Engineers Tell How Feedback Shaped Windows 7 452
An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica took the time to talk to three members of the Windows 7 product development and planning team to find out how user feedback impacted the latest version of Windows. There's some market speak you'll have to wade through, but overall it gives a solid picture regarding the development of a Windows release."
We Listened! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:We Listened! (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you kidding me?! You're a company named Microsoft. You've been developing operating systems for 30 years. It took you this long to realize that different users have different needs, and that your OS should run on low-end hardware? And you only figured that out because of user feedback??
Re:Hesitant (Score:2)
I also loved how the guys didn't want to compare their current progress to the BlackComb hype from 8 years ago and Cairo before that.
"Why waste good vaporware without a target to sink with it?"
Re:We Listened! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:We Listened! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's Microsoft, they take a very long time to do anything right (or do anything at all). Just look at Internet Explorer, they have been working on it since 1994. 15 years later, we are still YET to receive a browser from Microsoft that is at least more than 20% web compliant..
Microsoft does have the technical resources to make IE score 100% on the Acid3 test. However, it is not in their best interests to do so. Here is a quote from Bill Gates (taken from wikiquotes) which demonstrates Microsoft's business strategy.
One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities.
This is the attitude that Microsoft is developing software with. Just look at the number of businesses that are stuck with IE6 because of some legacy ActiveX application. Microsoft's strategy is working very well for them and I don't see them ever changing.
Re:We Listened! (Score:5, Insightful)
Because for a while (96-98) there weren't concrete standards for DOM interaction beyond document.clear/write/close .. Once the standards were firmed up, things headed in that direction and IE5 was pretty compliant for its' time compared to the alternatives. At that time Opera was pretty much following IE's lead, and Netscape 4.x was a nightmare by comparison. This is even without use of proprietary ActiveX plugins or Java.
Microsoft created an XML interface that eventually became the XmlHttpRequest we all know and love. MS's DOM interactions in IE4 shaped the direction of the W3C DOM specification we have now. It's easy to gripe about MS from today's standards, but when IE4-5 came out it was well ahead of the competition.
This is why your comments are trollish. You could say that from 2003-2007 there was a huge level of disparity between the development of IE and where web based standards have come. And that you have large issues with MS because of this. From 1997-2002 IE was pretty much the best option.
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Microsoft has a monopoly, they don't need to cater to users.
Users have to adapt to Microsoft. Haven't you noticed?
Re:We Listened! (Score:5, Interesting)
Well not really. The sudden concern for netbook users was caused by the possibility that people might switch to linux. When the original linux powered Asus EEE PC was released, it was so popular, it pushed Microsoft into third place behind Apple and Xandros for OS shipments that month. I imagine that would give monkey-boy a bit of a fright.
Re:We Listened! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Oh, that may well turn out to be a major decision: if OEMs and end users now expect to get their (netbook) operating systems for ~$20, how can Microsoft raise the price to $100?
That is a _major_ price hike for devices that now cost $200-$400 total...
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We Listened! And We Won! (Score:3, Interesting)
When the original linux powered Asus EEE PC was released, it was so popular, it pushed Microsoft into third place behind Apple and Xandros for OS shipments that month. I imagine that would give monkey-boy a bit of a fright.
Monkey-boy has the instincts and habits of a winner.*
When the Atom netbook entered the market - typically with a larger screen, better keyboard, and twice the RAM and storage space of the competition - the Linux netbook was drop-kicked into the dumpsters behind your local WalMart.
For the
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> When the Atom netbook entered the market - typically with a larger screen, better keyboard,
> and twice the RAM and storage space of the competition - the Linux netbook was drop-kicked
> into the dumpsters behind your local WalMart.
Yes... much beefier hardware. It bears little resemblance to the original EEE 900 really.
It bears repeating that Dell still sells a lot of Linux netbooks. They actually load
Linux on the newer hardware. They didn't just abandon Linux outright as if their use
of it was all
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When the Atom Netbook came out, Asus' Linux netbooks were still better specced for the same price, and it would be a few months before Acer and Dell would cut options off Linux books, HP still has the fully powered linux option outside the American continent (which is admittedly better than the HP VIA netbook did) and only MSI had fudded because they were too moronic to do as a corporation what a few million users easily had done on their own.
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Absolutely. Intel looked like they were going to start producing "decent" integrated graphics when, in 2004, they announced the GMA 900. It looked to Microsoft like the world's largest GPU maker would finally have something capable of desktop compositing, so they figured they could finally add this capability to Windows without a huge performance hit.
Then, in 2006 Intel announced the GMA X3000, but couldn't produce drivers to enable the advanced features like Vertex Shaders (this took eighteen months). I
Re:We Listened! (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember MS has never concerned themselves with consumers; for the most part consumers are not their customers. Companies were their customers for businesses. On the consumer side, OEMs are their customers. Either way, MS never dealt as much with direct consumer support and interaction. If there were support issues, companies' IT departments took care of their business users and OEMs handled the consumers. With Vista, this came back to hurt them as OEMs could simply blame MS on the whole fiasco especially when consumers could downgrade to XP and see a significant performance and stability improvements.
MS also gambled that minimum hardware would advance more than their new OS would bog it down. With every release, MS would redefine what "minimum" hardware requirements meant. With Win95 and 98, minimum meant Windows may be slower if the user was doing processor intensive. More memory would definitely fix it. With XP, "minimum" meant that Windows would be slower especially if the user was doing processor intensive. More memory would fix most things. By the time of Vista, minimum meant you could load Windows onto the machine. Good luck on actually running anything but the OS. More memory might fix it, but CPU and video card upgrades were more likely necessary which meant it would be cheaper for the user to buy a new computer or downgrade to XP rather than upgrade their computer to actually use Vista.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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|| So if MSFT wants to know who is to blame for folks hating Vista like the second coming of WinME, they just need to look in the mirror. Sure on a dual core with 2Gb+ of RAM it'll run decently, but the "Best Buy Specials" being sold at the time of the Vista release were single core Sempron and Celeron with 512Mb of RAM and really lousy Intel or SiS IGPs. Those machines should have NEVER had Vista come within a 1000 yards of it, yet MSFT let manufacturers put "Vista capable" on them along with that piece of
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The OS is much more important/integral to the user experience than the (different) windshield is to driving.
Try driving down i-75 in Florida WITHOUT a windshield and your mouth open. I bet you will recant this statement :)
Yes (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yes (Score:5, Funny)
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If you have bad hardware or are overclocking, that is a different story, but also your own fault.
Lets be reasonable, this is like a wife of 30 years, bringing up stuff you did in high school!
Re:Yes (Score:5, Funny)
I'm guessing you're not married.
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Actually, the crashes weren't all bad. Back when I was using W95 at work, I took coffee breaks every time it crashed in the morning. Of course I paid for it; I was in the bathroom during its afternoon crashes.
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Windows 2000 had a few internal issues that would cause BSODs to happen without outside interference in certain hardware without 3rd party drivers. Though many 3rd party drivers (I had an older burning software for NT4 that caused 2K instabilities). XP was much more stable, though again plagued by 3rd party drivers, and had quite a few stability issues of its' own.
I would say the core kernel in the NT line of windows has been very solid. Though many different drivers have caused numerous issues. This is
Feedback (Score:5, Funny)
We took all the feedback.
Printed it.
Made bricks with the printed feedback and some glue.
Built a piramid with the bricks.
Painted it green and brown.
Called it Mount Feedji.
Burned it down in a massive party.
Then, still drunk from the party, we designed W7.
.
Ok, that was a lie. We didn't actually paint it. But we considered that suggestion for quite a long while.
Re:Feedback (Score:5, Funny)
I wanted to start a farm on Feedji, you insensitive clod!
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Please say they at least hit the Balmer Peak after the party.
http://xkcd.com/323/ [xkcd.com]
Let's give the devil his due (Score:5, Funny)
Windows 7 plain rocks. Seems like Windows 2000 just got reincarnated and polished.
I've been running it for a while now and have no issues.
Re:Let's give the devil his due (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm actually not sure how this got to +4 funny. Maybe +5 interesting? I digress. I've been a fan of Win2k for a long time, I used it for just about everything from gaming to my work up until XP64 and had a stable driver set. Does Win7 have that nifty feel of Win2k? Yes actually it does. Even on lower end hardware it's decently snappy, and runs well.
Issues? The biggest I've found is it's ability to lose connection to the internet on reboots. Meaning you need to disable and reenable your network card which fixes it. Sadly no new drivers for my card, but otherwise works fine. I consider that a 2 on my 1-10(10 being worst) scale of crap. Otherwise, I'm quite happy. My XP64 machine has been up and running for a bit more than 460 days now without a reboot. I expect that Win7 will beat that easily.
Re:Let's give the devil his due (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have gone 460 days without a reboot, it's because you haven't been applying security updates. Your system is highly vulnerable, and you are a joke as a system administrator.
Turn in your geek card NOW.
Re:Let's give the devil his due (Score:5, Interesting)
Vista wasn't terrible to begin with.
Vista was terrible to begin with when it just got released. I ran it for 2 months, hoping for something to improve - some magic hotfix pushed through Windows Update, or better drivers, or whatever. I'm a patient guy, which is why it took 2 months to realize that I can forget about it till the service pack.
Vista SP1 now, that was usable. And, of course, 7 is built on everything that was in Vista SP2, and then there are some quite real tweaks perf-wise, and new taskbar is neat...
I have one other theory about why 7 is so much better received than Vista: part of it is the visual design.
If you recall, Vista had that weird color theme with yellow-green background and dark, almost solid black window frames and taskbar (and window frames were entirely black when maximized - and most windows are maximized when working). There also were those dark yet glossy green-cyan toolbars in Explorer that somehow made me think of uranium glass. The overall effect was fairly eye-straining and kinda "meh". It killed all the bling that Aero was supposed to bring on the spot.
Enter 7: bright blue wallpaper with a bright, highly saturated colored Windows logo in the middle. Almost transparent window chrome and taskbar with a light blue tint. Very pale blue selection highlight in menus, and toolbars are almost white. The entire design has a very "lightened" feeling about it because of the color choice.
I strongly suspect that, especially when seeing 7 right after Vista, there's a strong subconscious impulse to differentiate the two just because of the design difference, and not in Vista's favor.
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I know this is slashdot, but saying Windows 7 is not Ubuntu is just plain ridiculous.
No it isn't. I admit that I haven't used Windows 7 or Ubuntu much, but after even a cursory look I can quite safely say that Windows 7 is not Ubuntu. It is also not MS Bob, GEM, or OS/2, just in case you were still confused.
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MS moves fast (Score:4, Insightful)
And yet they could have used the Internet for feedback well more than a decade ago. Glad to see they've finally entered the mid-90s.
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Mojave Experiment 2.0 (Score:5, Interesting)
However, minus the new taskbar (which I think is a massive step forward), there really isn't that much that's new. A little bit faster, a little bit less buggy.
In the end, 7 is Mojave Experiment 2.0. Microsoft tried an ad campaign, it failed because people wouldn't get over how "bad Vista is". Microsoft gives it new clothes and a new name- now it's the best version of Windows EVER!
In short, Microsoft went back to marketing after the Vista launch floundered and destroyed its reputation (due to a bunch of underpowered computers with poorly written drivers giving the OS a bad reputation).
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Vista wasn't inherently bad. MS just put out minimum specs that were way too low and didn't enforce driver quality.
Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0 (Score:5, Insightful)
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Why do I have to re-learn everything because microsoft wants to try to sell more copies of an OS?
What did you have to re-learn?
The thing most amazing to me about Windows is how similar every version is, and yet how many people claim there's this massive amount of retraining needed. Retraining for what!? The UI is almost identical to XP, except looking slightly different. The differences are so trivial that if you have Vista in "Classic" mode, and compared it to XP in "Classic" mode, you can't even tell the
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Win 2000 = NT 5.0
Win XP = NT 5.1
Win Vista = NT 6.0
Win 7 = NT 6.1
What did people expect. It's not a new iteration, it's an enhancement. Just because they brand it as a new OS does not make it so.
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What did people expect. It's not a new iteration, it's an enhancement. Just because they brand it as a new OS does not make it so.
MS (Steven Sinofsky to be precise) has officially claimed that the kernel version number of 6.1 is only for compatibility reasons, for apps only looking at the major OS version number, and that it otherwise would have been an "NT 7.0". I can't be bothered to find the article now, but some careful Googling on the "Engineering Windows 7" blog would do the trick.
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7 truly is Vista SP3.
The line is always fuzzy and subjective. Was XP a "service pack for 2000"? Is the difference between pre-SP XP and 2000 really that much bigger than that between 7 and Vista?
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Vista needs 2GB to run comfortably, and with 3GB/4GB, it runs quite fast.
Given how much memory cost (forgetting today, when Vista came out DDR2 was cheap), I do think that it's underpowered.
As far as "bloat", yes, I do recognize that many Linux distros will run on much less. Ubuntu is usually happy with 512MB- anything more is gravy.
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If an app was coded to work as a non-priveleged user in NT4, there was a pretty good chance it would work on Vista. Directory structure changed a bit, but the OS used symlinks and junction points to hide that from apps.
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It's even harder to know the requirements when Microsoft has been publically publishing them as a part of the security guidelines required to get Windows Logo certified since 1993.
UAC doesn't enforce or work around anything new, at all. These requirements have always been known. They've always been considered standard security guidelines on UNIX-based systems and have been the standard security guidelines on Windows since the Windows NT 3.1 release, the first release of a Windows kernel capable of enforci
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a lot of these issues can be fixed by simply rebuilding from a non-administrator account and watching what happens.
What... I hope you don't mean the build process changes depending on the developer's user privileges?
Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0 (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll echo the above to a large extent. Here's my take on UAC, as compared to sudo.
First the similarities: they function in much the same way.They have similar (though not completely overlapping) goals, and they protect more or less the same stuff. Back when I first switched to Vista (about six months after it came out), there was still a lot of flap going on about UAC. I decided to keep a log of every UAC prompt I received, and did so for a month. I don't have it handy, but IIRC here is roughly how it came out. There were bascially three reasons I got prompted: (1) I was making an expected administrative change that would have required root on Linux (most of them), (2) there was a bit of the UI that was designed poorly, or (3) I was first logging on and this hardware monitoring piece of software was starting. The second category is the most interesting; almost all (or maybe all) of these were because I wanted to change my environment variables. Even though I was just changing my user's variables the dialog where you do that is also where you change system-wide environment variables; the fact that you could do the latter mean you needed elevation. (Win 7 fixes this dialog so you don't need elevation to change your own environment.) In addition, while I didn't get it for this reason, some people got UAC prompts for things like start menu and desktop changes. The desktop thing wouldn't happen on Linux because neither KDE nor Gnome have the idea off a global "all users" desktop in addition to the per-user one. The changes that caused these UAC prompts were because the change had to affect the all users desktop. I'm not sure how Gnome and KDE store the equivalent of the start menu soo I'm not sure hoow sudo would behave there.
Now the differencees:
1. UAC behaves more like 'su' than sudo. You need the password of the admin user, not your own. For enterprise users, this could be a big deal. For a home user, I doubt it matters much. For a single-user computer, it doesn't really matter in the slightest.
2. UAC doesn't cache its permission. If you need to elevate twice in a row, you have to explicitly elevate twice. At least on a typical desktop configuration, gksudo will cache its permission for a couple minutes. This is the main respect in which, IMO, UAC is more annoying. That said, this rarely happened in my month of UAC logging.
3. UAC is on-demand: a running program can ask for elevation. This is in contrast to sudo, where you need to start with said user's rights. This isn't very different from the end user's perspective as compared to stuff like GkSudo, but is pretty nice as compared to running sudo from the command line, where at least I often found myself going "oops, I needed to start that as root."
4. Even admin users need to elevate, but root doesn't need to sudo. A little annoying if you're doing a loot of admin stuff. Then again, you only need to click 'yes' as opposed to type your password, so it's not too bad. This is important for Windows users where most people are an admin anyway (and hence sudo as-such wouldn't do anything). Speaks more about the Windows architecture and programs than UAC in that respect. (Win 7 changes this; admin users don't have to explicitly elevate as much. Icons with the UAC logo elevate without a prompt. Programs that just want elevation, like installers, still cause a prompt.)
5. UAC checks the program's digital signature, and displays either the confirmed source or a warning about a missing signature; sudo doesn't do any of that. In theory this is a nice win on UAC's part, but in practice I doubt it matters much. A lot of programs (esp. OSS apps) aren't signed, so the presence of that warning usually isn't surprising so I just click through anyway, and (1) you need to a lot of thee time and (2) I even know all about what it's talking about it.
All Microsoft did in 7 is reduce the security, since many users will blindly click through whatever is shown anyways, and power users turn it off.
I don't buy this stat
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Memory & performance pig: 7 is a bit trimmed, but the difference really isn't that big.
Nothing to see here (Score:5, Informative)
Its a pretty useless article. You don't get any more info out of the article then you get from the title.
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Customer Support 101
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That's why they call it astroturf.
Dear God... (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows 7 is another proof that enough marketing can make something good.
Windows 7, Windows 7, Windows 7, ...
I yet have to find someone who can show me what it brings me, over XP, that is worth paying 100+ EUR for.
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Continued support?
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Honestly as a home user you get ipv6 (which you may not really benefit from if you're behind an ipv4 router), self-healing NTFS, DirectX 11, a new taskbar (which is admittedly pretty neat) and not a whole lot more.
You get continued security updates for a longer period of time.
Is it worth paying to upgrade?
Probably not. I bought a copy for DirectX 11 because the only reason I keep Windows around for is gaming. I also got the upgrade when it was $50 (USD) so it was a much easier pill to swallow. Your mileage
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I recently switched my HP Mini netbook from XP to the 7 RC.
I have found that some things are just more stable. Hibernate, for example, seems to work a lot better and works faster. It's much improved over XP. It's definitely been more stable and it's a number of little things I notice that are improvements, besides the improved task bar.
Memory wise, Windows 7 Ultimate it doesn't seem to use much more than what I was using with XP Home. If anything, the memory management feels like its improved quite a bit.
A
Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!" (Score:5, Funny)
I get the impression that the Windows 7 launch is a lot like seeing an old girlfriend suddenly show up on your doorstep wanting to get back together. She's had some work done, apparently: stomach stapling to take off some of the weight, breast augmentation, and a radical nosejob to make her look as much like your current girlfriend as medical science will allow.
She's pretty, of course, almost too pretty. She still wears far too much makeup and carries that desperate look in her eyes. The fragrant haze around her is the perfume she overuses to mask the scent of failure.
But standing there in that low-cut top, you'd almost forget for a moment what a psycho she was- how she used to shut down in the middle of a date and forget everything you were talking about and how she was only happy when you were buying her things. You'd almost forget about carrying around her legacy baggage or those nights when, for seemingly no reason at all, she would simply stop speaking to you and when you asked what was wrong she'd just spit a string of hex code at you and expect you to figure it out.
You complained about her for years before finally deciding to get rid of her, and here she is again. Though, somehow she seems like a completely different person now.
"I'm up here," she says when she catches you staring at her chest.
Tempted though you may be, you know that over time she'll get bored and slow down on you just like she always does. And then you'll be right back where you started: trapped. She keeps you by convincing you that you don't have a choice. You're just not smart enough for one option or rich enough to afford the other.
"But I'm different now," she says, batting her eyes innocently. "I've changed."
Indeed she has. Apparently, she's really into Cabala now or something like that. It's helped her discover loads of untapped potential in herself. But it also means that you'll have to buy all new furniture to fit with her understanding of feng shui. That's not the only change she has in store for you. The minute you let her move in, she'll have a new alarm system put in that succeeds only in preventing your friends from coming over on poker night.
She doesn't love you, but she doesn't hate you, either. The truth is that she couldn't care less one way or the other. She's here because she doesn't want to be alone. Like all human beings, especially those well past their prime, she wants to feel wanted and, after a string of lost jobs and bad investments, she needs a place to stay.
But all in all, she's OK. She's a seven. She'll do, I guess.
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You'd almost forget about carrying around her legacy baggage or those nights when, for seemingly no reason at all, she would simply stop speaking to you and when you asked what was wrong she'd just spit a string of hex code at you and expect you to figure it out.
Seems like a lot of /.'ers would find women easier to comprehend if this were the case.
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Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!" (Score:4, Funny)
+1, insightful (Score:3, Informative)
Too bad this brilliant little piece of prose is already rated at +5, Funny. In reality it should be +5, Insightful. It is both funny and insightful. So close to the truth as far as most people's relationship with Windows goes that it actually hurts! Best comment I think I've ever read on slashdot. Bravo.
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Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!" (Score:5, Funny)
Lets continue the analogy:
Your OSX Girlfriend shows up on your doorstep telling you to buy her a new Snow Leopard coat. Oh, and you are going to need to get her some updated pants and shoes too to match. Of course, she won't step inside your door until you've gone and bought one of those new Apple brand "iMansions" that, really, is just the same as the Intel Houses that everyone has, but comes with fancy aluminum siding and costs twice as much. You could TRY to put aluminum siding on any old Intel house, but you hear those contractors are getting sued out of business.
So, you finally get the new mansion and invite her in and you realize that she's really just like every other girl you've been with. But, all your friends like her, so you might as well go along with it. She's arty, but very serious too, and won't play any games with you. After a while, after buying her all her iAccessories you realize you really aren't getting any more out of her than your other girlfriends.
But your Linux girlfriend, she is awesome. She'll do whatever you want, whenever you want, rarely complains and will stay in pretty much any house or mobile home you have. Sadly, she's also a robot who gets delivered to your house in a box, and you have to assemble her up the way you want. You have to turn to your friends and the internet to find out why the heck she won't talk with you, or why her feet are on backwards. She's very secure in your relationship, so much that she won't do anything unless you really PROVE you are her boyfriend. She plays a few games, but you're getting sick of chess, solitaire and downhill sledding penguins. And then every few weeks you have to shut her down to replace her heart and lungs. You are so damn tired keeping her running and happy all the time who has time for sex?
To top it off, everyone has seen her naked. She's put it all over the Internet for everyone to see and fiddle with her naughty bits. She claims it makes her a better woman, but since you have to keep patching her up, you aren't so sure. What's worse, she keeps comparing you to some guy she met in Finland and talks about how much he "got inside her."
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Genius.
Waffle? (Score:2, Insightful)
Window's Explorer... (Score:4, Insightful)
Amen! (Score:3, Insightful)
I will never understand how file explorer gets WORSE as you go higher in releases. How is that possible?!?! Is there somekind of grand MSFT strategy to wean people from file explorer entirely? I just don't understand a computer operating system that does not allow easy navigation of its file and fold
Windows 7 audience... (Score:2)
I notice in TFA that the photo is of, what looks to be, a fifth grade classroom. Is this the target audience for Windows 7? I mean the commercials - er commercial - seems to be of that seven-year-old girl making a pink-pony presentation.
I'm confused. Is Windows 7 and Office 2007 -- which I hate, by the way (shakes fist) curse you "ribbon"! -- suppose to be so simple a seven-year-old can use it, or so simple that only
Now there's a title... (Score:2)
"...we had the pleasure of talking with...members of the Windows 7 product development and planning team: ...Cameron Turner, Group Program Manager for Telemetry."
He must coordinate the product launches with Houston.
Lack of feedback (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't want to sound like a broken record here, but one of the things I truly love about OSS development is how transparent development is. I can easily contact the developers. I can submit bugs.
I have tons of usability gripes with Windows. I've never felt like I could submit feedback to Microsoft that might be seen and looked at.
marketing waffle (Score:2)
There's you problem right their, no mention of the people who actually write the code, and it's a little late to the party to figure out that the end users might have a clue as to what they want. A simple uncluttered desktop that does what you want.
-------
Key Words:
beta feedback, beta testers , bugs were squashed, change, compatibility,, data-gathering, development principles, discu
... and the media blitz for Windows 7 begins (Score:2)
I wonder if they got my vista sugestion (Score:2)
I wonder if the vista engineers got my suggestion and stabbed themselve in the face.
Is there anything GOOD in windows 7.... (Score:4, Insightful)
...that came from this feedback, that makes businesses using XP want to switch? We all know why NOBODY switched to Vista, so why would anyone switch to win7?
Please, I'm not asking why should NOT switch, we all know that answer. But someone please explain why we SHOULD move to win7 !
Aero look for old Microsoft apps (Score:3, Interesting)
This was something I noticed when Vista came out...
To make application I have written have the Vista Aero look I had to recompile. But I noticed that my old version of Microsoft Excel (2003) has the new look. So there must be some code in in Vista that handles Microsoft projects nicer. Which doesn't seem fair.
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What's your point? That mojave marketing stunt didn't address Vista's actual problems.
Yes I've used it. I found it hideous for all the usual reasons, plus some of my own.
My brief use of windows 7 RC just confirms that Microsoft are taking windows down a path that I don't wish to follow any more.
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I'll partially agree. You seem to indicate that Windows 7 is pretty much just a continuation of Vista. Truthfully, I can't disagree there. I've ran Vista on my laptop since launch date, and ran it for about 6 months on my desktop (I switched to 7 RC when it was released on MS's website for preview). Overall, after a bit of shakedown time, some driver updates, etc, Vista isn't THAT bad. Don't get me wrong, it shares the same issues and gotchas as Microsoft OS's always have, but overall, compared to othe
Mojave was Vista SP1 (Score:5, Insightful)
What's your point? That mojave marketing stunt didn't address Vista's actual problems.
The Mojave ad campaign came out a few months after the February 2008 release of Windows Vista Service Pack 1, which did address technical problems with Windows Vista.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There is plenty of trolling. And abuse of mod points.
I happen to think you're right. I'm anti-Microsoft, but honesty makes me say that Win 7 is decent. So far, it works on all the hardware I've tried it on - as old as the original Athlon 1 Ghz machines. Of course, it's kinda slow on that machine, but it WORKS.
Huge improvement over that Vista abortion. Yeah, I know, lots of people thought Vista was good. Well, it never ran right on any of my hardware, including a 2.4 Ghz dual core Opteron with 8 gig of
Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than (Score:5, Insightful)
XP requires TONS more ram than Window 3.1 and would be much slower on the same hardware. Do you not agree that XP is progression from 3.1?
Re: (Score:2)
If you're suggesting that 3.1 to XP was a smaller move than XP to 7 then I'd like to have a bit of whatever you're smoking.
As a basic exercise: list the things relevant today that you can do on Windows 7 that you CAN'T do on XP. Now, list the things relevant today that you can do on XP that you CAN'T do on Windows 3.1. Guess which list is longer?
That isn't even going into things like stability.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than (Score:5, Interesting)
However:
3.1 required 2 MB, ran OK on 4
XP required 128 MB and ran OK on 256. That is 64 times what 3.1 needed over 9 years
7 requires 1 GB and runs OK on 2 GB. That is 8 times XP over 8 years
7 doesn't look too bad.
Re: (Score:2)
Ya, having half to a quarter the vulnerabilities doesn't count as a feature for most people because it is something you cant see. What my last scans on a xp box showed (fully patched) was around 167 vulnerabilities, a fully patched windows 7 box not on a domain is 10, on the domain is 50 or so...Not to mention that a child can hack an xp box.
Really? 167 vulnerabilities that either Microsoft doesn't know about and you do--or Microsoft just hasn't bothered to fix them? How many of them can raise local privileges? How many are remotely exploitable? I'm willing to bet that you wouldn't be able to do a damn thing to my fully-patched XP box*. This is pure FUD.
;)
* Before you can attempt to hack my fully-patched XP box, I have to stop running Linux on one of my computers...
Re: (Score:2)
Where do you live?
Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than (Score:2, Funny)
That's Windows Vista and not Windows 7.
4chan has already posted a guide on what is the lowest system you can expect to get windows 7 running on.
I'm bringing this up as an example since it is source outside of the popular media.
And in Marketing Droid speak (Score:2)
"If the suckers can afford our crappy O/S(aka Vista)" then they can afford
- More RAM
- bigger Hard Drive
Same argument goes for Windows 7 except the HDD.
An F-15 is much bigger than a P-51. OMG BLOAT! (Score:2)
You're ignoring that computers have more RAM available. My 5 year old machine is maxed at 4GB. The machine i'll build for 7 will likely START at 4GB. Did you miss the trend about computers having ever faster CPUs and more RAM and storage? How did that escape your notice as a member of Slashdot?
You're also ignoring that 7 will have more features than XP. Word is bigger than Notepad. Therefore Word is teh b10@3d!!! OMG!1! Bigger doesn't necessarily mean bloated. There might be some bloat, sure. But NE
Re:An F-15 is much bigger than a P-51. OMG BLOAT! (Score:5, Insightful)
From my observations, people are upgrading hardware at a slower and slower rate, so it is relevant. Most I know haven't done a major upgrade, outside of possibly adding ram or a changing video cards, in a few years and don't plan to anytime soon. Hardware has reached a "good enough" point.
I'm on a Athlon X2 with 4gb ram (maxed out). I have absolutely no intention of upgrading anytime soon.
There are full-size cars and compact cars. (Score:3, Interesting)
You're ignoring that computers have more RAM available.
And you're ignoring that computers come in a wider variety of form factors and price ranges than just mid-to-high-end desktops. How comfortably would Windows 7 run on even a one year old netbook with a 900 MHz Celeron, half a GB of RAM, and a 4 GB SSD?
Re: (Score:2)
Hardware cost has gone down and the computational power has increased significantly. More complex software can be developed. Just because something uses more disk space and memory does not mean it is inefficient.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Well, it's just Microsoft Technology Evangelist (TM) dollars at work. /shrug
Re: (Score:2)
And they say customer service is dead.