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20 Things You Won't Like About Vista
feminazi writes "Computerworld's Scot Finnie details 20 things you won't like in Windows Vista, with a visual tour to prove it. He says that MS has favored security over end-user productivity, making the user feel like a rat caught in a maze with all the protect-you-from-yourself password-entry and 'Continue' boxes required by the User Account Controls feature." From the article: "In its supreme state of being, Microsoft knows precisely what's best for you. It knows that because its well-implemented new Sleep mode uses very little electricity and also takes only two or three seconds to either shut down or restart, you want to use this mode to 'turn off' your computer, whether you realize it or not. It wants to teach you about what's best. It wants to make it harder for you to make a mistake."
2. It's only slightly shorter than War & Peace.
Seriously, remember back when you could read an entire article on one page instead of clicking through 20+ pages so the site could bump up the number of ad impressions they score? Man, that was great.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
You've probably had a relative, friend, girlfriend or a kid like this: whatever you do for them, it's never f*cking enough.
.NET2
Microsoft: what do you want in Vista
General consumer market: we want security, we want more neat graphics (like OSX!), we want better sleep mode, we want more games
Developers: we want a better and robust programming framework that's capable and fully OOP
Microsoft: ok here's Vista, we give you more security, more neat graphics, better sleep mode, more games; to developers, we give you WinFX, a brand new programming model based on
Developers: Screw your programming model, it locks me into Windows, managed code is slow, I can't run it on XP without 100MB of runtime installs and so on
General consumer market: we don't want SO much security, we don't want SO much graphics, we don't want the sleep mode SO much, and your games suck
It's ironic that everyone is critizing MS for improving security features, yet everyone is also criticizing them for their lack of security. I would rather have slightly slower security then having my infrastructure compromised. Do the math... 10 users in a small business with 1 hour less productivity. At a rate of say 20.00 an hour I've wasted $200. 10 users in small business with less security and more productivity. 1 incident... Cost to fix, cost to investigate, cost to clean up. I don't get what the big deal. In a production environment I would hope IT staffers customized their Operating Systems to what is necessary for workers to actually work. This means the majority of qualms about explorer having file, view, etc., hidden are irrelevant. When I migrated my former office to XP from Windows 2000, I customized the menus to make it look like Windows 2000 to avoid having users go bonkers not understanding Windows XP before they even logged in to Windows XP. Most weren't aware of the transition so I miss the author's point with most of his ramblings.
Infiltrated dot Net
Should't it be titled "20 Things You Might Not Like About Windows Vista Should These Features Remain In The Final Release 6 Months From Now"?
Sure, there may only be around 6 months or so to go before Vista supposedly becomes available to OEMs and whatnot. While that likely will translate into a lot of the "things" the author takes a disliking to making it into the final build due to time crunch, it does not mean everything is signed, sealed, and delivered. I've never understood the point of articles like this; telling me what I won't like based upon somebody else's opinions on a product that won't be available for at least another half a year. Things do change, even with the folks at Redmond, or so I'm told.
If big boobed women work at Hooters do one legged women work at IHOP?
Everything about this article seems kind of strange. Better security is mostly a good thing, especially for an OS as traditionally as insecure as Windows, isn't it?
It knows that because its well-implemented new Sleep mode uses very little electricity and also takes only two or three seconds to either shut down or restart, you want to use this mode to 'turn off' your computer, whether you realize it or not.
Um... I mostly use Macs, and I almost NEVER shut them off, for that very reason. I'm sure once Windows users finally have a sleep mode that actually fucking works like it's supposed to, they will also discover that simply closing the laptop lid (or selecting "Sleep" instead of "Shut Down" on their desktops), and being ready to do stuff in a manner of seconds when you come back to it, is a far, far nicer way to live as well.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Tux fans totally skipped the article
Windows applogists accuse author of being an OS X fanboi
OS X fans didn't read the article and simply stated how Vista is a lame rehash of Cheeta/Puma/Jaguar/Panther/Tiger/Leopard
People who RTFA recognize the author is both nit picking Beta software and pointing out Microsoft's overarching issue for two decades - user interface built upon system functionality instead of the other way around.
People who will actually buy Vista and/or use it on a regular basis type away mindlessly at their desks, unaware of the storm that brews on Slashdot
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
In all I've read I still haven't learned about many things that would have interested me more. Have they fixed it so programs are automatically categorized on the Start Menu (applications/games/utilities/etc?). I heard something about a games area, but what about the rest? Can program still install shortcuts on my desktop, quick-launch bar, and put an icon in my system tray so easily? Is there some way of managing the stuff that ends up in my system tray (like those little utilities that aren't in the start menu and are a pain to get rid of)?
Many of his complaints are stupid though. It takes too long to install. So? What else is new? Windows is like that now. It doesn't matter that much. There aren't enough Widgets? It's a beta. How many Widgets were there for OS X when it launched? About the same number, that is those supplied by the OS vender.
Vista may be better in many ways than XP/2000 for end users. But the OS they are delivering would have been good a few years ago. Now it just seems dated and bloated. The requirements are through the roof. If OS X can do it with lower requirements last year, then MS should be able to do the same thing.
It's strange. Even reading the articles about how great Vista will be (and we've all seen tons of those) just make me feel better about jumping ship to OS X. Vista has shown me just how bad journalism is in most of the PC industry. There is nothing like a terribly delayed OS that had some of it's best features cut (WinFS) being called the best thing in years and an end to all PC user's problems to prove how much of a shill magazines are.
But then again comparing Tiger when it was released to MS's feature list of what Vista was supposed to have when it was released 2 years later and using that to draw the conclusion "Tiger is nice but just wait for Vista" was an obvious sign too.
-- "Happy in Mac land"
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
From the Coke can to my keyboard... by way of my nose.
:)
Post of the month.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
What DRM issues are involved with Vista? The only ones I have heard about are that a HDMI adapter may be needed to view blu-ray / HD-dvd video.
I'm honestly interested because I'm a bit tired of building computers, and so my next may be Vista or OSX (if apple ever makes a tablet PC).
Depends on how it's done. Poorly designed security (that gets in your way, and interupts needlessly and annoyingly) gets turned off, or worked around. Turning it off may include installing XP.
Security isn't just 'lock things up by default', it is thinking about what needs to be locked, when it needs to be locked, and how is the best way to unlock it when that is necisary.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
Let's see... 250 million copies of vista (let's call it $100 each)
;)
200 million copies of office (let's call it $150 each)
$55 billion... in two years... just for Vista and Office on new machines? We can debate whether or not this product will sell well, but I don't see MS going bankrupt with those numbers
--------------------- -me, Crusher of those who are Foolish (don't be foolish)
Yes "smart" cut and paste in word is a really crap idea and I wish it was off by default, as is cut and paste as HTML which can only be avoided by doing Paste Special all the time or writing a macro and binding it to CTRL-V.
You forgot a big one. Who is the moron who thought that moving around your menu bar (not the toolbar, the menu bar) was a feature ? When I walk past "average users" of Office, they almost all have the menu bar in a weird position because they moved it by mistake, have no idea how they did it and no idea how to put it back.
Slashdot anagrams to "Sad Sloth"
Incidently, that no longer makes it a peer network (workgroup) but instead relies on a hierarchy (domain).
I've never had problems with seeing shares on a domain either...
agreed. password prompts do not a secure system make.
Know what would earn people a lot of points? Copying important parts of these pages to a Comment post before they're slashdotted
I am NOT a number! I am a - oh wait, I'm number 761710. Look! 761710!
Anyway, I'm sure you know all this, but not everyone seems to appreciate this fact.
Generally, if I use a root account, it's because I'm doing a mix of admin and other stuff. I could equally well use a user who is specifically configured for what I want. Root's powers go well beyond what I'm likely to use at any given time.
The primary reason people don't like role-based computing is that it's bloody hard to get it configured correctly. A big source of complaints is for servers like Apache, which do a lot of very different tasks and can (potentially) access many different types of service.
But hard is not the same as impossible. It does require effort, though, and a lot of planning in terms of what you are doing. Role-based computing is not designed for sit-down-and-hack operators, it's designed for people who architect their systems and know the interrelationships involved.
This is not to criticise the sit-down-and-hack folk - for a start, I'm usually one of them, and for another, the architects may be great admins but they're generally poor coders outside of the "mission critical" applications (life support, for example). Sit-down-and-hack types get things done, they get things done fast, and they get things done now. Software from such coders is frequently buggy, which is why peer-review is essential. Ultimately, though, hackers (in this correct use of the term) don't need all the powers of root - though usually far more than Windows allots to general users.
The problem with having a set number of specially-designed caricature user-types (which is the Windows model) is that users invariably end up way too restricted or way too powerful. REAL role-based computing is as fine-grained as you like, with the ideal restrictions being solely that you can't do what you wouldn't want to do anyway.
This is not to say hardened Linux, Trusted Irix, or any other system out there, is vastly better. I believe that there's a few thousand times as much room for improvement as there have been improvements since the first time-sharing OS' were developed. However, if we fail to criticise what is blatantly incorrect design, nobody will ever design anything better. If the inferior design is considered "good enough", there will be no motivation to design anything better - and no incentive for users to switch to it.
It is absolutely vital for the health of the industry that critics wrench every last defect that they can find out of a system and hold them to the light. In Open Source, this is part of the normal software lifecycle and is usually done on mailing lists, bugtrackers and pubs across the globe. For closed source, especially with the limitations on discovery placed by assorted US laws, we rely on tech journalists to do this work.
Sure, the journalist in question could have done a better job. They could probably have found twenty times the faults, and compressed the article to half the size in the process. But instead of telling me why they're not really "problems", maybe you should be telling journalists to explain their conclusions better and to dig a little deeper into the subject.
Hell, Windows 2000 reputedly came out with 65,536 known, documented bugs. Where were the investigative journalists, the go-getters, hunting through every last scrap of available information, questioning/bribing Microsoft employees for every last drop of data? If journalists don't have any problems doing this for celebrity movie stars who have done no harm and have no real capacity to - ever, then why not do this in an industry where a crashed computer could cost billions in some cases, or a breeched server could compromise tens of millions of bank accounts or credit cards? In both cases, we're talking nine or ten figure sums. Telephon
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
CompUSA lists XP Pro @ $289 (full, not upgrade).
I imagine Vista will be priced in that ballpark.
Assuming it is:
250M * 299 = $74,750,000,000
CompUSA lists Office 2003 @ $424.99 (after $75 MIR)
200M * 425 = $85,000,000,000.
Combined profit : $159,750,000,000
Now, techies are smart enough to not purchase from a B&M store..
Prices from Newegg:
XP Pro full - $134.99
250M * 135 = $33,750,000,000
Office 2003 not listed on Newegg.
It's highly doubtful that Newegg's prices would be any/much lower than anyone else's once Vista is released, but you never know. Maybe it'll $10 less or so.
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
a maze with all the protect-you-from-yourself password-entry and 'Continue' boxes
If anything, than this provides solid proof that MS is unable to learn from mistakes. Read Confirmation Dialogs harmful for a glance of what's been going through the heads of a lot of security professionals the past few years (disclaimer: including me): That the whole "are you sure?" bullshit is a huge fiasco. The only thing it did was train users to click "Ok" or "Continue" without bothering to read the actual text. If there wouldn't be such a slobbering mass of 'em, the dialogs might be taken seriously, but there is and they aren't.
I said it a couple months ago, and I still stand by it: Vista is a trainwreck happening in slow-motion. It's horrible to behold.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Actually, it does frequently pay the developer for adding on features and documentation/training, if 3rd parties want them. But that's beside the point -- you can sell GPL software that you wrote correctly from scratch. Sure, other people can try to sell it as well, but they can't guarantee support from the person who wrote it in the first place. So sell a GPL product. The people who would pirate it anyway will get it for free elsewhere, and you'll make money selling to those who want the option of support from the original developer, as well as added interest in their feature requests for the next version.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
Where is your proof? Based on my knowledge of power usage (at least in laptops), this makes no sense whatsoever. RAM power usage is a pittance in comparison to HD/Monitor/CPU wattage needs, and that's when it's actively being used!
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
So who is forcing you to write open source as your only occupation?
As a developer who routinely has a crapload of apps open at any given time, a reboot is often times more than "the sake of 20 seconds". It means all my open applications are shut down, many of which will not automatically restart and/or not reopen all of the documents I had open. For me, from a productivity standpoint the difference between logging off/shutting down overnight as opposed to sleep mode/leaving it running is as much as 15-30 minutes of trying to figure out where I left off compared to everything being exactly as I left it the night before.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
I can leave my powerbook asleep for 6 days before it runs out of battery. I can leave it off for.... 6 days before it runs out of battery. That tells me that the amount of electricity I'd be saving by shutting down instead of sleeping is too small to measure casually. Regardless of what you may think, the self-refresh mode of modern DRAM is very efficient, to the point where I wouldn't be surprised if you used more electricity booting up once then you do in sleep mode all day. A pair of AAs could probably refresh your computer's DRAM for a month or longer (depending on how much you have, of course).
This may not be the case on some PCs. Mac sleep mode is legendary for how good it is, and PC sleep mode is notorious for how bad it is... Some of my PCs leave the fans spinning in sleep mode, for example. Others work great. I make no arguments or excuses for shitty components.
144 kilowatt-seconds? That's 0.04 kilowatt-hours, which, at $0.10 per kilowatt-hour, comes out to $0.004. Sorry, not much ouch.
Why the privledge[sic] escalation feature will only help competent people, clueless users will just treat it as another, annoying, hoop to jump through. They'l just blanketly[sic] issue the password when asked, without thinking if this is really an action that should need higher privlidges[sic]. I've already seen the same behaviour[sic] from OS-X users and from Windows users with regards to downloaded files.
From what I've read of the implementation, I agree with your assessment. I would like to stress, however, that this is due to the crappy UI implementation more than anything else. Almost all users (even OS X users) have been conditioned by years of being given (OK)(Cancel) dialogue boxes with poorly phrased technobabble inside. clicking "OK" is what you do to make you computer do stuff. It's like putting gas in a car to make it run.
Sadly this atrocious UI design has been copied elsewhere, including in some OS X applications. To implement this properly users should not be given a "continue" button. They should be given two or more real actions as options. For example, "The program 'Aliens8' would like to change your monitor resolution. (Allow it to change resolution one time)(Always let it change the resolution)(Don't let it change the resolution)(Configure Advanced Settings)."
In the above example, the user is given real choices. They have to read it to pick one. They can't click "OK or "Continue" a million times until it is second nature.
It is also important to note that these dialogues should be kept to a minimum. For example, on most home user systems, there is no reason the default settings should not allow all users to configure the resolutions for their own login within normal ranges and without being asked for permission. Making these dialogue boxes rare will make users pay more attention to them as well.
With Vista hopefully we'll (eventually) be able to have the admins use normal acocunts, and just escalate as needed. However I've got now illusions that this will provide any overall increase in security for home users.
Until MS gets serious about making their own software and apps created with the default settings in their dev tools work in non-privileged accounts and provide a VM or other such accommodation for legacy applications, I don't see a lot of hope for this. And you're right, it won't do much for regular user security except convince people that security is the opposite of usability. This poorly designed interface will just annoy most people.
In the Windows world, "browse the web" means to download/install/execute potentially-hostile code and run it with full privileges with access right down to the hardware, all without any more user-interaction than a mouse click or two. Are you sure you "never change anything"? ;-)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
1. It's not "insecure by design".
2. "Everyone else" has since gone on to do it as well, making the argument that it was done to "put a competitor at a disadvantage" rather shaky.
Problems with ATI drivers? Surely you jest. ;)
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