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Vista Sales Rate Fell Last Quarter
Microsoft is not directly mentioning Vista demand while they brag about how much money they made last quarter, because sales fell. "[Microsoft] shipped approximately 28 million copies of Vista in the latest quarter ended September, or 9.3 million copies per month. Though the Windows developer pointed to 27 percent growth in business licenses and noted that many home users were buying the more lucrative Vista Home Premium or Ultimate editions, the rate represents a decline from the 10 million per month reported early in summer."
Now, some of that breakage is the result of improved security, but our Windows driver guy tells me that the disruption caused by the security causes a lot of users to just disable the security.
Also, I understand that MS provided a version to a few top-tier OEMs that didn't require product activation by end users, so as not to annoy them. This resulted in a crack being written by the w4r3z community that doesn't require activation at all! (look for it on a p2p network near you.) The product activation is very sensitive to hardware changes, more so than XP, so that legitimate users get no end of hassle from Vista, while pirates aren't inconvenienced at all.
Surely Microsoft must have had some regular people beta test Vista. And surely some - maybe all - of these people must have told MS that Vista shouldn't ship in the state it's in.
My wife is thinking about getting a new laptop. I said to her "Make sure you don't get Vista, it's really screwed up" and you know what she said? "Oh, yeah I know. Apple runs these TV ads with a young guy who's supposed to be a Mac, and a guy who looks like Bill Gates who's supposed to be a PC. And whenever they try to talk to each other, this Secret Service agent interrupts them to make sure it's OK."
Remember the Twiggy drive? Apple tried to manufacture their own floppy disk drive for the Apple II. They were never able to get it to work. There was a big shareholder lawsuit. I could really see a shareholder lawsuit coming from Vista. Corporate officers have a fiduciary duty - that means they're legally obligated - to look after shareholder interests. And Billy and Steve Balmer really screwed up.
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No. There's a brief surge of 'back-to-school' sales in August, and then a small decline, with Christmas sales starting to pick up around Halloween. It's followed that pattern for a very long time.
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You should reclaim money for every single licence you don't use.
1. To save money
2. Not to fund MS.
Actually, I've been a tech for over 20 years. And I DO have a machine that I CAN rip out the video card, or network card, or whatever, with no adverse effects to the OS or hardware... this particular machine (one of numerous models) is an IBM Netfinity 7000 M10. But here are the relevant points that refute your statement. (1) It's a function of the HARDWARE, BIOS, (IBM's add-on software and updates for the OS), and DRIVERS, (2) That feature is supported on numerous NON-VISTA OS's... if the HARDWARE, ETC supports it (the feature is supported under far earlier versions of Windows than Vista, as well as OS/2 and now, I think Linux as well for my machine - for EVERY PCI and PCI-X slot).
On the machines that DONT support it (which is many non-high end server machines... such as what you'd buy retail), removing the card will either shut down the machine, hang the machine, damage the machine or numerous other things faaaar different than what you claim will happen. While a few of the newer buses support such a feature, it is still HARDWARE, DRIVER and BIOS allowing it, and NOT locked to Vista, and in NO WAY an indication of stability in Vista - NOR a feature specific to Vista.
Get your facts straight.
I could go on in length about the rest of your post, but dont feel like wasting my time... perhaps later when I am bored.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
This is FUD.
Leopard's minimum system requirements are an 867MHz G4 and 512MB RAM. The CPU requirement is realistic; the RAM requirement should be 1GB. An 867MHz 1GB system will run Leopard very satisfactorily. A comparable system will run Vista, but not Aero, and it will be dog slow. (I have found Vista useless with less than 2GB RAM.)
As for RAGE 128 issues, those are only to be expected -- no machines that came stock with a RAGE 128 meet Leopard's requirements (unless they had aftermarket CPU upgrades). A comparable card would likely have trouble under Vista too, because no one would bother to write compatible drivers, although I haven't tried it.
Interestingly, Leopard's cut-off hardware is less powerful than Vista's "Home Basic recommended system". The Home Premium requirements are *much* higher than Leopard. if you have an older Mac with a RAGE 128 video for example, several applications just fail to run at all. The same is true for Vista. In fact, you lose out on more OS-level features by using a RAGE 128 on Vista than you do using one on Leopard.
You're promoting an odd position--that Leopard runs slower than Vista. Speaking from *personal* experience with *both* systems on the *exact same* hardware, I can tell you that, hands-down, the *opposite* is true.
Have you run both?
* It doesn't require a full OS reinstall if I want to get a feature added in the latest version. On Windows, you can't get ClearType without upgrading to XP. On Linux all you need is to update the necessary components and everything else stays the same
That one, I'd have to disagree with. I tried updating KDevelop ahead of the other KDE components in my system, and apt-get insisted it needed to download 450MB of packages to update, well pretty much everything, and everything that depended on that again. Maybe it's the package maintainers being too strict about requirements but in practise, it's not possible unless you want to fuck with the distro's packaging sytem by rolling your own and all that drags along with it.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
ask Microsoft!
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/21/1441240
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=724
http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2007/08/27/1833290.aspx
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I can confirm that the DRM stuff is pure FUD. You are thinking of the paper written by peter someone at Auckland University. He used such worthwhile sources of information as anonymous posts on online forums for his data. Lots of places use his paper as evidence that vista is crap, but more serious analysis has shown just how shoddy his paper is.
Vista does have more bells and whistles which do slow the system down somewhat. Also ATI and NVidia have had issues getting drivers to perform as well as they do in XP - their developers have had to learn a whole new architecture. Only recently are they catching up...
Yes, vista does throttle the network somewhat when media player plays MP3s. This is a silly, silly design decision to compensate a problem some users may sometimes have. And to compound that a bug means the network is throttled much more than is necessary. This bug is fixed in SP1 (I beleive) and due to the bad press they got I wouldn't be surprised if MS revisit the while network throttling. I hope they do.
I use vista, and there is plenty I don't like about it, but the DRM FUD pisses me off. Yes, vista does support some new DRM features. No, those DRM features are not applied to any of the media you are using today. Vista has performed as well or better than XP for me when ripping, downloading, playing and copying movies.