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Mom Blasts Ballmer Over Kid's Vista Experience
Lucas123 writes "While on stage at a Gartner's ITxpo conference today, Ballmer got an ear-full from the mother of a 13-year-old girl who said after installing Vista on her daughter's computer she decided only two days later to switch back to XP because Vista was so difficult. Ballmer defended Vista saying: 'Your daughter saw a lot of value'; to which the mother replied: 'She's 13.' Ballmer said that Vista is bigger than XP, and 'for some people that's an issue, and it's not going to get smaller in any significant way in SP1. But machines are constantly getting bigger, and [it's] probably important to remember that as well.' Says the mother: 'Good, I'll let you come in and install it for me.'"
Can I mod the submission?
...in learning something difficult?
Ballmer's comment seems really prick-like to me. It probably wasn't meant as such, but still.
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
The mom's body was later found floating in a river. The cause of death: chair-related injuries.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
So the "value" that the woman's 13 year-old daughter saw were Vista's gadgets:
I'm glad the end-user is seeing so much value in Vista.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
If Microsoft were anything other than one of the most dominant monopolies the world has ever seen, this would be a hideous and grave error.
As it is, people just shrug their shoulders and say, "Who is John Galt?"
Translation: We spent a lot of money packing it with bloat.
Translation: No matter how many versions we have, it's still one size fits all. The tension is generated because our developers don't lead normal lives and see things the way ordinary people do, which makes the end product obfuscated and confusing
Translation: We're banking on bloat, the more there is the longer it takes the crackers to find the exploits, but sure as the Sun rises, they will find them because more code has more holes.
Translation: Stock value. If we didn't come out with a new version of Windows everyone had to buy every few years our stock value would drop. We have to keep addicts supplied.
Translation: We rushed it to market. If we had waited until it was really ready we would have seen our stock drop. The premature release was purely driven by profit motives rather than care for our customers.
Translation: Revenue generating cycle - Bleeding edge, counting the casualties.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
/* No Comment */
> She's 13. Am I the only one missing the point here?
So, in short, the 13 yr old had no problem with it, but the mother couldn't understand it, so it's a bad OS? Yeah, that's GREAT logic.
Also, "she's 13" is not a valid retort for why it shouldn't matter that she found value in it. She obviously knew how to use it more than the mother did.
Ballmer was in an impossible situation here. He could make her look the complete fool and catch hell for picking on that woman, or let her 'win' and catch hell for letting a woman beat up his operating system. He chose the right route, for once.
For the record, Vista was the wrong route.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I can't say I'm looking forward to Mom's arrival in #gentoo...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Or, better yet, she can use an operating system that doesn't practically require new hardware for every new release, but operating system of which I speak can take advantage of new hardware when it's available, and that'll be sooner because she won't have to spend $400 on just the operating system.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
so, I guess mom should count herself lucky she didn't have to dodge chairs or endure Steve threatening to "f***ing kill" her..
...in my experience Vista is easier to transition to than most operating systems I've upgraded. Most hardware still works. Every program I've tried so far has worked. Can you say the same thing for 98 to XP? No. OS 9 to OS X? No. Linux to newer Linux? Well, yes. :)
Take a machine that runs 98 tolerably well and upgrade it to XP. Pain. Take a machine that runs XP tolerably well and upgrade it to Vista. Pain. Nothing is new here. You upgrade your OS and you'll probably need to upgrade your hardware too. And purchasers that doesn't realize this only have themselves to blame. Did I just agree with Steve Ballmer? Damn it, get me a razor blade...
Selling an OS is, in this respect, not a lot different from selling a car.
Some buy their cars for the greatest reliability. Some for performance or efficiency. Some people buy their car to have the newest and flashiest on the block. Some for safety. Some because they know the brand or it's what their friends have.
And some people just fall in love with the color or, wow, big cupholders or heated seats, and they're sold.
The same thing can be said to any OS w.r.t a 13 yr old. Even installing/using Ubuntu would be a hassle...The only reason why they find XP is fine is because the 13 yr old has been using it may be for few years. Someone installed it for her when she was 7 or 8 and hence didn't feel any pain.
I would mod the submission as a useless article.
Vista is NOT harder to use than XP. It's virtually the same, especially from the point of view of a non-power user. UAC might be a huge nuisance, but parents or whoever can just turn it off. I wouldn't give a 13-year-old admin privileges to a machine in the first place; you're just asking for trojans otherwise.
Ballmer was probably thinking "either you or your daugher or both are just stupid" but knew he couldn't say it so he was trying to be passive and just said some BS to try and get the lady off his case.
I like basketball!!1!
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why I'm a home Mac user.
She pointed out what everyone's common sense has been telling them, but they've been ignoring for years.
Ironic how she points out how safe and secure the originally very buggy XP is now a comfort zone and Vista is not.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
User is complaining. Allow or Deny?
*click*
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
It's all fun and games until someone gets a chair through the eye.
blog
That's it. I've never seen the public react this way to a Windows release before. Not Linux geeks, but the average Windows users.
Yea, yea, every new release faces nostalgia of the previous release blah blah. It's way worse here.
Average people call Vista shit. Businesses run away from it.
The Vista brand is ruined. Now even if they fix Vista, the brand will never recover.
I hope Microsoft learns something from this. First impression lasts forever. Don't release software unfinished.
I'd Like to know what kind of "analyst" listens to a 13 year old girl on the quality features of Vista? Seems to me the Mother never did a great deal of research/testing of this OS, otherwise she might have known that its a royal pain in the kester.
I'm not defending Vista or Ballmer in anyway but she almost sounds like a plant to make him look like the puppet he is.
What a load of horse crap! The machines being sold are generally more powerful, but the machines are not getting bigger by themselves. But in no uncertain terms is Microsoft stating that people are expected to buy newer, bigger, more powerful machines... and why? Just to run their OS? Here I was thinking that computing was about the data and the programs that operates on it... Goes to show me how wrong I was... it's actually about the OS!
Don't you all see! Vista was a wise move by Microsoft. IT has been long been agreed upon that one major contributor to windows' insecurity is its popularity. If Microsoft comes out with an OS that nobody wants, they won't be popular anymore, and suddenly they'll have a secure OS!!!
DUH!
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
I am a college student and needed to install MS Visual Studio for a project. Our CSE lab is partnered with MS through MSDN. We have access to most MS software. So I went online and noticed that Visual Studios 2003 Pro was on the website. (2005 is not available) Checked out the cd from the lab and went home to install it on Vista. After having trouble getting it to work I went searching for a fix.
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa948854.aspx
So Visual Basic 6, created in 1998, is supported but software from 2003 isn't??
waaaaaa i'm too lazy to learn something new, all computers should be 800x600 touch screens with big giant buttons to press to make it easy for dumb ass 14 year olds and soccer moms to figure out waaaaaa sorry for the rant, people piss me off sometimes :)
I don't get it.
Actually, I don't get just about anything in the article. It doesn't say what the "value" was. It doesn't say what the problems were.
If the "she's 13" comment is intended to explain that she's not a computer-expert (and I think that's the intent, but I'm not sure) then there's all kinds of dumb things going on here. Windows' main problem is security (mainly due to the horrific UI "click here to install malware"), and it simply shouldn't be used by anyone who isn't an expert or doesn't have a deep entrenched legacy that they can't afford to replace.
"She's 13" implies lack of a legacy. "She's 13" also implies lack of expertise. This person shouldn't be using either XP or Vista. That said, Vista may mitigate some of the security problems (especially important, if she's using the computer on the network), but at the cost of legacy compatibility. But overall, it just doesn't make any sense.
Is the 13-year-old some kind of hacker prodigy, where developing on Windows might make her some money or something? The article doesn't really suggest anything along those lines. So how did XP's or Vista's quality (or lack thereof) become a serious issue? It sounds like, "My daughter bought your screwdriver, dammit, and she's been doing an absolutely aweful job of pounding nails." Huh?!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Only on Slashdot do we discuss what is the most appropriate OS for a 13 year old girl. :)
Doesn't this mean that the next version of Windows will be less secure than Vista?
not yer average mom, its your geeky daughter avenging techie mom, and, top level cios, ceos, whatnots to boot !
watch out, she's gonna get you. she's gonna get you good !
be you may in open source, be you may in microsoft, be you may a long hair or a fanboi !!
she's gonna get you, and she's gonna get you good !!
for here comes, THE MOM !!!!
Read radical news here
as others said, nowhere does the article say the *daughter* found it difficult. Mom was complaining that it was too difficult, not that the daughter saw it that way.
Kid probably found it to be no problem at all...
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
I wonder how much Microsoft spends on internet shills. Because it sure seems like some people are willing to defend anything Microsoft does.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
In other comments, Mr. Ballmer was heard to say he was going to "fucking kill" Mrs. Genovese, and all the chairs in Mr. Ballmer's dressing room were found smashed to pieces.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
It's like Slashdot in mom form. A Momdot or Slashmom.
I just added more RAM to all 3 of my XP machines, due to updates running amuck with RAM usage. Now they are back to original performance.
My Vista laptop (that my daughter uses) is just too fluffy for me. Probably good for people that like fluffy and a whole lot of barriers for security.
I still can't get on NOAA's web site and see the animated RADAR with that laptop.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein
Actually, OS 9 to OS X had something called Classic in OS X, so that you could run all your OS 9 programs without a rewrite.
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And Ballmer says "If you switch to Linux, your 13 year old daughter will have to still pay us."
I'm sure he wasn't getting any jollies off on that lambasting. Ballmer needs to grow up. I think he's met his match with that quick witted mother. What the hell is wrong with Ballmer trying to say she got value from it. What a total idiot. The man is so out of touch. Typical of almost all of Microsoft. If that wasn't the case we wouldn't have Vista to begin with. We'd have a product the consumer could be proud of.
Back to XP. Back to XP. There you go. Back to XP. Screw Microsoft and their Vista even with SP1.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
If a baby duck is a "duckling," why would anyone want to eat "dumplings?"
...I've seen Ballmer being a complete prick in a lot of interviews and this is not one of them.
In my opinion, he didn't say anything out of the ordinary (from a guy who wants to sell his product, that is). He could have made the woman look like a complete fool if he wanted to: take the "XP is safe" statement, for instance. How's Vista less secure? Which bad experiences concerning security did she have? My guess? None. She probably has no idea of what the security differences between and XP and Vista are and probably just wanted something else to say.
The "your daughter saw a lot of value" it's not a good argument, I know, but it's also true that the woman was just describing HER experience, and not her daughter's, who was who she installed the system for in the first place. Maybe her daughter didn't like it as well, I don't know, but the interview shows more personal whining than actual arguments.
Replace "XP" with "Windows" in the text and replace "Vista" with "Linux". Now go to a Ubuntu support forum and see if something sounds familiar.
Take a machine that runs Mac OS X "Leopard" and upgrade it to OS X "Panther". Painless. Take a machine that runs "Panther" and upgrade it to Mac OS X "Tiger"-- also painless. It doesn't have to be this way. I am assuming that most major linux distros can say the same thing, probably even more so.
My Photography - http://ian-x.com
The Deathlings (comic) - http://thedeathlings.com
Yeah, Vista is bloat and irritating, and we all hate it on principle. But what's her point? Did it work, or not? She seems to have no specific complaint, just, 'we didn't like it". There's not a lot Ballmer can do about that.
Brett
"Unless you redefine "value" your point is meaningless."
Oops!
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
So you're saying the daughter used the same skillfully gathered empirical data to drive her decision to switch to Vista as a typical manager, while they mother was revolted by it in the same way headcount would to anything management blindly foist upon them?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Something interesting to take away from this. The 13 year old (the future of technology) wanted the gadgets - or rather - the useful yet entertaining and social aspects of Vista - rather than the technology underneath. Technology that serves a personal purpose, rather than technology that simply serves a purpose.
As we've all learned for ourselves now back when we started CS/IT/ENG/whatever, we constantly evolve using what we started with as a base. I can trace my usage of linux/unix now back to first using NextStations and IRIX boxes back in school.
What is Linux/Ubuntu/younameit doing to capitalize on the 13 year old market? What does Linux offer a teenager, or better yet, why would a teenage want to use Linux? Social interaction, gadgets/widgets, entertainment, etc may seem like a waste of purpose and time to us hardcore nerds, but these are very important to non-tech types. Once the 13 year old is interested, then the whole 'get em early' evolution begins.
A great example is the XO laptop. The XO has considered the social target audience of the product like few other hardware and software developers previously (except maybe Apple). As such, every review of the laptop so far by a schoolage child (the target) loves it. For Linux to succeed on the desktop for the masses, developers needs to consider what the desktop for the masses actually is - not what developers think the desktop to be where the masses adapt.
Vista has more eye-candy then XP, nobody's denying that. After the two hour honeymoon is over though, there's not much else in there. Certainly not enough to justify the expense and pain of an upgrade.
No sig today...
This would've been a lot more interesting if she'd challenged him about the actual problems she encountered...Perhaps she did, and it just wasn't captured? Ah well.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
We all know about the extra disk usage (11GB windows dir compared to 2GB for XP), ram usage (about 750MB used by vista even when doing nothing), vista's performance slow-ups etc.
The really wierd thing is, for all of the extra it takes,it doesn't seem to be offering the user any more features or functionality than XP already does (except translucent window borders).
In fact in quite a few cases Vista has less usability than XP. Even with UAC turned off, the extra confirmational dialog boxes whenever you copy files or folders around are massively annoying and unavoidable. Also since downgrading to Vista from XP I can't play my own DVD's on my PC any more because of DRM.
"You upgrade your OS and you'll probably need to upgrade your hardware too." Correction: "You upgrade your Microsoft OS and you'll probably need to upgrade your hardware too."
Neither my Linux nor my OS X needed hardware upgrades.
--
hint: try to look outside the cube...
is to install Mac OS instead of the bloated slow-running WinVista.
Unless she has a geek friend who can Ubuntu her.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
She's 13! And no, she's not a developerdeveloperdeveloper! Do you have to throw everything around?
Eh, here. Throw this $200 video card i bought six months ago.
Oh! Wait its starting...Shiny!
I only read:
Ballmer: "I love your daughter."
"She's 13," Genovese shot back.
I also think there was something in there about a chair being thrown and how he was going to bury her or ____ her or something.
According to our web stats, about 8% of our viewers are using Vista.
That's not an insubstantial share, especially since most of our viewers are probably corporate users and it's a bigger PITA for them to upgrade than a home user.
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?"
With just one irate customer out there with a ton of visibility, he could have told her he'd see to it personally and put a hand-picked tech on the job. "Don't worry ma'am. I'LL handle this!" He looks like a hero in front of thousands of people at the resource cost of ONE measly support call. If he wanted to be slick, he could have dressed up the solution as normal customer support (although he'd be fast-tracking her ticket behind the scenes).
Just bad politicking, man.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Did Vista adopt CUPS?
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
You have us on pins and needles, what was the file format she couldn't use?
They that their friend has X and suddenly they want X too.
Blar.
Since I dont have either, maybe I should switch her.
I have nothing to lose, apparently.
emt 377 emt 4
Indeed. You'll also note that some people value the choice to use the software that suits the purpose. What many of we OS agnostics without axes to grind have been saying for a while is that Vista is important in two ways: Firstly it shows that the dominant vendor of software is losing the plot, so we're watching for the likely successor (probably Google, IMHO. Whoa! A flying chair!) to the post of most evil IT corporation. Secondly, and most importantly, it's disappointing enough people to give ALL the alternatives, XP included, a few minutes under the microscope. That last point shows just how right Uncle Fester was: Vista has tremendous value. Just not the value he's looking for.
Resistance is futile. Reactance buggers it up.
"Actually it is the PERFECT retort, because it shows just how out-of-touch Microsoft is. Teenagers don't care about value, because they have no concept of what value is."
Well, that makes no sense then.
She purchased the OS on the suggestion of her 13 year old daughter, so apparently her opinion mattered at some point.
Either her 13 year old is worth listening to or she isn't, but using her age as an excuse or ignoring her opinion is pretty underhanded when mom didn't have a problem with that very same opinion previously.
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
Hes speaking of Windows Genuine Advantage?
Everyone different though. I put OO in my wifes laptop a few months back and was surprised when she said to me this morning "I like this open office. Its better than word". Probably because she had been using an older version of office (maybe as old as 97 but I think 2000) but it IS possible to switch users.
Quite the opposite Mr. Ballmer, trends are pointing to even smaller computers.
But in your case, chairs can always be made bigger although you might want to watch out, you could herniate a disc.
XP was not finished when it came out and now it is the flagship operating system. This happens everytime, there are problems cause some old POS hardware doesn't have a driver for Vista yet (or at all) and there are bugs here and there in the OS. Time will change it, whether the anti-MS crowd likes it or not, and MS will stay rich another day.
>> Your daughter saw a lot of value. > She's 13. ... and I'm 40. Gimme a break on change.
I'm assuming you mean a machine that shipped with 10.3. Newer apple hardware requires newer OS X versions for drivers. My ibook can run 10.3.5 but my wife's can't.
I built my pc last september. I had to install 6-7 drivers including video, sound, chipset, etc for XP. I formatted and put vista on it in january (along with a new bsd install). I only needed to install a sound and video driver. It was less work for me to go to vista in that sense. I'm running x64 vista at that. On newer hardware, it's easier to deal with vista. It actually has support for some sata controllers built in. Imagine that.
Linux distros are probably the same as my windows experience in some cases. Many people still end up using binary video drivers and perhaps a wireless driver and/or firmware load. It depends on the distro and what deals they have with ATI and nvidia.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
And neither is Vista.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
A mysterious, yet somehow incompatible, format you don't bother mentioning, mysterious. Very mysterious.
This reminds me of Stephenson's In The Beginning There Was The Command Line, which is a little dated now but still pretty funny. He describes the various OSes as different car dealerships, and Windows as an unreliable station wagon that for some reason 90% of the potential customers buy.
"With one exception, that is: Linux, which is right next door, and which is not a business at all. It's a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus. The people who live there are making tanks. These are not old-fashioned, cast-iron Soviet tanks; these are more like the M1 tanks of the U.S. Army, made of space-age materials and jammed with sophisticated technology from one end to the other. But they are better than Army tanks. They've been modified in such a way that they never, ever break down, are light and maneuverable enough to use on ordinary streets, and use no more fuel than a subcompact car. These tanks are being cranked out, on the spot, at a terrific pace, and a vast number of them are lined up along the edge of the road with keys in the ignition. Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free."
And:
"The group giving away the free tanks only stays alive because it is staffed by volunteers, who are lined up at the edge of the street with bullhorns, trying to draw customers' attention to this incredible situation. A typical conversation goes something like this:
Hacker with bullhorn: "Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!"
Prospective station wagon buyer: "I know what you say is true...but...er...I don't know how to maintain a tank!"
Bullhorn: "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either!"
Buyer: "But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music."
Bullhorn: "But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!"
Buyer: "Stay away from my house, you freak!"
Bullhorn: "But..."
Buyer: "Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?""
Um, Leopard is version 10.5, Tiger is 10.4, and Panther is 10.3.
Simple as that. I have XP Pro, a gig of memory and a real nice nVidia card and still the eye candy bogs the machine down and I really strip unneeded crap from my runtime. I don't need Vista. It's like KDE with all the candy. Buggy and sluggish, but I EXPECT THAT with KDE on Linux because I didn't pay for it and it is community supported on the same schedule people mow their lawns and clean their rooms on, when they get to it. When I pay a multibillion dollar company like MS for an OS that took them several years to come up with, I expect it to run a little better and a little more stable.
I really do feel bad for Balmer having to take the position he does. What a suck job that is. Oh wait, I work customer support and hardly agree with the morality of the positions I have to espouse as it is... Yeah, I really feel for Balmer now. Dude, big difference here. You are an exec and can take some other tack here. I strongly suggest you do it and quick Steve. I have yet to hear from or meet anyone who likes Vista. Stop being so damn 1995 all-bugs-are-features-or-customer-imagination and make your subordinated fix it.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Its easy to understand VB6 has huge market share in development.VB2003 is new.
They have to support it.
Exact Opposite, my wife said she was sick of all the notifications she couldn't figure out every time she started XP, and truth be told most of them were windows LIVE update,scans or defender updates (I think) I installed Feisty and showed the wife the only notification she will get to update and the two buttons she had to push to keep everything updated. She pretty much figured out Open office by herself and she hasn't bothered me much since (over computers). I play all my video stuff in Ubuntu (Gutsy), never missed yet, but yeah it took a few minutes at Ubuntu forums to get it all set up, well worth my time.
Cart
Want piece in the bedroom? Pay attention to the wife and give her good service.
My windows got a virus (my stupidity). I installed Ubuntu and it detected my video card, sound card, etc. Software came installed for most of what I wanted to do. My roommate asked me to make it dual-boot and install Windows for her. I did. It did not detect my sound card or ethernet card. I had to boot back into Ubuntu, download the drivers, burn a DVD, and then install it on Windows. I could not download Adobe Reader (some error with the adobe site). Some software would not install either because of service pack 2.
I can't find any excuse why Windows XP would not detect my sound automatically where Ubuntu did. Ubuntu might be more work for certain things, but for me it beat my windows experience. In fact, I could install Ubuntu on my work computer, and do everything I do with Windows.
In other words, Microsoft is slowly catching up with the rest of the operating systems.
Hmmm, not the best comparison. I upgraded from XP to XP SP1 to XP SP2 without much of a hitch. SP2 had a couple hitches but all my programs still run just fine.
The XP->Vista is much closer to the 9-X transition.
One should not theorize before one has data. -Sherlock Holmes-
It may not justify the five year development after XP's release, but it works for me (maybe some games run slower due to DX). I actually like it (including the gadgets).
I'd not recommend everyone upgrading their existing machines, but for a new machine capable of Vista, I see no reason to install XP either.
What if he runs into install problems?
Oops! forgot, this is windows.......
Indeed; there's no "if" about it.
Blank until
I guess it would take a 13 year old to see value in desktop gadgets.
Got Code?
She probably went back to XP because she hasn't been exposed to Linux, one of the perks of being a monopoly.
I switched my family to Debian form XP, switched the default desktop from Gnome to KDE, and my kids haven't missed a beat. It's been especially nice for them because none of that crap gets installed on Linux that was constantly getting installed on Windows, taking up hard drive space, slowing down the machine, making it impossible to shut it down, etc.
...but balmer does have one good point.
:)
He explains how now that vista is doing some things right wrt security, that apps that are poorly written are now broken. But, of course, windoze should never have encouraged the behavior in the first place, and there wouldn't be this mess.
Ok, I take it back. His point isn't good, because it's M$'s fault to begin with
The Geek always quotes the list price for the retail box when he wants to slag Microsoft.
This isn't "insightful," it is ignorant and foolish:
The Vista Basic laptop at Walmart starts at $400 Everex StepNote w/VIA CPU
The Dual-Core Vista Basic desktop with 1 GB RAM, 160 GB HDD and a DVD burner at $350. Compaq Presario w/ Dual-Core Athlon CPU
The Vista Premium HP Pavilion desktop with 3 GB RAM, 2.6 GHz Athlon Dual-Core CPU, 500 GB HDD, and nForce motherboard graphics is $670.
The Vista Ultimate HP Elite Media Center PC with an Intel Quad Core CPU, 3 GB RAM. 1 TB of storage and ATSC tuner is $1900.
The whole point of buying the OEM system bundle is to get a fully configured system, all the new tech and the latest Microsoft OS at a very attractive ptice.
I look at these specs and prices. I look at the price I paid for a mid-line refurbished PC four years ago and I wonder why the geek wastes his breath screaming about the "Microsoft Tax."
No one is listening. No one gives a damn.
If all you need is word processing and minimal spreadsheets, sure, as long as you don't mind the load times. But I've run into situations where I've installed OO on the machines of secretaries who I confidently expected to never be able to utilize the full potential of OO, only to have them blindside me two or three days later with a list of things they needed to be able to do, for which there was no equivalent in OO.
I don't even like OO for word processing myself...Abiword beats it easily.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Indeed, I haven't found any formats which won't play on Kubuntu 7.04... WMV will only play under MPlayer, but what are you gonna do? I can even watch flash content in a 32-bit wrapper for my 64-bit box (something which seems to be impossible under the 64-bit iteration of XP) - all it took was reading the right forum post and running a simple little script.
I use friend/foe to signal strong [dis]agreement instead of mod points. What else are f/f good for?
All I can say is GOOD LORD!! As much of a Microsoft hater as I am, I have to go with Ballmer on this one.
If you do not like the product, then do not freakin' use it! Why is this such a complicated concept? To complain to executives about the computing experience of some 13 year old is just way too much. News flash: Vista is neither designed for nor required by children!
I'll never understand the desire of people to "upgrade" to the latest version of whatever just because it is available - esp. when it comes to something as complex as an operating system - as opposed to upgrading for some specific purpose or well thought-out rationale.
I waited for something on the order of 2 years before making the jump from MacOS 9 to MacOS X - and I'm a die hard UNIX guy (first Mac was a Mac II running A/UX in 1989), specifically because the benefit to hassle ratio didn't quite cut it.
One can only guess how much time this child spent using Vista before deciding to make the switch. Either:
a). No time at all - so she can blame herself.
b). Enough time to make her own decision - so she can blame herself.
Why is this article on SlashDot anyway?
Wrong move indeed. First off, you shouldn't have removed XP until you knew Ubuntu did what she needed. Second, you should have started her off on Kubuntu, which will at least have a familiar interface.
As for your mysterious file format and your "forgetaboutit" OOo install, we'll need more info to refute/help you on those ones. I find that anyone who has used Office XP or earlier tends to enjoy using the latest OOo, unless they have a bunch of VB macros that don't work quite right, or some badly-created templates that don't display correctly.
Really, the only problem I've found so far for normal users is that Word documents don't always convert indices and other complex objects correctly, and need to be re-formatted once imported into ODF.
I think it's more that they are pushing people to use Visual Studio 2005 (which works great with Vista) for .NET developing, but if you want to do VB6, Visual Studio 6 would be best.
So they need to support it.
You think that's bad? I installed Ubuntu, and not only did it fail to recognize my sound card, but it also stole my wallet, beat my wife, and impregnated my dog (and he's a boy!). Figuring that these were just the usual install problems, I decided to leave it running for a couple of days to see if things improved. Big mistake. During the night, Ubuntu planted marijuana all over my house and called the ATF. Luckily, it also blew up my car, the sound of which woke me up in time to escape. Now I'm living in a shack in Tierra del Fuego on the run from an international crime syndicate after Ubuntu stole my identity, ran away with my wife, and stole 300 kilos of Colombian nose candy from them.
I think I've had enough of Ubuntu. I'm going to try Gentoo next.
In my experience, if you want your wife to stop bugging you about computer problems, buy her a Mac.
The cake is a pie
It all started going to hell before that. When people stopped having to punch it manually on to tape and run it through a machine, they got soft.
It's sad really, because it does work to just push out a slow and bloated piece of code and wait for the machines to catch up. Get a bigger, better machine, put a new OS on it, and see the complete lack of difference. Takes the same percentage of memory, pushes the processor just as high. Remember when everyone was up in arms because XP SP1 slowed down machines? Everyone who noticed had a new machine 6 months later, and it was a non-issue.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I don't know why you'd want to downgrade from 10.5 (Leopard) to 10.3 (Panther) and then go back up to 10.4 (Tiger)
I personally think that Apple has gone a bit cookie with the naming scheme for the OS, but who am I to judge, my favorite release was, and still is 10.2, Jaguar .
Incidentally, all linux distros have a feature similar to what you're mentioning, it's called 'mount /dev/hda2 /home'. However, that only works if you have enough foresight to make a separate home partition.
n/t
Sadly, my wife wasn't so impressed with OpenOffice. And she wasn't happy with the way MS Office ran on Linux, even under Crossover. Office was the only sticking point, though. She uses Firefox and Thunderbird, so that was no problem. So we picked up the cheapest possible Dell desktop for her (well, okay, I upped it to 1GB RAM, but other that that it's stock).
Unfortunately, that was before they'd let you 'downgrade' to XP. The thing is slow and apparently getting slower. I'm going to have to wipe it and install XP soon. I wish I could just stick Linux on it, but my wife is hooked on MS Office.
My parents, though... at least they're very happy with Ubuntu. I only have one user I have to do Windows tech support for now, thankfully.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
The value in Vista lies in all of the extra service calls I now get to bill for.
I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy.
From the article:
Moreover, because of the "instrumentation" built into Vista, Microsoft knows what problems people are facing, what drivers are missing and what application compatibility problems they are having, he said.Does that mean what I think it means?
This isn't a very good analogy because the Apple hardware is locked to only a few configurations whereas Windows is "expected" to run pretty much anything that gets past the bios. With all sorts of weird, poorly written drivers. With whatever keyboard, mouse, joystick, video card, network card ... hardware widget any Chinese manufacturer ever stamped out.
Linux tends not to break things when upgrading, but again the number of different gizmos that most people "expect" the various distros is fairly limited (look at the wireless card issues for an example). Now, Gates and Company have gone down this path on purpose, made it their life's ambition to run on everything, everywhere - but it's still an apples to Linux comparison.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Yea, because only a monopoly can afford to ignore some random schmo's uninformed opinion.
Seriously. We all agree that Vista has issues; some of them are the problems you'd expect of a windows pre-SP1 release...Bad drivers, no drivers, bugs, etc. The rest of them are either here to stay, or able to be disabled. That's the same crap we always have to eat from a Windows release.
But the fact that some non-savvy mom and her gadget-loving 13 year old daughter don't like it is supposed to mean something? When was the last time you asked someone like that for OS advice? This same chick will be doing the same whining in 10 years because she doesn't want to switch off Vista for XPII, or whatever the next release is, because she can't handle the "new" windows.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I think you meant 'User is complaining, "cancel" or "deny"?'
emt 377 emt 4
To those ready to post "redundant" I'll have you know that there were only two posts before I hit submit and neither had anything to do with chairs. Then everyone fucking posted chair-related jokes all at the same exact time. About 8 in the space of 30 seconds. So ease the fuck up please. At least I wasn't trying "first post" for chrissake.
If you want wmv playing under kaffeine, I'm guessing that installing libxine1-ffmpeg would fix it.
For Ubuntu users, if you want to get stuff working in gstreamer (i.e. for totem), you might want to install w32codecs or w64codecs (found in medibuntu), gstreamer-0.10-ffmpeg, and gstreamer-0.10-pitfdll (this last one provides support for the w32codecs DLLs), along with ubuntu-restricted-extras.
But at some stage the upgrade stops - my Mac can't be upgraded to the version of the OS above the one it has, the hardware won't support it (or the OS won't support the hardware).
"Ever" has always meant "forever till now".
While your comment was funny, I had to reread it a few times to understand that the subject was unrelated to the body of your post. As has been explained before /. was around at a time where the discussions happened in the main on mailing lists, so the subject line is a holdover from then.
I would argue that the subject lines are useful in outlining the content of what you want to say - they are helpful in scanning and taking in the point you're trying to make. When you misuse the subject lines, people waste time trying to parse it and get confused. I'm a native English speaker too, so I'd imagine someone who understands the language less well would be even more confused.
Oh, and that goes for those that use the subject line as part of their first sentence too. Shall I demonstrate? Compare this:
to this:
This is nothing personal, I'd just like to see people making proper use of subjects. Others would like to see that too. It makes the discussion look nicer; and let's face it, we all come to /. for the discussion. Cheers.
If all you have is a grenade, pretty soon every problem looks like a foxhole -- MightyYar
That does have an impact on security, but mostly because the features it's now necessary to be backwards compatible with were never designed to be secure or stable in the first place in the old home versions of Windows. For example a lot of Linux features are designed to work in the same manner as old UNIX equivalents, but there seem to be less gaping holes in its security despite providing its own support for legacy code and in some cases extremely old hardware platforms.
This kind of cruft certainly doesn't make an OS any easier to secure, but in the interests of creating a reasonably stable platform for developers, you can't just re-write the entire feature set every few years and expect software to be ported. It seems to me that if well enough thought through it's very possible to make a secure OS while remaining mostly backwards compatible (e.g. by emulating old and insecure features on newer hardware).
If its any help, I have VS 2003 (and 2005) running on Vista (32-bit) at work. The biggest problems with VS 2k3 are that it pops a warning about compatibility when it starts, and it took a bit of work to get ASP.NET 1.1 stuff working again (I have some old .NET 1 projects I maintain, without customer budget for an upgrade).
I tried both on 64-bit Vista, and VS2k3 barely worked at all.
Lead developer, http://wisptools.net
I also am a new Vista user -- I've had to learn to deal with it, since I have my own business apart from my full-time engineering job and most of my clients that have bought new computers have bought them with Vista. The main problem with Vista is that most mature users (let's say, between the ages of 40 and 80 -- I'm 54) have gotten quite used to XP, which, in my experience is the 2nd most popular Microsoft OS ever ( Win 2000 being the most popular, Win ME being the least), and have a steeper learning curve than going from 2000 to XP. Users who first complained about being "forced" to upgrade to XP, stopped complaining once they actually starting using it, and found it actually was a terrific OS. The paradigm shift in Vista, is a bit too much, especially since many users don't understand why some things that were not a problem were changed. Did the GUI have to change so much?? It's seems like there was a major "geek-fest" at Microsoft, with a bunch of engineers saying "isn't this cool", not taking into consideration that the average user doesn't care about "cool", they care about getting their work or "play" done. One client of mine immediately went out and spent $90.00 on Nero software because he found the "rip and burn" of media player so unintuitive (is Microsoft trying to be more like Apple ?!?). The change in the user interface this time is as great or greater than the change when we jumped from Win 3.11 to Win 95, but it's arguably NOT an improvement, but seems an attempt to force a paradigm change that "somebody" thinks is important. It's also objectionable that Vista is being forced on us like no previous OS. The stores around here want an extra $400.00 (!!) if you want to buy a new computer with XP instead of Vista. Come to think of it, I wonder if I can get $200.00 knocked of the price of the PC if I get it with no OS all, and then load Ubuntu?
She's been using it for over a month now, and is happily using it, she has wireless, Open Office, Kontact, kmail, Firefox, her favourite linux games (like supertux) basically everything she needs. She plugged it into her university network using an ethernet cable and was able to get on the net automatically.
-- Fuck Beta
That's like saying a vegetarian changes their diet without....
Damnit! I blew the punchline! AGAIN!
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Absolutely not true. You made the mistake of switching her applications, not her OS. Next time, ween her applications to Firefox, Tuhnderbird, and OOo before you switch her OS. I've done ten or so Fedora and Ubuntu installs on friends and families computers. If my 75 year old mother in law can use Ubuntu, with all the MS Office (mostly powerpoint) junk she gets from emails from her friends (Oooo! Another cute cats presentation!), then anybody who _wants_to_ can use it. Document compatibility is not a problem anymore. As for the super-brother's videos, have him send it in a standard format. If it's a specialty format that VLC or mPlayer cannot read, then it can probably only be read in some proprietary program that costs hundreds or thousands of dollars. Bet you pirated that, didn't you?
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
I'm willing to go with that whole analogy, but I'd add that Mac OS X is akin to a corporation most people generally admire taking in a large share of these free tanks, taking some of the parts off that are unnecessary (or potentially even harmful) to the typical end-user/consumer (say, pulling off a machine gun turret), giving the tank a smooth, comfortable ride, a great sound system inside, and an attractive, sleek exterior - and then selling these "value added tanks", backed with their full support (free training in their stores and so forth).
Meanwhile, the GNU crowd has mixed feelings on all of this. Some think it's great and bought one of these "OS X tanks" themselves, while others still can't grasp why people would want anything other than exactly what they offer for free.
software obesity.
Well the problem is not Ubuntu. My wife MUCH prefers Linux over Windows. Of course she also worked at Sun for 10 years. You must have one of those "WinWives" - you know, kinda like the old Winmodems? Time to upgrade dude... :-)
That is, if you know a guy named Mac, otherwise you may need to give her to Mike or John.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I switched my wife's to kubuntu a couple years back, and it took her about a day to get used to it. Actually, we weren't married at that point yet. Sometimes I half think she wanted to ensure a contractual obligation for tech support. So I guess it's girlfriend's computer yes, wife's computer no.
Everything will be taken away from you.
Perhaps it thought you weren't a human being
I had to look up ATF (I'm not from 'round there). BATF - Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms. Interesting combination. I don't know where to start taking the piss.
Interestingly enough, if you install Gentoo it will not only blow up your car but actually build you a new one.
From raw materials.
Make sure you specify USE="steeringwheel trunk windshield". You'll have to wait a while though but it will be worth it. It will rebuild itself every week or so and occasionally change colour for no accountable reason.
After three years you will discover that USE="-clutch" would have been a good idea when it suddenly becomes a manual shift without warning. You should have paid attention to the build logs when emerging --deep --newuse world. Oh, and it goes like stink most of the time. Ok so sometimes you have to fix it yourself by renting a foundry and full workshop and talking to Formula 1 mechanics but hey, this is a ~x86 car.
...if all his nerve endings evaporated.
He has no idea what users want, he only knows what he thinks they should have (DRM, no thank you).
Translation: Users recognize the non-value MS put into Vista. Even marginally technical 13 year old girls.
This should convince the remaining fanboys that Vista is a big steaming pile of FAIL, but sadly, it probably won't.
I tried this already. I thought it would eliminate all my home-support calls if I got her a Macbook.
I was wrong.
You can record more than 30 seconds in the old sound recorder by recording some silence and then copying/pasting it a lot until the sound clip reaches the desired length. Another Vista feature down the pan! I actually find myself using this a scary amount when I haven't installed any proper recording software on a machine. Quite why they imposed a 30 second limit in the first place when the program can clearly cope with clips of any length is a good question though.
n /t
you had me at #!
It's amazing how often people forget that cardinal rule of security, isn't it? Of course, leave it to MS to have their new OS beat people over the head with it. I am SO sick of the UAC popping up when I run programs I've proven to myself are safe. Why isn't there a way to say, "Yes, I'm sure I want to run this program, and don't freaking ask me again!"?
I eliminated support by allowing her to choose what she wanted. When it breaks, I tell her that it was her choice to use that crap. If she wants my help, she plays by my rules.
Thankfully she is smart enough to solve the windows issues that pop up, so this scenario actually works.
funny note... to avoid support calls from the mother in law, I gave her an old IBM laptop running ubuntu. The only time she claims it didn't work was when the ISPs DNS was in the toilet.
Questionable. I've used OO for about a year now. Works great. And you can do stuff you cannot do in Office - well, I quit using Office so maybe 2007 introduced a new drawing program and improvements to Wrod et al.
My wife uses Linux every day and the only support issue I have is when the cable modem fails. Far better than futzing with iTunes and Windows XP. We still have Windows on one box at home but I rarely use it. It doesn't handle the DVD drive well. Go figure.
I use Fedora but Ubuntu looked pretty good to me too. Just had no need to switch.
TimJowers
P.S> Tell you brother-in-law to use a non-Proprietary file format. That's what most of the rest of the world does. Windows and proprietary formats are buggy whips.
Expect Freedom.
I installed Ubuntu on my girlfriend's laptop a year ago, when the computer was brand new. It is set up as a dual boot. She has yet to start XP, whereas I have started it twice. (Think of the size of the security updates... Shudder...) I asked her some weeks ago if she had ever used XP on her own computer. She replied: "Why would I need to do that?"
I might add, she loves the look of Ubuntu (just needed to move the Gnome panel to the bottom). Some Compiz Fusion magic, OOo and Firefox, and she hasn't looked back.
-- As OT as it gets
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Can't argue with that one. The wife liked my iMac so much, she took it in the divorce.
There are two fatal blunders a man can make:
1. Never start a land war in Asia
2. Never try to divorce a divorce lawyer
Proverbs 21:19
Got a high end machine: quad processor, 4G RAM, fast drives, and Vista's Media Player can't play MP3s from my hard drive without skipping. (No I didn't have other software running at the time.)
And here I was, thinking that solving spousal tech problems was a bonding thing.
Hmm... libxine1-ffmpeg is already the newest version. To be clear, wmv will play under kaffeine -- but there's a weird bug on some of them where the frame will quit drawing anything not in motion rendering the video unwatchable. I haven't cared enough to look around to see if there's a fix for kaffeine, since Mplayer doesn't suffer from the same bug (and I check to see what format pr0n is in before I d/l it -- she has to be really hot to bother with the hassle of wmv).
I use friend/foe to signal strong [dis]agreement instead of mod points. What else are f/f good for?
I have found my Linux desktop to be far faster than Windows. I do SW development however so compile time is an essential issue. In reality, Linux matured as a desktop at the end of 2006 and Windows, OSX, and various Linux distro's/configs are all equivalent from the usability stance. Linux and Windows all have a few issues. Moving to Linux from Windows can be painful learning but moving to Windows from Linux is even more frustrating. Softie played their last card by changing the UI for Vista. If a usedr has to experience pain then they might as well move to Linux; thus, Microsoft nixed their one competitive advantage: momentum.
BTW, installing software is far easier on Linux than Windows. Just one example of where Linux is actually better than Windows. Also, OO runs better on Linux. On Windows I've seen font and other issues. Guess Microsoft needs to fix a few bugs in their OS or admit Linux is a better platform for office computing!
Expect Freedom.
Or just give her a Fotolog or MySpace account.
Minti: What's that huge shuriken in your back?! Kin: It's the instrument of my victory.
You must be new to this game. Here let me help you with some other good ones: Yes, she looks good in that outfit. Yes, you like what she made for dinner... You kind of like it burnt anyway. Yes, she is still as attractive as the day you met. No, you don't mind Hugh Grant movies. Yes, you like her family. Of course that restaurant is fine with you. Yes you have time to get those chores done this weekend. If you repeat those things enough, you may just get away with 3 computers, 4 remote controls, a basement full of electronics, and an occasional roll in the hay.
burrocrisy
and that would be what? Ruling by jackasses? Never has a slashdot misspelling been more apropos
Uh ... then Windows should offer to update itself, just like Ubuntu does. Heh.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Monopolysoft plays "find-the-applet" with every release of their OS. Imagine how stupid I felt when it took me 30 minutes to setup printer sharing for a friends home network when they already had it working on some of their computers. Ended up having to jump around to three different settings dialogs in various applets to get that darn thing setup. And searching on the Internet DID NOT HELP. Ironic that in a few short years the Linux desktop has surpassed Windows in usability and support. Guess $1-$2B in excess cash a month is not being invested properly. When will the market start funding innovation rather than stagnation?
P.S> Glad to see someone is studying CompSci. I thought young adults had given up on tech. Its a mess with all of the poorly trained and unskilled people out here and the market demand going up by the month. Still, you can make alot more money being a doctor, lawyer, RE developer. But not as challenging!
Expect Freedom.
This isn't a very good analogy because the Apple hardware is locked to only a few configurations whereas Windows is "expected" to run pretty much anything that gets past the bios. With all sorts of weird, poorly written drivers. With whatever keyboard, mouse, joystick, video card, network card ... hardware widget any Chinese manufacturer ever stamped out.
I read this and wonder why everyone magically expects OS X to work so much better in the same situation, if all the anti-Apple-hardware whiners got their wish and Apple sold it for generic x86 machines. No OS that has to support "lowest common denominator" with dodgy third party provided drivers is going to work like OS X does running on a limited pool of Apple-branded hardware.
~Philly
Me, myself... I got tired of trying to force my WinXP workstation to behave like a Linux box. I shrunk down the WinXP partition(s) and loaded Ubuntu. VMWare gives me access to the enterprise XP load for the few, rare times I need it. And now I do almost all my work in my favored desktop environment (better, faster, more reliably, etc.) - even operating in an environment that's heavily dominated by Microsoft.
To each their own.
I have a G3 pre-USB Mac, too... what year was that thing built in?? It barely supports 10.2. But I can run 10.2 on it, and it's very usable.
I have a PentuimII machine as well, from about the same era... I'm not going to even try running XP on it, or even a PIII, though. It might install but it wouldn't be terribly usable. OS X 10.2 is quite usable on that G3 333Mhz machine, oddly enough... it'd be even better if I bothered to disable some of the graphics stuff ( drop shadows and such ), but I haven't found that I need to.
It's a pity that Apple didn't want to bother with continuing to support their pre-USB machines in OS X, but really, I have a hard time faulting them, even though I own one. Few people buying a commercial OS based computer today expect to be installing new versions of a different OS from the same manufacturer on that same machine over 10 years in the future. It's safe to say that if you've been running the same machine for that long, you're getting a long lifetime out of your hardware, much, much longer than average. A Mac Mini is cheap and 20 times faster than your old machine- go get one. If you're clinging to some "Classic" app, pick up a G4, they're not terribly expensive used... though they're holding value a lot better than my PII...
ppppfffttt....
Just the other day, the Linux-resisting spouse made her own mp3 CD's for the car using K3b.
Oddly enough, she thought that this would be too much of a hassle under XP despite
the fact that the files in question are accessable to anyone in the house via the
home network and smb or nfs.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
As an adult, please define value for the rest of us.
Saying a teenager doesn't understand value, just shows that you don't understand value. Value is absolutely relative to the individual, and it varies wildly based on fashion, personal experience, age, sex, race, everything.
When you say that someone of a different demographic from yourself "doesn't understand value", what you're really saying is that you don't understand them, and that, therefore, you think the things they value are meaningless.
There are a lot of people who will profit from those people and their "meaningless" values, while you sit smugly telling them they're stupid for valuing those things anyway. Microsoft has become a monopoly doing this crap. It's heart and soul why Office beats the crap out of Open Office. OSS people need to take the needs of non-geeks seriously.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
You can turn UAC off, y'know. I don't mind Vista for the most part, but it is getting progressively slower :-(
Ballmer's defense in the article is that Vista has proven valuable to corporations and IT staffs. And this is exactly the point. Microsoft is interested in 1,000+ seat adoptions, where the companies have an IT group that can customize the install, create custom templates and VBA-based applications for the office apps, and where everyone uses exchange and sharepoint.
Microsoft products are broken for everyone else because they're not written for everyone else. Once the latest version of Windows and Office permeate the workplace, Microsoft users in the office drives sales of Microsoft products in the home.
It's all about the corporate customers.
Doesn't the XO run Linux?
There's probably less "wrong" with Linux for home use than most imply.
It probably comes down to ease of install, UI and media apps, which is maybe why Ubuntu is gaining traction.
Lies about crimes
This kind of thing didn't get published. I'm sure Microsoft talking heads have gotten an ear full from others over the years and they ignored it then. They should totally ignore this incident too. Write it off as a PR event that didn't go well or a "nut case slipped through the cracks" and further isolate Microsoft execs from people who aren't part of their current social circle.
I want all of Microsoft doing many more of the same kind of decisions that went into Vista. In fact, give the Vista managers total oversight over even more Microsoft products. Put a shiny star on each of their reviews.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Yeah, I could, but I actually agree with it in general. It's the constant nagging about programs I've already allowed that bothers me. I'm actually fine with it popping up and saying, "Hey, administrator access for component X is being requested. Did you know about that and initiate it?". It's when I've got one specific program that I use once every 30 minutes, and it asks me if I'm sure I want to run it every single time that makes me want to whack MS security folks over the head with a clue-by-four.
As for it getting slower, my main complaint in that department is its seemingly random disc thrash-o-thons. I've got all the automatic backup and drive-shadowing features that I can find turned off, and it still decides to do constant access to the hard drive every now and then for no obvious reason. If I could solve that one last issue, I'd be fairly happy with it.
Of course, I'd be even happier if I could run all the games I want to play under my Linux install. =)
I knew it was buggy, it was supposed to call the DEA!
~S
Well, I guess it's a matter of taste or something. I've installed Kubuntu on my fiancee's pc and she loves it. Doesn't want to go back to windows ever again. She's also got an ibook, and is thinking about selling it (it's quite old) and getting a dell notebook and put ubuntu on it.
Oh and she says OpenOffice is way better than word. She writes papers for the university all the time and finds the pdf-exporting very useful.
so.. go figure.
"Luck is my middle name," said Rincewind, indistinctly. "Mind you, my first name is Bad." -- Terry Pratchett
Its been interesting to watch Steve go from wild=and-crazy VP of Sales to CEO. The very talents (and he has talents) that made him a really good VP of Sales are not the talents that the CEO needs. Ballmer is the epitome of the classic sales guy. Nothing strategic,all tactical. Being tactical and able to execute NOW is what makes a sales guy good. M$ culture is built around having a CEO with both a vision of the playing field and a vision of how technology can be exploited to keep the Corp. competitive. These are very strategic, core capabilities. A company like M$ can't thrive when the CEO has to call his geeks and ask them what will be hot in a few years. They need the CEO to be the person who spots the hot stuff before most (not all) people know it is hot.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
I actually bought a Mac for my wife, and she hated it. She's not big on change. She didn't like different fonts, she didn't like having the app menus separated from the windows, and she didn't like losing MS Outlook. I ended up installing XP for her in bootcamp, and it's just the most stylish windows box on the block. I wasn't going to post on this thread because I didn't feel like that was much of a contribution, but her father IS actually called 'Mac.'
In my experience, if you want your wife to stop bugging you about computer problems, buy her a Mac.
NO, NO, NO!
I did exactly that. My wife had 4 wishes: be able to read e-mail, use word-processor, print things out, read her favourite website and I thought macbook would be perfect for her. It was one of the biggest mistakes I've done with computer ever. Guess what, nothing works:
a) E-mail. gmail poorly supported under safari. firefox experience constant lock-up : google for "firefox freeze mac" if you don't believe that
b) word-processor: neooffice useless, word is incredibily slow on a dual core machine and constantly brings machine with 1/2 gb to swapping. I know it is rosetta emulated, but this is not my problem.
c) Printer - had to install compiler suite to compile driver for linux to get my konica minolta working. It felt like early days of linux, haven't done that in ages.
d) Websites: movies didn't work and flip4mac didn't help either. My wife was furious. Luckily the converted to flash movies.
So, she's used to it now and doesn't give me much trouble. Every time it comes to a grinding halt with spinning wheel she just patiently waits, she's given up swearing at it ages ago, but I still feel shit.
Never, ever again.
I've heard the Deny option taps a few 12V rails to send a nice arcing surge through the keyboard/mouse to silence the user..
How about a machine that runs XP tolerably well, try downgrading it to run windows 98 and OMG!!! it runs so completely frickin lightning fast it is amazing, like that time I loaded DOS 5.0 on my pentium 3, it ran at blazing speed and ran windows 3.1 like no tomorrow!!!!!
So you take a machine that run Vista Tolerably well and install XP on it and "OMG Ponies iz so faster on dee computer" is what the 13 year old girl will say to her mom.
Buy a vista machine and downgrade, this is how you get more speed!
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
There, fixed that for ya.
Question everything
I'm actually wondering that myself. I mean, after win XP decided to format the wrong drive (apparently it's known to do that - wish someone had told _me_) and I lost about 6 months of my life, I decided to switch completely to Mandriva. No going back. And I haven't needed to. And I have yet to find anything it can't handle once you find the right programs.
Never send a marketing monkey to do PR.
... emotionless management-speak gave way to a mother's frustration...
He could've summed up his whole response by saying "Pffft. Your daughter disagrees. Next question!"
Yeah, I'm sure you'd need to jettison some parts of your brain to get into management.
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
Anybody want my mod points?
Ok, here's what broke for me (some are still broken):
1) Logitech Harmony 880 remote. Software would not run or install on Vista.
2) mAudio: Music software would not run or install on Vista.
3) Symantec AV version 9. Needed an upgrade to a special version 10, was not free.
4) ps tools: pslist, pskill, etc.
5) BIOS motherboard applications. Could not monitor fan speed, system health, etc.
6) Cisco VPN client. Needed to run a beta client that does not support Cisco firewall.
I actually had better luck going from Win98 to XP.
But did you ask what to do on the forums? There's a very friendly community out there, and someone must have experienced exactly the same problem. And you've got the code, so you can see what's causing it.
What does Linux have to do with it? Her daughter was using XP, but she wanted to use "gadgets" (whatever the hell that means) so she asked her mother to "upgrade" her to Vista. But two days later, she went back to XP because "It's safe, it works, all the hardware is fine, and everything is great." In other words, she had trouble with something that was new and unfamiliar so she went back to something she was already comfortable with. If she had been comfortable with Linux, I am pretty confident she would have trouble switching to XP, especially if there was no one who had experience with it able to help her.
It sounds to me like your wife had a similar experience. She was used to using a particular OS (XP) and when you switched her over to something unfamiliar (Ubuntu) she had difficulty with it.
My parents bought a new VCR a while back and had difficulty with it at first too. It didn't have the same features as the old one, some things were similar but you had to take different steps to accomplish the same thing. It's not that one was "easier" to use than the other. They were just used to using the one they were familiar with and had to make an effort to learn how to operate the new machine.
I recently picked up a used ibook for my girlfriend, who has used nothing but Windows up until that point. Guess what. She had to get used to doing things differently. The application launcher works differently than the Start button in Windows. When you launch an app, the menus for that app appear at the top of the screen, not within the app like she was used to. When you minimize an app, it puts a little black triangle under its button on the launcher to indicate it is running but minimized. Simple, right? But if it's not what you are familiar with, it takes time to get used to. Especially if you're not a geek, who loves trying new things.
I'm not discounting the experience your wife had, but if she had been comfortable with Ubuntu and you suddenly switched her to XP I think you would have been in the same boat.
I don't care why you're posting AC
Someone here is actually still waiting for you to come back and explain what format it was!?
Want piece in the bedroom? Pay attention to the wife and give her good service.
Wow! A recursive Freudian slip!
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
Oh, and you'll be taking the piss in the little cup they provided. I hope you haven't eaten a poppyseed muffin recently.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
funny isnt it? as much as i don't like vista, it comes with a guide which will help a noob, and you can find anything on google.... but sum people just havent got to that yet lol
What a ridiculous argument. Vista is mind-boggling simplistic enough as it is. In fact, they went to great lengths to make it more user-friendly: made dropdown menus invisible by default and added the common task bar, so as to not overwhelm users with options, added a nifty search bar right into the start menu for easy access to programs and documents, autodefragging, etc. The only thing I think could stump a 13yo would be UAC.
:wq
A long time ago, I heard of the "13-year old effect"... which basically says that whatever a 13 year old wants today will be expected when they enter the workforce. Never discount the opinion of a 13-year old! If gadgets and 3-D interfaces are what gets them excited you better bet your a$$ that those features need to be in the operating system... especially one that goes 5+ years between versions.
Ballmer also gets that corporations want a more secure and reliable desktop platform for Microsoft Office and e-mail... and to his best effort he attempted to point out these "values" were more important than a few gadgets. He couldn't care less if someone has trouble upgrading because he gets his OS revenue from OEM and corporate licenses, not a few excited users willing to shell out for an upgrade that doesn't work on old, incompatible hardware.
I might also add that the future of "operating systems" are DEAD... and not just Windows... Linux and OSX are on their way out too. Eventually (if not already), devices will interact with each other without complicated, hardwired interfaces and device drivers. The next version of the Xbox or Playstation will eliminate the PC at home. So all you fan-boys can bash each others' favorite OS all you want, I look forward to the day when I never have to sit down at my in-law's computer for hours eliminating spyware because I'm the only "geek" they know.
programming myself into obsolescence
Ballmer was good-natured about the critique as he defended the operating system.
Of course he was. All the chairs were occupied so he had to be on his best behavior.
So my cousin, who has 4 kids (all elementary school aged), went to Fry's and bought a low end Compaq for the brood. It came with Vista pre-installed. He would have preferred XP, but what are you going to do. So he gets the thing home, and after a couple hours of setting things up and uninstalling the cr*pware he lets the kids loose on it. At first everything seemed fine, but as time went on the overzealous security prompts and slowness became annoying (WAY underpowered hardware for Vista). My cousin had also installed Ubuntu on an old laptop he had as wells a Firefox and Open office. The kids took to Ubuntu like fish to water. One day when I'm over there, he mentions that his kids were fighting over who got to use the laptop and had started to largely ignore the Compaq with Vista. When he told me this, I asked him why he didn't just install Ubuntu on the Compaq. "Hmmmm, I hadn't thought about that, but now that you mention it...", he replied. The next day he installed Ubuntu over Vista and never looked back. Sure the warranty may be void, but hey for $300 who gives a flying burrito--not to mention that it looked like if they kept Vista, the computer would have gone unused--which would have been a waste of $300 anyways. Ubuntu, like Trix, is for kids....
Badges!?! We don't need no stinking badges!
The hills with the bloated green start button was an embarassment.
That's the best argument I've heard so far for handing over the bucks for vista and the new hardware it takes to run it. You can pay a lot more to hire an expert to download and install tasteful and attractive wallpaper. As for living with the shame of an ugly desktop, well, vista is to some minds a marginal improvement over suicide.
"The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality." -- George Bernard Shaw
Well, for one thing there are definitely a lot of completely un-necessary changes that do nothing but confuse those already familiar with windows. For example, try to find the "Add / Remove programs" menu, which has been standard for about a decade. Oh, but wait, it's now called "Programs and Features." Is there such a distinction that there was *really* a need to change it?
As for the hardware use... I recently had the displeasure of servicing a computer that had 512MB of RAM, Vista Basic, and Norton Internet Security. It was fresh-out-of-the-box agonizingly slow to use. Killing norton off sped things up a bit, but that just bumped it from "agonizing" to merely "painful." Yes, this is partly the Vendor's fault, but one does have to wonder what exactly is adding value to Vista (especially Basic, which is non-aero) over XP that causes such a huge increase in resource consumption?
The major improvements to Vista don't seem to account for the time to get it developed, nor the faults with its release, nor the added resource consumption. In short, it's a pig.
And with OOo, printing landscape is a failure...or has been an issue so much that I opted to get Office XP installed through CrossOverOffice for proper landscape printing of documents.
~CYD
//Nothing to see here, please move along.
I hate to say it, but you really need to yell at your college for sticking with VS2003. VS2005 is available from MSDNAA, which is what I assume you meant by "partnered with MS through MSDN."
However, schools choose on an individual basis which software packages are available.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Kids who actually use Linux actually end up liking it quite a bit (I should know, I work in schools). While I personally have not much use for it, Beryl and others present plenty of eye-candy. The available Linux games are actually quite fun, and increasingly more these days. The desktop is spiffy, and general tasks such as web-browsing etc are much the same as in windows.
Major lacks are - as always - hardware support, and moreover ease of configuration (of hardware and software). These are improving, and I'd say that configuring the desktop has improved noticeably over the past few years. Whether or not it's ready for the masses, I see no reason why Linux will not increase in popularity as we move into the future.
Vista continues to act in the annoying way I loathe XP for. Launching programs keep jumping to the "front" even when I switch back to another item to wait for the new item to load. It's a 'trick' that must have worked in some OS but not anymore. The code needs to say 'I'm on top' to believe it's open and a requested application. I haven't liked the new menus in IE (new interface which was a XP preview of Vista-ness), haven't liked Adobe Pro 8's new interface. Maybe all the icons made translation into other languages easier but it just made my coworkers ask how to print a web page in IE for the first two weeks it rolled out into our work computers. It's a good thing FireFox is around to bring some sanity back to web browsing. If it's the gadgets that wow'd the young woman from the article, her tech mom must have locked down all the free-er ware sidebars and things that do the same thing in the XP OS. No reason to move to Vista to have a weather bug and a clock on your desktop. There's a Kubuntu app that IMHO is a little flaky but brings (brought before vista even beta released?) a desktop gadget environment. Clock, weather, TV schedules. I guess the 13-year-old is the new-age techie child: able to work the computer/smartphone but not especially interested in experimenting with them in a software way. It is all about how much social content you can text to your BBFE in a day. Pre-made MS stuff is 'good enough' and the more like a simulation of the existing world, the better?
"I got it all together but I forgot where I put it."
Before I forget, though, VS2005 to my knowledge, doesn't support .NET 1.1, only 2.0.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
You left out the part where the station wagons drop anti-tank mines all over the roadways.
Careful. With gentoo you have to plant your own pot, beat your own wife, and steal your own wallet. I don't know if you can even do the dog thing with it.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
Have you tried giving her back?
This might keep her from complaining to you about her computer.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Funny but i have a dell xps from 2000 that ran Xp very well, ran Server 2003 very well, and now runs Vista very well.
I have absolutely no driver issues, no issues on any of the "upgrades" (really fresh installs), and no performance problems.
Personally, in every instance where I have looked at a computer that has had an "upgrade" to Vista installed (and this is in the neighborhood of several hundred now), where someone has been complaining about "poor performance", the original computer fell into one of the following categories almost exclusively:
1. An at least 3 year old sub $400 system that was upgraded from XP Home to Vista Premium
2. A system that had been upgraded to XP from Win98 or WinMe making it at least 9 years old and also usually with low end components.
Most every instance of someone not having a "supported driver" I've run into is also either due to old hardware (even a 7 year old ATI 9800 AGP vid card works fine), or due to the hardware manufacturer just deciding "we don't want to rewrite the driver to work in a proper way"
The same can basically be said of many applications.
I find it funny that Linux people bash on an OS that is trying to work in a secure way of not allowing applications to run in Kernal space, but instead forcing them to run in user space instead.
Isn't this a desired effect of an OS?
Just because the previous version didn't force it, doesn't mean that the new version is wrong.
Previous versions of automobiles didn't have seatbelts and airbags, newer ones do. This doesn't mean newer cars are "Bloaty and full of extra crap".
as a linux and windows user, i find it funny the lengths the average /.er will go to to criticize an OS that is attempting to be more secure.
Laughable really.
found out that her movie making brother (a world class photog) would send her his latest shows in a format that I have yet to find a Linux solution for.
.MOV plays nicely on mac,windows and PC. divx is the choice for HD quality (outside of MOV) so I am guessing these are not HD so he must be sending them as the universally hated WMV file formats as all the other play perfectly under mplayer.
And yet he cant export these world class movies in a format that is easily playable on most platforms.
So his world class video editing software he specifically configured it from the normal mpeg or other standard format to the incompatable WMV?
maybe he should learn how to use his editing software. Vegas, Premier, Canopus and Avid all default to standard formats for export, and those are the only real video editing apps available for windows. if he did this on a MAC and final cut he really screwed up.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Thanks for the laugh :)
First off, you shouldn't have removed XP until you knew Ubuntu did what she needed. Second, you should have started her off on Kubuntu, which will at least have a familiar interface.
I do not see why the Gnome desktop is that far off compared to the Windows desktop. The only major difference with Gnome setup in Ubuntu compared to the Windows desktop is the applications menu is in the top left rather than bottom right, the clock is in the top right, and everything isn't piled into one menu. Other than that, the windows are configured pretty much identically: menu bar just under the title, minimize, maximize, and close on the top right with similar icons to Windows.
The other major downside to Gnome is there isn't as much customization compared to KDE. I don't think this is a problem for most normal users as they tend to accept the UI as it is. Whenever I have to work on their computers they tend to let any program install its icons all over the place and never bother with cleaning it up. Geeks on the other hand are in a league of their own. Every geek has his own specific way of utilizing the desktop (scratch pad with too many icons, organized icons into logical groups, or even no icons at all) and how every peculiar detail is setup (theme, specific shortcuts, even menu organization customizations). But for most people that are not tech savvy, everything is as default as it can get.
"All of Debian" probably includes support for more architectures than any version of Windows has ever even run on and apps allowing you to do so many different things that most humans are not even able to go through a list of their descriptions and understand what the apps are for. Are you seriously comparing that to what's shipped with Vista and the size of it?
"As for your mysterious file format and your "forgetaboutit" OOo install, we'll need more info to refute/help you on those ones. I find that anyone who has used Office XP or earlier tends to enjoy using the latest OOo, unless they have a bunch of VB macros that don't work quite right, or some badly-created templates that don't display correctly."
... PEBKAC ... and believe me, that thought had crossed my mind. All we were trying to do was add text, and it would add it in a completely different font/size. When placing the cursor in a block of text that was created in Word, it would show us what font/size that text was (just like Word does). And when we place the cursor somewhere else the font/size would change to the default, which is expected behaviour, so we would manually change it to be consistent with the existing text. Well, it looked completely different. So then we resorted to copying/pasting text and editing it. The paste would paste it exact, but as soon as we started to modify the text it would modify it in a completely different font/size. Talk about frustrating. We never could get the font/size to be consistent with the original text and we eventually gave up and installed Office.
About 6 - 8 months ago my wife was applying for a job. My mother typed up her resume for her in Office and sent it to us. My wife didn't have office installed so I decided to install Open Office on her XP machine to edit it. It was a nightmare.
Open Office rendered the resume just fine but we couldn't figure out how to do *extremely* simple and trivial tasks like changing a font. I know what you're thinking
That experience completely turned me off from OO. If it can't do something so ridiculously and insanely simple and common then how the hell is anyone supposed to use it to do anything?
>> then Windows should offer to update itself, just like Ubuntu does. Heh
The original poster said that it didn't have drivers for the network card. How would it manage to update itself without a connection to the outside world?
Incidentally, if you read the rest of the essay (link to it's in my post above), he has some interesting things to say about Apple as well. Some of it's no longer topical (Mac OS isn't quite what it was when he wrote it), but some of it's pretty insightful.
Well, I'll agree that they're definitely on different wavelengths. Ballmer, market droid that he is, isn't even necessarily speaking a human language when he uses the word "value." His kind use that word in a sense disconnnected from human ideas of worth and demand. But again, my sense of value is my sense of value, and I'm not a good person to speculate on what Ballmer values.
;)
Still, I think that there are a lot of shiny widgets on Vista that may conform to the 13-year-old-girl definition of value, even if they don't really conform to mine, or her mom's, or hell, even Ballmer's. And peer-conformance probably has some value to the kid, and it may have status overtones, e.g. "I have the new Windows and you're using the old Windows."
And buy your kid a video iPod! He's probably the only kid at school who doesn't have one! Everyone makes fun of him, even the guy who got his mom's pink breast cancer iPod!
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Ballmer was good-natured about the critique as he defended the operating system. "Users appreciate the value that we put into Vista," he said. But, as with earlier operating system releases, "there is always a tension between the value that end users see -- and frankly, that software developers see -- and the value that we can deliver to IT."
In other words, yes, once Vista rolls over^h^h^h^h out the IT people will long for a job where the worst part is licking toilets clean, but it's loaded with shiny objects for the PHB!
The problem is that it takes between 5 and 10 years to bring a new operating system to enough maturity and stability that its suitable for consumers and business.
.NET and the new Window Manager system in Vista. As everything moves to .NET, it gives MS the ability to rip out the win32 layer between userland and the kernel, and do something better there.
About the fastest done successfully is OSX, and that was built on top of a very mature OS base. It's questionable whether MS would be willing to do the same thing.
Also, its worthwhile to note that MS is breaking a ton of backwards compability. But they're doing it at the break from 32-bit to 64-bit. Many, many of the backcompat fixes and issues arent present in the 64-bit versions of windows. Thats where the kernel patchguard is, for example, but not in the 32-bit versions.
So thats been MS line in the sand.
It's also important to realize that there have been some focused 'start fresh', like
This space unintentionally left blank.
There's a big difference between reading reviews of the Vista failure and experiencing it for yourself. This woman gave M$ a fair chance and was sorely disappointed. That's not surprising to me, but it would be to someone always willing to give M$ the benefit of the doubt. Apparently, repeated deception makes people angry and she let Stevie Wonderboy have it.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
since when? i'm a mississippian (though i now live in colorado). in mississippi the youngest age of consent (for sex) is 16 provided the partner is also a minor. for marriage, the legal age is 16 with parental consent and the two-week cooling off period for the marriage license is still required.
[move
"It's been especially nice for them because none of that crap gets installed on Linux that was constantly getting installed on Windows..."
You mean software?
There are a couple solutions.
1. Yell at the software developers and tell them to learn how to do software on windows. If the software worked right, it wouldnt be doing anything that would trigger UAC. Thats just lazy/sloppy programming.
2. Figure out what the bad software is doing wrong, and change ACLs such that it doesnt trigger them anymore. For example, its probably trying to write preferences or logs or something to C:\program files\ or c:\windows. This is a known bad thing to do for the last 10 years. So find out, using Regmon and/or Filemon, exactly what it needs, and adjust the acls.
Now hopefully its not doing something more invasive that you cant cure with ACLs, but then your fall back is to yell at the software developers to get their crap in gear and do it right.
Try/use VLC? So far that has played everything and more then the windows media player.
...The original poster said that it didn't have drivers for the network card. How would it manage to update itself without a connection to the outside world?
A USB or serial connection could be used.I gave my wife a MacBookPro, and I still have to do tech support. But it's a lot easier to fix the problems now. I don't have to nuke the system, restore from backup. I just fix the problem and off she goes. And when the problem is real bad, she goes to the Apple store and it gets fixed without my help.
The above is not worth reading.
Well, I'd suggest you start with the Nikon folks or whoever wrote the software for your camera. I'm not sure what their bad software has to do with Windows or .NET. Anyone can write shitty software in any language on any platform.
.NET and its the biggest pile of system resource eating garbage I've ever seen. But thats a Kodak problem, not a MS problem.
Take the Kodak EasyShare. It's all written in
Besides, back in the days of the IBCS module, you could transition ANY ix86-based Unix to Linux without any rewrites. That was one reason commercial Linux software started appearing - companies were losing support call income.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Yeah, I overlooked that. Though for Ubuntu 6.06 there is an optional iso with updated drivers that accompanies the install CD. I'd like to provide the link but it is too well hidden or I'm too stupid.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
By contrast, every new version of Windows seems to throw out huge chunks of the old system, and replace them with (often similarly ill-considered) 'new and improved' chunks -- and there are parts of Windows that are a side-effect of intentional mines put in to trip up competitors' products. Much of that weirdness has now been entrenched into Windows because Windows developers have been forced to work around and/or use those same logic-bombs.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Yup. All these guys 'round here talking about how they switched their wives/girlfriends/parents and they didn't mind or notice... These people either already came to them for every little thing on their computer so nothing changed for the writer, or their parents/whatever are pretty good with computers, or they REALLY used nothing but the browser. Because I tried with my parents' spare machine, and my mom panicked and got angry and was like, "Why can't you just install XP? What is this???"
And I'm smart enough not to try such a thing with my wife. I live with her.
Seriously, that's a recipe for disaster with most people. For them, it's like getting a Johnny Strong doll when they asked for G.I. Joe. You may think it's cool or better; they just think you're cheap.
Yes, I, too, find that people who are used to and comfortable with and generally enjoy using one thing tend to enjoy being switched to something else that requires them to reformat everything they did with the old thing, one by one!
I'm of the opinion that much of the Vista-specific bloat comes from the DRM layer. Under the DRM paradigm, every driver doesn't just have to worry about doing their normal work -- it also has to worry about doing some, apparently innocuous, thing that pisses off some other random driver (or, eve, program) in the system. It also has to worry about whether it is required to get 'pissed off' by what some other random element is doing.
That constant looking-over-the-shoulder (both your own and others') has got to result in a lot of the lost performancethat is being seen in Vista.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Microsoft Vista - It's what all the 13 year olds want!
I just can't be bothered.
I was going to reinstall XP, so I put in the cd. I couldn't see the intended HD, just my media drive. I fiddled around with the partitioning / formatting app for a minute trying to "find" the right drive then got nervous and rebooted. The OS hard drive (a raptor) was there, but my 120 gig drive was unreadable.
Now, whenever I go to do a format reinstall of anything, be it linux or windoze, I unplug any drive I'm not willing to "lose". Multiple partitions on the same drive - well, can't unplug those so you'd better know the sizes and have backups!
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
...the second guy ducks
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
"It's safe, it works, all the hardware is fine, and everything is great," -Mother of a 13 year old and Microsoft user.
Yes, she actually was quoted as saying those words, though not in reference to Vista....
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
That was the problem. He tried to unzip her in front of their child process and she gave him the finger for not waiting for a nicer time. Now he's sleeping in /tmp, and expecting to lose his fortune because she's now lseeking a fork in the marriage.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Wow, if splashy looks is all it takes to get people to use an OS, then all we need is some Compiz-Fusion & gDesklets/Superkaramba. Oh, did I mention that Linux doesn't cost $400 like Vista?
:-)
Good stuff.
I tried Office 2007, couldn't find the print button (oh, so that's what the big colorful logo in the corner is for, its a button). Luckily, Ctrl-P still works.
A friend of mine thought the same way, but that was way back on an ancient version of OOo...
The latest versions of OOo have had a very easy and office-like interface and the whole project has improved drastically since I started using it.
Ezekiel 23:20
You might convince her to run XP in a virtual machine. That way you can just reload a disc image if it gets fubar.
I like virtualbox, myself. It's fast and very user friendly.
God is imaginary
From what I've seen the number of XP->Vista upgrades which work 100% perfectly is quite small. There's always some program which doesn't work, something that needs a driver, etc.
Given that Vista offers no increase in productivity, only eye candy, a few broken programs or a non-working printer is enough for anybody with any sense to go back to XP and curse Microsoft for the wasted time.
Yes, she could probably have fixed it given time, but there's no increase in productivity with Vista. Your web browsing, your messaging, your Office suite, your media player...? It's all exactly the same!
No sig today...
I'd suggest you try OOo 2.3 -- it has come a long way since OOo 2.0. Or, try IBM Lotus Symphony if you prefer that; same software, slightly different interface & bells/whistles.
What makes me sad is...where the h*ll was my mum when I bought Windows ME?
3 Computers? 4 Remotes? I live in a room in my parents house and I easily meet this limitation in a 12x15' room. And no, I don't even have a TV in there. Gawd, I'm never getting married!
>> "It's been especially nice for them because none of that crap gets installed on Linux that was constantly getting installed on Windows..."
>
> You mean software?
Obviously the GP meant "crapware" -- which should have been evident from the post, but hey, "better safe than sorry," right? So here's a revised version for your benefit:
"It's been especially nice for them because none of that [ad / bundle / crap / mal / spy / stealth]ware gets installed on Linux that was constantly getting installed on Windows..."
Always happy to help!
"All hands, BRACE FOR IMPACT!"
Thanks, I needed those suggestions. I tried to modify the ACLs, but I'm still getting the UAC. BTW, I'm just a hobbyist, no sys admin.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
Booze, Butts, & Bullets
In my experience, if you want your wife to stop bugging you about computer problems, buy her a Mac.
On the other hand...if you really want her to stop bugging you about ANY problems...either get a new wife or get rid of the wife & get a decent gaming machine...along with a pet. Result of the former...no nagging...a decent machine & another living being which will always love you. A win-win situation.
Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia. - Charles M. Schulz
Just upgrade to a brand new 3000$ 'big box' and you will be happy.
Your consulting bill is in the mail, thanks for choosing microsoft.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
...to think that this is funny because Microsoft is the corporate giant, but these people are apparently computer-illiterates, because vista is incredibly easy to use, and probably any of the problems she was having could have been solved on Google and were caused by difference in XP and Vista.
Help Me! I'm trapped in the tubes! Oh noes! Here comes a internet!
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
I prefer having a living being who loves me that I can have sex with without getting arrested.
The cake is a pie
Did you RTFM? All of those issues are very common, and only require a few changes to the config files to correct. As I recall, you need to set EVILUBUNTU=0 in morals.conf. There should be a GUI option for this in the next version, but until then you have to do it manually.
Everything is subjective.
The point is still valid.
You can always download the most recent version of Ubuntu. Depending on your hardware, for which your millage may vary. It installed great on his system. Someone elses system may be different.
I would say, that XP is from 2001. Unless you slipstream it, most newer hardware won't work right out of the box. We all know the lack of driver support for the 64 bit edition of XP is legendary. Vista is bright shiny and new. It is also lacking great driver support.
From what I have seen. Anything that would run XP will run a modern linux distro just fine...and usually with FEWER driver issues.
vi +
Funny, but at this point I wouldn't be surprised if that happened the next time I tried to install it.
"It is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED that you call 555-8475 and tell the person you're going to tell the cops about his operation, and provide your address."
hmm...
*** One week later ***
"Dude, you're a fucking asshole. You called up a drug dealer while installing Ubuntu, threatened to narc, told him your address, nearly got killed, then mouthed off at the forum when someone suggested using the CD burner at the US embassy in Columbia?"
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
As much as I don't like alot of the things that MS has done, and I dislike their corporate tactics but (for the most part) their OS is an honest attempt to solve the hard problem of remaining backward compatible while delievering a good GUI/OS. I might not buy Vista but it's no (extra) reason to hate on MS that they weren't able to deliver an elegant solution to this hard problem.
However, I DO hate people like this woman. There is a large segment of the population that feels inadequate and stupid when they can't use a computer and lashes out blaming whoever wrote the software. I fucking hate those people.
If you aren't good with computers that's fine. If you don't like a piece of software because it frustrates you then don't buy it (or return it) but it's pretty inexcusable to take it out on other people because you feel inadequate.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
What annoys me about Linux is that each distro has its own way of doing things. Some desktop distros just do not get it, others only sort-of get it and some like Ubuntu mostly get it.
For my two primary PCs, I use XP and Vista but for my other PCs, I use Fedora 6/7 (server/development) and Ubuntu. While Linux may excel at various stuff, much of the software I use beyond web browsing, eMail and audio/video playback is either Windows-only or a PITA to setup under Linux.
I read much of this thread, and somehow got an impression of Déjà Vu.
... Sorry guys! Go back to Mom's basement and punch the wall. Or your pillow, softie..
I read the same shit when MS started flogging XP. "Nyah nya.. it's crap!"
AND when MS was starting to push W2003, And W2K. "It sucks. Gimme a macintosh"
Geez.. what a bunch of losers.
I have been running Vista now for 5 months. It never - repeat NEVER - crashes. And it looks just like W2k-
Yes, that's right - of course, I reverted to Classic-coke mode.
It is basically W2K with support. And much, MUCH more stability.
Why can't you weenies give it a break? You are OH, so SO tiresome...
PS- I also have Ubuntu FesteringFox on my laptop, but hardly ever boot it.
Vista is just THAT stable!
.
- aqk
F U
Kid: Mom, Vista sucks, I can't play any music or burn DVD's Mom: What seems to be the problem? Kid: Oh these big bad men from Redmond Added DRM. Mom: What's that? Kid: It breaks you music and DVD's Mom: This is an outrage. Vista Ultimate? HA. More like Vista Lame. Somebody's gonna hear about this How much did we pay for this? Kid: 319.99 Mom: That much and I can't watch Desperate Housewives? You're grounded.
None. ReactOS has replicated most of that functionality in a download of less than 25 megs.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Because hardly anyone has switched to it during these first six months?
The most secure release they can humanly make? What a claim, we'll see about that if it ever becomes something worth targeting.
and don't forget the little machine that automatically destroys the tank's engine if you try to, say, upgrade the sound system to a different one not made by that specific corporation.
some refuse to buy these "OSX tanks" for that reason and stick with the free ones, while others still can't grasp why people would want anything other than a sound system made by that corporation anyways, since they're so admirable.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Dude, I just about fell out of my chair; I salute you!
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Yep, I have to agree. The Canon RAW driver for windows crashes explorer, and takes up about 1 GB of memory... The only stable way I can view RAWs in Vista is in Adobe Lightroom. Again, that isn't a problem of MS, but rather dodgy coding on Canon's part. That being said, the native RAW driver in Ubuntu works flawlessly, and hasn't crashed anything yet, pity there is no nice Lightroom equivalent in Linux. (Hey Adobe! Port Lightroom to linux already!)
http://www.zombieapocalypse.tv/
I've always wondered why Ballmer and the other Microsoft guys don't get more lip from the audience at conferences. I mean, those conferences apparently are jam packed with Microsoft fanboys, or why else don't you ever hear of things like this? How in the hell is it possible that the first thing you hear about it is a mother pissed off about her child's Vista "experience"?
Or are all the anti-Microsoft people precautionally tasered before the conference?
Users appreciate the value that we put into Vista.
The most secure release of Windows you can humanly make.
Vista is bigger than XP, and it's not going to get smaller in any significant way in SP1.
Great! All I ever wanted from my operating system: It's got value, is most secure Windows that is bigger than XP, and will get even bigger. - I'm sold! I'll start installing Vista right now...
But seriously. Either the writer of TFA is a complete idiot, or the whole crowd gathered to hear Ballmer the Great talk. I mean, the arguments he gives are all just the worst kind of marketing jargon I've seen in a long time. You'd expect arguments like these from a 13 year old kid playing a salesman in a school play. C'mon Microsoft! You're not getting value from your marketing department...
Or could it be that Vista actually didn't bring anything new?
If all else fails, pull the plug and get out...
The Life is out there...
Open source has some real advantages in situations like this, as the community tends to develop stable, generic solutions that work widely.
.... many are fairly generic drivers, and work across a large number of devices. In the windows world, only the hardware vendors write drivers (for modern stuff), and (with the notable exception of Nvidia) they tend to write a whole new driver for each release of hardware, that only works for one device model.
On the Windows world, if MS doesnt do it, then you're left to the vendor, and thats often done very very poorly.
It's one of the genuine values of the open source community. Take hardware drivers
I still have programs that date back to System 6 on the Mac Plus. These run just fine and dandy on Mac OS X Tiger.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Much like Ballmer himself.
I don't know if Ubuntu uses the same archiver, but Fedora handles Zip files no problem. Double click in your preferred file manager and the zip file opens in the archiver window just like a tarball (just checked). I did have a hiccup with RAR files a few weeks ago, but Winrar under WINE worked perfectly. Installed with no tweaking required.
As for the yet to be discovered codec, I wonder if the poster had VLC installed.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
To where? Your (inexistent 'cause you're using a router) usb/serial modem? Your dog's lower back? No network -> no updates, period.
You are confusing the 10 year old grand papa named slashdot with the new kid on the block "digg"
Yeah, but you don't get laid. :)
strike
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Actually, I believe I detect a greater use of layering throughout the operating system, which if you must have bloat is a good thing, although it makes the bloat somewhat larger. I've had parts of Vista crash without bringing down the whole house. For example I've had the sound system do the audio equivalent of a snow crash, but have been able to do a normal shutdown, closing all of my files.
If you remember back in the day, OS/2 was supposed to be the wave of the future. Nobody seriously doubted it was a better OS, the problem is that it required a princely 16MB of RAM at a time when you were lucky to have 4MB. The problem may have been that Microsoft learned the wrong lesson, piling on more features while striving to avoid outstripping the resources customer machines were likely to have. The problem is that you can't have an OS that is complex, resource efficient and secure and stable.
So it may be that Vista feels like a step backward, camouflaged with a bunch of superficial frippery. But when you are on the wrong road, you do have to backtrack to get on the right one. The real question is whether a desktop OS ought to shoulder so much complexity. None of the killer aps of the last decade depend in any way on Desktop OS innovation.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
And therefore has far more points post installation where you need to set this!
I've honestly never understood the "less questions during install the better" crowd. I WANT to be asked about how my system should look, behave, feel and so on during install. I WANT to be able to choose what things I do and don't have installed. And to be able to do any of this, it HAS TO ask me.
I installed Vista in a VM the other day for work, simply because I need it for testing my software under Vista. It really bugged me that after install, I had to go through damn near every control panel item before the system was actually set up remotely how I wanted it (note: Regional Settings included!)
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
No more so than under Windows. You just know how to tweak Windows on your computer vendor did it for you. My XP box had like 4 DVD players as certain ones including MSFT's player did not work well with various DVD's such as ones from Blockbuster or bought off of Amazon.com.
/etc/alternatives (RHAT-ism) better support the full Java version switch (classpath, path, eclipse) but don't want it bad enough to code it myself. :-)
;-). OTOH, many apps are written for Unix/Linux. E.g. XP's file searching does not even work. To defend Windows as superior when it fails basic usability in such a basic end user task is retarded. (find sucks and Find in Files fails.) Sure, some great apps were written for Windows but I'm sure you know the rate of innovation is far greater in Linux. Just look at the last 5 years. Monopolysoft has resorted to lawsuits to try to stop innovation, or as they could be thought of as saying, "Innovation happens elsewhere". This is not a good slogan for technology in America!
Haven't moved to Fedora 7 so no comment there but know the trick with Fedora Core 6 was to find a website where someone tells you the needed repository websites and lists the most helpful software. You have to add useful repositories. The reality is Windows starts to fall down too once you install umpteen packages. They fight over who gets to open whatever file etc. You end up having to edit the Registry (or whatever Vista has) to support opening files with various apps. What is the equivalent in Linux? (Most people cannot answer this and this clearly shows most people have been trained on Windows and are judging usability from a biased perspective.)
As a Java developer the Linux setup is cleaner than Windows. I would like to see
Of course some apps are written for Windows. Expecting to get free equivalents for Linux is not realistic (not always!
TimJowers
Expect Freedom.
Not sure... I missed this presentation: http://www.trilug.org/node/66
I glanced at the Video editing software about this time last year and it was in v2.0 stability. Well, the rate of improvement is phenomenal. I did use DVDStyler (with DVDAuthor) to create a navigable DVD. That was very cool. Easy. Free. Worked.
The RIAA is suing the pants off of Americans but ignoring the rest of the world. As long as this continues then the rest of the world will use proprietary formats and commercial software without paying. So, the rest of the world already has a free standard. Just like with drugs and other things, Americans are bearing the burden of cost for the rest of the world.
TimJowers
Expect Freedom.
How do you know what percentage of visitors actively bought Vista? My point was that most new PCs come pre-loaded with Vista. It could be that 50% of visitors were using a PC that had come with Vista, but so far only 39% had gotten around to installing an OS that works in its place.
My son just bought a new HP Notebook which, of course, came with Vista installed. It looks "pretty" and yes there is a lot you can potentially do with it. However, the main reason he bought the HP high end notebook was so he could install Call Of Duty and some other FPS games. COD worked for a couple of hours and then he installed the WinTV that came with the system - BOOM! COD stopped working. Uninstalling WinTV didn't work (we had to call HP Support to even figure out how to uninstall WinTV) because by then the damage had been done. Re-installing COD didn't work either.
We tried installing XP, but none of the drivers HP told us to download worked with the new hardware. So, we are back to restoring Vista. It really sucks.
If you want an GUI that looks "pretty", then by all means get Vista. If you want a gaming computer that will actually work for you, stick with XP or Windows Server 2K3.
Mada mada dane.
"See, if your mother in law had just typed up the resume in Latex in the first place..."/><br /> ...so from this are we to assume that we must wear latex to get Office to work? Or was this just a precaution?
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
Costs me nothing to not be a prick. Anyway it was kinda interesting to really think about the value thing...Been reading economics, so it was on my mind.
Yea...When Ballmer says the word "Value" I hear "(shareholder) Value"...I've never seen any other sort of value out of him. There are people in the Microsoft machine who understand what the consumer values, but he's not one of them. That's what the whole "Developers" thing is about...Get the creative producers to drink your coolaid, and ride their coat-tails to success...I've never bought a MS OS because I liked the OS, but only because I wanted to use some software that was only available for that OS.
Ahhh, the negotiation process. My attention span for schoolwork was way too low for me to effectively pull off the "All A" gambit. I'd lose interest long before the end of the year, no matter what the prize. The peril of the iPhone is the phonebook-sized monthly bill, not the phone itself. Brrr, scary.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
So the daughter wanted a copy of Vista for the "Gadgets" and Ballmer feels this is proof that the 13 year old daughter saw value in it? Perhaps the mother should have just put Yahoo Widgets on it and kept it at XP?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
For some sneaky suspicion, I think my son's zeal to earn a video iPod will wane, once he realizes he has to work at it EVERYDAY and can't just cram the last week. Although I'd love to have to spend the money for his accomplishments, I think my $250 will be save for another term.
What little engine-destroying machine?
Seriously, is this meant to be a dig at Apple bricking iPhones that people hacked to use other carriers? Because if we're talking strictly computers here, I don't follow.
My Macbook Pro notebook and my Mac Pro tower both dual boot into Windows, and I used to run Yellow Dog Linux on an older PowerMac with no problems at all. I've certainly used all sorts of different printers, a couple different scanners, and any display I wanted with my current Macs - with no ill effects.
(And as far as the iPhone thing is concerned, I think Apple was pretty up-front with the whole thing. They never forced your phone to take the newer firmware, and even issued a warning giving you the option to cancel out - stating that "unlocked" phones were subject to damage if you continued.)
Not true. As I said in another reply, Ubuntu does have an optional iso with updated modules. I installed 7.10 (Gutsy) RC1 today, and the install menu offers to include these updates. I'm sure 6.06 (Dapper) is the same, even though I am unable to find the download link.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Nah, I know nothing about it but what I've read. Only thing I need from my phone is phone-ness, and maybe a camera.
I was that way as well, sort of. I studied what I wanted to study, in the order I wanted to study it. I usually ended up doing fine, but I remember one year where I failed 3 quarters of a class (Chemistry) before ending up with a B- after pulling a 98 for the last quarter and a curved 96 on the final. 'Course I was one of only 7 (out of 35) people to take the final, so I guess I still did better than most.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Can you say what software it is, or if not, at least what kind of software it is?
Some types of software need to dig deeper into the system and require special privs (debuggers, some a/v stuff, systems programs, etc). Those can be much harder to debug without really getting your hands dirty.
Even if you dont think it'll have an effect, put pressure on them to fix their software to work without UAC prompts on Windows. If they're making money off the software, then its the right thing to do.
Regmon
Filemonj
I'll warn you though it can be a pain to do this troubleshooting, and it can be time-consuming. Both regmon and filemon produce a fairly low signal-to-noise ratio, and can be hard to read. Use the filtering and searching tools within the apps.
The full name is Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives
Yee haw!
I blame Microsoft for not including a PDF reader the way Ubuntu did. I'd say PDF is a pretty standard format for now. It could have been bundled with it. The way they bundled the browser and media player.
If you still have a file like that, PM me and I'll look at it. I've yet to find anything that VLC would not open, and mPlayer does an excellent job as well. In fact, I've seen .wmv files that made Windows Media Player cry "codec!" but VLC played just fine. And let there be no mistake, as much as I dislike Microsoft's internet browser and operating system, I really like their Media Player.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Getting married because you want to get laid is like buying a sewage plant because you want to take a dump.
Most people don't even think inside the box.
Here's a link to a guy on macosxhints talking about the issue. Seems he found a work around, but it's not something grandma would think up on her own. :P
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060103193926854
My friend used to watch a lot of anime and the wmv9 codec is very popular in that area apparently (I'm not a big anime fan).
His method requires streaming from VLC to WMP- not an option for Linux users. I wonder what is so valuable about such a video that one would go through all that trouble. But, I don't understand much about Anime, either. Maybe a good porn flick...
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
I've run into these in other areas as well, such as free downloaded content and music. . . . or if, say, someone has ripped their entire cd collection with windows media player then switched to linux only to find they can't play any of it. :P
And I was clearly trying to imply the following:
"It's been especially nice for them because none of that [game / productivity / finance / tax / edutainment / education]ware gets installed on Linux that was constantly getting installed on Windows..."