How Vista Disappoints

MCSEBear writes "Writer Paul Thurrott has given Microsoft a verbal dressing down for what has become of Windows Vista. He details Microsoft's broken promises over the years since Longhorn/Vista was first previewed back in 2003. He demonstrates where current Vista builds fail to live up to Microsoft's current hype of the much reduced feature set. From the article: 'I don't hate Windows Vista, and I certainly don't hate Microsoft for disappointing me and countless other customers with a product that doesn't even come close to meeting its original promises. I'm sure the company learned something from this debacle, and hopefully it will be more open and honest about what it can and cannot do in the future ... It some ways, Windows Vista actually will exceed Mac OS X and Linux, but not to the depth we were promised. Instead, Windows Vista will do what so many other Windows releases have done, and simply offer consumers and business users a few major changes and many subtle or minor updates. That's not horrible. It's just not what was promised.'"

Comments

Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft

[yagu]

Well, in summary, the new Vista:

• Introduces the new user security model similar to Un*x, only 30 years later. But it is (so far) incredibly inane in its interaction model with the user (from the article):

  The bad news, then, is that UAP is a sad, sad joke. It's the most annoying feature that Microsoft has ever added to any software product, and yes, that includes that ridiculous Clippy character from older Office versions. The problem with UAP is that it throws up an unbelievable number of warning dialogs for even the simplest of tasks. That these dialogs pop up repeatedly for the same action would be comical if it weren't so amazingly frustrating. It would be hilarious if it weren't going to affect hundreds of millions of people in a few short months. It is, in fact, almost criminal in its insidiousness.

• they've taken the "windows" metaphor to its (in their opinion) next logical step, i.e., "glass", offering translucent and transparent windows. But (FTA):

  Anyway, the reality of glass windows is that they stink. The windows themselves are translucent, meaning you can see through them partially. But the visual difference between the topmost window (that is, the window with which you are currently interacting, or what we might describe as the window with focus) and any other windows (i.e. those windows that are visually located "under" the topmost window) is subtle at best. More to the point, you can't tell topmost windows from other windows at all. And don't pretend you can.

• they've added a "Media Center", but (summarizing the article), it stinks.

Thurrott says he still doesn't hate Microsoft for not delivering on all of these promises:

I don't hate Windows Vista, and I certainly don't hate Microsoft for disappointing me and countless other customers with a product that doesn't even come close to meeting its original promises.

The world needs friends like Mr. Thurrott. He's a pretty forgiving guy. But, it would have been nice had Microsoft really been able to deliver this as promised. I was looking forward to buying a new upgraded computer!

Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that a well known Microsoft apologist like Thurrott is even criticizing Vista (although in as kind words as possible) makes me think that it will be even worse than I had previously thought. If this is true, Microsoft is in deep deep trouble.

Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft

[IAmTheDave]

It's funny how one of Microsoft's biggest champions (and, despite that, a man I highly regard) really liked OSX and is honest enough to come down on MS when necessary.

This article and its points (good ones) make me respect Paul even more. Not to mention TFA has some really well thought out points. MS is blowing it, hard.

Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft

[Tibor the Hun]

Would you say he's griping about Vista or gloating?
You can't tell by the score 5/5.

Now imagine you get your college paper back with as much complaints and still get an A.
(Doesn't quite work like that, does it?)

No offense, but you've no reason to respect him even more.

That being said, the list of gripes is accurate and honest.
However considering how much money corporations and worse yet, individuals, have to spend each year fixing Microsoft's mistakes (viruses, security) I don't have the luxury of forgiveness that Paul does.

Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft

[ConceptJunkie]

I think the biggest problem with Vista is that it doesn't really give us anything new. Just mild improvements (or not based on your comment) to what's there now. From what I've read, it sounds like Windows NT 5.3... some performance improvements (much needed, but will they be overshadowed by the inevitable additional bloat?)... lots of eye candy (wild monkeys must have designed much of XP's look... I hope Vista isn't so hideous)... and improved security (something we've been promised, and were owed, for many years).

I'm sorry. I don't see any compelling reason (or hardly any reason at all) to move from Windows 2000 or (for those couple of laptops of mine that have it) XP.

Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft

[diegocgteleline.es]

Introduces the new user security model similar to Un*x, only 30 years later. But it is (so far) incredibly inane in its interaction model with the user (from the article)

IMHO it's isn't, NT had a unix-like security model (not exactly the same, but...)from the start. XP may created user accounts with administrator privileges by default, but the problem there is just a bad default, they could have changed it very easily in the vista code base or in a XP SP.

The vista security model is different. I'm not sure of what it is - some security expert may know better than me, all the information you can find today about vista is mostly full of marketing crap and the rest are docs about how to use what they've implemented, not about what they've implemented - but I'd say that Vista has a SeLinux-like access control thingy, which is really different from the typical unix security model.

Take for example IE 7 running under Vista. In Vista, IE 7 runs with *less* privileges than the user running it, which means they can allow the browser to run activex controls *and* ensure nothing bad happens to the user, because IE is not allowed to write/read files even if the files belongs to the same user that is running IE (unless you allow it). In theory you can extend this to every program connected to the net (email client, messenger). Even if lot of Linux distros are already using SELinux, I welcome this change in vista. Now, as Paul says they may have implemented a horrible UI, but that's another problem...

Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft

[MightyMartian]

I think he just describe MS' standard modus operandi: promise the world to stop companies switching. Then, when the product actually comes out without all those nifty features, promise the world in the next release.

Indeed, I can't really figure out why he, or anyone else for that matter, finds this surprising. Windows 95 was precisely the same kind of beast, as was Windows ME. Even Windows 2000, while one of the better MS operating systems, still didn't live up to expectations.

It's not as if MS is the only guys out there that pull this stunt, but why does everyone still, after all this time, act as if the new MS release is such a disappointment. It's almost as if they actually believe the hype coming out of Redmond, which, to be honest with you, would indicate some pretty big failures in the critical analysis abilities of such people.

Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

You can sum up Vista like this:

Microsoft spent years and billions of dollars redesigning their operating system around the idea of DRM... designing their operating system around a feature that not one single consumer wants... and that makes your computer do less than it could before.

Champion... money well spent.

Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft

[j3thr0]

"a means of managing access to administrative rights without forcing the user to always operate as Administrator"

You mean like sudo?

Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft

[Jugalator]

People consistently bash Paul Thurrott on pro-Windows forums these days and I find that sad because I think he's one of few people left that write thorough, and actually rather unbiased, reviews of Microsoft products these days. Heck, with this review he even got an MS employee (that I'll avoid naming the username of to not point fingers) to call him a "douchebag" in a one-liner flamebait as an opinion about this entire article. Such non-existant motivation behind a flame can only come from one with little to defend himself with.

Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft

[joshv]

NT's had that for ages as well, "runas", at the command line and in the GUI.

Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft

[Ucklak]

Hardly.

Computers will still be sold with the latest Windows has to offer. Computers still sold when ME was available.
People can walk down the computer aisles and see 8 feet (16 feet on some stores) of Apple computer offerings, 4 feet of Linux preloaded offerings (in some stores), or 48 feet of Windows offerings.

If Vista is an abonimation like ME was, then MS will simply create a patch, call it Vista SE (Second Edition), and sell it.

Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft

[lord_rob the only on]

Except that new computers don't especially need to be sold. You know, I could be a new computer if I wanted to, but what for ? I'm still hapopy with my AMD athlon 900MHz running the latest Debian Sid. Sure it's not as fast as thunder but well... So what ? It's more than enough for what I need to do with it (writing programs, typing reports lin LaTeX, IRC, MSN, ...).

Apart from gaming, who really needs a new PC every time ?

Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft

[HuguesT]

Actually this was from win2k onwards. However the criticism is not so much that 2k/XP have a way to let a normal user run a program as an administrator, rather than the fact that mere users must actually run most applications (even games) as the Administrator. Whether this is achieved through actually login as the admin or through the "run as" feature is irrelevant.

"run as" and login as an Administrator should be reserved for administrative tasks like managing users and devices, not running standard applications.

Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft

[drinkypoo]

I haven't read about the permissions scheme in vista but I do know something about how both Unix and NT handle them. Mind you, I won't talk about Unix ACLs, because I've never used them, which is in turn because there are not convenient userspace tools for dealing with ACLs. (And it will never be as easy to handle them on the commandline as octal mask perms.)

The biggest difference between classic Unix perms and NT perms isn't ACLs, though. It's the fact that Unix gives most permissions, and NT gives least. More accurately, Unix perms are additive, while NT perms can be either additive or subtractive.

In Unix, permissions are OR'd together. If you or any of the groups you belong to have a permission, then you have it as well. In NT, permissions are more complex. There is both a permit and a deny, and most significantly, deny trumps permit. If you belong to both the "good guys" and "assholes" groups, and good guys have read permit, but assholes have read deny, then the deny wins (supposedly) and you don't have access.

I still don't know what NT is doing to perms... but the common use of NT perms is superior to the common use of Unix perms (since practically no one uses ACLs in spite of the fact that assorted Commercial Unixes have had them for aeons.)

Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft

[Admiral Ag]

Please correct me if I am wrong, but Microsoft managed to avoid the disaster that was Windows ME by replacing it not long after (i.e. a couple of years) with XP Home Edition, which was based on NT. So at least they had some insurance.

If Vista is a disaster, they don't seem to have another OS ready to tweak to replace it. All their eggs seem to be in this basket.

More to the point, there are better competitors out there. Back in 2000 Apple was still selling the Classic Mac OS, and Linux on the desktop was quite crude. Now Apple is currently selling an OS that is at least as good as Vista and will release a new version that will probably be much better than Vista around the same time MS releases. Desktop Linux is starting to look really good, and the whole movement towards virtualization could conceivably provide backwards compatibility for people who want to move away from MS products (this is what Boot Camp and the rumoured virtualization in OS 10.5 are about).

There's a scene in "Pirates of Silicon Valley" where Steve Jobs confronts Gates about plagiarizing from Apple. Jobs claims he will win because Apple has better stuff, but Gates points out that this doesn't matter. The Gates character was proven right. But now this might bite the real Gates in the ass: Desktop Linux is probably not going to be as good as Vista, but that doesn't matter. Microsoft beat Apple because Apple had hardware lockin. Linux will beat Microsoft because Microsoft has software lockin, and because Linux these days is pretty much good enough.

We can only hope.

Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft

[drinkypoo]

RunAs doesn't work properly when you RunAs a process which spawns another process, unless that program was written specifically to work with RunAs. The second process will run under your user context, not the context of the program which launches it. This is done by design, although I have a hard time imagining what the design purpose was...

Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft

[Theatetus]

Get off of it. NT has had a fine grained, multi-user security model since it's inception, 13 years ago. In fact, until Unix got ACL's, I would say NTFS has a better file system security model.

He's not talking about filesystem security. And, yes, Linux didn't get ACLs as quickly as Windows did. UNIX, however, has had them for ages, before Windows was a commercial product.

UAP is a means of managing access to administrative rights without forcing the user to always operate as Administrator. Other than OS X, I know of no Unix-like OS that even attempts this.

Umm... how about all of them? As far as I know everything UNIX-like can run sudo

Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft

[Cunk]

You're hardly a representative of general PC-buying public.

Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft

[Ohreally_factor]

You know, I could be a new computer if I wanted to, but what for?

Don't you need to run BeOS if you actually want to BE a computer?

Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft

[misleb]

IMHO it's isn't, NT had a unix-like security model (not exactly the same, but...)from the start. XP may created user accounts with administrator privileges by default, but the problem there is just a bad default, they could have changed it very easily in the vista code base or in a XP SP.

The reason they use such a bad default is because a lot of programs require admin rights to run and your average user doesn't want to bother (or doesn't know how to) use the "runas" feature. In this regard, the security model is bad. It should be more like OS X where the system knows when you need admin to do something and it automatically prompts for a username/password with admin rights. This is a superior security model for a consumer desktop, IMO. It has one great thing going for it: It is dead simple. Microsoft has gone out of their way (as usual) to make things very complex. One wonders if they've ever heard the old engineering mantra: Keep It Simple, Stupid (KISS).

-matthew

Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft

[Bing Tsher E]

I hate to just post what some will interpret as flamebait, but on the surface, not one single consumer wants the UNIX security model, either. What people want is a computer they can easily add to and change to suit their purpose. No security model addresses that. With Windows, it's either an out-of-control insecure nest of spyware, viruses and trojans, or the new DRM model of locked-down-no-fun. With the freenixes, it's locked-down-no-fun or months of learning how to get around 'the barriers' of 'the rest of the world' and DRM.

The 'PC Revolution' came about when an MS-DOS machine could be had at low cost and could do the now-considered-limited things that a PC in that era could accomplish. Which was VERY liberating at the time, because the only other computers to be had were locked-down multiuser systems that the regular person wasn't even allowed to be in the same room with.

The Microsoft 'a computer on every desk and in every home' was a cool aspiration. The fact that it's now time for those computers to no longer have much (if any) software from Microsoft doesn't make it a less cool aspiration.

To a person who liked writing graphical programs in GW-Basic, who got into the hardware and learned how to do cool low-level things with, say, Turbo C 2.0, any modern system makes your computer do less than it could before. Simply because hardware abstraction and a modern 'security model' took that all away.

It's point-of-view and what you want to do with the gear that determines 'more' and 'less.' To some people 'more' is a DRM-enabled system they can download crappy TV shows onto.

Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft

[kimvette]

Well the drawback to Linux is that it is only part of the equation.

Your computer is a tool and for certain things you need pretty specific tools, like Quicken, Adobe CS2, Premiere/Final Cut/Media Studio Pro.

While there is Inkscape, Scribus, The Gimp, Ghostscript, and Krita on Linux, they don't match up feature-for-feature with Adobe CS2. They do their jobs "Good enough" but. . .

Image editing/digital painting: Every time I use The Gimp, I just cringe at the UI, I hate its window management (when I bring one Gimp document to the foreground, so should ALL of the palettes), and it only does about 95% of what I need. It does not have ANY vector support. :(

Illustration/drawing: Inkscape? It does its job fairly well, but its PDF support is horrid. If you use alpha blending, export to TIFF or PNG and use another program to convert to PDF. Also, printing directly from Inkscape stinks.

Accounting: Quickbooks? There IS no replacement. Folks will quickly suggest kmymoney or gnucash, but not having ever owned a business, they naively think that the Linux equivalent of MS Money or Quicken will get the job done. Hint: it won't.

Video NLE: Cinelerra is a bear to build, configure, and learn. Hell, you're lucky if you can resolve the 3,129,812 dependendencies and get it built.

With that said, I use Linux on my work machine >99% of the time. If I need Adobe CS2, I go to another workstation and do my work there, then copy it over. If I need to access Quickbooks, I remote desktop to the office manager's desktop and take care of what I need, but otherwise, we're running mostly Linux. Windows (and OS X) will always be around on at least one or two machines due to certain applications being unavailable on Linux, and no real suitable alternatives to those applications being available on Linux.

If Adobe CS2 and Quickbooks were to come out for Linux tomorrow, we'd be able to punt Windows for the most part, booting to it only when we need to develop a Windows solution for a client. Until the tools we need are available on Linux, it's not the complete solution and there is still some room for Microsoft at my office. In fact we're in the process of punting Exchange right now and hopefully by next Monday the cutover will be complete. :)

Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft

[udippel]

Though this seems obviuous, it needs to be seconded ! - This is a perspective that has changed compared to earlier releases.
Worse (for MS): It has nothing to do with Debian or stuff. We are running XP on a Duron 800 with 256 MB of RAM just fine. Not even slow. No need here to upgrade.

Except, and this is the bad predicament of Microsoft, they add so-called great new features that require advanced hardware. But when they do so, the very same moment, the uptake of new hardware (and subsequently Vista) will be slow.

I don't envy them. But their karma is self-inflicted and so there is no need to pity them, neither.

Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft

[Foolhardy]

Yes, it's possible to deny even Administrators access to files. However, Administrators also have a privilege that trumps it: the SeTakeOwnershipPrivilege. The owner of an object can always set the discressionary list (the one that controls access) and the take ownership privelege lets someone become the owner of an object regardless of permission. In other words, open the security dialog, click advanced, open the owner tab, set the owner to yourself or the admins group, and click OK for both dialogs. You can now assign a new access list with the add button. Administrators also have the SeRestorePrivilege which allows one to open a file for full access, as if to "restore" data or security properties from backup, but there's no convenient way to exploit this for a single file.

The reason it's setup this way is so that administrators can be held accountable in an audit log when overriding security settings, so that it's obvious when a file's access control has been forcibly changed. It's a good policy... for high security multiuser systems that Windows rarely runs on. It's not so great for your mom's desktop.

Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft

[Sepodati]

What programs do this, because I've never seen this to be true? I use runas to open up command line prompts and Explorer so I can start programs as an administrator. When installation programs finish after being started with runas, the startup the program still running as the admin user. I don't even log in as admin anymore and use runas shortcuts for everything that requires an admin's touch. This is all on XP, btw.

---John Holmes...

Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft

[ladoga]

not one single consumer wants the UNIX security model, either.
Not one single consumer?

Im quite happy with Unix security model. Im a Linux noob and it took me few hours to get hang of the basics of UNIX security concept. Root / user division in user accounts, filesystem and devices. I much prefer this security approach to windows one (or should i say lack of).

Maybe *nixes aren't just your thing? Im not saying that security model is ideal (tho i cant think of better for myself), but i fail to see how it's so hard to use or uncustomizable. OSX users don't seem to have so hard time with it either and sure you can set up sudo for other *nixes too if that matters.

Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft

[drinkypoo]

Run an installer with a 16-bit installer stub (the 16 bit setup.exe) using RunAs, and baby jesus will cry. Of course, the program has to need Admin to install for this example to be meaningful - but this is how I ran into the issue in the first place.

Sounds like an apologist

[thewiz]

'I don't hate Windows Vista, and I certainly don't hate Microsoft for disappointing me and countless other customers with a product that doesn't even come close to meeting its original promises. I'm sure the company learned something from this debacle, and hopefully it will be more open and honest about what it can and cannot do in the future ... It some ways, Windows Vista actually will exceed Mac OS X and Linux, but not to the depth we were promised. Instead, Windows Vista will do what so many other Windows releases have done, and simply offer consumers and business users a few major changes and many subtle or minor updates. That's not horrible. It's just not what was promised.'

Hmmm... Sounds like something I've heard before from a sister-in-law:

'I don't hate taking care of the kids, and I certainly don't hate my husband for disappointing me and the kids with his actions that don't even come close to meeting his original promises. I'm sure I learned something from this debacle, and hopefully he will be more open and honest about what he can and cannot do in the future ... In some ways, my husband actually will exceed other men, but not to the depth we were promised. Instead, he will do what so many other husbands have done, and simply promise us a few major changes and many subtle or minor ones. It's not so horrible that he misleads me and the kids. It's just not what I was promised at the alter.'

Both sound like someone trying to apologize and explain away someone elses bad behaviour.

Re:Sounds like an apologist

[moorcito]

Both sound like someone trying to apologize and explain away someone elses bad behaviour.

In the windows case yes, in the husband case let's just say that wives have incredibly high expectations.

Re:Sounds like an apologist

[run4ever79]

but not to the depth we were promised.
Interesting double entendre.

I still waiting.

[jellomizer]

Heck I am still waiting for MS to give us what they promised us in Windows 95

Re:I still waiting.

[nine-times]

You're right. The quote shows the author to be naive/uninformed:

I don't hate Windows Vista, and I certainly don't hate Microsoft for disappointing me and countless other customers with a product that doesn't even come close to meeting its original promises. I'm sure the company learned something from this debacle, and hopefully it will be more open and honest about what it can and cannot do in the future

This has always been Microsoft's MO. Late and with most of the intended features dropped out. They promise the world when they start development, but the new versions of their software tend to be the old version with a few tweaks, updates, fixes, a new skin, and all the controls in different places.

Re:I still waiting.

[besenslon]

And what is that? The only think they promised was more networking ... and THEY DID IT - with all their products they let the whole world network in your machine :)

Re:I still waiting.

[killjoe]

I don't see how any of this matters at all. MS could deliver a steaming pile of shit and everybody who bought a new PC would get it anyway whether they liked it or not. In two years all corporations would also be running it too.

It doesn't matter what MS delivers or doesn't deliver. That's the beauty of a monopoly. You have to eat whatever comes out of their bowels.

PSSSSST!!

[goldspider]

It's not done yet!

A credibility problem

[clevershark]

It's hard to trust the reviewer when he writes about how disappointed he is, but still gives the product 5/5.

Vista will dominate

[MarkByers]

It doesn't matter if Vista is good, bad or indifferent, it will get installed on millions of new machines and eventually the majority of users around the world will be using it. You better get used to it, because you will probably have to use it one day.

Re:Vista will dominate

[robogun]

I can't speak for everybody, but I'm still on Windows 2000. I "upgrade" any XP machines I end up with to Win2K, and I've done this service for several friends and family.

I think XP is gross and from what I hear about Vista so far, count me out. Especially if it includes *any* DRM.

Re:Vista will dominate

[clevershark]

A place I used to work for (very large bank) was using NT 4 as recently as 2004.

Then they relented and let *some people* install Windows 2000 on their machines, if it was determined that they really needed it. That's not an uncommon practice with very large companies. All the PCs we had had license stickers for more recent versions of Windows, but we still had an OS which had been released back in 1996.

I've nothing against using Windows, as long as someone pays me for it...

Re:Vista will dominate

[It doesn't come easy]

Not this time for me...while Microsoft has been practicing their perpetually delayed rollout approach to OS upgrades, I have been getting ready to switch to Linux for good. I (that is, linux developers) have almost all of the issues worked out and as soon as I can get complete driver support out of the box (so to speak) for my existing hardware in either Ubuntu or SUSE, I'll be using Linux exclusively. Yee-haw.

Re:Vista will dominate

[dsci]

Who cares if it is EOL'd 4 years from now? That just means you cannot get support directly from MS. Anyone willing to make the decision to not shell out the dough in vendor lock-in hell (yet still run Windows) is probably capable/willing to keep the OS going on their own.

And who's to say in 2010 Vista will be "current" anyway?

Re:Vista will dominate

[Phisbut]

And who's to say in 2010 Vista will be "current" anyway?

Vista probably won't be "current" in 2010... it'll be "coming soon"...

Re:Vista will dominate

[RatPh!nk]

What a terribly defeatist attitude. Maybe he won't use Vista, I won't. Maybe he will run linux, I do. Maybe he will buy a Mac, I did. Maybe (hopefully) more people will say enough of this crap and get something else. Do you need Windows to:

• Browse the web? No.
• Check email? No.
• Write some papers? No.
• Spreadsheets? No.
• Taxes? No.
• Games? Umm..err.. ;) (it is better than a couple years ago, most *major* games are at least dual platform)

I would imagine that very few people actually *have* to run Windows. They use it because it comes on the machine they buy, much like the reason they use IE. Those who *have* to, could use some emulator (hardware or software) or virtualization program. Maybe people will realize that it doesn't have to be so bad and move past the MS monopoly. Don't accept the status quo if you can help it, and when it comes to computers, we can help it.

Sorry but we are a Microsoft shop

[LWATCDR]

We tried out the live distro of GLX and most of us liked the new 3d accelerated Linux GUI better than Vista's Aeroglass. Since pretty is a big selling point that is very important. I have to admit I was shocked by how useful it was and how much Vista drove me nuts.

Don't care. Don't want to care.

[plover]

Frankly, I don't want to get excited about Vista.

Since they're building DRM right into the core of the OS (including crap such as the Protected Media Path and all its ilk) I have absolutely no reason to think they won't allow corporate partners (RIAA, MPAA, BSA) to abuse this to kill pieces of "unapproved" media or "rogue" apps. What happens when the .*AA tells them Azureus is being used to pirate software or media? Shut 'er down! Even if you've only ever used it to share the latest fad video or big open source distribution, it won't matter. And that's wrong.

Whether I agree with them on issues of piracy or not (I don't approve of pirating software myself) I refuse to allow my computer to participate in extending or enforcing their policies, and I refuse to install DRM based media players. I'm going to keep XP on that machine for as long as it runs, or until I replace it with an open OS.

So just for perspective...

[cgreuter]

Can anyone here name any Microsoft product that lived up to its hype? Anyone?

And no, Freecell doesn't count.

Re:So just for perspective...

[tehshen]

Halo?

Hi!

Re:So just for perspective...

[jdbartlett]

But seriously... Excel. I've thrown the rest of the Office suite out the window: I try to work in plain text, so Word isn't for me. I use SQL for databases, Access doesn't suit my purposes. Publisher is to DTP as Paint is to photo manipulation, I don't even bother installing it any more. I use Flash to compose presentations, I only use Powerpoint when forced to. Apple's iLife beats the stuffing out of Outlook, so the same applies there (I've been in offices that have an enforced Outlook policy). Gnumeric, KSpread, OpenOffice Calc... they're all based on Excel because it's a good application. Can't think of anything else, though!

Filesystem

[thebdj]

I lost all interest in Vista the second they dropped the idea of WinFS. You see they were finally going to catch up with everyone else in the world of the file system and instead have proven they couldn't handle it. I think I also got fed up with all those pesky delays. Two years late and really chopped down, Vista is not anything like what is was supposed to be.

Re:Filesystem

[realmolo]

"Catch up"? What other operating system in widespread use has an SQL-based filesystem?

Yeah, WinFS would and *will* be nice, but it's not a deal-breaker.

I'm more concerned that Vista is yet-another-version-of-Windows NT. I honestly would like MS to risk it all and make a brand-new version of Windows, written from scratch, that only runs "old" stuff under emulation. Just start over. It'll never happen, of course.

Re:Filesystem

[WindBourne]

What other operating system in widespread use has an SQL-based filesystem?

OS-400 comes to mind as being the original (probably was not). Of course, that was YEARS ago.

Re:Filesystem

[vtcodger]

***I lost all interest in Vista the second they dropped the idea of WinFS***

As I understand it (and I may not), WinFS -- if it is ever released -- will ride on top of the current file system and will be released for both Vista and XP. Keep in mind that WinFS was originally scheduled for Windows 95. Clearly, it's not so easy to do. If it were, we'd have gotten it in Windows 98 or W2K . While accessing data by content rather than file-directory heiarchy (I think that's what it is supposed to do) sounds like a nifty idea, I suspect that the idea might be fundamentally flawed. Basically, I suspect you need pretty good metadata to make WinFS work, and that it's hard to get metadata that good for all the files that people might want to find.

We'll see how right I am if WinFS is ever released.

Re:Filesystem

[Jugalator]

This is correct, and *I* thought WinFS was therefore short for Windows Future Storage.

Re:Filesystem

[ickoonite]

Nice troll.

I've karma to burn, so just a couple of points:

Vista doesn't look vastly different...

This is such bollocks it's hard to know where to start. As Thurrott laments, one of the most fundamental features of a windowing system - the idea of depth in a 2D space and so marking out the active window - has been thoroughly fucked up by a team whose sole goal seems to have been to chase the teh pretty crowd. Those screenshots were damning. Usability has gone to shreds.

...even though most of the OS has been rewritten...

Do you actually have any evidence of this? Judging by the icons in some of the dialogue boxes (try here), some of the stuff hasn't seen an update since Windows 95. There's a reason it "'appears' to not be different to push away current Windows Users".

...and has tons of new protections and features that just work..

Evidently not. Evidently they are so poorly implemented that even fanboy Thurrott is banging his head on the table.

Vista is a new OS with the first radical change in Windows since Windows 3.0.

You're a fucking idiot. A first class fucking nutcase.

Then I read the rest of your post, where you start talking about this fire bollocks, or something, and I realise that you actually are a fucking nutcase...

...you need to prepare, learn and even USE some of the ideas Microsoft has recreated in development, and bring these to other OSes.

OK, I'll give you that. Apple brought decent search to Mac OS X in 2005 after Microsoft announced it would implement it in Vista, then Longhorn. Alas, Windows users will get their hands on it in...2007. Hmmmm...

iqu :|

(And, just one thing, moderators, before modding me down, take a moment to read and consider the parent's post. I am normally a rational and controlled type, but sometimes things just have to be said...)

Re:Filesystem

[n8_f]

Apple brought decent search to Mac OS X in 2005 after Microsoft announced it would implement it in Vista, then Longhorn.

As you'll recall, is was quite evident that Apple had been working on this long before Microsoft announced it. They hired Dominic Giampaolo, the co-creator of BFS, the first commercial file system with live search (AFAIK), some time in 2002. And since BeOS introduced this in 1996, around 10 years ago, nothing Microsoft is doing with search or even WinFS is original.

This just in...

[Kohath]

This just in:

A product's performance doesn't live up to the hype.

I know we're all shocked that he unthinkable finally happened.

"The Bad Old Microsoft"

[mrchaotica]

As I've noted in the past, the Windows Division retains, as employees of the software giant have told me, the last vestiges of the bad, old Microsoft. This is the Microsoft that ran roughshod over competitors in order to gain market share at any cost. The Microsoft that forgot about customers in its blind zeal to harm competitors.

He talks about it as if they've changed, but Microsoft is the same as it ever was -- and it always will be, because the core of those "bad" ways is the upper management, including Gates and Ballmer themselves.

My Vista sucks

[VAXGeek]

I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Vista fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Windows Vista PC (Pentium 4/3000 w/64 bits of power) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than Windows Vista, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

In addition, during this file transfer, Firefox will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Windows Media Player 11 is straining to keep up as I type this.

I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Vista PCs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Vista machine that has run faster than its XP counterpart, despite the translucent interface. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 3000 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that Vista is a superior operating system.

Vista addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use Windows Vista over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.

Re:My Vista sucks

[eln]

The GP is an old Linux troll re-worked to apply to Windows Vista. I thought it was kind of clever, actually.

Re:My Vista sucks

[Penguinshit]

Wow.. according to your UID, you've been around since this troll was first crafted!

Bravo.

Re:My Vista sucks

[955301]

Because it wasn't supposed to be a year until the release. And yet they are having problems as severe as these?

Unless the folder he's trying to copy to is in his file cabinet, I'd say its a sign of mediocrity to come.

Re:My Vista sucks

[AceCaseOR]

Aahh. Well, it worked on me (and normally I'm pretty good at spotting trolls.)

Re:My Vista sucks

[mrchaotica]

Not quite; it was a Mac troll (from the "old" Mac OS days, when it didn't have proper scheduling). This would never have applied to Linux, since it was multitasking from the get-go.

Re:My Vista sucks

[Frumious Wombat]

That's because Macs used to have California Scheduling: "hey man, i'm like, not using these cycles, so why don't you go ahead an run for a while..". Now they have New Jersey Sceduling: "YOU! Outta da way! NOW!" Wierdly enough, while the first sounds better in theory, the other works much more effectively in practice.

They've missed the boat

[Nybarius]

the days of bloated client-side OS dominance are over. Google will probably unveil google OS concurrently with Vista, thus completely crippling Microsoft, which they will subsequently buy out.

You Have to Have to Have to

[bogie]

Watch this video

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-413444611 2378047444&q=Motorrider&pl=true

I've always been of fan of each OS borrowing from one another, but this is just sad. MS ripped everything out of Vista that was truly innovative and we are left with XP rethemed and few nice subsystem tweaks. Frankly Vista is a decent update if it had be released in 2003. WTF have they been doing for 6 years?

Re:You Have to Have to Have to

[Dis*abstraction]

What's up with the blurriness and staticky sound? Here's the original version of that video, plus a couple more, which haven't suffered a thousand transcodings. (Or is the copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy motif a subtle commentary? Either way...)

Re:You Have to Have to Have to

[ABoerma]

Also: http://tauquil.com/archives/2006/01/06/re-introduc ing-the-real-windows-vista

Re:You Have to Have to Have to

[I'm Don Giovanni]

WTF have they been doing for 6 years?

You must have missed the stories last year where Microsoft said in multiple interviews that their development process for Windows was so screwed up that they had to do what they called a "reset" and start over from the Windows Server 2003 code base. So, yeah, a lot of time was lost, and Micrsosoft admitted that.

Also during those "6 years", XP SP2 was being developed as was .NET 2.0, MCE2005, TabletPC Windows. Those have all been released but will be also included in Vista (the Home Premium version), so it's not like they were doing nothing regarding things that will be in Vista.

exceeding OS X and Linux

[kaan]

"In some ways, Windows Vista actually will exceed Mac OS X and Linux..."

For example, with Windows Vista, you will get more:
- system instability
- viruses
- application crashes
- lost data
- maintenance time
- security patches
- bug fixes

But it doesn't stop there! In order to take advantage of all new features in Vista, you will also get to spend more money on fancy hardware, including juiced up graphics cards to render the fancy new user interface.

Re:exceeding OS X and Linux

[mrchaotica]

...But wait! There's more! The system even has built-in DRM, so you can get that nice cozy jail cell feeling all the time instead of only after bashing someone's head in because you were too frustrated with XP!

Re:Promises

[eln]

So when people tell you they'll do something, you expect them not to do it unless they explicitly say "I promise?" Or do you require some sort of pinky swear?

Microsoft marketed a load of vapor to people for years so they would wait for Vista. And if someone is waiting for Vista, they aren't installing Mac OS X or Linux.

Either Microsoft did this to intentionally slow the growth of other products while their product was in development, or they screwed up so badly in their development that they were forced to strip out all of these planned features. Neither one of those options says anything good about Microsoft.

Warmed over MacOSX

[MCSEBear]

Microsoft's grand plans for Vista have turned into a warmed over version of MacOSX. The new graphics engine is definitely lifted right out of Apple's OS. The advanced WinFS filesystem has been reduced to nothing new with a copy of Apple's Spotlight bolted on. Microsoft's User Account Protection is so annoying as to be pretty much useless. It kicks in when you delete a shortcut to a program? Are they nuts? Paul Thurrott lets Microsoft have it with both guns in his review.

"Promises were made. Excitement was generated. None of it, as it turns out, was worth a damn. From a technical standpoint, the version of Windows Vista we will receive is a sad shell of its former self, a shadow. One might still call it a major Windows release. I will, for various reasons. The kernel was rewritten. The graphics subsystem is substantially improved, if a little obviously modeled after that in Mac OS X. Heck, half of the features of Windows Vista seem to have been lifted from Apple's marketing materials.

Shame on you, Microsoft. Shame on you, but not just for not doing better. We expect you to copy Apple, just as Apple (and Linux) in its turn copies you. But we do not and should not expect to be promised the world, only to be given a warmed over copy of Mac OS X Tiger in return. Windows Vista is a disappointment. There is no way to sugarcoat that very real truth."

Microsoft has really fumbled the ball over and over with the development of this OS. It's nice to see them get called out for it.

Another Windows OS... So what?

[pegr]

Microsoft has pretty much done all that they can do with an OS, so why bother, apart from keeping business users on the upgrade train. Don't agree? Then tell me what apps run on XP that don't run on Win2K. I can't think of any.

You think MS can rewrite the API with each release? ISVs want a consistent platform. If MS releases an OS that can't run software for previous OS versions, no one would buy it. The only reason for new OS releases is to keep siphoning money in exchange for "current version support". The whole idea is bogus and designed to maximize profit. The last thing MS considers is what is good for their customers.

It'll exceed OSX and Linux eh?

[frinkacheese]

A friend of mine said, when Windows 95 came out that "it'll knock the socks off Linux..." and it didn't. Then he said "This windows NT 4.0 will kill Linux" and it didn't. Then "XP is the Linux killer, mark my words. It's got built in security.." and look what happened. Need I go on? The MS buffs continually postition various MS OS releases as Linux killers, and they never are.

Why is this so?

Simply, it is because for a very large number of people, Linux just works damn well. It's flexiable, fast, secure and when things break, they usually get fixed pretty quick. It's the Un*x philosophy that makes it work so much better and that's a philosophy that no matter how much MS try to copy, will never quite be there in Windows. They may have a new swanky command line interface, but it'll simply not beat any Un*x shell or scripting language for getting stuff done.

Sure Vista will look pretty, but I bet itll still bork and need driver disks when you plug your USB thingy into a differant USB port..

In reality of course every OS sucks, but Linux sucks a lot less than any Windows release.

Oh and whilst you're at it, you can stick yer DRM up yer IPC$.

Re:It'll exceed OSX and Linux eh?

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

Um, when did Linux ever kill Windows?

I mean, to say something is a linux killer suggests that Linux is the mainstream OS that everybody is using, and so Windows will overtake their dominance.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but 95% of the world runs Windows on their Desktop.

Sure, Linux is dominant in servers and server technology. But I would never have claimed that Windows 95 would kill Linux as a server OS.

When Windows 95 came out, where as Linux? Linux back then WAS a difficult POS to use, a convoluted OS with a lot of potential and very little innovation. In fact, it wasn't until Windows 95 was released that Linux actually started to adopt a UI that people liked to use on it (i.e. no more X-Windows). Gnome and KDE all got a lot of big design cues form Windows 95.

Back then, people though Linux was going to kill Windows, and with each new version of Windows that was released since Windows 95, Linux failed to make a dent in the market.

Today, in 2006, with Ubuntu being the lastest flavour of the mont Linux distro(but waining with rumors of other must have distros like a Google version of linux), Linux still is failing to captivate an audience for desktop users. In the past 10 years, Linux has failed to focus into a consise and effective replacement of Windows, failed to take 100 renegage distibrutions and consolidate it into one super-uber-distro that could rule them all and truely compete with Windows. Linux, and all its fragmeneted groups of developers still cannot unite to develop ONE good replacement to Windows, and while they all feel they can make a better Windows, none realize how damaging keeping seperated is having on their beloved hobby OS.

I have no idea where your coming from saying something like Vista will require driver disks if you plug your USB thingy into them. At least on Windows, drivers EXIST. Driver CD's actaully come with the product, and you can download the drivers online at least. This is unlike Linux where if you have new hardware, until some open source developer gets around to buying it you won't get any driver support for it. Even once you do, if the driver isn't for the specific nightly build of the kernel your running, your SOL for getting it to install properly without configuring scripts for hours.

Sorry, I know your trying to make a point about how cool and great Linux is over Windows, but you have to have some platform to stand on. Never once did I even consider that Windows needed to be a Linux killer. Linux speaks for itself, 95% of the world computer users say so. They all can't be mindless lemmings.

Re:It'll exceed OSX and Linux eh?

[TheRaven64]

This windows NT 4.0 will kill Linux

I was using NT 4 back in 1996. Back then, it has SMP (scaled up to 32 processors, although the cheap version was limited to two). Linux was just starting to get SMP capability.

It had native threading, which Linux only got last year.

It had full support for ACLs in the filesystem. Linux got that in, what, 2000? Does it even work with the standard filesystems? I've been using ACLs with UFS2 (the default FS) on FreeBSD for a couple of years, but I've not seen them in common use on Linux.

It had a GUI with a single, consistent, user interface toolkit. Linux got one of those in 2030?

It had support for hardware accelerated OpenGL and later DirectX. I can't remember the first time I got 3D acceleration of anything other than GLide working with Linux, but I don't think it was before 2000.

It had a stable ABI and component system that allowed some basic introspection and management of reference counted objects. These objects still work on current versions of Windows[1].

Did NT4 kill Linux? No. It was, however, a long way ahead of the competition. Now, let's look at MacOS of that era; it had the consistent UI toolkit (and a set of HIGs people actually used), but no security model, no memory protection and no pre-emptive multitasking. NT4 was pretty far ahead of that too. Apparently OS/2 was in a similar place, but I didn't use it so I can't comment.

Now, let's look at Vista. It's got the same VMS-lite kernel. A nice architecture - much nicer than UNIX, in my opinion - but they haven't really done anything interesting with it for a decade. It's got a 3D accelerated desktop, which may be slightly better than OS X 10.4 (although 10.5 will probably be out before Vista), and fairly similar to Cairo on something like XGl. It will have a horrible mish-mash of visual styles and behaviours that will make a GNOME/KDE hybrid look like the paragon of usability. It will have...uh...

Vista may be ahead of the competition when it launches, but if it is then it will be by such a small margin that it will be the last release that is. When Microsoft originally announced Longhorn, people thought they might actually deliver. Their competitors were worried. They started developing the same sorts of features Vista promised and eventually came very close. Meanwhile, Microsoft started dropping the same features from their version until Vista became so anticlimactic that even Windows fanboys stopped caring.

[1] I think. I haven't actually used Windows for two years, but I haven't read anything to the contrary.

Re:It'll exceed OSX and Linux eh?

[m50d]

95% of the world computer users say so. They all can't be mindless lemmings.

I envy your faith in humanity

Re:It'll exceed OSX and Linux eh?

[Kjella]

Linux speaks for itself, 95% of the world computer users say so. They all can't be mindless lemmings. ...we're not but we still use Windows.

1. Windows took the initial desktop market (think OS/2 times, pre-OS X, Linux had little to nothing)
2. The next generation grew up with Windows
3. With dominance applications are built for Windows

Linux/OSS aren't just trying to catch up with Microsoft. They're also trying to catch up with just about every developer of commercial applications in the world, since hardly any produce commercial apps for Linux. Personally I think Windows peaked around Windows 2000 - it's solid, stable and runs almost every application to date (currently my favorite is Oblivion - running on a 6+ year old OS). Vista looks remarkably unimpressive.

The Microsofties like to say that Windows is ten years ahead of Linux, I think it's ahead. Even if that was true at the release of win2k I say six down, four to go. But there's a thousand little hooks and a few big ones that have kept me from using Linux as a desktop. I use it via remote X and have tried to use that as my main desktop, but well... Like I said, it's not Linux vs Windows, it's Linux platform vs Windows platform. The latter is far greater than Microsoft and a real juggernaut to battle.

Re:It'll exceed OSX and Linux eh?

[rossifer]

You've got a bunch of points (many of which are valid to one degree or another) but I'm only going to respond to one.

It [NT4] had full support for ACLs in the filesystem. Linux got that in, what, 2000? Does it even work with the standard filesystems?

ACL's are a filesystem feature, not an OS feature. NTFS has them, FAT and FAT32 do not. Ext2 does not have ACL's, though hooks were left for ACL's from the beginning and support can be patched into 2.4 and 2.6 kernels for Ext2 and Ext3. AFS (Andrew File System), which is the original king of ACL's, could be used on Linux in 1998. ReiserFS has them (don't know for how long). SGI's XFS is the same (I think this was pretty recent).

I've been using ACLs with UFS2 (the default FS) on FreeBSD for a couple of years, but I've not seen them in common use on Linux.

Evidently, people don't miss them, because the option has been available to Linux users about as long as NTFS has been on the scene. I would hazard a guess that ACL's aren't the "make or break" feature for most people's filesystem choice.

Now, I'm not going to seriously rain on your parade as the point of this argument seems to boil down to: NTFS is a great filesystem. I agree. NTFS is some sweet technology that works real nice in the here and now. But it isn't the only game in town for high performance journaling file systems (with ACL's no less). The fact that people don't really seek out ACL's on linux is simply that ogw permissions are so well understood by so many unix admins, and most of the time, ogw permissions are good enough.

Regards,
Ross

Re:It'll exceed OSX and Linux eh?

[rjstanford]

ACL's are a filesystem feature, not an OS feature

More to the point, ACLs are an OS feature, not a Kernel feature. To linux-the-kernel they are irrelevant. To linux-the-os they are important, after all you need implementations in the filesystem, the file utils, system libraries, gui file browsers, et cetera, to really implement them fully.

The grandparent was making the point that linux-the-os, in whatever flavor, was less mature than windows-the-os. Personally, I don't see that anything you said goes against that point, other than by pedantically treating linux as a kernel only.

Re:It'll exceed OSX and Linux eh?

[ookaze]

Well, I see your point, but I think you twist the facts to make it like NT4 was so much ahead, now let's see

I was using NT 4 back in 1996. Back then, it has SMP (scaled up to 32 processors, although the cheap version was limited to two). Linux was just starting to get SMP capability

NT4 had SMP and supported up to 32 processors on paper. Which does not mean it ever scaled. Support and scale, not the same thing.
Linux was just starting to get SMP, but got it better (and no, it was still not right, but better) than NT4 already.
Linux was not even scaling well to 4 processors, but was starting to be used far more than NT4 on these kind of setup.
And I don't think cost was the sole reason, especially when you use such architectures.
It must have to do with the fact that the number of processors is not all in these setup.
If you can't manage your memory correctly between processors, supporting 32 processors is often useless.

It had native threading, which Linux only got last year

And Linux non native threading was already way faster than NT4 native threading.
And Linux got native threading 2 years ago, increasing the gap with Windows even more.

It had full support for ACLs in the filesystem. Linux got that in, what, 2000? Does it even work with the standard filesystems? I've been using ACLs with UFS2 (the default FS) on FreeBSD for a couple of years, but I've not seen them in common use on Linux

Youhave not seem is not an evidence of anything.
At the time, ACL were considered unnecessary because too complicated to manage (that's still the case), and complexity is enemy of security.
Well, it has finally been implemented and more, for nearly every FS Linux supports.
But it still is not used a lot, because for most people, the base system is enough.

It had a GUI with a single, consistent, user interface toolkit. Linux got one of those in 2030?

Linux got that with KDE 2 and Gnome 2, which was in 2001 I think. Except that the GUI was not just like NT4, they were more advanced in lots of fields : i18n/l10n, multi user, multi session, cross platform, customisation, look, resolution agnostism, ...

I can't remember the first time I got 3D acceleration of anything other than GLide working with Linux, but I don't think it was before 2000

And of course, this has nothing to do that 3DFX was king of 3D until the end of 1999 ...

It had a stable ABI and component system that allowed some basic introspection and management of reference counted objects. These objects still work on current versions of Windows[1]

I don't understand the advantage ... Linux was working with lots of Unix programs, and shell and pipe still work very well today, and are still in wide use.

Did NT4 kill Linux? No. It was, however, a long way ahead of the competition

Sorry, but NT4 was the "Unix killer", and it didn't kill anything. On the other hand, Linux is way more on the way to kill Unix than NT4 ever was.

Vista may be ahead of the competition when it launches, but if it is then it will be by such a small margin that it will be the last release that is

It would be an improvement then. My perception is that WinXP was already behind the Linux GUI when it launched, and if Vista maintain the gap, I will already be impressed.
I'm one of the rare people that never caved in to all the rants of stupid people thinking that MS would deliver, and that Vista would kill Linux.
It's amazing, a few months ago, it seemed like Vista was going to kill everything. The tune has changed so fast, that the head of a lot of people must be spinning like mad.

When Microsoft originally announced Longhorn, people thought they might actually deliver

I never thought that, based entirely on past behaviour. It seems a lot of people never learn from history.
I do, and computing is the first field where I feel like a psychi

Easy

[MarkByers]

Can anyone here name any Microsoft product that lived up to its hype? Anyone?

Word 2007 will easily live up to the hype. I've heard it's going to be absolutely amazing.

Disappointing? Certainly. But...

[zapf]

• Most Windows users won't even know what Microsoft was promising two and a half years ago. They'll be happy with their shiny new glass windows and amazing alt-tab feature. Vista is ultimately going to be successful, despite the glaring development problems it's has had.
• What Microsoft should really be concerned about is the poor current implementation of the User Account Protection feature. It is really annoying as is, and there's a night and day usability difference between it and OS X's implementation. This is something that regular end users will actually notice and complain about.
• A deeper problem is interface consistency. Thurrott points out how Microsoft has basically turned into what it once despised: a reactive bureaucracy in the model of IBM in the 70's. This is really reflected in the current builds of Vista-- the interface is incredibly inconsistent compared to OS X, Gnome, or Windows 2000. It feels like twnety different teams worked on fourty different things without any real coordination or a common set of user interface guidelines.

Re:Disappointing? Certainly. But...

[dbc001]

Interface Consistency = Business Model
How does Microsoft make money? 1. Selling software. 2. Selling Books for that software. 3. Selling Certifications.
So what happens after everyone who is going to buy an OS, Book, & Cert has bought them all? What does Microsoft do? They announce that the old stuff is no longer supported, everyone has to buy the new stuff now! Then the mayhem starts. Applications slowly begin to break. Interfaces are no longer "flashy" or "in style". Then it hits the mainstream. "You don't have the new version yet? Wow, that OS is like 6 years old. You must not be on top of the IT world after all." Adoption hits critical mass, consumers start to flock to the new software. Now even the hard-core techies have to learn the bullshit new interfaces, programming languages, etc.

Point is, Microsoft's business model relies on breaking things. They can't sell the new stuff until they break the old. This is why Microsoft is dangerous to business on the whole.

Insightful

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Actually, you are correct on this one. Win 95 was cobbled together from parts of the Cairo project that either fell apart. You can see exactly what cairo was supposed to be here Ironically, enough the part that still hasn't been introduced is Winfs. Yes that's right winfs is over tweleve years late.

Re:Insightful

[IvyKing]

The OP (or GP...) was both funny and insightful.

The Cairo prject was M$'s attempt to finsih killing off OS/2 and kill off the various desktop UNIX distro's (HP had a nice candidate with the 900/712 with Lotus 123 and Ami-Pro running natively on HP-UX). Kind of thinking that the WinFS idea is like speech recognition (or Duke Nukem Forever) - remember reading Jerry Pournelle quoting Bill Godbout about the 80286 will be powerfull enough for speech recognition, this was ca 1982.

Re:Insightful

[telbij]

Ironically, enough the part that still hasn't been introduced is Winfs.

Far be it from me to be a grammar nazi, but even so I gotta say:

"Worst... Comma... Placement... EVER!"

Re:Insightful

[tmasssey]

We're *still* waiting for most of Cairo. Cairo was in answer to OS/2 and IBM/Apple/Taligent's Pink. Between the Workplace Shell and SOM, OS/2 was a decently object-oriented operating system, and Pink was supposed to be "even better". To prevent people from going in that direction, Microsoft talked up Cairo, the fully object-oriented OS built on the NT framework.

At the time (1993), there was talk of the fabled database-based file system that would revolutionize file storage. This was going to be integrated with a fully object-oriented interface: afer all, get rid of a typical file system and back everything with a database and objects just fall into place. Right, Gnome? :)

In the end, the closest we got to Cairo was Windows 2000/XP. No object-oriented interface, no database file system. In the interim, Linux started to get the same buzz that OS/2 was in 1993: growing mindshare on the desktop and highly useful in the server space. So what does Microsoft do? The exact same thing they had done a decade ago: start bringing up that advanced OS goodness "right around the corner." The embarassing part is that they used the *exact* *same* features, just a decade later!

Of course, the ones who should be embarrassed are the ones that belived the hype...

Sigh.

Me? A bitter ex-OS/2 user? Never! :)

Re:Insightful

[skingers6894]

If only Microsoft could learn from the comma and deliver earlier rather than later.

Leopard

[Diordna]

The funny thing here is that Apple is going to get OS X 10.5 out the door soon after Vista is out. So if Vista will be a "warmed-up version of OS X Tiger," Apple certainly isn't going to let Leopard be the same. This is a great opportunity for MS mockage by Apple marketing.

Never Been So Glad...

[The Lost Supertone]

Never been so glad to be a Mac user...

Re:View from a non programmer

[The-Bus]

"But basically Microsoft will bring Flash like GUI programming for real programs"

I know you meant to have that line as praise, but you've put the fear of God in me and anyone that's ever used a Flash-based UI.

Re:Don't care. Don't want to care.

[ScottLindner]

Once people started getting screwed hard right in their OWN HOME by the big media companies.. a lot of people will be looking for the change to take their home back from the corporate whorelords.

I don't even hate corporations, but this DRM crap and trying to tell us how we can live in our home owns is way out of line. And people will care too much. Maybe M$ should talk to Circuit City about their successful attempt in taking over a homeowner's living room.

And when this mass realization happens.. tons of small startups will form everywhere to help get people off M$ to Linux or whatever else is viable.

On the Programmers View

[ratboy666]

You look forward to exploiting the "3D interface". But you won't be able to. Here's why:

The "home" edition of Vista won't support the interfaces. So, any software oriented toward home use cannot depend on the feature.

Corporate desktops are plain. The investment in the required dx10 infrastructure won't happen for years. So, the feature cannot be exploited in corporate applications either.

After eliminating home and coporate, what is left? AERO really won't have much of a place, outside of enthusiasts. Unless there is an application that can start in the enthusiast domain and drive the migration.

My prediction: the ONLY application that exploits this feature will be Vista itself. Possibly Microsoft may update some applications, but it must remain an optional part.

Microsoft will offer .NET updates and maybe force MS IDE users to use the interface (not as many desktops to migrate, and its a minor part).

Don't count on this feature as a platform for 3 to 5 (or more) years, though.

Ratboy.

Re:On the Programmers View

[Kaetemi]

WPF isn't Aero. You can even use WPF in XP already.

I understand, but don't agree.

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

It would be very fun to program in avalon, but utlimately the best applications are the ones with the simplest interfaces. Too many comapnies try to be innovative and cool with their UI design and its crap. Its all nonstandard and does not behave the way all of the other controls in windows do. MAYBE avalon will entice those compaines to write all their crap in avalon, which will bring standardisation and a higher level of stability to these programs, but nto for a good 2-3 years after vista. Probley just in time for the update. I can't wait that long, as a user or a developer. I'd just rather use things ina simple elegent way without animated 3-d buttons. I'm not going to buy another computer, for a nother year at least. Even if vista is out then, I might have to take a real look at getting an intel mac Mac.

Re:View from a non programmer

[flooey]

I am not hoping for much out of Vista, but from a developers standpoint, it is exciting to see where this new Windows Presentation Layer will go. I am tired of static applications with dull grey buttons. I am looking forward to full 3D hardware acceleration and bringing rich, robust and dynamic GUI into my OS design.

Interestingly, I'm interested in the complete opposite. I think Dashboard (and possibly Windows Sidebar) is a neat idea because it has the potential to make my life easier. At best, animations and colors make my life exactly as easy as it was before, and (as the article mentions in relation to the active window) they have the potential to noticably impede me. I want things that do stuff, I don't really care what they look like.

Re:Resistant to change

[Tim Browse]

By not using it?

Re:Vista will dominate, maybe, maybe not

[slashname3]

From what has been described so far there does not appear to be any major features that will get the corporate world to jump on the upgrade bandwagon for Vista. If anything there are features that will cost a lot to use if you do upgrade. Many many companies will opt to continue to use XP for most of their systems for some time to come. Unless Microsoft can give corporate users a solid business reason to spend millions upgrading there won't be as big an uptake as Microsoft is hoping. The product has been delayed repeatedly, features have been cut, and there are viable alternatives available. As another writer wrote in another thread the reasons for the delay may be due to the software assurance deals they managed to get many many corporate users to sign up for a few years ago. Now that they have delayed the release of Vista long enough for those contracts to expire they can release the new version and charge those companies again. If they fall for it a second time shame on them. They deserve to through away that money on something that is not going to provide any real benefit to the end users. Eye candy is not a valid business reason to upgrade OS and hardware.

Most likely the biggest market for Vista will be cosumers buying new systems from the likes of Dell or HP which will bundle the new Vista OS with the hardware. They won't have a choice. Unless those vendors continue to sell lower priced systems with XP and reserve Vista for the high end systems which are apparently is needed to see all the eye candy.

User interface blunders

[Cutterman]

The two dialogues from User Account Protection that Thurrott illustrates are pretty extraordinary. It's hard to believe that MS could have produced anything so shabby. They look like examples from the Interface Hall of Shame!

The first one - http://www.winsupersite.com/images/reviews/vista_5 342_rev5_00.jpg is really contradictory and confusing.

First of all - "File access denied" - you havent been denied access, you been denied the right to delete the file (or so it seems), THEN it says "You don't currently have permission to delete this file" - Okay, but THEN it says "CONTINUE" and allows you to delete it, but only through ANOTHER dialogue!

I mean that's bizarre! COMPLETELY against any principles of interface design that I was taught.

The second/next dialogue in the series - http://www.winsupersite.com/images/reviews/vista_5 342_rev5_01.jpg - is even more bizarre. "Windows needs your permission to use this program" "File operation". WTF? I mean, that is REALLY confusing, and again COMPLETELY against good principles of IU design!

I though all this stuff about MS getting in a tangle was just exaggeration, but now I seriously think they must be. Wow!

Cutterman

He overlooks the biggest crime of all.

[Captain Rotundo]

I am not very familiar with this guy, as I dont ussually read microsoft press, but how can he link to a dialog like this: http://www.winsupersite.com/images/reviews/vista_5 342_rev5_00.jpg (it says 'You dont currently have permission to delete this file." and then offers the choices "Continue", "Skip", and "Cancel") - and not point out what a total usibility disaster it is? How can a company like microsoft in today's world put up something that abnoxious and unusable?

In case you don't get it its making a decarative statement and then presenting options that have no correlation to the statement, I'm a professional in computers, and have been using them for well over 15 years and couldn't possibly even guess what each of those options should do. Continue what? if I dont have permission to do it how can I continue. Cancel what exactly?, as far as I can tell it just said it wasn't going to do anything anyway. Skip? skip the delete I was just told I can't do? I am baffled... based on the article I guess that it should have said something like "You currently don't have permission to delete this file, what would you like to do?" and given choices like "Grant Permission", "Don't Delete" etc...

I haven't really used windows extensively in a very long time so maybe if I did I would be used to figuring out these obscure dialogues, but I don't think I would ever stop cringing when I saw them. It reminds me of the dialog windows used to put up when you went to access help for the first time in an app, it would ask how big the search database should be (or something) and give you three choices similar to "small (recommended)" "medium" "large" and no other info, not even a clue as to how this would effect your help at all. do they still do that nonsense?

Re:It's Paul Thurrott...

[diegocgteleline.es]

super-human Microsoft shill. Why would you trust him at all?

Yeah, why would trust a guy that admits and critizes Microsoft problems when they exist, that admits that most of the things in vista are inspired in mac os x, and that owns a mac and likes mac os x?

Re:Resistant to change

[Mister Whirly]

Um, DRM wasn't invented by Microsoft, nor are they the only ones using it.

Re:Here we go again..

[twofidyKidd]

Yes, it's true. The world might love Vista. And it's very likely that Vista will love up on the world like a prison inmate on a cheap hooker, but toss aside the butt sex and black eyes, and you're still left with a mediocre product.

That's where other products like OSX and Linux comes in to show you what the good lovin' is like. That's when the world will wise up to their bad relationship, and leave it for the hot piece of action that knows a thing or two about a thing or two.

Re:Another Windows OS... So what?

[besenslon]

Skype for one. Their new video stuff requires XP, and does not work on 2K.

Re:It's Paul Thurrott...

[Jugalator]

Well, it is the guy who called the Vista Beta 1 a train wreck after all, so it's not like it hasn't happened before, and that's why he's the Microsoft reviewer of my choice. I mean, listening to e.g an open source enthusiast isn't going to give you a less biased review, and unfortunately I don't know too many reviewers that use to criticize Microsoft when it's due without for that sake being anti-Microsoft per general philosophy.

Transparent Windows: learn from Apple's Mistake

[Aqua OS X]

There are a few useful nitches for transparent windows, but applying them to system windows is a giant no-no.

You'd think MS would learn from Apple's mistake... instead they took it to the next level of ridiculousness. When OS X first came out it was littered with transparent menus, menu bars, dialogs, etc. A lot of the elements have either been removed, or brought up to about 98% opacity. You might not even notice the transparency unless you really look closely.

Drastic transparency looked -awesome- in marketing screen shots, and it was promoted as a way to know if content existed behind something such as a window bar. However, it was really annoying. Interface elements become difficult to distinguish and it hindered the speed in which it took to accomplish a task.

But, at least MS gives users the option to turn this crap off. Apple never did that. Mac users needed to wait for Apple to slowly remedy the UI elements we were complaining about.

Re:Transparent Windows: learn from Apple's Mistake

[misleb]

You'd think MS would learn from Apple's mistake... instead they took it to the next level of ridiculousness. When OS X first came out it was littered with transparent menus, menu bars, dialogs, etc. A lot of the elements have either been removed, or brought up to about 98% opacity. You might not even notice the transparency unless you really look closely.

And what makes it worse for MS is that they have such a long release cycle. So people are going to be "stuck" with a bad GUI for many years. Of course, you can probalby shut it off, but peopel are going to be impacted by the first (default) impression and some may not even think to try to fix it. 5 years from now, people are going to be buying new Dells with the same horrible defaults as Vista. Apple, on the other hand, has released several major versions of OS X in the time between Windows XP and Vista. And each time they tweaked things just a little bit... and almost always for the better.

-matthew

Re:Posix and security

[IntlHarvester]

This is "role-based" security, not "user-based"

So, no, Linux/Unix has not been doing this since inception. There's been military versions of Unix that have done it for a long time, but it's hasn't been a generally available feature (and still isn't on the desktop even for SELinux distros).

But you keep coming back.

[lee n. field]

I don't hate Windows Vista, and I certainly don't hate Microsoft for disappointing me and countless other customers with a product that doesn't even come close to meeting its original promises.

Happens with every release of Windows. The happy users just keep coming back. Classic abusive relationship.

Somehow, I don't think you are average

[Ahnteis]

Somehow, I don't think your requirements are even CLOSE to what an average person wants.

Virtual desktops? Do you have any concept of how confusing that would be to most people? (Do you have any idea how many free virtual desktop programs you can download if you really want the feature?)

And follow mouse? Just plain annoying.

Shell? Most users never even know it's there.

Re:Vista will dominate, maybe, maybe not

[decipher_saint]

I have to agree with this right here, some of the large clients I work with are just getting around to this newfangled "XP" nonsense, *if* Vista proves itself useful to the business world it won't be on those machines for anywhere from 3 to 5 years (hopefully, at least) and even then who's to say it won't get leapfrogged by more business capable OSs.

As another poster mentioned Vista won't make an appearance on any of my home rigs for some time (if at all), it reminds me of the Windows ME release; over-hyped and dysfunctional trash.

Re:Posix and security

[IntlHarvester]

No, the program's rights are a subset of your user's rights.

Re:Resistant to change

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Nobody wants a change for the worse. But chances are that, just like Win95, 2k and XP, everybody will learn the new features, understand why the change is better and will be thankful they are past the old days of the previous OSs.

The problem is, most of the actual features were ripped out and mothballed, while most of the anti-features were left in. For features you get a graphics card accelerated UI, some security enhancements that reviewers claim are really annoying and poorly implemented, Some dev tool improvements, and that is about it. For anti-features you get DRM restricting use of your data, intentionally crippled OpenGL performance, a built-in proprietary replacement for the open PDF standard in an attempt to lock you in even more, etc. You do get indexed files (done less well than Google desktop or OS X), you don't get a database file system, you don't get resolution independent UI, you don't get a usable shell environment, etc. All the reasons to get it were ripped out while all the reasons to avoid it were left in. This makes sense for Microsoft. You have to buy a new computer eventually so you'll be forced to buy a copy of Vista bundled with it, regardless of the feature set. It just sucks donkey balls for users.

Re:Resistant to change

[shmlco]

"But there are still a lot of people looking forward optimistically to the new features in Vista."

True, if we just knew which version had which features. MS needs to take another page from Apple's book here. With Apple, there's OS X, and OS X Server.

But no, MS thinks we need the lite, medium, large, extra-large, huge, and super-sized versions, all at different price points, with the versions worth using being more expensive, of course.

Re:It's Paul Thurrott...

[diegocgteleline.es]

"I've been a Mac fan my entire life"

"Microsoft is working on similar, if further-reaching, technology for Longhorn. Apple's solution, however, is here right now and it appears to work quite well. Score one for Apple."

"Overall, I've always been a big fan of Safari, and I'd use it rather than Firefox or IE if it were available on Windows. It's an excellent application."

"Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" is, in fact, a minor upgrade to an already well-designed and rock-solid operating system. It will not change the way you use your computer at all, and instead uses the exact same mouse and windows interface we've had since the first Mac debuted in 1984. That isn't a complaint about Tiger, per se: It's a high-quality release. My issue here is with marketing, not with reality."

"Apple Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" is the strongest OS X release yet and a worthy competitor to Windows XP"

"And unlike Longhorn, it's shipping any day now. What a concept."

"The graphics subsystem is substantially improved, if a little obviously modeled after that in Mac OS X. Heck, half of the features of Windows Vista seem to have been lifted from Apple's marketing materials"

"Windows Vista will still include pervasive index-based searching features modeled, apparently, after the Spotlight feature in Mac OS X."

My Wife is Switching to the Mac

Yes, it definitively sounds like the typical Windows who can't write non-biased opinions about other products

One memorable line from his review of 10.4 had it that Windows XP SP2 was a more significant update than was Tiger, yet elsewhere in that review he just casually pointed out how 10.4 was little more than a large collection of bug fixes

Maybe because it may very well true? Sorry if it doesn't means the same for you, but the addition of applications to get the time, weather and stocks (nice, but "revolutionary"???), spothlight, quartz 2d extreme (an optimization to an already good graphics subsystem) and core image looks to me like a light addition compared with all the internal features microsoft touched/add in SP2 (rewriting part of the IE UI, rewrite part of the IE internals to handle better the security objects, the add-on manager, the much-improved firewall, the much improved wireless support, the reworked RPC internals, updated directx, the non-executable stack protection. You may argue that Mac OS X already does all what those XP updates do but for XP SP2 is a HUGE jump, much bigger than what 10.4 for mac os x 10.3

Re:Biggest Problem with Windows...

[tenco]

In Unix, I can assign a file an owner, one or more groups, and the type of access I want groups, owner, and everyone else to have to that file.

I know, I know. ACLs (you are using NTFS, right?) are a bit complicated to someone used to standard UNI* rights managment. If you cannot find ACLs in Win XP Pro, just turn off simple rights managment in your explorer preferences.

I can also be logged in as a user, and then also log in as root if I need to make some system changes, without logging off as a users. In Windows, I must go through an annoying process of switching accounts to log in as an administrator.

Discover "runas" or "Fast user switching".

Finally, the system doesn't have a coherent way of managing permissions. For example, if I install a program as root/admin, it will create a directory in Program Files, and assign the permissions as such, that when a non-root user logs in and the program installed tries to write it's data to that programs directory, it will cause an error.

That's not the fault of Windows, it's the fault of the installed programm. A simple, but not very secure, workaround for me is to give write access to problematic files/registry values to a user who needs these.

Why can't Microsoft just borrow the Unix permission system, it is not like it is patented or anything?

The standard UNI* permission system is way more simpler than ACLs.

Until recently i only used Linux. But my new shiny hardware unfortunately isn't supported (sata_sil issues). So i had to use Windows XP Home (slightly extended through a registry hack). The last Windows i used was Windows 98, and i must admit that current Windows XP is not that bad, after all.

Not the first time they haven't met expectations

[Locke2005]

Imagine how poor Melinda Gates felt on her honeymoon, when she discovered what Bill had been promising her for years was going to be "the greatest thing ever" could be summed up in two words -- "micro" and "soft".

Re:Biggest Problem with Windows...

[Lord Crc]

In Unix, I can assign a file an owner, one or more groups, and the type of access I want groups, owner, and everyone else to have to that file.

You can do this in Windows too.

I can also be logged in as a user, and then also log in as root if I need to make some system changes, without logging off as a users. In Windows, I must go through an annoying process of switching accounts to log in as an administrator.

They've finally fixed this in Vista from what I've heard. They've named it User Account Control. Basically it will only run the programs that needs admin access in the context of an administrator account, after asking you first.

I know that modern applications are not supposed to write to the Program Files directory and are supposed to write to the Application Data directory under the users specific directory... unfortunatly, the majority of software programs are not created to do that!

So it's Microsofts fault that application writers ignore Microsofts advice for how to write "proper" installers for Windows? Yeah backwards compatebility is an issue, but it's been like 6 years since the "Documents and Settings" directory was born.

Why can't Microsoft just borrow the Unix permission system, it is not like it is patented or anything?

It already has a superset of the Unix permission system, so I don't see how this is neccessary? For a file (or registry key etc), you can set permissions for any number of groups and users, and in a much more fine grained manner than the standard Unix way (unless you're using POSIX ACLs).

Re:It's Paul Thurrott...

[ickoonite]

I'm not really in the mood, but OK...

The main issue I had with that review is that its essential purpose was to highlight two features - Spotlight and Dashboard - one which could be safely explained away as being in Longhorn and one which could be dismissed as relatively pointless eye-candy.* It ignored advances like Core Data (probably too technical for Thurrott, and not particularly interesting for his readership, but some developers have been literally wanking over it. OK, not literally, but...) and, more obviously - until he later edited it in response to criticism - things like Automator, which is a wonderful way to make scripting more accessible. At the same time, he found himself able to devote a whole page's worth of text to the most cursory of updates to DVD Player! There are other things, but I'm not going to review 10.4 here as it's not relevant. In any case, the effect is not to praise the product at hand, but to trivialise it. It's quite clever, I'll give him that.

It's the subtle digs that nark me, as I said in the grandparent. I know he loves Mac OS X - the design of his Internet Nexus blog demonstrated as much, as for a long time it was awash with graphics lifted from Tiger - but he cannot resist taking a poke at every possible opportunity. For example:

In the previous version of Mac OS X, version 10.3, Apple introduced a feature for power users called Exposé that seeks to help manage the multiple applications and windows one typically opens in the course of using a Mac.

It's the "power users" dismissal that irritates me. The bit that says "Macs are for elitists, rather than for you and me." In fact, power users use Command+H and Command+Tab. Exposé is for people like my sister who want/like a simple visual representation of all their windows. Thurrott gets it totally wrong, and I can't help but wonder whether the misunderstanding is deliberate. And although he doesn't on this occasion, he is wont to bemoan its lack of keyboard shortcuts - this one I always love, because it makes me think of Windows Explorer and how you have to press Alt, F, W, F (separately) to create a new folder because there is no shortcut key. But I digress...

As to a couple of your quotes:

"Windows Vista will still include pervasive index-based searching features modeled, apparently, after the Spotlight feature in Mac OS X."

I'm not sure where this came from, but it's highy amusing. It's well-known that Apple copied Microsoft over Spotlight.

"The graphics subsystem is substantially improved, if a little obviously modeled after that in Mac OS X. Heck, half of the features of Windows Vista seem to have been lifted from Apple's marketing materials"

And herein my point is illustrated beautifully. In the Tiger review - in fact, in the bit that you quote - he can't help but include a little dig at Apple's marketing, or smoke and mirrors, as I like to call it. It all adds to the negative perception of Apple one takes from the article. But when it's Vista we're talking about, "Apple's marketing materials" is the fount of all Microsoft's innovation, and the negative connotations simply aren't there. He's schizophrenic.

But I think that the most succinct way to sum it all up is with numbers. After thoroughly savaging the current Vista, he awards it 5 stars. And Mac OS X 10.4 which, whatever you want to say about Windows XP SP2, was a far more significant update**? 4 stars.

Piffle.

iqu :|

(* I was dismissive of it at first, but with sufficient RAM, the dictionary and weather widgets are remarkably useful.)
(** Remember, as I have noted above, Thurrott's review is not a useful review of Tiger. If your opinions on Mac OS X are based on his review, then I cannot blame you for your conclusion, because, as I said, his purpose is to trivialise rather than to provide objective comment. Otherwise, consider Spotlight, RSS, Automator, CoreData, CoreI

Re:Don't care. Don't want to care.

[AeroIllini]

and yes I have tried Open Office, but I got too many complaints from people who still use office and complain about OO screwing up doc conversions... plus OO is resource hog and takes ages to load.

Many of the complaints I hear along these lines are usually referring to the 1.x versions of OOo, and were true at that time. However, the 2.x versions of OpenOffice are very stable, not as resource intensive, and much more mature than their 1.x counterparts (Sun had a big hand in that). Document conversion from MS Office is a problem still, but even Microsoft has problems converting between various versions of MS Office, so it's hardly a showstopper.

Bottom line: employees are usually retrained when an office upgrades to a new version of MS Office anyway, so why would this be any different? And because the native format of OpenOffice is OpenDocument, once you make the costly conversion from MS Office formats, you will not have to worry about conversion again (not necessarily because OpenDocument is the end-all of formats, but because it is open and documented, so that third parties can easily write batch converters for whatever new formats might pop up).

Admittedly, third party Windows-only software can be a problem. But just work that $200-a-seat savings into a contract with some software firm to get electronics or drafting software ported to Linux. Many CAD programs exist for UNIX and can be easily ported, and the Windows-only programs could run through an emulation layer such as Wine. The long-term cost savings would be quite high.

The bottom line is that there are absolutely no technical barriers to switching to Linux/OpenOffice on a workstation computer. There are only human resources challenges such as training, fear of change, and complacency, and perhaps budgetary concerns during the initial switch.

Very interesting...

[Warlock7]

How Microsoft, a software company, can develop such crappy software while Apple, arguably a hardware company, can develop such good software.

Even more interesting is that half of the features missing from the stripped down version of Vista are already in Apple's OS X and have been for about a year now. And Leopard is right around the corner.

Keep up the good work Bill & company.

Re:Posix and security

[dbIII]

This is "role-based" security, not "user-based". So, no, Linux/Unix has not been doing this since inception.

I refer you to the "/etc/group" file on almost every version of *nix for consideration as well as file permissions being able to be set differently as user/group/all for read/write/execute tasks.

If you meant something completely different then say so - I only have the incorrect blanket statement from before to go on. Yes, so the new version of MS Windows may be cool - but please consider that other systems may have solved the same problem in different ways.

But don't you remember the good old days?

[BadEvilYoda]

C:\FOO> Error deleting FOO.BAR
                  (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?

Re:Don't care. Don't want to care.

[plover]

I may be bound to Windows by necessity, but I have no reason to downgrade to Vista at home. My "outside" projects are things like DLLs and COM objects, and are pretty much restricted to Win32 development. Some of the people who use them still run on Windows 98. If I wanted, I could probably continue to do everything I currently do in NT 4.0 with no real changes.

I'm not a big GUI hacker (services and components are where I shine,) so the new chrome in Vista will have no impact on my code anyway.

Even once I do get into .NET development, the .NET 2.0 framework is going to continue to run on XP for a long time to come, as is Visual Studio. That's one of the positive aspects of .NET -- it's not bound to the OS.

That's why I'm not likely to switch my main home machine over to any of the flavors of Linux any time soon; although with mono approaching 98% feature completion it may become a possibility. I don't want to rule out any options, but at this point there is nothing in Vista to attract me and plenty to repel me.

True victim of Monopoly

[Enrique1218]

The true victim of the Microsoft monopoly is Microsoft. I could see the writing on the wall with Windows ME. Microsoft was no longer the underdog but the standard, so there was little incentive to get features right. Windows XP was an improvement but fast forward 5 years later and we know it had (has) major issues. But again, it seemed that Microsoft was more interested in milking its monopoly than getting it right. Now Vista is on the horizon, will they finally get it right? I don't believe so. The broken promises section seems to illustrate that Microsoft bit off more than they could chew. They had to copy OSX but they had to completely outdo Apple. That was the problem beacause while Apple was improving the OS in little jumps, Microsoft engineers were throwing away months of coding to start over. Now, OSX will be pretty close to Vista when it comes and they may have to move Vista out to show something for their years of work (what is the bug-o-meter going to read for Vista). Also, I think the bloated system requirements was for the sake of OEMs selling more expensive PCs than providing the user with innovation. I am glad I move off of Windows when I did because this is silly. Apple, being the underdog, has good incentive to get it right.

Re:Posix and security

[civilizedINTENSITY]

OK, replying to myself, but I should have googled first:
D.F. Ferraiolo and D.R. Kuhn "Role Based Access Control" 15th National Computer Security Conference (1992) - the original RBAC paper.

As defined in the TCSEC and commonly implemented, DAC is an access control mechanism that permits system users to allow or disallow other users access to objects under their control:
A means of restricting access to objects based on the identity of subjects and/or groups to which they belong. The controls are discretionary in the sense that a subject with a certain access permission is capable of passing that permission (perhaps indirectly) on to any other subject (unless restrained by mandatory access control).

and,

A role based access control (RBAC) policy bases access control decisions on the functions a user is allowed to perform within an organization. The users cannot pass access permissions on to other users at their discretion. This is a fundamental difference between RBAC and DAC.

Re:Resistant to change

[DCMonkey]

Actually there is a good reason, and 2 ways to get around it:

1: Legacy ICD's - These are the ICD's that are available today for use on Windows XP. These will continue to work on Windows Vista, but will disable the DWM when they are loaded in to the process of the application that's using OpenGL. The reason for this is that Legacy ICD's operate directly on the GPU without going through Windows at all, and we have no way of redirecting application's output in a stable, predictable manner.

2: Windows Vista ICD's - this is a new path for 3rd party ICD's introduced for Windows Vista that will work in a way that is compatible with desktop composition. Essentially allowing direct access to the GPU for hardware accellaration, but then having the final surface that appears to be the front buffer to the application actually be a shared surface that gets composed by the DWM

From: http://blogs.msdn.com/kamvedbrat/archive/2006/02/2 2/537624.aspx

Texas Hole'em???

[HaydnH]

From TFA:

"Among these missing features are the various Vista Ultimate Extras (features and services), including a Texas Hold-em game that was developed by the people behind Windows Calendar and Sidebar, Virtual PC Express, Media Center support for the Xbox 360 Media Center Extender, automatic hard disk defragmentation, themed slideshows, Windows Movie Maker HD, and so on."

I know a lot of people only use Windows for games... but stating the first missing feature to be a Texas Hold'em game is hardly important!

Re:Resistant to change

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Wait a second - why would OpenGL performance be crippled (this is a serious question, I didn't know MS was intending to cripple OpenGL at all)?

Vista runs all graphics via DirectX now. This means for a application to use OpenGL they hand the OpenGL calls to the OS, which hands them to DirectX, which hands them to the hardware. Basically add all the bottlenecks of both graphics methodologies together plus some additional overhead. This is their attempt to kill OpenGL entirely including OpenGL support in graphics cards.

How do we know that indexing will be worse than the other vendors pushing it, when we haven't seen and tested the final product(ok, rhetoric)?

So far the demoed feature (from what I've read) does not support plugging in new file formats for indexing. This means a search won't find files that contain the search term in an OpenOffice file, or any other filetype MS does not bother to add themselves.

Why isn't the Windows shell environment usable? The ability to shell script in Win2K3 surpasses any previous version of Windows to date.

According to MS, they planned to add the following features into the new shell environment:

Aliases, job control, command substitution, pipelines, regular expressions, transparent remote execution, command discovery via reflection APIs, object-based properties/methods, many server scripting, pervasive auto-complete.

That has since been "delayed." Note, most of these are features *NIX users take for granted and lacking them makes us cry. Every Windows machine here in engineering has Cygwin installed to perform a few simple tasks that for some reason are impossible or very hard with the normal Windows (DOS) shell environment.

As for the security enhancements, well honestly I find it laughable. The reviewers probably never used Linux or OS X, so they probably aren't used to the limitations of not running as Admin/Root/whatever.

The reviewer compares some of it to OS X, mentioning that OS X does not seem to make you click through seven dialogues to do a basic task. Some of the screenshots show also show some truly wretched UI built around it.

The other big complain from Mr Thurrott? It's taking too long, it's not delivering on promises, blah.

If you haven't noticed, Apple tends to under-promise and over-deliver. Linux is an open process and everyone can actually look and see what state of development features are in. MS on the other hand, tends to intentionally over-promise extravagant features to be released "real soon" in the hopes that people will delay buying from competitors and just use MS offerings. It works too. Obviously all software will have some level of bugs, especially if they announce a deadline and meet it. That does not excuse delivering buggy versions of features years late or not at all.