I don't know about GP, but I would probably say much the same thing, based on my own conceptions.
But your examples were all things where you had tried out the software, otherwise you would not have known that they got it right with Windows 7 (although I would like to know why you hate Vista so much and yet like Win7 when they are more alike than different).
My point is that you are free to dislike their software and find fault with it, and you are free to disregard them for future consideration based on your past experiences, but you really shouldn't make public statements about a product being bad when you have no idea if it is true.
But that is just FUD. You are making a statement that is not based in reality, but in your own preconceptions. It is the same as saying Linux is hard to use or administer because you tried it 10 years ago. It is the same as saying that the Mac doesn't have true multitasking because you tried it 10 years ago. Are you trying to claim that all these other operating systems have improved over the years but Windows has stayed the same?
It doesn't help anyone to perpetuate stereotypes about computers. It certainly doesn't allow people to make informed choices.
In what corrupt and twisted world do you live in where previous products and services from a company are irrelevant to evaluating whether or not to buy current products or services from that company?
Surely the far more important factor is what the current product is like. A lot of the complaints about Microsoft products turn out to be from people who saw an earlier version 10 years ago and who still assume that the current version has exactly the same problems. As jeffgeno said, Windows Mobile 7 has been totally rewritten, and it should be judged on its own merits.
Unfortunately, looking at the merits of the current OS, it does come up lacking. Microsoft released this product way too early. There are far too many missing features. For instance, what kind of idiotic company produces a product that can't do copy and paste? Apple were stupid for doing this with the iPhone, and Microsoft were doubly stupid for not learning from Apple's mistakes.
I haven't played with a Windows phone to really be able to judge it for myself because from the specs it seems that this is at version 0.5 and is not ready to be used. When Microsoft release the update this year, I will test it out. I haven't been convinced by the static screenshots that I have seen, but I get the feeling that it may be more intuitive once you start actually using the product.
does it still contain the DRM restrictions capability ?, because Intel can forget all about CPU sales from us and from any of our customers until its removed
That is just incredibly stupid. Having any DRM in the CPU doesn't prevent you from doing anything on your computer. Sure, some sites/applications will require it to run, but if you didn't have the support in the CPU then they wouldn't run anyway so absolutely nothing has been lost. If you want to boycott something, boycott the services/applicatios that use the DRM.
It will be interesting to see what your city gov. employees do when they need to print a contract or something.
They can always use the free Office viewer applications made by Microsoft. Still, I can't see user satisfaction being particularly high going with a cloud solution that doesn't offer much in the way of advanced features. This is obviously a decision made by people who don't actually use Office apps much.
Surely the better solution would be to go with OpenOffice. Or you could still use Microsoft Office, but just don't upgrade to every version that comes out. At my company, we went from Office 97 to 2003 to 2010. Going from 97 to 2003, people hardly noticed the difference!
Hardly. The cloud concept and name had been around long before Google came on the scene. Google also did what Microsoft often do and bought themselves into the game when they purchased the company Upstartle for the word processor and technology from 2Web Technologies for the spreadsheet.
Now I don't have any problems doing this, and I think they did a good job integrating the two systems together. But don't give them the credit for this revolution.
I hardly think that Intel stabbed them in the back by working on a competing product (and more expensive) product. Is it wrong to have a choice in the marketplace? That's as bad as when Microsoft insisted computer makers only sold DOS/Windows and not any competing OS. How is it that OLPC suddenly became the underdog for being monopolistic?
PCI slots dried up. My latest mobo has just the one.
A lot of motherboards use PCI internally as the interface for their onboard systems such as audio. Just because you don't see or use the physical slot doesn't mean that it is completely unused.
For example, the protected audio path introduced in Vista made many sound drivers much more complex to write, and resulted in poor performance and system stability problems. This was of course passed on to the customer as an additional expense, as well as yet another source of blue screens of death.
Hey? Vista simplified the audio system by handling more of the audio processing itself. The way they implemented the protected audio path effectively reduced what the companies had to do in their own drivers. Some of the things that used to be done using hardware acceleration is now handled by the OS in software. This resulted in new features such as per-application audio settings and enhancements such as virtual surround, room correction and loudness equalization for even the most basic sound chipset. APIs were introduced to allow the higher end soundcards to implement their custom system effects using the same hooks that Microsoft used to implement the built-in effects. The Universal Audio Architecture provided more structure to the driver model and meant that the driver writers could rely on the OS to provide many of the user configuration needs.
Furthermore, the code was moved from the kernel into userland to prevent buggy drivers from causing blue screens of death.
So rather than this system increasing the cost to consumers, it decreases it because it makes the integrated solutions (that come with every single motherboard) much more useful. There will always be people who prefer a dedicated soundcard, but more and more this is becoming a niche market due to improvements in integrated chipset quality and operating system features.
Microsoft pitches this as an advantage (predictable updates!), and I laugh out loud every time I hear one of their marketing people say it.
You might laugh out loud, but given that Microsoft has the infrastructure in place to perform the immediate release of patches, what advantage would there be for them to delay the updates other than to placate the needs of their business customers? They used to do updates as soon as they were ready, but they changed this practice based on feedback from their larger clients.
Prior "Windows Updates", people used to run systems that remained unpatched for years, so having to wait a month is still way better than it used to be.
When a child picks up the text of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and reads the word "nigger" I want them to take offense. Not to take offense at Mark Twain but more so to take offense to and own up to this great country's tortured past and to vow that this will never happen again.
While I agree with your sentiment, I would also like children to be even more offended by the idea that anyone was a slave, and that they would similarly vow that it would never happen again.
Can the average PC user (not necessarily the more technically inclined users here on Slashdot) be trusted not to screw anything up inside a desktop or laptop PC when installing RAM sticks?
Who cares? We are only talking to Slashdot readers here. Those people that you think will not be able to insert memory won't get to read that advice because it is highly unlikely that they are here. And just because Ma and Pa can't do the installation doesn't mean the advice is not good for the rest of us.
I don't give a damn whether you think these features were useful or not. Microsoft don't write their software just for you.
So you don't use the firewall? Big deal. Given how SP2 virtually stopped the worms that could infect your system within 15 minutes of connecting to the Internet, this was a useful tool for a lot of people. It doesn't just protect Internet users (especially dialup), but can stop worms from spreading within a network once one computer has become compromised.
You didn't use IE6? Well, it was the most popular web browser at the time, so once again this was a useful upgrade for a lot of people.
You don't have any Bluetooth device? Does that mean Microsoft shouldn't add support for it, or that they shouldn't list it as a feature of the service pack? How utterly self centered of you. As you say, Bluetooth is picking up more and more, but that wouldn't happen so much if the operating systems didn't have built-in support for it.
And Microsoft Security Center marked the beginning of the change of philosophy of Windows to incorporate these kind of settings into one single, easy to read place.
The fact that you had no use for these features doesn't change the fact that they wrote them and can legitimately count them as new features. Next you will be saying that the service pack wasn't required because it didn't help people who used a Mac!
I have heard that same story before. But I do wonder whether you would have had the same improved experience if you had installed a vanilla version of Vista instead of Windows 7. Some laptops and desktops come with a lot of third party software installed by default which can really slows the system down. One of the first things I do when I get a laptop is to remove all the add-on products, or if too time consuming then I install a new OS.
Anyway, I don't see any reason to use Vista if you have to use Windows since 7 is superior in every way.
Absolutely, if you have the choice then go with Win7. But I tend not to upgrade the OS on a working system. The time it takes to install it (plus all my usual add-ons) just doesn't seem worth it to me.
Yes, I said it was the most notable service pack. SP1 and SP3 did have a few new features, but definitely nothing like SP2. This was because SP2 arrived at the time MS would normally have come out with a new version of Windows (3 years after the release of XP).
It was a shame that they didn't call it Windows XP version 2 rather than just Service Pack 2. If they had, it would not have been such a PR problem for Vista to take so long. They would have looked like nice guys for making it a free upgrade to a minor Windows release to tide us over while they re-wrote a lot of the code for Vista. Instead, people just think of the service packs as bug fixes and that the OS that they love dates back to 2001. The version from back then was rubbish. The REAL beloved Operating System was released in 2004 when SP2 came out.
Windows 7 from the user experience is mostly Vista with feature tweaks and better driver support. The rest is mostly marketing.
True, but what an amazingly difference that marketing makes. It is incredible how many people around here have gushing praise for Windows 7, and yet total scorn for Vista. The main reason for this is hype, most for the downwards hype that Vista has got.
How many people skipped Vista all togather because of what everyone else was saying about it. I know I almost did. When I got my first laptop with Vista, I was ready with my XP disc in hand to wipe it when I decided to have a quick look at the OS to see how bad it really was. It wasn't bad at all (or at least nothing like the bad press that it got). That laptop is still on Vista today.
I acutally got quite angry with myself for believing the bad hype. I have long known to ignore positive spin on a product from the companies and reviewers, but Vista was the first time I had been sucked in by negative hype in the communuty. So many of the things that people said about it were just outright lies. It became obvious that a lot of people who denigrated the OS had never actually used it. That is not to say that it didn't have problems, just not as many as people said.
So sure, if you went from XP to Windows 7 then you would be much more likely to have good things to say about it. So Microsoft didn't really need to make substantial changes to Windows 7. They just needed to release an OS that had good driver support from the start and could start with a clean slate with the community.
XP's Service Packs were the equivalent of Mac OS's upgrades, but they were free. The most notable upgrade was Service Pack 2, which introduced the firewall, pop-up blocker, Bluetooth support, Windows Security Center, etc. Sure, it is not a patch on the monumental changes introduced with Vista, but when people say that XP did everything that they needed they actually should say that XP SP2 did all they need. If you gave someone a computer with the original version of the OS then they wouldn't be so happy.
According to the timeline, Microsoft too has also released patches for some but not all the bugs. This final delay appears to be because they had problems reproducing the crashes, which I think is probably due to the nature of this tool which makes reproducing the exact circumstances difficult. I can sympathise because I have had to find hard to reproduce bugs is the past.
Still I think that is correct that it should be all made public now, considering that the bad guys have already got the code.
That is just so bogus. One of the problems the scientists have when communicating to the general public is that it is too hard to get a straight answer from them with absolute certainty. They talk in terms of probability and uncertainty. The reason they do this is because within the scientific world, if your conclusions go beyond what your data shows then it will not pass a peer review.
Often conclusions end by highlighting what is still not known and where future research needs to be done. This idea that they make grand, unsupported statements and then treat them like they are the absolute truth has no resemblance to reality.
Because the iPhone is a toy, not for actual business use.
And a clock radio is for business use? It is substantially cheaper to make than an iPhone and yet they call usually make an alarm ring every day. Is a VCR/PVR a business grade device? No, but they can still record programs each week. And where the hell can you buy an alarm clock designed for business use?
For all the faults that I find with the iPhone, it still does some amazing things. Keeping a clock going and ringing an alarm would not be a task that I would consider amazing. It is trivial. It should not cause a problem for anything, even if it just looks neat and can play games.
Well in this case IE was found to have far fewer bugs than WebKit or Mozilla. They have all fixed some (but not all) of the reported bugs, so I don't think it is such a easy conclusion to say that you shouldn't use IE.
Personally, I am thinking of moving back to Opera. I have never been a fan of WebKit, and I don't think that Mozilla deserves the high praise that it gets for security. Of course, the best solution is to not trust any of the browsers.
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I don't know about GP, but I would probably say much the same thing, based on my own conceptions.
But your examples were all things where you had tried out the software, otherwise you would not have known that they got it right with Windows 7 (although I would like to know why you hate Vista so much and yet like Win7 when they are more alike than different).
My point is that you are free to dislike their software and find fault with it, and you are free to disregard them for future consideration based on your past experiences, but you really shouldn't make public statements about a product being bad when you have no idea if it is true.
But that is just FUD. You are making a statement that is not based in reality, but in your own preconceptions. It is the same as saying Linux is hard to use or administer because you tried it 10 years ago. It is the same as saying that the Mac doesn't have true multitasking because you tried it 10 years ago. Are you trying to claim that all these other operating systems have improved over the years but Windows has stayed the same?
It doesn't help anyone to perpetuate stereotypes about computers. It certainly doesn't allow people to make informed choices.
Now I don't have any problems doing this
Oops. I meant I have no problems with Google doing this. Obviously I didn't make Google Docs myself!
In what corrupt and twisted world do you live in where previous products and services from a company are irrelevant to evaluating whether or not to buy current products or services from that company?
Surely the far more important factor is what the current product is like. A lot of the complaints about Microsoft products turn out to be from people who saw an earlier version 10 years ago and who still assume that the current version has exactly the same problems. As jeffgeno said, Windows Mobile 7 has been totally rewritten, and it should be judged on its own merits.
Unfortunately, looking at the merits of the current OS, it does come up lacking. Microsoft released this product way too early. There are far too many missing features. For instance, what kind of idiotic company produces a product that can't do copy and paste? Apple were stupid for doing this with the iPhone, and Microsoft were doubly stupid for not learning from Apple's mistakes.
I haven't played with a Windows phone to really be able to judge it for myself because from the specs it seems that this is at version 0.5 and is not ready to be used. When Microsoft release the update this year, I will test it out. I haven't been convinced by the static screenshots that I have seen, but I get the feeling that it may be more intuitive once you start actually using the product.
does it still contain the DRM restrictions capability ?, because Intel can forget all about CPU sales from us and from any of our customers until its removed
That is just incredibly stupid. Having any DRM in the CPU doesn't prevent you from doing anything on your computer. Sure, some sites/applications will require it to run, but if you didn't have the support in the CPU then they wouldn't run anyway so absolutely nothing has been lost. If you want to boycott something, boycott the services/applicatios that use the DRM.
It will be interesting to see what your city gov. employees do when they need to print a contract or something.
They can always use the free Office viewer applications made by Microsoft. Still, I can't see user satisfaction being particularly high going with a cloud solution that doesn't offer much in the way of advanced features. This is obviously a decision made by people who don't actually use Office apps much.
Surely the better solution would be to go with OpenOffice. Or you could still use Microsoft Office, but just don't upgrade to every version that comes out. At my company, we went from Office 97 to 2003 to 2010. Going from 97 to 2003, people hardly noticed the difference!
Firmly established by Google.
Hardly. The cloud concept and name had been around long before Google came on the scene. Google also did what Microsoft often do and bought themselves into the game when they purchased the company Upstartle for the word processor and technology from 2Web Technologies for the spreadsheet.
Now I don't have any problems doing this, and I think they did a good job integrating the two systems together. But don't give them the credit for this revolution.
The other term would be upselling. Companies do it with their own products too.
I hardly think that Intel stabbed them in the back by working on a competing product (and more expensive) product. Is it wrong to have a choice in the marketplace? That's as bad as when Microsoft insisted computer makers only sold DOS/Windows and not any competing OS. How is it that OLPC suddenly became the underdog for being monopolistic?
PCI slots dried up. My latest mobo has just the one.
A lot of motherboards use PCI internally as the interface for their onboard systems such as audio. Just because you don't see or use the physical slot doesn't mean that it is completely unused.
For example, the protected audio path introduced in Vista made many sound drivers much more complex to write, and resulted in poor performance and system stability problems. This was of course passed on to the customer as an additional expense, as well as yet another source of blue screens of death.
Hey? Vista simplified the audio system by handling more of the audio processing itself. The way they implemented the protected audio path effectively reduced what the companies had to do in their own drivers. Some of the things that used to be done using hardware acceleration is now handled by the OS in software. This resulted in new features such as per-application audio settings and enhancements such as virtual surround, room correction and loudness equalization for even the most basic sound chipset. APIs were introduced to allow the higher end soundcards to implement their custom system effects using the same hooks that Microsoft used to implement the built-in effects. The Universal Audio Architecture provided more structure to the driver model and meant that the driver writers could rely on the OS to provide many of the user configuration needs.
Furthermore, the code was moved from the kernel into userland to prevent buggy drivers from causing blue screens of death.
So rather than this system increasing the cost to consumers, it decreases it because it makes the integrated solutions (that come with every single motherboard) much more useful. There will always be people who prefer a dedicated soundcard, but more and more this is becoming a niche market due to improvements in integrated chipset quality and operating system features.
Microsoft pitches this as an advantage (predictable updates!), and I laugh out loud every time I hear one of their marketing people say it.
You might laugh out loud, but given that Microsoft has the infrastructure in place to perform the immediate release of patches, what advantage would there be for them to delay the updates other than to placate the needs of their business customers? They used to do updates as soon as they were ready, but they changed this practice based on feedback from their larger clients.
Prior "Windows Updates", people used to run systems that remained unpatched for years, so having to wait a month is still way better than it used to be.
When a child picks up the text of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and reads the word "nigger" I want them to take offense. Not to take offense at Mark Twain but more so to take offense to and own up to this great country's tortured past and to vow that this will never happen again.
While I agree with your sentiment, I would also like children to be even more offended by the idea that anyone was a slave, and that they would similarly vow that it would never happen again.
Can the average PC user (not necessarily the more technically inclined users here on Slashdot) be trusted not to screw anything up inside a desktop or laptop PC when installing RAM sticks?
Who cares? We are only talking to Slashdot readers here. Those people that you think will not be able to insert memory won't get to read that advice because it is highly unlikely that they are here. And just because Ma and Pa can't do the installation doesn't mean the advice is not good for the rest of us.
I don't give a damn whether you think these features were useful or not. Microsoft don't write their software just for you.
So you don't use the firewall? Big deal. Given how SP2 virtually stopped the worms that could infect your system within 15 minutes of connecting to the Internet, this was a useful tool for a lot of people. It doesn't just protect Internet users (especially dialup), but can stop worms from spreading within a network once one computer has become compromised.
You didn't use IE6? Well, it was the most popular web browser at the time, so once again this was a useful upgrade for a lot of people.
You don't have any Bluetooth device? Does that mean Microsoft shouldn't add support for it, or that they shouldn't list it as a feature of the service pack? How utterly self centered of you. As you say, Bluetooth is picking up more and more, but that wouldn't happen so much if the operating systems didn't have built-in support for it.
And Microsoft Security Center marked the beginning of the change of philosophy of Windows to incorporate these kind of settings into one single, easy to read place.
The fact that you had no use for these features doesn't change the fact that they wrote them and can legitimately count them as new features. Next you will be saying that the service pack wasn't required because it didn't help people who used a Mac!
I have heard that same story before. But I do wonder whether you would have had the same improved experience if you had installed a vanilla version of Vista instead of Windows 7. Some laptops and desktops come with a lot of third party software installed by default which can really slows the system down. One of the first things I do when I get a laptop is to remove all the add-on products, or if too time consuming then I install a new OS.
Anyway, I don't see any reason to use Vista if you have to use Windows since 7 is superior in every way.
Absolutely, if you have the choice then go with Win7. But I tend not to upgrade the OS on a working system. The time it takes to install it (plus all my usual add-ons) just doesn't seem worth it to me.
Yes, I said it was the most notable service pack. SP1 and SP3 did have a few new features, but definitely nothing like SP2. This was because SP2 arrived at the time MS would normally have come out with a new version of Windows (3 years after the release of XP).
It was a shame that they didn't call it Windows XP version 2 rather than just Service Pack 2. If they had, it would not have been such a PR problem for Vista to take so long. They would have looked like nice guys for making it a free upgrade to a minor Windows release to tide us over while they re-wrote a lot of the code for Vista. Instead, people just think of the service packs as bug fixes and that the OS that they love dates back to 2001. The version from back then was rubbish. The REAL beloved Operating System was released in 2004 when SP2 came out.
Windows 7 from the user experience is mostly Vista with feature tweaks and better driver support. The rest is mostly marketing.
True, but what an amazingly difference that marketing makes. It is incredible how many people around here have gushing praise for Windows 7, and yet total scorn for Vista. The main reason for this is hype, most for the downwards hype that Vista has got.
How many people skipped Vista all togather because of what everyone else was saying about it. I know I almost did. When I got my first laptop with Vista, I was ready with my XP disc in hand to wipe it when I decided to have a quick look at the OS to see how bad it really was. It wasn't bad at all (or at least nothing like the bad press that it got). That laptop is still on Vista today.
I acutally got quite angry with myself for believing the bad hype. I have long known to ignore positive spin on a product from the companies and reviewers, but Vista was the first time I had been sucked in by negative hype in the communuty. So many of the things that people said about it were just outright lies. It became obvious that a lot of people who denigrated the OS had never actually used it. That is not to say that it didn't have problems, just not as many as people said.
So sure, if you went from XP to Windows 7 then you would be much more likely to have good things to say about it. So Microsoft didn't really need to make substantial changes to Windows 7. They just needed to release an OS that had good driver support from the start and could start with a clean slate with the community.
XP's Service Packs were the equivalent of Mac OS's upgrades, but they were free. The most notable upgrade was Service Pack 2, which introduced the firewall, pop-up blocker, Bluetooth support, Windows Security Center, etc. Sure, it is not a patch on the monumental changes introduced with Vista, but when people say that XP did everything that they needed they actually should say that XP SP2 did all they need. If you gave someone a computer with the original version of the OS then they wouldn't be so happy.
According to the timeline, Microsoft too has also released patches for some but not all the bugs. This final delay appears to be because they had problems reproducing the crashes, which I think is probably due to the nature of this tool which makes reproducing the exact circumstances difficult. I can sympathise because I have had to find hard to reproduce bugs is the past.
Still I think that is correct that it should be all made public now, considering that the bad guys have already got the code.
The problem is that most modern 'science' has nothing to do with the scientific method.
It would be good if you could expand on that please. How do current practices differ from the ideal scientific method?
That is just so bogus. One of the problems the scientists have when communicating to the general public is that it is too hard to get a straight answer from them with absolute certainty. They talk in terms of probability and uncertainty. The reason they do this is because within the scientific world, if your conclusions go beyond what your data shows then it will not pass a peer review.
Often conclusions end by highlighting what is still not known and where future research needs to be done. This idea that they make grand, unsupported statements and then treat them like they are the absolute truth has no resemblance to reality.
Because the iPhone is a toy, not for actual business use.
And a clock radio is for business use? It is substantially cheaper to make than an iPhone and yet they call usually make an alarm ring every day. Is a VCR/PVR a business grade device? No, but they can still record programs each week. And where the hell can you buy an alarm clock designed for business use?
For all the faults that I find with the iPhone, it still does some amazing things. Keeping a clock going and ringing an alarm would not be a task that I would consider amazing. It is trivial. It should not cause a problem for anything, even if it just looks neat and can play games.
Why do companies still use MS Explorer?
Well in this case IE was found to have far fewer bugs than WebKit or Mozilla. They have all fixed some (but not all) of the reported bugs, so I don't think it is such a easy conclusion to say that you shouldn't use IE.
Personally, I am thinking of moving back to Opera. I have never been a fan of WebKit, and I don't think that Mozilla deserves the high praise that it gets for security. Of course, the best solution is to not trust any of the browsers.
Oh please, somebody mod that one up! Nice one.