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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.'"
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
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,...
Vista would be fine if MS was selling it for $10 a pop.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Personally, I couldn't care less about being locked to a single provider, mostly because AT&T/Cingular is the best provider in my area and thus have no reason to switch (I was on Cingular for years before getting an iPhone). I assume by "pay-twice-for-songs" you're referring to ring tones, which couldn't be further from the truth. If you buy a song from iTunes, you can cut it up into ring tones as much as you like. More than that, you can "easily" make your own ring tones out of any audio you like without having to hack your phone at all:
- Use an audio editor like Audacity to pull a 30 second or less chunk of music from your audio file. Save this as an mp3
- Import the mp3 into iTunes
- Use iTunes to convert the mp3 to AAC
- Rename the new
.m4a file to .m4r
- Re-import the
.m4r file into iTunes and it will go into the Ringtones folder, which can then be synced to your iPhone
"Proprietary, locked-down, no-3rd party apps" is three ways of phrasing a single complaint, and that's changing early next year. In the meantime, you can write useful webapps or jailbreak your phone. While not ideal, Apple has committed to providing an SDK for third-party development, which is a change from their initial plans (from the start they always planned the iPhone to be locked down, rather than being a more open platform like Windows Mobile).I'm far from an Apple fanboy, but I like my iPhone. I bought it knowing exactly what it was and was not. Then again, I also actually like Vista and don't feel that it's the biggest disappointment of 2007. From the list, I also like Office 2007 and my Zune, so perhaps I really don't have any credibility in this discussion :).
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.
If I understand the whole 32/64 bit situation with Microsoft correctly, the 64bit model that MS chose (LLP64) may cause some issues beyond simple driver replacement. LLP64 creates a new integer type called long long which is 64bit and keeps long as 32bit. LP64 (Unix version) redefines long as 64bit. The advantage of LLP64 is that overflow will not occur since there are two distinct types but casting a pointer to a long will not work. The opposite would be true for LP64.
The end result is that software for LP64 software needs to be ported by being recompiled to either 32bit or 64bit systems but for LLP64, the software needs to be specifically written for either 32 or 64bit. I'm not an expert here. Can someone else comment?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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'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
Also as a developer, I was informed that the neighbor kid I used to laugh at when he ran around the yard in his diapers is now employed at MS. My first thought of course was, I would kill for whatever pay package and benefits he has. My second thought was, not in a million years would I work for a company where everything they ever did well enough to feel proud of was thrown under the bus by the people in charge.
They could choose to do the right thing, and spend a little more money here and there to make the applications and systems and whatever positively shine. Instead, the business drivers want to do whatever they can to promote the monopoly, lock-in, and anything proprietary. I get the feeling that there is actually animosity between the MS research branch (they have some awesome stuff) and the business drivers. The developers would be on the side of research (3/4 Utopians, as opposed to the full Utopians in Research), just tell us what to build and we will make it awesome. The marketing people (1/4 Utopians, who have to take the anti-consumer spew and make something decent out of it) would get their inspiration and direction from the business drivers.
In other words, I would never work at a company where the primary directive of the developers is to make something that is not quite compatible with a standard. That would piss me off every single day I came to work. Let's make an OS with inferior proactive defragmentation, then point people to a third party who sells a defragmentor, Then we put a stripped down version right in the OS, which is just a less-capable version of the third-party one. Let's cap off our most awesome MSVC 6 by including Dinkumware STL headers which are horribly broken, and because of license disputes cannot be updated in a service pack.
Software has bugs, and people make mistakes, but there are a lot more mistakes from MS which are rooted in either extreme short-sightedness or malicious (or selfish to the point of being self-destructive at best) intent.
The best thing that could happen is a large number of devs simply leave, giving as a reason something along the lines of I can't work for a company that makes me implement standards poorly, or I can't work for a company with such a huge disconnect between management and what's actually happening with the code. But the benefits will keep them placid...
I don't hate it. I just never used it yet. I have still Win2K at home and WinXP on my company's laptop. Even though it is labelled 'Windows Vista capable', and my company is actually the maker of the laptop, it never rolled out Windows Vista to its employees.