Internal Emails Released In Vista Capable Debacle 314
An anonymous reader writes "As previously discussed, Microsoft's attempt to shield itself from further discovery over the Windows Vista Capable debacle has failed and more internal emails have been released. Although Microsoft has successfully kept CEO Steve Ballmer away from the witness stand on grounds the he 'has no unique knowledge of the facts in this case,' emails suggest otherwise. An email was released in which Intel CEO Paul Otellini thanks Ballmer for listening and making changes to the program allowing their 915 chipset to pass the grade: 'I know you did it.'"
Here's the link (Score:5, Informative)
Link to the email conversation in question: http://media.techflash.com/documents/intelvictory.pdf [techflash.com] (pdf)
Re:Link goes to a Google News Search (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, and? (Score:3, Informative)
It's common knowledge by now even amongst the general public that Vista exploded on the launch pad. At this point, the only thing this line of inquiry has to offer is to help Microsoft prevent a repeat of the last performance. If you ask me, Windows 7 will suffer many of the same problems -- namely because they are still using the monkey-horde development technique, which is get a bunch of third-world programmers in a room and churn out very lackluster code, and then keep redeveloping it until it works "good enough". Microsoft still hasn't learned that great programmers have a lot of experience outside programming, and to make the best code you need to give them the freedom to try different solutions and then listen to their feedback. From what I've seen, Microsoft is a hugely divided organization where hundreds of small teams compete to produce the most lines of code and nobody knows quite what everybody else is doing. Management constantly changes direction during the development process, to the point that a lot of work is wasted in duplication of effort and things being thrown away due to changing priorities.
Windows has reached a level of complexity that these kinds of organizational mistakes can no longer be tolerated, but Microsoft is too large and entrenched to be capable of streamlining their development process. Maybe they get rid of UAC, and the DRM, and rewrite the driver infrastructure so it sucks less; And those are all fine goals to have, but it doesn't fix the real problem -- which is that the organization made these decisions in the first place when I know their developers were screaming at them "For the love of all things good and holy in the world don't do it!"
Microsoft isn't the first to deal with this. One Mr. Richard Feynman noted similar organizational problems that led to the Challenger disaster at NASA. NASA has been trying to squelch this addendum for some time and you won't find a link to it on their main report anymore, but you can find it here http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/rogers-commission/Appendix-F.txt [nasa.gov]
Re:The 915 is Vista Capable? (Score:4, Informative)
Did he try 8.10? I was having wireless issues and then I upgraded to 8.10 and they all went away and it works perfectly now.
Re:Windows 7ven? (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, I think you'll find that it'll soon be known as Windows Se7en, for reasons which will soon become apparent.
Re:Is anyone really surprised by this???? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, Winmodems and other controller-less hardware represented something much more sinister than that. They largely tied you to one platform; Windows. It took a significant amount of work and sometimes bending the "rules" to get a lot of this hardware to work under open source operating systems.
Re:Advertisers. (Score:1, Informative)
You must be new here.
inTheLoo is one of about a dozen accounts with terrible karma belonging to William Hill, a.k.a. twitter. He's often modded down because most of what he says is rabid M$ bashing combined with maniacal paranoia and people are annoyed over the fact that he tries to game the system using a bunch of accounts and dominates threads by talking to himself. His other posts are karma-whore attempts to try to keep his accounts from posting at -1 (the above is a fine example - It had not been modded down, the account just posts at -1).
For more info, if you're for some reason curious, see here: http://slashdot.org/~willyhill/journal/204399 [slashdot.org]
Re:Where is Intel in all of this? (Score:5, Informative)
Aqua works great on Intel graphics too. The problem really does seem to be Vista.
Re:Yeah, and? (Score:3, Informative)
H1B is not just 3rd world - 1st world programmers have to come in via H1B visas as well.
I think what you want to say is lousy sucky programmers put out lousy sucky code, and that's not something that only H1Bs do. Plenty of lousy sucky American born programmers as well.
Re:The 915 is Vista Capable? (Score:3, Informative)
The reason why Ubuntu 8.10 has better wireless capabilities is because in the newer Linux kernel, it has more wireless support. This is in the kernel itself now, not external drivers.
http://linux-wless.passys.nl/ [passys.nl]
This page is helpful for searching for support.
Re:WTF? (Score:3, Informative)
Since when does class action == anti-trust?
There is no anti-trust (not yet anyway and I have no crystal ball for the future and my magic 8 ball keeps on giving me a blank side) Open-GL != direct 3d or direct X. For some reason microsoft went with direct X (they made it that maybe why) instead of open-gl for the 3d parts of the desktop. If open-gl would work under vista which it doesn't that I have seen. I tried it with a open-gl screen saver. The fireworks one looks like stop animation on vista with a 256MB gaming (gforce 7800GTX) video card. With xp or linux it flies. Simple test but it shows how screwed up vista is with open-gl. from what I have seen, the 3d stuff on linux is open-gl. Which is fine, it works and looks good. The newer gaming titles do not use open-gl which is why a lot of gamers bitch that linux is not good for gaming. Can open-gl do all of the shading and 3d stuff that direct X can? I would hope so, I have not seen it to know.
The intel graphics in question (915 chip set) are not a high quality 3d gaming chip set. Intel wanted vista certification. I never saw that chip set being certificated for running 3d games. Running a web browser, spreadsheet app? sure. Running the latest 3d shooter? no.