Noel Given said:
saturn0660 said:
Makes me want to break out my old win3.11 floppies.. Ahhhh the good ol days..
Hey, give me DOS 3.3 - now there was a stable OS
And to the other poster I responded to ealier, above; I'm no fan of MS either but I do work in IT for a CA state organization, so when I mentioned 'corporate backlash' it was from MS's usual crop of early adopters who (after testing) decided 'no way'.
Give 'em time. I doubt they'll want to pay for extended support, so they may switch in the next couple years anyway. The question is, to what? If anyone really wants to take advantage of Vistaphobia, it's a fine opportunity to push Linux or Mac. (I'm not endorsing either--both have their strengths and drawbacks, like any other OS.)
The fact is MS screwed the pooch to a degree with the way they tried to implement DRM (20% of your CPU cycles are devoted/reserved for DRM processing, whether you're playing a CD, DVD, etc. or not - that's one reason Vista runs slower overall vs XP on any hardware platform you care to use); as well as eliminating more of their previous backwards compatability (I like Steve Balmer would LOVE to see all the DOS and older 16-bit apps at my shop scrapped - but redevelopment costs big bucks, and upper management philosophy is - if it still does the job, why spend the money?) And as much as they'd like to believe otherwise a good portion of Corporate America feels the same.
All true. I don't know what they were thinking when they decided to get away from backwards compatibility. If I recall, they tried to do that with some of the older versions of Windows (95, 98) and there was hell to pay. Nope, those 25-year-old DOS programs simply refuse to die.
Don't even get me started on the DRM bullshit...
But, be that as it may; I agree Vista will become the standard once the newest/hottest game that only runs under DX10 hits the selves.
(Although, who knows - back in the day, MS swore up and down that a version of DX9 would NEVER be made available for Windows 98 - and used the same 'it's too complicated to adapt...' BS; but they eventually had a Win98 version - thus if a big MS Game fails to grab the market share MS would like, we may see a DX10 version for XP yet).
Yeah, you have to take it with a grain of salt when MS says they "can't" do something. They said they couldn't de-integrate the browser, which was a lie. In any case, there actually is a working version of DX10 for XP, it's just not sanctioned by MS. So, I imagine it is largely smoke and mirrors and marketing that is having them toe that line.
In the end though; and ater a thurough testing of Vista at home and at work (and we have no plans to go to Vista at work as yet); I also went back to XP. But again, the fact that nearly one year after Vista is out, MS is still doing SP3 for XP shows me that Vista did NOT do what MS hoped it would; and honestly, aside from a few graphical interface changes; Vista isn't really 'all that' - it's more a small code facelift of XP, with DRM toploaded on it; (much like Windows 98 was really STILL Windows 95 at its core).
Like I said, the real changes in Vista have little to do with the portions of the OS users see. The graphical facelift is a marketing gimmick--it's certainly nothing you can't already do in XP, to some degree. It's the new API and driver model that they're really trying to entrench. You could guess at the reasons for this. I would imagine it's just because projects like ReactOS are managing to reimplement the entire Win32 API, which would make using a Microsoft operating system obsolete. So, their bright idea is to come up with a whole new one that will take years for others to reimplement... again.
I hope one day Steve Balmer will take his head out of his ass, and quit thinking that the general public will just blindly accept and buy whatever MS throws on the street. If you recall, while WXP did in fact work farely well out of the gate (and was the first true 'different' OS from a coding perspective than Win9X); MS tried to get home users to take multiple bites at the licensing 'apple' (no pun intended) by giving Home Users 5 'device upgades' (ie if you changed out more than 5 oieces of hardware you would have to pay MS for a new XP license to re-activate your copy of XP0 - but MS wisely dropped all that after consumer and corporate backlash.
Corporate users never had to abide by Windows Product Activation. They had site licenses. However, MS does deprecate keys which have been "compromised" when they push updates. Any system using such a key then fails the GenuineAdvantage check (or whatever the hell it's called.)
I've never had to activate any of my own XP systems--never had to reinstall.
So, I don't know how much of a hassle it is or isn't.
But hey, it's also true that MS wouldn't be the juggernaut it is without Steve Balmer's marketing ploys; as we BOTH know that MS DOES NOT (and never has) written well constructed/lean and mean software.
Microsoft wouldn't know lean code if it kicked them in the compiler. That is part and parcel of their "kitchen sink" approach to development, though. Have you ever used their development tools? It's insane how much stuff is in the included libraries.
