Re: Windows 7

The message <VA.00000044.0132f5c9@xxxxxxxxxx>
from Daniel James <daniel@xxxxxxxxxx> contains these words:

In article <31303030373730364B228C1563@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Johnny B Good
wrote:
And, for a damned good reason. Unfortunately, the priviledged few
users of win2k were so pitifully few that their highly accurate
observation that winXP was a festering PoS was dismissed by the
gullible majority as the rantings of a lunatic fringe group (exactly
as MS had hoped).

A trifle OTT ... and I think the real problem is that those switching
from Win9x to XP (Home, probably) had never experienced Win2k so they
didn't understand what was being said.

Agreed.

XP offered very real advantages in security, robustness, and reliability
over '9x (under which banner I include the tartload of curds known as
ME) and was a dramatic improvement to the '9x user -- so would Win2k
have been, but MS chose not to market that in a 'Home' edition at a
price that would compete with '9x.

I believe MS had another axe to grind. They probably thought the
uncluttered clean looks of win2k's GUI hinted more of win95 rather than
win98 thus sending the 'wrong' message.

We Win2k users may have been disgusted by the "Fisher Price colour
scheme" and the licensing/activation measures in XP, as well as a few
GUI changes, but some of us also welcomed it for its improved security
and support for new hardware. There ARE very significant increases in
security in XP, over Win2k, including (for example) some clever
technology that defeats some classes of buffer overrun attacks by
protecting stack frames from modification from outside a process, and
prevents malicious code from being executed.

I'll take your word on that but it does surprise me that any such
security improvements in winXP weren't also applied to win2k via the SP4
update and subsequent security patches.

Microsoft are in a difficult position -- when they make a significant
improvement in their OS they (understandably) want to be able to make
some money by selling it as an upgrade. They believe, rightly or
wrongly, that the average user won't cough up for an upgrade unless they
get something new and shiny to look at for their money. I think that
this is patronizing in the extreme and that MS are insulting the
intelligence of their users and that they should just sell the improved
OS as an improved OS /without/ adding a cartload of unnecessary,
resource-consuming, timewasting eye-candy ... but MS don't see it that
way.

A rather more sympathetic view than what MS deserve imho. MS have
decided to give the public what it wants by dictating 'what the public
wants', rather than by giving the public what it needs.

MS are, quite evidently, hell bent on world domination. Each successive
OS has incorporated more and more built in features which subvert the
need to install third party software. Assuming this trend continues,
they'll end up squeezing out all bar a few specialist third party
software businesses and achieve their goal.

This is the great irony of Windows -- whenever MS do something to make
it better they also add something that makes it worse in order to get
the public's attention.

All part of the 'Big Plan' :-(

Win7 is some improvement (how could it be otherwise? :-) but more
to do with "percieved" performance and a slightly smaller footprint
(allegedly).

Win7 has some improvements, of course, but they're mostly under the
covers. It isn't materially faster than Vista and doesn't have a smaller
footprint (though some of the betas did, because they weren't complete,
which has given Win7 a reputation for being lighter) -- it's just Vista
with some of the more egregious nastinesses papered over.

That seems about right (I've only tangled with Vista - not seen a box
with win7 on it yet).

Not really. XP has more security holes than swiss cheese. There
are also many things it does badly.

No disputing that (compared to win2k) but Vista and win7 is no great
improvement either.

It's the same story -- two steps forward one step back. Vista has a lot
of security enhancements over XP that are well worth having, but in
order to get them you have to suffer the extra eye-candy, the
disfunctional search, the extra resource use ...

UAC is a clever idea -- unfortunately it was broken enough in the first
release of Vista to open up more security holes than it closed. I
believe that's to some extent fixed in Vista SP1, and I certainly hope
it's fixed in Win7. It also produced so many pop-ups that a lot of
people turned it off, which is unfortunate (I'd suffer almost any number
of pop-ups if it really did mean that I got a more secure system).

In all cases, since the ruination of windows95 by the incorporation
of the web browser code into the kernel of win98 as a ploy to defeat
the netscape legal case against them, all subsequent OSes have had
to carry the web browser source of security holes ever since
(regardless of whether an alternative, such as Opera, is employed).

That's unfortunate, yes. There is no way that browser code needs to be
part of the OS and the courts really should have told MS to stop taking
the piss.

But they didn't. Money really _does_ talk in the land of the brave.

Now we have Windows Update that uses IE code (whether or not you have IE
configured as your browser) ... and the MS Update website doesn't work
with other browsers. I'm surprised the European Court didn't pick that
up when they made their recent rulings about bundled browsers and insist
that MS make their update mechanism work with the likes of Firefox,
Seamonkey, Chrome, Opera, and Safari.

Unfortunately, MS can raise legitimate security issues in this instance.

MS have a long history of "Giving What The Public Wants" ...

I don't think the public does want what MS thinks it does, in many
cases. MS has always been driven by Bill Gates's dream that computer can
make everything easy for everyone -- and unfortunately that has meant
easy for crackers and virus-writers as well as the licensed users. You
have to accept a bit of "hard to use" if you want anything secure -- if
you don't lock your front door strangers can come in and steal your
silverware, if you don't use a strong password strangers will come in
and use your PC (your online accounts, etc.)

Using focus groups based on the teenage demographic (rather than the
cynical demographic) allows MS to effectively dictate 'what the public
wants'

At least, with Vista onwards, users are not administrators by default.
The next step should be to make it impossible for users to carry out
some day-to-day tasks (browsing!) from an Administrator account, so that
people would HAVE to use a non-privileged account for those high-risk
activities.

That would be too close to the *nix security model for MS's liking.

... a pointless attempt at emulating the "Idiot Experience" of Apple
Computers' user experience, ...

It's all part of the "making it easier" thing ... I don't actually
accept that Windows is "pointless". I find using a GUI to be a
productive way of using the computer (partly because I'm a crap typist
and I can never type long pathnames without at least one mistake.

I wasn't referring to the GUI/mouse pointer thing. I was referring to
the idea of 'sanitizing' file names in explorer so as to avoid confusing
the hell out of any Apple Mac refugees.

This one setting alone (hide registered extensions) should have been
enough for a massive class action against MS over the matter of 'A Care
of Duty, lack of' with its persistance into winXP (by which time, a
defence of 'ignorance of the consequences' would have been a dead duck).
Sadly, such a class action failed to materialise thus saving MS from
bankruptcy.

I don't agree, either, that it is a copy of Apple; The original GUI work
was done by Xerox and copied by everyone -- there haven't really been
any innovations in GUI design since (unless you count the Office 2007
ribbon, which I find an infuriating timewaster) -- it's all ringing the
changes on the original Xerox work. When Windows 1 came out there were
other systems around, notably DRI's GEM, that were all copies of the
Xerox work. Apple was certainly not the only influence on Windows, and I
doubt that it was the greatest.

I only ever got to see a(n elderly) PC with windows 2 installed on it
just the one time. My first thought was "Why isn't Peter Norton suing
the ass off this mickey mouse company?". I mean, it _did_so_ look like a
dead ringer for PC Tools.

The main annoyance with Vista's GUI is the treatment they gave to
explorer which basically makes it a right pain to navigate the file
system. At least with winXP you could revert it back to a very close
approximation of the classic look in win2k.

It failed to fully emulate the win2k experience in one major (and very
important) aspect. This was the folder window sizing algorithm used when
opening previously unopened folders in the 'open each folder in its own
window' setting. Win2k had an intelligent algorithm to resize such
folder windows according the number of objects it contained. The winXP
version of explorer suffered a 'lobotomy' making it 'brain dead'
regarding this mode of displaying folders in individual windows.

All things considered, I can't see any justification for such a
backward step in what is sold as 'an improved OS'. It's as if MS don't
want to make it easy for users to play with files. The trend developed
into Vista suggests that this is, in fact, the case. Obviously all part
of the "Dumbing Down" exercise in MS's great marketing strategy to
achieve world domination.

In view of the seeming fact that the majority of 'civilised' humanity
is quite happy to sell its soul for a few shiny baubles, I'm pretty sure
that MS will eventually achieve this goal by which time even the digital
rights owners will be regretting the day they 'got into bed' with MS.

It's not the fact that MS will have market dominence that concerns me
so much as their being able to 'call the tune' and disenfranchise home
computer users. The OS will eventually become a straightjacket,
admittedly, a pleasant and comfortable straightjacket so that most
users wouldn't recognise it for what it is, but a straightjacket
nevertheless.

Now I do realise that each 'improvement' in life comes with a cost,
usually the loss of some 'freedom'. Until recent times, the trade off
has usually provided a net benefit but I rather doubt this will be the
case with MS's ultimate "Final Solution"(tm) OS.

--
Regards, John.

Please remove the "ohggcyht" before replying.
The address has been munged to reject Spam-bots.

.

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