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Vista Makes CNET UK's List of "Worst Consumer Tech"
Several anonymous readers pointed us at CNET UK's Crave blog for a list of what is or was, in their opinion, the worst consumer tech in history. Vista comes in at number 10, in company with Apple's puck mouse (number 6) and Sony's CD rootkit (number 9). According to Crave: "[Vista's] incompatibility with hardware, its obsessive requirement of human interaction to clear security dialogue box warnings and its abusive use of hated DRM, not to mention its general pointlessness as an upgrade, are just some examples of why this expensive operating system earns the final place in our terrible tech list." That's gotta hurt a little, coinciding as it does with Apple's Don't Give Up On Vista attack ad.
That's gotta hurt a little, coinciding as it does with Apple's Don't Give Up On Vista attack ad.
I wish they would go back to the ads showing how sexy the technology they offer is (like the PC with a mess of wires in the back compared to the iMac with nothing but the keyboard and mouse or the continuing awesome iPod ads with catchy tunes from bands with moderate success prior to the release of the video) instead of those crappy "attack" ads. Hell, go back to the old ads with the geek chic that was ever so popular here on Slashdot even.
Just enough talking about Vista and Windows -- they're starting to sound like politicians. In fact, they've been picking up other bad habits. My wife and I went into the Apple store at the Mall of America and while I was gawking and drooling over those huge displays, two of their employees launched a Best Buy style sales attack on her. She actually said, "you know, we used to enjoy entering this store and you're now very much like Best Buy, you might want to rethink that." The sales people actually left her alone after one replied, "sorry, I will bring that forward." Who knows if they did or not.
Think different, again, please!
I have had the displeasure of using one of these things and they are right about not knowing which way is up. Because it is circular there is no way to control how the thing is rotated so it frequently would become the case that moving the mouse (if you could call it that) left would move the cursor up on the screen. It seriously made me hate MAC computers just based on the "PUCK" and it made me contemplate putting out a hit on whomever designed this useless piece of shit. Yes, you could replace it but most Universities with MACS did not replace them.
I generally agree with you, except for one area where there IS abusive DRM: mandatory x64 driver signing.
They snuck it in under the guise of improved security, when the real purpose is to stop people from making drivers to intercept DRMed data. For proof of this, try watching certain DRMed content in 32-bit Vista with an unsigned driver loaded - it won't let you.
End result? People who want to still get past the DRM, developers have to pay large yearly amounts for a code signing certificate (which can be a severe cost for small-time and Free/Open Source developers), and users have to pay more to offset development costs.
I had an important business presentation with a Vista laptop that I had to buy in a hurry several months before (old one was damaged right before a business trip). The damn thing updated Vista online overnight by itself and then collapsed the next day on reboot and couldn't restart for 15 minutes in a meeting. There is no excuse for the problems that I have had with this Vista laptop, it should be more stable before it ships. IMHO any IT type recommending Vista deployment before SP1 or 2 should be terminated on sight. It is by far the most annoying I've had, far more than anything on previous 95, 98SE, XP laptops.
It may look much slicker, but Apple still could have learned from a similar design failure from a few years earlier. The old VAXstation 3100s used a round mouse, and everyone hated the fucking things. As with the Puck mouse, you couldn't easily tell by feel how it was oriented, and with three buttons instead of one it wasn't difficult to accidentally use the wrong one.
At least Apple avoided the other problem with them. The VAXstation mice didn't use a ball, but a pair of cylinders mounted so as to engage the surface at right angles to each other. When you were using it at the edge of the mousepad, one of they cylinders would invariably go past the edge so that the cursor would stop moving in one direction.
And the brethren went away edified.
You offer an opinion backed by personal experience.
I offer an alternative opinion, backed by John Locke's original description of the dynamics of a fair market. Here is my opinion:
Calling DRM "abusive" is redundant, but appropriate. Furthermore, "Digital Rights Management" has nothing to do with managing the rights an individual has under copyright law, nor does DRM benefit the creators of the materials it is attached to. The beneficiaries of DRM are third party corporations who once had a purpose in preparing and distributing old media like vinyl and eight-track tapes, but are now obsolete and too dinosaur-stupid to figure out how to do anything else with their resources.
DRM is at best only one more weak reason for The Revolution. It isn't a particularly good reason of itself: history will regard it as insignificant.
And that also pretty much summarizes the problem with Vista. After years of promising all kinds of significant improvements in computering, when it finally came to market, we found that Microsoft had switched focus away from the significant things that were promised, and instead concentrated its efforts on insignificant and sometimes irritating "features" like DRM.
The revolution will not be televised; you will not see it in Vista commercials. The revolution will not come from Redmond. It is, however, unfolding all around you, and you will see it if you bother to look beyond the commercials for other ways to get things done and make your life richer.
You completely miss the point. It is not Vista or any other OS's business to dictate to users above and beyond the necessities of serving the users up to the capabilities and limits of the hardware. Nor is it remotely practical to attempt to enforce anything using what essentially boils down to an "evil bit", as it is so easily circumvented and so often wrong. And the rules that it is trying to enforce are themselves excessive, of doubtful utility, subject to interpretation, changeable at the drop of a large bribe, and difficult to follow. So there are 3 reasons why Vista's attempt to do so is annoying, insulting, and stupid. Vista should have stuck to the business of operating the computer, and let the users worry about the morality and legality of the uses to which they would put it. Vista shouldn't be a nagging nanny, "helping" people obey ethics that they are too "stupid" to figure out for themselves.
You saying it's a "matter of legal compliance" completely ignores the impossibilities of actually forcing compliance, even upon somewhat willing users. You might as well be implying the answer to the question "how do you put a giraffe in a refrigerator?" with "open the refrigerator door, put the giraffe in, close the door." Just about anything can be used to break the law. People can be shot, stabbed, strangled with pretty much any sort of wire (network cables, piano wire, guitar strings, etc.), run over with cars, bludgeoned with hard drives, and on and on. But you don't and you won't see "smart" knives. Even if it was possible to make a "smart" knife, circumvention is as easy as whipping up a plain old knife out of pretty much any old sheet of suitable material. Stone Age tech-- actual Stone Age as in 8000 B.C.-- can circumvent a "smart" knife. Cameras can photograph anything-- there is no way to selectively cripple them so they won't photograph copyrighted material. If such a thing as a camera that "respects" copyright could be made, few would willingly buy it even if it wasn't more expensive, slower, and prone to false positives. Before there were cameras, there have always been eyes and visual memory. Suppose there was a "smart" car that wouldn't exceed the speed limit or allow the driver to run red lights or steer into oncoming traffic. The car still couldn't tell if one of the passengers had just robbed a convenience store, or memorized a few pages out of a book. Nor could it tell when it might be time to break the rules, as for instance in a medical emergency. And the car could still be hacked. An OS is no exception to these basic facts of nature that neither copy protection nor "evil bits" work. Don't know what drugs MS was on when they actually seriously tried to make a "smart" OS capable of preventing its users from committing just one kind of crime, and, like obscenity, a very difficult to define and detect crime at that.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"