In Vista they changed this so the dialog actually closed when the copy was complete, but now in SP1 they have gone back to the previous setup. This is not entirely accurate.
As Mark said, there were several problems with the XP model. The biggest problem being that large file copy operations could use up all the memory in the system. There were also scenarios where there as double-caching going on.
In Vista RTM, they completely did away with most cached i/o and increased the read/write sizes. This resulted in both a real and a perceived performance penalty for some local copy scenarios, but it dramatically improved network throughput and utilization.
In Vista SP1, they went back to doing *some* cached i/o in certain scenarios. So it's basically a blended approach. They also eliminated the double caching that sometimes took place.
Seems pretty clear to me that this was anything but a "simple" problem. You can call them "excuses", but Mark is not stupid, nor is he a marketing guy. If the problem was due to a stupid mistake, he would point it out.
Reading his explanation, it seems that there were trade offs either way. Microsoft originally went with the better network throughput and utilization at the expense of certain local file copy operations.
Consumers have spoken, and they say that it was a bad choice.
So now Microsoft went with a more blended approach. Seems reasonable to me.
In case anybody is interest *why* Vista pre-SP1 seemed so much slower copying files than XP, and why post-SP1 for the most part fixes it, you should check out Mark Russinovich's blog post on the matter.
I work in the mobile industry, and am very familiar with how SMS works. There are two big reasons why cell phone companies can charge as much as they do for SMS communications.
1.) Carriers don't typically send SMS communications to any kind of universal network. They often use an intermediary, called an aggregator, to bridge the various carrier networks. When I send an SMS from my Verizon phone to a user with an AT&T phone, the SMS data (the SMPP packet) is typically first sent to an aggregator (such as Verisign (formally mQube) or mBlox. This aggregator often does a bit of work on the packet to make it more compatible with the target network. Most carriers take advantage of a feature of the SMPP protocol called TLVs, which are essentially arbitrary name/value pairs. Carriers don't usually settle on any conventions for these TLVS, so they often must be translated. It then places this packet in a queue of sorts to be transmitted to the target network, in this case AT&T's. In exchange for this service, the aggregator typically charges the carrier(s) a little money. While this charge isn't usually on a per-message basis (unless it's a PSMS), it still factors in. These steps get more complex for binary SMS (MMS), WAP pushes, etc. While some cross-carrier communications is direct (such as Verizon to Sprint), in most cases this middle man plays an important role. Carriers simply pass on this cost to their users.
2.) Because they can. It's harder/more work to change carriers than it is to change ISPs. They have a pretty captive audience, and the 2 cents, 10 cents, 25 cents, or whatever their charging is what the market will bare.
Is this for real? So you have to pay $15 per month for the rest of your life if you want to keep listening to the music you have bought? Am I misunderstanding what you said? Surely that's the worst deal of all time isn't it? No, you're not misunderstanding. If you stop paying, the music you have downloaded will stop working in 3 months.
You're not buying the music. You're paying for access to a music library in the same way people pay for Sirius radio or premium streaming radio online. Sirius radio is about $120/year, or $10/month... but you don't get to "save" that music anywhere, nor do you get to choose what you listen to aside from picking a station.
If you really want to keep that music, you also have the option to buy it outright. The Zune Marketplace has a large library of music with, and without DRM. But I'd much rather spend $15/month for all the music I want, than to spend 79 cents on a song, or $10 on a single album.
I've been using the Zune Pass subscription for the past couple of months, and I'll never go back to one-off music purchases ever again.
For $15/month, I can download all the music I want. If I stop paying, the music will stop working after 3 months. For some people that's unacceptable, but for the price of a single CD, I think it's a damn good deal.
I've found myself simply clicking on the "related artists" link in the Zune Marketplace and downloading everything that's listed. It's a fantastic way to discover new music. I also stream the music directly from the marketplace and listen to it at work and at home. The Zune Pass lets you access the content from up to 3 different computers simultaneously.
The Zune Pass is the primary reason I purchased a Zune, but to be honest, a Zune isn't really even necessary. The streaming capabilities are worth the $15/month all by itself. I have discovered tons of new music that I likely would never have sought out if it wasn't for the all-you-can-eat Zune Pass.
The author says that he knows that about half the machines on campus stay on at night because he tracks the MAC addresses.
In order for this to be true, the entire network must be one giant collision domain. MAC addresses are only "trackable", that is, they are only preserved in the packets within a particular collision domain.
When a packet reaches a switch or router, the source MAC address in the packet is replaced with the outgoing port on that switch/router.
So for this guy to be telling the truth, his network must consist of nothing but hubs. With 8,000 machines, that would be a pretty crappy way to do things.
As usual, the Slashdot community will jump any distance to the conclusion that Microsoft sucks.
First, this 100 million number is ambiguous at best. One might assume that Gates included all sales in that figure, including volume licensing deals. This, however, seems to conflict with numbers that have already been published. For instance, as of October 2007, Microsoft said they sold 88 million copies of Vista, in *addition* to 42 million volume licensing purchases. See: http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/10/26/88-million-copies-of-Vista-shipped_1.html
The 89 million number cited for XP must have included volume licensing sales as well, because Microsoft's press release regarding the sales of XP during the first year of availability explicitly states that XP sold 67 million copies on new PCs *and* via retail upgrades.
In other words, XP was sold on, at absolute most, about 50% of new PCs in 2002. It was actually probably a bit less than this because the 67 million licenses *included* upgrades.
So, if we assume that Gates was talking about the sales of Vista on new PCs (not upgrades), and we factor in the 20% quarterly sales growth that Vista sales have seen since it was released, we get about 105 million units sold. This represents about 41% of all new PCs shipped, world wide. This number doesn't even account for the holiday season's affect on sales.
In order for sales to be identical to XP, we only need for 14% of people who bought XP during the first year to have bought it as a upgrade. I would say that's a pretty reasonable hypothesis. If you don't find that to be reasonable, PCs with Vista only need to sell at about double the rate during the holiday season as they sell during the rest of the year in order for Vista to hit that 50% mark. Either way, if you mix each of these factors, it becomes very easy for the Vista sales numbers to pan out in Vista's favor.
Furthermore, I was unable to find the data that shows where all those new PC purchases were coming from. The fastest growing PC market is Asia, especially China. Studies have shown that the piracy rate in China is over 90%. We have no idea how this information affected Vista sales overall. (Although, honestly, probably not much.)
It's certainly possible that Vista sales aren't as good as XP's, but we don't have that data yet, and it's definitely not the blowout that this article suggests. The data we do have suggests that Vista sales are about the same as XP as a percentage of total PC sales.
Attacks on other software packages, including Office and Firefox, have risen dramatically. If Windows and IE were still so easy to exploit, why would that be the case?
What this suggests is that hackers are having a harder and harder time exploiting these more traditional attack vectors. If there was such a huge library of holes that Microsoft patches silently, one would think that those would continue to be a great attack vector, and hackers wouldn't bother researching other vectors.
One could surmise that the bad guys just don't happen to know about these stealth-patched holes, and that's why they're turning to other attack vectors.
But guess what: if the bad guys don't know about them, they do no damage. Security through obscurity works great if the holes stay hidden. And, as I mentioned before, it appears that they are staying hidden, if they exist it all.
This guy has great motivation to make shit up, as does Microsoft. I know virtually everybody here will assume he is telling the truth, but that's an assumption. There is no evidence to back it up.
I'm in the process of building a Windows Home Server. It will cost a more than $500 with my configuration, but could be easily pared down removing a few disks or getting cheaper components. I know people who have built a 1TB machine for just a tad over $400.
This machine is virtually silent, can be expanded almost indefinitely with eSATA / USB, will automatically backup your Windows boxes (both image and differential), provides data redundancy, has remote access (terminal services and file shares) via your myhomeserver.homeserver.com free domain name, has the ability to do online backup with unlimited storage for about $70/year, and can stream media content to an Xbox 360.
In other words, it's a LOT better than a standard NAS.
Which is different than running as SYSTEM. Effectively, it is not. The only real difference is that the SYSTEM account has access to terminate/modify certain processes directly, where as Administrator must essentially request that they be done by SYSTEM.
For instance, there are some processes that run as SYSTEM that you can't kill in Task Manager, but that can be killed via certain administrative commands that are then run as SYSTEM.
In fact, SYSTEM typically has FEWER privileges than Administrator because some network operations can't be done by SYSTEM, but can be done by Administrator.
You're jumping to conclusions. We simply don't know all the facts at this point.
What we do know is that the bug doesn't affect Vista for two reasons. First, some of Vista's new security functionality prevent the privilege elevation regardless of the version of the DLL in question. Second, Microsoft included a newer version of the DLL with Vista, and this version of the DLL doesn't have the potential to attempt the elevation to begin with.
One possible explanation for this is that Microsoft didn't discovered the exploit and then tell Macromedia to write a new driver so they could include it in Vista, but instead that Macromedia provided Microsoft with a new version that *happened* to fix the issue in question and that version was included in Vista. Microsoft was unaware of the exploit, and therefore saw no reason to push that newer version down to old versions of Windows.
The driver model for Vista is quite different than the model for XP/2003. It's entirely possible that the act of re-writing the driver for Vista eliminated the bug without Macrovision even knowing about it, or that the new driver model makes that kind of bug impossible.
The point is, you're assuming that Microsoft and Macrovision knew about the bug and kept it quiet... but you're basing that off basically nothing.
This can only be exploited locally, so the chances it will affect any significant number of people are very small.
Since virtually everybody who uses Windows XP runs as admin, there would be no reason to use this exploit, since if you get code to run on the target machine, it's already running as admin.
For Windows Server, a bad guy with local access is going to be rare, and most admins don't usually download and run random code on their servers. The one exception might be a server used as a terminal services provider, but I can't imagine that's particularly common. Plus, standard domain policy best practices would prevent unsigned/unapproved code from being run by any non-admin anyway, so it's really not an issue.
Lastly, Vista isn't affected, both because it includes the newer version of the DLL, and because the privilege elevation itself would not be possible thanks to some new security measures in Vista's kernel.
So while it makes a great "DRM Sucks!" story, the security ramifications of this bug are essentially zero.
Napster has a lot of competition in the subscription-based music business, including the Zune / Zune Marketplace. Sure, the Zune has tiny marketshare in comparison with iPod/iTunes, but iTunes doesn't do subscription-based music.
My guess is that Napster is losing customers to their competitors. Subscription based music is actually a pretty great alternative to stealing or buying for $1.99/$.99/$.89/whatever.
It's an especially great way to legally listen to new music and find new artists. I know that the Zune Marketplace (as does iTunes and most of the major online music stores) offers "Sounds Like" artist/album lists. If I had to buy these songs I would be MUCH less likely to listen to them... but being able to download and listen to anything I want on up to 5 devices makes it a no-brainer.
And I don't care that the music stops working if I stop paying. I really don't.
If Vista sales were really as bad as Slashdot and its readers would like you to believe, then Microsoft would have been hammered by Wall Street.
Think about it. A massive percentage of Microsoft's revenue comes from Windows. (With most of the rest coming from Office.) If Vista sales were bad, or even a just a little under what was expected, Microsoft's stock would take a hit.
But, funny enough, that's exactly the opposite of what happened last week. Microsoft's stock is up about 10%. And that's a HUGE deal for a company as mature and with such a huge market cap as Microsoft.
Now, granted, Vista sales aren't the only thing that can affect Microsoft's stock price. There was lots of good news for Microsoft. Windows Server market share is increasing (at what just so happens to be almost exactly the pace at which Linux server market share has decreased in recent months), their "entertainment" group (aka Xbox) posted their 2nd profit (thanks to Halo 3), and Office sales are awesome.
But the fact remains that Vista sales are meeting or beating expectations. Virtually all Vista sales happen via new PC purchases, and those were higher than expected for most of the year... thanks to, you guess it, Vista.
Since we're just pre-holiday season right now, PC sales tend to drop a bit... and that's what happened. (And please note that the sales RATE dropped, yet overall sales are still higher than last year at this time.) To say that this drop was caused by Vista is, put simply, retarded.
What the hell are you talking about? Windows Update worked before the update, why the hell did it need to be updated? They were obviously changing something on Windows Update's servers that required a client side update in order for things to function properly. That's what the hell I'm talking about. Software is never perfect. Sometimes it needs updating. Even the code that normally does the updating.
And even if it needed to be updated it should have asked the user, not silently installing and mess up a perfectly working computer. If you finished reading my comment, you would see that I stated exactly that. They should have asked. Regardless, the update didn't "mess up a perfectly working computer". The update that was sent out was *REQUIRED* for Windows Update to continue to work. The fact that there was an oversight with regards to a CD-based restore is actually mitigated by the fact that, without this update, Windows Update would not have worked anyway! I'm sorry you don't understand this.
The number one rule of software development is that you don't fix something that isn't broken. Uh... right. How insightful.
The users that have used restore are now unable to update the machine, so even if Microsoft fixes this problem with windows update the computers that have installed this and used restore are now sitting ducks for viruses. Right, just as they would have been if the update wasn't installed. Do you really not understand this? Regardless, there is already a very easy fix that Microsoft will undoubtedly make available for the small number of people that are effected by this.
Microsoft has no excuse here they are just really stupid and don't give a damn about anything except money. Again, very insightful. Thank you.
Do these people realize that the ENTIRE POINT of Microsoft forcing the Windows Update patch was to make sure that future updates would trigger whatever policies the user had selected for the machine?
In other words, if Microsoft had not updated Windows Update automatically, and a user had chosen to be notified of future updates, these notifications would not work. The only way to ensure that the user's settings were properly respected was to update Windows Update.
So now this article says that the silent update wasn't harmless because Windows Update was broken after they did a restore. Do they realize that without this update, Windows Update *definitely* wouldn't work, and that the fact that this update may have a bug in it regarding restoration is completely besides the point?
Should Microsoft have made it more clear that they were doing an update? Yes. Is this update proof of Microsoft's desire to ignore user preferences and do whatever the hell they want? Obviously not.
People are blowing this completely out of proportion. (Big surprise.)
Here are the facts:
1.) The WGA servers were returning error number 0xC004C4A5 when attempting to validate Windows. 2.) This error did NOT cause Windows to go into "reduced functionality mode". 3.) It may have prevented people from downloading certain WGA-only applications/updates. 4.) It looks like the issue was causing problems for less than a day, and is now resolved. 5.) What actually caused the problem has not yet been announced.
So there you have it. People that just installed XP or Vista were not able to activate for a day, and the result of that problem was that the little key icon in the system tray was visible, and they may have had one of those balloon popups tell them to activate.
If that pissed them off a lot, they could have called Microsoft's activation phone number and had their machines activated in less than 5 minutes.
Oh, and a few people couldn't download some optional updates and perhaps a couple of apps from Microsoft.com. THE HORROR!
The innovative companies need flexibility, power and tunability, which is given by Apache, and the LAMP stack. The corporations that see the web as a necessity just want to put information onto the Internet. They don't care about "social networks." They just care that their catalog can be viewed. And that is the domain of Microsoft, not Apache. Huh? How is Apache any more flexible, powerful, or tunable than IIS?
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As Mark said, there were several problems with the XP model. The biggest problem being that large file copy operations could use up all the memory in the system. There were also scenarios where there as double-caching going on.
In Vista RTM, they completely did away with most cached i/o and increased the read/write sizes. This resulted in both a real and a perceived performance penalty for some local copy scenarios, but it dramatically improved network throughput and utilization.
In Vista SP1, they went back to doing *some* cached i/o in certain scenarios. So it's basically a blended approach. They also eliminated the double caching that sometimes took place.
Seems pretty clear to me that this was anything but a "simple" problem. You can call them "excuses", but Mark is not stupid, nor is he a marketing guy. If the problem was due to a stupid mistake, he would point it out.
Reading his explanation, it seems that there were trade offs either way. Microsoft originally went with the better network throughput and utilization at the expense of certain local file copy operations.
Consumers have spoken, and they say that it was a bad choice.
So now Microsoft went with a more blended approach. Seems reasonable to me.
In case anybody is interest *why* Vista pre-SP1 seemed so much slower copying files than XP, and why post-SP1 for the most part fixes it, you should check out Mark Russinovich's blog post on the matter.
It's a very interesting read.
I work in the mobile industry, and am very familiar with how SMS works. There are two big reasons why cell phone companies can charge as much as they do for SMS communications.
1.) Carriers don't typically send SMS communications to any kind of universal network. They often use an intermediary, called an aggregator, to bridge the various carrier networks. When I send an SMS from my Verizon phone to a user with an AT&T phone, the SMS data (the SMPP packet) is typically first sent to an aggregator (such as Verisign (formally mQube) or mBlox. This aggregator often does a bit of work on the packet to make it more compatible with the target network. Most carriers take advantage of a feature of the SMPP protocol called TLVs, which are essentially arbitrary name/value pairs. Carriers don't usually settle on any conventions for these TLVS, so they often must be translated. It then places this packet in a queue of sorts to be transmitted to the target network, in this case AT&T's. In exchange for this service, the aggregator typically charges the carrier(s) a little money. While this charge isn't usually on a per-message basis (unless it's a PSMS), it still factors in. These steps get more complex for binary SMS (MMS), WAP pushes, etc. While some cross-carrier communications is direct (such as Verizon to Sprint), in most cases this middle man plays an important role. Carriers simply pass on this cost to their users.
2.) Because they can. It's harder/more work to change carriers than it is to change ISPs. They have a pretty captive audience, and the 2 cents, 10 cents, 25 cents, or whatever their charging is what the market will bare.
You're not buying the music. You're paying for access to a music library in the same way people pay for Sirius radio or premium streaming radio online. Sirius radio is about $120/year, or $10/month... but you don't get to "save" that music anywhere, nor do you get to choose what you listen to aside from picking a station.
If you really want to keep that music, you also have the option to buy it outright. The Zune Marketplace has a large library of music with, and without DRM. But I'd much rather spend $15/month for all the music I want, than to spend 79 cents on a song, or $10 on a single album.
So why, exactly, do you think this is a bad deal?
I've been using the Zune Pass subscription for the past couple of months, and I'll never go back to one-off music purchases ever again.
For $15/month, I can download all the music I want. If I stop paying, the music will stop working after 3 months. For some people that's unacceptable, but for the price of a single CD, I think it's a damn good deal.
I've found myself simply clicking on the "related artists" link in the Zune Marketplace and downloading everything that's listed. It's a fantastic way to discover new music. I also stream the music directly from the marketplace and listen to it at work and at home. The Zune Pass lets you access the content from up to 3 different computers simultaneously.
The Zune Pass is the primary reason I purchased a Zune, but to be honest, a Zune isn't really even necessary. The streaming capabilities are worth the $15/month all by itself. I have discovered tons of new music that I likely would never have sought out if it wasn't for the all-you-can-eat Zune Pass.
This is a bit off topic, but...
The author says that he knows that about half the machines on campus stay on at night because he tracks the MAC addresses.
In order for this to be true, the entire network must be one giant collision domain. MAC addresses are only "trackable", that is, they are only preserved in the packets within a particular collision domain.
When a packet reaches a switch or router, the source MAC address in the packet is replaced with the outgoing port on that switch/router.
So for this guy to be telling the truth, his network must consist of nothing but hubs. With 8,000 machines, that would be a pretty crappy way to do things.
As usual, the Slashdot community will jump any distance to the conclusion that Microsoft sucks.
First, this 100 million number is ambiguous at best. One might assume that Gates included all sales in that figure, including volume licensing deals. This, however, seems to conflict with numbers that have already been published. For instance, as of October 2007, Microsoft said they sold 88 million copies of Vista, in *addition* to 42 million volume licensing purchases. See: http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/10/26/88-million-copies-of-Vista-shipped_1.html
The 89 million number cited for XP must have included volume licensing sales as well, because Microsoft's press release regarding the sales of XP during the first year of availability explicitly states that XP sold 67 million copies on new PCs *and* via retail upgrades.
In other words, XP was sold on, at absolute most, about 50% of new PCs in 2002. It was actually probably a bit less than this because the 67 million licenses *included* upgrades.
So, if we assume that Gates was talking about the sales of Vista on new PCs (not upgrades), and we factor in the 20% quarterly sales growth that Vista sales have seen since it was released, we get about 105 million units sold. This represents about 41% of all new PCs shipped, world wide. This number doesn't even account for the holiday season's affect on sales.
In order for sales to be identical to XP, we only need for 14% of people who bought XP during the first year to have bought it as a upgrade. I would say that's a pretty reasonable hypothesis. If you don't find that to be reasonable, PCs with Vista only need to sell at about double the rate during the holiday season as they sell during the rest of the year in order for Vista to hit that 50% mark. Either way, if you mix each of these factors, it becomes very easy for the Vista sales numbers to pan out in Vista's favor.
Furthermore, I was unable to find the data that shows where all those new PC purchases were coming from. The fastest growing PC market is Asia, especially China. Studies have shown that the piracy rate in China is over 90%. We have no idea how this information affected Vista sales overall. (Although, honestly, probably not much.)
It's certainly possible that Vista sales aren't as good as XP's, but we don't have that data yet, and it's definitely not the blowout that this article suggests. The data we do have suggests that Vista sales are about the same as XP as a percentage of total PC sales.
Funny you mention that, because Silverlight is VASTLY more compatible with accessibility technologies than Flash.
Damn you and your facts. Hate Microsoft! Everybody is doing it!
Perhaps a web development framework's web site should be designed in such a way that it can handle a burst of traffic from Slashdot.org and Digg.com.
Otherwise, one might think that RoR doesn't scale.
If that were true, that the number of attacks on IE/Windows would ALSO increase, proportionally.
But that's not what is happening.
He offers no evidence to back up his claims.
Attacks on other software packages, including Office and Firefox, have risen dramatically. If Windows and IE were still so easy to exploit, why would that be the case?
What this suggests is that hackers are having a harder and harder time exploiting these more traditional attack vectors. If there was such a huge library of holes that Microsoft patches silently, one would think that those would continue to be a great attack vector, and hackers wouldn't bother researching other vectors.
One could surmise that the bad guys just don't happen to know about these stealth-patched holes, and that's why they're turning to other attack vectors.
But guess what: if the bad guys don't know about them, they do no damage. Security through obscurity works great if the holes stay hidden. And, as I mentioned before, it appears that they are staying hidden, if they exist it all.
This guy has great motivation to make shit up, as does Microsoft. I know virtually everybody here will assume he is telling the truth, but that's an assumption. There is no evidence to back it up.
This machine is virtually silent, can be expanded almost indefinitely with eSATA / USB, will automatically backup your Windows boxes (both image and differential), provides data redundancy, has remote access (terminal services and file shares) via your myhomeserver.homeserver.com free domain name, has the ability to do online backup with unlimited storage for about $70/year, and can stream media content to an Xbox 360.
In other words, it's a LOT better than a standard NAS.
Total: $878.00 + $165 for WHS
For instance, there are some processes that run as SYSTEM that you can't kill in Task Manager, but that can be killed via certain administrative commands that are then run as SYSTEM.
In fact, SYSTEM typically has FEWER privileges than Administrator because some network operations can't be done by SYSTEM, but can be done by Administrator.
You're jumping to conclusions. We simply don't know all the facts at this point.
What we do know is that the bug doesn't affect Vista for two reasons. First, some of Vista's new security functionality prevent the privilege elevation regardless of the version of the DLL in question. Second, Microsoft included a newer version of the DLL with Vista, and this version of the DLL doesn't have the potential to attempt the elevation to begin with.
One possible explanation for this is that Microsoft didn't discovered the exploit and then tell Macromedia to write a new driver so they could include it in Vista, but instead that Macromedia provided Microsoft with a new version that *happened* to fix the issue in question and that version was included in Vista. Microsoft was unaware of the exploit, and therefore saw no reason to push that newer version down to old versions of Windows.
The driver model for Vista is quite different than the model for XP/2003. It's entirely possible that the act of re-writing the driver for Vista eliminated the bug without Macrovision even knowing about it, or that the new driver model makes that kind of bug impossible.
The point is, you're assuming that Microsoft and Macrovision knew about the bug and kept it quiet... but you're basing that off basically nothing.
This can only be exploited locally, so the chances it will affect any significant number of people are very small.
Since virtually everybody who uses Windows XP runs as admin, there would be no reason to use this exploit, since if you get code to run on the target machine, it's already running as admin.
For Windows Server, a bad guy with local access is going to be rare, and most admins don't usually download and run random code on their servers. The one exception might be a server used as a terminal services provider, but I can't imagine that's particularly common. Plus, standard domain policy best practices would prevent unsigned/unapproved code from being run by any non-admin anyway, so it's really not an issue.
Lastly, Vista isn't affected, both because it includes the newer version of the DLL, and because the privilege elevation itself would not be possible thanks to some new security measures in Vista's kernel.
So while it makes a great "DRM Sucks!" story, the security ramifications of this bug are essentially zero.
Napster has a lot of competition in the subscription-based music business, including the Zune / Zune Marketplace. Sure, the Zune has tiny marketshare in comparison with iPod/iTunes, but iTunes doesn't do subscription-based music.
My guess is that Napster is losing customers to their competitors. Subscription based music is actually a pretty great alternative to stealing or buying for $1.99/$.99/$.89/whatever.
It's an especially great way to legally listen to new music and find new artists. I know that the Zune Marketplace (as does iTunes and most of the major online music stores) offers "Sounds Like" artist/album lists. If I had to buy these songs I would be MUCH less likely to listen to them... but being able to download and listen to anything I want on up to 5 devices makes it a no-brainer.
And I don't care that the music stops working if I stop paying. I really don't.
If Vista sales were really as bad as Slashdot and its readers would like you to believe, then Microsoft would have been hammered by Wall Street.
Think about it. A massive percentage of Microsoft's revenue comes from Windows. (With most of the rest coming from Office.) If Vista sales were bad, or even a just a little under what was expected, Microsoft's stock would take a hit.
But, funny enough, that's exactly the opposite of what happened last week. Microsoft's stock is up about 10%. And that's a HUGE deal for a company as mature and with such a huge market cap as Microsoft.
Now, granted, Vista sales aren't the only thing that can affect Microsoft's stock price. There was lots of good news for Microsoft. Windows Server market share is increasing (at what just so happens to be almost exactly the pace at which Linux server market share has decreased in recent months), their "entertainment" group (aka Xbox) posted their 2nd profit (thanks to Halo 3), and Office sales are awesome.
But the fact remains that Vista sales are meeting or beating expectations. Virtually all Vista sales happen via new PC purchases, and those were higher than expected for most of the year... thanks to, you guess it, Vista.
Since we're just pre-holiday season right now, PC sales tend to drop a bit... and that's what happened. (And please note that the sales RATE dropped, yet overall sales are still higher than last year at this time.) To say that this drop was caused by Vista is, put simply, retarded.
working computer. If you finished reading my comment, you would see that I stated exactly that. They should have asked. Regardless, the update didn't "mess up a perfectly working computer". The update that was sent out was *REQUIRED* for Windows Update to continue to work. The fact that there was an oversight with regards to a CD-based restore is actually mitigated by the fact that, without this update, Windows Update would not have worked anyway! I'm sorry you don't understand this. The number one rule of software development is that you don't fix something that isn't broken. Uh... right. How insightful. The users that have used restore are now unable to update the machine, so even if Microsoft fixes this problem with windows update the computers that have installed this and used restore are now sitting ducks for viruses. Right, just as they would have been if the update wasn't installed. Do you really not understand this? Regardless, there is already a very easy fix that Microsoft will undoubtedly make available for the small number of people that are effected by this. Microsoft has no excuse here they are just really stupid and don't give a damn about anything except money. Again, very insightful. Thank you.
Sigh...
Do these people realize that the ENTIRE POINT of Microsoft forcing the Windows Update patch was to make sure that future updates would trigger whatever policies the user had selected for the machine?
In other words, if Microsoft had not updated Windows Update automatically, and a user had chosen to be notified of future updates, these notifications would not work. The only way to ensure that the user's settings were properly respected was to update Windows Update.
So now this article says that the silent update wasn't harmless because Windows Update was broken after they did a restore. Do they realize that without this update, Windows Update *definitely* wouldn't work, and that the fact that this update may have a bug in it regarding restoration is completely besides the point?
Should Microsoft have made it more clear that they were doing an update? Yes. Is this update proof of Microsoft's desire to ignore user preferences and do whatever the hell they want? Obviously not.
People are blowing this completely out of proportion. (Big surprise.)
Here are the facts:
1.) The WGA servers were returning error number 0xC004C4A5 when attempting to validate Windows.
2.) This error did NOT cause Windows to go into "reduced functionality mode".
3.) It may have prevented people from downloading certain WGA-only applications/updates.
4.) It looks like the issue was causing problems for less than a day, and is now resolved.
5.) What actually caused the problem has not yet been announced.
So there you have it. People that just installed XP or Vista were not able to activate for a day, and the result of that problem was that the little key icon in the system tray was visible, and they may have had one of those balloon popups tell them to activate.
If that pissed them off a lot, they could have called Microsoft's activation phone number and had their machines activated in less than 5 minutes.
Oh, and a few people couldn't download some optional updates and perhaps a couple of apps from Microsoft.com. THE HORROR!
Or it could be that IIS is a really excellent web server. Either one, really.
Care to explain what, exactly, is "irrational" about using IIS?
Also, last I checked, some pretty big social networking sites use IIS.
IIS already has a pretty dramatic marketshare lead when it comes to the Fortune 1000.