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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.'"
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
... 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
Parent is troll. Do not click link.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
M$ is losing it's temper with people laughing at Vista this way.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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.
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
it's called irony
The iPhone doesn't seem to be disappointing to those who actually have one. According to this survey an unprecedented 82% of owners were very satisfied. However I can understand how those who were expecting the Jesus Phone might be bitter. It's not perfect, but it is unprecedented as a pocket internet device. iPhone web usage already exceeds Windows mobile, etc by a wide margin.
No, I actually have been posting that from what I've seen at school, it wasn't being adopted. My university recently joined the Microsoft Developer Network Academic Allience (MSDNAA) and all CS students could download free copies of Vista Business edition. Many installed, but as I reported, I didn't know of even a single version that lasted. Every single one went back to either WinXP and/or Linux. I didn't go so far as to suggest MS would end up a laughing stock, but I did say it seemed to fail.
Maybe because other "more secure" OSes are faster?
Indeed, I've been using the 64 bit version of Home Premium for 2 months (should be the most incompatible version) but it works great and the aggressive prefetching works wonders. As long as you have 2GB of RAM, a decent DX9 graphics card and a decent processor (dual core probably helps) Vista is much faster than xp in daily use. Benchmarks show otherwise, but that 5-10% difference isn't something you are going to notice.
All your base are belong to Wii.
If you buy a song from iTunes, you can cut it up into ring tones as much as you like.
That doesn't work for those iTunes songs that are still DRM-protected. There is no *legal way (according to the DMCA) to convert such songs to ringtones without buying them again or going through the cumbersome process of burning them to CD and then ripping them back to MP3 before editing. Also, Apple has tried several times to block users wanting to put in their own home-made ringtones.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
No way to auto install security updates w/o also auto installing all other updates.
No built in support for hd-dvd or bluray playback, even with Microsoft's own hd-dvd hardware.
The price.
No support for unencrypted digital cable tuners in media center.
No good visual configuration options for REALLY BIG displays (I'm on a 47" at 1080p and it is always difficult getting the fonts balanced for readability and usability) Now, most of the issues exist in xp and linux as well. I'll reserve my final judgment for vista until it gets a bit past sp1.
P.S. I'm not an MS fanboy nor an MS apologist, I just call them like I see them. I am a professional Solaris/Linux system administrator with over a decade of nearly exclusive use of linux. I think that there just really isn't much serious innovation left to be had on the desktop, but vista makes a pretty decent living room OS...
-*The above statement is printed entirely on recycled electrons*-
Casting pointers to ints is generally bad practice, but there are situations where it's perfectly legitimate to do so. A couple I regularly run into is shoehorning pointers through an interface that can take either a pointer or an integer (and can't take a union), and bit-twiddling. (Some of us actually need to treat pointers as non-opaque values, though it's technically not standard-compliant to do so. But most of us aren't coding for some weird 36-bit machine with strange pointer formats, so it doesn't really impact the 32-bit/64-bit discussion.)
The recommended types for this are intptr_t (an integer type required to be wide enough to cast to and from a pointer without loss of information), and ptrdiff_t (an integer type required to be wide enough to hold the difference in value between two pointers).
As mentioned by another poster, stdint.h (combined with proper typedefs; you should still never use the stdint types directly) is a great solution to the "how wide is this type" conundrum. The proper technique is to define a header somewhere with a typedef based on the semantics of a given type. Instead of describing variables as being an "int" or a "long" or a "uint32_t", use typedefs like "BeanCounter_t" and then assign a primitive type in one place. (You can do the same thing with macros, of course, although I wouldn't recommend it when you can just use typedef.)
That said, there are also legitimate cases where it's fine to use the naked types. Generally, if a variable isn't going to hold values over a couple thousand, it doesn't matter what integer type it is. (Most loop counters come to mind.) Using typedefs is ideal for maintainability in many cases, but is also overkill in many other cases.
Did you by any chance mis-configure the K menu? It is way easier to find a specific application in KDE than in the Windows start menu, because the applications are grouped by application type (internet, multimedia, graphics, games, ...) and the applications are listed with their description. Example: K->Internet->Web browser (Konqueror). The menu is configurable and you can choose between "name only" (that's what you have), "name - description", "description only" and "description (name)".
You can still run Win32 apps on Win64.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WOW64
It's quite efficient too
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1857484,00.asp
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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.
Mine here measure their uptime in fraction of a power maintence interval :) That's normaly less than a year. And my Linuxes measures uptime on fraction of kernel updates interval.
Windows measures it on fraction of a week.
Rethinking email
You have apparently managed to seriously screw up your menu. I suggest you go back to the defaults, which are much, much easier to use that what you describe. Look at my current K menu (Kubuntu 7.10):
At the top level, we have three sections:
The Applications sections contains:
The only thing I think could possibly be improved there is perhaps the "Settings" and "System" -- it's not always clear which one I'm going to find the setting I'm looking in.
Now to address the core of your complaint, let's look at the contents of one of the categories. I'll pick "Multimedia":
How much clearer and simpler can it be?
Of course, this being KDE, it's configurable. If you don't find the application names useful, you can turn them off and have only the description. In fact, there are four options:
The second is the default, obviously.
GNOME handles things differently, of course, but uses the same concept. Programs are categorized sensibly, and then both names and descriptions are available.
So, please tell us, just how can this be improved? And in what way could either the Windows or OS X approaches possibly be better?
You seem to have chosen to criticize one of the things that the major Linux desktops get most right.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Dada, for you who don't know art, is anti-art art, or at least anti-art-establishment art.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest