Microsoft’s next-generation OS is finally here. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is walking the streets of London calling Windows XP the ‘no compromise’ operating system–both reliable, and compatible while Bill Gates officially launches the product, and what could be the company’s most important product in more than six years.
Steve Ballmer: Windows is Finally Stable
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Slow news day by all accounts. I’m so excited I could just snooze….
>Slow news day by all accounts.
Not really. I had to publish the interview about BlueOS, but I was watching Star Trek this morning, so I was kinda busy…
Microsoft’s draconian licensing and “Product Activation” will be the best thing ever to happen to Linux…I can’t wait to read rants and raves across the Web of pissed off home and business users who can’t do casual installs of XP the way they did with earlier M$ products.
I recently installed / registered some copies of WinXP home. It was simplicity itself – all i had to do was click an icon in the taskbar to register then it happened all by itself. This will not annoy anyone with internet access.
While I am dubious as to the benefits of installing the teletubby OS myself (I use win2k, Mandrake Linux and BeOS) many home users will no doubt find it quite friendly to use and there will be no mass exodus of home users to linux because of the evils of XP.
Businesses however will probably see some changeover – if only because of the inflated cost of the XP OS.
I can’t wait to read rants and raves across the Web of pissed off home and business users who can’t do casual installs of XP the way they did with earlier M$ products.
—————–
I can’t see a pissed-off Joe User moving to Linux only to get more pissed off at its shocking ease of use, compatibility and inelegance.
… that windows is stable. what linux, bsd, and other free and slightly less easier os’s compared to windows will find is that the whole game isn’t stabability it’s all about .net and licencing. and what’s funny is that with xp’s features they’ll find that things like gnome look kind of like the features in xp… (wonder why? i don’t. i already know that m$ wouldn’t really program it’s own software. hell did you really think MS-dos was really made by m$?)
the other things is how microsoft is trying to make it were you can only put it on one computer… once. with linux or anyother freeos you could put it on… everything, pretty much.
but i do like some ms products. i hate to admit it but i do. things like windows 3.1 and ms-dos. i liked it when they had windows 3.1. it was… great. i never found any problems with it, other than it was made by m$.
now i’m mensioning this cause windows 3.1 was pretty stable. but then they; mircosoft, made windows 95… buggy as hell. then windows 98, just as buggy, and then windows me little better, just as buggy. and now XP. ok let me put it in this way.
windows 1.0 -1985ish
windows 3.1 -1992ish
windows 1.0 to 3.1 gap: 7ish years.
windows95 -1995ish
windows xp -2001
windows95 to windowsxp: 6 year gap.
what does this mean?
if windows 3.1 was stable and it took 7 years to be that way. and then they released 95, which changed everything! it took 6 years to make stable. what’s stoping windows from doing this again?
well one thing is. that microsoft has a monopoly in this and many areas. nothing is stopping microsoft from just switching all and then go into another 6 or 7 year cycle.
so i’m not going to make up your mind on this. just judge for your self.
Umm.. Trakal nothing personal but you’re a freakshow if you think Windows 3.1 was stable. While using it (yes I remember Windows 3.1) it was quite common to see the “Blue Screen Of Death”, or did you think that was a Windows95 and up development?
If anything Windows95 was MORE stable than Win 3.1 if you only judge it by the core architecture / kernel etc.
Your 95 to XP is also a pointless comparison as XP is from the NT codebase not 9x as you suggest.
I got my developer copy of Windows XP on Monday (days before everyone else!!! Whooaaa haaa haaaa haaaa!!!). I hate it.
The reason is that I have at least 6 machines that I use all the time. I write code in Linux and then port and test my code on Windows 2000/ME/ and now XP.
In order to do clean tests, I do clean installs of Windows. I may choose not to do a clean install of each Windows OS on the same machine each time. ME and 2000 are good operating systems for this since they allow me to install as many times (running one copy at any given time mind you) as I want. XP doesn’t.
If I register XP for one machine, it won’t work on another machine (which in my case is a perfectly legal thing to do).
Also, I haven’t tested this, but I’ve heard you can only re-register XP a certain number of times and then MS won’t let you register it anymore and it becomes useless. I don’t know this for sure, so I would appreciate someone either confirming this or setting me straight.
Anyway, bottom line is that I find XP a pain.
–“I recently installed / registered some copies of WinXP home. It was simplicity itself – all i had to do was click an icon in the taskbar to register then it happened all by itself. This will not annoy anyone with internet access. ”
No matter how easy someone makes it, surrendering your rights as a consumer is never a good thing to do.
Also, upgrade your network card, video card, CD-ROM drive, et cetera and tell me how easy Windows XP is to use.
course stable can have so many meanings to many people. but the thing was i really never got that blue screen at all. (course i only used to using only the programs pre-installed on the os like i do with linux.) and yes i know windows Xp is based off of NT and 2k but they also says it’s also based off the 9x series.
Could somebody compile and run the following little program on Windows XP and tell me what happens? I had good fun running it on my Windows2000 system.
int main()
{
for(;;)
printf (“hung up\t\t\b\b\b\b\b\b”);
return 0;
}
Cheers,
Sander
I had the pleasure of installing XP on a machine… The very first thing I did was crash it. Nice and stable.
If anyone wants the details: I was installing something from the CD and while it was doing that I wanted to see if DMA was enabled on the CD-ROM because it seemed kind of slow. I checked and found it was in PIO mode so I figured I’d change it and say “No” when it asked to reboot. Oddly enough, it didn’t ask. It didn’t reboot. It changed it on the fly which totally screwed up the installation program. After that it wouldn’t quit, Task Manager would run but never show the screen. Explorer stopped responding. The only thing I could do was CTRL-ALT-DEL and shutdown from there. Granted, the shutdown process went fairly quickly.
Why would I spend 299$ for an upgrade to yet another unstable Wintendo OS, and yes I tried it… and I still hate M$ and all their crappy software.
Nah… I like my Debian Unstable (Rock stable !!) + KDE 2.2.1 just fine…
Linux is my savior !
>>Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is walking the streets of London calling Windows XP the ‘no compromise’ operating system–both reliable, and compatible while Bill Gates officially launches the product, and what could be the company’s most important product in more than six years. <<
They say this for every OS release… it’s almost like a band that puts out a new album and says its the best one they’ve done ever, next year they put out another album and say the same thing… over and over and over!!!
Of course everyone does this, it’s all about marketing huh?!
AFAIK NT is not based on 9X (the interface is).
NT was bought by MS (I can’t remember from who now, Novell or IBM I think, is it an OS/2 varent hence the existing Windows commpatablity?)
Win2K has extra compatabity stuff. but its not based on the Win9X code base.
> They say this for every OS release. <
The thing is Win2K is, and as XP is Win2K + WindowBlinds + shitty reg system + some code improvements/extra features I can only assume it is.
Windows stable? Mohaaa! That’ll be the day.
NT is an abreviation of “Northern Telecom, LTD.” This is in the fine print on the first page or so of the Getting Started book included with W2K and versions of NT 3.51 or older. For some reason, it was left out of NT 4 books.
I don’t remeber Northern Telecom being bought by MS. MS may have purchased code from them.
Regards To All,
Mike
“Your 95 to XP is also a pointless comparison as XP is from the NT codebase not 9x as you suggest. ”
That’s not the point. It took Microsoft 6 years to deliver another stable OS to consumers. The point is not weither it’s based on NT, 98, BSD or what ever. 6 years! Don’t you love microsoft?
Northern Telecom, LTD. became Nortel Networks Corporation in 1999. Nortel contains the first 3 letters in the word Northern and the first 3 letters in Telecom…
So, NT was probley the abbrivation for their company… and mabye the stock symbol too…
http://www.nortelnetworks.com/corporate/news/newsreleases/1999a/3_1…
NT has nothing to with Nothern Telecom. NT has always stood for ‘New Technology’. That’s what it stood for when the OS was being developed with IBM as ‘OS/2 NT’. MS and IBM settled the differences and the proejct was renamed Windows NT. Although, co-developed with IBM, NT was written entirely from scratch.
Where did Northern Telecom come into the picture, you ask?
Microsoft discovered that “NT” was already a registered trademark of
Northern Telecom. So they were forced to print this on their boxes.
We evaluated XP in the office, it failed miserably.
XP still cant see the HP printer network, unlike BeOS and Caldera which can!
Double click a shared NT printer and XP tells you the drivers are incompatable and then XP gives you OK or cancel options, no browse for drivers!
Logging onto our network, our anti virus software tries to install itself, and doesn’t work with XP (The cost of upgrading ALL our incompatable software is not an option, the cost would be phenominal).
Pluging in a W2K hard drive to copy files off onto XP, and XP goes blue screen then black screen with a flashing cursor then resets in the most spectacular fashion!
The end of the road for M$ upgrades in our office =)
Windows stable? Mohaaa! That’ll be the day.
———-
Have you used windows 2000?
> Windows stable? Mohaaa! That’ll be the day.
> ———-
> Have you used windows 2000?
I can’t believe that an OS still exists that forces you to reboot after making just about any change. I can’t believe that Win2K, a programme which has received more official beta testing than any other, still crashes hard and frequently. I can’t believe that Win2k had around 65,000 official bugs (and god knows how many unofficial ones) still open when it was released. I can’t believe that a 20MB bugfix was released only the day after XP (“eXPletive”) was released. I can’t believe that somebody was stupid enough to even _think_ about that horrid Registry, leave alone implementing one. I can’t believe that MS’s most advanced filesystem still fragments like a crumbling biscuit, and requires frequent defragging. I can’t believe that their OS slows down and becomes increasingly unstable over time, and that this becomes really noticible after less than six months.
> Windows stable? Mohaaa! That’ll be the day.
> ———-
> Have you used windows 2000?
I can’t believe that an OS still exists that forces you to reboot after making just about any change. I can’t believe that Win2K, a programme which has received more official beta testing than any other, still crashes hard and frequently. I can’t believe that Win2k had around 65,000 official bugs (and god knows how many unofficial ones) still open when it was released. I can’t believe that a 20MB bugfix was released only the day after XP (“eXPletive”) was released. I can’t believe that somebody was stupid enough to even _think_ about that horrid Registry, leave alone implementing one. I can’t believe that MS’s most advanced filesystem still fragments like a crumbling biscuit, and requires frequent defragging. I can’t believe that their OS slows down and becomes increasingly unstable over time, and that this becomes really noticible after less than six months.
oh win2k only had 65k bugs??? that’s all? must of been what m$ called stable.
also i apologise for saying that windows 3.1 is stable. i realised that i probably didn’t abuse that os enough to actually have it pop up a blue screen. the only programs i used in that was what? notepad, write, edit,and clock. that’s about it.
rick:
The idea of NT standing for “New Technology” happened when the term “new technology” was used in an early NT press sheet. A reviewer in a computer mag (sorry, I don’t remember which one) made the assertion/connection, which has stuck ever since.
I’ve never seen “Northern Telecom” printed on the box art. It must be in that *very* small print on the back. I’ve only seen it on the copyright page inside (most) of the books. I’ve never heard the explaination you gave for Northern Telecom’s presence re: NT before. Very interesting.
I’m familiar with IBM working with MS on an OS together, and there being a falling out. MS showed up for a meeting and announced they had developed their own .DLLs (something like that). IBM realised that MS was going to sever the relationship. MS had gotten the information they needed to solve the problem they couldn’t get around. It was why they partnered with IBM in the first place.
Notice NT starts numbering with 3.x, while OS/2 numbers start with (at least 2.x). I don’t know if there was an OS/2 1.x release (I started with 2.0 or 2.1). IBM added the Warp monicker with 3.0. Perhaps a result of the IBM/MS split?
I know there’s a book about IBM that explains the whole IBM/MS joint OS project in detail, along with the resulting product form the divorce. If anybody knows the title, chime in.
IBM and MS co-developed OS/2 until version 1.3. From that point they split: IBM went on to develop OS/2 2.0 and MS forked it into NT.
no text, or… <nt>