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Microsoft Should Abandon Vista?
mr_mischief writes "An editorial written by Don Reisinger over at CNet's News.com takes Microsoft to task for the outright failure of Vista. He suggests that Vista may be the downfall of the company as, despite years in development, Vista was delivered to market too early. His suggestion? Support those who are running it, but otherwise ditch Vista and move on. 'Never before have I seen such an abysmal start to an operating system release. For almost a year, people have been adopting Vista and becoming incensed by how poorly it operates. Not only does it cost too much, it requires more to run than XP, there is still poor driver support ... With Mac OS X hot on its tail, Vista is simply not capable of competing at an OS level with some of the best software around. If Microsoft continues down this path, it will be Vista that will bring the software giant to its knees--not Bill Gates' departure.'"
How fucking dare anyone out there make fun of Vista after all it has been through?
Its sales are flagging. Leopard made Steve Ballmer mad. He threw two fucking chairs.
Mr. Mischief turned out to be a blogger, and now he's posting stories to slashdot. All you people care about is quality and usability.
It's a version of Windows! What you don't realize is that Vista is just being Windows and all you do is write a bunch of crap about it.
Microsoft hasn't made a good OS in years. It prefixes everything with "Win" because all you people care about is WINNING! WINNING! WINNING!
LEAVE IT ALONE! You are lucky it even boots you bastards! LEAVE VISTA ALONE!
Please!
Don Reisinger talked about professionalism and said if Steve Ballmer was a professional he would've shouted "developers" a few more times.
Speaking of professionalism, when is it professional to publicly bash an operating system who is going through a hard time?
Leave Vista alone, please.
LEAVE VISTA ALONE RIGHT NOW. I MEAN IT.
Anyone that has a problem with it you deal with me, because it is not well right now.
LEAVE IT ALONE!
Windows ME anyone?
WindowsXP and Linux all the way! (Too bad this shows my ignorance about other OS's...)
Irony? Yea, it's like goldy and bronzy, only it's made of iron!
Hello inflamatory headline.
On the one hand, I'm not touching Vista with a 10 foot pole until service pack one at the earliest. On the other hand, any self-professed Ubuntu/Mac guy is not who I look to for advice about Windows.
Yea, it sucks. Yea, included DRM sucks. Yea, their goddamn "Allow or Deny?" stuff is flat awful. Slow file copy, etc, etc. Hell, I'm not even sure if I like anything about it.
But I'm not going to run out and buy a Mac! I don't like the fricking hardware, frankly, and since you have to buy the hardware to use the OS, screw it, I'm not using the OS. And even if I did, the software is still not there, and don't say "bootcamp" like it means something. We've been able to dual boot in linux forever.
And as for Linux, I already USE Linux. If I could use it to run all the software I need to run, I'd toss my Windows machine. So far, that's not happening. I don't see it happening any time soon; WINE is never going to take up the slack, so it's all down to the software manufacturers. Unfortunately for me, one of the software manufacturers I need to start doing Linux versions of software is Microsoft, and that's about as likely as Bush raising taxes.
So no, I'm not happy about the situation. I don't think ANYONE is happy about the situation except irrational fanboys who think that this is going to be the end of Microsoft, completely missing the point that the alternatives are no more attractive today than they were five years ago because the goddamn software is still not available!
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Don't ditch it. There's no need to ditch it altogether. Release a "second edition" a la Win98, give some options to reduce bloat, work with major hardware manufacturers to make useful drivers, and work on general compatibility (back and forward). Then re-release the OS to praise and thanks.
Make it a logical step from XP so that companies needn't retrain their employees.
All that being said, Microsoft is still a juggernaut, and they will continue for many years to come. My guess is five to ten years...
Dominant Meme
The vista story does look very similar to Windows Millenium to me. Today nobody remembers that OS anymore, maybe Vistas future will be the same...
So, they may *outlast* Vista.
And, for a fraction of the cost.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Why do so many people ignore the often-cited reason for not switching to Vista? DRM is invasive, restrictive, and ridiculous. Hard-core gamers went vista ASAP, much like file-sharers who got it for free. The universal response was either that they hated it, or that they didn't see an improvement.
I've had to trouble shoot computers with it on there. I repeatedly found myself wondering why they had changed things that were so simply on XP to be so complicated on Vista.
Microsoft won't "drop" Vista, any more than they "dropped" their most horrible other operating system - Windows ME *cringe*. They'll just move on. They've already wrote the system. They'll keep updating it. The real question - the critical one - is how long they will support XP. They'll need to continue to support XP until they get a system out that is an actual improvement, and not just a corporate-ass kissing piece of crap.
Come on moderators, you know that was funny.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I started using Vista as a result of a new laptop. While ditching Vista and going back to XP was my first choice the lack of drivers for some of my components was a problem. Over the last 6 months the frequent updates, have made the operating more responsive and games run smoother. i belive Vista was shipped a year early but it is now catching up to where its nearing XP's usability. I say otherwise, Vista is here to stay and sooner or later, most people will be using it daily.
I'm a linux sysadmin. For work reasons (stupid software only runs under windows) I need to run Windows on my office desktop. I'm running XP here, Vista on my laptop, and Vista on one of my machines at home. Personally, I don't see what the problem with it is. Yeah, some stuff works a bit differently and things aren't in the places I'm used to seeing them, but on the whole it's not *that* bad. I'd take it over WinME any day.
The problem is not the operating system itself. The problem is with Microsoft's development processes. Its ineffiency bloats the operating system and bogs down the speed and quality of the development. Moving on to a new operating system will result in the 'same' product. Think about it... telling the development team of Duke Nukem Forever to move onto Duke Nukem Whenever will not result in an expedited, improved, or actualized product.
From my limited perspective, it appears to me that Microsoft tries too hard to be everything to everyone. Other operating systems do not follow this plan. What you end up with is audio drivers slowing down network performance and a whole lot of feature bloat. Whereas I'm a FreeBSD/Mac OS X fan through-and-through, I have to admit Microsoft wouldn't be where they are if they didn't have decent product. It's just unfortunate to see them getting 'a little big for their britches.'
I'm sure we're just heading into something of a reform in the world of operating systems. I think that Vista is going to be just one of many casualties of competition. In the end, I feel the users will win.
said it a billion times already, but Windows VISTA is the Windows ME of this generation. Instead of usability and features they added bloat and shiny!
I really don't get the point of these commentaries. Yes, Vista is a bit of a dog's breakfast. Yes, companies aren't rushing out to buy it en masse.
But it's being bundled with home computers, and your average Joe is NOT going to know about the problems. If he's lucky, he may have a friend who recommends staying with XP for now. But for many, many people, they'll just buy 'the whole thing' from PC World and be running Vista.
Like a lot of things Microsoftish, it may not be a running success out-the-door (Zune, Xbox), but it'll slowly get a foothold until more and more people start using it. Vista is here to stay folks, and in five-or-so years, it'll be the dominant OS. Microsoft won't support XP forever.
(Posted on a Mac mini!)
Dumping Vista is unlikely, as the real driver for change here is revenue.
If Microsoft switched to a support model - cheap OS and bill for official MS tech support (or charge officially trained MS techs to keep their credentials via refresher courses and recertification) - they wouldn't need to force out a new product on a regular basis to make money.
Instead, we'd be seeing 'XP 2.0' coming out with incremental improvements and a whole slew of new support docs, training, and tech certificates.
There is 0% chance of Microsoft abandoning Vista.
Actually, it's a small but non-zero chance. At any rate, the author of TFA didn't say that MS would do it, only that they should do it.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
This article doesn't make any sense.
Microsoft can't be sunk by people choosing XP over Vista. Those people are still paying for a Microsoft OS. Congratulations, you've decided to give Microsoft money instead of giving Microsoft money.
A lot of things could someday sink Microsoft. People choosing to buy one of their products won't be it.
(Unless one of those products somehow combusted and burned down a pack of orphanages, resulting in worse publicity and lawsuits.)
What microsoft needs is some fixing. Let's go through their pile of technology and see... nope... nah... nada... a here we go!
Microsoft Vista: Bob Edition!
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Guy goes to an astrologer and he looks at the horoscope, does lots of calculations and says, "Jupiter is in the same House as Saturn. And Saturn will stay in that House for 7.5 years. All through that 7.5 years, you will have misery and misfortune. Your wife will leave you. Your son will usurp your house and throw you out. You will lose all your wealth and fall sick. You will be miserable for 7.5 years."
The guy, visibly disturbed asks, "What happens after 7.5 years when Saturn moves out of the House of Jupiter?"
The astrologer shrugged and said, "You will be used to the misery."
Same way, in three years the miserable performance of Vista will be defined to be industry standard fast tracked and approved by ISO and users will use 4GB of RAM to browse the internet.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
New operating system uses more resources than old operating system. People don't like change. The world is round.
All comments are properties and trademarks of the voices in my head. Not like I'm gonna claim them.
This short essay by Orson Scott Card (of Ender's Game fame) I think describes the development of the Microsoft Vista disaster pretty well.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
It's just cobbled together CE, ME, and NT versions with a new GUI. Though, they could of stuck with the first name... Windows CEMENT... Would of been far more accurate.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
I doubt Microsoft will take Don Reisinger up on his suggestion, if for no reason other than sheer arrogance.
Companies kill me, it's a corporate lifecycle that we see again and again, and very few seem to learn from it. Once a company gets so big, it gets it in its head that it's invulnerable. It thinks that it can do anything it wants, and people will flock to it because it's the latest and greatest offering from the King of the (Whatever).
We see it now with Microsoft and Vista. We're also seeing it from Sony on its Playstation 3. Sony thought, "Of course people will buy the Playstation 3. It's a Playstation, for crying out loud!" Anyone remember when Hayes thought that they had the modem market locked up tight? Or when IBM didn't treat clones as serious competitors?
Usually, companies like this end up either going out of business, or at least eventually become relegated back down into the fray because they stop asking themselves, "What do our customers want?" and become totally focused on "What do we want?
I see the same thing happening before too long with Apple and its iPods and even Google, which as recently announced that it's going to start running image and video ads and plastering ads on its YouTube videos. Once a company starts thinking about its own interests over that of its customers, it's the beginning of the end of that company's dominance.
Of course, who knows? They might eventually pull a Nintendo. Go into a slump for a few years, learn from their mistakes, and come back out swinging. Historically, though, that is rare, and we are talking about Microsoft here.
Looks like someone in the design department was having a joke at their employers' expense.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
If MS is guilty of anything, they are guilty of pushing and hyping and Vista too soon. We all knew that Vista wasn't going to be ready for prime time until SP1 or SP2. However, MS was overconfident and they shoved Vista down a lot of throats.
MS should've followed Apple's playbook. Release the OS according to it's already delayed schedule, let early adopter screw with it, but don't force the new OS on people who simply want new hardware.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
"Of course, categorically dumping an operating system is quite difficult.." - I suppose it will be! When will Microsoft come to its senses and completely abandon its new Os on the basis of this sensible bloggers devastating comments?!!1!
"With Mac OS X hot on its tail, Vista is simply not capable of competing at an OS level.."
Of course! It makes such sense!!
This article is unmitigated crap, and I'm typing this on a MacbookPro, so I have a bias towards agreeing with the idiot.
Folks,
..and in the IT Consulting community, the cache of owning a MB Pro is really taking hold.
I've always been in the camp that admired Microsoft and their products. I was an OS/2 guy out of the gate in my career, and when Windows 95 was released I was blown away at how innovative it was when it came to a consumer operating system.
Fast forward to today. I waited about 4 months before going out an purchasing Vista for my primary Windows XP machine. When I purchased Vista, I opted for the Ultimate edition, and looked forward to working with it. After one month, I was so disgusted with the OS as a whole, I backrevd my machine to XP and have been happy ever since.
I then within the past month purchased a Macbook Pro at my local apple store, and have been thrilled with how easy MAC OS X is to use, along with all the associated software products. I converted my XP machine to a VMware image, and now run it in Fusion to support IE and Visio. I've never been happier with a computer or platform until now... reminds me of when Win95 was released.
It is clear that MS has missed the boat, and that either XP will be built upon and support extended, or MAC OS X and Linux are going to begin to take even further mind and market share.
Lindsay Blanton
RadioReference.com
We've tried deploying vista in a corporate environment, but were forced to switch back running XP.
Our company uses 3D design software which has been certified "designed for windows vista" for almost a year now.
Only problem is, that the particular software doesn't work on vista! (business edition)
At SP0 level, the design program installs, but doesn't start.
We tried upgrading to latest SP4 version of the software, and now it doesn't even install properly.
After spending +40 hours trying to get it to work, the support team responded to our request and told us to forget
running on vista before next version which will be available somewhere 2Q2008.
Long story short.. We cannot deploy an operating system which disables us from doing our core business, 3d modelling and design.
Good thing we bought XP with volume licensing so we can freely switch our new workstations preloaded with vista back to XP
and actually get some work done.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
After reading many many Vista stories, last week I posted a comment on Slashdot, summing up what people's reactions to any "Vista Failure" story would be. And while I was right on my points, the comments to that story didn't have any of the Vista defenses that I was used to hearing.
Although Slashdot is obviously a pro-Linux site, for the first few months of Vista's release, there were plenty of people who would say "It works fine for me" or "It will catch on when more drivers are released" or "It will work fine with Service Pack 1", or the like. But there doesn't seem to be many defenders left. Is the Verdict in that Vista did, indeed, tank?
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
You know, the last time Microsoft rolled out an operating system that was a complete market flop, the developer had to marry Bill Gates.
There are worse fates for a failed project's lead, I guess.
So the question now is: is Steve Ballmer single, or will he just take on a mistress?
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Microsoft Vista is analogous to George W. Bush in so many ways. Arrogance, insecurity, spying, ineptitude, the list goes on.
Unfortunately, Linux is too much like the democrats, infighting, indecision, incapable of grasping opportunity.
Mac? Apple is just as evil, if not more so, as Microsoft, they just don't have the same amount of money.
Such nonsense... flame bait: rabble rousing.
I've been using this 'abysmal failure' as a primary OS for 8 months with nary a hitch. I really have. I spend every day developing various codes with various tools, for what turns out to be many different platforms. Among a few others I have a Debian box and OS X 10.4 within reach, on equally capable hardware and I don't even bother with them. To the point where I'll probably power them down to save money on the electric bill.
I suspect all the bad mouthing comes from people trying to shoehorn the thing into old hardware, or from people who fancy themselves capable with PC maintenance but can't handle simple configuration issues. Or most likely, by people who only ran a shoddy beta or have never run it at all. I'd really like someone to explain why the OS that I'm using right now without any problems doesn't work and should be abandoned.
oh, I know, not towing the party line here will get me modded down quick. but aside from the excited FOSS fanatics here and a few ad-hit grubbing bloggopundits and the like, millions of people are getting along just fine with vista. hopping up and down while shouting about what a failure it is doesn't actually make it a failure. sorry to break it to you all.
Silly me. I thought they already had!
*rimshot*
Windows ME. 'nuff said. Was in my opinion the worst commercial OS of all time. They flogged it for what it was worth until XP came along. Windows 2000 was available but primarily only to business customers. If you bought a DELL or any other computer (which I had the misfortune to do), you got Windows ME. It was like Windows 98, but slower, and more bugs.
While Vista may be a flop as far as sales are concerned, that speaks more to the acceptance of XP rather than to the quality of Vista.
I run Vista, and there are certain things I like, dislike, and stuff I can live with. As it gets more market share, and drivers and the like become more mature, it will get better I have no doubt. MS has been pretty good with patching, and they do have their work cut out for them in the future if they want it to take off. However they shouldn't give up on it, and they won't as they have spent too much money.
and i mean not with drm, but actually usable stuff.
even strip it a bit, get rid of non-os parts, get approval of eu in the meantime creating a lightweight os, sell it like mad.
Read radical news here
The real fact of the matter from those of us that use Vista everyday is that fact that it works just fine. My games play the same or better than they did in XP, my development tools run just fine, and the UI for once is actually nice to work with. Now call me crazy, but I don't find Vista bad at all.
As a software developer myself I realize the fact that OS's are large and complicated and they all have some issues. I use Linux, I use OS X, and I use Vista. Each has their own merits and their own problems. The problem is that now, just like it was popular in the 80s and 90s to hate IBM, its popular to hate Microsoft. News writers see this as a bandwagon they can use to get articles read and website hits. The real fact is that Vista has no more problems than any other OS at this point in its life cycle.
I truly wish that for the good of all of the tech industry, people would see that every piece of software, and every OS has its place. Vista does a lot of things well... It just happens to have a few flaws and a few "features" that just seem to go against the grain of the most vocal people in the geek world (i.e. DRM) and thus we see articles like this that are ridiculous and inflammatory simple for being as such.
I used Vista on four PC's - both at work and at home - and like it a lot. It's not perfect. Installing it on two older machines could have been easier. I had a few minor driver problems. But overall the experience is great - far far superior to Windows XP. I'm not sure why this guy has his panties in a twist but perhaps he should talk to more real customers and see what they think about Vista?
Didn't we go through this same issue when Windows XP first came out in 2001? I remember back then you needed 512 MB to make it run decently fast, and the "sweet spot" was 1 GB of RAM (both of which were not that common back in 2001).
The problem with Windows Vista is that the hardware has not yet completely caught up with the potential of the OS. Just wait till 2008, when machines with 4 GB or more of RAM become more commonly available and graphics cards that support DirectX 10 are more widely available.
How hard would it be for Microsoft to delay Windows XP Service Pack 3, bolt on the new Vista GUI, and call it Windows 6? Seriously, the only thing about Windows Vista that is a major improvement is the new user interface. I don't know how others have fared with it, but I found RC1's user interface to be faster and more responsive on my laptop than XP.
The rest of Vista? Thus throw that trash onto the heap where it belongs. It brings **zero** value to the average user.
That's not to say that Microsoft couldn't suffer losses in this generation, but it would be more about the presence of strong alternatives than their failure to adopt a 'move on' strategy.
What's really interesting about this /particular/ FUDy article is how quibbly it is. He appears to have three major complaints: the pricing scheme, specifically of the Ultimate edition, the UAC(and specifically, that it doesn't like a specific unnamed third party app which we're assured is from a 'well-known software company'), and DRM. We're not talking about blue screens and security holes here.
There is no compelling reason to move to Vista, and it seems obvious that waiting for SP1 is probably the right move for anyone who wants to upgrade. That doesn't mean that this OS won't succeed, however, and it's shown marked improvement on many counts since launch. Can we just call this FUD and "move on"?
Here's a few choice quotes from a 2001 "Techspot" review of Windows XP. They may sound familiar...
On installation...
Let me start off by saying the installation of Windows XP is long. When I say long, I mean REAL long. It took me over an hour to install on either test system! On speed... Well now, how does it feel you ask? It feels incredibly slow on the first system. That might just be an understatement. It feels ridiculously slow. If your system specs look anything like my first system, or even a little better, Windows XP is going to depress you. To me, the speed thing is also a concern. The desktop moves a bit slower than a Win9x GUI, and there are still some worries about gaming performance.On native drivers...
One quick note, XP did have drivers for the GeForce 2 card, but came up empty handed for the classic Voodoo2.On whether to upgrade from Windows 98SE...
I really do not see a need to upgrade from Windows 98/ME. If you are building a new system, then by all means, install Windows XP. If you think that Windows XP is going to revolutionize the way you use a computer and surf the web, wake up and save your money.And as plenty of recent Slashdot posts supporting XP have shown, we all know how short sighted the last quote was.
As I said, we've been here before in 1991 with Windows XP yet Windows XP is now touted as Microsofts greatest OS. I expect the same will happen with Vista and be said about Vista when Microsoft releases it's next OS in a few years time.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
I have Vista on one computer at home, because the computer went with and it used by my children to play game. Must of old Microsoft games (last year game made for XP) doesn't work on Vista. But the funiest part, is that my two Microsoft mouse are the only mouse where I can't find driver to work on Vista, and they don't work at all!
So, Vista is a OS that don't like Microsoft.
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
Is that in the same timeframe with the Xbox 360 Microsoft produced an actually-decent OS. Sure, it's purpose-built to run games...but is there any reason that a similar setup would not work for a PC? Aren't games a form of application? It's simple, clean, always accessible when needed and there's a "fixed" amount of resources that it will consume as a result, but the majority of the system is given to the desired application.
After all, an OS is simply an interface that gets users to the useful applications. I think Microsoft lost sight of that detail and tried to make Vista it's own entity. Now, the 360 had its own slew of issues...but the OS has been decently simple and easy to work with (most of the time).
Of course, comparing it to Vista isn't exactly setting the bar real high...but they at least have SOMEONE at Redmond that knows how to make an OS...or at least where to steal one. Let that team work on the next OS rather than the horrid "death by committee" fubar crew that seems to have produced Vista.
My main problem with Vista is that it is a resource hog. As far as I have seen, it isn't a flop in terms of capability like Windows ME was. The problem MS has is that standard computers are designed for low price. Most models still come with a gig or less of RAM and second class CPUs. On those machines, Vista doesn't run well. On a high-end dual monitor machine, it runs well.
The biggest problem they face is that a computer that runs Vista well still costs quite a bit of money. Leaving aside the obvious complaint that people don't want to waste so many resources on the OS no matter what they have, I'd think that waiting is the best bet for MS. Following Moore's law, it won't be too long before bargain PCs are fully capable to run it. Then, I think it would catch on better.
I was running Ubuntu for 4-5 months and it was an "OK" experience. Most things in the box worked right out of the box. With the notable exception of printer sharing.
The Open Source applications included by default did a good enough job. Many things not included but that could be installed with the package manager worked. Many others didn't, like Bluetooth support. I noticed that there were no application worth talking about when it came to doing anything multimedia. Even Myth-TV was a total disapointment with hundreds of megs to download (it needs a lot of extra junky software) and hours to setup.
And then I noticed how completely broken is sound mixing on Linux...
So I switched to Vista, the best OS the planet has ever seen.
Does Vista have any flaws? Probably. The Open Source zealots rip their shirts complaining about it. Maybe they hopelessely witness Linux disapearing in the shadow of Vista. Or maybe there's a basis to their whinning. Probably not the latter though sice they can't provide any example of what's bad with Vista that can't be easily brushed off..
Windows is about using applications. Linux is about enjoying the OS.
For 99.999% of people, and 100% of organizations, I recommend Vista. I don't recommend Linux.
Linux violates 235 Microsoft patents.
How many of you slashdolts who swing off of linux's nuts have actually tried it?
Its WAY better than WinMe for sure. Is it worth upgrading to? Not really, but its hardly crapware.
Its actually faster and smoother on decent hardware...the only probelms I have had with it are driver issues (blame lazy vendors) and UAC is a nightmare.
Overhyped? yes
needed? no
shitware? hardly.
oh wait, this is slashdot, where everything MS does is either evil, or poopy.
Ubuntu and OS X will both be getting even nicer. Nothing like a 2 or 3 year lead-time for your competition. Really, MS is giving Canonical and Apple a *gift*!
Now, let's hope the Excel 2007 team can learn basic multiplication in time for the next release cycle. I won't hold my breath - I found a very similar problem with Excel while testing it back in 1998. *shrug*
make me wonder why Apple isn't capitalizing on this and releasing the x86 version of X for generic x86 systems. A co-worker managed to get a leaked (older) version running on a Dell Inspiron with full functionality. They are losing a great opportunity to gain market share. (Linux fan myself though.)
Companies kill me
So? Companies kill many people.
Even if they wanted to, there is absolutely no way that Microsoft can walk away from this turd. The best possible situation that can be hoped for is that we can endure the smell for as long as it takes for Microsoft to come out with an improved replacement. Then the upgrade will happen and Vista will be relegated to the dark corder of Software Best Not Remembered, like WinMil. But I don't think that's going to happen. The more likely scenario is that Microsoft will keep patching and patching and wait for the hardware to catch up. When Vista is sorta running on SP4, then people will eventually migrate and success will be declared. Two years later, a fresh turd will be dropped and the cycle will begin anew.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Now for you youngsters who don't know what I'm talking about, DOS 4.0 was a train wreck of an operating system that gave user's who 'upgraded' from 3.X nothing but bugs and heartache.
What's that old saying? Oh Yeah, it's "Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it." I guess 15-18 years is enough time to forget about past mistakes.
Sometimes the new product flops. New Coke and the Sony PS3 are well known examples. Automobile models from major manufacturers flop regularly.
The problem for Microsoft is that they now have only one main OS product line. When Windows ME flopped, they had the NT product line almost ready for consumer desktops, and could afford to kill off the DOS/Win3.1/Win95 product line. This time, they only have one offering in the desktop/laptop OS space.
This is certainly fixable from the Microsoft side, but they need to recognize that they have a serious problem and fix it.
Maybe if Microsoft spent more time on stuff (that people actually _use_ you know), instead of fluff, maybe Vista would actually be half decent.
- A way to customize the File Open dialog box, with the folders you constantly use, gasp!?
- Expose. Enough said.
- A built in spell checker / Dictionary / Thesaurus, with quick access to wikipedia
- A search that isn't broken (Thx WinXP!)
- The ability to re-locate, (or hide) the dam 'close' button
- Title bars that stop sucking up valuable screen space, instead of being small movable tabs like in BeOS
- Virtual Desktops
- An OS that gets FASTER from version to version (again BeOS)
- A proper KILL command -- I'm admin on the dam box, let me kill that process.
- Unified widgets/gadgets: NO, I don't want seperate run-times for Yahoo, Google, Apple, Microsoft, insert flavor of the month company because they decided to do their own implementation.
- A home folder without spaces that doesn't move with almost every version of windows.
- A file system that doesn't suck. YES, I want to be able to start my filenames with spaces for sorting purposes (Thx Explorer. NOT.) have my filenames contain colons, end with a period or question mark. And treat the underscore as a virtual space, so we don't have to quote filenames in our command scripts. A way to "tag" files, so I can visually see BOTH a heirarchy, AND flat filesystem.
- Config files that can be moved from system to system instead of hiding everything in the bloated registry
- Free dev tools would be nice.
- Stop rebooting my dam system everytime you update system software. Or at least give me notification/icon that a reboot is required BEFORE installing.
All I want is an OS that doesn't suck... is that _really_ too much for a programmer to ask?
Don't make me install Vista Bro!
I have to say it, Linux will show up Mac OS X, why? Cause Mac OS X uses open source software without given back, breaking it's own software, and Linux will run on all those old machine that just can't work the Vista and people who don't wanna buy a new PC every six months cause Microsoft recommends it. I PREDICT that Linux will out shine Vista and by the year 2009 Linux will have as many desktops as windows and more laptops than Windows.....call me crazy......
To see a few of my Android apps goto: www.hartwired.com
It literally sucks the horsepower from your computer.
My employer's software runs on something like 60 platforms, including VMS, a variety of Linux distributions, and many variants of Windows. We know a thing or two about getting code to run on strange systems. We are having a devil of a time getting our product to run well on Vista. On the same hardware, it's so much slower than Linux and Solaris that it's not even funny. Why anyone would ever consider running any kind of server on Vista is just beyond me.
I think MS should abandon OS development all together - for the greater good.
Vista is what happens when marketing and legal drive OS development, it's a bloated, buggy, user-hostile mess. A Mac is cheap compared to the time you'll need to spend as a participant in an extended public beta and if you have that kind of time, linux or BSD is where it's at.
The real problem is that CPU speeds have nearly flatlined. Making a new more bloated OS on the assumption that CPU speeds will offset the slowdown is yesterday(7 years ago?)'s development model. Moore's law still holds for a while but it will result in more cores and memory rather than a significant per-cpu speed increase.
Please don't write that again. My eyes are bleeding.
Keep things on topic and write your political drivel somewhere else, thanks.
I use 32 bit Vista Ultimate everyday on my production machine. I can't say that I really have any complaints about it. Nor does it seem to be the "total disaster" that the article implies that it is. On the contrary, I just built my production machine, and all of the drivers for my motherboard were already installed in Vista. That was a nice surprise.
I just played through Bioshock (which isn't coming to a Mac near you, BTW). A few times through the 30 or so hours I spent playing the game, the screen went black for 10 seconds, and then came back up. I didn't know what had happened the first time it did that until I quit the game, and there was a dialog box saying something about the video driver crashing, but apparently Vista reloaded the driver, with just a momentary hiccup. On a Mac or an XP box, a video driver crash generally means hitting the Reset button.
Aero has some nice eye candy, but I ended up turning it off because my Illustrator CS2 pallets were incompatible with it. QuickBooks 2006 won't run on Vista, but I already have my old XP system installed on a Virtual PC drive for other work that I do, so I'll probably install QB there.
My brother is using the 64 bit version of Vista for his video production work (since 32 bit Vista is capped at 3 GB of RAM), so I know that there's a lot more headaches with 64 bit Vista. But, I was a Mac user when Apple switched from OS 9 to OS X, and how many headaches there were with that. I've been in IT long enough to know that major OS upgrades always come with a price, but progress is generally worth it.
Yeah, the DRM sucks, but what can you do?
Oh, and if you want to turn off the "Allow or Deny" dialogs (which are EXTREMELY annoying), just go to the User Accounts Control Panel and turn off User Account Control.
No one ever gets fired for buying Microsoft.
H. G. Wells got it right in Tono-Bungay:
"The idea of cornering a drug struck upon my mind then as a sort of irresponsible monkey trick that no one would ever be permitted to do in reality.... I thought it was part of my uncle's way of talking. But I've learnt differently since. The whole trend of modern money-making is to foresee something that will presently be needed and put it out of reach, and then to haggle yourself wealthy. You buy up land upon which people will presently want to build houses, you secure rights that will bar vitally important developments, and so on, and so on.... I will confess that when my uncle talked of cornering quinine, I had a clear impression that any one who contrived to do that would pretty certainly go to jail. Now I know that any one who could really bring it off would be much more likely to go to the House of Lords!"
The process has become somewhat moderated by antitrust laws, but the dynamic is still the same.
The phase in which a company produces good, useful stuff, and sells it to pleased customers, who are happy to pay money because of the value the product delivers... is just a temporary phase which all companies yearn to get past. It's just a ploy to expand market share in hopes of getting to the big payoff. The big payoff comes when the company is so dominant that it can stop pretending to be nice, and stick it to their competitors, their customers, and any meddling bureaucrats that have the nerve to try to regulate them.
Companies want to reach the stage where they can be arrogant, like Microsoft. It's not an aberration, it's what every good company is trying to achieve.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
The main reason I see Vista as doing so poorly is because XP was so good. Please don't try to start an OS holy war over that statement. The bottom line is that XP was a leaps and bounds improvement over 98 SE which most consumers were coming from, and a unification of business and individual users. And 98 was a huge improvement over 95.. and 95 was a huge improvement over Win 3.1.
I absolutely loathed every Microsoft Windows OS before 2000, and I couldn't really use that for games, so XP was the best of both worlds. Now Microsoft is trying to force us gamers into Vista with Dx10, but that probably won't really be a necessity for 5 years or so since game developers won't simply abandon XP's massive installed base. It was easier to make a big leap when most gamers quickly upgraded because of how horrible the previous OS was.
I think the biggest improvement to a Microsoft OS would be to make -all- software and OS interactions to be completely decoupable. I'd love to be able to take a fresh install of windows and swap apps and games in and out without losing all settings, save games, etc. Linux dist package management mostly achieves this since almost every sane application puts every setting in your home dir, and if that gets crufty it doesn't really impact too much.
Things are so horrifically intertwined with so many different settings mechanisms and locations in Windows its just a total nightmare. Maybe we'll use quad-core machines and dedicate one core to tracking all versioning all registry and file system changes just to deal with this problem.
So, with this in mind, look at some of the 'features' in Vista - most, if not all, of them are outside the "OS" paradigm and are just marketing driven bloat designed to (A) drive sales or (B) force retention.
Now with that out of the way, if anyone needs me I'll be reading my email under BeOS. :)
The witch is dead!
...it will give them something in common with its customer base.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
This is probably a case of ms trying so c*ck-hard to beat Linux KDE/Gnome/Enlightenment/et al to the new punch and take a swipe and Apple, too. Just LOOK at the radical departure in ms windows. Even XP and 2K were not terribly distant cousins to 95/98. I could be wrong but is obvious to me that the various interface changes in windows vista were inspired by open source- and Apple-related disclosures, as well as some 3rd-party products or enhancements.
So, here we have it: ms rushed ahead, and for all the money they spent, the market uptake is not growing for them as much as they wanted for Vista. Besides, thousands, hundreds of thousands of companies collectively spent BILLIONS on stabilizing what they acquired in XP and 2K. Why should they throw it all out after only 5 years? Now, with cranky, dodgey (sp) "stealth upgrades", it's likely 50% incompetent or non-foresight or a plan to compel people to migrate/upgrade/sidegrade to Vista.
Now, if ONLY the Dells and others would sell more laptops and desktops tuned for KDE, Gnome, et al. The GUI bells and whistles, with enterprise kiosk features (security, etc.) could surely only HELP Linux, something msoft fear.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
- A way to customize the File Open dialog box, with the folders you constantly use, gasp!? Available in Linux
- Expose. Enough said.Available in Linux
- A built in spell checker / Dictionary / Thesaurus, with quick access to wikipedia Available in Linux
- A search that isn't broken (Thx WinXP!) Available in Linux
- The ability to re-locate, (or hide) the dam 'close' button Available in Linux
- Title bars that stop sucking up valuable screen space, instead of being small movable tabs like in BeOS Available in Linux
- Virtual Desktops Available in Linux
- An OS that gets FASTER from version to version (again BeOS) Available in Linux
- A proper KILL command -- I'm admin on the dam box, let me kill that process. Available in Linux
- Unified widgets/gadgets: NO, I don't want seperate run-times for Yahoo, Google, Apple, Microsoft, insert flavor of the month company because they decided to do their own implementation. Available in Linux
- A home folder without spaces that doesn't move with almost every version of windows. Available in Linux
- A file system that doesn't suck. YES, I want to be able to start my filenames with spaces for sorting purposes (Thx Explorer. NOT.) have my filenames contain colons, end with a period or question mark. And treat the underscore as a virtual space, so we don't have to quote filenames in our command scripts. A way to "tag" files, so I can visually see BOTH a heirarchy, AND flat filesystem. Available in Linux
- Config files that can be moved from system to system instead of hiding everything in the bloated registry Available in Linux
- Free dev tools would be nice. Available in Linux
- Stop rebooting my dam system everytime you update system software. Or at least give me notification/icon that a reboot is required BEFORE installing. Available in Linux
All I want is an OS that doesn't suck... is that _really_ too much for a programmer to ask? Available in Linux
Take your mod and shove it!
Look, XP is a nightmare of permissions and a free-for-all single-user system. The GUI is a raster dinosaur. Kernel support for multi-core is spotty and clustering is limited.
SO, there's definitely a need to get a new kernel.
DRM in the OS is a no no. Techies know this, but who's going to bother using MSs DRM'd products when there's way better sources as a techie? So you get your music and video elsewhere. Still, one can use the vista OS in a corporate environment.
User Permissions are also a stupid implementation. There's a simple way around it: Make the OS actually secure by simply disallowing until done through an appropriate role. All this poppingupping to let grandma know that she's not root is perhaps fine, but for any user beyond 1 week of experience, that shite's gotta go.
However, in entirety, vista may have more to offer if it simply adjusted a bit:
- The "rainbow of flavors" has to disappear (I hope the EU will take care of that with unbundling).
- DRM can stay since MS's media-wrappers are a nonstarter in the market. Everyone using should this OS should expect HD support to be poor. Who cares why.
- Permissions need to disappear. Strip it to *works* or *error* with one checkbox somewhere. The rest is the magic of security role configuration. Nothing can replace that.
- Tighten up all the speed issues. Re-release the journaled FS. Lower the bar for virtualization and media programming.
- For godsakes - provide a desktop UI that doesn't zip and whirl like a carnival. Mac or Windows, I don't want animations. I want feedback as fast as my keystrokes.
- DROP backwards compatability already! Sheesh - MS in 2010 will still allow the freakin' 1987 3.1 apps to run. Comon! Who needs to bring all the skeletons in the closet when you move to a newly-built house? Win32 is a unbelievably ugly creature that needs to be buried. Carrying that says "keep developing on it" to your market. Stupid. Scared of losing market share? Then perhaps dropping XP is a bad idea! So support two OSes - two platforms. All this smearing is WHY YOU NEEDED TO REWRITE IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Get back to products, not platform.
The inherent problem with Vista is barely anything I've seen in this discussion- it is the focus of MS' attention to features instead of functionality.
Think about it. MS added the UAC feature. They added DRM features. They added a new UI feature or two. They added so many features it makes my head spin.
Now the functionality is more or less the same. It's (Vista) not any better at any of the tasks I used XP for. In fact, the glut of features hinders the overall performance of the OS thus decreasing the functionality of the system as a whole.
Everyone I know who dislikes Vista is primarily on the side that it is slower, somewhat of a resource hog and is overly-complicated with features and options for these features. This isn't just developer complaints but say my Mom who is using Ubuntu these days (though she doesn't know it and could really care less). My fiancee who is impatient and get pissy when her computer doesn't respond the way she wants (and expects) or me who spent a couple hours trying to install this or that patch so I could develop somewhat efficiently only to revert back to XP virtualized on my desktop.
There's too much junk and not enough performance to back it up.
The last thing I want is commercial and social wars being fought out on my desktop operating system, yet that is precisely what Vista appears to be. It's an extension of the US business and legal system into computers. If it applied to cars, every time my car went low on fuel it would try and drive itself to an Exxon garage. It would come without locks and I would have to go to a third party supplier, and every year I would need new locks. Every new model would need an engine twice as large as the previous one but would not seem to go any faster. What's more, the steering wheel and the gearshift would get steadily more expensive.
That's Vista. Microsoft's problem is simple. It makes something that once was a craft product but now is commoditised, and the commodity price is trending to zero. So it wants to create added value, but it hasn't realised that it cannot do that by extending the commodity product. And it has no really good ideas any more. In the real world, you can buy a cheap watch or an expensive watch. Most watches are cheap, the fancy ones are expensive. You can buy a cheap car or an expensive car. Most cars are cheap, a few are expensive. In the software world, most operating system installations are expensive, only a few percent are cheap. It's a population inversion, like the excited atoms in a laser. At some point, that distortion will start to right itself, one way or another.
Pining for the fjords
SatanicPuppy exposes his closed mind:
On the other hand, any self-professed Ubuntu/Mac guy is not who I look to for advice about Windows. ... I already USE Linux.
So, you'd rather the opinion of the M$ faithful who have no basis for comparison? Do you not trust yourself?
I don't think ANYONE is happy about the situation except irrational fanboys
You will be very happy when your allegiance shifts.
If I could use it to run all the software I need to run, I'd toss my Windows machine.
There are all sorts of emulation and virtual machine answers to your problems. They might not be free but they will deal with all the legacy problems you have except your attitude.
What you have to face is that people who actually need Windoze are a very small fraction of the general population. Even gamers have plenty to do with nvidia, ATI and Intel all supporting Linux. Everyone else will do just fine with nothing but free software. If you open your mind just a little and use free software to get things done, you will find that "the applications" are there along with tens of thousands of more specialized programs that do the job better.
Society will be better off when users really own their computers and we have better laws to protect what they send over networks. Windows is a tyrant's best friend, Vista was even worse. Free societies depend on free presses which need free software. Free Software, Free Society - you can't have one without the other.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
He is.
At 14B revenue this past quarter (that's more than 1B/week) and over 4.9B profit this quarter, I think they are doing OK, even with vista 'tanking' and XBOX360 selling for less than manufacturing costs... and they are predicting double-digit revenue growth for next year.
See, business don't care if something is "the best" or even really good. How else do you explain the ubiquity of MS OSes, IE 7, MS Office, Outlook, and Access, when there are plenty of better and cheaper alternatives? It is because business don't care about the user experience, and are immune to the emotional aspects of computing that make plodding along with MS products as much joy as a double root canal with an anal probe thrown in for fun.
Yes, my beloved OS X is making great strides, but will always be a niche system, because most people don't realize quality when you smack them in the face with it. You can't be "the best" and the most popular because you have to make concessions somewhere (cough, sell-out, iPod, cough) somewhere down the line and start making business decisions that maximize profit, while sticking it the end user. I don't see Apple switching their primary focus from making great personal computers/small office computers, to being that of seeking corporate desktop domination. It's not in their corporate culture (at least not the OS X deparment, heh).
I read this and thought of Joel Spolsky's recent blog post: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/09/18.html/. I imagine MS know just what they are doing and are positioning Vista for the typical desktop computer of about 18 months from now.
Let's just wait and see before we declare MS to be dead!
If your vendor says their software works on Vista, when it clearly doesn't - how is that MS's fault?
ME had no chance as it was. Everyone already knew XP was the future (Whistler has plenty of coverage at the time) and no one (except people buying new systems) wanted to waste their money on something that would be archaic soon.
This crap comes out every time Microsoft releases something new. It happened with Windows 98, it happened with Windows Me, and it happened with Windows XP. And the "Is this the death of Microsoft" spiel also comes out every time there's a new version of a popular Linux distribution. Is today that fucking slow of a news day?
Did Microsoft make mistakes with Vista? Yes. Should they have done more testing. Yes. Is it going to be Microsoft's downfall? Fuck no. Microsoft has reinvented itself more times than IBM. A year from now no one is going to remember this blather.
I'm not a Microsoft fanboy by any stretch. I have two Linux boxes and a Mac sitting on my desk beside this Vista box right now, and they all run fine. Including this Vista box. I just get tired of all the totally unrealistic "Is this the end of [insert OS or company of choice here]" crap. Linux isn't disappearing any time soon, and neither is Microsoft and Vista or Apple and OSX.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
As subject says, IMHO Win2K was the height of MS OS's released so far.
I am glad you brought up the fact that everyone here (and elsewhere too) bitched about XP. I recall TONS of articles & discussions asking why XP was slower on the same computer compared to Windows 2000.
The only reasons I switched to XP from 2000:
1) Much better USB support
2) Remote Desktop built in
Otherwise, there was not anything in it I cared about...
I still turn off all the XP GUI crap and using Windows Classic to keep my Windows 2000 interface (or close to it).
Unfortunately, yes it is.
I use Windows Vista and I have no problems at all. I bet millions of other users have no problems neither. :-)
The author of that article is a troll.
Seems like a nice clean environment right?
However.. on closer inspection the we find the air (gui) has some form of pollution.
The underneath the ground beneath our seemingly nice perch has high levels of naturally occuring radiation.
Not to mention the pirates and corrupt officials that are known to kidnap hapless travelers and hold them hostage for ransom.
Windows Vista should be renamed Windows Chernobyl. That probably is not snappy enough for the mass marketing folks. Since Windows Me! and Vista both share a common and lauded heritage how about renaming it "Windows Squint!"? Lets honor not only the past achievements of ME! but embrace the future while at the same time acknowledging the physical and emotional things that your eyes and intellect do when expecting lush riparian views you gaze up instead upon denuded infertile valleys and barren lands laid to waste by mans insatiable greed?
If you buy a new PC/Laptop with Vista you won't have many driver concerns because the machine comes functioning. Part of the 'failure' is Microsoft failing to exert their usual pressure on software companies.
For example: Palm Desktop *still* doesn't have a Vista version, Adobe Acrobat writer before version 8 doesn't work (and it's about $300 to upgrade). Microsoft should have been able to get these guys up to speed. Here, the loss is Adobe's, since other PDF writers are compatible.
Vista has run reliably, fast, and the start menu and alt+tab features are enough to be worth the switch because I can multitask more easily. The security warnings are a pain, but not frequent and if I was running a large corporate IT dept I'd be glad it was asking the non-techies that question ("huh, what software is asking to install? I'm on a website."). Plus, you can turn it off if you're confident in yourself and your anti-virus software.
I like Vista. The new Office is another story - who designed it? Fischer Price?
... personally MS have lost the plot and got far too way into trying to keep the monopoly lock-ins and have really lost their way with what a computer (and OS) is supposed to do.
...) and then literally have to 'innovate'... oops, I mean buy an AV company to bundle in their own 'protection'. Ha.
First instance [touched on many times in here] DRM. Visit here --> http://badvista.fsf.org/what-s-wrong-with-microsoft-windows-vista
Second. They are shit scared somebody can interoperate with MS systems (i.e. better systems), so make it as obscure and nebulous as possible (and it appears that happens internally to MS Corp too).
Third. NO WAY are you going to be able to copy this, so make every legal owner go through hoops and rings to get the thing to work (if that is at all possible) [again touched on many times in here].
Fourth. Ttoally ignore security as the aim is to get as many people 'hooked' on the MS crack as possible (this itself spawned a whole new industry in anti-virus/anti-trojan/anti-malware,
Fifth. Visit http://www.lamlaw.com/tiki-index.php
I think what we are seeing here a dying Elephant. And it is their own fault.
Some people's memories are shorter than their *****. This is the same crap people were saying about XP before SP2 came out. For about the first 2 years of XP's life, it was abysmal. There were countless driver support errors, migration problems, bugs worse than the biblical locusts, and hardware requirements that meant everyone had to basically go out and get all new machines. Not to mention - who remembers trying to navigate around in XP after being used to 2000/NT? I remember that I HATED XP, I mean REALLY HATED XP, for almost 2 years until it became the de facto standard for OS's during the SP2 release. Moral of the story, chicken little, is that an OS is the single most complicated piece of software known to man and if it doesn't work fresh from the developer desktop, the world will not cease to exist. Give it time and be patient and soon, it will become the new standard. Microsoft and all its users will continue to compute in symbiotic harmony. Enjoy!
I mean, a lot of computers are already bundled with Vista. So its a success. Onto the next release!
This is my sig.
Microsoft has been at this game long enough to know exactly what they're doing. And with that I think the author like many others are missing the point. It's about leverage after all. Working as a contractor for the government I can tell you without any hesitation Vista will succeed based upon the government adopting it. Once the sequel to Vista comes out in say 2009, Microsoft will cease support to XP as they have support only the previous OS and that's it. This forces the hand of the government to adopt Vista as oversight deems we can't purchase systems with OSs that aren't supported. And when the vendors state that their applications won't work on Vista, the government will find someone that will. Essentially it's a snowball effect and everyone eventually comes on board anyways. Like it or not Vista is here and people will have to accept it. If not Vista, it will be it's successor. Just look at the timing between 2000 and XP to find history repeating itself. Regardless XP will go by the wayside.
It seems there is nothing wrong with Vista that removing all the DRM garbage would not fix. So, Microsoft has a simple choice.
1. Strip DRM trash out of Vista (annoying the movie/music industry), restore the old driver model and succeed.
2. Keep the movie/music industry happy, keep DRM and watch Vista wither away.
A no-brainer?
I can't really see them just calling it BAD, but then again they kinda did with the old BOB system. I'd at least like them to give up and run DirectX 10 on XP and give up the 'Vista only' track for gaming. That seems like good business to me, as it would keep them from saying "We were wrong" while supporting their growing cross-platform gaming hopes.
-- I really need to bleed off some of this
This is what happens when pure greed takes over in a company. Get out product for the sake of sales.
I really hope this is the beginning of the end for them, but i know its not. It will sting tho, for a long long time.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
***Disclaimer: I'm joking around with this, so don't freak out!*** It's all one big conspiracy with MS and hardware makers.
Most people were content with their PC from 3 years ago. 1.8Ghz single core, and 512Mb or 1Gb or Ram was plenty. A normal video card that doesn't require it's own power substation.
The hardware makers were freaking out, so Microsoft stepped in to save the day. They said, we'll make an Operating SYstem that is such a resource hog, you won't be able to even install it with less than 1G ram. And we'll recommonend multicore chips, and super high end video cards.
Honestly, that takes some stones *recommended* ram is 2Gb and a multicore processor just to run the BASE OS!!!! Vista will probably get there. XP had the same problems. No/lacking drivers, lacking hardware support for older stuff, games and certain apps wouldn't run, etc. I hate the fact that MS crammed Vista down our throats with all these media blitzes, and ripped XP out from under our feet. I think Vista would have done better if it was an option rather than requirement for new PCs.
Shameless plug alert: Game server control panel
The heck with Vista, they should just dump the OS and sell the Windows API with a per seat license.
Here is my reasoning....
The OS biz gets them too much bad press. The real dominance is with the Windows API's. If they licensed the API's to OS vendors so that any OS could run "Windows" programs - recompiled against the API of course they could charge 70 or 80 bucks per seat still make LOADS of money, maybe even more than they are now. The upside is that they don't have to worry about all the horrible engineering that's needed to deal with an OS.
The world uses Windows Applications. Does it matter HOW you get your money? If you can get it selling per seat licenses at the same rate as per copy of Windows it would be a win for MS.
Good job.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
When XP was first released I heard this exact same argument and XP turned out to be fine. This article is just a repeat of what already happened before and was proved wrong.
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
According to our web stats, 2.64% of our visitors this month are using Vista!
Down from 3.38% last month!
OMFG Microsoft is in trouble! Declining market share!
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Well, Vista video drivers are measured by rps (reboot per seconds) not fps.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
It depends on where you shop, but many of the staff at the local computer shops recommend XP. Probably because Vista Basic doesn't give you much that XP doesn't (not even Aero, so no fancy eyecandy), and it's a whole lot hungrier on resources making it appear to buyers that they bought a sucky computer.
The smaller local shops give you the option of XP or Vista Basic. When you ask, they still recommend XP. Big manufacturers like Dell have pushed back towards shipping with XP as well, because when it runs like crap it reflects poorly on them. Many large corporations (buyers) are also avoiding Vista like the plague, and in many cases likewise for other nasty products (Office 2007 which is by default incompatible with previous office versions)
So it's not just ask-a-friend... a lot of people out there are avoiding Vista or recommending against it, and quite a few of those are some pretty big sellers/buyers.
Give me a break! I am no huge supporter of Microsoft, but they survived ME and are behaving in the exact fashion they did then. they will continue to support and sell XP because they are forced to and then quietly abandon Vista. Face it, even if you hate MS they are not going to fail over this.
If I was deep this is would be profound, if smart then wise, if a poet then verse. Here it is, you judge!
- A way to customize the File Open dialog box, with the folders you constantly use, gasp!?
++ This is in Vista. On the left pane of an Open dialog, you can add/remove favorite folders
- Expose. Enough said.
++ A big part of Vista was reworking the GUI backend and adding a composition layer, making this possible. In fact 3rd parties have already created expose clones. They're not perfect, but it's getting there. Now imagine if Vista put expose in the OS by default... that would bring a whole other level of hate from the apple fanatics.
- A built in spell checker / Dictionary / Thesaurus, with quick access to wikipedia
++ This exists in Office, but where are you suggesting this goes? In notepad? The yells of bloat would be overwhelming.
- A search that isn't broken (Thx WinXP!)
++ Have you tried the search in Vista? It's find-as-you type in every explorer window (the top right). It also works great from the start menu. Very conveniant to hit the windows key and type the program/file you want and find it instantly.
- The ability to re-locate, (or hide) the dam 'close' button
++ Why? Below you lament over the lack of a good "kill" feature. Why would you allow a program to take the UI equivalent of that from the user?
- Title bars that stop sucking up valuable screen space, instead of being small movable tabs like in BeOS
++ I had to go look up what you meant, but to me having tabs takes up the same visual space and adds clutter. How often do you think "oh I wish this title bar was a tab instead, it's blocking so much stuff in the top right corner". Plus you can see through the Aero glass now
- Virtual Desktops
++ Not exactly sure what you're asking for here. There's a VM client that's free from MS. There's also plenty of multiple desktop software solutions out there.
- An OS that gets FASTER from version to version (again BeOS)
++ This would be nice. But the eye candy will slow it down one way or another. I mean, just above you ask for expose. A feature that requires a video card to run smoothly.
- A proper KILL command -- I'm admin on the dam box, let me kill that process.
++ This I would like. Task manager doesn't cut it. Process explorer (from MS) is pretty good but not built in.
- Unified widgets/gadgets: NO, I don't want seperate run-times for Yahoo, Google, Apple, Microsoft, insert flavor of the month company because they decided to do their own implementation.
++ Don't know much about this so won't comment.
- A home folder without spaces that doesn't move with almost every version of windows.
- A file system that doesn't suck. YES, I want to be able to start my filenames with spaces for sorting purposes (Thx Explorer. NOT.) have my filenames contain colons, end with a period or question mark. And treat the underscore as a virtual space, so we don't have to quote filenames in our command scripts. A way to "tag" files, so I can visually see BOTH a heirarchy, AND flat filesystem.
++ I would like to see these, although the whole naming thing isn't that important to me.
- Config files that can be moved from system to system instead of hiding everything in the bloated registry
++ Yes.
- Free dev tools would be nice.
++ There's TONS of free stuff from MS. Pretty much every visual studio feature now has an "Express" version that is free. In fact you need to use Visual Studio 2005 Express to develop on the XNA (free) game engine for both windows and xbox360
- Stop rebooting my dam system everytime you update system software. Or at least give me notification/icon that a reboot is required BEFORE installing.
++ This bugs me too. Although most software nowadays warns me to close certain programs in order to avoid a reboot.
Is vista on every desktop in Microsoft? If not, why not?
Since before Vista was released, I've been calling it "WinME" in various ways. Many people called me on my predictions in various ways saying "no way... Microsoft learned its lesson with WinME" or "there's just NO similarity between WinME and Vista" and on and on.
Fluff the numbers and facts any way you like it, people aren't into Vista and it does less for people than XP. Vista is actually causing people to buy new computers because they don't want Vista and have eventually forced PC sellers and Microsoft to start allowing XP on the machines that were previously Vista only.
Honestly, how much more backward-movement does the consumer and supplier sides of the industry have to take before Microsoft admits failure? Does it have to actually go on for a FULL year?
Here's where I make another prediction:
Microsoft will release "a new variant of Windows XP" and will probably announce it starting near the end of the year. They've got to have SOMETHING the public can use before they can stop selling Windows XP.
I have Vista and ... it's fine. I prefer it to Windows XP. It handles multitasking and security better.
I'm sick and tired of these hip, "ironic" sigs. This is an actual, honest-to-goodness no-nonsense sig!
jeez.
That's not exactly a man's man.
I have heard (And said) the typical complaints against MS for many years, but something very unique is going on here.
This new Office suite was supposed to be revolutionary... but it's just TERRIBLE. It's so unintuitive, and its predecessors are simply far superior. I'm actually using Word 97 on my old desktop until I get around to replacing Office 07 on my laptop. And Vista is similarly awful. All these needless pretty effects are fine and dandy, I understand that people dig that stuff, but the system is simply less versatile than XP or Win 2000.
XP was a step up from Win 98. For all the complaints, the upgrade was worth real money. And Win 95 from Win 3.1 was also a tangible improvement.
MS has lost its mojo (little that it had).
I was actually jealous of a mac today. My Thinkpad deserves better. (yeah, I have ubuntu, but I have to use SharePoint at work).
The problem is that much energy has been wasted on flashy UI and trying to improve security by barking and forcing users to verify everything. This will only result in the "cry wolf" effect and nothing will be gained in security. The best security measures are those that never are visible to the end user but are doing their job silently.
The problem Microsoft now has is that there are user bases on three different basic OS variants, the classic W95/98/ME, the NT4/2k/XP and the Vista. (even though the first one is declining there are a few around that sticks to it for various reasons.) And the licensing rules are getting more and more cumbersome for each release... Lately the hidden updates has proven to cause some less than optimal results too, which only proves that M$ are losing control over their code due to complexity issues.
Not that Linux is free of complexity problems either but it has fewer problems and scales better from very small to very large without unnecessary overhead.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I have not used Vista, so I cannot speak to it's strengths or weaknesses as an operating system. I only feel obligated to point out, that I can't imagine that it is currently getting worse press than Windows 95 upon it's initial release. It was buggy as hell for the first year, and I don't really expect anything different from Microsoft.
that's what you have to counter with?
here's a hint: i have a casual relationship to techy slang. that isn't really proof of 'astroturfing'
nice try though.
Hi blantonl, you can do one step better!
Put that PC in a closet, and use Remote Desktop.
Lies about crimes
being a "MS faithful" i will add that the article is trying to compare it to XP it seems. having been using vista since it's release and having zero problems other than a driver/security software issue that was HP's fault, i'd say it's pretty good. some things are a bit slower than XP on my machine and the hardware requirements are a bit out there, but i have seriously had no problems that i can blame MS for (the HP thing was that the software for the fingerprint reader made it take forever for windows to startup).
i do see some regular large memory usage, but that's mostly because i have firefox open all the time. the indexing/cache thing for the file system is always running (and can be turned off) and uses a lot of memory, but it gives it up whenever something else needs it.
i had 2 installations of vista... first was an upgrade, took about an hour (a lot of files had to be moved around to their new directories) and nothing went wrong. the second was a fresh install on the same computer (because i prefer it that way, but wanted to see the upgrade) and that took about 25 minutes, the fastest windows install i had ever seen.
i actually now prefer vista to XP and find it easier to use. no single application can crash all of windows. the networking stuff makes more sense (and it doesn't auto-save every wireless network i connect to). i like the new start menu and the search feature, and the UAC doesn't annoy me all that much as it only comes up when i install software or have to use the server 2003 admin pack. i am really not sure where all these people are getting their problems from, but i have had no issues and absolutely love it.
for the record, i have used linux (and plan on installing ubuntu on my home desktop that currently has XP) and OS X. i work in a primarily windows environment and have to support it, so i use that primarily (though i think i'll be getting a powerbook in the near future, but i'll be dual booting vista).
please me, have no regrets.
oh. This isn't a poll.
Dungeon Tactics : Free Open Source SRPG
... on my 4Gb 2.4Ghz Quad Core w/7950 GTX2. It is only just bearable on my 2GHz Core 2 Duo 2Gb laptop. God help those poor bastards picking it up on $499 shit boxes.
I use all three, so I'm a better judge than someone who uses only two.
.NET crap.
If I didn't use Linux, would I be qualified to throw down on a Linux distro? If I didn't use Macs would I be qualified to throw down on a Mac release? If I dared to even attempt such an amazing sacrilege, I'd have people lining up to rip me a new one.
But it's different with Windows! Everyone is entitled to spout their opinion; they don't need it, so no one else ever will either!
I'm a gamer. Some companies support linux and mac, most don't. I'm a coder. No linux or mac support for Visual Studio anything, and while I wish I didn't have to use it, I don't have the luxury of telling my boss I'm too good to do work on his systems. I have to use Outlook every day and fricking Access every now and then, and there is no WAY to do that without a Windows machine. I need IE to check my web apps, and I need it to use other people's goddamn proprietary
None of it makes me happy, but I'm realistic enough to know that the world doesn't bend around my happiness. A person with an open mind uses the best tool that comes to hand, without a ton of irrational crap (e.g "Windoze") clouding their judgment, without making false claims like "There is a superiour OSS product for every closed source product", and without spouting shit about emulation! What emulation? WINE? The second time I failed to migrate a customer to Linux because WINE utterly FAILED TO DO THE JOB I opened my fricking eyes. Emulators suck; if all you need is an emulator, all you really need is a telnet client because your application is simplistic in the extreme.
I love it when people who've never had to get down and really try and make it work, not for themselves, not for some game or hobby project, but to deploy it in an environment where there are people who are going to raise hell every time something doesn't work the way they think it should, try and tell me how "easy" it is, and how "no one really NEEDS this stuff." When you lose a 250,000 dollar project because you can't get FUCKING FONT SUPPORT FOR A FUCKING LEGACY APP, you can fucking TALK about what people NEED.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Because it's a well known best practice in business that if you've invested a lot of money developing a product and it gets a slow start in the market, you should get rid of it so you can make sure that you can reduce revenue from it all the way down to zero dollars. And of course, think of the greater confidence investors would have if you stated that your flagship product sucks!
...was always good enough when I was using the previous version. I was using 2000 when people were moving to XP. I started using XP after Vista was announced. And I can count on my fingers the number of times I had crashes, viruses or other problems. Sure, I had two antivirus, two anti-spywares and two firewalls (router and computer), but that doesn't change the fact that during the whole period with 2000 and XP (years) I saw zero blue screens.
Then I recently bought a new laptop with Vista included and had one of the worst operating system experiences of my life.
(I won't even elaborate on this)
So, my opinion on the current situation? I'm curious to see if Vista will be more usable after, say, SP2. I'm betting it will.
Vista is simply not capable of competing at an OS level with some of the best software around.
...
Not true. Vista is quite capable of "competing" in the same way that all Microsoft software has always competed with higher-quality software from competitors: Microsoft's marketing budget is larger than the marketing budgets of all its competitors combined. This is what made MS-DOS the instant success it was over the much better (at the time) CP-M. It's what made MS Windows more successful than the better Apple and unix (X-Windows) offerings.
Microsoft has understood from the start the lesson that IBM (their initial funder) pioneered in the 1960s and 70s: If you have a big enough marketing budget, it doesn't matter whether you have a quality product. Computer customers mostly can't judge quality; they buy entirely on "reputation", i.e., marketing.
Consider the piece of crap that were Windows ME and Windows 2000. They did just fine, despite the long list of quality problems reported in the tech media (but never noticed by 90% of the buying public). There's no real reason to believe that Vista will do any worse. All it takes is the right marketing, and Microsoft has the budget to do it.
I'd love to be proved wrong, but
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
it did exactly what it was suppose to do. Allow coke to transition from sugar to corn syrup.
Coke could not get the flavors to match, so they invented a bad product. When it failed people want the old coke back. So coca-cola brought back coke "classic". Implying that it was the same, but it wasn't.
New coke was a genius way to transition. Coke a cola took on the "Oh, we screwed up, we are deeply sorry and we are ready to fess up. You, consumer, are right and we are here for you." mantle.
Genius.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You mean Microsoft released an operating system before it was really finished? It costs too much? Requires "more" than their previous OS (I'm guessing you mean resources)? Poor driver support?
NO!!! SURELY NOT! - That has NEVER happened before! Well, except for the last time they released an OS...oh, and then there was that time before last too...and the time before that...
No. In order for Microsoft to be "[brought]
- dm - The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity.
- A way to customize the File Open dialog box, with the folders you constantly use, gasp!?
.NET runtime, the Platform SDK, and a free-as-in-speech IDE like SharpDevelop.
The new standard file dialogs in Vista use the same Favorites panel as Explorer. Drag a folder there, and it shows up pretty much everywhere. (Not all apps seem to pick up the Vista dialog though. Not sure why yet.)
- Expose. Enough said.
Good luck shutting up the Mac fanboys. (As opposed to Mac users, like myself.)
- A built in spell checker / Dictionary / Thesaurus, with quick access to wikipedia
Agreed.
- A search that isn't broken (Thx WinXP!)
Vista has that. Google is trying to legislate it out of existence because they "don't know how" to disable Microsoft's built-in indexer service.
- A proper KILL command -- I'm admin on the dam box, let me kill that process.
Right click the task bar, and select Task Manager. (Ctrl-Shift-Esc also works.) Click "Show processes from all users". Right click a process, and select "End Process".
- Unified widgets/gadgets...
That's a universal problem. A common runtime for Dashboard, Yahoo Widgets, Sidebar, and Plasma would be sweet, but it'll happen when pigs fly.
- A home folder without spaces that doesn't move with almost every version of windows.
The bad news: They changed it again in Vista. The good news: No more spaces. "Documents and Settings" has been replaced with "Users", and that "My Foo" crap is gone. It's just nice one-word folders now: C:\Users\[username]\Documents.
- Free dev tools would be nice.
Check out the free-as-in-beer Visual Studio Express Editions, or just download the
- Stop rebooting my dam system everytime you update system software. Or at least give me notification/icon that a reboot is required BEFORE installing.
Amen, brother. Mac OS X does a much better job of this.
...MS made enough money in the past to bank a lot, and now they can pay you. If they had to support you and your team on vista sales..well....you wouldn't be. The only thing supporting vista now is economic inertia and past vendor lockin, it isn't engineering prowess. For every one positive vista review out there, there are 100 negative reviews. Rational intelligent people would take that as a "clue".
So you may get a kick out of it now, but eventually you'll be getting another kick, a kick out the door with a map to the unemployment office. Only a matter of when, not if, at this point. The rest of the planet is moving away from MS lockin and bloatware in a huge fashion, and in the computer world, things change pretty fast. The US may be last in that line,like they are in several other ways, but it is still going to happen. Now I don't think MS will totally close up shop, but I predict they'll split along product lines, and eventually, say within 5-8 years max, the OS division will have at best around 20% or so market share. and truth be told, if there is another class action lawsuit that results in a few more anti competitive judgements, combined with a few new laws addressing software "lemons" and government openess,as in lack of thereof, it'll happen sooner.
Good luck to you and bank extra cash while you can.
"...I am suspecting a certain arogance and disconnect with the user base. "
Before you mod 'Troll', think about it.
Yes, you just have to look at the markets where Apple is dominating (overhyped media-related products). They've had more than their share of heavy-handed behavior in regards to these, so why would anyone expect it to be different if OSX suddenly overtook Windows as the market leader?
Perhaps somebody could name some big companies that haven't caved in upon themselves. Google seems to be fast deteriorating, IBM used to be worse than MS, HP now has new management but we can only hope that they're not half as evil as the previous...
The only way consumers get ahead in the marketplace is through:
a) Competition / Choice
b) Community (and usually in the form of community backlash)
Personally, I'd be happy if Microsoft was diminished, and put in their place, but not killed off entirely. There are good things about the company, and a little humility combined with a Damocles sword of consequence might be better than simply replacing them with another company this is or grows to be as bad or worse. In regards to Open Source, yes projects can be forked etc, but sneaky/bad things can still happen. What would happen if Sun pulled open-office, and how long would it take for somebody to pick up the project?
Community, and concepts such as open-source (or better, friendly source) are a good thing, but competition and consequence are still the best for promoting good behavior IMHO.
1. there is a way to do that in XP (and i believe the same way works in vista), but you gotta do some registry editing, but that should really be in the GUI.
2. having used both to an extent, i like the vista rolodex effect over expose, though that's just an opinion.
3. not exactly sure what you mean by that.
4. i personally LOVE spotlight and i wish every OS would emulate that functionality.
5. i personally don't see the need, but whatever. if i like it the way it is, i'll leave it at default.
6. i don't find they take up that much. less than half an inch vertically.
7. yes please!
8. yes please!
9. yes yes, for the love of god, YES!
10. certainly
11. yes please!
12. never had problems with this yet, but flexability is always nice to have.
12.5. i WISH they hadn't axed winFS. it showed promise.
13. oh yes. ideally, i'd like to be able to work with a networkless roving profile on my thumbdrive. plug it it, say "load the profile stored here" and BAM! all my settings and stuff, at any computer.
14. yes, they would.
15. definetly would be nice.
16. another thing i'd like is for dual-screens to work properly with games. i want to be able to have the game take up 1 of the screens and leave my other screen available for other things (stratagy guide, IM program, actual work, etc.)
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Fact is, ðere is no real competitor yet in the OEM market -- meaning preintalled boxes.
Mac OS X is not available yet outide of Apple hardare. GNU/Linux till doen't have the rit tuff for ðis market: ne drivers, a dominant ditro (Ubuntu may yet become it, alo pulling drivers in), ISV oftare uch as codecs, Adobe tuff and o on (but tuff bundled in the ditros is fatly catching up).
So, MS indos Vita won't be ðe donfall of Microoft. But MS indos NT 7 may yet be.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
I've used Macs since OS 6.07, sold them, fixed them, made a living off them, and loved them. We own several. My primary computer is now a Dell E1705 running Vista, and frankly, it works fine. Yes, the need for virus protection is a pain, but there is nothing inherent to the Mac OS making it immune to the same problems other than lack of market share.
Vista is fine.
Having said this, I would like to note that there is a very good reason for bringing out Vista: plain old software engineering. The last thing I expected to do was to defend Microsoft from a software engineering point of view, but here goes.
I think it started when Jim Allchin (whom I much respect) had to report to Bill Gates that he would not be able to deliver the next Windows version (Longhorn) in time ... or at all (see http://software.silicon.com/os/0,39024651,39152715,00.htm and the original WSJ interview (subscription required) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB112743680328349448.html?mod=todays_us_page_one).
Why ever not?
Here is why: Jim Allchin, group VP in charge of Windows, told the Wall Street Journal he dropped the bombshell last summer, simply telling Gates "It's not going to work". Longhorn was so complex that Microsoft's developers would never be able to make it run properly, Allchin told Gates.
The root of the problem was Microsoft's historical approach to developing software - the so-called 'spaghetti code culture' - where the company's thousands of programmers would each develop their own piece of code and it would then all be stitched together at the end.
In other words: the design was so complex, so haphazard, and consisted of so many interlocking parts that it was no longer really modular.
In software engineering that's a killer. Because it's then impossible to really isolate problems. Let alone fix them. The remedy was as simple as it was brutal: stop the current line of MS Windows (i.e. kill Longhorn), start from scratch, and rigorously use good software engineering practice throughout.
The result is ... MS Windows Vista.
So ... did that approach work?
Yes it did:
As a result of this Microsoft received thousands fewer bug reports than usual when it released the beta version of Windows Vista this summer. Allchin's culture change also appears to be spreading through the rest of Microsoft. Gates said the new tools are now being used by the Office group. "I wish we'd done it earlier," he told the paper.
Unfortunately there is nothing about running current applications that Vista does that Windows XP can't do just as well. But then you don't always go by the best way to run current applications. Longhorn wasn't about that either. If it had been, you would be able to completely stop the development of Windows with XP and call it a completed work of art. Any takers?
It's not that Microsoft did the wrong thing or the right by moving to Vista. They did the *only* thing from a long-term perspective. Too bad the short-term payoff is a bit less rosy, but that's what you get when you redo the internals of a spaghetti-code system that works.
What emulation? WINE?
There's much more in the world than Wine, which is why I can dismiss everything you say about Linux as being about ten years out of date. Get out there and look at some of the commercial offerings before you shoot your mouth off again.
Wine works and that's why Crossover Office works. If all your customer needs is something dinky like Outlook or M$ Office and you want it to "look right", just sell them a copy of Crossover Office.
If you really need everything in the Windoze world, you can run Windoze in a virtual machine. It works like Windoze because it is Windoze. It works better than Windoze because Linux has better window managers. Parallels is just the start, but it works very well and does XP. There are others that work just as well. When you combine them with a desktop like Beryl, the result is beautiful. No client could possibly complain about running Windoze itself in a virtual window you can just flip a cube to get too. Any modern hardware should have no problem running this and it runs much better than Vista.
Vista is beat, 100%. There are better applications in the free software world and the non free software world of XP has just been contained and swallowed whole where it will work better and be easier to keep up.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Ever wonder why no one seems to appreciate your insightful long form commentary? Maybe its because 3 lines into a 50 line text block their eyes glaze over and they hit the back key. Paragraphs are your friend - not something to be avoided.
Reading a text block like that is the visual equivelant of listening to those sped up caveats they spit out at the end of car commercials - their must be something in there...but who the hell knows, I stopped paying attention 8 words in.
The thing this article misses is the fact that systems are shipping with Vista and not everyone is reverting to XP so the installed base is growing and growing and at some point (probably past) it will be unstoppable. Slow adoption does not mean failure it means slow adoption. And those people buying Windows XP. Well they may be reverting to XP but they are going backwards and they know it and nobody is happy with an old OS forever. These people are going to XP not OSX or Linux (at least not in dangerous numbers). They will eventually upgrade again. This gives Microsoft time to fix Vista while giving them more cash (for that box of XP and then the vista mark 2). Yeah they take a hit in the public relations but beyond that their dominance remains inevitable. Now if OSX was able to boot of a generic Vista Box you might have seen something different but it's not, not really.
That's the problem with Vista. So far it's effectively proved at best a lateral upgrade. Considering performance, it can be considered a downgrade.
People might be a lot of things that make more technical people feel smug, but they aren't stupid.
Take a familiar product from a consumer and replace it with a newer, less efficient product and what should you expect? Microsoft made some really bad assumptions:
- They assumed by increasing the acceptable requirements consumers wouldn't notice the decrease in performance (it evens out with better hardware, right?).
- They relied on their old monopoly tactics that have served then so well. The motive for the upgrade hasn't been "gee-wiz, I've got to have it!" features. It's been things like lock-in (Direct X10), (in)availability and support. That's going to be rather insulting to your average user, especially when you take the first point into account that they've effectively lost performance.
Imagine you go to the dealer with your reasonably new car for trade in, they offer you a new car that goes slower, has worse gas mileage and seemingly fewer features. With no real reason to upgrade you might be better off sticking with the car you already own, or even a new version of the same model.But in the end Microsoft is doing to consumers what they do to businesses. Forcing adoption. Not on features or buzz but relying on strong-arm tactics and lock-in. And your average user doesn't like to be bullied.
Quack, quack.
I remember NT 2.0... hardly any existing Windows programs ran on it.
I think you're getting at the core problem here, albeit a little obliquely. The problem, as I see it, is that Microsoft is completely unable to deliver what customers actually WANT. I saw a recent essay by an analyst who laid the blame at the feet of MS Windows VP Steve Sinofsky, accusing him of having NEVER EVER delivered a product that customers actually wanted. Then it listed the products he oversaw, bloatware rubbish like MS Office. Customers never wanted that crap, but he figured he could shove it down their throats. What the customers really wanted was not a new version with more bloat, they wanted MS to fix the existing problems, but they never did.
And it's the same way with Vista. Customers absolutely do not want Vista. What they want is WinXP, but with all the bugs fixed. And MS cannot deliver it, they do not know how. They have merely substituted a new, larger set of Vista problems for the old XP problems.
I am trying to recall a time when MS delivered products that people wanted. Leaving aside products they bought from other companies (like Halo for example), I'd probably have to go back decades, to their earliest products like Word 1.0, Microsoft Basic, etc. And even then, MS was already pitching crap people didn't want, like MS-DOS. Nobody wanted it, what they really wanted was a better CP/M, and in fact, customers would have kept on using CP/M if MS hadn't made their apps incompatible, this was the start of their monopoly.
Microsoft is now only capable of delivering products it thinks it can make people buy. It is incapable of developing products with elegance and simplicity. But IMHO Microsoft should keep Vista, they should keep flogging the dead horse. This will make the situation clearer: it is the CUSTOMERS who should abandon Vista.
"The real problem is that CPU speeds have nearly flatlined."
MOD PARENT UP. The abuse of deliberately making an OS require far more power, so people would feel it was necessary to buy another computer, has become a much bigger abuse than it was before.
However, that's not the REAL problem. The real problem is just a misunderstanding. People think that Microsoft is a software company that is routinely abusive, but it isn't. Microsoft is an abuse company that merely uses software as a means of delivering abuse.
It is more abusive to not just deliver abuse in constant streams, but to deliver big booms of abuse, too, so that people can't learn as easily to defend themselves. So, DOS 1.0, 1.1, 2.0 BOOM, 2.1, 3.0 BOOM, 3.1, 4.0 BOOM, 5.0, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME BOOM, Windows NT first release BOOM. Windows 2000, Windows XP first release BOOM, Win XP SP1, Win XP SP2, Windows Vista BOOM.
Dr. Death has arrived. After only 3 years, requiem for an OS: Dr. Death is ready to begin killing software that customers want to use. He has decided that Windows XP will begin to die soon: January 31, 2008. The purpose is to make Bill Gates richer. Bill Gates can't invade Iraq, so he has to be happy with killing an operating system.
The huge number of bugs in Windows XP before SP2 was very expensive for us. If I remember correctly, Windows XP SP2 fixed more than 630 bugs, and some of the fixes were not documented. The really major problems in Windows XP stopped only after SP2 was released, on August 25, 2004. That means we have gotten only 3 years of good use from Windows XP.
Let other people have the grief. Unless forced by circumstances, never move to a new version of Microsoft software until the second service pack is released.
(Someone said that rule will just cause Microsoft to release service packs much more often. If that happens, it may be necessary to change the rule to "until the X service pack...")
Even though updating Windows XP from an SP2 CD requires downloading more than 170 Megabytes of files, Microsoft hasn't delivered a service pack for Windows XP in 3 years. The Windows XP updates of just August's Patch Tuesday were more than 20 Megabytes. Microsoft seems to have delayed releasing an SP3 for Windows XP to try to discourage people from using Windows XP.
New versions of Linux are released to make a better OS. New versions of Microsoft Windows seem to have the purpose of 1) killing the old version and 2) using more CPU power so that it is necessary to buy new hardware. When you partner with Microsoft, you partner with a company that may sometimes choose to be your enemy, in my opinion.
It is not only the vulnerabilities that are expensive. Microsoft's adversarial behavior is expensive, too.
Some of this may be a joke, and some of it may be the truth.
Windows Vista has been slow to gain acceptance and adoption in the less-than-a-year since it was released
Abandon it! Kill it! It's had its chance, but it's too late!
Linux has been slow to gain acceptance and adoption in the sixteen years it's been available
Linux is improving! It's getting better! Give it a chance! Yes it has problems but these things take time!
Schnapple
Which really isn't an option for Microsoft. So what they did, doing Windows the engineering way, really was the only thing to do.
I had to buy a new machine a couple of weeks ago with Vista on it, and it's mostly annoyed me ever since, even more than XP.
I've had my unused XP Pro install CD (from a machine converted to Linux) sitting by my computer. This clinches it.
I'd do Linux, but I have three Linux machines and need at least one Windows machine to run some things on it.
With Mac OS X hot on its tail, Vista is simply not capable of competing at an OS level with some of the best software around
"Hot on Vista's tail" would mean that OS X has a market share close to Windows, which is obviously not true even under the most optimistic assumptions.
There is also no sense that I can see in which Microsoft has anything to fear from Apple. Even if Microsoft got out of the OS business tomorrow, Apple simply could not fill the void. Most likely, a disappearance of Microsoft would benefit Linux and BSD much more than it would Apple, because people can run those systems on the hardware they already have.
That's interesting. Here you say:
And of course you sound so amazingly insightful that you get modded up.
Playing the karma game is fun, isn't it? Well, what else could you do? All your sockpuppets are all in karma hell as it is.
Windows is a tyrant's best friend
Oooh, that's so clever. Completely offtopic and unnecessary, but always good with the mods, eh? Since Google does some really funky business with China, I should stop using their services as well. Do you agree?
I hope Microsoft thinks you're right. They'll go down all the faster.
Well the real problem here is, that MS is expecting/forcing people to upgrade right NOW. Ok, this happened with the XP too, but it wasn't so aggressive. I was using W2K happily for quite a while after XP release (maybe year or two). According to MS I should already use Vista. Well not going to happen any time soon as I need to upgrade my computer before it even runs! Maybe in two years I'll take a closer look what Vista can offer.
- A proper KILL command -- I'm admin on the dam box, let me kill that process.
Just a quick note, you can kill processes as an admin of a box. Find the process id of the process you want to kill, go to a command line, and use the "kill" command. Its not exactly the same as killing a Linux process on a Linux command line but it certainly works and gets the job done. I personally had to employ it to stop the WMI service because of an issue with Backup Exec.
Hope that helps.
"Don't feel bad for me child; I'm the monster that hides under your bed."
at least get the versions right.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Microsoft lost its focus on its core competency, and now it will pay for it. Nobody gets a free pass in the free market.
gosh, that brings back memories..of course it was what people where saying about IBM's operating system.
also, you missed the point in the second line. I would explain it to you, but I suspect anything other then a picture book would be a waste.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Didn't Gates go on various television shows reminding us about how long it took to develop Vista? Clearly it MUST be an amazing product given the amount of time spent on it, right? I thought Microsoft kept repeating the mantra that customers were asking for all these features that Vista delivers. From what Microsoft has been showing us with Vista, it's obvious that operating systems for computers were always originally designed with the clear intention to play video and audio that studios produced--NEVER were you expected to produce anything yourself! The impression I get from the Vista's experience illustrates that Microsoft doesn't design Windows to end up as a workstation or a server or as any kind of a tool--just a bloated yet very limited media center. My two cents, anyway.
Speaking as a Perl developer, a JScript developer, an IT professional, and a kiosk developer, I now adore the Microsoft corporate assistance, as well as Vista.
The article is question -- and boy is it questionable -- says things like "vista is too expensive" and "it sales are lower than xp's were". Welcome to economics. Just because you lack the funds, doesn't make it a bad thing.
As a business, I've had wonderful times with Microsoft licensing over the last six months. Where I thought I'd have to pay $300 per kiosk, I wound up having to pay $200 one-time licence. Umm, that's basically free.
I'm using both XP and Vista for the kiosks. XP is missing a number of features that Vista has perfectly --
all on the IT side.
I've been reading slashdot for well over a decade now. You guys have it all wrong. Windows is much more flexible than you give it credit for -- and all without having to re-compile a kernel. Absolutely every OS tweak and alteration is possible just as simply as changing a registry key. And each and every one is well named and documented. Just start reading.
Deploying a few hundred configurations is a breeze -- as easy as plugging in a UFD.
There are more tools, support, documentation, and details available for Microsoft's corporate professional solutions than Linux users have all but hoped for. And when they aren't free of charge, they are impressively within budget.
Sorry that your budget is absolute zero. Some of us actually operate successful businesses, and simply love the idea of spending one dollar to make ten. Spending zero to make ten is actually worse, not better. And spending half a dollar to make ten isn't significantly better than spending one.
Do something legitimate, with actual business intentions, and Microsoft is a dream to work with. Want to do something all on your own? That's a different story.
I have no problems with Vista. And any problems that you have with any features, are easily solved by disabling those features. I can't believe that linux users are upset with a default configuration -- freakin' change it. The only difference is that you aren't starting from scratch. You're capable, just do it. And if you do it for someone else, they'll pay you for it.
And no, you don't have to want to get paid. And no, they won't be paying you for your time, or your skill, or your abilities. They'll be paying you for the sole reason of not having to do it themselves. Welcome to the wonderful world of profitable business -- you don't do anything by yourself.
- A way to customize the File Open dialog box, with the folders you constantly use, gasp!?
Or have it open in same condition you left it. I have a lot of situations where I need Recent Files, Detail view, sorted by date, and I have to set it every fucking time the file browser opens.
Expose. Enough said.
My single most used feature under Mac OS X, especially on a laptop.
A home folder without spaces that doesn't move with almost every version of windows.
And ditch the whole "My Documents", "My Music" and "My Pictures" Playskool crap.
Some more:
An Escape key (or some other key) that IMMEDIATELY returns control to the user no matter WHAT is happening. PREEMPT IT, DAMMIT! I've lost count of the number of times Windows has been out on the network looking for something, or loading an application I didn't really want, or loading Acrobat plugin, or something, and I can't do ANYTHING.
When I simply click to highlight a shortcut to a network resource, and the resource is down for some reason, there's a big, unescapable delay. Many time I am highlighting the icon to delete it because I KNOW the resource is gone or moved. Do not try to talk to the remote computer unless I double click. Until then that icon is just a picture.
If I drag something from one window, across a window looking at something with a slow pipe, to another window, my drag freezes in the slow pipe window for a bit. Fucking STOP that! Do not access a network resource unless DROP the item into it. Until then it is just another window. Stop trying to anticipate me.
Speaking of anticipation, and to be fair, do not start a search or other activity until I have given you all the information I intend to give. I'm looking at YOU Mac OS X Spotlight. Typing should not s tu t te r.
Enough with the 8.3 filemane system. So many times when I need to do some deep troubleshooting in Windows, I have to poke through directory after directory of ill-named files in the 8.3 style. Why are you still doing that, developers? Why?
Cancel buttons that are not cruel hoaxes like unconnected crosswalk buttons.
Progress bars that don't say "5 seconds left" for ten minutes. If you don't know, just fess up.
It's even possible to run Halo 2 in XP...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_2#Windows_XP_compatibility
http://www.mininova.org/tor/763563
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Really. These arguments are so lame. NT was faster the 2000, 2000 was faster than XP, etc.
Windows ME sucked - XP and Vista are still the best versions of Windows ever released.
The Vista API is excellent - productivity and quality improvements in Vista specific apps will eventually be a wonderful thing.
The only downside to Vista is the lack of device drivers for abandoned hardware and the lame DRM crap. We can blame the hardware manufacturers for not supporting their old products for the drivers, and Hollywood and MS for the DRM.
You just didn't think it through then. See my previous post ;-P
You should maybe consider Linux, xBSD or OS X as your OS. ;-)
Windows XP will last five years after Microsoft cuts off support for it.
Windows Vista will die within five years.
By then, I hope that ReactOS is finished or at least in beta status to compete with the bloated, buggy, and security flawed Microsoft Windows Whatever Microsoft releases next after Vista.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Vista is a mess. They need to throw out everything and start fresh.
And to those who say that they already did that with Vista, they didn't-- they built it on top of Server 2003's codebase after the much-publicized "reset" in, what was it, 2004?
They need to chuck EVERYTHING and start with a clean slate, and build in a compatibility environment for the old stuff until 3rd-party developers get caught up. Apple managed to move from 68K to PPC to x86 quite easily by forging ahead but having very good backward compatibility to make it relatively painless. And yes, I know that Microsoft's installed base is much larger than Apple's and that's a cause for their reluctance, but even big ships need to change course once in a while, or they run into something and sink.
Microsoft already has a solution to the compatibility environment issue, because it fucking OWNS Virtual PC, and with hardware virtualization so prevalent these days they should have an even easier time than Apple did making the migration.
They copy everything else Apple does, so why they refuse to do this one thing is a mystery.
I was going to stick with XP as long as I could, but then I gave in and tried Vista. I've had some minor problems, and the flashy front end doesn't matter to me. I use it at home and work now, and at work I'm even testing it out by running it without an anti-virus program. I know that sounds insane, but I want to see how good is the new built-in security. So far so good. The more I use it the happier I am.
I think the FUD surrounding Vista might be unfair. The shift from XP to Vista seemed far smaller than from OS 9 to OS X or PowerPC to Intel on the Mac. Change requires some adaptation. I think it's insane to suggest scraping Vista. It might not be sliced bread, but I'm starting to wonder if it's not more stable and secure than XP, and that step up could be a big one.
Jim Harris
How fucking dare anyone out there make fun of Anonymous Coward after all they have been through?
Anonymous Coward hasn't made a good post in years. They begin everything with "fp" because all you people care about is FIRST POST! FIRST POST! FIRST POST!
LEAVE THEM ALONE! You are lucky they even chose to post here you bastards! LEAVE ANONYMOUS COWARD ALONE!
Please!
Speaking of professionalism, when is it professional to publicly bash a human being who is going through a hard time?
Leave Anonymous Coward alone, please.
LEAVE ANONYMOUS COWARD ALONE RIGHT NOW. I MEAN IT.
Anyone that has a problem with them, you deal with me, because it is not well right now.
LEAVE THEM ALONE!
...the competition from Windows XP. Right now (allmost a year after launch) the only real reason for upgrade is DirectX 10, and it seems that the gaming industry can't see any idea in changing to DirectX 10.
You wasted a MOD point for that?!?
However, the problem lies in the fact that XP is one generation behind (okay, more than one in some aspects).
If people keep choosing XP, then everyone else (esp. Apple) gets to rocket ahead in features, and proclaim loudly in their marketing that they have the New Big Thing, while Microsoft has... umm, either XP, or the dog's breakfast of an OS they call "Vista". OSX (and to an extent) Linux continues to come out with new, neat stuff, people (slowly at first) begin shifting to them, and Microsoft loses OS share. By the time Microsoft finally does pull their heads out and come up with a new OS (or an SP that makes Vista run worth a damn), the competition has already taken a bite out of them.
How big of a bite depends on how long it takes Microsoft to get its act together.
If Microsoft loses enough marketshare, then software developers will chase the new "emerging" market in larger numbers, thereby removing one of the big reasons Joe Sixpack continues to use Windows in spite of the overall love/hate relationship with it (e.g. "I already invested $$$ into these apps, and they only run in Windows!").
Once that's gone (or even seriously going away), Microsoft will have to compete just that much harder against Free (Linux), or Just Plain Works (OSX). There will be a louder clamor for interoperability. Other factors pick up, and Microsoft would have to work exponentially harder than they do today just to keep from dwindling into irrelevancy over the long-term.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
The new generation of OS requires more resources... and doesn't have 99% reliability on every hardware configuration? Where has this guy BEEN? Was he writing about what a memory hog XP was in 2001, and how his Sound Blaster 16 driver support was flaky? I'm all for bashing MS when appropriate, but this is just absurd.
I bought a new laptop with Vista and had every intention of reinstalling my old VLK XP should I have any problems... but here I am, still running it. Just turn off the UAC and you're good to go.
My only complaint with Vista is that the Cisco VPN won't install on 64 bit version... but that is a Cisco driver issue, not an MS issue.
Well, that, and its absurd pricing. Thats an MS problem.
Throw it away? No, no. You sell it on iOffer* as a shortly-used pull of genuine Apple hardware. Someone who's more into cool logos than good computers will pay more for it than you'll pay for the upgrades. Then, someone who likes Apple, but not too much for his or her own good, gets a nice machine with cheap upgrades.
Of course, other than OS X, you can often beat Dell or Apple either one by building your own. Unfortunately for geeks, some of the packages they put together these days are too good to beat by building from parts. You still get more control when you do it yourself, though, and the satisfaction and enjoyment of doing it.
* I'd say eBay, but that doesn't seem to be the safest place to put your credit card info this week.
The very day that Linux supports my wireless adapter! Seriously, every year or two I download Linux and give it another go. And every year something fails to work. I know that some of you run Linux and that's great. And I know that some of you want everyone else to run Linux too, and that's great too. But here is my wireless adapter: http://www.linksys.com/servlet/Satellite?c=L_Product_C2&childpagename=US%2FLayout&cid=1160093476789&pagename=Linksys%2FCommon%2FVisitorWrapper&lid=7678939789B01 I've had it for months now, and I tried real damn hard to get it to work with Ubuntu. Hours, literally. I posted on the Ubuntu forums and some generic Linux forums, I even broke down and BEGGED someone, somewhere to link me to a WIRELESS USB NETWORK ADAPTER that I can buy online, of any speed that I can plug into my computer, install a particular distro of linux (I wanted Ubuntu, but ANY one you tell me) where that OS will recognize the wireless adapter, and be able to use basic WEP encryption. Here are my choices.... 1.) Run Windows; everything works, new games run, OS isn't as fast as it could be and maybe I'll have to reboot once every 2 days and I might get a virus once a year if I'm a retard. 2.) Run Linux; replace a bunch of hardware including my wireless network adapter, have crappy support for my video card and even worse support for new games.... 3.) Run Mac; buy a new computer or deal with a bunch of emulators/hacks...have a bunch of hardware issues and lack of support for new games. I don't like Windows. I think I'd like Linux better. I've tried real hard to run Linux; but it don't work.
Abandoning Vista is one of the worst things Microsoft can do right now, despite its quality and performance issues. Yes, it doesn't measure up to expectations MS set for it, and it continues to be a source of embarassment for the company in general. However, it's much more worthwhile for Microsoft to make it performant and solid than to dump it. First, they can mend and extend their hurt relationships with PC makers. Second, it can continue executing on its WPF/WCF/.NET strategy, which is more about developer adoption than anything else. Finally, MS just can't afford to look that weak at this time with vultures like Google waiting for an opportunity, and Intel dumping them for Linux in the mobility space. As always, hardware will bail them out in 2 years. Give it hybrid hard drives (2nd gen with gigs of flash), 4-8GB memory, and AMD's Fusion processors, and Vista will become a Why Not versus Why decision when buying a new PC. Still, Microsoft would be wise to hurry the hell up with a real UMPC OS already. Intel dumped them, Apple's about to upstage them, and clunky Vista UMPC's with 2 hours battery life are not helping their image.
I think I am the only person on the planet that actually likes Vista. I guess I see it for what it will be rather than what it is. When XP first came out it had its problems, but as computers became more powerful, so did the OS. XP had hardware issues and driver problems when it was released, but eventually manufactures catch up and you are once again using a superior product. Vista is not meant to compete with OS X, as Macs have no place in the business world. Vista is designed for the business world. I agree with a previous poster that OS X would not replace Vista, but rather Linus would should Microsoft stop making Windows. If anything, the most likely scenerio is that everyone would just go back to XP. If you like Macs, I assume you are amused easily, so go check out some of the smaller programs that Microsoft has upgraded in Vista. Everything form Minesweeper to File Copier. Actually, the only one I can think of off hand that they didn't improve is Calculator. For people who like a little meat with their potatos, look at the networking capabilities, far superior to anything else I have used. I dont use Linux, but from what I hear, you have to download about three or four programs just to be able to scan for wireless networks. (Again, this is just based on what I have heard). As a software developer, who specializes in .net, I may have a bias, but as far as I am concerned Windows is the only platform I want to develop on. I am not sure if the argument is Vista vs XP, or Vista vs anything else, but when it comes to developing, there is nothing else in my opinion.
Microsft doesnt always have the best software, but lets look at the track record.
SQL Server > Oracle, MySQL
XP > OSX, Red Hat
C# > Java
ASP > PHP
IIS > Apache
Office > Any similar tools
Visual Studio > Any developer environment
Direct X > Open GL
Like I said, its not always the best,
Virtual PC VM Ware
MS Paint? Photoshop
JScript Javascript
I am sure I could list alot more... the difference is, all of Microsofts products are designed to work well with each other. Of course, this isn't always the case, but at least an attempt is made. If you are using all non Microsoft producs because they are free, or "better" then you are losing out. Individually some of the products may not be as good as the alternatives, but as a whole, you get a much better package. The same is true for Vista.
Just give Vista more time, its not as bad as its made out to be.
Vista Ultimate OEM costs today about what I paid for XP Pro OEM 3 or 4 years ago.
I'd say that's pretty good going given inflation would suggest it should be 10-12% more expensive.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
The first few times i used search I simply thought it was broken as it never returned any results. The fact that you have to go out of your way into some advanced dialogues to even gain the ability to search your local drives is a huge step backwards.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
I would hazard to say that Bill may have planned for Vista's poor operation. If I were Bill, and I were to leave Microsoft in the hands of an underling, I might do similarly. Why would I wish to be succeeded by anyone that could potentially take Microsoft to new heights I'd never dreamed? I wouldn't, and would sneakily set about to sabotage the latest product(s) so that the world would point years later and exclaim, "As soon as Bill Gates left Microsoft, that new jerk ran it into the ground." Or, knowing that a product (Vista) was going to be a piece of crapware, I'd leave before anyone realized it. Most people don't care who ran the company when something was being developed, they want to blame the person currently in charge. I've been saying for about two years now, during Vista's development, that it was crapware. Now I get to say, "I told you so."
I'd take it over WinME any day
nuff said.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Because there's already a working, clean, stable, fast version of Windows.
;-)
It's just not marketed to the end-user.
It's called Windows Server 2003.
Incidentially, Vista was developed from its source.
The only thing that stop it from mass-adoption is the fact that some tools (like anti-virus etc.) require server-versions, but they have come down in price, too over the last years.
They could just recompile 2003 without all the server-tools and some ifdefs so that it doesn't say "Server" anymore and Joe Shmoe's antivirus installs on it.
I don't know about DirectX etc. - but games are for consoles anyway
But MSFT will like (or not know any better other than) to beat on the Vista dead-horse.
Good luck with that, Redmond. In the meantime, see Apple continue to grow its Mac-sales grow double digit every year.
cheers,
Rainer
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
I don't understand why everyone hates on Vista. I need to have Windows on my iMac because I run some accounting software that is Windows only. I bought a copy of Vista the other day and had no problems installing it on my iMac. Everything that I use works fine on it. It seems to boot up faster than XP did on this same computer. Office 2007 opens much faster in Vista than it does in XP. Have the majority of you that claim to dislike Vista actually given it a fair shake? I doubt that you have. I still prefer OS X, but Vista isn't as bad as everyone makes it out to be. I was actually surprised that installation and updating went as smoothly as it did.
"bring the software giant to its knees" ? Please, save the drama for your Mama.
I dislike msft as much as anybody, but I think a company with $30B in the bank, and over 90% of the desktop market can afford a misfire, or two.
As much as I would love to see msft fail, it will take a lot more than an OS that is only semi-successful. Since msft essentially owns the desktop, and controls the standards, I don't we'll see msft brought to it's knees anytime soon.
Mac zealots should try spending some time in the real world.
I can only agree with most of the comments here. What puzzles me is that nobody is really calling MicroStuff on what they are actually doing. Selling "beta" OS to get the money they need to fix it and Nobody from the industry or consumer services will call them on it. On top of it they conspired with other Software developers, notably AutoDesk to make it so none of the earlier releases of their CAD software will run on VISTA and the latest release of Auto Desk Architectural desktop will not run on anything but VISTA. There must be other problems or why would MS be allowing or asking manufacturers to offer the XP upgrade from VISTA. Go ahead say it you won't choke and everyone will feel better!
If Microsoft fails and finaly goes to hell... where the IT world will go?
I used Linux several years ago... yes, Ubuntu (for example) is a good step forward for Linux, but my Dell Precision 690 with 3 monitors just doesn't work with Linux (tested Fedora, SuSE and Ubuntu).
Vista is a big piece of crap, yes... We can just go backwards to XP, like I did after spending $400 in Vista Ultimate, and will be fine for few years. Then what? Go for Apple? OH NO! I'll not just put in the trash 2 $18,000 Dell systems just for the OS.
And I insist, if Apple open its eyes and releases the Mac OS X for PC, they will gain the glory, will be the heroes of the century and save the IT world and will change it as we know it right now. I think this is too much to ask to a company that has a closed mind in all senses (just look at the iPod and their ridiculous "you NEED iTunes" to use this).
So... I see here a very bad future for the computer world. Linux doesn't really work for most people, Microsoft can fail miserably and Apple don't open their eyes... what to expect now? I feel total abandoned at this time. I will be married with XP and download all applications for it as I can to say my life, but the future is a big concern if someone doesn't do something about, but I have some hope in the intelligence at Apple.
Let them burn.
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
I agree; although Vista is not without faults, many of the points you mentioned are addressed or improved in Vista.
In the File Open dialog box, in "Favorite Links", right click on the small area below the list of folders, and click "Open Favorites Links" -- you can easily add or remove folders or links that are shown in that list. You can also get there by clicking on Start -> [username] (which will bring up your home directory) and open "Links".
A good point; Flip3d is useful and pretty, but it leaves some things desired. Happily, a third party has come up with a competent free-ware alternative which beats Expose and Flip 3d in a number of ways. Switcher (I recommend the 2.0 beta) is built on Aero so it supports all the neat live-window-preview features. It has some unique features, like alternative layouts (Tile, Dock, and Grid), and it has a very cool ability to find a window as you type it's title. Also, it has great multi-monitor support.
That is indeed missing!
I've found Vista's search to be pretty handy. For example, if I want to launch Winamp, I can just press my WinKey, and type "winamp" and press enter because it searches programs and the start menu. The few times I've needed search to locate a document, it's been useful. For real, non-indexed, text-based searches, the command line is much better. Windows Vista (and previous versions) comes with the findstr command. Example: to search for "resume" recursively: findstr /s resume *
findstr supports regular expressions with the "/r" parameter.
Nope, doesn't do that, sadly. However, Switcher (mentioned above) makes the lack of Virtual Desktops less painful.
Having only used BeOS 5, I don't know whether or not it got faster from version to version, but it was fast. Vista is faster than XP in certain areas due to optimization (it starts up faster and is more responsive after logging in and application launching is faster, for example). It is more resource intensive (read, slower) in other areas due to desktop composition and neat Aero effects, and possibly online indexing at times (although it's pretty good at throttling for idleness)
If you don't find Task Manager convenient, you can easily use the command line. Example of Taskkill (available in previous versions of Windows too):Taskkill /im notepad.exe You may find
Tasklist useful too.
Assuming you have UAC turned on, you'll probably want an elevated prompt which is Vista's answer to "su". You can find an way to get to a quick elevated prompt using the keyboard
I just got vista. and at first, i hated it. but who doesnt hate a new OS when they first get it? its like walking into your house to find out all your furniture has been rearranged. honestly though, for the average person, i think vista is fine. im not a HUGE tech guy (although i read /. and minored in CS) but i know my way around a computer. i like how vista looks and even though im aware of its (many) shortcomings, i believe these problems dont really make a huge difference to the avg user. most of my friends are unaware of power and memory consumption issues in the first place so as long as programs arent crashing all over the place, they dont really care. i guess this says a lot about the mind state of the average person, but hey...it is what it is.
...please, please, please. This flop was even worse than I expected, and makes my job much easier at work (slowly trying to get more free software in the office). I used to have to explain the advantages of good, free, open software. Nowadays I can just bring up Vista, and suddenly I've got a captive audience.
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
Because the alternative is that it comes with a baby cow?
This is IT for Microsoft! The year of Linux on the desktop has arrived! This is totally new, totally novel, and no one has ever made such a claim before! Obviously joking, but seriously I do remember people being excited about XP and grabbing it as soon as they could, but I haven't seen that with Vista. Anecdotal, sure, but backed up by some facts (manufacturers offering XP downgrades, etc.). Where the hell is XP SP3?
My grandmother used anecdotal evidence all the time, and she lived to be 120 years old.
ME was replaced by a more advanced OS in a single year. Microsoft's Vista replacement is still on the drawing boards.
What will Apple do to keep having record sales?
...
...
Think about all those Linux desktops that people are buying since they can't get a reasonable WinVista set up
I mean - seriously - without WinVista both Apple and the Open Source Linux domains might actually have some competition
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Even Dell knows the value of Vista... they charge you $30 more for an Inspiron 1501 with XP rather than Vista pre-installed! I find it difficult to believe that MS charges them $30 more per XP license.
MS Stock price was hovering around 25$ through the first
half of 2006.
Now it's close to 30$.
I guess Vista & Office 2007 is selling OK.
People said similiar stuff when XP was released.
Lots of people said Win2K was the best OS, Microsoft
every built & they would never switch.
Down, the line when Vienna is released, lot of people
will write that Microsoft should ditch Vienna & stick
with Vista.
The between the lines story here is that this is Ballmer's baby. With Gates taking a lessor role, this is Ballmer's first OS release that was developed fully under his direction as CEO. This IS about Gates stepping down, and it IS about Vista.
It personifies everything that he is: Big, loud, full of baggage, and out of control.
-CF
Is that you, Steve Balmer? At least make it believable when you defend Windows, so you don't give yourself away... No one loves Vista... 'Don't mind it' would be a more believable praise, or maybe 'didn't make me want to slit my wrists today'... Back to PR training you go!
Then turn the effects off you b00b. You have options, use them. Office 2003 is absolutely fine. Can't speak for 07 as i haven't used it.
Finagle's Law - "Anything that can go wrong, will."
Murphy's Law - "If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then someone will do it." (Named after Edwin A Murphy, who oversaw the US rocket sled experiments leading up to the NASA space race.)
"All hands, BRACE FOR IMPACT!"
Another trick I seem to recall using back when I still did Windows was to start taskmgr from an at job, it would end up running as SYSTEM and thereby be capable of killing anything. That little trick probably dates back to NT4 though, so may not work these days ..
I was worried about switching to Vista. So I just added a partition and 3-way-booted my machine with XP/Vista/Debian. After using Vista for a few week it feels great! I have it joined to my little Windows 2003 domain, got DB2, and SQL Server Express running fine on Vista. Running Eclipse, and Visual Studio ide for Java and c# developement. Never going back to XP and I only use Debian once a month for testing. Only tweaks I did was I turned off Aero (not into colors) and UAC (not a fan of alert prompts).
People still use IE? Why wouldn't you be using Firefox?
Windows running on Linux. When you make another 20 billion I'll be waiting for my cut.
Smarter thing to do is rework the sticky parts and make driver dev/64-bit support better in the next iteration.
One thing that should be done is support for other file systems. NTFS is getting old and need to solve fragmentation and then less time can be spent on fs dev afterward. windows on zfs sounds like a nice thought.
This is the same old garbage that was said when Windows XP came out.
This is just more sensationalist journalism.
Vista won't fail.
baby.
You vont be bääk.
"Microsoft should abandon Vista ?"
That's the dumbest fucking thing I've heard since I started Microsoft...
I've been using 64bit SUSE since 9.3. It works, and it works well. Don't tell me that 64bit Linux isn't going anywhere - I know better.
And in case any Microsoft PM is reading this:
How about fixing the god damned motherfucking 260 character path length limit in NTFS that's been there since 199-fucking-4?
I know NTFS supports paths up to 32,000 characters.
Now how about giving us tools to actually read and write paths that long?
It's 2007. (almost 8). Unicode anyone? Jesus H Christ what a clusterfuck of a "rewritten from the ground up" os.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Or are you just really blind?
XP was a big step-up from Win98; decent security, NT base, better look, at the cost of needing more RAM, and not much more when you think about it.
Vista adds almost nothing to the desktop experience that hasn't been done long before. Desktop effects? OSX has some, X11/Linux have a lot. Security? UNIX had sudo for decades.
And are you seriously willing to see the day where 4GiB of RAM is needed to browse the web? I can do that from a 486DX with 16MiB of RAM. I remember the days when 640k of RAM was enough for anyone (And oh how long that lasted).
Vista is just bloat. Microsoft had a chance to do something smart, XP 2.0 or something, by not putting in DRM, adding in the \Program Files restrictiveness, and releasing it around 2004-2005. But no, they fucked it up. And because of that, they'll slowly start to tank. We all know that though the desktop wars are over, Microsoft will eventually lose its spot, and stability will come. (In the form of a more diverse OS market.) And for the trolls who doubt that, where is IBM today? Consultancy.
Windows ME was only supposed to be a stopgap. It was a replacement for the consumer version of Windows 2000 that didn't happen. (That's why Windows 2000 wasn't called Windows NT 5: it was supposed to be the successor to Windows 95.) ME was the temporary replacement, to help consumer-level retailers move product until XP Home came along. Microsoft didn't have much at stake if ME wasn't a success. A little ill will among early adopters and resellers, all people who were too dependent on MS to seriously think of rebellion.
Microsoft had everything at stake with Vista. Not only was it supposed to replace XP for both home and business users, it was supposed to showcase a whole bunch of stunning new technologies and serve as a platform for a whole generation of new applications.
Where ME was a short and simple disaster, Vista was a big complicated disaster that started 5 years ago and shows no sign of ending. First they were criticized for setting the hardware requirements so high, few existing machines could be upgraded. Then it fell behind schedule. Then they had to strip out a bunch of stuff even to meet the new schedule. Then they fell behind the new schedule. Then beta testers started complaining about how obnoxious all the new security features were. Then, despite the extended development period, they still managed to deliver an OS full of glitches, crashes, and compatibility issues.
Now people are actually beginning to seriously question the wisdom of giving one company an effective monopoly of the desktop. Good for users (if anything comes of it), bad, awful, disastrous for Microsoft.
ME isn't in the same ballpark as Vista. Hell, it's not even in the same universe!
that's about as likely as Bush raising taxes ON THE RICH.
you think with all those billions of dollars someone @ microsoft would have bought a vowel?
you think someone over @ microsoft would have bought a vowel...
Today none of them work for M$ any more. I believe that factoid should complete the picture for you.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
>> Not only does it cost too much, it requires more to run than XP, there is still poor driver support ... With Mac OS X hot on its tail, Vista is simply not capable of competing at an OS level with some of the best software around. If Microsoft continues down this path, it will be Vista that will bring the software giant to its knees--not Bill Gates' departure.'"
wtf is this idiot smoking?
When XP came out, it was replacing a 90%-of-all-PCs-in-the-world install base of a largely dysfunctional OS - Windows 9x (or 2K, which, at that point in time, didn't appeal to many home users)
So everyone flocked to it.
Note this was despite:
1. Shoddy XP driver support at the time, much hardware having 9x-only drivers. Situation is nowhere near as bad now, as most XP drivers work in Vista and only the graphics driver model was replaced with a new one.
2. The cost of XP was way higher than 9x/ME
3. The insane resources the software used at the time (~100-200MB RAM occupied by XP, compared to ~30MB for 98)
Now, based on this behavior, some stupid marketers industry who're either religiously in favor of vista or against it, and the idiot who wrote TFA, expected consumers to flock to Vista same as they did then.
This turned out to be wrong, because consumers aren't total idiots 100% of the time. Most of them are already running a working product at home that is nowhere as dysfunctional and maintenance-expensive as 98 was. XP is reasonably stable, and offers next-to-everything vista does, except a worked out sudo-for-homeusers solution that Vista introduced, and which is not worth an immediate upgrade.
The result?
Rather than everyone flocking to vista at once, people are carrying on with whatever lifecycle their PC has, getting Vista (and I highly recommend doing so) if buying a new computer (which also makes the RAM-sufficiency problem completely minor, as ram is dirt cheap and even with Vista sitting on 700MB rather than XP's 200MB, 1-1.5GB of RAM is enough to run most home setups), and the percent of people upgraded resembles the number of people who'se PC's reached their end-of-life for some reason and got new ones.
There's some *relatively* niche groups of people that deviate from this model -
Enthusiasts (minus the anti-vista or anti-microsoft religious ones) may show a higher upgrade %.
Gamers will likely show a much lower one (for multiple reasons - lacking driver support - late, unimplemented features found in xp, etc - due to reworked graphics driver model, no games the DX10 front yet, and most gamers who can do math would rather give the extra 500MB (difference between Vista and XP) in their system to the game rather than to Vista, even if they're running 4GB boxes).
But both of these populations are relatively tiny compared to all the Joes out there in the world who just use their PC for internet, office and photos.
Moral?
A. There's ABSOLUTELY NOTHING fundamentally wrong with Vista. Not the resource usage (500MB more and optionally use basic graphics capabilities found in any, even ubercheap, GPU from the past 5 years minus via unichrome).
B. permissions & sudo for non-IT-savvy-homeusers is a DAMN FUCKING GOOD THING. Not a reason to run and switch, but DEFINITELY a reason to prefer XP over Vista on a new install, given sufficient RAM. Joe-Can-Do-Math user would rather spend 30$ more on RAM initially than run-as-root and consequently call me out to fix his malware three additional times every year for WAY more than 30$.
C. In a corporate environment this has existed forever on NT4, 2K and XP, so it is an UTTERLY IRRELEVANT advantage in that segment. I see ZERO reason why any corporate IT manager should switch his install base to Vista - OS costs more, kit to run it costs more, near-zero added value and some expected level of compatibility issues. Unless M$ gives some financial incentive to go down that route, there is no benefit and great expense. Use XP.
D. Adaptation will happen over the course of
-
First, the editorial makes a good point, but the Vista is going to be abandonware. The general public naivete on the burgeoning Information Age creates a monopoly for Microsoft. With commanding control of the market, Microsoft can basically dictate the features and pricing on the consumer instead the other way around. The editorial really should have advise the consumer not buy Microsoft, period. Obviously, not everyone can abandon Microsoft, but those able to switch to another OS can erode the monopoly to the point Microsoft starts to listen again. Read the sig for further suggestions.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
XP Pro is available retail until June 30, 2008 now.
Interestingly, it's 9:37pm EST and the page says it was updated on September 28th; must be done overseas?
body massage!
You didn't listen, okay. I have a legacy interface that only runs in OS 9, "Classic" mode. It does NOT NOT NO WAY run on ANY NEW MAC, because there IS NO CLASSIC ON THE INTEL MACS. Is that clear enough? No one is recompiling 10 year old software on the new hardware. That stuff is dead.
There is an emulator, which I linked in my original post, it is nice for some things but if you need advanced font support, fancy printing, or more than 512megs of RAM, you're screwed, because it doesn't cut it.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I have heard from two individuals that initially did not like Vista [name theft], but now are quite pleased using it as their main OS. Admittedly, I follow neither the details of the features (present or absent) nor do I follow the reason for the travails of the users. Nonetheless, I cannot see erstwhile MS OS users leaving MS en mass for any reason. That is what faithful means, the worse the treatment the more they persist.
Yes I see some movement towards the Mac, but given the higher pricing and similar lock in, is the flow of the disaffected significant? Eventually it will be, however, I doubt their (MS's) latest OS will do the trick. Yes, every little bit helps, but as in physics inertia rules. Indeed it may be partially user inertia that user complaints arise, but with conventional wisdom and most seeming to follow the MS path, it will take long time to break the habit. I would love to see a loss of 20% or more, but with piracy to hook new users those numbers will be replaced. Because unlike tobacco you are not killing off your best customers by using your product.
As in, "There is no such thing as a free puppy?"
I'm a linux/unix guy, and I've been the only one in more than a few places of employment. Sure, I produce cool things, but it doesn't make them comfortable, it makes them scared, because I'm the only one who can support my stuff. What if I quit? What if I die? Where before they were mostly windows, now there is all this crap that's going to need someone who knows how to work it, someone with more skill than your run-of-the-mill MCSE.
Freaks 'em out. They have knee jerk responses toward my requests for more equipment.
I think both the linux and the mac software libraries suck. Mac sucks less, because Microsoft isn't scared of them, and because companies like Adobe worship them, but it's still not all that great. Where I work we have tons of all three; linux and unix servers, mac desktops (and a couple of Mac servers too), and Windows desktops and servers. I'd like to replace half the windows servers with Linux servers, but so far, no luck. Don't really have any use for Mac servers; they don't play any better with Windows than Linux, and they're harder to maintain, and more expensive, and dammit, servers don't need to be all pretty.
I'm not completely anti-Vista. I've used it; it's buggy, but it'll get better. I'm used to the fact that Windows copies files as slow as crap...XP isn't all that quick either, compared to most Linux filesystems.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I agree completely. Win2K was the height of MS OS development. It had good hardware compatibility for its time, worked with pretty much all the software you wanted to use, and was both functional and stable. My Windows box is running a Win2Kpro image that I built in January of 2001. That install has been in continuous use that entire time and has never failed me. The image has even survived being ghosted over to a new hard drive due to disk failure. It still does everything that I need it to do (MS specific stuff that I can't do with my Linux box - which has been my primary for just over 2 years). As far as MS OS's go, Win2K kicked ass.
While I'm not a fan of Windows I think MS tried to do too much of a switch too fast and is feeling the result.
Apple did similar back a few years with OS 9 to OS X which was also a major switch but the first version they gave away and didn't say it HAD to be used, , the second and third they had PPC computers still and had Mac OS Classic which can run an awful lot of the earlier OS9 apps, Some jumped right away, for many it took years, but the transition happened without too much effect on sales.
Microsoft went with the out with the old and in with the new, now! approach. Partly because of all the security problems also (i believe) partly because they made a lot of promises to the RIAA and MPAA, etc. to get the RAM/CPU hungry DRM technology out there ASAP. No fall back no dual mode emultaion , etc. just Here's Vista!
Will it take off, probably like Apple's case it will take a couple years for enough developers to get up to speed. But in the mean time they are pissing off a lot of people who have stuff that works one day and the next (installing Vista) immediately stops.
I hope some of these newly 'experienced' users will come to the realization that companies selling closed source software can and will pull the rug from under you (with even good intentions) and you don't seem to have much say or choice along those lines. Along with that that they may open their eyes and notice there are other alternatives (also with good and bad points) and maybe it may be time to do some research and make a more informed choice on their long term computing technology.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
To those who'd like to know how this is done: You'll find the source code for the 'hack' here. Be aware though that it relies on an older version of the Windows SDK and you'll need to tweak a header file or two, but you'll find all the missing details in the h2vista thread (as well as a bit of noise).
A $40 price tag for PC-DOS vs $240 for CP/M 86 .
It's 1981. The floppy disk drive is an option. RAM is measured in kilobytes. You make the choice.
Consider the piece of crap that were Windows ME and Windows 2000.
They did just fine, despite the long list of quality problems reported in the tech media (but never noticed by 90% of the buying public). There's no real reason to believe that Vista will do any worse.
The real lesson here may be that the issues that obsess the geek do not obsess the non-technical user.
The user that buys his HP Pavilion laptop from WalMart.
NVIDIA 8600 GS graphics. HDTV tuner card. 2 GB RAM, 240 GB HDD, and a dual core processor. $1300 The OS Vista Premium. The drivers will be there, the performance will be there, for most anything he wants to do.
Stupid people will always destroy the good qualities of every operating system. The only reason this hasn't happened on Linux is because stupid people cannot use it. It's not matured enough yet as an OS to be able to be fucked up by stupid people. Really, the best advice I could give to Linux developers is just...never get popular. It'll ruin Linux without anything having been changed. I've never used a Mac for more than five or ten minutes at a time (though I can say with some confidence that I don't enjoy it), but it took me something around four seconds to figure out how to bind Expose to a key combination. Meanwhile, my computer illiterate friends who all use Macs have no idea these features even exist. Do you realize what's happened here? Computer illiterates use OS X because it's "easier" (i.e. slightly more difficult to break), and end up never using the good features it has because they don't know how. The big difference between Windows and OS X (and I won't include Linux here because it's popularity isn't quite enough to feature with idiots) is that Windows is simpler to break than OS X. It's not worse. Don't go around saying Apple has made a better product than Microsoft, because that's a matter of opinion. A better fact to state would be "Apple has a made an operating system that is harder to break than Microsoft has." In a sense, Apple has "succeeded" by catering to just sheer idiocy. But what am I getting at? All it boils down to is that you cannot judge any system based on what you hear about it. I've used Vista for a few months and it's great. It's definitely better than my times with OS X and better than any Linux experience I've had (Mandrake, Suse, Slackware, Ubuntu, and even a few BSDs). Is it slower than XP? Yes, if you have a mainstream machine, and that's the biggest problem: it doesn't run well on the average computer. Of course you can shut off all the pretty, but people don't want to do that, and that's fine. But if you haven't used Vista, and all you hear about it is from the average computer illiterate moron, then you shouldn't have an opinion. If I all I knew about OS X was from hearsay, it would just sound like a godawful OS ("Well it's grey, and it has some transparent buttons.")
Please, Please, Please!
In the official Microsoft excel spreadsheet they show that in just one day they sold 850 copies at $77.1 or $100,000 worth of sales!
And soon they will be, again.
Why bother.
I don't do Linux, and only Vista has persuaded me to seriously consider Mac. I am one of the many who feel trapped by the M$ monopoly, and I will eventually move to Vista, only because my clients will force me to do so for compatibility reasons. Having said that, Vista is a disaster. It biggest problems are its new features, the sluggish presentation manager, DRM, and security. M$ could fix each of those things if they wanted to, but I predict they won't. Fixing those components would involve rewriting the OS, not service packs. I suspect, when the time comes, I will turn off Aero and security and make do with less appealing graphics and third-party security.
Will this be the end of M$? I doubt it. Corporate America is enslaved, by their own choices, to M$, and only a truly unusable server OS release will cause them to even reconsider. On the other hand, the lemming herd is tiring of jumping off cliffs, especially when XP settled into being what many of us really wanted from a Windows OS. My prediction is that M$ will start losing their stranglehold. Some of us will turn to Mac at home. Businesses will slowly increase Linux use as Linux replaces UNIX for data center applications. But M$ will remain dominant for the next five years. After that, competition will become more intense as standardization makes options to M$ application software available. M$'s next desktop OS release will have much more riding on it. Until then, at least everyone has something complain about.
Yeah! What he said!
... Pay Up Suckers!!! While we sell your ass out the back door!"
Why to hell not just leave Vista alone for what it is.
The MPAA, RIAA, VISA, VISTA for the consumption of consumers OS.
In other words, the locked in, locked down, sell out, operating system of choice for Schmucks!
It's an Internet Enabled Composite Catalog and Credit Card Kiosk.
An Interactive Human Control Terminal wired straight to MegaCorp Microsoft.
A Trusted to Fuck You Computing Platform complete with a No Money Back Guarantee!
Yeah Microsoft. Vista! New and Improved! A longer Whip with a more biting lash, purpose built for Borg Slavers!
Not to worry though. Since Vista is bombing, all the really important parts can easily be slipstreamed into XP via automatic updates.
"Ha Ha
-The Memo
If Microsoft would license their excellent hardware (mice, XBox, er, mice) to other companies, I and a handul of people I know would buy them up in a snap. Really, the dominance of the Zune betrays Microsoft for what it really is -- a hardware company. License the hardware and drop the software and they could finally get some movement on that lackluster stock. C'mon Microsoft, I want your hardware but don't want to abandon my pricey software to use it.
SP1 = XP?
Kevin O'Kane http://www.cs.uni.edu/~okane/
If Reisinger has never seen a more abysmal OS release, he's obviously too young to remember Windows ME. So he must've been born sometime since the millenium. WinME was basically the same kind of mess as Windows Vista: it was bloated and slow compared with its predecessor (Win98), and offered no compelling reason for users to upgrade. From my point of view, ME was worse, because it had the (lack of) stability common to all Windows that were based on the DOS/Win 3.1 heritage.
We are the 198 proof..
"Never before have I seen such an abysmal start to an operating system release."
How many years has Linux been around and how much market share does it have? Should we leave Linux development because it has a small growth rate?
"I see undead people" Warcraft III - Necromancer
Heh, the writer is obviously oblivious of Windows 1 and Windows 2, etc.
I didn't make sufficiently clear in my grandparent comment that I am NOT against Microsoft in any way. I would view that as foolish.
My underlying point is that I am more pro-Microsoft than Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer, by far. If I were the top coordinator of Microsoft, I would not let the company self-destruct.
Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer are, in some ways, still emotionally confused teenagers, I'm guessing. They never had a chance to become fully adults because they were doing Microsoft every day. And money can be a very insidious destructive force in people's lives.
They never developed a feeling of idealism and of principle that guides the lives of happy people.
Stupid article. I use Vista, its fine, not perfect, but certainly better than XP. Does it use more memory than XP? Well, duh f**king duh. I repeat stupid article. Microsoft will scrap Vista as soon as Apple scrap OS X.
Congratulations on using both forms of you're/your incorrectly in the same post.
I remember that. I also remember uninstalling it by mistake and not knowing how to get it installed again (was my first PC). Those were the days. :-)
(hey look, someone has screen shots)
-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+ *** http://www.mountainfort.com *** +-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-
"Hot on Vista's tail" would mean that OS X has a market share close to Windows, which is obviously not true even under the most optimistic assumptions.
Actually, it would mean that OS X has a market share close to Vista, not to Windows as a whole. It's still quite possible that this is false, but we keep hearing about Vista's slow uptake, and I myself have a couple of computer-illiterate friends who (independently) went from Windows XP to Mac OSX rather than Vista, so I don't think it's quite as clearly out of the question.
Favorites.
I coded one for XP some time ago. I'm sure there's others if you care to google a bit.
Oh? I had virtual desktops in XP (or was it 2K) back in year 2000. Windows has supported virtual desktops from NT 4.1 if I remember correctly.
Vista is faster on my laptop (ASUS G1) than XP and has more functionalities.
win+r, cmd.exe, taskkill /?
There's a environment variable USERPROFILE for this. Spaces are absolutely valid characters in folder and file names (as they are in *nix).
First you want folders without spaces, now you want filenames with spaces. Are we contradicting ourselves here a bit? Or just trolling?
Depends on the software. All the software I write uses XML config files.
Visual Studio / SQL Server Express editions are perfectly free and can be used in production.
So you want MS to update system files that are locked at runtime but not to reboot? I didn't know that is even possible.
Maybe you shouldn't be?
You don't know what you don't know.
You can search from anywhere you like. Vista gives even nice notice to you that you are searching from non-indexed places and search might take a while because of that. Or you can add directories and drives to your indexed locations. I added %ProgramFiles% and my D drive to indexed locations. Vista indexes those parts when it's running idle and doesn't lag a shit.
It seems that all this whining crap comes from users who know shit about their systems. Are you totally incapable in learning something new? Stick with XP, or better yet switch to Linux, and stop whining.
You don't know what you don't know.
"Stupid article. I use Vista, its fine, not perfect, but certainly better than XP"
Better in what way, as in not worse?. And if it is 'better' then why are people downgrading to XP
was: Re:stupid
davecb5620@gmail.com
Wasn't it last week here on /. that one of us announced a paper demonstrating that Apple is drifting out of their window of opportunity to react in front of the fabulous Vista, and that OSX will soon die if no better reaction?
ah, yes, I got it: " Is Apple Doing All It Can to Beat Vista? ", here, at
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/16/0339226
Herve S.
"Windows is much more flexible than you give it credit for -- and all without having to re-compile a kernel"
..
Rest of BS ignored
was: Re:Microsoft is horrible because XP is still good?
davecb5620@gmail.com
That's a typical pattern on the stock market. Once the price slides a bit, it often crashes a bit.
Since so much of MS is built on the stock price (stock options as payment for employees, for example, or maybe more importantly, what do you think where their investment capital comes from?), MS can not afford to let the stock slide. Last time it was in danger of doing so, the company bought back huge quantities of stock. Doing so will deplete their famous "war chest", especially since to stabilize the price they have to buy at a high point, not like an investor.
50 billion is an unbelievable amount of money to any of us here, but at the stock exchange, it's small change.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
"Microsoft's marketing budget is larger than the marketing budgets of all its competitors combined. This is what made MS-DOS the instant success it was over the much better (at the time) CP-M. It's what made MS Windows more successful than the better Apple and unix (X-Windows) offerings"
Actually, at the time Micro-soft didn't have a marketing budget. In fact they didn't pay Seattle Computer Products until after they got paid by IBM for MS-DOS. What really made Microsoft the success it is, was the ability of third party's to clone the IBM PC without paying IBM a royalty. Because IBM didn't own DOS, MS was free to license it to these third party's.
'Payment if the initial fee described in Paragraph 2(c) above, and royalty's called for under this Agreement shall be due within 45 days of the date MS invoices their customer for the product'
'IBM recognizes thet MS will be licensing the MS Product Offering 1.1 to third parties'
"Microsoft has understood from the start the lesson that IBM (their initial funder) pioneered in the 1960s and 70s:"
Actually what Microsoft understood was that IBM, the PC company and the OEMs were just the delivery people. But never let the facts get in the way of a good story.
"If you have a big enough marketing budget, it doesn't matter whether you have a quality product"
No, if you have a restrictive locked-in license with the OEMs, then you don't have to have a 'quality product'
"Consider the piece of crap that were Windows ME and Windows 2000. They did just fine, despite the long list of quality problems reported in the tech media"
Well, if you can't go into a computer shop and buy anything but Windows on a PC, then of course it's GOING TO SELL!
Re:Maybe, maybe not (Score:4, MS.Revisionism)
davecb5620@gmail.com
So why did they stop giving free soft drinks to their employees? They probably only saved a few $million a year by doing that -- which is nothing for a company as rich as you say Microsoft is.
"So I switched to Vista, the best OS the planet has ever seen"
..
Buy a Mac, why don't you
was: Vista AWESOME compared with CRAPPY Linux(Score:5, BS)
davecb5620@gmail.com
drm killed it more then anything. the second a pc whont do what i want it to and yes that means ripping my cds or dvds i own to lets say to my pocket video player or anything else isnt ever going to tuch my pc or plugging or installing any pice of softwhere/hardware i please be it 3rd party or otherwise. being so locked down efects users of all types and when they relise wait this works in linux guess what they will remove from there pc. or wait i can acully make a backup using linux guess who wins. M$ better relise drm itsself is a failer and every drm product accept itunes has failed. itunes only had a chance was couse the drm isnt insane and now even that got removed.
How many of you slashdolts who swing off of linux's nuts have actually tried it?
.. :) What do you think about Linux MCE .. see also Linux MCE
Me for one, I use Ubuntu, I used to use OpenSUSE until I got banned from the OpenSUSE forum for talking about the GPL.
"Its WAY better than WinMe for sure. Is it worth upgrading to? Not really, but its hardly crapware"
Only compared to ME
was: Re:Used it?
davecb5620@gmail.com
H. G. Wells got it right in Tono-Bungay:
.. :)
..
Just kidding, nowadays in order to be marginalized, you would have to be accused of being some A-RAB terror'st
You are so right, right now we here in EnglandLand pay the Germans for our own water
was: Re:All businesses SEEK to become arrogant
davecb5620@gmail.com
Linux refers to two thing, a kernel, and a family of operating systems sometimes known as GNU/Linux.
The leadership of "Linux the kernel" has not that much interaction with what we normally think of as end-users, but that is OK, as the kernel has little direct interaction with end users. The kernel is mostly a layer between the runtime libraries (especially libc) and the hardware, so the "users" of the kernel is the runtime library authors, as well as the hardware and device driver people. And the leadership of "Linux the kernel" has plenty of interaction with those.
Then there is the family of operating systems. They are the distributions from places like Ubuntu, Red Hat, Gentoo, and SUSE. Some of these are in good touch with their particular user segment, some are not. Those that are not tend to wither and die. New ones in better touch with a user segment come to take their place. This is called a "market economy" and is exactly what MS Windows does not offer, which leads to disasters like Vista. If Red Hat had tried to pull a Vista on its users, Red Hat would simple have become irrelevant. But with Vista, there is really no other distributor of NT based technology to go to. So the users are screwed.
OK, we'll stop now.
Now, the summary makes Vista sound like it's slower than XP, and it simply isn't. I have a dual boot XP and Vista, and Vista is actually way faster than XP for starting up and the first few essential apps (firefox, mail, winamp etc). I'm using Vista as my main OS now, the XP install is very bare, and still I'm watching the hourglass for 30 seconds or so before any app becomes runnable in a meaningful way.
The only difference in hardware is the dedicated 4gb SDHC card I have for readyboost, but I guess overall Vista's caching and preloading really does have an effect.
There is no need to install the SATA drivers when installing from a Windows XP CD when:
Then XP installs just fine, after which you load the Chipset drivers, Audio Drivers, CPU Driver update, Graphics card driver - all of which you can should either find on the CD-ROM that came with the machine / Motherboard - or you can be organised and download the latest ones for that machine/motherboard ahead of time.
P.S. expecting an OS that was released in 2001 (or perhaps August 2004) to support hardware only available after that time is a tad unfair.
Customers always drag their feet when it comes to upgrading windows, but a big company like Microsoft have ways and means of making people upgrade.
-Getting high street stores to sell Vista on all their new computer
-Higher education courses that teach mostly Windows
-Giving away Windows to students
-Using the poser factor. "Look at me, I have the new Windows... awww you must be poor you're uding the 'old' version"
-Getting fanboy magazines and websites to give them good reviews and act like there are no Windows alternatives
-Badmouthing Windows alternatives.
It's all been done before and proved to be very effective. However Windows alternatives are getting better and there is definitely a stronger movement of people to alternative operating systems. It's just a matter of countering the M$ media campaign and making M$ alternatives are seen and widely available
you're asking them to look critically at themselves rather than others and assess the situation and the possibility of other viewpoints being correct.
Y'know, thinking.
It's a lot simpler for them to belittle anyone else (since if everyone disagreeing with them is a nerd still at home in the basement, their pronouncements are practically godlike in comparison) and with the added advantage that if everyone else is a small personality, that brings them up the pecker order...
"Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.
It's been 35 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment"
In the computer industry everything gets cheaper with time, not more expensive.
As for unfair, I'm a user, I don't HAVE to be fair. That's what I do at work.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Actually, it would mean that OS X has a market share close to Vista, not to Windows as a whole.
That's a bad comparison: Vista is a version of an operating system, OS X is a whole collection of versions. Either compare versions against versions, or operating systems against operating systems. And please bring some facts to the table: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
It's still quite possible that this is false, but we keep hearing about Vista's slow uptake,
"Possible"? You must be joking. Almost every new PC is sold with Vista--you can't help it.
Until Apple starts producing an OS that runs on commodity hardware, any notions that Apple could become a mass market brand are unreal (and whether this is even desirable is an entirely separate debate).
I'm not sure what you guys are running, but I have vista on a 7 year old computer, runs fine on its default. True, I don't use it very often, but when I do, I'm more impressed than I ever was with XP. Everyone tells me vista blows, its slow, hard to use, and crashes all the time. WHAT!?! when, where, who? I got my vista from the university, $14... and honestly, I use my mac just as much and it crashes more. I'm still confused.
That is informative? What turd doesn't know that "Muslims, Christians, and Jews are all children of Abraham"?
Insightful yes! An excellent point, of course. But informative?
By the way, water is wet. Mod me informative.
Jesus believed in the Old Testament, so I don't think a Christian (whith logic) could claim the "nasty bits in the Old Testament" could be from Satan.
Read the books dude, don't just believe what people tell you about them.
Sure, it's different. Why would I pay $250 for Vista Business and expect they same? I have years of tuning into my 600 XP stations. GPO's, ZenApps, et al. I'm going to have to invest some time getting my network ready for Vista.
But so far most things work, or there are work arounds to get them working. iSeries Access V5R4 works. My VB 6 apps work. My legacy imaging system, which we bought in 1991 and uses an ancient bTrieve database & DDE still works. My new imaging system works. Zenworks 10 works.
Sure, I don't want to be prompted 5 times when I change an INI in %windir%. But I can change that setting.
The same FUD was being said about XP when it came out. Many praised Windows 2000. I run both today and think XP is much better (workstation PRO editions.) I'm sure there will be a learning curve for Vista, as there always is. And I'm sure I'll like it even more than XP once I pass that curve.
I won a copy of Vista in a drawing, and while I didn't really intend to install it, I figured I'd at least see what was in the box. Whoever designed that plastic box is a sadist; that was so unbelievably *not* intuitive on how something should be opened. I couldn't believe that I was getting frustrated, and then *infuriated* just trying to OPEN the damn thing. When I did get it opened, part of the plastic hinge broke off, meaning now it would never stay closed. Not only did I not install Vista, I threw the whole thing away, disc and all; if Microsoft can piss me off so much just trying open the stupid package, no jury in the world would convict me for being the psycho I would probably become using it.
Really, I just don't get it.
I've been running Vista since it first came it. It performs fine. It doesn't crash. It adds a bunch of new features that are very welcome (everything from the little bars in Explorer that show HD usage to file indexing). And yes, I use it for gaming, and haven't noticed any real slowdown. And it makes installing anything absolutely painless. Generally, you don't even need to run installers anymore -- just pop in the driver disk, Vista will search it for any necessary files, and it installs everything you need for you.
And no, I'm not a newcomer to the OS world. Until recently, I had two XP computers, a PowerBook, a Linux server, and a Sparc (yeah, I'm so oldschool).
I understand that it's not a huge leap forward in the OS world, but these claims that it's going to singlehandedly bring down Microsoft can generally only come from people who haven't used it.
As for those who claim Vista is brutally expensive, well, it's certainly expensive compared to Linux. Compared to OSX, though, it's a steal. To explain:
Let's poorly assume you bought Windows 95. It cost you $210. If you purchased every upgrade, you moved to 98 for $110, XP for $100 - $150, and Vista for $200 (Home Premium, which is all most people will ever need). In total, you've spent $620.
Windows 95 came out in 1995; Mac OS 8 came out in 1997. Let's assume you bought OS 8 when it came out, and bought every upgrade (which Apple users do almost without exception; I can't actually think of a single person I know who has a Mac and hasn't purchased every OS upgrade). Upgrading to 8.5 (a necessary move for using a lot of hardware) cost you $100. OS 9? $130. OS X? $130. OS X.1? $130. Same goes for OS X.2-5. In total, you've spent $1,110 since you first bought OS 8.
Okay, NOW you can come back to me and complain about the price of Vista. Personally, I find it downright reasonable.
NT-based versions of Windows have a long history of lukewarm receptions when they first come out, the general consensus for each new version usually being "it's not an improvement". But eventuall the service packs start coming out and sooner or later most users of the previous version end up upgrading, if only because the new version comes with new hardware.
It'll happen that way with Vista too. and Longhorn/Vienna/Seven for that matter. Give it time.
Of course the "Worst-Received OS Version Ever" prize (at least in terms of Microsoft products) goes to DOS 4, with Windows Me running a distant second, but neither of those was part of the NT/2K/XP/Vista product line.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Oops, I didn't consider that. You even intercepted my retort w.r.t. alternatives...
We've used NX for a while at work. As you mentioned, it's essentially a steroids-enriched version of the VNC protocol, with proprietary(?) X compression techniques plus caching, all sent over an SSH-encrypted connection. I generally don't trust Remote Desktop over the internet, plus NX lets you serve on non-Windows boxes.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Question: Which major OS has a longer release cycle than AmigaOS and doesn't have the fanatical user base every other OS has (indicating anyone who cares reckons it is rubbish)? Answer: Microsoft Windows Please tell me why the hardware is still available. (could it be the large uncaring user base?)
1. Vista's OpenFile dialogs do allow for customization, and most apps do open the dialiog to the locaiton where it was last used in that app, even persisting that state from previous sessions. .NET apps have been doing that for years.
2. Expose is more important on Macs than Windows. I've used MAc and Windows for years, and Mac has always had a much greater tendency to end up with windows all over the place for some reason. Apple HAD to create Expose to fix that Mac-unique problem.
3. "And ditch the whole "My Documents", "My Music" and "My Pictures" Playskool crap."
This reveals that you don't know what the hell you're talking about. Vista does do awyay with the "My ***" stuff, and renames "Documents and Settings" to "Users". So where XP had "c:\Documents and Settings\[username]\My Documents", Vista has "C:\Users\[username]\Documents".
I'd bet that the vast majority of slashdotters don't know the first thing about Vista, as evidenced by complaining about issues that don't exist, and you illustrate the point perfectly.
As for not being able to use the Escape key to kill things, I find it incredible that a Mac guy would cite that as a Windows problem. I see the spinning beachball of death constantly in Safari, Mac Firefox, and Mac Opera, and the escape key does NOTHING to kill whatever the app is doing. I have to sit there and wait it out, or finally kill the app altogether.
And the 8.3 file system? What the hell are you doing that you encounter 8.3 files "so many times"?
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
"What? Muslims, Christians, and Jews are all children of Abraham. They all worship the same deity."
Monotheism in that part of the planet really began with "Aton", and his earthly prophet Akhenaton.
If you spent enough enough time in that sun-scorched part of the world, you might be able to see the "same deity" too.
Proving that they are all blood descendants of Abraham is rather more complicated.
...the sort of thing we kindasorta take on faith
I recently purchased a Vista PC from Circuit City. The first thing I did when I got home was reboot with the XP install CD, formated and did a clean install. I booted up for the first time and had no internet. My network card wasn't detected by XP...
Now I haven't tried to fix it yet. I will soon, I'm sure it wont be too hard to download the drivers and load them under XP. I'm amazed that they would cripple the computer like that though. To my knowledge, network cards haven't improved much since XP.
So I tried Vista for a while. I didn't mind it, except that it was slower than my 5-year-old PC despite having twice the specs (or more... jesus).
2. Expose is more important on Macs than Windows. I've used MAc and Windows for years, and Mac has always had a much greater tendency to end up with windows all over the place for some reason. Apple HAD to create Expose to fix that Mac-unique problem. ---- That is complete falsehood, every-time i use a windows system, i end up missing Expose, maybe because i'm not used to having every window maximized like I see on most windows, I do more than one thing at once, you know multi-task.
well it is...
superb suburb, nah forget it...
At one point in time I printed out a list of keyboard shortcuts, just because I was amazed at the number of things you can do that *don't* require a mouse on a Windows box - or at least, didn't used to. You can't even do my favorite keyboard shutcut on Vista - "Ctrl-Esc (or Window/Super), U, U" Don't mod me up just for bashing Microsoft. Any of you that have Windows experience know exactly what I'm talking about; they broke our non-mousing abilities.
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Microsoft has once again lost sight of what we really want.
Amen, brother!
I just need the OS to stay the hell out of my way and let me work. XP was already much too intrusive in the GUI. I run XP GUI in "classic" mode, but some things are still just agonizing (whoever "improved" the search function should be fired!). I had a look at Vista and, sheeesh, what the hell were they thinking? Just more and more crap to waste my time and tease my eyeballs (ooooh, shiny).
Naw, there'll be no Vista in my house.
Yes its bloated, etc... but from a usability perspective, I haven't had any issues. I ordered a new PC with Vista about 2 months ago and overall my experience has been ok. I wasn't floored by it...
About all I do on it is surf the web, run some vmware images (for training) and play america's army...
Are there reasons i'm missing as to why I should downgrade?
Since when is 6.5% market share equal "hot on the tail"? The only operating system that legitimately competes with Vista is XP. Give Vista three years (about how long it took XP to gain it's 85% market share) and then get back to me. Microsoft isn't going anywhere...
(n/t)
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I've used it and quickly went back to XP.
Here's something to think about. Computers using XP have been more than fast enough since about 2001. A 1ghz (PIII) system with 512MB of RAM can actually run XP effectively for day-to-day tasks. We've spent the past 6 yrs enjoying 1.5, 2 Ghz, 2.5Ghz, 3Ghz and now dual-core systems running XP. For each CPU upgrade, we've noticed a diminished performance boost - there is only so much fast WE can operate.
So..I'm going to say that anything over 1 Ghz was overkill. Vista, on a dual core 1.6Ghz system isn't really that great. So, MS has wiped away any performance gain going to a higher processor and it STILL stinks. It's like you need a dual-core 2.4 Ghz system with a buttload of RAM to run effectively.
In the history (as I know it) of the introduction of an OS, I've _never_ seen an OS created that required hardware that would be common in 1-2yrs after the OS introduction. Typically, the OS pushes the envelopes of what is already out there but runs pretty snappy on what it is being packaged with. I just don't know how the programmers could have squandered that much _reserve_ processing power and _still_ be demanding more.
SP1 better have some serious recoding done to optimize their code for performance or it still won't catch on.
It's sad, that I can take my 1ghz machine with 512mb of RAM running PCLOS and Compiz-fusion and have it be REAL responsive.
Here are my results:
Check
Check
Check
Windows installer complains that no disk drives are installed. To remedy this there are two options: 1) Install a floppy drive and use the F6 option to add the drivers from the floppy into the installation, or 2) create a custom XP installation CD that includes the SATA drivers.
I chose option 2. I also made sure it included drivers for the chipset, video, and included
The problem is that the Silicon Images SATA controller on that motherboard doesn't emulate standard ATA like the nVidia and most other chipsets do. I'm not blaming Microsoft for not including support for these chipsets, there are just too many to support. That said, they could have made the installer capable of installing drivers off of a third party driver CD.
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
OK, I don't use Vista. So call the fucking cops. "Pay mucho $$$ to upgrade to some bloated pile" isn't really a good solution to anything.
:)
:)
So where XP had "c:\Documents and Settings\[username]\My Documents", Vista has "C:\Users\[username]\Documents".
WOW! MASSIVE difference!! You have convinced me, sir!T
Lest me expand: the point is I have a project oriented approach to things. Most engineers and other people doing anything serious on a computer will. A single bin for all music and all photos and all whatever_file_type is nonsenseical for anyone but low end users, and yet this is what we see on the "Professional" version of Windows.
If I were a video guy working multiple projects, would I keep all my clips in a common bin, or keeps the clips for each project in the appropriate project folder?
Expose is more important on Macs than Windows. I've used MAc and Windows for years, and Mac has always had a much greater tendency to end up with windows all over the place for some reason.
Then you aren't doing any major multitasking on Windows. I pine for Expose on Windows every working day. The Show Desktop followed by unminimizing the desired window helps, but is still halfassery.
As for not being able to use the Escape key to kill things, I find it incredible that a Mac guy would cite that as a Windows problem. I see the spinning beachball of death constantly in Safari, Mac Firefox, and Mac Opera, and the escape key does NOTHING to kill whatever the app is doing. I have to sit there and wait it out, or finally kill the app altogether.
Well, I gave a Windows example, but I never specifially limited it to one OS. This is a general complaint of mine about any OS, Mac OS included.
If it helps, I fear for the next Mac OS X release. Apple is seriously into bloatware these days as well.
What the hell are you doing that you encounter 8.3 files "so many times"?
More than you, it seems.
Cheer up, it's nearly Christmas.
One of the reasons is that the younger gen is now in the businesses that buy MS. And if it's going to cause huge headaches, they know, and they are avoiding buying it. I know I've been nonstop begging my vendor to keep us on WinXP. And when Vista is the only choice, we're just going to use open licenses of WinXP and buy hardware with no OS. Screw VISTA and the DRM, slowness, hidden crap, annoying popups for everything you run, etc etc etc. Total crap!! MS, if you want to sell us stuff cuz we are lazy, you can only get it so wrong b4 the backlash hits.
I'd be glad to go all linux/unix if my company didnt have so much MS dependent crap going on b4 i got here.
yeah, I'm not a boob.
And maybe you didn't really read my comment before calling me one. The problem I cited was specifically functionality. IF you aren't aware that Office 2007 is severely unlike 2003 in ways that have nothing to do with graphics, then you just aren't informed about this stuff.
I said that I understand that people dig graphics and my beef is with less useful software. Vista has DRM and just does less than XP. Office 2007 is much much much less intuitive and simple type a fucking document on than Office 97 and 2003 (peas in a pod, in my opinion, like Windows 95 and 98, one is just a better version of the same idea).
You cannot "turn visual effects" off to get this new version of Office to behave well. This isn't like XP, where I really just want Windows 2000. Also, my laptop runs all this software quickly. The problem is that the software is trying too hard to be simplistic, and has reduced someone who is very competent with office programs to someone who has to click around with menus for ten minutes.
It's back to Office 2003.
Oh, did I mention that the default file saves do not work in Office 2003 without upgrading 2003? That's neat.
Anyway, you just don't seem to understand the issue. Go download the trial version of office and tyr to do something complicated in Excel or Word. Have fun!
views often expressed on slashdot that state that "vista is unusable compared to xp" "xp works so well and vista is broken". these are the views of geeks.. some of whom are not speaking from experience, just repeating views that are easy to rally around in the geek community.
as a reseller of vista and an early adopter of the os i find that it is the best os by far from ms and for myself i prefer it over the rest of the ms series. it is the most usable and so far the drivers that have been released (albeit slowly and im still waiting for more) have tended to give me about the same if not better reliability and ease of use as when i was an early adopter of xp (and some xp drivers still suck for stability (netgear wlan card on via chipset/athlon!! AAARGH!))
people who expect to put a new os that they have never used before into their computer and have it running perfectly in an hour are always going to be dissapointed to some degree... often greatly dissapointed to an extent they wish they never had started the process. and sometimes its jsut because they didnt check ahead to see if their favourite pet utility had a working vista version ready.
to preach to the choir is to say that very few organisations would have rushed out and replaced all their xp with vista. its obvious it needs more time in the real world to get a tailored stable standard image that most organisations would be prepared to use.
i realise this is an AC troll but the bigger troll is the article itself... and yes i posted AC because as an AC it means i have no right to RTFA.
my point is, if you explain to someone that is looking to adopt vista that they are going to have to wait for some devices to have drivers... some of their old hardware may never get driver support... some of their old programs will never run on vista. then they can make a better informed decision apart from... its new.. its kinda pretty.. get it now. these are all the same issues we had when 2000 came out and lesser extent with xp.
most of the people i have recommended vista to, come back to say that they do truly enjoy using vista much more than xp.
having said that... i like the new macs too.
"pretty damn good" means semi-regular reinstalls in the microsoft world.
does anyone with any pride still work on microsoft's OS?
"Vista is faster on my laptop (ASUS G1) than XP and has more functionalities."
Absoloute bullshit, plain and simple - period.
The rest of your post isn't worth reading if you put a comment in like that.
I don't care if love it, hate it, work for Microsoft or only use Vista at work, that is a lie, that's simply not how it works with MOST new OS's let alone Vista.
Stop wasting our time.
Oh, I didn't see you standing next to me when I upgraded from XP to Vista. But good that you know better.
You don't know what you don't know.
I suppose Reisinger's never used Windows MILLENNIUM EDITION?
I'd say chances are, you never tried this, as it ALWAYS works for me.
Another workaround that works well is to make the window INACTIVE by clicking the taskbar or the desktop, and then press Print Screen.
Why is this so hard to figure out for some people?!?!