Ignore Vista Until 2008 338
Blakey Rat writes "According to Gartner in a research note entitled 'Ten reasons you should and shouldn't care about Microsoft's Windows Vista', businesses should wait until 2008 before installing Windows Vista, or 'pursue a strategy of managed diversity' by only bringing in new machines with Windows Vista and not upgrading existing computers. Although acknowledging the security benefits of upgrading, they explain in the report that most of the security-related benefits that come with Vista are available today through third-party software products."
Amazing (Score:5, Interesting)
Though this article is pretty lame. First time I've read, "Ten reasons you should and shouldn't care about Microsoft's Windows Vista client," in a summary and the linked article doesn't even bother to list them.
This is news?
Summary: Too Little, Too Late (Score:5, Interesting)
My main problem with the article was the lack of options specified:
Or you could just install Firefox, with the foxie plugin, and get completely secure browsing for all sites, and great Triton/IE support for intranet/extranet legacy webapps.By that time... (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, ReactOS will be installed in a dual-boot with the latest Linux, which I hope, will be user-and-hardware friendly by then.
As long as Linux keeps providing me with... (Score:3, Interesting)
Isn't this Already the "Word on the Street"? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Amazing (Score:1, Interesting)
I do not see a company which is going to completely rebuild their infrastructure for Vista, unless there is an absolute need to. The hardware costs alone are going to be substantial, not to mention migrating applications from NT4. It's just not going to happen overnight. 2008 seems about when most users would start adopting it.
Developers - the musical by Steve Ballmer (Score:2, Interesting)
Developers [achurch.org] [mirror] [tarmo.fi]
Re:Not only Vista... (Score:4, Interesting)
I do corp help desk for a living supporting MS Office Applications and I would disagree with this part of your statment.
MS Office Apps are not intuitive nor easy to use for the average Joe office worker. It is why they pay me money to show people how to use them on a daily basis.
You may of course believe them to be so, but put someone who has no training infront of a windows box and you see the same mistakes over and over again by different people. Its a kind of bashing a head against my desk kind of job but its a living.
I could give specific examples about Track Changes and a few other settings that people think they should act a certain way but don't, but I could go on and on.
Have you tried it? (Score:3, Interesting)
- Software development (VS Studio 2003)
- Email / Browsing
- Gaming
First impression, wow this is great.
After 6 weeks, my impression have change, Vista (as of currently is pretty crap). I've got multiple reboot, blue screen, IE 7 is having a lots of issue (page not rendering properly, JavaScript error for example Google Spell checker not working properly on IE 7). The search "engine" is not that great, why we can't keep our old *.exe find?
Over that many application not working at all, some desktop application, other are game that just don't launch. Even stable program like SQL Enterprise Manager crash on Vista...
Vista new graphical engine is deadly slow too, all is on graphic card but this cause issue like to see the backbuffer when switching application and more. Application are not build like game with "Begin drawing" and "End drawing" so that cause to constantly redraw the screen and see flicker everywhere...
Iwill receive my new portable next week and I will definitely not install Vista on it... for me I agree with the report... I stay with Windows XP for a few years.
Re:This is the LAST Windows you'll ever buy!! (Score:3, Interesting)
With Windows XP I won't be able to install/use it in 10 years if I so desire (and yes, I recently just installed
a fresh usable MS-DOS box). With Windows 2000 I will be able to do this in 10 years (and block it from
Internet access altogether [as is already practice for Windows boxes in our offices
discontinues XP what do you think the average Joe will do when it comes time to activate a product which
won't be able to be used otherwise? You're already "renting" Windows whether you like it or not...
Re:Have you tried it? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The reason not to upgrade is... (Score:5, Interesting)
What's wrong with Windows may very well be something that doesn't exist at Microsoft: elegance, simplicity and modularity of design. They are trying for that lately, at least they say they are, but it's going to be hard to change the mindset of everybody at Microsoft. They've always had very clever people but not very smart people, as exemplefied by Bill Gates himself. He's a man who is as shrewd as any suit in the room, but he has no sense of elegance. He's like that guy everybody knows who can do any math problem you give him, but who has the creativity of a field mouse. Elegance goes a long way in design, and a good OS is equal parts design and science, I think. You can have the tightest kernel in the world, but when some dipshit comes up with an idea like the Registry, it's all over.
2k is ok as a desktop if you keep the gates closed (Score:3, Interesting)
But none of them is suitable for the average computer user who has just one box s/he wants to use for everything, including going online. Win* just doesn't work w/o a linux box controlling the gates to the real world. And MS soft related to the net really never recovered from the initial rush when b. gates realized he had slept over the big thing happening and purchased mosaic to hack it into a killer app.
They succeeded, didn't they? The blue e is a killer. But too many Win* users don't realize this and that's why I recommend macs for standard users, win* is just to hard to configure.
Myself, I haven't had a single virus/trojan event in 20 years of computing, 15 of them with MS OSen. I contribute this on:
- when it was bbs networking, I had more interest in pr0n than in games.
- I stayed with netscape until there was opera, and eudora is the mail app.
- I have that habbit of inverting most of the default settings on a clean MS OS install
- I skipped 98 and ME, using NT4 instead
- instead of c:\Windows it has been e:\WINNT all the time (don't laugh, the closest I ever got to catching an infection failed at that barrier)
- I'm running linux on the gateway/firewall since '97
Hm, maybe I should repeat that last line about 5 times or so...
And Vista? Bringing all the benefits of paying for enhanced DRM and "trusted" stuff? I will have to buy it as soon as customers demand it on their list of supported OSen and if it won't run in a vmware I will have to invest in a new laptop with it preInstalled. But I will have it running in a cage of linux boxen guarding it and it will be safe...
Re:The reason not to upgrade is... (Score:3, Interesting)
They didn't just rewrite the old games to not work on the PSX, and then slap an "XP" suffix on the title.
Oh, well, that explains the rest of your post, doesn't it.
Funny you should put it like that. I mean, you haven't noticed that word processors were pretty well modern sometime in the middle of the 80s? Or that spreadsheets were not long after? File and print sharing too, for that matter. So just exactly where is the killer app that will take advantage of your 3ghz machine? Game consoles basically have the killer app built into them, the personal computer doesn't.
Re:The reason not to upgrade is... (Score:3, Interesting)
What's wrong with the *idea* of the Registry ?
Re:The reason not to upgrade is... (Score:2, Interesting)
Now, if all you mean by the "idea" of the registry is a standard preferences management system, then there's nothing inherenrtly wrong with it, and other vendors (notably GNOME with gconf and Apple with NetInfo) have done it quite well. But the Windows implementation is horribly flawed.
Re:The reason not to upgrade is... (Score:3, Interesting)
You seem to be talking an awful lot there about implementation there. Not to mention irrelevancies like "critical system information".
Even on NT-based Windowses, the registry is fragile, [...]
Amazing how with the registry being so "fragile", I've yet to see a single example of an actual Registry corruption in the wild, despite having been a sysadmin for many years.
About the only thing that is likely to corrupt the Registry is a physical hardware error of some sort (memory, disk, etc). I hate the break it to you, but that sort of thing is going to cause problems on any OS.
[...] and if something happens to it the system is utterly hosed; it won't even boot to a command line in safe mode.
You make it sound like this doesn't happen to other OSes.
Now, if all you mean by the "idea" of the registry is a standard preferences management system, [...]
The "idea" of the Registry is actually a system-wide database. "Preferences management" is but one of many functions it performs.
But the Windows implementation is horribly flawed.
Hm. Yet still I've never had any major problems with the Registry, out of hundreds (if not thousands) of Windows machines.
Seems to me "Registry problems" are like "major XP SP2 problems". Rare, but widely referred to as being commonplace.
A single decision doomed Windows security (Score:4, Interesting)
In Win32, every module (EXE/DLL) is contiguous in the process virtual address space. The code and data are next to each other in each module, but not between modules. The stack and heap are allocated as blocks at essentially random addresses. The memory layout looks like this:
empty code data empty stack empty code data empty heap
The problem is that there is no single address that you could choose that says "only code is allowed below this address, and no code is allowed above this address".
On the x86, before AMD64, it was impossible to tell the processor that certain memory addresses cannot be executed. Anything that was readable was also executable. This means it is possible to execute from the data areas, a fatal flaw.
However, the x86 *does* have a feature that allows you to say "no code is allowed above this address". This is known as the "CS limit". By setting this, any attempt to execute from a data area would crash the program. Crashing the program is a lot better than taking over your computer.
Win32's memory layout prevents this feature from being used, because if you try to set a limit, either you have data in the code area, allowing exploits, or you have code in the data area, preventing legitimate code from executing.
AMD tried to correct this with the NX bit in the AMD64 chips, but it was too late. Too many Win32 programs rely on the ability to execute from a data section. As a result, in XP SP2 and Vista, the feature is only enabled by default in a few programs. You can turn it on for all, but then a lot of copy-protected games won't run.
Linux usually has the same problem. However, because most Linux programs come with source, it is possible to modify every application in the system to work this way.
Melissa
Re:The reason not to upgrade is... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The reason not to upgrade is... (Score:3, Interesting)
The registry is a real point of failure; despite your attempts to deny it. I believe your experience is not typical of the majority of users of MS Windows.
A corporate system has characteristics that are unique to to such systems. For example: Corporate systems don't usually fill their hard drives with the myriad of software that are usually found in home systems: games, photo editors, educational programs, etc.
If you haven't seen any examples of registry problems then I assure you you will be surprised at the horrors it can bring.
You see, the problem is not with the idea of the centralized registry itself but with the fact that the operating system (in this case MSWin) assumes that whatever program modifies the registry will modify it in such a way that it is still left in a consistent state.
Please read that again so you may understand. In other words, MSWin assumes that all installed software will play nice and that programmers have taken great care to ensure the safety and consistency of the registry.
Unfortunately, this leaves the stability of the entire system in the hands of unknown programmers who may or may not have done their homework!
What happens when a user decides to click on the cancel button in the middle of an installation and the program conveniently forgets that it has already modified the registry and thus should roll back whatever changes it has made? What do you think will happen to the registry now?
Ever wondered why Windows advises users to exit all other running programs before installing new software? What happens when program A modifies the registry but before it was able to save the changes, program B modifies and saves its changes to the same central registry? What happens to the changes made by program B when program A now saves its changes? This is called the concurrency problem and it is a real problem when two or more processes access and modify the same resource.
What if an installed program decides to insert information in the centralized registry that is specifically discouraged by Microsoft but which a lazy programmer decides is actually quite safe because it doesn't seem to have any deleterious effects in his system? Of course his system has very little installed software since it is a development system after all.
We can go on and on with possible disaster scenarios. In fact, you can even make it into a learning activity.
Discussion: List scenarios where a centralized registry is a disadvantage to the stability and consistency of a system. What do you think is a more reasonable compromise? Multiple configuration files with their attendant stability at the expense of complicated configuration management, or unstable systems but with a single API and thus easier configuration management?
Points for discussion: How many times are you expected to configure a typical application? Do you agree with the Unix philosophy that since software configuration is typically done only a few times and more often only once, that a fire and forget policy is more reasonable?
Additional points for discussion: Why is software configuration under a single registry system is not likely to be a fire and forget system?