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Information Technology Pros Debate Windows Vista
An anonymous reader writes "As a follow-on to John Welch's widely read review arguing that Mac OS X is superior to Vista, Information Week is running the first in a weeklong series of roundtables where a programmer, networking consultant, and 3 IT managers have a serious technical debate on the pros and cons of Vista. What's been your experience with Vista? More importantly, do you think it will ever gain traction among corporate users, or is its glitzy Aero interface destined to make it mainly a consumer OS?"
No one here has tried it.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
I have a free Business Edition copy, and a machine powerful enough to run it, however, I rather not thank you.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Hopefully the debate will be more involved than the poster's insinuation that all the OS adds is a pretty UI...
As an IT manager, I can plainly see Vista offers no benefits to my company. The only feature that piqued my interest was the Bitlocker technology but we use PGP's Whole Disk Encryption product already and that works fine.
I see nothing that will make our employees more productive or save us money on IT. We'll be sticking with XP.
Having used Vista, realised the issues, then gone back to XP, my perception of Vista now is that it is basically the new Windows Millennium Edition.
Staying with XPSP2 strongly advised.
Roll on 2009 and the next version, however in the meantime if you are going to have the hassle of nothing working anyway, you may as well take a look at switching to OSX or Linux.
What the hell does Aero have to do with business use? You can disable it if you don't want to use it in a business environment, which I'm sure that many businesses will do for hardare reasons anyway (Intel's Extreme Graphics / GMA900 can't run it anyway).
Would you claim that Mac OS X's "glitzy" UI makes it inappropriate for business use? Or that Beryl makes Linux inappropriate for business use?
Excellent! I don't think I've seen any discussions about Vista on Slashdot before! It's always nice to see some original topics; it can get so boring when, say, a news article that was posted three weeks ago is reposted with the meagre justification of additional multiply regurgitated opinions that add little to nothing in actual substance. Isn't it lucky that, with our excellent and discriminating Editorial team, such a thing happens so little now?
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
I've been running Vista Ultimate for 3 days now.
So far, my experience with Vista has been mostly positive. The intergrated search is quite useful and the re working of the explorer shell is a noticeable improvement.
On thing I have noticed is that Vista has re-done the menu layout and prompts and it now closely resembles KDE, imo. Not a complaint or a compliment though I do imagine the layout change is going to confuse a lot of people. I can see why it was re-done though and I imagine once I've gotten used to it I will find it an improvement over XP.
Really I can't say much else as I've only just scratched the surface of what Vista can do. Is it better then XP? So far yes. Is it worth years of delayed devlopment and several hundred dollars? That remains to be seen.
Geez, aren't there any tech stories out there besides the ones about how Vista sucks? How about more coverage of say... spam. We haven't heard anything about how spam is bad lately.
Oh well, -1 Offtopic. Goodbye Karma!
Or Vista for that matter. Its crippled by its limited hardware support. It simply will not run on 95% of the computers manufactured today. Whatever its merits in terms of user features and security, this puts it out of contention for most people in most applications.
>
> Anyone with a job title like that is sure to be a Master Debater.
its all about the apps, most windows shops have heavy investments in windows based infrastructure. that includes exchange, .NET apps, and all sorts of someware and middleware.
.NET is a good thing.
replacing it all is not easy, and many shops dont have the stomach for it, or the talent. and in some cases the shops have windows apps that can only run in windows. that all said:
when you really look at Vista objectiveily its a huge improvement over xp and 2k.
but sure it does have some things that are odd and different that annoy you, but in some and most cases that can be changed.
and some of the postive stuff like low rights framework that IE uses is exposed so other apps can use it. and
-Nex6
Huh? Of course it'll be widespread. It works fine. It's got all of the features of XP, and then some. MS is gonna stop selling XP eventually. What else are people going to use OSX? Linux? Turn off Aero, and it looks and acts like Windows XP 95% of the time. It's run every Windows XP app that I've tried to use on it. It's really not a big deal from a user point of view.
I don't respond to AC's.
Given Microsoft's history of releasing operating systems at least six months before they are ready for market, I think I'm going to wait for now. I'll stick with XP/FreeBSD any day of the week over a new MS offering.
.sig
Vista is just not ready for the desktop
You are trying to post the same damn Vista joke for the 10,000 time.
[ Allow ] [ Cancel ]
You keep using that word... I do not think it means what you think it means...
I can't tell if that is the setup or the punchline.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
As for corporate computing, nothing wrong with it, so if it comes preloaded figure business will eventually use it. Hell it took my company until a little over a year ago to deploy large number of XP machines. All under the guise of thorough testing but the real truth is, the PC group is slower than molasses in winter, lazier than the people in a welfare line, and more interested in new gadgets than running an OS through the testing requirements we have.
For the masses its just fine, my parents recently bought a new laptop which has Vista. Other than finding a few items moved or renamed they just use it. The key is, its just a damn operating system. It doesn't mean DIDDLY to them. they don't care. they saw a laptop with features they wanted at a price they wanted to pay. OS be damned, it didn't matter. All they wanted was to get mail while on the road, connect to wireless, and use WORD.
As for AERO, fwiw, if you have a video card with 32mb of memory you might just see a performance boost with it turned on, especially with low system ram installations.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
But I recently bought a brand new laptop. Dual core, 1GB of ram, etc etc... The thing came with Vista Home Premium installed... I figured I'd give it a shot. Straight out of the box, with a clean system the freaking thing used 679MB of RAM at IDLE!!!!! Thank you, I'll stick with XP.
Agreed, same thing happend when '98 moved to XP. Adoption takes time. I wouldn't say it's done just yet though. It will have some staying power as more and more new computers get shipped w/ it.
I am finding though that a few people are opting for Linux Dells and then installing their prior version of XP to it. I have to say, that's a brilliant Idea!
That's not the entire story though. You see, I used to do OS/2 tech support back in the days. I got pretty familiar with the guts of OS/2 and Windows and OS/2 share a lot of early design. And early design flaws. In my opinion the most frustrating one of these is the fact that the application itself handles window frame messages. That means if the application is poorly written and stops handling frame window commands at any point you can't even minimize the window until it gets done processing. Minimize, kill and move should pretty much never stop working for any given window, even if the application is displaying a goddamn modal dialog box (Another pet peeve of mine and Microsoft seems to encourage programming by modal dialog.)
Meanwhile OSX and E17 demonstrate that you can put a glitzy interface on an OS that's quite suitable for server purposes. I'm pretty sure the only way that Microsoft could design an OS that didn't suck would be to tear the whole thing down and start from scratch, though.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
In all honesty I do not use Windows Vista on my desktop. That said, I absolutely love Windows Vista (not astroturfing). Why? Because of the new iteration of the Media Center. Granted, I never even see the desktop of the bloody OS, but hooked up to my TV it's great. In fact, if you don't think Vista Media Center looks and feels great I wonder if you've ever seen it.
And to top that off, the API's for coding extensions are just lovely as well.
As for the rest? Oh well...
Heresy! Heresy I say!
The only good thing that Vista's release did was it forced PC manufacturers to finally ship computers with 1 Gig of RAM minimum and sometimes up to 2 Gigs. Take that ramped up comp and strip Vista from it and you have a pretty decent workstation for photo editing and movie editing.
When XP runs webbrowsing, email and office just fine and without any bluescreens I don't really see why... The reason XP became a success was because it was a lot more stable platform than Win98. Sure there was Windows 2000 however when XP shipped most drivers were already very mature and XP got a very good reputation from the start. However 2007 will be the year of Linux ;)
"So far, my experience with Vista has been mostly positive. The intergrated search is quite useful and the re working of the explorer shell is a noticeable improvement."
Better than copernic desktop search?
Am I the only one that thought all the interviewees were idiots?
There's a huge number of so-called "IT Professionals" that just don't have a clue. Lots of middle-aged guys who managed to get a job running the FAX machines at some corporation 20 years ago, and eventually ended up being the "IT guy". But they don't know ANYTHING. They buy whatever new hardware they think is neat, and that the salesmen from their vendors tell them they need. And then they pay for all-encompassing support contracts, so that they don't have to configure anything, or troubleshoot anything, because they don't actually know how to do that stuff.
I sometimes wonder if those guys are the majority of the IT employees in the United Stats. Guys that use the company's money to hire other people to do their jobs. The only reason they get away with it is because their boss is even MORE clueless about how IT should work.
Sorry, kind of off-topic, but I just can't stand the attitude of rags like "Information Week".
...What the comments here would be like if the criticism from the "Windows camp" about the latest release of Ubuntu or OS X was as shrill, biased and ill-informed as the daily "zOMG ! Vista is t3h suxx0rs, LOL !!11!"-style blog/article/review/journal making the front page of Slashdot.
After checking out Vista at the local Best Buy & Circuit City (for hours...), I decided that I didn't want M$'s latest & 'greatest'. If running Aero the machines all acted like XP with a 600Mhz Celery processor. Boy, only 20 days after Vista was released & all the retail stores are on the Vista bandwagon, no 'mo XP in sight. Wonder where all the old gear went ?
I wanted a hot laptop, AMD TL-56 64bit DP, 1GB memory, DVD+-, good screen, Nvidia graphic card, etc. Best Buy had one that was everything I wanted but it was Vista. Ugh ugh. So I started cruising the web & found the XP version of the same machine, $100 cheaper too ! At Best Buys web site. Quick, they only have a few left... And SuSE 10.2 installed just fine...
I could not find the "serious technical debate" in the article. It was more anecdotal, missing comprehensive, systematic evaluation.
It's also annoying that most of these professionals seem to hve close ties to Microsoft, which makes it difficult to view their words as an independent, bias-free opinion.
Windows Vista is the new Windows ME
We're being forced to deploy it by MANAGEMENT for some unknown reason. It's not as bad as I expected but we don't have it in the wild yet so who knows how that will go. It was supposed to have built in tools to make mass deployments easier but that seems to have been a bunch of hype, that's the biggest disappointment so far.
My complaints besides the deployment issue:
1) It's a complete resource hog.
2) UI isn't better than XP, just different.
We've all heard from dozens -- actually hundreds -- of analysts, journalists, pundits, bloggers, and other opinionated writers about Vista. I know I'm in for a good read when an article starts off with a gem like that.
The Aristocrats !
I've not actually installed Vista on my own machine, but I have used it on a friend's new laptop. It looks quite nice, and some of the menu's have been changed around, but I didn't object to the XP interface tbh so this is so much window dressing. Asides from the UI, I noticed (like many others I'm sure) that Vista is pretty resource hungry. It eats RAM for breakfast, and the install size is monstrous - a Home premium install is over 7 gigs, while the Ultimate Install is heading on towards 20Gb! This might be justifiable if a) It did something major that XP doesn't or b) XP was really in need of an update. Now I'm not gonna argue that XP is a perfect OS, but it works just fine for what I use it for (mainly just games and a spot of web browsing, do everything else on my macbook pro or my linux boot). Overall my first impressions are that Vista in no way justifies the amount of resources it munches.
"Everlasting peace will come to Earth when the last man kills the last but one." - Adolf Hitler
Pros:
- Scheduled defrags without third party software
- Aero interface looks less dated
Cons:Windows Experience rating was a 1.00 - I could not even run Aero on this laptop. 2.4ghz Pentium4M, 2 Gig Ram, 100gb Internal 2.5- 5400RPM HD, Nvidia 4200Go... Vista worked okay for most business apps (MS Office 2003, Lotus Notes, Etc...). Sucked up a lot in resources and annoying to have UAC pop up (until I shut it off).
With FC6, I have NVidia's Linux Drivers loaded on gnome with Beryl as a desktop. I have a full rotating cube desktop w/transparency through the cube to the other side while rotating. Nice performance on the UI vs none on Vista. Score a plus one for the Eye Candy on linux. I have VMware Workstation (5) Loaded with WinXP SP2 running and 768MB of RAM carved for it. A base OS (Linux) rotating cube w/transparency and WinXP in Virtual Machine (which I can also make transparent on the desktop). All of this on a 4-year old laptop. And other than a base install of FC6 all I added was the Livna repository.
Linux/Gnome/Beryl wins this one hands down.
We've got Vista running on computers around work, but generally there are just too many little gotcha's from programs that need updating to suddenly discovering wierd features like volumne shadowing that just mess you up. So when I just bought a new computer for home, which is plenty powerful enough to run Vista (even has a nVidia 8800 based graphics card), I chose XP for it. Was cheaper and I know how to work it and I know all my software will work on it. Just don't have time for the hassles of Vista, perhaps in a couple of years if the situation improves. Sounds like the Info Week people have the same experience.
remove a syllable and you'll have it right
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
It looks just *awesome* on the shelf in the local computer store.
I'm sure if I actually bought and installed it, though, I'd have a different opinion...
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
That was fixed in Vista (for Minimize and move, anyway), but only while running Glass. It's because the actual application is no more than a texture thrown onto a frame (the glass). Killing an app is also a tad easier than before: if an app isn't responding and you try to kill it, Windows asks you if you'd like to wait for it to come back to the light or if you'd like to hack it to bits. I haven't had an issue with it so far.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
Bought an MacBook just before Vista Came out. I really love studying the various aspects of UI's that make my life easier or harder; and OS X generally does nothing but make my life easier. I'm also a Unix/Linux developer, and OS X is perfect for me; develop in my console, with a great UI kicking around for the Web browsing and other GUI stuff. I tried out Vista (ever so briefly), and my impression was that it was big, cute, a bit confusing, and didn't really seem to offer me anything that XP did. (I keep a licensed copy of XP in a Paralllels virtual window, for compatability testing, and in case I need to run a Windows-specific app [hasn't happened yet].)
If you're teetering on the edge, check out the Mac's. Just do it. If you don't like OS X, you can still run XP/Vista on them. That's one of the justifications I used to convinced myself to jump. But believe me, the number of people who *will* primarily run XP/Vista on Mac hardware can probably be counted on one hand (even though apple hardware has been found to be the fastest Windows platform). OS X really *is* just that much better.
And this is with the "previous" (well, current) release of OS X; Leopard will only make that moreso.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
A brief summary by users. There's nothing really new here, except the depressing insistence that they have no choice.
The printable version of this article still displays. Pages 2 and 3 of the article did not display when I looked at it. The opinions of Bill Flanagan and David Gray were lost to formatting errors and merged with the others.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The latest software hasn't been pushing the limits of hardware like it used to, so Microsoft decided to do that with Vista by requiring a minimum 512 MB of RAM, among other things. Vista arbitrarily caching pieces of your hard drive to ram, only makes things faster if you have expensive hardware. In general, default background processes in Vista actually decrease the performance of your user processes by allocating system resources for background processes (especially on older hardware).
But this is nothing new. When I first saw XP it would boot really fast in 20-30 seconds, but after a few years of installing updates (which add and modify background processes and services) the boot process now takes a minute or two even with a fast processor. This is due to XP's long list of unnecessary background processes it has to initialize. Some sites have come out on how to optimize XP and they generally point to disabling unnecessary background processes, like this site does.
So what's this talk of Vista being a "Consumer OS"? Are we now consigned to an era where a populist OS is categorised as "Consumer". An alternative might be "Alternative" and for the minority "OSX"? (only kidding). Actually, come to think of it, maybe we already are with Microsoft's "Home", "Home Premium" "Home Professional", "Professional Professional" etc etc... In the future I will use a "Connoisseur OS", whilst my lesser peers will use a "Consumer OS"
IPV6, Security, new deployment features and new GPOs don't save you money. It's a no brainer that Vista will be better then XP (once softwanre packages / hardware vendors fully support it).
It's the pre-load feature and moves this out of memory when you need it. It wouldn't be so bad if it would just discard the unused pre-loaded stuff instead of the utterly stupid move of swapping it out to disk or USB storage! On a laptop you do not want two long sessions of disk access to a slow disk to load and swap out stuff you are not going to use that day. If I was using Vista I would turn this off - this feature will save time opening MS Office and various other bits but would slow down any machine that isn't dedicated to just running a small number of programs frequently.
I didn't think Vista was all that bad, once I switched the desktop and start menu to Windows Classic, turned off UAC, and killed about 20 unneeded services.
I found the new icons annoying, and the fact that the User folder has now taken the place of My Documents, leading to much confusion for my end users.
Hmm... User folder, with Documents, Pictures, etc., inside. Kind of like exactly what a User folder looks like on OS X.
What really pissed me off is Office 2007. It makes me want to scream. I now have to retrain my users (as they get new machines) how to use Office from scratch. I'm sorry, when you are used to working productively, and know exactly where everything is, it is really disgusting that every bloody thing you know how to do is now wrong.
Mir tut es leid, Menschen daß Einfältigfehlersuchenbaumfolgendenaffen sind.
Is it me or does the headline read wrong? Maybe I'm reading too fast.
More importantly, do you think it will ever gain traction among corporate users, or is its glitzy Aero interface destined to make it mainly a consumer OS?"
You're joking, right?
I hope so. Otherwise, you're not real observant. Of *course* it'll gain traction among corporate users. Because they have not fucking choice! What part of "vendor lock-in" is hard to grasp?
See, too many companies have millions of dollars of infrastructure tied up in MS-Windows, and other Microsoftware. They are not going to replace it overnight. And, by the time they really start to feel the burn, the worst will be over (at least as far as up-front cost goes: the pain never truly ends, but that's true no matter what). New PCs will come with MS-Vista (the 'MS' is to distinguish it from the health-care package that's been around for 20 years). Corporations will soon not have a choice. It'll be MS-Vista or nothing.
How many times do we have to go through this? We had this same debate when MS-Windows XP came out. This isn't our year. Maybe next year, but not this year.
Microsoft might be dying (I believe it is), but it takes a long, long time for a giant to decompose.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Thats about as logical as claiming that Linux is an inferior OS to Windows because less people use it!
Oh I don't know... suppose that more people had genital herpes than had HIV.
That would mean that HIV is an inferior virus to genital herpes.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
..unless you plan on upgrading everything in the shop.
;)
:)
Tried it today on a new laptop.
The 1st app, Symantec Antivirus, was incompatible. Required an upgrade.
The 2nd app, IBM Client Access, was incompatible without an AS400 OS upgrade.
Those were the 1st 2 apps I tried to install. That's all I needed to see. I popped in an XP Pro Disk and all was well, plus I had the added benefit of being able to fully utilized the power of the new laptop. No Vista bloat.
I'll take FC6 over Vista anyday.
We'll have no choice either but even if we turnover all of our desktops in 4 years that's only 25%/yr. Given it will be at least 1-1.5 years before we roll it out then it will be 5-5.5 years before we're totally embraced by the Microcotopus. Sauronsoft will be on to the next turn of the thumbscrews by then.
I wouldn't even consider using Vista as my primary OS until it reaches SP1 status. I worked as a 1st line tech back when XP was released, and it was a freakin' nightmare. But they've worked on it, and it's become a not-so-bad OS. Inferior to a GNU/Linux setup in almost every way but bearable nonetheless. I dare say Vista will eventually suck less once they're ironed out a few of the titanic kinks in it. I used to be an early adopter type - couldn't wait to get my hands on the latest and greatest. But now I've matured, and I just want things to work. My computer is my living, so it needs to work with me, not against me. To be honest, what I've heard about Vista really isn't encouraging me to consider it as a serious alternative. I could care less about eye-candy - I spend most of my time in an IDE for goodness' sake. If experience has taught me anything - it's wait for service pack 1 before even considering it for serious use.
I have none and hope to keep it that way. At least until SP1, and long after that if possible. Aero has a nifty cool look to it? That's nice. No thanks. Why would I want to load up my machines with bloated DRM? Bill Gates was only against DRM until Microsoft started selling it.
My install of Vista was a bogged down, hour and half long trial (on a 3.2ghz P4 system with a Gig of RAM), with nearly no proof that anything has been corrected or fixed in this new outing for Microsoft. The installer still loads everything in 16 color 800x600 mode, can't find simple pieces of hardware, and takes bloddy forever to simply get on with it. I saw Vista crash to BSOD in less than five minutes of installing it, and due to a sound card driver from a not even obscure sound card, nonetheless. The flashy interface doesn't impress me, and it doesn't offer me much when it comes to actually getting work done. Couple with that that almost no software developers have been able to release fully working Vista versions yet, and you have an OS that I can't understand anyone actually wanting to use. MS is about five years late on getting onto the Digital Lifestyle train, and I can't see anything in Vista that helps me enjoy my digital media, just the same poorly coded media player that only uses Microsoft's proprietary junk.
Finally, to anyone who says that MS made leaps and bounds in this OS release, I say to you this; there is not one thing in Vista that MS didn't rip off from Apple. Widgets are called Gadgets, windows now have transparencies, and suddenly there's a search bar in the start menu that seems oddly the same as spotlight, though still doesn't work even %1 as well as what it's ripping off, not to mention that IE 7 had to rip off Firefox in order to get anything new under it's belt, and still can't do it well. At least Microsoft stays true to their history of stealing ideas and repackaging them.
Finally there's the "security" of the system, which apparently means asking you 8 billion questions to do even the most menial system tasks;
"You'd like to install a piece of Microsoft software, is this ok?"
"Yes"
"you've said that you'd like to install a piece of microsoft software, is this ok?"
"GAH!"
Vista gets a 1 out of five, if even that. Too little, too late MS.
brian botkiller "Condensing fact from the vapor of nuance" - Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
Again with this stuff... Anyone who knows this stuff knows to avoid any new MS OS for the first year. Wait for the service packs which address these issues... and then upgrade if you want. If you buy a new machine now... then yeah, you'll be likely stuck with it until the fixes come if you plan to run windows. Almost everything that has been written about vista is a carbon copy of xp when it first came out. I am even beginning to think some of these hacks have pulled out their old xp articles and changed the name to vista.
The drivers are really are not an MS problem. The vendors were provided with the specs to make their drivers ages ago and some are doing it and not others. The main reason a lot aren't doing it are because the would rather you buy new stuff from them! They are choosing not to make the driver. This, again, is no different than when xp came out. Many manufacturers use the release of a new MS OS as a cash cow by forcing people to buy new stuff by not supporting the old.
I am not defending these practices, I have just seen them happen over and over. If it comes right down to it, I run a mythbox and an xp machine. I've never had a problem with either. That is mainly because I build my own machines. Many people don't and get stuck. No Linux drivers for some stuff? Not a problem if you pick components that have support. That info is readily available. Ditto is the advice to stay away from vista until they get the stuff worked out.
As for the corporate side. Unless they were planning to upgrade machines at this time of year, they will not likely upgrade until their hardware replacement cycle comes due. As for MS, of course they are going to release new OS's. That's what they do. And the same problem happens each time. As always folks... let the early adopters take the bullet...
u do know that ~ 50% of bankruptcys in this country are tied to large medical bills ?
u ever been in a welfare line ?
u actuallyknow anyone beeen in a welfare line ?
even if they are lazy, how about picking on corporate types who take home multi million paychecks when they get fired
I absolutely love my installation Vista Ultimate. That said, I hate the way certain vendors (Autodesk) are treating Vista users. Their software will simply not let you install AutoCAD on a Vista machine. It'll give you "this is not a supported version of windows" message. That doesn't mean AutoCAD 2005 won't work though. If you update an XP machine that already has AutoCAD, with Vista, the program will load just fine, it's only the installation on new machines where it gives errors. The reason? "Our new AutoCAD 2008 will be Vista compatible."
Yeah right. When it comes out in several months, I get to run out and purchase 30 new AutoCAD licenses at $4,000 a pop. All this because Autodesk wants to make a buck. If you guys think Microsoft is bad, just thank your megabytes you don't have to deal with Autode$$$k.
I maintain one Vista machine for testing purposes. I do as little work as possible on it because quite frankly I prefer Linux. In particular, I make sure that LedgerSMB runs on Vista. LedgerSMB in turn depends on PostgreSQL, Vanilla Perl, and Apache.
Compared to XP, Vista is a mixed bag. There are some user experience improvements, and way the menus work on the start menu is an improvement. Aside from the initial disorientation, the UI is closer to what XP's should have been.
However, there are many complaints I have about Vista. UAC is the biggest one, and this can result in corrupted installs of some software (including Apache), and it is simply way too tempting to turn off every security improvement that Vista offers. Whatever Vista does, it will *not* make Windows that much more secure-- it just allows Microsoft to blame the users.
I also find Vista to be surprisingly slow (granted I only have 512MB RAM in this system) and some settings like UAC are hard to find. I think that Vista is going to be a support headache for everyone, and I do not recommend that people upgrade.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I drove a 93 escort wagon until around 5 months ago. It pained me greatly to put her down, but ma said it was for the best. My children will go to a better university because of all I was able to squeeze out of that car.
Sweet informative mod.
More importantly, do you think it will ever gain traction among corporate users, or is its glitzy Aero interface destined to make it mainly a consumer OS?
Yes, because in 6 months, you won't be able to buy a new computer without Vista on it. And in two years, you won't be able to get support for XP. And then in about 4 years, you won't be able to get software compatible with XP for love or money.
Corporate users never really saw a lot of value in XP either. Moreover, it took about that long for it to "gain traction", in both the consumer and corporate markets. I've been working in the ISP industry since 1994, and tech support has watched as every new OS Microsoft has produced in that time get snapped up by a small percentage of early adopters, followed by the rest of the computing population as they upgrade their computers over time.
Most people find installing an operating system too much work, too time consuming, too difficult, or they just don't think about it at all. It *came* with the computer after all. Isn't it just a part of the computer? IT departments in companies see it much the same way. You have to upgrade the computer to get the next version of windows, so why not just let Dell or IBM do the install when you do your next upgrade? To install a new OS across an existing network of any size is too disruptive to the users, and too time consuming. A user would have to do without a computer for the better part of a day at the very least if you upgrade an existing system.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
That's not a valid summary of TFSummary. Nice troll though.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Next time do a google or even ask the 10 year old computer nerd that lives next door before trying to add information on something you know nothing about.
Anyone ever teach you manners? It doesn't appear so.
qz
Windows 95, 98, 2K, XP, all were seen as a big improvement over their predecessor. People lined up to get their copies and to upgrade their machines.
But here we are, months after the business introduction of Vista and people still debating it's merits with no sign of commitment. New machines are still being sold w/ XP by default, with the "option" to upgrade to Vista. It turns out that a Mac running Parallels w/ XP can run more Windows software that a PC running Vista. Developers are still writing for XP and are just not pumping out the Vista apps.
Microsoft used to be criticized for being backward compatible to the stone age. Vista is different. Vista breaks lots of Windows software. Lots. '
I see this rollout as being a complete failure. Much worse than Windows ME, more like OS/2.
More likely a Mass Debater...
"More importantly, do you think it will ever gain traction among corporate users, or is its glitzy Aero interface destined to make it mainly a consumer OS?"
What traction? You order a new PC, you get Vista. You can use that vista license to install XP, but really it's inevitable.
If you're an MS shop, I challenge you to keep Vista from gaining traction.
Interesting how I actually am working at microsoft at the moment (not a coder) and several of the guys and I were talking about how much a flop vista is. Its kinda funny to see that even the people inside don't like it. Someone even likend it to the next Windows ME (shudder).
Copying a 4 gig file from local disk onto the network pretty much destroyed the machine's interactive performance to the extent that I couldn't tell if I was trying to browse a folder with no files, or a folder full of files which simply hadn't appeared yet.
And have Microsoft replaced that dumb-as-a-rock CMD.EXE with a real shell yet? Something which provides command and pathname completion, at least?
When copying a 2 gig file from local disk to local disk, I swear the disk head was thrashing back and forth and it took about 10 times longer on Windows than Linux. How much data is the OS buffering before causing a head seek back to write? Doesn't seem like much!
Arguing that Vista or Microsoft products in general are not always the crap they're made out to be is never going to work on a website that pictures Bill Gates as a borg and doesn't render correctly at all in IE7. However, for those of you who actually care about facts instead of clinging to some crazy notion that blind evangelism is going to lead everybody realize the glory of Steve Jobs and OS X try reading up on what's new in Vista.
o ws_Vistae w_to_Windows_Vistaf eatures_new_to_Windows_Vista
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Wind
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_features_n
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_and_safety_
Turns out the changes really are substantial. The large number of brilliant developers working on Vista for 5 years created a good deal more than just a pretty interface. Read up on it, how is OS X superior? It's not. Can OS X catch up? Probably not.
OS X may have been gaining ground on XP, but Vista buries it.
This post would be in respect to Dennis Barr's comment (Page 2 of the article):
h tml
"Linux still has a way to go, unfortunately, because its ease of use and application support, despite the words of its partisans, still is not what it is under Windows. For instance, under OpenSUSE, there's no directly supported way to play back DVD movies."
Actually, if you pay for Suse (not OpenSUSE) you get codecs to play videos. Also; if those aren't enough you can buy additinal codecs from a company known as Fluendo. They support a couple of platforms with their codecs. Here is their press release.
http://www.fluendo.com/press/releases/PR-2007-01.
Now with respect to the statement:
"I've found involve a wink-wink-nudge-nudge disregard for legality"
Now you have support; no "wink-wink-nudge-nudge" needed.
Judging all Linux users by what you found in a forum isn't acceptable. I could send you to tens of thousand windows sites that do more than a wink and a nudge. Actually they break out sledge hammers.
To point out:
"Linux still has a way to go, unfortunately, because its ease of use and application support, despite the words of its partisans"
Application support? Linux / *BSD's and Solaris run all my applications just fine. If you are referring to commercial support; they you might have a point. There could be more commercial applications. But temper that with the fact that there are thousand of existing open source applications that cover many desktop users need.
So, to sum it up: Don't judge all Linux users by what you have found in a forum. I could send you more windows crack forums than you could ever find in the *nix universe. When talking about application support; be specific about the topic. Throwing out generalities like Linux isn't ready for the desktop isn't exactly appropriate. I will ask: who's desktop? Not all desktop users are created with the same needs. Please be fair and objective.
If you've made an argument here on Slashdot that corporations will switch because new PCs come with Vista installed, you've apparently forgotten to take into account that we're talking about corporations, not small businesses.
Corporations tend to have fancy things like Volume Licenses and purchasing agreements with computer manufacturers so that they can get computers with similar models. That way, they can simply ghost machines when they provision them.
I'm not claiming to be a guru about corporate windows installs, but that's how it has been done in my experience.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
You seriously have to try to not be able to name one thing that pisses you off. I'm not saying it's a terrible UI (although I don't particularly like it), but you lose credibility when you come across as blissfully ignorant. Off the top of the head of someone who rarely even uses MacOS10:
/. street cred. Hypocritcally you've never said a single thing bad about Vista, so by your own logic you're blissfully ignorant yourself.
/. do), and you have an application open on the secondary screen, where is the menu bar? It's still on the top of the primary display. To click "file" (or whatever menu you'd like), you get to sling your mouse across displays. I do hope the second monitor came with some wrist guards to protect against carpel tunnel.
A casual glance through your posting history reveals you feel the same way about Vista. You claim you're a college student who loves Vista and loves his Zune, and you throw in linux in that list perhaps in attempts to gain some
You say you rarely use OS X, and frankly it shows in your lack of understanding of the system itself.
1) How much information do you get on each instance of each application you have open by glancing at your screen? Open 15 Word documents, 27 instances of Safari, 32 PDFs, and you'll get three tiny, black triangles. That's it.
You have more than 3 triangles, if you want instance information you've got 15 Word windows on your screen, or if they're minimized you've got 15 Word window minimizations on the right side of the dock. The dock minimizations are mini copies of the window itself. Or you can use Expose (F-10 in this case) to view all concurrent instances of the application you want. Can XP do that? Perhaps I don't really understand what you are complaining about here.
2) What happens if you don't have a shortcut on the dock for an application you need to open? Count the clicks you need to make for this, and don't forget your large back of counting beans.
Firstly, you should put a link to the Applications folder on the right side of the dock itself. Right-clicking on this folder icon will launch a Windows-esque start menu of all applications, complete with nested applications and directories. I've seen people make their own folders here with links to only their commonly-used apps.
Secondly, and maybe more importantly, go get yourself Quicksilver and then read this tutorial.
3) While on the topic, how much space do you waste by having the dock display *every* application you regularly need at all times? Yes, you can make the dock miserably small. Yes, you can have the dock auto-hide. But yes, there are many better implementations of this functionality in other interfaces (Gnome/KDE/Windows, for example).
See my answer for #2 above. You are correct that there are better implementations, Quicksilver is just such a thing. And with the applications folder on the dock, you have your Windows-esque start menu, so what is the problem now?
4) If you have a dual-head system setup (as I think many of us on
I've never used a double-head display, so I don't know if there's any other ways. But you can use Ctrl-F2 to get keyboard access to the menubar.
As I said, I rarely use Macs, and even I can spout off a few major UI irritants when prompted. No UI is perfect, but you can't claim to "love studying the various aspects of UI's that make [your] life easier or harder" and have nothing negative to report without coming off like a complete fanboy.
Interesting that you've been Microsoft fanboyish in nearly all your posting history on slashdot, yet you accuse others of coming off like a fanboy for preferring OS X. Yet you don't hesitate to bash Macs and OS X when you can, especially in light of you saying you rarely use OS X.
make world, not war
"3 IT managers have a serious technical debate" hahah!, that's funny. Managers and technical don't mix too well, debate however involves talking, which they love to do. Can you imagine having to sit through that thing. eew.
Twelve years later and nothing has changed...
Seems fairly accurate to me. Would you like to pinpoint what Troll-action you spot? All I see is brief summary highlighting the blatant bias by the second guy and his inability to give objective reasoning why Vista is good.
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My day job is supporting Macintosh computers. However, due to the ever changing IT market, I always to stay up to date on what's going on with Windows and Linux. It's in my best interest to be cross platform, especially when I need to explain to a Windows user how to do a specific procedure on the Mac, and vice versa. I have been a Windows user much longer (3.1) than I have been a Macintosh (didn't get involved with Macs until circa OS 7.6.1) user, so I've seen my fair share of kernel, UI, graphics, and other changes on both platforms over the years.
I was excited to hear that our Windows Vista (Business) Licenses had arrived via our MSDNAA account at work. So, I grabbed a license for testing and went at it. I wanted to leave my Mac alone and not try to force a Vista boot with Boot Camp + hacking. My original test box was:
Dell Optiplex GX270 P4 2.4 GHz, hyper-threading enabled.
1.25 GB DDR 400 RAM
80 GB HD (7200RPM/8MB Cache)
GeForce 4 MX 400 64MB Video Card (AGP 8x)
17" Flat Screen display
Install went perfect. After installation was complete, there were three or four Windows security updates awaiting me. After installing those, I started to play around. Unfortunately, my computer scored a 1.0 on the performance scale, mostly because of the video card. I was also disappointed that Aero was not supported on my video card as well, so all I had was the "Windows Vista Basic" theme available to me, without any of the new eye candy I was looking to see.
I really wanted to see what Vista had to offer, so I didn't want to settle for the reduced package. This is significant though. Microsoft wonders why they haven't seen to many upgrades to Vista yet- well this is one of them. A large amount of users with existing computers will not see the biggest UI improvement that Aero has to offer. This is different in comparison to Mac OS X 10.4, where, except for not being able to run a few screen savers, and not getting a few fancy effects here and there, your experience is pretty much the same visually, from a G3 iBook, right on through to the newest Mac Pro. Sure, there are applications that need core image, but, for the basic OS X install set, your experience is pretty much the same right on down the line.
Getting back to Vista... I decided to upgrade the computer as much as I could to get the full Vista experience, so I bumped myself up to 3GB of RAM, a 250GB 7200/16MB Cache hard disk, and, a GeForce FX 5200 128MB video card (best I can get for a low profile card w/bracket for this Dell). This brought my performance rating up to a 2.5, again, with the video card being the weak point.
Now I was getting Aero in all of its glory. Despite my video card being the bottom of the barrel for Vista/Aero, I haven't had any performance issues with any of the special effects (all of them are turned on). The only thing I'm kind of peeved about is the lack of NVidia support for this class of video card. NVidia has newer drivers out, however, but I had to use beta drivers from November for this card, because it looks like NVidia is in the process of dropping support for it. Despite being beta drivers, I haven't had any BSOD's or issues with them, and they are still faster than the default Microsoft drivers.
As for applications on Vista, its a mixed bag. Most things installed and worked OK. All my typical Internet applications and plugins (Firefox, Adobe Reader, Flash Player, Sun Java JRE, etc) worked without a hitch- even Gaim/GTK worked. Divx and RealPlayer are giving me issues where Windows has to switch out of Aero mode when they are running. It's kind of weird... the screen goes black for two seconds, and then comes back in Windows Vista "basic" mode. When you close the application, the reverse occurs, and you are back to Aero, with transparencies etc. VLC won't show most movies, just a bunch of changing colors in its window. iTunes worked OK for me, but I don't have my library saved on this computer. Office 2003 worked as well.
A programmer, networking consultant, and 3 IT managers have a serious technical debate. The bartender asks, "What is this, some kind of a joke?"
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
You must be joking.
Any old software clearly states the OSes supported, this does not include any OSes commercialized in the future.
There is nothing stopping MS having 2 lines of products: one new, that would accept only certified software, one old, which will consist on keeping old systems running.
The backwards compatibility excuse is a tired one, which holds absolutely no water.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
A: Vista is Big, Slow, and wasteful.
B: I disagree. Vista is a resource sucking CPU hog!
C: Wrong - Vista is Windows XP with some new themes and graphics.
Well, that covers all sides of the discussion for this week.
C U next time on Vista World!
I will tell you how Vista roll outs are decided.
The top boss in my company is a golf buddy of Gates or Ballmer. They play a couple of games, some how the topic of our VIsta roll out comes up, our boss says this time he will push for a roll out by mid 2007 (because the MSofties remind our boss how a bad sport he has been for keep running W2K mostly on the desktops). Our boss can't say to his buddies that he was presented with compelling evidence it was a bad idea to move to XP (hints: no additional benefits, retraining, W2K mostly works, so why fix it?)
The MS guys have shares in our company.
One of our company's best clients is MS.
One or two individuals may sit in the board of directors of both companies.
Now tell me, what is the chance that anything but MS stuff will be deployed in the desktops?
What is telling, is that all the machines that keep our company up and running are not Windows based.
Friendship has its limits after all.
(1) DRM. As DRM is a serial chain of single points of failure you end up with three problems. Firstly, the MTBF of that chain is the MTBF of the weakest component. Secondly, the probability of failure increases with the number of components involved - with Vista this move from being a probability to being a likelihood (even ignoring the fact that it's an MS product which ups the ante even more). Thirdly, to that likelihood of failure you have to add that all DRM components are version 1, hardware as well of software - in the Microsoft world this is in principle a public beta. In summary, catastrophic failure and data loss is as good as guaranteed. Go ahead, implement this on a corporate scale..
(2) The 'advanced' GUI. I've been using Compiz and Beryl on Linux long enough to have played with eye candy and you know what? I switched it off. It slows my UI down, not because of computing power (plenty available) but because all that fancy stuff needs time to show itself. Opening a window that zooms or rolls or whatever takes longer than one that just appears on the screen, for example, and there's plenty of it. It gets in the way, period. The only thing I use in Beryl is a slightly transparent cube so I can see where things are because I can have quite a windows and desktops on the go.
(3) The licensing problems. I've been fighting the misnamed 'Genuine Advantage' on other systems which were as genuine as they come and, frankly, I've had enough. From what I've read Vista has even more of that nonsense in, and that, coupled with my unwillingness for any system to be allowed to 'phone home' without me knowing what details it sends is enough for me not to use it. I have client information I need to keep confidential and I have nil trust in systems that do things without me knowing. Apart from that, I get very little for the money - I rather spend it sponsoring an Open Source project that creates value for me and others.
(4) The eternal upgrade cycle, but that's more based on my experience with XP. I installed a couple of new systems 3 weeks ago, and I set it up so I have to authorise patches and updates. Well, it happens on a daily basis. Worse, one of the patches bluescreened one of the box to the point of me having to restore it from backup. I've only ever had that with Linux, 6 years ago, when a kernel patch went wrong - and that is easy to recover from.
(5) As with any version of Windows, the absolute dependency on the GUI for it to work. If there's a modal window somewhere hidden under the stack of others on your desktop it will stop the machine and actively prevent you from getting to the window. And you can't cancel the task because you need the GUI for that too. That leads me to another HUGE and related annoyance: if I say 'shut down' I want a machine to SHUT DOWN, no if, buts and maybes. It needs a shutdown that simply does what it says, no further questions asked.
And I don't buy into the 'hope cycle' that the next version will at last fix all the problems. Realistically, MS will NEVER willingly make such a version.
Who would buy the update?
Insert
For any IT managers out there, the update client in Vista behaves differently from XP. Doing a manual update with Vista now respects GP, and will update from your WSUS server instead of from windowsupdate.
A "me too" post gets moderated "informative"?..
A mere example of something already eloquently explained by a parent poster seems hardly informative.
...but I think I'll wait for Vienna.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Out! OUT!!!
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
There is so much conjecture and bad information on this topic.
Most of the stuff that I've read (278 posts) is absolute rubbish!
Misinformed opinions based on old wives's tales, ignorance of hardware and poorly developed understandings of operating systems, marketing, Windows history and conspiracy!
Vista is the next step in the Windows saga. There's nothing else to say about it.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
That about some it up for me I'm staying with linux
in my life God comes first.... but Linux is pretty high after that
Francis Smit
Is there anyone reading these comparitive articles who has ever been conviced to switch OSs? I suspect not. The reasons I have switched have been that 1) They stopped making TRS-dos 2) No more support for Amigas (any user can tell you this was the best OS ever!) 3) you want how much for a new version of your OS? The reason these articles are popular is mostly that the users of those OS's need to feel good about their choice. It is rare that there is any useful information, but at least it is funny listening to all the "you're a zealot fanboi" rhetoric.
Tried to install it on my machine and it won't. I'm guessing it's broken. I'll try it when I don't have to buy a whole new computer just to install it. Anyone who praises OSX (which can't won't install on 90% of the computers being used today without hacks) is hereby banned from discussing any compatibility issues with Vista.
The panel member Dennis Barr has offered some valuable comic relief. He is worried about the legality of playing back DVDs on OpenSUSE "in the corporate environment".
One hopes that he can watch The Shaggy Dog at work without getting thrown in the dungeon. In the meantime, avoid Linux, Rah Vista!
Reading TFA, it looks as if most "IT pros" will support moving over to Vista, even if the improvements are completely superficial. As a previous poster has already noted, Vista doesn't look like the fundamental leap over the incumbent as XP was over 98/ME. I did note that a couple of the people writing in TFA were somehow associated with Microsoft - they get given beta code and such well before launch, which is just another way that Microsoft keeps market position. I think this is pretty much the story with the IT industry in general - good or bad, corporate bods generally succumb to the cult of Microsoft because it's become part, not only of their thinking, but of their very livelihoods. I used to get angry about Billy G and his Machiavellian ways, but since he's giving away tons of his cash to help out with preventable diseases and such in the third world, I'm actually glad that he's able to hoover up such vast quantities of corporate cash and redistribute it somewhat more fairly. Let them have their little game, if you don't like it, there's always the free alternative of Linux, so I'm pretty cheerful.
You thought you could break the laws of physics without paying the PRICE?
you can go hunter2 my hunter2-ing hunter2
You don't need vi to edit your apt source files. All you need to do is echo the line, and append it to the source file to get a repository setup so you can install Emacs. Then you have a real editor.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
He's right about the modal box, but it doesn't really come up *that* much. Its not *always* modal either. I'm not sure yet what situations cause it to be modal or not. The kinds of things that cause it are attempts to install device drivers or attempts to modify system files. With one exception (NCSoft's stupid unified game launcher) I've never had it pop up when I wasn't installing software. In my book, its always been a good thing. I don't want any software getting installed without my say-so.
His complaint about not being prompted for the root password is flat out wrong. I always get prompted for the root password in Vista when I get one of those challenge dialogs. I love this, as it allows my kids to use the system while I'm at work without allowing them to load it up with spyware from nifty stuff they found online (voice of sad experience here).
It sounds to me like he was running under an administrator account. One of the really nice things about Vista is that you don't *need* to do that anymore. Since you don't need to, you really shouldn't. Most people wouldn't dream of running under "root" on Linux all the time, so compare apples with apples. (You gotta wonder about an "IT professional" who would do this...)
Notice I said "root password" above. One of the nice little new things about Vista is that you get to pick the name of the administrator account. I picked "root". Vista has hard and soft links now too. With a few more decades of work on it, Microsoft might finally produce a decent Unix clone.
Well almost, I recently built an AMD 4x4 system that is now running Vista64, you can check it out here: http://amd4x4.blogspot.com/
Here are a few thoughts:
Getting setup is a pain in the ass. Prompts abound and I feel my anger bubble up every time I see one of those stupid boxes. However, the boxes go away for the most part and day to day operation becomes easy.
Driver support from vendors sucks hard. NVidia should be ashamed of themselves. I'm pretty sure that we will see a class action of some kind fall out of their negligence. I think ATI has better driver support from what I have been reading, but I'm more involved in the nvidia world. What is unfortunate about this situation is that Microsoft is on the hook for ensuring compatibility. I don't really see it as their problem - the hardware vendors seem to have completely ignored Vista as a potential OS that consumers would adopt. As such hardware support is pretty bad at the moment. It's really inexcusable considering how long Vista has been in development.
The same goes for various applications - web sites, consumer apps. What's odd is that IE 7 and Vista have some serious issues with web sites. Also, "Trusted mode" isn't really trusted and you can still have major issues. My test cases are somewhat fringe: Outlook Web with Exchange 2003 doesn't work at all without a patch that's not part of the regular OS updates - get with it MSFT, Outlook users are your bread and butter. MSDN is a mess under IE 7 and Vista. Invalid/Expired security certificates make IE 7 throw a hissy fit.
I can see the IE 7 and Vista user experience driving users to adopt firefox.
File syncing is jacked up. It's totally confusing to see what is being synced, and I have yet to figure out how to bring offline drives online when the server they are on is alive. Most of the check boxes pertaining to this feature are grayed out, but there is no explanation as to why they are not available. In addition the sync center keeps hounding me about syncing temp files and my iTunes library doesn't seem to stay synced (I'm using network mapped home folders)
Note to Microsoft, I wanted to switch Windows Media player but you don't have a codec for decoding non encrypted AAC files.
iTunes uses a ridiculous amount of ram (Almost 100 mb with 8500 songs), and is just generally slow. It also can't burn dvds or cds on 64 bit systems. So I'm stuck with it for a bit longer.
On the flip side, I installed the "Sync Center" and plugged my T-Mobile Dash in and it showed a nice pretty icon of my phone, and of course it worked. I liked that. And the sync center isn't nearly as nag ware oriented as Active Sync.
Remember the "new" view in Windows XP for things like the control panel? I never switched, and I preferred "classic mode". Nesting 30 odd control panels in arbitrary categories wasn't really something I was a huge fan of. In Vista, Microsoft has made the "new" style in XP the only way to view many of the system functions. There is a bit of a learning curve associated with this.
Also, something that I'm not a huge fan of - Vista has a tendency to hide things if you can't use them. While this seems like a good idea it's not. For example, when setting up a Bluetooth PAN with your phone you must have Bluetooth on the Vista PC turned on in order for this option to show up under the list of connection options. It takes three clicks and a full scroll to find the option in the first place so when you go hunting for it, but don't really know that you need Bluetooth turned on to get the menu option a user ends up wondering if they are looking in the right place. For the sake of learning where things are, it's nice to see the option perhaps grayed out with an explanation as to why it is disabled rather than mysteriously hiding something, when the conditions around toggle logic isn't well known.
There are some things that are worth the switch. First and foremost: The start menu re-design. Being able to type
"As we have deepened our relationship with Microsoft as a managed ISV, our options for change grow less viable. For example, I did a LiveMeeting for Satya Nadella from Microsoft last summer, and the first thing he noticed was the Google toolbar in my Web browser. Needless to say, future presentations were made sans the Google toolbar. This being said, I don't feel we are losing out on anything by not exploring other options."
Gee, I wonder why with that kind of "bow down to Bill" attitude.
The rest of the discussion of options in Part 2 is on a par with that. "Gee, we can't switch because we run AutoCAD. You can't even run AutoCAD in a VM." "Gee, we can't switch because we have software with dongles."
Guys, all of those are REASONS to switch - not reasons you CAN'T switch.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
My Windows Vista Business Edition upgrade DVD arrived with my latest Action Pack shipment. I've been looking forward to Vista primarily for its user interface improvements (love the new Start menu), promises of performance gains (e.g., boot-time speed-ups), and updated tablet PC support (better handwriting recognition, performance fixes, etc). I tried it out on a Dell Latitude D410, because I had too much stuff sitting on my tablet that needed to be backed up. Of course, the laptop's video card precluded the new Aero interface, but I don't care a lot about Mac-like eye candy.
:)
:(
On Wednesday, I re-installed Windows XP on the laptop. Several of the applications on which I depend for work either malfunctioned (VCON vPoint HD could send audio/video but not receive) or crashed (the Cisco VPN Client would stop responding, then blue-screen Vista upon shutdown/reboot). I spent an excessive amount of time searching for updated Bluetooth drivers, DVD playing software, and so forth, and I was unable to find compatible drivers for my old IBM webcam (which I replaced) and my PC5740 EVDO wireless card (though Smith Micro says that updated drivers should be available some time in the next few months). (I also had to upgrade several older applications and utilities, including anti-virus software, but that's to be expected.)
I'm also not as impressed with the user interface. The new Start menu is about the only thing that I like. The rest of the navigation and UI changes make me feel like I'm in a maze of twisty passages, all alike. For example, the Control Panel offers a lot of different functionality, but it feels very cluttered to me. Folder views were also unnecessarily complicated. I like the basic "list" and "details/sort by name/arrange in groups" views in Windows 2000, XP, and 2003, but re-creating them in Vista took a little too much fiddling (and even then, the "arrange in groups" views didn't quite do what I wanted). I can tell that I've been using Plone for too long, because I have been thinking about a file system browser where a savvy user could code up various custom views as page templates in DTML or TAL.
If I didn't depend on this laptop for work, I probably would have stuck with it - UI bloat included. As it is, I think that I'll wait at least until the summer before revisiting Vista. I didn't expect so many significant compatibility problems, given my generally positive experience during the Windows 2000-to-XP transition. I might give Vista another try sooner, assuming I can find time to image my tablet. I am really, REALLY interested in the new Tablet PC features, but my tablet has even more arcane hardware than the Dell Lattitude (e.g., a fingerprint sensor, the digitizer). As much as I'm looking forward to reviewing the tablet stuff, I'm not looking forward to the inevitable driver hunt.
I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
The problem is that the security mechanisms are both intrusive and break things they really should not break. For example, if you want to install MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Apache on your Windows development workstation, you have to turn off UAC to do this. If you want to install software that depends on these on your production workstation you have to turn it off during the installation.
I imagine that users are going to get tired of turning it off and then turning it back on. THat is the problem. In short, *it doesn't work as advertised.* It is overly complex, breaks things, and hassles users. That is the problem.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
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