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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?
Show me a single claim from Apple that says that. Just one will do. Or are you talking about some know-nothing blogger trying to generate click-ads ? In any event, to make the claim, you have to cite your source, otherwise (given that this is slashdot, and you're a known anti-Apple troll) I call bullshit.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
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"
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,...
I think since 2001 every major Apple or Linux annoucement was met by something along the lines of "Longhorn can already do that in a better way". I was hoping there would be something behind the hype and atleast one improvement over MS Server 2003 and a few more improvements over XP. People really do expect more than a hobby operating system now and a suprising number of people are already being hit by the rather stupid limit of around 3GB of memory in 32 bit Vista. They are upgrading to Vista in the first place to get suppport for new hardware to better run their software and in the same year as release there is a very narrow window between inadequate memory and the top limit with a very poor way of handling what is in resident memory unless it is a machine dedicated to a very small number off application. A kludge like superfetch actually makes sense when so little memory can be adressed and most of it would normally be filled after boot with a lot of applications that may not be used in that session.
Once there are more drivers the 64 bit Vista may be a good option but the 32 bit version is a step backwards for Microsoft in my opinion. My opinion is coloured by having to deal with Vista installed on hardware that is completely inadequate - laptops with slow drives, low memory and sharing memory with graphics hardware that is not capable of handling the effects that got turned on by whoever does the installs.
You're new round here, right? Microsoft pwns the PC vendors. They push Vista, or they get the hose.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
... 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.
The instant pcworld bashes Vista it somehow gains credibility on slashdot I guess :)
You must be new here. The instant anyone bashes Vista it gains credibility on slashdot.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
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.
I like Vista.
I agree with John Gruber. If Apple has a few more "disappointments" like the iPhone next year, it will make its shareholders very, very, happy.
CATS/Diebold '08- All your vote are belong to us!
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 only thing keeping most companies using MS Office is inertia. It would be too much work to retrain people on a new interface with OpenOffice or KOffice or any other alternative. And Microsoft blew that argument to hell when they destroyed the "proven" interface of MS Office. The learning curve to go from MS Office 2003 to MS Office 2007 is *WORSE* than switching to OpenOffice, a point we have made very clear to our bosses where I work with regards to our recent switch to OpenOffice.
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
http://img523.imageshack.us/img523/1267/vistanokx6.jpg
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 +
Sorry, the iExpectation is from Apple.
In the sense of the word as it is actually used, agnostic means that God is unknowable, or more precisely, that one *believes* that God is unknowable.
No, the word agnostic is actually used with the two distinct meanings of personal ignorance and intrinsic unknowability in the same context. They are distinguished when necessary with a qualifier.
WEAK agnosticism: I have no fucking idea who fucked this shit up.
STRONG agnosticism: Nobody has any fucking idea who fucked this shit up.
There is a certain confusion with weak atheism which could (and frequently does) arise, but that is properly reserved for the category of theological noncognitivists,
WEAK atheism: What the fuck do you mean with this God shit?
STRONG atheism: Didn't take any God to fuck this shit up.
which is different again from weak theism.
WEAK theism: Somebody fucked this shit up.
STRONG theism: God fucked this shit up.
An interesting cross-categorical theological belief not easily represented above is
DEISM: God set this shit up and it fucked itself.
And of course, theological Slashdotism,
SOVIET RUSSIA: This shit fucks YOU up!