Windows is a monopoly in the desktop OS market and this has been clearly determined by the courts and MS has been convicted of abuses before. IE is a separate product for which there was an existing market before they tied it (via bundling the most common form of tying and the first example in case law) to Windows.
The problem here is that the laws fail to account for the pace at which the world changes (and thats true for a LOT of laws that involve technology...). Yes, when this all started, there was a separate market for browsers. Browsers were also distributed on physical medias as the standard. So back then, this judgment would have made perfect sense.
Today though, browsers ARE part of a standard operating system install. Even fucking cellphones are "bundled" with a browser. So yes, there was a pre-existing market, but browsers would be bundled with pretty much all functional internet enabled devices with a screen by now regardless, so Microsoft needs to bundle a browser to have a real product. The market changed.
Of course, if you interpret the law as is, there's no question. They need to un-bundle the browser, period. Doesn't change that its totally stupid. Oh, and go ahead and make them bundle Firefox. Then the market for the company that made the recent complain (Opera) will die an even faster death. There's a reason to consider a standard compliant browser if you have an inferior product installed. But if you have a perfectly acceptable one bundled... the reasons to go out of your way and look at alternatives are....minimal....
I'm probably fucking blind, but I can't seem to find the damn delete button. Can't be that hard to find considering all the people who replied to you saying they did it.
Because then they're part of the user's profile:) And the user can change them, and controlling settings for a hundred thousand workstations spread across the world on heterogeneous networks become a pain. Yes, creative scripting can arrange that. Some things become far trickier (like some UI modifications so the users don't think some settings are available when they're not), but its nothing impossible.
Just, having to do that for each and every program that doesn't play nice is time that could be better spent elsewhere. IE plays nice. And when it doesn't do what you want, if you're a company big enough to NEED these features, Microsoft will play nice with you and provide with the customizations you need. Mozilla will in the best case scenario not answer, and in the worse laugh in your face saying you're not their target audience. Which is fine, thats their product and their right, it just means we end up either with our own fork, or we use an alternative browser. We do both.
No, thats just the thing: Windows 7 Beta doesn't have the feature yet, but they are implementing a software renderer that will be able to run Aero regardless of videocard, using CPU alone. Thats why I mentioned that.
Indeed. A little birdy told me (very indirectly, so this isn't worth much) that Google was a lot more interested in such talk...so we may very well see "Chrome Enterprise" way before Firefox become enterprise ready.
Virus writers aren't former Visual basic 6 developers without degrees who think they're hot shit for being able to pop a modal dialog, and make a career out of it. Thats why.
And allow admins to control stuff like configuration, homepage, etc. Where I work, they modified firefox from source to allow some of these things. Supposingly tried to contact the team (big, big, big company) and they didn't even want to talk, so we did it on our own. Works fine, but (amusingly enough), IE is used as the primary browser just because we have can have our way with it, on a global scale, while Firefox, we need to play with the source to get it to do what we need, and while we actually DO that, its a pain in the ass.
Its a bit different, but the point still stands. Its Adobe certifying that CS4 will run on the PC, and it DOES, except it runs slow and 2 filters don't work at all. Still runs CS4 just fine and 99% of the features work (though a lot of the 1% are the new features). Still, can't really say that photoshop CS4 doesn't work...
So still, Adobe shouldn't be held liable.
At worse Microsoft here could just give people coupons for Windows 7 or something. It -will- run fine with Aero on, on these computers. Im sure it would make everyone happy.
They could even potentially do something even cheaper IMO: Assuming they lose (and thats a big IF...the lawsuit stands on the fact that stuff like Aero "makes" Vista...so Vista Basic isn't Vista or something...), they could give a free upgrade to Windows 7 (which WILL run with Aero on these crap lap-tops and other shitty computers, because of WARP10 and other such things). That would probably be cheaper in the long run for MS, because its fairly unlikely that a seizable amount of these people would upgrade anyway, and it would be free marketing, AND people would get something better than Vista Premium... win win win.
I agree. Both my current supervisors are Indians that came here on H-1B Visas. Both are paid significantly more than the average American in their position. Both are also some of the bests I've ever seen in that particular field (business software development on the backed). Go ahead, replace them with Americans of equivalent qualification. Good fucking luck:)
When its used the way it SHOULD be, H-1Bs are great tools. Problem is just that most people who use them (both the employers and the employees) are abusing it to hell and beyond.
Wouldn't any everyday cube browser along with any tool to detect base dimentions in a datawarehouse schema do the trick? You may have to add a few custom dimentions on your own depending on how shitty the master data is (I don't think that can be helped, no matter the solution, if a dimention is "these two fields multiplied together times a magic number appended to the value of another table", you need to know, no tool will guess), but aside that?
Thats usually what I do anyway. I dump my data in a datawarehouse, use whatever built in wizard can auto-generate dimensions, then play with them in a cube browser. Works for even pretty archaic home-made multi-thousand-tables-without-normalization ERP systems I had to work with in the past anyhow.
Microsoft is coming out with installers for non-MS products. For example, they have an installer that lets you pull what you need to do Web Development, and as part of the process, you can pull open source apps and it configures them for you. It supposingly downloads them straight from the source, its not bundled with the installer... So Microsoft could make arrangement with the Firefox team, Opera, and even Apple (ugh...) to have a repository for whatever Windows should pull at install.
The amount of problems that could cause, especially with the likes of Apple involved, is extreme IMO, and there's the problem of "why those browsers but not the rest? Microsoft now has the power to choose which browsers will be successful! OH NOES!", so really, the easiest way is to leave IE there, and make sure there's an easy way for OEMs to remove it from view.
Oh! Look at that! Its RIGHT THERE in XP SP2, Vista and Windows 7, you can do that easily. Oh, look at that again?! My current employer's standard desktop image has IE all but removed from view, with Firefox as the default browser in a fresh install!
So it can be done all along, and the current solution is just fine. By far most Windows sales are done through OEM, so let the OEMs install the browser they want. They always install IE? Well, OEMs are lazy, blame them.
I'm well aware of that. But that still pales compared to an overhaul of the module architecture, a total revamp of the installation procedures, removal of most of the integrated tools to make them optional, an overhaul of the UI that while not being as major as XP or Vista compared to their previous versions, is still vastly more in depth than anything else before, a new version of Direct X, a software Direct X Renderer, multi touch support, overhaul of the remote desktop support, overhaul of the basic apps' UI (for the first time since Win95?), etc etc etc etc etc.
We knew the feature was there since Win2k. The difference here is that there is UI support since Vista to map a drive to a folder. I beleive in Win2k and WinXP, you had to do it from the command line.
Even if Win7 (or Vista for that matter) was the best operating system of all time, with all of the advantages of Macs, Windows, Linux, Solaris and more, all in one package, with absolutely zero of the flaws of all these things, I don't foresee a large portion of companies switching.
"Pre-XP-to-Vista-long-delay-fluke", companies often skipped one or even 2 releases before upgrading. Now, with the OS not changing for an extremely large amount of time, they got even more "comfy" and laid back in their upgrade cycles... its very possible that none of their sysadmins even has ANY experience with rolling out a desktop OS upgrade, even if they have 6+ years of experience, or more if they're not using XP (which is still a significant amount of companies).
So all that makes the next upgrade incredibly painful, just like IE6 -> IE7 was. Because of that, I don't foresee much companies upgrading until the point where XP is not supported anymore comes close. Even before Vista got its bad reputation, what I kept hearing was "It doesn't matter if Vista's good. We're skipping it". Today, that situation got worse.
The installer is one of the parts thats definitely not finished, quite literally (I mean: it cannot even do an upgrade from anything except Vista SP1. That is obviously not even FEATURE complete, never mind ironed out).
Haven't seen any of the issue you mentioned, or even heard of em before, but at least unlike with Vista, they have time to fix these things, instead of being years late on just -shipping- the damn thing.
To add to my previous comment cuz I just tested yanking a RAM chip from the machine: I can't get it to boot at 128 megs of RAM. So ok, to run Win7 "fine", you need 256 megs of RAM while XP could run on less (if you wanted to torture yourself...)
Unused RAM is wasted RAM. So it will use whats there to optimize itself.
Try something for kicks. Boot Windows 7 on a 256 megs of RAM machine. See how much RAM it uses.
Pro tip hint: its not going to hit the swap file.
An OS that cannot adjust its ressource usage for caching and optimisations depending on your system's specs is a failure. Vista ran just fine on a single core machine with 1 gig of RAM, and ran better on a 800 mhz 512 megs of RAM (extremely low end by the time Vista came out) than XP did on a 500 mhz 256 megs RAM (quite high end when XP came out). Win7 runs even better than that.
I installed it on a 256 megs machine that makes XP Home struggle, and it arguably runs better. Enough to be able to get something done without wanting to kill myself anyway. Now, I know, a certain other OS can run on even less than that better. I'm not going to say on an extremely low end machine that -any- versions of Windows will work better than a *nix, but its a total urban legend from people who don't know what they're doing that you need such a powerful machine for Vista (I don't care if you're a sysadmin who works with 100 thousand desktops: if you need 2 gigs RAM and a strong CPU to make Vista work, you don't know how to work a Windows box better than my mom can), and Win7 can run on seriously minimalistic hardware by today's standards: you CAN squeeze it on 128 megs of RAM before it gets actually painful.
In the year of recession, my company and any other will not look after new PCs just because XP is old or W7 is new. They will try to squeeze as much as possible from old boxes, upgrade hardware only, and just as someone said, XP can run on PentiumII/III just fine.
Most companies do that -regardless- Recession or not. They only upgrade once dealing with compatibility issues is too much of a nightmare. Last time I witnessed a company upgrade was from Win 98/ME to WinXP, and it was because it was much easier to manage from a Win Server 2003(!) and overall saved money, even if you considered the upgrade cost...plus of course the support, patches, etc. They'll always wait at the very very last minute.
Also, with a few exceptions, if you can run WinXP fine, you can run Win7 on it. And I dunno what Pentium 2s you have, but WinXP on my P2, 256 megs lap-top is like hitting myself with a hammer, even trimmed down. In 2002~ we didn't have the same standards as we have now, so it felt ok...but today? Kill me now, seriously.
The Windows 7 search was improved really. Vista had more options, like dates and whatsnot, but who actually used that more than once a decade?
Now you just navigate to the top level of your search (let say, C:\), search, and if it doesn't find it in the index, it will automatically start searching the whole C:\ drive.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem here is that the laws fail to account for the pace at which the world changes (and thats true for a LOT of laws that involve technology...). Yes, when this all started, there was a separate market for browsers. Browsers were also distributed on physical medias as the standard. So back then, this judgment would have made perfect sense.
Today though, browsers ARE part of a standard operating system install. Even fucking cellphones are "bundled" with a browser. So yes, there was a pre-existing market, but browsers would be bundled with pretty much all functional internet enabled devices with a screen by now regardless, so Microsoft needs to bundle a browser to have a real product. The market changed.
Of course, if you interpret the law as is, there's no question. They need to un-bundle the browser, period. Doesn't change that its totally stupid. Oh, and go ahead and make them bundle Firefox. Then the market for the company that made the recent complain (Opera) will die an even faster death. There's a reason to consider a standard compliant browser if you have an inferior product installed. But if you have a perfectly acceptable one bundled... the reasons to go out of your way and look at alternatives are....minimal....
Yeah, I really was blind. Found it now :)
I'm probably fucking blind, but I can't seem to find the damn delete button. Can't be that hard to find considering all the people who replied to you saying they did it.
Because then they're part of the user's profile :) And the user can change them, and controlling settings for a hundred thousand workstations spread across the world on heterogeneous networks become a pain. Yes, creative scripting can arrange that. Some things become far trickier (like some UI modifications so the users don't think some settings are available when they're not), but its nothing impossible.
Just, having to do that for each and every program that doesn't play nice is time that could be better spent elsewhere. IE plays nice. And when it doesn't do what you want, if you're a company big enough to NEED these features, Microsoft will play nice with you and provide with the customizations you need. Mozilla will in the best case scenario not answer, and in the worse laugh in your face saying you're not their target audience. Which is fine, thats their product and their right, it just means we end up either with our own fork, or we use an alternative browser. We do both.
That was corny as hell, but your sig is a redeeming factor.
No, thats just the thing: Windows 7 Beta doesn't have the feature yet, but they are implementing a software renderer that will be able to run Aero regardless of videocard, using CPU alone. Thats why I mentioned that.
Indeed. A little birdy told me (very indirectly, so this isn't worth much) that Google was a lot more interested in such talk...so we may very well see "Chrome Enterprise" way before Firefox become enterprise ready.
Virus writers aren't former Visual basic 6 developers without degrees who think they're hot shit for being able to pop a modal dialog, and make a career out of it. Thats why.
And allow admins to control stuff like configuration, homepage, etc. Where I work, they modified firefox from source to allow some of these things. Supposingly tried to contact the team (big, big, big company) and they didn't even want to talk, so we did it on our own. Works fine, but (amusingly enough), IE is used as the primary browser just because we have can have our way with it, on a global scale, while Firefox, we need to play with the source to get it to do what we need, and while we actually DO that, its a pain in the ass.
Its a bit different, but the point still stands. Its Adobe certifying that CS4 will run on the PC, and it DOES, except it runs slow and 2 filters don't work at all. Still runs CS4 just fine and 99% of the features work (though a lot of the 1% are the new features). Still, can't really say that photoshop CS4 doesn't work...
So still, Adobe shouldn't be held liable.
At worse Microsoft here could just give people coupons for Windows 7 or something. It -will- run fine with Aero on, on these computers. Im sure it would make everyone happy.
They could even potentially do something even cheaper IMO: Assuming they lose (and thats a big IF...the lawsuit stands on the fact that stuff like Aero "makes" Vista...so Vista Basic isn't Vista or something...), they could give a free upgrade to Windows 7 (which WILL run with Aero on these crap lap-tops and other shitty computers, because of WARP10 and other such things). That would probably be cheaper in the long run for MS, because its fairly unlikely that a seizable amount of these people would upgrade anyway, and it would be free marketing, AND people would get something better than Vista Premium... win win win.
I agree. Both my current supervisors are Indians that came here on H-1B Visas. Both are paid significantly more than the average American in their position. Both are also some of the bests I've ever seen in that particular field (business software development on the backed). Go ahead, replace them with Americans of equivalent qualification. Good fucking luck :)
When its used the way it SHOULD be, H-1Bs are great tools. Problem is just that most people who use them (both the employers and the employees) are abusing it to hell and beyond.
Wouldn't any everyday cube browser along with any tool to detect base dimentions in a datawarehouse schema do the trick? You may have to add a few custom dimentions on your own depending on how shitty the master data is (I don't think that can be helped, no matter the solution, if a dimention is "these two fields multiplied together times a magic number appended to the value of another table", you need to know, no tool will guess), but aside that?
Thats usually what I do anyway. I dump my data in a datawarehouse, use whatever built in wizard can auto-generate dimensions, then play with them in a cube browser. Works for even pretty archaic home-made multi-thousand-tables-without-normalization ERP systems I had to work with in the past anyhow.
Microsoft is coming out with installers for non-MS products. For example, they have an installer that lets you pull what you need to do Web Development, and as part of the process, you can pull open source apps and it configures them for you. It supposingly downloads them straight from the source, its not bundled with the installer... So Microsoft could make arrangement with the Firefox team, Opera, and even Apple (ugh...) to have a repository for whatever Windows should pull at install.
The amount of problems that could cause, especially with the likes of Apple involved, is extreme IMO, and there's the problem of "why those browsers but not the rest? Microsoft now has the power to choose which browsers will be successful! OH NOES!", so really, the easiest way is to leave IE there, and make sure there's an easy way for OEMs to remove it from view.
Oh! Look at that! Its RIGHT THERE in XP SP2, Vista and Windows 7, you can do that easily. Oh, look at that again?! My current employer's standard desktop image has IE all but removed from view, with Firefox as the default browser in a fresh install!
So it can be done all along, and the current solution is just fine. By far most Windows sales are done through OEM, so let the OEMs install the browser they want. They always install IE? Well, OEMs are lazy, blame them.
I'm well aware of that. But that still pales compared to an overhaul of the module architecture, a total revamp of the installation procedures, removal of most of the integrated tools to make them optional, an overhaul of the UI that while not being as major as XP or Vista compared to their previous versions, is still vastly more in depth than anything else before, a new version of Direct X, a software Direct X Renderer, multi touch support, overhaul of the remote desktop support, overhaul of the basic apps' UI (for the first time since Win95?), etc etc etc etc etc.
Sp2 was major, but not this major.
Then I stand corrected. I've used that UI a billion times and never noticed it in XP. Thanks!
We knew the feature was there since Win2k. The difference here is that there is UI support since Vista to map a drive to a folder. I beleive in Win2k and WinXP, you had to do it from the command line.
I knew about this feature from the command line (the mount to folder), but I was curious about the UI element, so I just checked.
Yup, its there in Vista too. I can "mount" a partition to a folder from the UI, just like in Win7. Thats good to know :)
Even if Win7 (or Vista for that matter) was the best operating system of all time, with all of the advantages of Macs, Windows, Linux, Solaris and more, all in one package, with absolutely zero of the flaws of all these things, I don't foresee a large portion of companies switching.
"Pre-XP-to-Vista-long-delay-fluke", companies often skipped one or even 2 releases before upgrading. Now, with the OS not changing for an extremely large amount of time, they got even more "comfy" and laid back in their upgrade cycles... its very possible that none of their sysadmins even has ANY experience with rolling out a desktop OS upgrade, even if they have 6+ years of experience, or more if they're not using XP (which is still a significant amount of companies).
So all that makes the next upgrade incredibly painful, just like IE6 -> IE7 was. Because of that, I don't foresee much companies upgrading until the point where XP is not supported anymore comes close. Even before Vista got its bad reputation, what I kept hearing was "It doesn't matter if Vista's good. We're skipping it". Today, that situation got worse.
The installer is one of the parts thats definitely not finished, quite literally (I mean: it cannot even do an upgrade from anything except Vista SP1. That is obviously not even FEATURE complete, never mind ironed out).
Haven't seen any of the issue you mentioned, or even heard of em before, but at least unlike with Vista, they have time to fix these things, instead of being years late on just -shipping- the damn thing.
To add to my previous comment cuz I just tested yanking a RAM chip from the machine: I can't get it to boot at 128 megs of RAM. So ok, to run Win7 "fine", you need 256 megs of RAM while XP could run on less (if you wanted to torture yourself...)
oh, the horror!!!
Unused RAM is wasted RAM. So it will use whats there to optimize itself.
Try something for kicks. Boot Windows 7 on a 256 megs of RAM machine. See how much RAM it uses.
Pro tip hint: its not going to hit the swap file.
An OS that cannot adjust its ressource usage for caching and optimisations depending on your system's specs is a failure. Vista ran just fine on a single core machine with 1 gig of RAM, and ran better on a 800 mhz 512 megs of RAM (extremely low end by the time Vista came out) than XP did on a 500 mhz 256 megs RAM (quite high end when XP came out). Win7 runs even better than that.
I installed it on a 256 megs machine that makes XP Home struggle, and it arguably runs better. Enough to be able to get something done without wanting to kill myself anyway. Now, I know, a certain other OS can run on even less than that better. I'm not going to say on an extremely low end machine that -any- versions of Windows will work better than a *nix, but its a total urban legend from people who don't know what they're doing that you need such a powerful machine for Vista (I don't care if you're a sysadmin who works with 100 thousand desktops: if you need 2 gigs RAM and a strong CPU to make Vista work, you don't know how to work a Windows box better than my mom can), and Win7 can run on seriously minimalistic hardware by today's standards: you CAN squeeze it on 128 megs of RAM before it gets actually painful.
Most companies do that -regardless- Recession or not. They only upgrade once dealing with compatibility issues is too much of a nightmare. Last time I witnessed a company upgrade was from Win 98/ME to WinXP, and it was because it was much easier to manage from a Win Server 2003(!) and overall saved money, even if you considered the upgrade cost...plus of course the support, patches, etc. They'll always wait at the very very last minute.
Also, with a few exceptions, if you can run WinXP fine, you can run Win7 on it. And I dunno what Pentium 2s you have, but WinXP on my P2, 256 megs lap-top is like hitting myself with a hammer, even trimmed down. In 2002~ we didn't have the same standards as we have now, so it felt ok...but today? Kill me now, seriously.
Oh, just noticed, while its doing a "full" search, clicking back in the little box pops the menu to add the criterias, like date.
So yeah, its much better.
The Windows 7 search was improved really. Vista had more options, like dates and whatsnot, but who actually used that more than once a decade?
Now you just navigate to the top level of your search (let say, C:\), search, and if it doesn't find it in the index, it will automatically start searching the whole C:\ drive.