How Vista Disappoints 731
MCSEBear writes "Writer Paul Thurrott has given Microsoft a verbal dressing down for what has become of Windows Vista. He details Microsoft's broken promises over the years since Longhorn/Vista was first previewed back in 2003. He demonstrates where current Vista builds fail to live up to Microsoft's current hype of the much reduced feature set. From the article: 'I don't hate Windows Vista, and I certainly don't hate Microsoft for disappointing me and countless other customers with a product that doesn't even come close to meeting its original promises. I'm sure the company learned something from this debacle, and hopefully it will be more open and honest about what it can and cannot do in the future ... It some ways, Windows Vista actually will exceed Mac OS X and Linux, but not to the depth we were promised. Instead, Windows Vista will do what so many other Windows releases have done, and simply offer consumers and business users a few major changes and many subtle or minor updates. That's not horrible. It's just not what was promised.'"
Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, in summary, the new Vista:
Thurrott says he still doesn't hate Microsoft for not delivering on all of these promises:
The world needs friends like Mr. Thurrott. He's a pretty forgiving guy. But, it would have been nice had Microsoft really been able to deliver this as promised. I was looking forward to buying a new upgraded computer!
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft (Score:4, Insightful)
This article and its points (good ones) make me respect Paul even more. Not to mention TFA has some really well thought out points. MS is blowing it, hard.
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
You can't tell by the score 5/5.
Now imagine you get your college paper back with as much complaints and still get an A.
(Doesn't quite work like that, does it?)
No offense, but you've no reason to respect him even more.
That being said, the list of gripes is accurate and honest.
However considering how much money corporations and worse yet, individuals, have to spend each year fixing Microsoft's mistakes (viruses, security) I don't have the luxury of forgivenes
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry. I don't see any compelling reason (or hardly any reason at all) to move from Windows 2000 or (for those couple of laptops of mine that have it) XP.
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
IMHO it's isn't, NT had a unix-like security model (not exactly the same, but...)from the start. XP may created user accounts with administrator privileges by default, but the problem there is just a bad default, they could have changed it very easily in the vista code base or in a XP SP.
The vista security model is different. I'm not sure o
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
The reason they use such a bad default is because a lot of programs require admin rights to run and your average user doesn't want to bother (or doesn't know how to) use the "runas" feature. In this regard, the security mod
Re:Posix and security (Score:5, Insightful)
So, no, Linux/Unix has not been doing this since inception. There's been military versions of Unix that have done it for a long time, but it's hasn't been a generally available feature (and still isn't on the desktop even for SELinux distros).
Re:Posix and security (Score:3, Informative)
I refer you to the "/etc/group" file on almost every version of *nix for consideration as well as file permissions being able to be set differently as user/group/all for read/write/execute tasks.
If you meant something completely different then say so - I only have the incorrect blanket statement from before to go on. Yes, so the new version of MS Windows may be cool - but please consider that other
Transparent Windows: learn from Apple's Mistake (Score:5, Informative)
You'd think MS would learn from Apple's mistake... instead they took it to the next level of ridiculousness. When OS X first came out it was littered with transparent menus, menu bars, dialogs, etc. A lot of the elements have either been removed, or brought up to about 98% opacity. You might not even notice the transparency unless you really look closely.
Drastic transparency looked -awesome- in marketing screen shots, and it was promoted as a way to know if content existed behind something such as a window bar. However, it was really annoying. Interface elements become difficult to distinguish and it hindered the speed in which it took to accomplish a task.
But, at least MS gives users the option to turn this crap off. Apple never did that. Mac users needed to wait for Apple to slowly remedy the UI elements we were complaining about.
Re:Transparent Windows: learn from Apple's Mistake (Score:3, Insightful)
And what makes it worse for MS is that they have such a long release cycle. So people are going to be "stuck" with a bad GUI for many years. Of course, you
Re:Resistant to change (Score:5, Interesting)
Nobody wants a change for the worse. But chances are that, just like Win95, 2k and XP, everybody will learn the new features, understand why the change is better and will be thankful they are past the old days of the previous OSs.
The problem is, most of the actual features were ripped out and mothballed, while most of the anti-features were left in. For features you get a graphics card accelerated UI, some security enhancements that reviewers claim are really annoying and poorly implemented, Some dev tool improvements, and that is about it. For anti-features you get DRM restricting use of your data, intentionally crippled OpenGL performance, a built-in proprietary replacement for the open PDF standard in an attempt to lock you in even more, etc. You do get indexed files (done less well than Google desktop or OS X), you don't get a database file system, you don't get resolution independent UI, you don't get a usable shell environment, etc. All the reasons to get it were ripped out while all the reasons to avoid it were left in. This makes sense for Microsoft. You have to buy a new computer eventually so you'll be forced to buy a copy of Vista bundled with it, regardless of the feature set. It just sucks donkey balls for users.
Re:Resistant to change (Score:3, Interesting)
True, if we just knew which version had which features. MS needs to take another page from Apple's book here. With Apple, there's OS X, and OS X Server.
But no, MS thinks we need the lite, medium, large, extra-large, huge, and super-sized versions, all at different price points, with the versions worth using being more expensive, of course.
Re:Resistant to change (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed, I can't really figure out why he, or anyone else for that matter, finds this surprising. Windows 95 was precisely the same kind of beast, as was Windows ME. Even Windows 2000, while one of the better MS operating systems, still didn't live up to expectations.
It's not as if MS is
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean like sudo?
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft (Score:3, Interesting)
"run as" and login as an Administrator should be reserved for administrative tasks like managing users and devices, not running standard applica
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
He's not talking about filesystem security. And, yes, Linux didn't get ACLs as quickly as Windows did. UNIX, however, has had them for ages, before Windows was a commercial product.
UAP is a means of managing access to administrative rights without forcing the user to always operate as Administrator. Other than OS
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft (Score:3, Interesting)
Computers will still be sold with the latest Windows has to offer. Computers still sold when ME was available.
People can walk down the computer aisles and see 8 feet (16 feet on some stores) of Apple computer offerings, 4 feet of Linux preloaded offerings (in some stores), or 48 feet of Windows offerings.
If Vista is an abonimation like ME was, then MS will simply create a patch, call it Vista SE (Second Edition), and sell it.
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft (Score:3, Funny)
Don't you need to run BeOS if you actually want to BE a computer?
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft (Score:4, Informative)
Your computer is a tool and for certain things you need pretty specific tools, like Quicken, Adobe CS2, Premiere/Final Cut/Media Studio Pro.
While there is Inkscape, Scribus, The Gimp, Ghostscript, and Krita on Linux, they don't match up feature-for-feature with Adobe CS2. They do their jobs "Good enough" but. . .
Image editing/digital painting: Every time I use The Gimp, I just cringe at the UI, I hate its window management (when I bring one Gimp document to the foreground, so should ALL of the palettes), and it only does about 95% of what I need. It does not have ANY vector support.
Illustration/drawing: Inkscape? It does its job fairly well, but its PDF support is horrid. If you use alpha blending, export to TIFF or PNG and use another program to convert to PDF. Also, printing directly from Inkscape stinks.
Accounting: Quickbooks? There IS no replacement. Folks will quickly suggest kmymoney or gnucash, but not having ever owned a business, they naively think that the Linux equivalent of MS Money or Quicken will get the job done. Hint: it won't.
Video NLE: Cinelerra is a bear to build, configure, and learn. Hell, you're lucky if you can resolve the 3,129,812 dependendencies and get it built.
With that said, I use Linux on my work machine >99% of the time. If I need Adobe CS2, I go to another workstation and do my work there, then copy it over. If I need to access Quickbooks, I remote desktop to the office manager's desktop and take care of what I need, but otherwise, we're running mostly Linux. Windows (and OS X) will always be around on at least one or two machines due to certain applications being unavailable on Linux, and no real suitable alternatives to those applications being available on Linux.
If Adobe CS2 and Quickbooks were to come out for Linux tomorrow, we'd be able to punt Windows for the most part, booting to it only when we need to develop a Windows solution for a client. Until the tools we need are available on Linux, it's not the complete solution and there is still some room for Microsoft at my office. In fact we're in the process of punting Exchange right now and hopefully by next Monday the cutover will be complete.
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
I haven't read about the permissions scheme in vista but I do know something about how both Unix and NT handle them. Mind you, I won't talk about Unix ACLs, because I've never used them, which is in turn because there are not convenient userspace tools for dealing with ACLs. (And it will never be as easy to handle them on the commandline as octal mask perms.)
The biggest difference between classic Unix perms and NT perms isn't ACLs, though. It's the fact that Unix gives most permissions, and NT gives lea
Sounds like an apologist (Score:5, Funny)
Hmmm... Sounds like something I've heard before from a sister-in-law:
'I don't hate taking care of the kids, and I certainly don't hate my husband for disappointing me and the kids with his actions that don't even come close to meeting his original promises. I'm sure I learned something from this debacle, and hopefully he will be more open and honest about what he can and cannot do in the future
Both sound like someone trying to apologize and explain away someone elses bad behaviour.
Re:Sounds like an apologist (Score:3, Funny)
Interesting double entendre.
I still waiting. (Score:5, Funny)
Insightful (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Insightful (Score:3, Insightful)
The Cairo prject was M$'s attempt to finsih killing off OS/2 and kill off the various desktop UNIX distro's (HP had a nice candidate with the 900/712 with Lotus 123 and Ami-Pro running natively on HP-UX). Kind of thinking that the WinFS idea is like speech recognition (or Duke Nukem Forever) - remember reading Jerry Pournelle quoting Bill Godbout about the 80286 will be powerfull enough for speech recognition, this was ca 1982.
Re:Insightful (Score:5, Funny)
Far be it from me to be a grammar nazi, but even so I gotta say:
"Worst... Comma... Placement... EVER!"
Re:Insightful (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Insightful (Score:3, Interesting)
At the time (1993), there was talk of the fabled database-based file system that would revolutionize file storage. This was going to be integr
Re:I still waiting. (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right. The quote shows the author to be naive/uninformed:
I don't hate Windows Vista, and I certainly don't hate Microsoft for disappointing me and countless other customers with a product that doesn't even come close to meeting its original promises. I'm sure the company learned something from this debacle, and hopefully it will be more open and honest about what it can and cannot do in the future
This has always been Microsoft's MO. Late and with most of the intended features dropped out. They promise the world when they start development, but the new versions of their software tend to be the old version with a few tweaks, updates, fixes, a new skin, and all the controls in different places.
Re:I still waiting. (Score:3, Insightful)
It doesn't matter what MS delivers or doesn't deliver. That's the beauty of a monopoly. You have to eat whatever comes out of their bowels.
Re:I still waiting. (Score:3, Funny)
PSSSSST!! (Score:3, Funny)
A credibility problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's Paul Thurrott... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, why would trust a guy that admits and critizes Microsoft problems when they exist, that admits that most of the things in vista are inspired in mac os x, and that owns a mac and likes mac os x? [winsupersite.com]
Re:It's Paul Thurrott... (Score:4, Informative)
"Microsoft is working on similar, if further-reaching, technology for Longhorn. Apple's solution, however, is here right now and it appears to work quite well. Score one for Apple."
"Overall, I've always been a big fan of Safari, and I'd use it rather than Firefox or IE if it were available on Windows. It's an excellent application."
"Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" is, in fact, a minor upgrade to an already well-designed and rock-solid operating system. It will not change the way you use your computer at all, and instead uses the exact same mouse and windows interface we've had since the first Mac debuted in 1984. That isn't a complaint about Tiger, per se: It's a high-quality release. My issue here is with marketing, not with reality."
"Apple Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" is the strongest OS X release yet and a worthy competitor to Windows XP"
"And unlike Longhorn, it's shipping any day now. What a concept."
"The graphics subsystem is substantially improved, if a little obviously modeled after that in Mac OS X. Heck, half of the features of Windows Vista seem to have been lifted from Apple's marketing materials"
"Windows Vista will still include pervasive index-based searching features modeled, apparently, after the Spotlight feature in Mac OS X."
My Wife is Switching to the Mac [winsupersite.com]
Yes, it definitively sounds like the typical Windows who can't write non-biased opinions about other products
One memorable line from his review of 10.4 had it that Windows XP SP2 was a more significant update than was Tiger, yet elsewhere in that review he just casually pointed out how 10.4 was little more than a large collection of bug fixes
Maybe because it may very well true? Sorry if it doesn't means the same for you, but the addition of applications to get the time, weather and stocks (nice, but "revolutionary"???), spothlight, quartz 2d extreme (an optimization to an already good graphics subsystem) and core image looks to me like a light addition compared with all the internal features microsoft touched/add in SP2 (rewriting part of the IE UI, rewrite part of the IE internals to handle better the security objects, the add-on manager, the much-improved firewall, the much improved wireless support, the reworked RPC internals, updated directx, the non-executable stack protection. You may argue that Mac OS X already does all what those XP updates do but for XP SP2 is a HUGE jump, much bigger than what 10.4 for mac os x 10.3
Re:It's Paul Thurrott... (Score:3, Interesting)
The main issue I had with that review is that its essential purpose was to highlight two features - Spotlight and Dashboard - one which could be safely explained away as being in Longhorn and one which could be dismissed as relatively pointless eye-candy.* It ignored advances like Core Data (probably too technical for Thurrott, and not particularly interesting for his readership, but some developers have been literally wanking over it. OK, not literally, but...) and, m
Re:It's Paul Thurrott... (Score:3, Insightful)
Vista will dominate (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Vista will dominate (Score:3, Interesting)
I think XP is gross and from what I hear about Vista so far, count me out. Especially if it includes *any* DRM.
Re:Vista will dominate (Score:3, Interesting)
And who's to say in 2010 Vista will be "current" anyway?
Re:Vista will dominate (Score:3, Funny)
Vista probably won't be "current" in 2010... it'll be "coming soon"...
Re:Vista will dominate (Score:3, Insightful)
I would imagine that very few people actually *have* to run Windows.
Re:Vista will dominate (Score:5, Informative)
Then they relented and let *some people* install Windows 2000 on their machines, if it was determined that they really needed it. That's not an uncommon practice with very large companies. All the PCs we had had license stickers for more recent versions of Windows, but we still had an OS which had been released back in 1996.
I've nothing against using Windows, as long as someone pays me for it...
Re:Vista will dominate (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Vista will dominate, maybe, maybe not (Score:5, Insightful)
Most likely the biggest market for Vista will be cosumers buying new systems from the likes of Dell or HP which will bundle the new Vista OS with the hardware. They won't have a choice. Unless those vendors continue to sell lower priced systems with XP and reserve Vista for the high end systems which are apparently is needed to see all the eye candy.
Re:Vista will dominate, maybe, maybe not (Score:3, Insightful)
As another poster mentioned Vista won't make an appearance on any of my home rigs for some time (if at all), it reminds me of the Windows ME release; over-hyped
Don't care. Don't want to care. (Score:5, Insightful)
Since they're building DRM right into the core of the OS (including crap such as the Protected Media Path and all its ilk) I have absolutely no reason to think they won't allow corporate partners (RIAA, MPAA, BSA) to abuse this to kill pieces of "unapproved" media or "rogue" apps. What happens when the .*AA tells them Azureus is being used to pirate software or media? Shut 'er down! Even if you've only ever used it to share the latest fad video or big open source distribution, it won't matter. And that's wrong.
Whether I agree with them on issues of piracy or not (I don't approve of pirating software myself) I refuse to allow my computer to participate in extending or enforcing their policies, and I refuse to install DRM based media players. I'm going to keep XP on that machine for as long as it runs, or until I replace it with an open OS.
Re:Don't care. Don't want to care. (Score:4, Informative)
Many of the complaints I hear along these lines are usually referring to the 1.x versions of OOo, and were true at that time. However, the 2.x versions of OpenOffice are very stable, not as resource intensive, and much more mature than their 1.x counterparts (Sun had a big hand in that). Document conversion from MS Office is a problem still, but even Microsoft has problems converting between various versions of MS Office, so it's hardly a showstopper.
Bottom line: employees are usually retrained when an office upgrades to a new version of MS Office anyway, so why would this be any different? And because the native format of OpenOffice is OpenDocument, once you make the costly conversion from MS Office formats, you will not have to worry about conversion again (not necessarily because OpenDocument is the end-all of formats, but because it is open and documented, so that third parties can easily write batch converters for whatever new formats might pop up).
Admittedly, third party Windows-only software can be a problem. But just work that $200-a-seat savings into a contract with some software firm to get electronics or drafting software ported to Linux. Many CAD programs exist for UNIX and can be easily ported, and the Windows-only programs could run through an emulation layer such as Wine. The long-term cost savings would be quite high.
The bottom line is that there are absolutely no technical barriers to switching to Linux/OpenOffice on a workstation computer. There are only human resources challenges such as training, fear of change, and complacency, and perhaps budgetary concerns during the initial switch.
Re:Don't care. Don't want to care. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not a big GUI hacker (services and components are where I shine,) so the new chrome in Vista will have no impact on my code anyway.
Even o
So just for perspective... (Score:4, Funny)
Can anyone here name any Microsoft product that lived up to its hype? Anyone?
And no, Freecell doesn't count.
Easy (Score:5, Funny)
Word 2007 will easily live up to the hype. I've heard it's going to be absolutely amazing.
Re:So just for perspective... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So just for perspective... (Score:5, Funny)
Hi!
Filesystem (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Filesystem (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, WinFS would and *will* be nice, but it's not a deal-breaker.
I'm more concerned that Vista is yet-another-version-of-Windows NT. I honestly would like MS to risk it all and make a brand-new version of Windows, written from scratch, that only runs "old" stuff under emulation. Just start over. It'll never happen, of course.
Re:Filesystem (Score:4, Informative)
OS-400 comes to mind as being the original (probably was not). Of course, that was YEARS ago.
Re:Filesystem (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Filesystem (Score:5, Interesting)
I've karma to burn, so just a couple of points:
Vista doesn't look vastly different...
This is such bollocks it's hard to know where to start. As Thurrott laments, one of the most fundamental features of a windowing system - the idea of depth in a 2D space and so marking out the active window - has been thoroughly fucked up by a team whose sole goal seems to have been to chase the teh pretty crowd. Those screenshots were damning. Usability has gone to shreds.
Do you actually have any evidence of this? Judging by the icons in some of the dialogue boxes (try here [winsupersite.com]), some of the stuff hasn't seen an update since Windows 95. There's a reason it "'appears' to not be different to push away current Windows Users".
Evidently not. Evidently they are so poorly implemented that even fanboy Thurrott is banging his head on the table.
Vista is a new OS with the first radical change in Windows since Windows 3.0.
You're a fucking idiot. A first class fucking nutcase.
Then I read the rest of your post, where you start talking about this fire bollocks, or something, and I realise that you actually are a fucking nutcase...
OK, I'll give you that. Apple brought decent search to Mac OS X in 2005 after Microsoft announced it would implement it in Vista, then Longhorn. Alas, Windows users will get their hands on it in...2007. Hmmmm...
iqu
(And, just one thing, moderators, before modding me down, take a moment to read and consider the parent's post. I am normally a rational and controlled type, but sometimes things just have to be said...)
Re:Filesystem (Score:3, Insightful)
As you'll recall, is was quite evident that Apple had been working on this long before Microsoft announced it. They hired Dominic Giampaolo, the co-creator of BFS, the first commercial file system with live search (AFAIK), some time in 2002. And since BeOS introduced this in 1996, around 10 years ago, nothing Microsoft is doing with search or even WinFS is original.
This just in... (Score:5, Funny)
A product's performance doesn't live up to the hype.
I know we're all shocked that he unthinkable finally happened.
"The Bad Old Microsoft" (Score:5, Insightful)
My Vista sucks (Score:5, Funny)
In addition, during this file transfer, Firefox will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Windows Media Player 11 is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Vista PCs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Vista machine that has run faster than its XP counterpart, despite the translucent interface. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 3000 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that Vista is a superior operating system.
Vista addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use Windows Vista over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
Re:My Vista sucks (Score:4, Funny)
Wow.. according to your UID, you've been around since this troll was first crafted!
Bravo.
Re:My Vista sucks (Score:3, Funny)
Re:My Vista sucks (Score:3, Funny)
Re:My Vista sucks (Score:5, Informative)
Re:My Vista sucks (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:My Vista sucks (Score:3, Insightful)
Because it wasn't supposed to be a year until the release. And yet they are having problems as severe as these?
Unless the folder he's trying to copy to is in his file cabinet, I'd say its a sign of mediocrity to come.
You Have to Have to Have to (Score:5, Informative)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-41344461
I've always been of fan of each OS borrowing from one another, but this is just sad. MS ripped everything out of Vista that was truly innovative and we are left with XP rethemed and few nice subsystem tweaks. Frankly Vista is a decent update if it had be released in 2003. WTF have they been doing for 6 years?
Somehow, I don't think you are average (Score:3, Insightful)
Virtual desktops? Do you have any concept of how confusing that would be to most people? (Do you have any idea how many free virtual desktop programs you can download if you really want the feature?)
And follow mouse? Just plain annoying.
Shell? Most users never even know it's there.
exceeding OS X and Linux (Score:5, Funny)
For example, with Windows Vista, you will get more:
- system instability
- viruses
- application crashes
- lost data
- maintenance time
- security patches
- bug fixes
But it doesn't stop there! In order to take advantage of all new features in Vista, you will also get to spend more money on fancy hardware, including juiced up graphics cards to render the fancy new user interface.
Re:exceeding OS X and Linux (Score:4, Funny)
Warmed over MacOSX (Score:3, Interesting)
"Promises were made. Excitement was generated. None of it, as it turns out, was worth a damn. From a technical standpoint, the version of Windows Vista we will receive is a sad shell of its former self, a shadow. One might still call it a major Windows release. I will, for various reasons. The kernel was rewritten. The graphics subsystem is substantially improved, if a little obviously modeled after that in Mac OS X. Heck, half of the features of Windows Vista seem to have been lifted from Apple's marketing materials.
Shame on you, Microsoft. Shame on you, but not just for not doing better. We expect you to copy Apple, just as Apple (and Linux) in its turn copies you. But we do not and should not expect to be promised the world, only to be given a warmed over copy of Mac OS X Tiger in return. Windows Vista is a disappointment. There is no way to sugarcoat that very real truth."
Microsoft has really fumbled the ball over and over with the development of this OS. It's nice to see them get called out for it.
Another Windows OS... So what? (Score:3, Insightful)
You think MS can rewrite the API with each release? ISVs want a consistent platform. If MS releases an OS that can't run software for previous OS versions, no one would buy it. The only reason for new OS releases is to keep siphoning money in exchange for "current version support". The whole idea is bogus and designed to maximize profit. The last thing MS considers is what is good for their customers.
Disappointing? Certainly. But... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Disappointing? Certainly. But... (Score:5, Insightful)
How does Microsoft make money? 1. Selling software. 2. Selling Books for that software. 3. Selling Certifications.
So what happens after everyone who is going to buy an OS, Book, & Cert has bought them all? What does Microsoft do? They announce that the old stuff is no longer supported, everyone has to buy the new stuff now! Then the mayhem starts. Applications slowly begin to break. Interfaces are no longer "flashy" or "in style". Then it hits the mainstream. "You don't have the new version yet? Wow, that OS is like 6 years old. You must not be on top of the IT world after all." Adoption hits critical mass, consumers start to flock to the new software. Now even the hard-core techies have to learn the bullshit new interfaces, programming languages, etc.
Point is, Microsoft's business model relies on breaking things. They can't sell the new stuff until they break the old. This is why Microsoft is dangerous to business on the whole.
Leopard (Score:3, Interesting)
He overlooks the biggest crime of all. (Score:5, Informative)
In case you don't get it its making a decarative statement and then presenting options that have no correlation to the statement, I'm a professional in computers, and have been using them for well over 15 years and couldn't possibly even guess what each of those options should do. Continue what? if I dont have permission to do it how can I continue. Cancel what exactly?, as far as I can tell it just said it wasn't going to do anything anyway. Skip? skip the delete I was just told I can't do? I am baffled... based on the article I guess that it should have said something like "You currently don't have permission to delete this file, what would you like to do?" and given choices like "Grant Permission", "Don't Delete" etc...
I haven't really used windows extensively in a very long time so maybe if I did I would be used to figuring out these obscure dialogues, but I don't think I would ever stop cringing when I saw them. It reminds me of the dialog windows used to put up when you went to access help for the first time in an app, it would ask how big the search database should be (or something) and give you three choices similar to "small (recommended)" "medium" "large" and no other info, not even a clue as to how this would effect your help at all. do they still do that nonsense?
Not the first time they haven't met expectations (Score:5, Funny)
Very interesting... (Score:3, Insightful)
Even more interesting is that half of the features missing from the stripped down version of Vista are already in Apple's OS X and have been for about a year now. And Leopard is right around the corner.
Keep up the good work Bill & company.
True victim of Monopoly (Score:3, Interesting)
Sorry but we are a Microsoft shop (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Promises (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft marketed a load of vapor to people for years so they would wait for Vista. And if someone is waiting for Vista, they aren't installing Mac OS X or Linux.
Either Microsoft did this to intentionally slow the growth of other products while their product was in development, or they screwed up so badly in their development that they were forced to strip out all of these planned features. Neither one of those options says anything good about Microsoft.
Re:View from a non programmer (Score:5, Insightful)
I know you meant to have that line as praise, but you've put the fear of God in me and anyone that's ever used a Flash-based UI.
On the Programmers View (Score:5, Insightful)
The "home" edition of Vista won't support the interfaces. So, any software oriented toward home use cannot depend on the feature.
Corporate desktops are plain. The investment in the required dx10 infrastructure won't happen for years. So, the feature cannot be exploited in corporate applications either.
After eliminating home and coporate, what is left? AERO really won't have much of a place, outside of enthusiasts. Unless there is an application that can start in the enthusiast domain and drive the migration.
My prediction: the ONLY application that exploits this feature will be Vista itself. Possibly Microsoft may update some applications, but it must remain an optional part.
Microsoft will offer
Don't count on this feature as a platform for 3 to 5 (or more) years, though.
Ratboy.
I understand, but don't agree. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It'll exceed OSX and Linux eh? (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean, to say something is a linux killer suggests that Linux is the mainstream OS that everybody is using, and so Windows will overtake their dominance.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but 95% of the world runs Windows on their Desktop.
Sure, Linux is dominant in servers and server technology. But I would never have claimed that Windows 95 would kill Linux as a server OS.
When Windows 95 came out, where as Linux? Linux back then WAS a difficult POS to use, a convoluted OS w
Re:It'll exceed OSX and Linux eh? (Score:3, Funny)
I envy your faith in humanity
Re:It'll exceed OSX and Linux eh? (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Windows took the initial desktop market (think OS/2 times, pre-OS X, Linux had little to nothing)
2. The next generation grew up with Windows
3. With dominance applications are built for Windows
Linux/OSS aren't just trying to catch up with Microsoft. They're also trying to catch up with just about every developer of commercial applications in the world, since hardly an
Re:It'll exceed OSX and Linux eh? (Score:5, Informative)
I was using NT 4 back in 1996. Back then, it has SMP (scaled up to 32 processors, although the cheap version was limited to two). Linux was just starting to get SMP capability.
It had native threading, which Linux only got last year.
It had full support for ACLs in the filesystem. Linux got that in, what, 2000? Does it even work with the standard filesystems? I've been using ACLs with UFS2 (the default FS) on FreeBSD for a couple of years, but I've not seen them in common use on Linux.
It had a GUI with a single, consistent, user interface toolkit. Linux got one of those in 2030?
It had support for hardware accelerated OpenGL and later DirectX. I can't remember the first time I got 3D acceleration of anything other than GLide working with Linux, but I don't think it was before 2000.
It had a stable ABI and component system that allowed some basic introspection and management of reference counted objects. These objects still work on current versions of Windows[1].
Did NT4 kill Linux? No. It was, however, a long way ahead of the competition. Now, let's look at MacOS of that era; it had the consistent UI toolkit (and a set of HIGs people actually used), but no security model, no memory protection and no pre-emptive multitasking. NT4 was pretty far ahead of that too. Apparently OS/2 was in a similar place, but I didn't use it so I can't comment.
Now, let's look at Vista. It's got the same VMS-lite kernel. A nice architecture - much nicer than UNIX, in my opinion - but they haven't really done anything interesting with it for a decade. It's got a 3D accelerated desktop, which may be slightly better than OS X 10.4 (although 10.5 will probably be out before Vista), and fairly similar to Cairo on something like XGl. It will have a horrible mish-mash of visual styles and behaviours that will make a GNOME/KDE hybrid look like the paragon of usability. It will have...uh...
Vista may be ahead of the competition when it launches, but if it is then it will be by such a small margin that it will be the last release that is. When Microsoft originally announced Longhorn, people thought they might actually deliver. Their competitors were worried. They started developing the same sorts of features Vista promised and eventually came very close. Meanwhile, Microsoft started dropping the same features from their version until Vista became so anticlimactic that even Windows fanboys stopped caring.
[1] I think. I haven't actually used Windows for two years, but I haven't read anything to the contrary.
Re:It'll exceed OSX and Linux eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
It [NT4] had full support for ACLs in the filesystem. Linux got that in, what, 2000? Does it even work with the standard filesystems?
ACL's are a filesystem feature, not an OS feature. NTFS has them, FAT and FAT32 do not. Ext2 does not have ACL's, though hooks were left for ACL's from the beginning and support can be patched [bestbits.at] into 2.4 and 2.6 kernels for Ext2 and Ext3. AFS (Andrew File System), which is the original king of ACL's, could be used on Linux in 1998. ReiserFS has them (don't know for how long). SGI's XFS is the same (I think this was pretty recent).
I've been using ACLs with UFS2 (the default FS) on FreeBSD for a couple of years, but I've not seen them in common use on Linux.
Evidently, people don't miss them, because the option has been available to Linux users about as long as NTFS has been on the scene. I would hazard a guess that ACL's aren't the "make or break" feature for most people's filesystem choice.
Now, I'm not going to seriously rain on your parade as the point of this argument seems to boil down to: NTFS is a great filesystem. I agree. NTFS is some sweet technology that works real nice in the here and now. But it isn't the only game in town for high performance journaling file systems (with ACL's no less). The fact that people don't really seek out ACL's on linux is simply that ogw permissions are so well understood by so many unix admins, and most of the time, ogw permissions are good enough.
Regards,
Ross
Re:It'll exceed OSX and Linux eh? (Score:4, Insightful)
More to the point, ACLs are an OS feature, not a Kernel feature. To linux-the-kernel they are irrelevant. To linux-the-os they are important, after all you need implementations in the filesystem, the file utils, system libraries, gui file browsers, et cetera, to really implement them fully.
The grandparent was making the point that linux-the-os, in whatever flavor, was less mature than windows-the-os. Personally, I don't see that anything you said goes against that point, other than by pedantically treating linux as a kernel only.
Re:Here we go again.. (Score:3, Funny)
That's where other products like OSX and Linux comes in to show you what the good lovin' is like. That's when the world will wise up to their bad relationship, and leave it for the hot piece of action that knows a thing or two about a thing or two.
Re:Biggest Problem with Windows... (Score:3, Informative)
I know, I know. ACLs (you are using NTFS, right?) are a bit complicated to someone used to standard UNI* rights managment. If you cannot find ACLs in Win XP Pro, just turn off simple rights managment in your explorer preferences.
I can also be logged in as a user, and then also log in as root if I need to make some system changes, without logging off as a users. In
Re:Biggest Problem with Windows... (Score:3, Informative)
You can do this in Windows too.
I can also be logged in as a user, and then also log in as root if I need to make some system changes, without logging off as a users. In Windows, I must go through an annoying process of switching accounts to log in as an administrator.
They've finally fixed this in Vista from what I've heard. They've named it User Account Control [microsoft.com]. Basi