Before forming such a comprehensive opinion on it, wouldn't it make sense to, y'know, actually take a look at it?
I have all of my Skydrive content saved as D:\Skydrive (on three different machines). If I want to save something to Skydrive, I put it in this directory and it gets synced to the cloud, and thus to the other machines, via a background process (the "app"). I also back up this directory to an external drive just in case - I can do this because it's just a regular directory tree. Why is this such a difficult concept to understand?
Most people that slag Vista on Slashdot do it because of its problems for home use (DRM issues and the like). I agree that implementing Vista in a business environment is problematic - as enterprise architect for the world's largest company in my industry segment, I do have some experience in that area - but upgrading to Vista from XP or Win2000 in a corporate environment involves the same due diligence (app compat testing, driver research, hardware upgrades, etc) as did upgrades to previous upgrades of Windows. A lot of companies upgraded directly from Win95 to XP, and I can guarantee you that they found that XP did not perform acceptably on a 64Mb Pentium-100, and that some applications did not survive the upgrade.
Some poorly-written applications may not work properly on Vista, but that has always been the case. If third-party developers always followed Windows guidelines, Windows wouldn't have to be such a steaming pile of compatibility hacks. But the fact remains that those applications have to be supported - can you imagine what Windows threads on Slashdot would look like if they weren't? - and any new version of Windows that adds significant functionality will break some subset of the Windows application base. Vista does add significant functionality - it natively supports x64 processors, moved most device drivers from kernel mode to user mode to increase stability, has TPM and Bitlocker support (both important for enterprise usage), supports regulation of content on removable drives, etc.
Whether you think it's worth it or not is one issue - whether it's objectively a step backward is another. Complaining because it makes enterprise upgrades difficult is irrelevant; enterprise upgrades are always difficult. If this stuff were easy, many of us would be out of a job.
I've been running Vista 64-bit for over a year. No bluescreens, no incompatible hardware, no problems with media files of any type - divx, xvid, mp3, wma, etc. I don't have any intention of going back to XP.
I wonder how many of the "Vista sucks" crows are trying to run it on outdated hardware. Vista does like a lot of memory - I wouldn't touch it without at least 1.5 GB - but this isn't 2001 any more. There should be an expectation that a modern OS will require more RAM and CPU than an OS released 7 years ago. (I have a Pentium D CPU, so I'm nowhere near state of the art, but I have 2 GB RAM).
Despite what many of the basement-dwellers here think, it IS possible to be an IT Manager and keep your integrity, and it can be a very rewarding career step. I moved into management years ago and never looked back. I love having the ability to influence the strategic direction of a business.
A few tips for you:
1. Leaders get promoted. Are you acting like a leader? Do you mentor junior employees, step in when not called upon, and/or speak up in a professional manner when a problem arises? If you want to move into a leadership position, the time to lead is now.
2. Take an interest in the larger business. I can't stress enough how important this is. The easiest way to distinguish yourself from your peers is to really understand your company's specific business needs and tailor technology to meet those needs, and not (as is often the case) trying to force-feed technology to the business.
3. Make your case. Have you shown your ability to lead in your current role? If so, by all means talk to your employer about it. Most likely, they will appreciate knowing where you stand.
Um... folks, all search products are not created equal. While you might think Google is the cat's pajamas because it makes it easier for you to find pr0n and Britney Spears updates, B2C sites and enterprises have their own needs for search.
FAST plays in the same space as Autonomy and Endeca. While you may not have heard of these companies, they're widely known in the enterprise search arena; they power search at web sites such as those used by WalMart, Home Depot, etc. They're built to categorize structured AND unstructured information (whereas Google works mostly with unstructured information), and have features that www.google.com never dreamed of.
For instance, Autonomy will convert video speech to text and index it relative to its position in the video, letting you search for a phrase and pinpoint the moment it was uttered within the video file. FAST has contextual search capabilities; for example, you can search for the keyword "contract" and it will retrieve a set of contract-like documents, whether or not they actually contain the word "contract".
It's not uncommon for large companies to implement SharePoint and select another enterprise search vendor to search SharePoint content. SharePoint search is decent, but does not work well in a federated or widely distributed environment and does not include advanced features like conceptual search (or even wildcarding capabilities, out of the box). This sort of acquisition isn't unexpected and fills a gaping hole in MSFT's enterprise platform.
We now return you to the same lame Vista jokes, already in progress.
This sort of "unbiased commentary" is what I love about Slashdot.
So, let me get this straight. You have never used Vista, but you're sure that its performance sucks?
My work PC is a 1.73 GHz pentium M laptop with 1Gb RAM. I currently have Outlook 2007, 3 IE windows, Word 2007, and a 384Mb Virtual PC image loaded. I'm quite happy with the performance, especially since I'm installing Visual Studio on the VPC image while I'm typing this message.
If Vista is usable in my environment, your son's homework isn't likely to be a problem. But, then again, why let facts stand in the way of a good rant?
Um... I'm opposed to it because it's patently ridiculous FUD and, in the absence of hard numbers - which the abstract most certainly does not have - should be treated as such.
I've been using Vista since October of last year and its UI is at least as responsive as XP. There certainly isn't a noticeable difference in my opinion, and I've used it on many machines with varying configurations.
So this expert consulting firm is really recommending that users avoid Vista because of menu latency and mouse imprecision? Is this serious or some kind of joke?
I realize Slashdot will leave no stone unturned when it comes to slagging Windows, but isn't this getting just a bit carried away? There are plenty of things to criticize about Vista - substantial things - if one is so inclined. Look at the totally brain-dead backup and defrag utilities, for example; both are a major step back from their equivalents in XP. But if you really think it's a horrible OS for the reasons cited in this article, you're venturing into Ted Kaczynski-like levels of MS hatred.
I've been running Vista at home since pre-Beta 2. When the RTM version surfaced on MSDN in early December, I decided to hold my breath and reinstall using the 64 bit version.
Specs: I'm running a stock Dell box, D620 processor, dual core with 1 gb RAM. Video is ATI X1300 with 256Mb, Dell dual tuner card, no-name Web cam, USB external drive, built-in sound.
To my great surprise, all of my applications and hardware worked fine on 64 bit Vista. There was one minor exception: the SyncToy app from Microsoft would not run. Everything else - Office, Civ 4, Diablo II, WinZip, etc - worked great. Some dev tools did require updates - Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Express both had to be patched, although they seemed to work OK before I installed the patches. There is a 64-bit version of IE, but I don't run it, so I can't speak to plug-in compatibility. Most surprisingly, I haven't had any problems with drivers; even my el cheapo Web cam worked perfectly.
Overall, I like Vista. It looks nice and works well. Programs seem to load faster, probably because of the SuperCache feature that keeps commonly-used stuff in memory. The eye candy is OK, but probably not worth the price of admission - the important thing is that it has been rock solid so far.
Things I like:
- The sidebar is nice, although there aren't many gadgets available yet. The ones that are available look good. - The OS is very, very stable. No crashes at all in almost two months. No "this program is closing" messages that I recall. - The anti-spyware package seems to work as advertised. I'm running OneCare 1.5 for antivirus, and that works fine too. No problems with security, although I didn't have any under XP either. - The new fonts are very nice - especially Consolas, the new fixed-width font. Looks great in Visual Studio. - Boot time and resume from standby time has been much improved. - No one seems to be talking about the voice recognition features, but they are awesome. It's possible to start Word, dictate a letter, save it, open Gmail, and mail it to someone using only voice commands. Accuracy is very good, and it's pretty easy to use. This is a killer feature that needs more publicity.
Things I don't like:
- Some of the new utilities are very, very dumbed down. NTBACKUP is gone, replaced by the most brain-dead "backup program" I've ever seen. This program is not backward-compatible, so if you have Windows Backup files, you'll have to download another utility from Microsoft to restore files from them. - The disk defragmenter is also dumbed down to the point of absurdity. There is no status display at all - no disk block diagram, no percentage indicator - just a "please wait, this operation may take several hours to complete" message. VOPT did this better in 1983. - Existing CD burning software probably won't work. - The new search indexer searches only a small subset of the directory tree by default. While it's possibly to manually tweak the list of directories to search, there's no easy way to tell it to, for example, index every directory except those that hold temporary files. Non-index searches (in other words, a full grovel through the directory tree) seem to be slower than in XP. - There is a "Run" box on the Start menu, but it doesn't work exactly as it used to. I have always used it to launch some programs and Explorer windows, and it still does this in some cases, but - for example - typing "D:" won't take you to the root of your D drive - it brings up the first application it can find that starts with "D". Very annoying.
Other observations:
- The ReadyBoost feature (that allows you to use a USB key as swap space) works, but I didn't notice any speed increase. This was with a very fast USB drive (patriot XT). - The control panel utilities and desktop properties screens have been moved around quite a bit, which may confuse some people at first, but the new order probably makes more sense than the old one. - There's a lot of FUD floating a
I've been running Vista since Beta 2 and decided to hold my breath and try the 64-bit version when the RTM was released to MSDN a month or so ago. So far, much to my surprise, it's been rock solid. it worked with every piece of hardware I have, including a Dell dual-tuner TV card, a no-name Web cam, a couple of digital cameras, and my ATI X1300 video card. No software problems to speak of either - the only thing I can think of that didn't work right off the bat is the MS SyncToy application.
I can't speak to WinXP 64-bit, but I can highly recommend it on Vista.
It's just that most game companies take the easy way out and try to make the game as pretty as possible while skimping on gameplay.
Look at Diablo II, for example. When it first came out - in 1999 - it was a sprite-based anachronism and was slagged for its lack of 3d graphics. Now, six years later, there are still 30,000 or more people playing it every night on Battle.Net. It was on the top 10 sales list for years.
I'm mostly talking about NT Server, not NT workstation. Wine isn't meant to run MS SQL server applications, Lotus Notes, and the like. I'm not talking about an emulator, either, but an OS that runs Win32 binaries and conforms to the Win32 API.
a REAL alternative to Microsoft for corporate users would be an open-source NT clone.
Quite a few small companies are completely dependent on their vertical-market applications. These companies (such as mine) can't consider Linux without support from their vendors, who often don't have high enough margins to justify development under Linux on the off chance that a market will emerge.
An NT clone would allow companies like mine to use their current mission-critical software while telling M$ to kiss their OWN butts for a change. My company (and lots of others) would jump on it with both feet.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget antitrust, which is absolutely essential.
Before forming such a comprehensive opinion on it, wouldn't it make sense to, y'know, actually take a look at it?
I have all of my Skydrive content saved as D:\Skydrive (on three different machines). If I want to save something to Skydrive, I put it in this directory and it gets synced to the cloud, and thus to the other machines, via a background process (the "app"). I also back up this directory to an external drive just in case - I can do this because it's just a regular directory tree. Why is this such a difficult concept to understand?
Most people that slag Vista on Slashdot do it because of its problems for home use (DRM issues and the like). I agree that implementing Vista in a business environment is problematic - as enterprise architect for the world's largest company in my industry segment, I do have some experience in that area - but upgrading to Vista from XP or Win2000 in a corporate environment involves the same due diligence (app compat testing, driver research, hardware upgrades, etc) as did upgrades to previous upgrades of Windows. A lot of companies upgraded directly from Win95 to XP, and I can guarantee you that they found that XP did not perform acceptably on a 64Mb Pentium-100, and that some applications did not survive the upgrade.
Some poorly-written applications may not work properly on Vista, but that has always been the case. If third-party developers always followed Windows guidelines, Windows wouldn't have to be such a steaming pile of compatibility hacks. But the fact remains that those applications have to be supported - can you imagine what Windows threads on Slashdot would look like if they weren't? - and any new version of Windows that adds significant functionality will break some subset of the Windows application base. Vista does add significant functionality - it natively supports x64 processors, moved most device drivers from kernel mode to user mode to increase stability, has TPM and Bitlocker support (both important for enterprise usage), supports regulation of content on removable drives, etc.
Whether you think it's worth it or not is one issue - whether it's objectively a step backward is another. Complaining because it makes enterprise upgrades difficult is irrelevant; enterprise upgrades are always difficult. If this stuff were easy, many of us would be out of a job.
I've been running Vista 64-bit for over a year. No bluescreens, no incompatible hardware, no problems with media files of any type - divx, xvid, mp3, wma, etc. I don't have any intention of going back to XP.
I wonder how many of the "Vista sucks" crows are trying to run it on outdated hardware. Vista does like a lot of memory - I wouldn't touch it without at least 1.5 GB - but this isn't 2001 any more. There should be an expectation that a modern OS will require more RAM and CPU than an OS released 7 years ago. (I have a Pentium D CPU, so I'm nowhere near state of the art, but I have 2 GB RAM).
Despite what many of the basement-dwellers here think, it IS possible to be an IT Manager and keep your integrity, and it can be a very rewarding career step. I moved into management years ago and never looked back. I love having the ability to influence the strategic direction of a business.
A few tips for you:
1. Leaders get promoted. Are you acting like a leader? Do you mentor junior employees, step in when not called upon, and/or speak up in a professional manner when a problem arises? If you want to move into a leadership position, the time to lead is now.
2. Take an interest in the larger business. I can't stress enough how important this is. The easiest way to distinguish yourself from your peers is to really understand your company's specific business needs and tailor technology to meet those needs, and not (as is often the case) trying to force-feed technology to the business.
3. Make your case. Have you shown your ability to lead in your current role? If so, by all means talk to your employer about it. Most likely, they will appreciate knowing where you stand.
Um... folks, all search products are not created equal. While you might think Google is the cat's pajamas because it makes it easier for you to find pr0n and Britney Spears updates, B2C sites and enterprises have their own needs for search.
FAST plays in the same space as Autonomy and Endeca. While you may not have heard of these companies, they're widely known in the enterprise search arena; they power search at web sites such as those used by WalMart, Home Depot, etc. They're built to categorize structured AND unstructured information (whereas Google works mostly with unstructured information), and have features that www.google.com never dreamed of.
For instance, Autonomy will convert video speech to text and index it relative to its position in the video, letting you search for a phrase and pinpoint the moment it was uttered within the video file. FAST has contextual search capabilities; for example, you can search for the keyword "contract" and it will retrieve a set of contract-like documents, whether or not they actually contain the word "contract".
It's not uncommon for large companies to implement SharePoint and select another enterprise search vendor to search SharePoint content. SharePoint search is decent, but does not work well in a federated or widely distributed environment and does not include advanced features like conceptual search (or even wildcarding capabilities, out of the box). This sort of acquisition isn't unexpected and fills a gaping hole in MSFT's enterprise platform.
We now return you to the same lame Vista jokes, already in progress.
This sort of "unbiased commentary" is what I love about Slashdot.
So, let me get this straight. You have never used Vista, but you're sure that its performance sucks?
My work PC is a 1.73 GHz pentium M laptop with 1Gb RAM. I currently have Outlook 2007, 3 IE windows, Word 2007, and a 384Mb Virtual PC image loaded. I'm quite happy with the performance, especially since I'm installing Visual Studio on the VPC image while I'm typing this message.
If Vista is usable in my environment, your son's homework isn't likely to be a problem. But, then again, why let facts stand in the way of a good rant?
Um... I'm opposed to it because it's patently ridiculous FUD and, in the absence of hard numbers - which the abstract most certainly does not have - should be treated as such.
I've been using Vista since October of last year and its UI is at least as responsive as XP. There certainly isn't a noticeable difference in my opinion, and I've used it on many machines with varying configurations.
But thanks for proving my point.
So this expert consulting firm is really recommending that users avoid Vista because of menu latency and mouse imprecision? Is this serious or some kind of joke?
I realize Slashdot will leave no stone unturned when it comes to slagging Windows, but isn't this getting just a bit carried away? There are plenty of things to criticize about Vista - substantial things - if one is so inclined. Look at the totally brain-dead backup and defrag utilities, for example; both are a major step back from their equivalents in XP. But if you really think it's a horrible OS for the reasons cited in this article, you're venturing into Ted Kaczynski-like levels of MS hatred.
I've been running Vista at home since pre-Beta 2. When the RTM version surfaced on MSDN in early December, I decided to hold my breath and reinstall using the 64 bit version.
Specs: I'm running a stock Dell box, D620 processor, dual core with 1 gb RAM. Video is ATI X1300 with 256Mb, Dell dual tuner card, no-name Web cam, USB external drive, built-in sound.
To my great surprise, all of my applications and hardware worked fine on 64 bit Vista. There was one minor exception: the SyncToy app from Microsoft would not run. Everything else - Office, Civ 4, Diablo II, WinZip, etc - worked great. Some dev tools did require updates - Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Express both had to be patched, although they seemed to work OK before I installed the patches. There is a 64-bit version of IE, but I don't run it, so I can't speak to plug-in compatibility. Most surprisingly, I haven't had any problems with drivers; even my el cheapo Web cam worked perfectly.
Overall, I like Vista. It looks nice and works well. Programs seem to load faster, probably because of the SuperCache feature that keeps commonly-used stuff in memory. The eye candy is OK, but probably not worth the price of admission - the important thing is that it has been rock solid so far.
Things I like:
- The sidebar is nice, although there aren't many gadgets available yet. The ones that are available look good.
- The OS is very, very stable. No crashes at all in almost two months. No "this program is closing" messages that I recall.
- The anti-spyware package seems to work as advertised. I'm running OneCare 1.5 for antivirus, and that works fine too. No problems with security, although I didn't have any under XP either.
- The new fonts are very nice - especially Consolas, the new fixed-width font. Looks great in Visual Studio.
- Boot time and resume from standby time has been much improved.
- No one seems to be talking about the voice recognition features, but they are awesome. It's possible to start Word, dictate a letter, save it, open Gmail, and mail it to someone using only voice commands. Accuracy is very good, and it's pretty easy to use. This is a killer feature that needs more publicity.
Things I don't like:
- Some of the new utilities are very, very dumbed down. NTBACKUP is gone, replaced by the most brain-dead "backup program" I've ever seen. This program is not backward-compatible, so if you have Windows Backup files, you'll have to download another utility from Microsoft to restore files from them.
- The disk defragmenter is also dumbed down to the point of absurdity. There is no status display at all - no disk block diagram, no percentage indicator - just a "please wait, this operation may take several hours to complete" message. VOPT did this better in 1983.
- Existing CD burning software probably won't work.
- The new search indexer searches only a small subset of the directory tree by default. While it's possibly to manually tweak the list of directories to search, there's no easy way to tell it to, for example, index every directory except those that hold temporary files. Non-index searches (in other words, a full grovel through the directory tree) seem to be slower than in XP.
- There is a "Run" box on the Start menu, but it doesn't work exactly as it used to. I have always used it to launch some programs and Explorer windows, and it still does this in some cases, but - for example - typing "D:" won't take you to the root of your D drive - it brings up the first application it can find that starts with "D". Very annoying.
Other observations:
- The ReadyBoost feature (that allows you to use a USB key as swap space) works, but I didn't notice any speed increase. This was with a very fast USB drive (patriot XT).
- The control panel utilities and desktop properties screens have been moved around quite a bit, which may confuse some people at first, but the new order probably makes more sense than the old one.
- There's a lot of FUD floating a
I've been running Vista since Beta 2 and decided to hold my breath and try the 64-bit version when the RTM was released to MSDN a month or so ago. So far, much to my surprise, it's been rock solid. it worked with every piece of hardware I have, including a Dell dual-tuner TV card, a no-name Web cam, a couple of digital cameras, and my ATI X1300 video card. No software problems to speak of either - the only thing I can think of that didn't work right off the bat is the MS SyncToy application.
I can't speak to WinXP 64-bit, but I can highly recommend it on Vista.
It's just that most game companies take the easy way out and try to make the game as pretty as possible while skimping on gameplay.
Look at Diablo II, for example. When it first came out - in 1999 - it was a sprite-based anachronism and was slagged for its lack of 3d graphics. Now, six years later, there are still 30,000 or more people playing it every night on Battle.Net. It was on the top 10 sales list for years.
I'm mostly talking about NT Server, not NT workstation. Wine isn't meant to run MS SQL server applications, Lotus Notes, and the like. I'm not talking about an emulator, either, but an OS that runs Win32 binaries and conforms to the Win32 API.
a REAL alternative to Microsoft for corporate users would be an open-source NT clone. Quite a few small companies are completely dependent on their vertical-market applications. These companies (such as mine) can't consider Linux without support from their vendors, who often don't have high enough margins to justify development under Linux on the off chance that a market will emerge. An NT clone would allow companies like mine to use their current mission-critical software while telling M$ to kiss their OWN butts for a change. My company (and lots of others) would jump on it with both feet.