Driver versions being incompatible and not overwritable. For example the thumb drive I carry around uses True Crypt but now next time I plug it into my desktop I'll get the incompatible driver error.
The AMD system was cheaper, performed better overall and had a more complex set of qualifications in order to receive the "AMD Live" certification. Yawn, this really was not a very interesting comparison. Anyway CableCards, DRM, and cheap cable company DVR's that have room to grow are going to be the death of HTPC's so I wouldn't go spending a bucket load of cash on one right now.
Kaspersky has always been rated highly and for those of you that don't know AOL, yes that AOL, has repackaged it for Free. I've personally been using it for a while and can whole heartedly recommend it without any hesitation.
I've been teaching people for 5 years to use XP's "File and Folder Tasks" pane in Explorer. It was a very easy way to show people how to Copy, Move, or Email files and folders. It works great why change it? Apparently Microsoft now thinks everyone is a home user who wants nothing more than to assign star ratings to their picture and mp3 files. Thanks for removing the UP button too, you've made my life all the more easier. I keep harping on this but I swear to God the mantra during Vista's redesign had to have been "change for the sake of change!". I really don't know how else to explain some of the boneheaded changes they have made. And they wonder why sales are off.
You can buy many Billboard top 20 albums for $9.99 at amazon and get free shipping if you buy a few at a time. If you buy used then your looking at ~5 a CD.
We already have DRM-Free music for cheap. We've had DRM-Free music for 25 years you, why would we pay more now? WTF is wrong with these people?
Microsoft has bet that in the long run that their new memory optimization technologies will pay off with much improved performance and robustness. Seriously, that is exactly what's going on. The problem is all along XP is there staring at you with a whole slew of built-in app provider support and optimization. Vista can't help but be slower considering the change MS made under the hood. Btw I'm certainly not saying that MS's under the hood changes will be beneficial long term, look at Netburst. MS could dump or change whatever they want when Vista's replacement comes out in two years. You would hope that you could have it both ways ala how people claim OS X gets faster with each release, but with MS that just isn't going to happen. Thus early Vista adopters must suffer.
My advice to to either A)stay put on XP or B)make dam sure you app runs at an acceptable clip under Vista.
Hint - Sidebar and all those widgets while fun to look at waste cpu time, turn em off or use 3rd party alternatives.
Surprisingly Aero actually has little impact on system performance. It is all of that other crap like DRM running in the background that is causing everything to slow down. Overall Vista is measurably slower than XP and many applications just run like shit right now on Vista. Just running the OS and doing some surfing or email won't show much difference than XP on modern hardware.
All I know is beyond whatever the benchmarks show Explorer is even slower in Vista than it was before. Go out on the network and wait in agony while the little green bar at the top of Explorer chugs along taking forever to finally display files. I'm sure this just the fault of the switches and Windows 2003 R3 servers I've been using though *rolls eyes*. I'm just really disappointed with Vista after all of this wait and at this point the only time I boot into it anymore is to check app compatibility.
Hint - Set VLC to GDI mode so you don't have to see the f'ing jarring screen transition anymore.
"UI prettiness" Lots of 3rd party companies like Stardock already do this.
"indexed searching" Use google Desktop search or Windows Desktop Search
"an attempt at proper admin" That's been available forever on 2k/XP. Guess what? Vendors are STILL forcing you to run things a admin. I guess kudos to MS for finally not giving root access to every user *sigh*.
"quick access mini-apps" Google desktop search, whatever-task-toolbar from whoever. Been there done that.
"more included applications" All of the big apps like WMP 11, IE7, etc are available for XP. There are free alternatives for many of the other things. Picasa owns Windows Photo Gallery. The other apps fall into the "nice to have something" category vs being legitimate Ilife competitors.
"parental controls" Good idea, we'll see how well vendors support it.
"speech recognition" Wider adoption is IMHO a good thing but A) 99% of people have zero interest in it, B) the other 1% saw that disasterous demonstration of Vista's speech recognition and assume it sucks and will never use it.
"better encryption integration/ease of use" Worthless for the general public because only certain high-end versions of Vista come with it. Ease of use is like learning a new OS. Microsoft has gone to great lengths to complicate and obfuscate things that you could do in two clicks on XP. Shifting things around for the hell of it does not = making it easier. Network Center? Need I say more?
Overall as I'll repeat again, as Vista stands right now it remains for now an expensive solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Benchmarks show it runs anywhere from 5-50% slower than XP for general tasks http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/29/xp-vs-vista / and Nvidia users are simply screwed when it comes to Vista. In short the performance is just terrible considering the insane processing power we have available these days, Oh and if you have anything more than 512MB of ram DON'T use readyboost you'll just slow your PC down.
Post SP1 Vista will finally be an OS worth upgrading to, but that's still quite a way off and consumers are IMHO much better off sticking with XP. By then Vienna will be out so why bother?
To be talking about this now. If this story gains traction then it will just hurt business adoption. Two years is nothing to wait out Vista and XP still works fine. Many small businesses I've personally heard from have not heard great things about Vista, this will scare them off even more. To take a page from Huggy Bear word on the street is...Vista is OK, nothing special and not worth upgrading to. News of Vista's early replacement certainly isn't the method I'd use to try and win people over.
"For the NVIDIA drivers to work properly in Vista, there is a LOT of work and possible debugging due to Vista's chaos."
And yet somehow, through alien technology I suppose, ATI was able to put out drivers that are performing pretty much exactly the same as they do on XP. This whole episode smacks of the Nvidia DX9 fiasco where their first gen DX9 cards were garbage. I can't even install the lastest Nvidia Vista drivers for my 7600GS because the driver installer keeps saying that the the drivers are "only for windows vista", lord knows what OS it thinks I'm using.
I'm actually quite annoyed that Vista isn't better than it is considering how long it's been in the oven. I hate that to keep my skills up to date I have to move from XP to something that takes more hardware resources but doesn't offer much more. My pain would be greatly reduced if Nvidia would get off their asses and make some decent drivers for my Nforce4 board and 7600GS.
Blame Nvidia. We all knew that an across the board 10% drop in performance was coming. New OS=slower by 10%, that's just the way it is. But if anyone is to blame it is Nvidia. Nvidia's crap driver's are causing slowdowns in the effect of 15-50% and thus ruining gaming on Vista. ATI users are in mcuh better shape but they could use some help also.
Unless your an IT professional and need to learn Vista to keep your skills current plan on staying on XP for a long time. Your simply not missing anything.
Not sure if you are joking, but he's referring to Ayn Rand of the Atlas Shrugged variety. Whenever I hear anyone mentioning Rand it seems to be in the vein of laissez-faire capitalism and an "every man for himself" philosophy. Usually I end up not liking that person very much, but that's just me.
You can only do VHDs or complete image based backups and restores on Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate. So home user's are basically screwed and will have to continue to rely on 3rd parties for real backups. Now, how many of those users which MS is leaving hung out to dry will actually go and buy something like True Image?
Way to go Microsoft, way to stick it to home users. Oh well, I guess IT consultants who deal with home users will be more then happy to benefit from MS's greediness.
The GMA950 is a crap 3D card. Even the most basic google research shows that it is NOT a return of Intel to 3D and no reviewer worth a dam has said the graphics "scream". Poor performance and incomplete 3d support are the hallmarks of the GMA950. If you play nothing but Quake II than yea, the GMA950 is for you.
Depends if your idea of fun is to have NPC players replaced with 12yr olds that would like nothing better then to ruin your single player game. IF you can can ensure that the NPC players are of a certain quality level and stay in character then yes it could be cool. Pay the NPC players a fair wage and have players rate them and maybe you'd have something.
I do see that some of this is addressed in the article but overall it appears you'd have to be very rigid in making sure your NPC player strictly follow a story line as opposed to just hoping on and treating this like UT, BF, or any other PvP online game.
Sorry but your simply wrong about attributing this to Vista. Either you were upgraded to a higher tier by your ISP ala Optimum Online Boost or Vista is reporting inaccurate speeds. Vista is no magic bullet, it will only dramatically improve download speeds for DSL/Cable users who have a hosed XP system. These same users would get the same result from reinstalling XP. The reason why you can't "find anything to back your claim up" is because you've come to the wrong conclusion as to why you might be seeing faster download speeds.
Easy test for your problem. If you don't see the same magic speeds when you boot off of a Linux LiveCD like Knoppix then you can chaulk it up to Vista's new improved TCP/IP stack lying to you.
How does everyone think a WWII vet would react if you strapped some headphones on to him and made him relive the D-day landing ala Medal of Honor?
Either we accept violent games as a legitmate pastime or we don't. Selectively barring certain game titles because they "hit too close to home" is about the worse solution possible.
Power user's will adapt and overcome after some initial awkwardness. Normal users will be completely fucked. The type of person who if you hide their desktop IE icon thinks the "Internet is gone" will be lost. Most office workers get by at knowing the minimum to do their job in MS Word. Take that away from them and they are without a doubt screwed and will require lots of retraining.
Microsoft messed up big time. The only people happy with the new interface are Trainers who are currently raking in cash big time training people how to overcome the new "improved" interface in MS Office.
IMHO that is a fair ding against Vista. With Vista MS somehow managed to make the gui LESS consistent than it is in XP. I really don't know what the heck they were thinking but it appears they just did a really bad job copying OS X. Many areas that MS changed in Vista were very much change for the sake of change, they don't actually improve efficiency or make things easier for the user. Maybe I'm being too harsh but conversely I've just seen way too many Vista defenders swoon over things like Aero which from any objective viewing currently add very little to the user experience.
"The problem with so-called 'responsible disclosure' is that for some people, it means keeping others on hold for insane amounts of time, even when the fix should be trivial."
Is Apple as bad as MS when it comes to fixing security flaws? Is there really a need to show how "insecure" OS X is? Or is this more a "your going to start listening to security experts when they have something to say or else..." type situation. I did read the FAQ but they really don't show any evidence to prove why this is a good thing, how this will improve OS X security, or how Apple has been unwilling to fix flaws in the past.
They could be 1000% right, but on the surface I just don't see anything which either confirms or denies their theory. It would be nice to at least read some sort of history of how Apple has interacted with Security researchers in the past.
Hardware makers have done a huge disservice to their customers by not producing stable chipsets. They'll have several revisions of say the "Linksys USB11" and each one using a different chipset. You go to Amazon and buy it and yet have no idea which version you'll be getting. To be fair there have been some new standards like WPA etc that possibly would have required a new chipset, but the vendors just went way overboard in their lack of regard for stability in their product lines.
I must have half a dozen wirless nics from PC Cards, to PCI cards, to USB versions and I think one of them is detected automatically without major problems in linux. And of course the one that is detected won't do WPA in linux so it is 100% worthless. Good thing I don't use Linux as my main desktop OS anymore. While things have gotten better, support for hardware on linux still sucks just as bad now as it did many years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Driver versions being incompatible and not overwritable. For example the thumb drive I carry around uses True Crypt but now next time I plug it into my desktop I'll get the incompatible driver error.
Unfortunately not going to ever happen in a billion years. Feel free to blame MS on this one as they could have and should have made this happen.
The AMD system was cheaper, performed better overall and had a more complex set of qualifications in order to receive the "AMD Live" certification. Yawn, this really was not a very interesting comparison. Anyway CableCards, DRM, and cheap cable company DVR's that have room to grow are going to be the death of HTPC's so I wouldn't go spending a bucket load of cash on one right now.
Kaspersky has always been rated highly and for those of you that don't know AOL, yes that AOL, has repackaged it for Free. I've personally been using it for a while and can whole heartedly recommend it without any hesitation.
/ index.adp?
http://www.activevirusshield.com/antivirus/freeav
I've been teaching people for 5 years to use XP's "File and Folder Tasks" pane in Explorer. It was a very easy way to show people how to Copy, Move, or Email files and folders. It works great why change it? Apparently Microsoft now thinks everyone is a home user who wants nothing more than to assign star ratings to their picture and mp3 files. Thanks for removing the UP button too, you've made my life all the more easier. I keep harping on this but I swear to God the mantra during Vista's redesign had to have been "change for the sake of change!". I really don't know how else to explain some of the boneheaded changes they have made. And they wonder why sales are off.
Parry Parry Parry
You can buy many Billboard top 20 albums for $9.99 at amazon and get free shipping if you buy a few at a time. If you buy used then your looking at ~5 a CD.
We already have DRM-Free music for cheap. We've had DRM-Free music for 25 years you, why would we pay more now? WTF is wrong with these people?
Microsoft has bet that in the long run that their new memory optimization technologies will pay off with much improved performance and robustness. Seriously, that is exactly what's going on. The problem is all along XP is there staring at you with a whole slew of built-in app provider support and optimization. Vista can't help but be slower considering the change MS made under the hood. Btw I'm certainly not saying that MS's under the hood changes will be beneficial long term, look at Netburst. MS could dump or change whatever they want when Vista's replacement comes out in two years. You would hope that you could have it both ways ala how people claim OS X gets faster with each release, but with MS that just isn't going to happen. Thus early Vista adopters must suffer.
My advice to to either A)stay put on XP or B)make dam sure you app runs at an acceptable clip under Vista.
Hint - Sidebar and all those widgets while fun to look at waste cpu time, turn em off or use 3rd party alternatives.
Surprisingly Aero actually has little impact on system performance. It is all of that other crap like DRM running in the background that is causing everything to slow down. Overall Vista is measurably slower than XP and many applications just run like shit right now on Vista. Just running the OS and doing some surfing or email won't show much difference than XP on modern hardware.
All I know is beyond whatever the benchmarks show Explorer is even slower in Vista than it was before. Go out on the network and wait in agony while the little green bar at the top of Explorer chugs along taking forever to finally display files. I'm sure this just the fault of the switches and Windows 2003 R3 servers I've been using though *rolls eyes*. I'm just really disappointed with Vista after all of this wait and at this point the only time I boot into it anymore is to check app compatibility.
Hint - Set VLC to GDI mode so you don't have to see the f'ing jarring screen transition anymore.
The amount of prompting is just silly.
"UI prettiness"
a /
Lots of 3rd party companies like Stardock already do this.
"indexed searching"
Use google Desktop search or Windows Desktop Search
"an attempt at proper admin"
That's been available forever on 2k/XP. Guess what? Vendors are STILL forcing you to run things a admin. I guess kudos to MS for finally not giving root access to every user *sigh*.
"quick access mini-apps"
Google desktop search, whatever-task-toolbar from whoever. Been there done that.
"more included applications"
All of the big apps like WMP 11, IE7, etc are available for XP. There are free alternatives for many of the other things. Picasa owns Windows Photo Gallery. The other apps fall into the "nice to have something" category vs being legitimate Ilife competitors.
"parental controls"
Good idea, we'll see how well vendors support it.
"speech recognition"
Wider adoption is IMHO a good thing but A) 99% of people have zero interest in it, B) the other 1% saw that disasterous demonstration of Vista's speech recognition and assume it sucks and will never use it.
"better encryption integration/ease of use"
Worthless for the general public because only certain high-end versions of Vista come with it. Ease of use is like learning a new OS. Microsoft has gone to great lengths to complicate and obfuscate things that you could do in two clicks on XP. Shifting things around for the hell of it does not = making it easier. Network Center? Need I say more?
Overall as I'll repeat again, as Vista stands right now it remains for now an expensive solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Benchmarks show it runs anywhere from 5-50% slower than XP for general tasks http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/29/xp-vs-vist
and Nvidia users are simply screwed when it comes to Vista. In short the performance is just terrible considering the insane processing power we have available these days, Oh and if you have anything more than 512MB of ram DON'T use readyboost you'll just slow your PC down.
Post SP1 Vista will finally be an OS worth upgrading to, but that's still quite a way off and consumers are IMHO much better off sticking with XP. By then Vienna will be out so why bother?
To be talking about this now. If this story gains traction then it will just hurt business adoption. Two years is nothing to wait out Vista and XP still works fine. Many small businesses I've personally heard from have not heard great things about Vista, this will scare them off even more. To take a page from Huggy Bear word on the street is...Vista is OK, nothing special and not worth upgrading to. News of Vista's early replacement certainly isn't the method I'd use to try and win people over.
"For the NVIDIA drivers to work properly in Vista, there is a LOT of work and possible debugging due to Vista's chaos."
And yet somehow, through alien technology I suppose, ATI was able to put out drivers that are performing pretty much exactly the same as they do on XP. This whole episode smacks of the Nvidia DX9 fiasco where their first gen DX9 cards were garbage. I can't even install the lastest Nvidia Vista drivers for my 7600GS because the driver installer keeps saying that the the drivers are "only for windows vista", lord knows what OS it thinks I'm using.
I'm actually quite annoyed that Vista isn't better than it is considering how long it's been in the oven. I hate that to keep my skills up to date I have to move from XP to something that takes more hardware resources but doesn't offer much more. My pain would be greatly reduced if Nvidia would get off their asses and make some decent drivers for my Nforce4 board and 7600GS.
Blame Nvidia. We all knew that an across the board 10% drop in performance was coming. New OS=slower by 10%, that's just the way it is. But if anyone is to blame it is Nvidia. Nvidia's crap driver's are causing slowdowns in the effect of 15-50% and thus ruining gaming on Vista. ATI users are in mcuh better shape but they could use some help also.
Unless your an IT professional and need to learn Vista to keep your skills current plan on staying on XP for a long time. Your simply not missing anything.
Not sure if you are joking, but he's referring to Ayn Rand of the Atlas Shrugged variety. Whenever I hear anyone mentioning Rand it seems to be in the vein of laissez-faire capitalism and an "every man for himself" philosophy. Usually I end up not liking that person very much, but that's just me.
You can only do VHDs or complete image based backups and restores on Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate. So home user's are basically screwed and will have to continue to rely on 3rd parties for real backups. Now, how many of those users which MS is leaving hung out to dry will actually go and buy something like True Image?
Way to go Microsoft, way to stick it to home users. Oh well, I guess IT consultants who deal with home users will be more then happy to benefit from MS's greediness.
The GMA950 is a crap 3D card. Even the most basic google research shows that it is NOT a return of Intel to 3D and no reviewer worth a dam has said the graphics "scream". Poor performance and incomplete 3d support are the hallmarks of the GMA950. If you play nothing but Quake II than yea, the GMA950 is for you.
4 ,00.asp7 &p=3- gma-950-terrible-opengl.html
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,182181
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=242
http://everythingapple.blogspot.com/2006/03/intel
Depends if your idea of fun is to have NPC players replaced with 12yr olds that would like nothing better then to ruin your single player game. IF you can can ensure that the NPC players are of a certain quality level and stay in character then yes it could be cool. Pay the NPC players a fair wage and have players rate them and maybe you'd have something.
I do see that some of this is addressed in the article but overall it appears you'd have to be very rigid in making sure your NPC player strictly follow a story line as opposed to just hoping on and treating this like UT, BF, or any other PvP online game.
Sorry but your simply wrong about attributing this to Vista. Either you were upgraded to a higher tier by your ISP ala Optimum Online Boost or Vista is reporting inaccurate speeds.
Vista is no magic bullet, it will only dramatically improve download speeds for DSL/Cable users who have a hosed XP system. These same users would get the same result from reinstalling XP.
The reason why you can't "find anything to back your claim up" is because you've come to the wrong conclusion as to why you might be seeing faster download speeds.
Easy test for your problem. If you don't see the same magic speeds when you boot off of a Linux LiveCD like Knoppix then you can chaulk it up to Vista's new improved TCP/IP stack lying to you.
How does everyone think a WWII vet would react if you strapped some headphones on to him and made him relive the D-day landing ala Medal of Honor?
Either we accept violent games as a legitmate pastime or we don't. Selectively barring certain game titles because they "hit too close to home" is about the worse solution possible.
Power user's will adapt and overcome after some initial awkwardness. Normal users will be completely fucked. The type of person who if you hide their desktop IE icon thinks the "Internet is gone" will be lost. Most office workers get by at knowing the minimum to do their job in MS Word. Take that away from them and they are without a doubt screwed and will require lots of retraining.
Microsoft messed up big time. The only people happy with the new interface are Trainers who are currently raking in cash big time training people how to overcome the new "improved" interface in MS Office.
IMHO that is a fair ding against Vista. With Vista MS somehow managed to make the gui LESS consistent than it is in XP. I really don't know what the heck they were thinking but it appears they just did a really bad job copying OS X. Many areas that MS changed in Vista were very much change for the sake of change, they don't actually improve efficiency or make things easier for the user. Maybe I'm being too harsh but conversely I've just seen way too many Vista defenders swoon over things like Aero which from any objective viewing currently add very little to the user experience.
My God what is wrong with you? Pipe down already.
"The problem with so-called 'responsible disclosure' is that for some people, it means keeping others on hold for insane amounts of time, even when the fix should be trivial."
Is Apple as bad as MS when it comes to fixing security flaws? Is there really a need to show how "insecure" OS X is? Or is this more a "your going to start listening to security experts when they have something to say or else..." type situation. I did read the FAQ but they really don't show any evidence to prove why this is a good thing, how this will improve OS X security, or how Apple has been unwilling to fix flaws in the past.
They could be 1000% right, but on the surface I just don't see anything which either confirms or denies their theory. It would be nice to at least read some sort of history of how Apple has interacted with Security researchers in the past.
Hardware makers have done a huge disservice to their customers by not producing stable chipsets. They'll have several revisions of say the "Linksys USB11" and each one using a different chipset. You go to Amazon and buy it and yet have no idea which version you'll be getting. To be fair there have been some new standards like WPA etc that possibly would have required a new chipset, but the vendors just went way overboard in their lack of regard for stability in their product lines.
I must have half a dozen wirless nics from PC Cards, to PCI cards, to USB versions and I think one of them is detected automatically without major problems in linux. And of course the one that is detected won't do WPA in linux so it is 100% worthless. Good thing I don't use Linux as my main desktop OS anymore. While things have gotten better, support for hardware on linux still sucks just as bad now as it did many years ago.