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Windows Vista Launches To Mixed Reactions
Several users have submitted stories reporting on the launch of Microsoft's newest operating system. The Guardian focuses on virus warnings already threatening the OS, while the New York Times discusses the bug hunt that's begun. With hackers writing scripts to attack, and well-paid bounty hunters looking for bugs to defend, Vista's first few months on the market are sure to be interesting. In the meantime, what is your impression of the OS? Have you had a chance to use the retail version yet? Are you supporting it in a business environment? What's the launch of Vista been like for you?
For one client who is a medical service provider, I'm pretty sure that the "rights" that M$ has awarded itself via Vista's EULA are at odds with the requirements for keeping clients' medical records confidential. So until someone can provide assurances to the contrary, Vista isn't coming anywhere near their facilities.
You're using her as bait, Master!
I've been using Vista at work for just over a month now. I personally like the sidebar, not that it's anything that I couldn't have downloaded seperately anyway, but I enjoy having the CPU usage meter right on the side, along with a calender, the weather and a currency converter. I do not have Aero installed since this computer would not handle it, nor would I want to use it even if it could. The operating system itself has not crashed on me, and it has run suprisingly smoothly. I've got everything I need for work installed without a problem. There is one thing that drives me absolutely mental though ... in the windows explorer there is no "up" button, and back does not do the same thing, and yes, I am aware that I can just hit backspace, but when I'm in "mouse only" mode, this does not cut it.
I like the added shortcuts (ie windows key+0-9 to launch quick launch programs) but I hate having to use the "search" method in control panel to find the things that should be in the obvious spots. Also the defrag is terrible, while the command line version is significantly better, I would still like a visual display of what is going on.
All in all though, it has worked for me quite well at work, however it will be a long time before I would use it at home, it's simply not worth the money IMO.
Best Buy had a Vista demo station set up yesterday. They were using what looked like a brand-new demo machine, with Vista branding on it and everything.
When I tried to turn up the graphics settings, I got a warning saying that the highest setting would result in severely decreased performance. When I tried to open the Media Center application, it crashed.
I looked around in the Control Panels, Start Menu, and Documents folders, and tried out IE 7, and was amazed at what a disaster the interface was. The cheap eye candy looked tacky and ran slowly, the "Flip 3D" feature was next to useless and an obvious failed clone of Expose, and I still found old Windows 3.1-style dialog boxes and icons littered throughout the system.
More than anything else, the interface was confusing, overly busy, and disorganized. I'm sure a power user would find what they're looking for eventually, but I got a headache just thinking about my parents, secretary, and other casual users trying to puzzle it out.
Frankly, I was amazed at how horrible it was. It seems like an early Beta release, at best - and not a very promising one, at that.
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"That's a nice music library you've got there, be a shame if anything happened to it..."
So long as my existing music works then no problem. The moment I'm locked out of my own files to force an upgrade we're talking RICO suit.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Beowulf Cluster Computing with Windows
That's always been my main issue with MS: cost for doing the serious stuff at home. While many people might want to relegate people like me to the insulting category of "hobbiest", there are some of us who want enterprise functionality at home and use it in a serious way. Of that set, there are those of us who want to play by the rules and would therefore buy legitimate copies of an OS. If MS was really smart, they'd realize this and would provide multi system license packs for home users who want enterprise features. I'd happily pay $500 to have the right to legitimately install Windows Vista on five of my fifteen machines at home. I'd happily pay $750 to set up a full Windows AD domain at home with Win2K3 + five Vista clients. While my needs may not be mainstream, there are more people like me that you'd think.
But since MS only focuses on the largest markets, many very important sectors are ignored. That's where F/OSS and GNU/Linux come in. Thanks to FOSS and Linux I've been able to more than accommodate my need for 15 machines plus seven virtual systems without having to worry about licensing or cost. The money saved goes where it counts: large amounts of redundant storage, RAM and CPU.
Regarding the insulting moniker "hobbiest", my main problem is that it downplays the need that the average home has for enterprise class storage, user and resource management, print management and distributed computing. We don't call electricians who work on their wiring at home or plumbers who work on their plumbing at home, "hobbiests". In fact we tend to praise them as being self-sufficient and skilled. The same metric should be applied to the IT guy who sets up enterprise class centralized storage (Global Network Block Devices or iSCSI), hardware assisted virtualization or paravirtualization (Xen + AMD SVM or Intel VT) and centralized application serving (persistent remote desktops using VNC or NX protocols). These are serious solutions to real problems encountered in the home. The age of the standalone PC is long dead, but MS doesn't seem to get that.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
So instead of popping up Clippy (utilising system resources that are comparable to calculating Pi to the 10,000 digit) we get Clocky? I just demoed Windows Vista at Best Buy across the street over lunch and I can confirm the ~30% figure for the clock. The widget menu bar also has a 'cpu monitor' which conveniently lets you see real time how detrimental the new UI is to performance.
I find it interesting that there's no big launch party, midnight madness, etc for Vista. Wii got it; PS/3 got it; Xbox 360 got it; heck even The Burning Crusade got it. There is a definite lack of hooplaa with this release. I think the retailers know that its a dog sales wise; its a standing in place upgrade whose main sales will come through OEM equipment.
This is probably the most underwhelming release since Windows ME. I get the sense that Microsoft really has jumped the shark. 5 years for this? Oi vey...
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
Mostly I'm just kind of disappointed that we weren't able to release KDE 4.0 or a stable version of Debian etch before this day.
Otherwise, I can't see how the consumers who have bought into Vista so far will have much to cheer about. It'll be a lot slower than XP, since the recommended hardware requirements are so much higher than for XP. Aside from the new interface, its supposedly improved stability and security, Vista is really all about DRM: preventing people from playing protected content, including in cases of fair use. What they get back in return for these heinous constraints is the possibility of playing high definition content on their PCs.
However, that last part isn't going to happen any time soon, at least not legally. To play high definition content on Vista, your graphics card and your monitor both have to be HDCP compliant, but according to this article, which is less than a month old, only two monitors tested last year were HDCP compliant and not a single graphics card. When will HDCP compatibile hardware start to appear? According to the article, many monitor manufacturers haven't even heard of it and can't say anything about it, while the graphics card manufacturers (nVidia, ATI) could do it, but haven't seemed to have found the incentive yet to do so. For the latter it seems to a be a chicken and egg story: no content? no support. And even if the manufacturers do decide to start making their products HDCP compliant, remember what Peter Gutmann had to say about the ridiculous guidelines M$ gives them: they're "fundamentally impossible" to comply with.
The future is also looking increasingly bleak for DRM. Even if Vista does well, it's content protection will not make much difference to the content industry if people can buy super-cheap Chinese media players that play every known file format without any restrictions whatsoever. Hell, only last week we heard that the music companies seem to be thinking about ditching DRM. If so, then Vista will become rather uncool in this respect and M$ will start to play down the protected content issue as DRM begins to disappear from music and movies.
Of course, for M$, the MPAA and the RIAA were never what the DRM was about: they really only added it to Vista for their own benefit. M$ is always looking for ways to milk more money out of its stagnant share of the market. For years now they've had only two options: raising prices and fighting piracy. Of course, with Vista they're doing both. Now all they need is for it to catch on. However, I'm not so sure it'll be that easy. Their plan may backfire on them. Why? I know a lot of people who have remained satisfied with Windows over the years only because they've been able to run so much software on their PCs -- pirated software. If they're no longer able to do that, I'm not so sure they're just going to roll over and start paying for everything they'd like to continue to use. I figure we're about to see the arrival of a new wave of Linux newbies as a result. Perhaps not a flood, but I figure it'll be enough to offset any financial gains M$ planned on making. Most important of all for consumers, M$ will lose market share.
I can well believe you with respect to the linearity of RAM usage. I am not claiming anything in particular about the behavior of Windows in situations where it has to treat RAM as a scarce resource.
/., but if your eyes aren't looking at anything else there is no downside to maximizing. It is only when you try to do that and watch a compile and watch a news feed that you have to decide how to apportion display space.
What I am saying, is that so far as the O/S is concerned, there is no downside to using more RAM, up until the point where it runs out. If the system decides that it can benefit from having 1/2GB of disk cache, and no one else has asked for that RAM, why not let it have the cache? The RAM isn't being used for anything anyway.
My point was rather narrow - RAM that is not in use does nothing for you, and if by using it the system could prevent a page fault later, it may as well use it. Hence my contention that RAM usage in the idle state need not be a good predictor of O/S bloat or how memory constrained the system really is.
Once demand for RAM heats up and the system has to determine how to parcel it out to the running tasks is where things get interesting, and where a well designed memory manager will make a big difference.
It is kind of like screen real estate. You may not need your browser maximized to read