New Steam survey results

[neliz]

Win7 will definitely gain traction under business users because it features some of the best business options out there, period.

People haven't been exactly jumpy about Vista or Win2008, but a feature like DirectAccess are THE reason for corporations, be it large or small, to migrate from WinXP/2003 to 7/2008R2.

For compatibility's sake, the Transparant XP mode for businesses (which is different from the VPC'10 based home user mode) is a boon. It's a lot.. no a LOT quicker when it comes to user data synchronization, roaming profiles since they cut the startup path in a foreground and background one. No more "Please wait, copying user settings."

Any admin that has seen Win7 in action in an actual domain knows that XP is holding them back.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

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.

This happened with the Dos/Win3.11 -> Win95 change, the Win98 -> Win2k/WinXP change, and is happening with the WinXP -> Vista/Win7 change.

I should expect such whining by people by now, but it still gets under my nerves from time to time.

I shudder to think what the computing landscape would be like if people like that had their way. We'd still be stuck with DOS. Computers would still be absent from virtually all households. Noone, but the technical elite would even bother to use computers... Ugh...

Regards,
SB

 

[Sc4freak]

I agree, and it seems to happen a lot. A lot of people hate Vista, but few are able to say why they hate it. And out of those who do have justifications for why they think Vista is fundamentally flawed, many of their arguments are invalid or just plain wrong... as evidenced by some posters in this thread.

I honestly don't know how it came to this, but the level of hatred and ignorance surrounding Vista still continues to astound me.

 

[flynn]

I agree, and it seems to happen a lot. A lot of people hate Vista, but few are able to say why they hate it. And out of those who do have justifications for why they think Vista is fundamentally flawed, many of their arguments are invalid or just plain wrong... as evidenced by some posters in this thread.

I honestly don't know how it came to this, but the level of hatred and ignorance surrounding Vista still continues to astound me.

I won't touch a Microsoft OS with a 10 ft pole, but everyone I know who has used Vista complained about speed. For them Windows XP was way faster and offered everything they need, read: their games performed better under XP than they did when ran on Vista.

I've used Vista for a gran total of 30 minutes and it indeed felt slower. I guess these days with quad core CPUs and 8GiBs of memory it's not much of an issue anymore.

 

[Kaotik]

I won't touch a Microsoft OS with a 10 ft pole, but everyone I know who has used Vista complained about speed. For them Windows XP was way faster and offered everything they need, read: their games performed better under XP than they did when ran on Vista.

I've used Vista for a gran total of 30 minutes and it indeed felt slower. I guess these days with quad core CPUs and 8GiBs of memory it's not much of an issue anymore.

If you had modern machine when Vista was launched, it wasn't a problem back then either. It didn't take long before the drivers catched up either, and on last check up nVidia was a tad slower on Vista compared to XP, and ATI a tad faster on Vista compared to XP

 

[Richard]

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.

When OSX has 90% of the market you should look at how Apple will update it. Same problem with Firefox: while it had a small share they could break compatibility right away, now everyone complains how their extensions don't work with the new version. Sorry, but bringing Apple and OSX into this discussion is not helping your argument. Apple is now also under pressure because it's leaving the PowerPC (that is 2006) hardware in the dark. Despite the dissent, they can still do that because they have a small share of the market. MS tried to do some of that with Vista and all they got was people complaining, like you.

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.

What expected rate? If it's MS's then according to them it's above XP's levels. If you go back to 2002 you will see a lot of reports about how XP was bombing and how Linux would scoop up the desktop market. Now XP is the bestest OS eva! In my University we only upgraded to XP in 2004 because that's when the budget and upgrade cycle allowed us to. Big business doesn't care about release dates, they will upgrade at their own pace which Vista broke because it was 1-2 years late.

Now 7 is coming out; it doesn't worsen the backwards compatibility picture, improves performance and has some end-user flashy improvements; the top 3 complaints about Vista. Microsoft will paint this as a victory and everyone will forget about XP before the 2014 deadline rolls around. Compare this to WinMe's sad short life.

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.

Your experience with Vista and WinMe are completely different than mine then. I barely knew anyone that had WinMe and the handful of people that did kept calling me to fix their computer. I know hundreds of people that have Vista installed. Nearly all of my students have it and aside from some speed issues I never hear them complain. Some have 7 installed and love it. In fact, most of the problems my studends have concern the Home/Professional divide in XP which some software (like SQL Server) doesn't like. In Vista Premium+ they just work.

Over this year, there have been many articles benchmarking XP, Vista and the pre-release versions of 7 on how they handled games, productivity suites and general OS operations and most of them find Vista (SP2) at or above XP with 7 being a little bit better. Don't let your RTM impressions cloud the OS today; I only moved to Vista with SP1 myself.

ANova: MS not porting DX10 to XP was a BS move I agree. willard, et al. aren't wrong though: it would have been a massive undertaking to have DX10 on a WDDM-less environment and an even bigger one porting WDDM as well.

At the time I did say MS ought to have made the financial/project effort and the poor adoption of DX10 has shown it was probably because it was Vista-only. MS made a bad call between a two hard choices.

That's why I'm worried MS is making the DX11-upgrade pack for Vista so obscure. I don't want to have to wait for the next-gen consoles to get some games that push the envelope.

 

[Ninjagnu]

I'll just add that vista is way way faster than XP, pre-fetching often used data/programs into memory to make them load instantly makes a huge difference.

People who use XP over vista and have a choice about it are either uninformed or stupid.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

That's why I'm worried MS is making the DX11-upgrade pack for Vista so obscure. I don't want to have to wait for the next-gen consoles to get some games that push the envelope.

Perhaps I misunderstand what you are referring to here, but Vista will receive DX11 through windows update. I wouldn't exactly consider that obscure.

And for me, RTM Vista was out of the gate similar in speed to Windows XP except for slow network transfer speeds due to the broadcom ethernet controller. Once I switched to a Marvell or Intel based ethernet controller that was remedied also (prior to SP1). But then I was lucky to not have Nforce based chipset or Geforced based video card slowing things down. Likewise not having a Creative Labs soundcard or HP printer. But as you noted, even those companies eventually got out solid Vista drivers and even those complaints have been non-existant for the past year.

Regards,
SB

 

[Groo The Wanderer]

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.)

Oh you n00b. Do you remember when MS put 3rd party graphics drivers in Ring 0? During the NT 3.5 to 4.0 transition. The idiots. Do you remember why? To speed up graphics on their *SERVER* OS, something they are just realizing should not have a GUI to begin with.

Putting the graphics drivers in Ring 0 was voluntary and STUPID. They did it because of moronic design decisions that their competitors were not doing, so once again, they destroyed the user's stability to win benchmarks. They sold you out, and we have been paying for that for about a decade.

Now they 'realize' their mistakes, which weren't mistakes, but design choices predicated on a wrong set of choices, money. MS did the same thing with security, they weighed the choices and realized that fixing things would cost them more than not, so they aren't even trying to secure things.

So, to summarize, that is a hole MS dug on purpose. The assenine and broken decision making process that lead to that choice is alive and well in Redmond. If you use an MS OS, you are an idiot.

-Charlie

 

[Florin]

If you use an MS OS, you are an idiot.

So what kind of cutting edge graphics technology applications are you personally interested in, and on which platform do they run?

 

[Kaotik]

On what planet NT is *SERVER* OS? Sure, there's Server versions based on from it, but it's a workstation OS by default

 

[neliz]

On what planet NT is *SERVER* OS? Sure, there's Server versions based on from it, but it's a workstation OS by default

Maybe what he was trying to say is that Whoever thought that adding the bullets for Processes or Background priorities was good enough for NT to become a server OS should be shot. Charlies main gripe has been rectified though (Win2008 Core)

This Link is gold for anyone who wants to know a bit about Windows server

"We started with five guys from DEC and one from the 'outside' (i.e. Microsoft), a guy named Steve Wood," Lucovsky said. "And we stayed a tiny group for a long time, through the summer. We thought, 'How hard could it be to build an OS?' and scheduled 18 months to build NT. But we had forgotten about some of the important stuff--user mode, networking, and so on."

It also let's you know the REAL origin of the name NT, intel's N-Ten/i860, a predecessor of the WAY more successful i960.

and

Since the completion of Windows 2000, the biggest decision the Windows team made was to split the client and server releases with the Whistler products, which became Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. "This lets us focus on the server customers, who want it rock solid, rather than right now," Thompson told us. "Desktop software has to ship in sync with [PC maker] sales cycles. There is no holiday rush with servers.

 

[Groo The Wanderer]

So what kind of cutting edge graphics technology applications are you personally interested in, and on which platform do they run?

Right now, having lots of large screens. Games really suck since the 'consolification' of the industry, and that was my major one. Having three large screens running without ghosting/stuttering/whatnot is how I like to work, and that is the major one.

Given the option, I would prefer to work under Windows, but MS Malware, anti-user EULA, and blatant data theft makes me unable to use that platform. Now I am 100% Linux other than a single XP test station.

-Charlie

 

[I.S.T.]

I won't touch a Microsoft OS with a 10 ft pole, but everyone I know who has used Vista complained about speed. For them Windows XP was way faster and offered everything they need, read: their games performed better under XP than they did when ran on Vista.

I've used Vista for a gran total of 30 minutes and it indeed felt slower. I guess these days with quad core CPUs and 8GiBs of memory it's not much of an issue anymore.

Vista's a little slow, but not excessively. On my 73 dollar at the time I bought it CPU, it was a bit too slow for my tastes, but I ran XP for years with too slow a CPU/not enough ram, so I'm used ot that. After I overclocked it, all the speed problems disappeared.

See, the thing is, low end CPUs rarely cope well with brand new OSes. I have a 933 MHZ P3 PC I stuck XP on as part of a general repair/upgrade thing, and it was slow too. Recall that the P3 was still being sold when XP came around, and was considered low end in late 2001.

XP was fast on CPUs considered low end in early 2007 due to, well, nearly six years in between XP and Vista. CPU tech had, of course, advanced quite a bit in that six year span of time. The bar for low end changed. It's really not fair to blame Vista for being slow, IMO. It forgets history.

Now, it has other problems, ones I do not like... but speed is, IMO, not one of them.

For the record, I am currently using XP.

 

[Albuquerque]

Oh you n00b. Do you remember when MS put 3rd party graphics drivers in Ring 0? During the NT 3.5 to 4.0 transition. The idiots. Do you remember why? To speed up graphics on their *SERVER* OS, something they are just realizing should not have a GUI to begin with.

Actually, if you recall (and you probably don't, because you were wrong about competition not doing it...) NT4 was going to be the point where OS2 and NT met in the middle and became "OS2 v3." Remember? And if you remember that, you'll remember that OS2 placed video drivers in Ring 0 long before NT3.5 was around... As operating systems take quite a while to design and implement, and the original design for OS2 v3 (later NT4) called for an amalgamation of the NT3.5 and OS2 operating systems, I have a feeling that inclusion of driver models into Ring 0 were a combination of decisions from MS and IBM. Likely for performance reasons, sure, but since Ring swaps from user to kernel mode take many hundreds (or thousands) of cycles to complete, and we're talking about the days of 386 and 486 hardware, I think it was less of a "benchmark" win and more of a "making the OS fundamentally responsive" win.

I'm sure your tinted glasses will have filtered out that logical thought though, Occam's Razor obviously doesn't apply to you nor your mostly-inaccurate website.

Regardless, you cried about Microsoft just putting bandaids over broken stuff rather than truly fixing it (your words) and yet they fixed this specific issue -- and here you are, nevertheless, crying foul because it breaks compatibility. I think it's time you change your complaints to something more logical.

Oh, and I absolutely love this:

but MS Malware, anti-user EULA, and blatant data theft makes me unable to use that platform

Bwuhahahahaha! Fantastic!

I tell you what, PM me your physical mailing address so that I can FedEx you an industrial-sized roll of tinfoil. That way you can make yourself a fantastic hat to keep out all the Microsoft data thieves and expouse yourself from all that MS malware!

 

[Groo The Wanderer]

The competition wasn't OS/2, that was more of a relative. Netware, and various Unixes were the competition.

As for MS's data theft, have you ever looked at what Vista sends home on a packet level?

-Charlie

 

[flynn]

As for MS's data theft, have you ever looked at what Vista sends home on a packet level?

It's not like MS hasn't questionable things before but I'm really curious about this. Could you elaborate on this topic?

Anyway, what prevents you from having an <insert fave Linux/BSD> firewall between your Windows box and the router that drops those packets?

 

[Albuquerque]

The competition wasn't OS/2, that was more of a relative. Netware, and various Unixes were the competition.

As for MS's data theft, have you ever looked at what Vista sends home on a packet level?

-Charlie

So I see you had no actual retort for the ring level zero nonsense you're riling against. Well done.

And yes, I've taken a packet sniffer to several thousand Vista machines. They don't "send home" anything like what you're describing. And unless you have some rational and factual data to back up your claim (which you will post here for peer review), then I think you're deluded at best -- or being purposefully antagonistic, or just entirely stupid.

 

[flynn]

And yes, I've taken a packet sniffer to several thousand Vista machines. They don't "send home" anything like what you're describing.

He didn't really mention what was being sent home, right? For all we know MS could be grabbing your SS and CC numbers and using them to cover for RROD'd xbox360 losses. Or maybe it was just plain BS.

And unless you have some rational and factual data to back up your claim (which you will post here for peer review), then I think you're deluded at best -- or being purposefully antagonistic, or just entirely stupid.

I think after saying "If you use an MS OS, you are an idiot." you cannot really expect a fact-backed dialog anymore. Still, it makes for a nice quote to put in your sig :smile:

 

[Albuquerque]

He didn't really mention what was being sent home, right? For all we know MS could be grabbing your SS and CC numbers and using them to cover for RROD'd xbox360 losses. Or maybe it was just plain BS.

I am making the assumption that he is parroting some of the very early Vista hate BS (that has since been widely debunked) about Microsoft "tattling" on your DRM'ed media that you've ripped to your local drive. This was intertwined with all the other (similarly debunked) crap about DRM being continuously scanned like 500 times per second, which turned out to be absolutely nothing of the sort.

Unless of course you're one of those tinfoil advocates who only want to believe whatever your current zealotry / religion is preaching that day. Or perhaps, shame on me for assuming that's what he meant I'll be surprised if it's anything else though...

I think after saying "If you use an MS OS, you are an idiot." you cannot really expect a fact-backed dialog anymore. Still, it makes for a nice quote to put in your sig :smile: