Your experience must be very, very limited.
In my experience, almost all Windows users hate it. They use it because they have no idea that there's a choice. Most of the people that I know don't hate Windows, and most of them know about the Mac, and a few even know about Linux. I know it makes the "niche-os" communities feel superior to say this, and I know it helps many of them rationalize why more people don't like their particular "niche-os", but the fact of the matter is that most people just don't care. Windows gets the job done for them, and some of them actually like Windows.
They didn't buy "windows", they bought "a computer", and that mysterious thing called "Windows" came with it. Come on man. This might have been the case, oh, 15 years ago... but now a days most people understand what Windows is, that Microsoft makes it, and that it is the dominant operating system on the market.
An important reason for all this is that Microsoft has an advertising budget larger than the budgets of all their competitors combined. Funny, you would think with an advertising budget like that, Microsoft would be able to communicate what their product is to all these hapless users.
This simple situation is all you need to understand MS's market dominance. (Though their ability to lock out competitors via their contracts with retailers also helps.) If that makes you feel better, go with it.
Wait! Walter Mossberg, the paragon of unbiased and informed tech journalism, isn't impressed with Vista!?
Wow! I guess I'll go ahead an uninstall it. Here I was, all this time, really loving Vista and appreciating its massive list of new features... when all along I was just using XP with a pretty face.
Re:freaking me out
on
Who won?
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· Score: 5, Informative
Indeed, people are in need of a reality check.
I don't know of very many people who say that GWB "engineered" anything, much less large scale election fraud. You do realize that the people in this administration number more than 1, right? You do realize that the people who would stand to gain from this kind of fraud aren't limited to people named George.
America voted Bush in. The first time because he was a friendly likable guy and the Lewinsky scandal scoured them on Clinton/Gore.
Actually, Gore won the popular vote in 2000. In addition, in case you missed it, Clinton had had 66%+ approval rating when he left office. Most political analysts now say that Gore's reluctance to embrace Clinton, coupled with how incredibly boring the man is, cost him the election. (Or, rather, made it as close as it was.) Oh, and not to mention the fact that it was the Supreme Court that handed Bush the win in 2000, stopping a recount that we now know would have resulted in a Gore win.
He won the second time because they felt he was protecting them from danger and wanted to give him a chance to win the war. Bush won. Both times. Get over it.
Except that the book we're commenting on here offers evidence that this was not what happened, and in fact it was fraud that won Bush his second term. If you would like to dispute the data, then sobeit, but making pronouncements like that doesn't make them true.
In 2008 you'll have a shot at the White House again, and it'll be be your election to lose.
Who, exactly, are you talking to? The authors of this book never claimed to be Democrats. Furthermore, if what they're saying is true, the very foundations of our Democracy are at risk. One would think people would be a little more concerned over it.
IE 7 on XP really doesn't offer much to Firefox converts. Aside from perhaps the nifty tab screenshot thingy, and a really good RSS reader, Firefox has all of IE 7's features, plus it has the "comfort" factor.
But IE 7 on XP isn't really the big deal here. IE 7 on Vista is what Mozilla should be worried about.
IE 7's protected mode feature trumps the number one reason why people switched to Firefox (in my opinion): security. That's why I switched to Firefox. I was sick and tired of being at risk while I was surfing. Switching to a browser will very small market share gave me security through obscurity.
But IE 7 in protected mode is mostly likely the safest, full featured browser one can use. While people upgrading to Vista might stick with Firefox, I have a feeling that most people getting a new machine with Vista pre-installed will have little reason to switch to Firefox.
Furthermore, as the market share for IE 7 on Vista increases, I suspect malware writers will start to target Firefox more and more. It would certainly be a strange turn of events if Vista and IE 7 actually made Firefox less safe to use.
I've been using Office 2007 since it was released to MSDN Subscribers back in November.
I went into the upgrade with high expectations for the ribbon. I had read a lot about it, and honestly it just makes a lot of sense. Commands that are grouped logically and presented contextually, while at the same time not being buried in a menu that few will ever see, simply seems like the right way to do things.
At the same time I realized that I have been using Office for many, many years, and the fairly dramatic UI shift would probably result in some learning curve.
I was, however, pleasantly surprised. For the most part, commands are where they should be. If I want to change the alignment of some text I go to the layout tab. (Or just highlight the text and move my mouse toward the fading in popup thingy.) If I want to insert a picture, surprise surprise, I got to the insert tab. It all makes a lot of sense.
Furthermore, in just the couple of months that I've been using Office 2007, I've discovered a lot of functionality I never new existed. (And, as many of you know, most Office users only use a very small fraction of Office's features.)
Each Office upgrade before 2007 has, for the most part, been an exercise in adding features that few will ever use because they don't know they're there. Office 2007's new UI changes that. For many users, it will be like Microsoft added thousands of new features when, in fact, they've been there all along but were never seen.
Yes, and I'll bet that each one of those features has it's own bugs which can be exploited - which makes the entire computer easier to exploit, not harder.
The features I was referring to are things like ASLR. Even a flawed implementation of ASLR will make the computer harder to exploit, not easier. To assume that any new feature will automatically result in a more vulnerable computer is a flawed assumption. It completely depends on the feature in question.
I see you've already considered the possibility that the features will have their own bugs. However, unlike you, I will decide to err on the side of historical evidence.
Of course I've considered that. Your claim that any new feature automatically makes the computer less security is equally as flawed as the opposite assumption. (An assumption I was *not* making.)
If you read the link about Protected Mode IE you would see that it uses a fairly innovative model to secure IE. The quick summary is that all "privileged" operations must go through a broker which is only a few thousand lines of code. IE must use this broker because its process runs as a user will even fewer privileges than a Guest account. Since the broker is relatively simple, it is *much* easier to audit 2000 lines of code than to audit the 2,000,000 lines of code (that was a guess) in IE. So even to write a file to the user's desktop, IE must "ask" the broker to perform this operation on IE's behalf, as the broker is running with the same privs as the user. A flaw that allowed a bad guy to try and get IE to write someplace else on the file system, for instance, would fail due to a lack of privs.
I'm sure you'll now say that all it will take is a problem with the privs system in Windows, and this model breaks down. Very true. But priv elevation exploits are much, much more rare than a bug in IE. The privs system in Windows is very, very well fleshed out. It has had a few exploits over the years, but those exploits are usually a lot harder to create than one of the billion different ways one can take advantage of the swiss cheese that is IE.
Furthermore, features such as the ASLR I previously mentioned would make these exploits extremely hard as well.
Protected Mode IE has, in effect, dramatically reduced the attack surface of IE. You can consider this a feature, but it's a feature that can really only reduce vulnerabilities, not increase them.
Historically, MS doesn't know how to write secure software, and takes several attempts to get it right. Why would these new features be any different?
Good question. Historically, you're obviously correct. Past Microsoft products have been iffy, at best. But Microsoft (or, rather, the people who work there) isn't stupid. They DO learn from their mistakes, no matter how much Slashdotters think they don't. Microsoft has implemented drastic changes in their development process.
Some products that have resulted from that new process are IIS 6, the.NET Framework (versions 1, 1.1, 2, and 3). If you do a search on your favorite security site, you'll see that these products have almost NO security holes. IIS 6 has dramatically fewer vulnerabilities than Apache, for instance. These products are obviously attacked a great deal, so their lack of holes is definitely not from a lack of attempts.
You're claiming that the OS enforces this? It will refuse to run non-system apps as Admin?
So what happens with all of the existing software that requires Administrative privileges to run? There are thousands of them. Will they all stop working when you upgrade to Vista?
Yes, the OS does enforce this. If you had read the links I posted, you would know that. It's called UAC. (User Account Control.) While your questions are good ones, they should that your conclusions about Vista are assumptions, and are not based on
I had no doubt that there would be flaws found in Vista. No non-trivial software is bug free.
But Vista has a lot of features that makes the inevitable bugs much, much harder to take advantage of.
The single most common attack vector in Windows is IE. Virtually all the malware installed on machines today was likely installed by a drive-by-download caused by one of the many, many holes in IE.
But users running Vista have Protected Mode, which effectively isolates IE and prevents it from doing damage. It's possible that protected mode has a flaw, but judging by how it works I find that unlikely.
In addition, the fact that Vista users aren't running as admin makes flaws that affect the interactive user much, much less dangerous. The ability to take over the entire machine, or even run arbitrary code effectively as the interactive user, are almost non-existent.
I suspect that this is either fraudulent, or it doesn't have the ability to root the box.
Very true, but if malware is on your machine it will do what it damn well pleases. Google preventing the user from changing the default search provider does only that - prevents the USER from changing it. Malware will change it just fine.
The fact that Vista is "released" in some fashion or another is completely irrelevant. The FACT is that SQL Server Express works FINE on Vista with minor tweaks, and works without tweaks if you install SP2 beta. SP2 will be FINAL before Vista's OFFICIAL release at the end of January.
Who exactly cares that you can get a copy of Vista at CompUSA? You think the guy who goes and buys Vista at CompUSA is also going to be doing a lot of SQL Server development? Give me a break.
Let me get this straight - how else am I supposed to make SQL Server development woork wih reporting services and/or SSIS on my laptop without internet connection?
Ah, cause that happens all the time. After all, I do all my development completely offline.
If you *really* must do development offline, have you ever heard of Virtual PC or VMWare? VPC is free, and you can run Win2k3 Server on it with all the SQL Server goodness you want. Sure, there is the cost of the OS license and the SQL Server license, but your company either has tons of money, has an MSDN subscription, or pirates its software, since your running full fledged SQL Server on your desktops.
Furthermore, running SQL Server 2000/2005 (full) on a desktop has NEVER BEEN SUPPORTED. PERIOD. END OF STORY. How can you cry and moan when you've been doing something that has been unsupported from the get go?
You're making a mountain out of a mole hill so that you can have some kind of faux outrage and bash Microsoft. Get a grip, and get a clue.
Wrong, it was compatible. It is not meant to be used on that - on a poroduction environment, but it is compatible, and a good reason to install it on XP is development. Like having a SQL Server avaialble on your laptop.
Really? Funny, because if you go and look at the list of supported operating systems for SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005, XP is NOT ONE OF THEM. Furthermore, the installer for SQL Server 2000 would PREVENT you from installing SQL Server on XP. You had to fool it to get it to work.
Why not run MSDE on your development machine? For development, MSDE does pretty much everything you'll need to get your work done. If you need to do "real" testing, then guess what, you should have a staging environment. What's that? You don't have a staging environment? Who is the idiot again?
SQL Server Express, which is what this article is actually about, is the replacement for MSDE. As I said, SP1 works fine with some tweaks, and SP2 is in beta.
Bullshit. Serious. Vista was RTM what - three weeks ago?
I've been running Vista RTM since November 17th. It was made available on MSDN / Windows Connect for EARLY ADOPTERS. Vista has NOT been made available to the public, only to people who have access to MSDN, and to certain corporate clients. This group of people is more than capable enough to run an app as admin or to install a beta service pack.
If your company runs full fledged SQL Server on desktops, they're morons for multiple reasons. If they're rolling out Vista without regard to this, then they're completely incompetent.
The fact of the matter is that this article was FUD, pure and simple. And your response to my post showed your idiocy, not mine.
First of all, the title of the post (and the article's title) are misleading. "SQL Server" (suggesting its full fledged version) was NEVER compatible with Vista, or XP for that matter. It's meant for servers, not desktops.
Second, Vista is NOT RELEASED YET. Despite that, early adopters can download SQL Server Express SP1, which runs fine on Vista, although it is not technically "supported" by Microsoft. In fact, almost all of the issues are easily worked around by running the setup as admin, and SQL Server Management Studio as admin.
For those people who have additional problems, there is plenty of good documentation on how to get it running, or they can install the beta of SP2, which should be RTM by the time Vista hits the shelves in the end of Jan anyway.
So despite the author's obvious attempts at a sensational title that would get him lots of hits (and, evidentially, posted on Slashdot), his content is almost pure FUD... and pure gold for Slashdot.
Except that the primary reason that Google created this customized version is so they can then bundle this not just with all their software, but with OEM's standard software.
In other words, Google's eventual goal is to get Dell, Gateway, HP, etc., to include the Googleized version of IE with all their new PCs.
Google's new customized IE apparently prevents users from changing the default search provider to anything other than Google.
Then there's the debacle of last week's release of a Google-branded version of Internet Explorer (IE) 7, which conspicuously copied--in a blatant, wholehearted fashion--a similar project from Yahoo. But my favorite little bit of fun out of Mordor, er ah, Google has got to be what happens if you try to change the default search provider on a version of IE 7 in which you've installed the Google toolbar. It actually prevents you from changing the search provider to anything other than Google, using a feature that presents itself as protection against other applications that are trying to surreptitiously change your search provider. And you know how often that happens.
FYI, this does not seem to affect Windows Media Player 11, which is available via Windows Update or the WMP site.
It also does not affect Vista, both because Vista comes with WMP 11, and thanks to IE7 running in protected mode. This would likely cause the browser to crash, however.
... without spreading FUD along with it. Microsoft did *not* say you shouldn't open documents "even from trusted sources". They said:
Do not open or save Word files that you receive from un-trusted sources or that you receive unexpectedly from trusted sources. This vulnerability could be exploited when a user opens a specially crafted Word file.
Indeed, but you have to understand the difference between a lobbyist advocating a solution (he was paid to do so regardless of the merits) and a civil servant advocating a solution (he was paid to dispassionately figure out what the best solution is).
Not sure what about my post would suggest that I don't understand there is a difference. My post was merely to criticize the original story poster for ignore the fact that the ODF-side of things are also a special interest. Furthermore, there is no reason to think that the "civil servant" is making the choice based on what the best solution is. They are not immune to outside influences, nor are they free from bias. In addition, many companies would *love* for Microsoft to lose MA as a customer because it would make it easier for them to sell their products and services.
Appointing a lobbyist for a policy-making committee is silly not because we may disagree with his former employer, but because lobbying and making policy decisions require completely orthogonal skills.
I'm not sure they're completely orthogonal. A lobbyist must have a strong understanding of the landscape for which they lobby. It's hard to convince people that your product or cause is the correct one if you know nothing of its competitors.
In general, I agree that appointing a lobbyist is a bad idea. I wasn't really arguing for or against that in my original post. I was simply saying that the people arguing for ODF to win were not some kind of benevolent entity with only the interests of the people in mind.
What a surprise that the most negative review of the Zune that anybody could find would be posted on Slashdot.
I guess we'll just ignore the many, many more moderate reviews that rate the Zune as good, but no iPod killer. After all, we wouldn't want to represent the general consensus.
I could just as easily post very positive reviews of the Zune, but I guarantee those will never been seen on Slashdot's front page.
If I recall, virtually everybody dismissed Microsoft's entry into the game console market in much the same way. People criticized the Xbox as being inferior to the PS2, although in general they gave more credit to the Xbox than they're giving to the Zune. (Perhaps because the iPod fans have a bit more zealotry in their blood than the Sony fans.)
But as we learned from the Xbox360, which according to almost everybody is the tentative winner of the next gen console wars, Microsoft often uses the first release of a product as a test bed for their eventual successful strategy.
I suspect we'll look back in a few years as see the Zune as a predecessor of the device that finally kills the iPod.
Actually, Dawkins talks about the millions of Christians who don't oppose science all the time.
You obviously don't read many of his books (such as the latest one, The God Delusion), nor listen to many of his speeches (most of which can be found on YouTube or at RichardDawkins.net), because Dawkins has made that seemingly benign group of people the target of many of his criticisms.
In The God Delusion, Dawkins examines how he thinks these people are able to compartmentalize their lives in such a way that makes belief in God possible while also having a natural and healthy skepticism about other, non-religious claims. For instance, most people scoff at the idea that idea that there should be evidence of God's existance before they believe in him, yet would demand just such evidence if I were to claim I had a dragon in my garage.
While Dawkins certainly loves picking the low hanging fruit (the right-wing religious wackos), he is more than happy to address what he views as the hypocritical moderates. In fact, he has said numerous times that he almost has more respect for people who are steadfast in their religious beliefs than those who are willing to blend modern life with religious dogma.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps you're not fully aware of all of the new features in Vista.
Wait! Walter Mossberg, the paragon of unbiased and informed tech journalism, isn't impressed with Vista!?
Wow! I guess I'll go ahead an uninstall it. Here I was, all this time, really loving Vista and appreciating its massive list of new features... when all along I was just using XP with a pretty face.
I don't know of very many people who say that GWB "engineered" anything, much less large scale election fraud. You do realize that the people in this administration number more than 1, right? You do realize that the people who would stand to gain from this kind of fraud aren't limited to people named George.
Actually, Gore won the popular vote in 2000. In addition, in case you missed it, Clinton had had 66%+ approval rating when he left office. Most political analysts now say that Gore's reluctance to embrace Clinton, coupled with how incredibly boring the man is, cost him the election. (Or, rather, made it as close as it was.) Oh, and not to mention the fact that it was the Supreme Court that handed Bush the win in 2000, stopping a recount that we now know would have resulted in a Gore win.
Except that the book we're commenting on here offers evidence that this was not what happened, and in fact it was fraud that won Bush his second term. If you would like to dispute the data, then sobeit, but making pronouncements like that doesn't make them true.
Who, exactly, are you talking to? The authors of this book never claimed to be Democrats. Furthermore, if what they're saying is true, the very foundations of our Democracy are at risk. One would think people would be a little more concerned over it.
If you're a "Fox News Republican" then, yes, hating the Democrats is a prerequisite for being considered unbiased.
Flamebait? Really? Wow.
Well, we'll see.
I'm going to bookmark this post so that in a year or so I can repeatedly link to it when we start seeing a sharp increase in Firefox vulnerabilities.
IE 7 on XP really doesn't offer much to Firefox converts. Aside from perhaps the nifty tab screenshot thingy, and a really good RSS reader, Firefox has all of IE 7's features, plus it has the "comfort" factor.
But IE 7 on XP isn't really the big deal here. IE 7 on Vista is what Mozilla should be worried about.
IE 7's protected mode feature trumps the number one reason why people switched to Firefox (in my opinion): security. That's why I switched to Firefox. I was sick and tired of being at risk while I was surfing. Switching to a browser will very small market share gave me security through obscurity.
But IE 7 in protected mode is mostly likely the safest, full featured browser one can use. While people upgrading to Vista might stick with Firefox, I have a feeling that most people getting a new machine with Vista pre-installed will have little reason to switch to Firefox.
Furthermore, as the market share for IE 7 on Vista increases, I suspect malware writers will start to target Firefox more and more. It would certainly be a strange turn of events if Vista and IE 7 actually made Firefox less safe to use.
Wow... talk about not proof reading a post. I never "new" existed? Oh well.
One day Slashdot will enable an "edit comment" feature like basically every other site on the planet.
I've been using Office 2007 since it was released to MSDN Subscribers back in November.
I went into the upgrade with high expectations for the ribbon. I had read a lot about it, and honestly it just makes a lot of sense. Commands that are grouped logically and presented contextually, while at the same time not being buried in a menu that few will ever see, simply seems like the right way to do things.
At the same time I realized that I have been using Office for many, many years, and the fairly dramatic UI shift would probably result in some learning curve.
I was, however, pleasantly surprised. For the most part, commands are where they should be. If I want to change the alignment of some text I go to the layout tab. (Or just highlight the text and move my mouse toward the fading in popup thingy.) If I want to insert a picture, surprise surprise, I got to the insert tab. It all makes a lot of sense.
Furthermore, in just the couple of months that I've been using Office 2007, I've discovered a lot of functionality I never new existed. (And, as many of you know, most Office users only use a very small fraction of Office's features.)
Each Office upgrade before 2007 has, for the most part, been an exercise in adding features that few will ever use because they don't know they're there. Office 2007's new UI changes that. For many users, it will be like Microsoft added thousands of new features when, in fact, they've been there all along but were never seen.
The features I was referring to are things like ASLR. Even a flawed implementation of ASLR will make the computer harder to exploit, not easier. To assume that any new feature will automatically result in a more vulnerable computer is a flawed assumption. It completely depends on the feature in question.
Of course I've considered that. Your claim that any new feature automatically makes the computer less security is equally as flawed as the opposite assumption. (An assumption I was *not* making.)
If you read the link about Protected Mode IE you would see that it uses a fairly innovative model to secure IE. The quick summary is that all "privileged" operations must go through a broker which is only a few thousand lines of code. IE must use this broker because its process runs as a user will even fewer privileges than a Guest account. Since the broker is relatively simple, it is *much* easier to audit 2000 lines of code than to audit the 2,000,000 lines of code (that was a guess) in IE. So even to write a file to the user's desktop, IE must "ask" the broker to perform this operation on IE's behalf, as the broker is running with the same privs as the user. A flaw that allowed a bad guy to try and get IE to write someplace else on the file system, for instance, would fail due to a lack of privs.
I'm sure you'll now say that all it will take is a problem with the privs system in Windows, and this model breaks down. Very true. But priv elevation exploits are much, much more rare than a bug in IE. The privs system in Windows is very, very well fleshed out. It has had a few exploits over the years, but those exploits are usually a lot harder to create than one of the billion different ways one can take advantage of the swiss cheese that is IE.
Furthermore, features such as the ASLR I previously mentioned would make these exploits extremely hard as well.
Protected Mode IE has, in effect, dramatically reduced the attack surface of IE. You can consider this a feature, but it's a feature that can really only reduce vulnerabilities, not increase them.
Good question. Historically, you're obviously correct. Past Microsoft products have been iffy, at best. But Microsoft (or, rather, the people who work there) isn't stupid. They DO learn from their mistakes, no matter how much Slashdotters think they don't. Microsoft has implemented drastic changes in their development process.
.NET Framework (versions 1, 1.1, 2, and 3). If you do a search on your favorite security site, you'll see that these products have almost NO security holes. IIS 6 has dramatically fewer vulnerabilities than Apache, for instance. These products are obviously attacked a great deal, so their lack of holes is definitely not from a lack of attempts.
Some products that have resulted from that new process are IIS 6, the
Yes, the OS does enforce this. If you had read the links I posted, you would know that. It's called UAC. (User Account Control.) While your questions are good ones, they should that your conclusions about Vista are assumptions, and are not based on
I had no doubt that there would be flaws found in Vista. No non-trivial software is bug free.
But Vista has a lot of features that makes the inevitable bugs much, much harder to take advantage of.
The single most common attack vector in Windows is IE. Virtually all the malware installed on machines today was likely installed by a drive-by-download caused by one of the many, many holes in IE.
But users running Vista have Protected Mode, which effectively isolates IE and prevents it from doing damage. It's possible that protected mode has a flaw, but judging by how it works I find that unlikely.
In addition, the fact that Vista users aren't running as admin makes flaws that affect the interactive user much, much less dangerous. The ability to take over the entire machine, or even run arbitrary code effectively as the interactive user, are almost non-existent.
I suspect that this is either fraudulent, or it doesn't have the ability to root the box.
Very true, but if malware is on your machine it will do what it damn well pleases. Google preventing the user from changing the default search provider does only that - prevents the USER from changing it. Malware will change it just fine.
Oh, one more thing, it turns out you CAN develop SQL Server Reporting solutions on SQL Server Express. See this document.
:)
Yet more evidence that you have no real interest in the facts. It took me about 20 seconds to find that document.
*OWNED*
Who exactly cares that you can get a copy of Vista at CompUSA? You think the guy who goes and buys Vista at CompUSA is also going to be doing a lot of SQL Server development? Give me a break.
Ah, cause that happens all the time. After all, I do all my development completely offline.
If you *really* must do development offline, have you ever heard of Virtual PC or VMWare? VPC is free, and you can run Win2k3 Server on it with all the SQL Server goodness you want. Sure, there is the cost of the OS license and the SQL Server license, but your company either has tons of money, has an MSDN subscription, or pirates its software, since your running full fledged SQL Server on your desktops.
Furthermore, running SQL Server 2000/2005 (full) on a desktop has NEVER BEEN SUPPORTED. PERIOD. END OF STORY. How can you cry and moan when you've been doing something that has been unsupported from the get go?
You're making a mountain out of a mole hill so that you can have some kind of faux outrage and bash Microsoft. Get a grip, and get a clue.
Really? Funny, because if you go and look at the list of supported operating systems for SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005, XP is NOT ONE OF THEM. Furthermore, the installer for SQL Server 2000 would PREVENT you from installing SQL Server on XP. You had to fool it to get it to work.
Why not run MSDE on your development machine? For development, MSDE does pretty much everything you'll need to get your work done. If you need to do "real" testing, then guess what, you should have a staging environment. What's that? You don't have a staging environment? Who is the idiot again?
SQL Server Express, which is what this article is actually about, is the replacement for MSDE. As I said, SP1 works fine with some tweaks, and SP2 is in beta.
I've been running Vista RTM since November 17th. It was made available on MSDN / Windows Connect for EARLY ADOPTERS. Vista has NOT been made available to the public, only to people who have access to MSDN, and to certain corporate clients. This group of people is more than capable enough to run an app as admin or to install a beta service pack.
If your company runs full fledged SQL Server on desktops, they're morons for multiple reasons. If they're rolling out Vista without regard to this, then they're completely incompetent.
The fact of the matter is that this article was FUD, pure and simple. And your response to my post showed your idiocy, not mine.
First of all, the title of the post (and the article's title) are misleading. "SQL Server" (suggesting its full fledged version) was NEVER compatible with Vista, or XP for that matter. It's meant for servers, not desktops.
Second, Vista is NOT RELEASED YET. Despite that, early adopters can download SQL Server Express SP1, which runs fine on Vista, although it is not technically "supported" by Microsoft. In fact, almost all of the issues are easily worked around by running the setup as admin, and SQL Server Management Studio as admin.
For those people who have additional problems, there is plenty of good documentation on how to get it running, or they can install the beta of SP2, which should be RTM by the time Vista hits the shelves in the end of Jan anyway.
So despite the author's obvious attempts at a sensational title that would get him lots of hits (and, evidentially, posted on Slashdot), his content is almost pure FUD... and pure gold for Slashdot.
Except that the primary reason that Google created this customized version is so they can then bundle this not just with all their software, but with OEM's standard software.
In other words, Google's eventual goal is to get Dell, Gateway, HP, etc., to include the Googleized version of IE with all their new PCs.
FYI, this does not seem to affect Windows Media Player 11, which is available via Windows Update or the WMP site.
It also does not affect Vista, both because Vista comes with WMP 11, and thanks to IE7 running in protected mode. This would likely cause the browser to crash, however.
Not sure what about my post would suggest that I don't understand there is a difference. My post was merely to criticize the original story poster for ignore the fact that the ODF-side of things are also a special interest. Furthermore, there is no reason to think that the "civil servant" is making the choice based on what the best solution is. They are not immune to outside influences, nor are they free from bias. In addition, many companies would *love* for Microsoft to lose MA as a customer because it would make it easier for them to sell their products and services.
I'm not sure they're completely orthogonal. A lobbyist must have a strong understanding of the landscape for which they lobby. It's hard to convince people that your product or cause is the correct one if you know nothing of its competitors.
In general, I agree that appointing a lobbyist is a bad idea. I wasn't really arguing for or against that in my original post. I was simply saying that the people arguing for ODF to win were not some kind of benevolent entity with only the interests of the people in mind.
Both sides of the Microsoft vs ODF battle are special interests.
Just because you agree with one side more than the other doesn't make it any less "special".
What a surprise that the most negative review of the Zune that anybody could find would be posted on Slashdot.
I guess we'll just ignore the many, many more moderate reviews that rate the Zune as good, but no iPod killer. After all, we wouldn't want to represent the general consensus.
I could just as easily post very positive reviews of the Zune, but I guarantee those will never been seen on Slashdot's front page.
If I recall, virtually everybody dismissed Microsoft's entry into the game console market in much the same way. People criticized the Xbox as being inferior to the PS2, although in general they gave more credit to the Xbox than they're giving to the Zune. (Perhaps because the iPod fans have a bit more zealotry in their blood than the Sony fans.)
But as we learned from the Xbox360, which according to almost everybody is the tentative winner of the next gen console wars, Microsoft often uses the first release of a product as a test bed for their eventual successful strategy.
I suspect we'll look back in a few years as see the Zune as a predecessor of the device that finally kills the iPod.
Actually, Dawkins talks about the millions of Christians who don't oppose science all the time.
You obviously don't read many of his books (such as the latest one, The God Delusion), nor listen to many of his speeches (most of which can be found on YouTube or at RichardDawkins.net), because Dawkins has made that seemingly benign group of people the target of many of his criticisms.
In The God Delusion, Dawkins examines how he thinks these people are able to compartmentalize their lives in such a way that makes belief in God possible while also having a natural and healthy skepticism about other, non-religious claims. For instance, most people scoff at the idea that idea that there should be evidence of God's existance before they believe in him, yet would demand just such evidence if I were to claim I had a dragon in my garage.
While Dawkins certainly loves picking the low hanging fruit (the right-wing religious wackos), he is more than happy to address what he views as the hypocritical moderates. In fact, he has said numerous times that he almost has more respect for people who are steadfast in their religious beliefs than those who are willing to blend modern life with religious dogma.
Wow, seriously? The Slashdot crowd is usually educated enough for that statement not to be necessary.
If you read Slashdot regularly, and you don't believe in Evolution, you must have an incredible ability to compartmentalize your life.