Vista SP1 Release Candidate Available
Posted by
kdawson
on Thursday December 13, @09:57AM
from the get-it-while-it's-hot dept.
from the get-it-while-it's-hot dept.
Microsoft has made available the release candidate for Vista SP1, after a limited beta begun last September. Informationweek points out white papers telling business users that if they were waiting for SP1 to solve application compatibility issues, they needn't bother waiting: SP1 won't solve them, and in fact might cause applications to break that were running under Vista. Techworld outlines the hoops users will have to jump through to get SP1 installed.
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Vista SP1 Release Candidate Available
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So... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:So... (Score:4, Funny)
It's a Release Candidate (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you planning on installing it on a production machine?
Are you planning on installing it on your home machine?
The answer is: Don't!. But, if you do, don't come complaining that it broke your system and that's why MS sucks. It's a release candidate.
Are you planning on installing it on a test system and documenting any issues to see how things go so you can plan on how the install will go when it is in RTM?
O.k., go ahead, that's what a release candidate is for. Especially if you plan on providing the feedback on major issues.
Anyone who installs "beta", "community technology preview", or "release candidate" software on their systems and then complains about the experience and how it sucks should be branded with a big ol' "D U M B A S S" on their short-bus-riding-tuckus.
Now, if you install the RC on your test system, provide feedback on you major error, and then the RTM has the same problem, you can complain.
Re:It's a Release Candidate (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It's a Release Candidate (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's a Release Candidate (Score:5, Funny)
Vista's shell sucks. I hate it with the burning rage that could only otherwise be produced by 35 angry chihuahuas.
Luckily, geoshell works on it, so I don't have to put up with it.
Re:It's a Release Candidate (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, gunna have to disagree with you there. A release candidate is just that - a candidate for release. Just because Microsoft has warped the term to mean "late beta", doesn't mean that's what it is. In many cases a release candidate becomes the final release.
RC's aren't meant to have major errors. RC's are designed to be feature-complete and stable. If a release candidate has major bugs, then it isn't release quality and thus should never have been labeled as such in the first place.
Note: I'm not condoning putting RC's on mission-critical equipment, but I fundamentally disagree that an RC should be inherently considered unstable.
Re:It's a Release Candidate (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So... (Score:4, Interesting)
File copies are faster (as in, they work properly now. Yay?).
My Hauppauge TV tuner still doesn't work with 4 GB of RAM (x64 edition). I have to set it to 3GB max in msconfig. Hauppauge says this is a vista driver model issue, but clearly it still isn't fixed.
Still slow as molasses.
I bought a Macbook back in the spring, and find myself pretty much only using the Vista box now as a media center server (Media center is still pretty damn cool). I'm usually pretty patient with MS, but Vista is clearly a useless upgrade thus far - I can't even use the 4GB of RAM! Might as well roll back to Media Center 2005.
But... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:But... (Score:4, Funny)
No, but Linux runs Windows applications [winehq.org].
The question, then, is which has netter application compatibility: Wine or Windows Vista ? In my experience Wine bugs mostly cause slightly corrupted graphics, while Vista causes applications to crash randomly.
Same Old SP1 (Score:2, Funny)
It's the mile-marker where the new OS stops feeling "foreign" as the details are refined, and developers have some reason to fully embrace it. Corporate deployments will pick up, as software vendors of TRUE business applications release their "real" Vista products. etc etc etc
It's the same old pattern that has been going on since Windows NT. Business as usual.
Re:Same Old SP1 (Score:5, Informative)
Seems weird to me (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Seems weird to me (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Seems weird to me (Score:5, Funny)
MSFT continues to be the King of the Hill. (Score:5, Insightful)
There will be no change in the situation as long as the business customers take it in their chin and continue to buy MSFT no matter how much abuse they suffer. If the constant acceleration of upgrade treadmill gets interrupted, at least MSFT will retreat from all its loss leading misadventures and allow creativity and innovation to flourish in other areas of computing. Hopefully. The way it goes, PCs are a lost cause for the next five to ten years.
Re:MSFT continues to be the King of the Hill. (Score:5, Insightful)
I am sorry to tell you this. But you are rather bit in the minority on Slashdot
I'd agree with that.
Most people just don't think that hard or care that much about their computers and don't feel like they're being oppressed by Microsoft or anyone else who makes the crap they buy.
Microsoft problem solution (Score:5, Funny)
SP3 (Score:4, Informative)
Re:SP3 (Score:4, Informative)
Win2k SP5 will never happen because MS wants people to think that Win2k is obselete abadonware, even though they've promised to support it until summer of 2010 [microsoft.com]. They refused, for instance, to make a public patch for Win2k's Daylight Saving rules. I doubt they'll even do another post-SP4 patch rollup -- probably just the same trickle of IE6 and DirectX patches we've seen for the last couple of years.
(Of course, you can make your own SP5 [hfslip.org] and use third [intelliadmin.com] party [mdgx.com] time zone updates. There will probably be a lot of third-party patching as MS continues to drop the ball, pushing the new shiny stuff instead.)
Patience (Score:1)
Also.. XP SP3 RC1 (Score:2, Informative)
Business users of Vista ? (Score:2, Troll)
How badly informed is this magazine? The Fortune 500 companies (probably the fortune 5,000,000 companies) wont touch Vista with a bargepole. They have spent millions of man hours writing testing and deploying thousands of apps Windows XP.
Does Information week think they are going to risk this investment by deploying evferything on an untested operating System after upgrading/replacing millions of working XP PCs with "Vista unready" hardware.
Windows NT was a common site on business desktops until about 2005 a full five years after Win2K became available and three years after XP was released. This comparitively rapid deployement of XP only happened because it was largely a rebranding of NT plus some eye candy. Vista is drasticly different from XP and no sensible IT department will touch it until at least SP2 is available and the current set of desktop hardware needs replacing anyway.
Re:Business users of Vista ? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is in a Fortune 100 company. I expect that this is typical of the other Fortune 100 companies.
Out of curiosity, anyone know what Microsoft's corporate image looks like? Specifically, is it XP or Vista based?
Total Cost Ownership study needs updating (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh yeah, sure. MSFT dissed Linux with the Total Cost of Ownership BS. The cost of migrating applications to Linux was what had boosted the cost for Linux column. Now will Gartner re run the Total Cost of Ownership studies including the cost of migrating "XP to Vista"?
Re:Total Cost Ownership study needs updating (Score:4, Funny)
If it's too much of a hassle (Score:2)
That's gonna hurt... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm actually not trolling, but if anything, stating the obvious. Windows NT's setup was a good-enough architecture back when "the company LAN" was just a bunch of computers strung together on a hub or in a ring. The Internet changed that, and just as it almost left Microsoft behind back in 1995 at the apps level, it's almost about to leave them behind right now at the OS level. It's becoming apparent that the thing simply cannot keep up with what's required.
If SP1 actually improved speed and performance, as well as add a better legacy/compatibility mode, they might have been able to eke by without people (outside of /. and the Mac community) questioning it.
Not anymore.
I think we're going to start seeing the decline of Microsoft. It won't crash overnight, but I suspect that, barring a miracle on their part, things will only start falling from here for them. Between Macs at home and Linux at the server room, MSFT's market share loss will be slow at first, then start accelerating. It'll take about a decade, but by then Microsoft's OS will be about as popular as Amiga's was in 1998-2000 (roughly), but will perhaps a larger base of holdouts, depending on developer mindshare and markets.
I've never really said that (at least and meant it) before... now it's moved from being a personal guesstimation to becoming my professional opinion.
Glad I went full *nix a long time ago...
Who'd have thought (Score:1)
Step 1... (Score:1)
Step 2. Rush out Service Pack and fumble over yourself trying to fix bugs you knew about before plus the slew of new ones that came after release
Step 3. ???
Step 4. Profit
How do they do it?
Thank God for small mercies! (Score:5, Insightful)
What the heck is going on here? That applications wont break is an upside? Wasn't the biggest selling point of MSFT has been the compatibility with the existing installed base?
This is a telling moment for all the CIOs and IT managers of corporations. The biggest reason why most companies could not migrate to a competing platform (or at least platform-agnostic technologies) was because they were locked into this proprietary system and it simply costs money to remove all the hacks and remove dependencies. Now they can't dodge the cost. It is inevitable. Given that, does it make sense to pay so much to get locked into another proprietary vendor locked system again? They were fooled once into vendor lock or vendor lock crept up on them unsuspected. But now?
The MSFT strategy is clear. They must make the cost of migrating from XP to Vista will be marginally smaller than migrating from XP to platform-neutral-technology. If the IT managers fall for this trap once more they will exactly be in the same situation five years from now.
The key is open standards. We don't have to bicker among ourselves the merits and demerits of open source vs closed source, or free software with paid software or whatever. Open Standards will level the playing field. That is all we should ask for. Let us duke it out in a level field and may the better philosophy win.
Biggest reason for not upgrading to Vista (Score:5, Insightful)
If Parallels and VMware can make the desktop sharing between Mac OS X and Windows easy, why can't Microsoft make it easy between Win9X/NT/XP and Vista easy?
Problem is no one at Microsoft in interested in doing this. I was invited to Microsoft's London offices last month and suggested it to a few of their top engineers and sales/marketing people and no one wanted to admit that Vista was a relative failure. You can downgrade to XP but you need your own DVD/CD media, and can't run Vista and XP at the same time, it's one licence or the other. Madness!
RC? (Score:3, Funny)
So much for a release candidate...
Oddest warning (Score:5, Interesting)
I have heard phone support script humanoid robots demand that I turn off the modem and router and wait for 30 seconds before switching them on. Kind of made sense, something like make sure all capacitors are fully discharged and the machines are really truly off.
In India there is a popular belief that if an AirConditioner is turned off one must wait for three minutes before turning it on. One technician hand waved about the compressor might be at some odd point in the cycle and suddenly making it run would "break" the shaft. Did not believe him. But in the last trip I find that all the A/C are connected to the grid through "voltage stabilizers" that have a delay timer to prevent the machine from being turned on too soon!
Now MSFT takes the cake! Wait for one hour after uninstalling software! Why? The pagefile is still thinking SP1 is running? The MSFT DRM software has to call in and tell Redmond that SP1 has been really uninstalled and get a confirmation back? Or uninstalled bits of SP1 is considered to be an radioactive waste and they must be beamed to Jupiter to be buried?
Re:Oddest warning (Score:4, Funny)
To calm down, that's why. Attempting to perform too many consecutive installations of Microsoft software, without proper breaks, has been linked to the recent upsurge in general anxiety disorder.
Re:Oddest warning (Score:4, Insightful)
A one hour delay sounds like propagation time through a distributed data base. So all that it probably is waiting for is whatever implements Microsoft Windows registration to fully recognize that the machine in question is legal to switch to Microsoft Vista SP1. I.e. it's perfectly normal and there's nothing to see here, move along.
Is it too late to talk about Vista? (Score:5, Funny)
Dear reader, I have a confession to make: I love Microsoft. I love it more than I love my family. This ought not come as a surprise to any that know me: a long line of jaded ex girlfriends will laugh bitterly and recall the passion they could never share in, and those few that can call themselves my friends accept that, on Patch Tuesday, their lives are nothing to me.
But above even my love for Bill Gates' corporate loin product is my love for my work. It is a sacred task that has been assigned to me, and I dare not let friends, nor family, nor even software allegiances stand in the way of the fairness and impartiality that is my trademark.
But why do I tell you this? Why do I bare my soul in such a vulgar fashion? It is that you may understand: even now, I will not let my love blind me; I do not write from the perspective of an enamored lover, nor a too-faithful user. No, it is as a Genuine Microsoft User hungry for the Next Best Thing that I pen this, my review of Windows Vista.
Part I: Making the Switch
"Aha," you are saying, having been inundated by countless negative reviews, "He will surely realize that Vista is in every way a downgrade from previous Microsoft products; he will slowly become disillusioned with its clunkiness, bloat, and arbitrary changes made only for the sake of justifying an overzealous Vice President's salary. Over the course of many painful pages, he will finally renounce his love for the Monopolist, and end with an impassioned plea for the adoption of the obviously superior Apple OSX [slashdot.org] while a swelling orchestral piece rises in the background."
Alas, no. Such a review, while undoubtedly entertaining, would be as far from the truth as, say, religion. No, this is most assuredly a glowingly positive testimonial: Windows Vista is easily the best operating system on the market today. Such an assertion, I realize, may offend some of my readers' base sensibilities; if that is the case, kindly allow me to show you to the exit [kuactet.com].
But I have, once again, gotten ahead of myself. Firstly, why I choose to review the Vistas now, rather than immediately following the January launch, bears explaining.
It was a cloudy Monday morning, some two months back, when my erstwhile laptop, a venerable old Compaq, gave up the ghost. The screen, which had been flaky for a number of weeks, finally quit altogether.
After a brief mourning period, I began scouring the print classifieds, searching for a replacement. I soon found one, a dual-core offering from Hewlett Packard. The $600 price tag--considerably less than my weekly escort--made its purchase, and my subsequent review, a foregone conclusion. It arrived the following Thursday, in the hands of a perky blonde UPS driver; I christened it Alex, turned it on, transferred my data (a breeze thanks to Microsoft's new Streaming Automatic External Backup Restore technology), configured it to suit my needs, and resumed my work.
I have been using it, very happily, ever since and, today, shall pass judgment.
Part II: New Features (and what they mean for you)
Aero:
This brand new DirectX-based desktop rendering engine was the focus of Microsoft's Vista promotional materials. It is easy to see why: Vista with Aero is stunning; it puts, in this writer's humble opinion, all other human achievements to shame.
I have been to the Louvre; I have seen the works of the masters, of Monet and Michaelangelo. My heart swelled, and I nearly wept at the sight. But the feeling I get when I gaze at Aero... even that cannot compare. It is more than my simple words can express. My screenshots [kuactet.com] are but pale reflections of its splendor.
You must experience it yourself: study the subtle interplay between light and shadow, feel the cool ephemeral breeze of transparency, and despair, for you have looked upon that which is fairest, and all the world's wonders will seem drab and dull in comparison. It is our collective burden, my friend, the Great Tragedy of our time. Once you have experienced it, you can never go back. Aero is more beautiful than your firstborn. And, let's face it, seeing the contents of a folder in the thumbnail preview [kuactet.com] is goddamn cool.
Microsoft Rick:
It is easy to get lost in the glitz and glamor of Aero, and forget that a computer is, first and foremost, a tool, a technological productivity enhancer. As Apple's designers seem so eager to forget, a computer must be functional above all.
Functionality, however, is only one factor; countless studies over the years have demonstrated, the average user is terrified of computers. Many possible explanations (including negative perception caused by Stanley Kubrick's documentary film) have been offered, but one thing is clear: this fear must be overcome if computers are to gain acceptance in the workplace of tomorrow. For all its other failings, the Cupertino team gets this. Microsoft Rick (named for its creator, Rick Griffin, a Senior Designer at the Redmond campus) however, is a step in the right direction.
The premise behind Rick, its chief tenet, is simple: people are uncomfortable using computers because computers are not human. Rick, therefore, is designed to inject a massive dose of humanity into the user experience.
Images and biographies of the Vista developers are sprinkled liberally throughout the interface, and every feature contains a drop-down menu allowing the user to read more about those responsible for it. This serves to frame Vista as a tool for people, by people. It is, I believe, an effective tactic, for one quickly begins to feel kinship of sorts with the engineers: the system's successes feel like genuine human triumphs, and the failures are easier to forgive, knowing the men behind them.
Rick himself, naturally, takes the prominent position on the new desktop [kuactet.com].
Flip-3d:
An integral part of the Vista experience is the Flip-3d. This Microsoft innovation allows the user, with the press of a button, to cascade, Rolodex-like [kuactet.com], through all open windows.
It has been claimed by many that Flip-3d is merely an inferior ripoff of the Apple Expose featured in Mac OSX. It is true that there are notable similarities; however, Microsoft has made two key improvements to the basic formula that place Filp-3d firmly above Expose:
1) With Flip-3d the user has the option of using a two-button mouse
2) Flip-3d runs on any hardware up to the challenge
Start Menu:
The Windows platform has experienced its second start menu revamp [kuactet.com] in as many versions.
I would like to draw attention to the Aero features on display in this shot, in particular the soft dynamic lighting on the user icon--one Edmund Harris, Network Architect--and the translucent edge flowing gently over the supple body of Ray Valentine, the tough-as-nails Senior VP with a heart of gold.
Users should also note the 'Start Search' prompt: this innovative new feature allows the user to type in the program he wishes to run, and Vista will find and start it automatically. It is inevitably faster than navigating through the menu tree.
It should be clear now that the new Start Menu is far superior to XP's--which is widely regarded as a sin--and, in many ways superior to that of the classic Windows 2000. That isn't to say there aren't quirks: a scroll wheel is practically mandatory, so on a laptop it is somewhat less than convenient, but overall it is a marked improvement over previous offerings.
Sidebar:
The Redmond giant attracted more than its fair share of flack for this new feature, the primary criticism being that it is blatantly copied from the Redmond Pretender's "Dashboard" application. The better-informed users, however, pointed out that "Dashboard" was blatantly copied from Konfabulator, a Konqueror add-on for the GNU/Linux Kubuntu, dating back to 2001.
That debate, however, is irrelevant to this review. Regardless of whether they are called Gadgets, Widgets, or Kadgets, the functioning is the same: small, unobtrusive programs designed with a single purpose in mind. Whether this is to act as a clock, calculator, sticky note, RSS feed reader, stock ticker, or other seemingly-useful program, these programs are created to do one thing, but do it well.
The Sidebar in action [kuactet.com].
The biggest problem with Sidebar and its ilk (and the sole reason I do not use it myself) is that desktop space is a precious, limited commodity; I cannot be alone when I say that I prefer Rick's warm, comforting gaze to the knowledge that the dollar continues to plummet.
Child-rearing:
The engineers at Redmond call this their most socially-responsible feature to date, and it is hard to disagree, given the sharp drop in household violence since its inception.
Vista is designed to constantly engage the user [kuactet.com], drawing attention away from their tasks and to the maintenance of the system itself, exactly analogous to a child.
The key difference is, if the user beats his computer with a belt, it is only the user that is hurt. As I have been, of late, considering adopting a young boy and raising him as my own, such training has been invaluable.
Memory Management:
"Vista will ship with the most sophisticated memory allocation engine ever seen in an operating system. It will intelligently manage your computer's memory the way, for example, Hitler managed the Jews."
-Ray Ozzie [kuactet.com], Microsoft CSA, 2005 CES
It was a promise made years ago at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, that would be difficult for any company to live up to. The talent at Microsoft, however, was able to deliver.
Vista automatically breaks up the system memory and allocates it across all running processes; then, it spawns its own background processes as necessary, to put the otherwise unused and unproductive memory to good use. This system is carefully engineered to decrease the amount of available memory over time--exactly as advertised.
Voice Recognition:
Microsoft developed a brand-new Voice Recognition technology for inclusion in Vista. As you can see in the enclosed video, it performs quite well [kuactet.com] in the standard tests, though for men who have full use of their fingers--such as myself--it is clunky at best. On the other hand, should I have the misfortune to run afoul of the local Mafiosos, it may prove invaluable.
Quantum Computing:
Vista has been designed from the ground up to provide the latest quantum characteristics and Quantum Information Processing (QuIP) performance enhancements on machines with Quantum Hardware Acceleration (though it is emulated via software processes on classical systems).
For those of you unfamiliar with the latest developments in non-classical computation, the basis of QuIP is that, in a quantum-mechanical sense, it is impossible to know the precise state and operation of the machine; therefore, it is impossible to predict its operation. For example, in the quantum system, even simple tasks--such as file copy--succeed or fail at random because of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle; moreover, it is fundamentally impossible to know, even after the fact, if such a failure has occurred.
For those of us that love the feeling of the razor's edge of technological advancement slicing deeply into our pale girlish wrists, this new feature is an exciting must-have.
Security:
Vista has it.
License Validation Service:
Microsoft had previously been lambasted by content producers for its notable lack of Digital Rights Management solutions, both for software and digital media. Microsoft responded by integrating its new LVS system into the Windows Kernel, the very heart of Vista.
LVS acts as a virtual watchdog, ensuring that no under-handed users attempt to steal a producer's intellectual property. It scans the files a user accesses, checking that each is valid, genuine, and licensed. This protection extends to every piece of media on the machine, regardless of its origin, and even Vista itself.
This scanning is thorough, complete, and transparent to the user; it would only be noticed when, for example, it fails and pops up an error message telling the user that the OEM software that shipped loaded on his brand new system (not from some fly-by-night back-of-a-truck dealer, but Hewlett Packard) which, by the way, has never had its hardware modified, is not goddamn genuine [kuactet.com] .
The user then has the option of either trying to resolve the problem via Microsoft's official channels [kuactet.com] or realizing that Vista is a piece of godawful bloated assware that isn't worthy of the fifteen cockslapping gigabytes of hard disk it requires and that he should switch to Linux where he wouldn't have to deal with this sort of bullshit.
This is, I believe, the most useful feature of all.
Five stars.
Re:Is it too late to talk about Vista? (Score:5, Funny)
Hoops? What hoops? (Score:5, Informative)
Here are the "hoops" you have to "jump through" to install SP1:
1. Download the RC1 package.
2. Execute the
3. Done!
Vista will automatically download all updates you need to install the RC1 and install them over the next couple of days (unless you have automatic updates turned off, of course). If you're impatient like me, you can manually kick off Windows Update and install everything with a couple of reboots.
So, speaking as someone that's compiled their own Linux kernel and most of my apps from source more than a few times, the above is no "hoop" at all. Slashdot again goes out of its way to make things seem worse than they are. It's a Release Candidate for crying out loud! I never see this level of scrutiny and criticism directed at any Linux-related software, be it free, open, or commercial.
Only Apple will threaten MSFT (Score:2, Interesting)
I remember when I setup a local ISP with 128 kbits of bandwidth and 300 email users using just one server, with kernel 2.0.0, with a motherboard sporting a chipset Triton and a whopping 128 MBytes of RAM.
Later I went to a medium size company where I ended as the IT manager. Through the years we migrated all our Sun servers to Suse Linux. Right now this company online sales system is based on linux, and things are going great.
I consider myself a linux expert after all these years using different versions of linux kernels and setting up an IT infrastructure which is mission crytical and moves more than 2000 million dollars. I've been a great linux supporter, and I'm still very proficient managing it.
But as succesful as a server system linux has been, at the desktop the community has failed miserably to produce a simple consistent desktop solution to reach the masses. KDE and gnome should have merged years ago and psch together. X should have been abandoned for a new and more efficient graphics system, years ago too. Anyone remmeber the GGI project? That one offered hope for some time, then failed. We were in need of a Linus Torvald leading a common desktop effort. It did not happen
In the meantime, the windows server system has become much more stable. In the late 90s linux was incredibly more stable than windows. Now the difference is very narrow, and you can already run a mission crytical business on linux, without much an effort.
To make things worse,
You can check it if you want at www.netcraft.com. Never the difference in market share between apache and IIS was so slim.
Very dangerous too for the OOS movement is also the fact that all the managers seem to think now that OOS will be the solution to their company and IT problems. Those who saw the
So I'm just beginning to invest heavily my spare time in learning
Wow (Score:2)
Can we still nominate them for the Engineering Award of 2007? Making Vista any worse is not exactly a small feat.
Betas for pathes (Score:4, Funny)
Future tech support calls:
Tech: "What version are you running?"
User "Lemme check. Looks like version '2007 SP1b Build 3567 Patch Level 3'"
Tech: "Sir, you should be at version 2007 SP1b Build 3768 Patch Level 2"
User: "Wait, is that newer or older than what I have now?"
Tech: "It is a newer build of an older patch. You can download it from our web site, but if you do install it, you will not be able to install older builds of newer patches."
User: "Uh, OK?"
Tech: "You may also want to try running the beta version 2008 which I hear from our dev tech is just awesome after you apply all the prerelease sub patches."
User: "Uh..."
Warning: Breaks Activation (Score:1)
This isn't a production machine so I don't greatly care, but I do feel I'm being punished just for trying it out - i.e. I paid $400 for an O/S, go put a SP1 on and now look as if I've pirated it... Thanks guys...
N/A
My Microsoft (Score:1, Offtopic)
Then I'd bundle in all the crap that makes Windows work well with all kinds of other products. Proprietary drivers, bundled 3rd party apps.
And it would all work, it would use all the Linux development (and developers) to sell Windows. It would keep everyone's desktop looking like Windows. And it would actually work, because it would be running on Linux, which is much more reliable than Windows (which gets unmanageably complex under the hood copying all Linux's features).
So what does Vista SP1 do exactly? (Score:2)
Next to nothing there. No surprise. They talk about updates offering improvements, then say SP1 is another mechanism. Meaning not the same as the updates? Recent reports say performance and compatibility aren't part of the mix, so we can hope it's reliability. Oh yeah, and hardware. Ok, they address customer feedback, but they don't say they made improvements, just addressed them. "Yes, I understand your pain. But we're a monopoly so too bad" is addressing a problem.
Still holds true... (Score:2)
As Miracle Max said... (Score:2)
ya, vista failed, ug (Score:2)
Submission accepted? (Score:3, Informative)
But I still like my headline better, it was "MS says Vista compatibility not solved in SP1"
Because you aren't supposed to upgrade until SP1 (Score:2)
With Vista sucking so bad, the upgrade cycle was not fast as msft wanted. So to eliminate at least one reason for not "upgrading" msft released SP1.
Sure, SP1 sucks. At best SP1 is useless. But, it's there. So upgrade already! Dammit!
Unbelievable (Score:2)
No. Bullshit. It takes the developers a YEAR to recode around some security issues? Read the comments from the developers under the article - it takes them ten times as long to code for Windows as it does for UNIX/Linux due to crappy design.
The reason there was no security on Windows is simply bad design from the get-go.
The Registry was the dumbest idea in OS history. UNIX/Linux doesn't have it - much more stable and secure. I got a client with a machine that won't install anything the other day precisely because of this crap. Windows hosed itself or one of their third party media apps hosed it. They can barely run 23 machines for two weeks without shit like this happening.
Microsoft didn't bitch for years about bad developer practices - such as QuickBooks, which was never even certified for Windows XP because of its bad practices - because they wanted the OS dominance on the desktop, instead of security for their customers.
And now they're not fixing the compatability issues because they want people to buy Vista NOW rather than wait for SP1 because their sales are flat.
People who use Windows are suckers.
M$ sucks!! die bill gates (Score:1)
Vista == bèta (Score:1)
Re:stale mate? (Score:2)
I am a senior telecoms security consultant for a company who's core product is a Linux-based PABX, running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux actually.
And you are correct - in the case of the telephone servers, we install a licensed copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the servers because, in the case of OS problems, we need to rely upon Red Hat for support to issue appropriately tested RPM updates. However, the cost of that license is factored into the cost of the server which is currently treated as an appliance - the customer has no need to touch the Linux OS as all updates are applied through our own software updates.
But what you are paying for here is the support from Red Hat, not for Linux itself. Ultimately, just about all of the software in Red Hat Linux (or any commercial Linux) is available freely on its own or within the myriad of other free Linux distros out there.
In other words, you, sir, are talking UTTER BOLLOCKS!