I don't think it's necessarily power, although there is a huge "do what I say, obey me!" factor to all special-interest groups.
Penn and Teller did an episode of Bullshit on this, and they came to the conclusion that what most environmentalists are really wanting is anti-corporatism. They hate corporations, anything a corporation does it "evil" and it just so happens that corporations, since most of them actually make products, tend to pollute more than, say, pot-smokers who produce absolutely nothing.
And really safe too, along a speed limit 55 country highway with no barrier for a bike lane in Washington State where it's midnight-dark by 4:30 PM in the winter.
The State of Washington has "default" speed limits, based on the type of road you're on. IIRC, residential streets are 25 MPH, arterials 35 MPH, country highways 45 or 50 MPH and freeways 60 MPH. Been a long time since driver's ed. though. And I'm not sure if this applies in other states.
The fact that microsoft spent years developing a browser when there was already a much more capable browser available is a pretty sure sign that they care about having a position in the market though, user needs be damned.
Whoa, you're in nostalgia-land here.
Netscape 2-4 were buggy pieces of crap. They crashed all the time. IE didn't crash nearly as much, on Windows *or* Macintosh.
And remember, there was a Macintosh version of IE, which also beat Netscape in market-share-- on a platform Microsoft didn't control, and when both browsers were included on the OS disk. Fair and square.
That is a purist point of view. To the end user they had a program that worked just fine and now it doesn't.
Not to this end-user. But, generally, you're correct.
In any case, what was Microsoft supposed to do? Company X wrote buggy software; it was buggy for 10 years before Microsoft did *anything* to make the bug apparent to the user. In my opinion, that's pretty damned good.
Would you prefer that everything just run as Administrator all the time? Because, that was one of the huge gripes *against* XP and 2000. Now the big gripe is that Microsoft fixed it? Criminy.
Your USB problem is one of the ones that have been reported also many USB to serial converters have issues with just shutting down after a few hours of use.
I still think my specific USB problem is either the BIOS in the computer or the USB hub the keyboard is plugged into. I don't have or use a USB-to-serial converter; I imagine that's an extremely niche piece of hardware.
I notice you are not going to comment on audio problems.
Why would I? I have no experience in trying to record audio at rates below yadda yadda. I don't record audio at all. If you want me to comment on it, I'll comment: "Oh." There, happy?
What it comes down to for most users. Does Vista help me get my work done or does it slow me down. I claim that it helps almost nobody and slows almost everybody down.
Yes, well, I can't speak for everyone, but it certainly helps me. Vista's recovering from crashed video card drivers alone saves me a couple of reboots a week, that's really enough to put it ahead of XP in my book even without considering anything else.
How bad is Vista? Well that depends. The UAC does break a good amount of software that works just fine on XP.
Only software that was already broken for normal user accounts in XP, i.e. software that blindly tried to write into the Program Files directory, or software that tried to use registry keys that it wasn't allowed.
This software is already broken; if you use XP as a normal user account, you already can't run the program. Same applies for Windows 2000, or hell, NT4. All Vista did was expose the existing errors more prominently by tightening up security. (Writing applications to work in a multi-user OS is not hard. There's just a lot of Windows developers who, frankly, are completely incompetent and still think of Windows as Windows 95.)
Also the USB system seems to have some bugs in it.
I haven't noticed any. Can you elaborate? (I do have a bug where sometimes when I reboot my keyboard isn't recognized right away, and I have to unplug/replug it. But I think that's my BIOS.)
It is also different and often it seems like it is different not to be better but to just be different.
My guess is that in the cast majority of cases, "different" was determined to be "better" at Microsoft. That doesn't necessarily mean it *is* better, but that does mean that Microsoft did the usability testing, et al, required to make a case for changing it. Simply knowing the amount of usability testing Microsoft does compared to most software products makes me feel better about the changes.
Sure, the Control Panel is a little weird compared to before, but on the other hand when I can just search for "calibrate tablet screen" and I get the correct control panel in a tenth of a second, it's hard to complain. Finding that control panel could have taken significantly longer in XP, with no search feature.
But if you turn off all the extras is it any better than XP?
Depends on how many you turn off. Obviously you can turn off enough to make it exactly like XP; or even more and make it like Windows 2000 if you want.
But if you don't like, for example, UAC and you turn it off, you still get the full-text disk indexing, you still get Shadow Copy, you still get the Aero VPU-rendered desktop, etc.
Remember then they took Netscape down ? That should be enough proof for anyone.
They didn't "take Netscape down." They included a browser with their OS, something that's standard-practice now but they were trend-setting to some extent. Netscape sued over this, then took themselves down by deciding to not actually release any web browsers for several years.
Does harm have to be measured in "economic loss" ?
No, but it's really easy to measure and prove. Otherwise everybody in the US claims "mental anguish" and the legal system grinds to a halt.
And frankly, if some "harm" isn't worth money at some level or another, does it really matter to society enough to engage a judge?
That's a pretty grim inditement of US society in itself.
The US legal system is derived from the British Common Law system (at least in the vast majority of states; I think Louisiana uses a French legal system.) We didn't invent it.
You'll notice that it was the team, not the CEO, who sent the cake.
Well, der. If Ballmer personally sent a cake every single time a competitor (or potential competitor) released a product, he'd do nothing all day but send cakes. I don't see that as an indicator of anything.
They actually use Live Search as the default search in IE, I'm not sure MSN Search even exists (it appears to just redirect to Live Search.) But yes, you're right that that does net a lot of advertising dollars, no doubt.
Secondly, the more people who use alternative browsers, the more websites will cater to those browsers. Using Linux used to have a lot of downfalls because a lot of websites didn't support any browsers that ran in Linux. Now that many windows users are also using alternative browsers, it means that most websites also work with the alternative browsers. That's one less reason why you wouldn't move to Linux.
I suppose so, but that chicken's already left the roost-- sites already work in non-IE browsers, if only to support Macintosh users.
I still don't see why Ballmer would be all that upset about it, frankly. You've given a reason for mild concern, perhaps, but even with that, IE still has a commanding lead in marketshare and it's improving at a high rate of speed since development has restarted on it.
Amazon has gone down once, a couple weeks ago. Once ever, as far as I'm aware... it was rare enough that it made it to the news! When your downtime is so rare its on the news, I call that pretty damned good, personally.
Out of legitimate curiosity, why do many Slashdotters think that Microsoft sees Firefox as a threat? They currently give out IE for free, so it's not like they're making money off of it, and the vast majority of Firefox installs go on Windows computers, so it's not like Firefox significantly is increasing Linux adoption...
Dude, relax. You're typing like your brain is about to explode or something. It's just a BS promotional stunt anyway. (Does Guinness even have a category for this? If you make up a new category, of course you'll get the record.)
If you want to bash Vista for something, bash it for removing the NTDVM and Win16 support from the 64-bit version, the weird versioning and language support, or maybe the lack of 100% backwards compatibility - bash it for something that's actually true, not pre-SP1 performance (which was abysmal, but HAS BEEN FIXED).
Dude, this is Slashdot. People still frequently bash Microsoft for Bob here, a product that was in stores for maybe 6 months, 15 years ago.
Lots of anti-MS people will (after a bit of discussion) admit that XP is probably the best Windows ever.
Yeah, but three years ago they would have said the same about 2000 Pro, and would have told you that XP was a bloated piece of crap with a playskool theme.
And now people are whining and griping about Vista the same way they were about XP when it came out. Yawn.
"Abandonware" isn't any kind of legal definition, someone just made it up to justify stealing old games. (As far as I can work out; another posted implied that its only used for defunct companies, but there are a lot of "abandonware" sites with old EA or LucasArts products on them.)
In short, the answer is: no, you're not entitled to take Windows without paying Microsoft until their copyright expires. Which won't happen... well, it won't happen during your lifetime, most likely.
If I needed to build a new PC tomorrow, I'll want to install XP on it. But if Microsoft won't sell it to me, what can I do about it?
I got three copies of XP Pro sitting in my livingroom. Tell you what, when that happens I'll let you have one at a bargain price. (Maybe a grand or two?:)
Hibernation with Vista works fine on my tablet. As far as I can tell, Ubuntu doesn't support tablet PCs at all, so there's not a lot of choice there. (For what it's worth, Vista has *excellent* handwriting recognition features, heads and shoulders above any previous system I've used.)
The really funny thing is that OS X supports tablet features better than Vista, and Apple doesn't even make a tablet.
Vista has been a complete disaster for Microsoft. It's here, but it doesn't work well,
Wrong.
lacks drivers
Wrong. (Vista can run XP drivers, as long as the number of bits lines up. i.e. 32-bit XP driver on 32-bit Vista driver{1})
and is slower than molasses.
Wrong.
Admit that Vista was the disaster it is: Every else already knows that.
"The majority of people who post on Slashdot" != "Everybody."
Sanction the developers that screwed it up so badly, and Fire the bureaucrats who would rather see Microsoft go down the tubes that admit they made a huge mistake with Vista.
Oh, I agree that the development process was screwed up, and the that Microsoft cut far more QA people than they should have. (They're making a big move towards "XP", complete with the 'no testing other than automated testing' thing, which IMO is a recipe for making terrible products.)
But the end Vista product is not anywhere close to as bad as people on Slashdot seem to think of it. Of course, most of those people have probably never used it, they're just echoing the crowd. (Kudos on actually trying it for a few months.)
{1} I was going to link to the driver page for my Netgear WG111v2 which quite clearly stated a few months ago that no Vista support was forthcoming, but they've now released a Vista-compatible driver for it. WTF, Netgear? In any case, trust me, I was running the XP driver for ages, and it worked fine.
Christ, we saw all these posts when Windows XP supplanted Windows 2000. I feel like I'm stuck in a time-warp.
Is Windows Vista really that bad, or is everyone just a grumpy nostalgia-addled creature of habit? I vote the latter.
Hell, I was happy with the graphics in Windows 2000, and in fact when I use XP I turn it back to Win2K themes always.
Ok, so you're firmly in the "grumpy" camp.
If you want Windows 2000, just use Windows 2000 and shut the hell up so the rest of us can have intelligent conversations on Slashdot about new Windows releases.
My friend, I think you overlook an evident fact: OSX is actually BETTER and FASTER than what OS9 was.
Both of those are arguable. Versions of OS X that competed directly with OS 9 were not faster, and there are many, many parts of OS X that certainly aren't better from a UI perspective. I'd kill to get my Apple Menu Items folder and Application Switcher back and ditch that idiotic Dock, and I've love Finder to... well, to resemble (OS 9) Finder in some way.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think it's necessarily power, although there is a huge "do what I say, obey me!" factor to all special-interest groups.
Penn and Teller did an episode of Bullshit on this, and they came to the conclusion that what most environmentalists are really wanting is anti-corporatism. They hate corporations, anything a corporation does it "evil" and it just so happens that corporations, since most of them actually make products, tend to pollute more than, say, pot-smokers who produce absolutely nothing.
And really safe too, along a speed limit 55 country highway with no barrier for a bike lane in Washington State where it's midnight-dark by 4:30 PM in the winter.
The State of Washington has "default" speed limits, based on the type of road you're on. IIRC, residential streets are 25 MPH, arterials 35 MPH, country highways 45 or 50 MPH and freeways 60 MPH. Been a long time since driver's ed. though. And I'm not sure if this applies in other states.
He's taking his timeline cues from SimCity 2000. We'll have fusion plants by 2050, no problem-- they'll cost $40,000.
The fact that microsoft spent years developing a browser when there was already a much more capable browser available is a pretty sure sign that they care about having a position in the market though, user needs be damned.
Whoa, you're in nostalgia-land here.
Netscape 2-4 were buggy pieces of crap. They crashed all the time. IE didn't crash nearly as much, on Windows *or* Macintosh.
And remember, there was a Macintosh version of IE, which also beat Netscape in market-share-- on a platform Microsoft didn't control, and when both browsers were included on the OS disk. Fair and square.
That is a purist point of view. To the end user they had a program that worked just fine and now it doesn't.
Not to this end-user. But, generally, you're correct.
In any case, what was Microsoft supposed to do? Company X wrote buggy software; it was buggy for 10 years before Microsoft did *anything* to make the bug apparent to the user. In my opinion, that's pretty damned good.
Would you prefer that everything just run as Administrator all the time? Because, that was one of the huge gripes *against* XP and 2000. Now the big gripe is that Microsoft fixed it? Criminy.
Your USB problem is one of the ones that have been reported also many USB to serial converters have issues with just shutting down after a few hours of use.
I still think my specific USB problem is either the BIOS in the computer or the USB hub the keyboard is plugged into. I don't have or use a USB-to-serial converter; I imagine that's an extremely niche piece of hardware.
I notice you are not going to comment on audio problems.
Why would I? I have no experience in trying to record audio at rates below yadda yadda. I don't record audio at all. If you want me to comment on it, I'll comment: "Oh." There, happy?
What it comes down to for most users. Does Vista help me get my work done or does it slow me down.
I claim that it helps almost nobody and slows almost everybody down.
Yes, well, I can't speak for everyone, but it certainly helps me. Vista's recovering from crashed video card drivers alone saves me a couple of reboots a week, that's really enough to put it ahead of XP in my book even without considering anything else.
How bad is Vista? Well that depends. The UAC does break a good amount of software that works just fine on XP.
Only software that was already broken for normal user accounts in XP, i.e. software that blindly tried to write into the Program Files directory, or software that tried to use registry keys that it wasn't allowed.
This software is already broken; if you use XP as a normal user account, you already can't run the program. Same applies for Windows 2000, or hell, NT4. All Vista did was expose the existing errors more prominently by tightening up security. (Writing applications to work in a multi-user OS is not hard. There's just a lot of Windows developers who, frankly, are completely incompetent and still think of Windows as Windows 95.)
Also the USB system seems to have some bugs in it.
I haven't noticed any. Can you elaborate? (I do have a bug where sometimes when I reboot my keyboard isn't recognized right away, and I have to unplug/replug it. But I think that's my BIOS.)
It is also different and often it seems like it is different not to be better but to just be different.
My guess is that in the cast majority of cases, "different" was determined to be "better" at Microsoft. That doesn't necessarily mean it *is* better, but that does mean that Microsoft did the usability testing, et al, required to make a case for changing it. Simply knowing the amount of usability testing Microsoft does compared to most software products makes me feel better about the changes.
Sure, the Control Panel is a little weird compared to before, but on the other hand when I can just search for "calibrate tablet screen" and I get the correct control panel in a tenth of a second, it's hard to complain. Finding that control panel could have taken significantly longer in XP, with no search feature.
But if you turn off all the extras is it any better than XP?
Depends on how many you turn off. Obviously you can turn off enough to make it exactly like XP; or even more and make it like Windows 2000 if you want.
But if you don't like, for example, UAC and you turn it off, you still get the full-text disk indexing, you still get Shadow Copy, you still get the Aero VPU-rendered desktop, etc.
Because they do, and rightly so.
Remember then they took Netscape down ? That should be enough proof for anyone.
They didn't "take Netscape down." They included a browser with their OS, something that's standard-practice now but they were trend-setting to some extent. Netscape sued over this, then took themselves down by deciding to not actually release any web browsers for several years.
Does harm have to be measured in "economic loss" ?
No, but it's really easy to measure and prove. Otherwise everybody in the US claims "mental anguish" and the legal system grinds to a halt.
And frankly, if some "harm" isn't worth money at some level or another, does it really matter to society enough to engage a judge?
That's a pretty grim inditement of US society in itself.
The US legal system is derived from the British Common Law system (at least in the vast majority of states; I think Louisiana uses a French legal system.) We didn't invent it.
You'll notice that it was the team, not the CEO, who sent the cake.
Well, der. If Ballmer personally sent a cake every single time a competitor (or potential competitor) released a product, he'd do nothing all day but send cakes. I don't see that as an indicator of anything.
They actually use Live Search as the default search in IE, I'm not sure MSN Search even exists (it appears to just redirect to Live Search.) But yes, you're right that that does net a lot of advertising dollars, no doubt.
Secondly, the more people who use alternative browsers, the more websites will cater to those browsers. Using Linux used to have a lot of downfalls because a lot of websites didn't support any browsers that ran in Linux. Now that many windows users are also using alternative browsers, it means that most websites also work with the alternative browsers. That's one less reason why you wouldn't move to Linux.
I suppose so, but that chicken's already left the roost-- sites already work in non-IE browsers, if only to support Macintosh users.
I still don't see why Ballmer would be all that upset about it, frankly. You've given a reason for mild concern, perhaps, but even with that, IE still has a commanding lead in marketshare and it's improving at a high rate of speed since development has restarted on it.
Assuming you're being sarcastic...
Amazon has gone down once, a couple weeks ago. Once ever, as far as I'm aware... it was rare enough that it made it to the news! When your downtime is so rare its on the news, I call that pretty damned good, personally.
Out of legitimate curiosity, why do many Slashdotters think that Microsoft sees Firefox as a threat? They currently give out IE for free, so it's not like they're making money off of it, and the vast majority of Firefox installs go on Windows computers, so it's not like Firefox significantly is increasing Linux adoption...
Hell, the IE team sent them a cake:
http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2008/06/17/the-cake-is-a-lie-ie-team-bakes-a-treat-for-mozilla
And I'd wager it makes their jobs a lot more interesting and important, so there's no resentment there.
I don't get why Microsoft would care, frankly.
Spore is an EA game. You'll be lucky if it doesn't kick you in the nuts when you install it.
Dude, relax. You're typing like your brain is about to explode or something. It's just a BS promotional stunt anyway. (Does Guinness even have a category for this? If you make up a new category, of course you'll get the record.)
Blah blah blah... did you have an actual point?
Yes, actually, I do.
If you want to bash Vista for something, bash it for removing the NTDVM and Win16 support from the 64-bit version, the weird versioning and language support, or maybe the lack of 100% backwards compatibility - bash it for something that's actually true, not pre-SP1 performance (which was abysmal, but HAS BEEN FIXED).
Dude, this is Slashdot. People still frequently bash Microsoft for Bob here, a product that was in stores for maybe 6 months, 15 years ago.
Good luck with that.
Well, you're right, I was simplifying too much.
If the copyright owner decides not to make the product available, you're pretty much SOL.
Sorry. But if you don't like the law, campaign to change the law-- don't just steal shit.
Lots of anti-MS people will (after a bit of discussion) admit that XP is probably the best Windows ever.
Yeah, but three years ago they would have said the same about 2000 Pro, and would have told you that XP was a bloated piece of crap with a playskool theme.
And now people are whining and griping about Vista the same way they were about XP when it came out. Yawn.
"Abandonware" isn't any kind of legal definition, someone just made it up to justify stealing old games. (As far as I can work out; another posted implied that its only used for defunct companies, but there are a lot of "abandonware" sites with old EA or LucasArts products on them.)
:)
In short, the answer is: no, you're not entitled to take Windows without paying Microsoft until their copyright expires. Which won't happen... well, it won't happen during your lifetime, most likely.
If I needed to build a new PC tomorrow, I'll want to install XP on it. But if Microsoft won't sell it to me, what can I do about it?
I got three copies of XP Pro sitting in my livingroom. Tell you what, when that happens I'll let you have one at a bargain price. (Maybe a grand or two?
Hibernation with Vista works fine on my tablet. As far as I can tell, Ubuntu doesn't support tablet PCs at all, so there's not a lot of choice there. (For what it's worth, Vista has *excellent* handwriting recognition features, heads and shoulders above any previous system I've used.)
The really funny thing is that OS X supports tablet features better than Vista, and Apple doesn't even make a tablet.
Vista has been a complete disaster for Microsoft. It's here, but it doesn't work well,
Wrong.
lacks drivers
Wrong. (Vista can run XP drivers, as long as the number of bits lines up. i.e. 32-bit XP driver on 32-bit Vista driver{1})
and is slower than molasses.
Wrong.
Admit that Vista was the disaster it is: Every else already knows that.
"The majority of people who post on Slashdot" != "Everybody."
Sanction the developers that screwed it up so badly, and Fire the bureaucrats who would rather see Microsoft go down the tubes that admit they made a huge mistake with Vista.
Oh, I agree that the development process was screwed up, and the that Microsoft cut far more QA people than they should have. (They're making a big move towards "XP", complete with the 'no testing other than automated testing' thing, which IMO is a recipe for making terrible products.)
But the end Vista product is not anywhere close to as bad as people on Slashdot seem to think of it. Of course, most of those people have probably never used it, they're just echoing the crowd. (Kudos on actually trying it for a few months.)
{1} I was going to link to the driver page for my Netgear WG111v2 which quite clearly stated a few months ago that no Vista support was forthcoming, but they've now released a Vista-compatible driver for it. WTF, Netgear? In any case, trust me, I was running the XP driver for ages, and it worked fine.
Christ, we saw all these posts when Windows XP supplanted Windows 2000. I feel like I'm stuck in a time-warp.
Is Windows Vista really that bad, or is everyone just a grumpy nostalgia-addled creature of habit? I vote the latter.
Hell, I was happy with the graphics in Windows 2000, and in fact when I use XP I turn it back to Win2K themes always.
Ok, so you're firmly in the "grumpy" camp.
If you want Windows 2000, just use Windows 2000 and shut the hell up so the rest of us can have intelligent conversations on Slashdot about new Windows releases.
My friend, I think you overlook an evident fact: OSX is actually BETTER and FASTER than what OS9 was.
Both of those are arguable. Versions of OS X that competed directly with OS 9 were not faster, and there are many, many parts of OS X that certainly aren't better from a UI perspective. I'd kill to get my Apple Menu Items folder and Application Switcher back and ditch that idiotic Dock, and I've love Finder to... well, to resemble (OS 9) Finder in some way.