Metro?
Isn't it TIFKAM now?
While attending Microsoft's TechEd Australia this week, I've been reminded of the fact that in 2001 I worked for a PR company that did Microsoft's work in Australia. I therefore worked on the periphery of the team that launched Windows XP. One of my most vivid memories from that time is of Microsoft folk telling me Windows XP …
"One of my most vivid memories from that time is of Microsoft folk telling me Windows XP was expected to re-invigorate the PC industry, a statement made without the tiniest quantity of doubt or sense it was in any way preposterous to suggest the software tail could wag the hardware dog."
XP was just as crashy as it's predecessors so will their new one be any different?
XP is rock solid stable and you hardly ever see crashes even in estates of tens of thousands of systems. And when you do, 99% of the time the problem is either faulty RAM, faulty Disk, or a vendor driver.
I can't quite get where the writer thinks that 90%+ market share is coming from behind?! Surely maintaining a massive lead....
I dragged a 15 inch RM badged laptop with XP on it around for a couple of years, plugging it into all kinds of projectors &c and popping in my USB mobile internet dongle in all kinds of venues. Can't remember any crashes. It was locked down and we had a restricted range of Proper Software. Updates back at base on a wired connection.
No crashes with CentOS on the PC or Ubuntu on the (smallish light) Thinkpad either, similar use cases.
Aren't most OSes reasonable these days?
I hear nothing but horror stories about the fragility of Linux from my friends at Amazon. On my workstation PC with ECC memory, neither XP nor Win7 has ever blue screened. I reboot my system a couple times a month, usually just when an update requires it (and yes I know Linux likes to hot-slide DLLs into a running system without rebooting, but don't assume that is a safe practice). There was a study done about ten years ago that showed that 50% of windows crashes were caused by parity errors in memory hardware. Does Linux just ignore or not detect memory errors?
XP was a version of NT, not a version of Windows 9x like ME. It was meant to merge all the functionality of NT and 9x into one system, and the technical challenge was that 9x was very permissive with apps and games. XP had to be "apps compatable", while maintaining the safer, more formal system interface of NT.
To be fair, compared to the previous generation (Windows ME) XP was rock-stable. And compared to the nightmare of compatibility that was Windows 2000, XP was incredibly open and inviting.
Of course, if you were one of those who pirated it, installed a hundred toolbars, and only used IE... there was a reason your OS was crashing, and it wasn't the OS's fault. Yarrr, me hearties!
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So the reg should just let their demographic ill-inform their own opinions, or maybe as an IT news publication they should report on new things in IT and try to show the truth behind the rhetoric on both sides?
Then again, it looks like lots of people don't come here to have their opinions challenged in any way.
Windows XP's poor security also caused Microsoft its first significant stumble.
This drives me bananas. 2K was the first to have an actual security model that worked, provided users bothered to use it. Way too many applications for the day were written with 95/98's lack-of-security model in mind. I had 2K desktops that were malware-proof before the fact and I took a lot of vendors to task for shoddy design in the process. XP was really a pretty face on 2K.
Vista? That was the wake-up call for these shoddy vendors to fix their [censored]. Helicopter-parenting was apparently badly needed for these ignorant (after seven years of 2K I call them ignorant!) developers and many of them finally got it right in time for Windows 7's release. Many more still don't have it right.
The security model was there twelve years ago. Stop blaming Microsoft for no one using it.
And downvotes don't make this wrong; they just make it unpopular. Tough. Deal with it.
............talking about XP after SP1, and particularly after SP2. IMHO XP before those service packs was as buggy, unstable and insecure as all get out. After those SPs it became (for its time) a very fine os - it served me well at any rate for many years thereafter (Pro version).
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" 2K was the first to have an actual security model that worked"
...which was NOT brought into XP, for compatibility reasons. They knew that people wanted to run their old apps, so they had to compromise security to do so.
"XP was really a pretty face on 2K"
No, it really wasn't. XP was designed as a replacement for Win 95/98/ME, and had the task of running Win9x apps, despite being NT architecture. The way many 9x programs were written assuming they had what many today would consider root access. This was simply incompatible with the traditional NT security defaults...so MS turned them off. What really turned the security efforts around was that programmers were starting to recognise and work reliably around the security architecture, thus achieving the same effect and letting the security setup do it's job. This was more or less forced in SP2 (when new defaults came into play).
2K was an enterprise OS designed to replace NT4, already of the NT lineage. It was a kick-ass system that solidified the NT line's reputation as a reliable OS, not that NT4 was doing a bad job anyway (compared to Win98). While there were improvements, they weren't of the kind that could break applications (or at least not as seriously as with WinXP). Win NT apps were already coded around a decent security model that was later inherited in XP, so they didn't have issues with compatibility
No, it really wasn't
Yes, it really was. The 9x layer was dealt with by Windows on Windows in XP, just as it was in 2K. WoW applications don't run with elevated privileges, except inside the WoW sandbox.
I dunno where you got that little rant from, but it's wrong
So blaster never existed. And the pile of visit a website with IE get hosed flaws never happened.
You could make XP secure... with an air gap.
By the time it reached SP2 it was a lot better with a lot of the attacks were against applications (some were MS applications like Office) and not the OS.
Utter tripe. The Morris worm - which was the worst internet worm ever - existed on platforms claimed at the time as 'secure'. OS-X gets hacked by its browser every year before IE falls, and Android and IOS can both be rooted by visiting websites.
Windows had a secure base design since Windows NT and has improved ever since as bugs were removed, and more secure coding and attack surface approaches were adopted.
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