(I'm not sure what Emily Post would say about dribbling the blood from a beaten, (dying?) topic across multiple threads and fora, but I figured best to get OT out of General and put it in the nice, new OT Forum where it can be more systematically ignored by those so inclined! So....)

Yes, this, The MOTHER of All Windows XP Threads, would like to categorically say that it's predecessor, the so-called ONE, TRUE Off-Topic XP Thread! is a poseur, a weakling, a twisted sorry thread barely worthy of your consideration (Um, you may have already concluded as much...) Why, it's not even in the right place!

Anyhow, I just wanted to respond to a few posts in predecessor threads. (I'll e-mail 'em a note in the event they care...) If folks have other observations related to their experience with XP, I guess this would also make an OT place to put them.

Over here BarryB wrote (among other things):

Recently at my company, the site manager has started using the phrase "technology bullshit" to describe many IT projects. At first I and many others thought he "just didn't get it" and must be a moron. Now I'm coming to realize he's right to a large extent. In IT we often spend large sums of money upgrading and changing systems and technologies. The cost to the company to make these changes is often not trival, yet it's nearly impossible to accuratly assess the payout after we do the project.

This is in complete contrast to other projects in the company. Other, non-IT, projects absolutely have to justify a payout with-in a fairly short timespan or the project doesn't happen. Why should IT be any different?

One project that often doesn't need to happen is upgrading Windows and Office every year or two. In many cases we are happy with how these work and see no need to change anything. (..........)

I want to agree with your post in general, but I want to say that I really think I'd like your site manager! I think a lot of companies have gotten swept away with the some technologies (IT being the biggest example) without accurately counting the costs or measuring the business outcomes. This seems to have gotten briefly worse during the recent techno-bubble, and it looks like now we get to deal with that champagne hangover.


Yet, I saw Bill Gates on Charle Rose two nights ago claiming that Windows XP will introduce new improvements in productivity which will in turn help revive the economy! Is he really that arogant, or does he just think we're all idiots? It was really hard to tell.

I saw some of that and the "most important product ..." stuff, too. I don't really have a way to tell, but it does not seem inconceivable that the answer to your question could be "both".

Over here Tim wrote:

Personally, I feel that XP is hella better than 2k. I know a few people who have had problems with XP, but I've had very few.

Everyone I know who is running it or has run it tells me they think it is a functional improvement, although some of them haven't run it for that long.

I was really struck by this part of a previously-cited InfoWorld article: "HOPELESS OPTIMISM must be a fundamental part of human nature, because we want to believe that new operating systems truly represent an improvement on their predecessors." This really resonates with me. In the cases of NT3.51, NT4, and Windows 2000, I was really happy to be installing a product that eased some prior pain and which I believed were substantial improvements. And they really were improvements, especially 2000, but in each case the absolute benefit of the upgrade was shown to be less than I originally thought as installations started to degrade and serious care and feeding became an issue (and we're talking on HCL-compliant hardware with mainstream apps). Indeed, the Infoworld benchmarks show 2000 outperforming XP in their scenarios; that kind of report just adds to any caution I have.

The boot-up time is amazing. It was like 5 mins with Win2k, but like 36secs with XP. I really like that. The interface is snappier. I don't have to wait for the menus or anything to pop up any more.

For folks who had to run NT on a laptop, boot time (coupled with no real power management), was one of the killers. Win2K made that a lot better, but this sounds amazingly better. I'm assuming these two times are on the same machine. What kind of specs? For grins I timed the bootup on this 500MHz Dell laptop. I got 1:50 from power-on to Win2K logon prompt, and 2:20 total to the point that I could could actually get the Start menu to respond. That included a couple of boot manager menus and my login, but doubt they added more than 8-10 seconds. Where were you at 36 seconds? Logon prompt, or - gasp - desktop?? Relatively few apps have insinuated themselves into this laptop's startup folder and registry, so it's probably a near-best case for this hardware.

OfficeXP works very nicely with it.

It had better!!

Explorer.exe seems to have a memory leak or something.

The more things change...

What I love is people who make claims and rant without any personal experience with a product, just what some writer has to say.

Hmmm. Having not yet worked with XP, and having quoted a writer, it looks like I fall into this category and that, and that....you LOVE me???

As far as I can tell, most journalists (of the big media companies) have no clue about what they write. They are looking for a way to sell articles, page hits, subscriptions. A way of doing this is to bash things that are popular to bash.

I would agree that there can be a sensationalist, attentionseeking tendency in various media and that contributors improve their chances of continued employment if they help sell magazines, newspaper, et cetera. Sometimes this may be manifested in "bashing", but conversely can be manifested in some of the popular computing press by near-hucksterism -- "Upgrade to Windows 95 and meet the woman of your dreams!!" Thankfully they occasionally publish our letters to the editor debunking them when they stray, but perhaps not often enough. Retractions and corrections go on page 143.

I do not agree with the generalization that most of them don't know what they are talking about. A decent number of them, while very fallible, are pretty smart and, unlike we mere mortals, they often get paid to spend more serious amounts of time getting familiar with products. There are several I value for their aptitude and an ability to (succintly!) put things into words much better than I ever could.

I don't work for Microsoft, and pretty much hate most of their stuff (yeah, WinME was miserable, etc, etc). However, I do like XP and the improvement it is over their past OSes. Just don't bash something you haven't used personally.

I can believe that if I was running XP on this laptop right now, I might easily like it more than this Win2K install (that is starting to show its age) or even more than a brand-new Win2K install. I don't run multimedia stuff on this laptop, nor do I hook up digital cameras to it (or some other new things that XP does) so the immediate benefits might be fewer and less evident. As it is, I don't think anybody's going to pay money to upgrade this laptop to XP as there's no business case. At home, on my desktop/game/multimedia machine, the decision criteria are different, but, on balance, for some reasons that I may have beaten to death, I've decided that I'm not going to upgrade. Where several other folks have also said they couldn't give a hoot about issues like spam (and the seemingly related XP licensing clauses), that single issue, combined with my accumulated experience of MSFT, could be enough of a showstopper all by itself!

In making that kind of decision, I'm not sure if I falling into the category of "bashing something I haven't used personally". If I'm bashing or being unfairly critical, I guess I should get told off or something. As far as an absolute requirement for using something personally, I don't agree. I have had occasion to make use of Demerol and morphine (and they were both great!), but have decided never to use heroin. I have had a sewing machine fall on my head (I am not kidding) and have been run over by a speeding bicycle, but have decided that I never want to try "A Poke In The Eye With A Sharp Stick" (TM). Don't these decisions sound reasonable? And, please, I'm not comparing XP to a sharp stick or illegal narcotics, but I hope instead that I'm just making a decent point.

Again, I'll be interested to see how the latest Windows saga unfolds, so if anybody has any new tidbits, test results, personal; experiences, corrections, whatever....well, we got this new Off-Topic Forum thing here...

Those boot times are from the same machine - a celery 566 overclocked to 707 with 256M. The 36 sec boot time is after the BIOS post and the OS starts loading. It ends at the functional desktop. In this time, it loads an IRC session, ZoneAlarm Pro, McAfee VirusScan, a FTP Server, Apache and I'm sure I'm missing a few things. The Win2k boot didn't include the IRC session, the ftpd or anything else except the firewall.

Of course, Slackware boots and gets me into WindowMaker in like 25-30secs, including the time to manually log in and start X.

As for benchmarks, when Win2k first came out, there were benchmarks that showed that NT4 was actually faster than Win2k when both had memory over 256M (or maybe it was 128M). Not many people seemed to notice, or care. I don't put a lot of stock in benchmarks, whether on accident or with malicious intent, benchmarks can be made to show whatever you want.

Tim notes: Those boot times are from the same machine - a celery 566 overclocked to 707 with 256M. The 36 sec boot time is after the BIOS post and the OS starts loading. It ends at the functional desktop. In this time, it loads an IRC session, ZoneAlarm Pro, McAfee VirusScan, a FTP Server, Apache and I'm sure I'm missing a few things.

Yikes, that's fast. I *am* jealous. Even adjusting for slower machine (with 128 RAM) and ~15 seconds of POST, this Win2K isn't even close. Not there to check, but I don't think my Win2K home PC (866 P3/512 RAM) is much faster on boot than this laptop. Boot times seemed like less of an issue with Win2K power management and suspend capabilities, but that's one of the things that isn't working as well as it did at first.

(.....) As for benchmarks, when Win2k first came out, there were benchmarks that showed that NT4 was actually faster than Win2k when both had memory over 256M (or maybe it was 128M). Not many people seemed to notice, or care. I don't put a lot of stock in benchmarks, whether on accident or with malicious intent, benchmarks can be made to show whatever you want.

Like any research study, I think these come down to whether you are measuring the right things, whether the methodology is made clear, and whether the methodology is legitimate for what you're trying to measure. Absolutely agree that interested parties can structure these to show what they want -- witness the endless go-round of "fastest" RDBMSes --, but I also believe that it is possible to perform benchmarks that are useful. Infoworld and their ilk aren't exactly peer-reviewed, though, and the methods aren't always spelled out as well as they should be. Even if I do have the time to critically read the whole thing, I'll tend to take each one of these as a single data point on a scatter plot. That Infoworld *seemed* pretty reasonable, but it was focused on a small set of multitasking benchmarks. I'll keep reading.

I *have* spent a bigger chunk of my life than I would prefer responding to execs who throw a benchmark in my inbox and, without having read it (Understandable. It's not their bailiwick.), demand that I debunk the headline that usually says something like "The Product We Are Using (The one Jim recommended!) Sucks!"

There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damn Lies, and Benchmarks.

tfabris: There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damn Lies, and Benchmarks.

Why, 96.3 percent of computer users think benchmarks are "4. Somewhat Helpful"!

Lie #4 : Polls

The original quote was "statistics", which is the same as polls.

Was that Mark Twain?

"Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them to myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: 'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics'." - Autobiography of Mark Twain

Well, I have to ask if the infrequent Halloween/full moon convergence is having an affect on y'all! I usually think I'm way, way up there on the curmudgeon/cynic scale for this BBS, but Tony and greggerm are making me want to pull on a nice flower-print dress and a blonde wig with pigtails and break out in song!

In case anyone thought I was serious (how often has *that* happened?), my reference to 96.3 percent of computer users was a perversion of a favorite Doonesbury (roughly):

Reporter Hedley: "President Reagan, some citizens have questioned your use of statistics..."
Reagan: "Well, that's not true. 99 percent of Americans think my statistics are fine!"

Tony, you'll be pleased to know that Infoworld stole your line in that article: "In Search of a Better Benchmark: We've said for years that there are lies, damned lies, and benchmarks. Popular benchmarks (....)but are designed around linear scripts..." Their professed cynicism does not make their testing valid. I did take a look again at their methods and it did not seem obviously tilted. *However*, they use a "better, more realistic", vendor-provided test suite that is essentially a black box, so I suppose first you have to decide whether they are measuring things that matter (looks like it to me) and then whether the testing tool is valid (No idea. Could it be biased to one OS or the other with calls that it's making to MAPI, DB, etc?)

In defense of statistics -- one of my concentrations in a grad degree and something I dealt with during my time as an epidemiologist -- I would say that it is entirely possible to conduct valid and meaningful surveys, benchmarks, and studies. Does this mean that people don't intentionally or inadverdently bias the methodology, pick the wrong methodology, overextend the methodology, design it poorly, and/or misinterpret their results or the results of others? Does it mean that there aren't complex phenomena that are very challenging to study well (from a statistical standpoint?) No. On top of all the methodological issues are certainly all the issues of motive. Why did X do this study? Who paid them? What were their biases and interests going in? Of the two ways to analyze this data, why did they pick the second? What did they omit? These things aren't the fault of poor, harrassed Statistics.

On a very crude level, I think Tim and I just conducted a benchmark. It has limited validity, but that doesn't make it entirely invalid. It's a data point. For better or worse, many of the opinion polls that are conducted follow well-tested random sampling methodologies that account for their own weaknesses (i.e.- increase samples to adjust for non-response rates), then you just get to deal with the issues of leading/slanted questions, etc. You just have to keep those "non-scientific poll" and "sponsored by" filters working all the time.

Pollyanna Jim

Well, since we're on the subject of polling, here is an in depth, meaningful, relevant, topical poll whose results are sure to impact future world peace.



-Z

Yes, it was Mark Twain ( Samual Clements) who said the lies thing.

There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damn Lies, and Benchmarks.

I've said this very thing a few times on www.linuxnewbie.org...

Why is CowboyNeal not listed?

/Pepijn

For those interested, there's a book first published in 1954 "How to Lie with Statistics" by Darrell Huff (reprint 1993) that is a first class little book. Highly entertaining & illuminating. It's available at Amazon & I'm sure other places. Well worth the $9 price.

-Zeke

Ezekiel: For those interested, there's a book first published in 1954 "How to Lie with Statistics" by Darrell Huff (reprint 1993) that is a first class little book. Highly entertaining & illuminating. It's available at Amazon & I'm sure other places. Well worth the $9 price.

I think I still have a copy of this if anyone wants to borrow it; it was required reading in one of my early biostatistics classes, IIRC. There are indeed lots of things to look out for in the use of statistics, as indeed there are lots of things to look out for in the use of the English (and all other) languages. However, while lots of folks seem eager to beat up on poor Mister Statistics, fewer seem keen on attacking the use of various languages....

...OK, maybe that's not entirely true. A fair amount of attention is paid to the use of language in the construction of logical fallacies. I'm just continuing to feel the need to stick up for statistics. They're really pretty cool.

BTW, if you look at something like that Infoworld article on XP, what is included are figures that barely qualify as statistics. Those figures -- averages/means and such that anyone could measure and calculate with a spreadsheet -- are what is called descriptive statistics. They are less fertile ground for the kind of manipulation that Huff suggests. Essentially, if you can look at all the cells in the spreadsheet, you can do the math yourself. As things get more complicated, and as more complex methods are employed, the opportunity to twist statistics increases.

[edit....]

In my vigorous defense of "proper" statistics, it occurred to me that it might appear that I was dissing Huff's book. That is not the case. I don't remember it that well, but any decent book that points out how statistics (actually more often things like sampling and terminology) can be misused is probably a useful tool for folks looking to critically evaluate the "93.6 percent of respondents think USA Today is swell" types of stat-bytes presented by media outlets, companies, government, and other parties.

I only jest. One good course in experimental design and statistical analysis was enough for statistics to earn my respect. The problem for most folks is that the detailed analysis that go into great statistics gets complicated pretty quickly and the average person can't/doesn't have time to investigate all the claims that are made under the banner of statistical fact, even if they had the background to do so.

My dad had that book on the bookshelf for years, and I borrowed it 10 years ago and have kept it since. Definitely on my desert island short list.

-Zeke

My favorite Simpsons quote:

Kent Brockman: "Homer, how do you explain the fact that violent crime is down 32%, while brutal "sack-beatings" are up a shocking 900%?"
Homer: "Oh, Kent. People can prove anything with statistics. 14% of all people know that."