company would waste time telling users to not buy Vista, or anger your customers because your 'products' don't support Vista if they have already purchased a new system.
If you truly are providing wireless service to this many customers, then I suggest you get a freaking tech to write a script that changes THIS SIMPLE registry setting for your Vista users, or give your support people a quick walk through instruction paper to walk the customers through the process to support your 'legacy' hardware.
This is not like Vista won't work at ALL, it is only that BY DEFAULT, accepting multi-cast DHCP is disabled, and flipping a simple setting turns this BACK ON.
Your company either has a hard on for Vista or your customers, and neither is something I would call good support for your customers.
Personally, I find it far, Far, FAR, FAR easier to recover a damaged Linux box than a damaged Windows box. But that is primarily because the damaged Windows boxes that I get have major Registry issues.
If this is really your true belief, you haven't used Windows in about 6 years.
1) WindowsXP. Safe mode comes on by default when a problem happens, and it asks the user if they want to 'restore' the system to previous restore point. The user picks a previous day the computer was working (ie. the registry wasn't corrupt, bad software wasn't installed, bad drivers weren't just loaded etc.) and within a few minutes the machine boots up to a perfectly fixed state.
2) Vista. Same thing, except with Vista in reference to the article, you can literally remove the video card while running and replace it, and Vista won't even drop the GUI or crash. You get a pop-up that the display adapter stopped working and Vista recovered.
These are features you don't have in Linux (rememeber system restore doesn't modify or touch user files, so NO DATA is lost or needs to be restored from a backup) and the driver model in Linux does not allow for X to recover graphically if the video adapter is removed from the running computer.
So again, explain to me how Linux can even do these things and why recovering Linux is easier than clicking 'system restore'?
Now users can accidentally install this crap and wonder why their Vista search abilities don't work right or start crashing the system.
How well will Google search do with audio, image/ocr searches that are necessary for products like OneNote, or developers that write their own plug-ins to Vista's search that are standard APIs, will this now also fail on Vista if Google is installed?
I wonder how Google's search handles remote network shares and other features of the Vista search system, that will really be nice for users when these features stop working... (geesh)
Sometimes you get what you asked for and Google is asking for a lot here and I know their current product DOES NOT even come close to the features that it wants to replace in Vista.
don't have to disable it in any other OS, and I didn't ask for it in this one
That is because your OTHER OSes can't DO REALTIME MEDIA scheduling, sucks for them, Vista users are happy with glitch free audio/video even in HD formats.
At least Vista offers a real-time scheduler for Media, as the once touted BeOS was SO NOTED and PRAISED for, and yet people here think it is a bad thing when it is in Vista, but still hold high regard for BeOS...
Even comparing audio in XP to other OSes like OSX and many *nix variants depending on the scheduler, there is a vast difference, as XP had a priority media scheduler, although not real-time. This is why on XP in comparison to the other mentioned OSes, audio and Video is very stable and glitch free in comparison. It is sad that a Dual processor OSX Mac can glitch audio when multi-tasking on tasks that XP wouldn't skip audio on with a slower single core processor.
MS has nothing to apologize for, as many OSS advocates have pleaded for real-time desktop OS scheduling SPECIFICALLY for multi-media demands. Go look up the articles about real-time, OSS, BeOS and all the focus on something MS actually DID for their desktop OSes, and now because of a couple of FREAKING bugs people are flipping out over it because it is MS and Vista.
If you don't want to use HD content, then FREAKING disable the Multi-media Real-time scheduler.
It takes three clicks to turn off the freaking Media Scheduler Service FOREVER...
Why are people so up in arms about something that probably don't affect them, is a bug that is being fixed and also is something that can be EASILY disabled?
Nope it's working as designed -- I mean in effect it's a bug, but it's more accurate to say it's a design flaw.
This is the point people keep missing. Several things are at play here.
1) The real-time media scheduler being overly aggressive. ('known' by MS)
2) There is also a couple of REAL BUGS that MS was NOT AWARE of dealing with various hardware configurations, especially some onbaord NIC chipset drivers. There is ALSO a bug in the network stack that 'allows' this to happen to the extreme it does, that was also NOT KNOWN by MS.
So yes, there are a couple of bugs that have popped up, from the network stack, and NIC drivers/configurations, to bug of letting the real-time media scheduler get too much when it was not needed.
These do not specifically include the 'known' performance models MS did on 100mb networks tuning related to the real-time scheduler.
Linux also has real-time scheduling.
Actually, NO. The main Linux kernel DOES NOT have true real-time scheduling, although there are ports that modify the scheduler to offer real-time. And the changes with CFS makes Linux, LESS real-time than with the previous scheduler.
Do a search on OSS and real-time, and the proponents pushing for TRUE real-time schedulers on desktop OSS OSes specifically for MEDIA, citing OSes like BeOS, which Vista is the only mainstream desktop OS to date to have this feature.
BTW, your references to the Linux scheduling and networking is right on, but you seem to discount that it is also 'easily' managed and changed on Windows. It can be assigned to a higher level on Windows as well, and the real-time media scheduler can even be disabled...
I also have a lot of respect for Russinovich, no matter who he is working for...
Everyone here can 'agree' that Vista is feked up for 1gb networks, but the 'reasons' behind the real-time scheduler for multimedia is something that isn't getting properly represented.
Many people (even in the OSS world) have argued for years that THERE IS a need for a real-time OS on the desktop specifically for Audio/Video demands, and this is with modern hardware. The Linux world tends to discount the need for a real-time OS as being 'needed', but when it comes to audio/video and sync it can fail miserably with both of the recent schedulers.
Sure playing MP3s or WMA files in Vista is extreme for the 'engineered' real-time media threads to grab as much as they do.
However, when considering HD video and Audio, the 'demands' on even modern hardware is fairly high if you want to pull off glitch free 1080p video.
Vista's real-time media scheduler was designed specifically for these demands and allows Vista to run these threads in real-time, and is why even non-assisted HD Video will run ok on Vista, and it WILL NOT run well on XP or even Linux or OSX without hardware specific decoding, no matter what everyone here thinks.
Also the 1gb network issues is something that surprises me that so many people here 'don't' get how demanding pushing this much data over a wire is on a system. We are pushing data transfers that are pushing past HD transfer speeds, and have to handle all the packets and basics of the protocol and ethernet to do so in addition.
Running CPU based on-board NICs and trying to push GB speeds is demanding even on today's CPUs, so I am surprised that it is dismissed so easily here as not being relevant.
Everyone here also seems to think that Vista's design was 'specifically' designed to offer this bug, but it was NOT.
There is a BUG in the way the real-time media scheduler is working, not all of what is happening was 'designed'. For anyone that didn't get this, re-read the article posted. The bug doesn't specifically happen with ALL multi-NIC setups, nor does it happen with ALL GB NIC setups, etc, it is a bug that happens on some system configurations. PERIOD. So MS is looking at two areas in fixing this issue, making the real-time scheduler more lenient, and fixing the specific BUG that causes the massive network loss.
There is also an issue in Vista with GB networks not specifically related to this issue, where Vista by default turns off 'Flow Control' on most NICs, and when using GB networks, many swtiches/routers don't properly downshift when accessing legacy 100/10mb devices, and many switches and routers don't handle this 'as they are supposed to do', so users are being forced to turn 'Flow Control' back on so that older computers or even XBoxes hanging of a GB switch that only handle 100mb connections don't suffer poor performance when talking to the Vista system.
I love how people here simplify this issue, yet have very little understanding of the actually numbers of performance factor in, nor even look at the OSS OSes that can't even do some of the things they are 'bitching' about Vista not doing 'well enough'.
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Myth #3: the more people have an OS that supports DRM, the more likely the entertainment industry is to use it.
Ok, lets say this is the basic trend. But most people don't watch movies on their PC, they watch them on a stand alone player.
And since EVERY stand alone player has the HDMI/HDCP DRM in it, the market is already encouraged as much as it can be.
Vista is the just the only PC OS that allows HD content using this DRM to play currently, but considering most people other than laptop users or media center users don't freaking use their computer to watch HD-DVD or Blu-RAY, how do you think this is going to affect the market at all?
All PS3s also come with this DRM built in, are you going to tell everyone the PS3 is DRM filled crapware too?
People forget that even DVDs have DRM built into them, just because it is easy to subvert them today does not mean it is not there, and yes even Linux Distributions have region codes and their players decode regular DVDs DRM, so should we yell at Linux for supporting the DRM industry?
Geesh...
*aren't getting a bounce or reflection
PS it also will far exceed both bandwidth and latency of satelitte.
Actually how far are you?
With good 'old' 802.11 antennas you can shove wireless 15-25 miles. Look for someone within that range that has access to Cable or DSL and work out a deal.
The antennas are going to be about $200 each, but the APs should be pretty cheap by now. You can use a tower/pole to get the antenna up high enough to shoot it down, and then it is just a bit of tweaking so you are getting a bounce or reflection.
(This is using the older 1-3mbps 802.11, but it works well, and is faster than some broadband anyway.)
WGA and DRM
WGA is dead and being shut off, go read the news please...
DRM in Vista is NO FREAKING different than DRM in XP, with the exception of the protected Video pipeline that allows for DRMed HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. Which all HD-DVD and Blu-RAY players on the market ALSO FREAKING HAVE. So next time you see a Toshiba HD-DVD player at Wal-Mart, yell to everyone it is crap because it is full of DRM.
Geesh. Are people really stupid enough to believe people like the idiot writing papers on Vista DRM that hasn't even used Vista, when technical people and developers have continually refuted it over and over and over and over again...
Vista locks you out of NOTHING, and can lock you out of NOTHING. I can even go in and change and remove any aspect of the OS, as you do have FULL CONTROL over the OS. People yelled about XP for the same reasons because it didn't let 'average' users or crap 3rd party software overwrite system DLLs without permission, everyone yelled that XP took away their control. Guess what, they were also freaking idiots, and have been proven wrong and wrong again countless times. Heck even look up old XP articles on SlashDot, you will hear the FUD of XP and why it is evil and restricts users, blah blah blah. Same crap, just insert Vista inplace of XP...
This gets tiring, why can't people do research on something they care to comment on beyond 'SlashDot' or 'SlashDot' mentallity?
I don't care if Vista will run "extremely well", it will take up far more resources than any other option, and I'm running very CPU and memory intensive applications. I'm getting a powerful machine to run my applications, not just to run a lumbering OS.
Myth #1, Vista's CPU footprint is virtually the same as XP, and RAM is not a big difference with today's systems. Vista will allocate more 'free' RAM for Smart Caching, but only if it is 'free' RAM. The only real difference between Vista and XP here is the RAM usage, where XP can hold at a 128mb footprint with lots of system RAM available, Vista holds at about 256mb footprint. So you would be loosing 100mb by using Vista. (Hence why Vista on 512mb is tight and 1GB is faster than XP.)
I have a bunch of peripherals and don't want to risk driver problems.
Myth #2. Vista, even Vista 64 has more driver support than any other OS in history, including better support than XP, and when it comes to 64bit, the best driver support out there. The crap our test labs have threw at Vista 64 and 32 has often even shocked our techs in driver availability as XP 64 sucked for driver support.
I do not want to be encumbered with DRM and other "trusted computing" issues with basic system configuration, troubleshooting, and software development, nor in my media recording, archives, and playback.
Myth #3, if you don't buy or use DRM product, no DRM mechanisms are EVER used on Vista. It is just like freaking XP, if you don't buy a DRM song, then DRM is NEVER used.
I run a lot of not-very-mainstream software that doesn't explicitly support Vista yet, but does support Win32 and Linux.
Vista is Win32, even Vista 64bit has a full Win32 subsystem. I am not sure what software you are talking about, but we run a lot of open source and 'odd' utilities, and to date nothing major has yet failed to work properly on Vista.
In the little that I've played around with doing simple things on Vista on store display boxes, it has either crashed or thrown security exceptions at me. I think it reflects a lot of the negative responses I've seen here from Vista users here and elsewhere as consistent usability, stability, and access problems.
The OMG Myth. Well we know how well demos in stores are cared for. Ok, Vista is more stable and crash proof than even XP, which has a pretty good record at this point.
Even past that, 3D applications that are prone to stressing hardware or crashing the OS, don't even phase Vista, where they would drop XP to its knees. For example, running a high-end Game or MMO, if the Video card drivers screw up or the Video card starts to overheat, etc. Vista will simply shut down the Video and restart it, in a fraction of a second. You could even remove your Video card while Vista was running, and put it back in and Vista would say, oops Video stopped working and continue on as nothing had happened. NO OTHER OS can do this, especially when running 3D applications, and not only recover the GUI in full, but even the 3D game recovers.
As for other performance.
Vista for gaming is even faster than XP now, there is no longer th 10% hit with the early NVidia/ATI drivers. Vista is now about 5-10% faster than XP in 99.9% of all gaming. Go read a 'revisted' review of Vista, go to Tomshardware or about any place that has test Vista and gaming recently. (Vista also loads games faster, which is nice to have your load screen times cut to 1/10th in MMOs especially.
Desktop applications are faster under Vista, especially applications that write a lot to the screen because of the pass-through composer in Vista. This includes simple stuff from a web page or spreadsheet to Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw or AutoCad, the redraw of vector is not only accelerated at the GDI/GDI+ layer, but the composer makes the drawing updates instant. Scenes in Corel or AutoCad that take over 20secs to fully render (yes complex ones) on XP, take less than a second to render on Vista.
The reason XP
I have to sometimes wonder how, when security is considered so important, how Microsoft has been allowed to take so long.
You have to consider the product's market and the legacy of some of the products.
When you had NO NETWORKING or DOS/Win95 based OSes that were NOT designed with ANY security, the hardest part has been moving the industry and 3rd party developers to even 'respect' or code for security. Vista is the first Version that 'requires' developers to code for security that are coming from the Win9x era of computing.
Mac System users faced the same challenges, and Apple took the road to virtualize the System9 portion of the OS.
Microsoft screwed up with XP and allowed everyday people and developers to write software that assumed it or the user had admin rights. This was a 'usuability' decision so it didn't break all the Win9X applications, but it also was a 'security' mistake in trying to compete with *nix, and even original NT itself that was all about security.
So questioning the 'bar' you also have to have perspective. Consumer based OS models from the 90s had little to no security. And sadly this does include non-MS OSes from the same timeframe like OS/2, BeOS, System7-9, and even early Linux and other *nixes. (To make this point, put the 1997 Linux kernel and distribution on a server and put it on the Internet and count the seconds until it can and will be exploited.)
I think it is strange that people seem the lack of security from the early 00s in MS products as a result of MS being inept in doing secure OSes, when they already had a good track record with NT until they moved it to be the next consumer version of Windows, and 'lightened' the security for application compatibility.
I also realize though that a 'lot' of SlashDot users stopped using Windows or 'seriously' using it around the Win9x/ME era, and this is also sad, as the OS from that era is as far from XP and Vista as DOS is from Linux.
Just like Vista, it in itself it not drastically more secure than XP SP2, but it does start the 'force' of getting 3rd party application and driver developers to take security seriously.
Windows itself has not ever been a poor performer or horrible with security, but because the model from the 90s allowed 'too much' program access and customization (ie changing core system files) it left a lot of doors open that were not inherently insecure in the base OS, but as software from 3rd parties strapped into or replaced portions, stability and reliability became a nightmare for a lot of users.
This is just like the debate in 'why' to upgrade to Vista, if none of the other features or reasons MS offers makes sense to a person or business, six months down the road the chance it will have reduced reliability or security due to 3rd party application bloat is virtually non-existent even in comparison to XP which started to do a pretty good job around SP2.
So it sounds like they are saying, this is Windows only. Lots of Mac and Linux users are going to be disappointed.
For now maybe, but Silverlight plays WMV files, will eventually become the standard web based video client instead of WMP.
As this happens, flipping channels on the net or NBC will be available for all OSes and be a heck a lot better quality than current offerings. Even the 'new proposal' for flash video still lacks behind WMV (VC-1) and SilverLight.
Although the NBC is an independent offering, eventually all broadcast will be available live or later streaming on the web, or available via IPTV as Vista users already have access to instead of having to purchase Cable service just to get your latest fix of Heroes or House. (BTW Heroes was available online last year after the show aired and was 'very' successful for viewers that missed the original airing.)
So now that hackers know there exists a backdoor to the windows update which will let them update a stealth patch to anything they want in the system because it runs with admin rights, this isn't a big deal to you?
So explain to everyone how a hacker without prior access will get the machine to go to their server instead of the MS server, present the correct authenication, which still has not been broken, and then forge security certificates for every file they want to download?
A system would already have to be compromised to even attempt to use or subvert this system and would be a lot harder than just taking control of other areas of the OS...
Are people really this stupid?
Read it again (the first time?), it wasn't on.
That's the problem, it updated even when disabled.
Um, No...
Can't SlashDot trolls read now? It was set to notify me of updates, it was NOT disabled. So this means it HAD TO BE IN COMMUNICATION WITH MS SERVERS TO NOTIFY THE USER.
Since the notification 'services/system' changed, it HAD to update itself or the user wouldn't get their 'NOTIFICATIONS'...
Get it yet?
I have never heard of anything this evil before. An OS that updates it Update Notification system if it is turned on.
Holy cow, let's get the torches and head to Redmond...
Oh wait, maybe the few thousand idiots that never update Windows will get BETTER notifications and actually not leave their systems open to 5 year old exploits.
a) MS doesn't keep Windows Secure enough (No longer True - Damn)
b) MS doesn't supply updates fast enough (No longer True - Damn)
New Flame, plan (c)...
c) MS updates Windows too often and keeps it too secure!
Why has Slashdot turned into kool-aid drinkers instead of the rational 'open' community it use to be when I first started coming here? This is like when AOL opened the gates to the internet to all users, the idiot masses of success lowered the IQ of the Internet ten fold.
Now SlashDot has courted enough fringe idiocy and OS zealots that it is about as informational or interesting as Page Six.
No it is easier to just...
/gag
Use another product. Creative Zen (especially Ms) are very nice, have better screens and natively play XVid, MP3, WMA, etc without having to convert.
Nothing better than just dropping songs or movies on a Zen and going, instead of using an iPod with iTunes and waiting for and hoping it can convert your movies or audio to the crApple format...
Where are the Apple hates DRM posts? Oh wait, Apple is just once again proving they are the King of DRM, hardware, software, and even their store.
So glad they are so 'open' and accepted on a OSS site like SlashDot.
Strange that the Zune and Windows Plays for Sure technology doesn't have any inherent required DRM, and only uses it if the online provider requires it, letting users drag and drop audio and movies to their devices via the File System or any program the user chooses. So where is the MS OSS love for their more 'open' device formats?
Of course, since I haven't heard a word that's very common in the midwestern USA I must never leave my basement. Right. Ever consider that there are places outside the midwest?
Well, considering the last time I was even in freaking Belgium the non-native english speakers there 'knew EXACTLY' what the colloquialism meant, I would say that it more common than just where it originated from.
Please don't continue to defend your lack of knowledge, just go, "Ok, I learned something." and move on.
I have never seen or heard anyone else use it this way.
I'm sorry more people don't get to your basement, now move along and troll somewhere else. In Midwestern USA, it is VERY common...
So when your teacher was 'hard on' you, it meant he 'really' liked you?
And going back to the penis reference, if someone has a 'hard on' for another person, that means they want to 'stick it to them' or 'fuck them over'.
I don't know what country you are coming from, but this is becoming too funny at this point.
I think you are playing stupid, and stupid is winning...
This will cause flames, but it is the best advice.
Since your TabletPC has 1GB of RAM and a very capable Intel 950 Video. The first thing you need to do is pick up a copy of Vista Ultimate or Premium. The pen and TabletPC support in Vista is years ahead of XP running TabletPC Windows. (You might want to upgrade to 2GB of RAM, even with XP the performance difference for TabletPCs is noticeable when it is doing voice or handwriting recognition.)
Next get a copy of Office 2007 OneNote. It will be your new best friend for writing, preparing notes, animations, videos, web content and even doing math in the application as you write.
It is like Windows Journal on crack, as you can even voice record your lectures and include a copy of the Audio and notes in standard web formats for you students to download or even OneNote formats if you want the audio and writing to be in sync for your users.
Office 2007 Word also works well with properly formatting equations and converting hand notes to type forms without losing your equation or notation formats.
Since you are a teacher, you can get the Education versions of all this software cheap, and just Vista and OneNote 2007 will transform what you are doing with your TabletPC into a whole new direction.
Also check out the Microsoft Education software constucts and Forums. There are lots of bright people doing what you are wanting to do and will have been suggestions for other software specfic to what you are teaching than the answers you will find on SlashDot, as most people posting here couldn't even give you 5 changes between Vista with built in TabletPC features and XP TabletPC, as most here run from MS technology.
Yes I know I will get flamed on this, but for Tablet technology MS is the 'best' provider of an OS and basic software that makes the technology shine and work effortlessly.
As a service to you, I must inform you that "have a hard on for" means the exact and total opposite from what you apparently think it means.
Sorry Freud, not everything involves a penis. Go look up the idiom and don't be a troll.
Hard on - Agression towards or want to cause damage to.
The problem is liability. If we tell a user to change a registry setting and it breaks the OS, we're liable to fix it. If you've ever worked in tech support you probably already know how something as simple as "change 0 to 1" can get messed up sometimes.
This is bullcrap...
If you truly work in a network or ISP industry, then you know that ISPs distribute software that 'extensively' modifies users systems to the point of being insane.
From the old days, ISP I worked with would bundle crap Netscape suites for users to even modern ISPs like Yahoo that completely override all user settings on the system.
And GUESS WHAT, every FREAKING one of the 'installs' changes TONS OF REGISTRY KEYS.
This could be a simple utility your company provides to your users, so they don't mess it up. PERIOD.
BTW, I have been in the tech support industry since before you were probably still pissing yourself. I currently work with companies that are tech support and infrastructure like EDS.
If EDS or an uplink provider is using a BAD or OUTDATED switch/server/etc it is their responsibility to keep the customers systems working. This usually involves a patch application that they can send to support sites that MODIFY these types of registry changes for the customer automatically, as it takes about 10 min to write an application to make a change like this.
Just this last week working with an Europe based telco they could not get the relay to the customer's site to hold consistently at normal packet size. Guess, what, we issued a freaking application patch that updated the client's servers so the packet size was able to handle the inconsistent uplink and keep services from failing.
This IS CALLED technical support, and if you think you have liability by HELPING your customers, just wait until they FORCE you to update the equipment or FIX you network architecture to support their client OSes. You are already hitting into liability by NOT helping your customers, and they could FORCE you to make things work, as technically it is you failing to provide a basic service that you contracted to provide without any exemption for users running Vista.
Also if you are in a competitive market, all your competitor has to do is call your bluff and fix your client's Vista installations to work properly and make a full mockery of your company's ability to provide a service with adequate support.
I think it is great that you and the company you work for will just sit back and blame MS and blame Vista for something you have control over. Let me know how this works for you and your company in about six months.
In fact I should do a bit of research and look up you and your company and make sure your competitors know of your ignorance, and if you have a local monopoly invest in your area so your customers have a choice that doesn't leave them locked out because of your company's arrogance.
Not only is what you are saying something that is borderline insane, I find it freaking amazing you are 'proud' to post and announce your incompetence for all the public to see.
Ok, I get that you can blame MS for changing a specification, even if it is 'technically' allowed, and I also understand that Vista's network stack was written from the ground up, so cleaning up legacy or possible vulnerbilities does seem plausible.
However, what I DON'T understand is why your company would waste time telling users to not buy Vista, or anger your customers because your 'products' don't support Vista if they have already purchased a new system.
If you truly are providing wireless service to this many customers, then I suggest you get a freaking tech to write a script that changes THIS SIMPLE registry setting for your Vista users, or give your support people a quick walk through instruction paper to walk the customers through the process to support your 'legacy' hardware.
This is not like Vista won't work at ALL, it is only that BY DEFAULT, accepting multi-cast DHCP is disabled, and flipping a simple setting turns this BACK ON.
Your company either has a hard on for Vista or your customers, and neither is something I would call good support for your customers.
I feel sorry for your customers, sad...
Personally, I find it far, Far, FAR, FAR easier to recover a damaged Linux box than a damaged Windows box. But that is primarily because the damaged Windows boxes that I get have major Registry issues.
If this is really your true belief, you haven't used Windows in about 6 years.
1) WindowsXP. Safe mode comes on by default when a problem happens, and it asks the user if they want to 'restore' the system to previous restore point. The user picks a previous day the computer was working (ie. the registry wasn't corrupt, bad software wasn't installed, bad drivers weren't just loaded etc.) and within a few minutes the machine boots up to a perfectly fixed state.
2) Vista. Same thing, except with Vista in reference to the article, you can literally remove the video card while running and replace it, and Vista won't even drop the GUI or crash. You get a pop-up that the display adapter stopped working and Vista recovered.
These are features you don't have in Linux (rememeber system restore doesn't modify or touch user files, so NO DATA is lost or needs to be restored from a backup) and the driver model in Linux does not allow for X to recover graphically if the video adapter is removed from the running computer.
So again, explain to me how Linux can even do these things and why recovering Linux is easier than clicking 'system restore'?
Geesh.
Cool Google Search in Vista!
Now users can accidentally install this crap and wonder why their Vista search abilities don't work right or start crashing the system.
How well will Google search do with audio, image/ocr searches that are necessary for products like OneNote, or developers that write their own plug-ins to Vista's search that are standard APIs, will this now also fail on Vista if Google is installed?
I wonder how Google's search handles remote network shares and other features of the Vista search system, that will really be nice for users when these features stop working... (geesh)
Sometimes you get what you asked for and Google is asking for a lot here and I know their current product DOES NOT even come close to the features that it wants to replace in Vista.
don't have to disable it in any other OS, and I didn't ask for it in this one
That is because your OTHER OSes can't DO REALTIME MEDIA scheduling, sucks for them, Vista users are happy with glitch free audio/video even in HD formats.
PS
At least Vista offers a real-time scheduler for Media, as the once touted BeOS was SO NOTED and PRAISED for, and yet people here think it is a bad thing when it is in Vista, but still hold high regard for BeOS...
Even comparing audio in XP to other OSes like OSX and many *nix variants depending on the scheduler, there is a vast difference, as XP had a priority media scheduler, although not real-time. This is why on XP in comparison to the other mentioned OSes, audio and Video is very stable and glitch free in comparison. It is sad that a Dual processor OSX Mac can glitch audio when multi-tasking on tasks that XP wouldn't skip audio on with a slower single core processor.
MS has nothing to apologize for, as many OSS advocates have pleaded for real-time desktop OS scheduling SPECIFICALLY for multi-media demands. Go look up the articles about real-time, OSS, BeOS and all the focus on something MS actually DID for their desktop OSes, and now because of a couple of FREAKING bugs people are flipping out over it because it is MS and Vista.
If you don't want to use HD content, then FREAKING disable the Multi-media Real-time scheduler.
It takes three clicks to turn off the freaking Media Scheduler Service FOREVER...
Why are people so up in arms about something that probably don't affect them, is a bug that is being fixed and also is something that can be EASILY disabled?
Nope it's working as designed -- I mean in effect it's a bug, but it's more accurate to say it's a design flaw.
This is the point people keep missing. Several things are at play here.
1) The real-time media scheduler being overly aggressive. ('known' by MS)
2) There is also a couple of REAL BUGS that MS was NOT AWARE of dealing with various hardware configurations, especially some onbaord NIC chipset drivers. There is ALSO a bug in the network stack that 'allows' this to happen to the extreme it does, that was also NOT KNOWN by MS.
So yes, there are a couple of bugs that have popped up, from the network stack, and NIC drivers/configurations, to bug of letting the real-time media scheduler get too much when it was not needed.
These do not specifically include the 'known' performance models MS did on 100mb networks tuning related to the real-time scheduler.
Linux also has real-time scheduling.
Actually, NO. The main Linux kernel DOES NOT have true real-time scheduling, although there are ports that modify the scheduler to offer real-time. And the changes with CFS makes Linux, LESS real-time than with the previous scheduler.
Do a search on OSS and real-time, and the proponents pushing for TRUE real-time schedulers on desktop OSS OSes specifically for MEDIA, citing OSes like BeOS, which Vista is the only mainstream desktop OS to date to have this feature.
BTW, your references to the Linux scheduling and networking is right on, but you seem to discount that it is also 'easily' managed and changed on Windows. It can be assigned to a higher level on Windows as well, and the real-time media scheduler can even be disabled...
I also have a lot of respect for Russinovich, no matter who he is working for...
Everyone here can 'agree' that Vista is feked up for 1gb networks, but the 'reasons' behind the real-time scheduler for multimedia is something that isn't getting properly represented.
Many people (even in the OSS world) have argued for years that THERE IS a need for a real-time OS on the desktop specifically for Audio/Video demands, and this is with modern hardware. The Linux world tends to discount the need for a real-time OS as being 'needed', but when it comes to audio/video and sync it can fail miserably with both of the recent schedulers.
Sure playing MP3s or WMA files in Vista is extreme for the 'engineered' real-time media threads to grab as much as they do.
However, when considering HD video and Audio, the 'demands' on even modern hardware is fairly high if you want to pull off glitch free 1080p video.
Vista's real-time media scheduler was designed specifically for these demands and allows Vista to run these threads in real-time, and is why even non-assisted HD Video will run ok on Vista, and it WILL NOT run well on XP or even Linux or OSX without hardware specific decoding, no matter what everyone here thinks.
Also the 1gb network issues is something that surprises me that so many people here 'don't' get how demanding pushing this much data over a wire is on a system. We are pushing data transfers that are pushing past HD transfer speeds, and have to handle all the packets and basics of the protocol and ethernet to do so in addition.
Running CPU based on-board NICs and trying to push GB speeds is demanding even on today's CPUs, so I am surprised that it is dismissed so easily here as not being relevant.
Everyone here also seems to think that Vista's design was 'specifically' designed to offer this bug, but it was NOT.
There is a BUG in the way the real-time media scheduler is working, not all of what is happening was 'designed'. For anyone that didn't get this, re-read the article posted. The bug doesn't specifically happen with ALL multi-NIC setups, nor does it happen with ALL GB NIC setups, etc, it is a bug that happens on some system configurations. PERIOD. So MS is looking at two areas in fixing this issue, making the real-time scheduler more lenient, and fixing the specific BUG that causes the massive network loss.
There is also an issue in Vista with GB networks not specifically related to this issue, where Vista by default turns off 'Flow Control' on most NICs, and when using GB networks, many swtiches/routers don't properly downshift when accessing legacy 100/10mb devices, and many switches and routers don't handle this 'as they are supposed to do', so users are being forced to turn 'Flow Control' back on so that older computers or even XBoxes hanging of a GB switch that only handle 100mb connections don't suffer poor performance when talking to the Vista system.
I love how people here simplify this issue, yet have very little understanding of the actually numbers of performance factor in, nor even look at the OSS OSes that can't even do some of the things they are 'bitching' about Vista not doing 'well enough'.