“A lot of controversy has sprung up lately about when Vista is likely to ship. The most recent dates given by Microsoft are November this year for the business version and January 2007 for the home version. The brouhaha centers around management’s recent equivocal statements regarding these dates. At the late-July annual Financial Analysts Meeting in Redmond, the Kevin Johnson, the President of the Platforms and Services Division, said, ‘We’ll ship when it’s ready.’ This sort of statement is not at all reassuring. In fact, you could almost make a rule: if a top manager of a Fortune 50 company says he’s “almost sure” of something, that means it’s not going to happen,” Roger Kay writes for Technology Pundits.
“So, from the eagle’s eye view, I’d say the company is going to miss the dates. But let’s take a look from the snail’s eye view,” Kay writes.
Kay writes, “I’ve been testing Vista betas as they’ve come out. I’ve got the most recent, Build 5472, right here at my desk, firing away on an adjacent system. It’s running a slide show and playing music at the same time and doing a fine job. True, a couple of functions crashed when I first ran them (the slide show, the clock settings), but I’m used to these sort of mild interruptions and went right ahead (after checking the status of the Task Manager by hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del) and rebooted them with no great harm. Laugh if you will, Macheads, this system is almost ready for prime time.” Then Vista went all to hell on Kay prompting him to write, “Never in history has a Microsoft operating system been this buggy this late in the game.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We’re not laughing that Windows crashes, we’re incredulous that you’re so “used to these sort of mild interruptions” that we expect to be extremely rare and don’t consider to be “mild.” Why forgive and apologize for Microsoft? You paid them money and they sold you something most of us consider to be crap; something that over the years has beaten you down into accepting substandard quality. Mac users have much higher expectations than Windows sufferers.
Related article:
PC World writer’s advice for Microsoft: ‘Stop making crap’ – July 27, 2006
Kay says “Aero sure is cool. One last step. Restart the slide show. ”
So cool… err um…? that Aero copies Mouse over UI? Bet he never said that about OS X, if he even bothered to look.
One last step. Enough allready! Restart in OS X
That “7up” kid has been hanging around here for a couple of weeks now doing his best (as pitiful as that may be) to write like an adult and formulate some kind of cogent opinion. He fails miserably each and every time, as revealed in his 7th or 8th grade understanding of English grammar, mechanics, and usage.
7up Kid: XP is a pathetic excuse for an operating system, and you know it. But, being an inexperienced, immature, emotionally-driven youth, you’re going to stick by it and its 114,000 known security flaws and, thereby, become a REAL MAN. Right? There’s just nothing like broken bones and deeo scars to validate one’s transition into adulthood, is there?
My recommendation: Do your best to find something WORTH defending. You’ll be much better for it, and you won’t have to be embarrassed, humiliated, and defeated all the time by your superiors.
“Microsoft Windows Vista likely to slip again”
NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
I’ll just say this: the people who believe, yes, BELIEVE that Windows will be great are trying to stuff fanatical love of an OS into their God-shaped hole. Why would anyone go that far to defend something that unimportant, by comparison? Get your priorities straight, people. And if you have time leftover to talk about OSes, then find one that’s worth defending, please. Oh wait, I’ve lost your attention. You’re busy rebooting Windows because your clock crashed. *rolling my eyes*
unless you dont know what your doing win xp rocks hard and does NOT crash.
Well, that’s not true and – even if it was – Windows would still have to carry around the baggage of stories like this.
21 September 2004
Microsoft server crash nearly causes 800-plane pile-up
By Matthew Broersma, Techworld
A major breakdown in Southern California’s air traffic control system last week was partly due to a “design anomaly” in the way Microsoft Windows servers were integrated into the system, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times.
The radio system shutdown, which lasted more than three hours, left 800 planes in the air without contact to air traffic control, and led to at least five cases where planes came too close to one another, according to comments by the Federal Aviation Administration reported in the LA Times and The New York Times. Air traffic controllers were reduced to using personal mobile phones to pass on warnings to controllers at other facilities, and watched close calls without being able to alert pilots, according to the LA Times report.
The failure was ultimately down to a combination of human error and a design glitch in the Windows servers brought in over the past three years to replace the radio system’s original Unix servers, according to the FAA.
The servers are timed to shut down after 49.7 days of use in order to prevent a data overload, a union official told the LA Times. To avoid this automatic shutdown, technicians are required to restart the system manually every 30 days. An improperly trained employee failed to reset the system, leading it to shut down without warning, the official said. Backup systems failed because of a software failure, according to a report in The New York Times.
The contract for designing the system, called Voice Switching and Control System (VSCS), was awarded to Harris Corporation in 1992 and the system was installed in the late 1990s, initially using Unix servers, according to Harris. In 2001, the company completed testing of the VSCS Control Subsystem Upgrade (VCSU), which replaced the original servers with off-the-shelf Dell hardware running Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server. The upgrade was installed in California last year, according to the FAA.
Soon after installation, however, the FAA discovered that the system design could lead to a radio system shutdown, and put the maintenance procedure into place as a workaround, the LA Times said. The FAA reportedly said it has been working on a permanent fix but has only eliminated the problem in Seattle. The FAA is now planning to institute a second workaround – an alert that will warn controllers well before the software shuts down.
The shutdown is intended to keep the system from becoming overloaded with data and potentially giving controllers wrong information about flights, according to a software analyst cited by the LA Times.
Microsoft told Techworld it was aware of the reports but was not immediately able to comment.
Confidence inspiring, I think you’ll agree – Windows 2000 ships in 2000 and in 2004, despite all the service packs and hotfixes, it still needs to be restarted every 30 days because of what appears to be some sort of memory leak.
neither does vista once they FINISH it.
Define FINISHED. I would have thought Vista was finished when all of the originally-promised functionality (like WinFS) is implemented. Or how about implemented and bug-free. Or maybe implemented, bug-free and secure. Maybe I’ll stop now.
til then lay off its called beta.
So we’re agreed, Vista is a beta until around 2010 – works for me.
really are macs so 200% perfect 200% of the time?
No, but then I don’t live in a bizarre Einsteinian paradox, however – judging by the next sentence – I’m not on psychotropic drugs either.
of course not any computer crashes sometimes.
For the benefit of humans on Planet Earth, let me translate…
Of course not! All computers crash sometimes
Makes more sense! It’s true. All computers crash sometimes. One of my clients runs an HP ProLiant running Windows SBS 2003. At the moment, I have to stop ‘Services For Macintosh’ every Thursday night and restart it early on Friday morning, because – if I don’t – some sort of conflict between the weekly full backup (Backup Exec) and SFM causes the server to blue-screen. I’m going to have to replace SFM with ExtremeZ*IP to get rid of the bugs.
I’m also having to write a proposal for a mail archiving system because Exchange is putting the system under stress according to the logs which have been generated by two other recent BSODs.
If they can’t get a server OS to run properly, why should I believe they’ll put any care into their less critical desktop OS?
lies about vista show how scared macheads are, where is your leper now?
Sorry, did we film that abortion of a speech recognition demo? Did we broadcast it? Is it a lie that Vista is late? Is it a lie that a huge amount of the originally promised functionality has been stripped out?
Leopard is mere days away from being unveiled. And I’ll give you dollars to fried dough products that – like BootCamp – it will be more ready for primetime now than Vista will be in twelve months.
any way you look at it vistas not perfect YET but it WILL be.
Ah, but will it be 200% perfect 200% of the time, or – like most worshippers at the cult of Microsoft and their charisma-free chairman – are you going to hold Vista and Office 2007 to a lower standard than most of us would tolerate.
And when will this perfection be attained? Will it be round about the time that I wake up to find myself in bed next to Keira Knightly. Or will it be when all of the original Vista functionality is shipped as opposed to the warmed-over Imagination not included™ Windows XP SP3 that we’re likely to see to begin with. I wonder which will come first. Actually, no I don’t.
@ matt:
Probably it’s a bit late to reply, but you can do something about applications,
wich – off course not “crash” – but are unexpectedly quit..
Check this out: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25702
And get your disk permissions fixed by booting from the install DVD and
using disk utility… That should help a bit…
But when you use the article, don’t forget t change the rights of the dropbox
afterwards, just in case you share files on the lan or wlan…
and to whom it may concern:
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”wink” style=”border:0;” />
Let’s just be patient until Vista is out. It’s a bit pointless to discuss about it now.
A public beta is nice and gives a first view, but if Microsoft is clever they would
not put in all the features right now… Do they?
And ‘one more thing’
The M$ Explorer is not that bad, I have heard from people who like it…
And at the end of the day, everybody should use what she/he wants, right?
sorry: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107039
Matt, I was experiencing major crashing problems with my 20″ iMac. I took it to the genius bar twice because they did not help the first time. It was a bad power supply, which they replaced for free. 6 months later, and not a single crash.
They can afford to hire any and all of the programmers in the world.
Which is one of MS’s problems.
You can’t buy a loyal, winning team.
You can’t buy a team the gut desire -and ability- to succeed.
Can you think of anyone so passionate about Windows, someone so burning with the drive to make Windows THE best OS, that they’d volunteer in a second for a chance to work on it for free? I didn’t think so.
Like Ballmer, MS is too fat, too rich, and too clueless for their own good.
MS could never build itself with the operation it has today.
Until the cash cows go dry, absolutely nothing will change, and Vista will never ship.
Love MDN’s take!!!
We’re not laughing at Windows’ crashes. And we’re certainly not laughing at Vista’s delays.
“Incredulous” is a fitting word for people who paid (paid!) for such dreadfully inferior products, yet feel a need to show loyalty to the vendor! I mean, WHY?!?!
There’s a rule in business: when someone repeatedly can’t deliver what’s expected and promised, you need to dump them like a bad date & get with someone who can. Nobody has time for BS.
It’s about time that rule gets applied to MS.
“Laugh if you will, Macheads, . . .”
HAHAHA!
OMG! Whew! Vista’s codename wasn’t Longhorn. It was Cold Fusion.
This sort of statement is not at all reassuring. In fact, you could almost make a rule: if a top manager of a Fortune 50 company says he’s “almost sure” of something, that means it’s not going to happen,”
In short: Microsoft’s credibility is shot.
Could you imagine Bill Ford (a bozo himself) saying “We’re almost sure our 2007 vehicles will ship within the next year.”? Of course not!
“Almost” carries no merit. MS managers should be fired for not knowing the exact status of their own products (esp. big critical ones like Vista).
Then again, keep those managers at MS, and give ’em unlimited time to get Vista all polished up or whatever. Apple couldn’t ask for anything better.
Hey,
What if MS is delaying Vista to make it really perfect?
What if, when it ships, it is beautiful, intuitive and is rock stable with security shut up tighter than your maiden aunt Bertha?
What if they are delaying Vista to catch every bug & to plug every hole? Then, when it comes out, it will be large, & shiney and have lots of extra translucency!
Well it could be.
Just you wait.
Vista is just the next step in M$ slipping. As techies have seen what M$ will do to tech and in business, competition is growing, as well as the sentiment that M$ should not rule all. The transition will happen slowly at first (it’s begun), but at some point, like all changes, there will be a tipping/turning point. M$ hegemony will topple. Maybe it’ll be OS-related, hardware-related, physics-related, or political– but eventually, the paradigm will change.
And if there’s one thing M$ has demonstrated: change is really, really, really hard. In fact, change for M$ means doing everything just the same, but with a brand new coat. Bleh.
Are you ready for the latest OS? Windows 2008
Top Secret: News Just released.
MS using (BSE) Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy- in Longhorn/Vista code
It’s he underlying code that is running Vista. Sort of like BSD on the Mac but much much worse.
My prediction: Q3 2007 at the earliest for the home version. You have to add in RTM (Release To Manufacture) time. I heard a Win developer say he wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t ship until Q4! I won’t be running it, so I suppose when it ships doesn’t really matter to me. Anyway, that’s my guess.
Don’t you just love the comments from my customers. This is loyalty, this is faith. C’mon, you must admit WE have the epitome of a loyal customer.
Whatever we say about Vista, however we strip features off it, how much we are going to delay it and no matter how many demos will break and go bananas Vista is still the Shangri-La for them.
When we’ll have finished to design the box to ship Vista with we will ship it. It terms of quality we are detecting so many apologetic messages from our customers around that we feel we do not need to fix anything. The way it is today is already good enough. We are not going to miss promised shipment date. Discussing it right now.
If it sells, why bother?
Concerning business moving to Vista. What about announcing discontinued support for older versions? Worked so far.
Ahhh, life as usual at Redmond.
I may be a lone voice here, but Macs do crash. Not as often as PCs, but they crash all the same.
I run Final Cut Pro on a few different machines – Older G4 Tower, Intel iMac 20″, Dual G5 Tower, and a MacBook – it has crashed them all – sure, most times I can reach the desktop, but the Finder becomes unresponsive, Force Quit doesn’t work and even Activity Monitor refuses to quit FCPs running processes.
I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve watched the SBOD hoping for things to return to normal.
Fortunately FCP has Autosave vault, and that has saved me a few times.
I have spoken to many other industry professionals and my experiences are not unusual.
Macs crash … those disenfranchised ex-Windows programmers have to be employed somewhere, so maybe they’ve brought their sloppy coding to Macs.