New Steam survey results

[Richard]

Blame Microsoft for ignoring XP so they can sell more windows licenses.

You can't blame them for something that's SOP. Win2000 didn't even get a SP5 which it sorely needed so consider yourself lucky you got a new SP just as XP was ending the mainstream support period! They've also extended the... er... extended support period to 2014 when they didn't have to, which I wish they hadn't.

I only use XP for my VMs now. And speaking of which, one of them just KO complaining of a corrupt registry and doesn't let me start windows. Last Known Config does minus zero.

And Charlie, Vista a minor release? No, no, no & no. You're way off base here. Win7 I can see that and agree with but Vista was a sea change, regardless of whether it was a good OS. Comparing both with WinMe doesn't help your credibility either.

 

[Groo The Wanderer]

And Charlie, Vista a minor release? No, no, no & no. You're way off base here. Win7 I can see that and agree with but Vista was a sea change, regardless of whether it was a good OS. Comparing both with WinMe doesn't help your credibility either.

I meant minor tweaks to the security model. Yes I know all about it, address space randomization, memory protection etc etc. The problem is they are trying to patch holes while refusing to change architectural flaws. Until they address the herd of elephants in the room, it is all window(s) dressing. They won't address it because it would cost them money.

As for Me II, are you trying to say the parallels aren't dead on? You have seen how MS crows about Vista selling more than any OS in history etc etc. Compare and contrast that to how many of those licenses actually install Me II.....

-Charlie

 

[Kaotik]

They tried to change, it was going to be really closed kernel, but then symantec and mcafee started crying on how it would put 'em out of business

 

[Richard]

I meant minor tweaks to the security model. Yes I know all about it, address space randomization, memory protection etc etc. The problem is they are trying to patch holes while refusing to change architectural flaws. Until they address the herd of elephants in the room, it is all window(s) dressing. They won't address it because it would cost them money.

Well, in all OS release you can find somethings that were hardly changed. Even Win95, often quoted as a revolutionary change, kept a lot of crud from MSDOS/Win3.x.

I think entropy is a much bigger reason than money for a lack of complete rewrites. You have stuff that works; it may not work perfectly but once you decide to change everything you have two choices:

a) Change everything at once: leads to bugs, stuff that worked doesn't anymore for reasons that are hard to discern.
b) Change few things at once: longer development cycles. If people felt Vista took so long they wouldn't like a total rewrite of Windows NT.

As for Me II, are you trying to say the parallels aren't dead on? You have seen how MS crows about Vista selling more than any OS in history etc etc. Compare and contrast that to how many of those licenses actually install Me II.....

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by licensees not installing Vista (?) but Vista/7 are nothing like Me. For starters Me was the last line of a dying breed of OS, whereas Vista is the kickstarter of a new line of NT.

Me was obsolete in one year when XP shipped whereas you had to wait 2.5 years for 7. Me was in nearly all ways that matter worse than the OS that preceeded it (Win 2000); yes, it had better icons. People complain about Vista being slower than XP but all MS OS releases have been slower than their predecessors (7 as an exception); I'm talking about usability, feature-wise, architecturally, etc.

Windows Me was a stop-gap for end-user consumers between Win98SE and XP since Win2000 was mostly targetted at businesses. In the post-XP world there isn't any home/business divide anymore.

It may be fashionable to bash Vista (and if you look at my post history you'll see I have had a lot of bad things to say about it - still do) but comparing Vista to Me, on any level, is a factitious argument. Comparing 7 to Me doubly so.

 

[Groo The Wanderer]

Entropy is the problem. MS does not attempt to secure their OS because of it. Apple rips and replaces where needed. One of these companies makes something that people want, the other makes products that people are forced to use.

As for not installing Vista, November will be 3 years since the release of the OS. It hasn't broken 25% market penetration in a hair short of a full PC replacement cycle. Even you you say 5 years, Vista is still at half the expected install rate. None of the desktops I am responsible for run it, and that is in the high hundreds.

Lots of licenses were sold, but everyone upgraded to XP. Vista blows. It is about as well liked, as widely installed, and garners much less respect than Me. Hence Me II.

MS could have done right with Vista and Vista SP7. They _CHOSE_ not to.

-Charlie

 

[Razor1]

You do release more then 50% of all computers sold are sold to businesses? And they really don't want to move off of XP yet. That does have a lot to do with the picking up of Vista.

 

[willardjuice]

Yes I know all about it, address space randomization, memory protection etc etc

ASLR is not a minor tweak and a huge security improvement. You don't get to say "Well besides x, y, and z features, Windows Vista/7 didn't improve security". That's a pretty glaring flaw in your argument.

 

[ANova]

You can't blame them for something that's SOP. Win2000 didn't even get a SP5 which it sorely needed so consider yourself lucky you got a new SP just as XP was ending the mainstream support period! They've also extended the... er... extended support period to 2014 when they didn't have to, which I wish they hadn't.

I think you misunderstood, I was referring to the fact that MS purposely chose to end support for DX10 and beyond in XP in favor of their new OS because 1. they didn't want to spend time and money making it backwards compatible and 2. they used it as an incentive for people to buy their new OS. Their claim that it wasn't possible because of the updated device driver interface is bs.

I really couldn't care less about service packs or product support, I only commented because I find the accusation that I'm somehow "hurting progress" by not buying their new crap as disingenuous.

 

[willardjuice]

I think you misunderstood, I was referring to the fact that MS purposely chose to end support for DX10 and beyond in XP in favor of their new OS because 1. they didn't want to spend time and money making it backwards compatible and 2. they used it as an incentive for people to buy their new OS. Their claim that it wasn't possible because of the updated device driver interface is bs.

I really couldn't care less about service packs or product support, I only commented because I find the accusation that I'm somehow "hurting progress" by not buying their new crap as disingenuous.

Please can you enlighten us with all your technical knowledge how trivial it would have been to implement DirectX 10 in XP? Implementing WDDM for XP probably would have taken like a day (give or take) right?

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

Please can you enlighten us with all your technical knowledge how trivial it would have been to implement DirectX 10 in XP? Implementing WDDM for XP probably would have taken like a day (give or take) right?

Yeah seriously... WDDM itself is *easily* a large enough feature to justify putting it in a new OS, and incidentally buying a new OS for it. All this UI stuff that people go on about in Vista/Win7 is child's play compared to stuff like WDDM Should they have patched NTFS or multiprocessor support into Win95 or even DOS? I think not...

 

[ANova]

Please can you enlighten us with all your technical knowledge how trivial it would have been to implement DirectX 10 in XP? Implementing WDDM for XP probably would have taken like a day (give or take) right?

It's already been ported to XP, by a third party (though somewhat buggy). Do you honestly believe it would have been so difficult for MS? WDDM wasn't even technically necessary, they created the new model to try to standardize features and performance, other composited desktops such as Quartz in OSX and Compiz in Linux do not use special display driver models. I also love how GDI was back pedaled to being software rendered making it a slow piece of crap if you don't like or have the necessary hardware to run Aero. The audio layer is no longer hardware accelerated as well.

 

[Kaotik]

It's already been ported to XP, by a third party (though somewhat buggy). Do you honestly believe it would have been so difficult for MS? WDDM wasn't even technically necessary, they created the new model to try to standardize features and performance, other composited desktops such as Quartz in OSX and Compiz in Linux do not use special display driver models. I also love how GDI was back pedaled to being software rendered making it a slow piece of crap if you don't like or have the necessary hardware to run Aero. The audio layer is no longer hardware accelerated as well.

Are you talking about Alky Project, which apparently was some sort of wrapper that doesn't really work at all?
(I've yet to see single proof of it working anywhere, yet at least couple who have tested it have said that it doesn't work. at all.)

 

[Groo The Wanderer]

ASLR is not a minor tweak and a huge security improvement. You don't get to say "Well besides x, y, and z features, Windows Vista/7 didn't improve security". That's a pretty glaring flaw in your argument.

It may have been hard to do, but it only catches MS up with the entire rest of the world, several years later.

The problem is MS is putting band-aids on a broken model. Some of the band-aids are complex and expensive, but in the end, they are just patches. They won't change the model because it would cost them money. Until recently, every botnet, hack, malware infestation and hijacking has not been 'their problem', they just patch the hole again, and move on. There is NO incentive to fix the problems, just patch the things that make headlines.

I will repeat myself. Microsoft will not fix their security problems, they can, but they will not.

MS is coming out with the largest patch ever next week. I think it is 13 flaws, 8 critical, 5 severe or whatever, and they fix something like 50+ exploits. This is three years or so after Vista came out. Nothing has changed. Nothing will change because MS doesn't want to.

-Charlie

 

[willardjuice]

It may have been hard to do, but it only catches MS up with the entire rest of the world, several years later.

Really? You know that Snow Leopard still doesn't fully support it right?

 

[willardjuice]

It's already been ported to XP, by a third party (though somewhat buggy)

Try again, that "port" (if one can even call it that) was no where remotely close to being functional, let alone fully functional.

WDDM wasn't even technically necessary, they created the new model to try to standardize features and performance

This is how you are hurting progress. WDDM has been a fantastic improvement for Windows (performance wise, stability wise, and flexibility wise). And yet you want Microsoft not to implement it just because you don't feel like upgrading your operating system! If you had your way a large portion of users would have missed out on a great feature. I don't care if you don't want to upgrade, but by staying with XP (and crying that XP didn't get certain upgrades like DirectX 10+) you are hurting progress. I don't blame you for hurting progress (you don't have to justify why you use XP to me), but that doesn't change the fact that you are (intentionally or not).

 

[ANova]

WDDM allowed for some improvements but it was at the cost of compatibility. Those benefits are not all that impressive imo. Games run slower in Vista/7 than XP so any performance improvements are moot. No, I will not 'upgrade' my operating system for the sake of it as I do not find it to be an upgrade at all but rather a downgrade. If I hurt progress in any way as a result it's because MS decided to end backwards compatibility. If they make something I like, I will use it.

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

No, I will not 'upgrade' my operating system for the sake of it as I do not find it to be an upgrade at all but rather a downgrade.

That's fine and your choice, but realize that any whining about not having DX10 from such a viewpoint falls on deaf ears... you can't have it both ways. Feel free to enjoy XP as long as it does what you want, but just realize that many of us want more... I personally don't buy the "hurting progress" argument as it's up to the market to decide what they want, which is precisely what you're doing.

That said, I will warn you that we've gone over the hill and almost all future games currently in development are going to require Vista/Win7 and DX10 HW as a minimum. No immediate rush, but just a heads-up that progress it isn't going to stop or anything.

 

[ANova]

I never whined about not having DX10, like I said, I really don't care about a few new effects in some games. Willard simply used it as a justification for his argument.

Games aren't going to require Vista/7 anytime soon (aside from maybe a couple here and there whose developers are paid by MS to do so), the industry isn't going to abandon the majority userbase overnight, and as the steam survey shows, only a minority are DX10 capable as of today.

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

Games aren't going to require Vista/7 anytime soon (aside from maybe a couple here and there whose developers are paid by MS to do so), the industry isn't going to abandon the majority userbase overnight, and as the steam survey shows, only a minority are DX10 capable as of today.

The expectation is that the majority of people still on XP will move to Win7. I'm just saying, almost all of the AAA titles that I know of starting/early in development now target the DX11 interfaces, which means Vista/Win7. So like I said, not immediately, but within a year or two you're going to be looking at stuff that won't run on XP.

 

[Albuquerque]

WDDM allowed for some improvements but it was at the cost of compatibility.

Now, here we get to the crux of it.

There are several people in this thread complaining about things that Microsoft hasn't fixed -- but could if they so choose. And look what happened when they took something that was fundamentally broken and fixed it? We get people complaining about "some improvement but at the cost of compatibility."

Well, freaking duh.

WDDM gutted GDI, which had an epic pile of flaws. WDDM removed 3rd-party developed drivers from ring level 0, which drastically reduces stability problems that Microsoft cannot otherwise control, or see or effectively change (but are ultimately still held responsible for.)

Doing these things required new driver model, new kernel interfaces, and a LOT of work. Backporting to XP could've certainly happened, say as part of a whole new service pack. But then we'd be also needing a whole new slew of drivers at the same time. Talk about a huge pile of fail when you take an already functional OS and replace such a massive chunk of it, and then require all the 3rd parties to follow suit.

How long did it take ATI and NVIDIA (primarily, NVIDIA) to get really well functioning drivers under Vista? Almost a year, wasn't it? The public would have accepted this change in XP like a turd in a punch bowl at your local Sunday church luncheon. Seriously.

So either shut up about MS not changing anything, or shut up your complaints about them changing things. I'm tired of reading / hearing / seeing people bitch about what doesn't get changed, and then when something does change, they bitch more. It makes anyone pulling this nonsense look entirely ignorant, which apparently, and I see several instances of it right above me.