Jezza, while I appreciate your interest, "funny" doesn't get karma but "troll" costs karma, so all the folks who moderated that "troll" get to dig my karma, and now the folks who would have moderated it "interesting" or "informative" are clicking the "funny" button.
And if they're really sharp, the astroturfers now can "funny troll" me into negative karma.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense compared to the completely irrational "use all the copies you want, but if you make changes you have to share them back" model.
Who would take a completely insane deal like "use all you want. We'll make more." rather than the more rational "pay us per seat or per user, but no changes are possible and if you overdeploy, we'll sue you." Or the even more rational "Pay us per seat and per server, annually, and you get the right to update to our latest software... if we ever do update our software - oh, and if you overdeploy, we'll sue you" model.
That's just crazy talk. It's like choosing to not be sued. Who in their right mind would choose to not be sued even if choosing not to be sued would save them tons of cash? Especially when the alternative is free and contains no lawsuit exposure? Please, please don't throw me in that briar patch.
What's wrong with Micosoft's licensing model? You pay either per server or per seat. If you license some servers per server, and some per seat their monitoring software tells you how often you need to "true up", and if their software fails to do its math correctly they get to sue you and seize all your computers. That makes a lot more sense than Linux or BSD's licensing model where no matter how many clients or servers you have you don't have to pay. That's just anarchy.
The highest IQ guy I've ever met (that I know about) drove a car for a living and aspired to not work any harder than he had to. His greatest aspiration was to get laid today if he could. He seldom met this goal. His IQ was measured at 165. He was interesting to talk to. Most people aren't.
What did this experience teach me about intelligence? Exactly nothing. Which is what I gained from your post. But at least you didn't puke in my shoes like he did.
At least it should not be a national goal to take the people who are expanding the realm of human knowledge and chain them to a desk managing federal middle managers. It's cruel. It's wasteful.
Kudos to the incoming administration for being able to figure out who the thinkers in their country are. That's a refreshing change from the previous administration. Now please - for the sake of us all - when you identify them, leave them in place and appoint administrators to get stuff out of their way. For all our sakes, don't take them from their honest work and make lobbyists out of them. I'd rather you set money on fire. Really.
a few years after that we have matrix and wave mechanics.
And a few years later we have the whole thing is a hologram and the speed of light (and everything else) is subject to where you are because that alters your light cone and hence your local laws of physics.
Sometimes I think the more you know, the more aware you are of how much you don't know.
If you invent a better quality, speed, performance and reliability format and still it fails to *win the war* you failed. You went to the buffet and grabbed a snack. You left almost all of the meal on the table. The other guy ate your lunch. You can't justify the better technology failing in the market even once. Every single freaking time is a habit of failure.
Is that not obvious? What is the point of innovation if not to win the market? Why are you even paying engineers? Where is your money coming from? Yeah, if you get more money out than you paid in, that's a good thing for your corporate bottom line. That's a little win. That's not the win Sony wants. It's not the win Sony's shareholders want. That's not even close.
Sony is an object lesson in "if you build a better mousetrap the world might beat a path to your door but you can still brick it up to prevent the flood of profits that would naturally spring therefrom".
I think you answered your own question here. Sony+Philips is not Sony. Sony's failures in media are all about the attempt to assert control too early in the demand curve. When they split ownership of a standard with Philips, they surrender the ability to assert control.
Since this is the third such question in direct descent from the original post, I get to ask if you're paying attention. Are you?
At CES last week vendors were displaying new platforms that are not Vista compatible, some of which will not even initially ship until after this deadline. One must presume either that you know something they don't, or they know something you don't. My money is on the latter.
I wrote this three months after Vista's launch. I'd been writing similar stuff for months here. The subject was hotly debated at the time. I'm glad some still agree.
I see equal astro-turfing by the pro and anti Microsoft camps around here.
You mean bias. Yes, slashdot is bipolar. The extremes get moderated up (or down) and the middle, not so much. This may be my design since the more controversial an opinion is, the more likely it is to drive discussion, and hence hits. Regardless it's the system here and we're here, so we must like it. The definition of astroturfing is different from bias. The difference is in the motivation, and in public advocacy motivation is everything.
Buisnesses who want to keep getting security patches will have to upgrade from XP sooner or later.
While I agree with this part of your observation, I happen to disagree with your assessment: "upgrade to what?" We have choices now and "Vista or W7" isn't the whole list.
The product has to be released before it can fail. Remember that you're bashing a beta.
And yeah, if it has even one port open to the Internet in its default configuration on ship day, it's hosed. The targeted exploits will begin on day zero, and by six months they'll be commonly known. And then a patch will be issued that won't be applied by everyone because automatic updates break too much stuff. And so we'll have another worm like Conficker. Again. Because why would we learn from history?
But if it otherwise works OK noone will care. [sigh]
You got moderated well but you're overselling here. Too many selling features in one post is almost certain to attract detractors who will accuse you of bias. As a thumb rule three is good, more is bad.
Yes a lot of these things can be had on Linux/through 3rd party programs. But now they are included in the OS, which 99% of the time means less problems/slowness/crashes. And developers can count on them to be there.
And a lot of these features are offered by third party companies who hoped to stay in business through 2010. That's adding to the pile of offenses antitrust courts are going to look at.
I would go into more details but I am just learning how to use all the new features myself as I am only beginning the process of deploying it out to the corporate desktops.
Ah, there's the rub. There are pain points. You've a few more miles to walk in those shoes before they're broke in.
You might just get it done. From my first look 7 does look a lot better. But you should actually use those features before you start bragging them up because the devil is in the details. For Full Disk Encryption it's not the deployment challenge - it's the challenge of upgrading a system with it to $Windows_Next_Version. For the image based installers... well, the marketing feature list reads better than the documentation. Probably because the marketing feature list is the documentation.
Centralized software licensing, auditing,.... are all new features in Vista that would appeal to the enterprise.
That this is true makes me sad. I would prefer that people subscribed to open source license enforcement and auditing software. That is, if they feel compelled to have a killswitch at all.
On a related note, the mojave experiment website now almost requires Silverlight. Whodathunkit? Is there a good slashdot word for compound failure? Maybe fail++?
The only reason we're seeing so many "Windows 7 does [Nice Thing]" comments is Microsoft marketing.
Oz, you've seen me on here enough to know I'm no Microsoft shill. If you have any doubts you can review my comment history.
7 really does look a lot better to me. I'm not sure if it's "good enough," but I've tried it for a week and not found any showstoppers yet. Vista? It wasn't even installed before I found blocking issues.
This is not a rave review. It's cautious optimism. Go ahead and try it yourself. I hear it runs fine in a VM.
Some issues are aesthetic. Some, like the failure to support some ancient legacy hardware are forgivable in a forward looking company. Some, like infrequent crashing of Windows Explorer or memory leaks are acceptable under the "all software has bugs" philosophy.
And then there are some that you don't get a Mulligan for. There's no do-over allowed on these because they betray a lack of commitment to good coding practice, validation testing and best network practice that not only has been the industry standard for a decade, but that you committed to years ago and continue to promise since.
"From the 30th of June, we have no longer been able to ship a PC with a XP licence," said Jane Bradburn, Market Development Manager, Commercial Notebooks for HP Australia.
"However, what we have been able to do with Microsoft is ship PCs with a Vista Business licence but with XP pre-loaded. That is still the majority of business computers we are selling today."
Um, yeah. Vista is selling great... If you count the fictional licenses that come with the XP installations that people really want.
All of Sony's innovations in media have come to naught except BluRay, and that one's being settled still. They were all objectively better, and they all failed.
It's the closest thing to a perfect record you can get.
First mover advantage is real, as is best product advantage. You can still defeat these advantages by hosing up your demand curve by premature exploitation of your advantage or flat alienating your customers - lessons Sony still has not learned.
I'm going to go ahead and point to the topic of this thread: "Windows 7's Media Hype Having the Opposite Effect As Vista's." Now let's go to the quote machine for a backgrounder:
If your goal is Vista advocacy, "What consensus?" isn't one of the questions you should ask on slashdot.
You tell 'em! Vista failed, because of ppl on Slashdot ranting about "Get A Mac"! That's right!
Not just slashdot. It pros with Vista experience everywhere. The difference I suppose is that the advocates say "works for me on my new computer" and the detractors get specific about bugs, platforms and features. If your perception is that this thing was enthusiastically adopted, I guess I have nothing to offer you - you're not going to believe me anyway.
It's no longer necessary to enumerate Vista's faults here. That's a well worn path you can find for yourself quite easily, and I'm sure you've heard it all before. But you like it, and that's fine for you. Great!
I mentioned that people have to pay an extra $150 or so to get XP installed
I've seen this happen too. I agree with you it's not a good thing. HP has some issues, including marking every page of their product faq's with the bold headline "HP recommends Windows Vista® Business" even when the platform involved isn't compatible with Vista. To be fair their product FAQs also include "Why would I choose Linux on HP workstations?" Regardless I'm confident they're not going to abolish XP any time soon, no matter what their website says.
But the fact remains that people have to push hard and even pay extra
It's all about the vendor. Some vendors are better at offering choice, some are worse. When you've got a good relationship with a vendor and then they start pushing in this way, it's a hard thing to deal with because we get fond of our established relationships and the developed trust that underlies them. Eventually it becomes about whether you'll be pushed, or if you'll take your business elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Jezza, while I appreciate your interest, "funny" doesn't get karma but "troll" costs karma, so all the folks who moderated that "troll" get to dig my karma, and now the folks who would have moderated it "interesting" or "informative" are clicking the "funny" button.
And if they're really sharp, the astroturfers now can "funny troll" me into negative karma.
Please. Don't help.
Windows is licensed like so....
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense compared to the completely irrational "use all the copies you want, but if you make changes you have to share them back" model.
Who would take a completely insane deal like "use all you want. We'll make more." rather than the more rational "pay us per seat or per user, but no changes are possible and if you overdeploy, we'll sue you." Or the even more rational "Pay us per seat and per server, annually, and you get the right to update to our latest software... if we ever do update our software - oh, and if you overdeploy, we'll sue you" model.
That's just crazy talk. It's like choosing to not be sued. Who in their right mind would choose to not be sued even if choosing not to be sued would save them tons of cash? Especially when the alternative is free and contains no lawsuit exposure? Please, please don't throw me in that briar patch.
What's wrong with Micosoft's licensing model? You pay either per server or per seat. If you license some servers per server, and some per seat their monitoring software tells you how often you need to "true up", and if their software fails to do its math correctly they get to sue you and seize all your computers. That makes a lot more sense than Linux or BSD's licensing model where no matter how many clients or servers you have you don't have to pay. That's just anarchy.
The highest IQ guy I've ever met (that I know about) drove a car for a living and aspired to not work any harder than he had to. His greatest aspiration was to get laid today if he could. He seldom met this goal. His IQ was measured at 165. He was interesting to talk to. Most people aren't.
His hero was Groo the Wanderer.
What did this experience teach me about intelligence? Exactly nothing. Which is what I gained from your post. But at least you didn't puke in my shoes like he did.
At least it should not be a national goal to take the people who are expanding the realm of human knowledge and chain them to a desk managing federal middle managers. It's cruel. It's wasteful.
Kudos to the incoming administration for being able to figure out who the thinkers in their country are. That's a refreshing change from the previous administration. Now please - for the sake of us all - when you identify them, leave them in place and appoint administrators to get stuff out of their way. For all our sakes, don't take them from their honest work and make lobbyists out of them. I'd rather you set money on fire. Really.
a few years after that we have matrix and wave mechanics.
And a few years later we have the whole thing is a hologram and the speed of light (and everything else) is subject to where you are because that alters your light cone and hence your local laws of physics.
Sometimes I think the more you know, the more aware you are of how much you don't know.
If you invent a better quality, speed, performance and reliability format and still it fails to *win the war* you failed. You went to the buffet and grabbed a snack. You left almost all of the meal on the table. The other guy ate your lunch. You can't justify the better technology failing in the market even once. Every single freaking time is a habit of failure.
Is that not obvious? What is the point of innovation if not to win the market? Why are you even paying engineers? Where is your money coming from? Yeah, if you get more money out than you paid in, that's a good thing for your corporate bottom line. That's a little win. That's not the win Sony wants. It's not the win Sony's shareholders want. That's not even close.
Sony is an object lesson in "if you build a better mousetrap the world might beat a path to your door but you can still brick it up to prevent the flood of profits that would naturally spring therefrom".
both developed by sony+phillips.
I think you answered your own question here. Sony+Philips is not Sony. Sony's failures in media are all about the attempt to assert control too early in the demand curve. When they split ownership of a standard with Philips, they surrender the ability to assert control.
Since this is the third such question in direct descent from the original post, I get to ask if you're paying attention. Are you?
At CES last week vendors were displaying new platforms that are not Vista compatible, some of which will not even initially ship until after this deadline. One must presume either that you know something they don't, or they know something you don't. My money is on the latter.
Vista offered no compelling reason to change
I wrote this three months after Vista's launch. I'd been writing similar stuff for months here. The subject was hotly debated at the time. I'm glad some still agree.
I see equal astro-turfing by the pro and anti Microsoft camps around here.
You mean bias. Yes, slashdot is bipolar. The extremes get moderated up (or down) and the middle, not so much. This may be my design since the more controversial an opinion is, the more likely it is to drive discussion, and hence hits. Regardless it's the system here and we're here, so we must like it. The definition of astroturfing is different from bias. The difference is in the motivation, and in public advocacy motivation is everything.
Buisnesses who want to keep getting security patches will have to upgrade from XP sooner or later.
While I agree with this part of your observation, I happen to disagree with your assessment: "upgrade to what?" We have choices now and "Vista or W7" isn't the whole list.
The biggest failure of Windows 7...
The product has to be released before it can fail. Remember that you're bashing a beta.
And yeah, if it has even one port open to the Internet in its default configuration on ship day, it's hosed. The targeted exploits will begin on day zero, and by six months they'll be commonly known. And then a patch will be issued that won't be applied by everyone because automatic updates break too much stuff. And so we'll have another worm like Conficker. Again. Because why would we learn from history?
But if it otherwise works OK noone will care. [sigh]
You got moderated well but you're overselling here. Too many selling features in one post is almost certain to attract detractors who will accuse you of bias. As a thumb rule three is good, more is bad.
Yes a lot of these things can be had on Linux/through 3rd party programs. But now they are included in the OS, which 99% of the time means less problems/slowness/crashes. And developers can count on them to be there.
And a lot of these features are offered by third party companies who hoped to stay in business through 2010. That's adding to the pile of offenses antitrust courts are going to look at.
I would go into more details but I am just learning how to use all the new features myself as I am only beginning the process of deploying it out to the corporate desktops.
Ah, there's the rub. There are pain points. You've a few more miles to walk in those shoes before they're broke in.
You might just get it done. From my first look 7 does look a lot better. But you should actually use those features before you start bragging them up because the devil is in the details. For Full Disk Encryption it's not the deployment challenge - it's the challenge of upgrading a system with it to $Windows_Next_Version. For the image based installers... well, the marketing feature list reads better than the documentation. Probably because the marketing feature list is the documentation.
Centralized software licensing, auditing,.... are all new features in Vista that would appeal to the enterprise.
That this is true makes me sad. I would prefer that people subscribed to open source license enforcement and auditing software. That is, if they feel compelled to have a killswitch at all.
At least their new message is not "our product doesn't suck as much as you've heard -- as witnessed by these people who saw somebody else use it".
On a related note, the mojave experiment website now almost requires Silverlight. Whodathunkit? Is there a good slashdot word for compound failure? Maybe fail++?
The only reason we're seeing so many "Windows 7 does [Nice Thing]" comments is Microsoft marketing.
Oz, you've seen me on here enough to know I'm no Microsoft shill. If you have any doubts you can review my comment history.
7 really does look a lot better to me. I'm not sure if it's "good enough," but I've tried it for a week and not found any showstoppers yet. Vista? It wasn't even installed before I found blocking issues.
This is not a rave review. It's cautious optimism. Go ahead and try it yourself. I hear it runs fine in a VM.
Some issues are aesthetic. Some, like the failure to support some ancient legacy hardware are forgivable in a forward looking company. Some, like infrequent crashing of Windows Explorer or memory leaks are acceptable under the "all software has bugs" philosophy.
And then there are some that you don't get a Mulligan for. There's no do-over allowed on these because they betray a lack of commitment to good coding practice, validation testing and best network practice that not only has been the industry standard for a decade, but that you committed to years ago and continue to promise since.
I ran a webserver on one of these for years. Got the hits up to 1M/mo at one point. Not bad for that level of tech and DSL.
And yeah, I ran X on it. To be fair that was painful compared to what we've got today, but it could be done.
Yes, just look at the sales figures.
Hey! Look where the sales numbers come from!
"From the 30th of June, we have no longer been able to ship a PC with a XP licence," said Jane Bradburn, Market Development Manager, Commercial Notebooks for HP Australia. "However, what we have been able to do with Microsoft is ship PCs with a Vista Business licence but with XP pre-loaded. That is still the majority of business computers we are selling today."
Um, yeah. Vista is selling great... If you count the fictional licenses that come with the XP installations that people really want.
All of Sony's innovations in media have come to naught except BluRay, and that one's being settled still. They were all objectively better, and they all failed.
It's the closest thing to a perfect record you can get.
First mover advantage is real, as is best product advantage. You can still defeat these advantages by hosing up your demand curve by premature exploitation of your advantage or flat alienating your customers - lessons Sony still has not learned.
Vista needed beefier hardware because it wasn't tuned to run on a 1GB machine with integrated Intel graphics.
We could go with that. W7 beta definitely runs OK on a 1GB machine with integrated Intel graphics.
It doesn't cover the slow file copy problem, though. Or the multimedia interfering with networking problem. Or the problem with the backdoor that listens over the Internet by default for authentication attempts despite the fact that best practice has for 10 years to by default not do that.
But yeah, not running on bog standard hardware - that's a nit some people would pick.
What consensus?
I'm going to go ahead and point to the topic of this thread: "Windows 7's Media Hype Having the Opposite Effect As Vista's." Now let's go to the quote machine for a backgrounder:
The fact that Windows 7 has been fast-tracked just proves that Vista is one of those mistakes that Redmond would rather forget, just like the woeful Windows ME.
Think about it -- there's clearly a (high) level of consumer demand for Windows 7, the likes of which never materialized for Vista.
[falling revenue] That's due, in part, to slowing growth for PCs powered by Microsoft Windows software and the mighty kerthunk left by the debut of Windows Vista.
If your goal is Vista advocacy, "What consensus?" isn't one of the questions you should ask on slashdot.
You tell 'em! Vista failed, because of ppl on Slashdot ranting about "Get A Mac"! That's right!
Not just slashdot. It pros with Vista experience everywhere. The difference I suppose is that the advocates say "works for me on my new computer" and the detractors get specific about bugs, platforms and features. If your perception is that this thing was enthusiastically adopted, I guess I have nothing to offer you - you're not going to believe me anyway.
Good for you. I'm glad you're happy.
It's no longer necessary to enumerate Vista's faults here. That's a well worn path you can find for yourself quite easily, and I'm sure you've heard it all before. But you like it, and that's fine for you. Great!
I mentioned that people have to pay an extra $150 or so to get XP installed
I've seen this happen too. I agree with you it's not a good thing. HP has some issues, including marking every page of their product faq's with the bold headline "HP recommends Windows Vista® Business" even when the platform involved isn't compatible with Vista. To be fair their product FAQs also include "Why would I choose Linux on HP workstations?" Regardless I'm confident they're not going to abolish XP any time soon, no matter what their website says.
But the fact remains that people have to push hard and even pay extra
It's all about the vendor. Some vendors are better at offering choice, some are worse. When you've got a good relationship with a vendor and then they start pushing in this way, it's a hard thing to deal with because we get fond of our established relationships and the developed trust that underlies them. Eventually it becomes about whether you'll be pushed, or if you'll take your business elsewhere.
I, too am interested to see if the W7 beta is compatible with the latest rage in operating system add-ons: downadup.
It's going to be a groaner of a January and February for most of my IT friends. And many of you.