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Business 2.0 Says 'Boycott Vista'
amyandjake writes "Business 2.0 has a story about Vista's delays, the amount of time wasted by Microsoft bringing Vista to market, and the fact that it doesn't seem to have any compelling features for upgrading. The last paragraph of the story says 'Boycott Vista. Keep your old Windows XP PC around. Don't buy a new one. That's the only way we have to let Microsoft know Vista is an overhyped, late, and pointless update to XP — a perfectly fine operating system.'" Relatedly, torrensmith writes "Paul Thurrott is at it again with his seemingly never-ending supply of information about Windows Vista. This time, he discusses the things he dislikes about the program, in the article The Dark Side of Windows Vista RC1."
Is the decree of consent over? In Paul Thurrott's article, aside from the refreshing observation Mr. Thurrott is willing to critique as well as fawn, I find it notable he picks one example where MS has been inconsistent and stupid (I agree) with their navigation ergonomics.
From his article, it's pretty clear MS is shipping a DVD maker, and from just one screen it appears to be a video/other type of application. Is this now considered de rigeur intrinsic Operating System? I know the definition of OS has blurred and been trickier to pin down, and I would expect an OS to have the appropriate drivers to allow burning of a DVD (it is after all, a component of the OS, or at least drivers for a DVD burner are).
If I were ROXIO or NERO, I'd be pissed, this looks like a de facto and direct competitor product, and if it's bundled as "part of the OS", it would seem close to the line of leveraging again.
And later in Thurrott's article he mentions the builtin virus checking -- something previously discussed on slashdot -- this also seems like another market niche MS is conveniently incorporating as part of their OS.... (how about making an OS much less susceptible to this in the first place?).
Is MS free to do this now?
As for boycotting Vista, I wish the world would consider, but it won't. And, I'll have to have some Vista machine and exposure to continue to pretend to support friends and family. Everything I've read about Vista bolsters the view there is not much new worth the upgrade, and there's enough annoying to induce a ferocious case of buyer's remorse.
they had me right until the point where they say "XP is a perfectly fine operating system".
why?
what features are you looking forward to in vista? i'm not trying to flamebait or troll, i just want to know what you are looking forward to.
-- lol pwned
I'm not buying another version of Windows. I don't care how good they say it is. I was told Windows 95 would be awesome, it was suffering incarnate. I was told Windows 98 would be great, they started putting in irritating behaviour and it was still a pain to do things with. I was told Windows XP would be great, it's widely credited with being worse than Windows 98.
Next for me is either Mac or just throw everything I don't have in Linux into Linux. At least that way I stop paying a tax every few years to enrich people who have been very careless with security while at the same time trying to control everyone's market by bundling everything under the sun into it.
I think Vista could be the best thing Microsoft ever did for Apple or Linux.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
A perfectly fine operating system.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
upgrade my new Mac Book Pro from OS X to Vista.
Right, O. Thomas is the troll with the flamebait...
Sure. No problem. Done.
It's obvious to most of us out there that Paul Thurott is a paid plant for Microsoft. Why do we keep talking about his articles, especially at a site that's as heavily Linux-biased as Slashdot?
Everyone loves to consider the effect of Vista on XP... But what about 98? There are still thousands and thousands of business machines churning away on 98, which Microsoft has already tried to phase out. This is just another necessary step in that process to Gates and Co. Vista will drive continued XP sales as it forces these users to upgrade.
Sooner or later, it will have something that you need and can't get on XP, or you will get a new PC that has it bundled (or you are not on windows anyway so you aren't part of this conversation :) )
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
This guy is one forward-looking pundit!
you mispelled "downgrade" ;)
"Luck is my middle name," said Rincewind, indistinctly. "Mind you, my first name is Bad." -- Terry Pratchett
From the article:
So what do I do once popular applications require more RAM than my PC's motherboard can hold? And is PC133 SDRAM even available anymore?
Vista's extreme support for DRM is my concern. I realize that XP also supports DRM in various ways, but Vista has quite a focus on it, and I'm not inclined to support that. That's what made XP my last Windows purchase. I bought an early Mac mini, and I've been nothing less than delighted with the thing. Feels like my linux machines, only prettier and a lot friendlier. Going to buy another Mac soon.
Apple's pushing DRM in a big way too; but Microsoft dominates the market and that's who I think the message needs to go to. In the meantime, buying MP3, staying away from iTunes AAC media, and supporting anyone who posts actual uncompressed, high-quality audio is the way to go. Vote with your wallet. That is the only thing these companies pay attention to. Every time you buy iTunes or any other proprietary DRM'd solution, you're screwing yourself and everyone else. And not in a fun way.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
1. If Vista is pointless, what does it matter if it's "overhyped and late"?
2. Would good does it do to send MS a message that XP is perfectly fine? Is any business going to stop developing new versions of sucessful products just because people liked the old version?
Since Microsoft's main market is the average computer user, i.e., desktop sales of their OS, am I correct to conclude that said people don't read Business 2.0 and hence his call to boycott Vista will go unheard?
Smart Machines Blog
Try reading some technical documentation sometime and see if you can't find anything wrong with that subject. If you don't, then feel free to keep on posting at the intellectual level of a broken mop handle.
XP was late and overhyped as well. Many argued that NT4SP6, W2K and W98SE would be enough for anyone. There were numerous predictions that companies and consumers wouldn't upgrade and stick with what they have.
But this didn't happen. XP was adopted, just like Vista will be adopted over time. Trying to stop this inevitable progression is really a complete waste of one's political vigor.
I'm glad you asked. My comments aren't meant to be flaimbait either. But I'm just a guy. Owen Thomas is a journalist for a fairly-respectable magazine.
I made the 'switch' to Apple a few months back. Half of it was because of the hardware and the other half was the advanced GUI of OS X. I have been a Windows(TM) desktop user prior to that (I use Linux for all servers). For me, productivity is important. And clicking around w/ a mouse is not the way to do it. I'm still learning shortcut keys on OS X but what I have found is that it is incredibly inconsistent. Simple 'highlight current position to the end of the line' shortcuts vary from application to application.
So while I love the UI of OS X, the consistency of it is not there yet. I want the latest AND the greatest. And whether people like it or not, when Vista comes out, it will be both.
Needless to say, we bought the new van.
Anyway.
Thought that might be relevant.
The heavens do not fall for such a trifle.
People saying Vista is going to be a terrible OS just because of so called computer 'gossip' they heard [hello juding a book by its cover]! I went a TechNet meeting last week on Vista. After sitting in an auditorium for 4 hours, listening and watching what Vista can do, I can't wait to upgrade.
Vista has matured greatly since Beta 2 (as I had run Beta 2 and am currently running Pre-RC1 right now and RC1 will be installed later tonight). I would greatly appreciate people actually installing it and then saying why its no good after they have something to back-it-up with.
Boycott all you want - it will became a standard anyway. Just like [insert_windows_version_here] was. Justl like XP is. You want it, or you don't. It will.
Because changes happen. Welcome to the world of computing.
I've noticed a lot of the nay sayers don't seem to have really used Vista on decent hardware. My 1 year old laptop works just fine with RC1, and in fact the GUI is significantly slicker and more responsive than any XP installation I've used. I like Vista and think it's going in a kick ass direction. Vista is not appropriate for older PCs that are underpowered, but neither was XP when it came out.
If you buy a crappy PC, it's going to become outdated sooner rather than later. It's just that simple. As a general rule, I don't pay anything less than $1200-$1300 for a new PC. My laptop was going for $2000 a year ago before I got a $750 off deal. You can't buy a cheap POS for $500 and expect it to work like a $1500-$2000 (or especially $3000+) PC. How many of these mental giants would expect ferrari performance from a stock Civic?
More accurate to say :
Paul Thurrott is at it again with his seemingly never-ending supply of linkbait, generating page views for his advertisers by beathlessly stating Vista is great one week and it sucks the next.
I will save you guys mod points. This response is:
+5 Flame Bait.
You have it all wrong. Well, your post IS tripe but... If the article was simply, "Windows Vista isn't worth buying because it is crap so don't even consider it", it would be flame bait; and, perfectly correct as far as I'm concerned. Unfortunately for us, the previous article writen by this author listed things that he found acceptable. He obviously wasn't wearing his glasses that day.
A good rule of thumb for software purchasing is: If the label says Microsoft the GUI center is shit.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
what features are you looking forward to in vista?
Isn't that the point? Not only are we not getting any (useful) new features, but ones that already exist are being removed vias digitally restriction management.
Microsoft's biggest enemy is not Linux nor Apple but is rather Microsoft itself. Microsoft's entire business model is built on growth and expansion. They have now saturated the desktop and a major portion of the server market. Their quality has improved...and this is actually going to work against them since there is less and less incentive to upgrade. The windows 98 to XP migration was a no-brainer. XP is a lot more stable and capable than 98/95/me. Server 2003 is a lot easier to deal with than Windows 2000 ever was.
If Vista can't provide incentive to get current Microsoft customers to shell out money once again to sustain the financial monster of Microsoft, then Microsoft's place in the software market will shink in a way only remnicent of IBM.
I suspect when this happens, there will be a major but temporary dip it Microsoft's stock. Microsoft is well aware they're dead in the software market and have since poised themselves to emerge as the world's premiere media/content distributor. I'm going to ride this one for all its worth ;-)
The whole thing is Market hype. IT seems to need this sort of thing to keep it going, or else we'd still be at our desks running Windows 3.11 on Pentium 60's... Overhype, overprice, make sure they have to upgrade or lose support or functionality. And oh yeah, throw in some bells and whistles for the sheeples as well...They should come out with an XP Overhaul Update for $100 or less...They'd still make money, update the technology, and find ways to give us "Features" that may soon limit our freedom on our own freeking PC's...Vista ? Ran the Betas and RC. I saw nothing relevant that would make me want to keep it. XP on my pc's, 2003Server on my file stashes and unix on my web server. I'm not buying another copy of the white album on BlueRay when it comes out either. Cheers
End of Line.
I think you misspelled something there. It should be "the latest AND the grate-est." As in, I hope Vista is declared D.O.A. once it ships because all the crap MS decided to load into it is so damn annoying. Neither Vista nor XP does anything that my tried and true Win2000+SP4 doesn't do, other than impose silly restrictions, of course.
"osake no hou ga, biiru yori ii" to omotteiru.
I didn't even have to attack the Pointless argument because the argument itself is pointless. By inference that makes your post pointless :)
Paul Thurrott:
Even calling this thing Windows Mail is an insult. The Windows name should only be added to first rate products.
But what would they call their operating system, then?
Wow guys, from your reactions it seems as though you don't like windows vista, or xp. What a fucking suprise. I know everyone here says that xp is crappy and unstable, but iv been running it on one of my systems with no problems (except for a few hardware fuckups). Hell, i was running another system on 98 for a solid five years without any thing to worry about until i broke down and got another xp license. For many people xp just plain works, and im sure vista will be the same way. For a grand majority of consumers that all the matters, frankly i have more important shit to worry about instead of making sure i can find hardware and device drivers for linux and that i can actually play the game i just purchased. Everyone knows vista is going to be the new standard and will be used in most new systems, if you want to bother complaining about it, go on. btw, im not trying to flamebait or troll, im just tired of reading this crap, on my xp system that has been running for 6 months straight i might add.
Windows 98 is to Windows ME what Windows XP is to Windows Vista.
In just about every text entry box in Mac OS X, Apple-Shift-RightArrow will deliver the desired result; in carbon and cocoa the base TextView class has the same behavior, and everybody uses NSTextView unless they're using a decades-old or explicitly cross-platform UI codebase. I can think of a few programs that break this rule, but they're extremely rare -- however I am aware one particularly-popular productivity suite that does not conform to the selection keybindings, on account of legacy behavior and a cross-platform codebase.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
He's definitely a big Microsoft fan, but his article that we're talking about is pretty harsh on some serious issues with Vista RC1. If Super-Fan 1000 thinks you did something wrong, that means it's probably quite bad.
It's scary being a Flash and Flex developer on Slashdot. You guys are unnaturally rabid.
So exactly what ARE the new features of Vista that are compelling? All I'm reading is that you don't like OSX. The question was not about OS X, it was about Vista.
All in all, it might not be what the customer wants, but MS is ensuring that resellers are doing their best to convince customers that. With their new online software purchasing model, resellers are seeing a need to do this so they get some sort of revenue (credits) for lost software sales that are supposedly going to be done online through MS and their partners.
Remember, reality doesnt matter... marketing and pressure on resellers does - most people arent computer saavy enough to know whether they are being sold a boat or a boat anchor we've tied around their neck.
-Rob
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
So we're back to buying audio CDs? At least I get mine used, so take that RIAA.
It's a done deal that Vista will be accepted. The upgrade community doesn't count. Most new PCs will be pre-installed with Vista and with each new machine purchase, the market share will go over the new OS. The future apps are already written. Resistance is futile.
ceci n'est pas un sig
The only thing that really bugs me about OS X is command-line management. Apple has gone out of their way to make it REALLY flippin difficult to administer via command line (important when you have a lot of machines, when you want to do something the GUI just doesn't do, or administer a headless server from 2000 miles away.) They hide crap in binary pseudo XML blobs and such. Why not just use a simple text file for gods sakes?!?
Other than that, it's pretty good.
DRM is just another virus infesting your computer. Vista is nothing but one big virus. This is M$ example of "nothing new invented here" but "we are going to squeeze more cash out of your wallet!".
I WILL NOT buy any of it!
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Just what do you mean by "it's widely credited with being worse than Windows 98?" Show us three credible references where Win98 is shown to be better than XP for any common activity today. Win98 was a nightmare, XP more or less works. Believe me, I'm as much of a Microsoft basher as the next guy, but Dude, don't get all foaming-at-the-mouth on us.
From what I hear it's still pretty much the case that windows is the ...well, not necessarily preferred, but frequently required... OS for gaming. A friend of mine in the world of Warcraft tells me that the Vista RC1 gets 10 fps higher than winXP.
From DOS 6.22 through Win XP; I was a M$ junkie. I even went so far as to become MCSE cert. and to attend various M$ propaganda shows here and there. I was one of those guys who justified my addiction by saying "everyone has it" or "I know how to use M$ stuff- I'm too set in my ways to change".
But it wasn't OSX, *Nix or even the delays of Vista that turned me off to Heir Gates- it was the Internet. As soon as I realized that 90% of my "mission critical" activities were all web-based (email, research, development) I realized that it really didn't matter which desktop I used- they all connected to the same Internet.
Once I got past that hurdle, I found the courage to play with various linux distros and ended up on a Mac running OSX. In retrospect, I can see perfectly well that all of these options are superior to windows (for my needs, perhaps not yours). However, I was unwilling to even explore my other options because I had trapped myself into a proprietary mindset- something even more dangerous than a proprietary format.
Having played with these various OSes, I can see that each of them has "borrowed" from each other; features that prove popular in one almost inevitably find themselves to the others. Just like a favorite make/model of car, there is no "wrong" answer, only preferences and favorites. I think the "masses" are begining to understand this, just as they understand a choice between pickup truck or sports car (good for different things).
And this is why Vista is "doomed"- the dreaded Microsoft Monopoly preys on the ignorance and confusion of the masses. And yes, most people over the age of 40 are mildly retarded in terms of computers. But these dinosaurs are quickly being replaced by a new generation, the first generation "raised on the Internet", the first generation of which 90% are proficient and experienced with a home PC. The confusion factor shrinks more every day, directly proportionate to the decline in M$ market share.
barack to the future?
A lot of people don't have a copy of Microsoft Windows 2000 or Windows XP retail, OEM, or academic editions, but only a copy of the recovery disc that came with a national brand PC. I thought Microsoft's newer OS recovery discs worked only on the make and model of PC that they came with. For instance if (dude) you got a Dell, you can't install its operating system on a PC with a non-Dell mainboard.
From the article:
That is just beyond parody.
Do you have ESP?
I really think that Vista is going to be a reality check for alot of longtime Windows users. Now, to put this in perspective, I've been a longtime Windows user myself since Windows 95 first hit the market. I've used every version of Windows since then on my own desktop and have gone on to break into IT management when Windows 2000 first came out. I also broke into web development by learning ASP six years ago. So you could say that I've supported Microsoft for a very long time and have stood by them ever since....at least up until about two or three years ago! I used to swear by Microsoft. I never understood Linux; I always thought it was overly complex. I didn't get the overzealous, almost cult-like attitude of the Mac community of users. Let's face it...Windows simply dominates the desktop and it's easy to see how Microsoft can continue to hold onto their userbase.
However, with the release of Vista, I really feel that it will be very similar to what happened with Windows Millenium Edition. Starting with beta 1, I've installed and tried out each subsequent build of Vista all the way up to the latest RC1 release. All I can say is...WHAT THE?? It's a dog...a big ole' stinkin' dog! I couldn't believe the amount of resources you really need to run it. The default install is over 6 gigs, you need at least a gig of RAM just to get by, and the new interface is pointless unless you have a fairly decent video card that is DirectX 9 compatible. All in all, lots of fluff with little substance. Plus, the new User Account Control features really feel like something of an add-on...as if Microsoft just layered it on top of their existing security model leftover from Windows 2000 and XP. UAC is useless...especially when you consider that a user with administrator rights can simply disable the damn thing!
The problem is this: In order for Vista or any other future version of Windows to continue to succeed, Microsoft needs to learn that Windows needs to be rebuilt and reworked with a new security model that rivals even Unix-based operating systems. Nobody can say that Unix, Linux, and even Mac OS X are bad operating systems when it comes to security. They are very secure by their very nature on how they were built. Microsoft needs to learn from this and build on top of it. This is why Apple made such a smart move when they developed OS X. Rather than re-inventing the wheel, they simply took a proven secure OS and built on top of it. The beauty behind this is that the OS is modular and can be easily updated and upgraded. Windows is anything but modular.
I've since moved on from ASP and am now using PHP as my web development platform of choice. Naturally, I use Linux as a server platform and plan to use a Mac as a desktop. I'm simply tired of Microsoft and all their shenanigans. At least with Apple, when they say their going to do something they do it! They don't tease their customers with features and then pull them out later and say, "Sorry! We screwed up!" So, make mine Apple! I'm really looking forward to Leopard! :)
Jeff Whitfield jeffwhitfield@gmail.com "I can learn to resist anything but temptation..."
the OS that comes with 99.6% of new computers and XP of any flavor isn't being sold anymore? I think not. I'm glad I've got Linux to upgrade to.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
I'm putting off buying a new laptop until Slackware 11.0 comes out. All I care about as far as Vista goes is if I can get out of paying any money to Uncle Bill.
Vista's extreme support for DRM is my concern.
I bought an early Mac mini...
Going to buy another Mac soon.
Apple's pushing DRM in a big way too...
Vote with your wallet.
You're an idiot.I guess I'm just going to have to keep saying it until it stops:
When it is released and available for purchase, have someone review it like any other product, make one post, and be done with it. We don't need to hear about or debate every single time a developer in the Windows group sneezes or a random blogger decides to write their personal conclusions on a product that isn't even released
Anti-virus and Anti-spam Windows Vista's antivirus and anti-spam features are particularly embarrassing because of Microsoft's stated focus on security in Windows Vista. Oh, and because there aren't any. To get this kind of protection, you'll need to pay Microsoft $50 a year for Windows Live OneCare which, while admittedly an excellent product, should also just come free with the OS that caused the problems in the first place. Obviously.
Heh - and if MS had included them, they would be getting sued all over the place because the retards like the EU like getting free money...You have to pay for McAfee, Norton, etc...there are some free alternatives too...but c'mon - they caught (and paid for) a lot of shit with fucking media player as it was....how do you think it'd be with fucking AV and anti-spam?
I thought Vista was all about security. I thought MS trimmied down the features because everyone was bitching about how unsecure older windows was. Now people are bitching because it sucks because it doesn't have enough new featues to upgrade. I think the real test for whether Vista is a success will be a couple of years from now. If the number of security issues is still high, then they should have just added a bunch of new features quickly. If they're successful at the security thing then the delays and trimming of features was justified.
Owen Thomas's article is horrid, but if you had yet to read Thurrott's article go read it. He actually makes points, not just observations and tells you to boycott. He puts the blame squarely where it should go. On microsoft's head.
I fear the idea of Windows Mail, a system that makes Outlook Express seem advanced? Sadly the only thing I'm hearing that will cause users to upgrade to vista is DirectX 10 and of course graphics, and I don't see anyone saying they won't support XP in games just yet.
As a gamer I know they are going to force me to upgrade by not providing DirectX 10 for Windows XP. Hopefully it will be awhile before this really matters because I do not look forward to installing Vista prior to the eventual release of service pack 1.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
They had me up to the point I realized the article is by something called "Business 2.0."
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
I'm still learning shortcut keys on OS X
That's no fault of MacOS X - it is simply a lack of practice. I have been using the Mac for fifteen years and I'm super efficient at using it (keyboard shortcuts you wouldn't even know about probably). I can barely use Windows at all. Is this because Windows has bad keyboard shortcuts - no... it is because I don't have any experience using it.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
You know, I really don't think we are. We can buy MP3s, we can encourage uncompressed and non-lossy recordings — disk space isn't really an issue any longer, and when there's no compression, there's less work for your CPU to do, so there's a good reason... and no compression inherently rules out lossy compression which audiophiles and anyone with a really good ear will appreciate. Plain encodings also mean that they are easy to process, easy to write loaders and savers for in terms of audio programs, and they're also easier to maintain error correction for (row/column error correction can fix single sample errors with almost trivial ease when the surrounding data doesn't have to be decoded.)
I'm really tired of being told what I can do with something I purchased. I don't steal or share audio or video I buy (I'm a musician, and I appreciate the idea of intellectual property and support it fully) but by Darwin, if I bought a recording, I think I should have ZERO flipping problem putting it in my PSP, my MP3 player, any computer I own, any editor I want, and so on. Compression mechanisms are, for the most part, patented and otherwise encumbered — and it seems to me that these days, they mostly serve to make things more difficult. So I say the hell with them. It's not like we're using 64k byte machines any more. Plopping a 30 megabyte tune into RAM is no problem for my machine; most current machines are 512 megs or more, so playing an uncompressed tune (typical) is about a 10% RAM load... who cares? Not most people, I suspect. Likewise, most portable players carry LOTS of memory and I bet hardly anyone is using all that space, or if they are, they're not listening to everything they've got stored... and memory continues to get less expensive and denser as time goes on, so what are we doing, really, by insisting on compression? Let's use our memory and encourage the memory manufacturers to give us more of that instead of the damned DRM trolls giving us more grief.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Vista has a very nice TCP stack. Seriously!
Best I've seen on any desktop OS.
So, imagine this scenario:
Microsoft wants to sell a new operating system that has strict video display requirements -- such that many systems will need new video cards.
Resellers have a lot of inventory in stock that does not meet the new video display requirements. They need to get rid of it.
Microsoft sees this problem, so they 1) schedule release of the new operating system for late January, just after the holiday season and 2) manipulate the market by seeding specific information to the media that makes the new operating system seem to be a bad purchase.
Folks considering new system purchases in Q1 of 2007 scramble to buy PCs BEFORE the new operating system is force-fed to them. Thus, PC sales are strong in Q4 of 2006, especially in December (naturally higher than the rest of the year, but especially high this time). Inventory of hardware not meeting the new operating system's hardware requirements are depleted.
In January, negative press about the new operating system wanes as Microsoft announces changes to the new operating system that satisfy the market. Maybe they even push back the release date by 30 days to allow more market satisfaction.
A perfectly fine operating system.
That is until IBM killed it.
I think to keep in mind is when folks say "Pretty good" or "OK" doesn't mean much. OS has come along way and I think every has the same impression of Windows XP being "It's OK". I'm always hard pressed to find folks who say Windows is "Great", "Awesome" or "Fantastic". Now isn't that funny thing in all this considering the resources used to improve Windows?
Oops, how did this get here?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
that XP is a "a perfectly fine operating system" is kind of stretching it, but kudos for trying to educate the masses :D
OS X was late and it still overhyped. BTW - I use it everyday
Boycott Vista. Keep your old Windows XP PC around. Don't buy a new one.
That's the key that I think a lot of the other comments are missing. As individuals, we're not nearly as important to the absorbtion rate of Vista as Dell, HP, Gateway and all the other PC manufactures are. People "in the know" about Vista don't seem to be terribly excited about it, at least not as much as previous versions of Windows. Those not in the know will be presented with the opportunity to pay a couple hundred dollars for an upgrade, at minimum, to get no more functionality then thay have, and likely find out that the experience will suck unless they also purchace new hardware. That doesn't seem exciting to me either.
But from the day Vista is released, every small to large scale PC manufacturer will be preinstalling it instead of XP. Just about every new machine purchased will be a Vista purchase. The number of copies of Windows bought off the shelf pales in comparison to pre-installed distribution. So what if we don't go out and buy a retail upgrade?
And that's where the magic of Microsoft kicks in. Even when delivering a half-baked, late-delivered operating system, they'll still be successful. There's little to no chance that someone like Dell will be convinced to not deal with Vista. Bigger operating systems need bigger hardware means more sales means more markups. An individual boycot is not only unlikely, it's completely ineffective.
I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.
Let's assume Vista hits the streets in February 2007. After how many months will Dell, etc be required to drop XP and only ship Vista? (My guess 3 - 6 months.) At that point:
About 200 million pcs are sold annually. And 96% (?) of those will have Vista.
Microsoft is not worried about the 1-2 year upgrade holdouts.
What kind of consistency are you waiting for? I haven't found Windows to be very consistent in functionality, except to consistently barf white-on-blue onto the screen at least once a week. The Mac platform has used the same intuitive keyboard shortcuts for years, if that's what you really care about. Not once has a Mac OS X machine completely crashed on me (excepting a hard disk failure). The worst I've got is a failure to save wireless network settings, which I have encoutered on every platform I've used, and which happened to be a simple security update bug, fixed within a month. There's also the spinning beach ball of death, easily remedied with Opt-Cmd-Esc, the one-handed Mac equivalent of Ctl-Alt-Del, without the system-crashing side effects. You will of course need to relearn shortcuts on a new platform, seeing as you unsuprisingly fall into the 90% pie slice of lifetime Windozers, but if that is all of which you complain, you have no reason to do so here.
This is not the signature you're looking for.
You seem to be confusing "perfectly fine" with "not worse than Mac on Linux". The two are completely different.
Even if we assume it's no worse than Mac or Linux (where did all these Windows fanboys come from?), that doesn't automatically make it "perfectly fine".
If you can't identify dozens of design and implementation issues with your operating system (whichever it is), at every level from the UI down to the kernel, then you've got blinders on. *No* current operating system is "perfectly fine".
The difference is that Apple releases a new and vastly improved system every year, and Linux updates are even more frequent (e.g., big GNOME and Ubuntu releases twice a year), while Microsoft hasn't had a new desktop release in, what, over 5 years? Ouch. Microsoft may be on par when they release, but then they spend most of a decade falling behind again.
Oh yeah, let's show those Redmond bastards that we hate that stupid DRM, by using the DRM-loving Apple's products instead, that'll teach them!! Apple being a minor company compared to Microsoft, makes it just fine to be doing the same thing we are boycotting Windows Vista for! We'll vote with our wallets!
Boycott Vista...Get Ubuntu.
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How can one say that Windows XP is fine as an operating system? I believe that is an absurd thought. Anyone that has sat behind a Windows XP machine will feel the performance of the OS degrade over time. I recommend many of my clients to reinstall windows at least once a year. I understand legacy support has much to do with the problems that plague windows, but Vista has a promise to resolve this. There are countless reason to upgrade windows and if you don't - well, you're probably are running OS X as your main OS.
MS-DOS was 'perfectly fine'.
Lots of people knew how it worked and got lots of work done with it. It was'nt always fun but it worked well enough.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Providing reasonable download times for people on older, slower network connections comes to mind.
Yaz.
comparativly XP isnt too shabby but it's still a long way from being right. and perfectly... oh frickin please.
Storm
...even if you, as an individual, boycott Vista, it won't matter. Next time you go to buy a new PC, XP won't be a choice, HP/Dell/etc. will only give you the option for Vista, preinstalled.
Maybe this will push a few people to OS X. But my money is on Vista becoming the defacto standard, much as XP is now.
The only thing that may work, is if corporate America doens't standardize on Vista. If large companies only want PC's with XP, im sure the boxmakers will oblige them.
What I worry about is there being 32 and 64 bit versions of Vista. I think it just confuses the market. I use the computer for software development, business, media editing, and gaming. I would like to get the 64 bit version of Windows Vista for the expanded memory capability, and the signed drivers. What scares me away though is the fact that there is a 32 bit version of Vista.
Are the people who make my development software, business software, media software, and games going to develop their products for both versions of the operating system? Will I have to worry about compatibility issues? If my current library of software, hardware, and games work with the 32-bit version of the Vista operating system will they also work with the 64 bit version?
Can we really expect hardware manufacturers to make top quality drivers for both the 32 and 64 bit versions of Vista? Will it take longer for hardware manufacturers to produce drivers now since they have to provide two versions? Why didn't microsoft make a single unified driver model for the 32/64 bit versions of Vista? As I understand it, Apple has done this.
I wish they had just made a 64 bit version of Vista, and focused on giving it a good Windows on Windows emulation for 32 bit apps and backwards compatibility. The only reason I can see for having a 32-bit version of the OS is because Intel currently ships Core 2 Duo chips that are only 32-bits.
Usually I've always upgraded to the latest version of windows as soon as it was released to retail, but I intend to wait several months before I make a purchase. Now I feel forced to wait until I hear all reviews about compatibility and stability, and opinion articles about 32 bit versus 64 bit. I plan to buy a whole new machine to ensure full compatibility with the new OS and to take advantage of it's high end features.
I like a lot of what I've seen about the architecture of Windows Vista and the new features they have added, what I don't like is the uncertainty of the compatibility. If I buy the 64 bit version of Vista will I be screwed by compatibility issues, and slow hardware driver releases? Will I be able to play my games or am I buying a Beta machine?
I'm the odd man out in an even number of participants
Another day another whine board. DRM doesn't affect me. I don't have an iPod and I encode mp3s of my own CDs for the mp3 player in my car. I buy my dvds off the used rack at bbv and I'm happy enough with it. MS is putting in DRM yes because of business reasons... of course it makes sense for them to comply with the recording industry. With another lawsuit against another kazaa bonehead every day, you think MS wants to be one of them? Looking at the press 13-year old Jimmy gets, what would MS as a business get? As far as Vista goes, like it or don't like it; but don't whine about it. Not a lot of new features for you? Then what do you want??? Can you tell me? I haven't seen one request in these boards besides "make it work" and "make it suck less". Helpful stuff. As for M$, they're doing the same thing every other software company does: trying to sell a new version; but they're not doing it without reason. Substantial rewrites to the underlying operation of the operating system and the driver model have happened, and yay it's delayed. May as well make it work as well as they can, eh? As far as included features, hasn't anyone noticed that 'OS' (even where linux or mac is concerned) now emcompasses all sorts of everything? 'Operating System' is maybe outdated and now 'Operating Suite' (ahem, computing, not surgery) is the appropriate term. I don't know if I'll go Vista right away, I don't know later. I know that the XP box I set up for my in-laws and the kids still living there has been running four months straight. Use what you use but don't slag M$ or Vista for being there when the power button is turned on. Same post I made yesterday: don't like it? Then stop recompiling your kernel and compete already!! Nobody here markets Linux, they just bash ... everyone else.
(for the record, I hate the XP build on my work laptop and I love the XP build on my home compy)
Wow, if Vista's release is delayed any further I will be very interested to see what depths of invention the technopundits will sink to in order to keep generating words about Microsoft.
I mean, c'mon -- this fluff makes about as many cogent points as a ball of wet wool.
XP a "fine Operating System"? Well, sure, if your into malware. Some people are turned on by all kinds of crazy jazz. But, realistically, the rest of us would be more impressed with Windows-based PCs that weren't compromised thirty seconds after grandma gets it out of the cardboard box.
Also, does this walking rimjob understand that if Microsoft doesn't keep up with the Joneses the Joneses will eventually start eroding their Borg-like marketshare? With the rise of things like YouTube more people than ever want to be able to manipulate video and audio on their PCs as easily as on Macintoshes -- if Microsoft doesn't deliver, Jobs wins by default.
Microsoft does have to move forward. Microsoft does have to improve. A boycott nobody but Linux zealots will even pay attention to is, in a word, retarded.
These stories are free but worth money.
Didn't you read the EULA? By clicking on the Agree button, you give Microsoft full access to all of your assets - Vista will automatically analyze your financial status and transfer the appropriate Tax directly to Microsoft's Cayman Islands account.
"Another fine feature from Microsoft, and an excellent reason to upgrade to Vista" says Microwhore magazine.
Getting a new PC? Guess what? VISTA, baby! Yeah! Groovy! Shag-a-delic! Boycott if you must, but be left behind (oh be-hayve).
You have got to be joking. Vista is one of the most inconsistent interfaces Microsoft will have ever delivered. As for the end-of-line shortcut, I have never encountered an app that didn't use the standard shortcut, and you don't give any examples that can be addressed.
It's really bizarre to me that someone would prefer waiting for Vista instead of having a modern OS today with OS X Tiger.
"Sufferin' succotash."
I dunno. I thought replacing your aging Windows XP PC with a PC with no bundled operating system that you load <Non-Windows OS of choice> on was a good way of upgrading hardware to meet new demands, while addressing (and expressing your perception of) the lack of value in Windows Vista. I hardly see sticking with aging hardware and Windows XP as the only way to do that.
What he says about the Sidebar confirms my expectations: more worthless cruft. These features aren't their to please the users, they're they to please Microsoft. They can feel clever that they made their widgets as pretty as Apple.
Good point. Still, higher-bandwidth connections are spreading fast, too. :-)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Although it was probably not your intention, you basically just supported the claim of the parent poster that it is inconsistent.
How has no one made the direct connection with Vista and WindowsME? There isn't really a whole lot Vista has to offer over XP other than eye candy. Does anyone remember the release of WindowsME?
I feel that Vista is just something to ease us into the next generation of Microsoft OS', you know with more DRM 'Features' and 'Security Policies' to help you be uh, safe.
they have already boycotted XP in large part... when i look around at various places the workstations seem to almost always be running win2k not XP... as 2k is in extended support ending (according to m$ 2010) can business users boycott vista? Assuming corporate customers are not willing to move the desktops to XP or Vista what does m$ do at that point... stick to the plan and end support for 2k ??? running the risk that corp customers look at other options?
....so if your going to have to do that anyway. maybe it is the perfect time to look at moving to *nix desktop enviroments or something.
/timewasting stuff to disable /remove.
Vista's UI is different enough that end user training is going to seem necessary
my question with XP pro in a corporate network setting is what exactly does it bring that is useful to the table over 2k? not much really more stuff to turn off to keep people from wasting time and improved wifi support i guess...and somewhat better boottime.
with vista it seems there would be even more bloat
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
I wonder how long it will truly be before Microsoft whittles a toothpick of obtrusiveness from this trunk of obstruction.
I hate Grammar Nazi's
Getting people up to Vista is not only about money, it's about going another level up the MS proprietary ladder.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
The main purpose of Vista is to position 5 year old OSX & Linux features as Micro-and-soft's "NEW! Innovative technology never seen before!!!" before the market does finally realize that weendoze is by all parameters most sucking OS on the market.
Come on, if five years ago "i can't run my favourite *** on Linux" was one of the reasons to stay on Windows, now it's the ONLY one - and Microsoft is starting to lose that too...
Get a Mac! Get Ubuntu! Get the point, at last!
i have to agree with you.
after a week with my new OS X computer i had learned all of the hotkeys and i was already working faster than before. i must admit, it was mostly a result of superior programs (namely, Transmit, first shareware i've paid for in ages), but still i am working faster now.
-- lol pwned
Wait...OS X to Vista is an upgrade? Seriously? I might call it switching, I definitely would not define it as an UPGRADE.
Think about it again.
Since Microsoft's OS is the dominant home OS and one of the largest OS for business, the preparation and potential capabilities of its new OS seem like they would be worthy of more than average consideration, particularly since many of the people here might end up working on them and/or programming for them. The emphasis on DRM in Vista also seems worthy of consideration before it comes out, as once a nucleus of users have Vista, others will be forced to change to it (and its DRM) in order to preserve compatibility with others - thus dealing with the DRM before Vista comes out might prevent complaints about DRM from being so much tilting at windmills (and the users might know what they are getting).
Complaining about the lack of substantitive information in articles about Vista is legitimate, but the discussion of Vista does not seem to be misplaced, even before its release, because the consequences of its release for Microsoft users, for other programmers, and for related issues are significant and widespread.
FLAC. It's lossless, it's unencumbered by patents, it's open source, and it compresses well, and it's supported natively by many, many media players. It's what I use for all of my audio.
CPU load is probably the least of my worries. RAM however, is a big concern. RAM affects the speed of your computer more than CPU. 30 Megs may seem like a drop in the bucket, but what happens if you have all 512 Megs in use? Or even worse, you're using Windows (which for some reason just *adores* its swapfile.) You start using your swapfile or partition, and now your computer goes from hopping to dragging along like a molasses zombie in a vat of liquid oxygen.
So next time you rip a cd kids, just flac --best -o %o --tag=Artist=%{artist} --tag=Album=%{albumtitle} --tag=Date=%{year} --tag=Title=%{title} --tag=Tracknumber=%{number} --tag=Genre=%{genre} %f
"Build a man a fire warm him for a day, set a man on fire and warm him for the rest of his life."
I shall not purchase a license for it out of spite. Good day to you, sir. -Journalist
I've read that some people did studies using actual stopwatches and found that using the mouse for things like selecting text and moving your input cursor is faster than using the keyboard on average. Using the keyboard is faster for some things, but mostly it's that using the keyboard feels faster than using the mouse. Sometimes when I'm bouncing around in Vim I realize that some of my operations would be much quicker easier if I used the mouse (Vim, of course, has a mouse language but I'm not all that familiar with it). It feels like there are more situations where the keyboard is quicker, but when the mouse is quicker it's a *lot* quicker. But I don't have stopwatch numbers to back that particular feeling up. It's hard to test things like that without a bunch of test subjects.
You make good points, but you have a slightly incomplete notion of compression and "lossless" formats.
Sound is an analog phenomenon by nature, and with a good microphone the amount of information we could extract, were we interested, is really incredible. Consider though that 6-channel, 96kHz, 24-bit digital encoding (for instance) is 1.7 megabytes per second. I am not even remotely kidding -- that's 13.824 megabit. A five-minute tune isn't 30MB, it's over 500MB. (We're sticking to SI units here, as is standard).
In digital recording, we're taking quantized samples of an analog phenomenon at regular intervals. This is inherently lossy compression. (Analog recording is inherently lossy also, but that's another issue).
If we want 30MB songs instead, we could use a very simple method of lossy compression -- we could throw away half the samples, two-thirds of the channels, and a third of the sample detail. Then we'd have CD-quality audio. Trouble is, this is very crude; we've thrown away useful detail, like the subtle, soulful sound of a sax, while keeping the same level of detail in silent passages or for simpler waveforms. We've cut the bitrate, but lost too much sound.
Another thing that we could do is use sophisticated mathematical algorithms to analyze the sound in detail and figure out which bits to throw away. We might have problems if our algorithm is poor and throws out something we want, but after years of refinement we've developed algorithms that are far better than simple bit-tossing. In all blind testing, this gives much better results; you may hate a 128kb/s MP3, but try listening to an 8-bit 11khz recording sometime (88kb/s... for mono!)
What we DO need to do is use higher bitrates. MP3 can be encoded pretty well, but nowadays there's no reason to cut the bitrate so much. If we used the bitrate of a CD (1.4 megabit) and our better "lossy" compression formats, we'd get way better sound than we get from a "lossless" regular CD.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Even if "no one" bought Vista, I doubt Microsoft would change. Now, if all the system manufacturers didn't preload Vista... well that's another story.
I don't get why people can't get this.
I don't get Microsoft's plan here. They seem to be looking the wrong way. Why make all these add-ons when the core product could be improved? XP is slow, has pleanty of bugs, and isn't as secure as it should be. An operating system, first and formost, should not be that way. Why doesn't MS simply put their effort into fixing it? After that, they can spend a few years making addons like a built-in DVD burner software. I really don't get it. If they made XP faster, cleaner, and more secure/stable, then I'd buy that. I don't need the gobbeldgook of all the little features that I could easily DL off the Net. Hell, why not even market a stripped down version for power users; give us here something to chomp on? I'd bet, if they made the striped down version correctly, that many of us here would buy it. I'd also bet that if they striped off a lot of the extra crap that comes with XP that the damn thing would be a hell of a lot more stable.
I also don't understand why they keep legacy support in the main application. Why not make it bootable to the last stable version of the old OS as part of the whole OS? Like if you want to run this old APP from 1995, then you must reboot into the old os. More realistically, they could make a virtual machine option available. Think about it, anyone who's going to run anything arcane, is likely to have some techie's around to make sure it works. I know a lot of folks who work in hospitals that still run software on 98 machines. They have pleanty of techie's around keeping those old machines working.
MS is like a little kid running through a toy store that wants every little thing, but will only spend 2 minutes with it. We'd all be better off if they took some Riddelin and stuck with the point for while.
anyway, that's my 2 cents and my rant for the day!
- Mike
Once you've lost your temper, you've lost the argument - Me
I want the latest AND the greatest. And whether people like it or not, when Vista comes out, it will be both.
Don't worry about it then, because Leopard will be out before you know it.
Han shot first.
All this is is just some Microsoft hater.
Wana know a GREAT feature about Vista that I just cant wait for?
Image deployment.
The ability to install Windows and have all applications for a spacific department layed out for them to use. This would save a TON of time and make things much easier...There thats a feature I look forward to.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
Look people, Microsoft is not forcing DRM on anybody. They simply put the tool out there for the authors of content. It gives the creator of content an extra set of options on how they want their content to be played. The author is free to choose to release content with no DRM whatsoever.
Personally, I don't buy DRMed content (except games). That's my choice. If somebody wants to intentionally exclude me and people like me as a potential customer that is their choice. They can look for someone else to buy their stuff and I can look for somewhere else to spend my money.
Vista has no impact on the equation.
I'll never understand why you people choose to harp on the most pointless things...
How is this an insightful comment? This author shows his complete LACK of knowledge about Vista, not some insight about it.
Just because you haven't done more than 30 seconds of research on what's new in Vista doesn't mean there aren't any useful new features.
It means you're being willfully ignorant.
If you're blue and you don't know
where to go to why don't you go
where fashion sits (take it, 98)
Hroowra owra riis!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Half out of curiosity, half out of hubris: how often does WoW freeze on him under RC1?
I hate Grammar Nazi's
The Windows name should only be added to first rate products.
Why start now?
Continued revenue growth for recording companies is not ensured if you are only buying new music. They need you to buy the things you already own but lost in order to keep their shareholders happy. That's why they seem to feel that when they sell you music, they are really selling you a license to use the music, unmodified, in whatever format it has been distributed. That business model won't work with the ease of format conversion now, and I think they are slowly figuring that out. On Wall Street, if you're not growing, you're dying.
I can't really tell for sure, but it sounds to me like you're suggesting that decoding flac takes appreciably less memory than decoding mp3 (and that as a result, your system will perform better). Or was your second paragraph completely tangential to your first and third paragraphs?
Did I read that right?
---glv
Anyone over the age of 40 who "knows computers" tends to know far more than I do (born 1980). Anyone over the age of 40 who has purchased a first computer sometime within the past decade tends to get locked into the "Microsoft Way"(tm) of doing things, and can be extremely frusterating to work with.
And don't feel bad about my ageism crack- it's only a matter of time until some jackass born in 1996 pulls the same stunt with me (and video games already make me feel old and out-of-touch).
barack to the future?
Save for a few clued in geeks but who cares about that demographic anyway?
Otherwise how do you boycot buying new computers which will all come with Vista preloaded? There is no viable alternative.
If anything, MS will collapse under its own weight and Vista just might be that one brick to many that shatters the shins of this giant and when the big bastard falls it is going to fall fast and hard.
Sure. A little boycot certainly wouldn't hurt and getting the word on the street that Microsoft is Anti-Consumer would help even more but ultimately it will be Investors finally realizing that the company is not worth the stock price and pulling their money out while they still can. From there on it is the domino effect. Those who wait to long to divest will lose large.
That's the achilles heel of Microsoft. Investors realizing that M$ has lost 30% of it valuation since Jan 02, that the company has not recoved from that loss in six years and one more slip sends M$FT into a death spiral. By the time any investor realizes that the day of reakoning has arrived via news reports is the day they get to watch their investments evaporate before their helpless eyes.
If M$FT investors are a nervous lot, they should be. The great hope is that Vista gives M$FT just enough of a bounce to trigger a face saving sell off. Save what you can while you can. Conversly, if M$FT gets no bounce from a Vista release then Vista, the last great hope for short term recovery and one last opportunity for a burst of profit taking, is a failure.
Nobody believes that Vista is going to give Microsoft its old legs back. Investors as well as Geeks know that Vista is nothing more than XP Service Pack 3 with additional Eye Candy and Enhanced End User Digital Restrictions and that virtually nobody will be lining up outside the local big box to buy this trojan'd pig at the stroke of midnight on launch day.
It is inevitable that the stock price will continue to decline with speed of that decline the only true remaining variable to fuss over. Dividends have been lackluster and will continue to be so no matter how much Microsoft may attempt to pump it up to some semblance of normalcy.
A consortium of Wall street investors have begun mulling the idea of buying the company out and gutting it as the better alternative to an otherwise future found bleak at best and disasterous at worst. Microsoft the bloated behemouth consumes way to much working capital to simply maintain its enormity given the products and services it actually produces and provides and there are no new vistas on the horizon that will justify the expense of it'self any further.
The only way Microsoft staves off the inevitable for a few more years is if Vista is wildly successful and nobody, not even Microsoft, envisions that happening. Microsoft as we have known it is a goner. The only question that remains is exactly when but the day that Vista officially ships into consumer space, the countdown begins. Bump the bubble or bust, investors do not want to get caught long on this one.
Microsoft is in the business of making operating systems (and other things). Their last OS was released almost six years ago (will probably be six years at least once Vista ships). They want to sell an upgrade and they've waited that long to do it.
I don't really know of course but I suspect that a number of the same people who call Vista overhyped and bloated are Mac fans. Mac fans who are perfectly willing every year and a half or so to plop down $129 for the latest Mac OSX upgrade.
If you send a message to Microsoft that XP is fine and you don't want an upgrade then all you get is Apple, charging for what should be service packs. Sure, Mac OSX upgrades are bigger deals than service packs but that's what XP SP3 would become - a slightly beefier than a service pack upgrade with a pricetag.
Businesses will just upgrade when they get the chance anyway. I don't see what the point of boycotting Vista is...
Schnapple
I don't really care about Vista. I deal with server systems, what desktop users are using...bleh, don't really care.
.Net. PHP is better than original ASP though (VBScript is terrible). Just my 2 cents.
That being said :
1) You cannot judge a software's performance by betas.
2) Windows has always been large, but honestly I can't say that my typical Linux desktop that I actually *use* winds up being any smaller. My working Windows machines typically wind up being about as big as my working Linux machines. Windows has never been about customizability, its about working for people who are complete idiots.
3) The admin user should be able to disable that UAC garbage. Frankly, I've never had a problem with Windows security, because I use things like permissions and limited user accounts on my home computers as well as in the office. If you're handing out admin privileges to everyone that touches your box, you're doing something wrong from the get-go. You wouldn't do that on Linux and you shouldn't do it on Windows either, even though Windows makes it easier. Microsoft defaults to that on XP Home edition and such because its too confusing for your "average" user otherwise. For those people, disabling UAC may as well be "constructing a rocket to fly to space".
I'm not sure I agree with you about Windows security system. It isn't bad...it should just have different distros for different users. You'd be surprised how many people don't want to mess with security at all. On the other hand, for those users who want a secure box, they should have that option more readily available and with less configuration. Additionally, the real problem with Windows isn't even Windows, its the software developers that use registry & system folders for everything and don't follow good software design principles. Applications should be capable of running once you copy the folders...unfortunately, few in the Windows world are that simple to deploy.
Re: ASP vs PHP. PHP is garbage compared to ASP
Intel's Core 2 Duo line of chips are all natively 64 bit processors. ...which is all the more reason why M$ are morons for not making Vista a 64bit OS ONLY.
"In the kingdom where everything dies, the sky is mortal."
I don't respond to ACs. Oh wait...
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
what features are you looking forward to in vista? i'm not trying to flamebait or troll, i just want to know what you are looking forward to.
You waste your time posting your question here. The Slashdot Geek is not Microsoft's target audience.
Yes, but predominantly because of Microsoft. The Apple HIG has defined behavior for this for years, which most programs follow, unless they've been led down the garden path by MSFT.
Vista is supposedly rewritten from scratch. That's fine, because the code now incorporates an awareness of security issues that weren't anticipated when the original codebase was developed...or so they say.
If you listen to Steve Gibson's latest Security Now podcast, he talks about the same mentality at work again - creating new 'features' that might be 'cool' to a technically-minded person, but will create nothing but headaches. The specific feature to which I am referring is Vista's purported ability to broadcast internal, non-routeable IPs, making them accessible from the outside. This completely eradicates NAT as a first (and very effective) layer of security for many people.
Issues like this aside, when code is rewritten, it introduces a whole new set of problems. Obviously, the objective is to minimize them, but I have a feeling that Vista users will experience some of the same kinds of pain they've already endured with XP.
I don't think a boycott of MS Vista is warranted, but right now I feel a boycott of HP products might be more appropriate. Spying on journalists who report on and/or review your products for the masses is just stupid.
Ah!
So, perhaps you can name a SINGLE "useful new feature" that is worth $170k in new desktops across my enterprise. And when I say "useful", I mean it'll earn that $170k BACK somehow.
Please, name one. And, "Solitare 2007" doesn't cut it.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
Personally I think the problem with Microsoft is the ginormous releases every 3-7 years. Why don't they take on a development model similar to the BSDs or Debian.
Allow people to subscribe the "Branch" they want to use or their hardware allows. People with slower machines sync with the "2000 Branch." Bleeding edge people subscribe to "XP-current." Instead of forcing us through these heinous upgrades every few years, roll out your changes into the existing OS as they're stable.
Heck if they added a decent package/ports like system, you could run mix and match the GUI (Aero on XP, XP's explorer on Vista) so they wouldn't have to release 6 versions of Vista like they're planning.
And while I'm dreaming I'd like a pony . . .
I'll have to ask, she keeps using it so I'm guessing not too frequently. Gamespot did a report on Vista's backwards compatibility with games designed for XP and it looks like all Blizzard's games got the green checkmark.
M$ and there marketshare can CONTROL the market right? so why the hell not make Vista 64bit ONLY? it makes total sense right? i mean, when you upgraded from 3.1 to like say....the 9x series...you jumped from the 16bit world to the 32 bit world right? so why not do another jump to the 64 bit world. it only makes sense. then maybe we would be more compelled to adventure into the 64 bit world lol. backward compatability is Microsoft's MAIN weakness when they breed there operation systems. remember the horrors of 95 and 95a? ya exactly. this OS may have a recompiled kernel and brand new boot process...via BSD n all, but no normal person is going to care about that stuff. i remember when the sega genesis and super nindendo was all about that jazz cause they jumped from 8 bit to 16 bit. now the gaming evolution is way past 64 bit for consoles...so why not computing for the home user? every other BRAND new box retail or custom build is gonna have something beyond an X2 or a Core 2 by the time Vista does eventually come out...(the quad cores lol omg is just even more beef to deal with) so the hardware support is there. 64 bit is the future and to hold onto the past forever means death. screw the hybrids like ME lol and just GET IT DONE.
"In the kingdom where everything dies, the sky is mortal."
Really, there will be no "alternatives" to migrating to Vista - other than a complete change in platform (say, Linux, BSD, or a Mac). If you want to keep using your Microsoft Windows compatible applications and games, you're slowly going to be pushed down Microsoft's migration path. The idea of a voluntary "boycott" is only practical in the short-term. (EG. You could actively refuse to upgrade just for the sake of having Vista as soon as it comes out.)
Eventually though, support for XP will be dropped, just as it has been for older versions of Windows in the past - and you won't even be able to use recent versions of Microsoft's "companion products" for Windows (Media Player, for example) without an upgrade. New hardware is going to come pre-loaded with Vista, and only a fool would reformat over it, opting to buy an XP license just to put back on it and "downgrade" to an older OS....
Large businesses will feel the pressure to make a move to Vista as well, simply because it becomes too difficult to provide user support for multiple OS's. As soon as they buy a few Vista machines, I.T. is going to be under the gun to look into what's needed to deploy proper group policy settings for them... and that opens the door for switching everyone else over too. (Hey, we already put in all the effort getting the policies set up for the new boxes. May as well roll out the new stuff and make use of them for more than just 10 sample boxes, right?)
Just for clarification, the Core Duo chips are 32 bit, all Core2s are 64bit.
"How is this an insightful comment?"
New here?
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
More security, without it getting in my way. Oh, that wasn't the kind of thing you meant? You want actual features? I don't know. The problem is, Microsoft doesn't know either. Hence the lack of compelling features in Vista. Hence our comments about the lack of new features.
The OS is becoming a commodity. Commodities don't have many spiffy new features. When was the last really innovative, compelling new feature you saw in a potato chip?
but I have a feeling that Vista users will experience some of the same kinds of pain they've already endured with XP.
Exactly. It reminds me of The Onion's article on "World Death Rate Hovers at a Steady 100%" Microsoft says Vista will revolutionize security and make it (nearly) tamper-proof. When you look at how that's been promised in some form for every single OS they've released, and then later proven wildly false, you have to see a pretty consistent pattern.
64-bit is useless. There's no need for it.
Back when everything was 16-bit, programmers were already glueing variables together to sort of make 21 or 22-bit variables. They needed the space.
Now, though, no one is yet needing 64-bit. If you do because of larger memory, then I would argue that the memory is too big, or that you should unbloat your program.
For peripherals that I already own, there exist more drivers on Windows NT 5 (Windows 2000 and Windows XP) and Mac OS X than on any BSD or Linux operating system. Or should I eat the cost of replacing hardware when switching to FreeBSD or Ubuntu? What do you recommend for people who receive a lot of donations in kind of hardware that may not be on a distribution's HCL, such as family members and IT departments of non-profit organizations?
Well, if you look at my other post, I would say the TCP/IP improvements, productivity gains from improved UI, the revamped security model, and the general reliability improvements you'll get from Vista would all be worth while reasons to upgrade.
That said, upgrading an entire enterprise is very different from an individual upgrading their personal machine. The Business 2.0 article was talking about individuals, not enterprises. Vista is most definitly a great upgrade for home users. Anybody familiar with the features would agree with that.
But for a business, it's a much different decision. (Obviously.) Honestly, for most medium/large businesses, I would wait until Longhorn Server hits the market. The combination of Vista on both the client and the server will be far more attractive than just Vista.
Just out of curiosity, how many desktops are we talking about? Microsoft's volume licensing typically reduces the cost of Windows to between $50 and $60 per machine if you're dealing with more than 250 desktops. That means you're talking about 3000+ machines?
For enterprise desktop deployment? Easy. ImageX/WIM.
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM
Boycott Vista? I believe I speak for pretty much everyone at Slashdot when I say:
"With gusto!"
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
After switching to Linux, Ubuntu to be exact, I have booted into windows about 3 times. Once to get some settings I needed, once to convert some video (I later found I program to do what I needed under Linux, and once by accident.
Frankly, I don't care. I won't buy Vista, because it has nothing I want. Linux does the job, doesn't cost loads, and is better in so many ways. I'm no linux fanboy, but I will use the overall best thing for me, and that in Linux. I'm not going to ask people to Boycott it. I'm just going to use what I find best, and encourage others to do the same, aswell as telling them all the options.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
See this post.
I want the latest AND the greatest. And whether people like it or not, when Vista comes out, it will be both.
Vista has nothing to do with 'latest and greatest'. It's the last gasp of the two massive but crumbling monopolies, Microsoft and the entertainment industry, to try and lock down everything you see and hear so they can charge you for it. The future doesn't have these monopolies, content creation is becoming more and more decentralized and their business model is dying and they are well aware of this.
I for one will absolutely be boycotting Vista.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
Or we could use sophisticated mathematical algorithm to analyze the sound and only store the diffs between the channels, and compress anything that can be. Without information loss...
In a word, we could use... say... FLAC...
And we would have higher bitrates.
Because, you know, lossy formats even at uber-high bitrates- always have loss nonetheless. They all have "signatures", specific losses that you can't do anything about whatever bitrate you use. And they accumulate, which means that you couldn't use your high-bitrate lossy tune as a source for your conversion needs (to MP3, to OGG, to WMV, ...) because you'd get the old artifacts plus the new ones.
So no, our "better" lossy compression format wouldn't get a way better sound than we get from a "lossless" CD, it would merely have a different sound signature, different losses.
Now if more work was done on truely lossless compression formats, and these formats were used instead of the current CD format, we could get much better quality music (most formats already yield CD-quality audio at 40% to 60% of a CD bitrate)
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
If only that were 100% true... I'd still be running Win2k. But when I bought my dual core box, my choice in Microsoft offerings was XP or XP.
I'm sorry, ya lost me.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
It must be me, but having 3 flavours of linux running, a Mac G4 and 3 PC's with windows XP, XP-x64 and 2003 I don't understand all the flaming back and forth. I love the Linux for getting me on the internet worry free and letting me experiment with all kinds of stuff, I dig the Mac for feeding my Ipod and driving my KORG WS and I just cherisch my Windows flavours for getting my Canos EOS connected and playing my games, doing my SQL 2005 and putting my ASP based forum up nice and secure. I have dedictated a disc for Vista (RC1 at the moment) and I don't realy see the reason for all the big fuss. Everybody is shouting about monopolies and in the same sentence is pushing there own fav OS. Realy, it CAN work, I have all those PC's working in harmony and I wouldn't want to part with any of them. Whenever I get comments to ditch this or that it reminds me of all those fundamentalists trying to force their religion onto the world. Believe me, they all work, they all are manageble, they all have their down and up sides. You just need to know what you are doing... And that is what REAL system administration is all about. Everything else is just an inabbility to deal with it.
Supporting MS products doesn't mean you have to like them.
The trick is whether or not you have to move from the keyboard to the mouse all the time. I have no doubt that the mouse is faster for a great many things. However, if I'm typing a 15 page paper and the sun is coming up, I don't want to jump back and forth between the keyboard and the mouse all the time. I would guess that the time to move from the keyboard to the mouse, perform one mouse action, and then move back to the keyboard is greater than the time to perform the same action using the keyboard, in the majority of cases where the mouse action itself is faster than the keyboard action itself. Now, if you do two mouse actions, then you're a little bit more likely to be faster than the keyboard. If you need to perform a whole string of actions, all or nearly all of which are faster on the mouse than the keyboard, then you should almost definitely use the mouse.
So, in using Vim, the fundamental action is typing. That is done on the keyboard. So, using the mouse in Vim doesn't make all that much sense most of the time, even when the individual actions are faster with the mouse.
Of course, the converse is true as well. If I'm browsing the web, clickety clickety, then suddenly jumping to the keyboard for the shortcut key for my homepage is kinda silly. I'm already on the mouse, so I'll use the mouse. We have duplicate methods for doing most common actions so that people can minimize their time moving back and forth from one to the other.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
XP doesn't let me do that. I actually am MORE experienced on XP, and it is my preferred OS, but I'm not as fast at it. To my knowledge there's no handy "go-up-a-folder" shortcut or "go-to-desktop" shortcut when in the "open" or "save" dialog. There ARE shortcuts, but none are the ones I used most frequently. Navigating folders/files by keystroke alone is more tedious.
As a republican I feel it my responsibity to manufacture criminals. People need punished!
compelling features? DX10. that's it. but there wont even be any DX10 games worth upgrading GPU and OS for for about another 2 years or so xD.
You know, I've seen this list dozens of times, and the majority is still complete marketing BS.
First of all, the UI changes, IE7, simple network changes, start menu, explorer changes, new dialogs, USB caching, search, WPF, backup utils, audio changes, and speech recognition are next to useless, and are certainly not worth paying for. Some of thing are even a further step backwards over the old W2k way.
The kernel scheduling, file operations, superfetch, DX10, driver changes, and driver API improvements should just have been there already. They are not worth paying for. They are definitely not worth a new OS. These things fix things that Microsoft should have been fixing in service packs.
This leaves the new TCP/IP stack, desktop compositing, and DPI independence (part of the composition engine anyway), and some new security model improvements. Considering how broken people have been saying UAC is, this *really* is leaving the network stack and the composition engine.
As far as the speed recognition FUD, yeah, it might work. It's much more likely that it just doesn't work well enough to be useful. You can't use it while on the phone, or having a conversation. You won't use it in a busy office. It's just a gimmick.
If you want to hype improvements, they *REALLY* need to be both useful and novel. Many of the things on that list we've had for years on other platforms. Many are only niche useful, or not useful at all. Most of the rest of fixes for poorly implemented MS functionality.
What about the SYSTEM user? Is that gone? That is a critical issue.
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
That's for six years?
A two-three new linux kernel versions have a longer summary changelog.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Granted, but you do have to admin that there are substantial improvements to Vista. (Setting users to run not as admin is itself a substantial improvement, albeit one that should have been done a while ago.) Also, Vista is the first Windows version to have had more than a small part of its development cycle under the new security procedures Gates announced a number of years back. (Maybe with the exception of 2003, but even with that, there's little comparison with Vista.)
I certainly understand the distrust, and don't really fault you for it, but there is reason to not be entirely pessimistic with this one.
That's a good list. Once someone has used Vista for a while, they will not want to go back. Even though many of the improvements there are pretty small by themselves, the small things really add up. When I use Windows 2000, it's the small things that really bug me, like the fact that Paint doesn't support PNG, or the lack of the "align to grid" option for the desktop icons (Auto Arrange is *not* the same thing).
The improved Explorer and file operations by themselves will be great (though long overdue).
Firebug. It will make your jaw hit the floor.
...just to show off you have a recent build of Vista and that you know the codenames of your CPUs...what a weeny.
Why would I want to consider that? Humans cannot hear sounds at frequencies up to 45 kHz. No speaker or headphone driver can reproduce a signal with a dynamic range of 24 bits, and I don't believe that any microphone is that sensitive.
So, an analog device that cannot be built can record sounds that a human being cannot hear. So what?
Electronic noise is an unavoidable reality. More bits (including infinity, aka theoretical analog) gains you nothing if the signal you want is below the noise.
Microsoft won't be releasing DirectX 10 for XP so unless someone figures out how to "make it work" people who want the latest and greatest in gaming won't be able to experience some of the new things DX10 offers. Unless of course OpenGL catches up. :)
So, perhaps you can name a SINGLE "useful new feature" that is worth $170k in new desktops across my enterprise. And when I say "useful", I mean it'll earn that $170k BACK somehow.
Here are several for ya.
There's more, of course. These are just a few of the things I see as big wins for the IT department that deploys Vista over existing XP/2000 systems. Yes, Vista really is more than just Aero Glass. Who would've thought it?
OK, I get that it's bundling; and I get why that's "bad".
Internet Explorer
Sure its not bad per se, but without competition there is no incentive to improve it, fix bugs, or innovate. If it wasn't for Firefox, IE 7 would still wouldn't have Tabs and advanced security options.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Nice to see strawman arguments getting modded insightful. When you started using the current OS that you are using, did you throw out every desktop and replace them all with new ones?
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Yes! Bittorrent is the answer! Because you just know the proverbial entertainment industry will keep making those movies if noone buys them.
Ok, seriously now that you are used to XP would you really go back to 98?
I recommend that people get the benefits of Vista by upgrading to free software. Still, I prefer 98 to XP and respect people who are still running it. As usual, it's a matter of control. XP sucks and Vista is going to be worse. The features that people actually want are available in free software.
I still have windoze 98 somewhere myself. I keep it just in case there's some kind of DOS thing that has to be done with hardware. Because I've been careful with my hardware, I have not had to boot that partition in more than three years. I would not trade it for a version that has to be registered on line, pops up all sorts of Bob style messages and is generally obnoxious without real security improvement.
Various versions of debian deal with newer hardware just fine. Again, it takes some care. When things don't work, I send them back and say why, "It does not work with my computer."
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
> Vista's extreme support for DRM is my concern.
There is this weird pipe-dream people have that if no computing platform supports DRM natively, then DRM will go away.
This is not true.
The initial IBM PCs and compatibles didn't have any inherent support for copy protection, which is essentially primitive DRM. Yet many people refused to release software without copy protection, and as a result many schemes were enacted which ultimately hurt the consumer *and* sales of the software.
DRM is the same. Many copyright holders refuse to release works on digital media without some sort of DRM. If modern operating systems do not provide DRM natively, then third-party developers will provide it - much like Sony did with their rootkit-infested CDs. We don't want anything else like that, do we?
In the end, DRM will probably go the way of copy protection. The fears that DRM is designed to address are largely illusory, and those that aren't will not really be terribly impacted by DRM. Once companies figure out that DRM is really not worth having, they'll stop having it.
But we can't make them do that any sooner than they're ready. If you try to cram the message down their throat, they'll just fight that much harder to have their DRM, and they'll do much more offensive and draconian things. So relax and be secure in the idea that eventually, DRM will prove ineffective and drop off the radar because it's just not worth the effort.
Microsoft cheerleader, blue flag waving, you got a problem with that?
I understand that saying that DirectX 10 might be an upgrade from DirectX 9.
The question is that since Direct X 10 is going to be tied to Vista and not available for 98/2K/XP then there will not be a substantial user base available for any games that happen to use Direct X 10.
Tying DirectX 10 to Vista might be a selling point for Vista, but it might also mean the death of DirectX.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
At $500/pop this is going to be one hell of an expensive eyecandy.
I guess this costs about as much as a Mac mini + Tiger...
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
is all the DRM.
The only reason I'd want to run Vista is for games that use DirectX10, which currently is exactly 0.
The minute my favourite games work under linux, and with equal or better performance than windows I'm moving to a Linux-only PC.
First of all, the UI changes, IE7, simple network changes, start menu, explorer changes, new dialogs, USB caching, search, WPF, backup utils, audio changes, and speech recognition are next to useless, and are certainly not worth paying for.
No, not really. I've never paid for a windows license, but I'm willing to pay to have most of those above in my home PC.
Let me put it another way: if Vista isn't worth it to you, then no OS ever will be worth it to you.
Oh damn. If I hadn't replyed to a different thread I would have mod'd it Insightful.
Yes, what he said is funny, but he makes a very very good point.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
I'm boycotting apple because of ABCs GOP propaganda film they are releasing that claims to be based off 9-11 commission report but in reality is just made up stuff to smear the clinton administration. The reason for boycotting apple is because steve jobs is the largest share holder of disney and disney owns ABC. If he's unwilling to prevent this film from being shown, i will not buy his apple products. As the largest share holder of disney, we have to start holding Jobs accountable for disney's actions.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
Please learn how to spell "flame" correctly. This is the second post I've seen of yours in which you spell it "flaim".
Tangential, and in reply to Great Grandparent's assertion that memory is cheaper than CPU power.
"Build a man a fire warm him for a day, set a man on fire and warm him for the rest of his life."
If you listen to Steve Gibson's latest Security Now podcast
Steve Gibson is a fucking moron. Nobody should listen to him. Ever.
Currently using Windows at work I learned just how many leaps and bounds Apple is above MS in that regard. Special-character keystrokes are just the tip of the iceberg (i need to type Alt-whatthefuck?) You use the ctrl key as the primary modifier... unless you're going for a systemwide command then you use Alt-ObscureFkey (??!!). At least Command-Q has a mnemonic tag by design. Meanwhile, publishing industry apps such as Quark and Adobe suite include ctrl-Q for poor Apple-oriented saps like myself.
As far as I recall, hitting shift-end does what you want universally on both platforms, no?
I hate Grammar Nazi's
I'd say im a power user of Windows and Linux (Ubuntu BB) at home and a user of Mac Minis (at work), and frankly I've never had a problem with Windows XP at all. Sure it sucks as a development environment, but hell, it hasnt crashed on me in ages, (though I pretty much use it as a media center for movies/music only!!). Ive used it extensively for simulations lasting weeks (Matlab simulations for wireless communications), and hey, its not all that bad! Im sick of people bashing XP for no apparent reason, and while Id only recommend it to a complete novice at computing such as my grandparents, its a pretty nifty piece of software! Im so not qualified to bitch about Vista, but I'm sure there isnt any earth shattering development in there that would justify the cost involved in switching from XP!
Has anyone see that they actually managed to bloat and screw up MINESWEEPER?! The simplest of all games, and they've screwed it up past the point of playability. If you upgrade and are a minesweeper fan, make sure you bring over your copy of winmine.exe (if it runs, I haven't tried it).
The drivers for xp 64 bit still suck and that was released years ago. I'm certain that drivers for 64 bit vista will be dismally bad.
Then again, if you're a manufacturer, crappy or no drivers is a great way to get your customers to but a new printer or scanner from you.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
I wish I owned one of these crumbling industries. Microsoft is making one billion dollars in cash profit every month and that figure is increasing every month. Likewise the movie industry just enjoyed a very profitable year (with a large percentage gain in profits over last year). Of course this is slashdot, where reality and truth dont seem to penetrate
nuff sed.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
ThinkFr33ly posted a list of new features, not a changelog. If you got ahold of an actual changelog of XP->Vista, it'd likely be the size of a phonebook.
Those were also merely features ThinkFr33ly was interested in, not a comprehensive list of new features.
i thought windows 2000 supported dual cores. any other reason?
yeah, that's about it
I don't know about up a folder, but winkey-d is go to desktop.
winkey-e opens explorer, though navigating through that with keys is a bit of a pain really, but hey, autocomplete on paths/files in the address bar or winkey+r (run) still works fine, even nicer imo if you use tweakui to let tab autocomplete.
I have to disagree about the audio changes. Prior to reading details of the new audio system I had no interest in even trying vista, even was actively against it. Now I am not so sure. The stuff they've put in there is roughly equivalent to a $10K TacT Audio room correction box. Sure the TacT box is over-priced, but it is still an amazingly cool technology.
Linux has a DRC package available, it is probably even more functional than what MS is providing, but it is orders of magnitude harder to use.
The real issue for the geeks of the world who buy their own kit and load whatever OS they want is when will M$ drop support for XP? I am guessing they will do it quicker than they have done for past OS's
When will they stop fixing bugs and releasing patches?
That is when we will have no choice but to give bill some more of our money?
(or maybe DX10 games will force the issue)
I know windows-D is go to desktop, but in an "open" dialogue, it minimizes my dialog and everything else. What is the shortcut to make the dialogue browsing location the desktop?
As a republican I feel it my responsibity to manufacture criminals. People need punished!
These people that did this study with real watches and lots of people sitting around... you don't think they actually didn't take into account the hand movements, do you? The study said that in the course of doing real editing, probably of a non-technical nature, that it actually is quicker to move your hand to the mouse, because the keyboard commands are really that much less efficient. I don't know how technical their users were, I doubt they were using Vim, and they probably didn't have to make huge multi-screen selections of the type that mice tend to make a mess of.
They probably also had their people sitting with proper posture and with all their equipment well-positioned. They probably had well-maintained mice with mousepads. They probably had enough room in their setup to allow for effective mouse use. When all these things are true it takes very little time to move your hand to the mouse, do some things quickly, then move back. If you're reaching for your keyboard or hunched over that makes it more difficult to move to the mouse. I have a trackball that allows me to operate without taking much space, but it's a bit slower than a mouse (all my best minesweeper times have come with a normal mouse). Laptop users have a whole slew of input devices that sacrifice something (usually speed and ergonomics) to deal with the limited space in which they can operate; on the other hand, it's often very efficient to switch from keyboard to mouse on a laptop.
Or we could use sophisticated mathematical algorithm to analyze the sound and only store the diffs between the channels, and compress anything that can be. Without information loss...
Without post-quantization loss, you mean. The whole point of the GP post was that recording and digitization are inherently lossy.
The other, less obvious, perhaps, point is that lossy compression is the best way to high fidelity reproduction for a given bitrate. Suppose, for example, that you have an available bitrate of 1.4Mbps (which is the data rate of an audio CD), what is the best way to get the highest quality audio into that data stream?
Now, which approach do you think is going to result in the most accurate sound reproduction? Taking 220Khz sample rate as the baseline, the lossy encoder option captures all of the initial analog data, and then intelligently discards the bits that are less important. The FLAC encoding option, on the other hand, discards 60% of the data right off the top, and not in any intelligent way, so that it can then retain all of the 40% that remains. The uncompressed audio option discards 80% of the data and keeps the 20% that remains.
Of course, all of this assumes that higher sample rates actually lead to an audible difference with real-world reproduction equipment, which I don't really believe. OTOH, I also don't believe that anyone can hear the difference between CD audio and a 300kbps Vorbis-compressed version of it. So since the whole discussion is on a purely theoretical plane anyway, we might as well take it to the logical conclusion, which is that for a given data rate, the best option is lossy compression. That is also, BTW, the same conclusion that we reach with video streams. There's no debate about video because uncompressed and losslessly-compressed video is impractical on current random-access storage, but the issues and the conclusion are ultimately the same.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Not quite. The parent is mostsly wrong about loss, but it is correct about higher fidelity coming about due to recording higher frequencies (which is what higher bitrates can translate to in a digital recording, assuming good input data), most definitely including frequencies you can't hear. This is why:
When two waveforms are combined, there are often four reasonably high amplitude results. The original two, the sum of the original two, and the difference between the original two.
Now for instance, let's stipulate that your hearing goes to 20 Khz (not likely, but let's go with it.) Let us also say that you have a recording, recorded with a brick wall filter that doesn't let anything past 20 KHz into the data stream. This is recording A. Recording B, however, let's say records up to, oh, 50 KHz.
Let us now suppose that as part of the performance, waveforms of, um, 35 KHz and 22 KHz are created. They're on recording B, but not on recording A.
Now comes time to play these back in your living room. Recording A produces everything up to 20 KHz, and you listen and you can hear all that. Nothing above comes out.
Recording B is played back now. 35 KHz and 22 KHz are faithfully radiated from your (very, very good) speakers. You can't hear these. But! They hit the walls and other hardish things in your listening room, and at that point, you get reflections at 22 KHz (can't hear it), 35 KHz (can't hear it) 57 KHz ((the sum) can't hear it) and at 13 KHz ((the difference) which you can hear!)
In this way, recording stuff above your listening range directly affects the playback qualities.
It goes further than that, too. Those fundamental, sum and difference frequencies bounce around your room, getting phase shifted, adding with other signals at other times (sound is slow; room size matters) and all of this not only contributes to exactly what you hear, but when. In other words, the room is an unavoidable part of the playback, and "stuff" on the recording that is (nominally) above your natural ability to hear will have a direct and potentially significant effect on what you hear.
So, the bottom line is, the broader the bandwidth of the recording, the more complex (and accurate) your listening experience is. Broader bandwidth literally does a better job of putting the performance into your performance space 9your listening area.)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
"Well, do you necessarily go out and buy a new car of the same model every 2 years because the manufacturer developed a new one?"
Well, OSs aren't much like cars and the interval between XP and Vista is significantly longer than two years, but other than that, great analogy.
In any case, I wasn't expressing an opinion on whether people should upgrade to Vista, I just think doing it in order to "send a message" to MS that XP is fine is pointless and dumb.
The logic of the argument is extremely flawed yet somehow i do want to agree. Fact of the matter is that Win 3.1 was a 'perfectly good' OS. If we all followed that logic we'd still be there. However i am forced to agree that XP is still the best OS out there. I tried out both x64 and x86 editions of the Vista Beta 2. That was a week so awful i honestly felt like i was back on '98 with random crashes for no apparent reason. Chances are i, and most of the /. crowd will probably never upgrade to Vista or at the very least will give it a year on the shelves before we think about it.
"No, no, no, don't tug on that! You never know what it might be attached to."
Disclaimer: My experience with Vista has been limited to pre-RC1 and RC1, but both times, making a sincere effort to use them as both my dev OS and my primary OS.
Various kernel improvements in scheduling
Vista does seem to handle high-load situations better than XP (which quite frankly, sucked at dealing with them.)
Completely new TCP/IP stack
Both a plus and a minus -- on the plus side, yes it is fast. On the minus side, what are the bets that a completely new TCP/IP stack is free of security-holes, especially given that this isn't the OpenBSD team we're talking about...
Composited desktop / Aero prettiness
Compositing and hardware-accelerated windows are nice. It's a little on the graphics heavy side though, and does require a beefy video card for the really shiny bits to be usable. That said, I personally (although I expect that others feel differently) find Aero to be so-so... it's got several cool effects, but I actually ended up turning it off when I got sick of it. To each his own, I guess...
Resolution/DPI independence
Except not really. While the frameworks/APIs are in place for this, and some of Vista is resolution independent, much of the OS is still very much bitmap-based. If you don't believe me, take a peek inside some of the shell DLLs. It is prettier, and high-res icons are being used in many places, but the res-independent stuff isn't used very much. (For anyone who thinks I'm an Apple fanboy.... OS X doesn't have res-independence either. Leopard does have it, but it's off by default, and is very very very alpha.)
Revamped security model (UAC, new system services model, etc.)
About time. The UAC stuff is nice, as are the sane default settings, but this isn't really a compelling reason to upgrade (since it's all stuff that a properly configured Win2K or XP box will do.)
IE 7+ (Protected Mode IE) - this will virtually eliminate malware via the browser
Ha ha ha ha ha.... IE Protected Mode is nice... but "virtually eliminate malware"? I think not. As long as the mshtml engine is used as part of the OS, it is still a risk. IE7 is an improvement from IE6, but is still outpaced by other browsers, IMHO.
Much better networking UI / auto network discovery
Better, but still a pain in the ass compared to OS X. This actually _is_ a good feature for people, at least if they're travelling, but not very computer-savvy.
New start menu really is a LOT better than XPs
I agree with half of that statement: it's new. Better is subjective... but it's basically just tries to get you to use the search field instead of the traditional "Programs" hierarchy. I guess that's easier, but I honestly don't like the OS guessing what I want to run. So yes, it's new... but from me it gets a solid "meh... so what?"
Far better Explorer interface
Amen. I like the new concepts seen in the Explorer interface. Some of them are really cool features. My only gripe, and the reason why I currently dislike explorer hasn't changed: from a UI consistancy standpoint, it's complete crap. It breaks it's own rules all the time -- stuff looks different depending on pretty much everything except for the phases of the moon. I know easy UIs have never been Microsoft's strong point, but Vista's Explorer is pretty darn inconsistent. Apple's actually made a screw-up like this too: the "Services" menu in the application-name menu. Each service is pretty cool, but the reasoning behind why they're there, and why they're enabled/disabled seems to be an arbitrary one (to the user.)
WAY better file operations dialogs
WAY better file operations in general
The dialogs are nicer. The operations themselves... well... I haven't really noticed that much of an improvement over XP, to be honest. No complaints though.
ReadyBoost
Works well... if you have a USB drive... and if you keep it plugged in...
The real litigious bastards...
Dude! Thank you for correcting me! You are right, I am wrong. I'm switching back to 2k this weekend, I hate XP.
Unfortunately, I'm a game developer so I don't think I'm going to be able to get away with this for long - the DirectX SDK will no longer install to 2k unless you use a version that's a few years out of date.
"What we DO need to do is use higher bitrates. MP3 can be encoded pretty well, but nowadays there's no reason to cut the bitrate so much. If we used the bitrate of a CD (1.4 megabit) and our better "lossy" compression formats, we'd get way better sound than we get from a "lossless" regular CD."
Poppycock and balderdash.
MP3 is based around perceptual models.
Very few people can hear the difference between 16/44.1 and 24/96, and even then only on carefully chosen material.
You cannot improve a lossy compression system that relies on discarding what is not audible by throwing more data bandwidth at it, if you have already reached the point where there is enough data that a human cannot detect any improvement. What perceptual models do you base your compression on?
MP3 also uses filters and temporal masking to construct the audio and a whole host of other tricks.
These filters naturally have ringing and other distortions that degrade the sound.
I.e., the more you fuck with the audio the more it sounds fucked.
So, lossy compression with the data bandwidth of CD will sound worse than a CD.
Lossless compression like flac on the other hand may give some improvement.
That's what people said about IBM's decree that Micro Channel was the new standard. Up until that point, the industry followed wherever IBM lead. After companies simply ignored MCA because it just wasn't worth it, people's perceptions changed and IBM lost its leadership: It didn't happen right away, though. People still bought Big Blue because it was "the standard", but that number decreased with time.a ndard_Architecturee cture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Industry_St
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Channel_archit
More than a few people believe XP was a turning point for Microsoft. Up until that time, Microsoft's OSes kept getting better and better (if you ignore ME, which most people did anyway). XP wasn't significantly better than W2K, and by pursuing the consumer electronics market they actually made a lot of things worse. With XP, Microsoft lost its leadership. Unlike previous releases, most people simply chose not to upgrade unless forced to, and some who were forced to upgrade simply chose to move to Linux or MacOSX.
It's actually no co-incidence that people started looking at alternatives to Microsoft (e.g. office formats, operating systems, etc) after Microsoft's infallibility was put into question.
It's also no co-incidence that people accellerated looking at alternatives to Microsoft after it was clear the Vista and Office 12 were both underwhelming and more trouble than they were worth.
Face it. Microsoft can't move the market the way they used to.
Perhaps. However: I'm an EE, and an audio engineer. I'm somewhat experienced with compression, having been the first to produce a number of signal compression modes, some of which are still in wide today, for instance inside PNG, and several types of very high lossless compression in WinImages and the audio CODECS in one of the first all-digital SSTV systems. So while you may catch me out, you're going to have to work harder at it. :-)
I was talking about CD quality, and stereo. Which I probably should have stipulated, but then again, I don't think I've ever downloaded a >2 channel recording at bitrates/depths higher than a CD, so I think I was addressing the common experience, and perhaps you should have as well. I am perfectly ready to say that stuffing high bandwidth, deep word uncompressed signals into a PC is more demanding. But I am also presuming almost no one does such a thing at this point in time, and likely as (or if) it becomes common, media and RAM size will have swollen to accomodate such uses.
As an EE and and audio engineer and a musician, I have a simple reply to this: There are no "insignificant" bits. Only bits that are lost due to one factor or another. Lossy compression isn't something to figure out. It is something to abandon.
No argument. The more detail there is, the more I like it.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
You are mixing up amplitude and frequency. When two waveforms interact, the interference pattern can boost or cancel out the amplitude, but it doesn't really affect the frequenciies.
Sure, there are hi-frequency tones that produce harmonincs with audible tones, but its not really as simple as summing up the frequencies.
Even his 5 best things about Vista are all things I hate:
...and now even more bloated with internet-based service crap that you have to fight with just to not buy anything online. If you just want a simple player to play your locally stored unprotected mp3 file without it assuming it must scan your whole drive and waste space on an unwanted list of all your media then compare it all with online imdb databases, you're screwed.
5) Windows ReadyBoost
Using a USB key to speed up your machine.
This has to be the dumbest idea ever. Flash typicallaly has a 100k rewrite lifetime. Also, your cheap-enough-not-to-care usb key is still only 256 or 512Mb which limits your swap file size. If you're gonna buy a big enough key then it'll cost maybe $100+ which is more than you'd need to spend to add another 1 or 2Gb of main system memory instead which would give you much better performance returns.
4) Integrated Search
In short, even more layers of click-through internet/media/people crap that gets in your way when you're just trying to find where windows hid your file on your local hard drive.
3) Media Center
Can you say DRM?
2) Windows Photo Gallery
Yes, even more redundant bloatware that should never be a part of an operating system. If I want this crap I'll buy it. Windows photo editor has traditionally made simple jobs hard and hard jobs impossible. it also unavoidably 'automatically adjusts the quality' (read: corrupts) your picture if you just want to simply rotate it 90 degrees, for example.
1)Setup
To save about 2 minutes of autmated install time, Windows Vista's interactive Setup skips half the steps you used to perform in XP Setup. Wow thats intelligent *NOT*. It means that hour or two you used to spend fiddling with a newly (re)installed XP before you could use it just got longer.
Summary:
Linux just keeps looking better.
> I would say the TCP/IP improvements,
No value; existing network is tuned as good as it gets.
> productivity gains from improved UI,
I've yet to meet one SINGLE user who spends *ANY* time in the OS UI. Result: 0. Users spend time in app-land, not the desktop. And again, a new improved "open/save" common-dialogue doesn't cut it. On a good day, a fancy new dialog might change an 8 second process... to a 7 second process. It'll be years before we see our $60 at that rate; you're also ignoring the cash required to pay me to roll this stuff out, which is one hell of a lot more than $60 a shot.
> the revamped security model,
Again, not relevent - it does not allow for the relaxation of any legacy tactics... at the end of the day, it's just more eye-candy that accomplishes nothing, just another layer of complexity that must be managed yet provides no value. "Revamped"... you mean, "not yet debugged". You know, like WMTimer priv escallation design flaw stuff.
> and the general reliability improvements you'll get from Vista
Sorry to take exception to this one, rofl... that would be a negative value. We're already at a 2-nine uptime (if we *ignore* black tuesday) with XP and 2K; any "crashes" are generally a result of bad behavior in userland, which has no bearing on the OS. You're asking us to start back at square-one, and you're retroactively giving credit to the stability of WVSP6a before we've even hit SP1, yet. Sorry, but "reliability improvements" are long, long ways away.
So, you gave it a good amateur try... but I'm still waiting for an actual reason that puts money on the table, which includes User's Time.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
Nope, sorry. Wrong answer. Graph the addition of two different frequency sine waves. Look at the results. It just gets more complex with more complex waveforms.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I would expect nothing less from you than to link to Thurrott's anti-Vista article and not link to his bajillion pro-Vista articles.
The compelling reason is what Microsoft makes of it. They'll either deny installation of XP on any new box to force vendors to install Vista thus by attrition making it the defacto standard. Or, they'll get the Department of Homeland Security to declare that we need to upgrade to protect ourselves from terrorist viral infections.
I've said this a hundred times now since I looked at the beta of Vista (and the RC1 candidate). Vista is Windows XP with a new interface and that's pretty much it. Any security could have been upgraded in Vista by simply coming out with SP3. What will Microsoft do/say to us all about how good/bad XP is and about it's security down the road? In 6 months when they realize people aren't buying this non-compelling OS, or the new OSes' sales drop off, will they claim that no further enhancements will be made to XPs security?
XP is good enough right now and there is no real compelling reason to upgrade. Microsoft gutted the OS prior to the ship date, and promising us that feature X or Y will be available for download for genuine Vista customers is downright lame. Why would we believe them?
You know Microsoft was sued recently for stealing the IP used to implement the activation features of XP. They were further fined extra due to their abuse of the legal system by burying the plantiff and court in paperwork in an attempt to hide the proof that this guy owned the IP. The fact is, they stole the IP that was implemented to keep you from stealing their IP.
Why would we believe them about anything?
They implemented features into the OS that spies on you. They deceptively included it in the critical update and then tried to manipulate opinion by saying that if it was OK for the European and Asian continents then there's no reason that American's should complain about it.
We are to believe anything they say or do? On top of that they haven't quit. They knew they could ride the storm out and then continue to ship that update in the exact same way.
On top of that they are telling the support groups all around the world that those updates are for security reasons to keep you secure.
Microsoft started that mechanism to keep their revenues high. They wouldn't even pay the guy that invented it. Then they tried to bury him financially to keep from being caught. Then they implement these systems and almost make it mandatory to install. Then they manipulate the public into believing that if the europeans and asians can accept it we should too. Then they tell their support groups all around the world to sell this as if it was critical to security.
This is trustworthy behavior? We should believe them that there are future features that we'll get if we buy now? We should believe them that Vista is secure?
On top of that they have the gall to tell us that they are consulting with Mozilla in order to teach them to be more secure?
I think not.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Also, here's a little experiment you can do if you can find a guitar.
Tune the E string so the A at the 5th fret is perfect. Tune the A string so that it is perfect open. Fret the E string at the 5th fret. Pluck both strings. Slowly and gently, while both strings are still strongly vibrating, de-tune the A string. You'll hear (or see, if you can see the drivers on a guitar amp's speaker system) a very low frequency, wavering tone appear as you move away from A. This tone is the frequency difference signal between the two notes. The tone will increase in frequency as you move further away. Amplitude will depend on the resonant characteristics of the guitar itself; non-linear mixing is virtually guaranteed.
Believe me, if adding two frequencies didn't produce sum and difference frequencies, a whole lot of radio equipment wouldn't ever have worked. :-)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
There's a lot more to evaluating an OS than counting the number of times it crashes. With both 2K and XP, the #1 issue is security. In particular, both OSs are magnets for malware. Not only are there security holes up the wazoo, but it's much too easy to design social engineering into a malware installer so that a user is tricked into using their administrator status to install the damn thing.
The security holes can maybe be patched with clever recoding and redesign. But the only way to fix the installation issue is to totally rearchitect the way Windows applications are installed and run. Microsoft has to make this change in order for Windows to continue to be viable.
Now it appears that they're doing a really fucked-up job of making this change. That doesn't change the fact that these changes are necessary, and that running Windows will continue to be a nightmare for many users until these change are implemented.
Anybody who describes XP as a "perfectly fine OS" is demonstrating extreme unawareness of the issues that most PC users face. In other words, Thurrott is an idiot.
But you said....
"So, the bottom line is, the broader the bandwidth of the recording, the more complex (and accurate) your listening experience is."
Any sidebands produced by the combining of ultrasonic frequencies and your listening environment will not lead to greater accuracy, it's just weird spurious stuff that the people making the record did not intend to be there.
I'd agree that it could be more complex, as you will hear a different sound by moving your head a few cm.
What is being said in that article is nothing. The bulletted list lists nothing specific that could not have been included in XP. Essentially he's confirming that the 10000 programmers were wasting alot of our time, and theirs. Virtually everything listed could have been incorporated into windows xp and in fact a great many of them probably. The idea that we should upgrade because of dialog boxes or network discovery or ipv6 is downright insane.
99% of the stuff they promised to make into VISTA is gone. The compelling reason to upgrade is because Microsoft will make it non-compelling not to via whatever tactics they can find once they disciver that people are not willing to pay for new dialog boxes and a pretty interface.
Some of the things that guy wrote about in his prior slashdot article are obviously open to personal tastes. I've seen the new interface and I love how pretty it is but the fact remains that Microsoft's programmers don't know how to do 3d code well. They are using features that are unnecessary thus forcing you to buy a newer graphics card. Another major problem lies in that most of the machines that were sold from the likes of Dell (most particularly), HP/Compaq, Gateway, eMachines, etc aren't capable of using the Aero interface, specifically for that reason.
I installed Vista on a geforce 5200 card with 128mb of video ram and the OS refused to enable the interface. On a 6800gt it worked. The point is that even a card capable of playing most of the modern games in the past 3 years won't even display rather minor effects of a glass-style 3d interface which is a far cry from the number of polygons that geforce 5200 card could generate.
The drivers suck for this for alot of hardware. I wound up using old XP drivers because none were provided for components that were well provided for under XP. Copying a file or a series of files takes excessively long periods of time. Wireless cards essentially function a a fraction of their abilities. Any networking seems to take excessively long periods of time.
These are the compelling reasons--you give vendors something more to sell you.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Sadly the only thing I'm hearing that will cause users to upgrade to vista is DirectX 10 and of course graphics
Its the worms. The worms will make users upgrade. No I don't mean mind-controlling larvae, but the first XP-only internet worm that does not affect Vista (with its supposedly new security model) will send people scambling to upgrade.
ooh, yes, that would be cool. I'm pretty sure you can't at the moment. that does sound like it's something osx does have set up very nicely. I've got vista rc1 going but i haven't explored shortcuts in it at all yet (it's on mostly unused desktop instead of always in use laptop which just doesn't have the 15gig free (gag) to install)
I don't get it; aren't humans only able to hear up to 20 KHz or so? Doesn't the Shannon-Nyquist theorem tell us that we can reconstruct those frequencies perfectly from a signal sampled at 40 KHz? Shouldn't the CD's 44 KHz be enough?
Can someone explain it to me? Is it an audiophile thing?
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
If I had to guess, I'd say the DVD software does burn DVD's but makes sure you are burning home movies vs. personal backups of your Entertainment MegaCorp owned movies.
Also keep in mind, DVD burning is a premium feature folks. That's right, MS has a product tier for the luxury of burning DVD's. You pay MS extra for the priviledge
As I have said many times over Longwait is broken in many ways.
Sadly, this about the only time critics will get a chance to be critical. Once the PR/media onslaught begins, the roar of fanboys will be intense.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I, for one, don't care if Hollywood movies stop being made. It's not as if they're capable of making anything good with those billion-doller budgets anyway!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
You just THINK you've never paid for a Windows license.
Or did you buy all your computers a part at a time?
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
True, but you don't need equipment capable of ultrasonic reproduction to hear this.
The audible beat frequencies are on the record, anything else is distortion caused by interaction with your listening environment.
We used to call this 'air mixing'. You get even weirder effects with large pipe organs.
FLAC. It's lossless, it's unencumbered by patents, it's open source, and it compresses well,
Compresses well?
50% compression is good?!
You're right on the other points tho.
Want an open-source, un-patented compression that actually compresses well, look at OGG. Not lossless but I've heard you can't tell the difference.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Let me put it still a different way: these features in any other OS are worth it to me, but it's not worth selling my soul to DRM to get them in Vista!
You've gotta pay attention not to just the shiny baubles Microsoft is giving to you, but also what it's taking away (namely, your freedom to use your PC as a general-purpose machine).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Nitpick: it's not iTunes; it's the iTunes Music Store (iTMS). Plain AAC files created by iTunes (e.g. by ripping a CD) are not restricted.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
A third option: Use a lossy encoder, like Vorbis or MP3. You can easily achieve 80% compression, meaning you can start by sampling at 220,500 Hz.
With the Nyquist theorem, that means you can reproduce sounds up to 110,250 Hz. That is even above dog's hearing.
Do you have any bats in your house you are playing the music to??
P.S. It would be better to use 32 bits instead of 16. (96 db dynamic range instead of 48 db is actually worth it, even then one could afford more range, since you can hear as low as 0 db and might want to go up to 110 or 120 or so). 48 bits would give you 144 db which hopefully is enough.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
I'd prefer lossless compression (e.g. FLAC), myself. In my opinion, disk space is still more of an issue than CPU cycles!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I just made a 13kHz tone, didn't sound very musical (an ultra-high pitched squeal is more like it). Many people wouldn't hear it at all.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
That's wonderful and all, but from a practical standpoint it's really simple: We get a CD with X bits. If after compression and decompression we get the same X bits back, it's lossless. That's it.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
# I'll just lump UAC, the more-secure IE7 running in protected mode, Mandatory Integrity Control, Session 0 isolation, BitLocker drive encryption, Address Space Layout Randomization,and, oh, a handful of other security features into this one little bullet point. Properly taken advantage of, these could deliver that $170k of ROI all by themselves, in the form of less 3rd-party security requirements, managment of same, and management of security incidents.
All of this is irrelevent or already covered by a competent and tested solution. You'd really retire tried and tested legacy "security measures" for brand new, immature, untested ones? No, the legacy layers stay intact for quite some time... long enough that they effectively never go away, because they stay until every other legacy piece goes away. And by then, Vista will be the thing we're upgrading *from*.
# Speech recognition that works. Not sure if you want a cube-farm full of blabbering knowledge workers, but hey. I can see some orgs using this to good advantage.
You have a new definition of "works". I do have a cube farm; not only does the fun SRE not work that well for realtime production usage, but it's several orders of magnitude slower than typing.
# IPV6, much better wireless support, saved network profiles.
Uh... I've got installs of NT4 with IP6. "Wireless support", again... last I checked, (a) who cares in a desktop world, and (b) "better" defined as "sucks less". Saved profiles? As opposed to the original prism drivers from a century ago?
# mklink -- create, modify and delete junctions, hard links, and symbolic links.
Are you new? We've had this since day 1 of NTFS!
# Completely re-written image-based installation will make deployment a lot easier. It'll also make it a snap to move an employee from old computer to new computer, preserving all apps and settings without extra frobbing by IT staff (or the user!)
That will be a nice feature; too bad it goes against deployment costs, which are only required AFTER the deployment is justified. "We need to upgrade to Vista, because we'll save money by the method of deployment! In fact, if we deploy enough copies... we'll actually turn a profit! We can setup an automated batch job to repeatedly deploy Vista to a single machine, over and over, and make a fortune off the money we save!" My wife uses that same argument about buying junk we don't need that's "on sale". Bzzzt... and then there's Ghost.
As for legacy app migration, aside from most of this already being handled by conditional GPOs and things like X-Setup, such migration will only work as well as the legacy software's copyprotection allows. In other words, it won't... massive frobs will still be required, and in fact existing 2k/xp kludges will need to be redesigned because we're now on... Vista. (This last part doesn't really matter, though; the kludges would eventually need adaptation anyway, once Vista is deployed as a replacement... but we're not talking replacement, we're talking upgrade. Very, very, big difference.)
# Deadlock detection should remove most hang conditions. User-mode drivers should also be worthwhile in this respect.
How that applies to our devices remains to be seen; most users never encounter such deadlocks, unless something got fudged. And if that's the case, then they have bigger issues. Then there's the whole FUD surrounding the signed driver/module/whatever issue, which has yet to be de-FUDded to anyone's satisfaction.
# New task manager can perform specific actions in response to system events, or even multiple triggers.
If you're talking about what I think you are, again... we've had this since NT4. Just not from MS.
# Restart Manager should make most reboots a thing of the past.
Our only major outages seem to mysteriously occur on the 2nd Tuesday of each month, even with 2K3R2... our uptime is actually worse than we had when the backline was NTS4. Will those "mysterious outages" be going away? No?
# Service
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
I had a 5200FX, and the fancy glass interface worked fine, at least on Beta 1. Right, now I'm using Vista RC1 with a 6100 (terrible integrated video, though, admittedly, about as good as the 5200,) and it still works fine. Also, RC1's added A LOT of the missing drivers. (Beta 1 and 2 were terrible.) Finally, I don't know where you get the idea that, since Aero Glass requires Pixel Shaders, the programmers "don't know how to do 3d code well." XGL and Compiz on Linux (The closest equivanent to Glass on Linux at this point, I think) also require pixel shaders, and work with even less cards than Vista does! The only OS that gets it right is Mac OS X, which somehow can have a fully composited desktop with fancy UI effects using a generic VESA driver.
I was going to make a boycott Vista website but then I just went and played Silkroad Online, lol. I'm so lazy...but I'm glad someone did it! If a product sucks, don't buy it!
and also..."pointless update to XP -- a perfectly fine operating system"
WHAT?!
now stop reading and go play Dance Dance Revolution!
First of all, plist isn't binary. Second, it's not "pseudo" XML, it is XML. Third, 50 different formats of text files are not "simple!" A single text file format is what's simple; you just haven't gotten used to it yet.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
It will be provided in xp and win2k. You'll have alot of pissed off people if they force their market share by limiting technologies to one version of their platform when it isn't necessary to do so.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Suppose your nose-pickin' cousin hears how bad Vista is going to be. Which linux distro would you suggest for the complete newbie? Catch: he is nose-pickin' dumb and has a computer with an atheros wifi card in it.
Resolution/DPI independence
/shrug). I'm still confused about what the power button on the start menu does. Hibernate isn't mentioned anywhere there, but it is in the power management dialogues. I know when I hit shut down last night fans were stlll running after it was "off", thought it was a nifty feature to let the stuff inside cool off while the box was in standby (and then shut off), but they were still running this morning.
;)
Some apps look like crap when resized - resource monitor and the windows media player intro screens.
New start menu really is a LOT better than XPs
Not really. Much of the same actually. It's black. The search bar in it is nice, but since the search bar is in almost every window, it isn't as nice.
I don't like the scrolling "all programs" thing they did either. I usually have tons of items in there. At least it looks like they got rid of the "click the carrot to show all your programs" thing.
Administrative tools doesn't expand for me in the all programs scrolley menu (it does on the other part of the taskbar
WAY better file operations dialogs
No pause or queue up options, so mr hard drive gets to thrash. Sure, they added the speed (18mb/s etc) and some other info, but that isn't much of a change.
Priority is still high on copy operations - I understand that is a matter of taste, but I'd prefer that a copy operation run at lower priority than, say, the search app.
Oh, the copy box lies to you. Even though it says it's still calculating, it's actually copying.
Speaking of disk thrashing, the defrag app is hidden somewhere (i.e not in the manage mmc, I had to search for it). No analyze button that I could see.
WAY better file operations in general (no more huge lag when accessing network devices, disks, etc.)
Dragging a file to a shortcut that points to a disconnected computer will still freeze the desktop - and it remains frozen for a far longer time than it does in XP/2k3 server.
Even better, the info box that tells us the other computer can't be reached pops up under the current window and is modal to the desktop (so the desktop looks frozen to the user until you start minimizing windows)
I'll have to give it to MS that they sort of fixed the "hangs desktop if you drag icon over the shortcut" problem they've had since 95, but would it be that hard to toss up a "looking for missing computer" dialogue box for the "drag onto"?
Oh, and write cache is disabled on hard drives by default - just like in 2k3 server. Good? Bad?
New audio subsystem with TONS of cool features like being able to adjust audio for individual applications or the system as a whole.
Quite nice. Especially with annoying browser ads nowadays.
Still looking for the recording mixer...
You should add a couple things.
Help dialogues are really (actually impressing) fast. In 2k3 server and xp, they were dreadfully slow.
Automated scheduled defrags (this will put a couple companies out of business
The wallpaper changer doesn't suck (as much)
Reliability and performance monitor is cool.
Running 5600.
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I wish I owned one of these crumbling industries. Microsoft is making one billion dollars in cash profit every month and that figure is increasing every month. Likewise the movie industry just enjoyed a very profitable year (with a large percentage gain in profits over last year). Of course this is slashdot, where reality and truth dont seem to penetrate
Yes they are making large amounts of money but so were the railroads in the early 1900's.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
Then they can just go fuck themselves because I don't want anything to do with them if they're so selfish, greedy and shortsighted as to use DRM!
Here's a newsflash for you: copyright law isn't for them. In reality, it exists to benefit us, by (eventually) increasing the Public Domain. Their choices are either to accept that bargain, or not get any copyright protection at all. DRM inherently breaks this principle, therefore all DRM is anti-American and should be abolished, without exception!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Examine list of features that are supposed to be great carefully and consider a hypothetical group of 100 consumers.
0 00296
# Various kernel improvements in scheduling
# Completely new TCP/IP stack that offers much greater performance on high latency connections
# Resolution/DPI independence
# Much better networking UI / auto network discovery - much cooler than I expected
# Windows Display Driver Model (virtualization of graphics card memory!)
# Dramatic improvements in driver development (can develop a simple driver in 500 instead of 5000 lines of code) Note: These are the one's that must be signed by MS for how much money?
# WAY better file operations dialogs
# WAY better file operations in general (no more huge lag when accessing network devices, disks, etc.)
# DirectX 10
# New audio subsystem with TONS of cool features like being able to adjust audio for individual applications or the system as a whole.
# Speech Recognition that really, really works. (Ignore the FUD about that failed demo and TRY it yourself.)
# SuperFetch - a much improved version of XPs intelligent caching
Every one of the above mean nothing to 90+ of the 100 end users. They won't see it, they don't know it, they don't care. These users don't like upgrading because they don't like UI changes too.
# Nice UI improvements like Flip3d (works well), taskbar thumbnails
# New start menu really is a LOT better than XPs
# Composited desktop / Aero prettiness (looks far less childish than XP, imo)
Now you may get 10% of the 90% that don't care for the above three reasons. They won't like the change, and lose their email because they don't have a clue how to transfer anything. (Microsoft makes that so easy right? hint: outlook.pst is a hidden file by default...)
Okay the score is 9 Longwait 91 XP/2000/Linux/OSX (or thereabouts)
You've got some things that sound great.
#IE 7+ (Protected Mode IE) - this will virtually eliminate malware via the browser
#Revamped security model (UAC, new system services model, etc.)
Wait, no. I mean they sound great but we know from all previous versions before this is just happy pretend thinking. The target is too large, the "security" too half-baked and such an afterthought it's made a great career for me.
But then you aren't selling to me, there's probably 80 people out of the 91 left that will get Longwait with the next PC they buy. They won't buy it because they -want- it. But just because it's there. And I'll be making plenty of money off them babysitting their new OS.
Finally, you neglected to mention Longwait is intentionally broken in many ways: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=195283&cid=16
And then, there's the aftermarket firewall, antivirus software, antispyware software are also required.
In the end, Microsoft loses maybe 10 people out of the 100. But they'll be charging the 90 suckers left more for less and they'll be paying me more too. In the end, it's a win-win.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Dip$%|*,
The topic is "upgrade".
Please note that there is a significant difference between the terms "upgrade" and "retire".
If a box has reached end-of-life, and you retire it from production for a new one... the process is not an "upgrade". It is a "retirement".
If a box is still in production, and you deliberately "replace" it before its intended end-of-life for the sake of enhancement, THAT is an "upgrade". For example, we UPGRADED several EGA monitors and video adaptors to take advantage of VGA, long ago. The EGA video was adequate, and the machines using them worked fine - and they were not due for retirement for another year or two. But, there was significant advantage in dumping EGA, and moving those machines up to VGA. THAT is an "upgrade". Meanwhile, other EGA machines were slated for retirement - and they were NOT upgraded. They were RETIRED. And the replacements had VGA cards and monitors. THAT is NOT an "upgrade"; that's just the normal churn of replacement.
So, get your facts straight. The topic is "Upgrade"; the deliberate tossing of one thing for another, for the sake of having that other.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
I could quibble with your valuations of the things mentioned - but I won't. Perhaps you wouldn't immediately depend on the new security features of Vista - that doesn't mean others will choose your strategy. Maybe your org wishes to continue licensing Ghost - but maybe other orgs don't. And so on. Value is in the eye of the beholder!
While we actually haven't had *usable* symlinks 'since day 1 of NTFS', again, that's not the point. The point is, many potentially valuable features do exist in Vista. *You* may not see value in them, but that's your right. Still, blowing off the whole thing as simple a new Aero-ized Solitaire is way, way too simplistic.
Dude: In 10.4, plists are BINARY and have to be manually converted back to text. Furthermore, many plists contain binary blobs of crap within the XML - ditto for the "open directory" schemas that contain the proprietary extensions. I HATE binary blobs of crap. That's what I mean by pseudo XML. If you are just wrapping binary blobs with XML, you may as well not use XML. It would be one thing if it were only true binary data, like pictures, but they are dumping undocumented encoded data structures in there.
The wordyness of the XML makes it MUCH more time consuming to deal with on a command line level. Seasoned Unix system administrators can't walk up to a mac box and do jack with it because NOTHING is done the normal way. This means a steep learning curve for all. Worse, most is not publicly documented (or so poorly documented that it is effectivly undocumented.
Really, its a whole lot of the same thing.
Like with Windows XP, when it came out, it was a piece of crap, and Windows 2000 was miles better. Now Windows XP is quite solid with the service packs and third party support. Same thing will happen here, nothing new, just people who have nothing to talk about. Same thing with just about anything and everything. The big killer here is that Vista won't be all that hot even though it took so long to deliver, but meh. Will still probably get a copy bundled with the MSDN subscription or MS Partnership or whatever, so why not, and for most others, it will come bundled with their PC.
Aside for a few exceptions, like companies who need a specific feature of an OS, is there -anyone- who actualy pays specificaly (and not as part as something else) to upgrade Windows? All of 3 people maybe? So i'm not sure that it matters. As long as its not -worse- than XP, who cares?
16bit=96db dynamic range.
24bit=144db dynamic range.
144db is enough for anyone. No A/D converters exist that can capture >125db dynamic range.
no, i don't think you really want that.
Full autocomplete is nice in some situations, but with the likelyhood of having multiple folders with the same name, tab completion (as apposed to auto) is a nice addition. Tab is on my list of 'twitch keys' by now
Apple only provides 32-bit kernels that can support both 32 and 64-bit processes in user mode (one for PPC and one for Intel). Microsoft provides both a 32-bit kernel that can run 32-bit processes and a 64-bit kernel that can run both 32 and 64-bit processes. The system processes run in the same mode as the kernel in both cases.I, for one, don't plan to buy a new machine anytime just to upgrade to Vista. There are other features besides the eye candy that might be nice to have. I'm sure this machine is capable of running Vista (I've been trying the betas for while now), but it's far from compatible with the 64-bit version.Microsoft always publishes a hardware compatibility list with their operating systems: check it. Check with the manufacturers of your hardware to see if and when they will provide appropriate drivers.
...is not crash, then you should get yourself an old copy of DOS and be happy.
Some of us, on the other hand, have somewhat higher requirements for an OS: decent POSIX support and standard utility programs (e.g. bash), a UI that doesn't mostly freeze when all we're doing is copying a file, the ability to use the machine without having to worry about malware, etc.
Windows wouldn't meet this criteria even if it were perfectly stable!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
So are denying that you said this?
"So, perhaps you can name a SINGLE "useful new feature" that is worth $170k in new desktops across my enterprise."
Sounds like your talking about *NEW DESKTOPS* to me.
Is "new desktops" your code word for uprading the OS, or are you jsut mad at being caught making a strawman?
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
You must be the guy who put 2000 on my mother-in-law's 32MB 266MHz machine! LOL. It took 20 minutes to boot... the poor hard drive practically melted through the floor. I asked her "Who put 2000 on here?" She says, "The computer guy when I took it in because the Zip drive wasn't working." I said, "Does the Zip drive work now?" "Yes, but nothing else really does," was the predictable answer.
I "fixed" that machine by putting a spare 128MB stick into it and removing the Windows 98 antivirus software that they helpfully left on there :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
In digital recording, we're taking quantized samples of an analog phenomenon at regular intervals. This is inherently lossy compression.
Um, no it isn't. Assuming you sample at at least the Nyquist frequency, you can reproduce the original analog signal exactly.
I love it when I don't have to do anything to become a member of a group that is doing something like "boycotting Vista". I can't afford a new PC with that on it when they do come out. So, I can say I am boycotting, too. And, I have no idea when my local Office Depot will have HP computers with Vista on them to look at and wish I could somehow get away with buying one.
My source of PC's now are older Windows computers that were discarded when XP came out. Not thrown out in the trash, mind you, but lovingly gathered up, all the software, manuals and cables, and brought to me by people that can say, "He'll have a good time with this computer". They hate to throw one out that cost them big bucks when new. Some were $2400, some $3000. "Just think what he will be able to do with it", they say, as they enjoy the "out of box experience" with their new Windows XP computer. And I do appreciate each and every one.
See the screenshots below to see what one of these boxes could do.
Dual 200 MMX, had Windows 98 on it, wouldn't stay connected to the internet, so I wound up with it.
XP seems so good, really, that so far, I have not had one of these left on my doorstep.
Rapidweather's Linux Screenshots.
...hmmm... I'm not surprised. Seriously, does anyone in the world actually LIKE windows? I know that I don't. I HATE windows, but most games come out for windows, and most corporations use windows. Every single other person that I've talked to, that I would've expected to be a windows zealot(haven't fgound a single one yet) end up admitting that they only use windows because they are forced to in some fashion or other(corporate use and/or games), but otherwise HATE it.
...and I'd like to see a REAL honest-to-god-low-down-and-dirty assessment of what vista offers over XPP, such as was available for win2k v.XP in which the only real difference was a bloated(nearly unusable) UI in XP, and a few minor support lib changes/additions...
I mean there are Mac zealots, linux bigots, but windows what? apologists? supported by the morass/inertia or morons?
On a more factual note, I see that their "administrator priveleges" access is totally FUBARred from the get go, and remains that way. Even Linux does a better job at it.
So, the home/end keys don't work the same as Windows? That's it? That's kind of praising with faint damns.
Command + Right/Left Arrow, btw.
Most of the time it's we've done it, and the units are already shipping to stores.
Every space has characteristics it adds. The performer's space, yours, anything that isn't a pure anechoic chamber. The performers are not responsible for your space. You are. Having said that, this doesn't mean that your space doesn't, or cannot, contribute. Many recordings are made without microphones; that is, direct-to-media through the board and any FX loops that might be in use. In this case, there is no "space" and the only one that will affect anything is yours. Mics, when used, also have very specific pickup patterns. They don't always hear what is behind them (which includes things coming from the space you're in, theoretically speaking.) It's not as simple as just imagining a mic that picks up everything there is and gives it to you.
The bottom line is that recording those higher frequencies brings to YOUR space what was in THE MUSICIAN'S space. Mixing can occur right in your ears, for that matter. It's not like your ears are linear. :-)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
With that kind of market share, Microsoft's at long last trying to leverage its monopoly power by raising prices.
"at long last"? "AT LONG LAST"?? People have noted for YEARS that the value/price of Microsoft software has been abysmal compared to the value/price of improving hardware.
If anything, you wonder whether there will be some Microsoft "retirements" and whether any of those will complain that their predecessors put them in an untenable position by keeping prices jacked until the bubble burst on these guys.
This would be correct if (a) Mics were omnidirectional and omnisensitive and linear with regard to frequency response for all directions and (not OR, *and* !!!) (b) the nonlinear and mixing characteristics of your space were the same as the musician's space and (c) reflections and mixing were actually distortions -- but they are not -- they are, in essense, the ambiance of the room, and were you to get rid of them, you'd have an anechoic chamber, and having been in many of them, I'm pretty sure you'd hate it, big-time. Music sounds like shit on toast in an AC.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
That's funny, the one I checked before I wrote the previous post opened up in TextEdit (on an Intel Mac, which necessarily runs 10.4) just fine.
With the possible exception of stuff that isn't character data anyway (e.g. images), I haven't found that to be true. Can you name an example?
I don't think this is an inherent flaw to XML; I think this is a result of trying to work with it the same way you would a traditional config file -- if you modify your approach I'll bet you'd have much more success. Maybe a Perl or Python XML library could be helpful?
Fair enough, but the "normal way" isn't necessarily the best way. I, for one, would like to see the rest of the UNIX-like OSs take some of the better ideas (e.g. launchd) from OS X and adopt them themselves.
Most, such as everything related to the UI, doesn't even exist in a comparable way in other unices either.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
"Vista is supposedly rewritten from scratch. That's fine, because the code now incorporates an awareness of security issues that weren't anticipated when the original codebase was developed...or so they say."
This is the third Microsoft OS that's going to be a huge leap forward in security, so I'm a bit skeptical. I hadn't heard it was rewritten from scratch, but I wouldn't have believed it if I _had_ heard it. The existing code base represents an arbitrary (I doubt even MS could give an accurate figure) but large number of man-centuries. Any company would be hesitant to through that sort of investment away. I can't see Microsoft doing it. Also, the nature of a couple of the already-released exploits seems to indicate a common code base. Though I'm not prepared to swear it wasn't an example of a common design flaw.
Aside from his UI comments (which don't interest me, as my non-MS desktop does everything I ask of it), Thurrott also had a good point with the following:
"Anti-virus and Anti-spam
Windows Vista's antivirus and anti-spam features are particularly embarrassing because of Microsoft's stated focus on security in Windows Vista. Oh, and because there aren't any. To get this kind of protection, you'll need to pay Microsoft $50 a year for Windows Live OneCare which, while admittedly an excellent product, should also just come free with the OS that caused the problems in the first place. Obviously."
Essentially, MS doesn't exactly have a sterling track record, and I'd have to see this OS survive in the wild for a few months before I'd have much confidence in it. If I get a Vista box at all, it won't be 'till SP1 or SP2.
What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.
I like having the OS (shell) guess at what I want to run...
OMG, not the DRM crap again.
You do realize that such DRM is required to play next gen movie discs, don't you? And Apple is a member of BDA (the bluray association group), so you can be sure that OSX will have DRM requried to play BR discs. This isn't a Windows-specific thing. And what would you prefer, that MS remove that DRM so that Windows wouldn't be able to play those discs at all? The discs are going to have DRM whether Windows or Mac OS implement that DRM or not.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
First of all, the UI changes, IE7, simple network changes, start menu, explorer changes, new dialogs, USB caching, search, WPF, backup utils, audio changes, and speech recognition are next to useless, and are certainly not worth paying for. Some of thing are even a further step backwards over the old W2k way.
;-)
Search is useless and not worth paying for? Don't let a Mac fanboy hear you say that.
And USB caching is very cool. The ability to simply plug in a USB2 flash drive and instantly get a gig or two of extra ram is useless (particularly for notebooks, where it's harder to add RAM the old-fashioned way).
WPF is usesless? Only someone that doesn't have a clue what it is would say that. Well, you're pretty much clueless about everything anyway.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
In short, everyone with a laptop with 128mb dedicated memory is screwed on Vista w/ Aero, but in heaven on Linux with AIGLX. Props to the devs.
Totally off-topic: I used your software back in the Amiga days, and it was simply amazing - I bet the Win version is totally off the hook now.
:( Good to see you're still around.
:)
I'd use it now, but my arty computer graphics passed with that system
Please resume your conversation about Vista
Yes, for a lossless format, 50% compression is good. You're probably thinking about lossy codecs, for which 50% would not be good.
Myself, I prefer lossless, so I use FLAC. If you want smaller files, but don't mind a slight drop in quality from lossless, use OGG; it has all the other advantages of FLAC...
How to enable garbage collection on a system without protected memory: #define malloc() ((void *) rand())
Whoops. I stopped paying much attention to your post after started with the ad hominem BS, and missed your semantics lesson.
So by your defeintion of upgrade, I take it there is the requirement that every desktop PC run the same OS in your enterprise? If so your situation is rare. Most businesses start getting new PC's with the new OS, and run a mix of OSs.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
I'm not sure I understand your point...Steve Gibson made an observation about a new 'feature' that Vista will be sporting...is he wrong? If he's wrong, just say so. If he's right, then what's your problem?
With the Nyquist theorem, that means you can reproduce sounds up to 110,250 Hz.
Yes, I'm aware of that. Audiophiles will tell you that very high frequencies do make a difference because they introduce subtle harmonics that are in the audible range. But audiophiles will also tell you that gold-plated RJ-45 connectors will make your bits sound cleaner.
I'm not sure that we really need any more dynamic range than is offered by CDs, actually. 16 bits actually provides tremendous dynamic range -- so much so that almost no CDs actually use the range that is available.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
This is ultimately what will keep me away from Vista. I too have run Windows at home since the release of Windows 95 (though I've had my share of dual boot systems with various Linux incarnations that whole time as well), and do software development primarily in a Windows environment (pretty exclusively .NET/C# these days). Since Windows 95, I've watched the quality of the Windows OS steadily increase with each new version (with some notable deviations *cough*WinME*cough*); getting heavy into Windows 2000 was the first time I was impressed/satisfied with the overall quality of the OS. As such, it was quite some time before I upgraded to XP, because there simply was no need: Win2k was getting it done for me in the Windows world, both at the server and client (Professional) level. Now that I've made the jump, XP has proven to be a stable, satisfactory environment for my consumer-level computing needs, just as Windows Server 2003 has proven to be a reliable extension to Windows 2000 Server for my development needs.
I haven't personally evaluated Vista by installing it and trying it out. But from what I've read, I just don't see any benefit to upgrading. It doesn't sound like there's any significant change in functionality. Just new shiny things that translate into resource hogs. Features I don't really care about, even if they weren't resource hogs. Security? Got that nailed; it's just a configuration/responsible use issue. Multimedia? I'm not really lacking there either. What else is there? 3D-ish windowing? Yeah, that's not going to do it for me.
I'm sure I'm not the prototypical Windows user, but that's my take on Vista: not enough bang for the buck, and as such I'm not going to mess with a good thing. Maybe there will be a compelling reason to change OSes by the time the next one comes out?
I'm sorry sandwich! --Brak
Yea, let's make broad generalizations about the next MS OS and say it's not worth it.
Honestly, to get a shell that chatty over WAN's and has a completely reworked TCP/IP stack is worth it. Yea, it pisses me off that explorer wasn't like that in the beginning.
Oh well, classic Slashdot garbage. Where's the latest ubuntu fellating post?
BTW, the likelihood of having folders with the same name is 0 if you set it up that way on purpose.
Anyway, how about this solution? How about an OS with shortcuts as customizable as they are in Adobe Photoshop or InDesign nowadays? I bet that would make us BOTH happy.
As a republican I feel it my responsibity to manufacture criminals. People need punished!
"Yes they are making large amounts of money but so were the railroads in the early 1900's."
Are you expecting a return of the 1900's.
The UI seems kind of lame to me, I think the article was mostly right in the inconsistency with that back button and the next button, I personally think that's a rookie design blunder.
What I don't understand is the way that every single thing is going towards that awful, blurry kind of interface, I mean, even firefox is going there. I think that the current theme for windows XP had the perfect balance between solid colors and fading, I can't understand the reason for making everything more blurry, perhaps the software companies' final plot is to turn us all blind
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Uh, maybe I lack the right amount of delicacy needed here, but
Vista has a new device driver model. Let's say you've got 2gigs of ram and a 512meg video card. That is nothing like 2.5gigs; it is actually closer to 1 gigabyte. You'll store a texture for your latest game once on the video card, a second copy likely in non-pageable area reserved by your AGP aperture settings (automatic on PCIe), and finally a third copy in the regular area of system memory. Yes, sometimes you can have two copies of your data in system memory in addition to the copy of the video card.
If you want DX10, and you do if you're a gamer, you need Vista. A lot of DX10 could be on XP, but some of it that makes things more convenient (no lost devices on alt-tab (like OpenGL), full virtualization so each application thinks it has all the texture memory like how multiple applications can run each thinking they have 4 gigs to themselves) is tied to the nice new device driver system.
The other benefits of DX10 (keep in mind this requires DX10 hardware as there are no more cap bits, everything is required (like OpenGL)) include lower rendering overhead so you can have more unique objects on screen or run get a higher frame rate, it is more suited to multi-threading so those with multicore CPUs can get a bit of a boost even if the game doesn't really take advantage of a 2nd core, and it exposes cool new technology like the geometry shader.
The GS sits between the vertex shader and pixel shader. You can think of it as a geometry amplification stage, although MS stresses this is mis-use of it. So you could just store a single value for a point sprite and send that from through the VS and then turn it into a quad in the GS. There is fixed function that sort of does that now, but this is more generalized. Or you could render to six faces for a reflection cube map or shadow map with a single render call. In dx9 on XP this isn't practical due to the high overhead*6. Or you can extend quads from the edge of an object for good motion blur.
When Vista comes out I'm upgrading to it and buying a new DX10 card.
For my Mom, and all non gamers for that matter, I'm obviously recommending she doesn't bother going to Vista until MS stops patching XP.
You don't care if there are any movies, but it upsets you to think that the movies that you don't care about might use DRM.
cmd-D navigates the "open" dialogue to the desktop. and, in the "open" dialogue, ENTER opens folders. But I am sure you knew that.
Oh, and all the spare "ENTER" hits were because QuarkXPress 4.0 is always fussing about some page layout reflow baloney and so one has to go through a bunch of dialogues to open a document. Anyway, I am female. :-\
As a republican I feel it my responsibity to manufacture criminals. People need punished!
,i>OMG, not the DRM crap again.
You, sir, are correct!
You do realize that such DRM is required to play next gen movie discs, don't you?
I don't ever plan on adopting such a locked-down, poorly thought out and implemented, "Gee, we've not been able to lock down DVDs enough, let's try again!" 'next gen' movie disc format. DVDs are bad enough, thanks!
And Apple is a member of BDA (the bluray association group), so you can be sure that OSX will have DRM requried to play BR discs. This isn't a Windows-specific thing. And what would you prefer, that MS remove that DRM so that Windows wouldn't be able to play those discs at all? The discs are going to have DRM whether Windows or Mac OS implement that DRM or not.
I don't care if Apple and/or Microsoft *invented* the blasted things, let alone if either of them will play them. Because I won't *buy* them! Neither those two OSs, nor the crappy new media formats. It doesn't matter to me what DRM Hollywood decides to use, or who adopts it, because *I* won't.
As a previous poster said, I couldn't care less if the movie/content industries go broke. They haven't made anything worth watching, let alone buying, or giving up liberties for, for a very very long time. I don't pirate. I just don't buy. Same deal with OSs and software.
Maybe if more people stopped buying into the crap, they'd go broke and make room for another buisiness model to spring up.
Ok, I suppose I've ranted enough.
Cheers!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Humans can hear about 20Hz to about 20kHz, although with age that high end decreases significantly. Modern speakers and headphones come extremely close to responding accurately in that range.
So in light of this, your comment makes no sense at all. Unfortunately, "semi-coherent rambling" is not an available mod on /. (You qualify.)
Here's another "feature": forced driver signing. Only corporations of a particular size are allowed to pay the VeriSign tax and be allowed to make drivers for Vista 64, and there is no way to turn it off. No longer are administrators owners of their machines.
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
The thing is, even if there is competition and it's better, most people use the bundled thing anyway.
I don't understand why any pro-Microsoft IT nitwit could convince his superiors to upgrade to Vista and go through another round of hardware upgrades, utility software upgrades, bugs, and security holes in exchange for snazzy graphics. Better to stick with XP until long after the next service pack comes out. The bootable image format with Vista sounds very useful, but why not just provide it with an updated XP?
but Microsoft is STILL a monopoly! they can screw up as much as they want but when push comes to shove, they have the locked in multi-year OEM contract for just about every single pre-built PC that's sold in the US. Even if they crash and burn they are guaranteed MILLIONS of sales per year! and they can use the OEM contracts to keep the competition out too.
When it's my choice, I tend to use OpenGL or an engine that does both... but when someone else is paying for it, I use what I'm being paid to use.
I'm hoping that with the cluster*bleep* that is DirectX 10 and Vista, we'll see the game industry return to OpenGL on a broader scale.
The most logical thing would be to transfer the files compressed with lossless compression. If someone wanted them uncompressed, they could always do it themselves...they get back the same file.
Although I can't imagine the amount of people who would want to double their music collection's size to save 3% of their CPU while playing music actually number more than two. In theory, you might have some hardcore gamers trying to squeeze every cycle from their box, but in reality, if they're that hardcode, they aren't fricking playing music while they game, or playing it off a CD player or something.
Actually, come to think of it, I suspect that doubling the size of the file would produce more disk activity and disk caching, so you might not actually come out ahead with that tradeoff anyway.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I have been working with vista for a little bit now. I am not really sure what to say about it. I think just having a newer os is nice. After using xp since it came out its boring, there are still the same old bugs and lack of new features, it still uses ie6, I now use FireFox so that isn't that big of a deal. the thing that bothers me the most is the Microsoft could quite simply never release an upgrade. They could sit on xp forever. Who can force them to release it? Who can force Microsoft to do anything? Not even the justice system could do anything about it. So Microsoft with their 30 percent of 40 billion of a year can do whatever they wish. They can stagnate the entire information technology industry and continue to destroy competition and who will stop them? The common folk are too ignorant and blind to what is good, what is better and what is useful. We all know that Microsoft is lazy, they use the word innovation like a religious person uses the word god. They simply don't know what it means. They copy, everyone else. They come out with competing products after others are well established. They know, they are not going to make a superior product. So they will wait it out until the other guy makes a mistake. This example can be used for the os market, the office suite, the portable handheld market and even the console market. All of these markets that Microsoft gets into are money black holes. No other products Microsoft has other then windows and office would allow them to survive. Everything they make is copies and is far inferior to what they are competing with. quite simply Microsoft needs an entire new CEO on down. They need innovation which means new products. they need to play fair and embrace their competition, not eliminate it. Some of you might be saying well that's business. The fact is Microsoft has more enemies in the world then friends. When the desktop computer changes, which it will. Microsoft will be grabbing for straws . With companies like Google, apple, IBM with Linux and Mozilla I don't see Microsoft doing much more growing. The simple fact is, Microsoft can't compete with free. They have failed in every attempt to compete with free products. They can destroy others that are fee based but once that free comes in, the tech community goes nuts with all the products that are great. As soon as there is a viable os that plays windows games and an office program that works as well as office that has 100 percent compatability taht is free, Microsoft will be out of business within a few years. This will be enough time to get all the government agencies and corporate customers off of the cancer which is Microsoft.
I want spam! cranbers@gmail.com
Works pretty damned well under Wine or OS X. It's also not exactly the most resource-intensive game out there. So I can see buying Vista for Halo 2, but WoW?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
no, it definitely needs to be lossless. Ogg is a competitor to MP3, not to FLAC. The reason it needs to be lossless it that you want to be able to have a master copy that you can compress for portable media when required or full quality when necessary.
This comment is guaranteed*
*not guaranteed
So do I, but does the start menu work like that?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
As an EE and and audio engineer and a musician, I have a simple reply to this: There are no "insignificant" bits. Only bits that are lost due to one factor or another. Lossy compression isn't something to figure out. It is something to abandon.
The point still stands. Some bits are more significant than others, and as an engineer you must know this. Start with a very high-bandwidth encoding (96k x 6 x 24, or 6-channel high-frequency sigma-delta, or whatever). It's not practical to haul it around, so you have to compress it to something reasonable, say 500kb/s. Since all compression down to a given bitrate "loses" the same amount of information (assuming that it is optimal, and so cannot be compressed further). It's equally lossy.
What's to say that the optimal encoding (in whatever psychoacoustic sense) is a function of the 44k x 2 x 8 CD-quality version?
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
For the "cool thumbnails on minimized windows"-http://www.visualtasktips.com/
For the "cool see-through windows"-http://www.chime.tv/products/glass2k.shtm l
For the "cool black layout and start menu"http://www.freewarefiles.com/program_2_219_18 733.html
and http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/20903764/?qo=2 3&q=visual+styles+in%3Acustomization%2Fskins%2Fwin dows%2Fvisualstyle+boost%3Apopular+age_sigma%3A24h +age_scale%3A5
After trying both Vista and my little mashed up XP version I think I'll stick with XP.At least I won't have to throw out my year old laptop and I still get all the pretty without the piggy parts.The only thing I wanted Vista for(WinFS)is gone and I got the pretty parts that I liked in XP.So unless the can come up with the "killer feature" that just can't be done in XP I'll stick with XP on my laptop and old reliable Win2K pro on my workstation.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
All that, /and/ reversi!
But not in Nebraska....
Take off every 'sig' !!
Likewise, not to quibble... but not had *usable* symlinks and junctions? What are all those things in the directory & share structures I made that are nearing 8 years old? They gave a util to make them in the value-add, man! And then there's other places like sysint, assuming you don't roll your own (which is what most of us did anyway, while we were tweaking).
The point is... and I stress this, because it *is* this simplistic - "upgrade", to prematurely toss existing for the sake of something new. And, there is *nothing* new of value in Vista - it *enables* nothing. I'm sure it'll make a fine replacement as things are retired... but no upgrades, since there is no point. Again, name one thing of value that it enables, that isn't already handled by legacies. Your examples were certainly Golden Topics - but Vista does not enable them; all it does is consolidate... and the resulting consolidated featureset is *not* necessarily the "best of breed" that I'd choose. You mentioned a better TCP/IP stack in Vista, for example... remember the old days when TCP/IP wasn't bundled with Windows? You got to pick your favorite from a variety of sources. Now, it's included... and it is very difficult to justify *not* using it, by simple virtue of being bundled.
Consolidation is a very weak and double-edged value, methinks... and that's about all that Vista offers, more homogeneity of preexisting solutions. For upgrades, it's pointless.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
First you said we've had reparse points since day one of NTFS. Not true; those came with Windows 2000 (RTM December of '99). NTFS is older than that. Arggh, this is the sort of quibbling I promised not to do.
No, I didn't mention the newer TCP/IP stack; others did. I mentioned a few specific new features, like save-able profiles, who's point you seem to have missed.
Finish your sentence ... there is *nothing* new of value to you. Others will differ, as I've said. And yes, there are many things that make their debut in Vista. See the wikipedia article I mentioned. For those areas where Vista fleshes out pre-existing features, the fleshing-out and the increased manageability of those things are new value.
But I don't need to sell Vista to you. Only to make the point that it is NOT, as you earlier tried to suggest, simply an Aero-ized Solitaire upgrade.
> Whoops. I stopped paying much attention to your post after started with the ad hominem BS
Yeah, sort of like starting out a post with the word "strawman".
> So by your defeintion of upgrade, I take it there is the requirement...
No, not at all. By THE definition of upgrade, we would PREEMPT the lifecycle of existing products. The quantity is irrelevent... quite literally, I'd take a brand new XP box that was purchased and deployed last week, and wipe it for the sake of having Vista. Or in the general case, I'd need to toss the older machines prematurely, since MS's definition of "Vista Capable" means that none of the "cool features" will work. Hopefully that answers your question.
> Most businesses start getting new PC's with the new OS, and run a mix of OSs.
See above; they do NOT go out of their way to buy them prematurely. They retire old things according to lifecycle, and replace them with whatever's current. They do NOT retire prematurely for the sake of the new... the example you mention is the normal lifecycle churn, and is not "upgrading" since no preemption is involved.
Think about the toaster in your kitchen. The last time you upgraded it was... uh, you've never upgraded your toaster. If you're like most of us, your toaster is probably the same one you've had for a decade or more. If you did replace it, it was because it either died or became too much of a fire hazard. And that is a very big difference... contrast it with buying a new toaster *every* 6 months because the "new" ones make "better" toast. Kenmore comes out with a new toaster model next week... hey, this lets me make better toast than the one I bought last month, right? And next month, when SunBeam releases their new model, well... we gotta buy THAT one now, because it's *better* than the Kenmore! And, perhaps it's true - but I don't see people tossing their existing (functional) toasters every week for the latest and greatest; when they no longer trust the toaster (end of life), THEN they retire it. They do not "upgrade", however; they pick the most adequate for their needs from what's available. If the new one is a fully Digital, Color toaster with half a gig of RAM... great! But they didn't upgrade to it... since the legacy was not discarded for the features of the new one. Any new features, while nice, are incidental to the replacement... NOT the cause of the replacement.
Is my example a little extreme? Perhaps - but it should help you see the point. There is a very big difference between "retire" and "upgrade".
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
The search that MS is including after ripping out WinFS is not worth money. Google Desktop Search and MSN Desktop are both free and already available. A lot of people love Copernic Desktop Search, too.
.NET 3.0. I don't want it. I don't need or want another pretend MS "standard" that adds yet another layer of machine performance sapping abstraction that doesn't fix the problems inherent in their platform. It will just make it harder to port away from Windows. It would be more interesting to me if it wasn't from a company with such a tremendous and horrible track record for lying, stealing, cheating, issuing closed "standards", and generally half-assing everything they do.
USB2 is an aweful lot slower than RAM, and has a theoretical max throughput of around 60MB/s. Most flash drives out there are a lot slower than that, and are often slower than my hard drive anyway. Plus I lose the use of whatever space Vista is using for cache, and shorten the lifespan of the flash drive. I can't even use the stick for caching on multiple systems. It's also not instant, as you have to set it up specially. It's only instant for whatever flash drive you set up, and only on that one computer. It's a cute gimmick and it isn't a big deal.
For reference, a decent 1GB flash drive is around 50$. A 1GB stick of RAM for a desktop is around 75$; for a notebook it's 100$. The flash drive gets you 7-10MB/s write and 9-20MB/s reads, max. A 7200rpm hard drive gets you 35-50MB/s reads, and about 17-25MB/s writes. RAM gets you 1.6GB/s to 6.4GB/s. The USB drive will have better latency than the hard drive, but the hard drive will have better throughput. RAM trumps both by two orders of magnitude.
I'm not sure what you mean about being hard to add RAM to a laptop. All you do is unscrew the typically single screw holding on the cover, and add or swap a module. I consider this to be easier than adding RAM to a desktop, since it's easier to get to and there is no groping around with internals or cables.
WPF is a large part of
On a Win 2k system, a pentium-D shows up as 2 processors. But so does a pentium-4 (hyperthreading).
Shouldn't a pentium-D show up as 4 processors? (2 cores, each with 2 threads)
Does it on XP?
Are the two processors showing up on Win 2k the two cores (without hyperthreading option), or are they two threads on one core and is the other core not used?
The current CDs offer a very good dynamic range by itself, but as of late (well they've been at it for a few years already) labels have undergone a loudness war and are all but killing the dynamic range (see The Death of the Dynamic Range). There is also a fairly good article on the subject on the wikipedia including a most telling comparison of ABBA's One of Us 1981 version and 2005 remastering
CDs have a tremendous dynamic range, but it's less and less used in order to sound louder and louder.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
I hope that ReactOS is good enough for you by then.
you can do this yourself: del notepad.exe. The problem isn't bundling as such, the problem is when the product gets embedded so it becomes an part of the OS and cannot be removed or replaced.
Now, you seem to be someone who could answer this: why is it when MS bundle stuff it is good for the consumer because they get it for free. Yet, when defending the higher price of windows with each release, it is because they have so much more stuff in it. So how can something be free and yet paid for?
Q: The number one feature for Vista is....drumroll please....
A: Security.
That somewhat elusive feature that drives Norton to be the number 1 shrinkwrap
software out there is money in the bank for Microsoft.
And that will be it.
- these are not the droids you are looking for -
There is a (huge) list available here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windo ws_Vista
Check out the tags for this story: vista, duh, fud, notfud, obvious. Does anyone know how to tag properly around here? How is this tag feature ever going to work with crummy tags like that?
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
So tell me: what does WPF do that PDF and SVG don't do ? Other than lock the user to Windows, that is.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Do you have any better hostages?
To be fair, this includes the changes to device drivers too and not only kernel core.
And now I've defended Microsoft. I never thought I'd see this day :|.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Do you have any better hostages?
I have heard that Intel dropped HyperThreading from new CPUs: it's too complicated and doesn't provide any real advantage to applications. Anyway, HT was implemented as a way to workaround Pentium4 stupid design.
In other words, on newer Pentiums you have better design, more real CPU cores along with faster memory interface. No hacks to get most out of the CPU is required.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
[Vista is most definitly a great upgrade for home users. Anybody familiar with the features would agree with that. But for a business, it's a much different decision. (Obviously.)] ?? Not so obvious to me ?? Care to elaborate? I think I am familiar with the features, but I don't agree with that. Why is it a much different decision for a business? For a home user, the stereotypical use-cases are web browsing, e-mail, multimedia and gaming. What does Vista offer over XP for these use-cases? Are you thinking about the future and maybe some DirectX xx for Vista only? Do you believe that the security enhancements will successfully deter malware writers? For a business user, the use cases are office suite, web browsing, e-mail and Solitaire. What does Vista offer over XP for these use-cases? If I buy something as a "home user", I also want value for the money I spend. I might not call it ROI but I also want to get something for my money. What exactly is it in Vista (near future) that is worth the money from a home user but not from a business?
It must be me, but having 3 flavours of linux running, a Mac G4 and 3 PC's with windows XP, XP-x64 and 2003 ..
.. :)
.." - Rob Enderle Oct 20 2003
You're obviously a lot cleverer than most. Personally I have settled on the one OS, SuSE Linux. It's all I can handle at the one time.
"I don't understand all the flaming back and forth.. "
What flaming, the article stated that: "Vista is an overhyped, late, and pointless update to XP -- a perfectly fine operating system.'", although I wouldn't agree with the opinion regarding XP.
"I love the Linux for getting me on the internet worry free and letting me experiment with all kinds of stuff,"
Surely its also of use to the non technical public
"I dig the Mac for feeding my Ipod and driving my KORG WS"
You happened to pick a keyboard that only has drivers for Mac and Windows, again.
"I just cherisch my Windows flavours for getting my Canos EOS connected"
Coincidentally the one Camera that don't have drivers for Linux. But that's maybe down to the manufacturers.
"and playing my games,"
And catching viruses. How about a games console
"I have dedictated a disc for Vista (RC1 at the moment) and I don't realy see the reason for all the big fuss."
There is no fuss, the article states that there should be no big fuss.
"Everybody is shouting about monopolies and in the same sentence is pushing there own fav OS"
But everybody is not strong arming the OEMs into keeping the other OSes off the desktop.
"I have all those PC's working in harmony and I wouldn't want to part with any of them."
Personally I just see it as a tool. Computers used to work in 'harmony' until someone decided to pollute the protocols.
"Whenever I get comments to ditch this or that it reminds me of all those fundamentalists trying to force their religion onto the world"
Personally when I see comments equating Open Source users with religous zealots from paid propagandists in the media, I get a tad unharmonious.
"I have a hard time seeing the Zealots as any different from terrorists
--
was: Re:I realy don't get it
davecb5620@gmail.com
They don't want to know facts man... they just want to keep their heads in the sand and pretend it's all going to stay the same as it was when Linux was clearly superior - back before Server 2003 and XP SP2.
They will jsut keep screaming that there are no new features and become less and less relevant as time goes on.
--> Fight tyranny and repression.... read
If uSoft would just fix turning off the computer. Try turning off the stupid thing, and it has to ask "Oh, there are other users logged in, are you sure you want to shut down?" Or until the later release of outlook "I can compress your data, you know." Applications that don't close, etc.
I'm tired of shutting off the computer, only to find the next morning when stupid dialogue boxes are popped up, and upon closing them I have to wait for Windows to shut down.
Ed Barbar, President and General Manager, Furnit USA
"Frankly, I've never had a problem with Windows security, because I use things like permissions and limited user accounts on my home computers as well as in the office"
Perhaps you'de like to impart your knowlege to the people who suffered yet another zero day exploit.
"If you're handing out admin privileges to everyone that touches your box, you're doing something wrong from the get-go. You wouldn't do that on Linux and you shouldn't do it on Windows either"
You don't need to do it on Linux. A locked down Windows is unusable.
'Microsoft defaults to that on XP Home edition and such because its too confusing for your "average" user otherwise'
Nonsence, since when is security confusing. MS defaults to that because Windows is unusable otherwise.
'For those people, disabling UAC may as well be "constructing a rocket to fly to space"'
Since when do you need the brains of a rocket scientist to safely browse and type a letter.
"I'm not sure I agree with you about Windows security system. It isn't bad...it should just have different distros for different users."
translation: Windows security isn't bad it's only because it doesn't come in different distros.
"You'd be surprised how many people don't want to mess with security at all"
You'd be suprised how many people don't want to mess with the brakes at all.
"the real problem with Windows isn't even Windows, its the software developers"
QUÉ !
"Applications should be capable of running once you copy the folders...unfortunately, few in the Windows world are that simple to deploy."
That used to be the case until his billness invented the registry to thwart piracy and prevent cloning of the Windows API keeping it a 'moving target' as he put it.
davecb5620@gmail.com
Well, each Xeon processor also shows up as two threads. So it is not only on Pentium 4.
Maybe someone with XP Professional on a Pentium-D can tell how many processors show up in the taskmanager and the NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS environment variable.
Planned obsolesence: it's how to keep the revenue flowing in a saturated market.
CDs have a tremendous dynamic range, but it's less and less used in order to sound louder and louder.
Yep. That's why I said that "almost no CDs use the dynamic range that's available". And they haven't since the 90s. Increasing the range available wouldn't improve the situation, because the problem isn't that CDs don't have adequate dynamic range, it's that labels are deliberately choosing to make the music "loud".
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
"UI that doesn't mostly freeze when all we're doing is copying a file..."
So you must disqualify any system using X then and OS X in the case of network filesystems. Seriously, if that's your criteria then Windows should be your choice.
"...the ability to use the machine without having to worry about malware, etc."
I don't worry about malware any more than anyone else running Windows alternatives should. I maintain a good firewall and avoid obvious unsafe practices. I occasionally remove tracking cookies that everyone gets, including browsers on Linux and OS X.
"...decent POSIX support and standard utility programs (e.g. bash)..."
Oh boy, welcome to the 1980's. Programmers need a platform that allows development for their target system. End users don't need shells. Nerds who screw around for the fun of it don't matter. if you want bash on Windows it's yours for free (and about as easy to install as anything on Linux is).
Strictly speaking, win-d is "show desktop", not "go to desktop" - the difference being obvious when you try it in an explorer or file chooser window which, as you mention, disappears, rather than navigating to the desktop.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Vista does seem to handle high-load situations better than XP (which quite frankly, sucked at dealing with them.)
That will arrive just in time to not matter, as the new computers that come with Vista will nearly all have dual-core chips.
That said, I personally (although I expect that others feel differently) find Aero to be so-so... it's got several cool effects, but I actually ended up turning it off when I got sick of it.
I'm looking forward to seeing what IDE designers do with it. When you're tracing a procedure call, zooming through the calling code into the called (and being able to manually back out of a 3D representation of the call stack to examine where you came from) could be a big help.
To paraphrase a well known line, "we won't have the same pains... we'll have whole new ones!"
XP may be moth ridden and aging, but it has developed into a midline OS, and *because* it has been around for a while, there was *time* for the much vaunted SP2 to develop.
Take one look at the breakneck "get it out the door* pace of Vista, and it will be immediately obvious that Vista will be completly unusable. Just because it's now possible to open a webpage without ducking the falling code, does not mean the OS is ready. The weird architecture will break hundreds of important software packages. (It's only a matter of time which ones.) MAYBE by the 1-year Vista SP1 it will subside from laughable to merely useless.
I will be buying an XP DarkBox (kept 75% offline) for major work, with junk prescreener to wander the web with.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
In digital recording, we're taking quantized samples of an analog phenomenon at regular intervals.
Unless it was a digital source to begin with, like keyboards or electronic drums. I'd like to see an audio format support MIDI in parallel with the digitized samples within the same file. You might only have to worry about the audio compression for three of the parts, rather than five, or maybe even better for pop music.
That's how many times per second the Analog to Digital converter took a reading of the analog signal. It has nothing to do with the frequency of the analog sound being digitized.
You're mistaken, those two frequencies are very closely related. To record a frequency clearly, you need to sample at >= double the rate of what you want to record.
The 24-bit designation refers to the depth of sound and has NOTHING to do with dynamic range. Each sample (1/96,000s) has a value for the frequency at that instant.
Again, no. To get frequencies you'd need to do a Fourier analysis. Each sample is an instantaneous value of the electrical signal. They don't exactly record amplitude, because that refers to entire waves rather than a single point in time, but amplitude is a lot closer to correct than frequency.
Re: MS Office 0-day exploit...were we talking about Office? I didn't think we were. I thought we were talking about the OS itself. Should I post about a Firefox 0-day exploit to prove Linux security is terrible? You're talking apples and oranges.
A locked down Window box is unusable? Geez, I wonder how I've done it all these years then. Guess I just have magical powers.
As far as home users mod'ing their systems...I'm guessing you've never dealt with the lion's share of home users. I'm happy if I walk into a company and their exec's know how to set up their own email accounts. Its a rarity.
As far as the registry...since when do you need to use it? My software doesn't. You don't have to, unless you're modifying MS software's behavior.
Your ROI calculations actually raise two interesting points. At the company I work for where IT supports operations, our formula is a bit harsher. How will this IT upgrade help us net (cost of upgrade * cost of doing business) + incremental sales. (As that isn't totally clear, here is an example). The way it works is say you want a new software package at $1000. We have a 10% (not true value) profit margin on sales. We have to sell $10,0000 worth of merchandise to cover your purchase. For it to stand a chance of being approved, you want the $10K bump plus at least another $20K incremental. Now for Vista to be justified across 2000 computers at $100 volume upgrade pricing, that is $20,000. Double it for testing and implementation, $40,000. Sales to support cost = $400,000, plus incremental benefit = $1.2 million. Another way to consider the incremental is evey project should net a strong positive ROI. For your project, it has to be in the top projects on total ROI because implementation resources are limited.
Now, your post claims nearly all the features of Vista are minimal, which I agree with. With OS X upgrades, each release has improved transactional performance. Every time a file was opened, it took a little less time than the previous OS release. Each release increased 'teh snappy'. An OS X upgrade would be much easier to justify.
Sig-"Out beyond fields of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there." Jelaluddin Rumi
The interesting thing about the Microsoft Windows market, is that after all the hype, and years of development that Microsoft may cram into Vista (or indeed any other version of Windows), it is ultimately a product aimed soely at one group of people.....the OEMs.
These are the people that are actually going to be shipping Windows ultimately. If Microsoft produce a shiny new Windows, they get to pre-bundle it on their machines, and in fact end up taking a lot of glory for it too when the customer is wooed by the "pretty graphics and stuff" their computer (read: Windows) can produce.
My point is that to Bob Homeowner, he doesn't give a fuck about "who made what bit" in his computer. It's all the same; all just "computer" and that includes the operating-system it runs too. Hence when his computer impresses his neighbours because of some shiny new wizard for pulling off his family photos that Vista happens to have, he'll probably not mention "Oh yes, Microsoft Windows Vista - great system!" - it'll be "Yeah, Dell do make some impressive machines!".
In return OEMs just have to sell their souls to Billy-boy Gates of course, but at least the customer is happy and Microsoft get their OS sold.
I mean, despite the fact I think Vista is a nice incremental update from XP, there's no way in hell I'd ever actually buy the thing!
throw new NoSignatureException();
But disk needs to work a lot harder to supply the information. With today's CPU speeds I'd say that mp3's are propably better than uncompressed WAV's - the CPU usage is a few percent at most, and getting smaller fast, while disk throughput tends to be the bottleneck of modern machines, especially if it starts swapping...
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
No, you don't. I have tuned a guitar enough times to know.
What you get is that amplitude of the A pulsing (i.e. getting louder and softer) at a low rate.
This is math from like 9th grade. sin(f-df)+sin(f+df)=2sin(f)cos(df).
Multiply two signals, like with a mixer from Minicircuits, and you get the sum and difference frequencies. (Any nonlinear element can act as a low efficiency mixer to some extant.)
"Yeah, sort of like starting out a post with the word "strawman"."
If that offends you then don't make strawman arguments.
IMO, spending a large amount of money to move every desktop to a new operating system would be a huge waste of money, and I would never advocate that. It sounds like we agree on that point, except I don't think that was the point of the person you replied to.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Yeah, I'm sure various corporations will happily boycott Vista -- until MSFT EOLs XP, cutting support, at which point businesses will fork over the cash for a Vista upgrade.
Consumers won't boycott Vista either, because consumers haven't seriously boycotted anything in a very long time...
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
Secondly, I never said the 24-bit depth was the same as or equal to the frequency and the word amplitude did not occur in my post. That was not a topic under discussion. I fully realize the digitization process does not directly record amplitude, which you correctly point out is an analog term. But again, Crispy was not talking about that. He was confusing 24-bit depth (a digital concept) and dynamic range (an analog concept).
Why are you defending Crispy's egregiously misinformed and confused post? I was trying to shed some light on the subject, and you are obscuring other people's understanding with technically correct but irrelevant "corrections" to what I wrote, for instance by writing "Again, no." Unless you have something helpful to add, at least refrain from being unhelpful. Sheesh.
Right, and when that amplitude pulses slowly, say at one Hz, you now have direct examples of A, A minus 1 Hz, and 1 Hz in the signal. Which is exactly what I was telling you, and exactly what a transform of the signal will show you. You can't say "the amplitude pulses at one Hz" without also saying "there's a 1 Hz product in the signal." A sine wave is nothing but amplitude. Describing a repetitive amplitude change and claiming it doesn't represent the frequency at which it is changing is incoherent.
Try it. Don't imagine it, because your imagination isn't doing you any favors here. Just try it.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Yes and no. The 24-bit designation refers to the number of discrete levels that are recorded. That's not "depth of sound", it is just a recording accuracy specification (which also depends entirely upon all the other elements in the chain to be useful.) The dynamic range is a function of the curve described by the 16 million values available in 24 bits. If the range is linear, then the dynamic range is easily, and obviously, determined. If the range is nonlinear (log or semilog, for instance) then it is also easily determined, but it isn't what you'd naturally presume from 24 bits.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
"The 24-bit designation refers to the depth of sound and has NOTHING to do with dynamic range. Each sample (1/96,000s) has a value for the frequency at that instant."
This is so wrong I hardly know where to start.
Ok...
The 24 bit designation defines the dynamic range, it has nothing to do with 'depth of sound'.
Dynamic range is the range between the loudest possible signal and the noise floor.
For 16bit CD, it's 96db, for 24bit it's 144db.
Each sample does not represent frequency, but simple amplitude. Frequency is a function of amplitude over time.
You are technically correct that to ACCURATELY approximate, let's say, a sine wave, the sampling frequency must be greater than the sine wave (analog) frequency.
.Ogg, etc. work; I don't know. It is not, however, how CD audio, .Wav, or analog-to-digital converters work. The initial conversion and the cruder audio formats are recording "What's the electrical level now?", "What's the electrical level now?" at a steady rate. For CD audio, those samples are taken 44k times per second per channel, and each one is a 16 bit number. No single sample tells you anything about frequency.
Greater than double. And while period snapshots of a wave mostly come up in digitization, this is not fundamentally an analog vs. digital distinction. It would be pointless and difficult, but you could build a system to take 44k analog snapshots per second of an audio source, too.
I never said the 24-bit depth was the same as or equal to the frequency and the word amplitude did not occur in my post.
You said that the 24 bits are used to record frequency. It is closer to true (although still not quite right) to say that they are used to record amplitude.
Why are you defending Crispy's egregiously misinformed and confused post?
I'm not sure I had actually read it before. Looking now, he or she is a little off about the nature of an individual sample, but not too badly. The bit about the sampling rate seems to be correct, although some of the audiophiles who chimed in may have a point about the reverberations being affected by higher frequency sounds (I'm not sure they've demonstrated that the effect is for the better.).
you are obscuring other people's understanding with technically correct but irrelevant "corrections" to what I wrote
No, I'm not. You clearly do not understand what is actually being recorded when an analog signal is digitized. And if you understand the difference between analog and digital, you are not displaying it well.
A file listing the indvidual waves in a sound, including their start time, duration, frequency and amplitude might be a reasonable audio format. It might even be how MP3,
CDs are 44k x 2 x 16, actually. :-) But I wasn't saying it was optimum, I was saying it is the common experience. As for some bits being more significant than others... well of course, that's the whole point. Twice each, unless the encoding is nonlinear. But in the sense that some parts of the signal can be thrown out and "not missed" (Sony's theory with ATRAC, for instance), I disagree. Assuming you weren't recording noise/nonsense (ie, 64 bit recording of a 16 bit signal) then no, I can't see throwing anything out. Higher bit rates throw less out, so I'm in favor. Wider words, given the available fidelity in the rest of the chain to get the data to them, also throw less out, so again, I'm in favor. I am staunchly against processing that (for instance) detects one signal in the presence of another and assumes (again, as per Sony) that you can't hear "A" because "B" is present at the moment, and so throws out A. Even if that were true, A has side effects on other things just because it is there, simply given that a degree of nonlinear mixing occurs at the ears even in the deadest of acoustically dead environments.
I've been down this road with audio and images. JPEG (and MPEG) look like crap until the compression is so light it isn't helping any. And of course it precludes further processing, for instance, detail in dark areas is gone. ATRAC sounds like crap. Lossy compression is a response to trying to use limited resources (memory, storage, bandwidth) to represent what amount to considerably less limited data sets. Fortunately, we're coming out of the limited resource stage, and as far as I am concerned, the time to abandon lossy compression is the very first day you can handle the data set. With 512 megs of memory, I don't see the need to lose anything further out of a CD quality signal -- put it that way. 30 to 60 megs wouldn't bother me at all, and I still think that if listening to high quality music is your goal, then a 512 meg machine can afford this type of resource utilization for music. I have gigs in all my machines, so I *really* don't care, personally, but I'm atypical.
With regard to lossless compression, other than IP encumberment and the computing resources required to unpack the data, I have no further objections (though I think those are significant as they stand.) I've written quite a few lossless compressors myself, and in fact, one of the highest compression lossless image compressors you can find today is mine -- the TRIM compression in WinImages (and previously, Imagemaster) is my work. It continues to match or exceed the best lossless compressions available today, 17 years after it was created. And if you think that sounds a bit smug, you're quite right. :-)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
A standard File Open dialog on Windows has a place to type a filename right below the list view showing all of the files in the current folder. The place you type a filename has focus by default, but if you press Shift+Tab it will move the focus to the list of files. At that point you can press "p" to move to the first file or folder starting with "p", or "po" to go to the first object starting with "po", etc.
If you want to go right to the Desktop I don't know of any single keystroke, but there are a few ways to do it. One is to press Alt+I to go to the "Look in" box and then either F4 or Alt+Down to drop down the menu. At that point you can cursor up/down to get to the Desktop and then hit Enter. If the dialog has the vertical box on the left side you can press Shift+Tab a couple times to get to it, then cursor down until you get to the Desktop button, then hit Enter or Space. A third way is to press Shift+Tab once to get the focus on the file list (as above), then press Backspace until you're up to the Desktop.
And the reason that you may need to type in the filename is that it allows you to paste in a filename. I have a folder with over 150,000 files in it. It's just much easier to type in the file I want than to try to find it. There are some parts of my source tree that have paths over 80 characters long and 10 folders deep. It's a pain in the ass to select those files by finding and opening 10 folders in a row, but it's easy to just paste in the complete path to the file I want. The lack of this sort of flexibility is what always made using a Mac so annoying.
dom
"You happened to pick a keyboard that only has drivers for Mac and Windows, again"
Seriously, if it would work, together with my mixing software just as good under Linux, I would not bother with the Mac, but it doesn't, so the Mac is there. I don't give a hoot under which OS it runs, I want it to run and perform.
"Coincidentally the one Camera that don't have drivers for Linux. But that's maybe down to the manufacturers."
And I happen to like that Camera and see no reason to buy myself another one for the sake of running it under linux when I have an XP box that can do that task.
"But everybody is not strong arming the OEMs into keeping the other OSes off the desktop"
You mean MS? They probably use their power to get leverage, but that doesn't seem to stop all those happy Mac and Linux users? OK, it can be a bitch when you have a KORG or a Canon, but like you said that is coincidentally or just happen to be a product that doesn't have a drivers for one or the other OS.
"And catching viruses. How about a games console"
I don't know about virii, I must be doing something wrong or it is that nasty firewall and virusscanner I must have running and spoiling all the fun. Or maybe it is that I don't go downloading every friggin offer that comes up on a webpage just because it is "free"
"Personally I just see it as a tool. Computers used to work in 'harmony' until someone decided to pollute the protocols"
Hey, I see them as a tool too! but sometimes it's so frustrating trying to use a hammer for a saw, I rather reach for the saw, thank you very much.
As for the polution part, you realy have to explain that one to me what that has to do with my setup. Are you aware of any protocol problems in my setup I have that I didn't spot yet?
Well, I would not considder myself an Open Source user...More an Open Mind user who makes his conclusions after actually working with the stuff and decide to use whatever I want for whatever I wish to do.
So I still don't get the point what all the fuss is about.
Supporting MS products doesn't mean you have to like them.
If this is even true (WOW doesn't come with any built-in benchmark*), I'd be willing to bet that it has solely to do with the amount of cruft running on your friend's XP install, not anything "special" in Vista. Frankly, there's no gaming performance enhancements in Vista over XP.
* WOW lets you enable a frame rate display, but there are a ton of factors in taking it seriously in cross-platform comparisons. Things like time of day, lag, number of players on screen, OS, and (obviously) where you are and what you're looking at.
Xeon... Where to start. This is group name for server line of Intel's CPUs.
And yes, Intel keeps HyperThreading on Xeons - even on newer ones. Thou it seems that Dual Core Xeons do not have it: Wikipedia doesn't mention it and 2 new servers my company has bought this spring equipped with 2 dual core Xeons do not have HT.
Also keep in mind many vendors ship HT capable processors with HT disabled. Dell is one of them. It might be there but just turned off.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
You forget that sometimes programs need access to shitloads of data. Big simulations, big images, big databases, etc. Operating systems have supported files larger than 4GB for a long time now for good reason, and the HPC world has been 64-bit for over a decade, with other sorts of big-iron server not far behind. (More than 4GB of program code is still obscene though. How can you possibly debug anything that large?)
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
There's a physiological limit to our perceptive abilities, and going beyond it (or, frankly, even very close up to it) is a waste of money.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
I can see that happening on servers and corporate systems, but come on, on consumer machines? I don't think so.
>You're planning to need more than 3GB of resident memory in a single process on your new computer? Don't available memory with address space. The latter is FAR more critical, at least on servers doing even non-trivial work, and desktops are starting to get there. MSXML's XSLT engine is highly optimized, for speed. Not resource consumption. Feed it a 100M input document and perform a trivial XSL transform (e.g. convert every 'X' to 'O') and watch memory usage in PerfMon -- it peaks at >1GB! If you're doing in memory transforms not not i/o, I've seen this routinely fail on real world servers with as little as 30M input - plenty of virtual memory to go around, but not enough contiguous address space to handle the request. I for one can't wait for 64bit to be available and practical (that means comparable quality drivers and such).
I agree completely that there are uses for lots of address space and 64-bit computing. What I was questioning was if the OP was actually had need of them. The OP didn't seem to understand the implications of 64-bitness very well.
You've gotta pay attention not to just the shiny baubles Microsoft is giving to you, but also what it's taking away (namely, your freedom to use your PC as a general-purpose machine).
It doesn't matter - if you've bought into the Windows environment you're going to buy Vista because either your apps, your drivers, or your application are going to start requiring it, within the next year.
When you buy into Windows you're accepting that Microsoft is going to dictate the terms of how you do computing, and that you're going to be writing them checks the whole time.
That's not a bargain compatible with freedom, but you'd be surprised how many people don't value, and are even scared by it.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
OK, the audience is business users here, not gammers and home users. RTFA.
From a BUSINESS perspective, there is NOTHING compelling in ANY of those lists that would make it worth spending all the time and money it would take to convert an enterprise to Vista. That is the point that you, and Microsoft, are missing. It has nothing to do with Linux (not sure why you even brought that up except to troll....)
Not the best site or source, but it was the first in the list so.........hey why not?
http://news.softpedia.com/news/DirectX-10-and-so-
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Anyway, my original point was that the determining factor in whether or not a particular action is going to be faster with the mouse or with the keyboard is, in most cases, the position of your hands before the action, and the desired position of your hands after the action. I suppose that the study could very well have measured the time to perform an action with a mouse, the time to perform the same action with the keyboard, and also the times to move your hand to and from the keyboard. In that case, if we actually examined the results from such a study, we would see whether the difference in keyboard/mouse actions times was generally larger or smaller than the time of motion of the hand. We would also see whether the difference in action times is generally in favor of the mouse or the keyboard. From the general tone of your posts, I would assume that it is in favor of the mouse.
Where is this study? I very much want to see it.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.