Microsoft Withdraws Vista's Kill Switch

l-ascorbic writes "In what they are calling a change of tactics, Microsoft has removed the controversial 'kill switch' from Vista in SP1. This feature is designed to disable pirated copies of the OS, but had led to numerous reports of it disabling legitimate copies. It will be replaced with a notice that repeatedly informs the user that their OS is pirated. '[Microsoft corporate vice president Mike Sievert] added: "It's worth re-emphasizing that our fundamental strategy has not changed. All copies of Windows Vista still require activation and the system will continue to validate from time to time to verify that systems are activated properly." Microsoft said it had pursued legal action against more than 1,000 dealers of counterfeit Microsoft products in the last year and taken down more than 50,000 "illegal and improper" online software auctions.'"

Comments

Microsoft responds with...

[Anonymous Coward]

"We do not a piracy problem with Windows."

Re:Microsoft responds with...

[tsj5j]

Microsoft has described the new approach as a "change of tactics". It said efforts to tackle piracy had seen numbers of fake copies of Vista at half the level of XP, the previous Windows operating system. Wow, even pirates don't want Vista. Speaks volumes.

Re:Microsoft responds with...

[ILuvRamen]

that's the REAL anti-piracy measure. They're lying about changing tactics. The strategy all along has been to make Vista suck so bad nobody would pirate it. And if you don't believe me ask yourself right now if someone paid you to run an illegal copy...or any copy of Vista, would you? I wouldn't! That's practically bricking my computer. I wouldn't be able to use half my software and hardware

Re:Microsoft responds with...

[Sillygates]

This is because Vista is being bought with new PCs. Many of these people that I have talked to were not overly excited about buying Vista, instead they were forced/tricked into it.

And, I would like to bet that some of these users are now pirating Windows XP.

If made you bitch...

[smittyoneeach]

If made____you____bitch
Did this____kill____switch
How 'bout__a______pitch
In a_______fine____triptych?
Burma___________Shave

Re:If made you bitch...

[I_Heat_Sexylaid]

Proper use of the word "triptych", and you mod it "troll"?
Turn in your nerd card, miscreant!

Re:If made you bitch...

[Zontar The Mindless]

Mods are braindead and/or humorless, parent is Funny.

Re:If made you bitch...

[Maxim Kovalenko]

I wish I had the mod points to mod this up. smity_one, you have great class.

Why stop there?

[faloi]

I think a lot of users would be happier if they withdrew Vista entirely. I know I'm scrambling to see if I can upgrade my system to XP. Darn gaming addiction...

Re:Why stop there?

[Billosaur]

XP?!? Bah! I'm trying to "upgrade" to Windows 3.11 for Workgroups!

Re:Why stop there?

[dave420]

You!=Everyone else :) You have to remember that every bad story about Vista isn't representing the whole truth - that there are thousands of folks out there who are using Vista on a day-to-day basis, and are not having problems.

Re:Why stop there?

[networkBoy]

I know it's a joke, but...
Does anyone know where to get a copy of CP/M that will run reliably on newer hardware and with clean drivers for larger HDDs?
-nB

Re:Why stop there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not having problems != a good computing experience. Besides, those vista users are probably the same republican-christian-intelligent-design-believing-microsoft-lovin'-linux-bashin'-hate-filled-racist-sexist Forrest Gump wannabe's that tend to skew the entire national budget towards war. DAMN YOU, VISTA USERS! Don't you know that Vista == Hitler?

Re:Why stop there?

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

You!=Everyone else :) You have to remember that every bad story about Vista isn't representing the whole truth - that there are thousands of folks out there who are using Vista on a day-to-day basis, and are not having problems. I agree! There are definitely thousands of folks out there who are perfectly happy with Vista. That only leaves the other few million customers...

Re:Why stop there?

[Entropius]

I imagine that 95% of those people could also use WinXP on a daily basis and not have problems either, and that 80% of those could use Ubuntu and not have problems either.

Re:Why stop there?

[Corporate Troll]

Not CP/M, but FreeDOS is pretty cool. According to wikipedia, CP/M is open source, so perhaps what you seek may exist.

Re:Why stop there?

[cheater512]

My dad wonders why I'm so negative about Vista.
He got it with a new laptop and claims to have no problems.

Then I ask if I can use his laptop to burn a iso with Nero.
His response? Nero isnt compatible with Vista.
He didnt realize at all what he just said. It was perfectly normal for him for programs to not work.

There have been plenty of things like that.
That one was just the most recent being from yesterday.

Someone claiming that Vista has no problems is completely different from Vista having no problems.

Re:Why stop there?

[InsaneProcessor]

I am one of those republican-Christian-intelligent-design-believing-microsoft-lovin'...
Wait a minute. Stop right there. I have NEVER loved M$.

Probably most of those happy Vista users don't turn there computers on more than 5 minutes a day.

Re:Why stop there?

[smittyoneeach]

What he said!
Gentoo uber goober!
They forgot the "Chula" in front of "Vista"!

Re:Why stop there?

[erroneus]

I've got some consultants that work for me that have Vista loaded on their machines. Some won't comment about it. One seems to be pretending he likes it and one doesn't seem to have a problem explaining that they are running it because Microsoft strongly urged them to do so.

It is my opinion that Vista is a good idea badly implemented, poorly presented and inappropriately pushed out.

It's a good idea because Windows and security are generally considered to be diametrically opposed. Windows and stability are generally considered to be diametrically opposed as well. Vista is a good idea because it's actually trying to address those problems.

It's a bad implementation because it causes people to feel very lost. I can't say that plainly enough. But frankly, moving from Win98 to WinXP was a similar experience although perhaps not as intense.

It's poorly presented because it has problems with backward compatibility and support for older software. I don't consider this a "problem" except that Microsoft did not adequately warn the public of this issue. Part of the problem with Windows is that it supports a LOT of broken behavior in older apps. This comes largely from software being written for broken, badly implemented or undocumented Windows API calls, but also to keep good software running after Microsoft updates their API. Getting rid of the burden of backward compatibility is a step forward for Microsoft and part of why Vista is a good idea.

It is inappropriately pushed out simply because it's not ready for prime time in the sense that prime applications and average hardware cannot be supported under Vista and it hasn't been stated clearly or loudly enough that to run Vista, "off the shelf" isn't good enough. Microsoft hasn't spelled that out well enough for the consuming public. Sales people want to sell. Consumers pretty much buy whatever is offered to them. (Though consumers are actually starting to wise up about that bad habit!) I recall when WindowsNT was being introduced. It had a set of requirements well about those of Windows 3.1 and was considered to be apart from mainstream Windows. It was accepted that it would run slower on old hardware and was intended for only the most powerful machines and the most advanced of applications. WindowsNT wasn't simply pushed out to consumers saying "Here! This is new! Use it!" It was offered and relatively slowly adopted by IT and eventually by consumers in the form of Windows2000 which even then was pretty much presented to business.

An appropriate push for Vista would have been to create "Elite Computing" status for Vista users initially and make WindowsXP usage appear to be legacy. It would have provided incentive for consumers to "strive" to be good enough for Vista. It would have provided incentive to software makers to update their software for Vista. We're not seeing that. Instead we're seeing "I'm sorry, that computer only ships with Vista... if you want that machine, we cannot support you under XP... you have no choice in the matter." How dark is that?! More than dark, it's inappropriate.

It's true that the whole truth isn't being told. But mostly, the truth that needs to be told isn't being told by Microsoft to the consumer.

Re:Why stop there?

[Khuffie]

and that 80% of those could use Ubuntu and not have problems either.

Until they want to install something like say...oh, the Flash plugin. Or install software easily.

Re:Why stop there?

[gallwapa]

I've found vista[ultimate] to be rather enjoyable. Performance is great, the new features are nice, and it is overall a nice experience. UAC is a godsend when you demote yourself to a "user" (and before you even start complaining, it makes it like sudo)

At any rate. This coming from a guy who had his 5 home computers + 1 laptop running SuSE 10.2 / 10.3 for the past year, and SLED 10 on his work machine for the year before that.

Truth be told, there is a lot of great stuff you can do with Linux. Things I enjoyed were VPNC, for starters. A lot of clients have Cisco VPN and I spent 1 week trying to acquire the Cisco VPN client for Vista. ( Cisco requires a login with a contract associated...yea...). When it came down to it though, things just still didn't work reliably for day-to-day operation.

Re:Why stop there?

[JediN8]

Nero works fine with Vista for me.

Re:Why stop there?

[Khuffie]

a) New version of Nero are compatible with Vista b) That is a problem with his version of Nero, not Vista. OS upgrades tend to break compatability with older software, be it in Ubuntu, OS X or Windows.

Re:Why stop there?

[PrescriptionWarning]

"You!=Everyone else :) You have to remember that every bad story about Linux isn't representing the whole truth - that there are thousands of folks out there who are using Linux on a day-to-day basis, and are not having problems."

See how I did that there, its like those crazy mad libs or something. Yeah, I'm a genius.

Re:Why stop there?

[edwardpickman]

Given the fact there are millions of copies of Vista out there and a few thousand are having a good experience I'm hardly reassured. I had a store geek talk me into how amazing ME was and I made the horrible mistake of upgrading to it. I managed to scrub it out of my system by myself but it was a mess. It lost most of my system fonts and largely reduced my computer to a paperweight. Once I managed to delete it out I found the fonts were still there. That was the last time I tried upgrading a copy of Windows and it was also the last time I listened to a diehard fan of any product. From there on out I did my homework before I dove in. I have no plans to install any version of Vista and I'm still waiting for the dust to settle with Leopard although I feel more confident Apple will resolve the Leopard issues. Apple seems to take the issues more seriously where as Microsoft's defense seems to be "just buy the damn thing".

Re:Why stop there?

[Anonymous Coward]

and he didn't say everyone else. He said "a lot of users" -- which I think is an accurate statement of the problem. Sure there are people who are using Vista -- some of whom undoubtedly are happy and some who aren't.

Re:Why stop there?

[bev_tech_rob]

Touche'

Re:Why stop there?

[bev_tech_rob]

"sudo apt-get" works like a charm!

Re:Why stop there?

[blind biker]

And that's thousands of users whose computer is wasting CPU and memory resources on clearpath.

Re:Why stop there?

[vertinox]

You!=Everyone else :) You have to remember that every bad story about Vista isn't representing the whole truth - that there are thousands of folks out there who are using Vista on a day-to-day basis, and are not having problems.

I think that the main issue most everyone with Vista is not how bad it is but why they need to use it. There isn't a compelling reason to use Vista (other than DX10) for most End users if they have WinXP.

Re:Why stop there?

[Khuffie]

a) 'sudo apt-get' is a command line. Casual PC users aren't going to touch the command line. Not to mention you need to know what you're 'apt-get'ing in the first place
b) http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash&P2_Platform=Linux - not quite as easy as Windows, eh? When you can do stuff like that in Linux, then you can claim it's easy to use for novices.

Re:Why stop there?

[AnomaliesAndrew]

I just bought a reasonably powerful, SMALL and light weight, dual core tablet (i.e. touchscreen w/ stylus) laptop for $999 at BestBuy, which came with Vista, about 2 weeks ago and so far I haven't seen what all the (negative) fuss is about -- and I've done some pretty questionable things with it already...

It's worked flawlessly for me so far, and the pen support is excellent. I did notice that it seems to use 800MB of ram (out of 2GB) when idle, but it also doesn't seem to spike too much when under decent load either. I see no reason to roll back to XP at this point. I'm pretty impressed, and that's not easy.

Sure, XP might perform marginally better, but I haven't had a need for that extra headroom yet, and, in my case, the laptop is primarily for its mobility.

Also, if I may... I must suggest that you all try this tablet PC stuff out. It's the future of computing (at least until we get brain implants.)

Re:Why stop there?

[Blakey Rat]

Just FYI, I'm using Vista on a day-to-day basis and I'm not having any significant problems. (Although, admittedly, I've had games behave flaky-- Dark Messiah of M&M being the last example, but it's not a deal-breaker for me since my Xbox works just fine.)

Re:Why stop there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually in the latest Ubuntu all you need to do is visit a site that uses flash and Firefox tells you you need the flash plugin and offers to automatically download and install it for you at the click of a button (all using apt and the repositories in the background, without the user needing to know how to use apt or the command line). Moments later you have fully functioning flash without any complicated commands or terminals involved.

Re:Why stop there?

[Anonymous Coward]

...there are thousands of folks out there who are using Vista on a day-to-day basis, and are not having problems.

Ah, the Microsoft shills are out today.

If you think that most people are happy with their experience with Vista, you must live in a different computing world than I. I have talked to a lot of clients with new desktop and laptop systems with Vista pre-installed and most are, well, unhappy seems to be putting it mildly.

Ya know, if Microsoft would spend 1/10 the time listening to their customers that they spend FUDing them, their products might not suck so much!

Re:Why stop there?

[Blakey Rat]

So I buy my copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements from CompUSA or somewhere, shove it in my DVD drive, then type "sudo apt-get" into the notepad application? And it magically installs it?

Yeah, I'm being purposefully dense, but anybody who truly believes that "sudo apt-get" is the end-all and be-all of software installation is simply out-of-touch with the rest of the industry and the intended non-technical users of the product.

Re:Why stop there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you tell them to turn their machines on?

Re:Why stop there?

[Corporate Troll]

Of course, but I still use Nero 5.5. It does everything I want, so if I upgrade to Vista I have to shell out money for a new buring program? Wow.... That sucks donkeys balls.

That's exactly how users tend to think... I'm just illustrating.

Re:Why stop there?

[jacquesm]

gp asked for CP/M, parent advises to go for DOS instead and gets modded informative ???

Re:Why stop there?

[barzok]

He didnt realize at all what he just said. It was perfectly normal for him for programs to not work.

20 years of Microsoft has taught people that broken, crashy, incompatible, incomplete software is "OK".

Re:Why stop there?

[Anonymous Coward]

"You have to remember that every bad story about Vista isn't representing the whole truth - that there are thousands of folks out there who are using Vista on a day-to-day basis, and are not having problems."

Yeah, there are probably thousands of folks out there who are using Vista on a day-to-day basis, and are not having problems.
Of course, there are millions of computers with Vista installed...so that would be 0.1%?

Re:Why stop there?

[Hatta]

You know there's a version of Nero for linux now.

Re:Why stop there?

[Blakey Rat]

How is Nero's failure to update their product (after two YEARS of betas) Microsoft's fault? The reason it doesn't work in the first place is because it's doing something that was technically 'against the rules' in Windows NT as well, the only difference being that Vista actually enforces the rules. (Rules like 'don't write to the Program Files folder'.)

Re:Why stop there?

[wanderingknight]

Huh? Is there anything a normal user would want that can't be installed through Synaptic or Add/Remove (both frontends to apt)? And as another user pointed out, the Flash plugin is automatically installed by Firefox. In fact, they've even tweaked it in 7.10 to make Firefox install the 64-bit Windows plugin via ndiswrapper for people who are using Ubuntu 64-bit.

Really, people need to stop this FUD. There's anti-MS FUD, but there's also lots of anti-Linux FUD.

Re:Why stop there?

[Z34107]

MS-DOS started out as essentially a copy of CP/M-86, and he also pointed out that CP/M is open-source and should be findable.

Re:Why stop there?

[Corporate Troll]

Perhaps you noted that I linked to Wikipedia saying that CP/M is opensource these days and that what he looks for might be out there. That was new to me too, I just wanted to check the license on wikipedia. So, to some that part might be informative, yes... Read the whole post, will ya?

Re:Why stop there?

[i.r.id10t]

I've got both my original opened CP/M setup for a C64 and an unopened one here on the shelf in my office... shall I put them on ebay for you?

Re:Why stop there?

[Trelane]

a) New version of Nero are compatible with Vista b) That is a problem with his version of Nero, not Vista.

Out of curiosity, would you also argue that Linux is an inferior solution to Windows because existing software does not work on it?

Re:Why stop there?

[CaptPungent]

Funny. All I had to do was run "Add/Remove Software", search for "Flash", click the box next to it, click "Apply", and I had the package installed in about 2 minutes. I had more problems trying to get Flash or Java installed in WindowsXP than I did in Ubuntu.

Re:Why stop there?

[Sockatume]

I'd wager that anyone who got Vista preinstalled on a general-purpose box (not a gaming machine, and not a homebuild) would be pretty happy. It's actually quite well behaved if you're not trying to do Serious Business with it, and I've lived reasonably comfortably with an HP Vista Business notebook for the past 6 months. Alas these people are not the most vocal part of the customer base.

Re:Why stop there?

[ZeroConcept]

Absolutely! And there are thousands of places in Iraq with little or no explosions.

Re:Why stop there?

[CaptPungent]

You are comparing software bought at a store that was written expressly for Windows to somehow being a merit of Windows? That has nothing to do with comparing Ubuntu vs Vista. Compare the two OS's themselves. Besides, screw "sudo apt-get". Menu->Add/Remove Software->Search "photo"->Click button next to Gimp->Click "Apply"->installed.

Re:Why stop there?

[grasshoppa]

Out of curiosity, would you also argue that Linux is an inferior solution to Windows because existing software does not work on it?

That's a bit of fallacious argument. More accurate comparison would be, say, apps under the 2.4 kernel not working under the 2.6 kernel ( which is false. Any app not directly related to the kernel should work just fine under both kernels ).

Re:Why stop there?

[mattpalmer1086]

You missed out (in Ubuntu):

(c) click install when firefox prompts you to install flash
(d) automatic updates for all software on the system, not just the OS.

No having to find those downloads buried somewhere on every manufacturers site, occasionally having to locate the right version of additional runtime DLLs, and keep them all up to date yourself.

Windows isn't quite as easy as Linux, eh? When you can do that in Windows, it'll be ready for novices!

Btw, I have been a DOS / Windows user since forever, and I'm now a very happy Linux user too. Some things are better in Windows, some are better in Linux. Your comments just show that you're not really familiar with anything except Windows.

Re:Why stop there?

[Anonymous Coward]

I won't even go the pointy-clicky and spot you the command line -- where do I apt-get to the new version of nero since the old OS seems to have borked compatibility with it?

Re:Why stop there?

[Stewie241]

You don't have to bother with that in Ubuntu... you just go to a flash enabled page, it will say it is missing a plugin and ask if you want to install it. You click a couple of times and it installs it and it works.

Isn't too complicated. apt-get isn't needed.

Ian

Re:Why stop there?

[Anonymous Coward]

No doubt there ARE thousands of satisfied users, out of the millions of copies sold.

Re:Why stop there?

[zmollusc]

WTF? I thought that the reason windows is so bloated and crappy was 'because it has to maintain backwards compatibility' ?

Re:Why stop there?

[plague3106]

Nero is compatable. It is perfectly reasonable that an older program may not run on a newer OS, especially if said older program wasn't coded to MS guidelines.

That's actually why a chunk of programs don't work. The coders didn't follow guidelines. That said, I haven't come across anything I own that doesn't work, including Doom 3 and Red Alert 2, to give you an idea that older programs CAN work if done properly.

At some point though you do leave the older stuff behind. That's the nature of computing. Or do you think we should still have 5.25" floppies?

Re:Why stop there?

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah and 10 years of linux has not taught people that it is mkay to compile their kernel. rofl

Re:Why stop there?

[laffer1]

Yes, but it only takes one negative experience to wipe out the positive. I ran Windows Vista x64 Ultimate between January and last week. I decided to upgrade my PC to 4GB of RAM from 2.5GB. I figured I had a 64bit OS and my motherboard supports 8GB even according to Microsoft's KB on supported chipsets. So I put the RAM in. Next thing I know Vista takes 22 minutes to boot. I had random corruption and finally I lost my MBR, all the security permissions on the NTFS volume and about 10GB of data disappeared. Vista would not boot of course.

I tested the RAM. It's good. MidnightBSD (amd64) works fine with the RAM. An older 32bit ubuntu cd booted, but 7.10 did not. I have a feeling it's a combination of a screwy Intel bios not mapping memory right and a failure in vista. The motherboard is an Intel DP965LT.

Aside from software that would not run in Vista, I would say that my experience was mostly positive. However, since 64bit windows is not ready for additional memory (which is the whole point of 64bit) and there are no other advantages to vista aside from integrated media center for me, I went back to XP Pro (32bit). I can't get drivers for 64bit XP and I figured it wouldn't work either.

I haven't experienced a data loss of this magnitude from a windows install since Windows 98. Granted, you can blame me for trying to feed Vista's memory hungry environment with more RAM, but it is the first time I've ever seen a memory upgrade cause this level of damage. Coincidently my wife bought 4GB of RAM for her Mac Pro. Leopard was up in less than 30 minutes with 5GB of RAM and playing WoW.

Re:Why stop there?

[fyoder]

You!=Everyone else :) You have to remember that every bad story about Vista isn't representing the whole truth - that there are thousands of folks out there who are using Vista on a day-to-day basis, and are not having problems. And I imagine there are many thousands like a friend of mine who contacts me periodically to ask about Linux. Vista has pissed her off. Then later I'll hear that she overcame her frustration. Then later she'll contact me again wanting advice about Linux again. She seems to be developing a tolerance/hate relationship with it. I can almost imagine her talking to it: "Listen, you behave yourself or I will nuke you and replace you with Linux. I'm not kidding. You think I'm kidding? Ok, this is me emailing fyoder about Linux. I'm sure he'd be happy to help me wipe you out you bastard OS. Hitting send now."

Re:Why stop there?

[plague3106]

It's poorly presented because it has problems with backward compatibility and support for older software. I don't consider this a "problem" except that Microsoft did not adequately warn the public of this issue.

Sorry, I have to take issue with that. They released a while ago a tool that will check your hardware AND software for compatability issues. Its pretty comprehensive.

Re:Why stop there?

[Stewie241]

I did not know that... very interesting to know... this certainly seems to be a sign that Linux is advancing when names like Nero start to pick up on it... Though I do note that the memory hog needs 128 megs of ram and an 800 mhz pentium III.

Re:Why stop there?

[Trelane]

That's a bit of fallacious argument

No, it's a direct application of identical logic. Parent said:

[Nero not working on Vista] is a problem with his version of Nero, not Vista.

Seems to me that parent is stating that the problem of an app supporting an OS is the problem of the app vendor, not the OS provider. Yet, I would wager that the app vendor's lack of support of Linux would be used against Linux by said parent (generally couched in the dressing of "Linux sucks because xxx doesn't run on it!")

Therefore, I'm asking parent if he or she disagrees with applying the same logic across OSes.

Re:Why stop there?

[ChrisA90278]

"OS upgrades tend to break compatability with older software, be it in Ubuntu, OS X or Windows"

Sun has an interesting warranty with Solaris. If the new version of Solaris breaks any old program you have, Sun will work continuously with you until the problem is solved. What this means is that they will put real engineers (not telephone support people) on your problem and change the OS if required.

Re:Why stop there?

[weicco]

My version of Nero doesn't work on my PC with SuSE. It must be SuSE's fault!

Re:Why stop there?

[SirMeliot]

Nothing new there. When I upgraded to XP Nero promptly broke.

Re:Why stop there?

[ceoyoyo]

I don't think anyone will even notice the "your copy is pirated" popups. I had the, uh, opportunity to use Vista for a bit the other day. Someone asked me to install Office and such. It seemed all right until I tried to actually do something, then the constant whining for permission started to drive me nuts. Then the pre-installed Norton virus guard decided to throw some kind of error every time you clicked on something. Then Office started asking for a serial number, even though I had already given it one.

Was it ever a relief to get back to my Mac.

Re:Why stop there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. The problems that have affected some users haven't affected me at all. Vista (ultimate) has been stable and except for a cheap USB dongle for bluetooth runs all my hardware just fine. It's pretty, too. And it only cost me $189 for the 64-bit OEM version.

Like you, I have several computers and I am a linux user. I run CentOS, Slackware, Trustix, Ubuntu, some linux appliance distros, etc and have for years.

Re:Why stop there?

[Spy der Mann]

Of course, but I still use Nero 5.5. It does everything I want, so if I upgrade to Vista I have to shell out money for a new buring program?

Welcome to the world of proprietary software! Where the programmers, and NOT YOU, have control over your computing.

Personally, to those users with this problem, I recommend using an open source CD burner, like InfraRecorder - or at least a freeware one, like CDBurnerXP.

Or if you definitely hate vista, switch to Linux ;-)

Re:Why stop there?

[Khuffie]

One cannot expect a version of a program written for an operating system (in this case XP) to work for operating systems that weren't even in beta at the point of the program release. According to Wikipedia, Nero 5 came out in 2001, when XP first came out. I don't consider Linux inferior to Windows because Nero doesn't run on it (wait a second, it does, but even if it didn't, I'm sure there's lots of free alternatives out there for Linux; not to mention Windows). Linux has it's advantages. It's main disadvantage is that it's still harder to use than Windows if you want to do any sort of configuration, installation of applications and drivers. Though it has gotten better and better over the years, it's still very rare where you find the equivalent of an exe installer, double click it and install the program.

Re:Why stop there?

[JohnFluxx]

It's windows that is simply out of touch. In linux I can just browse through an application list, click the apps that I want, and click install.

The other day I installed maxima and octave, along with the extra plugins, documentation, etc. I took a few seconds of clicking to chose it. It automatically fetched gnuplot etc for me. It took 10 seconds between choosing and clicking install. I go away for a 20 minutes or so (crappy internet connection) and come back and its installed.

Windows doesn't even come close to that. Not even look-through-a-telescope close.

Re:Why stop there?

[mopower70]

there are thousands of folks out there who are using Vista on a day-to-day basis, and are not having problems. I find that difficult if not impossible to believe. I had my second experience with Vista this weekend, attempting some maintenance on an out-of-the-box Vista install on a computer my in-laws had purchased several months back. Turns out they hadn't used it since I installed it because it kept telling them things were broken, incompatible, or they didn't have permission to use them.

I wanted to download PuTTY so I could SSH into my machine from their house. Simple enough. It doesn't get any simpler than PuTTY - it doesn't even have an installer, you just unzip the files and run them. I'm not exaggerating when I say the whole thing took 10 minutes. For a 2M file.

It went something like this:

Windows: I see you're trying to access the Internet. Would you like to allow this?
Me: yes. [navigate to the PuTTY site and click the zip file download]
Windows: I see you're trying to download a file. Would you like to allow this?
Me: yes. [file downloads. Fine. That's about 1 minute right there.]
Me: [Navigate to the file and drag it to Program Files with the intention of extracting it there.]
Windows: I see you're trying to extract this file. Would you like to allow this?
Me: Yes. [Windows sits. And thinks. 30 seconds later.]
Windows: I can't allow you to do this.
Me: WTF? [Try it again. Same result].
Me: Fine. [I navigate to Program Files and create a directory named PuTTY].
Windows: I see you're trying to create a directory. Are you an administrator?
Me: Yes. [Windows sits. And thinks.]
Windows: This action will require administrative privileges to run. Would you like to allow this?
Me: Yes. [Windows sits. And thinks.]
Windows: You are attempting to create a directory. Would you like to allow this?
Me: Fuck yes. [Windows sits. And thinks. And suddenly there's a new directory! Yeah. I rename it. 5 minutes has gone by.]
Me: [I drag the zip file and attempt to extract it to the folder I just created.]
Windows: I see you're trying to extract a file. This file is unsigned by Windows and may be hazardous to your health. Would you like to allow this?
Me: Yes. [Windows sits. And thinks.]
Windows: This action will require administrative privileges to run. Are you an administrator?
Me: yes. [Windows sits. And thinks.]
Windows: [Starts extracting the first file.]
Windows: This file is unsigned. Would you like to allow it to be extracted?
Me: Yes. [Windows sits. And thinks. And finally extracts the file.]
Windows: [Starts extracting the second file.] This file is unsigned. Would you like to allow it to be extracted?
Me: WTF? Yes. [Windows sits. And thinks.]
Windows: Would you like to apply these privileges to the remaining files?
Me: WTF? Yes. [Windows sits. And thinks.]
Windows: [Starts extracting the 2.2M zip file. AT 2K PER SECOND. FOR A FILE EXTRACTION!!!]
Me: WTFZOMGBBQ?!? ...

Me: [Click on the PuTTY icon.] Finally...
Windows: I see you're trying to use an application.
Me: BANG!

Re:Why stop there?

[creativeHavoc]

c) that was not his point

Re:Why stop there?

[Chicken04GTO]

Why is this idiot modded up?
Vista sucks because his dad is using uber old version of software which isn't compatible?
WTF?

Re:Why stop there?

[UncleTogie]

You are comparing software bought at a store that was written expressly for Windows to somehow being a merit of Windows? That has nothing to do with comparing Ubuntu vs Vista. Compare the two OS's themselves. Besides, screw "sudo apt-get". Menu->Add/Remove Software->Search "photo"->Click button next to Gimp->Click "Apply"->installed.

You forgot to mention that he also paid $99 bucks for Elements. How much did that GIMP install cost?

Re:Why stop there?

[JasterBobaMereel]

No you select "Install Software" pick the nearest equivilent from the list and press install ... and it magically installs it (along with any updates to other software you require)

No Money, No Shop, No hassle ....

Please call back when installing Windows software is this easy (Confirm/Deny)

Re:Why stop there?

[UncleTogie]

Though it has gotten better and better over the years, it's still very rare where you find the equivalent of an exe installer, double click it and install the program.

You mean like RPM or DEB files?

Re:Why stop there?

[gallwapa]

I've been very pleased with how well the Media Center app works, and am actually ditching my MythTV ambitions in favor of the Vista MC.

My $20 trendnet bluetooth adapter (i think its a 102b) works well with Vista, too: A good thing, since I just got a new phone and very easily transferred all my contacts.

To be honest, as an IT Professional I read all the FUD re: vista and I joined right in. UAC this performance that. I've got Vista running on a machine with 1gb of RAM and an Athlon XP 1800+, stuffed with a rather low end ($35) video card and it runs Aero without a hitch.

I don't know what people are running to report such dramatic performance problems. I've even left Windows defender enabled (although it is unneeded in my case: I think my comment history about that should sum it up)

Re:Why stop there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, past versions of Windows were very good at preserving backward compatibility with older software - significantly better in that regard than MacOS and Linux. Indeed, that is one of the reasons why Microsoft had such effective lock-in, and why Vista has the potential to threaten Microsoft's monopoly if they don't get things back on the ball in a hurry. Joel Spolsky and Raymond Chen have both discussed this issue in the past.

I think it's a cop-out to blame the software when an upgrade breaks something. The exception would be if the software was doing something the API documentation specifically said not to, but there's no evidence of that here. Indeed, it is known that some documented and perfectly legitimate APIs (in the DirectSound subsystem, for instance) just stopped working on Vista.

Re:Why stop there?

[Blakey Rat]

GIMP costs less, but also doesn't work as well as Photoshop Elements.

Honestly, on Windows, I'd recommend Paint.NET which is just as free as GIMP and works much, much better. It is missing some features that GIMP has, but the UI is tremendously better, and those features aren't anything the casual GIMP/Elements/PaintShopPro user is going to miss much anyway.

Re:Why stop there?

[gallwapa]

SuSE 10.3 has a "1 click install" via zypper.

Re:Why stop there?

[whoever57]

It's main disadvantage is that it's still harder to use than Windows if you want to do any sort of configuration, installation of applications and drivers.

Above is BS. I have had recent experiences with many pieces of hardware that goes like this:

Linux: plug in the hardware, application opens.

Windows: plug in hardware, find driver CD, now, am I Admininstrator? no: OK, run-as........

The fact is that for a lot of hardware (cameras, music players, etc.), under Linux, it is simply a matter of plugging it in; while under WIndows, I have to go through the process of installing some drivers from a CD. I don't see how that makes Windows easier to use.

Re:Why stop there?

[mattpalmer1086]

This always cracks me up. You don't install software like that in Linux because there are *better* and easier ways of doing it! Check the box, hit apply, job done. All software kept up-to-date automatically, not just the OS. You want to uninstall? Untick the box. Files and unneeded dependencies automatically removed, completely.

Although you can install software the Windows way - hunt for files on manufacturer web site, resolve any dependencies yourself (e.g. missing runtime DLLs), keep it all up to date yourself. You can try to uninstall software, but it often leaves traces of itself around the system.

The idea that something is hard just because it's not done the Windows way is laughable.

Re:Why stop there?

[gallwapa]

FUD: I've done this

Open Browser (lets use IE For sake of argument) No UAC prompt
Search for Putty No UAC prompt
click link for putty website No UAC prompt
Click link for download No UAC prompt
Save the file No UAC prompt
Open the file No UAC prompt
Extract the file No UAC prompt
Launch the file - This file is unsigned/untrusted. Mark the checkbox that indicates "Always trust this executable"
Done.

No UAC prompt.

Imagine that.

Re:Why stop there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your dad is using an old version of Nero that writes files directly to the Program Files directory while in use.
Vista doesn't allow that without UAC, for security reasons. YOU GUYS HAVE BEEN BITCHING FOR SIX YEARS THAT MICROSOFT SHOULD BREAK COMPATIBILITY FOR SECURITY REASONS, THEN WHEN THEY DO IT, YOU BITCH ABOUT IT.

Slashdotters are the most hypocritical entities that God ever created.

Re:Why stop there?

[pikakilla]

wow, for a price like that how COULD I go wrong!
shill....

Re:Why stop there?

[Blkdeath]

I'd wager that anyone who got Vista preinstalled on a general-purpose box (not a gaming machine, and not a homebuild) would be pretty happy. It's actually quite well behaved if you're not trying to do Serious Business with it, and I've lived reasonably comfortably with an HP Vista Business notebook for the past 6 months. Alas these people are not the most vocal part of the customer base.

I have an interesting problem at work. Our LAN is pretty simple. SonicWall firewall box connected to our dual ADSL Internet connections, connected at the other end to a Cisco Catalyst 1924 24-port 10Mbit switch, static IPs in the 10.x.x.x range each location has its own /24 so we properly co-mingle on the WAN with the rest of the group.

Each PC is assigned its own IP address, no conflicts, gateway is the SonicWall box, DNS servers belong to the ISP and are routed without issue.

Our network is primarily static with most of our machines running Windows 2000, my machine runs Windows XP Pro. Two employees and our boss all bought new laptops within a 3 month period. Two Toshiba Satellites and one Sony Vaio. All three run Vista (Home Ultimate, I think). All three of them were configured as simply as possible with their IPs plugged into the network card configuration along with gateway and both DNS servers. All three, without fail, have problems connecting to certain websites. www.tdcanadatrust.com, www.msn.com, www.hotmail.com, www.cnn.com, www.gotomeeting.com and a plethora of others. They will, however, visit the vast majority of sites out there.

None of these websites are secure - just entry pages for various sites and services.

Each Vista laptop came pre-installed with a copy of Symantec/Norton Internet Security / Antivirus suite (90 day trial). In my efforts to make the computers 'work' as expected I've systematically disabled and then uninstalled this suite from 2 of the 3, I've disabled UAC, the firewall on the network interface, as well as anything Vista had that was related in any way to security. The pages simply do not load, I can not ping their addresses (I can, however, resolve the names in DNS).

For the record, these sites work flawlessly on any of the Windows 2000 and my Windows XP machine and under Linux (my machine dual-boots) there are no glitches, pauses, delays or hiccups that could indicate any sort of network problem. Ping, traceroute and HTTP work perfectly as expected. The problem occurs under both Internet Explorer (7 - fully up to date) that comes with Vista and the latest version of Mozilla Firefox (2.0.0.8 I believe). This happens on any network drop the machines connect to - even in cases where a (perfectly functional) Windows 2000 machine is unplugged and the Vista laptop immediately connected the same problem occurs. There are no VLANs or overly complex configurations present on the switch. It merely passes packets back and forth and that's it.

So I'm at a loss. Without an error message or popup or anything to describe the source of the problem I just can not for the life of me figure out what is causing this problem. I've tried configuring the network settings as both the primary and the alternate configurations (alternate being preferred because each of the three use their laptops both at home with DHCP and at work with a static) but to no avail. I've gone through trials with all security functions fully enabled and locked down as tight as Vista can be right through trials with no security whatsoever and every viable stage in between. The consistent symptom remains the computer unable to visit these web pages, only telling me after considerable delay that it was "unable to connect" with the usual balderdash about the server may be down, blah blah.

Re:Why stop there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you Redmond trolls keep coming on here spouting your propaganda? Throwing in a little pseudo-Linux knowledge like you actually know what you are talking about. Someone up the thread a bit mentioned how you Microsofties are desperate at this point with your debacle of an operating system. You're just pathetic. How many of you people have Slashdot accounts just so you can come on here and pretend to be just another "JoeSlashdotUser" and spread your troll lies? Commenting to yourselves and carrying on seemingly legitimate conversations with your sockpuppets.

Sadly, you people are just slick enough with your bullshit that you fool enough mods into giving you points. Although, I'm inclined to believe that you just send out a memo to your buddies at 1 Microsoft way or whatever satellite office you're at with, "Hey, another Vista story is on that Slashdot site, let's crapflood it with our bullshit." You are all just sad. Please know that you don't have everybody on here fooled.

Re:Why stop there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, when I upgrade my OS all my applications are upgraded too and all still work...

Re:Why stop there?

[cmacb]

I agree! There are definitely thousands of folks out there who are perfectly happy with Vista. That only leaves the other few million customers...

No, the thousands of people he was talking about are Microsoft employees. For them, the current state of the product translates to almost infinite job security.

Re:Why stop there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. Check out this new feature of Windows Vista! Microsoft engineers have thought of a brand new concept called symbolic links which allows a file to appear in two different directories! No other OS has this!

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa363878.aspx

Re:Why stop there?

[burnin1965]

b) That is a problem with his version of Nero, not Vista. OS upgrades tend to break compatability with older software, be it in Ubuntu, OS X or Windows.

It is true its not a problem with Vista, just a problem for Vista. But the root of the problem is not OS upgrades as you suggest.

The problem for Vista, and Microsoft and its ISVs, is an outdated archaic software development model. In the case of Ubuntu linux it is likely that the application you use to burn images to discs is an open source application. Your linux distributor of choice will download the latest source code for the burning software, compile and test it against their distribution, and package it for downlad and use by end users. No more compatibility problems caused by OS upgrades.

Re:Why stop there?

[eneville]

but with ubuntu you can just recompile if needs be, you have that ability. what if you paid a lot of money for something like WordPerfect 5.1, which isn't maintained any more, what does one do? Or even something a little more popular like 3d studio max, or adobe... No one wants to get a new version of it, and I doubt the manufacturer would be happy to send you a rebuild.

Re:Why stop there?

[Celarnor]

While this may be true, "The Windows way" is what Grandpa Joe and Bob down the street now. Without having an intuitive knowledge of how to use a computer, they simply memorize "My Computer" > "Control Panel" > "Add/Remove Software" as the way to get stuff off their computer. To add software, they know to pick up the CD, put it in and wait for autorun, or may click setup.exe.

While "Applications > Add/Remove" makes a hell of a lot more sense, it's harder for people who only know "the Windows way."

Re:Why stop there?

[billcopc]

Not true, it shows that he's familiar with Windows and Linux distros. Ubuntu is an oddball, a very interesting oddball for which I hold high praise, but it's clearly astray from every other distro.

Me, I'm still in the "Linux for servers - not users" camp. Don't get me wrong, I love me some Gentoo, but that's because I'm a ginormous geek. Everyone else calls my computer "the Matrix" because it's got a bunch of monitors with Emerge whizzing by at ludicrous speed =)

Re:Why stop there?

[evilbessie]

So what you are saying is that all OS's suck in at least some respect... I think if it's a computer you should be able to use it to do what you need.

Re:Why stop there?

[uberjoe]

if you want to burn iso files with vista, ImgBurn works just fine. It's also free.

http://www.imgburn.com/

Re:Why stop there?

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to remember that every bad story about Vista isn't representing the whole truth

... and neither are the good stories ...

I love how people running Vista talk about how great it is for gaming, as they pull out their credit card to buy another GB of RAM to handle Vista Ultimate's 768MB footprint _and_ their game.

Vista is by far the biggest commonly used operating system. Why? What possible gaming value does it add to have a memory footprint almost 7x bigger than XP? Moreover, how the hell can that extra consumption possibly be good for gaming on your PC?

A more disconcerting question is why are companies shipping Vista laptops with 512MB of RAM?

WTF? Sometimes I feel like I am in the Twilight Zone.

Sorry, but the engineer in me calls shenanigans... I'm still not convinced. Vista is being shoved down our throats and it offers _nothing_ in return for all that extra memory usage. It can't possibly be more secure than XP. You get more secure by simplifying your code, not bloating it.

-AC

Re:Why stop there?

[SanityInAnarchy]

sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree flashplayer-nonfree

Assuming it doesn't actually prompt you, on first boot, whether you'd like to install it.

I'll also wager that most of those 80% don't really need to install software, as long as they can get to YouTube and MySpace.

Re:Why stop there?

[billcopc]

How can you claim the problem is with Nero ? (Ok I'll admit, Nero's a steamer!)

An operating system that claims compatibility with existing software, should be compatible with existing software. If it's not, then the operating system has failed to fulfill its own promises.

The OS is (for most people) the cheapest, most insignificant piece of software on the system. It is dwarfed by professional applications and entertainment software. The OS is everyone else's bitch.

Re:Why stop there?

[Almahtar]

a) New version of Nero are compatible with Vista He specifically mentions that this was just one (the most recent) example - it isn't the point. The point is that his dad wasn't even listening to himself as he claimed that 'vista has no problems' and then without so much as batting an eye said 'yeah that doesn't work with Vista'. Nero wasn't the point - the behavior of his dad was the point.

b) That is a problem with his version of Nero, not Vista. OS upgrades tend to break compatability with older software, be it in Ubuntu, OS X or Windows. It doesn't matter whose fault it was, what matters is that X worked before and doesn't in Vista. Yes it's normal, but yes it's still a problem.

Re:Why stop there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely this amazing technological achievement bestowed upon us by our benevolent benefactors from Washington will be patented soon so their intellectual property cannot be stolen by those nasty Stallman-ite Linux pirates. Just tell me where to send my royalty check the next time I start multiple X servers, er, I mean...shit.

Re:Why stop there?

[oakgrove]

The (Confirm/Deny) part got me rolling. Classic.

Re:Why stop there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, and this comes from a computer user that's as Linux-zealous as the best of them, yes, there is an application that a normal user would want that can't be installed on Linux period (barring virtual machine, wine, etc. Which doesn't count because even on a modern Core processor, requires more power than is provided by these solutions). And the saddest thing of all, the proprietary "king of the hill" is a Microsoft app. I'm referring to Streets & Trips. If you could, I would be forever indebted to you if you could point me to a comparable program to that that is Linux binary compatible. And by comparable, I mean up to date maps from Navteq (not the census bureau) that feature one way streets, takes input from NMEA compatible GPS sensors, has exit numbers, text to speech turn by turn instructions, a routing engine that is not brain dead, multiple stops, and is mature, meaning not version 0.0.1 alpha.

I would pay good money for an app like that.

Re:Why stop there?

[mattpalmer1086]

Fair point - I haven't tried any other distros in a year or two. My comments just show my unfamiliarity with them ;)

I had a lot of fun with Gentoo too - loved watching everything build, but it was a passing fascination. I ended up with Ubuntu - great ease of use, and it doesn't get in my way if I want to tweak things for some reason. I still use Windows at work, and develop against it, but at home it's Linux and OS/X - they're both more fun and less fuss.

Re:Why stop there?

[cheater512]

Ignoring the fact that you completely missed the point of my post.

Vista changed so little yet it broke so many things without any reason.
If Microsoft is going to break compatibility then they should rip out all the 3.1 crap and do it properly.
Not just break some programs over here and some over there while leaving all the old rubbish behind.

Breaking compatibility in the name of progress is good.
Having a accident and breaking compatibility as a result is just stupid.

Re:Why stop there?

[Anonymous Coward]

What in the world are you on about? After I installed Kubuntu, the first time I went to a Flash-based site I was asked if I wanted to install the plugin. Three clicks later it was installed.

You believe Ubuntu users can't "install software easily"? So I guess you know nothing about how software gets installed on the Ubuntu family. My wife, no power user by any means, frequently tells me how much better Adept is than the confusing Windows ways of installing software.

Re:Why stop there?

[Junta]

This is actually one point I *hate* in Windows versus the current generation of Linux systems.

In windows, they have a semi-appfolder oriented design (except most apps either must or choose to dump some crap in system wide directories). As a result, they started out without anything resembling decent package management, and left it to third parties. Now you have a number of InstallAnywhere, MSI (microsoft's eventual 'standard'), Nullsoft installer, dozens of one-off installers for specific applications, and a bunch more I'm forgetting that are semi-standard). Most are moderately to severely anti-unattended and inconsistent. They have the 'add/remove' programs control panel, but largely it's relegated to just remove software, and even then some software ends up mangling the list so that different 'components' appear independently on the list, but uninstalling one breaks the uninstaller for the other, so you should have used the uninstall icon which a lot of programs put right next to running the application. It's horribly mangled and ugly and if the world wasn't so damned used to it, it becomes painfully obvious how piss-poor Windows has dealt with this.

Meanwhile, Linux was 'stuck' with the need to provide an alternative view on which pieces of software owned which binaries that were mixed in with everything else. To get out of a relatively messy situation that was undeniably there, they rolled the most sophisticated package management for a platform ever (mainly deb and rpm). With that, installs *knew* in a standardized way what other programs needed to be installed to work right, and things kind of 'just worked'. It was beautiful.

Then, recognizing the power of the package management, repository management emerged. Apt and Yum are the two prominent things. This above anything else is an *incredible* framework for software installation and, *CRITICALLY* updating. Not only does the *extremely* rich platform 'vendor' provide 99.9% of packages most common people would ever need, the architectures are pluggable so that third-parties can smoothly integrate their updates with your process. Using your flash plugin example and, say, Fedora Core. Adobe provides a yum repository. The low-level mechanics is that a file gets dumped in /etc/yum.repos.d, and from then on out, the global system update monitoring process tracks Adobe's software as well as the vendors. I don't know much about non-free software, but I do know that yum in RHEL requires authentication tokens to easily interact with RedHat servers. The framework is simple http, so I presume at the worst, https with http auth would be a viable thing for automated updates even for commercial, for-pay applications. I don't know about flashy layers over yum (I normally use ubuntu) that make yum administration painless, but I do know that Ubuntu wraps up the low-level framework in a mostly clean way. I added the wine repo by opening a terminal and copying and pasting the two lines from the wine repo install directions to the command line. It's not that hard, but a simple GUI tool could wrap even that.

Now, compare that to the MS side of things. Well, you got Microsoft update, which generally cares only about the low-level windows stuff (though I can't remember if Office would tag along for the ride or not..), which also wants to WGA the hell out of clients, but we'll put that aside from now. I install Java, and what happens, a freaking java update checker/manager starts (it can't hook into the running MS update architecture). I install quicktime, Apple's software updater starts running (same as Java). I install Half Life, suddenly Steam also needs to run to manage updates for games. I install Warcraft and Blizzards software starts checking for updates independently. Repeat for Bioware, Symantec, etc. Oh, my video driver, well, I'll have to go to a website somewhere and manually check for updates. And that *still* omits a ton of applications for which they never implemented an update management solution. I

Re:Why stop there?

[cleatsupkeep]

Link to this deal? Sounds too good to be true to me.

Re:Why stop there?

[tcc3]

This is another nice option for burning ISOs.

http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm

Re:Why stop there?

[Blakey Rat]

so you're free to choose an OS that isn't going to crash every twenty minutes.

I already have one, it's called Windows.

Re:Why stop there?

[cleatsupkeep]

Nevermind - I think I found it - I didn't see one with 2 GB of RAM - just 1 GB - but looks like a great deal nonetheless - here is a link.

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8525875&st=tablet&lp=11&type=product&cp=1&id=1186007267767

Re:Why stop there?

[Steve001]

I agree that installation should be much easier than the way that Windows does it. One of my favorite installs was for Professional Write 2.0 for DOS, in which the entire installation process was: "copy all of the files into a single directory." To uninstall the program simply delete that directory. Why can't program installations/uninstalls be that simple?

Re:Why stop there?

[Sancho]

(c) click install when firefox prompts you to install flash Pretty sure Windows does this.

(d) automatic updates for all software on the system, not just the OS. Yeah. If Microsoft tried to do something like this (offer lots of really useful, free software, and update them all from a central location), they'd probably get charged with being a monopoly. That's what happened with Internet Explorer in the United States, and with Windows Media Player in the EU.

No having to find those downloads buried somewhere on every manufacturers site, occasionally having to locate the right version of additional runtime DLLs, and keep them all up to date yourself. I haven't had to manage DLLs on Windows in years. Is this for obscure software, or something?

Btw, I have been a DOS / Windows user since forever, and I'm now a very happy Linux user too. Some things are better in Windows, some are better in Linux. Your comments just show that you're not really familiar with anything except Windows. (Incidentally, I'm not the original poster)
Well.. yeah. People tend to be biased towards what they're familiar with. That's why it will take a really long time for Windows or OS X to gain significant ground on Windows. Almost everyone uses Windows, and moving to the unfamiliar is scary.

I haven't used Windows as my primary OS in years, but even around XP, a lot of the old complaints had been addressed. It's pretty damned usable, though niceties like automatic updates for software would be a huge boon.

Re:Why stop there?

[Sancho]

Interesting. I'm in the "FreeBSD is for servers, Linux is for Desktops, and Windows is a toy" camp, myself. These days, the list of tasks you can't do in Linux, but that you can do in Windows is pretty small. For home users, it's basically just specific games. There aren't that many home users that buy the highly specialized applications like Photoshop.

Editing movies is one of those holdouts, though. It'd be nice if there was a good (note the emphasis) movie editor on Linux.

Re:Why stop there?

[rapidweather]

Then one day it won't boot, and you are too busy trying to fix it that you don't tell the world about it, and don't get counted as "someone who has a problem with Vista".
Good thing Dell Vista boxes have the "image restore" setup, but then how are you going to recover your data you put on the machine since day one?
Or in some cases, "day two" if it has "failed to boot" before.

Good thing you never failed to back everything up to an external hard drive or a usb memory stick.
Bringing this up on Slashdot is probably a waste of time, it is all those Vista users that have never heard of Slashdot that need to be reminded to back up their data, because Vista will fail to boot at least a couple of times a year.
Anyone here remember when we were told "never to turn the computer off", leave it on 24x7, for it might not boot back up. Windows 3.1?
  What's funny is they left the monitors on too, blazing away all night long.

Re:Why stop there?

[ultramkancool]

Disable UAC, make your account administrative. Microsoft hasn't yet came up with a decent, fast, easy way for people to be secure. Maybe they should talk to the ubuntu people, they seem to have done an excellent job :)

Re:Why stop there?

[ddoctor]

Nero IS compatible with Vista... Nero 8 anyway.

Re:Why stop there?

[Anonymous Coward]

eh...

I bought a new laptop last week which arrived yesterday (Asus G1S-A1, pre-installed with Vista). Nero also came pre-installed and was one of the 3 disks I received with the laptop.

Heck, the screenshow on the website for Nero 8 Ultra Edition shows it running in Vista: http://www.nero.com/enu/nero8-introduction.html, and the bulletpoints say "Optimized for Windows Vista®".

I'm not saying I like Vista or anything (will be attempting to replace Vista with XP on the laptop this weekend), but your anecdote doesn't seem to hold water.

Re:Why stop there?

[Sancho]

Huh? Is there anything a normal user would want that can't be installed through Synaptic or Add/Remove (both frontends to apt)? There's plenty.

Lots of software in the universe and multiverse repositories isn't kept up-to-date. This can be pretty annoying. Off the top of my head, I always have to work extra hard to get Valknut and Pan (newsreader) to their newest versions (with the former, I compile several packages from source, and with the latter, I go to the website where I get the up-to-date debs.)

In emulation, Virtualbox also isn't in any of the repositories, (well, the open source version is, but it doesn't include a lot of the niceties that come with the less free version.) Wine is never at the newest version whenever I look for it, and the newer versions tend to include lots of compatibility updates. Cedega requires extra work, too. For transitioning people to Linux, software like this is essential.

For the longest time, GAIM wasn't up-to-date--or I should say, Pidgin wasn't available.

The Multiverse and Universe repositories aren't held to any particular standard, yet they are now apparently enabled by default (they were on my install from yesterday.) This means that software updates may not be enough to get you up-to-date software. The usability will (probably) be there, but there may be security issues.

Re:Why stop there?

[Reziac]

Just curious, what are you doing with CP/M that one of the emulators can't handle?

I know someone who still nurses along a CP/M machine, because he hasn't been able to replace one particular app. Dunno if he's tried an emulator or not.

Re:Why stop there?

[Camel Pilot]

I wish what you say is true. Unfortunately I have a few applications (such as alarm security system software) that only works in windows. I would switch in a heartbeat if I could.

Re:Why stop there?

[Sancho]

Of course, all of this depends upon the third-party developers who target the Linux operating system actually having a repository.

Anyway, Linux is all about the extremes. If the package is in one of the default repositories, it's a breeze to install. If it's not, your average user probably isn't going to be able to install it. Tarballs just aren't easy for the neophyte, and usually you need special -dev libraries in order to build the software. The -dev libraries aren't usually included when you install binary packages, so the user is going to have a heck of a time getting things to work.

Re:Why stop there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Vista does almost all driver installation by itself. At first boot, all my hardware was preinstalled and Aero was turned on. I plugged in my printer, the drivers installed in the background, and within a minute it was ready to use. External hard drive? Same thing. Especially useful in setting up the external hard drive was the fact that Vista comes with a proper partition editor. Admittedly it won't format a drive in ext3 or reiserfs or any of that, but you can partition any way you like without rebooting (you can even edit the C: drive while it's in use).

Re:Why stop there?

[Loke the Dog]

Well, I've yet to find a windows app that I had to compile myself.

But yeah, as long as the software you need can be installed with apt-get, Ubuntu is much easier than windows. The problems start where apt-get ends, and the problem is that if 9/10 installs go smoothly, the user will only remember the 1/10 that didn't.

Re:Why stop there?

[Sancho]

It's not apples-to-apples because backwards compatibility is expected.

Anyway, saying "Linux sucks," is rarely actually a statement on the quality of Linux, and more a personal opinion statement about operating system choice based upon the total experience. People just tend to say "X sucks" because it's short.

Of course, I guess this could extend as deeply as you want to go. "Linux sucks because the quality of the code is deficient in many, many modules." "Linux sucks because it doesn't have a stable API, and kernel drivers must always be recompiled when upgrading minor kernel versions." "Linux sucks because it doesn't fix hardware flaws in the most recent Intel chipset." At what point is it okay to say "Linux sucks"?

Re:Why stop there?

[MooseTick]

Then I ask if I can use his laptop to burn a iso with Nero. His response? Nero isnt compatible with Vista. He didnt realize at all what he just said. It was perfectly normal for him for programs to not work. Yeah, MS products are weak. Other OSes can run every version of every software available but Vista can't and is therefore weak.

Re:Why stop there?

[mattpalmer1086]

Yes, I remember the days most programs just lived in their own folders. INI files weren't that great, but the registry made installing and managing software ten times more complicated. Every client needed its own configuration, you couldn't share bits of configuration and software easily across the network.

It seems to be manageable now, with a lot of extra tools to deal with the complexity... but it could be a lot easier. I wonder how much of this complexity is motivated by the desire to lock software down to each client?

Re:Why stop there?

[Hucko]

Slashdotters are the most hypocritical entities that God ever created.

Yeah, they even whine about that...

Re:Why stop there?

[Hucko]

Hmmm... It wasn't putty, but I've had and still have the UAC popping up. "Always trust this executable" didn't work. Soo... I'll try Putty to run my own tests, but I'm inclined to believe gp.

Imagine that...

Re:Why stop there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow.. I can buy Maya and use it for "free" on Windows and on Mac .. OMG!? Just because there are more versions of it doesn't mean its somehow more "free". The cost being 0 and them having multiple versions are independent events. Only a moron would seek to connect them.

Crash every twenty minutes? I have kept mine running for years without it crashing. You must be real stupid. I'm sorry.

Re:Why stop there?

[Sockatume]

Yeah, exactly that sort of oddness is why Vista's so unpopular for use in serious situations. My own gripes are mostly with file sharing over the network: XP machines refuse to see Vista's "Public" folders, but can see any other kinds of shares, while the Vista machines can't see "Shared Documents" folders, but can see any other kind of shares. Try as I might, I can't figure it out. Maybe it's something to do with the way Vista insists that I have "password protected" public folders, but provides no means to set up such authentication and never asks me for a password to access them. It's some sort of odd voodoo.

Re:Why stop there?

[porl]

"develop against it"

i think that is probably the best description of working with windows i have ever heard :P

porl

Re:Why stop there?

[gallwapa]

Wow. Check out this new feature of Windows Vista!
Microsoft engineers have thought of a brand new concept called symbolic links which allows a file to appear in two different directories! No other OS has this!

Gee, I guess I missed the part where they claimed they came up with the idea? From one page up:

Symbolic links are designed to aid in migration and application compatibility with UNIX operating systems. Microsoft has implemented its symbolic links to function just like UNIX links.

Re:Why stop there?

[Junta]

If it's out there, free and compilable, there almost always exists somewhere a moderately easy repository to add that contains it. If it isn't compilable, the company either publishes a repository (Adobe) or provides the Windows level installation process (InstallAnywhere applications, for example, which sucks so much in Linux simply because of the sane alternative the platform provides. One exception that comes to mind is if you try to go to Sun's web site for Linux installation instructions instead of the repository, I could see that being a painful process to follow.

If Linux were the predominant platform, you could bet it would be no worse than Windows, and probably better for companies that understand repostiories. Ubuntu, Fedora, RedHat, SuSE, all of the above provide enough frameworks today to be better than Windows without additonal work on their end.

Re:Why stop there?

[damsa]

Windows Xp was bundled with a version of Roxio's burning tech. Who knows if that's the reason why Nero wasn't following NT rules. But it seems mighty suspect.

Re:Why stop there?

[ozbird]

Windows: This action will require administrative privileges to run. Are you an administrator?

Why doesn't Vista know? If I'm not an administrator and answer "Yes", will it say "Liar!"?

Re:Why stop there?

[enoz]

Perhaps parent was referring to Flash in a 64bit Linux OS, or maybe I just dreamed that up.

Either way, the last I heard was the only way to get Flash on Linux was to use 32bit Firefox - please correct me if I am mistaken.

Re:Why stop there?

[Sancho]

If it's out there, free and compilable, there almost always exists somewhere a moderately easy repository to add that contains it. I guess if you're willing to trust some random website. I generally prefer to get from known repositories or from the developer.

Re:Why stop there?

[AnomaliesAndrew]

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8525875&type=product&id=1186007267767&ref=06&loc=01&ci_src=17588969&ci_sku=8525875

Re:Why stop there?

[revengebomber]

The problem is that it's a pain for proprietary software vendors to manage all the different package formats. With F/OSS, you just shove a tarball out there and if it's popular, everyone starts maintaining it in their repositories. With proprietary software, the best you could do (besides everything yourself) is some kind of license clause that permits repackaging the binaries for different systems (but God help you if a library your game runs on goes out of style, like open sound system).

Re:Why stop there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perfectly normal for XP programs not to work?

Thank god Macs don't have this problem.

Re:Why stop there?

[DatAsian]

New laptops will come with Nero 7 or something compatible with Vista. Using old Nero 6 CDs and stuff is no excuse.

Re:Why stop there?

[timnbron]

The update system on Ubuntu has worked really well for me. So well, that I'm nervous about my broadband bill. It updates everything, whether I use it or not!

But it's still far better than the annoying popups and other assorted ways that software on Windows uses to update itself (Do I need a background process running continually just to check for updates on my keyboard driver?). I also have (more) confidence that the updates will be compatible in Ubuntu, since they allegedly come from the same place, or rather through the same update system. No problems yet.

To bring it nearer to topic...

I haven't heard any of my non-techie friends singing the praises of Vista, or wanting help upgrading. Generally I think they're nervous about the requirements of Vista, and of breaking a PC that currently works fine. The place is so awash with PCs now that there's little incentive to buy another.

Re:Why stop there?

[Trelane]

I guess this could extend as deeply as you want to go.

Quite. That's the cornerstone of an arugment--laying out your statement of position point by point.

Re:Why stop there?

[cbhacking]

Not to say you're wrong, but if you're right, I'm certainly one of the 5%. For me, Vista makes XP feel like I AM using Win95 (or rather, its contemporary NT4). The most painfully obvious thing missing from XP is certainly the instant search integrated into the Start menu, though the feature I find the most important is certainly UAC - as somebody who likes to tinker with my system, doesn't like running as an Admin, and spent several painful months trying to use XP as a limited user before switching to Linux (openSuse; I tried Ubuntu but it was terrible back then) until Vista reached usability (beta 2, for me), UAC is a truly fantastic feature. That said, all the other features - ranging from big things like Volume Shadow Copies to little ones like notification area bubble not appearing while in a full-screen app (they queue up instead, and are displayed when you return to the Windows desktop) - make XP feel at least as outdated as it is.

Vista has a lot of nice tricks for power users too; the firewall configuration options completely blow away XP's firewall, the updated Task Manager and new performance monitor are fantastic for everything from identifying system processes that are slowing the machine to catching when an app tries to phone home, the configurability of the power options still puts some desktop Linux distros to shame (when I first saw it, it blew them all away - and I still get better battery life in Vista than I do in Linux, even if I leave Aero enabled), and there's an incredible amount one can do with the Registry, either by hand or with third-party tools (so far as I know, there's no MS powertoy anything like TweakUI for Vista yet). Linux may still be more configurable, but most of the changes on Vista are pretty easy and, at worst, will make things run slower or break some features - not render the machine unbootable, or close to it.

Re:Why stop there?

[erroneus]

Yeah, they did the same thing for WindowsXP. But ask anyone you know who is NOT an IT professional if they know anything about that. Further, since a very large number of new machines are only supporting Windows Vista, I'd say that the tool is irrelevant. As it stands, I could not get the kind of machine that one of my users wanted to have simply because it was only supported under Vista and our general software set is not compatible with Vista.

We're not talking exclusively about people using stuff at home for personal use. We're talking about actual machines and software being used in business situations. There are many reasons why business isn't ready to move over to Vista, but one of the most important reasons is that there is no business reason for it... there's no need!

Re:Why stop there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Either you are a troll or a complete noob, given that my personal experience doing the exaqct same task you described did not come up with one single UAC prompt I would be inclined to think you are simply a troll.

Re:Why stop there?

[toddhunter]

Exactly. God help the software industry if Microsoft ever get their act together and produce something that is decent. Next thing you know, everyone will be expecting all software to not have any problems!

Re:Why stop there?

[cbhacking]

Aside from the already well-pointed-out fact that newer versions of Nero are compatible and that Nero has broken across other Windows version upgrades as well (a sign, to me, that they tie too closely to the OS), why the hell pay for burner software? The only thing I need third-part software for in Vista is ISOs (and other image files) for which I use ImgBurn; it's free (as in beer, not speech), runs on everything from Win95 (so they claim, never tried) to Vista x64 to Linux via Wine (see comment on Win95; K3B rules). Fast, easy to use, feature-packed, and while I regret that Vista doesn't include an image burner in its disk-burning abilities, I was using ImgBurn on Vista since the Beta 2 days.

No, I'm not associated with ImgBurn in any way other than finding them in a Google search over 18 months ago when I was looking to burn some Linux discs and an early Vista beta, and happily using ever since.

Re:Why stop there?

[Cloud K]

Yeah but we'd get moderated down as a troll :) Seriously though, no problems here, and yes I'm a geek (I'm on Slashdot for starters!). Guess I'm just lucky.

Number one complaint seems to be the UAC prompts. Eh? You're geeks, why let the OS protect you from yourself? Turn it off! Problem solved.

The other gripe is hardware and software compatibility. Doesn't anyone remember when XP came out? Ooooh boy, gaming? Forget it!!

Upgrades do break things (even happens in the Apple world, check out Leopard). Developers and hardware manufacturers do catch up. Just wait a little while, it'll be fine in the end like XP was... don't adopt early unless you've checked out the compatibility with what you use.

Re:Why stop there?

[cbhacking]

No offense, but if you're installing the crap on the CDs for cameras or MP3 players, and your version of Windows is newer than 98, you're somewhere between wasting your time and actively massing up your computer. That stuff is all garbage, in my experience. All you need is the MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) or UMS (USB Mass Storage) protocol, which have been included in Windows since 2000, I believe. No special software or drivers needed.

Granted, the instructions, should you happen to read them, will probably tell you to use the (heavily branded, often slow and buggy, and possible causes of everything from slow booting to data loss) software they include. No, thank you! Plug and play; it Just Bloody Works (even as a non-admin).

Of course, there is some specialized hardware that is new enough XP won't have drivers for it, beyond perhaps basic capabilities of it's a specialized version of standard hardware (note that Linux isn't likely to give you any more than that, either). Vista is much more likely to have the drivers - it's plug-and-play collection is far newer, and part of the install footprint is over 2GB of relatively common drivers - but even if it doesn't, it can automatically find them online via Windows Update. If that fails, you can search the web manually, and even if there aren't any labeled for Vista, XP drivers will almost always work. Compare that to Linux, where most (binary) drivers will break between kernel versions (and yes, this is an advantage of open-source, but it doesn't make it any less annoying to find a driver for kernel 2.6.8 or - heaven forbid - 2.4.33, that won't work on your newer system).

Re:Why stop there?

[FurryFeet]

"Ray, when someone asks you if you're an administrator, you say "YES"! "

Re:Why stop there?

[alshithead]

"You!=Everyone else :) You have to remember that every bad story about Vista isn't representing the whole truth - that there are thousands of folks out there who are using Vista on a day-to-day basis, and are not having problems."

Hmm... Thousands out there not having problems? Citation please. While every bad story about Vista may not represent the whole truth...I doubt your statement does either. If only thousands are not having problems out of millions, wouldn't that represent a significant issue with reliability? I'll grant that my experience with Vista is limited but I sure as hell was unimpressed. It might be that other installations aren't dead dog slow but I don't intend to have one at home until I have to support it at work. That might be a long time according to my bosses.

Re:Why stop there?

[JohnBailey]

a) 'sudo apt-get' is a command line. Casual PC users aren't going to touch the command line. Not to mention you need to know what you're 'apt-get'ing in the first place So don't use the command line. There are usually one or two GUI tools with obscure titles like Add/Remove software hidden away in the first layer of the Applications menu. They also have a search function that reads through the descriptions and everything. So even if you don't know the name of the program you want, you surely know what you want to do, and can search on that.

It's a living hell here with us Linux weirdos. Downloading, installing and registering the application in a categorized menu, and then getting rid of the download files and setting it up for global updates with no user intervention except choosing it from a list with descriptions of all the software.. I agree. Its useless. Why would anybody prefer that over the joy that is Windows software installation?

Much better to hunt around for multiple easily damaged or lost install disks and serial numbers. Or going to various websites and hoping the one you download is the right one. Then wasting gigabytes of disk space or multiple DVDs to keep them so you don't have to download again. And then downloading or installing all the patches for the various programs, providing the company is still in business.

b) http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash&P2_Platform=Linux - not quite as easy as Windows, eh? When you can do stuff like that in Linux, then you can claim it's easy to use for novices. Or.. Go to youtube or any other site that has a fair chance of having flash on the page and follow the instructions for installing the firefox plugin automatically.. Just like with Windows. We did want to make it nice and complicated, but those darn Mozilla people went and made it simple!!

So now we can claim its ready for novices then.. Great.. Party at Khuffie's!!

Oops.. hang on.. We still don't have all the latest games, Photoshop or Microsoft Office. So we obviously can't be using our Linux computers for anything useful or fun. Drat!! Back to the basement to sob into our noodles while we curse the software gods for not giving us over priced software to pirate.

Re:Why stop there?

[Brad1138]

WTF? I thought that the reason windows is so bloated and crappy was 'because it has to maintain backwards compatibility' ?

Nope, turns out windows just sucks all the way around.

Re:Why stop there?

[kungfujesus]

You must not be a developer then. I've had to compile libraries from source on windows, and it is a pain in the ass. Some libraries will be nice enough to give you an installer (like QT4) but others are 10x as hard to install in windows as in linux (such as FLTK)

Re:Why stop there?

[dlelash]

I'm pretty sure 80% of people could use the cardboard prop computer from the office furniture showroom and have no problems.

Re:Why stop there?

[El_Oscuro]

About a year ago, I bought an el-cheapo Kodak camera at best buy. I plugged it into my Windows 2000 computer (fully patched, with the latest SP), expecting it to Just Work (tm). When I plugged it in, nothing, no dice. No new driver letter with the camera files, no prompts for a new USB device. Nothing, just nothing.

I run the setup program on the CD that came with the camera, and after about a half-hour of installing 100MB of crapware on my PC, I am able to see the camera and download photos from it.

Out of curiosity, I plugged the same camera into my other computer running SUSE 10.0. When I plugged it in, it asked me: "A camera was detected. Would you like to import photos into F-Spot?". Linux now manages all of my photos and other multimedia. It Just Works (tm).

Re:Why stop there?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, how hard would it be to start up a Linux packaging company that takes care of all that messy distro-specific infrastructure stuff? The propreitary company sends in code (under an NDA of course), out comes a few neatly packaged .debs/.rpms/whatever for your distro of choice.

I for one could kill for such a service.

Re:Why stop there?

[QuietObserver]

At least on Ubuntu, 64 bit Firefox is now able to get Flash (another thread on this post indicated that it's running an encapsulated verion of the 64 bit Windows version). I cannot speak for any other Linux distro.

Re:Why stop there?

[CaptPungent]

The real question is, does Photoshop Elements do $99 worth more? Is the minor difference in UI worth $99? Everyone I've shown Gimp to didn't think so, problem is most people don't know Gimp exists. If they install Ubuntu, search for "photo", find Gimp, install it, and it was free, a whole lot more people would not be paying $99 for a crippled photo program to resize their digital camera photos. Everyone online I've suggested the Windows Gimp port loved it. Anecdote, yes, but at least in my experience common people don't rate what Photoshop Elements can do over Gimp to be worth $99. Especially not for what they intend to use it for.

Re:Why stop there?

[Elite_Warrior]

hey! tell me how to add win32 to my DOS

Re:Why stop there?

[CCFreak2K]

I went to install Tribes 2 server on a remote Debian box. The installer didn't work, naturally (segmentation fault...). I poked around in the .run package (something a normal user wouldn't do), and I figured out that it required glibc 2.1. Guessing that it was choking on 2.2, I asked in #debian if I could install it for compatibility purposes in Debian Etch, to which I was told that it probably wasn't possible on Etch. I ended up just running it in Wine (don't get me started on the problems I've had with Wine...).

Re:Why stop there?

[vaximily]

Me and everyone I know are rolling on the floor right now. I couldn't have put it any better myself.

Re:Why stop there?

[cheater512]

And as per usual, half of slashdot completely missed my point.
Nero has nothing to do with the point of my post.

Re:Why stop there?

[sponga]

Uhhh Nero 7 does work on Vista.

Version 8 which I just got Free After Rebate works also completely fine on my Vista and the same for my buddies laptop, along with everything else I used to use on XP.

Re:Why stop there?

[onefriedrice]

> Meanwhile, Linux was 'stuck' with the need to provide an alternative view on which pieces of software owned which
> binaries that were mixed in with everything else. To get out of a relatively messy situation that was undeniably there,
> they rolled the most sophisticated package management for a platform ever (mainly deb and rpm). With that, installs
> *knew* in a standardized way what other programs needed to be installed to work right, and things kind of 'just
> worked'. It was beautiful.

Ahh, and then there was Mac OS X.

Click.
Drag.
Installed.

The executables and resources all fit seamlessly into the all-encompassing idea that is the Application Bundle so you can install, delete, or move around software at will, in a fashion that make perfect sense. It is indeed quite beautiful.

Re:Why stop there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yah because somebody installing hardware it is going to be so hard to 'find cd' and click 'continue' for admin privelage.

The CD comes with the hardware usually and Windows already has a library full of drivers.

I pick up stuff all the time from FRY's for very cheap and got this random Emprex video camera for dirt cheap.
Plugged it into my USB on Vista and sure enough it finds drivers automatically on Vista

Usually the choices are
1. Install these uncertified drivers
2. Search computer and internet for drivers
3. Do not notify me about installing these drivers/hardware.

My bet would be on the Windows installation of the hardware to be more of a greater experience and get to use all the extras on the hardware.
While Linux would be crippled and not fully supported, although I guess you get it installed quicker.

My experience with Ubuntu was starting it up and than the screen just goes black.
The answer from the community when I told them I had an ATI 9800 Pro in there
"well thats ATI's fault for not opening their drivers"

At the end of the day Windows has been accomplishing the tasks and it 'just works' since 3.1.

Re:Why stop there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows: I can't allow you to do this.

That sounds familiar

Re:Why stop there?

[Squozen]

Unless that app is Postfix.

Re:Why stop there?

[derfy]

Well played, sir.

Re:Why stop there?

[DocHoncho]

Wow... just wow! A system from circa 1983, which makes it 24 years old. In computer years thats like 400! Just out of curiosity, just what kind of app would be worth the trouble of taking care of a 400 year old system anyway? I mean the sponge baths alone...

Re:Why stop there?

[DocHoncho]

So if Vista == Hitler, what does this mean for Godwin's law?

Considering the quantity of Vista==Sux0rz stories found on Slashdot, if Vista==Hitler, the probability of Nazi analogies == 1 even before any meaningful discussion has occurred ("frist psot"s aside).

The mind boggles...

Re:Why stop there?

[ZorbaTHut]

I actually used Linux recently to determine what a piece of hardware was - I couldn't find Windows drivers that worked with it, but an Ubuntu boot disk detected it and told me exactly what it was.

(Which, annoyingly, was exactly what I'd thought it was. Stupid Windows laptop video drivers. Why can't they be more compatible?)

Re:Why stop there?

[richlv]

actually, it appeared several years ago.
at that point k3b already was in a pretty good shape, but i decided to try nero anyway (i used it before on windows).

i installed it. installation was awkward. it didn't work with my cdburner. the interface was DAMN UGLY (and i'm really fine with what others call ugly - i have thunderbird and gimp on slackware kde system using some very squared widgets).
it did not offer me anything i missed in k3b, was damn ugly, was proprietary and i had to pay for it. doh ?

if it had appeared before k3b and if it was decent, it might have slowed down k3b and become popular. it came too late, was too crappy.

Re:Why stop there?

[DocHoncho]

Lots of software in the universe and multiverse repositories isn't kept up-to-date. This can be pretty annoying. Off the top of my head, I always have to work extra hard to get Valknut and Pan (newsreader) to their newest versions (with the former, I compile several packages from source, and with the latter, I go to the website where I get the up-to-date debs.)

Given the implications of the Free Software philosophy,i.e., "there's more than one way to do it", it should be no surprise that the particular applications you have highlighted here are not necessarily kept up to date. I would assume that there are several other newsreader applications which are more popular, and thus worth the added effort of keeping them current in the repositories. If Ubuntu's maintainers tried to keep up with every two-bit open source application floating around out there in the interwebs they would be unable to update the things which people actually use.

In emulation, Virtualbox also isn't in any of the repositories, (well, the open source version is, but it doesn't include a lot of the niceties that come with the less free version.) Wine is never at the newest version whenever I look for it, and the newer versions tend to include lots of compatibility updates. Cedega requires extra work, too. For transitioning people to Linux, software like this is essential.

Since the grandparent was referring to "normal users", and that Ubuntu seems to be targeted to said "normal users", the fact that a yet another virtualization tool has fallen beneath the radar of the maintainers is rather unsurprising. If you need the services of a tool such as Virtualbox, it may be reasonably assumed that you should know your way around Linux systems, and therefore are capable of "jumping through the hoops" of downloading tarballs and compiling a software package. And if that is too much of a hassle, perhaps you should begin to question the decision to use an relatively obscure software package in the first place.

The Multiverse and Universe repositories aren't held to any particular standard, yet they are now apparently enabled by default (they were on my install from yesterday.) This means that software updates may not be enough to get you up-to-date software. The usability will (probably) be there, but there may be security issues.

So the fact that several of your pet applications are missing from the official repositories implies that said repositories are not held to any particular standard? While there may be legitimate security issues in particular applications, I would assume that serious security flaws in popular software packages would take precedence over more obscure ones. How many security flaws in mainstream (and thus more likely to be exploited) packages go without being patched?

Re:Why stop there?

[drsmithy]

Sun has an interesting warranty with Solaris. If the new version of Solaris breaks any old program you have, Sun will work continuously with you until the problem is solved. What this means is that they will put real engineers (not telephone support people) on your problem and change the OS if required.

Somehow I doubt they do that if the application is using undocumented, unsupported or deprecated APIs and system features - which is why 99% of the software that breaks in new versions of Windows, does so.

Re:Why stop there?

[drsmithy]

An operating system that claims compatibility with existing software, should be compatible with existing software. If it's not, then the operating system has failed to fulfill its own promises.

Only if the applications are written using documented, supported and recommended APIs and methods.

*Vast* amounts of Windows software do not. Just look at how much of it breaks when not running under an Administrator account (no piece of software released in the last 8 or so years has any excuse for this), or from a service pack.

Microsoft have _zero_ responsibility to retain compatibility with undocumented, unsupported or deprecated APIs. That they expend _any_ effort to do so, in itself, is significant. This is before even getting into the massive scale of their work to remain "bug compatible" (eg: having special code in the Windows 95 memory manager to detect when Sim City is running and modify its behaviour to support a Sim City bug).

Yes, some software breaks from version to version of Windows - but in the context of the millions (if not tens of millions) of Windows (and DOS) programs that continue to work, it's statistical noise. No other platform or vendor even goes close to Microsoft and Windows, in terms of legacy code support coverage.

Re:Why stop there?

[jacquesm]

as an example of why antique computers and emulators are still useful, I find that the smaller machines are much less intimidating to kids that are trying to 'grok' the entirety of a computer. A linux distro is so vast that you could never completely understand it from one end (the boot) to the other (your user interface). These old machines are *much* more friendly to that kind of curiosity. I am running 'brandy' (a BBC basic V clone) in a window to teach my son a bit about programming and I find that he takes to it much faster than to most other environments.
There something really rewarding about typing:
10 LINE 0,0,1280,1024
RUN
and getting a line on the screen, or even doing it in direct mode.
I'm not even sure if there is any other modern equivalent that is in actual use that gives you that kind of return-on-time-invested. Most GUI based frameworks would require tons of code before you could draw that line, which is a surefire way to kill off any interest (no, see we first have to open the window and get a handle...).

Re:Why stop there?

[Anonymous Coward]

The real question is, does Photoshop Elements do $99 worth more?

Yes.

Is the minor difference in UI worth $99?

Yes.

Re:Why stop there?

[Blakey Rat]

Ok, since you described Photoshop Elements as "crippled" I can only assume you've never touched it, and therefore you can't possibly have an opinion on whether it's worth $99 or not.

Re:Why stop there?

[wanderingknight]

Lots of software in the universe and multiverse repositories isn't kept up-to-date. This can be pretty annoying. Off the top of my head, I always have to work extra hard to get Valknut and Pan (newsreader) to their newest versions (with the former, I compile several packages from source, and with the latter, I go to the website where I get the up-to-date debs.) Applications aren't kept "up-to-date" due to stability issues. That's why you have the 6-month cicle: you're supposed to have a stable set of applications in the repositories that will last 6 months. Once the new release of Ubuntu is out, all said applications will be updated to the next stable version. However, you can easily turn on new updates to applications by activating the 'Ubuntu backports' repository. Besides, for most of things that aren't in the repositories, there's always the .deb packages (which work pretty much like .exes in Windows in the eyes of a regular user), and being Ubuntu the most popular distro, not finding any .deb packages precompiled for that distro in any project page is pretty rare. Moreover, _normal_ users should not care about running the latest software--they should care about it working. GAIM, despite being replaced by Pidgin now, still works, and it should meet the needs of any regular user.

Wine is never at the newest version whenever I look for it, and the newer versions tend to include lots of compatibility updates. Wine is probably one of the most unstable and constantly updating pieces of software around. It gets an update every two weeks--maintaining it via an official repository would be a pain in the ass. That's why the regular way of doing it is adding Wine's own repository--which can be easily done with a click-and-run GUI.

Re:Why stop there?

[Sancho]

I would assume that there are several other newsreader applications which are more popular, and thus worth the added effort of keeping them current in the repositories. Ah, assuming. Great way to counter arguments. You don't even have to have any knowledge to do it!

Since the grandparent was referring to "normal users", and that Ubuntu seems to be targeted to said "normal users", the fact that a yet another virtualization tool has fallen beneath the radar of the maintainers is rather unsurprising. If you need the services of a tool such as Virtualbox, it may be reasonably assumed that you should know your way around Linux systems, and therefore are capable of "jumping through the hoops" of downloading tarballs and compiling a software package. And if that is too much of a hassle, perhaps you should begin to question the decision to use an relatively obscure software package in the first place. People try to convert others to the OS X platform with the promises of virtualization allowing them to run their old Windows software. I don't think that those users are any more capable than the ones who move over to Linux.

And again, fantastic argument. When replying to a post about how easy repositories in X distribution are, I point out a few software packages that don't fit that bill. Your response that I should reconsider my use of those packages is simply classic.

Computers should be our slaves, not the other way around.

So the fact that several of your pet applications are missing from the official repositories implies that said repositories are not held to any particular standard? While there may be legitimate security issues in particular applications, I would assume that serious security flaws in popular software packages would take precedence over more obscure ones. How many security flaws in mainstream (and thus more likely to be exploited) packages go without being patched? Read what I said. I was referring to the multiverse and universe repositories. These are not maintained directly by Canonical personnel. From the wiki (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories/Ubuntu):

he components are called Main (officially supported software), Restricted (supported software that is not available under a completely free license), Universe (community-maintained, i.e. not officially supported software) and Multiverse (software that is "not free"). My complaint is that these are enabled by default (or silently enabled at some point during the first few hours of use of the system--I can't honestly speak to which without making a new install), yet they are unmaintained (i.e. old and buggy versions of the software) in many cases. I wouldn't expect Canonical to maintain software in Universe or Multiverse--if they were maintaining them, they should be in one of the official repos. Instead, they shouldn't be enabled by default, where an unsuspecting user might find himself with old, buggy software. I'll state it again--software in Universe and Multiverse aren't held to a high enough standard to be included in the default.

Re:Why stop there?

[Anonymous Coward]

In actual fact virtual box is very easy to install and setup far easier than vmware (and i do like vmware but easy it is not). yes there are two versions of virtualbox available the open source community version which is available directly from ubuntu or the vendor supplied version which is available as a .deb package (amongst over options) for ubuntu or debian distro's

it's got some nice features, the built in rdp server is brilliant, i tried a vista install without problem written to a networked partition decided i might as well run it directly from that PC used ssh and installed and ran virtualbox from that PC then found i could use RDP with the image directly and then proceeded to log into vista from my phone.

Thats pretty impressive, with the ability to use rdp using non standard ports you can choose to run more than 1 VM remotely at the same time. The negative side is that the graphics support is basic, vmware can do better.

An important other feature is host based networking allowing you to have the vmimage on your actual network rather than Nat through your host OS, Only catch is most wireless cards do not support more than one pc on a single network card.

All in all virtualbox is very very easy to install, it is not the example of a difficult to install program that you were looking for. Vmware that is more difficult.

Re:Why stop there?

[AP31R0N]

Only if they don't want to EVER play current video games, or send and receive files from 90% of all the other desktops in the world.

Re:Why stop there?

[jonbryce]

Have you tried installing Flash on 64bit Vista?

I have. I managed it. But it wasn't easy. Nowhere near as easy as Ubuntu.

Re:Why stop there?

[CaptPungent]

Oh? Since when did Photoshop Elements become anything other than a crippled version of regular Photoshop? It is crippled. They purposefully blocked some of the functionality that regular Photoshop can do to provide the product. You dodged the question, by the by. Tell me, what can it do that Gimp can't do, that makes it worth $99?

Re:Why stop there?

[xhrit]

How about Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Cleaner & Cleaner XL, Autodesk FBX, Autodesk Flame, Autodesk Inferno, Autodesk Lustre, Autodesk Maya, Autodesk MotionBuilder, Autodesk Mudbox, Autodesk Smoke, and Autodesk Toxik?

Used to make movies such as The Fountain, The Covenant, Charlottes Web, Casino Royale, Stranger Than Fiction, D-War, Night at the Museum, Apocalypto, Blood Diamond, Unaccompanied Minors, Rocky Balboa, Babel, The Black Dahlia, and For Your Consideration

Oh, you mean CHEAP movie editor on Linux. (note the emphasis)

http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/linux_wp_2006.pdf

Re:Why stop there?

[Sancho]

No, I actually just meant 'good.' I had no idea that Autodesk offered a movie editor (I knew that there were rendering solutions for graphics, but I didn't know that the other editing tools were available!)

Of course, cheap would be better. There are plenty of cheap, high quality (well, high enough for the home user) editing tools for Windows. But this is pretty cool. Thanks for the info!

Re:Why stop there?

[Blakey Rat]

They purposefully blocked some of the functionality that regular Photoshop can do to provide the product.

Yes, but that doesn't *cripple* the product. Photoshop Elements is designed for home users doing tasks like photo management, you don't need professional-level CMYK printing or the other removed features for that.

By your logic, the $20 coffeemaker I buy with doesn't have a timer is "crippled" since the same company sells a $50 coffeemaker with a timer on it. I don't buy that logic at all.

Tell me, what can it do that Gimp can't do, that makes it worth $99?

Among other things, it can use Photoshop plug-ins. Which means my Canon scanner works with it natively.

Re:Why stop there?

[AdamReyher]

That's funny. I have PuTTY sitting on my desktop and I've never been prompted once by Windows. Hmm. /me scratches his head

Re:Why stop there?

[CaptPungent]

UH, yes that is exactly what I'm saying. It is crippled. It is not the same as a real-life product where the features all cost money to put into every unit. The code was already written, it cost them no more money to replicate. They took what was already done, something they could replicate for free over and over, and disabled portions of it, thus actually spending more money to remove features. It was crippled. Plain and simple, and if you can't get that then I question your ability to understand logic. So, it can use Photoshop plugins. Which Gimp also has it's own suite of plugins. Perhaps it doesn't have one for your scanner. Does that make it worth $99, a single plugin? What is cheaper, spending that much on software, or just buying another scanner that does have a plugin? What about someone who's scanner is supported in Gimp? What about those that aren't using scanners and just copy photos from a camera? Is it worth $99 to them? Again, what exactly makes Photoshop Elements worth $99 over Gimp? What else can it do better that most people actually care about? Again, this all goes back to your assertion that Gimp isn't as good as Photoshop Elements. That is a faulty statement, and again the price of that software isn't worth the differences to most people.

Re:Why stop there?

[caluml]

Is your father's name Richard? What the hell is he doing running Vista?!

Re:Why stop there?

[Reziac]

Yeah, this poor old computer needs a walker and nappies... the irreplaceable app is some sort of Jewish lunar calendar thing, that prints everything Just So.

The guy is a dBase programmer, you'd think he could code up something to replace it...??!

Re:Why stop there?

[Reziac]

I think you're right -- I doubt I'd ever have become as proficient at hardware and OSs if I'd not been blessed with an old DOS 286 as my learner kit. Everything was right there in front of me, nothing needed to be dug up or interpreted or RTFM'd. Sure gentled the learning curve!

Re:Why stop there?

[Entropius]

The current video games thing: yes, you do need Windows for that.

I have no problems exchanging files with people running Windows while on Ubuntu, though. Why would I?

Re:Why stop there?

[cp.tar]

So if Vista == Hitler, what does this mean for Godwin's law?

In any discussion, the probability of someone mentioning Vista or Bill Gates approaches 1?

Re:Why stop there?

[GwaihirBW]

As with GP . . . cool! I didn't know they had a movie editor either! I'd mod you up Informative, but no points. :-(

Re:Why stop there?

[skiman1979]

(d) automatic updates for all software on the system, not just the OS.

Yeah. If Microsoft tried to do something like this (offer lots of really useful, free software, and update them all from a central location), they'd probably get charged with being a monopoly. That's what happened with Internet Explorer in the United States, and with Windows Media Player in the EU.

Of course if Microsoft centrally managed it all, then people would cry monopoly. With Linux, I can point my package manager (portage, apt, yum...) at different repositories, whether at the main distro's site, or community repositories. The software will happily grab updated packages from those repositories. Microsoft could design Automatic Updates the same way. The update software could download from Microsoft's servers by default, but allow users to add 'community' repositories as well. In Ubuntu, and I assume other distros, I can tell apt to download the latest packages for, say, wine, from winehq.com instead of the usual ubuntu apt repositories. I just found this on Sourceforge. I've never used it, but it looks interesting.

Re:Why stop there?

[Sancho]

Well, there's WSUS, but it still ultimately gets packages from Microsoft. I wonder if one could figure out how to add your own updates.

So Desperate

[Corporate Troll]

They probably hope that pirates will make Vista popular and that a fraction actually will buy Vista in the end ;-)

Re:So Desperate

[dave420]

How is that desperate? Vista is already beating XP's sales figures at the same point in XP's release. They're just listening to their customers, and you seem to think it's a sign of desperation? Weird.

Re:So Desperate

[Hennell]

How many pirates actually want vista? I know people hardly go about saying "Ho Ho, I've stolen MS latest OS" to strangers, but I haven't really heard much about vista pirating. I've have heard a lot about lack of game support etc, which I would have thought would discourage many would-be-pirates, Not to mention you seem to need fairly new hardware which may limit some. Is there actually going to be a large number of people who want to pirate it?
---
I think the method in my madness is a mad method
---

Re:So Desperate

[ntropia]

Ehehe, looking at the Vista sale numbers, I guess that Redmordor guys have to thank those unauthorized sellers, 'cause they could be the most part of OS activation requests at the Windows Update site... that boooooooosts the $HUGE_NUMBER of Vista selled copies.

eNjoy

Re:So Desperate

[Anonymous Coward]

If I had mod points I'd mod you informative. That is so true; it has been proven time and again that copy protection actually leads to decreased sales.

Re:So Desperate

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Good point, if true. I do remember XP getting off to a slow start as well. I guess the difference at the time is that there weren't many real alternatives. Open Office and mozilla weren't any good, which really limited the use of any alternative operating system. So for users of 98 & me, Xp was the best solution and everyone eventually migrated. Now? I think the application stack for the alternative OS's has improved greatly. Its a much easier decision to not upgrade an existing XP machine ( than going form 98 or me to xp), and there are easier transitions to competitors. So, its not really the same. If this is the upgrade that people don't adopt for those reasons, microsoft is in serious trouble. So there is a hint of desperation around Vista. There is a sense that they aren't responsive to their large customers wishes. So this is a good move in that regard, but you have to wonder why they did it in the first place. Shouldn't they have know the reaction? Shouldn't they have consulted their corporate customers?

Re:So Desperate

[Mattsson]

Beating sales figures aren't really a relevant comparison.
Amount of computers 2002 = X
Amount of computers 2007 = 5X
Yes, I'm pulling numbers out of thin air, but you get the picture. There are lot's more potential customers of Vista then there where of XP.
What I'd want to know is:
1. How many percent of older MS-systems have upgraded to Vista.
2. How many percent of OEM computers come with Vista relative other systems.
3. How many percent of non-MS users have switched to Vista.
3. How many percent of those who have switched/upgraded are happy with Vista.

Then compare the same percentages to those of XP after the same period of time.

Re:So Desperate

[cheater512]

No, Vista is only beating XP if you count OEM licenses which are in possession of distributors, not customers.

Re:So Desperate

[Tassach]

Vista is already beating XP's sales figures at the same point in XP's release.

Only because M$ has bullied the large PC companies into not giving consumers the choice between Vista and XP. If you buy a new computer, you get Vista whether you want it or not. This is nothing new. The only reason that Vista is beating XP's sales numbers is that the PC market is larger now than it was then.

Re:So Desperate

[Burnhard]

That is actually a very insightful comment, so I don't know why it was moderated Interesting ;).

Re:So Desperate

[mqduck]

They probably hope that pirates will make Vista popular and that a fraction actually will buy Vista in the end ;-) Hmm, maybe there should be a "+/-0 Stating the Obvious" mod. I'm surprised this hasn't dawned on more people.

Re:So Desperate

[Anonymous Coward]

Since you like to make up numbers, here's my shot at it.

Amount of computers capable of running Vista in 2007:

X/5

Re:So Desperate

[kylehase]

They probably hope that pirates will make Vista popular and that a fraction actually will buy Vista in the end ;-)

Close but more accurately. They hope that...

1. Pirates will begin to use Vista.
2. New popularity will convince third party software developers to fix Vista compatibility issues.
3. New popularity will make many Vista gripes clear to MS.
4. MS will roll out service packs.
5. Companies/enterprise will begin to buy Vista.
6. Profit

It worked for XP and Photoshop

Re:So Desperate

[sponga]

So pirates chose to pirate Windows rather than take the free one.

Slightly better

[Bieeanda]

Nifty. Instead of crippling itself, Windows will keep popping windows up like the delightful direct message spam of yesteryear. I wonder how difficult it will be to get a legit install with a bug up its ass properly validated.

Re:Slightly better

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, and I had just managed to forget about that old pita.

Re:Slightly better

[t0rkm3]

From personal experience... Not much harder than calling the Microshaft hinderdesk and holding for an eon or two.

It sucks, but at least the laptop will be usable in the interim. I really hate it when my sister bugs me about her brand new laptop and the fact that Vista has questions about the veracity of the sticker on the bottom of the laptop.

òô

Re:Slightly better

[rolfc]

The next thing you will know is that the popping windows will become paid banners i SP2!!

Re:Slightly better

[dave420]

It's really easy. I even called up and got a non-legit copy properly validated. You can do it automatically, or via an operator. I was installing a downloaded English copy of it on a friend's German notebook. It's Vista was in German, and he preferred it in English. I installed Vista, typed in the code on the box, and it told me to call them (as the code is for a re-install of the OEM version, not the off-the-shelf English one). I called, entered the code, and they gave me an activation number. I typed it in, and it was done. The whole experience took me two minutes, and they didn't even have to do it.

Re:Slightly better

[Bieeanda]

So like what I go through after reinstalling XP once too often, too quickly, then. That's good to know-- with all of the breast-beating and moaning I've heard about Vista since before it launched, I half expected them to have gone with something totally obnoxious and obtuse.

Re:Slightly better

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Also, while they are reportedly killing the "kill switch" that WGA uses (in some unspecified way), they aren't killing the basic product activation mess or phone-home behaviour.

In other words, they aren't actually stopping Vista being a user-hostile operating system in this respect, but they're toning down the draconian anti-piracy features enough that people prepared to put up with the nagware could use it (presumably until they bother to get a cracked, nag-free version instead).

Am I the only person who can't see how this is really good for anyone?

Obsolete Business Model

[clang_jangle]

A company that fancies itself a "tech leader" has no business attempting to enforce such an obsolete business model. The fact that MS still does not get this will be their undoing.

Re:Obsolete Business Model

[smittyoneeach]

Look, they can trot out lousy policy after lousy policy, but so long as they own the file formats, all else is moot.
Hence the ramrodding of OOXML, which, while painfully boring, is really under-reported in the geek press, like most imortant issues.

Re:Obsolete Business Model

[thejam]

Obsolete? I guess you must mean Apple selling proprietary/closed stuff is obsolete then too, no? Last spasms of a failed regime?

Re:Obsolete Business Model

[vulgrin]

I'm sorry, what business model should they use instead? Give everything away for free and hope that people paypal them a donation for their efforts? Build a business model off of paying for support? So they can have a market cap of 3.8B like Redhat instead of 300B? Are YOU going to hire / feed / clothe all those folks from Microsoft who get laid off or who's jobs get sent overseas?

IF the piracy reminders affect legitimate users, then that's one thing and an issue they would need to fix. If its only going after the people who aren't activating Vista, then good for them.

If you don't like it, them, and their business practices, then just STFU and "buy" something else. And if you hate Microsoft because you think they are a money grubbing, evil, capitalist company - then wake up to the real world. That's what business is about - making as much money as you possibly can, however you can do it, and make yourself and your shareholders rich. If you can't stand that idea then go buy yourself a farm somewhere in the middle of nowhere and milk some goats for a living - because you can't escape it in today's modern life.

Microsoft's not any more or less evil than any other large-cap corporation out there. The whiners better just face up to that fact and move the hell on. You are getting tiring to listen to.

Re:Obsolete Business Model

[clang_jangle]

No, you're comparing Apples and oranges -- Apple sells complete computers (hard and software), so their model is not obsolete so long as it remains non-trivial to copy a Mac. MS is basing their business model on software which can be easily copied and downloaded.

Re:Obsolete Business Model

[clang_jangle]

Microsoft's not any more or less evil than any other large-cap corporation out there. The whiners better just face up to that fact and move the hell on. You are getting tiring to listen to.

I was just thinking that very thought, but it was about the hardcore capitalist greed mongers who think society owes them the right to exploit whatever resources necessary in order to "manufacture wealth". I sure do wish you all would grow up and stop being so selfish. The business model is obsolete because it cannot work anymore without creating some *artificial* arrangement, okay genius? It ain't my job to solve MS' (or the **AA's) problems, but given the resources at their disposal I'm quite confident I'd do better than they are doing.

The real whiners are the stupid people for whom capitalism is a religion. Sadly that appears to be the vast majority of people in the US these days...

Re:Obsolete Business Model

[Anonymous Coward]

"That's what business is about - making as much money as you possibly can, however you can do it"

Business is about making money, but by keeping your customers happy. Microsoft has done everything in their power to piss off their customers and make the world hate Vista. That's not good business. Wake up to MS' endless mistakes. It's ok to like Apple, since they're doing the complete opposite.

Re:Obsolete Business Model

[vulgrin]

Oh, ye of higher moral values. So I assume you work on your own farm, generate your own power, sew your own clothes, grow your own food, and hand built that computer you are using to type up your comments on? No - I didn't think so. You are just a part of the problem and the machine as the rest of us.

Do I wish that everyone had enough to eat, that there was no "want" in the world, there wasn't any resource shortages and no disease? and that everyone could go off and do whatever the hell they wanted all the time? Sure I do! But as much as I'd love to be off drinking, gambling, and cavorting with supermodels all day, I'm also a realist and realize that that is a fantasy world.

Capitalism isn't a religion - its a fact of life. It always has been. People need stuff, other people make and sell stuff. If you don't like that - then don't participate. (And you will very likely starve to death or die of disease.)

I don't get how Microsoft is "exploiting resources." They built a product, they can charge whatever the hell they want for it, and its their right that people aren't stealing it. Period. If you don't like the product, don't like the company, think they beat midgets with bats to make them right the code, or whatever your personal stick up your butt is with it, then JUST DON'T BUY IT. If you, and the legions of haters out there are so damned smart, then your lack of market share should make the product tank, will force Microsoft to go back to the drawing board and write a product a little more to your liking. In the meantime, shouting "YOU GUYS SUCK!" from every mountaintop is just pissing everyone else off and makes you look like a sheep that's joining the bleating crowd of the anti-Microsoft "religion."

Re:Obsolete Business Model

[vulgrin]

Well, they haven't pissed me off yet. I'm running Vista Ultimate 64 bit, and other than some driver issues at the beginning (which were resolved fairly quickly) things have been great. The only time I had any real trouble with it was when one version of iTunes kept bluescreening the system, but even that's been fixed now.

As far as I'm concerned, it's not a mistake. All I see are a bunch of lemmings who would rather bitch and moan about the "big bad evil company" than actually look at the product logically and thoughtfully.

Re:Obsolete Business Model

[networkBoy]

Actually I think their Shareware-ish approach is a good idea. By not reducing the functionality and simply nagging the user they will get a wider adoption from pirate geeks who usually are responsible for recommending systems to average users. Maybe they've come to finally realize that widespread piracy is bad, but no piracy is worse.
-nB

Re:Obsolete Business Model

[Tranzistors]

If you don't like it, them, and their business practices, then just STFU and "buy" something else.

Freedom of speech anyone? Most people are used to MS business practices and it wouldn't hurt too much to show them the world, where evil things are done in lesser extent.

That's what business is about - making as much money as you possibly can, however you can do it, and make yourself and your shareholders rich.

Al Capone pops in my mind. He did a good job of making himself rich. I am pretty sure we are better off without him and his kind.

I'm sorry, what business model should they use instead? Give everything away for free and hope that people paypal them a donation for their efforts?

They should keep the business model, choke up and die. And one will be responsible for the starving high class employees.

Seriously, if they are evil, they deserve bad things (natural or mob type). In those cases, goading is ok.

Cheers!

Re:Obsolete Business Model

[clang_jangle]

They built a product, they can charge whatever the hell they want for it, and its their right that people aren't stealing it.

Okay, now you refer to copying a file as "stealing". Therefore you are probably delusional due to your irrational faith in capitalism and there is no point trying to discuss this with you. What can I say? Game over, get well soon.

Re:Obsolete Business Model

[clang_jangle]

I'm laughing at you MS fanbois who wasted your modpoints to mod me down for speaking the truth. Y'all astro turfers disgust me, eat truth!

Re:Obsolete Business Model

[gsslay]

I'm sorry, what business model should they use instead? Quit asking questions. "Business model" is the Slashdot magic phrase that anyone can use if they want to whine about how unfair evil corporations are. No-one actually expects to be asked to explain what they mean by it. That would only reveal that no, they don't have an MBA and haven't the first clue of what they're talking about.

Re:Obsolete Business Model

[Phisbut]

Okay, now you refer to copying a file as "stealing". Therefore you are probably delusional due to your irrational faith in capitalism and there is no point trying to discuss this with you. What can I say? Game over, get well soon.

I'm sick and tired of people trying to argument that pirating is not stealing. Get real, copying a copyrighted file for which you do not have a license is stealing. Let's have a look at the many definitions of the verb "to steal" and see if one of them apply:

1. to take (the property of another or others) without permission or right, esp. secretly or by force.

Will ya look at that. The very fucking first definition. Pirating is taking a intellectual property and copying it without permission. Case closed.

Re:Obsolete Business Model

[UncleTogie]

All I see are a bunch of lemmings who would rather bitch and moan about the "big bad evil company" than actually look at the product logically and thoughtfully.

Fine. Answer this: where is the value in a $400 OS that doesn't do what the purchaser wants, when OSes that DO are free? OSes that have tamer sysreqs and similar functionality?

Re:Obsolete Business Model

[clang_jangle]

If you have an apple and I take it without your permission that is stealing because I deprive you of that apple.
If you have a file I can see on the network and I copy it you will probably never know it happened. Therefore, no theft has occurred.
These are the simple facts of life, no matter which socio-economic-political ideology you choose to subscribe to. Therefore, one can eassily conclude that people who believe as you do have chosen poorly and have lost. I do not pay taxes to assuage the feelings or recoup the "damages" claimed by incompetent proponents of unnatural ideologies, period. Go get a sustainable business model! Where is the sense of personal responsibility in your "capitalist" foolishness? Get real! The USA is already a socialist state for corporations, and a feudalist state for humans, what more do you people want?
Now please leave me alone and go get yourself an education.

Re:Obsolete Business Model

[pionzypher]

True, Microsoft is making progress and improving their latest OS. Similar to the problems XP had early on, they will eventually be tweaked to a state that a majority will find workable.

That said, however your good experience may not be typical for those running it. For example, I've run Vista business on my main machine two separate times for a total of perhaps six months. I am simply not happy with it. I experience random hard locks that are difficult to trace. The Event Log doesn't catch what's causing these, and updating all drivers & the bios has not solved the problem. I play WoW occasionally, and have suffered numerous issues with it. Ranging from files occasionally becoming corrupted to complete loss of the WoW folder itself. The biggest headache for me were the random crashes that would occur after 15 to 60 minutes of play (if it hadn't happened by then, I could continue playing that session without worry). The file corruption and entire loss of the folder required the use of Xcopy to keep a copy of the entire WoW folder elsewhere which could be partially or wholy copied back to my install folder when the need arose. Copying the whole folder through Explorer caused problems of it's own. Winamp had issues as well as iTunes. I ended up just sticking with WMP for my music.

After some of the random hard locks and after the reboot, windows would display an error message for perhaps half a second about being unable to verify the product ID and would then shut down. Rebooting normally at this point would activate the kill switch and I'd be stuck. Rebooting with F8 and selecting the Previous known good configuration option would bring me back to a workable desktop (though I'd have the This Copy Of Windows Is Not Genuine message at the bottom right of my screen until the next reboot). Memory tests all pass, and XP does not suffer any of these symptoms. Whether driver or OS issue, I am still unsure.

I have given Vista what I consider a fair shake. Perhaps SP1 will help things. I will definitely try it.

No doubt there are some who are just bitching for the sake of it. But I'd appreciate it if there were less generalizations about all the lemmings who hate it just because it came from Redmond. I cannot be the only person experiencing these issues, and the market reaction with many attempting to move back to XP from Vista reinforces my opinion. I have used it and believe I've given it a fair chance. It simply doesn't suit me, not yet.

Re:Obsolete Business Model

[Blkdeath]

"That's what business is about - making as much money as you possibly can, however you can do it"

Business is about making money, but by keeping your customers happy. Microsoft has done everything in their power to piss off their customers and make the world hate Vista. That's not good business. Wake up to MS' endless mistakes. It's ok to like Apple, since they're doing the complete opposite.

The OP was correct, actually. Business is about making money. It just so happens that keeping your customers happy is a good way to make more money so most companies try to go that route.

Re:Obsolete Business Model

[Anonymous Coward]

Your argument would have been fantastic if you'd made it a hundred years ago. Nowadays, however, a lot of items aren't physical and are still considered to be owned. Your view of ownership being limited to the possession of a physical artifact is what makes your take on the current state of affairs ridiculous.

What you're saying is if I hacked into my bank account and changed the balance from $10 to 10,000,000 dollars, because no physical property is involved it's not a crime. Clearly, however, the exchange of currency in physical form or otherwise is valuable, and we live in a day and age when ideas also have a value.

So, if you copy someone's program, you're essentially taking their ideas and therefore the currency they would have received in exchange for creating them. That's where the theft lies.

You may not like it, but you happen to live in a capitalist democratic republic. May I suggest China or Russia? I hear they have it so much better over there.

Re:Obsolete Business Model

[clang_jangle]

Your argument would have been fantastic if you'd made it a hundred years ago. Nowadays, however, a lot of items aren't physical and are still considered to be owned. Your view of ownership being limited to the possession of a physical artifact is what makes your take on the current state of affairs ridiculous.

That is an incorrect assessment. Have the laws of physics changed? No. And neither has the definition of theft. It is you who are the dinosaur bleating about how unfair your impending extinction is.

What you're saying is if I hacked into my bank account and changed the balance from $10 to 10,000,000 dollars, because no physical property is involved it's not a crime

No, that is most certainly not what I said, that is what you said. Presumably because it served your desire to spew rhetoric rather than have an actual debate. Go on already with your irrational sputtering of insane ideas. I'm done with you. You are neither rational nor honest.

Re:Obsolete Business Model

[Phisbut]

If you have a file I can see on the network and I copy it you will probably never know it happened. Therefore, no theft has occurred.

I have never mentioned theft. "Stealing something" and "theft" aren't synonyms, no matter how hard you wish for it to be. Stealing something is taking something that you shouldn't. Theft is depriving someone of something he owns.

Piracy is not theft. Piracy is stealing. Learn what words mean.

Re:Obsolete Business Model

[Ajehals]

1. to take (the property of another or others) without permission or right, esp. secretly or by force. 1a. To take suggests that the item being taken is no longer wherever it was before being taken, copying does not deprive the original owner of access to the copied item. Its still not right, but it is not the same. For example, stealing a CD deprives someone of the true cost of that CD (maybe £1), it also potentially deprives them of the sale of that CD (say £10). Buying and then copying that CD and distributing the contents causing no actual loss at all, but it does cause significantly more potential loss (£10 x the number of copies). So take and copy are not the same, in this context that is quite important.

1b. 'Intellectual Property' and actual property are so different as to make them incomparable, firstly actual property can be assigned a real value (usually the cost it would require to replace) which is usually determined by how scarce it is, intellectual property has no real value and its scarcity (or lack thereof) is defined artificially by whoever derives a benefit from it. Not to mention that the value of an idea or concept are impossible to accurately value unless you realise them.

1c. Rights are defined differently in different areas and are not the same when referring to real property or intellectual property, for example I can grow and sell potatoes, but my rights extend only to the potatoes up to the point of sale, I can't prevent you from selling them as chips to the public (a derivative work) or using them to grow more potatoes (copying). If I were selling a song or a book then I would have additional rights to that book even after you purchased it. As such rights in both fields are different.

Now as I said, I find the violation of copyright for the purposes of distribution reprehensible, I think it is probably more serious than 'stealing' (although less serious than piracy), but I would deem ripping a song so that it can be used on an MP3 player, or backing up DVD's so that they can be recovered if your 3 year old trashes them as reasonable acts (you would presumably consider both as stealing).

Equating a copyright violation with stealing is disingenuous and in my opinion rather stupid, there is too much difference between the two to make them easily comparable, a massive breach of copyright can be carried out with little or no preparation or skill and can cause significant losses without the recipient or the rights owner of the copied items being aware or concerned.
More importantly it is almost impossible to accidentally steal something (because you didn't realise you were doing it) in a manner that leaves no one out of pocket; the average person thinks that it is OK to rip the contents of a CD they own and place the contents onto an MP3 player, of course if copyright infringement is considered stealing then that person has stolen x number of songs, after all the MP3 player would now contain unlicensed copies, that person would be unlikely to realise that they had done anything wrong.

Re:Obsolete Business Model

[clang_jangle]

"Stealing something" and "theft" aren't synonyms, no matter how hard you wish for it to be. Stealing something is taking something that you shouldn't. Theft is depriving someone of something he owns.

You are delusional. I suppose statistically speaking, that makes you normal in today's USA. Still, I prefer honesty and reality. The "system" you rationalise is dishonest and false. It really is just as simple as that, no matter how many straw men you build or how emotional you become.

Piracy is not theft. Piracy is stealing. Learn what words mean.

Good Lord, where did you go to school -- the Ministry of Truth?

Re:Obsolete Business Model

[Phisbut]

Now as I said, I find the violation of copyright for the purposes of distribution reprehensible, I think it is probably more serious than 'stealing' (although less serious than piracy), but I would deem ripping a song so that it can be used on an MP3 player, or backing up DVD's so that they can be recovered if your 3 year old trashes them as reasonable acts (you would presumably consider both as stealing).

Ripping a song to put it on an MP3 player is fair use. You have (implicit) permission to do so, and is therefore not stealing. Same goes for backing up stuff to keep the original away from your 3 year old.

However, let's not divert this conversation towards music, because music is not what this is about. The topic at hand here is software and piracy. There is no such thing as "fair use" when downloading a copy of Windows, or Photoshop, or what-have-you with the intent of using it for what it was designed.

You download Windows/Photoshop and use it without a license? Then you took something to which you are not entitled, you stole a copy of Windows/Photoshop, it doesn't matter whether Microsoft/Adobe is deprived of the copy or not.

Re:Obsolete Business Model

[Ajehals]

First off, fair use doesn't exist everywhere, so for most people making a duplicate of a song, like any other work subject to copyright is an offence.

Secondly, you can state that taking a copy of something is stealing if you wish, that doesn't make the assertion valid, making an unauthorised copy is a violation of copyright, it is not stealing. My previous post covered most of why think that, and you have ignored most of it, but the point you took up is fairly important part of it. It does matter that the owner of a copy or the rights holder is not deprived of a copy, it makes the violation of copyright harder to spot and changes the way in which the victim of a breach of copyright (if you can use that phrase) feels the impact of the copying, this in turn changes method used to reclaim damages and the way in which damage can be assessed.

Copyright violations are wrong, they are illegal, they are not and should not be deemed as theft/stealing.

Here are some other things you could define as 'stealing',

Tax evasion (Deprives the state of cash so is stealing from the tax payer)
Littering (Costs the community money to clean up so is stealing from the community)
Insurance Fraud(Costs the insurer money so its stealing from your insurer)

In fact you could almost define every violation of the law as stealing in one way or another (less rape, murder and some traffic offences) but that doesn't make it accurate or right, call a spade a spade, that way people know what you mean.

Re:Obsolete Business Model

[Hucko]

Piracy is both theft and stealing. Copying is not stealing, theft, or piracy. It can be cheating as in being the 5th Ace of Diamonds in a pack of cards, but that is about it.

Re:Obsolete Business Model

[mattmatt]

...you will probably never know it happened. Therefore, no theft has occurred.

If I murder you before I steal your wallet, you will probably never know it happened. Therefore, no theft has occurred.

Re:Obsolete Business Model

[Phisbut]

Piracy is both theft and stealing. Copying is not stealing, theft, or piracy. It can be cheating as in being the 5th Ace of Diamonds in a pack of cards, but that is about it.

But copying a proprietary application without authorization is piracy.

Definition of piracy :
2. the unauthorized reproduction or use of a copyrighted book, recording, television program, patented invention, trademarked product, etc.

Re:Obsolete Business Model

[clang_jangle]

Not just a straw man, a drama queen straw man!

Re:Obsolete Business Model

[Hucko]

Where did this definition come from? (I don't mean the website/'dictionary'.) Every common use I've ever heard of using piracy was more of the rape and pillage until our dear media companies started using it as a synonym with copying and it still seems to be only those have a secondary financial gain (of an original product) using it in that manner. Most original creators I've spoken to, don't use it in that manner. Sure, language is fluid, but this is more of a stupid business buzz word than a evolution of a word. And yes, I hate the substitution of Google for search. It however is an evolution of a word.

Re:Obsolete Business Model

[mattmatt]

Well the intention was a joke, albeit a not-so-funny one.

Feh.

Re:Obsolete Business Model

[clang_jangle]

Oops. I apologise then, you know it can be hard to tell sometimes -- and actually it was pretty funny, but there are so many people these days saying such things in earnest.

Re:Obsolete Business Model

[Phisbut]

Where did this definition come from? (I don't mean the website/'dictionary'.)

I think the tag you are looking for here is [Citation needed], but let me whip out the bibliography then...

piracy. Dictionary.com. Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Law. Merriam-Webster, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/piracy (accessed: December 06, 2007).

It's not just some random website, it's a Merriam-Webster dictionary.

until our dear media companies started using it as a synonym with copying and it still seems to be only those have a secondary financial gain (of an original product) using it in that manner.

Nope. From MW's definition (emphasis mine) :

2 a : the unauthorized copying, distribution, or use of another's production (as a film) esp. in infringement of a copyright <software piracy>

You don't need to be seeking monetary advantage to be infringing copyright. Downloading Photoshop from a website with the intent of simply using it is copyright infringement, and so it is piracy.

A single word may have several meanings. There are many words in the English language (and other languages too) that have more than one meaning, and the context in which the word is used is usually sufficient in letting the reader know what meaning the word has. When using the word piracy in a context where we are talking about software, licensing and copyright, one can expect the word to not mean robbery on the high seas. In this context, piracy is about people taking copyrighted stuff from the Internet without paying for it.

Re:Obsolete Business Model

[Hucko]

It's not just some random website, it's a Merriam-Webster dictionary.

You say that like it means something. Come on, man, this is English we are talking about!

Yeah, and piracy is being hi-jacked to another meaning. Piracy didn't have that meaning until the ... okay, some bloke named Alfred Tennyson seems to have coined it. Stupid git.

I apologise, I was mistaken. I understood it to be the workings of the PR department of MPAA

Market share?

[Noctrnl]

I guess this is one way to get Vista's adoption rate to go up. Just let it be pirated!

Re:Market share?

[ReAn1985]

Actually that kind of makes sense. I think the pirating of XP probably lead to it's success. Because most people were scared to spend money on the new system (especially given 2000's stability) the priates got and spread vista a lot. More people == more beta testers, more bugs, more people developing, more support. By SP2 most companies were adopting XP and ~most~ companies will actually buy thier licences. Just a theory.

Re:Market share?

[CastrTroy]

Exactly. People who are pirating, know they are pirating. They won't care about the message that says they are pirating the software. If MS really did keep this kind of stuff in Vista, it would stop a lot of people from using it. I imagine there would be a lot of people who would have a dual boot machine with pirated vista installed just to play the games that required vista.

Re:Market share?

[smittyoneeach]

Really, it's a variation on the old theme:
Oderint Dum Metuant--Lucius Accius
"Let them hate, so long as they fear."
Now it's: "Let them pirate, so long as they remain locked in to our crappy architecture", which I'm not really Latin scholar enough to mangle into the classic tongue. :(

Re:Market share?

[Entropius]

And how many of those are there now?

I've seen a lot of games that say things like "System requirements: 1GB RAM, 2.4GHz Pentium 4 or equivalent. Vista: 2GB RAM, 3GHz Pentium 4, dual core recommended."

Re:Market share?

[CastrTroy]

Not a lot of games that required it, but there's quite a few games that require it for setting the games at the highest detail level.

Re:Market share?

[Phu5ion]

Actually, Microsoft would rather you pirate Windows than leave the fold.

Re:Market share?

[Parafilmus]

People who are pirating, know they are pirating. They won't care about the message that says they are pirating the software.

This is true for personal machines in private locations. But in other situations, such a message would help to curb piracy.

For example, most companies would be embarrassed to have such a message appear on their workplace computers. Likewise, schools and organizations would be embarrassed to have such a message on their lab computers.

Re:Market share?

[krazytekn0]

That's pretty much how XP got the market share it has, it's one of the reasons that people use Microsoft and Adobe at all. Both are just giants who create bloatware, but the pirates have made it so everybody is learning computers on MS and learning graphic design on Photoshop, then when you go buy a new machine, you get a windows box, and if you become a good enough designer to start selling your stuff, you buy Adobe products. Who's gonna go from using win XP for free on an old computer that came with 98, and buy a linux system? Who's going to, as they make the transition to a professional designer, start learning a whole new program so they don't get sued when they get some real contracts?

Re:Market share?

[Nossie]

"I guess this is one way to get Vista's adoption rate to go up. Just let it be pirated!"

Agreed!! I'm sure they took WGA off IE7 for the same reason.

Re:Market share?

[Surye]

Quite a few. If you want all the features and highest quality, which anyone who has the hardware to support it WILL want and will consider it a requirement.

Re:Market share?

[CastrTroy]

But the reason they removed it, is because there was too many false positives. How long until we see "This copy of windows has been pirated" on a billboard, or during an important presentation with clients, or during a speech by Steve Ballmer (watch out for chairs). Being locked out of your data kind of sucks. However, having a message being displayed on your screen can be just as harmful. Many places would be embarrassed to have such a message on their computers. But this fix doesn't do anything about the false positive rate. In many situations, having the computer be non-operational would be a better fallback than displaying a message saying that it is pirated.

Strategy not changing?

[Jester998]

It's worth re-emphasizing that our fundamental strategy has not changed.

i.e. We're still gonna bend you over. The big guy named Bubba is still employed with us, but now we've taken away his lube.

Re:Strategy not changing?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's worth re-emphasizing that our fundamental strategy has not changed.

i.e. We're still gonna bend you over. The big guy named Bubba is still employed with us, but now we've taken away his lube. Well I for one won't stand it. As a long time MS customer I demand Bubba get his lube back.

Re:Strategy not changing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sry u are posting as AC therefore no mod up for u.

Re:Strategy not changing?

[Mercano]

Well I for one won't stand it. Standing isn't technically necessary. See the first sentence of the GP.

Re:Strategy not changing?

[nine-times]

It's worth re-emphasizing that our fundamental strategy has not changed.

It's worth re-emphasizing that our fundamental strategy of not-buying Vista has not changed either.

Re:Strategy not changing?

[__aailob1448]

I think taking Bubba's lube away is a bad thing. Just think about it for a minute.

Re:Strategy not changing?

[Jester998]

Congratulations, you win a cookie.

"Our fundamental strategy will not change" -> We're still going to fuck you over.

"We'll just find sneakier ways to punish you instead" -> Taking the lube away.

Re:Strategy not changing?

[jimicus]

Actually, if they've decided to deactivate the kill switch I'd say they've given him lube.

Re:Strategy not changing?

[Anonymous Coward]

The big guy named Bubba is still employed with us, but now we've taken away his lube.

No, you've got it wrong: now they've given him lube.

- Peder

Fat lot of good this does me

[Ginger Unicorn]

i got erroneously locked out of my new laptop because of this. does this mean it will unlock? i think not. (but hope so). luckily i dual boot ubuntu so MS can kiss my ass. the only reason i kept the vista install is because it's legit and i have no setup disc to reinstall it later. (recovery partition my ass)

Re:Fat lot of good this does me

[baadger]

The get yourself a Vista RTM ISO off of BitTorrent and utilize the little app at the very bottom of this page to save your OEM license. I've done it and it works a charm.

Re:Fat lot of good this does me

[Ginger Unicorn]

nice one, cheers. might wait till an sp1 ISO is out and do it all in one go, instead of having to install the sp afterwards.

Re:Fat lot of good this does me

[Ginger Unicorn]

wait i just realised, vista is rejecting my licence, claiming that it has been subject to an "unauthorised change" so i think i should just reactivate it after installation. also i cant run anything under vista as i'm locked out so i couldn't run that app anyway. i think the trouble was caused by comodo3 being overzealous when i ran genuine advantage, so i might just reboot in safe mode and uninstall comodo as per the suggestion on the knowledgebase article attached to this bug.

Let me think...

[CaptainZapp]

Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon : Free as in speech, free as in beer comes with about 20000 apps (the number's pulled out of thin air, but there are a lot of apps available), of which most are probably quite simple or outright crap, but there's true quality stuff among them and the pre-selection by the installer is quite good in my book. Oh and I'm part of the Ubuntu community, too.

OS/X : Hereround 155$. Probably nicest user interface, at least at Panther level very stable, rock solid foundation (BSD) a real shell and real scripting. Oh and it gives me fanboy privileges.

Vista Ultimate: ~700$. Nothing really to offer, exept maybe this floating waterfall background, which must eat a ton of resources. Requires activation, abuses 30% of my resources for Hollywoods satisfaction. Oh: And by default I'm a criminal software thieve pirate.

I'd wager that if i really chose option three I must be a blistering idiot, too.

Re:Let me think...

[Nos.]

According to a similar article I had just finished reading when I saw this one, users who are 'caught' by WGA, will receive an offer to buy Vista Home Premium for $119 (USD), about 1/2 of what it retails for. That's right folks, if you want Vista, pirate it first, get caught, and you can have it for half price. http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/12/04/tech-vista-pirated.html

Re:Let me think...

[Locklin]

How many people *actually* pay the full $700 for Vista? As much as I dislike everything Vista represents, the parent is offtopic and verging on troll.

Re:Let me think...

[Anonymous Coward]

you're an idiot. why don't you just use XP till vista works? why pay $700 to beta test MS's unfinished poop.

Re:Let me think...

[Svartalf]

How about not using it at all? XP only "works" after a fashion.

It's less secure (Vista is too, but we won't go into that...).
It's more resource intensive.
It takes resources away from my system to enforce the media company's "rights"- of which, I largely don't use their crap any more.
I have to buy all sorts of things to make it more robust, secure, etc.- things that shouldn't need to be there or should have came with the OS in the first place.

With Linux, I don't have those issues- and it's not because it's "The Underdog" OS.

Re:Let me think...

[plague3106]

Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon : Free as in speech, free as in beer comes with about 20000 apps (the number's pulled out of thin air, but there are a lot of apps available), of which most are probably quite simple or outright crap, but there's true quality stuff among them and the pre-selection by the installer is quite good in my book. Oh and I'm part of the Ubuntu community, too.

And I can't really buy games off the shelf, nor printers, or a lot of other hardware, and have it work. Oh, and Linux does have its own problems, weird things breaking, spending hours figuring out what exactly is wrong, and then diving into a text file to change some obsure setting. Most of those 20,000 apps are shit. Sorry.

OS/X : Hereround 155$. Probably nicest user interface, at least at Panther level very stable, rock solid foundation (BSD) a real shell and real scripting. Oh and it gives me fanboy privileges.

People knock Linux / Windows UIs; I find Macs to be infurating. Why exactly would you want to be a fanboy? Fanboy is just another word for zealot.

Vista Ultimate: ~700$. Nothing really to offer, exept maybe this floating waterfall background, which must eat a ton of resources. Requires activation, abuses 30% of my resources for Hollywoods satisfaction. Oh: And by default I'm a criminal software thieve pirate.

Surely you mean only ~$260? Not very computer savy if you can't find Vista at a good price.

I'd wager that if i really chose option three I must be a blistering idiot, too.

The other option is that you're a smart professional that just wants to get things done. Since I ditched my Linux desktop and server, I spent more time doing the things I want on the computer, instead of trying to figure out what text file I got wrong and then being told to RTM (which doesn't exist).

Re:Let me think...

[Killjoy_NL]

Well for me it's quite stable, last uptime run was 61 days of daily heavy use without problems and I only paid about 19 euros for it.
Lots of room for improvement, but everything I do on it works perfectly, games, pic/mov editing, multimedia all without a hitch.

I know Vista succes stories aren't that popular here, but they are out there.

Re:Let me think...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it seems that I'll be needing a new computer soon (old one is still under warranty, but trying to get Mesh to honour it is another matter -- six weeks and counting, and with an MTBF of a little under 3 months the computer is now down for longer than it's up). Although I keep getting told that XP is still available, trying to find someone who will supply it is another matter so it looks as if I'll be stuffed and have to go with Vista :-(

Re:Let me think...

[CaptainZapp]

Surely you mean only ~$260 [pricegrabber.com]? Not very computer savy if you can't find Vista at a good price.

No I mean ~700$. Microsoft shamelessly gouges central european customers and I found not a lot of cheapie offers for Vista Ultimate in retail here.

And I can't really buy games off the shelf, nor printers, or a lot of other hardware, and have it work.

The only point I buy are games. I never had a hardware issue with Ubuntu; sorry. Even my brand spanking new laptop worked, including WLan and hybernation.

Most of those 20,000 apps are shit. Sorry.

If you read my original post you would have noticed that I said exactly that. That doesn't discount the fact that there are dozens of high quality, professional, industry grade apps available, which would cost 1000s of $ in addition to the OS. It doesn't discount the fact that I get a very high quality software build environment out of the box, too.

The other option is that you're a smart professional that just wants to get things done.

I totally agree, but it's exactly that what infuriates me more and more with Microsoft products. They are trying to turn my computer into a consumer appliance (granted, Apple is not very different) and that's not acceptable to me. But yeah, too each his own.

But my major point is that I'm not willing to shell out money to a company which treats me (the customer, the dude ultimately signing their checks) like a thieving pirate.

Re:Let me think...

[nojjynb]

Except that Vista offers the best media center I have ever used, and all of my *NEW* hardware works (as in, my ExpressCard TV Tuner). That being said, I also have Ubuntu installed. Oh, and as to the OS/X, I spent a couple of years developing with it (the online newspaper I worked for was mac happy), and between the four main interfaces (OS/X, Gnome, KDE and Windows) I find OS/X to be the least user friendly, most un-intuitive interface. Though it is pretty and does good with with videos :)

Re:Let me think...

[15Bit]

Its basically horses for courses - you use the OS which does what you want the best. This will inevitably be a trade-off between functionality, software compatibility, user friendliness and cost. I have a Windows XP desktop and a file-server/firewall etc running Fedora. I don't run Windows on the server cos it doesn't do what i want. The same is true for Linux on the desktop. So i mix and match according to my needs. I'm sure many others do the same, and look admiringly over the fence at the prettiness of OSX, or the stability of Linux, or the universality of software for Windows. But in the end, your computer must do what you want, and having a pretty OSX box or highly secure and stable Ubuntu desktop is pretty pointless if all the software you need to use runs only on Windows.

Re:Let me think...

[spyrochaete]

I don't think I've ever seen Vista Ultimate sold for more than $400, and that was the ridiculous version that was signed by Bill Gates. Regardless, Ultimate does have a few good features and I'd probably buy it over any other version. For instance, it gives you both 32bit and 64bit support which makes it a good buy for the sake of longevity. It also has some bullet points for business like a remote desktop client, a more flexible virtualization license, and BitLocker encryption.

And let's be honest here - if you're a gamer or an IT manager and you recommend Ubuntu or Mac you're going to get laughed out of the office. Mac is proprietary in every way and the average Windows user will have a lot of habits to change before getting accustomed to it, and as they say about Linux, it's free if your time is worthless.

I'm not defending the price of Vista Ultimate because I agree it's quite steep, but you blew things a bit out of proportion in your post so I'm just balancing out the cosmos.

Re:Let me think...

[Jugalator]

Vista Ultimate: ~700$. Nothing really to offer, exept maybe this floating waterfall background, which must eat a ton of resources. Come on, I know you love Linux even above your girly JPG's, but please. This is getting old, fucking old even.

Windows Vista disadvantages over XP

- Lacking application compatibility.
- Lacking driver compatibility that only recently seem to start being resolved.
- Added resource requirements, although some can be mitigated by deactivating Aero Glass.
- Added system services to improve performance over time, that may actually do things works. YMMV here.
- Further tightened antipiracy features that sometimes lead to false positives.
- Slow file operation bugs that affect some users, to be fixed in SP1, and available now as a hotfix.
- Obnoxious User Account Control, although it is debated if it's finally what Windows has needed, and *NIX systems have had for decades in "sudo".
- DRM support, although some debate this is only a support, not a requirement. People are still in charge of their systems and whether to actually play DRM protected files. Pirated HD movies can be streamed fine to a HDTV set in full resolution, for example. Nevertheless, this can be seen as Microsoft supporting anticompetitive and anticonsumer business practices in the media industry.
- Increased battery life when using Aero Glass.
- Widely reported reduced game performance.
- Lacking IE customization controls compared to IE 6.
- Dumbed down backup tool.
- Loss of functionality in the sound recorder tool.
- Controversial Kernel Patch Protection feature that achieves both good and evil.
Etc...

Windows Vista advantages over XP

- Enhanced Explorer through breadcrumb navigation and better visualized meta-data.
- Plugin architecture for thumbnail previews.
- "Abstract" virtual folders that base their contents on custom criteria, not "physical" contents.
- Organize files in "stacks" based on their metadata.
- New API:s to help users discover which application is keeping a file lock.
- Instant search / search as you type.
- Performance diagnostics console with problem history for overviews and problem resolution assistance.
- Non-destructive disk manager.
- Application-specific audio controls.
- Shadow copies for file versioning support.
- Per-user language support for multiuser installations.
- New contact management with extensibility API:s for application integration.
- New calendar application to support the iCalendar format and WebDAV server synchronization.
- Improved search in WMP 11, added integrated format support. (VC-1, AC3, etc)
- New, modularized IIS engine.
- Security feautres: Address space layout randomization, improved outbound firewall, drive encryption, EFS, ...
- Significantly improved task scheduler application.
- New health monitoring and system diagnostics tools.
- Significant changes to mobile computing.
Etc...

I know you wish to see the world in black & white. Sure, you really do. But the truth is that it has many shades of grey too.

I agree with you that Vista Ultimate is expensive as hell, but most of what I listed doesn't even require it.

Re:Let me think...

[dave420]

Oooh where to begin.

1. Gutsy Gibbon is not an option for some people, due to its lack of some key software (games, 100% MS Office-compatible suite, driver support). That's not saying anything bad about GG, just that it's not a panacea for those wishing to ditch The Beast
2. OS X is not as stable as you think. Sure, it's BSD underneath, but on top it's still an operating system. It still has drivers that are not 100% fantastic. It still crashes. On some peoples' machines, frequently. You also ignore the cost of the hardware, which is greater than for those wishing to run either GG or Vista.
3. Vista Ultimate (which is not $700 but about $200, depending on the dealer) offers a lot more than just a waterfall background. I can't believe I have to go into this, but I will anyway. It has a 3D-accelerated desktop, which means it can move a lot of the processing of windows and redrawing into the GPU, which would otherwise just be sat there, doing nothing, thereby increasing performance of your CPU (which also allows the "waterfall background" to not eat lots of resources). It has far more aggressive memory-handling techniques, which load apps into and out of memory at certain times to increase their loading times. It can use the hybrid HDDs, external flash memory for improved performance, etc. It has support for Volume Shadow Copy (think: time machine), either locally or for network shares. It has major improvements with its audio architecture, allowing for per-application sound management, support for arrayed sound devices. It has full tablet features, speech recognition, text synthesis, fantastic handwriting support. There are a bunch of extra features, which you can read about here, if you want

Re:Let me think...

[Jugalator]

Sorry, missed some words here and there:
- Decreased battery life when using Aero Glass.
- may actually do things worse

At least I put them in the right categories.

Re:Let me think...

[Entropius]

Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon : Free as in speech, free as in beer comes with about 20000 apps (the number's pulled out of thin air, but there are a lot of apps available), of which most are probably quite simple or outright crap, but there's true quality stuff among them and the pre-selection by the installer is quite good in my book. Oh and I'm part of the Ubuntu community, too.

Been there, tried that. Sorry, not my cup of tea. I have no time to tweak here and there. And I need to run my games and my visual studio, amd my autocad natively.

That's exactly why I use Ubuntu: because I don't have time to tweak things. My laptop came with a dodgy wireless driver in WinXP. It didn't come with a lot of things that you'd expect a new system to have: a vorbis decoder, for one, or ssh/sftp clients, or a working shell, or a compiler, or a web browser*, or an office suite.

Sure, I can download all those things, but it's constantly a pain under Windows to have to fiddle with things. Want subpixel rendering for LCD screens? Have to download some MS thing and fiddle with it. Want to *install* it? Get ready to reboot, a lot. (Ubuntu requires one reboot, and you can use all the apps while it's reinstalling.)

Autoupdating of things? Oh god. Windows is always trying to push dodgy Windows Media-type updates, and every program has its own updater. In Ubuntu I get upgrade notifications for all sorts of random packages, and can trust that they're not malicious.

I use Ubuntu because, well, it's easier.

*That doesn't suck

Re:Let me think...

[CaptainZapp]

You make a few fair points. But this is something I really need to correct:

which is not $700 but about $200, depending on the dealer

That may be the case in the US, it is not the case in Switzerland. I recently checked at MediaMarkt (which is a huge local chain) and retail prices are still in that ballpark. Granted, hardly anybody buys reatil, but I don't think it's unfair when I compare the price with comparable offers. And both, OS/X and Ubuntu 7.10 are comparable offers.

I grant that my initial post was a bit polemic, so the main point probably went under: Microsoft corporation treats me, their customer, as a crook by default. It's comparable to those innane anti-piracy spots in a cinema. ("Hello! McFly! I just shelled out 14 bucks (yes, 14 bucks) for that movie so I'm most likely in the wrong demographics for your cheesy add. Doncha think???"

Re:Let me think...

[vulgrin]

You truly are an idiot if you are spending $700 on Vista. Get the Vista Ultimate OEM at NewEgg for $169

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832116213

Re:Let me think...

[onkelonkel]

You forgot option 4. Odd, since it's by far the most common one. Windows XP Pro SP2, most likely pirated. Free as in beer. Runs AutoCAD. I'll say it again - RUNS AUTOCAD !! (like my old foreman used to say - Ya don't work, Ya don't eat). Bonus - "Just works" (tm) with all my games from Master of Orion on up to Bioshock.

Re:Let me think...

[MMC Monster]

There's actually a lot of quality applications in the Ubuntu Gutsy repositories. Some cruft as well, however. :-(

The real gold for Ubuntu is the paid support from Canonical and the ubuntuforums.org for the rest of us. I have hundreds of posts in my bookmarks for solving various problems. (And, there are problems. But most of them have working solutions.)

Re:Let me think...

[Anonymous Coward]

While I agree with the European price tag,(Americans can get it for much cheaper) I think your comparison could use some work. I have never been able to get Gutsy Gibbon working with my TV card to make a media center. Which is the only reason I ended up with Vista Ultimate. I am not the best of LINUX users and so maybe that is why I decided it was worth my time to get a $300 copy of Ultimate instead of searching high and low for the software that Ultimate comes with. Probably would be more appropriate to compare it to the much overpriced Vista Business instead of Ultimate.

Re:Let me think...

[Anonymous Coward]

For

$350 you can get a laptop that fits in your pocket, runs linux out of the box, and boots in under 10 seconds.
for $700 you get vista ultimate, and can't run it on anything because you're out of money. and a computer to run vista ultimate is going to cost you at least another $2000.

p.s. my eeepc laptop feels in every way faster than my 1 year old dell laptop running xp. boots faster, loads apps faster, word docs load faster. types faster. works with my 22" flatscreen and external mouse and keyboard. I switched from a 1500 dollar laptop running windows to a 350$ laptop the size of a paperback book, and it's in every way faster than a big, "fast", windows laptop. I'm getting one each for my parents. microsoft should be very afraid.

Re:Let me think...

[Fross]

What about people who don't want to spend all day running an OS, but are more interested in the *applications* that it supports, in order to get some work done? I don't particularly care how good the shell scripting is on a system given that I probably use that 1% of the time, and do more than tinker with my system the other 99%. I'd rather have Photoshop, Cubase and Bioshock than Gimp, Rosegarden (hahaha!) and Tux Racer.

By all means hack the nasty bits out of Vista or OS/X and turn them off, but isn't the point of a computer to actually run applications than just tinker with shell scripts?

Re:Let me think...

[Trelane]

So, what you're saying is that, if you and the collective market paint themselves into a corner, they paint themselves into a corner?

I dunno about you, but when I've painted myself into a corner, the first thing I do is to stop painting.

Re:Let me think...

[ericrost]

So the one thing you came up with to spend most of your time talking about for Vista both OSX and Linux (all linux distros btw, not just Ubuntu) have, and Linux has had versions in various stages of development for 2 years or so.

Compiz, Beryl, now together as Compiz Fusion.

Just shows how weak of a showing Vista really is. Microsoft will continue selling vaporware and releasing catchup versions of their OS (that are only 10 years or so behind their vaporware) as they always have. First it was Cairo, then it was Longhorn, now its Windows 7. When will people learn?

Re:Let me think...

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, for most users, it'll look more like this:

Ubuntu: doesn't run my games. Next.
OSX: doesn't run my games. Next.
Windows: runs my games. Yay!

Substitute "microsoft office" for "my games" for business-oriented users. Alternatively, consider the total newb:

Ubuntu: huh, what's that? what do I have to do? where do I get it? what does it cost?
OSX: huh, what's that? what do I have to do? where do I get it? what does it cost?
Windows: I know that one. It came preinstalled on my new computer. It cost me nothing (beyond the price of the computer).

Of course, you may say that the last bit of reasoning (that it doesn't cost anything) is flawed, but it makes sense when you consider that you won't get a windows refund just because you buy Ubuntu or OSX.

Re:Let me think...

[Anonymous Coward]

Its basically horses for courses - you use the OS which does what you want...

Oh, silly me! You are right! I want...
The OS to eat a ton of resources - resources that I would only waste running applications
Activation - it is something I must have. How did I ever do without it?
to use 30% of my resources for Hollywoods satisfaction, NO, profit!

Do you get it yet? None of these things are what I want. But they expect me to pay for it, with my money, time, convenience and lack of a smooth-running, fast, non-intrusive OS.

Re:Let me think...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

As much as I dislike certain aspects of Windows, and while acknowledging that I'll not put Vista anywhere near any PC I build, you are still wrong about much of that rant.

For one thing, some of us don't want 2,000 applications installed as part of a distro, when approximately 1,974 of them are crap we'll never use and most of the remainder are clearly inferior to the popular commercial alternatives on Windows or OS/X. I'd rather choose a small number of high quality applications for myself, and if that means either coughing up real money for them or spending a little time to download them, so be it: I'd rather pay the asking price and have better quality.

For another thing, ClearType is available to do subpixel AA in font rendering on any Windows XP system, and has been since pretty much forever, with no download required. Perhaps you're confusing that with the ClearType Tuner application that lets you fine tune some of the settings? In any case, anyone who criticises either Windows or OS/X for anything to do with typography while themselves using Linux and related apps can surely look forward to a rewarding career as a comedian.

As for your final point, yes, it's a shame there isn't a centralised auto-updater that everyone can use in Windows. In fact, the mess that is installing software for many Windows applications (and OS/X ones too, in some cases) is one of the worst aspects of the OS for everyday users. But your comments about getting notifications in Ubuntu are a bit misleading, too: those are available because of the distribution you're using, and I'll wager they only cover tools that are part of that distribution. Anyone who's writing something independent can't benefit from the same framework, can they?

Re:Let me think...

[MBGMorden]

I didn't even think there was a version that went to $700? I thought the "Super Duper Ultimate Awesome" edition maxed out at around $400 or so.

That aside, the Home Basic (which is what I use) is only $100 for OEM, which you can get with almost any purchase of hardware (buy a $5 mouse with it and it's legal, even though I usually combine my OS upgrades with real hardware upgrades anyways).

Now personally, I'm still a big OS X fan. I hated the old MacOS (version 9 and previous), but OS X is like the OS that I always wanted Linux to be and it never could become. A beautiful, stable, fast UNIX system that "just works", doesn't require that you ever touch a shell prompt, and with a truly fast GUI system (read: not X11). All that PLUS if you DO need a command shell, it's there, and if you do have X11-only apps, that's even available too, just as an addon rather than the main GUI system (which is as it should be IMHO).

Having said that though, Windows does most everything I need it to too. Vista even works for the most part (only used on a laptop because it came with it). Vista doesn't however really offer anything over XP in my eyes (I've got several machines on XP and have no plans to move to Vista on them). That, and Windows is a dangerous thing in the hands of a novice. My parents for example. Their machine was recently completely hose up with spyware. It was beyond the point at which I could clean it off, so I broke down and wiped it clean. I did a fresh format plus Windows XP install, put on all service packs and patches, and then installed Firefox. I get a call 1 week later that the "computer isn't acting right again". Lo and behold, it's again riddled with spyware (they had been using Internet Explorer still despite being told to use Firefox). When I go back over there this weekend, I'm loading Ubuntu on the machine.

I think that's the main issue at this point. Windows, though it gets the job done, has nothing to offer power users, but it's safe ONLY in the hands of power users. Linux or OS X offer safety for the newbies, and more flexibility for the power users. The only thing Windows really has is market share and as such software selection. If all my Windows apps were also available for Mac (in native Mac versions) I'd ditch it completely in a heartbeat. Luckily though most open source apps traditionally run on Linux can be made to work on OS X, so though I still keep a Gentoo box on hand, I've been using it less and less these days in favor of the Mac.

Re:Let me think...

[plague3106]

No I mean ~700$. Microsoft shamelessly gouges central european customers and I found not a lot of cheapie offers for Vista Ultimate in retail here.

No equivolent of pricegrabber in your country?

The only point I buy are games. I never had a hardware issue with Ubuntu; sorry. Even my brand spanking new laptop worked, including WLan and hybernation.

You're lucky then. Printers are notorious for not working on Linux; wlan is hit or miss.

If you read my original post you would have noticed that I said exactly that.

Then there's no need to mention them, as they aren't a positive.

That doesn't discount the fact that there are dozens of high quality, professional, industry grade apps available, which would cost 1000s of $ in addition to the OS. It doesn't discount the fact that I get a very high quality software build environment out of the box, too.

Again I have to disagree. Gimp doesn't replace PS, OOo doesn't replace Office, etc. If by "high quality software build environment" you mean a command line compiler and vi, then yes. Does it come with anything else though? Netbeans? Eclipse? Last time i used linux, the answer was no, and I can get those some tools on windows as well.

I totally agree, but it's exactly that what infuriates me more and more with Microsoft products. They are trying to turn my computer into a consumer appliance (granted, Apple is not very different) and that's not acceptable to me. But yeah, too each his own.

I tend to think being able to do something in 10 minutes that before took me three hours is a good thing. I don't know why you think consumer appliance is where they'd like to go, because the only advantage of a computer over other devices is that its general purpose, which doesn't mesh well with consumer appliciance.

But my major point is that I'm not willing to shell out money to a company which treats me (the customer, the dude ultimately signing their checks) like a thieving pirate.

How do they treat you like a pirate? I have several copies of Vista running at home or work, and have never been identified as a pirate. They activated, and off they went. Unfortunately software is easy to copy, and I can understand them wanting to protect the money they spent making their products. Then again, I'm a software guy too.

Re:Let me think...

[Blakey Rat]

Vista feature I discovered yesterday: It has an application-level sound mixer. Finally I can tell my IM client to shut up while keeping iTunes at full volume! That's a nice feature. There's a lot of little nice touches like that in Vista, things that I'd been waiting for in other OSes for ages.

Re:Let me think...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

That doesn't discount the fact that there are dozens of high quality, professional, industry grade apps available, which would cost 1000s of $ in addition to the OS.

Name a few of them, please.

I get very bored of reading comments like the above, yet never seeing specific examples. I defy anyone to name even one dozen native Linux apps that really are as good at what they do as serious commercial apps that cost $1000s. Off the top of my head, I can think of perhaps three or four that are at least comparable, but they're all toys for geeks rather than toys for your average end user who might be looking for an alternative to Vista.

Re:Let me think...

[Blakey Rat]

Just shows how weak of a showing Vista really is. Microsoft will continue selling vaporware and releasing catchup versions of their OS (that are only 10 years or so behind their vaporware) as they always have.

Behind the vaporware, maybe.

But what is Microsoft catching up to exactly? They're on-par with Apple, and significantly ahead of Linux (IMO at least-- sure Linux has sparkly features, but Windows has working copy-and-paste and much superior GUI design/consistency.)

Re:Let me think...

[Trelane]

There's a lot of little nice touches like that in Vista, things that I'd been waiting for in other OSes for ages.

As a Linux developer, could you enumerate these touches you'd like to see? Thanks! Zealots: please don't flame him/her if she/he doesn't know Linux already has stuff (e..g pulseaudio does per-app volume control)

Re:Let me think...

[compro01]

It has far more aggressive memory-handling techniques, which load apps into and out of memory at certain times to increase their loading times.

I resume you meant "decrease their loading times", though this feature is a cause of annoyance to me. It's a great idea, but it seems really reluctant to release memory used for this caching when I'm actually doing something.

I've had more than one instance (happens at least every other day that I use this machine) where I have only OpenOffce.org writer (or a similarly non-intensive program) open, and it's SWAPPING with practically zero remaining RAM!

The computer in question has 2 GiB of RAM and practically nothing running in the background, so there's nothing else to take up all that RAM except vista's berzerk caching.

Add that to the fact that several programs i need on a daily basis either don't work (humorously, one is "vista compatible" and it won't even install), don't work properly, or require lots of futzing to get working, means i don't plan on getting vista anytime soon.

A bit of a shame IMO, as i really like some of vista's new stuff (the WGF stuff is a great improvement over the previous system and UAC would be great if they could make it a little less hyperactive (about every 3rd time i run KiCAD, it prompts me for some reason), along with several of the things you point out.)

Re:Let me think...

[CaptainZapp]

Name a few of them, please.

OpenOffice; Granted. There are a lot of environments that can't just switch away from MS Office and the tight integration into the MS Server monoculture. But as an office suite it is definitely high quality. As a matter of fact it does a few things worse then Office, but some features are better then what MS has to offer. Most notably: I never lost work on a crashed word session or had a document corrupted beyond repair.

The Gimp; And no! I'm not claiming that it's a Photoshop replacement and it has no song to sing in a professional graphics processing environment let alone a printshop. But claiming it's not a high quality, solid, full featured graphics processing app is well, a bit unreal.

Postgresql; which can replace many very expensive proprietary database engines in a lot of environments.

Thunderbird & Firefox; for my use Thunderbird beats Outlook in just about any aspect. Firfox ,of course, is available for Windows, but compared to what Microsoft has to offer, well, need I say more?

Media players? Try VLC. It kicks the pulp out of Windows Media Player and plays anything plus the crap that WMP refuses to play. This is of course except DRMd stuff. But I don't buy into that.

Blender? Apache? But better not get started on the server front anyway. Because it's exactly there where Microsoft looks very old as compared to Linux. Especially when you look into costs

Most notably for me, personally, is the Unix command line, including SSH, FTP and Telnet from any terminal window by default. Plus the fact that I own the system and not vice versea

Let's turn the question around: Except media burning (which works perfectly fine for the command line) give me one example of software I need for everyday tasks and then some that is not available on Linux.

Re:Let me think...

[Anonymous Coward]

Want subpixel rendering for LCD screens?

What is so good about subpixel smoothing? I've turned it on on several machines with LCD monitors and it makes text look worse on the LCD monitor's native resolution than it did with subpixel smoothing off.

Re:Let me think...

[plague3106]

To be fair, other people in the audience may also have shelled out $14, and intend to record the film and sell the crap quality version on the street at $5 a pop...

Re:Let me think...

[Pengo]

First let me say, I'm not really a Apple Fanboi, but hardly anti Microsoft. I'm using MS at home (for gaming mostly) and my work computer is a Mac Pro tower (Developer/admin/etc.. small company so I do a LOT of different things).

I don't find Vista bad, or Mac perfect. I think both are fine if used in the context of what they where designed to do, but I digress. I'd just like to add a few things to what you said.

> Gutsy Gibbon is not an option for some people, due to its lack of some key software (games, 100% MS Office-compatible suite, driver support). That's not saying anything bad about GG, just that it's not a panacea for those wishing to ditch The Beast

I tried installing it at home on my Dell XPS-710 H2C. It didn't work.
I ran into problems with my video cards (Dual 8800GTX boards). The raid card wasn't read right off the bad, so I tracked down a cheap single SATA drive and the OS was able to see it.

After installing, countless playing with the video drivers, twiddling with different tools to configure X I gave up. Granted I use Linux for all our office servers and our datacenter, it was just more than I wanted to mess with. To the credit of Gutsy, it did install perfect on a couple of office machines and it seemed pretty slick. I haven't used Linux as a full desktop machine since the old Redhat 8 / 9 days, and I was more curious to see how far they have come. (I'm very happy with linux as our server platform of choice though :) ).

Gutsy is probably good for most people, but definitely not everyone.

>OS X is not as stable as you think. Sure, it's BSD underneath, but on top it's still an operating system. It still has drivers that are not 100% fantastic. It still crashes. On some peoples' machines, frequently. You also ignore the cost of the hardware, which is greater than for those wishing to run either GG or Vista.

OS X isn't infallible to problems, that's for sure. I've had a few over the years.. but I still measure my uptime on my Mac Pro at the office in months. (Usually only rebooting to install software updates). The OS is rock solid from my experience. Some things that kind of annoy me about it are the lack of real options on 3rd party hardware. If you want to upgrade the video card, forget it.. unless you want to buy Apples outdated and overpriced ATI board (Which i did for a second display that required Dual-DVI). For apple to ship that computer with a NVidia 7300 is just offensive. There are so many decent cards out there that are cheap and fast, I just don't understand the reasoning other than maybe wanting a passive cooling card.

Now price rant:

The hardware is expensive, but I make my living on that machine. I find that I am more productive on what I consider to be an elegant user experience. Maybe it's silly, but that's just how I am. It's the reason I don't drive a 79 Renault to work, it's not because the car wouldn't get me there and it's cheaper.. the car is just not something I want to be driving, and I enjoy nice things. Practicality does not always trump, and in my case I spend too much time behind the machine to not be using exactly what I want. I know that a lot of people don't have the option to even make the choice, but I do and I've never regretted picking up my mac for the office. :)

>Vista Ultimate (which is not $700 but about $200, depending on the dealer) offers a lot more than just a waterfall background. I can't believe I have to go into this, but I will anyway. It has a 3D-accelerated desktop, which means it can move a lot of the processing of windows and redrawing into the GPU, which would otherwise just be sat there, doing nothing, thereby increasing performance of your CPU (which also allows the "waterfall background" to not eat lots of resources). It has far more aggressive memory-handling techniques, which load apps into and out of memory at certain times to increase their loading times. It can use the hybrid HDDs, external flash memo

Re:Let me think...

[plague3106]

Huh? I found this on Compiz Fusion: First stable release of Compiz Fusion is 0.6.0 released on October 20 2007.

Re:Let me think...

[Ash-Fox]

Gutsy Gibbon is not an option for some people, due to its lack of some key software (games, 100% MS Office-compatible suite, driver support).

Gutsy comes by default with Wine

Going for specifically modern games (older games tend to work fine and far too many to list)... Wine can run all the Valve source games, that includes:

• half life 2
• half life 2: death match
• half life 2: ep1
• half life 2: ep2
• Team fortress 2
• Portal
• Counter Strike: Source

It can also run:

• World of Warcraft
• Eve Online

These series of games have native Linux ports:

• Unreal
• Doom
• Quake

The only game modern game I am particulary aware of that has issues (this is from personal experience) is Call of Duty 4, it runs, but certain effects do not work, nor does multi-player or punkbuster. Those issues will likely be fixed very soon anyway.

There are probably a lot more games that could be added to the lists above.

But no, I wouldn't say Gutsy lacks the ability to play good, modern games.

As for a 100% MS office compatible suite. I have installed Office XP directly out of the box under Gutsy, you can also install Office 2003 (but you need to install a few Microsoft runtimes first that Microsoft neglected to include with it). I know Office 2007 does not work with Wine yet.

As for driver support. I've found restricted-manager was more than adequate for the needs of driver support and installation.

The sad thing is that I have been running Wine under Vista to run some applications that just don't want to run under Vista normally (weird runtime errors, crashes etc).

OS X is not as stable as you think. Sure, it's BSD underneath, but on top it's still an operating system.

Actually, the only real BSD part is the BSD subsystem in the kernel. The kernel itself is a horrible mishmash of other kernels stuck together, it's known as the XNU kernel.

It still has drivers that are not 100% fantastic. It still crashes. On some peoples' machines, frequently.

I've experienced this first hand. I am greatly disappointed that for a company that handles the hardware and software, that they don't seem to be able to do better than their competition which doesn't even handle the hardware.

You also ignore the cost of the hardware, which is greater than for those wishing to run either GG or Vista.

The hardware itself is not exactly, more expensive. The fact is, most people want the hardware specs of of the Mac mini, with the ability to just slap in new graphic card, plenty more RAM, new PCI cards. But the only Mac that truly lets you do all that is hell too powerful to the point you would not need to and way too expensive.

Vista Ultimate (which is not $700 but about $200, depending on the dealer) offers a lot more than just a waterfall background. I can't believe I have to go into this, but I will anyway. It has a 3D-accelerated desktop, which means it can move a lot of the processing of windows and redrawing into the GPU, which would otherwise just be sat there, doing nothing, thereby increasing performance of your CPU (which also allows the "waterfall background" to not eat lots of resources).

OS X and Beryl do this. They also do not need such high hardware requirements to do it either.

It has far more aggressive memory-handling techniques, which load apps into and out of memory at certain times to increase their loading times.

I don't know what they did in Vista, but when it takes almost a entire minute to copy a 500kb file, because it's spending most of that time 'calculating' and then instantly copies it.. compared to Windows XP where the equivalent action is just a flicker of the copy dialog on the screen. Something is really wrong. The fact that many people report issues where network

Re:Let me think...

[Stewie241]

For one thing, some of us don't want 2,000 applications installed as part of a distro, when approximately 1,974 of them are crap we'll never use and most of the remainder are clearly inferior to the popular commercial alternatives on Windows or OS/X. I'd rather choose a small number of high quality applications for myself, and if that means either coughing up real money for them or spending a little time to download them, so be it: I'd rather pay the asking price and have better quality.
Most aren't installed by default, but are easily accessible from Add/Remove Programs.

I have no idea about the subpixel junk, so I can't speak to that.

But on the point about notifications, it sure is possible to write something independent. You just create a repository and users add it to their list of software sources in ubuntu. Then the same interface will manage all the updates, and notifications will appear in the centralized place.

Re:Let me think...

[remmelt]

As a matter of fact, they can. They will have to package for debian/ubuntu and maintain a repository though. Before you start about that, it's an easy package making command and a repository is basically a website. With stuff. Downside is you have to do something similar for Redhat. Either way, for a decent developer it's no big deal. Anything installed via apt is centrally administered.

Re:Let me think...

[friedman101]

Vista Ultimate is about $350, not $700. The cheap price of OSX is subsidized by your purchase of Apple hardware (which isn't so cheap). Vista offers more binary backward compatibility than any distribution of Linux I've played around with. Also, it doesn't use 30% of your resources for DRM, that's a made up statistic unless you're running Vista on your toaster. I've never heard of one person's media experience thwarted by Vista's legendary DRM. I double click an mp3 file and it plays, same with any other file I have the decoder for. This won't be a popular post but why on earth did that bullshit fanboy rambling get modded up?

Re:Let me think...

[PitaBred]

Media burning? Try k3b. Works better for me than Nero and it's infatuation with wizards and crap any more. I just drag the files and burn, like it's supposed to work.

Re:Let me think...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I guess we have different perspectives. I would argue precisely that it is precisely the commercial heavy-hitters like Microsoft's Office and Exchange Server, Adobe's creative apps, recent PC games like Supreme Commander, various heavyweight business management applications, and specialist software like CAD that set the Windows world apart from the Linux world.

Sure, Linux has apps like OpenOffice, Scribus and the GIMP, but for serious professional use, they really are only toys by comparison. If you just need to write a letter or remove a touch of red-eye, sure, they're fine for that. However, they lack the power, flexibility, and (perhaps most importantly) the supporting culture of their commercial brethren. I won't go into specifics here, but I have written several detailed Slashdot posts in the past supporting this position, which you can readily find with a search engine if you're interested.

Some of the other applications you mentioned, such as Thunderbird and Firefox, are available on both platforms, but even then, they are also bordering on the toy category. Thunderbird is crippled for many businesses by its refusal to play nicely with Exchange. Firefox is crippled for many businesses by its stubborn insistence that everything work according to standards and the developers' view of safety, with no pragmatic concessions to the way browsers are actually used on corporate intranets. I've used both apps at home for some time, but even then I'm looking to switch because of horrendous bugs I've encountered and daft missing features.

As you say, in the server space Linux is a serious challenger for Windows, thanks to the likes of Apache and the big name DB servers. But really, this is the only area where I would put the Linux world on a par or ahead of the Windows world.

Re:Let me think...

[JohnFluxx]

The "MATLAB Distributed Computing Engine" alone is $1000 when discounted. Octave and Maxima are free (Math programs). And that's not counting the dozens of end seat licenses required for each user.

I maintain a university physics 'sun grid engine' cluster with 20 connected machines that use maxima and octave. Nothing fancy, but not too shabby.

Re:Let me think...

[JohnFluxx]

And you're an idiot for thinking everyone lives in the US.

A quick froogle search:
http://www.google.co.uk/products?q=windows+vista+ultimate+-upgrade&btnG=Search+Products&show=dd

All around 350 pounds - which is $700

Re:Let me think...

[Anonymous Coward]

You can stop blowing Balmer now.

Re:Let me think...

[Anonymous Coward]

And I can't really buy games off the shelf, nor printers, or a lot of other hardware, and have it work. Oh, and Linux does have its own problems, weird things breaking, spending hours figuring out what exactly is wrong, and then diving into a text file to change some obsure setting.

Ubuntu works fine with any printer I've ever tried it with. HP Printers, LexMark, Dell. Haven't had to fiddle with text files to make it work either, it just works. Can't say the same thing for Windows though, you've got to go googling for the driver file, then find the updated driver file, run the installer, reboot the machine, etc... With Ubuntu you plug it in and Choose print on the application. Oh yeah, and games are for consoles - you should try one.

Re:Let me think...

[ericrost]

Huh?

from my original post:

"in various stages of development for 2 years or so"

Re:Let me think...

[plague3106]

My point was that you claimed MS was the one playing catch up though. Certainly doesn't seem that way.

Re:Let me think...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I actually work in mathematical software development, and yes, in our world there certainly are some excellent bits of software available from non-commercial sources. Actually, most of the ones I can think of now are libraries rather than end user software, but in this case, fair enough, your example is certainly a valid one.

Re:Let me think...

[ericrost]

What are they catching up to?

DNS services, firewalling, true security, stability, granular permissions, true file permissions, multi user environments, portable desktops, networking, online service integration, shell scripting, fixing code problems in less than several years, open API's, modularity.

The list is long.

Re:Let me think...

[Dirk Pitt]

he commercial heavy-hitters like...specialist software like CAD that set the Windows world apart from the Linux world. Many of the consumers of big MCAD/CAM/CAE packages are flocking to Linux. Commodity hardware prices, Unix performance.

Most 'heavy-hitter' commercial MCAD packages port to Linux. As a matter of fact, many numerical analysis packages recommend that analysts dual-boot their computers if they prefer running Windows day-to-day - when they run a solve, boot up Linux and get a huge performance increase. It's extraordinary - Windows is just a pathetic resource hog. I can't believe Adobe hasn't gone to Linux yet.

Re:Let me think...

[Kadin2048]

Not only that, but you can (totally for free) put together a thin-client/backend solution with Linux that would cost you a fortune in Citrix and Windows license fees to operate. You can even use Windows machines as the client if you want, although you need to install X11. It's easy to forget that an average Linux system contains a lot of technology that you pay through the nose for if you want "The Microsoft Way" version.

People who are unfamiliar are generally appalled at how much it costs to do a Citrix setup. I think their licensing structure is actually one of the things that has really held back thin clients and centralized computing: they charge so much for the seat licenses that it kills most projects right there, before they're even seriously considered.

The delivery of custom applications is one area where Linux can do very well, and I think it's a growth market. You just need to get over the "we want COTS everything" kneejerk response from management (which is usually a terrible idea; all it does is minimize upfront costs but incur huge maintenance expenses -- at which point said management has usually jumped ship and swum away). You can write and deploy your system in one place and then trivially deliver it to the clients via remote X11 or web services. And with no licenses to pay for, you can spend your money on actually making the software support your business processes better: you pay for improvement, not just a continual stream of tithes to the software lords.

In the scheme of things, Linux is still very new. Windows survives because it's a direct descendant of DOS and CP/M and has ridiculous amounts of inertia (much of it ironically supplied by IBM, who now are probably really wishing they hadn't). It was in a unique position during a period when PC's really exploded onto the scene in business and in the home, and it rode on the coattails of that revolution. If you brought Windows out today as a new product and there was some other market leader, you'd get laughed out of a room for mentioning it. It's a mediocre pile and everyone -- even its supporters -- basically acknowledge this. (Microsoft's slogan really ought to be "It's good enough, shut up and deal.") Its success is probably not repeatable and certainly not sustainable in the very long term, and I think Microsoft realizes this, which is why they're constantly trying to diversify away from Windows and Office.

Re:Let me think...

[I'm Don Giovanni]

OS/X : Hereround 155$.

OSX retail boxes are essentially "upgrade" packages because they can only be installed on computers that at some point had an earlier version of Mac OS on it (legally, that is; one can install OSX on a non-Mac computer, against Apple's EULA), i.e. computers for which Apple already received payment for an OS at some time in the past (though the cost was hidden in the price of the Mac computer itself). Since OSX retail boxes are defacto "upgrade" packages, then the price of OSX retail boxes should be compared with the price of Vista *upgrade* packages, and those prices are comparable.

Re:Let me think...

[ericrost]

Well, since you won't actually research the topic.

"The first version of Compiz was released as free software by Novell (SUSE) in January 2006 in the wake of the also new Xgl."

So, that would be pre-Vista. Also, its not much of a wag that they got it into Vista when Linux is "sooo terrible" in terms of UI and associated technologies if you listen to most of the drones.

Re:Let me think...

[Blakey Rat]

DNS services

What "DNS services" does Linux offer (and Vista does not) that I might want to make use of?

firewalling

Vista has this, as does XP for that matter. XP's was kind of flaky until Service Pack 2, admittedly, but the SP2 firewall is great.

true security,

Vista runs IE in a sandbox specifically to increase security, does any Linux distro do the same with its web browser? (Note: of course you *can* configure them to, but it won't by default?) I don't see any difference in "true security" between Vista and Linux, at least from a home user's point of view.

Note, that I still think both OSes completely and utterly miss the point on security: the valuable data in my computer is my documents. The OS/applications *are not valuable*, they can be reinstalled in a couple hours. My income tax returns for the last 8 years can't be reconstructed without considerable expense in time and labor. Vista misses the point less than Linux, because at least the Ultimate version of it offers Shadow Copy. (OS X also misses the point less than Linux for the same reason, except they call it Time Machine.)

And again, I know you *can* configure this stuff on Linux, but Vista and OS X do it by default, on install.

granular permissions

More so than Windows ACLs/Group Policy? I need a citation on this one, buddy. All I've seen for permissions on Linux is a very basic "read/write/execute" with groups.

true file permissions

In what way are Linux file permissions more "true" than Windows XP/Vista NTFS file permissions? I'm gonna need a cite here, also.

multi user environments

Windows has had this since Windows 2000. In addition, Windows XP added Fast User Switching *before* both Linux and OS X. (Both of which decided it was good enough to copy.) So that's a bad example for Windows being behind the technology curve.

portable desktops

What's a "portable desktop?" I can't comment on this. (Unless you mean roaming profiles? Maybe? Or an iMac?)

networking

I'll hand you this one, I guess, not that it matters when even the dumbest OS has mature, stable networking capabilities. I will mention that Windows (and/or Novell) definitely lead the charge when it comes to resource sharing, networking printers and drives.

online service integration

Example? How did Linux "integrate" with online services better than Windows Vista? This point is so vague I can't even really comment on it.

shell scripting

Everything in the Windows Vista shell is scriptable using the old "cmd.exe" method (and always has been) and in Vista, the new Monad scripting environment.

fixing code problems in less than several years

Everyone prioritizes bugs. Want me to show you some very nasty Firefox bugs that have been alive for "several years?" I could dig up at least two, just from the top of my head. Of course, this is where you argue "OMG LINUX IS JUST A KERNEL!!!"

open API's

Linux was ahead of this, but .net has removed these arguments from the table.

modularity

Again, very vague, but the core kernel seems to be modular enough to run on my desktop, my Xbox and in a bunch of luxury cars I can't afford. Maybe Linux could do this earlier, but frankly it doesn't matter for my needs.

Re:Let me think...

[SpiritGod21]

I assumed the OP was in a country other than the USA. American software tends to be more expensive in the UK, Australia, etc.

Re:Let me think...

[15Bit]

I agree. But once you've stopped painting you still need to walk through the paint to get to the door (unless you papered over it too). And thats where many of us are now - we want to change, but we can't, so we have to hope that MS eventually produces the OS that we want. A bit like sitting and waiting for the paint to dry...

Re:Let me think...

[plague3106]

Tell that to my Lexmark x4200 series printer. I have no idea what you're talking about googling for Windows drivers either, THEY COME ON A DISK WITH THE HARDWARE. Reboot? Who cares? Oh, and if I want to play games on my computer that's perfectly valid, dispite your typical snobby elitist remark. You may think that computers are for spreedsheets only, but that's just your (worthless) opinion.

Re:Let me think...

[plague3106]

You release that they begin work on the next version of the OS soon after they launch the one they just completed, right? Aero was being worked on at least as early as 2003. Horrid linux UI (or lack thereof) is one of the reasons I dropped Linux.

Re:Let me think...

[Calyth]

Really? You have printer problems with Ubuntu Gutsy? What printer do you use?

And what is with the OSX interface that infuriates you? At least I can name them. I don't like the stoplight adjustments. I understand the Red X, and the Yellow -, but I never understood the Green +, since it never really does what I want. I also don't like the use of Finder to connect to server, and if it fails, it takes down the whole Finder to it. But other than that, there isn't any GUI elements that really pisses me off, and I've been using a Mac at work for about 8 months now.
Would I use a Mac even with my gripes? Certainly.

And I do agree with you on the Vista bit, I went to microsoft.com, and that's the listed price from them.

However, I wouldn't mind hearing you qualify the gripes that you have. I personally don't have much problems with Ubuntu - I use a Samsung ML-1710, and the only gripe with printing is that it seems to print multiple pages as multiple jobs, and OSX gripes are listed above.

Re:Let me think...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I find that rather hard to believe. The industry move has started, but a heavy majority of CAD is still running on Windows, and only a relatively small number of the big name packages have actually released Linux versions so far.

As with much to do with Linux, in a few years' time the picture might be very different, but right now, Windows has a clear advantage in the number of big name apps available. As far as I'm aware, there's no-one among the big names in the CAD industry who's actually releasing more functionality or sooner on Linux.

Re:Let me think...

[Peaker]

Since I ditched my Linux desktop and server, I spent more time doing the things I want on the computer, instead of trying to figure out what text file I got wrong and then being told to RTM (which doesn't exist).

Really?

Can you describe a problem or two that you encountered?

Every time I use Windows I am again amazed by the insane things that happen...

I try to compress a folder via "add to compressed folder", and it actually quietly fails to add files whose names begin with a dot. Insane!
I try to compress via WinZip, and it actually wants me to pay more money!

To get working _compression_, which is a trivial commodity, you have to buy extra software with Windows.
Insane!

And this is one of thousands of examples where Windows is interfering with my work.

In Ubuntu, things just tend to work (Granted, except on some exotically new or rare hardware). Ofcourse, an informed user would buy hardware after verifying software compatibility.

Re:Let me think...

[msormune]

So what is exactly stopping you from installing many of all those quality OS application on the Windows Vista :) They are free, after all. And that "free as in beer" Ubuntu did cost a lot of people a LOT of time and effort. At least Vista and OS/X developers got paid for their work.

Re:Let me think...

[Just Some Guy]

And I can't really buy games off the shelf, nor printers, or a lot of other hardware, and have it work. Oh, and Linux does have its own problems, weird things breaking, spending hours figuring out what exactly is wrong, and then diving into a text file to change some obsure setting. Most of those 20,000 apps are shit. Sorry.

You mean like the sound cards and printers that don't work under Vista? Or the fact that you have to dive into a text file to change some "obsure" setting to uncripple the video game you just bought? I don't think Windows can claim the technical advantage here.

Re:Let me think...

[Anonymous Coward]

I call Bullshit.

First of all, Linux supports far more hardware than Vista does. Secondly, anyone who has supposedly run Linux on both the desktop and server would know "[which] file [they] got wrong".

So tell me... how's the weather in Redmond?

Re:Let me think...

[ericrost]

"What "DNS services" does Linux offer (and Vista does not) that I might want to make use of?"

"What's a "portable desktop?" I can't comment on this. (Unless you mean roaming profiles? Maybe? Or an iMac?)"

roaming profiles, etc. Thin clients and all the rest.

"I'll hand you this one, I guess, not that it matters when even the dumbest OS has mature, stable networking capabilities. I will mention that Windows (and/or Novell) definitely lead the charge when it comes to resource sharing, networking printers and drives."

"Example? How did Linux "integrate" with online services better than Windows Vista? This point is so vague I can't even really comment on it."

Gnome online desktop.

"Everything in the Windows Vista shell is scriptable using the old "cmd.exe" method (and always has been) and in Vista, the new Monad scripting environment."

Thats like trading a ferrari for a pinto. cmd.exe is a half assed shell. You can't get anything useful done with it, I've tried. No perl, sed, awk, grep, etc.

"Everyone prioritizes bugs. Want me to show you some very nasty Firefox bugs that have been alive for "several years?" I could dig up at least two, just from the top of my head. Of course, this is where you argue "OMG LINUX IS JUST A KERNEL!!!""

Actually, we could show you plenty of IE bugs that still aren't fixed, but Windows is just a kernel, right?

"Again, very vague, but the core kernel seems to be modular enough to run on my desktop, my Xbox and in a bunch of luxury cars I can't afford. Maybe Linux could do this earlier, but frankly it doesn't matter for my needs."

I can run any shell with any window manager, with any decorator with any sound subsystem with any (insert component here) that I like. Windows (nor mac for that matter) have nothing even close (well you can install X11 on mac.. but why not just use BSD at that point).

Re:Let me think...

[ericrost]

again, with emphasis:

RELEASED in 2006.

Re:Let me think...

[ericrost]

somehow it chopped out large portions of my reply...

BIND is the dns service that runs the internet. dnsmasq can give you ping and browse by name based on dhcp lease name for you local network.

Windows does resource sharing badly, but its there. Linux has always had resource sharing via NFS (remember my son, everything is a file)

Re:Let me think...

[Entropius]

It looks better on mine; that's all I know.

Re:Let me think...

[plague3106]

A Lexmark X4200 series 4in1. It failed to do anything at all.

RE: OSX. I hate one button mice (no, I'm not going to buy a mouse for a machine I don't own). I hate that closing the window doesn't close the application. Its still running in Finder. The window sizing you discuss is also irritating. I don't care for the fact that the menu bar is always up top and not attached to the application I'm using.

Re:Let me think...

[plague3106]

Besides the printer not working at all? Sound card would just stop functioning (IIRC the KDE sound daemon or whatever would die). KMail would suddenly show up with no messages in my inbox, even though I had over 2000. This was due to its index file corrupting; deleting said file "fixed" things. GNUCash would crash occasionally. There were other odd crashes too. That's nothing to say that administering it was much more difficult.

Regarding your zip file.. I'm not sure that .filename is really supported on Windows. Yes, you can create them, but explorer doesn't let you. At any rate, you could use 7zip, which is free and on Windows, so you don't HAVE to pay for file compression. Free software exists for Windows too. You could even roll your own; there's a free .Net library (SharpZip) you could use.

Any other examples?

Ofcourse, an informed user would buy hardware after verifying software compatibility.

With Windows though, you don't even really have to check. If you're buying a new piece of hardware, it will have drivers for the latest version of Windows, and likely past versions too. I've never bought hardware and had it not work with Windows or come with the drivers.

Re:Let me think...

[plague3106]

Released doesn't matter too much; they were already working on the idea well before any open sourcers even attempted a go at it. Or are you claiming that a nearly done product needs to catch up with one just completed somehow?

Are you sure its a release too? Releases usually have a 1.x marker, not a 0.6.

Re:Let me think...

[toddestan]

The problem is, Ubuntu doesn't support that new, shiny hardware that everyone wants to use and Vista does. Sure, Ubuntu supports that P2-era hardware just fine, and will install and run on that old G3 Powermac, but people don't care about that as much (atleast outside of here).

Re:Let me think...

[skinfitz]

Eve now has a Linux client.

Re:Let me think...

[Ramadog]

I didn't even think there was a version that went to $700? I thought the "Super Duper Ultimate Awesome" edition maxed out at around $400 or so.

Maybe it depends where you are. I just found vista ultimate for $754 AUD which at the current exchange rate is $655 USD.

Re:Let me think...

[Draek]

to be fair, Nero's Linux version is much, much nicer than the Windows crap they shove down your throat when you buy a DVD burner these days, plus it converts Audio CDs to FLAC at an amazing speed, even on my ancient laptop. Though for general-purpose media burning I'd still take K3B over it, were it not for my slight distaste for anything KDE.

Re:Let me think...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re 3: And yet, it still runs like ass. Please defend.

Re:Let me think...

[TechForensics]

You work for MS in their blog spin department, right?

Re:Let me think...

[DrYak]

No equivolent of pricegrabber in your country?

I don't know about his country. In my country, what you'll learn from this kind of tools (once you click an entry and go read the details) is that the only way to pay less than 700$ is: to buy an "upgrade" version (thus it requires having paid the "wad of cash" the previous time) and the reduction isn't big ($700 > $500).
OEM version still cost more than alternative OSes ($700 > $250).

That's in addition of what you'll have to pay Microsoft Office (and maybe a couple of other software like Visual Studio, Paintshop, etc.)

All this for functionality that Linux gives you free (and often dressed in a nice user friendly GUI that hides away all the low level cmd-line, at least with Ubuntu and OpenSUSE)

You're lucky then. Printers are notorious for not working on Linux; wlan is hit or miss.

WTF ? Most of the laser printers will understand Postscript any way.
The most popular brand in the shops around here (HP, Epson, Brother) have almost all of their printers supported out of the box.
For the rest, there are nice website like Linux Printing to help you pick a working printer.

Usually the few more problematic printers are those from less known asian brands. In most case, these printers are also problematic in windows, because of crap-quality drivers and/or because it stops functioning once you upgrade Windows because the parent company either doesn't provide more recent drivers or went out of business by the time.

Again I have to disagree. Gimp doesn't replace PS, OOo doesn't replace Office, etc. If by "high quality software build environment" you mean a command line compiler and vi, then yes. Does it come with anything else though? Netbeans? Eclipse? Last time i used linux, the answer was no, and I can get those some tools on windows as well.

They are not exactly equivalent. But GIMP and OpenOffice.org provide enough functionality so most of users can get rid of the corresponding commercial application.
As for programming Linux has the widest set of tools, starting from cmd-line+editor driven one like emacs or vi (and once you get hang of them they can really be powerful, specially given the kitchen-sink-scriptability of emacs) up to very nice graphical environment like eclipse (a lot of people are able to pull serious work out of it) kdevelop (Default on most KDE-based installation. I'm playing around with it and liking it, provides everything I need) anjuta, etc.
or even curiosity like SetEdit (for the nostalgic of the Borland's early "Turbo" era).
Just think for a second : If Visual Studio was this state-of-the-art "nothing is as good as this" environment ? Why doesn't it happen that most developer cross compile their linux creations from VMware image with Windows+Visual ? Whereas it happens that some of the Linux developer that make multiplatform software do cross-compile to Windows using their usual tools and Cygnus or MingW ? There's a big programming culture around Linux, and they have built tools that have evolved with them. Some are more cryptic like Emacs, other much more easy to start working in.

Linux gives you access to thousands of libraries all providing a lot of useful technologies. Keep in mind that any component, even the smallest, that you see on your linux installation, comes with it's source code, and you could play around with it - provided the necessary coding skill, like the PDF rendering ability ? Poppler is included with it's -devels. Want to put some SVG ? Access Videos ? Whatever else ? The libs are here at your finger tips.
Making a SVG-to-PDF converter is nothing more complicated than gluing together a couple of components (SVG, Cai

Re:Let me think...

[drsmithy]

That may be the case in the US, it is not the case in Switzerland. I recently checked at MediaMarkt (which is a huge local chain) and retail prices are still in that ballpark. Granted, hardly anybody buys reatil, but I don't think it's unfair when I compare the price with comparable offers. And both, OS/X and Ubuntu 7.10 are comparable offers.

Regarding OSX, it is invalid to compare full retail Vista with it. You need to use upgrade prices (since every off the shelf copy of OS X is priced as an upgrade). You must also account for functionality Vista Ultimate has, that OSX does not. Media Centre, for example (a feature of non-trivial value on its own, for those who are interested).

Further, you need to remember that for most purchasers, Vista *is* free. It comes with their computer.

Re:Let me think...

[drsmithy]

The list is long.

You misspelled "wrong". Windows has had all of those things since it was released in 1993.

Re:Let me think...

[drsmithy]

RELEASED in 2006.

"Released" is an utterly worthless metric in the OSS world, where it can mean anything from a feature-complete, well-tested, well-documented, supported product to someone creating an empty Sourceforge site.

Your example is laughable (although not as stupid the equivalent Vista functionality was a reaction to it). Even as little as 6 months ago, getting Compiz/Beryl/whatever working *at all* (let alone reliably) required either a great deal or in-depth knowledge of the system.

Re:Let me think...

[drsmithy]

I've had more than one instance (happens at least every other day that I use this machine) where I have only OpenOffce.org writer (or a similarly non-intensive program) open, and it's SWAPPING with practically zero remaining RAM!

Firstly, how did you confirm what you thought was happening ?

Secondly, Windows will pre-emptively swap out when the machine is otherwise idle. Linux does it as well. It's a *good* thing, because it means if the machine really does have to swap (because of memory pressure), most of the heavy lifting is already done.

A bit of a shame IMO, as i really like some of vista's new stuff (the WGF stuff is a great improvement over the previous system and UAC would be great if they could make it a little less hyperactive (about every 3rd time i run KiCAD, it prompts me for some reason), along with several of the things you point out.)

UAC is only reacting to what the program is trying to do. It is the program, not UAC, that is broken.

Re:Let me think...

[BravoZuluM]

------> OS/X : Hereround 155$. Probably nicest user interface, at least at Panther level very stable, rock solid foundation (BSD) a real shell and real scripting. Oh and it gives me fanboy privileges.

--->People knock Linux / Windows UIs; I find Macs to be infurating. Why exactly would you want to be a fanboy? Fanboy is just another word for zealot.

Fanboy zealots don't exist on the Windows platform? Reread your post for an answer to that question.

Re:Let me think...

[compro01]

Firstly, how did you confirm what you thought was happening ? available RAM in single-digit megs (not a bad thing. empty ram is wasted ram, but if something in the foreground needs that ram for something, it needs to be made available right now.), drive activity going nuts whenever i do something simple like open a menu, page file size rising, programs running extremely slow. to me, all this fits the usual "out of ram. go use the swap" symptoms.

UAC is only reacting to what the program is trying to do. It is the program, not UAC, that is broken. yes, and what i'm saying it that it seems to be reacting to something it shouldn't react to and the randomness of it is irritating. i can't think of anything that should require permission that it would do only every 3rd run, or anything that it does anytime that should require permission.

Re:Let me think...

[Dirk Pitt]

Are you kidding me? Maybe the AutoCAD market is mainly on Windows, but I'm talking about real heavy-duty, $100k a seat CAD - Catia, ProE, NX, and I-deas. A heavy majority is *not* on Windows.

I can't tell you what the current split is between Linux and Win32 in MCAD, but I can assure you that most of the industry is still on proprietary Unix iron - mostly Solaris, IBM and HP.

And all of these players (Dassault, UGS, PTC, and other big players in FEA) release their platforms simultaneously.

Who do you consider big names? Dassault did about twice Autodesk's 2006 revenue.

Re:Let me think...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

No, I'm not kidding you. As a result of my current job, I'm one of a handful of people on the entire planet who does know reliably what the figures are for just about everyone in the CAD industry, and I respectfully suggest that you are mistaken in much of what you wrote there.

If you really know the industry, you'll be able to pin down my employer to one of a very small number of companies from that statement, and I'm sure you'll understand why I can't say more on a public forum.

Re:Let me think...

[drsmithy]

available RAM in single-digit megs (not a bad thing. empty ram is wasted ram, but if something in the foreground needs that ram for something, it needs to be made available right now.), drive activity going nuts whenever i do something simple like open a menu, page file size rising, programs running extremely slow. to me, all this fits the usual "out of ram. go use the swap" symptoms.

Sounds like some application had gone out of control. Not much the OS could do about that.

yes, and what i'm saying it that it seems to be reacting to something it shouldn't react to and the randomness of it is irritating. i can't think of anything that should require permission that it would do only every 3rd run, or anything that it does anytime that should require permission.

While this is true, there's not much the OS can do about a program that, say, every third run tries to write to a system-level Registry key to update it's default configuration.

UAC is triggered by programs trying to access protected parts of the system. This is not the OS's fault, it's the application's fault.

How soon...

[Iphtashu Fitz]

...until they start counting all pirated version of Vista among those "happily" using it in order to inflate their numbers.

Re:How soon...

[icepick72]

I doubt Microsoft's numbers need much inflation considering Win Xp / Vista / 2000 / 2003, even still in use NT, 95, ME, 98 ... the upcoming 2008 server. Microsoft is sitting pretty all things considered. What I find most funny is a lot of /. has fallen in love with XP in their fight against Vista. Microsoft has them either way. When Vista becomes a stable product as XP did over its lifetime they will all be moving to it and ragging on the Windows 7. One step behind in the Microsoft line doesn't matter. They're still pwned.

Re:How soon...

[Dan Ost]

Is there any evidence that Vista is actually increasing uptake of Linux and OSX on the desktop?

I've googled around a bit but haven't found anything (my google-fu is weak).

Re:How soon...

[yakumo.unr]

To be fair, why put happily in quotes? why would someone run an illegal copy of a program if it wasn't the program they were happy to use? they'd just pirate (or maybe even buy) the product they were happy with.

Re:How soon...

[edwardpickman]

...until they start counting all pirated version of Vista among those "happily" using it in order to inflate their numbers.

If the blogs and fan sites are any indication that should double the number of happy Vista users......to two.

Re:How soon...

[mcrbids]

What I find most funny is a lot of /. has fallen in love with XP in their fight against Vista.

Don't confuse "falling in love" with "choosing the lesser of two evils". For all the nasty, ridiculous, and lame qualities that XP manages to invoke, Vista is simply far, far, worse. As a software vendor, Vista has been a TRAIN WRECK for us, despite fairly extensive testing with Vista B2. It's as though the O/S is specifically engineered to prevent you from actually doing *anything* with it. For example, it requires some SEVEN "Yes, I approve" clicks to install our application from the website.

Yes. SEVEN. "I agree to download the executable". "I agree to save the executable". "I agree to run the program" "I know it's an installer and might install something". "Yes, I'd like to install everything." "Yes, I agree to let the installer install something in Program Files" "Yes, I agree to let the installer update the registry".

Only ONE of those prompts is ours, the "I want to install everything". This is not security. This is teaching your users to frustratedly click "OK" on every dialog box they see without reading them.

Which then worsens problems for us. We now find many of our tech support calls involve users complaining about a problem that has a fix they've already been notified about.

Example: User calls, having problem claiming attendance, saying that "they get an error" and that's it. The error that they saw briefly and clicked "OK" on as quickly as possible (without reading) said something like: "You set the enrollment dates incorrectly in your program, and so we cannot find the school calendar to claim attendance on. Please check the student's enrollment date and try again.".

Training your users to ignore notice boxes by throwing lots of meaningless ones up does not improve security, it increases human/machine interface tension and results in frustrated, ineffective users.

Porting our application to OSX originally took us a month. Porting it over to Leopard was done in a day, with no complaints. The only change since 10.3 for us has been that Leopard removed the requirement to call X11 expressly. Now actually EASIER to write X11 apps for OSX, our application bombed after hunting for X11 binaries and not finding them.

Re:How soon...

[Gr8Apes]

Unless we've moved on... to Macs or Ubuntu for clients, and Linux/Solaris servers.

I know I'm not the only one that's done this, as I see a proliferation of mac book pros sprouting up everywhere among my colleagues.

Re:How soon...

[plague3106]

You really don't know what the hell you're doing if your application is causing that may popups. I've downloaded other software from the web, and get ONE UAC prompt. Perhaps you should try signing your binaries, and then get on MSDN to figure out what else you're doing wrong.

Re:How soon...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sad to see you blaming your own incompetence at writing software on Vista. Moron, if the software that you produce is causing lots of UACs, then you are constantly doing something that required elevated privileges. Fix the problem in your app and stop whining, idiot.

Re:How soon...

[Anonymous Coward]

> Perhaps you should try signing your binaries, and then get on MSDN to figure out what else you're doing wrong.

How much does that cost? Oh, right.

And UAC is still the wrong approach. People still keep calling it sudo, but it's not. Sudo asks you once and it asks for a password, not a mouse click. It doesn't give you seven layers of meaningless message boxes.

Re:How soon...

[plague3106]

Nothing. You can search MSDN content online for nothing. At any rate, if you're a professional shop, what would you be doing without an subscription? At least sign up for the magazine!

UAC is a fine approach; it doesn't launch seven message boxes IF you've done your job properly, which you haven't. Signing your binaries is one of those steps. FWIW, UAC will prompt for a password if the user isn't part of the Administrators group. Again, if you paid more attention and read up on UAC, you'd know this as well.

Given the large number of other apps that manage only ONE prompt, I don't see how you can possibly blame Vista.

Re:How soon...

[Carnildo]

Yes. SEVEN. "I agree to download the executable". "I agree to save the executable". "I agree to run the program" "I know it's an installer and might install something". "Yes, I'd like to install everything." "Yes, I agree to let the installer install something in Program Files" "Yes, I agree to let the installer update the registry".

You might want to change installers, then. We're using InstallerVise: yes, it requires clicking "next" a few times, but it doesn't trigger the "update the registry", "install in Program Files", and "run the program" UAC prompts.

Re:How soon...

[GaryPatterson]

>>> Perhaps you should try signing your binaries, and then get on MSDN to figure out what else you're doing wrong.

>>How much does that cost? Oh, right.

>Nothing.

Signed binaries are free? Wow, that's good of Microsoft!

Re:How soon...

[mcrbids]

Right, because developing a cross-platform application that works with Mac OSX 10.3, 10.4, and 10.5, Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP, and Server 2003, and Linux requires intimate knowledge of UAC, on this thing called "MSDN", for something that worked wonderfully in every version of Windows prior to this one...

It's not that Microsoft has broken retro-compatibility, they've just enhanced forward incompatibility! Of course! Why didn't I figure that out before?!?!?

Re:How soon...

[plague3106]

Ya, certificates are VERY expensive to buy. And you have to keep buying them over and over again every time you sign! Oh wait, neither of those are true.

At any rate, searching the MSDN content online is what I was refering to as free.

Read this on ZDNet

[kat_skan]

A blog on ZDNet has this interesting bit:

This drastic change in Microsoft's WGA system is only the latest in series of attempts to smooth WGA's rough edges. In August, Kochis apologized on Microsoft's WGA blog for an outage that incorrectly flagged thousands of customers' systems as "non genuine." In October, Microsoft removed the WGA validation requirement from IE7 downloads. Two weeks ago, on November 20, Kochis promised to "build more trust in WGA" by improving its back-end systems, its response times, and its customer support.

Getting rid of the "kill switch" is a much better way to build that trust.

This is software explicitly designed to make your computer less useful. It does nothing else for you. Why would "improving its back-end systems" ever make me trust it the least bit more?

Re:Read this on ZDNet

[dave420]

Well, that's not technically true. If the only people using dodgy copies of Windows were those who've not bought them, then yes - it could (and should) be argued that this is effectively a great disservice to their customers. However, these features are there not for downloaders, but from counterfeiters. These people have sold Windows illegally, and the people who've bought it have no idea. They've paid for support and service, and they're getting neither. This piece of software is primarily there for those people. We don't see a lot of this in more developed countries, but elsewhere it's a massive problem. Agree with it or not, but their motivation is not directed against pirates - they're just included in this because their versions of Windows look awfully similar to those selling illegal copies. It would be like being angry with your bank for them asking you to sign something before they took money from your account. If they didn't, you could be getting screwed, and not even know until it's too late to do anything about it.

Re:Read this on ZDNet

[kat_skan]

What support does Microsoft actually provide to people with legitimate copies of their software that isn't available to people who have been sold counterfeit copies, though? Both get patches. Both have to pay per incident for support. What else does that leave?

Re:Read this on ZDNet

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I believe non-validated computers can only get critical/security-related patches (i.e. they won't get updates that provide new functionality or fix non-security related bugs). As far as support goes, you probably have to validate your installation somehow (product key, etc) before they will diagnose your problem. So it's not like validation doesn't serve any purpose, but I think we all agree that for most people the downsides by far outweigh the benefits.

There is no technical reason Microsoft couldn't just get rid of activation as currently implemented; I think a nag screen is the best solution. Activation doesn't stop people from pirating Windows (I have a pirated installation of Vista myself), and a nag screen won't destroy a legitimate customer's machine. Honest people who are sold illegitimate copies of Vista can contact Microsoft to rectify the situation (this is already how activation currently works) and dishonest people can continue to do as they will. Activation doesn't have to punish honest customers.

Notice

[nermaljcat]

Maybe the notice should just contain a link to Ubuntu? =] "An error has occurred and Windows was detected on your drive. Please format disk and install Linux. Download Ubuntu here"

Re:Notice

[Locklin]

With the old "lock down," I don't think there was time or system resources to download and burn Ubuntu. At least now that will be an option!

Micro$oft whould use the kill swith

[Anonymous Coward]

on all machines,whether the machine uses XP or Vista. Then people will see the problems with non-free software and they will all switch over to GNU/Linux and Open-Source software exclusively in droves.
--
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.

Dear Microsoft.

[LWATCDR]

Just so you understand.
If I install a new motherboard in my PC that is not piracy.
If I format my old hard drive and install Vista on a new PC I built that is not piracy.
If I have to call to take down that nag screen then you must hire enough people that I never have to wait more than two minutes to get the nag removed. You must also offer a world wide toll free number so I can call no matter where I am and you must keep that number staffed until the sun goes nova or you go out of business.
Only then will any type of "activation" be acceptable.
Never mind OpenSuse is working just fine as is Ubuntu. Or maybe I will just buy a Mac.

Re:Dear Microsoft.

[Library Spoff]

Correct, installing a new motherboard is not piracy.

But if you built the original pc with an OEM version of Windows because you could get it cheaper and you then try to upgrade then tough. Though Microsoft should make this point a lot clearer.

Re:Dear Microsoft.

[pak9rabid]

If I install a new motherboard in my PC that is not piracy.

If you're installing a new motherboard and not reinstalling the OS, I have a feeling being flagged as a pirate is probably going to be the least of your concerns.

Re:Dear Microsoft.

[kernelpanicked]

Why, exactly? The last three machines I've been through I have built the machine, yanked the drive out of my old machine, and booted it up in the new one. No problems. Yes, I use BSD and Linux. If this is a problem when doing it with Windows, well then, learn not to buy shit software.

Re:Dear Microsoft.

[Junior J. Junior III]

Add to that, if they ever do go out of business they will permanently auto-activate any and all Windows license.

Re:Dear Microsoft.

[Serge_Tomiko]

My machine was locked out due to the installation of a new sound card - a trivial hardware change that should have been ignored. So, I called Microsoft, got some activation code and within 10-15 minutes I was up and running again. No harm done. I'm glad they are removing this "feature" but it's not a huge deal.

Re:Dear Microsoft.

[jackbird]

.25 x (your hourly) = nonzero opportunity cost to you.

Re:Dear Microsoft.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've done this probably a dozen times with Linux and maybe two or three times with OpenBSD. Not a problem.

Thankfully, reasonable operating systems ship with a reasonable set of drivers.

Re:Dear Microsoft.

[LWATCDR]

"So, I called Microsoft, got some activation code and within 10-15 minutes I was up and running again."
So it took you 15 minutes to fix something that should never have broke?
Kind of like getting searched without a warrant for 15 minutes. I mean it is no big deal if you are not carrying any thing illegal right?

Re:Dear Microsoft.

[LWATCDR]

Why is that tough?
What if the motherboard fails? Why should I have to get a new OS if I replace a part? Nope same rules should apply.
Frankly since Microsoft is a convicted monopoly they should be under all sorts of control as far as things like OEM version and such.

Re:Dear Microsoft.

[pak9rabid]

Linux, or any other decent OS for that matter, is a completely different story. Most of the Linux distros ship w/just about every driver included w/the kernel as modules, so it's just a matter of udev probing the hardware and loading the correct modules. Windows on the other hand...

Re:Dear Microsoft.

[Carewolf]

Still not piracy, OEM versions are no different from any other versions. In most countries you can even resell them legally. Only thing Microsoft can do is try to encourage their resellers to only sell OEM versions to OEMs.

Remember the magic phrase: EULAs are not valid!

Re:Dear Microsoft.

[Loganscomputer]

The most difficult problem I have ever had with reactivation when a clients system has been upgraded is a telephone call. If I was unable to do it over the automated system I have never had the voice operators tell me that I could not activate the copy again, OEM or otherwise. It seems that their question are fairly easy to field: "Is this copy of windows on any other computer?" If you answer no they are usually ok from there. I did have one ask why I was reinstalling and I told him motherboard crash and he was fine with it. In the interest of being honest I did have one copy of office that the Indian guy on the line did not want to activate at first but when I asked for a manager he activated it.

Re:Dear Microsoft.

[nine-times]

Only then will any type of "activation" be acceptable.

No, not even then in my book. I use my computer for relatively important purposes, and the real purpose of the OS is to stay up and running and allow me to access my data and applications. That's priority number 1, and in fact most of what I care about.

Therefore, in my opinion, When I see an OS vendor who spends their time trying to figure out how to make their OS not-work and how to make it disallow access to my programs and applications, I must assume that they don't understand the first thing about what they're doing.

I know that explanation might sound too clever by half, but I am dead serious. When Microsoft should have been spending their time figuring out how to keep my system running at all times, they were instead engineering a kill switch. It's like if a shoemaker was trying to engineer a shoe so that it could easily be made uncomfortable or made to fall apart.

So my message to Microsoft: as long as you're spending your resources trying to figure out how to make my computer less useful and less reliable, I will not buy your OS anymore. Spend your immense resources on making an operating system that does what operating systems are supposed to do, and I may reconsider.

Re:Dear Microsoft.

[DigitAl56K]

The worst part is that they tell us WGA is all about protecting their legal users and keeping down the cost of piracy, then they launch Vista Ultimate at $400.

If they want to build trust in WGA, give me the "pro" version of the OS for $100. If you need to charge $400 then either WGA hasn't helped MS at all while it has burdened me, or else it has helped MS but I see none of the benefits but am still burdened by it.

Re:Dear Microsoft.

[PitaBred]

I wish I had mod points. It's the same thing with the water companies "Save water!". So when we do, what do we get? Rate increases because they aren't making as much money as they did previously.

Re:Dear Microsoft.

[Serge_Tomiko]

Ever heard the phrase "making a mountain out of a mole hill?"

Yeah, the 15 minutes sucked. Just last night, someone fell ill on a subway train ahead of the one I was in and I was stuck on the Manhattan Bridge for 45 minutes. What am I going to do? Complain about the old lady? Sue the MTA?

We get inconvenienced all the time. If every time you have to wait 15 minutes you flip out and compare to getting searched by a cop, you are going to be very unhappy in life. Seriously, just be cool...

Re:Dear Microsoft.

[vondo]

I did it this week under Linux and didn't. Well, actually I fired up my package updater and switched kernel flavors because I was going from an Athlon to a Core 2 Duo. I'm pretty sure I didn't edit a single config file in doing this switch.

Re:Dear Microsoft.

[vondo]

Dunno about that. The Windows XP side of my machine is on it's third motherboard, I think. First was an original Athlon, next was an Athlon XP, and last weekend I upped it to a Core 2 Duo. This time I got hit with having to reactivate. It was the first time. Basically, XP goes into safe mode and you have to install all the drivers off the CD that comes with the motherboard. I had to reboot 4 or 5 times, make a phone call, and plug my mouse into the MB instead of a hub (why?), but it did work and it was less hassle than reinstalling and restoring data.

Linux was easier, of course. A switch of kernels in Ubuntu was all I had to do there.

Re:Dear Microsoft.

[Anonymous Coward]

man thats nothing. we as residents of melbourne, australia are told "save water" and if we dont we'll end up drinking treated sewerage, or waste billions building desalination plants. but big business are not faced with any water restrictions whatsoever, because it might hurt the bottom line

treated effluent here we come

Re:Dear Microsoft.

[LWATCDR]

I for one am SICK of being treated like a criminal by the companies I do business with.
If I buy a copy of Vista I can forgive mistakes but this "FEATURE" is only benefits Microsoft. SO HECK YES if they make do jump through a hoop after paying them I am going to hopping mad!

Re:Dear Microsoft.

[LWATCDR]

I really do agree maybe I should have said "marginally tolerable". I hope like heck that they don't put it into the server product. Imagine if use where dumb enough to use such and OS for your VOIP PBX or network firewall?
Another good example of it being really bad is in say a Emergency management center or any other mission critical system. What about all the copies being used by hospitals or the military!
I believe that the enterprise version has unlimited reauthorizations but that is SUPER expensive.
Right now with that kill switch I think Vista is dangerous for any mission critical application. Even with SP1 I question if it is wise to use for anything but a game machine.

Re:Dear Microsoft.

[nine-times]

I just find the whole "activation" process to be completely wrong-headed. To me, it's the same thing with DRM. It's like they're putting all their effort into making sure that it's not worth the trouble to pirate their IP, but if it's not worth pirating, then it sure as hell isn't worth buying.

I'm not a fan of activation/DRM in the first place, and it's particularly bad when it keeps re-checking and re-authenticating, so that even if it was working today it might stop working tomorrow. I would agree, though, that activation and DRM can be tolerable when done properly. I've bought music from iTunes and games from Steam, and never really had a problem with the restrictions.

However, I just think there's no place for this in operating systems. If my steam account breaks and I can't play Half Life for a couple days, Valve knows there isn't going to be much harm done. Even if you have Adobe's software break due to activation problems, it's unlikely that there will be any damages more than some lost productivity. However, there is no way to gauge what the consequences are going to be if you suddenly and unexpectedly disable someone's operating system. Microsoft doesn't know how you use your computer, can't predict the importance of your need of a functioning computer on any given day, and has no idea what trouble it will cause to deny you access to your own applications and data.

Whether you're talking about the OS that runs a life-support system or one that runs my grandmother's home PC, it simply shouldn't be built to break. They shouldn't be built to be disabled or stop function when you really need them to work. And more to the point, I don't want Microsoft deciding under which circumstances it's ok for my computer to break-- by itself, on purpose.

I actually think Vista disabling itself on my grandmother's home PC is a particularly bad situation. Her data might not be "mission critical", but it's still important to her. And she doesn't have a tech-support team that can help her get her data off if she can't get Windows running again. Generally, unless she had someone like me to figure it out, she'd probably end up buying a new PC and losing her data because she can't figure out what the hell is going on.

Re:Dear Microsoft.

[rastoboy29]

They spent six billion dollars to make an OS that doesn't work.  That's all you need to know.

Re:Dear Microsoft.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's like if a shoemaker was trying to engineer a shoe so that it could easily be made uncomfortable or made to fall apart. High heels?

Re:Dear Microsoft.

[Pofy]

>Add to that, if they ever do go out of business they will
>permanently auto-activate any and all Windows license.

What does it help "activating" a license/contract? What they need to do is activate the individual copies of Windows.

MS OSes overpriced in general

[Delusion_]

You pay a couple hundred dollars per client. You pay several times that per server. Then you have to buy CALs to let the clients and servers actually communicate. It's getting ridiculous, and it reminds me of when it was Novell's game to lose: the difference between the $500 server package and the $5000 server package was a license file with a different number in it. It's not as if Microsoft isn't covering its profit margin by the price of the OS alone, is it?

I'm not suggesting MS is doing anything wrong by, god forbid, charging for their software, but this sort of expensive buy-in is pretty much the opposite of the rampant piracy which pretty much ensured MS a place in the OS game to begin with.

CALs in particular annoy me, as do arbitrary price differences between versions.

Before anyone says it, I'm not a "linux on the desktop FFE" guy, I'm a "choose the OS for the applications you want to run" guy. Which means for a lot of server applciations, you've got some real choices, and for user applicaions, you've either got two and a half choices, or in some cases, only one.

Re:MS OSes overpriced in general

[ReAn1985]

Microsoft seems to think 'economy pricing' should be left to thier 'upgrade' packages.

I can buy Vista Upgrade for $100, but i have to install XP, then upgrade it to vista every time i format. 10 years ago if i kept following this idea, id have to install Windows 95, Upgrade to 98, Upgrade to 2000, Upgrade to XP, and then Upgrade to Vista, but id would have saved 60% of my costs for 10x the load time.

It really is the price of the OS that drives people to pirate it. I bet lots of people would buy Vista if the midgrade version was $100 and the Ultimate was $250. Cheapos could move up with a $60 payment. M$ would probably still make a profit.

Re:MS OSes overpriced in general

[mooglez]

Well, you guys in US can consider your selves lucky with the pricing. Here in EU, Vista Ultimate retail costs between 400 to 500 euros. Might be MS trying to get back on the EU antitrust rulings.

Re:MS OSes overpriced in general

[baadger]

I can buy Vista Upgrade for $100, but i have to install XP, then upgrade it to vista every time i format.

Yeah it is strange, you'd think they'd just have the Vista upgrade installer to do a fresh install but ask you to insert your XP CD and type your XP product key for verification. I guess MS just aren't that smart.

Re:MS OSes overpriced in general

[Delusion_]

I'm of mixed minds on the EU anti-trust issue.

The problem that the EU identified is not the problem (bundling). If MS wants to include a free competitor product to other vendor's offerings, that doesn't really bother me. Include IE? Absolutely, it's good to have a backup plan if Firefox ever gets wonky. And it's easier to download Firefox if you've got a browser included already. Include Windows Media Player? I won't use it, but many will, throw it in. Hell, throw in any kind of application you want, Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly on ideas anyway.

The real problems are the ones the EU didn't address as effectively. Particularly, in my opinion, predatory marketing with OEM lock-ins which make including Windows either a requirement, or actually cheaper than not doing so, making any non-MS offerings just as expensive (or more), even though the OS alone is more expensive.

It's not illegal to have a monopoly. It's illegal to use it to engage in price-fixing.

Re:MS OSes overpriced in general

[Erwos]

I was under the impression that you could do exactly what you suggest. Am I misinformed?

Re:MS OSes overpriced in general

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever actually installed a Windows OS before? You don't have to install the previous versions and "upgrade" the install. At most all you have to do is insert the disk with the previous version during the install and it will go ahead fine. Oftentimes not even that is required. So, that would be, by your numbers, 60% savings, except for 1% more work.

Re:MS OSes overpriced in general

[dave420]

Actually, the difference between those server packages is the support you get with it. It might not be actual phone support, but developmental support (hotfixes, improvements, etc.) which is happening all the time. Looking at a server OS, in this day and age, as just a CD with 0s and 1s on it is a bit short-sighted. There is a whole host of work going on behind the scenes to get you updates for your software, and that's what you pay for. The cheaper versions exist to save people having to fund the support of software they have no intention of using.

Re:MS OSes overpriced in general

[Ash-Fox]

Have you ever actually installed a Windows OS before? You don't have to install the previous versions and "upgrade" the install.

Unfortunately, you cannot do this with Vista.

Re:MS OSes overpriced in general

[Ash-Fox]

I was under the impression that you could do exactly what you suggest. Am I misinformed?

It was possible with XP's upgrade CD, not with Vista's.

Just like a beta demo.

[Ariastis]

Just like a beta, Vista is still full of bugs. Just like a demo, it has a lot of nag screens & unnecessary steps in order to make you install the "full" version (XP).

but...

[owlnation]

...isn't this one of Vista's most popular features?

Without that kill switch customers will be left with a slow, buggy OS.

Kill switch is still there if...

[G4from128k]

What stops MS from turning the switch back on at any future date? Although MS may have "turned off" the kill switch, it remains a feature of the system as long as MS auto-update can make changes to the OS without the user's consent.

Re:Kill switch is still there if...

[Threni]

There is no `switch`. It's all software. Microsoft could probably destroy every install of every version of Windows as soon as they next went online should they so choose.

Re:Kill switch is still there if...

[SL Baur]

Microsoft could probably destroy every install of every version of Windows as soon as they next went online should they so choose. That would be a dramatic, though effective way of dealing with the Botnet problem.

Re:Kill switch is still there if...

[Mathness]

What stops MS from turning the switch back on at any future date? *rubs a crystal ball*
Uh oh, I see a shadow heading your way, and ... This is a bit hard to see
*rubs the crystal ball vigoursly*
Ah, and it is wielding a chair.

Re:Kill switch is still there if...

[Anonymous Coward]

You can *always* revert it by reapplying SP1 (you may have to unpack it and manually replace a DLL but that is unlikely).

Re:Kill switch is still there if...

[brkello]

You bring up a good point. Any software that is patched could have a kill switch in it now. We must make a firm stand to remove the ability of companies to patch their software! Besides, computers have been around for awhile now...I am sure they have figured out how to create software free of bugs.

Re:Kill switch is still there if...

[Anonymous Coward]

What stops MS from turning the switch back on at any future date?

Tracer Tong?

Re:Kill switch is still there if...

[weicco]

You know what's even worse? Our power company has a huge kill switch which can take a lot of PCs down at once should they choose so. That is something I would call a very, very, very distributed DOS attack ;)

Re:Kill switch is still there if...

[eneville]

man, i hope you dont mind, but i'm going to quote that all over the place

Re:Kill switch is still there if...

[rastoboy29]

You know, I always hated automatic updates until I installed Ubuntu.  I realized, suddenly, that it didn't bother me when Ubuntu did it.  You know why?  Because I know they're doing it for ME.

With Windows, I know they're doing it for THEM.

Any they just aren't very important to me.

Must be a fun way to conduct a DoS

[dido]

I suppose they realized that it would be just a matter of time before someone outside of Microsoft discovers a way to use the kill switch. And then every Internet-connected computer running Vista will die instantly. Hmm... Doesn't sound like such a bad idea after all...

Re:Must be a fun way to conduct a DoS

[ReAn1985]

Or even more scary: the delivery system for these no-consent MS Updates.

Re:Must be a fun way to conduct a DoS

[CFBMoo1]

I suppose they realized that it would be just a matter of time before someone outside of Microsoft discovers a way to use the kill switch. And then every Internet-connected computer running Vista will die instantly. Hmm... Doesn't sound like such a bad idea after all...

I wouldn't wish this on anyone but it would make one hell of an interesting story for a book or movie if that ever happened. Maybe it could be split up in to a bunch of small stories for each chapter to give different accounts of the disaster that would occure.

Re:Must be a fun way to conduct a DoS

[jkrise]

I suspect this kill 'feature' will be activated once Microsoft releases the next stable version of the OS.

Re:Must be a fun way to conduct a DoS

[Phat_Tony]

In the old days, viruses used to do things like delete users data to be malicious. Now, virus authors go to great lengths to write stealth rootkits to be sure there is never any visible sign to the user that the virus is installed on the system.

Viruses used to written by basement hackers who wanted to be elite and cool and to show what they could do, and visibly damaging people's user experience drew a lot of attention to them. Now, viruses are authored by hackers payed by organized crime, and they are used to mail spam, steal credit card numbers, and blackmail companies for cash under threat of DDOS attacks. Today's hackers won't bother going after the kill switch, it's not in their interest. They want those machines online, unknowingly marching to their orders like a good little botnet bot should.

End the Era

[dcray2000]

Excellent Microsoft, keep destroying the wide spread use of your own OS, frustrating your end users, and alienating the next generation of system/software engineers.
 
We'll be that much better off.

Re:End the Era

[fialar]

Didn't IBM do the exact same thing with OS/2? :D

Re:End the Era

[dcray2000]

what's OS/2 ?
heehe

Coincidence or Related?

[Xest]

One of my XP machines pulled down a WGA update from Windows automatic updates yesterday.

Have they also somehow altered WGA in XP?

Re:Coincidence or Related?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know, but it sounds like all they're doing is reversing the Vista WGA to the same waste of time WGA that XP has had.

This statement amuses me tho

"Microsoft has described the new approach as a "change of tactics". It said efforts to tackle piracy had seen numbers of fake copies of Vista at half the level of XP, the previous Windows operating system."

Probably because the only copies of Vista they're shifting are pre-installed ones (which are by their very nature, usually legit), Very few people are willingly replacing their legitimate (or otherwise) XP copies with it because they don't want it so of course piracy is going to be lower. It has _nothing_ to do with their Anti-piracy efforts. If people want to pirate Vista right now, they can, and they can disable all the WGA crap Microsoft added in their pirates copies anyway. (note Microsoft, Pirated copy = better)

Re:Coincidence or Related?

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting observation. I don't know why they would have to wait until SP1 in Vista to change the WGA thing, because I've also noticed that XP has had numerous hotpatches that claimed to change WGA somehow.

Re:Coincidence or Related?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah this would be why I never let my XP machine see the internet; I can keep all the malicious software off my machine, especially Microsoft "updates".

Re:Coincidence or Related?

[illumin8]

One of my XP machines pulled down a WGA update from Windows automatic updates yesterday.

Have they also somehow altered WGA in XP?

Yes, they have. I have my automatic updates on XP set to download only, then ask me before installing. Months ago, I already told it to NOT install WGA, and don't ask me about this update again. They changed something recently, because I got an auto-download of IE7, and it asked me to install that. I said no, of course. Then, right after, I got another auto-download of WGA, and it asked me again to install it.

What they seem to have done is simply published a newer version of WGA. Even if you had chosen to not install it the first time, it still tries to install the newer version, because Windows thinks it's a brand new update. If you had automatic updates set to install without prompting you, BAM! your computer is now infected with the WGA rootkit.

And yes, WGA is a rootkit, as far as I'm concerned. If I can help it, I will never install it on my machine. Why should I give MS the permission to disable my hardware and software? Sneaky tricks aside, I'm sure they'll figure out some way to get it on my system some day.

not worth stealing

[aslan963]

Microsoft knows it is not worth stealing so why generate the ill will with people who actually purchase vistawful to begin with.

Re:not worth stealing

[Pofy]

>Microsoft knows it is not worth stealing....

That is why so many instead copy it....

Oh! Shucks.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

I was hoping finally the corporations would wake up to the onerous requirements MSFT is placing on them, making them jump through so many hoops like a trained monkey and finally decide to become less independent on MSFT. Now the computer will continue to work, but with a few more nagging messages. Given the amount of nagging dialogs that most users don't understand who routinely press OK to continue and get on with their work. It will merely accustom the users to higher levels of pain and raise the tolerance levels. Is there any wonder people hate computers?

Re:Oh! Shucks.

[petermgreen]

For big buisness it isn't really that onerous, you set one (or two for redundancy) machine up as a KMS and make sure all your machines can access it every so often. No big deal.

Ordinary home users at least in the west will mostly buy big brand machines and get bios locked media that does not need activation.

The people it really hits are enthusiasts who build thier own PCs and modify them at lot, small time PC repair places that must have either have loads of different types of bios locked media or convince MS to activate whitebox windows using those machines keys over the phone and small buisnesses who have a mixture of PC brands and either don't have a volume license agreement or don't have enough machines to deploy a KMS.

Re:Oh! Shucks.

[Anonymous Coward]

NT4 was 'gets the red out'. And it did.
2000 was the upgrade for that and some customers went to it
XP was the consumer version. It was WAY better than 9x and people liked it
Vista is an upgrade to that and some people will go to it.

I worked with a customer last year that was still using NT4. Which is 1996 tech. It worked for them. They had NO reason to upgrade. The same will be for XP and 2000. Most people get a new OS when they get a new computer. That is how it works in the real world. Not because 'oh i heard its crap'. I knew people who actually LIKED WinME.

What MS needs to fix is the 'perception' of slow that Vista has. Its bad. XP was semi bad when it first came out but this is amazingly slow. I have turned off some services and its 'better' but not much. The popup dialog thing I get, and it is not THAT bad. I am usually doing something adminy anyways. Many Linux distros do the EXACT same thing. I think Vista's slowness is related the fact it fills memory when it starts. So the first thing an application has to do when starting is clear out some memory for itself to live in. It could also be a driver issue. I am measuring things to figure out what is going on.

My overall impression of vista at this point is. Not as bad as people make it out to be. But not that much better than XP, just very different (and some people do not like that). Stick with the home premium ver. Ultimate gives you nothing. Dont be in a hurry to get it. I only got it because my laptop ate itself.

Re:Oh! Shucks.

[Ash-Fox]

What MS needs to fix is the 'perception' of slow that Vista has. Its bad.

Okay, you're trying to copy a 500kb file somewhere, and Vista's copy window pops up saying "Calculating" for almost a entire minute, before instantly just copying it.

It really is not just a perception. These things seem so obvious to me to be a flaw somewhere, I wonder how quality assurance even passed that. On XP, you would just see the copy window flicker onto the screen and poof and the file would be there.

Re:Oh! Shucks.

[RESPAWN]

Just so you know, a lot of corporations would probably move from MSFT if the software vendors would move first. It's not that we're all dependent on the OS to get our work done. What we are dependent on is the industry standard software that will only run on said OS.

Re:Oh! Shucks.

[Anonymous Coward]

Using Vista Business, I just copied a nine-megabyte file from one folder to another. This happened so fast a copy window never even appeared. Even I wasn't expecting it to go so fast.

For the record, I have less than a gigabyte of RAM, and a 1.6 GHZ AMD processor.

(captcha: "copying")

Re:Oh! Shucks.

[Paul Pierce]

This was the reason I switched back to XP. I didn't run into this will a file that small, but I ran into it all the time. I couldn't figure out why it took so frigin long to calculate how long it was going to take. I didn't even care how long it thought it was going to take, I just wanted to move the file. I found this to be exceptionally bad when moving between hard drives. Vista does not offer me anything I need that XP doesn't, but XP offers me plenty that Vista cannot do.

Re:Oh! Shucks.

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, you're trying to copy a 500kb file somewhere, and Vista's copy window pops up saying "Calculating" for almost a entire minute, before instantly just copying it.

I have had this issue too, it doesn't always happen, but it does happen often to be annoying. It happens particularly with copying between harddrives and copying between file shares.

Re:Oh! Shucks.

[cbhacking]

That only happened, in my experience, copying into a protected location (requiring UAC elevation) and even then a minute is a ridiculous exaggeration. I'll grant you that it did tend to say it for about 6 seconds though (on my year old, mid-range laptop)... until a couple months ago, when they released a patch that fixed that and a couple other performance issues. File operations are quite painless now. Run Windows Update, or go check online - they released the patch as a standalone before pushing it out over Update.

Re:Oh! Shucks.

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, you're trying to copy a 500kb file somewhere, and Vista's copy window pops up saying "Calculating" for almost a entire minute, before instantly just copying it.We use Vista at work and it happens all the time!

Re:Oh! Shucks.

[Ash-Fox]

That only happened, in my experience, copying into a protected location (requiring UAC elevation) and even then a minute is a ridiculous exaggeration. I'll grant you that it did tend to say it for about 6 seconds though (on my year old, mid-range laptop)...

In my experience, it seems to be common. My experiences were mostly on dual core laptops. I don't take likely to slowness of applications on what I consider 'good' hardware. I had a few times literally jumped out of my chair and started screaming at the machines, because all I wanted to do was copy/move a tiny file and I really needed to go do other things.

I haven't got that angry at machines since... I don't remember ever being so angry at a machine before Vista.

until a couple months ago, when they released a patch that fixed that and a couple other performance issues. File operations are quite painless now.

I know of the patch and had it installed on various machines. I'm still jumping out of my chair, so I know that it didn't fix my issues.

How is this going to stop piracy of Vista?

[Mystery00]

Windows has always added some kind of protection, it has always been cracked, and only legitimate customers have suffered. Same goes for any other piece of software.

Crackers will remove this and continue to spread Vista as if nothing happened. Only the silly twits that bought Vista are going to end up dealing with this.

They just don't learn.

Is the kill switch really working?

[ronanbear]

Or might the lower piracy rates for Vista be due to other reasons, say pirating XP instead.

"improper"

[quarrel]

Anyone shed any light on what "improper" copies are?

Are these the legitimate after-market sales that we hear them going after? All power to 'em if they're going after illegal sellers, but you gotta worry when a corporate like MSFT starts going after "improper" things..

Sell me something, and sod off would be my preference.

--Q

Re:"improper"

[ReAn1985]

Just because you paid for it dosent mean it's "proper" according to M$. From what I've seen victims of unlicenced OEM distrobuters / pirates basically get a "sorry, you paid a crook some money, now pay some more crooks (M$) and we'll let you keep using it."

It's like buying a stolen car, if the cops find out it's stolen, and don't catch the guy you bought it from, you get squat, and your car is taken away.

My big, round, shiny Vista Kill Switch was...

[capnkr]

...a Linux CD.

Hasta La Vista, Billy!

:)

Vista was the first m$ OS I'd actually owned since Win98 - it came on my new laptop. I even went through the setup procedures (see Vista setup/3+hrs | Linux/1.25hrs *with xtra apps*), but I haven't used it since, nor will I ever.

Why? Linux runs much faster, and with much better software and extras, than Vista does on this 'native' Vista system (haha). No point in using the substandard OS variety.

cut MS some slack

[stormguard2099]

Ok, so I gotta say, this is too much vista hating in the comments. I think the community should be congratulating MS for backing off of their anti-piracy campaign a little bit. They are changing a feature to help users, like the legit users who are having issues with this. I agree that they should do away with more of it but hey, you have to start somewhere. This isn't like an article just saying they are thinking about it, they are going to implement it. Doesn't that deserve a bit of praise?
Just to keep the record straight, I am not a windows fanboy. I am typing this from a macbook and I have no intentions of going back to windows anytime soon. If anything I am a mac fanboy but seriosuly, the majority of the other posts I have seen are just bashing vista in such an offtopic manner that it bothers even me.

Re:cut MS some slack

[BuckaBooBob]

Just wait.. Next week MS will announce that XP WGA is more hardcore than ever before.. But if you don't like teh Nags.. Just Upgrade to Vista. If people wont do it willingly force them via nags..

Re:cut MS some slack

[15Bit]

I'd agree that this isn't exactly the most balanced or objective of places where discussion of MS is concerned, and it also annoys me. In many ways though, the MS bashing is just people being unable to express themselves properly. In this instance, for example, what the MS bashers are trying to say is that whilst in principle it is a good thing that MS have changed their mind now, they have a past record of making similar announcements and then quietly sneaking the original idea through the back-door a couple of months later. Accordingly, the slashdot community is skeptical with respect to the real value of this announcement as MS have proven themselves untrustworthy in the past.

Re:cut MS some slack

[marcosdumay]

"I think the community should be congratulating MS for backing off of their anti-piracy campaign a little bit."

People are complaining that by doing that Microsoft will slow the switch to Linux. As far as I know, that is a compliment.

Re:cut MS some slack

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a product where you give me money and I give you a product and kick you in the balls. I don't know why you bought it, because there are non-ball-kicking alternatives, but you did.

Then I "respond to customer concerns" and "improve the overall experience" by not kicking you in the balls as hard, or only kicking you in one ball.

I will expect praise when I implement this latest feature, and no more complaints of "Hey, I'm still being kicked in the balls" from you.

Replace "balls" with "box" or whatever it is girls have down there if needed.

Re:cut MS some slack

[JohnFluxx]

Well personally I want to microsoft to restrict piracy as much as possible. It would be very interesting to see what would happen if people could not pirate the latest version.

In linux, wine is now able to play an awful lot of games now. In particular most of the games in steam.

Imagine if Wine got DirectX 10 support. It would be very delicious if a lot of people were unable to play the latest directx 10 games in Windows because they couldn't manage to pirate Vista, and so have to reboot into linux in order to play their games..

Re:I bet I know who's happy!

[Killjoy_NL]

Whoah you must be the Goatse guy to pull numbers of that size out of your behind ;)

"Illegal and Improper"

[mallardtheduck]

Microsoft said it [...] [has] taken down more than 50,000 "illegal and improper" online software auctions.'

So that means that Microsoft have been getting perfectly legal auctions taken down because they deem then "improper" then.

Re:"Illegal and Improper"

[Anonymous Coward]

That was an AND (I can bold too!). Meaning they only took down auctions which were both illegal as well as improper (whatever that means). If you are going to try to read between the lines as least learn to read.

Re:"Illegal and Improper"

[Drewmeister]

Just because you choose to interpret something a certain way doesn't make it true.

Re:"Illegal and Improper"

[gsslay]

For someone reading slashdot, you seem distressingly clueless about the meaning of AND compared to OR.

Re:"Illegal and Improper"

[mallardtheduck]

Firstly, English is imprecise. It is not a programming language.
Secondly, the quote said:

Microsoft said it had [...] taken down more than 50,000 "illegal and improper" online software auctions.'"

Because English is imprecise, that can have multiple valid meanings.

If we break the sentence down we could get:
Microsoft said it had [...] taken down more than {50,000 [("illegal) and (improper")]} online software auctions.'"
Meaning a number of illegal auctions were taken down and a number of improper auctions were taken down. The total is more than 50,000.

Equally, we could get:
Microsoft said it had [...] taken down more than {50,000 ("illegal and improper")} online software auctions.'"
Meaning more than 50,000 auctions that were both illegal and improper were taken down.

Note that either makes sense. Saying "More than 100 men and women ran in the race." does not mean "More than 100 entities that are both men and women ran in the race." It means "A number of men ran and a number of women ran. The total is greater than 100."

Since the line was written by PR people, who are notorious for twisting the meaning of language and, in the second interpretation, the word "improper" adds no meaning (since, implicitly, illegal => improper), I am inclined to believe that the first meaning was the one meant.

Re:"Illegal and Improper"

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, strictly by the rules of grammar, the GP is correct. If they meant what you are saying, they would have to say 'illegal-and-improper auctions.' As it stands, it mean illegal auctions and improper auctions.

Re:"Illegal and Improper"

[foreverdisillusioned]

Except it's not illegal to resell OEM software. It violates the EULA, but the first-sale doctrine trumps any contract you may or may not have signed, EULAs included.

Re:"Illegal and Improper"

[gsslay]

I don't know. A good percentage of slashdot posts willing argue that illegal does not therefore necessarily imply improper. I took the phrase as a combined double whammy used to emphasise just how naughty the auctions were. Which is pretty much in line with how programming logic would interpret it.

If we chose to interpret it otherwise, we must conclude that not only has Microsoft taken it upon itself to determine what is improper, but also has the ability to enforce this on online auctions, and keep it quiet. But alas! Your masterly analysis of some PR fluff has exposed the hidden, shocking truth!

I know what sounds far more likely to me, and I suspect so do you. But I guess only the second can be used as a stick to beat Microsoft with, no matter how feebly.

Re:I bet I know who's happy!

[Macthorpe]

6,000,000,000 Linux users Did I fall asleep and wake up in a parallel universe again?

God dammit, I only just got the cottonwool and KY out of my hair from last time.

Do you listen to yourself?

[mattgreen]

I suppose they realized that it would be just a matter of time before someone outside of Microsoft discovers a way to use the kill switch. And then every Internet-connected computer running Vista will die instantly. Hmm... Doesn't sound like such a bad idea after all... Why is it OK for thousands of people to have their computers be rendered inoperable just because they run an operating system that you don't like? Oh, right, because Vista is the worst operating system in all of history and everyone that uses it somehow deserves their computer to be unusable.

I'd be careful with all the elitism you're spewing, you might choke on it.

Re:Do you listen to yourself?

[SCHecklerX]

Why is it OK for thousands of people to have their computers be rendered inoperable just because they run an operating system that you don't like? Oh, right, because Vista is the worst operating system in all of history and everyone that uses it somehow deserves their computer to be unusable.

Because THEY are the ones who are part of the friggin' botnets that kill my bandwidth, cause ISPs to block MY mail server, etc. Windoze users have a VERY real impact on my ability to use the bandwidth I am paying for thankyouverymuch.

If they are able to be killswitched by ANYONE, then they SHOULD BE.

Re:Do you listen to yourself?

[Anonymous Coward]

How wonderful to see someone filled with hate flame a trivial, light-hearted joke. Better than have you do damage someplace important.

here, flame my post, too. Fetch, spot!

Re:Do you listen to yourself?

[trytoguess]

Now now, that's WinXP. Vista is an (kind of) attempt to solve such issues, it's a GOOD thing. :)

Re:Do you listen to yourself?

[o'reor]

Why is it OK for thousands of people to have their computers be rendered inoperable just because they run an operating system that you don't like?

Whoa, wait a minute. Did you ever ask that question before when destructive worms, specifically targeted at Windows, were released in the wild ? Ever heard of Klez.E ? Or W32/Magistr ?. The latter wiped out my data a few years ago, I promise you I had the thrill of my life... [/sarcasm]

As one of the posters said below, malware writers don't care about your data or your life. They only ask themselves how efficient their next virus or worm will be to reach their goals, whether it be using the resources of thousands of zombie-PCs, or threatening a large corporation with a massive breakdown of their IT infrastructure. Happened in a Orange/France Telecom R&D center 4 years ago : all PCs down for a whole monday morning. 1200 people suddenly locked out of their PCs. Fortunately the coffee machine stood up and running that day... ;-)

Shouldn't they be more concerned...

[jpellino]

...with quality? Somehow piracy doesn't seem the biggest roadblock to Vista sales right now.

Microsoft probably can't win but must act

[CtrlShiftEsc]

People can bitch about the apparent tunnel-visioned business model that they adopt with WGA. The fact of the matter is that if the tables were turned and Apple were the most dominant and pervasive OS, there would be similar tactics employed. You bet your life that Apple would hunt you down with their 'iCanDoNoWrong' activation software. It's just that way it is, being a monopoly, good or bad.

Microsoft is in business to make money and do the bidding of its shareholders, period. If one accepts that fact, then expect that they have to do something to protect their interests because it does affect their bottom line. Again, /. people might not care but then again, it's not your bottom line, on the line.

Not so many years ago, Steam arrived on the scene in the PC games world. Everyone moaned and complained. Groups formed to try and find ways to circumvent it (and I suspect they still do). Everyone said it was organised spying because the software had to 'phone home', nobody wanted to activate their game on-line. Now, Steam does a whole lot more than just phone home, it's practically Borg! Yet, I don't really have a problem with it. Maybe Microsoft could use their model instead? It certainly doesn't treat legitimate customers as potential criminals as far as I can see.

I accept that WGA is just plain wrong, wrong, wrong. However, if one accepts that there is a global piracy problem for Microsoft to deal with, how would /. people solve it? Don't bother to chime in 'Make it free' or 'Make it Open Source and then I'll pay for it' or 'sell it for peanuts because no-one will pirate it then' - yeah, right. Business is business.

Re:Microsoft probably can't win but must act

[Entropius]

Sell the OS at a fair price. I'd wager that some games have had a whole lot more dev work put into them, and have higher quality code, than Vista. Some also have free online play requiring infrastructure from the company (see Guild Wars). Yet your average game is $50, and Vista is $hundreds?

Piracy is a symptom of overpriced software.

Re:Microsoft probably can't win but must act

[Trelane]

First, are you a Microsoft employee, or a user of operating systems? I will assume for the duration that you're a user of operating systems.

I accept that WGA is just plain wrong, wrong, wrong.

Right. It gives you nothing (indeed, it causes you and/or others Windows users problems!). It's your job the capitalist system to push back against the company and make them give you what you want. If they don't, you complain and go elsewhere and they lose money.

if one accepts that there is a global piracy problem for Microsoft to deal with, how would /. people solve it?

Aside from the huge if that's looming large over your statement, I fail to see why it's the customer's problem. Microsoft's problem is balancing causing you trouble and losing your business against losing business to people breaking their copyright. Your problem is making sure the software does what you want. As you stated, WGA is "bad, bad, bad" for you, so why are you supporting it?

As an extreme example, any business would love to get money from people for doing nothing--pure profit! Their customers, on the other hand, would love to get stuff for free--pure profit! The fight between the two is what causes capitalism to succeed.

Re:Microsoft probably can't win but must act

[Ash-Fox]

Sell the OS at a fair price.

I think Windows is sold at a fair price. For software that relied upon by so many various applications and hardware, I think it's great value. That said, I think I would pay the same for my Linux system.

I'd wager that some games have had a whole lot more dev work put into them, and have higher quality code, than Vista.

Agreed.

Piracy is a symptom of overpriced software.

Piracy is easy because everyone has that 'friend' or 'friend of a friend' who can get them any software they need. People don't even consider buying software these days I've noticed. They goto the person, speak of their problem (old software and want new) and of course, expect the problem to be fixed for free.

The problem is, they do not have to pay for their software. If you offer a free alternative, they don't want to know in most cases unless it is similar enough (100% the same functionality)... Because they can get the other for free too.

This really hurts the software market (more so than the company they are pirating from), where by competitors will never get any real monetary support, no matter how cheap their products are. Nor will they be able to make their products more appealing by lowering the cost. Software like Adobe's Photoshop, Microsoft Windows are going to likely remain being the dominant software in the commercial, proprietary industry for a very long time.

So far the only real competition I have seen in years to these products come from the opensource community (Linux distributions, Krita, GIMP) and that's mostly because some people put certain philosophies first or are very honest people (who don't pirate) and in some cases (particularly mine), people who just see that software as superior or better suited for their needs.

Re:Microsoft probably can't win but must act

[Anonymous Coward]

Fact: there is piracy
Fact: the current anti-piracy system does not prevent piracy
Fact: the current anti-piracy system pisses of a lot of people
Conclusion: they should keep doing it because they, "have to do something"

Do you really not see the problem here?

What would I do eh? I think a good model in this case is give it away free to individuals and charge businesses for using it, and by businesses I also include OEM licenses. I would guess that that is where MS gets most of it's money anyway.

Oh, and I completely disagree with your assumption that any market-dominating OS would "naturally" include an invasive and overblown copy protection scheme.

Re:Microsoft probably can't win but must act

[Decameron81]

Business is business.

Image IS business, it's everything for a company... forget the lawsuits and anti piracy schemes. They have been long proven useless.br>
And no, Microsoft doesn't care enough about its image.

Re:Microsoft probably can't win but must act

[geekoid]

"The fact of the matter is that if the tables were turned and Apple were the most dominant and pervasive OS, there would be similar tactics employed."
First: Apple is a Hardware seller. The OS is needed for it to run. Just like the software in you microwave. That means they would have this problem.

Second: You should be more generic when making a claim like this. You are more likely to get a thoughtful repsonce and not inflame people.

Third(and to your point): You have no idea if that would actually happen id another company built the primary OS. IT's just some assumption you make based on nothing.

"If one accepts that fact, then expect that they have to do something to protect their interests because it does affect their bottom line."
I would argue that there approach is hurting the bottom line. The current market, and MS's change seem to back that.

"Yet, I don't really have a problem with it."

That's great, but says nothing to your point and overlooks many of the flaws of a 'Steam like' system.

"It certainly doesn't treat legitimate customers as potential criminals as far as I can see."

Absolutely it does. Anytime you have to prove your innocent of a crime is treating you like an ACTUAL criminal.

"However, if one accepts that there is a global piracy problem for Microsoft to deal with, how would /. people solve it? "
I don't believe its a large problem at all for MS. Look at their profit of all their OS's. Clearly it's not driving them out of business.
To my mind there are a couple of approaches MS could take.
1) Don't sell it retail.
2) Don't confuse your customers. They have been doing this a lot in the last 7 years. 1(One) version of Vista. The development cost is sunk, and every version was developed as one. Remove all Vista version except ultimate. Drop the price to 100 bucks. Based on approximate dev costs, they will make their money back just on 2 years of Dell sales.

Apple ended up doing what I expected MS to do. Build upon BSD. It is a solid foundation to brand your style upon.

The more people that look away from their OS, the less they're going to make money from their key revenue source, Office.
Even if it meant giving the OS away, they must maintain the Office revenue. I am not suggest they should give it away.

I am a windows developer, and the fact that I am still running 2K at home is because of their outrages retail costs of XP and especially Vista.

Re:Microsoft probably can't win but must act

[El_Oscuro]

I agree, and so apparently does Oracle. The last time I checked, they make a lot of money. I have another post on this exact subject.

Re:Microsoft probably can't win but must act

[illumin8]

The fact of the matter is that if the tables were turned and Apple were the most dominant and pervasive OS, there would be similar tactics employed. You bet your life that Apple would hunt you down with their 'iCanDoNoWrong' activation software.

You have no proof that just because one convicted monopolist, with greater than 90% marketshare, throws their weight around in the computer industry and treats their users like thieves, a small computer company, with ~3% marketshare, who has never required activation or authentication to use any of their operating systems, would ever do the same thing.

Your argument is totally illogical. It's like saying "just because Dick Cheney likes to waterboard and torture enemy combatants, if Jesus were vice president, he would do the same thing."

Of course Dick Cheney isn't Steve Ballmer, and Steve Jobs isn't Jesus, but you get the picture.

Apple and Microsoft are like the Yin and Yang of the computer world. They represent the opposite views on almost everything related to computing technology. One company likes to force users through monopolistic practices, bundling, and activation. The other company believes "your computer is yours to use how you like."

3 words

[Samalie]

Technet Plus Direct

Every version of Vista, Office 2007, Server Platforms, et all.

$350

Actually $250 - use Promo Code TMSAM04 for the discount.

Disclaimer: Yes, Vista licks balls. But if you actually want it, there's the cheapest path.

The later versions of Nero work fine with Vista.

[Anonymous Coward]

What's he using, a 5 year old version of Nero?

Sad News

[psbrogna]

I was saddened to hear this. What better way to expedite the industry switching to a kindler, gentler OS than for the market leader to start turning off their own user base en masse?

I'm actually thinking of upgrading to Vista today

[Fross]

(As basically everyone else is talking about Vista in general, thought I would too.)

I just upgraded my main machine last month (from athlon 3000xp / nforce2 / 2G ram / 6800gs, to core2quad q6600 / nforce 680i sli / 4G 800Mhz ram / BFG 8800GT) I felt I was reaching XP's limits on what I wanted, namely:

- can't access 4G ram, or higher. Maxes out around 3.25G
- can't run DirectX 10 (this is the total killer, for games)
- also, I'd have to reinstall if I wanted XP-64, so may as well go the whole hog

I use my PC for gaming, and music production (Cubase, etc). Over the last few weeks I've been painstakingly contacting the manufacturers of every peripheral/software I use, ensuring I won't lose the use of anything I currently am used to. That takes care of the driver issue.

The other main issues seem to be memory (4G should be enough for now), and general resource usage. I've looked into it a bit and found a bunch of services that are useless for me and will speed things up when disabled (ReadyBoost, Search index services for example) - but to be honest, this was always the way with any Windows installation - msmsgs, anyone? A bit of tweaking will always be necessary.

Right now, it seems hard for me to find something that doesn't work under Vista, and the new device driver stack, directx 10 and expansion to 64 bit seem worth it to me. Anyone been through a similar upgrade recently and have a story to tell?

Cause and Effect?

[greypilgrim]

"It said efforts to tackle piracy had seen numbers of fake copies of Vista at half the level of XP, the previous Windows operating system." Where is the link? They have added anti-piracy controls, piracy is lower, therefore, anti-piracy controls work. WRONG. What about demand? IMHO piracy is lower because nobody wants this piece of sh!t, free or otherwise.

interesting ...

[Computer Consulting]

Some of the major things I advise computer consultants to look for in an initial IT audit with a new computer consulting prospect or customer are up-to-date software licenses. Surprisingly in the small business arena, pirated software can be a big problem (particularly with micro small businesses that have between 1 and 10 employees). They think they can escape the radar because of their very small size in the grand scheme of things. However, we've seen in recent years that people can and do get caught - both home users and business users - when they use pirated software in their daily lives. It seems interesting that Microsoft would change the way it handles piracy issues with Vista. While I don't personally use Vista, from what I have learned and seen about the software package's many problems in just its first year or so of existence, I wouldn't be surprised if there were real issues surrounding the disabling of legitimate copies.

not even the pirates want it

[unknown_user_name]

Microsoft claims that its next-generation operating system is more robust at preventing counterfeit attempts. A more accurate story might mention that no one wants to counterfeit the bloated package of crippleware that is Windows Vista.

WGA extreme edition

[Cr0t]

This sounds like WGA 2 aka "WGA eXtreme edition.

So MS has gone from....

[bealzabobs_youruncle]

hating their customers to merely treating them as an irritant. Leopard FTW!!1!1!!

Re:So MS has gone from....

[Anonymous Coward]

hating their customers to merely treating them as an irritant. Leopard FTW!!1!1!!

Irony.

Vista increases piracy - of XP

[gosand]

I wonder how many people bought a new PC that has Vista pre-installed, and they hated it so much they downloaded a pirated copy of XP to install over it?

We bought my wife a new laptop last year, and there was no way I was going with Vista. Luckily, you could get one through Dell Small Business with XP on it. I run Kubuntu, and I have an old Win2k machine if I need it. But for my wife, and especially on a laptop, I wanted XP. I've still never seen Vista in person, but I really have no reason to either. I only use Windows when I have to.

ok

[Anonymous Coward]

i don't like the idea of purchacing an OS that cost more than the hardware of the PC Itself. an OS should not cost more than $50, even for a 'premium' version of it.

Re:I'm actually thinking of upgrading to Vista tod

[Ash-Fox]

can't run DirectX 10 (this is the total killer, for games)

Are there any notable games yet for DirectX10 only? So far many games have not been made for DirectX10 because the market of users who have it is too small (at least this is what was said by Valve and others in the past).

Right now, it seems hard for me to find something that doesn't work under Vista

DirectX9's directplay does not work in my experience under Vista.

and expansion to 64 bit seem worth it to me.

A lot of 32bit software just does not run under 64bit Vista. I would suggest you try running a trial version of the 64bit Vista version first before committing.

yeah and those people dont do SHIT

[Anonymous Coward]

but browse, email, and run office.

the rest of us expect fucking better software as an 'upgrade' for such an insane price.

you make me sick

Re:I'm actually thinking of upgrading to Vista tod

[chammy]

I'll tell you right now that Vista is a waste of time if you're wanting a better gaming system. I ran both 64bit and 32bit for a time to see what Dx10 was all about.
 
A few months later and I'm back to XP for my gaming setup. At first Vista seemed nicer than XP (cleaned up interface, etc) but after a while the annoyances start to wear on you. Horrible surround sound support, random applications crashing, and incredibly slow bootups every once in a while were just too much for me to handle. Never mind that hardly any games actually gain anything from Dx10.

For now I'm sticking with XP for the games that I can't play in Linux.

New API ?

[Nicolay77]

I'm using Unlocker 1.8.5

It shows me which application is keeping a file lock, it lets me close the application, or even delete the file from the dialog and I'm using Windows XP SP2.

Yeah, right.

[Eternal Annoyance]

Microsoft says it removed the kill switch, but I don't believe it. They've lied before, and I don't trust them anymore. If they'd actually be honest and tell us the kill switch is still there, but disabled, I might actually believe them. However, I think it's still there (and enabled), but needs to be told manually to do its dirty work.

Idiots!

[hyades1]

What a wonderful change! So now, I can be standing in front of a couple of hundred people, and instead of spontaneously "phoning home" and then going into drone mode, my laptop will start screaming at the audience, inaccurately, that the guy giving a PowerPoint presentation on Business Ethics stole the operating system he's using.

If I was ever stupid enough to install Vista and this happened to me, I swear to God there'd be legal consequences. Another marketing triumph from the tools at Microsoft, and another reason why my next OS will be Linux.

Pirate this, you cretinous half-wits!

Apple Commercials

[Kris_B_04]

Oh... the Apple Mac "I'm a Mac and I'm a PC" commercials are going to have a hay-day with this one!!

*grin*

Kris

Re:I'm actually thinking of upgrading to Vista tod

[Fross]

Are there any notable games yet for DirectX10 only? So far many games have not been made for DirectX10 because the market of users who have it is too small (at least this is what was said by Valve and others in the past).

There are several VERY notable games that look far better under DirectX 10. Crysis, Bioshock, Lost Planet, and likely anything good released here-on in. My point is I now have the graphics power in my rig, I may as well use it!

DirectX9's directplay does not work in my experience under Vista.

According to wikipedia, that's been deprecated and replaced by Live since 2004. I personally don't know of any software that uses it.

A lot of 32bit software just does not run under 64bit Vista. I would suggest you try running a trial version of the 64bit Vista version first before committing.

That's what I was looking in to. I've found I have one piece of hardware (albeit 6 years old) that has been discontinued by the manufacturer and won't have Vista 64 drivers, though it runs fine under 32 bit. I'll be looking to see whether I can run it in some sort of compatability wrapper. I will be using a trial on another HD first though, of course :)

My criticism

[UnknowingFool]

A lot of comments will be about how poor Vista is as software. This diverts from my main criticism of MS. I don't mind that MS put a kill switch in Vista as they have a right to protect their interests against pirates. My criticism of MS is that if they employ such tactics, they had better be right the vast majority of the time. Otherwise this is a rather poorly executed idea that can only get the ire of legitimate and loyal customers. Apparently this feature like many other features of MS software was rushed out and tested on customers before it was ready.

Re:My criticism

[argent]

My criticism of MS is that if they employ such tactics, they had better be right the vast majority of the time.

As far as I'm concerned, they better be right 100% of the time, or put themselves on the hook for making things right with everyone they screw up. Including compensation for lost time.

Your ignorance shows

[Anonymous Coward]

Frankly since Microsoft is a convicted monopoly...
This simply isn't true. Stop regurgitating slashdot FUD. Microsoft was convicted of abusing a monopoly position. Being a monopoly isn't illegal and it doesn't mean you can apply arbitrary restrictions on them.

Re:Your ignorance shows

[LWATCDR]

Can you say splitting hairs?
Okay Microsoft has been convicted of abusing it's postion as a monoply and as such should be under government oversite until it's business practices fall in line with federal law.

Had one brick on me

[thorkyl]

I built a vista pc for fun, let it sit for 90 days of the network, moved the mouse and low and behold it was a brick, the os had been disabled since it could not call home.

So there went that test... and PC

Re:Ha ha, Vista is Begware.

[Anonymous Coward]

So if they remove the 'killswitch', their software is nagware and designed to be copied. If they leave it in, they're treating their customers as thieves by default.

You become more and more illogical by the day.

Why wait?

[cheros]

another reason why my next OS will be Linux

Why not start now? You can cut your dependency on anything MS makes right now - I had to start this because the uncontrolled "phone home" features have the potential to unknowingly put me on the wrong side of the law re. client privacy. I'm presently using a mix of XP and Linux. Linux where possible, XP where unavoidable (I'd really love mobile phone companies to ^%$£ stop using Outlook as an essential component of data backup and sync).

Having said that, I use where possible Outlook Express for that (because I don't use it for email anyway) because I haven't used any MS Office in over two years.

It's unfortunately not yet possible to fully ditch MS (see the above for an example of what a lack of open standards does) but I'm working on it. There is NO server left running Windows, which is a nice start.

It may be time to examine how OpenOffice automation works too..

Final remark: "legal consequences" re. the piracy tool? You must be joking. I suggest you examine the EULA, where you agree to sign away all your rights and sacrifice your first born in exchange for nothing at all. I'm not even sure such a one-sided contract is legal, but it appears MS gets away with it.

Thank you kind sir

[CaptainZapp]

You made my point more eloquently then I ever could. Actually my original point, which seems to have started this pissfest, is that I refuse to be treated as a crook by a vendor who just took my money. And a lot of it. (Many posters apparently believe that Microsoft sells in Europe for the same prices as in the US, hell! They price gouge what they can. Is anybody surprised?)

There's no question that you should use the right platform for the right job. Personally I deal with databases. Since this is very server based software Linux/Unix is definitely the best plaform. If you're doing graphics design you don't necessarily want a laptop, which is good in databases. And yeah, that's simplified...

I tried and went back to XP...

[Churla]

I tried Vista, and took weeks wrestling to get drivers to install and work for things. In the end I had to go back, why?

Because in XP you can have a video card with two monitors present to the system as one very wide monitor. In Vista you can't and there is a very blunt statement from MS about that fact that their display architecture will never support that. Until they do I can't game the way I like to in Vista, so I stay with XP.

Real men use

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I mean, everyone knows real men use sudo aptitude.

Re:Real men use

[Anonymous Coward]

user@mpc:~$ apt-get
apt 0.7.6ubuntu14 for i386 compiled on Oct 15 2007 20:39:10

                                              This APT has Super Cow Powers.

user@mpc:~$ aptitude -h
aptitude 0.4.6.1

                                    This aptitude does not have Super Cow Powers.

apt-get > aptitude. You obviously haven't mooed today.

Re:I'm actually thinking of upgrading to Vista tod

[Cythrawl]

"A lot of 32bit software just does not run under 64bit Vista. I would suggest you try running a trial version of the 64bit Vista version first before committing."

Being a user of Vista x64 since febuary, would you care to point out this "lot of 32bit software"?

I havent found one item that does not work due to it being Vista X64. Now on XPx64 on the other hand I got this crap all the time, but I havent had it on Vista X64.
Back to the topic on hand, the only problem I can see that you will get is if anything relies on DirectSound. DirectX10 dropped the DirectSound Hardware layer and now does it through emulation Via Vista's new sound layer. The only problem I had with this was the Audigy 2 soundcard having real issues running with some games. Creative would not own it and said that users would have to buy ALchemy to bring back functionality. However what Creative DIDNT tell you is that every other sound card MFG, and all onboard sound systems work perfectly under Vista, but thiers doesnt.. Not a big deal for me, but as a Cubase user that may be you major bugbear.

Times are changing.....

[King_TJ]

The days may be numbered when an I.T. manager recommending a Mac or Ubuntu would get "laughed out of the office"....

Today, yeah, most of the time, that's still correct. But how much of that is legitimate, and how much is just incorrect perception, perpetuated by people with no guts to attempt REAL changes?

I know as "network manager" of the company I work for, I put a Linux-based web proxy/filtering solution in place, the first month I started. I didn't really ask for permission first. I just re-used some old hardware that was sitting around, and since it cost nothing in software licenses, there was no budget approval required. For the last 2 years now, it's done it's job quite well, with almost no maintenance required.

Sometimes that's how you get changes started. You don't go around "recommending" something potentially controversial. You just implement it in a limited fashion, after making sure it's going to perform as intended. If all goes well, nobody even notices the change -- but the device sits there, justifying itself with its own good performance each day. Eventually, it will be realized it's part of the environment, and it will become a "given" that it's not only a "good choice", but probably a "best choice" because it has worked so well.

I do see this happening with Macs as well. Just last weekend, I did some computer work in an office, and noticed they had new Apple iMacs in the conference rooms, in the break room, etc. The offices themselves were still all using Windows boxes, but I'm sure the iMacs got put in due to their lack of spyware/virus issues, in all the places where they'd have a "low impact" on the day-to-day operations. Give them a couple years, and if they don't suffer massive hardware failures or something unexpected, they'll have silently proven themselves -- and somebody is going to start asking "Why don't we have some more of these around here?"

Re:Times are changing.....

[spyrochaete]

You're correct, of course, since you're the one who did it. I didn't mean to be facetious or a baseless flamer although I probably should have qualified my "laughed out of the office" remark.

What I meant was that Joe Cubicle doesn't know how to use anything but Windows XP, and barely knows even that much. The same goes for the vast majority of IT teams. It's one thing to turn a linux server into a one task appliance, but quite another to replace your information workers' PCs over the weekend with Ubuntu/OpenOffice or OSX/iLife. Who's going to train them? Who's going to fix their OSes when they break? How much of Active Directory and Exchange are you willing to forgo?

My point was that time is money and the average user can probably make the (supposed) $700 for Vista Ultimate faster than it'd take to learn a new OS and regain productivity, and also that Vista Ultimate does indeed have some benefits that the lesser SKUs do not.

It's not worth pirating Vista...

[jkrise]

I guess this is one way to get Vista's adoption rate to go up. Just let it be pirated!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ATeLDM1H4M

Pirating XP or Win2K is far more profitable than pirating Vista; from a pirate's point of view... I mean, a bloke willing to pirate Vista and save money is not gonna blow it all in high-end h/w for running it! Pirates are cunning and smart, much smarter than the folks at Redmond.

Re:I'm actually thinking of upgrading to Vista tod

[geekoid]

"- can't run DirectX 10 (this is the total killer, for games)"
It's not a killer if the games don't require it.

Wait until there is a game you absolutely want to play that requires directX10.
Historically, waiting longer is better for most OS.s The only exception was 2K

With Vista as it is right now, having 8 Gigs is not going to be a significant noticeable jump from 4 G on XP.

I thought XP was a 3G limit? IF this is the case, then I highly suggest you make 1 gig a RAMDisk and locate the page file there. You will notice a difference.

No big deal

[JRHelgeson]

Until they completely pull DRM out of the kernel, I will never support the corporate adoption within our enterprise. In a perfect world, the DRM should only activate when "Premium Content" is being played. However, if we are copying gigabytes of .mp3 voice recording files (recorded phone calls to customer service, etc.) Vista just bogs down and stops. "It won't do that", we were promised last year while Vista was being readied for release. "It shouldn't do that" we're told when we encountered the problems, but it doesn't matter, Because. It. DOES.

With today's computers and today's work environment who DOESN'T work with or Manipulate multimedia content at some point? How could we possibly rely on an operating system that treats all multimedia content as special requiring extra inspection attempting to verify that I'm not trying to circumvent some nonexistent copy protection.

Windows Vista truly is the longest suicide note in history.

Re:No big deal

[Anonymous Coward]

However, if we are copying gigabytes of .mp3 voice recording files (recorded phone calls to customer service, etc.) Vista just bogs down and stops. You wanna double check that statement again? Are you seriously implying that when you copy an mp3 file with Windows Vista, that it's also scanning the file for DRM watermarks or some such nonsense and then stops the copy?

I've copied six years worth of music from my file server to my Vista machine. No faster or slower than any other data. If you had a problem with a file copy, it was for some other hardware/software reason, and had ZERO to do with any DRM garbage that you're spreading.

Re:No big deal

[JRHelgeson]

Your comment is akin to claiming "I Don't have cancer, so therefore nobody else has cancer, and if they do have it, it is all in their head and its their fault anyway..."

I do not dispute that YOU can copy files without issue, but it does not change the fact that I do have problems with this and I am far from being the only one. This is the fallout from when Microsoft put Mickey Mouse in charge of vista kernel development.

Mickey wanted DRM, now it can reset the network traffic if it is suspicious of breach. It also depends on how the information was encoded... Your comments

Re:No big deal

[drsmithy]

Until they completely pull DRM out of the kernel, I will never support the corporate adoption within our enterprise. In a perfect world, the DRM should only activate when "Premium Content" is being played.

That's exactly how Vista works. No DRM-encumbered content, no DRM being applied.

Re:No big deal

[JRHelgeson]

No, that is how Vista *SHOULD* work... How it *ACTUALLY* works in practice is something else entirely.
The saving grace that keeps up the appearance of it working, albeit slowly, is that they spent so much development time creating error recovery that resets the stack/application and resumes without actually crashing. Put a debug trace on the app, you'll be able to see it tanking and restarting. So people complain about speed instead of it just not working, or crashing.

For the record- I'm using Vista64 to write this. I've been trying to use Vista all year since its release. I use MS products 24/7, I'm not just some Linux junkie that is lookin to bash MS.

Joel

Re:No big deal

[drsmithy]

No, that is how Vista *SHOULD* work... How it *ACTUALLY* works in practice is something else entirely.

That's exactly how it works. Unless some DRM-encumbered media sets the ICT, no DRM is applied. None. Nada. Zilch.

The saving grace that keeps up the appearance of it working, albeit slowly, is that they spent so much development time creating error recovery that resets the stack/application and resumes without actually crashing. Put a debug trace on the app, you'll be able to see it tanking and restarting. So people complain about speed instead of it just not working, or crashing.

Third-party applications and drivers that crash have nothing to do with DRM, nor can blame for them be laid at Microsoft's feet.

There have already been numerous benchmarks showing that with up to date drivers and hardware, Vista matches - if not exceeds - the performance of Windows XP. Whatever you might think is causing your Vista installation to be slow and/or unstable, DRM ain't it.

For the record- I'm using Vista64 to write this. I've been trying to use Vista all year since its release. I use MS products 24/7, I'm not just some Linux junkie that is lookin to bash MS.

Makes no difference, you're still wrong.

As I've said elsewhere, "DRM" is quite possible the single biggest non-argument made against Vista (with the possible exception of "hardware requirements"). If you don't have DRM-encumbered media, the DRM subsystems never activate, and it simple doesn't matter. If you *do* have DRM-encumbered media, Vista isn't doing anything more than any other device capable of playing it would do (and the alternative to both is not being able to use the media at all).

Either way, it's irrelevant.

Re:No big deal

[JRHelgeson]

If it has nothing to do with DRM, then please explain to me why every single device needs updated drivers in order to work properly under Vista when it used to be that Windows 2000, XP and 2003 all used the same exact driver? Win2k-XP-2003 all had their unified driver model that worked wonderfully. Video card frame rates were fast, audio playback worked, life was 'good'. All hardware developers had to do was to create one driver that complied with the Microsoft unified driver model and they could relax knowing that it would work the same under all versions of Microsoft's products.

Microsoft destroyed the Unified Driver model under Vista. Why? So that they could create an entirely *NEW* path through the kernel that was completely isolated from *EVERYTHING ELSE*. They tore up a perfectly good freeway in order to put in, not just a carpool lane, but a "top secret" carpool lane that whenever occupied, walls would be thrown up such that no eavesdropping could take place on the traffic as it passed.

Forget that this is impossible to accomplish, but that didn't matter. Microsoft didn't rewrite the kernel to make it more secure, they rewrote it to secure premium content. This entire reworking of the kernel architecture has screwed everything up because every few milliseconds, the kernel needs to check to see if premium content is being played.

Let me ask you this: At what point do you think the Vista DRM activates when playing premium content? When it reads the data from the HD-DVD disk? Yes... but what if you disabled that level... whelllll, we need to check at the kernel level, ring0, see if it is trying to get snuck past the front gates. You see, at every step along the way, your content is being checked, and double checked to see if DRM should be getting applied. If it didn't, then the advanced DRM features of Vista would have been trivial to circumvent.

You cannot have this level of kernel modification and NOT have it impact every other part of the system... Peering into the kernel activity using debug tools you can see the OS methodically checking itself, navel gazing if you will.

I'm telling you, even though the DRM 'features' might not be 'active' when 'premium content' is not present, the rerouting of the freeways and the building up of whole new subsystems has created a nightmare for any application or hardware device to access kernel resources... and adding insult to injury, if the kernel thinks it is trying to be subverted (if it gets paranoid), then the kernel can reset/reload the whole stack for that process that is running, no questions asked. The offending application or driver simply gets an error code and bam, thats it. How the hell are developers supposed to code a stable application when they're not dealing with BUGS, they're having to deal with, TILT BITS! (yes, just like on a pinball machine). Seriously, how can a developer know what the OS is considering a tilt bit? What other apps are running that might be causing tilt bits to get set?

Which is why I say that Vista is truly the longest suicide note in history...

Re:No big deal

[drsmithy]

If it has nothing to do with DRM, then please explain to me why every single device needs updated drivers in order to work properly under Vista when it used to be that Windows 2000, XP and 2003 all used the same exact driver?

For the same reason most NT 4.0 drivers don't work in Windows 2000, XP or 2003. Because it's a major kernel revision. Windows 2000 = NT 5.0, Windows XP = NT 5.1, Windows 2003 - NT 5.2. Windows Vista is NT 6.0.

This is before even getting into the complete redesign and reimplementation that the video display system, audio stack and network stack have gone. At the kernel level, XP->Vista is like Linux 2.2 -> 2.6, or NeXTSTEP 4.x -> OSX 10.4. Make no mistake, it is a large and significant update to the Windows NT kernel.

Crikey, Linux drivers typically can't even survive a trivial +0.0.1 kernel bump without breaking, OSX drivers have frequently broken after +0.1 revisions, yet you're getting upset because Windows has a major +1.x kernel revision and needs driver updates ? If only anti-Microsoft zealots had the same low expectations of Microsoft as they did to other vendors...

Forget that this is impossible to accomplish, but that didn't matter. Microsoft didn't rewrite the kernel to make it more secure, they rewrote it to secure premium content.

They didn't rewrite it at all - and the inclusion of protected paths were far from the only changes made. If you were more interested in the technology than the Microsoft-bashing, you'd probably be prepared to go out and learn about it.

This entire reworking of the kernel architecture has screwed everything up because every few milliseconds, the kernel needs to check to see if premium content is being played.

No, it doesn't. This *ONLY* happens when the ICT is set - ie: you are playing DRM-encumbered content. Further, modern computers have more than enough horsepower to make up for the overheads even when the protected paths are active (which is essentially never, at this particular point in time, given no content uses the ICT yet).

Let me ask you this: At what point do you think the Vista DRM activates when playing premium content?

The DRM systems are activated when the playback software indicates they should be by setting the Image Constraint Token.

When it reads the data from the HD-DVD disk? Yes... but what if you disabled that level... whelllll, we need to check at the kernel level, ring0, see if it is trying to get snuck past the front gates. You see, at every step along the way, your content is being checked, and double checked to see if DRM should be getting applied. If it didn't, then the advanced DRM features of Vista would have been trivial to circumvent.

You don't appear to have a clue what you're talking about.

You cannot have this level of kernel modification and NOT have it impact every other part of the system... Peering into the kernel activity using debug tools you can see the OS methodically checking itself, navel gazing if you will.

Please link to some evidence that the DRM subsystems are being used even when non-DRM-encumbered media is being played.

From the look of it you're just parroting standard Slashdot FUD, which is mostly embellishments on Gutmann's Vista paper. These claims have been refuted on numerous occasions, and most of the more outrageous ones - eg: the suggestion that HD video, regardless of its DRM status, simply wouldn't play on analogue screens, or that SPDIF outputs would be disabled regardless of whether the audio is DRM-encumbered - are trivially disproven simply by *using* Vista (something Mr Gutmann has not actually done, AFAIK).

Re:No big deal

[JRHelgeson]

I wrote my previous comment as I was about to nod off, didn't proofread it... you're right, I did start spouting nonsense.

For the record, I am a MCT, a big time MS User and supporter (both morally and technically)... I am not one of these stereotypical Slashdot knee-jerk MS Bashers. I use Linux where necessary, it is an invaluable tool I use when needed. I have a couple versions I run in a VM environment on my various MS boxes. Outside that, I am completely Windows.

What it boils down to is that I am profoundly disappointed with Microsoft and its release of Vista. There was no need that I was aware of to redo the Printer Drivers or the Video subsystem. Perhaps I am wrong, I don't know. What I do know is that video drivers were stable, frame rates were fast (I am not a gamer, but) video playback worked great. Things were stable enough that Windows 2003 has been out for five years and were only at SP2 level. Things were pretty stable coming out of the redesign starting with Win2k.

Many moons ago, I worked at WordPerfect. I was there when WordPerfect for Windows was first released. It was a disaster. WPWin5.1 was nothing but WP DOS 5.1 with a WYSIWYG interface bolted on. WPWin6.0 was a complete redesign that was arguably worse than WPWin5.1. For users that were accustomed to the stability of WP Dos 5.1, they were furious - and rightfully so, such that when Microsoft came out with Word, even though it sucked, it at least worked. And thus was the fall of WordPerfect.

The only parallel I wish to draw here is that there was a LOT riding on WordPerfect getting it right. With Vista, there is/was a lot riding on MS getting it right. Well, MS didn't get it done right. Vista is the modern day equivalent of the Edsel.

I just hope they get Server 2008 done right...

Re:No big deal

[drsmithy]

What it boils down to is that I am profoundly disappointed with Microsoft and its release of Vista. There was no need that I was aware of to redo the Printer Drivers or the Video subsystem. Perhaps I am wrong, I don't know.

There were very good reasons. From NT4 to Windows 2003, Printer drivers ran in kernel space. This meant that a buggy printer driver could BSOD the machine. Now print drivers run in user space (there are other benefits as well, but that's probably the biggest).

The video system overhaul was well overdue, and mainly introduces something that matches - indeed, exceeds - the capabilities of OS X's "Quartz 2D/3D/Extreme/whatever". Further, stability is dramatically improved. You can literally hotplug a video card in Vista (even on hardware that technically doesn't support it) and all that will happen is the video subsystem will restart. On any previous versions of Windows - and other mainstream OSes - you'd be looking at a BSOD (/kernel panic). Since something like 50% of *all* BSODs are caused just by video drivers, according to Microsoft's statistics (that come from those "crash reporter" thingies), this represents a potentially *huge* user-visible reliability improvement.
(Caution: don't try it with anything you care about. Most video hardware *is not* hotplug capable, and doing so can certainly lead to physical damage that renders the hardware inoperable.)

What I do know is that video drivers were stable, frame rates were fast (I am not a gamer, but) video playback worked great. Things were stable enough that Windows 2003 has been out for five years and were only at SP2 level. Things were pretty stable coming out of the redesign starting with Win2k.

Vista is improving as the hardware developers refine their drivers. Framerates are already comparable between Vista and XP with the latest drivers from ATI and NVIDIA.

Many moons ago, I worked at WordPerfect. I was there when WordPerfect for Windows was first released. It was a disaster. WPWin5.1 was nothing but WP DOS 5.1 with a WYSIWYG interface bolted on. WPWin6.0 was a complete redesign that was arguably worse than WPWin5.1. For users that were accustomed to the stability of WP Dos 5.1, they were furious - and rightfully so, such that when Microsoft came out with Word, even though it sucked, it at least worked. And thus was the fall of WordPerfect.

I remember it well. Word was already making significant inroads against WP, but the first iterations of WPWIN really were the screwups that killed WP.

The only parallel I wish to draw here is that there was a LOT riding on WordPerfect getting it right. With Vista, there is/was a lot riding on MS getting it right. Well, MS didn't get it done right. Vista is the modern day equivalent of the Edsel.

Not really. There's a lot of people complaining about Vista, but most (if not all) of their arguments are utter bollocks. The hardware requirements are not high - I have run it happily on machines that were 5+ years old - and UAC is, ultimately, no different to the equivalents on OS X and Linux. "DRM" is probably the biggest non-argument of the lot, since either you're not using DRM-encumbered media, and it's completely irrelevant, or you are using DRM-encumbered media, and the alternative would be a blank screen.

Ultimately, the "problem" is not that Vista is bad, it's that XP is "good enough". So most people aren't going to "upgrade" until they get a new computer. It's not that they don't want VIsta, it's that they don't see any reason to go out of their way to get it.

On the corporate/business side, it's business as usual. There is *nothing* at all different about the supposed slow uptake of Vista compared to previous releases of Windows. Businesses move on a 3-5 year cycle, and outside of unmanaged small business networks, and those on the "cutting edge", no-one with any industry experience expected Vista to be rolled out any faster than it has been. You won't see any significant c

Killswitch: only feature that ever worked...

[Anonymous Coward]

This so called "killswitch" is the only feature that worked properly for "MS Vista"... and they removed it?

oh boy.

Re:I'm actually thinking of upgrading to Vista tod

[BUL2294]

- can't access 4G ram, or higher. Maxes out around 3.25G

Looking at articles on Tom's Hardware or Anandtech, this appears to be a BIOS/hardware issue--and Vista doesn't resolve it. Remember the good ol' days of DOS when even though your 386SX/16 had 1MB RAM, you could practially use only 640KB of it??? That's because hardware devices mapped to the area between 640K and 1MB. (Yes, you could use the A20 gate by way of HIMEM.SYS/DOS=HIGH and EMM386/QEMM to load your drivers into the UMB, but as much as 10% of the address space of your 1MB was already taken). Guess what--hardware addressing is back when you deal with 4GB of RAM and a 32-bit OS!!!

Re:I'm actually thinking of upgrading to Vista tod

[Ash-Fox]

Being a user of Vista x64 since febuary, would you care to point out this "lot of 32bit software"?

Here is software I have had issues running under the 64bit version of Vista (had no problem under 32bit), I haven't tried most of these in months:

• Freelancer (Microsoft claims this is supported under Vista)
• Continuum
• The GIMP
• SyncTERM (crashed as you tried to connect anywhere)
• Spybot Search & Destroy (kept crashing)

That's about all I can remember off the top of my head.

Back to the topic on hand, the only problem I can see that you will get is if anything relies on DirectSound.

DirectPlay is a issue, particularly if the application in question uses DirectPlay's socket system (experienced with applications I had written not working under Vista).

Re:I'm actually thinking of upgrading to Vista tod

[Ash-Fox]

There are several VERY notable games that look far better under DirectX 10. Crysis, Bioshock, Lost Planet

I checked what you said.

With Crysis the snapshots did not look 'far better'. In some instances like the 'paradise' pictures on that page, I actually preferred the directx9 shots.

With Bioshock the snapshots did not look so 'far better' either and even articles pointed it out.

I also looked at Lost planet and the same pattern occured (some cases I again preferred the dx9 renderings).

I don't really think the slight 'improvements' in the games Vista is very justifiable.

According to wikipedia, that's been deprecated and replaced by Live since 2004. I personally don't know of any software that uses it.

Generally software does not advertise what networking stack they use. :P

Re:Market share? - M$ plan all along.

[gabrieltss]

How do you think Micro$oft got their domanence to begin with? They turned a "blind eye" to piracy of the early versions of Windows so OS/2 would get knocked out of the playing field. Guess what the gamble worked then and I'm sure it will work now. They are seeing no one in their right mind wants Vista - so they now want to again turn a "blind eye" to piracy of Windows to -try- to get more Vista installations. Problem is the majority of people are just happy with XP. What would break MIcro$oft is if the game manufactures said screw Vista and kept programming the games to work fine under XP. Then pretty much there would be no desperate need to upgrade to Vista - leaving virtually dead - just like Micro$oft BOB and Windows ME. All the gamers out there should be contacting the game companies and tell them they don't want Vista games - stick with XP compatable games.

Maybe They Need Piracy?

[SpeedStreet]

While I understand that this does not designate a paradigm shift in the way Microsoft is dealing with piracy, I believe that perhaps they may be beginning to realize how much piracy (not counterfeiting) aids in product ubiquity. Think about it: How many of us are not running Vista not only because its a pain to deal with incompatibilities, but also because with those incompatibilities is the piggyback of having to deal with a more annoying WGA than in previous iterations. How fast would XP have been adopted had the existing WGA been baked in and we all knew we would have to fight DLLs, etc. every month. So in a sense, people like me....geeks in the industry and geeks that people look to to recommend what to buy, what to purchase, and what to stay away from are avoiding the newest flagship product. Furthermore, think of how much of our "learning" in the industry was done on software that was easy to acquire? I'm not sure I know many autodidacts with limitless bank rolls to download, test, and learn enterprise level software. Piracy in this sense positions students and self-taught individuals to understand more of the positions they seek. Once in those positions, they then have the background knowledge to be able to recommend and purchase the very products that they were using in the past. I am beyond the days of needing to fear my downloads because I wanted the latest and greatest. I have a copy of Vista at home gathering dust because even though I want to learn the cutting edge, I am not willing to deal with asinine issues like large file transfer crashes or DRM like HDCP that is meant to "protect" me. I am willing to be a little forgiving if your software is rushed to market and you need to run a few patches to fix it. I am not alright with the dinosaur division of Microsoft turning our industry into a learning divide of have's and have not's. I apologize in advance if this creates flames, especially considering I am abbreviating my own diatribe on the difference between individual piracy and mass counterfeiting.

It is disapointing

[Ash-Fox]

It is disapointing that Microsoft removed the 'kill switch'. To me that sends a clear message that they will not fix their Windows Genuine Advantage/Windows activation system to get lower false positives and instead just made it less annoying for users.

It is my belief that they had a large amount of false positives that made many users stop using Vista all together. The fact Microsoft does not fix the false positive problem but just makes it 'less annoying' (such as now it just refuses to install application updates - non security related, microsoft office, free applications from Microsoft) is not very encouraging about the quality of their products.

All non-programmers always are.

[Kadin2048]

Welcome to the world of proprietary software! Where the programmers, and NOT YOU, have control over your computing. To be fair, the programmers have control over your Linux system too, if you're a non-programmer. It's just a different bunch of programmers, who tend to be significantly less evil.

Unless you're one of the very, very few people who are capable of sitting down and writing their own fully-functional OS and all the applications for it (if such a person actually exists), you're pretty much always going to be at the mercy of somebody else. The trick is in evaluating and choosing whose mercy you want to be at.

Re:All non-programmers always are.

[Spy der Mann]

...you're pretty much always going to be at the mercy of somebody else.

The problem is that with proprietary applications, it doesn't matter whether you're the best hacker and programmer in the world - the software makers STILL have control over your computing.

Re:I'm actually thinking of upgrading to Vista tod

[Anonymous Coward]

pae allows an supporting 32bit operateing system to address 32gig of ram...

why does xp not support this?
why does 2k3 not support this? (unless you fork over the $$$ for enterprise edition!)

dear m$ stop giveing us cripled operateing systems...

Yarr, this 'ere booty looks like a tard,me mateys!

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft simply realized that the rampant pirating of their software in the past was actually one of the main reasons Windows became so popular. Furthermore, there is the growing pressure from Ubuntu, CentOS, openSuse etc.. They have to do *something*; obviously writing a good OS is not one of the options at their disposal though..

This is the application's fault, why exactly??

[Tetsujin]

a) New version of Nero are compatible with Vista
b) That is a problem with his version of Nero, not Vista. OS upgrades tend to break compatability with older software, be it in Ubuntu, OS X or Windows. Well, yeah, and this is certainly true on Linux. I remember the living hell I had to go through when Linux dropped the ide-scsi driver, and I suddenly needed to swap out all my CD burning programs...

But how do you figure this is a problem with the application? I mean, don't get me wrong, here, I don't endorse backwards compatibility if it interferes with progress - but isn't the basic problem here (in both cases) that the underlying OS made some design changes which the application writers couldn't have predicted or planned for? Their API was basically pulled out from under them by a change to the OS. Doesn't that make it the OS's fault, regardless of whether it was changed for a good reason?

Re:This is the application's fault, why exactly??

[cheater512]

With Linux the application writers get plenty of notice. Mainstream distros will never see changes for about 6 months.
You woud have found that the cd burning program (it name escapes me atm) had been fixed long before you found the problem.
Your distro should have updated it with the kernel.

Re:This is the application's fault, why exactly??

[Tetsujin]

With Linux the application writers get plenty of notice. Mainstream distros will never see changes for about 6 months.
You woud have found that the cd burning program (it name escapes me atm) had been fixed long before you found the problem.
Your distro should have updated it with the kernel. That's not the point. I dealt with this particular hassle and moved on. My post was more about the Nero situation on Vista.

The point is that the change to the Linux kernel effectively broke my CD writing apps - and when that happens it is not the CD writing app's fault! The point is, if you're inclined to blame somebody in situations like those, lay it where it's due - at the OS change that broke compatibility.

Re:I'm actually thinking of upgrading to Vista tod

[BUL2294]

Because PAE is a modern reincarnation of LIM EMS--i.e. "expanded memory". Expanded memory, not extended memory, allowed even an IBM XT from 1983 (or even an original IBM PC from 1981) to address as much as 32MB of RAM, provided your DOS-based app could use it. It was a (necessary) hack then and PAE's a hack now...

Oh, and Vista does have the ~3.2GB problem... See this M$ KB article.

Re:I'm actually thinking of upgrading to Vista tod

[Cythrawl]

Freelancer does work (in fact its installed on my system complete with mods for Starwars ships etc)
Spybot search and destroy also works (Again installed and running on my system)

The Gimp has always been flakey at best under windows. It was unstable on windows XP, or I always had some odd crashes with it..

I have yet to see a game work becuase of the lack of Directplay implementation.. and lets be honest here, how many AAA titles use(d) Directplay

No Internet = Not Valid?

[MBHkewl]

What about those who wish to use their computer without a network? MS is just assuming that everyone with Vista will always be connected whenever the OS needs activation? Didn't that already happen with XP & bit MS in the butt?

Re:I'm actually thinking of upgrading to Vista tod

[Ash-Fox]

Freelancer does work (in fact its installed on my system complete with mods for Starwars ships etc)
Spybot search and destroy also works (Again installed and running on my system)

I can only say that wasn't the case when I tried to use them in the past.

The Gimp has always been flakey at best under windows. It was unstable on windows XP, or I always had some odd crashes with it..

Can't say I had OS specific crashes with the Gimp until Vista, there was one script-fu script that would crash it on all platforms though (no longer the case with the latest version).

I have yet to see a game work becuase of the lack of Directplay implementation..

Less problems for you.

and lets be honest here, how many AAA titles use(d) Directplay

I am not familiar with games by "AAA". I only know of a car company (they don't sell cars) under that name.

And now a public announcement from captain obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't use Vista if you paid me.

DING DING DING we have a winner

[Anonymous Coward]

DING DING DING we have a winner! Pretty obvious isn't it......

Re:Ha ha, Vista is Begware. and karma .....

[chawly]

Yours is probably in the same box as mine. I say that karma whores are there for the free f**k. They would have to pay otherwise

UAC?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, UAC is NOT like sudo.

For one, applications don't call for sudo privileges on a whim.

Secondly, sudo requires a password, not just "click okay and ignore this."

Thirdly, UAC is training people to click allow to everything, because things break horribly if you don't. That's terrible for security. They don't even have to read or think about the prompt. That does NOT help them make good security choices. Security relies on the person as much as the software. Software should encourage good security choices, it should not train people to avoid thinking about them.

You can say that those are all application problems, of course, but that misses the point. Microsoft has encouraged that brokenness for decades now. Saying "it's not _our_ fault!" when the problems catch up to them rings a bit hollow at this point.

Re:UAC?

[gallwapa]

Uh, no. If you don't run your accounts as local admin, UAC prompts for a password.

Re:UAC?

[gallwapa]

Oh and one more followup to the UAC thing:

UAC Doesn't call out on a whim: Its when you do admin-based functions on your machine, such as

modifying files owned by another user to which you have no rights (hmm, sounds like you need sudo for this)
adding/removing programs
lots of 'system' level settings in the control panel

Regedit will even run without UAC prompt, and lets you access HKLU

improving your general purpose computer

[columbus]

I had a very rewarding vista experience the other day.
Windows Vista + goodbye-microsoft.com
(paraphrased dialog with computer)

vista: I see you are trying to connect to the internet. The internet is full of boogeymen. Are you sure you want to connect?
me: yes
vista: I see you are downloading a progam. Programs can be dangerous. They can be full of nasty things. Maybe you would like to go back to your sandbox and play with some of your toys instead. Are you sure you want to download?
me: yes
vista: Oops! the progam is attempting to run now! I'm pretty sure you didn't want to do that! That progam is from the internet. You don't know where its been. Why don't you go back and play with the shiny new interface while I hide all of your files and programs to protect you from yourself?
me: I know what I'm doing. run that program.
vista: Oh No! That program is going into the registry! It's going into the bootloader! It's TOUCHING me in my SPECIAL PLACES! Please stop this! I can give you all kinds of shiny trinkets for you to waste your time with.
me: escalate authority. force override. proceed with execution.
vista: AAAAAGGGHHH! WHAT'S THAT YOU'RE HACKING OFF? IS IT MY TORSO? IT IS! MY PRECIOUS TORSO!
me: Hahahaha. (reboot)
debian linux: thank you for accepting one of our free tanks.

Re:Why stop there? And at that cost.........

[chawly]

Twitter is right - fuck Karma. The truth will make us free

Tagged "nagware"

[SanityInAnarchy]

Parent is a troll, but I still couldn't resist tagging this article "nagware".

"You still haven't registered WinRAR..."

My vista on Windows

[gorba]

The ONLY thing of value on Vista is DX10, and yet the hardware support for DX10 hasn't been good.

Nice, but not a huge deal

[Almahtar]

I'm sure soon enough we would have figured out how to disable it for ourselves anyway.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Mike Sievert?

[Conanymous Award]

Microsoft's Mike Sievert? That makes him microsievert!

But not an oddball

[Junta]

If you take the common distributions, they all have the framework (but Ubuntu may leverage it the best).

Can you tell me honestly that Windows makes installing software easy intrinsically? Let's use the plugin example...

I browse to a flash site without a plugin install. *Firefox* helpfully points me to where to install it (note, Windows did not help me and Firefox had no Microsoft provided framework to assist/hook into). Adobe provides me a binary to run and install (retrieved through firefox) that takes after itself (presumably at least registering itself with the add/remove programs, the *one* interaction with Microsoft framework related to installs. You install it, it's done, and is now fixed at that version without manual effort to keep track of bugfix/security issues, and almost entirely without any help from microsoft, and instead the applications fending for themselves in a non-standardized way. This was the way it happened to work for a Flash plugin, but installing a java run time environment is different, which is different from installing a Valve game, which is different from installing an id game, which is different from installing Pidgin, etc etc.

Now, look at ubuntu. If you don't use the OS method to install it first, you browse, and firefox *asks the apt repository* for something appropriate and has the apt framework install and package manage it. This means any updates to flash plugin are tracked, and by the single update manager that tracks the whole platform. The framework is there to do so much more and help out application providers rather than leaving them to reinvent the wheel in many different styles and frustratingly different ways.

Another point is that people are *way* too quick to judge the general usability of Linux based on too wide a sampling of distributions. Gentoo has an audience, but it's not going to be a random non-technical person (unless it's a build from a friend/relative that's set in stone or actively maintained). By the same token, commercial apps wouldn't have to support umpteen different distros, support Ubuntu LTS releases and CentOS/RHEL and the rest can sort themselves out (hey, it's better than the current situation of people trying to eek by with Wine and running completely outside the parameters planned for/supported by the software vendors).

spin is everything

[m2bord]

one plausible reason for the decreased number of "pirated" copies of vista is that it's so bad that pirates don't think it's worth the time to hack. from personal experience...vista is a royal pain and if i had a choice when buying a new computer, i'd take ubuntu or xp or even win2k over vista.

Re:Ha ha, Vista is Begware.

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently, changing the 'M$' to 'MS' in his signature didn't help much.

Business is business

[notagain.was.notagai]

Do you think that folks don't understand that MS is a business, and their legal responsibility is to make money by any legal means necessary? Are you suggesting that ./ers are mildly retarded and don't understand the legal atmosphere of contemporary capitalism?

Of course MS will try to extract every last dime they can. The questions are: 1) are their methods efficacious and 2) should they be accepted socially and/or legally? For point 1, the fact that MS thinks this is the way it can maximize profits doesn't necessarily true - stupidity is just as common among CEOs as among janitors. For point 2, your motto of "business is business" is completely irrelevant - if IBM is working in Saudi Arabia and they believe that they can maximize profit by using slaves, "business is business" would dictate that they should. That would obviously be abhorrent (and don't start whining that that's different - of course it. It's an analogy.).

So please, don't use trite cliches and childish simplifications and believe that you are being clever. Not everyone has the mental faculties of a slightly impaired rhesus monkey.

Honestly, those caught were stupid

[HermMunster]

Anyone stealing Windows Vista for one are just plain stupid. If they want a real OS they have a choice. Linux will provide them with an abundance of features that all levels of people can use (not just the zealot). But frankly to get caught stealing it when there's essentially a fast, easy DVD that they can download that will give them virtually undetectable Vista Ultimate install is just plain incompetence.

I don't condone stealing. I'd rather these people not purchase Windows at all since the better OS is Linux.

Piracy vs. Viracy

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand why microsoft is so mad that people are pirating vista. That's like a hacker getting mad that people are installing unlicensed copies of his virus.

Save Money: Pirate Vista

[DynaSoar]

From TFA on MSNBC: "Users with a high tolerance for irritation can put off switching to genuine software indefinitely, but those who relent and buy a real copy of Windows can do so at reduced prices -- $119 for Windows Vista Home Premium, half the regular retail price."

So, pirate Vista, call M$ and confess your sins, and get your valid Vista for 50% off. If I had bought Vista for full price, and then saw that those who stole it were getting it now for half that, I'd consider handing out the torches and pitchforks to the peasants in preparation to storm the castle.

This is just more evidence that M$'s marketing people aren't evil, they're just dain bramaged. This could only be topped by their rationalization for it. Watch for that, it should be enormously entertaining.

No Vista for Pirates ? Great !

[codeboost]

I really wish Microsoft makes Vista impossible to install for pirates.
This way, the millions and millions of 'pirates' would be forced to switch to another OS (Linux !) and the world would be a happier and safer place for everyone.

Seriously, though, I think 'piracy' has been one of the key elements in windows OS domination. Millions of computer enthusiasts from around the world installed pirated versions of windows and started to use it as a development platform (especially in Eastern Europe, India, China, with piracy rates in the 80%+ range). This led to lots of apps being developed for windows, and lots of new windows users as PCs became more and more accessible.

Today, young developers and users are becoming used to software freedom - bittorrent, linux, apache, php, firefox (and thousands of others) tell them that it's cool to be open, it's cool to build a free software universe and it's uncool to be closed and restrictive.

I think Microsoft should tolerate if not encourage piracy if they want to survive the growing competition from OSS and web-based software. This way they can 'buy' a little more time before being eventually forced to make all their desktop apps free and open sourced.

PS. As I was writing this article, my other box, which runs Vista, has miraculously shut itself down. That's probably because of the continuous swearing that I laid upon it because of the new file association architecture in Vista, which requires me to rewrite code in my app. That sucks.

Win2k vs Vista

[argent]

Why "or even win2k"? I'll take win2k over XP.

Re:Win2k vs Vista

[m2bord]

it was just an expression...sorry

Re:I'm actually thinking of upgrading to Vista tod

[olman]

For now I'm sticking with XP for the games that I can't play in Linux.

You were doing fine until that last bit, there..

In any case, yeah, DX10 is a non-issue as it is. Never fear, thought, since Vista is crammed down new pc shopper's throats 9 times out of 10, you'll start seeing those DX10 -required games sooner or later. Maybe Xmas 2008 already?

Nero = sledgehammer to crack a nut

[SEMW]

Then I ask if I can use his laptop to burn a iso with Nero. You want to install Nero, just to burn an ISO? Why use a sledgehammer to crack a nut? Windows ISO recorder powertoy, right-click the ISO, 'Burn to disc'. Done.

If it's compilable...

[Junta]

It's almost *certainly* either in the main repository or another repository not too hard to add. Either way, it's a matter of how things are abused/not used, rather than rather the platforms in question provide sane frameworks that can be used correctly.

The biggest pain in my opinion are the commercial companies that simply don't "get it" and use InstallAnywhere for Linux as well, or some other relatively braindead process that's more like Windows than Linux. Non-free commercial applications so far have not 'gotten it' at all (though there are so few of them), but even then, it's not really much harder than Windows. (Though try following suns instructions on installing linux for java rather than repositories, and that is rough...)

Explain Please

[camperdave]

I've heard that this is funny, (proper use of triptych, or not) but frankly, I don't get it. I see a rhyme. I see a bunch of words highlighted by blanks. I don't, however, see where anything is funny. Perhaps there is some cultural thing I'm missing. Please help. Please explain.

Re:Explain Please

[VirusEqualsVeryYes]

The bolded "Burma Shave" should have tipped you off, whether you're familiar with the old ad or not. Either way, please edumacate yourself on the Burma Shave American phenomenon, uncultured heathen.

Also, off my lawn.

Re:Explain Please

[Anonymous Coward]

America has no culture.

Re:Explain Please

[wokithub]

Untrue! Welcome to the Postmodern, where culture is a mass-manufactured commodity to be consumed by the largest possible group of individuals.

Re:Explain Please

[Anonymous Coward]

Untrue! America has a culture. What it is sadly missing is class.

Whoops, almost had me there for a second...

[Lime Green Bowler]

It was looking good, until "All copies of Windows Vista still require activation and the system will continue to validate from time to time to verify that systems are activated properly."

Almost had me hooked there. I don't 'do' activation, and resent the "Guilty until proven innocent" policy. Drop those and I buy Vista. Otherwise, suck it, Billy Goats.

Re:I'm actually thinking of upgrading to Vista tod

[roachdabug]

Fross, my setup is somewhat similar, and though I stopped considering myself a computer whiz a few years ago, I can tell you what I've learned through the experience. First, my system:

C2D E6420
ASUS P5N32-E SLi Plus mobo (hybrid chipset incorporating a 650i and somethin else i can't remember... dual 16x PCIe!)
4GB DDR2 800MHz RAM (currently OC'd to 1066 to match FSB. OCZ Reaper series looks funny but good stuff!)
Vista 64
2x eVGA 8800GT in SLi

What I've learned:

1) SLi on these cards is just as buggy in Vista 64 as it was in Vista 32, but no worse as far as I can tell: lots of program crashes, display adapter not responding and restarting, and occasional BSODs. I haven't been able to decipher if it is the drivers, the cards, or even worse, my funky mobo. These problems get worse as the games get more complex. WoW has no trouble, but I'm lucky if Crysis runs for 15 minutes.

2) In non-SLi, even under Vista 64 with modest overclocking, the cards are as solid as a rock.

3) It seems that moving from vista 32 to vista 64 and 4GB RAM, loading times have actually slightly INCREASED. (It's also worth noting that my $7000 3D CAD workstation at work takes longer than I would expect to load things. It's running XP x64.) No clue why this happens, but once games are loaded, they are smoother, probably due to the crapton of new memory available.

4) Not smooth enough to say I got a huge benefit from upgrading from 2GB of memory. Crysis WAS playable with 2GB after all. Vista eats up tons of memory at idle but I believe it offloads as much OS stuff to the swap file as possible while you're playing full-screen games, so games actually run much better than you'd think. Just don't try to alt-tab!

5) You may already know this but in case others dont (I didn't): Microsoft will tell you (and is correct in the fact that) Vista 32 can utilize 4 GB of memory. What they don't tell you is that the limit INCLUDES the memory of every other component in your system, INCLUDING your video cards. When it was all said and done, with my SLi setup, Vista32 only saw 2.5.

6) As a whole, am I disappointed in Vista's performance for gaming? Absolutely not. HL2:EP2, TF2, Bioshock, CoD4 to name a few ran exceptionally WELL in Vista even with only 2GB memory. Even Crysis was playable on High. In my own experience, Vista manages its bloat impressively well. Contrary to popular belief, Aero does NOT cripple your gameplay on recent graphics cards. On full screen games, it gets turned off automatically (and quickly). For an even better example, I play WoW at 1680x1050 in full-screen windowed mode (it makes sense if you play) to make alt-tabbing faster and easier. WoW will fully render with NO drop in fps when I use flip 3D, with the Aero UI remaining as fluid as could be in the process. I don't care who you are, that's impressive. Vista has it's issues, and I can see how it would absolutely cripple an older PC, but with modern hardware it's definately not as bad as people make it out to be. So far, I have not experienced a single issue which makes me regret moving from XP. All this coming from a pessimist.. Sheesh.

7) I will point out that if you have a Creative X-Fi sound card, Vista's new sound system will go to war with it. I'd imagine older cards would be even worse. I can't help but blame Creative though... If I can get 64 bit Vista drivers for my 6 year old printer which work just fine, then why can't Creative muster some appropriate drivers for its FLAGSHIP LINE?

Fross, you're going to need to go 64 bit to take advantage of your memory. Whether you go XP 64 or Vista 64 is up to you, but I can tell you that Vista wasn't all bad.

Re:I'm actually thinking of upgrading to Vista tod

[roachdabug]

I don't know about you, but I haven't played any 3D games lately where I stare at a static image for 2 minutes. The shader effects are what REALLY set DX9 and DX10 apart, and screen shots don't really do shader effects justice. I assure you, there is a notable difference.

Re:I'm actually thinking of upgrading to Vista tod

[roachdabug]

It's also worth noting that at least when I bought it, the 64-bit DVD only comes in the box with Vista Ultimate. For all other editions, you'll need to either have MS ship you the disc via snail mail for 10 bucks, or find some place to download the .iso.

Re:I'm actually thinking of upgrading to Vista tod

[chammy]

You were doing fine until that last bit, there.. Care to explain what this is supposed to mean? So what if I prefer using Wine instead of rebooting every time I feel like playing a game; I use Linux for work, and when I want to play I'm not going to wait around for a reboot. Apparently just mentioning the magic L-word is enough to bring up a little FUD from any Microsoft fanboy these days...

Re:The later versions of Nero work fine with Vista

[toddestan]

The latest version of Nero is horrible compared to the older versions, why would I want to upgrade?

That's very informative, thanks!

[Fross]

I have the model up of your botherboard (P5N32-E SLi, with the 680i chipset), so I'm waiting to go SLi in time... hopefully delay it until it's sorted out, I know a few people with SLi problems.

I got a decent boost going from 2G ram up, but I turned off my page file. I like to alt-tab (and, playing WoW too!), and that made the system much, much more responsive. For some reason XP dumps tons of stuff to swap even when it has more ram available than it knows what to do with.

I've since found out my midi box would have problems under Vista 64 (not 32 though) so I may just give it a trial on a separate partition and see how it copes. Thanks for the very descriptive post though!

Re:I'm actually thinking of upgrading to Vista tod

[dbIII]

I thought XP was a 3G limit? IF this is the case, then I highly suggest you make 1 gig a RAMDisk

You can't do it. 32 bit XP and most versions of 32 bit Server 2003 can only address a total of 4GB for all memory. This includes the location of hardware addresses and video memory so you can't use it for a ramdisk or any other purpose. The OS has mapped other stuff below 4GB to be sure various poorly written drivers and applications can see it. It doesn't matter how many processors you have (there was a 2GB per 32 bit processor address limit some years ago) you still can't get to 4GB. The MS Server 2003 Enterprise version will let you address the full 4GB and more since it maps it differently. The ridiculous thing is 32 bit Vista still has this problem of not being able to address more than 4GB of which less than that is going to be real memory.

Of course with the 64 bit versions you don't have that same arbitrary 4GB for absolutely everything limit. I ran a beta of 64 bit server 2003 with no problems other than a lack of drivers for cheap and nasty hardware. The 64 bit drivers are of course written to address more memory.

Re:I'm actually thinking of upgrading to Vista tod

[cbhacking]

Actually, I would suggest holding on to the search indexer, for at least a while - it's pretty good about running when you don't even notice, and instant search is a feature that makes so much difference, it's hard to explain. From simple things like finding programs in a few keystrokes (I haven't expanded the Programs list in weeks at least, now - sometimes I got for months without doing so) to instantly filtering your mail and web history to find the message/page with the text you're looking for to hitting Google, Wikipedia, Dictionary.com, or any of a wide number of other services using Start++ (Google it, it's a fantastic powertoy for Vista's Start menu search).

As for my upgrade, it was well over a year ago, and I can't stand to use XP anymore. Like you, I did a clean install, but all the programs I still want to use (and a good many I don't use any more, but used to) all worked out of the box, though a few stored data in their install folder (Bad developers! No donuts!) so I had to change the access permissions to those folders so I didn't need to run them as Admin each time.

All hardware works just fine. Back when I first upgraded I had to use XP drivers for some things (I still do, for the Ext2 Filesystem driver to access my Linux partitions) but they worked fine. By six months ago, all the commercial drivers were labeled for Vista and available on Windows Update. Of course, x64 did complain at bootup about that Ext2 driver, but thankfully it needed only very infrequent reboots (I'm using 32-bit again now; my system isn't nearly as great as yours and I didn't feel x64 was worth the risk of a hassle. I may upgrade later, though.)

If Microsoft were to tolerate piracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Then since many pirate websites have pornagraphy and people are just next to prostituting themselves, does that mean that Microsoft would tolerate pornagraphy and prostitution?

Vista copies files fast?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Did you move the file within the same hard disk? Have you tried to copy a large file from one hard disk to another?

Re:Vista copies files fast?

[Anonymous Coward]

Copying a 180mb file from one hard disk to another took ten seconds.

Re:Liberate Yourself.

[Anonymous Coward]

god willy, you try so hard. it's just awe-inspiring. too bad at the end of the day you're still an idiot with no noticeable impact on the world. just another loser posting on a website and neglecting his family. so sad.

But still lacking

[Junta]

The danger of pure Application Directory strategies (ala OSX) is that there is *still* no mechanism for automated updates in a centralized fashion regardless of application vendor if the vendor hooks into something. Hence my caveat that Windows kinda fell into the trap by being somewhat AppDir oriented (but half-assing enough to have the worst of both worlds).

But proprietary doesn't have to manage all..

[Junta]

As I said, support one or two (say Ubuntu LTS and RHEL/CentOS), with a license permitting repackaging of the binaries, but not leaving the company on the hook for support. If it's truly a commercial endeavor without redistribution, forget officially catering to 100% of the linux base, and focus on select pieces that target a great share of it. The problem when people talk about 'Linux' vs. 'Windows' is that is way too vague. 'Linux' has the bad reputation of being hopelessly diverse as to not even be worth it. It's simply a detail you don't *have* to sweat. Just because 3% of your possible market runs Gentoo, doesn't mean they won't rpm2cpio your rpm and run it anyway, writing their own build script, and they won't necessarily expect support if you set the record straight up front. Even worst case scenario, by targeting two you almost completely meet the needs of 70-80% of the Linux market you'd reach otherwise, which is 70-80% higher than 0% when you refuse to take a stand. My whole point is that you offer up your yum and apt repositories, and anyone not in a supported distribution can fend for themselves. The problem with being somewhat distribution independent by packing it up as a tarball/installanywhere, is that you are being neutral by being a huge pain in the ass to every distribution. It's no harder for a Slackware box to install stuff stored in an rpm than it is for it to run the Java installer you wrap your crap in, so just pick a technology or two and the rest of the world would cope.

As to the library going out of style, OSS is a good example. ALSA at least to me *still* provides the audio interface needing by legacy apps. I can still start Quake2 commercial binary and have sound work. Though ABIs of libraries have moved on, legacy copies of the libraries and interfaces continue to coexist. Device node and syscall interfaces have been pretty stable and standard and consistantly maintained as legacy. For libraries, the distribution better make concessions, or else it's the distribution's fault for not provided adequate 'compat' packaging.

I thought Microsoft had come to their senses for

[Progman3K]

a moment:

"Microsoft has removed the controversial 'kill switch' from Vista in SP1. This feature is designed to disable pirated copies of the OS, but had led to numerous reports of it disabling legitimate copies."

But the next line was so hilarious I realized they still are out to lunch:

"It will be replaced with a notice that repeatedly informs the user that their OS is pirated."

I just couldn't stop laughing.

Keep at it Microsoft, you may no longer be relevant in operating systems, but you sure are entertaining to watch!

Excelsior!

Re:Liberate Yourself.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for ignoring my actual point, asshole - however you clearly think WGA is bad, so this story is actually good, right?

Only free software treats the customer with the respect of a peer Then what's the GPL for? Decoration?

Re:I'm actually thinking of upgrading to Vista tod

[roachdabug]

1) SLi on these cards is just as buggy in Vista 64 as it was in Vista 32, but no worse as far as I can tell: lots of program crashes, display adapter not responding and restarting, and occasional BSODs. I haven't been able to decipher if it is the drivers, the cards, or even worse, my funky mobo.

Update: It turns out all the trouble was due to a BIOS setting. Turning off "SLI BROADCAST APERTURE" made the instability go away entirely.

It turns out that hardly anybody knows what the setting even is or does, and I have no noticable drop in performance by having it disabled. One comment did say that it allows your graphics cards to operate in SLi even in the absence of an SLi bridge, but I haven't been able to confirm this. I haven't even seen a bridge-less SLi capable card since the 6800.

If anyone actually knows what the setting does for sure, i'd love to know.

Re:I'm actually thinking of upgrading to Vista tod

[Ash-Fox]

The shader effects are what REALLY set DX9 and DX10 apart, and screen shots don't really do shader effects justice. I assure you, there is a notable difference.

I honestly went out of my way and tried this and I really was not impressed with effects, they looked in my opinion, slightly better.

It didn't change the feel of the game, like a vast graphical improvements in other games have (like playing Freelancer with minimum settings, then getting a new rig, being able to set it all to max).

I'm annoyed that you got me to waste my time on this.