- Site menu:
- Latest Discussions
- Latest Newswire
- Archives
- Submit Story
- Story HOWTO
- Syndicate
- E-mail Alerts
Microsoft's plans for XP
The recent news about the stealth Windows updates (as summarized by The Register) got me to thinking about the last time Microsoft was performing undisclosed updates. In early 2006, Microsoft pushed out updates for Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) without giving people a change to deny them. Some people found that these updates included a "kill-switch" for disabling computers that did not pass the WGA test, whether because the OS was truly pirated or because the test was faulty. At the time I remember thinking that if someone had AutoUpdates turned off it would be impossible for Microsoft to get this kill switch onto the computer. Microsoft was obviously thinking the same thing. Last fall they rolled out SP2, which has slowly made its way onto most XP installs. Now we find out that release had an advantage for Microsoft built in. How do you get updates to a computer that has updates turned off? Pick a program that "needs" updated whether people want it or not, and give it the ability to bypass the Windows Update settings. What better program to have this capability than the updater itself? With Microsoft's history of backward compatibility, it is no surprise that updates to their update system will break compatibility with older update tools. Thus we now have updates with no need to ask permission. It is no great leap of logic to decide that WGA is part of the update system. The whole idea is to block updates for pirated installs. Because of this, if Microsoft decides to trigger "kill-switches" for computers that have SP2 installed, they only need to update WGA as part of a new Updater update. Now here is the insidious part of the plan. Before much longer XP will reach end-of-life, and Microsoft will want everybody to upgrade to Vista for their own good and security (or at least for the good of Microsoft's pocketbook). If past history is any indication, many people will still think XP is good enough for many years to come, and will not be persuaded to upgrade as long as it works (or until they need to reinstall and they can't activate XP any more). So what can Microsoft do ensure that people make the move? The handy Updater will get updated one last time, this time with a "kill switch" or a crippler for XP. Suddenly people will find that their perfectly good computer is worthless, and their only options are: buy a new computer with Vista (because their computer is probably to old to run Vista), buy a Mac, or upgrade to Linux. Oops! Did Microsoft think about that last part? I don't know. I don't even know that they have any of this in mind, but I do know from watching Microsoft for many years now that I trust them almost as far as I trust a Democrat politician (that's for all of you who have to throw a jab at George W. Bush in an otherwise-unrelated technical article). Any way, if such a thing happens, I hope we are ready to help people out of their Microsoft misery into the wonderful world of Linux we already enjoy. |
|
|
Comments (15)
SOP
Microsoft stole the browser market away from Netscape in an underhanded way, and when the Netscape "threat" was gone, sat back while Mozilla stole it from them. IE is now a Windows-only product, and Firefox continues to nip away at the IE base.
I don't know quite how MS Word was able to eliminate WordPerfect as a competitor and completely take over the word-processing space. I think it had something to do with Word being available for Mac and for Windows when WP was still heavily entrenched in the MS-DOS world. Same with Excel vs. Lotus 1-2-3, I imagine.
But when it comes to the OS itself, I still believe Microsoft is vulnerable. There have already been reports on how MS is way, way ahead in the overall numbers, but when it comes to the high end, Mac has a large and growing share of the desktops.
Back to applications. Once you use Firefox in Windows, it's not that big of a leap to use it in Mac or Linux.
If more people knew about OpenOffice, that it reads and writes MS Office-compatible files; that the GIMP is ready for production-level work (I use it every day, all day), that Evolution and Thunderbird can handle e-mail better than Outlook, and most of all, the threat of viruses, malware and other non-niceties is reduced to almost nothing -- and best of all, the whole damn thing is free -- how can they stay with Windows?
If Linux gets 2 percent of the desktop market, it'll still be huge. 5 percent -- that would be quite a bit of momentum.
Have you ever tried to explain FOSS to anybody out there who's never heard of it? They have trouble even wrapping their head around the concept -- that they don't have to either a) steal or b) pay through the nose to keep their computer up to date?
GNU/Linux needs more marketing, smoother installs, better hardware detection, completely graphical configuration management, the ability to play every kind of multimedia ... and did I say marketing? Yes, I did.
First one to do all this wins.
For years most games have supported pretty much anything 98 or later, but within the last few years that has started to change. For example, when Dungeon Siege 2 was released in the last couple years, it required XP. Why? Who knows. We certainly didn't see any reason for it. MS influence? Most likely (I know MS published the first one, but don't remember if they published the second as well.)
The most recent I've heard of from my gamer friends is that Valve has recently updated Steam and now it no longer supports anything before Win2k. I mentioned the possibility of them updating it to require XP or later next, then Vista only, and my Windows using friend is fairly certain that's the idea..after all they apparently announced the dropping on pre-2k support right after Vista was released.
Those are only the ones I actually know of, I wouldn't be surprised if there are many other examples.
Frankly, it makes perfect sense to me. We all know that gaming tends to push the hardware market, so why not the OS market as well? If someone is going to spend $600 on the latest video card, why not make them spend another $400 for Vista so they can play SuperFPSRPGMMO 5.0?
Coincidence? Conspiracy? You decide. :)
The "why" becomes pretty clear once you actually try to make something work with various versions of Windows.
LyX nowadays also doesn't (really) support W95/98 anymore. Reason: these are completely different OSs. Supporting them would mean effectively duplicating large areas of code (especially in installers/configurators and anything using system services, like the display side) using reams of #ifdef.
Nobody could be bothered to do this for LyX (or had even a running system for doing it on -- yes I know, virtualization --), so out it went.
By comparison, "multi-distribution hell" is paradise -- even including Solaris and other archaeo-linuxes ;-)
Yes, that's a bit weird.
I also don't know Windows well enough to say what the saving is due to dropping w2k, or conversely, the added cost of supporting it.
Perhaps it is the perception that people not having (or affording) the money to upgrade their hardware and OS to the latest, won't spend a lot on games either. And some folks are spending a lot on gaming.
Imagine some hardcore gamer with a leet rig upgrades from 2k/XP to Vista so he can play the latest games. He suddenly realizes: 1. His computer's performance has suddenly dropped and the base resource usage has suddenly risen significantly due to the overhead of Vista. 2. A bunch of his old games won't run anymore.
Somehow I doubt he would have many nice things to say about MS right then....
And DirectX...yeah...almost makes you wonder if MS specifically made DirectX easy to work with (so I've heard) so companies won't use OpenGL...or offers them some sort of "incentive" to use DirectX....
a) include not only graphics in DirectX but also sound, input, etcetera. That's smart and I have no beef about that.
b) They stopped supporting OpenGL. The Windows OpenGL library is frozen at version 1.2 which is really, really old. If you want to use any of the new post OGL 1.2 functionality then you have to do a whole lot of programing magic with function pointers and other crap, requesting all kinds of things directly from the video driver.
You see, OpenGL should work like this:
application -> Windows OpenGL DLL -> video driver -> hardware
You need to bypass the Windows DLL and talk directly to the driver. Nasty.
Thanks for clearing that up. :)
How to detect internal modems by Linux ?
As Sander said, for ADSL, a standard DSL modem that uses ethernet is the way to go. For dialup modems, a proper serial modem if possible, if not, you've got some research to do to find an internal one that will work in linux.
http://www.linmodems.org/
They seem to be the best source for help in finding drivers, et.al.
Added: Much of the information appears to be old and may be out of date, but the directions for determining your chipset and modem family are still what you need to get started.
Post a comment
A free account is needed to post. Write your comment here first: your text is kept in this browser while you sign up or log in, and is waiting for you when you come back.
Your message:Sign up and post (it is free) or Log in and post
And the world all switched to Linux back when we were forced to go to XP? No. And it won't happen this time either.
HOWEVER... some WILL move... and that's significant. Just like they did when Win98 died. But are we talking about taking away more than 10% of Microsoft's desktop market share this time? No. But, maybe as high as 20-30% will look at alternatives and out of that, perhaps as many as 2-5% will opt for Linux.
Overall.. Microsoft is still sitting pretty. It's still the ONLY OS required on all new hardware purchases (Ok... there are some exceptions, but nothing that would show up statistically).
My current company develops enterprise level software on mainframes and "open" OS's (includes *ix, Linux and Microsoft... the quotes are intentional). We develop and support software on i-Series, Tandem and VMS as well. But you know, our infrastructure, instead of moving forward to a platform independent design is actually becoming more and more entrenched with Microsoft-ONLY solutions. Which is sad.