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Mossberg - Vista Is Worthy, Largely Unexciting
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Wall Street Journal tech columnist Walter S. Mossberg says Vista is the best version of Windows yet, but doesn't represent a major step forward: 'Overall, it works pretty much the same way as Windows XP.' More from the review: 'Nearly all of the major, visible new features in Vista are already available in Apple's operating system, called Mac OS X, which came out in 2001 and received its last major upgrade in 2005. ... in my tests, some elements of Vista could be maddeningly slow even on new, well-configured computers. Also, despite Vista's claimed security improvements, you will still have to run, and keep updating, security programs, which can be annoying and burdensome. Microsoft has thrown in one such program free, but you will have to buy at least one more. That means that, while Vista has eased some of the burden on users imposed by the Windows security crisis, it will still force you to spend more time managing the computer than I believe people should have to devote.'"
Has anyone else noticed that Microsoft is going to allow you to purchase and download Vista over the net, instead of having to buy the physical CDs?
I guess many here are not planning to buy it, but anyway, this is something new from Microsoft. I guess they are really happy with their Genuine Advantage to go through with this.
And so, the last horse crosses the finish line...
you could hear the sounds of chairs breaking all over Redmond.
Use the operating system Walter Mossberg called 'The best version of Windows yet!'
Vista is indeed a worthy improvement, but not a worthy upgrade. I'd buy it on a new PC, but in no way buy it outright...
UAC is one of the biggest improvements in my opinion; not in that it makes Windows nicer to use (far from it in fact), but that finally, Windows has adopted a more *nix based approach to user-security (in at least, you don't have to be a full admin to do anything useful, and full-admin rights are difficult to obtain) and thank god for that!
But like I say, I'm not rushing out to buy it...and not many people will either if you ask me.
throw new NoSignatureException();
Have you ever felt that sometimes people go out of their way to put down Microsoft.
Basically the article says:
Vista is the best version of Windows ever...But its not.
Vista is very secure...But only if secure it.
You get a free Antivirus program...Buts its not as good as the ones you have to pay for.
Vista is very easy to use...But I still had to click on stuff, so it sucks
Vista has a cool search feature...But Apple had it first.
D
The first, last, and only tech news site on the net
Does his mother make his bed for him still?
I use a Mac, I have no need for third-party spyware hunters or virus protection. Windows users have accepted this whole battle-against-spyware thing as an integral part of the computing experience. While I believe that this is unavoidable given Windows' market share, a hassle-free virus-free zero-paranoia computing environment is possible.
Seems to me kind of like saying "Best Pauly Shore movie ever"
I'm glad that you can be welcomed to the world of the-rest-of-us, with Operating System features we've had since 2005 or so.
Now, I can only hope that Microsoft got this security "issue" fixed, so that you PC users will stop spamming me with sexually explicit crap and drug sales, and maybe my shared cable modem speeds will go up, with the worms circulating the internet being fixed in Vista.
Hopefully, in time, I can welcome you all to the world of computing with minimal/no time spent on security and maintenance. Either way, I'm glad the world is catching up.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
My work here is dung.
Uhh...
Unix users don't really worry about these things. As an admin, I occasionally poke around to make sure everything is okay (verify checksums once in a while), but invariably, everything is fine.
I ran a virus scan for fun, once. (ClamAV).
Once you setup a Unix-y network, you just leave it, and things tend to keep working until the machines rust. I'm including Apple in this category, but we've got plenty of Linux machines around, too.
It's not so much a mother still makes the bed for me, as it is a I enjoy city-provided water and natural gas supply. I don't like lugging propane cyclinders, I hate chopping wood, and I wouldn't stand for no-running-water.
Why should you spend ANY of your computing time. If you're going to waste your time, at least waste it on Slashdot, not Norton Anti-virus.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
FTA: even a slicker version of Solitaire
What more could you want?
That's sort of like overall this year's flu virus is a lot like last year's. Or President Bush's new Iraq strategy isn't much different from the old strategy. Hardly a recommendation.
I just spent an hour finding and killing some mysterious Browser Helper Object on my wife's XP-SP2 PC that devoted its life to helping out the browser by popping up ads in IE. At least I think I killed it. Every year, the malware gets more clever. Every release, the software gets more bloated and complex. Every year, the Internet becomes more of a mess and it is harder to find information on exorcising malware, or on persuading Windows to do even the most simple and basic things. And every year I get older, dumber, and less interested in dinking with Windows just in order to do stuff I do find interesting.
Screw it. I never upgraded to XP, and I don't believe that I'll be upgrading to Vista. I have finally moved from Windows 95 to Windows 98 despite the fact that W95 boots faster and runs as well. But only because I think eventually I will need USB that works and I don't think that will ever be available in Windows 95.
I don't really hate Microsoft, but they are going to have to do a lot better than NT based Windows desktops to make me a customer again. Let me know when MS releases an OS worth buying. It hasn't happened for quite a few years, and doesn't look likely to happen again any time soon.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
The DRM embedded in Vista has been well hashed here and I believe the implementation will cause many people headaches, especially those wanting to view digital media.
I'm concerned about the new security levels of the OS and that there are two levels higher than Administrator, namely System and Trusted. The sticking point for me is that (as far as I know) no user on the system, not even the admin, can access these higher levels. In other words, we are not and cannot be "trusted".
I don't like the idea that there may be things on *my* computer that I cannot access, but Microsoft, or other entities they trust, can. I'm not sure I trust them that much...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Will people be lining up at midnight to buy it?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I don't think that's fair to compare the transition from XP to Vista to OS X 10.3 to 10.4. That's basically comparing one year worth of Mac improvements to 5 of Windows'.
The requirements for Vista will be the most annoying thing to consumers. Unlike XP, the basic sub $500 computer is not good enough to run most versions. The requirements difference between XP Home and Pro was not as large as it is between Vista Home Basic and Vista Home Premium. Most of the hardware requirement differences were based on the applications that the user would run. If the consumer was a gamer or edited home movies, he or she would need a better video card and more RAM. But with Vista these requirement differences are on the OS. This applies to businesses too where the modus operandi is to buy the cheapest solution as possible. So a business getting the lowest price computer finds that it is dramatically slower than XP on the same hardware is not likely to upgrade anytime soon.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Correct. In 2001, there wasn't much there. By 2002 [10.2], it was pretty good. Stuff just worked, so Vista was only bested by 5 years, or almost 2 years if you count the current features in OS X mimicked by Vista in their unique, crudely inferior way.
Most of the stuff on
This has nothing to do with fanboyism. The difference is, OS X from 10.0 to 10.1 (faster) to 10.2 (smoother looking) to 10.3 (expose) to 10.4 (dashboard, spotlight) has had lots of improvements, and each previous release was only a year or so apart, and 10.4 came out over a year ago, while Vista took the largest software company in the world 5 years to come up, stripping features the whole time, which is is just coming out now. (Where by "now" I mean "soon.") So of course the differences in each version of OS X are smaller, and of course it's more impressive to have had a product with most of the same features out sooner, and of course MS looks like crap for taking so long to deliver so little.
:-)
Add to that the system requirements, the many different versions, and Microsoft's abysmal security record--their response to which is mostly to ask users "Are you sure you want to do this?" before every trivial operation, AND NOT EVEN REQUIRING AN ADMIN PASSWORD TO SAY 'YES'--and you can see why people aren't getting excited about it.
On a related note, I think it would be the funniest thing in the world if Apple announced tomorrow that 10.5 would be released on Monday the 29th.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Because we all know that with insecure women, trojans are a very good investment...
If it wasn't for the games, I wouldn't even consider vista. I have a mac laptop, and that serves most of my needs just fine. However, the selection of games on a PC is better, so I keep upgrading mine to play them.
However, I'm starting to challenge my gaming habit, as it is getting tiresome to keep that PC going. It's not a technical challenge - I'm a typical slashdotter with experience in PCs, Macs, Unices of various sorts and so on. Nor is it a financial challenge; I have a decent job and could replace my PC now.
The issue is the work involved just to maintain a security hole for gaming, especially when there are a few decent games available on the Mac. They may not all be exactly the games I want, but they're decent and it's only gaming.
Now add a substantial OS upgrade to the mix, and I really am having a hard time justifying upgrading my PC more. Maybe I'll just get a console for choice in my games.
-Jeff
Please learn the difference between a dissenting opinion and a troll before you moderate.
NO COMPLEMENTARY LAPTOP for YOU! Mr. Mossberg!!!
Does anyone know why Vista is such a resource hog? I don't mean the fancy UI/eye candy. I mean basic OS functionality: even Vista's most basic mode without the fancy features has a bare minimum RAM requirement of a half gig. At home, I have a Linux/KDE box with Windows 2000 running in a VMWare image -- hardly a minimal environment -- all with 384M of RAM. Apart from the exotic graphics stuff turned off, what is it about Vista that is hogging all that RAM? Can that junk be turned off?
Most of the time, I want an OS to boot up and get out of my way so I can open up my applications where I do my real work. I'm not sure I'm too excited about an OS that wants most of my RAM just to wake up, leaving me with little room to do real work.
>> 2) when dragging and dropping 97,000 files, a read error on just one fricken file causes the whole operation to hold until a popup window is responded to. I have not experienced the CDRom problem you mention, but #2 IS addressed in Vista. When you copy 30GB / 30,000 files the copy is completed and then any "problem files" are dealt with in UI at the end of the entire job.
Actually, Bill Gates doesn't like DRM too much. Recently at a bloggers conference in Redmond, he had this to say.
n -the-future-of-drm/
Gates didn't get into what could replace DRM, but he did give some reasonably candid insights suggesting that he thinks DRM is as lame as the rest of us. Gates said that no one is satisfied with the current state of DRM, which "causes too much pain for legitmate buyers" while trying to distinguish between legal and illegal uses. He says no one has done it right, yet. There are "huge problems" with DRM, he says, and "we need more flexible models, such as the ability to "buy an artist out for life" (not sure what he means). He also criticized DRM schemes that try to install intelligence in each copy so that it is device specific.
His short term advice: "People should just buy a cd and rip it. You are legal then."
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/12/14/bill-gates-o
"But this one goes to 11!"
In any other venue, hundreds of millions of dollars spent and YEARS late, and functionality stripped out of it left and right would be called a failure. How MS and its minions can spin a great big fat yawn into success is mindboggling. We here seem to be moderately happy that it doesn't suck like cancer. Ok it doesn't suck like cancer. Does that make it good?
Imagine what realistic quotes on the box might look like:
"Yesterday's technology today!"
"Doesn't slow games down more than 10%!"
"Easier than driving through a tornado!"
"Angers your Mac friends!"
"Sufferin' succotash."
You know, there are plenty of legitimate ways to critisize Vista (UAC being annoying, Integrated WGA), but I am sick and tired of hearing the line that you need "hefty" hardware to run Vista. You don't. It runs fine on anything that's remotely modern. I ran Vista (RTM) - including Aero Glass - on a P4 Willamette (2GHz) system with 512M of memory and a GeForce 6200. Vista (RC1) also ran fine on the cheapshit $150 Celeron system I got in 2005 for Black Friday, albeit with a memory upgrade (to 512M using an old DIMM I had sitting around) and without Aero Glass.
Aero Glass requires DirectX 9 hardware. Any low or midrange standalone card released in the last couple of years will work. Hell, even GeForce FX 5200 cards work. Even most integrated video works, including Intel's GMA950, ATI's Radeon Xpress, and NVIDIA's GeForce 6100. My $50 Athlon 64 motherboard has integrated video that works. HP's $269 desktop has video that works.
Does Vista require more memory? Absolutely - you want 512M at a minimum, preferably 1GB. Does it require more CPU? A bit more.
These are not high requirements. The cheapest system sold at Best Buy can run Vista with Aero Glass. Yes, that's right - the eMachines T3516, with its 3.2GHz Celeron D, Radeon Xpress 200 graphics, and 512M of memory will run Vista just fine.
So much for "hefty" hardware.
Vista was a mistake in the sense that they stopped pretty much everything to overhaul security. Unfortunately that's the guts you never really see, but MS did a Hell of a lot of work implementing UAC which is only so obnoxious because Windows continues to work with over 20 years worth of software. Apple can't make any such claim; they eliminate legacy at a much higher rate which gives them the opportunity to clean house every once in a while. The new Intel Macs cannot run any software written for the Motorola Macs. That's a software lifecycle of under 10 years. If Microsoft were to announce that programs written for Windows 95 would no longer work you better fucking believe that Slashdot, and the market, would be up in arms.
But then compare the actual features. Yes, Apple did launch Spotlight first. But compare the actual features side-by-side. They are curiously similar, but Vista's Search is a lot more. Spotlight is limited specifically to files, and you can only index data by a file. What that means is that programs which store data in a single file database are completely unable to work with Spotlight. Vista Search is more of a general purpose full-text search engine with a fully programmable API. Not only can programs that store data in a single data file store and index that data, but programs with no files whatsoever could do the same, and programs can very easily tie into the search mechanism to search for things which aren't files at all. That is a pretty big difference from a functionality point of view. How did Apple's Contact manager deal with it? It also has to keep a hidden directory full of files, one for each contact, and keep that in sync with the contact database. Spotlight indexes that hidden directory to permit searching for contacts and when you click the file the Contact Manager opens, reads that little file and then searches for an ID. It's a hack because Apple could only think so far, and frankly they don't understand how to think one step beyond the next Jobs keynote.
Wake me when threading in OSX isn't so broken that two threads can access the I/O level of the kernel at the same time.