Report: No DirectX 10 For Windows XP

Well this was sort of expected.... "Evolve or Die" [upgrade or miss the next gen games]?

Screw 'em, they can keep their DX10. I'm sticking with XP as long as possible.

Also, all drivers on Vista are required to be digitally signed. Seems MS is really going too far this time.

If they don't want my money then be so.

The next generation of butt rapage takes a new step huh? :)

All I can say is that they must be REALLY desperate to get you to upgrade to Vista.

"I'm sticking with XP as long as possible."
Me too - I'm tired of this game.

I als suspect that all government departments/ professional bodies (a massive market) will also say 'enough' and not buy.
MS may find that _only_ game players / new home users get Vista.

Actually I'm quite thinking it'll have the opposite effect. People will stop buying DX10 only games. It certainly won't be seen as a smart move by mainstream game publishers (including, but not limited to Microsoft games).

I think Microsoft just shot themselves in the foot. Think we'll se an OpenGL revival?

The Danish government is certainly moving in that direction, the ministry of science being chosen to trial ODF documentation, and one of the largest Danish Unions are switching 1200 PC's to OpenOffice in an effort to limit spending.

And with Novell managing to post a profit, hopefully it'll only be a matter of time before Microsoft are forced to compete alongside everyone else.

I somehow really don't care anymore, at least this time...

Different markets and so different needs. For games i would say that people will buy content and if great content will be available on dx10 only then the majority will also buy this...

Look at how restrictive HalfLife2 is/was. They still got superb sales. If i have the choice between playing a Bejeweld clone number 1234 on xp or HalfLife3 on Vista i will go for Vista. It's that easy.

OSX will also be a DRM secured system so what do you want? Linux as a desktop in it's current state simply isn't working...at least for me. Linux on PS3?

Honestly i do care more about crappy copy protections. Would be much nicer to use a game without everytime visting gamecopyworld before playing, no matter if it's xp or vista.

Vista run DX9 in aero or a seperate DX9?

If it run DX9 via aero we can expect some performance impact, less or more?

I'm glad I don't play PC games. :/

Yes, and I'm not buying the sequels (even though I really enjoyed HL2 when it finally did work on my machine).

I win either way - I'll have a brand new machine with Vista. I've got all of the Windows operating systems and I will continue to collect them by simply purchasing new machines.

Bring it on.

£10 says that within a year of Vista being released it will be on 80% of desktops PC's in the world.

@Perturbatio
Yep, but i suspect the majority will go for it. I myself was thinking about:

a) Never again buying a game under such conditions.
b) Buying the Addon when all three episodes are finished and so also cheaper.
c) Or just say f**k it and enjoy the game.

This time i will go for c)...

I'll stick with winxp AS LONG AS POSSIBLE.
Talk to me again when Vista with SP2 is out...

LOL @ Amon, Big10P :)

--Mike

Vista is bloatware. XP Pro for at least another 2 years! Then we will see what comes up from the sewers. I think Billy boy is working too hard to promote Vista (and still think the name sounds like a feminine hygene product!) I am betting there will be a DX10 for XP. I am also betting that the system requirements will not attract many people to Vista as they think.

I was running Win2000 till a couple months ago. New machine came with XP so that is when I upgraded. I won't be in a rush to buy a vista machine either.

I also think MS might have made a big mistake this time by not having DX10 for XP, time will tell.

Sorry MS, this is what happens when you write a decent operating system... people don't need to upgrade :P


How many of you people that call Vista bloatware have really used it?
I would go as far as to say that it's far less bloated than XP; it runs fine, even with the little graphical enhancements, fullscreen apps run much nicer, and the file management is vastly improved!
There is a single centralized Games folder including an Update system (sort of like the Synaptic Package Manager) which hopefully developers (including EA) will support. This keeps stuff off your desktop, and you won't need to know the developer/publisher to find something.
Another thing is apparent fixes to the problems with stupid programs writing their junk to My Documents.
They still do it, but it doesn't get in your way. (I still think MS should harrass them for it, though).

Unlike various computer programs that ARE bloatware, Vista manages to maintain loads of features that noone will ever use without any slowdown unless they are in use.



No DX10 for XP is annoying, though, as I am also unlikely to purchase Vista for some time (I'm not saying I like it, I'm just saying that Bloatware is no excuse)... I bet that it'll be cracked pretty quickly to run on XP, and such a thing would only introduce more people to the concept of pirating Windows.
I imagine they'll decide against it soon enough...

This is awesome. Now we won't have 50,000 threads asking Mark to add DirectX 10 support to Blitz3D. *bliss*

Console gaming just gets better and better huh by default :)

Eh? XP needs about 2.5GB -- Vista requires over 15GB for the OS itself. How can that possibly be "less bloated"?

Anyway, it's not like the world has a choice -- once Vista is released, you pretty much won't be able to buy a computer without it thanks to Microsoft's nice little licensing conditions with the system builders. The vast majority of people don't manually upgrade their OS ever, but 'automatically' upgrade when they buy their next computer. So no, by no means 80% will have upgraded in a year as mentioned above... But more than likely that 80% will have been hit after 4-5 years when most people would have upgraded their computers anyway, after their current ones get crippled beyond usability thanks to spyware.
While MS makes some money on the side through upgrades, the vast majority of their income is through bundled operating systems with new computers

although especially in corporate settings, I don't expect to see XP go away any time soon -- simply because you can save a significant amount of money by getting XP capable machines over Vista-capable machines....

<unrelated>
Heh. Microsoft's worst nightmare would be for Fisher Price to get into the OS market themselves. ;-)
</unrelated>

"There is a single centralized Games folder"

I don't even use the single centralized "my documents" folder. And a good thing too. There's a virus out there which encrypts all the documents in the My Documents folder and demands you pay money to get the password to unlock them!

Centralization is good you say?

The registry centralized all the INI files, and look what that got us? You can't move an app from one PC to another or even one drive or one directory to another now without resinstalling it and losing all your settings. I've got both a graphics directory and a grpahics directory because I made a typo when installing one of my graphics apps, and I can't move the application without reinstalling it which is a big pain in the ass!

I'll stick with XP for now thank you very much. Duke Nukem Forever is the only PC game I'm waiting for right now and that's gonna be DX9.

I think that its great that DX10 is going to be Vista only and they wiped the slate clean. It will be a couple of years before its widely used, because the hardware needs to saturate through the market before Developers support it in games.

DX10 is supposed to be a huge jump over DX9, and would require a lot of changes to XP's core to get it to run properly.

I think its a good thing to lose backwards compatibility in DX10 and have a DX9 fallback to keep people up and running for the mid term. Its all this compatibility that holds the PC back. You have to draw the line somewhere and start over, to me it seems as good a time as ever.

In a couple of years from now, 80% of us will be using Vista anyway, just like we almost all got XP.

Don't see a big deal here at all, and look forward to DX10 :)

I'm just wondering if this will cause a chicken and egg situation. Developers will not develop DX10 games since the market is so small, and gamers (for once) will not feel the need to update since there are no games that make use of DX10. (I freely admit to possibly being delusional, but I remember the fate of the Commodore 128 - it ran c-64 software so developers kept writing for the C64 mode, ignoring the 128 mode)

Gamers will buy DX10 hardware to play DX9 games. So eventualy there will be a big enough userbase with suitable hardware. I expect we will see DX10 enhanced/flavoured versions of the biggest games long before DX10 becomes mainstream.

Just how many games today really make exceptional use of DX9 even? Most havent really progressed past DX8 in capabilities yet.

i share taumel and evak's views on this topic...

the new order is coming... "resistance is futile"

--Mike

I agree with Evak too...Sometimes you need to throw out the old!

I'll take that bet.

I would wager about as many people who call Linux unsuitable for a desktop OS who have tried Ubuntu? Just a ballpark figure.

And it's such a mystery why traditional PC developers (like Bioware, Bethesda and Rockstar) are jumping ship left and right.

So you're saying that you think that gamers are going to buy top-of-the+line graphics cards, with features they cannot use, to play games with no visual quality over their exsisting setup? I think you're gravely mistaken. Seen this? Don't you find it interesting that the majority of Half-life 2 players (that would be gamers) still cling to their GeForce 6600s and their Radeon 9600s? If gamers aren't even likely to upgrade to this generations finest, for games that support them, what makes you think they're going to buy the next without any immediate benefits. Stupidity?

You need to read up on the technology adoption lifecycle. Real people, pragmatic buyers (the most lucrative market) are not going to throw out a $2000 USD 6 month old computer because Vista just came out.

Was that before or after you saw this pic?
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/

no there will be a 600 or 9600GT for about $200 - $300 within a year that will be great for vista and DX10 and beat current cards at DX9.

You won't need to upgrade your CPU if and possibly not your ram if you bought yout computer in the last year.

Vista doesn't need a lot of resources to run as well as XP as it is.

Awesome! It's like they're trying to market it that way:



I'll stick with XP for a good while and don't plan to upgrade to it (assuming it isn't an ME-level debacle) until I get a new system in a couple of years. Until then, the early DX10-only games will just have to get by without me buying them (I'll pick up any decent ones for next-to-nothing in the bargain bin once I do get Vista).

Looking at that web site, I think it's hilarious how much it begs for proper PNG support with alpha...

So you think that people are willing to pay more than $600 USD (for a new graphics card, and a new OS, never mind what Dell is going to charge them for the upgrade) just to play a single game? Why for that price they could get a PS3.

You wouldn't want to upgrade your computer at all if you bought in the last year, and it's still covered by warranty.

I'm not talking about the technophiles and geeks here, I'm talking about normal rational people, who make common sense, pragmatic decisions on when to acquire discontinuous high-tech products. Those people who make up 66% of the total market, and are your only chance for sustaining a mainstream market product.

Vista is the new Linux.

Most gamers will upgrade. Infact most people I know that play PC games upgrade every 8 - 12 months. Most people that use PC's don't play games. But those that do will often upgrade.

As far as I can tell most people on here aren't really PC gamers anyway. They just like making games.

Sidenote:
This girl on the picture is extremely cute. Though this won't change my attitude towards the product.... :)

I'll probably be upgrading for gaming. My two year old gaming PC (not top of the line even when I built it) is still well in to the "premium" category so it shouldn't be a problem for it. The whole gaming side of the OS has been completely re-worked, from the driver model to "installationless gaming" and I'm looking forward to it.

I don't know if DX10 is being deliberately held back from XP to encourage people to upgrade or if it has something to do with the driver overhaul.

hahahahahhaaaaa... Micrsoft knows exactly what they're doin...

it's the age of the woman... and the sensitive male...

MS knows that most of em have looked at their wife's panties lying in the drawer and wondered at one time or another, what it would feel like to wear em...

and some of em have actually tried em on... (don't deny it, you know you have ya lil 'preverts' you)

:)

for the rest of us 'real men' still left alive, they're aware that we really don't give a damn any more... although that 'stay fresh as a flower' thing does seem a bit too much though... that wasn't really part of the original ad, was it... one of you jokers added that, didn't you...

--Mike

*laughing* :O)

Not meaning to be offensive to people, but, how many normal, everyday users, who aren't clued up to a certain extent, will not buy Vista? Anyone buying a new computer, ie. lots of people, will probably have vista preinstalled. The switch is unstoppable, and mostly everyone will have switched and bought it. I don't think it matters whether you buy it now or later. Your going to need to upgrade.

I'm not looking forward to Vista btw :o)

Erm not that I want to play the ass ... but you all are aware that Intel GMA 950 is a Vista card as well and that piece of **** is within any craptastic dell and other "system" producers lineup with CoreDuo ...

So its not like there won't be any cheap ones ... its more like the current graphic cards focus around a technology that never should have come to life (split shaders into vertex and pixel units) ...

And the not XP compatibility: Sorry, I already have support to stone age DX ... and the result is a worse one as drivers are written for DX 9, they run worse at DX8 and tend to break on DX7 as whole.
With DX10, only DX10 runs directly, the rest is run through DX10 calls which ensures that my drivers work ... and thats not possible with any windows before vista as they internally need DX8 to be installed which DX10 does not like that much!

That's true. But how many people are buying new computers? Not that many, why? Cause the market is saturated. Which is probably what trigger the 'evolve or die' strategy, trying to recycle the market. The question is will it work as Microsoft intended, or will they instead open up a huge market to other companies looking to capitalize on now obsolete hardware?

Because you're right you know. Normal everyday users, who aren't clued up, are not going to know that they shouldn't buy a computer until after Vista is out, and they're not going to know they're going to need a powerful graphics card to get the most of it. So they're going to buy whatever PC they can afford off the Dell website, and they're not going to buy a new one 6 months from now (or whenever Windows Vista Forever is comming out). That's the difficulty in successfully launching a discontinuous high-tech product, a lesson Microsoft is about to learn the hard way.

Vista is really crappy. I mean REALLY crappy.

You lie!!
Actually, I agree.
Let's switch.

Not Apple, though, they are in the perfect position to become just as evil as Microsoft -- they are good right now, and will continue to be as long as they remain a sort of a successful niche thing.

Yah, you know what the other choice is.
Afraid?
Let's hurry back to Uncle Gates, then!

(Note: I'm not saying that you are this person, Leiden; just demonstrating... eventually and ramblingly... the behaviour of lots of people who say that).

Apple are not the good guys. Apple are simply the lesser of two evils.

And Vista is not any worse than XP. It just takes up more space and requires better hardware.

Makes you wonder how people even got GEOS and Amiga Workbench to work on ~1MHz and ~7MHz machines respectively.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Rather than tell people they need to upgrade.

Who needs to upgrade?

Only the eye candy guys ... all regular user won't need to beside the harddisk ... but thats the price when you have a full home entertainement system tied into your OS ... as if Apple would be better lol ... who started with deliverying on DVD? ;-)

I meant "Who needs to upgrade to Vista". Really I can't see a compelling reaon to buy, much less a reason to upgrade. I mean sure, back when it was called longhorn and had something to offer besdides a fancy transparent frontend, sure - I woulkd've out my money down right away. But now? I can all the fancy frontends I want on Linux - look me up when it looks better than Enlightenment.

there are a few things that make it works:

WinFX only runs partially on fullspeed on WinXP
WinFS will suffer the same problems on XP (although both use NTFS 5.1, Vista uses an exteded version that is different to WinXP. If you ever try to clone a vista partition with partition magic 8 you will see what I'm talking about :) )

Beside that, there isn't much reason for me either ... I already replaced taskbar etc throgh objectdock and have winplosion when playing around with many windows ... so in the end I'm using OSX like controls with a usefull and widely used OS under the hood and that will most likely not change with Vista ... the only thing I can kick off then is this crappy want to be entertainement stuff that came with my USB TV card as the MCE parts are definitely better :-)

I think all the Vista naysayers are probably the same people who said XP was gonna be rubbish and bomb and just love to bash MS. For some reason MS bashing is eternally popular, the penalty of success I suppose.

XP is IMHO unquestionably one of Microsoft's best achievements so far and works very well: its stable, is easy to use and has a good feature set. Most of the time people don't even think about their XP operating system because it's that good, you just know it will work.

I think Vista will be successful and will support the next line of Microsoft applications well. As for support I think they have supported XP well and why should they spend a lot of time adding support for Direct X 10 to their old OS? People are behaving as if they have a God-given rigt to indefinate updates from Microsoft which they don't, particularly for something as non-essential as a new gaming API.

Like a lot of products, if you want the functionality in the new product buy it, if you are so happy with the functionality in the existing product, don't. But don't expect the company to give you a free upgrade to your old product just because they release features in their new one.

If it was any other company than Microsoft I doubt there would even be a discussion about this!

Darkheart

I had a tech support guy tell me that Microsoft's official stance is that new OSes will be released every 18 months, but old ones will only be supported for 4 years - This is to force an upgrade every 4 years.

If the professional application people can resist adding Vista-only features, and the gaming industry can resist DX10-required strategies, then we may have a chance to show MS that we don't like to be forced to do ANYTHING!

Russell

Its a stupid debate.
The last time I bought a windows os was a floppy disk version of 95. Since then every computer I get has a different windows with it. For free. (ie I have two 98s a 2000 spanish, two xp homes and an xp profesinal). And only one of these computers had an option to buy it without windows, and they were out of stock of that version.
So if I buy a computer next year it will have vista. I wont have the option to choose it or not.
Ok if I go on the upgrade rounderbout then MayBe I will need to change/buy a new OS. But quite frankly I will know someone by then who has a copy, and will just "Borrow" theirs

(And yes I downgraded at home the 2000 one to a second edition 98)

- Except it's been 4 years since XP came out
- Except Microsoft's own published timeline shows that their products (including operating systems) have 5 years of 'mainstream' support, and an additional 5 years of secondary support. Meaning during the first 5 years you can expect bugfixes and possibly enhancements / new features, and the next 5 years only important seucirty patches. After 10 years, you're on your own.

They where right tho', wheren't they? XP is just Windows 2000 with a flashier GUI, and System Restore, that nobody ever uses.

That's hardly argumentative. Of course XP is the best, it's the latest. It would be CRIMINAL if a market leader consistently produced worse operating systems that its predecessors. Also, considering it gets at least two critical updates a month, XP today is clearly better than the early version of XP.

If you happen to have the correct combination of Microsoft certified hardware and software drivers for the unspecified time period.

If there WHERE any other companies than Microsoft there wouldn't be a discussion about it either, because people would be able to get RedHat DirectX10 for Windows XP instead. In either case, didn't Adobe just go over the exact same thing with not giving Microsoft a carte blanche to use Acrobat technology?

Since we're talking about stupid...

Did you get those computers for free too genius? Guess you have a pirate copy then, I wonder if Microsoft appreaciate that. What's that? You got an OEM version? Sure, but here comes the clue train, last stop you. OEM versions cost money. Just like you don't get a free harddrive, or a free monitor with your new PC, you don't get a free Windows either. It's all factored into the total price you pay for the system. Nothing is free.

It doesn't matter. Microsoft will give you a refund if you send in the OEM version. Google "Microsoft Tax" for more information.

No, your system builder paid the "microsoft tax" to be allowed to distribute their system with windows. And the best thing is that (until not too long ago) you would EVEN pay this fee if you happened to buy a system *without* windows from any largish place, since not paying for the OEM license for *every* computer they shipped would violate their licencing agreement with Microsoft resulting in significantly higher rates to distribute windows with a new PC.

Must be nice to have a monopoly, and even get money when people DON'T use your products.

Interestingly enough, software like your 'free' copy of windows makes up a disproportionally large amount of the purchase price of a cheap system. Hardware components have come down in price tremendously over the years, but software prices only creep upwards.

@Xlsior, err no. Because every comptuer I have bought has been an end of line discounted one. My desktop is, and always will be a homebuild.
Ive had the same computer for 15 years, just over that time i have changed the case twice, the motherboard 4 times ... etc..)
The comps Im talking about have all been portibles, (very cheap end of stock portibles)
ie (2003) toshiba portage with windows 98se £170

XP is WAY WAY better than win2k. It may not have changed that much on the surface, but its so much better when it comes to running resource hungry apps, and excellent stability. I'd say its about 40% better than win2k.

I'm quite happy with the price of windows, works out at about $50 per year or less if you buy OEM, for its useable life.

Thats a lot better than OSX which costs about $130 per year if you want to stay up to date with 100% compatibility with new apps.

"...
Thats a lot better than OSX which costs about $130 per year if you want to stay up to date with 100% compatibility with new apps. ..."

I think we all know that this statement simply is not true. Neither your calculation for Windows nor the one for OS X is correct, and your assumptions about the supported product lifecycle of both systems are also wrong.

In a few weeks, even the support for XP SP1 will be dropped by Microsoft. They stick to their five year lifecycle. Doing the Math with your very own figures, XP will have cost you around 250 USD by now. I am quite positive that nobody on this planet has paid 250 USD for his copy of XP. Not even if you bought it with Software Assurance.

As for Apple: They release new versions of their operating systems every 18 to 24 months, but they do not drop the support for the last OS version. As for the new apps, well iLife 06 for example still is supported on OS X 10.3.9, and most other applications also still support the old version.

For Pro apps it is a different story, but here is the newsflash: Many professionals "freeze" their system configuration, esp. the software, until they buy a completely new machine with completely new software. And there is a very good reason for this: They do not want to break the compatibility of the components. It is the workflow that matters to them, not being on the technological cutting edge.

It also has a lot to do with cost-benefit analysis. If you use Pro applications (like Photoshop, Aperture, Final Cut Studio, QuarkXPress, AutoCad - you name it) and do upgrade, then you do not necessarily care about the few bucks more for the new operating system. You are in this business to make money with your tools, so you calculate whether you need the new tools or not. And, btw, it does not matter if you are in the Apple or Microsoft or Unix/Linux world for this.

The few bucks matter for hobbyist and private users. And let's face facts: They are the ones who really do not need to stay on the bleeding edge of technology. The only reason for a typical geek is the ego boost and the kick that he thinks he gets out of wasting his money on the newest toys.

Normal people just don't need all the updates and upgrades the industry wants to sell them.

No, it will enter the extended support stage, where it will be for another 5 years. That means no new features and additions, and more limited technical support, but still another 5 years of being able to buy it and receiving free security updates.

@ Winni... while Evak's cost cycle breakdown may not be 100% accurate, he is correct in his comparison though... the Apple OS costs more to license and use than the Winxxx OS...

especially if you are a developer...

just take a look at GMans frustrations in making a wrapper for irrlicht in the BMax forums... all because of the differences between OSX 10.3. and 10.4... this shows the necessity for devs to upgrade...

plus, the relative prices for a new Apple box as opposed to a new PC box, both with a respective version of OSX or Winxxx... clearly gives the cost advantage to the Winxxx OS were the end consumer is concerned...

i recently spent $399 for an eMachines, preloaded with XP... and a machine i bought over a year ago was also in the same price range, came preloaded with Windows XP, and it is still in front line service... service pak2 that is :) ...

compare these to the single Mac mini i bought for $599, which is now obsolete (intel core switch) and the OS is also obsolete (XCode wise for many purposes), and i can't just log onto Apple cares and upgrade to the next kitty...

factoring in all these points makes the PC/WinOS more cost effective than the comparable Mac/OSX counterpart...

and i like Macs... but hey... fact is fact...

--Mike

hey winni, you have he same name as my Dog ;P

Who cares about professionals, I'm talking about the average joe on the street. All I was saying was that windows hardly costs a lot. If don't already have XP and cant afford the equivalent of $50 a year then use linux instead.

I thought OSX went through 4 updates in the last 5 years. Which would have been expensive if you didn't rush over to your nearest apple store on launch day.

Just because you say it, doesn't make it true. My Intellistation runs much better on 2K. My mates ABook Laptop also runs better on 2K (and even Ubuntu Linux) than it does on XP, where in the space of 45 minutes, 3 BSOD errors are not uncommon. Let's see what Microsoft have to say. Oh. Sorry, we've known for more than 2 years this is an issue, we even know why it happens, we just can't be bothered to fix it. Sorry.

Never seen a BOSD in XP yet and it used to happen daily in 2K. It also runs office and the web faster on a Pentium 2 400 Geforce 2 than it ran on Win2k.

I don't have to reinstall windows every 3 months to keep it from deteriorating over time as I used to with win2k.

But then, perhaps I run more demanding software than you more often (shrug)

So long as you have at least 512mb of ram XP has proven a much better experience for me. Of course you do have to go and do all the optimisations first, registry and services. But after that it's easily the best windows for running my software yet.

That's because the default configuration is setup to reboot immediately.

I have seen that several times during last few weeks at work - but it's bit different when you're dev'ving apps like 3DMark with code that's so wip and when you have alpha-this-and-that display drivers etc. Coding errors can and will happen and it's not really XP's fault... well sort of it is, because it should catch even those better than it does.

I've never had a reboot either, I actually keep my 2 systems with XP running 24/7 months on end without rebooting at all.

My initial XP experience was mediocre at best -- many times it pretty much stopped in its tracks and became almost unresponsive.

that problem went away after a full reinstall. all was fine until SP2 was released, and when I finally took the plunge after a couple of weeks, it blew up in my face and the machine wouldn't boot up anymore after installing it. (It would come to the XP loading screen, and spontaneously reboot without error. Even safe mode didn't work, requiring another full reinstall.

Since that point things have been working fairly solidly, although every couple of months there's a spontaneous reboot.

Win2000 on the other hand has never given me the headaches that XP has thrown at me. don't remember my workstation ever crashing on me.

On top of that, it takes a lot of tweaking to de-fisherprice XP and make it look usable like Win2000 did.

One ongoing issue I do have with XP is that the drivers for my scanner (that were supplied on the XP installation CD itself) are pretty bad -- the histogram of any scanned image only shows about half the spectrum, making each and every scanned picture look incredibly washed out. the same scanner looks great under Win2000.

What probably puzzles me the most is that Microsoft thinks it fit to labeled a product 'professional' while using animated animals to assist you with your dumbed-down file searches -- while second-guessing you and preventing you from actually searching for strings inside files with any 'non-approved' file extensions. Luckily there's a registry hack which will return some sanity by restoring the old-style Windows 2000 file search into XP, without those limitations.

Anyway, for everyone convinced that XP is a humongous increase over Win2000: just keep in mind that there is a *reason* that Microsoft has internally labeled Windows 2000 version 5.0, and XP is 5.1.
It's nothing more than a minor incremental point update.
(Vista is slated to be 6.0)

I don't know... I guess I may be biased, but in my view for every step microsoft takes forward in one area, they go three back and 7 sideways in another. Too bad that it's their way or the highway, uncle Bill knows best.
the *only* reason I run XP instead of 2000 on my main machine is that it's a requirement of one of the apps I need to run... If it weren't for that, I'd still be using Win2000 myself.

Resistance is futile, we all say that now and will get vista as soon as our title or dev tool of choice will sport the new DX10 feature!

We had that the exact same debate when XP came out, rinse and repeat.. oh look now, we're all on XP.

must...get...new...shiny..toy!

No matter what people say about MS, you dont get in the position they are in, and you dont make as much money as they have and you dont control the amount of market that they do by being stupid.

It cant just be done with brute force, walk up take it and say HAHA!.

It takes well thought out plans tactics and ideas. and Microsoft has that in spades.

No matter what our own personal opinion is, I'll be most of you run and use their OS. most of you in your day to day life have no problems with it all. In fact its probably prity rare that anything does go wrong with your Windows XP, and when it does you will cry like it happens all the time.

Stop being sheep, take a step back and see what they have given the computer market.

Vista will dominate the OS world like a virus, and it will be hacked to shit within a month, a few days l8r will see relaes after release of patch, and eventually we will have a truely stable and well made operating system.

i agree... most wholeheartedly... like i said before...

be calm... you have nothing to fear...

blessings of the state... blessings of the masses...

you are a true believer...

resistance is indeed... futile...


stimulating rhetoric... absolutely :)
the theatre of noise is proof of our potential...


are you now... have you ever been...


buy...

buy more...

buy more... now...

and be happy...

--Mike

And what have they given the computer market? I for one can’t name a single product Microsoft makes that is not bettered by a rival’s product, which is surely no mean feat if you’re the richest company on the planet and could head hunt the best programmers in the world and play them any figure they please. People use Windows because everybody else uses Windows and to use another OS would complicate your life slightly.

I mean just look at Windows for god's sake. Still missing features that were present in Amiga Workbench such as datatypes for example

Visual Studio 2005

X-Develop, Eclipse. CodeWarrior. Take your pick. Visual Studio is horrible, frustrating, slow, takes too long to setup (read: all its default values are rubbish), is lacking vital features that other IDEs have (like easy source code navigation and continous compilation).

In nearly three years I have yet to find one single thing that could be considered a saving grace feature. I mean Visual Studio only just got refactoring, and its not particularly good at it.

The short list of Microsoft products that aren't shattered by their rivals, would be Project, Visio and Publisher.

hahahahaaa... maybe you need a newer machine duck... and you might wanna read up a lil on how to use the thing correctly before you start condeming it so vociferously...

it's free...

shattered... isn't that being a lil overly dramatic duck... i mean, look how many companies are using MS products... look at the value of each one of those trademarks you just mentioned... i get on my knees each night and pray to god, please let me be shattered in such a way...

sorry... i just think your points here need to be... uhhh, how can i put this... laffed at :)
while there is a twinge of truth and fact in some of what you say... it is eventually lost in the wildly extrappolated urban legends that you include with your statements...

ooops... lemme apologize to 'duck before he sees this and beats me to a pulp... without deleting what i said.

sorry, i misread your post... scanning by it tooooo fast...


--Mike

Agreed. *Some* of the complaints were true of earlier visual studios. I'm pretty sure I said 2005 in my post.

BSOD: So far I have not had any electronical device with a OS or pseudo OS I was not able to freeze at least once.

Mentioning that I own any nintendo console, XBox, PS1 /2, DreamCast as well as have access to Win98 / 2k Pro / XP / 3 different linux and an Apple with OSX, this means there is simply nothing that does not freeze ...

And as so often: Its normally the software creator that is the problem, not the OS (sure single threaded only like Win98 / ME makes it easier to break it). So I don't understand why all go bad (should be declared stupid) about .NET 2.0 / 3.0 ... that was the best thing in quite some time as now even stupid programmers can't break stuff anymore due to GC control etc.

Those are what I'd consider three of their very worst products and bettered by nearly every commercial (and some non-commercial) product on the market. Throw in Visual SourceSafe and you've got the set.

lol


!

*updates virus scanner*

Throw in MS Installer and you got the worst one! (Only few know, but MSI has a hidden folder in the windows directory where the whole install stuff gets backuped ... it is getting to 500-1000MB quite fast .. and without those data you can't run uninstaller anymore)

I was talking about VS2005, and there's nothing wrong with my machine. Sure 2005 finally got refactoring (5 years after everyone else) and the ability to generate method stubs (10 years after everyone else). But can you navigate your code by holding down CTRL and clicking on a keyword (like in XDevelop) or set it up to build in the background, so rebuilding your solution/project doesn't take forever (like Eclipse), can you set it up to compile for different platforms (like CodeWarrior) or can you get it to open a source file, in the fucking source view rather than the designer?

Really? I know SmartDraw is very nearly as good as Visio (except it can't reverse engineer source code). But I don't even know of a product that competes with Project, or Publisher.

Well we can all agree on that one. Visual Source Rape is worse than CVS, and CVS hasn't been updated in like 10 years or something.