...how that more & more Windows looks like *nix sometimes.
Since NT 3.5 we've had: True multi-user (Terminal services, fast-user switching), sudo (UAC), headless servers (server core), decent scripting (PowerShell), and now more modularity?
Yeah I know, some of these aren't exactly the same, but you see my point.
Twitter, you are actually capable of posting interesting coherent comments. How about using your brain cycles to talk up the good points of FOSS software, rather than bash Microsoft software mindlessly? Believe me, you'll be doing everyone a favour.
You never know, you might even have the same karma as an AC if you do. Maybe more; imagine that!
You missed my point...everyone here knows there's plenty of very good FOSS projects out there, but idiots like twitter that promote FOSS by spreading pure FUD unashamedly do these projects (and the FOSS philosophy) more damage than good.
He reminds me in fact of the Christian preachers you get that try and convert you by shouting at you how you're going to hell for living in sin. Just about everyone's reaction to these people is "go preach in the traffic" with even more determination not to even try it.
1. Fixed in SP1 2. Either driver error or fixed in SP1. The network/audio bug went into SP1 I know. 3. Bullshit. It says in the status bar whether it's plugged in. Sounds like something is seriously wrong with your machine if it start forgetting stuff. 4. BSOD. Will probablly be for driver reasons too, possibly hardware. 5. Look up SuperFetch. Did you want your RAM doing nothing? 6. No idea. If DNS was utterly broken do you think you'd be the first person we hear complaining? I see no evidence of this 7. Turn off indexing (you can specify only to index on AC); turn off Aero (3 clicks). 8. No idea.
In conclusion, I'd say your computer is fucked and you're blaming it on vista as it's a soft target. Get newer drivers, get better hardware. In fairness though the first waves of drivers for Vista were utterly shoddy, so this is a common complaint for early adopters.
Twitter is a troll, Eris too. They both shamelessly bash Microsoft, and especially Vista at all costs, with lies or heavily distorted facts like a raving madman foaming at the mouth, blindly screaming murder.
They represent the absolute worst of FOSS people - complete fanatics motivated by pure hatred of Microsoft, and with zero professional intent.
They are the biggest advert on this site to stay well away from FOSS as much as possible, and in my opinion do more damage to the FOSS reputation than anything else.
"Beeb" is a name for the whole BBC, not just the machines....
And yes, i had one too, bought for me by my father....said it was "chipped", whatever that meant; it was probablly supposed to convince me it had superpowers or something, but anyway, this machine was my foundation of everyone's first program....
Iggy33 was just one of dozens of posters complaining about Vista Service Pack 1's effect on their PCs Whole 'Dozens' of machines break under SP1. Quick, someone tell Bill to pull the plug!
There are specific drivers versions that the update will not work with (and will prevent installation until they're updated), and specific application versions that break too. Shocking, it's true.
Someone remind me how many binary proprietary drivers break in Linux when you upgrade the kernel? All the nvidia drivers come to mind...but I digress.
This isn't a troll, these are facts...maybe it sucks that drivers are binary proprietary blobs that get shipped with Windows, but because they are, I'd say "dozens" isn't a bad percentage. I've been running SP1 just fine for weeks btw...
Perhaps the real news here is Vista should've shipped only when SP1 came out? Win2k8 did.
I've been running it for a couple of weeks now, and yes, shock horror it does work just fine.
The system feels more responsive, and stuff happens as it should. This is the Vista that should've shipped, but where Vista has suffered Windows Server 2008 has gained; all the initial frustrations have been fixed in SP1 for Vista and Windows Server 2008, so consider Vista RTM a beta kernel for Win2k8. It is after all, the server market Windows isn't 95% prevalent in after all.
I got told once that by me changing the toolbars in explorer in my own profile I was "changing the configuration of the computer, and therefore violating company policy". With a straight face. Yeah, I didn't stay long.
I'm now a network & system admin for one of the largest and most successful companies in IT. If you don't like where you work, move and quit bitching. If you're good, they'll convince you to stay.
When you consider 99% of pc's sold that weren't mac for the last year came with Vista, it's not so unbelievable....I mean, no one doubts that XP is by far the most popular desktop OS right now, that's only really because it's had 7 years to get there and only recently has Vista started to mature into a realistic replacement. Sure some have kept with XP despite having Vista; most aren't convinced it's solid enough (1 year compared to 7 production airtime), which is fair enough.
Not only that, despite how much "Vista has sucked" (and yeah, when it first came out, it was pretty awful), how much has Linux progressed in desktop market share? Less than 1%? Ok, so your mates have Ubuntu....I know one guy that runs Linux, and he's a Fedora contributor, so it's not Ubuntu - how much more valid a metric is my claim than yours? None is the answer.
Don't get me wrong, Linux has it's place; certainly in the lower-powered, more focused operations market like the Asus machine.
Not that I entirely doubt what you're saying, some sources tend to lend more credibility than "everyone I know runs X therefore...".
At the end of the day Windows is highly prevalent at home (for it's application-range available & compatibility for which Linux can't compete) and at work (for the ADS services for while Linux doesn't even bother competing). You're right it's not suitable for everything, and people that argue otherwise are delusional, but to say it's not got a prominent place in IT is even more so.
Most likely, your old machine had accumulated crap over time, and resinstalling XP would have given an even larger speedup. Most likely it's stuff like SuperFetch in Vista doing what it's designed to do in fact. For once I've got an OS that's gonna use the memory i bought with the machine. That's what it's designed for, and it does it very well. FireFox opens faster than IE6 does in any XP machine; fresh or otherwise. Believe me, Vista is faster if you have the memory. And all the palava about Areo grinding systems down is rubbish too; it's all 3d accelerated (read: using hardware features otherwise doing nowt), so that too has no effect of performance. Feels very snappy in fact, especially with SP1 which i've been running for a couple of weeks now - it's the Vista that should've shipped. There are some things i don't like about Vista of course; the dumbed down explorer for one, and the higher memory requirements for another, but it does load stuff faster than XP, no doubt.
If it's the 1530, goto the dell site and get the latest everything except wireless; specifically the chipset drivers - which you'll want direct from Intel (install only the driver, not the other thing too).
Also, it really helps putting the drives in SATA mode, not HCPI mode.
Having bought a new Dell laptop with Vista on that's lower spec than my work machine (policy is to update desktops later this year), my laptop almost always feels far more responsive.
Plus, there's other unsung stuff in Vista i've not seen in any OS - the problem solutions centre (not sure exactly how to translate into English); when I got it I had my one and only BSOD in Vista. Shocked, I rebooted and as soon as I was back to the desktop Windows pops up a message saying "I see something real bad happened; do you mind if I see if there's a solution online?". Click Yes, comes back saying "Ah I crashed because of this driver; there's a update to it here which will fix the problem". It's never happened since.
So yeah, there's reasons Vista is better. UAC is top too; I like to know when a program is gonna try and change my system (some try that you'd never think would - denied).
It's an upgrade without a doubt. I wouldn't pay specifically to upgrade mind you, but I appreciate the changes as they come anyway.
The real value behind Linux (to take one example) is the notion that knowledge (and in this example, code) should be public domain and should not just be held back by any one organisation, especially one bent on just making a heap of cash from it.
With OSS we all benefit from the sharing of ideas and code, and this is a good thing(tm).
That said, I still prefer working in Microsoft tech at the time of writing (you could say); I still find overall they have the best eco-system for what I want to do.....but I fully respect the ideas and philosophies of OSS.
I don't know about anyone else, but when I were but a young'un, I remember being told by various techie fortune tellers that when I grew up GAMES would be completely virtual reality based complete with headsets/central-nervous-system connections, and nothing like the cutting edge 8-bit bitmaps bouncing across the screen with cheesy 2 tone music of the day.
I still remember the huge disappointment at trying my first VR system in some crappy French arcade years after that...instead of bouncing bitmaps, it was no more than maybe 20 untextured polygons being rendered before my eyes on a headset big & heavy enough to crush a small mammal. Yeah ok, so I could look around, but at a glorious 15 FPS I got sick after about 2 minutes and probably would've come face-to-face with my breakfast for the 2nd time that day had the credit not have run out due to the fact I didn't know what the I was supposed to be doing (bitch slapping the "evil plain-red polygon" with the mechanical wand one presumed).
My question really is; has has gaming tech progressed any further in this area? Rare is the occasion I see anything remotely VR anywhere now, (apparently, even the French have given up on it - a sure sign it's a shit idea), and yet still I would love to fulfil my childhood dreams of running care-free through a futuristic sci-fi world with a Big Fuckoff LaserGun (tm)....in a virtual reality, not in my bedroom.
Paper and pens have yet to crash, require patching or accidentally reveal any credit-card information on anyone (Netcraft confirms this); why not take it even further?
I think more corporation between the two entities would be a good thing. OSS and MS are like ying and yang; they keep each other in check and balance each other out. In the real world, there's little benefit in either being omnipresent over the other; the two ideals have to work together for the perfect technological suolutions if you ask me.
Without Windows, Linux desktop would have no market penetration target, and without Linux Windows would stagnate.
I think any IT professional that thinks either one paradigm should be 100% prevalent over the other needs to take a good look at themselves and ask how "professional" they really think they are.
Interoperability is good, and personally I thank god neither MS or OSS will ever be 100% dominant in IT (each for their own reasons).
One good friend of mine who works as a network admin for an unnamed estate agent had this problem. Once upon a time he had 3 people working for him, maintaining the impressive stack of servers and clients connected to them. Slowly but surely, management became increasingly stingy and one by one his minions had to be relieved, as the IT budget dried up. Eventually he even had to sell off some of the servers just to make sure he had enough money to pay himself (oh yes, IT really were disconnected from management in an impressive fashion). After running the network on it's barebones configuration for several months, not receiving pay during that time, and after lodging several complaints I suggested that come the next power blip (a common occurrence in the south of Spain), he just doesn't turn the servers back on again.
One such blip happened hours before a crucial sales meeting and Bob was at home. They called screaming he get the network operational, and said he would except he hadn't been paid in months and couldn't afford the petrol in the car (a slight lie, due to excess server sales). Anyway, needless to say he got his cut in the end plus some extras.
Management often hate IT until they're groping around in the dark begging for them. Sometimes it can be healthy to 'demonstrate' why IT are important to management I think.
...to see what shareholders would think about Microsoft pulling out of, oh I dunno, the world's largest trading block for the sake of a poultry fine in comparison?
-You can't recompile the kernel with functionality you'll never use (i.e boot of a floppy for instance). -You can't strip out executables you'll likely never need (wmp.exe for instance). -You have to wait until Microsoft approve patches in order to stay upto-date. -You can't specialise and fork projects to run on Windows Server (like IIS)
But, having said that: -Windows Server 2008 contains a bucket load of functionality Linux doesn't (Active Directory, SharePoint services, etc) -Hard-disc space is cheap (is about the best argument for this counter-point - a weak one I know) -Server's if locked down correctly should be patched that ofen; plus important patches like Service Patches come tested to high-heaven -IIS7 is highly modular; there's very very little you can't customise/disable/write-your-own. IIS7 core is a proverbial house-brick capable of send HTTP OK only responses all stripped down.
Slashdot Mirror
...how that more & more Windows looks like *nix sometimes.
Since NT 3.5 we've had:
True multi-user (Terminal services, fast-user switching), sudo (UAC), headless servers (server core), decent scripting (PowerShell), and now more modularity?
Yeah I know, some of these aren't exactly the same, but you see my point.
Twitter, you are actually capable of posting interesting coherent comments. How about using your brain cycles to talk up the good points of FOSS software, rather than bash Microsoft software mindlessly? Believe me, you'll be doing everyone a favour.
You never know, you might even have the same karma as an AC if you do. Maybe more; imagine that!
You missed my point...everyone here knows there's plenty of very good FOSS projects out there, but idiots like twitter that promote FOSS by spreading pure FUD unashamedly do these projects (and the FOSS philosophy) more damage than good.
He reminds me in fact of the Christian preachers you get that try and convert you by shouting at you how you're going to hell for living in sin. Just about everyone's reaction to these people is "go preach in the traffic" with even more determination not to even try it.
1. Fixed in SP1
2. Either driver error or fixed in SP1. The network/audio bug went into SP1 I know.
3. Bullshit. It says in the status bar whether it's plugged in. Sounds like something is seriously wrong with your machine if it start forgetting stuff.
4. BSOD. Will probablly be for driver reasons too, possibly hardware.
5. Look up SuperFetch. Did you want your RAM doing nothing?
6. No idea. If DNS was utterly broken do you think you'd be the first person we hear complaining? I see no evidence of this
7. Turn off indexing (you can specify only to index on AC); turn off Aero (3 clicks).
8. No idea.
In conclusion, I'd say your computer is fucked and you're blaming it on vista as it's a soft target. Get newer drivers, get better hardware.
In fairness though the first waves of drivers for Vista were utterly shoddy, so this is a common complaint for early adopters.
...and stop posting twitter journals on the FP.
Twitter is a troll, Eris too. They both shamelessly bash Microsoft, and especially Vista at all costs, with lies or heavily distorted facts like a raving madman foaming at the mouth, blindly screaming murder.
They represent the absolute worst of FOSS people - complete fanatics motivated by pure hatred of Microsoft, and with zero professional intent.
They are the biggest advert on this site to stay well away from FOSS as much as possible, and in my opinion do more damage to the FOSS reputation than anything else.
"Beeb" is a name for the whole BBC, not just the machines....
And yes, i had one too, bought for me by my father....said it was "chipped", whatever that meant; it was probablly supposed to convince me it had superpowers or something, but anyway, this machine was my foundation of everyone's first program....
10 print "hello world bum bum willy willy weeeeeeeee!"
20 goto 10
Ok ok, so I was 8-9 - give me some credit...
There are specific drivers versions that the update will not work with (and will prevent installation until they're updated), and specific application versions that break too. Shocking, it's true.
Someone remind me how many binary proprietary drivers break in Linux when you upgrade the kernel? All the nvidia drivers come to mind...but I digress.
This isn't a troll, these are facts...maybe it sucks that drivers are binary proprietary blobs that get shipped with Windows, but because they are, I'd say "dozens" isn't a bad percentage. I've been running SP1 just fine for weeks btw...
Perhaps the real news here is Vista should've shipped only when SP1 came out? Win2k8 did.
I've been running it for a couple of weeks now, and yes, shock horror it does work just fine.
The system feels more responsive, and stuff happens as it should. This is the Vista that should've shipped, but where Vista has suffered Windows Server 2008 has gained; all the initial frustrations have been fixed in SP1 for Vista and Windows Server 2008, so consider Vista RTM a beta kernel for Win2k8. It is after all, the server market Windows isn't 95% prevalent in after all.
I got told once that by me changing the toolbars in explorer in my own profile I was "changing the configuration of the computer, and therefore violating company policy". With a straight face. Yeah, I didn't stay long.
I'm now a network & system admin for one of the largest and most successful companies in IT. If you don't like where you work, move and quit bitching. If you're good, they'll convince you to stay.
When you consider 99% of pc's sold that weren't mac for the last year came with Vista, it's not so unbelievable....I mean, no one doubts that XP is by far the most popular desktop OS right now, that's only really because it's had 7 years to get there and only recently has Vista started to mature into a realistic replacement. Sure some have kept with XP despite having Vista; most aren't convinced it's solid enough (1 year compared to 7 production airtime), which is fair enough.
Not only that, despite how much "Vista has sucked" (and yeah, when it first came out, it was pretty awful), how much has Linux progressed in desktop market share? Less than 1%? Ok, so your mates have Ubuntu....I know one guy that runs Linux, and he's a Fedora contributor, so it's not Ubuntu - how much more valid a metric is my claim than yours? None is the answer.
Don't get me wrong, Linux has it's place; certainly in the lower-powered, more focused operations market like the Asus machine.
Not that I entirely doubt what you're saying, some sources tend to lend more credibility than "everyone I know runs X therefore...".
At the end of the day Windows is highly prevalent at home (for it's application-range available & compatibility for which Linux can't compete) and at work (for the ADS services for while Linux doesn't even bother competing). You're right it's not suitable for everything, and people that argue otherwise are delusional, but to say it's not got a prominent place in IT is even more so.
How about that the 2nd most popular OS in use today is finally getting fixed?
I'd say a lot of people care.
And all the palava about Areo grinding systems down is rubbish too; it's all 3d accelerated (read: using hardware features otherwise doing nowt), so that too has no effect of performance. Feels very snappy in fact, especially with SP1 which i've been running for a couple of weeks now - it's the Vista that should've shipped.
There are some things i don't like about Vista of course; the dumbed down explorer for one, and the higher memory requirements for another, but it does load stuff faster than XP, no doubt.
If it's the 1530, goto the dell site and get the latest everything except wireless; specifically the chipset drivers - which you'll want direct from Intel (install only the driver, not the other thing too).
:)
Also, it really helps putting the drives in SATA mode, not HCPI mode.
Oh, and SP1 too
Having bought a new Dell laptop with Vista on that's lower spec than my work machine (policy is to update desktops later this year), my laptop almost always feels far more responsive.
Plus, there's other unsung stuff in Vista i've not seen in any OS - the problem solutions centre (not sure exactly how to translate into English); when I got it I had my one and only BSOD in Vista. Shocked, I rebooted and as soon as I was back to the desktop Windows pops up a message saying "I see something real bad happened; do you mind if I see if there's a solution online?". Click Yes, comes back saying "Ah I crashed because of this driver; there's a update to it here which will fix the problem". It's never happened since.
So yeah, there's reasons Vista is better. UAC is top too; I like to know when a program is gonna try and change my system (some try that you'd never think would - denied).
It's an upgrade without a doubt. I wouldn't pay specifically to upgrade mind you, but I appreciate the changes as they come anyway.
The real value behind Linux (to take one example) is the notion that knowledge (and in this example, code) should be public domain and should not just be held back by any one organisation, especially one bent on just making a heap of cash from it.
With OSS we all benefit from the sharing of ideas and code, and this is a good thing(tm).
That said, I still prefer working in Microsoft tech at the time of writing (you could say); I still find overall they have the best eco-system for what I want to do.....but I fully respect the ideas and philosophies of OSS.
Good on you all.
I don't know about anyone else, but when I were but a young'un, I remember being told by various techie fortune tellers that when I grew up GAMES would be completely virtual reality based complete with headsets/central-nervous-system connections, and nothing like the cutting edge 8-bit bitmaps bouncing across the screen with cheesy 2 tone music of the day.
I still remember the huge disappointment at trying my first VR system in some crappy French arcade years after that...instead of bouncing bitmaps, it was no more than maybe 20 untextured polygons being rendered before my eyes on a headset big & heavy enough to crush a small mammal. Yeah ok, so I could look around, but at a glorious 15 FPS I got sick after about 2 minutes and probably would've come face-to-face with my breakfast for the 2nd time that day had the credit not have run out due to the fact I didn't know what the I was supposed to be doing (bitch slapping the "evil plain-red polygon" with the mechanical wand one presumed).
My question really is; has has gaming tech progressed any further in this area? Rare is the occasion I see anything remotely VR anywhere now, (apparently, even the French have given up on it - a sure sign it's a shit idea), and yet still I would love to fulfil my childhood dreams of running care-free through a futuristic sci-fi world with a Big Fuckoff LaserGun (tm)....in a virtual reality, not in my bedroom.
Paper and pens have yet to crash, require patching or accidentally reveal any credit-card information on anyone (Netcraft confirms this); why not take it even further?
I think more corporation between the two entities would be a good thing. OSS and MS are like ying and yang; they keep each other in check and balance each other out. In the real world, there's little benefit in either being omnipresent over the other; the two ideals have to work together for the perfect technological suolutions if you ask me.
Without Windows, Linux desktop would have no market penetration target, and without Linux Windows would stagnate.
I think any IT professional that thinks either one paradigm should be 100% prevalent over the other needs to take a good look at themselves and ask how "professional" they really think they are.
Interoperability is good, and personally I thank god neither MS or OSS will ever be 100% dominant in IT (each for their own reasons).
Just my 2 cents.
One good friend of mine who works as a network admin for an unnamed estate agent had this problem. Once upon a time he had 3 people working for him, maintaining the impressive stack of servers and clients connected to them. Slowly but surely, management became increasingly stingy and one by one his minions had to be relieved, as the IT budget dried up. Eventually he even had to sell off some of the servers just to make sure he had enough money to pay himself (oh yes, IT really were disconnected from management in an impressive fashion). After running the network on it's barebones configuration for several months, not receiving pay during that time, and after lodging several complaints I suggested that come the next power blip (a common occurrence in the south of Spain), he just doesn't turn the servers back on again.
One such blip happened hours before a crucial sales meeting and Bob was at home. They called screaming he get the network operational, and said he would except he hadn't been paid in months and couldn't afford the petrol in the car (a slight lie, due to excess server sales). Anyway, needless to say he got his cut in the end plus some extras.
Management often hate IT until they're groping around in the dark begging for them. Sometimes it can be healthy to 'demonstrate' why IT are important to management I think.
You forget there's still this - http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/newsroom/winxp/WinXPStarterFS.mspx
If low-cost Linux machines become more & more popular, I'd expect to see Microsoft broaden the market for the cheapest Windows editions.
...to see what shareholders would think about Microsoft pulling out of, oh I dunno, the world's largest trading block for the sake of a poultry fine in comparison?
Read: it ain't gonna happen.
Let's clear the air on this one now...
-You can't recompile the kernel with functionality you'll never use (i.e boot of a floppy for instance).
-You can't strip out executables you'll likely never need (wmp.exe for instance).
-You have to wait until Microsoft approve patches in order to stay upto-date.
-You can't specialise and fork projects to run on Windows Server (like IIS)
But, having said that:
-Windows Server 2008 contains a bucket load of functionality Linux doesn't (Active Directory, SharePoint services, etc)
-Hard-disc space is cheap (is about the best argument for this counter-point - a weak one I know)
-Server's if locked down correctly should be patched that ofen; plus important patches like Service Patches come tested to high-heaven
-IIS7 is highly modular; there's very very little you can't customise/disable/write-your-own. IIS7 core is a proverbial house-brick capable of send HTTP OK only responses all stripped down.
Like most people are even going to notice.
Vista Home Basic is basically Vista minus Areo.
So directly comparable to Windows XP Home. It's for people that don't have 3d acceleration, but want the rest.
Therefore it's still Vista, and Vista 'capable' seems like a reasonable tag for me.