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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
...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.
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.
User is complaining. Allow or Deny?
*click*
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
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.
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??
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?
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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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
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.
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.
"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...
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.
Did Vista adopt CUPS?
You have us on pins and needles, what was the file format she couldn't use?
Since I dont have either, maybe I should switch her.
I have nothing to lose, apparently.
emt 377 emt 4
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.
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
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?""
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.
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-
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
I don't know about his list, but here's mine, and I *like* OOo.
1. Outlining mode that works the way M$Word *should* work (but usually doesn't) I want a real outlining program.
2. Change tracking that is at least as good as M$Work XP and later. The balloons are nice, but not the only way to do it.
3. A robust multi-format multi-lingual bibliography system that supports all the major publication formats.
4. Templates for all the major publication formats.
And p.s., I know everyone complains about the startup time, but it has never bothered me. I even have a subjective preception that OOo loads are more competitive with larger documents.
"Free radicals of the world, UNIONIZE!"
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
Running Win3.1 apps on Win32 isn't really a virtual machine. It's just a 16 bit process where all the Win16 API calls thunk over to the corresponding Win32 calls. Likewise for running Win32 apps on Win64.
And it does matter how large it is, as the Win32 code has to know how to deal with being called from 16 bit code.
There, fixed that for ya.
Question everything
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.
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
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
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.
"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?
This space unintentionally left blank.
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.
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!
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.
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?
Much like Ballmer himself.
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.
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