Windows XP forum: Is Vista going to be the new Windows ME?

I am using Windows Vista now with an Unsigned Beta Drive for my Netgear WG511T wireless PCMCIA card. I have no issues with DRM or things not working or anything going wrong. Everything works fine. Am i missing something fundamental in this whole article?

Easy to install OS, hardware & programs.

here's no chance that Vista will turn out like ME, and only an attention-deprived FUD-meister and self-proclaimed expert would say so

And you are a self-proclaimed expert so state this? You make enough "sure of yourself" statements to proclaim expert status attitude that you are right and everyone else is simply wrong. So show me your expert papers and i'll take your statement as being anything near tangible as well. I doubt the future of Vista will depend on this thread and I may be wrong, but these are user's opinions and how they feel. Just for the record, i've been here around 2 years and never heard Bob Proffit speak out against anything, that alone concerns me.That aside, I am a tech, I fix computers, do you? This Vista IS a step closer to closing out techs, it's bad enough jobs are dropping every day, so you may call people FUDS which just sounds completely ignorant anyway and usless but nonetheless, it's my livelyhood , I am concerned and I have a right to be.

Paul

It's kind of hard not to post negative to your statements, you simply put it out there but I will try my best not to.

You may have installed every version of Windows, so have I , so has my son, I don't feel it's that large a task to be honest. I chose not to be admin , don't care for it. These are not expert papers from either you or I, simply bragging rights, well not even with so many that do this. I write HTML, going into programming, do graphics work as well, so what? So do a million others. My point is you are making statements and judgements on FUD, not technical. And I also know they have been working on software that will self repair sofware issues to the point there is no need for Admins save for hardware changes, what? Once every few months give or take. Which brings me to my next point...

You claim you would rather be moving forward, lol. Well the problem I see is this. If Vista has issues or future software, if techs are becoming locked out, who is going to fix them? Ohhhh, Microsoft would make a bundle wouldn't they? Or I hope people get used to re-installing A LOT. As far as Bob goes, you may not agree, yes Bob can be impolite, yes he makes short statements that leave people scratching their heads, yes he can even irritate you, but he knows what he's talking about and that's something i'll never dispute. If you've been here that long, you must know this.

"Sorry Bob, lol, no offense meant"

If in the future MS locks out vendors, I hope you trust MS security enough to not worry about it.

Linux has future plans to become what i've been wondering about for years, an OS for many who want more user friendly and affordable and compatable. I don't know how it will work, or IF it will, but it's a shot.
Vist and future versions i'm sure, are becoming a fire danger. Why do I say this? It's sort of like a home, you can seal every door, every window, board them all up,put chains on everything, now your house is safe right? If there is a fire, good luck getting out. Same for an OS, begin locking everyone out, fine, until the very same hacks decide to find a hole and take down the whole system which WE NO LONGER HAVE ACCESS TO.

So I think this is where the FUD belongs, not to those who are worried that one day their livelyhood may be at stake. It's the FUD you claim that puts the locks on the OS's, not from techs. Blame hackers and other malicious beings who exploit our systems, they caused this FUD , not people like me.


Paul

"The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history"

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

The big problem with ME was stability. Everyone has to give Vista one thing at least : stability. The main culprit to stability is bad drivers. Microsoft had to take a stand and I applaud them, hardware manufacturers pushed the blame way too long and have to onw up to the poor quality drivers they made.

Vendors want to sell new product on a popular, "new" platform. Microsoft wants operating system to run well on current and new hardware, certifies drivers. Please note that the OS is still only 25% or less of the delivered system costs: the higher-end the system, the lower the Microsoft %-age. So why should Microsoft pay hardware manufacturers, exactly?

We're not talking Apple here where all the markup on everything goes to the seller. Or XBox 360, where Microsoft does pay for the driver development, and sells the systems at a loss, hoping to make it up in services and software sales.

And who is to push the blame for a poor OS and browser *cough IE*. IE6 had known issues for what, well over a year before anything was done about it? Who do we blame, driver companies? Who do we blame when an OS doesn't have valid support for new and upcoming drivers do to lack of foresight? Funny, when I first used ME, it wasn't driver issues I had, it was OS issues. People would run the same drivers and jump right back to 98SE because it was still more stable than ME. So if in fact it was the drivers in all cases, this wouldn't have occured. I could still load a 98 system right now, and it would hold up better than ME does. ME was dubbed "Many Errors" for a reason. I simply can't swallow main culprit being bad drivers when it comes to MS. They rushed to get the 9X to NTFS bridge out there and screwed up and as I stated, MS thinks about it's OS first and other vendors last and leave the mistakes for us to deal with from both parties. MS is not cooperative and never has been with outside doings to go along with their OS.

I am not saying NONE of it is due to poor drivers, some of it is and I agree to some extent. I also agree with the stability issue.

Paul

Yeah, right. Someone's gonna crack the driver signing, the https protocol, Triple-DES encryption -- and NO ONE WILL KNOW WHO.

THEN, they will extort a quadrillion dollars from us all, buy Australia, and setup a super-computer that will ENTHRALL ALL the computers in the world.

At the end of this we will find out -- it's -- MAC -- from the TV commercials. And all will end happily ever after when we all use iLi(f)e to make videos and great recordings that will be shared by all freely under the GPL V3.

"Someone's going to impersonate a hardware company."

ISPs are a bunch of goofs, and the loose configuration of former academics and libertarians who -- still -- run the Internet (because the US government couldn't figure out a way to keep it, and it wasn't important enough to fight about) are amateurs. So anything that happens to the Internet is a model for exactly ... nothing else.

Why don't you just predict that the pornsters and hackers will get enough money to get a director on the Board at Microsoft (with two of the five richest billionaires in the world there, they should feel right at home) and then will command Microsoft to GIVE them the signing rights. Yeah, that's the ticket!

Did you do ANY research into how the signing rights work?

This title is proven by the significant investments in Linux by Intel, and the fact that Microsoft cooperates fully with AMD on their projects.

Whether mom-and-pop shops in Taiwan will get signing rights is a side-light is probably irrelevant to the concept of a porn-empire doing same. Your error in describing collusion negates the entire argument.

the same guy who way back said computer users would never need more than 256k ram ? Wow, needing more than that, that's outrageous, who will ever need more than that? That will never happen, only in science fiction movies.

You are probably right, driver signing cracked? Nahhh, MS did away with this issue by giving a BSOD even from authentic changes! How smart of them. That's right, even when necessary changes to the drivers are made, you may get that pretty blue screen. So if MS shuts the pc down thinking a driver has been tampered with, it would be a good thing to restart the system, the one thing you DONT want to do if there is an infection of any kind. So it's impossible to plant a code into the driver, wait for a reboot, bypassing protective gate and viola! Instant driver take over! Nah, this is crazy talk.

Paul

"I didn't predict that PCs would only need 256k. My first PC had 1M, then I found out that there were all sorts of problems accessing it with DOS on a 286, even with advanced memory management like the Lotus scheme."

My first personal computer was a Convergent Miniframe, with 1 MB of RAM. Its operating system, CTIX, was a BSD variant, with demand-paged virtual memory and copy-on-write on a 68K. This was in 1984. I can't help laughing when someone calls the MS-DOS paging kludges that were coming out around the same time "advanced memory management." Yes I know one of them actually went by that name.

"I started looking for better systems so I could run more than one app at a time." The Miniframe, like any computer that big running a real operating system, easily kept eight high speed terminals busy running a few apps each.

"Those who do not understand unix are doomed to reinvent it, poorly." --Henry "utzoo" Spencer

DEC's Unix flavor was called, quite simply, Digital Unix. It was later renamed Tru64 when Compaq took over DEC, and now HP has killed it off in favor of the train wreck that is HP-UX. Originally they claimed they were going to try to merge the two code bases, which never happened, and Tru64 was so far beyond HP-UX, they couldn't even really bring over any features easily.

Irix was/is SGI's flavor of Unix BTW. Solaris is from Sun, AIX is IBM, and UnixWare is from SCO, not that SCO is likely to be around much longer.

Also, while you're entitled to your opinion, that doesn't cover baseless conjecture and counterfactual thinking. You have no idea if the PC (as in, personal computer, transcending operating system, instruction set, etc) market would have been better or worse had Microsoft not gotten lucky. Odds are, IBM would have kept trying to track down the CP/M guy if Gates hadn't been in the right place at the right time, and instead of MS-DOS, we would have had CP/M which QDOS (later renamed to MS-DOS) was a near identical clone of. I would further bet that things would have largely played out the same in the early years. Compaq still would have reverse engineered the IBM PC BIOS, and while they may not have been able to get CP/M, they could have just as easily found QDOS like Gates did. I don't know if the two were source and/or binary compatible, but I'd bet they probably were, or could have been with minimal effort.

The important thing to note here, is that I don't know for sure what would have happened, and neither do you. For all we know, the computing world as we know it could have been light years ahead of where it is now... It's also equally probable that it would have remained shackled to the realm of large businesses and electronics geeks.

What I will say, is that Unix, and it's many variants and work-alikes have been doing things for decades that Windows still has yet to fully crack. Microsoft also seems to be a company that makes a number of poor design decisions with their software. There were a number of memory management kludges with DOS, then they finally scrapped the entire DOS codebase after WinME, only to have the NT codebase crap out on them after only two more releases. And before that, Microsoft was working on OS/2 as a replacement for DOS until they had a falling out with IBM on the matter. How many times have they held the industry back? DirectX comes to mind as a great example. Until DirectX 7, it was god awful compared to OpenGL. Yet Microsoft insisted on dragging the computer gaming industry through the teething pains of DirectX. Internet Explorer has done the same for the web industry. MS Office has maybe done the most damage of all, particularly PowerPoint. Windows has been continually playing catchup to its rivals, only succeeding because of iron clad licensing agreements with big name OEMs. Who knows where we'd be if Microsoft never came onto the scene. I don't know, you certainly don't know, nor does anyone else.

And since none of this really has anything to do with Vista being a train wreck about to happen, which was the original premise for this discussion, I respectfully suggest we just drop the whole subject.

"And I know that Gates didn't get lucky."

I'd call being born into old money "lucky." The Gates family was rich. Granddad owned the biggest bank in the state. He bought daddy a seat in the legislature! Mommy sat on a bunch of corporate boards, including IBM's main law firm's. They didn't tell you that in _Pirates of Silicon Valley_, did they?

"He was tireless and ruthless in equal parts" Basically a marketing and finance guy. But he had one great idea: NO INVENTING HERE. MSFT got where it is by IBM for some reason handing them its monopoly (first BASIC-in-ROM, then the Quick and Dirty OS they bought from that guy in Seattle), and stayed there by never introducing anything original. They let others take the risk. Then when an idea is already proven, they buy, steal, or imitate it.


"The CPM guy (Gary Kildare as I recall) would never have been able to work to the extent that Gates did"

What a shame that Gary Killdall was killed a few weeks before he was scheduled to testify in MSFT's antitrust trial. I'll bet he would have debunked that silly "Gary went flying" story, under oath. Funny how MSFT just keeps getting "lucky," eh?


"There was a CP/M OS for the IBM PC that never causght on."

That's how the computer market works. Users are so desperate for an interoperability "standard" that they'll put up with the monopoly that comes with it. Economists call this the "network effect." When IBM said MSFT, that was the end of the rivals, until the hardware got big enough that it could do important things that MS-Windows couldn't. By then the unix patents (set user-ID being the big one) had expired and AT&T had lost its suit against Berkeley, making free unix legal.

"There have been tons of OSes offered for PC hardware, and none of them have caught on except those from Microsoft."

GNU/Linux *has* caught on. It's at least twice as popular for running Internet servers as anything from MSFT. Gaining ground on the desktop, except in the US. BSD never left. If you want it reliable and secure, you don't use Windoze.