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Vista Named Year's Most Disappointing Product
Shadow7789 writes "No surprise here, but to complete its humiliation, PC World has declared that Windows Vista is the most disappointing product of 2007. Quoting: 'Five years in the making and this is the best Microsoft could do?... No wonder so many users are clinging to XP like shipwrecked sailors to a life raft, while others who made the upgrade are switching back. And when the fastest Vista notebook PC World has ever tested is an Apple MacBook Pro, there's something deeply wrong with the universe.'"
But my expectations were 0 to begin with. Can't disappoint from there.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
This was under discussion (again) just the other day... http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/15/1944206
Here is the full PC World Magazine's list http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,140583/printable.html#
*The 15 Biggest Tech Disappointments of 2007*
#1. No Wow, No How: Windows Vista
#2. What Is It Good For: The High-Def Format War
#3. The Anti-Social Network: Facebook Beacon
#4. In a Sorry State: Yahoo
#5. The Great, The Bad, The Ugly: Apple iPhone
#6. Un-Neutral: The Broadband Industry
#7. Cannot be Completed as Dialed: Voice Over IP
#8. Needs To Change Its Spots: Apple "Leopard" OS 10.5
#9. Sorry, We Already Gave: Office 2007
#10. Is Anyone Listening?: Wireless Carriers
#11. Singing an Old Familiar Zune: Microsoft Zune
#12. Just Another Oxymoron: Internet Security
#13. Web 2 Woe: Social Networks
#14. Screwed up to the Max: Municipal WiMax
#15. Box Unpopuli: Amazon Unbox
The pre-iphone hysteria was touting the iphone as being the device that would liberate US consumers from the shackles of the telcos.
And while it turned out to be a pretty cool product, it's got the same locked-to-a-cingle-provider, pay-twice-for-songs, proprietary, locked-down, no-3rd party apps attitude as other US cell phones
Vista wasn't the most dissapointing product - we already new how crap it was going to be. The iPhone was, because prior to release, it bought a ray of hope to US cell-phone consumers that was cruelly dashed.
(Yes, I know the iPhone is number 5 on the list, but it's there for the wrong reasons)
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
This is news? I thought everyone knew Vista is the biggest failure since the cheeseshake.
Yeah that's right - you haven't heard about it because it failed miserably.
It is the best thing that ever happened to Linux on the Desktop. Who needs friends, when you have enemies like this?
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
i'd ever see a new OS that would make people *want* to stick with XP.
It aways makes me feel kinda bad for the Microsoft developers that worked for years on Vista... Truth is, its not horrible, just lackluster. But it still has to burn a little to have the reason you came to work for the past 5 years be labeled "The Most Disappointing Product of the Year"
The chant at Microsoft, "We're number one, we're number one!"
I have this hope that people will keep not buying vista and eventually MS will be forced to add directx 10 to xp. I know...keep dreaming.
Old Linux on the Desktop was as dead as a doornail.
god bless him, every distro
The sky is still blue.
Dissa Vista ista dissappointing...
I'd say something's finally *right* with the universe, if people are starting to realize that MS is a crap peddler.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Sure it can, you score can go into the negative area since Vista is slower than XP. By my count, it is -5 because of the worse benchmark score and compatibility issues.
http://www.mobilecomputermag.co.uk/20071128181/windows-xp-faster-than-vista.html
The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity....Calvin
"...and when the fastest Vista notebook PC World has ever tested is an Apple MacBook Pro, there's something deeply wrong with the universe." Why does that have anything to do with Vista? Isn't that just an indication that Apple make great computers?
As for all the extra "eye candy" ... yeah, it's probably a little over the top. But on that same coin, Linux and MacOS have been getting their fair share of extra processor-eating-eye-candy, too, so what's the big deal here?
Still, if you have Windows XP, there's still no reason to rush out and replace it with Vista (just not worth the hassle, really). But if you're buying a new PC, I wouldn't freak out if it has Vista,...
You know how Microsoft changed all their development practices with security dead in their sights? Well, maybe Microsoft saw Apple's security through obscurity model and just thought "if we could get our numbers down to Apple's share, then nobody would attack us." And Vista is the result - an OS so bad nobody wants to use it.
My personal experience? I have hardware that works flawlessly in XP. When I install Vista, its okay until I try to run update. Then I get constant blue screens. I don't want Vista enough to figure out why, so I switched back.
Not that I classify windows users as sensible people in the first place, but why oh WHY are 90% of the windows computers sold today preloaded with Vista, if so many people can't stand it???
My best guess is that MS is licensing to machine retailers at some ridiculously low rate of like $35 for a $299 install, to insure we get it rammed down our throats whether we want it or not. This being the case, MS is taking a calculated loss on Vista, evidently hoping to get more windows users for whatever comes after vista? I don't think it's going to work out that way?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Vista would be fine if MS was selling it for $10 a pop.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
... to complete its humiliation, Slashdot has managed to confuse PC Magazine, which has nothing to do with the article, with PC World which is where the article actually appears: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140583-page,5-c,techindustrytrends/article.html
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
The big deal with Vista, yes it's not that bad, but even in its best possible light, its a minor improvement on XP. In its worst light, it is actually worse then the product that was released before it.
Put simply, it is not worth the cost of upgrading for all of the new features.
I have found a great use for it though. I have officially taken the stance that I will "never buy Vista" and will also "not support Vista", which frees me from the usual role of having to do tech support for anyone that knows I am in IT. I will happily support a Linux distro and most XP problems have solutions on the net by now, so my "personal favours" workload has reduced dramatically.
Seems every OS and gadget from 2007 is listed here, including the media darling, the iPhone.
Leopard is listed, which came as a bit of a surprise until I read this:
Adding insult to injury, some upgraders even reported a Windows-like Blue Screen of Death when upgrading from previous Mac OSs.
There's nothing Windows-like about it. There's a big difference between a kernel panic and simply stalling during the boot process on a screen which happens to be a shade of blue.
In mid-November, Apple released an update to Leopard that fixed some of the bugs, including the firewall glitch. Repairing Apple's reputation, however, may take slightly longer.
It speaks volumes that Apple fixed some problems 2 weeks after the OS was initially released. Their reputation is OK with me.
I don't think anything would please the author of this article unless it wiped his ass or gave him a spontaneous orgasm.
(sorry for the sort of off-topic-ish post)
Office 2007? iPhone? Social Networks - and then Facebook as its own entry? Leopard?
All of those could be cut and I'm just listing what I remember from the article. Why did PC World choose 15 when clearly more than half of those are not tech dissapointments at all, or are so vague and general that they should have never been included in the first place?
Sigh...this is a non-story. Vista is not very good, but it's better than this list.
If O2 is good, O3 must be 1.5 times better!
The reason I don't like Vista (even though I choose to run it):
The Start Menu.
The instant search feature is great. Having to SCROLL THROUGH MY PROGRAMS is not. Plus, there's no way to go back to XP-style Start Menu. It's Windows NT or nothing.
http://img441.imageshack.us/my.php?image=slowstartmenukb9.png
Even worse: I run a Core2 Duo overclocked to 3.4GHz and 2 gigs of PC6400 RAM. The start menu program folders take a bit to open. How the hell do you make opening a start menu folder SLOWER on a FASTER machine?
(If any of this is incorrect or someone has any tips they are welcome!)
If you don't like the newer Start Menu, why not just switch back to Classic View?
That's a great effort MS! that must be two years running now, right?
These are not the same publications.
Zoid.com
It does NOT suck.
And I suspect you are many. How do you address the following issues?
-the continued contribution of CO2 from breathing
-starving children in Africa while you eat
-original sin
-britney spears
-the continuation of a two-party system
-Slashdot trolls
-the david lynch version of Dune
-the holocaust
-Vista
Vista 6.3%
Growing at slightly under 1% a month.
This train may have been slow leaving the station, but it is building up momentum.
XP 72.8%
XP's loss is Vista's gain?
The so-called "upgrade" migration to XP is beginning to look like just another Geek fantasy.
W2K 5.1%
Some good news for the die-hards.
Linux 3.3%
Slow erosion all year, and not much to show for four years of "The Year of Linux"
OSX 3.9%
A healthy niche, but ending the year where it began.
part of it is that MS put out Vista when there was no need for it. A refresh of an operating system brings new drivers for new stuff, a bit of a different look, and built-in support or roughed in plumbing for what's coming down the pike. With the exception of gamers and videographers, for most people the PC, Mac, what have you, was fast and good enough three years ago. Most people browse the net, post here and there and do some mail/sms. They won't bother with computer or OS upgrades for quite some time, like only if their machine breaks. Companies, well, they dislike change, and the expense it brings, and for their limited computing needs, Vista brings nothing to the table.
The gamers, videographers and other hobbyists, they will have more than enough power to run Vista anyway so that won't really be an issue. That there is not enough superior to XP software for them available in Vista, is another matter.
Really, if Vista fails, it is because MS tried to make a market when there was none. The halcyon days of the 90's when people upgraded like buying shoes is over. Somebody just didn't get the memo.
Slashdot recently celebrated its tenth anniversary of not being ashamed about inaccurate article titles, so they're not about to start getting all embarrassed about them now.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
M$ is losing it's temper with people laughing at Vista this way.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Because he doesn't like Classic. He likes the XP-style start menu, not 2K.
If your comment was about XP and not Vista, I might agree. I'm a very happy XP user. However, last weekend I bought a new laptop when my old one crapped out. Obviously it had Vista, so I tried to use it for a couple of days. Between the fact it was abysmally slow, consumed a gig of memory just sitting there, kept asking me if I wanted to do things (yes, I know about limited user privileges, but this is Windows, for god's sake, where everything needs administrator), and I couldn't find a damn thing, well... the best compliment I could give it was that it was pretty. Add to that the fact I don't even get a damned OS install disk anymore, and I was significantly less than thrilled about its long term sustainability.
So, I decided to downgrade (upgrade?) back to XP. HP's own website basically said "DON'T DO IT, MAN, IT'LL NEVER WORK" and provided exactly no XP drivers, only Vista. Yeah, like I'm going to believe that. So I did, and after nearly ten hours of collecting drivers from other sources (occasionally having to change vendor IDs and the like to get them to load), I had it running perfectly.
The thing that bugs me most is that HP has the drivers - the hardware in this new box isn't anything all that revolutionary, or different from what was found in their old XP offerings. There's no reason they couldn't have put up the necessary XP drivers - most of them I got from HP's site, just under other models. The only possible explanation is that MS is sitting in the background, threatening to flog them mightily if they dared not do everything possible to push this steaming pile known as Vista upon us.
Oh, and yes, it dual-boots into Ubuntu 7.10 just fine.
Personally I am not a vista fan, and I love *X, but this article seems too prejudiced.. the list contains major developments, now I think invention of the color picture tube by Philips would be on their most dissapointing list when it was invented.. cause its .. blah blah blah.. I think you need to be not that harsh on the things that are completely new.. The ribbons of MS Office might not be the best, but when you have 1000's of options to choose from, maybe the regular dropdown menu's arnt good eiter.. yes, it has to be disappointment to the current users when you change stuff, but things have to be changed in order to improve.. and personally I liked the idea of ribbons.. Iphone, Zune.. all termed as dissaopintments.. well Probably you were hoping for too much too soon..
Because that sucks too.
Vista's Start Menu problems are that it's half significant improvement, and half abomination.
If they'd just drop the scrolling menus and go back to popup for All Programs, it'd be fine.
Scrolling menus are one of the worst UI ideas ever. I've never seen an instance in which scrolling menus have been a good idea.
Advanced users are users too!
Is there anyone outside of M$ that has said anything good about Vista? PCWorld said a few good things but their overall dissapointment carries weight because of their past enthusiasm. What this means is that Vista is so bad that anyone daring to defend it risks their credibility.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
People sure do hate Vista.
I have never seen this before. Nope. Not ever.
Not when XP came out and everyone was all "I love my 2k and I will never upgrade ever. Fucking XP is rubbish. I will never ever ever use it ever."
Vista is not horrible. Is is great? Not really. But it works and it works pretty well. It is a bit overly secure (but that is because of install base that makes Microsoft OS worth attacking; Apple is expected to be targeted within the next 2 years due to increasing popularity) and overly prettified (but so is everything. I hate all the animations of OS X and now even Linux flavors--they add nothing; my attention span is not that short that I need my windows to be all fancy in minimizing and restoration.) But it works.
People be all acting like Vista is the worst thing ever. It is not. It is not even the worst thing released this year.
Office is 10x worse. The "ribbon" interface is horrible. It went from usable and known to clunky and confusing. I hate it. It would be a good package otherwise.
Anyone who is not out of touch with the needs of today's home users. WinXP and Linux work fine on such systems, and are pretty fast. Home users don't have a need for 1 GB of RAM and a 2 Ghz CPU. Never mind dual-core, quad-core, etc.
They do it while eating up much less.
The crazy thing is, microsoft spent an incredible amount of money and time on Vista. Then before release cut a lot of the features that were in Longhorn.
I'm also very cynical about their multi versioning ultimate, basic etc. They're just trying to segment the market to maximize revenue, it's software - it isn't costing them anymore to produce ultimate than basic.
Extra DRM restrictions on HD content etc just makes me want to puke.
I just expected more. Vista and Bill Gates can go to hell.
It was the most disappointing product last year because, after five years and the infamous codebase "reset", it was finally going to ship in time for the back to school season and Christmas holidays, galvanizing the PC industry in the process. Only the team blew right by those deadlines too, except for "press release" shipments taken by some of Microsoft's best business customers.
I run 64 bit Vista every day on my main computer (not by choice, I assure you), and I've never run into a single 64 bit frustration. OK, so there was the one time I wanted to run a stupid program that the federal government wrote 15 years ago, but that's the government's fault, not Microsoft's. I mean, yeah, Vista sucks and all, but 64 bit Vista is actually substantially better than the 32 bit version, and if people like you would stop running it into the ground for supposed "incompatibility", maybe we could all finally leave 32 bit in the distant past, where it needs to be.
On the other hand, it KILLS me that Microsoft plans on releasing a 32 bit version of Windows 7. That absolutely, 100% blows my mind, and deserves every ounce of scorn that anyone can muster...
What are you talking about? Cherry Cheeseshakes are awesome.
Come on, after working with Office 2007 for the past four months, I have grown very accustomed to it. I still have 2003 at home, but 2007 isn't bad. In fact, I find that I'm able to mix the different components much better than in 2003.
But then again, maybe that's because I'm more adaptable. The people at PC World appear to be fogies, with their complaint about Office 2007 being the ribbon. They're probably the same kind of people who needed a seminar in order to figure out what all those little buttons across the top 10% of the screen are supposed to do in Office 2003, and had no clue that they also were in the menus until a second seminar.
The full list is here:
:p).
http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,140583/printable.html
And both iPhone and Leopard are on the list (just for Apple fanboys that came here to gloat on Vista's #1 ranking
The list is pretty weak, really. And strange too. Putting Office 2k7 on the list because it has a new interface? WTF?
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
Earlier this year Dell reneged on Vista and allowed customers to choose XP to be pre-installed on some of their machines.
I've been telling people I "don't do Windows" for years, and have kept almost all personal PC maintenance favors away despite having a degree in Computer Science. You just now figured out to leave the riffraff to themselves? The sheer joy of telling PC users to fix it themselves makes the learning curve of Linux worthwhile.
But you're right -- Vista is simply not worth the upgrade price. In a large part, neither were Windows 98, 2000, or XP.
Every major tech development is on that list as most disappointing. Lets see, Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, The entire security industry, the entire cell phone industry, the entire social networking space, the entire VoIP industry are all on the list. Google isn't on the list, probably only because they didn't really release a *New* product in 2007, if they had, they'd be right up there. Both Microsoft and Apple made the list twice, Microsoft for Office and Windows, Apple for OS X and the iPhone... I guess we'd all be happier if these companies had just sat on their thumbs this year?
This list is just bizarre, what are their top 10 products of 07?
Sorry, PCWorld - It *IS* 'awful'... :)
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
I also have an HP laptop, a DV2310 to be exact. And I'd like to vote Ubuntu 7.10 to the list of biggest disappointments of the year. Many people have had problems with Ubuntu 7.10 and HP laptops. It seems that Ubuntu is geared towards Dell. Ubuntu 7.10 has cut down on my battery life by about 33% despite a promise that 7.10 would increase it. My monitor doesn't work as expected due to the visual effects. This is just the tip of the iceberg that doesn't work in 7.10.
To me, I think Vista wins this award, but Leopard 10.5 and Ubuntu 7.10 are honorary mentions. 2007 wasn't the year of the operating system.
> And when the fastest Vista notebook PC World has ever tested is an Apple MacBook Pro, there's something deeply wrong with the universe.
This statement was proven false a month ago -- and reported on Slashdot at that -- and yet it still pops up in a summary?
If Vista is the most disappointing product the second must surely be Slashdot. Vista is what it is, but Slashdot pretends to be so much more.
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
Here, here! XP is the last version of Windows I'm going to support, if I have any choice in the matter.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Instead of switching back to XP I switched to Ubuntu and haven't looked back since.
Best regards.
And what really drives me nuts is that these apparently incompetent engineers and clueless leaders at Microsoft have DOUBLED their sales of OS because so many people are buying new machines with Vista pre-installed, then buying XP to replace it.
Drives me nuts. For God sakes buy a machine with XP or linux preinstalled. Like from Dell. Don't reward those loosers with double sales. Sends the wrong message.
Doesn't the term disappointment require a failed expectation? Did anyone expect any more from this Windows installment?
Just because you can, does not mean you should.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
I could actually give you 60 reasons why I HATE Vista. That's the amount of days I had a new and powerful laptop with Vista on it and each day is a different problem (and it's not like the old problems magically disappear when a new one comes up). I think M$ should be sued in a class action, for putting out a product that does not work properly (far from it) and forcing people to buy it (by having a monopoly they force you to have Vista rather than XP on new computers). If any other company in any other industry would put out a half working product they'd pay high consequences... why can't we hold the IT industry accountable as well?
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
I must be living under a rock or something because I just simply haven't had any problems with Vista. Sure my old HP Scanner doesn't work but its about 5 years old now and its HPs fault for not supporting it not Microsofts. Despite this I would now never go back to Windows XP. My build: Dell Inspiron 1520 Notebook Intel Core 2 Duo 1.5Ghz T5250 Vista Home Premium 4 GB Ram(Reduced to 3.5 because I only have a 32 bit version of Vista) 160GB 5200 RPM SATA Hard Disk drive Nvidia 8600M GT 256M Everything in Vista just works! It's extremely fast. Just as fast as XP. True the UAC can get a little annoying sometimes but you can disable it if you go into msconfig and thats what I did.
In real world use I see it as:
1. An excellent home OS where applicable
2. An OS that has no place in the enterprise
The hardware constraints (somewhat beefy hardware, drivers issues, etc...) make it nearly impossible to considering implementing in the enterprise in the near future.
But for a home OS I fail to see the problem. It's stable. It has a lot of nice little features (great indexing and file management (probably best I've seen by default in any OS to date), finally something that nicely uses previously wasted RAM and CPU cycles, improved user management and security, nice built in backup features, much better multi-media management (this one sorts goes with indexing and file management I supposed) etc..).
I know, there's ton of issues out there even for those where it should work. But there are for any OS. And for every "my network slows down when I play music" on Vista there's a "if you lose your network drive in the middle of a file move, your file goes *poof*" on another OS.
Sure, your old sound card might not work with Vista. So don't upgrade to it. I don't see that as a knock on the OS. Legacy support is always a give and take when upgrading. The "beefy" requirements to run it are always overstated around here. Turn off aero and your middle of the pack 4 year old CPU will run it just fine with a gig of ram. I don't know if there's enough of a reason to want to upgrade over XP for the cost. But surely after using both a lot I'd much rather have Vista, it's sandbox, and it's interface (even without aero, window thumbnails, and transparent windows) then XP.
Generally I think Vista just gets railed because no real "geek" should run windows, and because for some reason it's not OK for MS to release *new* software only meant for *new* hardware. The negativity isn't based on the actual product because the actual produce isn't that bad.
> How about that, asswipe?
So you know this guy, is this some sort of inside joke or did someone piss on your cheerios?
And to those who claim Vista has been treated unfairly at /. by a bunch of snobby, anti-Microsoft uber-nerds, there is is in black and white. One of Microsoft's major sources of free publicity has just offered to speak at the funeral.
It takes one back. The sneaky-peaky buzz about something called, gasp, "Longhorn". The breathless, it's almost-just-about-nearly-any-day-now blurbs.
And now, this. The honeymoon is truly over, and the groom is sporting a frying-pan-sized lump on his forehead.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
The trick is to find out exactly what hardware is in the thing and then go to the HP support site and claim you need the driver for XP. If need be, get a Linux live CD and boot the thing to Linux long enough to do a lspci and you'll have all of the information you need. At this point Google is your friend since you can either search for the hardware manufacturers driver or the HP driver. Just be sure you download at least the network drivers so get a network connection once you have installed XP.
From my experience with my wife's DV9015, HP has XP drivers for all of their hardware. They just don't let you get to it if your system identifies itself as having Vista when you connect to support. That's where using Google to find the XP drivers comes in. HP will let you download the files even if your system is running Linux if you ask for a specific file. It's just that they've idiot-proofed their support site so you can't easily get an XP driver for a Vista system by mistake. Download the driver files, stick them on a thumb drive, install XP, load drivers from thumb drive and you've got a fully functional XP system.
Cheers,
Dave
Note: I stopped at the Linux step for my HP zv6015. See my blog if you want the details: http://davenjudy.org/wordpress
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Don't quit your day job, unless you predicted the year would end with Vista as laughing stock. Everyone predicted "Vista would become the dominant OS, if only because consumers have no choice." The countless Slashdot stories are coming from countless unbelievable articles elsewhere claiming "dissapointment". This is all the more remarkable given the tremendous marketing budget tied to reviews. It's nothing less than an industry wide blowback.
It's not that we hate Vista, it's just that we're tired of Soviet Russia jokes.
Well, what else did you expect? The word "vista" means "view," so it's not like they weren't telling us right up front that their New! Shiny! OS is all about eye candy.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
The "Start" menu has always sucked in MS-Windows. It's never been good. Not at all.
And here's why:
Every GOD DAMNED vendor in the world has their own fuckin' menu! Instead of programs grouped by function or task, you get "Adobe Acrobat" and "Adobe GoLive!" and "Microsoft Office" and "McAfee Virus Scanner" and SO WHAT THE FUCK IS THE POINT OF A MENUING SYSTEM?
Sorry. I get really het up about this issue. It's one of the simplest, most fundamental problems with every version of MS-Windows. It's the most concise indication of the target audience of MS-Windows.
Other corporations.
Not the end-user. MS-Windows wasn't designed for end user ease-of-use. I've used computers, and helped other people use computers, for 25 years, and MS-Windows is the worst to have to teach. It makes the least sense, and is the least pleasing. It's a sad state of affairs when the biggest MS-Windows proponents say, "But I have to use MS-Windows, since that's the only thing MS-Office runs on," rather than (as most Mac users say), "Of course I use a Mac. It's fun."
The "Start" menu shows just how fucked-up and disorganized MS-Windows really is. It's hard to find a specific program, and when you are looking for a program to do a specific task, you have no idea how to find it. You have to "know" which programs do what, and which corporation makes each program. It's a corporate mash, and it tastes bitter, with a lingering sour aftertaste, like bad wine in a good bottle.
That's why MS-Windows is painful to use, and you'll find very few people who love to use it, even among fanbois. You can tell by how they defend it they don't really love it. It's just the sports team they chose to back.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
I think the product segmentation is going to get more pronounced in the future. This is a very good thing.
Why? Simple, people at home treat their computers different then at work.
At work, you log into a domain. At home, who is logged in doesn't matter much at all; in fact, Vista is the first OS I've even bothered setting up a new profile for my girlfriend.
At work, somebody who is a professional manages your computer and it's hardware. At home, you do, and you might not be very sophisticated.
At work, all the computers are the same. At home, there is only one computer, but every computer in the home market is different then the other home computer.
At work, your sysadmin installs your software via a group policy. The Windows Server in the closet feeds your computer updates. Unless it is your job, you probably dont do much "multimedia" things like rip CD's or play videos. You certinaly aren't playing games (ha ha) At home, Microsoft.com gives you updates. You might have your computer hooked up to your TV and stereo. You play games on it.
At work, all your data is stored in a roaming profile. Your documents and data are backed up by a trained professional with expensive hardware. At home, you might be lucky to have a USB disk drive or a couple DVD's.
The Home and Business market have very different needs. For example, the backup solution for home users is useless in a business. A backup solution for a business is a vast overkill for home users. The massive active directory model for a business is to complex for a home network of perhaps three computers. A traditional windows workgroup is very insecure for a corporate network.
It makes a lot of sense to segment the Operating system into Home and Business. The trick is what to add and remove from each offering. Obviously "vista ultimate" is "all of the above".
Sorry, but I didn't see a lot to this list besides bashing the big guys.
Two Apple entries? I'll kinda give Leopard, because it has made a mockery of Apple's long-standing claims about not needing to be constantly patched. But, the iPhone? Who bought an iPhone and was pissed about it?
Vista, at the top, I concede, but I think we all saw that coming after they ditched WinFS.
Social networking? Couldn't we have joined the chorus when everyone else said it sucked, instead of two years too late?
Besides, the most disappointing product of each year is some kid's Ajax-driven killer CMS that never makes it past a week of coding.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
They may be spot on by ranking the debacle that is Vista as #1 on their list, but I wouldn't be surprised if they are just following everyone else's lead. FTA "and the Aero interface is as whizzy as it gets"... obviously they've never heard of Enlightenment, Compiz, Beryl or KDE4.
/.er, but they lost me right there on the second line of the second paragraph.
I enjoy a good MS bash as the next
its a horrible, horrible os. I had to spend $200 more on a new dell laptop just to get an xp machine. all of the pc retailers have sold us out. I have no respect for microsoft anymore.
I'm slightly sick of the Slashdot MS bashing.
:P) I also run a Linux server at my home... Whilst nothing fancy it runs postresql, apache, coldfusion plus also ktorrent - I consider myself fairly agnostic.
They obviously didn't try running Vista on a tablet PC. On my wife's TC4400 with a dual core 1.83ghz celeron and 2GB memory it's the duck's nuts of mobile computing. I absolutely love the upgrade from XP in every aspect - battery performance, usability and especially how wonderful the pen interface is. I've been using it all day to get through a difficult spec and am wondering why I never tried this before - beats the print outs any day.
The only place where WinXP is still better (given reasonable hardware) is games. That'll probably be changed around with 10.1 and the next generation of graphics cards. This is why I multi boot my main PC (3.8ghz Q6600), it's better for games not to have a full application base installed alongside it anyway so a separate partition makes sense.
For the record (karma whoring?
ISO certified == THX certified
Argh! This "consumed a gig of memory just sitting there" is such a complete misconception.
Your operating system SHOULD be using up memory when NOTHING ELSE IS USING IT!
If nothing else is using the memory then the OS SHOULD be using it for caching and whatever else it feels like. As long as it RELEASES said memory when SOMETHING else wants it, what the HELL is the problem with the OS using it?
It's just such a friggen cop out to slam an OS for doing that. I GUARANTEE that if OSX did that people would be quick to point out that it's using it wisely and gives it up when you want it etc.
Just give it a friggen rest.
Pick on Vista for reasons it should be picked on.
I run it at home and these are my gripes:
* DVD Maker, what could easily be a really nice, quick way of putting video compilations on very pretty DVDs, but RUINED by its complete lack of ability to generate anything like what it shows during ALL it's previews. Either it'll burn it in the wrong aspect ratio, or it'll just quit burning at 99% with no helpful error message.
* Deleting things is sometimes PAINFULLY slow. I mean, how can deleting one shortcut from the desktop take around a minute before the message goes away?
* Copying things can be horrendously slow. Unless you're copying from a local disk it seems to have some serious file management issues.
* It took me a LONG, LONG time to stop the darn thing bringing itself out of standby, no matter how many places I told it not to.
Here is what I actually LIKE about it:
* The games folder is very nice, nicely displayed, good info, very nice, look forward to increasing my games collection on it.
* The photo gallery is GREAT, really easy importing and tagging of photos and great organisation
* It does look pretty
* All my hardware has just worked straight away with it (gamepad, scanner, printer, camera)
* The start menu quick search feature is indeed cool, much quicker to find things that way.
* Live thumbnails of the programs you have open on your taskbar, actually quite handy to see what's going on with other apps.
And what I couldn't care less about:
* The sidebar... waste of resources, never have it on
* The funky task rotating 3D task switcher, pretty, but completely pointless
If they'd just fix the darn bugs I'd be very happy with Vista, it's just a case of having one of them come up and thinking 'How in the hell did this pass quality control?'. It's amazing to think that a company with that many employees doesn't come across the bugs that so many of us actual users do.
How about "Wake the fuck up" to you?
Why do have an account on a site devoted to and run by teen-aged losers and whiners, founded by a retard who calls himself "CmdrTaco"?
And you wonder why all the posters are immature sheep???
There's features in there? Oh yeah, the eye candy that requires all that video horsepower and still looks like crap. (If I want a "pretty" OS, I'll buy a Mac. lol)
;)
UAC = Supposedly there to protect you, but it's a little too protective and everyone just clicks through to get their stuff working, or the ones who are smart enough just turn the bloody thing off.
Truth is, its not horrible, just lackluster.
Only compared to other MS-Windows products, and only if you use Microsoft metrics.
Sure, Vista is mostly an eye-candy upgrade with some DRM poison sugar thrown in. But that's not what makes it horrible.
What makes it horrible is that it's still insecure, that it is still poorly-organized, and the it's still not a joy to use. Sure, that's exactly like every other version of MS-Windows, but that's not the point. The point is, Vista might've been adequate for 2001, but for 2008, it's still just a rehash of MS-Windows. Instead of focusing on creating a secure system that's pleasant to use and easy to centrally manage, they created a system that is a pain in the ass to manage (though they have some very expensive server products to help with that), it's not that pleasant to use, and it's still a mish-mash of features designed to try to be all things. (Kind of a misdesign by aggregation.) It fails miserably when compared to NeXTStep, OS/2, several Linux distributions, Apple OS X, and pretty much any Unix OS out there. Sure, I wouldn't recommend Solaris for a desktop OS (yet), but I sure as hell wouldn't recommend MS-Windows for a server. For the desktop, NeXTStep has Vista beat, and that hasn't been around for 12 years. (This is the basis for my assertion that Microsoft has set the computer world back 12 years. And counting.)
That's part of the reason why many, many geeks despise MS-Windows. Once you stop judging MS-Windows by Microsoft's rules, you start to realize how shoddy it really is. Vista might look good at the bar after several drinks, but you're gonna regret waking up next to it the next morning.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
You use the same writing style, consistently misspell the same words and even that "M$" thing is identical.
Are you posting to Slashdot with two different accounts? Is that even allowed?
Anonymous Coward says - Dissapointing is one s, but two p's. :) Now that's similarly disappointing to Vista.
Sales are down because the economy is heading into the toilet on the heels of the worst housing market collapse in recent memory, and CompUSA is going out of business, partially because of increasing competition with online stores that offer better prices and more convenience, and partially from bad management.
Have you though about being tested for Syphilis?
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Why the hell should it use a gig just sitting there on boot? I haven't told it to do a goddamn thing other than boot, and I'd stripped out most of the crapware that was starting. I realize there's a lot that goes into bringing up a system, but it's so massively disproportional to XP and quite a bit slower. Also, if it was cache, then why did it keep increasing (by about the same amounts as XP) as I started other processes? And then started paging out to disk when I hit the end of physical memory?
No, I'm sorry, but at least a large portion of that wasn't cache. Vista raw boot: 943MB - XP raw boot: 143MB That's called bloat and inefficient coding. Vista - slow as fuck, but pretty. Really I'd rather have ugly but responsive.
Really... For all I dislike Microsoft and think that Vista is essentially a resource-hogging, effectively worthless upgrade (except for the 64bit arch.), OS X Leopard is so much worse it's not even funny. People complain about Vista's bugginess and don't even bat an eye at the serious problems that have been revealed in Apple's new product. Leopard can lose data, simply by copy-pasting a file. Not to mention the fact that it BSoDs. These are just a small sampling of the many issues And when we consider how the respective companies handle these problems, Apple clearly falls behind. At least you can get tech-support for Windows; they'll admit they need an SP. If you bring up a fault of an Apple product, you'll only be censored (I assume most here have heard of Apple's draconian censoring of their online forums). Just my two cents...
Fear the penguin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_Windowing_Extensions allows addressing up to 64GB of RAM. If the OS can enable an app to do it why can't it do it self?
Software Inventor
Suppose you are writing a technical paper with a coauthor at another institution who uses Word 2003. You upgrade to 2007. You discover that in compatibility mode you can't edit the equations in your own paper (they're graphic images). And if you switch out of compatibility mode, your coauthor will be unable to edit the equations you create. WTF??? How much time is being wasted on this kind of crap for people who were happy with 2003. And if you think I'm making this up, here it is from Microsoft:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word/HA100444751033.aspx
And the ribbons? I'm sorry. I'm glad you're happy, but for many of us who knew the keystrokes, and took the time to learn the capabilities of the software, it's a huge step backward. I heard the hype and I gave it a chance, but I agree with PC World on this one. If the ribbons are optional, I have no complaint. But they take up a huge amount of precious screen real estate (esp on a small notebook) and they practically force you to use a mouse, which some don't mind, but it slows me down enormously.
And WRT those little icons that you claim have menu counterparts: where is the menu item "Accept all changes in document" when you're tracking changes? Seriously. If it's there I would like to know.
If you know anything about developing software, you know that a product that spends 5 years in development before release is going to suck. Has nobody at Microsoft read The Mythical Man-Month? Vista is OS/360 all over again. (Look over the chapter titles again. It's uncanny.) I thought Microsoft was supposed to have tough interviews; maybe they should just ask "have you read TMMM?".
Anybody at Microsoft who spent the last 5 years on Vista either already knew it would suck (before it was even released), or is at least finally learning a valuable lesson about software development. Nobody said life had to be easy; you don't win every time.
If you're working on the flagship product of the world's biggest/richest software company, releasing a "lackluster" product years late, and making every mistake enumerated by a 30-year-old book which is essentially required reading in the industry, that *is* horrible. I mean, that's practically the definition of how to be horrible. Short of going out of business over the fiasco, I can't imagine how to be horribler.
Alan Kay was right: "I don't think you could find a physicist who has not gone back and tried to find out what Newton actually did. It's unimaginable. Yet the computing profession acts as if there isn't anything to learn from the past". If they were a hardware engineering team and nobody happened to know how to apply Newton's results, would anybody be similarly apologetic?
Or a mathematician -- practically everything they do is standing on the shoulders of their predecessors. If you start from first principles in mathematics (like, say, Peano's Axioms), you're pretty much guaranteed to never produce anything innovative. If a group of mathematicians said "well, no, nothing new to report, but look, the old stuff again with this pretty 3d effect!", they'd be laughed out of the room, and rightly so.
So no, sorry, as a developer, I don't have a lot of pity for those guys. When you're 2 guys in a garage, it's fine to make rookie mistakes. When you're a $50B company, people expect more than "lackluster" results and a rehash of the industry's greatest blunders from the 1970's.
to the 5 people who own a tablet pc
Even if that statistic represented the whole market, almost all new PC's come with Vista preloaded (due to customer demand? HARDY, HAR, HAR!), and the PC market is still growing. Vista's share WILL grow, because the market is stuffed to the gills with Vista PCs. It'd better be growing pretty damned fast before you start trumpeting Vista's success.
This is my favorite part though. The very page you linked to sums it up best: Statistics Are Often Misleading
You cannot - as a web developer - rely only on statistics. Statistics can often be misleading.
Global averages may not always be relevant to your web site. Different sites attract different audiences. Some web sites attract professional developers using professional hardware, while other sites attract hobbyists using old low spec computers. Can't get much clearer than that.
but having seen and used the product, I don't think Vista is all that bad. I would have to agree. I was going to load XP on my new machine--- until I got to the part where I needed to load a driver for the RAID controller and it said "Insert floppy into drive A:"! FLOPPY?!?! What is this, the middle ages? So I loaded on Vista (site licensed version for the university where my wife works) just to have something windows enough to do what little I find inconvenient to do under Debian Linux. I don't see what people's issues are. Seems to work just fine. Of course, my new machine is a Core2 Quad 2.4GHz (OC'd to 3.2GHz) with 4GB RAM and four 250GB hard drives in a RAID10 array, so there's probably little out there that could choke it. Even Unreal Tournament 3 doesn't push the cumulative CPU usage past 45%.
Conclusion: the Empire squashes the Federation like a bug. Accept it.
http://img523.imageshack.us/img523/1267/vistanokx6.jpg
Yes it's true, Vista is really number one. Good job Microsoft, you did well !
I feel your pain on the HP drivers, but I had exactly the same issue with an HP laptop trying to downgrade it to WIN2K from XP - and this was five years or so ago. New HP laptop? only the latest MS OS drivers are available...
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Don't blame Vista for lack of install disk, that's the crap that companies like HP have been dumping on it's users for years, besides the fact that they tinker with the OS and then you can't run a standard repair on it. That's why I won't buy computers, or printers for that matter, from HP. Bloated code, non-standard stuff etc. But to get back to the downgrade to XP, maybe if you bought a computer that can handle Vista you would have had better success. I'm running a top of the line Dell laptop that runs Vista without a single problem and I'm flogging it with some heavy duty stuff. Maybe you should downgrade to Windows 95, then it would really fly.
I don't have vista so I wouldn't know if its good or bad. However after waiting years for UT3 and buying it the day it came back I think UT3 is the most disappointing product of 2007. What a huge disappointment. Its unfortunate they had to sell out to the consoles.
You can have my SIG when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
I had an expectation of 0, but the reality was closer to the square root of -1.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
How long did it take you to write that answer? And find those links?
They don't even support your contention that wmf is a troll (I believe they are, but the burden of proof is upon you).
I laughed out loud when I saw this headline. This was one of the funniest headlines I've seen. I just have to add to the noise.
Here's my shot at Microsoft bashing:
Vista sucks so hard I've never used it and I've never seen anyone else use it. I've heard stories about people who have used it but that's about it.
I will say this. There were no lines at the tech shops this time at Midnight at Best Buy like there was with Windows 95. Microsoft did not get the response they were expecting. I think OEMs were caught off guard by this too. They thought hardware sales would go up. The Microsoft execs seemed so wrapped up in this Microsoft release and they were anticipating it so much, that they just couldn't believe it ended up this way. I'm actually having trouble believing it myself.
Personally I think it doesn't matter either way. Hardcore Microsoft types are using XP and will continue. The Mac people will continue on their paths. The people like me will keep using Linux like we always have for the last 12 years. And home users will call people like me up and I'll tell them what I've heard about Vista.
The only person to blame here is Steve Ballmer. He's a loser and he has no vision. Microsoft hasn't really done anything interesting on their own in a long time. They've acquired companies which are intesting but that's about it. This happened to IBM until they reinvented themselves. Microsoft will have to do the same thing. But it'll never happen with Ballmer driving the company into the ground. I think the man hates his customers. As an outsider, that's what it seems like to me.
You can have my SIG when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Put simply, it is not worth the cost of upgrading for all of the new features.
Neither was XP. And when Windows 2000 came out I didn't see people leaping from NT4 like ants to a sugarbowl either.
Other than Windows 95/NT4 which was an amazing upgrade from Win3/NT3, no Windows release has been terribly exciting. Win98 from Win95? No big deal. Windows XP Pro from 2000 Pro? No big deal. Windows ME from 98...nothing could be less compelling. Windows XP Home from Win98? A boost in stability to be sure, but 'worth the cost of upgrading' for the new features? Hah!
The only real issue with Vista is that its just an evolutionary step. All the Vista hype was monsterously out of proportion to the actual product. Some of that is Microsofts fault... and some is just the internet doing what the internet does.
Hell, even in the Mac world... really, other than MacOS6 to MacOS7 in the early ninties and MacOS9 to OSX 10.0 each release hasn't been a wondrous new dawn upon the world. (Although in Apple's defense the OS 10.x revisions have come out more rapidly than the revisions to Windows. But then again...even Vista Ultimate at full retail is a fraction of what it would have cost to upgrade to each 10.x revision. (Although to Apples credit the family pack pricing is an excellent idea I'd like to see from Microsoft.)
Dude, go back to being a counselor for kindergarten. Vista took 5 years and all they came up with was eye-candy and annoying "are you sure" messages. Several of the most egregious bugs were simply carryovers from XP that were never found, in code that was supposed to be completely rewritten. The essence of vista is "You don't have to like it, it will be there when you buy a new PC because we made deals with the OEMs, and you will pay whatever we ask, and we don't have to care"
You are aware that all the items in the ribbon have Alt+XY shortcuts, aren't you? If not, just hold down your Alt key for a moment, and it'll pop up labels of which key activates which tab. Press one of them (while holding down Alt) and it'll switch the labels to show which key to press to activate the individual functions. If there's stuff you use regularly, it shouldn't be any harder to memorize than menu shortcut keys.
where is the menu item "Accept all changes in document" when you're tracking changes?As best as I can tell, it's under "Review", "Accept" (in the Changes section), then the last menu item: Accept All Changes in Document. Or, Alt+R, A, D if you'd prefer (Alt+R opens the Review ribbon tab, A opens "Accept", and "D" accepts all changes in the Document.
Btw I don't do much word processing and have never used the track changes feature, it's just not exactly well hidden.
Most of the issues with vista are dreadful UI incosistencies some of them are deeper down but only a handful. Vista in itself has a nice core, except for the DRM left and right which bogs the system down. Anyway here is a list a) The new system config is dreadful, especially the vital network part needs a serious overhaul, it is close to impossible to find anything, not that the old one was not either but the one is 10 times worse b) The 3d UI is dreadfully slow, recent X-Windows desktops show that a 3d desktop can be blazingly fast, Vistas is even slower than the one from OSX and the OSX desktop is not snappy either (it is slower than old versions of Javas Swing) c) Booting times are horrendous, from startup to being able to do anything more than 2 minutes pass on my notebook computer, at least the power savings feature works decently so I usually dont turn it off, but nevertheless, the booting time is a disgrace. d) add to that that once you play video files, thanks to the drm the network traffic slows down to a crawl. Anyway, it is not worse the ME the entire 95 series was way worse, but Vista is a shoddy upgrade to a somewhat good XP.
If MS wanted a clean break with the past, they probably could come up with a clean-sheet OS that rocks. Vista may suck, but when you think of the co-ordinated effort just to get something out the door with all that legacy support, all those years of cruft, of design commitments that are soooooooooo 1998... they're running really fast, but with a huge anchor chained to them.
Why don't they build that OS, and then add legacy support back in as emulation layers? If the Wine folks can run a bunch of Windows software on Linux, with absolutely no help from the kernel, you'd think MS would be able to actually build the same emulation layer in a quarter of the time without the need to reverse engineer themselves.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
> I'm running a top of the line Dell laptop that runs Vista without a single problem
No your not. Your lack of problems are clearly photoshopped in.
Yup. You nailed it. Anybody who likes a Microsoft product is clearly a shill for Microsoft. I am clearly paid by Microsoft to make these comments. You got it. Sorry for the mistake.
Come to think of it, maybe you are the one getting paid by the Apple to post your comments. Why don't you go talk to *your* manager at apple and ask for a raise? Maybe you should quit your job at Apple and go work for RMS at the FSF. I hear they pay real great to shill the Hurd. I've heard he even flies first class when he makes trips to paris for uninvited visits to important officials. You damn shill... get back to making GNOME not suck or something...
Fair game Mr. Raven Sir,
You know what sucks more than Vista? Linux! And the best parts is, Linux isn't even worth it's price and it is free! How do you like those apples? Linux cannot even compete when it is free! The only reason it is more popular than FreeBSD or OpenBSD is because of paid shills like you. Which is a shame, because FreeBSD is a much more stable, well documented system.
My Question for you, Mr. Raven is how do you get paid by the FSF to make these comments when your whole damn operating system is free!?
Of course, I'm joking about the paid shills (maybe) but I'm serious about linux (for all values of $DISTRO) being a shitty operating system. FreeBSD is far better. Vista is much better than them on, at least on the desktop.
However, last weekend I bought a new laptop when my old one crapped out. Obviously it had Vista, so I tried to use it for a couple of days. Between the fact it was abysmally slow, consumed a gig of memory just sitting there [...]
I installed Vista a couple of weeks back, and so far my impressions are very good. For the things I do, it's anywhere from not much slower to much faster. However, I think I see a pattern in all this... Everyone I've talked to who says Vista sucks has used a laptop. Almost all those I've talked to who liked Vista has used a desktop PC. Guess what I'm using. A friend of mine who works at a local Dell tech support office has confirmed my pattern, saying that over 75% of Vista related issues are on laptops.
I guess one reason for this pattern is that more people have bought laptops this year, however from personal experience with a Vista laptop, I think wonky OEM software and drivers is a big part of the problem.
My list of positive things about Vista:
- File caching seems much better, and ReadyBoost works like a charm. Reopening apps after gaming is much faster than in XP. All in all this makes some applications MUCH faster to use.
- Kernel doesn't make my entire machine seem like a 286 just because an app hogs all the CPU @ normal pri. Even some single threaded apps (most notably VS2005) managed to do that. This only happened once I upgraded to a quad core, and I won't rule out some driver error, but still, was nice to have a smooth system again.
- Gfx driver in userspace. Finally games etc won't crash my box (not that it happened that often in XP, but it did). Takes about 10 seconds to recover, and you continue as if nothing happened.
- New task manager is a nice, with direct access to the services list for starting/stopping them.
And negative:
- Main issue I have is Windows Explorer, which, as usual it seems, is the worst part of Windows. For instance, deleting files is quite slow (it seems to want to scan through the directory before asking the magic yes/no question). And I haven't yet figured out how to disable it's "intelligent view" thing, which makes every folder appear different. Since I'm used to having Detail view all over, it's quite annoying at times.
- Can't make it turn off the HDs (power saving), because for some reason it tries to spin then up and down all the continously for some period. Annoying cause I have an archive disk which is a bit noisy, and which I seldom use.
As an Itanium developer I would have loved it had the Itanium gotten such a shit kicking.
Those of us in the trenches felt that management (especially middle management) screwed the project. It often seemed like their whole plan was to pump up their resume, dump things and move to another project/company (this was the height of the boom). The micro-architecture of that chip kept changing every six months.
And, they eventually froze internal transfers when morale tanked. So, when people left, they left for good.
So, had Itanium been taken to the woodshed, upper management would have had a tougher time refusing to face it as a failure.
There is a certain joy in knowing that things are F'ed up and having a major publication agree with you.
... Insightful. This list is ridiculous. Yes, they DID describe some failings of each of these products. They did NOT describe, sufficiently, why these products were "the most disappointing." Can something be both "the most disappointing" and "the most revolutionary/awesome/ridiculously incredibly life-affirmingly awesome"? If not, I think maybe these guys need to reconsider their stances on most of these issues, i.e. iPhone, because it would seem that they are in the minority on this. You know what most disappointed me? The Optimus Maximus keyboard. No mention. I'm no MS fanboi (and this is aimed at the article in general, not just the MS specific parts), but it seems like this piece is nothing more than an attempt to drive traffic... who better to target for shock value than the leaders? For example... which book do you think would sell more copies, even if it was total bullshit:
"5 Reasons Hitler Was The Devil"
"5 Reasons Mother Teresa Was The Devil"
Not when XP came out and everyone was all "I love my 2k and I will never upgrade ever. Fucking XP is rubbish. I will never ever ever use it ever."
I did a lot of computer repair work back when XP first came out AND handed out a lot of advice. I am also as uncomfortable with Microsoft as the next guy. When someone would buy XP back then. I had to admit, it was a step up from 98. Now I did not want to change from 98, it was plenty stable for me and used less resources.
But I could understand why people upgraded. It was more stable for the average user who did not know how to tweak his machine. Some people even liked the fisher price interface. A good laptop or desktop ran XP decently.
Of course spyware and drive by downloads made XP a disaster for the average lo-tech user. Since 2004, it takes less than 3 months to reduce XP to such a mess, that it has to be reloaded.
Flash forward to today and I could not say the same thing. Anyone who is in the market for a computer I warn to not try vista, especially if they are comfortable with XP. It runs slower on hardware that would make XP fly. If you are an average lo-tech user, you will be confused by how everything you are used to has been moved around. Many new features are downright invasive.
Being objective about things. I have gone from "upgrading from 98 to XP, well to each his own" to "upgrade from XP to Vista, you will regret it".
We have one Vista laptop user left at work and he is begging to get back to XP. Lets face it. Vista is a dog no one wants to take for a walk.
vi +
I GUARANTEE that if OSX did that people would be quick to point out that it's using it wisely and gives it up when you want it etc.
OS X does do that, and the howls about memory use when the behaviour changed to that (Tiger I believe) did come out. A spot more education and people are satisfied with it.
Same for Vista - not enough people are using it yet for this information to filter down and enter accepted wisdom. There's a lot of people basing their idea of memory behaviour on the older XP way and expecting things to be exactly the same in Vista. Unlearning old habits will take a while.
Cheers,
Ian
The big thing in Vista was always supposed to the re-engineering of the deep parts of the OS, not the UI features. I.e., it would do the same things but better, with more stability and less need for constant patching. Maybe MS managed that, or maybe they cocked it up; but had they done great things inside, Vista would still disappoint those who judge it by the UI.
Background: I work for various schools, managing networks. Have done for years. Linux fan (Linux-only at home) but always recommend most sensible solution at work, which means XP at the moment (and for the past few years) when you have Windows software you need to run. Schools can't really do non-Windows when their local authorities are demanding they use Windows packages for finance, inventory etc.
Vista is a heap of rubbish. We looked at it when it first came out, and didn't even bother to keep the OEM-installed Vista image on the hard disk on the trial computer that we used. After ten minutes of trying it out, we wiped it back to XP. Nothing new, nothing useful, nothing that saves us time, in fact the exact opposite. Verdict: No benefit.
Later, having moved schools and been given more time and complete say in a new network, I installed it on a laptop that, ironically, we'd specified as XP only but happened to come with OEM-installed XP and a Vista Business Key/Disk. Install procedure was fairly unobtrusive. I remember one or two quirks though, where I heard myself say "I'm not an idiot, just do what I want."
Got into Vista and followed my standard "join to domain" procedure. This involves installing the usual Flash, etc. players and Office and configuring network interfaces, turning off certain options etc. Installs went fine (albeit blighted by the UAC which I eventually turned off completely because I couldn't have that bugging me, so my users certainly weren't going to tolerate it) and then I got round to doing things like setting IP's/DNS, proxy servers, setting up local users, etc.
Then it just turns into a nightmare. Everything's moved, quite often to even more nonsensical places. "Classic" modes for anything don't actually put things back how they were in older versions of Windows. Some options gone completely (like turning off that "new" Login window which, incidentally, totally stopped my usage of the machine - if my users have to type RANDOMSERIALISEDMACHINENAME\theirlocaluser they aren't going to bother. Instead of just selecting from a drop-down box like in XP... there I was thinking that computers were supposed to save you time and having to type in long, obtuse commands. And what happened to the double-Ctrl-Alt-Del classic login? Or the option in GP to turn it back?), some just weren't powerful enough any more.
There is no way that my users could do some of the things that Vista demanded of it. They are not going to sit and click through twenty-odd UAC dialogs that make absolutely no sense just to install their local software (this is why they get a local login for out-of-school use - so they can install their own software for testing, evaluation etc. for the next academic year without buggering up their network profile), nor are they going to remember to type in the machine name, or even have a clue where that was stored when they do need it.
Everything was suddenly more complex, like going back ten years. I could seriously look at Vista and XP and if I didn't know better I'd say that Vista was a first over-reaching attempt to improve on Windows 98/2000 and then people complained and it was replaced a few years later by the much calmer and more friendly XP. It really is that bad.
And that's before I even bothered to look at activation, program compatibility, etc. which would (from my own research) be killers for the types of places that I work. We run a lot of different programs. At least 25% just weren't avilable/updated/ready for Vista at all and still aren't - but the fact of the matter is that most of them were nothing more than a few webpages stored on a CD with a simple executable interface or children's games using things like Shockwave to display. I don't mind Vista breaking compatibility, so long as it provides advantages. We had to upgrade most (not all) software in the 98 -> XP era anyway because of similar problems but we got advantages by doing so - better security, better network integration, etc. Vista just takes
"Linux and MacOS have been getting their fair share of extra processor-eating-eye-candy, too, so what's the big deal here?" No that eye candy is using the GPU not the cpu. The gpu was pretty useless in the past if you did not play games so it leads to a better use of hardware and a lot of visual clues are observed really fast and without much thought so they really do help productivity . How long did you use vista? I was pretty positive so were most of my coworkers. I have not installed it yet I was to busy with other things. The coworkers who installed it and are using it for a while seem to slowly develop a real hate for it . The thing I observe here with the developers is the steady invasion of the macbook pro with boot camp or parallels altho that is a pretty expensive machine so apple is probably the future for us all. My personal linux campaign is so-far only successful in the server department and we do not even install X11 there ;-)
The hype was primarily based on the interface - not on some vision of "liberation from the telcos". The collaboration with AT&T was announced *during the keynote introduction of the phone, including AT&T on stage collaboration*.
this year has gotta be the year of Linux, right???
Maybe Vista is taking a beating since it is being compared to an excellent product called WIndows XP (especially after SP2) ?
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
In the long term, ODF as file format alone should be worth it. Microsoft's binary formats were poorly documented (if at all), and OOXML needs a lot more work to become a reasonably usable standard. Maybe it will get there by the time Microsoft builds Office 2010, but I'd rather not rely on that...
C - the footgun of programming languages
In the case of Win2K, I guess its "honest" cost-cutting by some hardware vendors. According to the last Valve hardware survey I took part in, Windows 2000 gamers are only a few percent of the Steam population these days. If some companies think at this point they don't need Windows 2000 drivers anymore, I'm not surprised.
Microsoft's intervention is not necessary to make this happen.
Personally, I'm expecting that my next new computer (a few years from now) might not work with Windows 2000 anymore. Time to get more familiar with Linux...
C - the footgun of programming languages
I was forced to upgrade my work laptop from a Thinkpad X40 with 512 MiB and XP to a Thinkpad X61s with 4 GiB and Vista, as the old one broke in an accident. It did not feel like an upgrade.
1) The new computer felt much less responsive, probably due to the UI. Despite the new computer being basically a fully equipped top-of-the-line model, and the old computer being two generation behind the time.
2) The UI is significantly different, meaning I could not reuse much of what I learned from earlier incarnations of NT (4.0 and XP). And I'm not talking about the look, I did not like the look of XP, so I switched it to classic theme and could use it as 4.0.
3) The new functionality seem to assume you are either total ignorant or Vista expert, it doesn't leave much for people like me who know what an IP address is, and what DNS stands for.
4) The constant "allow or deny" pop-ups when doing anything. I can see the idea behind them (they are basically a GUI implementation of what Unix people know as sudo), but I doubt training people who don't have the same OS background to blindly type "Allow" will do much for security.
5) I never managed to get access to the files on our University's shared servers (running SAMBA), so I still have to copy files through an XP machine.
It cost me about two weeks of work time before the new computer was in a condition that I could use it for my real job, meaning the TCO is already about twice the cost of the machine.
Once I started working I loved it, mostly because I'm a programmer and compilation is way faster than on the old computer. And having finished configuring machine to the best of my ability, the Allow/Deny pop-ups are much rarer. And the UI feels faster than in the beginning, maybe I have just gotten used to it.
Nonetheless, if I could go back in time I'd advice myself to insist that the new computer was delivered with XP. I would then have had a faster and better configured machine, and I would have saved two weeks of work.
The reason I didn't was that I expected Vista to work as well as XP (except for larger memmory use, something I had plenty of), and assumed that although I didn't need any of the extra functionality today, applications would start taking advantage of it in a few years, and then it would be nice to have.
I haven't had much bad to say about the OS, with the exception of some minor gaming glitches. The computer is running better with Vista than it had with XP. However, that XP install had been pirated, and was out of date without the possibility of catching up (stupid WGA bullshyte). I actually received Vista for free from Microsoft without strings attached, because I won a raffle while I worked at Circuit City during their Vista launch. Maybe that's why I am easily impressed by it, it was free, and it's working. I know the same would also be true if it was running Linux, but that's what I use on my laptops, and I tire of looking at the same GUI all the time. (XP at work and on my DVR computer, Vista on my internet/gaming computer, Ubuntu on my laptops.)
To start with, this just isn't true. People loved Windows 98 when it came out (Windows 95 was barely usable in terms of stability) and Windows 2000 had a similar impact again. There were dissenters for XP but they faded away with the arrival of XPsp1 - Vista sp1 doesn't seem to be having a similar effect. I accept that ME was a botched release but it got torn apart by critics and never widely adopted due to the problems with it. It's not implausible - although it's unlikely - that Vista will suffer a similar fate. Since Vista has more commitment from Microsoft than it's ME release did, I suspect that Moore's law will eventually come to the rescue.
Free Software games list and commentary
That's nothing, you should see Linux there is.... Uh... uhm... uh... Doesn't work with unsupported hardware!
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Im not currently at my machine at home so I can't remember off the top of my head but you can change the start menu back to the way it was in XP. I have it set that was at home, I might have downloaded something though, not sure.
Also I run a AMD 4200+ and 2 gigs of ram and my start menu opens instantly. 320gb of programs listed in there and its instant. You probably have some issues with spyware or viruses slowing your computer down.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
... would accept they are stupid.
You have to somehow convince yourself that it was worth it to lock yourself in for 18 months to the most expensive mobile telephony contract ever.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Vista is like a Piñata. It's designed to be bashed.
"And Microsoft blew that argument to hell when they destroyed the "proven" interface of MS Office. "
No worse than the GIMP programmers destroying a proven interface like Adobe Photoshop, or the Blender folks not following the likes of Maya, Lightwave, etc. Me thinks you should leave the kettle alone.
Question: Here on slashdot, it's assumed that Vista is shit, worse than cancer, etc. Do you accept Vista will become just as dominant as XP? If so, why?
I got a feeling you're going to say "Because MS forces it down the throats of the retailers", but I don't buy that. How so? Is there any (recent) evidence? You all equally claim Linux is ready for the desktop, and at the end of the day it's free too, so why oh why is Windows 95% dominant?
I'm not trolling, I'm asking. To me it doesn't add up.
throw new NoSignatureException();
Bill: "Merry Christmas!"
Tux: "Ah! Vista... Thanks!"
Yes, I'm aware of the keystroke equivalents. But the hesitation is a pain (I know that's there so you can see the little letters pop up, but geez I hate icons, and I hate having to look for the little letters; what's wrong with underlining the damn menu item letter), and why should I have to ***relearn*** keystrokes?? The whole point of keystrokes is that they're automatic. I will gladly do if it's beneficial, but I have yet to see that this rearrangement benefits *me*, so it's pure cost. And Quattro Pro had multiple keystroke sets 20 years ago --- lotus modes, native modes, etc.
:-)
Regarding "accept all changes", I thought the previous poster was talking about Office 2003, and that's what I was referring to. I do not believe there is a menu item there. I'm sure you're right about the 2007 keystrokes.
Just FYI, I remap my keyboards so the control key is left of the A, I constantly use the command shell (and cygwin), and I use emacs and LaTeX and Word only when forced to. I just want to get my work done. Microsoft does not help me do that. (neither does slashdot for that matter
Excuse your French.
"after working with Office 2007 for the past four months, I have grown very accustomed to it"
"2007 isn't bad"
"But then again, maybe that's because I'm more adaptable"
Four months for an adaptable person to get accustomed to an upgrade to a piece of software that's been around for years and is in daily use by millions of people and business, and even then the verdict is "isn't bad". And *this* is why people complain. After MONTHS of user training (at least, that's for the technically literate) on *everyone* who uses Office (read: Everyone) in your business and an enormous upgrade price, not to mention the man-hours, testing etc. to upgrade, you get an office suite that "isn't bad" and can't really do that much more than 2003. And isn't backward compatible (as was pointed out in one of the other replies above). And in most businesses, Office does little more than open Office docs so the advanced collaboration etc. is in a relatively minor bracket compared to, say, being able to find where the menus you've been using since Office 97 are without ten minutes of hunting.
Personally I am not a vista fan, and I love *X, but this article seems too prejudiced.. the list contains major developments, now I think invention of the color picture tube by Philips would be on their most dissapointing list when it was invented.. cause its .. blah blah blah..
I remember that year and the first sets that came out. I can see the parallel. It was horribly expensive, the programs were not in color, but some of the commercials were. Big deal, pay a lot to see some commercials in color.. not worth the upgrade. I grew up watching The Wizard of Oz every year. After I joined the Navy, I finaly saw it in color. The big suprise for me was the witch wasn't deathly charcoal grey. She was bright green.
Unlike Vista which has some backwards problems with some programs, the color TV would play the old B&W movies just fine.
The truth shall set you free!
Vista's not that bad, but it's disappointing because of what it _could_ have been. Microsoft took about 5 years to make Vista. Besides eye candy, what does Vista have that XP doesn't? I don't think it has much more to offer. Microsoft removed a lot of features that were originally planned for the OS (WinFS for one). I remember back when they were making all the hype about Longhorn, it was supposed to be a (nearly) complete rewrite of a new "Windows" OS with all these new useful features. In the end, it just seems to be a rehash of XP with a face lift. I guess I wouldn't say Vista is a bad operating system, but it's disappointing that Microsoft couldn't have come up with anything better after so long in development. What features does Vista have that you can't find in an Operating System that already exists? I remember seeing a video on youtube comparing Vista with OS X with the search features, picture/video, etc and it's "not the same". I mean, Vista's search is in the bottom left corner, and OS X's is in the top right corner! I'd do a search for the video but youtube and google video is blocked here at the office.
Having a smoking section in a public restaurant is like having a peeing section in a public swimming pool.
I am the part time sysadmin for a small (40 people) design company that runs on 80% Macs (Designers and file servers) and 20% Windows (CAD and consultants) and Linux (mail, web, dns, dhcp). I am fairly used to supporting the oddities of the various OSs and personally use WinXP about 80% of the time myself. I have found that Mac OSX is generally an incredibly robust system and requiring generally little in the way of user support. Second WinXP is also fairly robust these days, with the caveat (this also applies to OSX to a certain extent) that if your users are allowed, as ours are, to install whatever they feel like, some will install all sorts of little gadgets and widgets that will bring the system to a crawl and, in the case of WinXP, make the system very unreliable. By and large, my largest support task on WinXP is Office support.
One user got a new Lenovo top of the line T61, with nVidia Quadro in September this year. With Vista Business. To support possible future Vista installs, I got and installed Vista Ultimate on a Mac Pro tower (Quad Xeon), where, after careful tweeking, it runs quite well, albeit far slower than OSX or WinXP on the same machine. Vista on the Lenovo Laptop, coupled with the usual insane amount of crapware that comes with Thinkpads preinstalled, is an absolute abomination. The GUI is actually less responsive than the first release of OSX 10.0 was on my old 333MHz PPC Lombard Powerbook 6 years ago. You can cure the slashdot "I'm sittnig here at my freelncer gig.." trolls here.
Vista on that laptop, a 2.2Ghz Machine, 2GB Ram, etc, is so bad, it almost makes me cry. The UAC nightmare, while supposedly making the system more secure, also makes it almost impossible to do any normal work (any control panel stuff requires a UAC clickfest from hell). Turning UAC and Lenovo's Account management crap off is an improvement, but it brings up the point of why one would use Vista anyway. A lot of software, such as our Inventory clients, will simply not run. Working through custom DNS or DHCP settings is a major PIAS.
Every time I have to use Vista, I am more convinced that Microsoft has lost its edge. I can not see ANY company interested in productivity and efficiency using Vista. Microsoft has more than enough cash to last it through years of losses, but if that does in fact come to pass, MS will lose its standing business and get a bad reputation that will be harder to fix than merely better products will do.
You can make the start menu higher by increasing the number of entries in the 'frequently-used' list. The menu will make itself higher to accommodate the extra entries it will have to display in the most-frequently-used list, which means less scrolling through the all programs list.
I dont have vista at work, but the setting is probably under Customize Start Menu->Number of programs on Start menu or something similar (that's where it is on XP).
But then again, maybe that's because I'm more adaptable. The people at PC World appear to be fogies, with their complaint about Office 2007 being the ribbon. They're probably the same kind of people who needed a seminar in order to figure out what all those little buttons across the top 10% of the screen are supposed to do in Office 2003, and had no clue that they also were in the menus until a second seminar.
You also got some training for the stuff that wasn't intuitive. For example, if you din't know the print menu was hidden in the big Windows Logo, how long would it take you to find the print menu, say you wanted to print on the color printer instead of the default laser? It took my wife 2 weeks of changing the default printer in Windows to select printers for Office 2007. A Google search finaly let me know the Windows logo was a button with the print menu. This is one example of things that are not located where they are in every other Windows program. File - Print.. there in all programs except Office 2007. This is only one of several learning curves needed just for the new Office suite.
Back to Vista, how long would it take you to connect to my CUPS networked printer at \\192.168.1.102\lp1? It took me a while to find where to plug in the printer address. It gets split onto 2 dialog windows to enter all the parts of the address unlike any other OS I have.
The truth shall set you free!
Typing the name, both in Vista and in OSX (spotlight or quicksilver) is nifty and quick but it's a patch. It doesn't address the underlying problem. Most Windows installs have a huge (I see people with two screen heights full of shit) start menus. There's no guideline, every vendor just puts their stuff anywhere. Sometimes they let you choose in the installer, but mostly it's just anywhere. They even resorted to highlighting newly installed programs (badly.) I like the type-to-find a lot, I use Quicksilver all the time, but especially on Windows it's just there to hide the shame that is the Start menu.
.apps in the Applications folder and are started from there or from the dock. Still not perfect, it's just a huge pile of applications, but at least there are no cryptically named submenus, not counting Utilities and any user made ones.
Even if I know I want to start that Mysql program, what's it called? Ah, "SQL Manager for MySQL!" I still don't know (and don't really care) that it was made by EMS, so it's in the EMS folder.
Last but certainly not least, most apps install with a separate folder, which contains 1) a link to the app 2) a link to the app with some weird startup param 3) a link to the uninstaller 4) a link to the readme 5) a link to the vendor's website. Are you still with me? Do we really NEED all this crap?
This is what we have come to, after decades of experience, years of work, scores of highly trained people, an extensive beta program: the same shitty start menu in Vista. I think this is the main reason that people dislike Vista so much, it's just all so disappointing.
OSX is mostly a bunch of
Ubuntu organises all the programs in its repositories in the start menu, there's probably a setting somewhere that tells it where to install in KDE/Gnome/etc's menu. Install Eclipse over apt -> it shows up under Development or something like that. Works very well. I don't know if it will still work with the odd non-repo install, but for those the menu is easily adaptable.
The interesting thing in the article that no one mentioned (and none of the Microsoft bashers at Slashdot ever want to mention) was this blurb: "When it debuted last January, incompatibilities were rampant--in part because hardware and software makers didn't feel any urgency to revamp their products to work with the new OS. The user account controls that were supposed to make users feel safer just made them feel irritated." Vista was in Beta for over 3 years. Microsoft gave 3rd parties FOREVER to modernize and get used to the new UAC --- but they dropped the ball. Poor, cheap, no-nothing 3rd party developers that can't figure out how to write a program that doesn't run as admin / root are the biggest problem with Vista. Microsoft did everything in its power to force these idiots to change --- but they failed --- and now many of those some idiots (including a lot of you that post on slashdot) blame Microsoft for poor compatibility. You bitch for years about poor security. They give it to you, and you now bitch about incompatibility. What do you want?
You have never used Leopard did you? Go copy-paste your MS astroturfing somewhere else if you don't know what you're talking about.
The thing about Vista is that while it has almost no major improvements compared to Windows XP, if you add up all those tiny little "nice" additions, it does improve the overall user experience if you have a computer that doesn't suck. Honestly, if you turn off the idiotic UAC botherware and just use the OS for everything from productivity to games, you will probably find that things tend to run decently.
As for benchmarks, I really wonder when the last set of benchmarks have been run to compare Windows XP to Windows Vista. Driver support from NVIDIA and ATI/AMD has improved quite a bit, and I am curious at this point if the differences in performance have become minimal between the two operating systems or not.
Keep in mind that if you test with computers that only have one gig of memory, you are unfairly penalizing Vista in the same way that running Windows XP with only 256 megs of memory will be unfair if you compare it to a Windows 98 machine. If you starve the OS during testing, then you can't expect to get fair results. Vista has a number of additional services running for various things, and they do take a bit more memory and CPU power. How much of the reduced performance is caused by all of these services(many that may not be needed)?
So, Vista may not be fantastic, but if you compare Windows XP to Windows Vista with four gigs of system memory, Vista may not seem quite as bad as many would have you believe. If you tested the OS a year ago, the improved drivers may very well change how well it works for you. Just don't give me that garbage that it doesn't run well on your three year old computer, because Windows XP ran like crap on older computers too if they didn't have enough RAM.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I'm so old I can remember when a non-Microsoft app would win Product of the Year: like WordPerfect for word processing and Quattro Pro for spreadsheet. You have to recognize the source to appreciate the degree of condemnation.
That was my thought, too. When their shills are making catcalls, they've stepped on it. You should be modded up.
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
It's all because the Linux crowd doesn't have ideas. They're waiting for others to come up with ideas so they can rip them off like they did with their OS, their office suite and their graphics program.
Agreed; I guess there's a lot of people who don't like having the keys underlined, since they made the default in XP to hiding the accelerator keys in menus until you press Alt. I guess that's the problem with asking Average Joe's for their opinion; you wind up with a product optimised for Average Joe's.
In Office 2007's defence, if you memorize the accelerator key for each tab, it will display the keys for that tab immediately. Some of them are a bit strange I'll admit; why is "View" Alt+W? One interesting thing is the accelerator for the Insert tab is Alt+N. Why not Alt+I? If you press Alt+I, you get a message saying "Office 2003 Access Key: Alt, I - Continue typing the Office 2003 menu key sequence, or press Escape to cancel". So I guess you can use some of the sequences you've memorised from 2003 still. Alt+T (the old Tools menu) has the same behaviour. Might be worth investigating more.
why should I have to ***relearn*** keystrokes?? The whole point of keystrokes is that they're automatic. I will gladly do if it's beneficial, but I have yet to see that this rearrangement benefits *me*, so it's pure cost.Okay, fair enough, but I guess the "accept all changes" thing is an example of a possible benefit to you: this functionality wasn't previously accessible via keystrokes, but now it is. Maybe it's one you won't use, but there probably are other functions that are now accessible via keystrokes that were previously only on the button toolbar. Now yes, they could have crammed these functions into the menus somewhere, but sometimes it is better to start fresh.
Anyway, next time you get a chance try out some of the Office 2003 shortcut keys you've memorised and see how many are still supported. With any luck you might find yourself pleasantly surprised.
That's the whole point. Five years in development yet there's no real reason to upgrade from the previous version.
I have never read PC World Magazine. Looks I wouldn't like it.
OS X Leopard, especially on PowerPC feels like you downloaded a beta torrent by paying $130 (more in my case, family license).
There are inexplainable issues, they simply make no sense and I am not speaking about that "move files" bug, I never moved any file on any OS, I always considered it a risk.
In my case, OpenGL is 40% slower (tested multi, multi tools) than Tiger 10.4.11. As Nvidia says "it is up to Apple" for drivers, I reported to Apple and never heard back except one really redundant and irritating question.
Those people doing a massive job to port thousands of open source tools to OS X have to start over. Developers never had final version before it hit shelves by a childish (I think) reason as "They are leaking them". There is a blame game going on and those tiny Mac fanboy fascists are trying to censor every kind of feedback on web. I am not speaking about posting a security issue to public forums and whine to slashdot when it is deleted.
I am patiently waiting for 10.5.2 update, I will see if it fixes anything or gives slightest hope and if it doesn't, I will do my first OS downgrade since Atari 800XL DOS 3.0 back in 1985.
I don't like to post bugs to public but I have seen some idiots modded down (using overrated censor) some posts making sense here.
Vista? I have used it for 3 days, I haven't seen major issues but it was a professional developer machine.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
I would agree if Vista had come out in 2003, or maybe even 2005. But I would hope that after 6 years, the biggest software company could come out with more than minor improvements, especially after all the Longhorn hypefest.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Unless there is a massive MS conspiracy, these people have used Leopard and they are posting it to a Mac only website:
http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=2007121710540526
There are so many bugs to report that we hardly get feedback from Apple when we report issues. We are being still good customers and reporting them and patiently keep BETA TESTING this paid OS. I am personally understanding to the fact that Leopard is more like OS XI (11) , Apple have taken very advanced steps to future especially enterprise/business. It doesn't change the fact that this version of OS is horribly buggy, looks like rushed out of door just to make couple of loudmouth Mac trolls happy.
Nobody is astroturfing, discussions.apple.com does not respond to my IP for weeks, it barely handles the load of feedback/disaster reports.
Also he has taken enough "overrated" beating from those little fascist slashdotter mods IMHO, they couldn't dare to flamebait -1 him since they know overrated is not meta moderated.
It doesn't fix Leopard issues though.
One of my favorite books. Though the terminology is becoming quaint -- secretaries, typewriters and listings!
So now, it's both a nostalgic look back into the early days of software development, as well as a warning to future developers...
As much as I hate the OS, Vista is the most disappointing product of 2006. It wasn't released this year, it was released last year.
I'm curious to hear why people like the ribbon. Is it because it is something new and different, or doest it really improve productivity? Other than it removing all the little ridiculous Microsoft buttons from the top of the screen, what does it accomplish?
Cue fanboi moderation but it's true - 10.5 sucks mightily.
...my brother-in-law knows a guy who heard someone say that she thought that Vista wasn't that bad.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
I recall PC World sucking the tit of Microsoft and espousing the wonders of MS Vista before it came out. Looks like they're backtracking. Guess they still haven't learned the lesson of not hyping a product before they have a chance to try it. I don't buy a word they say about anything good or bad for any product.
This conversation brings up a bigger issue. What's with the Windows shortcut keys in general over the past 12 years, anyway? Why are some shortcuts the "alt" key, yet others are the "ctrl" key? Why are some "shortcuts" buried two or three levels deep with no way to implement them from the top layer, sometimes requiring a "ctrl" key shortuct followed by an "alt" key? ...just a peeve of mine, and yet another example of how Microsoft just doesn't get it.
But the whole argument with ribbons is the same as QWERTY v DVORAK. If we all abanonded QWERTY, imagine the hell that would follow, even though DVORAK is more efficient.
Just because there's a status quo doesn't mean that it's efficient, let alone the most efficient system possible. What Microsoft, as well as many other groups, like GNOME and Apple, are doing is trying to find something more efficient than what is out there now. I think it's a great movement. All of the fogies out there, you can stick with Lotus Notes and DOS for all I care. What I'm looking for is some form of progression.
Microsoft Halo doesn't need Windows Vista; it's also available for Xbox or Xbox 360. Nor will any Animal Crossing, Mario Kart, or Super Smash Bros. game be likely to require Windows Vista. The closest thing to a Windows version requirement for games on consoles that I've seen is the requirement of Windows XP (and not Windows 2000) to use Nintendo's USB Wi-Fi adapter ($40), but a cheap wireless B/G router (also $40) works around that problem handily.
So this narrows it down to PC-exclusive games that need DirectX 10. I am not convinced that those will come out in the next three years because nowadays, many PC-exclusive games are either MMORPGs or games from smaller studios, which need all the customers they can get.
Right on the spot!
And for developers, Leopard has managed to break installation of, like, 90% oss projects out there!
Which means that either Apple:
1) Didn't bother to test their new OS with any open source apps.
2) Deliberately broke the install to give an advantage to apple-oss-ware.
I've been telling people I "don't do Windows" for years, and have kept almost all personal PC maintenance favors away despite having a degree in Computer Science. You just now figured out to leave the riffraff to themselves? The sheer joy of telling PC users to fix it themselves makes the learning curve of Linux worthwhile.
And so nothing ever needs fixing under Linux? I'm not sure what your point is here.
Back in the days of DOS almost every new version was denounced by users of the previous version (except users of 4.0 who couldn't wait to upgrade)
When Windows 2 and 3 came out, they were both denounced as "glorified menu systems that used up half the computers resources, I'll just stick with DOS, thanks"
When Windows 95 came out, many of peoples old DOS programs didn't work in it and it was hard to find drivers.
Windows 98 and active desktop got tons of bad press, I'll never forget the hilarious South park (possible nsfw) that summed it up so nicely.
When Windows XP was still young, many users and especially gamers latched onto Windows 98 with a death grip saying things like "M$ can take Windows 98 away from me when they can pry it from my cold dead hands"
So here we are again with Windows Vista. I doubt M$ or it's employees care if the general public likes Vista right now or not, I'm sure they just assume people are naïve to be afraid of change even in the face of (what they consider to be) innovation, and that we will eventually come around because we always do.
I recently bought a Gateway laptop (2Gb RAM, T7400 CPU, 200Gb 7200rpm HDD) with Vista Ultimate for under $1000. I figured it was a great deal since Vista Ultimate was $300 list by itself and I'd have an opportunity to test drive Microsoft's latest. Oops. I primarily use WinXP SP2 as a workstation/gaming system with Linux doing all my home networking chores. A bit of background, I'm an MCSE and RHCE with 10 years of IT experience (majority in web hosting).
...... Forget it. I've simply had enough.
I've had nothing but problems with Vista and ended up installing Fedora Core 8 and WinXP instead. To be fair, FC8 gave me a little trouble too (wireless) but I was able to solve it without spending $60 for a technical support call. Now that my FC8 problem is resolved, it just WORKS. I find it offensive that Microsoft wants *me* to pay for problems with their broken O/S.
Between file sharing problems between XP and Vista (easily fixed but I'm stunned), severe performance degradation over XP or Linux, random system freezes, a Windows Security patch that renders the system inoperable (that M$ keeps forcing), annoying and repeated harassing prompts and DRM stuff and
Vista Ultimate is a $300 expense that I will never personally make. With the exception of eye candy, Vista offers absolutely ZERO over XP from a user's perspective. My next expense will be a dedicated gaming system when XP is no longer a viable gaming platform.
Fortunately, Gateway offers XP drivers for my laptop on their website so I wasn't forced to hunt. Since you didn't have this luxury? I will never buy a product from HP again.
-Brian
- Brian
... You'll be out of work in three years.
Interesting that despite Vista's high score on the low list, not too many people have noticed OS X 10.5 on there as well. But one of the main reasons for it being on the list should have taken no one by surprise: new versions of OS X always have nasty bugs that affect a few scattered people and make big headlines. In fact, it's not just limited to Apple's operating systems, but rather is a key part of the Apple Product Cycle. The company's products are usually quite good, but it's always worth letting the early adopters try them first.
I have to agree completely. Is everyone suffering from some sort of collective, selective amnesia? Does anyone besides me remember what XP was like in SP0? Having owned Vista (Home Premium 64-bit) for about a month and a half, (OEM edition because I'm not such a fool as to pay $400 for it) I've turned off the constant confirmation requests, and with proper care and maintenance, I've experienced not a single system crash except when overclocking. All told I've spent about twenty minutes getting compatibility issues sorted out. I'm not that worried about my benchmarks, but with 4 gigs of RAM, I don't think I'm taking much of a hit over 64-bit XP anyway. DX10 sure is pretty, though. In the end, Vista is, at the least, much less hideous out of the box than XP was. I think we can all agree on that. Does anyone here not run XP to look just like 2000?
I dunno. I have one machine running Vista, upgraded from XP. It "just works".
I have one maching "running" (if you want to call it that) Leoptard. It "just doesn't work".
Guess which one I'm more disappointed with? Guess which one is a bigger flop? Guess which one should have never been coded, much less released?
Well several magazines have said the iPhone is the best product of the year. And PC Mag names Vista as the worse product of the year. Perhaps the Universe is not as baddly out of wack as we thought.
Think Deeply.
"Unlike Vista which has some backwards problems with some programs, the color TV would play the old B&W movies just fine." Oh, with Vista I agree, my problem was with the list and inclusion of things like office 2007 (which I think is good, but only problem is that people are so used to the old one, that they find it difficult with the new menu's)..
They didn't write either Vista or the article about it. Did PC World beat them to the punch?
Aw, what's the matter, little boy? Did that mean, nasty person disagree with you?
Why don't you run home to mommy, so she can kiss your boo-boo and make it all better.
I'll be the first to say that Windows Vista hasn't been the best thing ever... However, your comments point out that each step in the evolutionary process is helpful. Sometimes the mistakes are as important as the successes. As long as MS learns from what has gone wrong with Vista, continues to improve it (SP1, SP2, etc.) I don't think the problems are earth shattering. Also, if we look at each step in the process, I'm comfortable saying I would never go backwards. As soon as I could go to 2000 at my organization I did. As soon as XP was out I started upgrading and learning that OS. I've been running Vista for almost 12 months now and I don't think I'd go back. I haven't deployed it throughout my company yet, but I'm working out the kinks and I'll be fine by the time I deploy it throughout the organization. If I remember correctly, the first 12 months of using any update to Windows has been a pain. To expect this change to be different would be extremely naive. If we were to guess in 3 years, could we imagine people still clinging to XP? It doesn't seem likely. Perhaps Vista will turn out to be a bit like Windows ME... Even if it does, I'll be happy if it leads to something like Windows 2000. Now the question for me is not how is Vista going to work... It is, how will Windows server 2008 be?
If you are never moderated, do you really exist?
While I concur, that's easily explained by the Stockholm syndrom. Let's get back in time ; MS-DOS 1.0 through 3.1 were complete POS. DOS 3.2 was finally apt enough right at the time DRI ultimately bit the bullet, leaving MS the only game in town for professionnal OS. Subsequent versions of DOS were POS too, but under pressure from the gaming industry, bridged the gap to bring the PC world alive out of the amigatari era ; finally, DOS 6.2 ran correctly enough when the home gaming industry parted with non-PC manufacturers. Provided you had 7 or more config.sys sections to launch everything you wished (lim-ems or xms, everyone ? Dos UMB or not ?)
We can draw the same timeline for windows. Win 1, 286, 386, 3.0, were complete failures ; not until 3.1 was windows barely tolerable, provided you add wing32 and a couple of things. In the 'NT' line, things were about the same until NT4. Then came 95 and 2K that weren't big hits but stabilised enough for day to day use after shitloads of service packs, the last one being win 98sp2 for 95. Let's count Me as a market testbed for some user features due to enter XP. Finally, comes XP, stable enough after 7 years of serious consumer abuse.
And now, Vista. So let me look at my crystal ball : in about a 5~7 years time frame, after countless SPs, bugs, consumer trampling over and smothering, Vista will be EOLed, and we will gather again to mourn the gone OS while bashing the new Redmond's bloatware.
Well, I won't be playing that silly game, because I left the boat around 1996 for a slackware 3 and never felt compelled to look back.
I have used the memorized shortcut keys and they totally interrupt my workflow (because of the help messages you describe). Why couldn't they just have had an option "Use old keystrokes" and gotten rid of the hesitation? Then folks could take their time getting used to the new keys. At the same time I do applaud Microsoft for a willingness to break with the past, however misguided. I know there are lots of reasonable people who do like the ribbon and the new approach to menus.
Stepping back from my personal issues with this, I find it amazing that every few years Microsoft rolls out upgrades of marginal incremental value to millions of users, and these millions of people have to endure hours of installation, relearning, document translations, etc. The cost of the software is the least of it. Personally I would be perfectly happy with Office 97. The upgrades are a *huge* social cost, and I just don't see it as worth paying, except in the narrow sense of keeping Microsoft running, so they can do it to us all over again three years later.
The good news is that I spend relatively little time in Word. The better news is that I have VBA-intensive Excel spreadsheets that I ported to StarBasic last week. I finally see the glimmerings of a way out.
Just to expand on the "Complexity isn't a good thing." statement a bit ....
.BAT files with the same syntax they had in the MS-DOS era, for example. Meanwhile, just about every other OS on the market uses FAR more powerful batch/scripting languages, because they have no concerns about tying them to legacy MS-DOS methods.)
Microsoft is constantly trying to make their products "Bigger! Better! More!". The problem is, they ALSO insist on inter-twining and "integrating" everything with everything else that came before. (As perhaps the oldest example of this, every single OS they've made STILL has remnants of MS-DOS in them, in some shape or form. You can still create and run
The complexity just keeps increasing for both their developers AND the end-users.
Just last night, I fought for hours (unsuccessfully) to correct problems with someone's Windows XP system who subscribed to "MSN Premium" services. Apparently, Microsoft finally decided to abandon the "MSN Messenger" client that was included (and subsequently update-patched via Windows Updates), in favor of an all new "MSN Live Messenger" client. In order to roll this out, they developed a whole new program called "Live Installer" - which lets a user check-mark various components they want or don't want and then auto-installs the appropriate files. Well, in typical Microsoft style - this "Live Installer" seems to have a lot of issues. On this lady's PC, it crashed about 3/4ths. of the way through installing the Live Messenger, and rendered the whole "MSN Explorer" web browser unusable. After much digging, I found a way to manually delete the whole thing - so Live Installer could get a fresh shot at installing, determining what was there, and re-downloading the messenger client. Turned out though, I must not have deleted quite enough. It kept insisting the Messenger component was already installed, despite it not being there at all! Then, MSN Explorer refused to log the lady on - because it kept telling me I needed to "visit http://msn.messenger.com/ and download Live Messenger first!" Argh!!
That's like a mechanic saying "I will never fix 2008 GM cars." Millions of people run Vista. If you won't help them, someone else will. You should pray that your company never adopts Vista or one of its children.
If the IT pros of the past decade had refused to support Windows ME, we would have seen a lot more unemployed IT pros. Volunteer work is your own business, but when it comes to putting food on the table, many of us don't have the luxury of OS snobbery.
The fact is that most of us simply ***DON'T CARE*** about wasting valuable CPU cycles on redundant eye-candy. Five years after XP came out, it runs pretty damn fast on the most recent PCs, can be stripped down to run even faster, runs all of the applications and games most people want to use and is therefore good enough. Those techies like me who want to tweak an OS and get better security and stability go off and use Linux (I myself am now an 80% Linux and 20% Windows XP user now).
The Mac users need to accept that Macs and OS X are a niche market. Joe Public just wants a PC like his friends have to surf the Internet and play games on whilst the techies see Macs as locked down machines that you just have to accept you cannot fiddle with and optimise - I have no idea whether that's actually true or not because in 30 years of playing with computers, I've own everything from ZX Spectrums, Commodore 64s and Amigas to PCs and have ***NEVER*** felt the least bit inclined to even look at what a Mac can bring to my computing experience. Macs just are not on my roadmap, or indeed just about everyone else I know at work or socially.
These days, Linux on a PC does most of what I need and XP is great for firing up the occasional game or application that I can't run on Linux - and, yes, I need to constantly tweak XP (and Linux), run virus and spyware checkers and occasionally reinstall it. But I do understand its weaknesses and used in conjunction with Linux, does everything I need computers to do.
So flame me for my final comment but, in my experience, most Mac users are elitist people who have the need to be different but cannot be bothered to invest the time and effort in learning a new OS like Linux.
If you like your Mac and OS X then good luck to you but I'm sure if it became the number one computing platform, you'd be out there looking for an alternative just to be different to everyone else.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
> And when the fastest Vista notebook...is an Apple MacBook Pro, there's
> something deeply wrong with the universe.
And when the greatest morality by a supernatural being was the Devil opening humanity's eyes to good and evil, there's something deeply wrong with the universe. What's your point?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
And your post wins the longest serie of "but"s of 2007!
Rethinking email
I was going to say that they hate everything and try to prove it by pointing out that Apple got hit twice until I actually read their comments on iPhone and Leopard. Dang it. I'm an Apple fan, but I've got to admit the articles are honest, fair, and accurate. Apple, get with it, man, you're embarrassing your fans.
Wasn't this the same kind of crap that went on with XP
> This DRM complaint thing - what's the deal? Vista doesn't prevent you from doing anything XP will let you do. They added the ability to play restricted formats, which simply isn't included at all in XP. If you don't like HD-DVD playback, then don't use it! It's not like MS could have offered it without DRM (and not been sued to high hell). I can still rip DVDs and CDs with aplomb.
:]
And they added extra protections for those formats that impact any ordinary things you're doing in the mean time. It sounds like you're defending it because it's only got "a little" spam in it, but I don't want any spam at all.
Also, I think they went above and beyond here. They eventually want to control the restricted formats, after all, not just play them.
> Its true, but as an IT professional I need to stay current on MS technology, or risk unemployment. At home I use Linux and OSX primarily, though I do play the occasional game on Vista. Hardware though? I don't think Windows restricts your hardware options too much... most stuff works on other OSes too.
Do you not remember winmodems at all? Have you never seen the memo on ACPI where Bill Gates himself wrote that they should define a "standard" that's as hard for Linux to implement as possible? As for "staying current or risking unemployment", well, I admin a line of MS-DOS 6 machines. Yes, you read that correctly. Somehow, this reminds me of the planet ruled by lizards, where it "honestly doesn't occur to them" that they could vote for (support) something else. And while winmodems are all but dead, ACPI troubles (crash on suspend) still plague Linux. Those are by no means the only examples. And when they can do things like this, they will. That's what I hold against them.
> Yeah Windows is pricey at retail, but OEM copies aren't that bad (similar to OSX pricing). I agree, though. I got my copy through our MSDN subscription of course so it doesn't apply to me.
"Not so bad" is hardly a ringing endorsement
> Their standards (un-) support is extremely frustrating, probably my #1 complaint. Also why I have to keep a Windows machine around - to find out how to get everything else to work with it. Did you know they broke CIFS again in Vista/Server 2008? Yup.
It's deliberate. That's what's so galling.
> I use Linux because it's so functional, OSX because its enjoyable, and Windows because I have to.
Now this sounds about right.
It does seem perfectly reasonable to give ribbons a try. But why can't I turn them off if I don't want them? Why isn't there a menu option to give me the old-fashioned menu bar? Why does every Office user in the world *have* to participate in this experiment? (And they do have to participate, because Microsoft has once again created incompatabilities that ensure widespread upgrades.) To follow up with your analogy, suppose that Vista only worked with Dvorak keyboards. Would that be a good thing?
Microsoft has hired some of the smartest people on the planet. No one can claim that they couldn't have engineered more flexibility into the UI.
Personally I always liked context menus (the box that comes up when you right click). Great idea. Microsoft's implementation was always half-hearted and inconsistent. I expect to see "ribbon-drift" in the next version. Microsoft just isn't good at ruthlessly consistent implementations.
Thank you for the great tip. It will help me out, but I still have too many programs so they don't all fit. Even though I'm running 1200x1600.
Thank you!
Deeq,
If you find it can you do me a favor and reply to this message? Thank you!
I hope that all of this is the result of orderlies at the mental hospital not monitoring your computer time carefully enough. I'd be concerned if you were out in public, because I think I'd really regret being there when you snap.
You can get the XP drivers disc for their new laptops if you call HP and pay a fee for it (about 10 bucks). Not sure why the don't make it available online. The HP laptops we have been ordering (6715b's) at the office have been coming with Vista, and so I immediately tried to find a solution to revert back to XP.
-Xoltri
And you know that this is really Bill G's present to his wife, so that we'll all forget what a turkey Bob was ...
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
A: This. Who care about this article...does everyone not already know that Vista is disappointing at best?
"Know but never fear the consequences of your actions."
Wrong. that's idiotic. When the OS does that, it has to then free up those resources when a user application requests them. That means that data it caches data in ram is either pushed in to swap, or is dumped; makes things really responsive.
How about making sure that the CPU always runs at 100% when nothing else is using it while we're at it. CPU cycles that aren't used are useless.
Imagine the poor guy who decided to finally upgrade and went from ME to Vista!
Vista has basically the same functionality as windows 3.1. Its a graphical program launcher, thats all.
Yet vista takes 11GB of disk space, uses nearly 1GB of ram and upto 30% of my CPU time even when I haven't even launched an app yet. Vista uses more resources than most of my apps.
I mean what the fuck is it doing?
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/apple-censor-leopard,review-1020.html http://www.tomsguide.com/us/mac-osx,review-1019-2.html http://www.tomsguide.com/us/apple-osx-leopard,review-1016.html http://www.tomsguide.com/us/leopard-osx-problems,review-1028.html
I'm sure more can be found, but here are a few that I have read (my apologies that they are all Tom's Hardware, but these were the first I could think of off the top of my head). As for the astroturfing, I'm writing this from Fedora Core 7 thank you very much, on which I pretty much do all of my computing.
Fear the penguin.
> The only possible explanation is that MS is sitting in the background, threatening to flog them mightily if they dared not do everything possible to push this steaming pile known as Vista upon us.
more likely they didn't test any XP configurations on the hardware so it's officially unsupported.
Leopard might have not been one of the greatest OS updates, out of the box, but it quite possibly was the most quick to improve. Within a month, the first point update fixed most of the major issues, and other companies have been faster to update their software than I've ever experienced before. Tiger was a nightmare, taking up to 6 months, in some cases, to get major software devs online.
Every new OS or software package will have its bugs, but Leopard has surprised me by how fast those have been corrected. I can't say the same with Vista, which I use at work, and is rotten to the dual core.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
I thought it was traditional to link to the first page of an article, not the last page. This just makes the submitter look like somebody who just likes to gloat at Microsoft's incompetence. It also ruins the thread of the article.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
A large number of devs *are* leaving Microsoft. There's a group called Seattle Tech Startups here; every month, at least 1/3 of the attendees are Microsoft employees, who show up to figure out what else they can do. (Amazon also has a decent contingent present; nobody from Google ever seems to appear, though.)
Of course, they probably don't tell mgmt all their reasons when they leave; I don't think anybody "burns bridges" like that when they leave a company. No matter how much you hate them, they were willing to pay you well, and if your startup bombs, it's nice to know you have a place you can go back to easily.
You know that for all the fuckups they make, Microsoft must be doing some things right, even if those things are not what we
Here we are, always saying how the switch from the old Office menus to OpenOffice would be so easy and wonderful. Microsoft hears this too. They laugh, because they know today OpenOffice does not have the functionality for most business uses.
But then someone in the room says "But it (OpenOffice) is getting better every day."
Microsoft's solution: Create a new UI to their Office suite BEFORE OpenOffice becomes close to feature parity.
So WHEN OpenOffice reaches feature parity, all the business users will now be used to the Ribbon, and OpenOffice will lose again, because then it WILL require retraining.
I use Office2007 at home (got it free from MS for attending their developer release party), and Office2003 at work (just upgraded from Office97 in the last year). I enjoy using 2007 more.
I also have a Dell E1505 with Vista and have had no issues. Sure copies were slow at first, but updates have sped that way up. It recognizes all my cameras and other hardware with no issues. I've used DVDDecrypter and AutoGK to make backup copies of movies for travel, both new (Transformers) and old, with no problems ripping, merging, or burning.
I know we are supposed to hate Microsoft here, but Vista is an improvement over XP and will continue to be refined, just like XP was refined in its release against W2K.
And the Ribbon....Microsoft's way to stay one step ahead of OpenOffice.
If OpenOffice does not reach feature parity with MSOffice BEFORE the masses convert to the Ribbon interface, they will once again be playing catchup in a game they have already lost.
Indeed, two or three fuckwad asshat groupthink mods have modded you "-1 Troll" for daring to civilly express the opinion that Vista is not all that bad in your experience. Good old Slashdot.
No, anyone who talks about how great a shit sandwich tastes is either a tool or a troll. And Vista is a shit sandwich.
Of course, my new machine is a Core2 Quad 2.4GHz (OC'd to 3.2GHz) with 4GB RAM and four 250GB hard drives in a RAID10 array, so there's probably little out there that could choke it.
Naturally. Find a work around for your driver issue and upgrade it to XP. You'll notice the difference.
It makes a lot of sense to segment the Operating system into Home and Business.
Yes, just as it made sense for Microsoft to charge more for multiple processors when the code difference is a few lines in the registry. Client/Server segmentation does make sense. Home/Business, not so much.
That's fine - to each his own. It's just that all the popular tech press (and even some non-tech press, like the Wall Street Journal via Walt Mossberg) is ambivalent at best of Redmond's newest. It's not just Slashdot that's calling it a dog.
But on that same coin, Linux and MacOS have been getting their fair share of extra processor-eating-eye-candy, too, so what's the big deal here?The big deal is that OS X and Linux are using the graphics card as a coprocessor to enhance performance. You get some shiny effects for free or cheap along the way, so developers are throwing those in for those who want it. In many cases the new snazzy displays actually run better than their boring counterparts; they're not using it to drive hardware sales.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I think XP is the way to go. (Maybe Linux but my skills are week, BeOS and Mac OS 9.5 are better, but they are gathering dust.) I warn people of Vista and to stick with XP. For a new computer user I am tempted to say XP, but they know nothing, so they have to learn at the beginning of any OS that they use. If you are learning from scratch you might as well learn the latest generation that is going to be around for a while, so new users should choose Vista over XP. (Yes it's painful) If you know windows you should wait till the latest generation gets a little older and more stable. If Grandma wants a computer and has never used one what OS do I get? XP, yes but grandma will have to learn vista in the future. Linux, In my opinion if you ask about Linux you probably shouldn't use it. (Especially my grandma) MacOS, Yes. Does it have what you need? I could see issues with Work software or Games. Vista, If you are learning computers get a mac, if you know computers avoid this for a year or 4.
Didn't Zune get number 1 last year? What's for 2008? Silverlight?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
In all the lab tests I ahve seen, the bests the tables qwere marginally better but not enough to warrent an upgrade.
When I say seen, I mean walk into the lab and look at measured results tested over time.
That said, Next time I'm down there I will specifically see if they tested the TC4400.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The Skin
The program.
Its a pay program though, but ya know.
Naturally. Find a work around for your driver issue and upgrade it to XP. You'll notice the difference. Fuckin' tard. What part of "not saturating any of the machine's bottlenecks" did you not understand? It works nigh-instantaneously already. There's really no room for improvement.
Conclusion: the Empire squashes the Federation like a bug. Accept it.
See, it's dumbfucks like you that can't tell the difference between arguable fact ("anyone who talks about how great a shit sandwich tastes is...a troll") and opinion ("Vista is a shit sandwich") that fuck up the moderation system. In reality, it's shit-sucking toads like you that are the trolls. And, of course, foul mouthed asshole like me. The difference is that I just call people names rather than try to silence them.
:)
It is a fact. A bloated, massive downgrade in performance for little to no benefit in return is a shit sandwich anyway you slice it...cock gobbler.
Fuckin' tard. What part of "not saturating any of the machine's bottlenecks" did you not understand? It works nigh-instantaneously already.
It's not about bottlenecks, it's about improving performance, dumbass. Is a 500 hp Mustang Cobra pretty sweet? Of course. But a 750 hp Saleen S7 is even sweeter. With Vista, you're trading performance (and a lot of disk space) for what? A pretty GUI? Whoop de fuckin do.
Lot's of things need fixing under Linux. Same as every other OS. But I don't get aunts, uncles, my dentist, neighbor, etc. bugging me to fix their Windows crap. I don't mind fixing my own shit. I just don't want to get asked to fix everybody else's shit.
Its not the present result, but the present intentions.. Consider: Three Rings for the Slashdotters under the sky, Seven for the .Net-lords in their halls of stone, Nine for Mortal Anti-Microsoft Men doomed to die, One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne In the Land of Microsoft where the Service Packs lie. One Token Ring to rule them all, One Token Ring to find them,One Token Ring to bring them all together and in the Microsoft darkness bind them In the Land of Microsoft Vista where the Buggy-Bugs lie.-- J R R Tolkien, amended and perverted, previously posted and re-posted here.
Look at the number of those bound to XP, Microsoft intends that they will eventually fall to Vista.
#11: Slashdot mod system succumbs to reverse psychology.
The early Macs made computing intuitive because all you had to do was look around in the menus and figure out what they did. You learned tricks and shortcuts that remain in place to this day.
The early Macs were mostly intuitive. There was only one thing I found non-intuitive that I needed help on; How to eject a floppy. I didn't want to delete the data, I just wanted to eject the disk. Throwing data you wanted to keep in the trash was not intuitive. Other than that, the Mac was very intuitive.
The truth shall set you free!
Still waiting on that evidence, champ. Or would you prefer to continue screaming your dishonesty?
Click on the radio button that says 'Classic Start menu'.
Click OK.
There you go.
I dont know what to say about the start menu opening slowly. Your desktop is faster than my laptop (though my laptop has 4gb) and I dont experience that.
I'm running Vista Business x64 though
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
IMO, the main reason for Vista was to shove DRM down your throat.
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
Hey there old friend from Albany... mawahaha. I happened upon this comment you posted. As a user of both XP, Vista and Fedora... I must say there are very few things in Vista that have made me attempt to believe that its not worth the money... (Granted I did get Vista for free with my MSDN account so free is better than paying anything.). Anyway, I like Vista, I really do. Its not good for a development environment, but beyond that, games are amazing on it. XP... Well, everything just works. XP had its issues when it first came out. (Remember I r workededed at Worsted Buyz at that time) But you were right on 98 as far as "worth" it in upgrading... ME you could throw away after giving your donation to M$. Windows 2000 vs NT 4.1 was definately worth it though man. You know that. But I am ranting and have no idea what I am saying now... have fun Mr. DM.
-- Josh
"Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me!" - Pete Conrad