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158 Pages of Microsoft's Dirty Laundry
KrispyRasher writes "Even internally, Microsoft couldn't agree on what the base requirements to run Vista were, but that didn't stop it from inaccurately promoting the OS as running on some hardware. 158 pages of Microsoft internal emails reveal scandalous truths about the squabbles that took place in the lead up to Vista's launch."
Microsoft execs on Vista problems is an excellent summary of the affair so far.
This class action suit isn't looking too good for Microsoft, I would say (though I'm not a lawyer, fortunately)
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
Even the cancel/allow is perfectly fine for most cases. If you are in the admin group it will ask you for the cancel allow which supposedly runs isolated from other apps so that they can't push the allow button for you. If you're not in the admin group, then it prompts you for admin credentials. Its really not that bad of a system except theres no "yes, and leave me alone for the next few minutes while I actually try to get some stuff done with out this freaking thing harassing me every time I try to change a system setting" option.
Their "service packs" are the 10.5.x updates. Those are free and add features on top of bug fixes. Something Microsoft has promised the Vista Ultimate customers and failed to follow through with. The 10.x updated are the updates you're thinking about, and they're released every couple of years. We just got Leopard after 2-3 years of Tiger. They're not just bug fixes or UI changes, unlike Microsoft, when Apple says "we're going to add a new file system and change the OS in x, y, and z ways, they change them. Vista is XP with a new hat and a STD.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Mplayer has always had dvd sub support...at least, for as long as I can remember, and I remember many years. There are also subtitle OCR programs, though some are better than others, and some aren't very good at all. Even if you don't like the unix ones, virtualdub is very well supported through wine, and has been for, again, as long as I can remember.
I don't know what media player classic is, however, but there are lots of good media player programs for unix, and they all share the same libraries with every other player out there. If you're trying to say "Call me when Ubuntu is Windows XP" you're never going to be satisfied, but Ubuntu does all the things you mention, with the exclusion of XFI, which is a terrible SPU anyway.
Check out page 47 of the PDF. There's a pretty interesting table showing the percentage of crashes attributed to each graphics vendor. Nvidia is way out front, with 25% compared to less than 10% for ATI.
Search first, ask questions later.
Actually, you'll find it's because Aero demands decent pixel shader support to do the blur effect underneath the titlebar (aka, glass). That's the difference between compiz and aero, basically. Aero uses a bunch of pixel shaders, and thus, limits itself as to what cards can do everything. Compiz uses basic transforms (in most cases) instead, and runs on more hardware as a result. (Note, hardware accelerated alpha blending isn't texture-mapped blurring. The latter's a bit more complex)
Which looks better is a matter of subjective opinion. Glass looks nice to me, but then, I only ever have high-end video cards. Some of the compiz effects are nice as well, although quite a few just bring a system to it's knees just as easily as Aero will, and some compiz effects seem fairly pointless. A lot of it is asthetics, although compiz does have some handy ones as well as just visually appealing ones.
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