The first officially-released build of Windows XP SP3 has surfaced, with 1073 patches/hotfixes and several new features. This build has been made available to testers as a part of the Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 beta program and is available in English, German, and Japanese.
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Member since:2005-07-06
The problem is that they're making 'gradual breakages' to the point that customers know that each release is going to break something major.
The solution; completely overhaul the operating system rather than incremental breakages; then at least people *know* that the following release will less like to introduce mini-breakages.
Member since:2005-11-10
Member since:2007-06-07
The 'backwards compatibility' argument became a red herring, the day that MS bought VirtualPC.
MS needs to properly integrate VirtualPC into their next version of Windows, and when someone clicks the 'Windows XP' compatibility checkbox on a software app, run that app in a sandbox. They own the old versions of Windows. They own VirtualPC. The hit that software takes running as a guest OS in a virtual machine is just not that big. This would bring virtually 100% backward compatibility while allowing the the new version of Windows to completely break compatibility with old APIs.
I don't expect this to happen though. Can you imagine the flack that MS would take if they wrote a new OS from scratch, and it sucked as bad as Windows? 'Backward Compatibility' is a very convenient excuse that they are not going to want to throw away by using a simple available solution.
Member since:
2007-09-03
Next time maybe they wont take so much time to release an OS... Otherwise it's going to be another "die hard" version.