No they didn't, companies could have just fixed their **** and when users complained to microsoft told them that it was working as designed and the fault was with the application vendor ignoring 15 year old documentation
When people upgrade the OS and their applications stop working, they blame Microsoft. It doesn't matter if it was a bug in the application that the developer got away with for years, as far as the end user is concerned it was the Windows upgrade that broke their app. You can see examples of exactly that in this very thread.
The M$ OS is reaching a level of surrealism incredible. When the OS is a disaster, add a button for "fast restore configuration" and call it "feature".
My head is spinning now....
People have a bad tendency to download any old crap off the internet, install it and all the crapware it contains and then eventually wonder why their PC is a complete mess. Having an easy, one-click method of putting the computer back to how it started saves them a bunch of time and money having to go to an "IT person" and get it "fixed".
Memory management that can work efficiently with > 1GB RAM (XP was designed for ~128MB and as a result zeroes pages far too aggressively, impacting performance quite heavily) I had 2GB in the XP SP2 days and even with SP1 I had 256mb, I'm not saying it does not happen but I never noticed a problem.
It's not necessarily something you "notice" just by using the PC, although it often manifests in apps that have been minimized for a while seemingly taking a long time to recover. If you watch what is actually happening at kernel level though, the problem is very evident.
It stems from a core assumption in the XP memory manager that there is considerably more free VA space than there is physical RAM. As a result it doesn't worry about VA fragmentation but does aggressively zero physical pages because it assumes it can't afford to keep things lingering around even though it probably could.
It's also part (though by no means only) of the reason that Vista was slammed for "using way more memory", because the changes in the MM were geared around a completely different assumption, namely that VA space was far more scarce than physical ram (at least in the 32-bit version). The changes there help machines with more ram use it effectively, albeit at the cost that the OS no longer bothers to target situations with <512MB ram (because even if it did, performance would suck for entirely the same reason)
So that's it then we got better security, proper 64 bit OS interoperability with 32 bit programs and drivers and it turns things of when they are not being used. So all the confusing jiggling about with configuration options and other user facing parts was futile then. It seems despite all the changes to the UI and ways of doing things these changes brought us nothing new other than confusion, all the credible changes were in the back end.
Swings and roundabouts. Many of the changes improve the key situations for the majority of people, but the need for backwards compatibility with old third-party control panels and applications (yes, there really are applications that attempt to do things by automating control panel pages rather than using system provided APIs!) always hamstrings to a certain amount how much things can be changed.
And it would be a pretty poor world if everything was just left as it was without anyone ever attempting to make it better (regardless of whether you agree that's what they did). Because that really is the slow drawn out path to mediocrity and irrelevance.
When people upgrade the OS and their applications stop working, they blame Microsoft. It doesn't matter if it was a bug in the application that the developer got away with for years, as far as the end user is concerned it was the Windows upgrade that broke their app. You can see examples of exactly that in this very thread.
Microsoft has their money and they'll have forgotten about it by the time they get their next PC though. If Microsoft were actually worried about upsetting users they wouldn't keep removing useful features :p
By enforcing a sensible permissions model all the way back in XP and before they might have avoided all the ridicule of being the OS that put a billion spam zombies on the 'net.
By enforcing a sensible permissions model all the way back in XP and before they might have avoided all the ridicule of being the OS that put a billion spam zombies on the 'net.
It's just as likely it would have made ME seem like the better choice, because XP would've just been lumped with NT4 and 2000 as being 'business only' and 'incompatible with most software'. And sticking with the 9x line wasn't really a better choice from a security standpoint than running XP as Administrator.
Ideally they'd have had a full blown multi-user security model right back in Windows 1, then all this would be moot. But nobody has a time machine, so instead we can all look back with 20:20 hindsight about the decisions that weren't necessarily ideal.
Ideally they'd have had a full blown multi-user security model right back in Windows 1, then all this would be moot. But nobody has a time machine, so instead we can all look back with 20:20 hindsight about the decisions that weren't necessarily ideal.
Windows 1 wasn't intended to be a multi-user operating system though (or indeed an operating system at all). If you needed a multi-user operating system that rather suggests you had hardware capable of running one, and MSDOS didn't run on that hardware anyway.
Obviously by the late 90s it was clear that networking and multi-user systems were necessary and that all versions of windows needed to be built on the same NT kernel. This would have been the perfect time for microsoft to set those sensible defaults. Poorly written software was going to break anyway, and at that time MS still had enough leverage that if people didn't like it it was tough. You had to buy Windows because there was no other choice for most people.
Obviously by the late 90s it was clear that networking and multi-user systems were necessary and that all versions of windows needed to be built on the same NT kernel. This would have been the perfect time for microsoft to set those sensible defaults.
So NT4 for everyone. Technically it was miles better than Win98, but it ran like a dog on older hardware. My first work PC was a 64MB P2 running NT4. It wasn't a pleasant experience. Sure, if you had a P3 and a whopping 256MB it was decent. My next job gave me a dual P3 running NT4 with a mind-blowing 512MB! This wasn't the typical home configuration at the time.
MS and Apple both moved to proper multiuser OSes for the home, at more or less the same time, when the hardware became available at commodity prices. The moaning we get about every release eating cycles and RAM would have been ten-fold if NT4 was the only upgrade from Win95 back in the day.
I never said NT4 would have been suitable as a home operating system. It came out in '96 but by the end of the 90s it was obvious that a DOS based system wasn't going to cut it any longer in a word where networking home PCs was becoming the norm.
ME was put out as a buggy new shell on top of 98 because Microsoft cancelled Neptune and transferred the developers onto the team working on the upgrade from 2000. Effectively merging the two creating the Whistler project which of course was released as XP in 2001.
Actually, I've got a copy or two w8 pre-installed (starter and basic?) on some of my PC's, but I don't fancy that metro-style UI. Well, many people I know switch to w7 style. Frankly speaking, my primary OS is still an old XP SP3 Pro with the last 'non-stripped' MS Office 2003, although the machine is i5 4GB with 1.5TB HDD. Just a matter of practicality and time.
As for those weird statements that only brand-new x64 machine can 'see' (and probably even 'use'?) more than 3.3 GB is but half-truth, because our admin has a Windows Server 2003 x32, which easily handles 16GB being a x32 machine. Indeed, at that time it was a rather special MB, but now even my crappest machine (Gigabyte GA-965GM-S3) can take it. Therefore, it's only the infamous MS 'political correctness' and marketing, and the only possible advantage is handling huge arrays of data, which is databases and some lame-coded soft/games, but rather many people do believe that x64 really implies that it's twice as fast as x32... Even educated ones.
IMO w7 is ok for tabletPC, but it's rather awkward attempt to combine desktop version and sensors. Lazy poor MS/
As for those weird statements that only brand-new x64 machine can 'see' (and probably even 'use'?) more than 3.3 GB is but half-truth, because our admin has a Windows Server 2003 x32, which easily handles 16GB being a x32 machine.
The server versions had PAE enabled. Perhaps the home versions could have had it too, but I suspect it was esoteric enough at the time to be a good differentiator between home and business.
It wasn't the same as a true 64 bit OS though. There was another layer of indirection in the paging algorithm and individual apps could still only access 4GB. At my previous job I worked on a CAM product. That was hitting the 4GB limit (2GB or 3GB after the OS had taken its slice) on x86, so PAE wouldn't help us. x64 was absolutely necessary for that.
Many people do believe that x64 really implies that it's twice as fast as x32... Even educated ones.
Not twice as fast, but the increased register set on x64 is a definite improvement of x86's archaic design.
I never said NT4 would have been suitable as a home operating system. It came out in '96 but by the end of the 90s it was obvious that a DOS based system wasn't going to cut it any longer in a word where networking home PCs was becoming the norm.
True, but to get people to move it was pretty much essential to ensure that at least most of their existing software was going to work. At some point Windows had to go through the pain point of breaking stuff and when it finally did, via UAC, look at the complaints it got. Doing the same thing in XP wouldn't necessarily have been any more successful.
=guesser;678380]ME was put out as a buggy new shell on top of 98 because Microsoft cancelled Neptune and transferred the developers onto the team working on the upgrade from 2000. Effectively merging the two creating the Whistler project which of course was released as XP in 2001.
ME was put out because of the typical internal squabbling at Microsoft, at that time between the 9x team and the NT team over which was the "proper" version of Windows. Frankly any management worth it's salt should have seen the future was with the NT line and development of ME should simply never have happened.
The server versions had PAE enabled. Perhaps the home versions could have had it too, but I suspect it was esoteric enough at the time to be a good differentiator between home and business.
Prior to SP2 it was actually possible to enable PAE on XP using a boot flag. However the vast majority of drivers found on home systems simply couldn't cope and enabling it was pretty much guaranteed to turn your machine into a crash-fest. When XPSP2 came along and needed PAE enabled for things like NX support, the OS was changed to ignore the boot flag and simply never allocate over the 4GB limit.
It's still nowhere near like using a 64-bit OS anyway, for one thing individual applications are still limited to 2GB of address space (because of the way 32-bit Windows handles 16-bit pointer support).
As far as I know the 3.5GB limitation is real and it's because of the operating system, not the hardware? I've had customers who asked me to upgrade their XP machines to 4GB and I explained it wouldn't "see" the full 4GB but they still wanted me to do it. Same on some Vista and 7 32-bit operating systems. In some cases where the customer wanted upgrades to 8GB because the hardware supported it, I convinced them to have the 64-bit version of the operating system re-installed.
As far as I know the 3.5GB limitation is real and it's because of the operating system, not the hardware?
It's both. 32 bit Windows has 2^32 addresses. These can't all be dedicated to RAM because other hardware, such as the graphics card, use up some of the address space. Some hardware/OS combinations allow these non-RAM devices to be shoved into a separate address space which would let the system see the whole 4GB. 32 bit OS X on a Santa Rosa chipset would be an example. I guess MS didn't see the point of re-jigging 32 bit Windows to support this when customers could buy the 64 bit version instead.
True, but to get people to move it was pretty much essential to ensure that at least most of their existing software was going to work. At some point Windows had to go through the pain point of breaking stuff and when it finally did, via UAC, look at the complaints it got. Doing the same thing in XP wouldn't necessarily have been any more successful.
This is the point though, they did it twice! Loads of stuff, especially games, broke with the move to NT and patches had to be released before they'd run on XP. Why go through the whole thing again six years later when they could have put their foot down about security then.
I guess MS didn't see the point of re-jigging 32 bit Windows to support this when customers could buy the 64 bit version instead.
The problem is drivers, because to work in a PAE system they need to be (sort-of) 64-bit aware and the vast majority of drivers weren't and were unlikely to be updated for the few people buying 4GB+ machines. It was less of a problem on Windows Server because most people run it on certified hardware and thus the vendors can ensure the drivers work. Likewise for Apple, since OS X only has to run a small selection of hardware.
This is the point though, they did it twice! Loads of stuff, especially games, broke with the move to NT and patches had to be released before they'd run on XP. Why go through the whole thing again six years later when they could have put their foot down about security then.
With every upgrade, there are inevitably some apps that just fail for various reasons, the move to NT broke a few but not nearly as much a forcing the NT security model did. Even UAC is a heavy compromise to allow users to run more safely as Administrators.
In any case as the trend away from shared computers to more "one person" PCs increases, coupled with a malware scene more favouring zombie botnets (which don't necessarily need admin rights) the classical OS security model (which is geared towards protecting the system against users) is less and less relevant.
In any case as the trend away from shared computers to more "one person" PCs increases, coupled with a malware scene more favouring zombie botnets (which don't necessarily need admin rights) the classical OS security model (which is geared towards protecting the system against users) is less and less relevant.
Damned good thing too, can you imagine how bad Windows would become if we went too far the other way? :-D
Jeez Andy, can you get any further up MS's butthole? You keep on spouting all this crap about how great windows is (and not terribly sincerely either - you must work for them or summats) but even so my next machine is going to be linux. I've had Win7 on here for a couple of years and it's just getting slower and slower with each bloody Windows Update.
Oh for ****s sake. It's just an operating system, no better or worse than Linux/Mac OS/whatever in that regards. It happens to be interesting in the context of the historical progression of computing and large scale software engineering in general because of it's place in history (something you'd think people on this forum of all places might just understand)
I know there are those who think any non-negative statement about Microsoft or anything not fawning over open source as if it were delivered on stone tablets by Moses himself is some sort of heresy, but for gods sake grow the **** up. We're not in the playground anymore.
Oh for ****s sake. It's just an operating system, no better or worse than Linux/Mac OS/whatever in that regards. It happens to be interesting in the context of the historical progression of computing and large scale software engineering in general because of it's place in history (something you'd think people on this forum of all places might just understand)
You're trying to equate the enormous cluster-fcuk that is MS Windows with something like the oft-times genius of the Speccy ROM? Crikey, that's going a bit far.
My Win7 c:\windows folder is now at around 25GB. That's just insane, and that is with the all-singing, all-dancing restrictions on what crap can get in there. If I weren't intending to just junk this POS and get a new PC, I'd have wiped and reinstalled by now.
I know there are those who think any non-negative statement about Microsoft or anything not fawning over open source as if it were delivered on stone tablets by Moses himself is some sort of heresy, but for gods sake grow the **** up. We're not in the playground anymore.
Who said anything about OSS? Personally I'm all for closed-source software, especially my own, but if you want stuff to run on other hardware then you need to open it up.
Of course, the way things are going 3rd party devs are going to have to pay through the nose to develop their code the same way that iOS is going, and with the release of Win8 you just know that MS is after some of the pie that Apple is scoffing all to itself. It's bloody depressing when all you've got in the end is the also-ran linux that remains actually free.
I think Microsoft has proved now that almost* everyone wants touchscreen user interfaces on a desktop machine.
The question is of course, what comes next? By the time Windows 9 arrives, Android/iOS will have more features (well, at least you can play movies there) and are probably also suitable for the desktop. On the other hand, people with more "hardcore" usage will flock to Macs (or Linux).
I don't want to see Microsoft dying so fast, but I think Windows 8 just make it a little faster now.
I'm not a mac fan boy by no means, but what's great about OSX, is that you don't have to relearn everything when they bring out a new version. Its basically been the same for years now and works very well.
I've got a 1st get 64bit with 1gb ram running with it, fully networked, streaming movies, using my phone as a remote, can VNC from my laptop, not had to search for drivers, and it boots in seconds....
All within an hour of installing it...
My kids can use it with ease, and it doesn't have touch screen.
I get the feeling some people just *want* to hate it....
e.g. WTF is the start button.. and 2 pages for starting apps etc. one that looks like the old windows and one that is trying to flog ya apps etc
to a point where a fair few of my friends installed fake start button type apps. it also depends on what you are using the pc for.. as they keep doing benchmarks for music production and a while back , performance wise 7 was better.. they are all for tablet users.. but anyone who uses pro-music stuff is last in the user chain / minority.. pretty much an after thought.. while apple sell a LOT of machines solely to pro video and audio folk, due to logic / final cut pro
The question is of course, what comes next? By the time Windows 9 arrives, Android/iOS will have more features (well, at least you can play movies there) and are probably also suitable for the desktop. On the other hand, people with more "hardcore" usage will flock to Macs (or Linux).
I don't want to see Microsoft dying so fast, but I think Windows 8 just make it a little faster now.
It wouldn't surprise me if at some point, operating systems are a non-profit business. That is, apart from some 'niches' like real-time OS'es or custom variations. With open source-based OS'es being the lowest common denominator that rule on the most popular/cheapest devices. And some hardware companies building their own stuff as a freebie (?) that's designed to only run on that company's devices (like Apple does).
At that point, M$ could focus on applications (Office & co?), get into the hardware business (phones, mice, keyboards, etc etc), or profit from services a la iTunes (or whatever is popular then).
They won't be dead any time soon, but IMHO the Windows ecosystem (and profits to be derived from that business) has reached or passed its peak.
e.g. WTF is the start button.. and 2 pages for starting apps etc. one that looks like the old windows and one that is trying to flog ya apps etc
to a point where a fair few of my friends installed fake start button type apps. it also depends on what you are using the pc for.. as they keep doing benchmarks for music production and a while back , performance wise 7 was better.. they are all for tablet users.. but anyone who uses pro-music stuff is last in the user chain / minority.. pretty much an after thought.. while apple sell a LOT of machines solely to pro video and audio folk, due to logic / final cut pro
It wouldn't surprise me if at some point, operating systems are a non-profit business. That is, apart from some 'niches' like real-time OS'es or custom variations. With open source-based OS'es being the lowest common denominator that rule on the most popular/cheapest devices. And some hardware companies building their own stuff as a freebie (?) that's designed to only run on that company's devices (like Apple does).
At that point, M$ could focus on applications (Office & co?), get into the hardware business (phones, mice, keyboards, etc etc), or profit from services a la iTunes (or whatever is popular then).
They won't be dead any time soon, but IMHO the Windows ecosystem (and profits to be derived from that business) has reached or passed its peak.
All OS's are heading towards a solely cloud based solution, so all you need your device to do is boot & connect to the internet. There will still be offline machines for development, etc... but the majority of users won't need them...
All OS's are heading towards a solely cloud based solution
Except the ones that run the servers (sorry "clouds") that the the thin clients connect to. Or the ones that run on devices which aren't connected to the internet. Or all the other exceptions to that statement. :p
All OS's are heading towards a solely cloud based solution
Possibly, but you'll always need some locally stored software. If only to boot the thing. Likely application software will be retrieved on demand, and run on some sort of virtual machine. Like for Android (Dalvik VM), Java, apps that build on HTML5, etc.
That bottom layer (kernel + VM) either already is, or (very likely) will be open source-based in the vast majority of cases. Or hardware company will give that away. I mean, why would users pay for that part if free software does it excellent? And why would a hardware company spend resources to make their own, when free software does everything needed?
Basically, open source will 'eat' into those low-level software layers unstoppable, which leaves only profit to be made with apps / media / services / hardware. Like what's already happening.
Except the ones that run the servers (sorry "clouds") that the the thin clients connect to. Or the ones that run on devices which aren't connected to the internet. Or all the other exceptions to that statement. :p
I'm not a mac fan boy by no means, but what's great about OSX, is that you don't have to relearn everything when they bring out a new version. Its basically been the same for years now and works very well.
But that's also what's deeply frustrating about it, because it just doesn't improve in any notable sense either. Similar problem with the iPhone, which is looking increasingly less interesting as the new versions become an increasingly minor variation on the original, a fact reflected in the decline in sales.
to a point where a fair few of my friends installed fake start button type apps. it also depends on what you are using the pc for.. as they keep doing benchmarks for music production and a while back , performance wise 7 was better.. they are all for tablet users.. but anyone who uses pro-music stuff is last in the user chain / minority.. pretty much an after thought.. while apple sell a LOT of machines solely to pro video and audio folk, due to logic / final cut pro
Ironically that turned out to be a bug in the benchmark most pro music folks were using to measure DPC latency, which was making incorrect assumptions about. Of course once the "Windows 8 sucks for pro audio" stories get out there, they perpetuate in the interweb echo chamber long after even the original software vendor has coughed up to their bug.
All OS's are heading towards a solely cloud based solution, so all you need your device to do is boot & connect to the internet. There will still be offline machines for development, etc... but the majority of users won't need them...
So they say, but I just don't see it myself. There are always going to be situations when you don't have net access for whatever reason and at that point the completely online solutions like Chromebook become a useless paperweight. Smartphones are probably the best example of where things are more likely to go, highly connected but still predominantly running local apps (even if they are supported heavily by online services) with sync technology being used to keep data "in the cloud" whilst still available in the periods you're offline.
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"Call Nine One One!!!"
When people upgrade the OS and their applications stop working, they blame Microsoft. It doesn't matter if it was a bug in the application that the developer got away with for years, as far as the end user is concerned it was the Windows upgrade that broke their app. You can see examples of exactly that in this very thread.
People have a bad tendency to download any old crap off the internet, install it and all the crapware it contains and then eventually wonder why their PC is a complete mess. Having an easy, one-click method of putting the computer back to how it started saves them a bunch of time and money having to go to an "IT person" and get it "fixed".
Pragmatism at work.
It's not necessarily something you "notice" just by using the PC, although it often manifests in apps that have been minimized for a while seemingly taking a long time to recover. If you watch what is actually happening at kernel level though, the problem is very evident.
It stems from a core assumption in the XP memory manager that there is considerably more free VA space than there is physical RAM. As a result it doesn't worry about VA fragmentation but does aggressively zero physical pages because it assumes it can't afford to keep things lingering around even though it probably could.
It's also part (though by no means only) of the reason that Vista was slammed for "using way more memory", because the changes in the MM were geared around a completely different assumption, namely that VA space was far more scarce than physical ram (at least in the 32-bit version). The changes there help machines with more ram use it effectively, albeit at the cost that the OS no longer bothers to target situations with <512MB ram (because even if it did, performance would suck for entirely the same reason)
Swings and roundabouts. Many of the changes improve the key situations for the majority of people, but the need for backwards compatibility with old third-party control panels and applications (yes, there really are applications that attempt to do things by automating control panel pages rather than using system provided APIs!) always hamstrings to a certain amount how much things can be changed.
And it would be a pretty poor world if everything was just left as it was without anyone ever attempting to make it better (regardless of whether you agree that's what they did). Because that really is the slow drawn out path to mediocrity and irrelevance.
Microsoft has their money and they'll have forgotten about it by the time they get their next PC though. If Microsoft were actually worried about upsetting users they wouldn't keep removing useful features :p
By enforcing a sensible permissions model all the way back in XP and before they might have avoided all the ridicule of being the OS that put a billion spam zombies on the 'net.
It's just as likely it would have made ME seem like the better choice, because XP would've just been lumped with NT4 and 2000 as being 'business only' and 'incompatible with most software'. And sticking with the 9x line wasn't really a better choice from a security standpoint than running XP as Administrator.
Ideally they'd have had a full blown multi-user security model right back in Windows 1, then all this would be moot. But nobody has a time machine, so instead we can all look back with 20:20 hindsight about the decisions that weren't necessarily ideal.
Windows 1 wasn't intended to be a multi-user operating system though (or indeed an operating system at all). If you needed a multi-user operating system that rather suggests you had hardware capable of running one, and MSDOS didn't run on that hardware anyway.
Obviously by the late 90s it was clear that networking and multi-user systems were necessary and that all versions of windows needed to be built on the same NT kernel. This would have been the perfect time for microsoft to set those sensible defaults. Poorly written software was going to break anyway, and at that time MS still had enough leverage that if people didn't like it it was tough. You had to buy Windows because there was no other choice for most people.
MS and Apple both moved to proper multiuser OSes for the home, at more or less the same time, when the hardware became available at commodity prices. The moaning we get about every release eating cycles and RAM would have been ten-fold if NT4 was the only upgrade from Win95 back in the day.
ME was put out as a buggy new shell on top of 98 because Microsoft cancelled Neptune and transferred the developers onto the team working on the upgrade from 2000. Effectively merging the two creating the Whistler project which of course was released as XP in 2001.
As for those weird statements that only brand-new x64 machine can 'see' (and probably even 'use'?) more than 3.3 GB is but half-truth, because our admin has a Windows Server 2003 x32, which easily handles 16GB being a x32 machine. Indeed, at that time it was a rather special MB, but now even my crappest machine (Gigabyte GA-965GM-S3) can take it. Therefore, it's only the infamous MS 'political correctness' and marketing, and the only possible advantage is handling huge arrays of data, which is databases and some lame-coded soft/games, but rather many people do believe that x64 really implies that it's twice as fast as x32... Even educated ones.
IMO w7 is ok for tabletPC, but it's rather awkward attempt to combine desktop version and sensors. Lazy poor MS/
It wasn't the same as a true 64 bit OS though. There was another layer of indirection in the paging algorithm and individual apps could still only access 4GB. At my previous job I worked on a CAM product. That was hitting the 4GB limit (2GB or 3GB after the OS had taken its slice) on x86, so PAE wouldn't help us. x64 was absolutely necessary for that.
Not twice as fast, but the increased register set on x64 is a definite improvement of x86's archaic design.
True, but to get people to move it was pretty much essential to ensure that at least most of their existing software was going to work. At some point Windows had to go through the pain point of breaking stuff and when it finally did, via UAC, look at the complaints it got. Doing the same thing in XP wouldn't necessarily have been any more successful.
ME was put out because of the typical internal squabbling at Microsoft, at that time between the 9x team and the NT team over which was the "proper" version of Windows. Frankly any management worth it's salt should have seen the future was with the NT line and development of ME should simply never have happened.
Prior to SP2 it was actually possible to enable PAE on XP using a boot flag. However the vast majority of drivers found on home systems simply couldn't cope and enabling it was pretty much guaranteed to turn your machine into a crash-fest. When XPSP2 came along and needed PAE enabled for things like NX support, the OS was changed to ignore the boot flag and simply never allocate over the 4GB limit.
It's still nowhere near like using a 64-bit OS anyway, for one thing individual applications are still limited to 2GB of address space (because of the way 32-bit Windows handles 16-bit pointer support).
This is the point though, they did it twice! Loads of stuff, especially games, broke with the move to NT and patches had to be released before they'd run on XP. Why go through the whole thing again six years later when they could have put their foot down about security then.
The problem is drivers, because to work in a PAE system they need to be (sort-of) 64-bit aware and the vast majority of drivers weren't and were unlikely to be updated for the few people buying 4GB+ machines. It was less of a problem on Windows Server because most people run it on certified hardware and thus the vendors can ensure the drivers work. Likewise for Apple, since OS X only has to run a small selection of hardware.
With every upgrade, there are inevitably some apps that just fail for various reasons, the move to NT broke a few but not nearly as much a forcing the NT security model did. Even UAC is a heavy compromise to allow users to run more safely as Administrators.
In any case as the trend away from shared computers to more "one person" PCs increases, coupled with a malware scene more favouring zombie botnets (which don't necessarily need admin rights) the classical OS security model (which is geared towards protecting the system against users) is less and less relevant.
Damned good thing too, can you imagine how bad Windows would become if we went too far the other way? :-D
Jeez Andy, can you get any further up MS's butthole? You keep on spouting all this crap about how great windows is (and not terribly sincerely either - you must work for them or summats) but even so my next machine is going to be linux. I've had Win7 on here for a couple of years and it's just getting slower and slower with each bloody Windows Update.
Win8 is definitely not for me.
D.
I know there are those who think any non-negative statement about Microsoft or anything not fawning over open source as if it were delivered on stone tablets by Moses himself is some sort of heresy, but for gods sake grow the **** up. We're not in the playground anymore.
You're trying to equate the enormous cluster-fcuk that is MS Windows with something like the oft-times genius of the Speccy ROM? Crikey, that's going a bit far.
My Win7 c:\windows folder is now at around 25GB. That's just insane, and that is with the all-singing, all-dancing restrictions on what crap can get in there. If I weren't intending to just junk this POS and get a new PC, I'd have wiped and reinstalled by now.
Who said anything about OSS? Personally I'm all for closed-source software, especially my own, but if you want stuff to run on other hardware then you need to open it up.
Of course, the way things are going 3rd party devs are going to have to pay through the nose to develop their code the same way that iOS is going, and with the release of Win8 you just know that MS is after some of the pie that Apple is scoffing all to itself. It's bloody depressing when all you've got in the end is the also-ran linux that remains actually free.
D.
The question is of course, what comes next? By the time Windows 9 arrives, Android/iOS will have more features (well, at least you can play movies there) and are probably also suitable for the desktop. On the other hand, people with more "hardcore" usage will flock to Macs (or Linux).
I don't want to see Microsoft dying so fast, but I think Windows 8 just make it a little faster now.
*) in the SU kind of sense, obviously :p
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I've got a 1st get 64bit with 1gb ram running with it, fully networked, streaming movies, using my phone as a remote, can VNC from my laptop, not had to search for drivers, and it boots in seconds....
All within an hour of installing it...
My kids can use it with ease, and it doesn't have touch screen.
I get the feeling some people just *want* to hate it....
e.g. WTF is the start button.. and 2 pages for starting apps etc. one that looks like the old windows and one that is trying to flog ya apps etc
to a point where a fair few of my friends installed fake start button type apps. it also depends on what you are using the pc for.. as they keep doing benchmarks for music production and a while back , performance wise 7 was better.. they are all for tablet users.. but anyone who uses pro-music stuff is last in the user chain / minority.. pretty much an after thought.. while apple sell a LOT of machines solely to pro video and audio folk, due to logic / final cut pro
At that point, M$ could focus on applications (Office & co?), get into the hardware business (phones, mice, keyboards, etc etc), or profit from services a la iTunes (or whatever is popular then).
They won't be dead any time soon, but IMHO the Windows ecosystem (and profits to be derived from that business) has reached or passed its peak.
Oh yeah - I have cakewalk installed too :)
All OS's are heading towards a solely cloud based solution, so all you need your device to do is boot & connect to the internet. There will still be offline machines for development, etc... but the majority of users won't need them...
Except the ones that run the servers (sorry "clouds") that the the thin clients connect to. Or the ones that run on devices which aren't connected to the internet. Or all the other exceptions to that statement. :p
That bottom layer (kernel + VM) either already is, or (very likely) will be open source-based in the vast majority of cases. Or hardware company will give that away. I mean, why would users pay for that part if free software does it excellent? And why would a hardware company spend resources to make their own, when free software does everything needed?
Basically, open source will 'eat' into those low-level software layers unstoppable, which leaves only profit to be made with apps / media / services / hardware. Like what's already happening.
I meant all user ones git.
But that's also what's deeply frustrating about it, because it just doesn't improve in any notable sense either. Similar problem with the iPhone, which is looking increasingly less interesting as the new versions become an increasingly minor variation on the original, a fact reflected in the decline in sales.
Ironically that turned out to be a bug in the benchmark most pro music folks were using to measure DPC latency, which was making incorrect assumptions about. Of course once the "Windows 8 sucks for pro audio" stories get out there, they perpetuate in the interweb echo chamber long after even the original software vendor has coughed up to their bug.
So they say, but I just don't see it myself. There are always going to be situations when you don't have net access for whatever reason and at that point the completely online solutions like Chromebook become a useless paperweight. Smartphones are probably the best example of where things are more likely to go, highly connected but still predominantly running local apps (even if they are supported heavily by online services) with sync technology being used to keep data "in the cloud" whilst still available in the periods you're offline.