Microsoft Disses Windows to Sell More Windows 407
mjasay writes "I stumbled across this fascinating Microsoft tutorial entitled "How to Justify a Desktop Upgrade." It's an attempt to coach IT professionals on how to sell Windows desktop upgrades internally. Apparently the value of Vista is not readily apparent, requiring detailed instructions on how to connive and cajole into an upgrade from XP. The most intriguing thing about the tutorial is its implicit rejection of Microsoft's older technology. Just a few years ago Microsoft was pitching the world on how secure and cool XP was. Now it's telling us largely the opposite, implying that XP is a security threat, costs too much to run, and so on. With Microsoft marketing against itself, perhaps the Mac and Linux camps can simply wait for Microsoft to self-destruct?"
a few years late (Score:5, Funny)
Hah! Now I have the evidence I need to convince my boss not to make that XP transition. Now where did I put that time machine?
Re:a few years late (Score:5, Funny)
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I wish they were as sincere from the start, though.
op ed on Ms Windows "security" or rather the lack (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft will *never* produce a secure system: the user is *not* the customer: the advertising industry is. just as in television, *we* are *not* the customer: *we* are what is for sale, advertising is the customer, tv industry is selling *us* as *audience* to the advertisers
and Windows is not any different in this respect but is rather a transitional product taking us from the television screen to the selectivision screen which is what the WWW+television will morph into
the initial work is already done: the www has injected so much graphics into computer presentaions that hi-speed broad band is now necessary for "surfing".
now that that's been done the next step is to combine the web with digital TV and you have the advertising marketing dream come true: television with instantaneous feed-back on what everyone is watching and how everyone is responding to it
the ability to adjust your windows programming all along a little here and there is critical to the development and maintenance of this scheme and that is why Microsoft can *never* produce a secure system. Their system provides access to customer computer for paying customers and that includes the ability to modify the client programming ( your computer ). all of this is hidden from everyone except the hackers of course
why do you think we patch and patch and patch and patch and for every patch a new vulnerability shows up? because the patch only moves the remote access capability from one hiding place to another it doesn't remove it. and never will.
"IMHO", -- FWIW
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Every time I install XP these days, the screens during the initial install phase crack me up. They proclaim it to be the most secure Microsoft OS product to date, etc. I wonder if a class action lawsuit could be raised to take them to task for making these bogus statements about their product...
No, not at all.
The statements a coached as relative -- "Microsoft" operating system, "to date", etc. To find something more secure than XP on the day XP was released, you need to find something that needs an addition to do what XP does out of the box.
And even if it could be shown that they're literally false, those are clearly conched as "fluffing" statements, and have no more requirement for literal truth than a salesperson saying "this is the best deal ever."
Re:a few years late (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wow... more rabid MS hate? On Slashdot? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Wow... more rabid MS hate? On Slashdot? (Score:5, Interesting)
Many changes in Vista are simply immediately apparent to even end-users, because there is a ton of new eye-candy (in addition to the extensive under-the-hood reworkings). Leopard, most of the important changes are under-the-hood modifications (better access to filesystem, such as the FSEvents API, the new 64-bit throughout setup, system self-signing of downloaded applications, etc.), with less new eye-candy, but speaking as a developer, there are some equally sweeping changes under the hood.
Every operating system progresses as time goes on, as long as it is still in active development. Windows, Linux, Mac OS X...
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Default Administrators (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, this is funny, but I want to caution you that this is something they need to change. If you criticize them for attacking their own vulnerabilities, you're not giving them a chance to change. Microsoft isn't going to self destruct so let's hope they stop giving botnets & trojans a home in this world. Better security is better for the community and the users. Don't attack someone when they recognize their wrong doings and attempt to correct them. If you don't allow that, then how can anyone improve? Personally I examine my mistakes, acknowledge them and fix them. I certainly hope that Microsoft does this because it's evident that they'll still sell well despite them.
Re:Default Administrators (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, I don't know. I, for one, take great comfort in the thought of Microsoft delivering the DRM products of tomorrow. It's like being locked in the Alcatraz for life and realizing that the walls are made of wet cardboard.
Re:Default Administrators (Score:4, Insightful)
So to revise your simile:
It's like being locked in the Alcatraz for life and realizing that the walls are made of wet cardboard. But if you break out prison, it doesn't really matter, because every building, vehicle, and flat surface is also made out of that same wet cardboard.
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In principal, you are right. Practice? Wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
But we're talking about a company with proprietary operating system and total market control that spent man-years developing kernel-level DRM for practically all I/O instead of developing a sane security model. "Allow/Deny?" is not a security model. Neither is UAC. It allows privilege escalation. Mark Russinovich, MS's own man said so m
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Right, because *nix OSes don't allow privledge escalation either. Do an experiment. Take your Vista machine and remove your account from the Administrators group. Notice how Allow / Deny becomes "Enter administrator password."
Then, logon to your Linux machine and run any UI tool for administering the system. Notice the same "Enter administrator password" prompt.
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it's a fine idea, but it's too prompt-happy IMO. it prompts for things it shouldn't need permission for. with KiCAD (a PCB design program), it randomly prompts when you open the program, and i can't think of anything that it would need permission for. another friend of mine has it prompting him for permission everytime he compiles a program (using code::blocks (forget what build) and gcc. though i haven't
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Re:The problem is with the programs then, not the (Score:2)
UAC Model Is A Nasty Hack (Score:2)
Most importantly, I'm not interrupted and I don't need antivirus software. I work/waste time/whatever safely. Most importantly the people who come to me for IT advice who don't care to know IT have nothing to worry about.
From an enterprise perspective, the whole ACL sys
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Suppose you download an installation package for some really neato whizbang gotta-have-it program. Like SuperDuperCutesyChat Deluxe, v9.0. Unbeknown to you, SuperDuperCutesyChat is a Trojan horse, laden with mal-ware of one kind or another.
When you run the installer, one way or another, you have to give the installer admin-level privileges. If your account is an admin account, you see a couple of UAC prompts. If your account is a us
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Some of the people modding your comment insightful have (probably) fallen into Microsoft's version of the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field.
Not all of us have. Microsoft security model sucks. It is even too complex for MSCEs to understand. And how many used "Policies" in the NT and XP models? I mean really used them?
The model needs to be simplified. Linux is my answer. Ubuntu has it down nicely and so does Fedora.
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But we're talking about a company with proprietary operating system and total market control that spent man-years developing kernel-level DRM for practically all I/O instead of developing a sane security model.
Mod parent up. That, really, is the point.
It's not that security is hard - it is, but it isn't as hard as the jokers who don't even have the easy parts try to make you believe.
We have lots and lots and lots of security methods and systems that would put 99% of today's trojan and exploit writers out of business because they'd have to get a degree in CS first just to understand even the theoretical exploits.
But that stuff is hard to implement, and even harder to implement right. MS is one of the few entities
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That assumes I want them to improve rather than damage themselves. Even if their operating system suddenly became wonderful the company would still be a problem.
I don't want them to get better, I want them to screw up visibly and often.
Sandboxing the registry (Score:2)
Had this been implemented, people could install any programs and they wouldn't affect other accounts - which meant that, if you got a virus, the virus would only be for your current user. It would be a lot easier for an admin to then scan the registry for viruses
Re:Default Administrators (Score:4, Insightful)
Separate I & D space and protected kernel memory came a bit after multiuser in the early to mid 1970s. Virtual memory and paging were added on the late 1970s about the same time as the Berkeley networking stack was first written. The earliest networking code was done without giving much^H^H^H^Hany thought to security. The earliest consumer Unix systems (System V/R2-based) had trivial root exploits out of the box (at least the ones I had at home did). All this stuff got fixed over time, of course and eventually Microsoft might even be able to manage it too.
So with Vista, Microsoft is at last catching up to the level of security and features we had in Unix in the mid to late 1980s.
Re:Default Administrators (Score:4, Informative)
The exploits that Windows has had have very rarely been kernel or core design issues. Windows has a secure design, but it's rarely configured to be secure and has suffered numerous implementation faults. In particular: usermode components, notably the shell, LSA and RPC. Microsoft is also guilty of putting compatible defaults ahead of secure ones, e.g. making Admin accounts default in XP. OEMs are also partially to blame here because they decide how the computer comes loaded from the factory (i.e. with one auto-logon admin account), network admins for allowing it to stay that way (in a corp environment), and ISVs for making tons of software that requires admin privileges when it shouldn't.
With Vista, Microsoft is trying to keep around as much old code as possible in certain components, maintain compatibility with old software, change the default privilege level for programs to non-admin, and implement some kind of TCPAesque DRM. In short, they're trying to have their cake and eat it too, via technical means. It's not pretty. Time will tell how effective it is.
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Now, this is funny, but I want to caution you that this is something they need to change. If you criticize them for attacking their own vulnerabilities, you're not giving them a chance to change.
Excellent point, those with mod points are correct in modding you up. I also want to add that I hope MS sees the errors in their ways concerning HDD partitioning. Why do they make it so hard to define the Program Files directory on a different partition?
I realize that you can force the user space to a different partition, but it is kludgy and you can't define it during install (so you will still have a ghost "C:\Documents and Settings" in XP or "C:\Users" in Vista).
The main benefit of defining at
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Microsoft only "sells well"
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Not everything can be fixed by a few meg patch.
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While you may wish that Grandma employ a system administrator to take her of her computer, that's quite unrealistic, isn't it?
According to your line of reasoning, the year of the linux desktop was around 2001, as anyone with a competent enough system administrator would have not had any problems using Linux for everything at that time. What? Are you saying you are even nowadays having problems? Ah: I guess you should get a more competent system administrator...
Re:Slackware what? (Score:5, Funny)
"*Installs Slackware Hey look guys root is default"
Kids nowadays! Bah!!! Humbug!!!!!
(... and merry xmas/seasons greetings/whatever floats your boat)
Is an old version of Linux better than the latest? (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux may be a great OS, but I'd take a 2.6 kernel over a 2.2 kernel any day for my desktop computing needs. 2.2 is buggy, slow, insecure, and sucks compared to the latest kernel. If you were in charge of upselling users to 2.6, you'd say as much, I hope.
Re:Is an old version of Linux better than the late (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Is an old version of Linux better than the late (Score:3, Insightful)
This simple idea has been around for at least 25 years, so there is no technical reason that Microsoft are so late to this party.
Comparing this gaping security hole (from DOS to WinXP) to minor linux kernel enhancements from 2.2 to 2.6 is not terribly rele
Re:Is an old version of Linux better than the late (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Is an old version of Linux better than the late (Score:2)
I don't see any real issue with MS for making progress. The difference between Linux and Windows is that Linux has been open about its faults whereas MS has not been as open. Because Linux isn't a product by single company, it does not have as much to lo
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In what ways, precisely? OK, you don't get the fuzzy fonts, or the Barbie Horse Adventures default theming, but in what other ways does 2K feel "dated" and "clumsy"?
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The best that you can come up with is 'runs an updated version of paint'?? lol.
Paint is not a graphics package. It's a simple bmp editor that that's largely useless.
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Hmmm (Score:4, Interesting)
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Umm... Ok, that would require actually having any features the user needs or at least wants.
How about saying the older product was less stable and prone to sudden crashes?
Umm... Ok, that would require that the new product is at least as stable.
How about saying the older product offers great compatibility, but the new one is more compatible with products from other manufacturers, so you can more easily
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Instead we have: "Our new and expensive product implements what the competition did 10 years ago ( for free ), you should spend a lot of money buying new hardware to run it since the last thing we sold you was a broken piece of shit."
Things change (Score:5, Insightful)
Think about it, there was a time when Apple said that the PPC arch was far superior to x86....they may have even been right, there are tons of things that I personally would have designed differently. But here we are today, using x86 Macs. No biggie, it was a big flip flop or anything, they just decided that switching to PPC made more sense on enough levels. In fact, now Apple is advertising that they are great because they can run Windows too (more that Windows is faster on a mac...but still). This implies that the switch to x86 was an improvement!
Bottom line is that they weren't lying when they said XP was better. By the time SP2 came out, this was very much the truth. Now they believe that Vista is an improvement, and antiquates XP. And you know what, in many ways this is the truth. Vista is FAR more secure than XP is, the technologies applied make it simply harder to weaponize vulnerabilities than it was with XP.
Technologies evolve, times change, perspectives get updated. No biggie.
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As a side note, you can type cmd into the search box and hit enter, and it will open the command prompt. Ya.. much more difficult.
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UAC: designed to help prevent a successful exploit from having system wide impact. yea *nix has been doing this from the start, but being slow on the uptake doesn't make it any less of a good idea.
Non-Executable Stack: yea, XP had it, but it is still a good idea. Makes standard overflows just a little harder to write (unless you use return to libc techniques).
ASLR: this addresses 2 things. Almost eliminates
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I never used any anti-malware program on my XP machines. Taking simple precautions like not running the PC as administrator pretty much kills malware. A bit of common sense is all one needs to forgo the use of anti-malware
Nothing New... (Score:5, Insightful)
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The problem is that New Version is not a forgone conclusion. Reading TFA, Linux is actually a better answer to most of the issues raised. And if you convince your customers that they need to replace the old, they may look at other options for the new. Windows can become Mac or Linux. Pentium can become AMD
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Really? Linux is better? Considering that you have to throw out all investment in the software you have which runs on Windows? You need to forget everything you learned about Windows, and re-learn for Linux? That's a better idea?
Doubtful.
Re:Nothing New... (Score:4, Insightful)
This shows how little experience you have in this regard. Not surprising, as few people do. None of my customers do, for example, until I come in. Lets start with "Legacy Software." Surprisingly enough, most business legacy software is DOS based! Really! The nasty old crap they can not do without runs very well in dosbox and Wine. And a lot of other Windows stuff works well in Wine. For the one or 2 apps that do not, a VM or terminal server work well. But most of my clients have lots of people that use a web browser, e-mail and Word, and nothing else. Linux can do this.
As to relearning, I suggest you try the latest Ubuntu LiveCD. If you can not figure out how to be productive, I will be surprised. Most people I have dealt with find it easier to adjust to than Vista. You know that they moved things in Vista, right?
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Same with Windows. Along came 95 with a completely integrated graphical interface (ok, more or less, don't bash me). 98 was a huge leap forward
MS greatest competition is themselves (Score:3, Insightful)
They have not been able to add compelling enough features, and customers get very angry at incompatibilities such as MS-Word has seen.
So they have to resort to targetted obsolescence, cajolery and legalistic tactics such as trying to tie the OS the the machine it was first licenced for. I'm not sure if those portions of the EULA violating ":first sale" have been upheld.
Does what I need syndrome? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not because Vista is particularily bad? (Score:2)
It's horrible.
It tells me that my system administrator has set up policies to stop certain things (I haven't, and neither can I find where it claims these policies are set).
It refuses to run some programs on startup and has no button for "Just run it, asshole", admin privileges or no.
It's confusing and restricting. That and the enormous system hoggery have really put me off. I always used Windows for my main system before, the machine that came with Vista finally pushed me to use linux full
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Of course, when XP first came out, it drove me nuts, much like it seems Vista has done for you. So I switched to Mandriva in 2001 or so (my server had been RH for years). I ran it as my desktop (except for games) until about 2005, when the latest Mandriva was pissing
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Vista Costs Too (Score:4, Interesting)
So there aren't any costs to maintaining Vista? Yeah right. Marketing FUD if I ever heard. I guess it's no real surprise though. Business x wants you to pay them the most money, so they'll say whatever to get your money, even if it is FUD.
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Obviously there are always costs to maintaining any system. However it is not at all unreasonable to say that there are hidden costs in maintaining older systems, and in fact it's very often - even usually - true. Updates are generally slower, new versions of applications that run on them will gradually become unavailable, security issues or system efficiency or human factors or other flaws may slowly drain productivity.
By contrast there are often costs with new OS versions as well - you often need to upg
Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or consider the Linux kernel. Back in the 2.0 days, everyone was telling me about how great Linux was. Now that we've got kernel 2.6, everyone's just dropping support for 2.0 and telling me it sucks compared to the latest version.
It is not unfair for a company to say that the newest version of their software is BETTER than their old version. If it wasn't, why release it?
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Haha, those ones are great in the Open Source world, specially when talking about bugs. Open source developers usually are like "there are no bugs! no no noallaalalalla no bugs in my program no, the bug does not exsist, no memory leak no you are dreaming"... and suddenly, after som
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Yes, lets.
If you *want* the 2.0 kernel (first released in 1996, and last officially updated in 2004), you can still get it. If there is a known exploit, you can still fix it, or have it fixed. It's no longer off the table.
Can you get MS-Windows 95? '98 SP2? NT 3.5? Not officially. Nor will you be able to get known bugs fixed.
In 10 years, you'll *still* be able to get Linux 2.0. You won't be able to get MS-Windows Vista, nor XP, nor especially MS-Windows 98 SP2. Why you'd want MS
Pssssst.... (Score:2)
Now if Only Linux had the desktop apps....
Stressing secrurity is good. (Score:2)
What management may not realize, however, is that they are already paying a hefty hidden cost by having outdated systems in place, "because you are paying for an administrator's time to deal with these issues," Johnson said. The trick is to show management this in a way that translates into dollars saved.
"It's a hard sell, because security is not a line item on their income or expense sheets. There also is not a line item that says they lost, say, $100
The nature of the beast (Score:2)
This reminds me of a commercial that Best Buy was running a few years ago about a guy who was looking to something for his brother for Christmas. The Best Buy Guy(tm) was asking what kind of person his brother was and there was this cheesy flashback of a guy with a mullet in a Camero who was all stoked about buying "the latest technology" (a VCR with a tethered remote). The Best Buy Guy and t
That's the point (Score:4, Interesting)
I guess you've never read the “Intel Retail Edge” program manual or virtually any software's change-log/release notes.
It's been a long time since I've seen such crap on the frontpage of /. Almost every product out there gets released under these values, including the Linux kernel and MacOS. “It's more secure, upgrade now!”
That's the point. XP came out years ago, and finally in 2007 a new version of Windows was released after much bitching by the market (us). Now that it's out, we're attacking its release because of the reasons we wanted a new version of Windows?
Excuse me if I don't see the point of this news...
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I'd love to see any “threats” made by Microsoft that mandate you to update your Operating System. Also, Vista doesn't require you to upgrade your machine to “exotic levels,” look at this:
I can hardly call this exotic, minimal at best.
Lead slashdot post is a lie (Score:5, Informative)
"How to Justify a Desktop Upgrade." Why is garbage like this allowed to stay up?
1) The MS tutorial mentions older operating systems as a generic, it does not diss XP, it does not even mention XP!
2) "newer operating system, such as Windows Vista". Vista is the example, put "XP" or other OS in there if you want.
3) The article is a template to help frustrated IT admins/managers show reason and overcome objection to a proposal of migrating to a newer OS. Any admin in any environment could use this template.
I am not commenting on the PCWorld article here, just the misrepresentation in the first part of the article. Let me know if the poster is talking about a differnt version of "How to Justify a Desktop Upgrade" because from what I see the posting is a lie, plain and simple.
CC
the hidden cost of vulnerability .. (Score:2)
Do you mean that what they really mean is that Vista is not more secure, has less TCO and doesn't save money than Vista. If so then why the need to write an article on 'How to Justify a Desktop Upgrade'.
The hidden cost of vulnerability
'What management may not realize, however, is that they are already paying a hefty hidden cost by having outdated systems in place, "because you are paying for an administrator's t
Nothing like reading between the lines (Score:3, Informative)
What the articles *states*, and what it *says*, are two different things. It states several things, but *says* a very specific thing.
The
It's kind of disingenuous of you to give a strictly-literal interpretation of the article to claim the
NT was supposedly bullet-proof too... (Score:2, Funny)
Microsoft's competition (Score:2)
They hardly can compare themselves to Apple or Linux, because those aren't really competition
All the reasons to upgrade to Vista I've seen are in reality nothing. The support costs for Vista in my organization are huge, especially when dealing with re-imaging issues (Ghost, WDS etc). It will take one of us (Analyst level) guys six months to evaluate, test, and prepare for a Vista rollout. That's six months of dedicated planning. Six Months with our small un
it's just market and brain saturation at MS (Score:2)
Arnold Toynbee wins again.. societies (and large megacorporations) die from within, not from without.
if SP1 doesn't make Vista more XP-ish, they'd better have something quick and dirty up their sleeve, like MicroWindowsFlash2100+, with the footprint of 3.1 and the speed of DOS 6.2.1
Wishful thinking... (Score:3, Insightful)
While I'd likely be the first in line with gasoline if MS HQ was on fire, I really don't see how the situation described could in any reasonable way be expected to be a sign of Microsoft's impending doom. Even if they never made it into high 6-figure sales of Vista, they'd still have what, about 90% market share for their desktop OS? If Vista completely laid an egg, there still wouldn't be dramatic anti-MS push from the mainstream.
Even as myself a FreeBSD user, I'll say that I just don't see the failure of Vista as panning out in any real way to be a fantastic victory for the Unix-based systems out there. People are still going to want to stay with their familiar OS - which of course is windows.
Lots of sales angles here: (Score:2)
Because lack of necessity shouldn't stop you.
Because you need a reason to buy a new computer.
A better reason to jump to Mac/Linux/etc.
Because Microsoft needs to make a couple more millionaires.
Because Windows XP makes baby Jesus cry!
OR ELSE!
How is this new? (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft has done the "when Windows version n+1 ships, immediately admit that Windows version n was crap" thing since Windows 95 appeared.
Maybe this time they're just being more aggressive about it, since XP is so firmly entrenched and all the compelling features that would have driven Vista upgrades were stripped out so they could actually ship it. They can market it all they like, but it's already got the reputation of being a trouble-plagued, warmed-over version of XP with a GUI that's a bad attempt at copying OS X's.
~Philly
Gee, Vista runs fine on my quad core 4G machine .. (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems that Microsoft thinks that as soon as a new version of Windows comes out, all Windows users must immediately buy a brand new, maxed out system, install Vista and throw out whatever they had before. It's really just mind-bending how the hardware gets faster and faster, and Microsoft continues to come out with point zero versions of their operating system that demands new hardware.
If Microsoft were as smart as I thought they were, they'd happily continue to sell XP (instead of being forced into it by the marketplace), but focus new development on Vista, and work on getting the bugs out of Vista in the meantime. I am so tired of hearing MS fanatics expostulating that the latest Release Candidate is 'rock solid' for them. It was tiring when Windows 95 was in development, and it still tiring a dozen years later.
Then again, I must be in the minority -- I have Windows 98 on an old P-450, and Linux on two other systems, but I manage to get a lot done.
Graphics Cards take the cake (Score:3, Funny)
Version n-1 does not:
- Run these demos. They are to weak(Reality is usually a hardcode version check in the demo).
- Run this new DXn Version.
- Look as cool.
Version n-1 is:
- Embarassingly limited is this or than pipline number/bus width
- Reflective of your tiny cock size.
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Windows 2k used more resources than windows 98 and offered a host of new features. Windows XP used more resources than win2k but was mostly eye candy.
Vista looks to me like it's mostly eye candy. Some of the UI changes take some getting used to, but so does upgrading gnome or kde.
I don't think vista is a compelling reason to upgrade, but new machines will run it because tha
Re:Value of Vista (Score:4, Informative)
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Right, because you can see security improvements in the UI.
Re:Value of Vista (Score:4, Funny)
{it looks like your posting to an insecure site. WWW.slashdot.org, would you like to continue? allow/deny}
the problem with UAC is that MSFt went straight to fine grained control of applications without having a general course grain security refined and in place to start with. It will take a while to sort out all the random issues with it. Maybe by SP2 it will be secure and useful.
then again MSFT doesn't think you own your PC or the content that's on it so maybe not.
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Sure there are security updates, but to find out if they're a) good or b) effective will take some time.
If we're lucky, we will see some dramatic improvement in the number of programs available that will run correctly under a limited user account. If the majority of windows programs had run effectively under limited user accounts, many many of the problems windows has faced could have been alleviated.
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Isn't that what restricting Administrative privileges are for? Grandma's XP Home machine has that feature.
Problem is, between Microsoft and their dev community, you pretty much need Admin access to install anything. As a result, windows gives you the choice between having security and being able to use your machine. Fantastic.
Granted it's not entirely their fault, but they've let the dev community persist too long with the whole 'run everything as admin and install globally' thing.
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As the other devs release the next version of thier software, these UAC issues should die out.
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Re:Value? (Score:5, Funny)
Neither is the value of used cat litter.
You'll find even more similarities as you dig and sift through everything, too.
No Moderation Box on this comment! (Score:2)
What gives Slashdot?
Don't tell me you can suddenly withdraw the powers of moderation from a comment if you don't like the way it's going?
Nah! Probably a technical glitch, eh?
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