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Vista Indicates A Shift in Microsoft's Priorities
jcatcw writes "After hundreds of hours of testing Vista, Scot Finnie is supremely tired of it. And of Microsoft. Although 80% of the changes in Windows Vista are positive, there is nothing about Vista that is truly innovative or compelling; there's no transformational, gotta-have-it feature in Vista. But the real problem isn't with Vista. It's with Microsoft itself. His opinion is that Microsoft has stopped focusing on end users. They 'now seemingly make many decisions based on these two things: 1. Avoiding negative publicity (especially about security and software quality) 2. Making sure the largest enterprise customers are happy.'"
Stop me if I'm wrong, but the "largest enterprise customers" are end users
I have copy of Vista Business, so I installed it on a spare disk. The hardware compatibility test app GPFed, which wasn't a great sign. I went ahead with the install to see what would happen. The installer archived all of the XP files on the disc, then installed Vista without any problems - or so I thought. Turns out there were no Vista drivers for my brand name NIC. Bought one of the few NICs with native drivers, so I was able to connect to the net. But what? No sound? No drivers for my sound card either.
That was as far as I wanted to go at this point. The stark reality about Vista is that driver support is minimal at best. Rather shocking considering XP had drivers for much more hardware. I'm really curious if anyone knows why driver support is so minimal at this time. Does the consumer version have more? If not, all of the people who bought Vista are in for an uncharacteristic surprise.
<tinfoilhat>Is the lack of drivers a conspiracy to get people to upgrade hardware?</tinfoilhat>
Why are the hardware vendors so far behind supplying drivers?
Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings! -Feynman, maybe
I keep hearing about the partiality of slashdotters, but some moderations i got seem to come up with a different picture.
6 45444/= 17295322/
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=217328&cid=17
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=212480&cid
Problem is, i didn't really care about microsoft. Bought a bundled office back in 1997, seen the first bomb on my new mac after 5 minutes, uninstalled it, manually removed files that the installer forgot about, started realizing people weren't bashing microsoft for nothing.
Then at work I had to use XP and the hate slowly mounted.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Remember that Windows Vista has changed the way some drivers are written. The audio subsystem has been completely rewritten for example. And the way windows talks to display drivers has changed too. So all the drivers for these subsystems have to be rewritten to fit the new Vista driver model.
Also, in order for all the DRM to work, only software drivers that are secure enough are allowed to run on vista if you want to use "protected content". This means that all those old XP drivers (many of which don't meet the requirements vis a vis protected content) wont work if you want DRM.
Sure the OS costs $189 or less per station if you buy a VLK for it, but the server it talks to needs the right licensing to be legal.
Terminal server, for example, is stupid expensive per remote access license. Oh you want Exchange server? Thats $N. Want to actually CONNECT to it? Thats ($Y * (number of connections)).
-paul
http://www.allsorthost.com/is_ie7_ment_to_kill_my_ cpu/
This image has been doctored. I will not trust it.
How dare you be so modest!! You conceited bastard!!
XP's driver support was much better than Vista, that's certainly true. This is probably because Vista has a new driver model, and XP was basically Windows 2000 Plus, which meant that the drivers were essentially the same. Therefore drivers for Vista are taking a while to appear in the wild, and upgrading on existing hardware is currently a bit of crapshoot. My recommendation to friends and coworkers is not to upgrade to Vista at all on their existing hardware at all - instead wait for their next hardware refresh when they can be assured (well, more likely at least) to have Vista-compatible hardware.
For enthusiasts and box builders, sites like Tech Report have useful articles like their Vista System Guide that includes notes on Vista support for various pieces of hardware in both 32 and 64 bit flavors. Interestingly the current video card king, the GeForce 8800, only has preliminary support for Vista. Updates are no doubt in the pipeline, but it's good info to know before going shopping.
You know, I hate it when people talk out their asses without having any clue.
"The minor effort that it required for them to add a 3D UI"
Go read just the userland API details on that "minor effort". If this is all a minor effort to you, you should be writing the Windows killer right now and release it by the end of the year, why deprive the world of your incredible kung-fu programming skills?
As for the DX10/Games thing, that's more of an Anti-feature. Updates to Direct X are normal as graphics cards improve. The news here isn't that Microsoft is releasing a new version of Direct X - that's normal, the news is that they're *not* releasing it for XP.
Did the fact that DX10 is a complete rewrite escaped your attention? The whole thing is redone so the API has much less overhead, can multithread and allow videocard virtual memory (swap)? And this is the reason why it's not ported back to XP, it's a completely different architecture.
But let me calm you down: Microsoft ported back all the new *shaders* capabilities to a DirectX9 release called "L". The same one that will also run in Vista alongside DX10.
Aero itself runs on 9L as DX10 cards aren't even done or out yet. So what exactly are you spreading FUD about?
It was a Dell box (surprisingly quick delivery, ordered Monday, delivered Thursday). The nvidia display driver sucked and the fonts were disgusting (looked just fine post XP).
Replaced it with stale piss (XP-legal) the next day.
It is still not ready, and M$ is just turning end users into free beta testers yet again (shame on Dell for bowing to M$ and eliminating customer choice on some models).
Anybody who think aero looks good must have also loved all those chromey bits on 1970s - 1980s japanese cars).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen