Outside of the linux/slashdot/open source community and Sony/Nintendo/Apple fanboys, there really isn't that much MS hate going around out there.
Agreed. The only places you really find this rabid hate spewing at MS is at sites like Slashdot which are free-software centric and post heavily biased anti-MS rants as "articles" on the front page. Out in the real world, when speaking to business colleagues and the like, I find these opinions just aren't present, which makes me think it's really a very vocal majority of "mom's basement" geeks spewing off.
That's not saying everyone I know at or through work thinks Microsoft's products are the best things since sliced bread or that their business practices have always been fair and just. I know lots of people who're not particularly fond of Windows as an operating system. That doesn't mean they hate the company. Being intelligent, rationally-minded people, they realize that business is no place for wild emotions and that Microsoft deserves to be taken seriously, being a very successful business.
My point is, anyone who would get up on a soapbox and loudly proclaim their hate for a company needs to chill the fsck out and start thinking rationally. Out in the business world, nobody will listen to a maniac who screams until his face is all red and puffy. What people will listen to are solid, rational, technical arguments. Noone really cares what companies Microsoft put out of business in the 80's or 90's.
I've got a dev box with Vista Business on 1 GB RAM (and a Thunderbird 2GHz CPU). No performance issues and no real compat issues either. It doesn't exactly play today's hot games, but it IS a five year old box, and performance is certainly no worse than with XP. I play a lot of old games (like GTA:SA) on it.
Way too much Vista talk here on/. is just hearsay, anti-MS trolling and ignorant fools passing on rumours as facts. Just like you wouldn't take Linux advice from someone who thinks Linux is garbage and doesn't use it himself, don't listen to MS haters if you want informed opinions about Vista.
If you run MS SQL Server and don't manage the RAM then it will use it all just for the fun of it.
If you find this in any way strange, wrong or confusing, perhaps you should read up as to what the primary purpose of a frikkin' DATABASE SERVER is.
Here's a hint: the more data it can keep readily accessible (that is, in RAM) the better it will perform. And as you mentiones, you can of course set it to use less RAM if you have to. It's just that it's optimized for performance by default.
Here, here. Vista's been working just fine for me. I even installed it on a 5-year-old PC and it runs fine, albeit not as snappy as on my more modern Dell Precision. It's all-around better than XP in any case. Installed SP1 (got it via MSDN subscription) recently and so far I've had no problems. I have absolutely zero reasons to consider downgrading to XP.
Vista runs just fine on my ancient Socket-A Thunderbird (XP2800+). Aero enabled. You should be able to get better Vista performance out of your Sempron, assuming you've enough RAM for it, a decent graphics card and fresh drivers. I've noticed nVidia's drivers for Vista seem to work much better than ATi's, fwiw.
The first two are easily fixed. Firstly, getting your music as files over the Internet does not automatically mean worse quality. In fact, since any format can be used, quality superior to red-book CD's is easily achievable. I personally prefer my music files as FLACs, rather than MP3s. They're losslessly compressed, so transcoding to any other format produces the same result as encoding from the raw media (assuming the FLAC was encoded from the raw media to start with).
Second, a digital file never wears out, so there is no point to a "used market". On the other hand, it is easy to make unlimited perfect copies of a file, so you can just copy someone else's if you don't want to pay full price. After all, this is what everybody does today. The practical difference is slim because when you buy a used CD, none of the money goes to the artist anyway.
As for physical objects, I'm afraid there's no easy fix for that one, though some artists put CD labels and jewelcase inserts on their website (PDFs usually) that you can download to make your home-made CD-R's look as good as the real thing (given a decent printer).
Likely the users were running the game as administrators, and an administrator would have the necessary rights to overwrite any file on the disk. I don't see how this could be blamed on Microsoft. On Vista you'd get a UAC prompt for trying to write to C:\, but Vista doesn't use a BOOT.INI anyway, so no risk of breaking the system.
Go to Sweden. I was visiting a major household/electronics retailer the other day and Wiis were gathering dust on the shelves. I very nearly bought one myself, despite not owning a TV and generally preferring PC games anyway. Maybe now I'll go buy one and sell it for profit on eBay...
The following line from the review strikes me as fishy:
OpenOffice.org Writer starts in 10 seconds, which is actually slightly faster than on my dual core 2.2 GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+!
He doesn't mention what OS the Athlon64 box runs, but my ancient AMD Athlon 1 GHz with 1 GB of RAM running Vista Business starts OpenOffice Writer in 12 seconds. This is with multiple open Firefox windows, Winamp, IRC client, Thunderbird and phpEd running at the same time and all the Vista graphics effects turned on.
My slightly more modern 2.1 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 2.1 with 2 GB RAM (also running Vista Biz) starts OpenOffice Writer in about two seconds. In both cases, I measured the time from when the start menu item is clicked to when I can begin typing text into the document. Neither computer runs the "OpenOffice starter" tray junk that is supposed to speed up starting OOo.
In other words, while starting OOo Writer in 10 seconds is perhaps impressive for a five year old computer running Vista, a brand new PC running Linux should do it much faster. And the author's Athlon64 box is just plain misconfigured, or filled with crap, or perhaps a horribly old Java VM...
You are probably just a stupid troll, but I'll bite: these waves have nothing to do with climate change. Read the fscking article. Rogue waves like these have been sinking ships for centuries.
As for myself: Because I disagree with the idea that someone who has created some content has the exclusive right to control distribution of that content. In short, I believe copyright as it works today does not benefit society, and should be radically changed. I believe there is no such thing as "intellectual property", because anything anyone will ever create ultimately builds on stuff that person has picked up from the environment and people around him/her. This does not mean there is nothing called originality, individual creativity and skill certainly counts for something. However, copyright removes, for an unjustifiably long timespan, content is withheld from the public domain where it would otherwise be used as a foundation for new and better content.
Of course, there are certain pieces of content that cost huge sums of money to create and where the creator will likely not go through the trouble unless he/she has some hope of return on investment. Certain types of software certainly fall into this category. Thus some sort of compromise is in order: I would propose that current copyright law is reduced to 5 years and that copying for noncommercial purposes is legalized. This would make selling pirated software, music etc illegal but permit filesharing.
You are incorrect. I do not consider stuff like pointers "cruft" in a programming language; C, for example, while old, is quite an elegant and cruft-free language. C++, however, is not, unless you trim off all the bits that characterize it as C++ rather than C with a few pieces of syntactic sugar added. The stuff in C++ that makes it messy is that they kept mostly backwards-compatible with C, to make it easy to port programs from C to C++, while introducing a poorly structured and horribly bloated STL. Still, there are enough differences between C and C++ to make porting a pain in the ass anyway, so it can be argued that it would have been better to drop the legacy stuff from the beginning.
Second, you may not have noticed, but none of the current big operating systems are actually written in C++. The Windows, Linux, BSD and OSX kernels are all written in straight C. You can use C++ in the kernel, but there are lots of drawbacks, google "kernel c++" for details. Now, you said "operating systems", but the kernel is the only part that's relevant here; userspace tools can be written in any language so long as there's a compiler for it.
Also "Tacking on updates to existing standards only creates ugly security loopholes, and all sort of weird hacks."?
Yeah, that explains why Python 2.x is so much worse than Python 1.x and Perl 5 is so much worse than 4 and why the new versions of C, C++, C# and Java never caught on... Oh, wait.
Your examples actually strengthen the point you are trying to argue against. C++ is indeed lots of new stuff tacked on to an existing language (C), with a result that is far from elegant and full of gotchas, as any newbie to C++ will know. C# and Java are both completely new languages, they can be called successors to C/C++ but neither even tries to be backwards-compatible and neither builds on the C++ standard. I don't know about Python and Perl.. but if you want another example of a language where tons of insecure and hacky cruft has accumulated over the versions, try PHP. Now there's a language that needs a complete restart if I ever saw one!
However, does this mean that there is an incentive for Microsoft to rush out SP1 as fast as possible, and will SP2 now be the one to wait for?
Depends. If I were Microsoft, I'd do anything NOT to put the idea into people's heads that even waiting for SP1 is not enough. They are probably losing tons of early sales as it is, because they can't manage to put out products that are stable from day 1.
I for one, however, think the biggest problem with Vista atm isn't the OS itself, but the flaky third-party drivers. On every PC with Vista I have used, the graphics drivers have been unstable, sometimes even causing BSoDs, regardless of whether they are nVidia's or ATi's.
Vista is no longer "new", so obviously there is less demand. Those who want it already own it, those who don't aren't going to buy it, but it's still being shipped on millions of new PC's. This goes for pretty much any product, sales are strong at the beginning then gradually fade. I would expect Vista sales to continue dropping, with another spike after SP1 is released and more people feel like trying it out.
Apart from not being new, this also says nothing about the relative merits of Vista as an OS. In fact, if Vista sales had continued to increase right when people are saving up for the holidays, that would be extremely impressive, and quite unexpected.
What's different is what MS has at stake. They _need_ Vista to succeed much more than they needed XP to succeed.
Really? Last I checked, MS is sitting on a pretty huge pile of cash. It will take more than one "failed" OS release to kill them. And as I have pointed out in my journal, calling Vista a failure at this point is premature at best, but I'd call it flat-out wrong in addition to that. The last I've heard, Microsoft has sold over 60 million licenses. And everybody knows what (relatively minor) issues there are in Vista will be fixed at SP1, at which point Vista will take over as the dominant Windows version. We've all seen this exact sequence of events before, so I can't believe it will turn out different.
And the market perception about MS has changed too. In XP times MS was an OK company. Now they are simply EVIL.
I'm afraid you've been reading too much Slashdot.:) Only here will you find rabid anti-Microsoft trolls who genuinely believe that a company comprised of hundreds of thousands of individuals can be considered "evil". Also, I don't really recall those trolls being any less vocal back in the XP days. Out here in the real world, you won't find anyone preaching that "Microsoft is evil" being taken seriously. Such people are confusing religion and business.
I should know better than replying to an AC, but oh well.
Vista IS a pain to develop for. It's new "lame" attempt at security has rendered writing to the file system a mess
Only if your application wants to write in places you have no business going into in the first place, such as the Windows\System32 folder. If you have legitimate business in there, then you are writing an administrative tool, and it SHOULD require admin rights to run.
Having to defrag a file system makes it very much so NOT a superior file system. Even ext3 is far better than NTFS. I have to defrag my NTFS filesystem at work at least once a week to keep my machine running reasonably.
Idiocy. Users are so used to defrag:ing being a necessity from the W95 days that Microsoft had to please them by putting defrag.exe back in rather than letting the FS handle it automatically. Only on really wasted systems does it really make a difference. NTFS, if left entirely alone, never climbs above a few percents of fragmentation in YEARS of normal use.
.NET is no more "backwards" compatable than QT (C++). And, when I think about it, QT runs on ALL major operating systems. Your point is LAME.
Apples and oranges. QT is just a GUI toolkit..NET is a full API which handles pretty much everything, and with C#, it's so integrated you will not even notice that you are using a library. There are lots of GUI toolkits that are multiplatform, but Linux/OSX has nothing that compares to C#/.NET, Java being the closest attempt.
I'm a professional Windows software developer who has been there since Windows 3.0. Windows and Windows APIs are my bread and butter. And you sir, are living in a complete fantasy land.
I am also a professional Windows software developer who has been at it for over a decade (though I can't remember the specific version) and I put it to you, sir, that you are the one living in a fantasy. You are correct on some points, because the poster you are replying to also made some stupid claims. So I'll just reply to what you got wrong, and that other replies haven't already mentioned...
Our company still, after dedicating all that effort, will not support running our product on Vista.
Then you are incompetent. I have not encountered any significant difficulties porting code from XP to Vista. In fact, we have encountered several problems that only occur on XP, becuase it has strange limitations that have been raised or remove in Vista. Overall, Vista is the superior development platform.
The fact that Vista has revised how its internal subsystems interconnect has had zero impact on the user experience,
This sounds strange coming from a developer, since you should know that even small changes beneath the surface of a program can dramatically alter the user experience. Not saying Vista really offers a dramatically changed experience from XP.. looking only at the UI, it's pretty similar, except with more nice visual effects.
and your assertation that Vista is faster than XP flies in the face of reality.
It is notably faster on my 1+ year old laptop, which shipped with XP but was upgraded to Vista shortly after (so I got to test both OSes). In particular, the Vista UI seems much quicker to respond. On my five year old PC at home, Vista is significantly slower than XP, but it seems logical that they would optimize the OS for new hardware, seeing as it is expected to be around for at least five years. In other words: If Vista runs slowly on your computer and the drivers are all OK, your computer is under-spec'd for Vista, and you should be running something older.
No developer in their right mind is going to code to an API that is not backwards compatible to XP.
The easy way around this is, of course, to use.NET, which is somewhat independent of what version of Windows you are using (and well-documented where it's not). If that's not an option you can still leverage new stuff in Vista by simply coding fallbacks, or disabling certain features that are not available in XP.
On the other hand Vista has technologies that OS X, Linux, etc don't have yet and won't have for several years.
Name one.
Easy: ReadyBoost. To add, a proper file system (NTFS). A well-documented, built-in, backwards-compatible, object-oriented API (.NET). Good hardware support (not really a "technology" so much as a side effect of being the only desktop OS with double-digit market share). Compatibility with practically every piece of popular software on the market, because they're all written for Windows.
The poster you are replying to also mentioned that many features of OSX/Linux can be implemented in Vista via third-party applications. Of course, this goes both ways. So simply comparing features between OSes is kind of silly.
Under Aero, you cannot have a single application running within 10% of the efficiency it would have run had it been on XP. That's the problem. It's a huge step down in efficiency.
Please Google before you make untruthful statements like this. The performance impact of Aero is zero; this has been benchmarked and verified by independent parties. Aero improves subjective performance because the GPU handles graphics operations faster than the CPU, which has to do all the work if Aero is disabled.
It is more stable than XP, OS X, and Linux...
No. No, it's not. Arguing that is rid
At work, we save everything as.docx, because we use Microsoft Office 2007 internally. At home I use OpenOffice.org, so stuff gets saved as.odt. Basically, I use the defaults, because it's easiest, and it's relatively easy to convert between the formats anyway. If I need to send a document to someone, I send it in whatever format I expect the recipient will prefer; if I do not expect the recipient to want to edit it (invoices, for example) I send as.pdf.
BTW, between Office 2007 and OO.o, I prefer Office 2007. OO.o seems to have gotten more buggy with the latest release. Writer will regularly get stuck in italics mode and refuse to let me switch back to regular font. Doing anything with images in Calc is a royal pain, it does not save sizes correctly and sometimes loses images. Office 2007 has very few annoying bugs (who actually got bit by the Excel 2007 multiplication thing in practice? I didn't...) and it's much faster than OO.o. Plus I love the ribbons.
I bet employees of Novell will read your post and shake their heads.. maybe mutter the word "Slashdot" with an explicative prefixed.
And they would be right. The enormous and irrational bias on/. against anything even remotely affiliated with Microsoft is pathetic and reflects very poorly on the people of the free/open software community. Although I expect most of the complainers have never actually written a line of open source code.
I'm certain they'll offer Episode 2 on its own once it's out. Likely it'll be priced the same as Ep1 was on release, which was about $30 if I remember incorrectly. So some people will no doubt whine that they are being ripped off when TOB, which contains the full game in addition to lots of other goodies, is only $15 more.
So let them whine. It's a bundle; the whole point of a bundle is that you get more value for less money. If this includes some stuff you don't want, do a simple cost/benefit and decide if it's worth it anyway; if not, don't buy the bundle. It's STUPIDLY SIMPLE. Yet some people will still whine, like Valve should be obligated to provide a good deal that fits their needs precisely. Childish and immature.
Slashdot Mirror
Outside of the linux/slashdot/open source community and Sony/Nintendo/Apple fanboys, there really isn't that much MS hate going around out there.
Agreed. The only places you really find this rabid hate spewing at MS is at sites like Slashdot which are free-software centric and post heavily biased anti-MS rants as "articles" on the front page. Out in the real world, when speaking to business colleagues and the like, I find these opinions just aren't present, which makes me think it's really a very vocal majority of "mom's basement" geeks spewing off.
That's not saying everyone I know at or through work thinks Microsoft's products are the best things since sliced bread or that their business practices have always been fair and just. I know lots of people who're not particularly fond of Windows as an operating system. That doesn't mean they hate the company. Being intelligent, rationally-minded people, they realize that business is no place for wild emotions and that Microsoft deserves to be taken seriously, being a very successful business.
My point is, anyone who would get up on a soapbox and loudly proclaim their hate for a company needs to chill the fsck out and start thinking rationally. Out in the business world, nobody will listen to a maniac who screams until his face is all red and puffy. What people will listen to are solid, rational, technical arguments. Noone really cares what companies Microsoft put out of business in the 80's or 90's.
I've got a dev box with Vista Business on 1 GB RAM (and a Thunderbird 2GHz CPU). No performance issues and no real compat issues either. It doesn't exactly play today's hot games, but it IS a five year old box, and performance is certainly no worse than with XP. I play a lot of old games (like GTA:SA) on it.
/. is just hearsay, anti-MS trolling and ignorant fools passing on rumours as facts. Just like you wouldn't take Linux advice from someone who thinks Linux is garbage and doesn't use it himself, don't listen to MS haters if you want informed opinions about Vista.
Way too much Vista talk here on
If you run MS SQL Server and don't manage the RAM then it will use it all just for the fun of it.
If you find this in any way strange, wrong or confusing, perhaps you should read up as to what the primary purpose of a frikkin' DATABASE SERVER is.
Here's a hint: the more data it can keep readily accessible (that is, in RAM) the better it will perform. And as you mentiones, you can of course set it to use less RAM if you have to. It's just that it's optimized for performance by default.
Here, here. Vista's been working just fine for me. I even installed it on a 5-year-old PC and it runs fine, albeit not as snappy as on my more modern Dell Precision. It's all-around better than XP in any case. Installed SP1 (got it via MSDN subscription) recently and so far I've had no problems. I have absolutely zero reasons to consider downgrading to XP.
Vista runs just fine on my ancient Socket-A Thunderbird (XP2800+). Aero enabled. You should be able to get better Vista performance out of your Sempron, assuming you've enough RAM for it, a decent graphics card and fresh drivers. I've noticed nVidia's drivers for Vista seem to work much better than ATi's, fwiw.
Silly, Silverlight works fine in Firefox.
The first two are easily fixed. Firstly, getting your music as files over the Internet does not automatically mean worse quality. In fact, since any format can be used, quality superior to red-book CD's is easily achievable. I personally prefer my music files as FLACs, rather than MP3s. They're losslessly compressed, so transcoding to any other format produces the same result as encoding from the raw media (assuming the FLAC was encoded from the raw media to start with).
Second, a digital file never wears out, so there is no point to a "used market". On the other hand, it is easy to make unlimited perfect copies of a file, so you can just copy someone else's if you don't want to pay full price. After all, this is what everybody does today. The practical difference is slim because when you buy a used CD, none of the money goes to the artist anyway.
As for physical objects, I'm afraid there's no easy fix for that one, though some artists put CD labels and jewelcase inserts on their website (PDFs usually) that you can download to make your home-made CD-R's look as good as the real thing (given a decent printer).
Likely the users were running the game as administrators, and an administrator would have the necessary rights to overwrite any file on the disk. I don't see how this could be blamed on Microsoft. On Vista you'd get a UAC prompt for trying to write to C:\, but Vista doesn't use a BOOT.INI anyway, so no risk of breaking the system.
Go to Sweden. I was visiting a major household/electronics retailer the other day and Wiis were gathering dust on the shelves. I very nearly bought one myself, despite not owning a TV and generally preferring PC games anyway. Maybe now I'll go buy one and sell it for profit on eBay...
The following line from the review strikes me as fishy:
OpenOffice.org Writer starts in 10 seconds, which is actually slightly faster than on my dual core 2.2 GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+!
He doesn't mention what OS the Athlon64 box runs, but my ancient AMD Athlon 1 GHz with 1 GB of RAM running Vista Business starts OpenOffice Writer in 12 seconds. This is with multiple open Firefox windows, Winamp, IRC client, Thunderbird and phpEd running at the same time and all the Vista graphics effects turned on.
My slightly more modern 2.1 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 2.1 with 2 GB RAM (also running Vista Biz) starts OpenOffice Writer in about two seconds. In both cases, I measured the time from when the start menu item is clicked to when I can begin typing text into the document. Neither computer runs the "OpenOffice starter" tray junk that is supposed to speed up starting OOo.
In other words, while starting OOo Writer in 10 seconds is perhaps impressive for a five year old computer running Vista, a brand new PC running Linux should do it much faster. And the author's Athlon64 box is just plain misconfigured, or filled with crap, or perhaps a horribly old Java VM...
Wouldn't it be a lot easier just to halt the global climate change that's causing catastrophic seaward events like these?
First line of the comment I replied to, emphasis mine. You were saying?
You are probably just a stupid troll, but I'll bite: these waves have nothing to do with climate change. Read the fscking article. Rogue waves like these have been sinking ships for centuries.
As for myself: Because I disagree with the idea that someone who has created some content has the exclusive right to control distribution of that content. In short, I believe copyright as it works today does not benefit society, and should be radically changed. I believe there is no such thing as "intellectual property", because anything anyone will ever create ultimately builds on stuff that person has picked up from the environment and people around him/her. This does not mean there is nothing called originality, individual creativity and skill certainly counts for something. However, copyright removes, for an unjustifiably long timespan, content is withheld from the public domain where it would otherwise be used as a foundation for new and better content.
Of course, there are certain pieces of content that cost huge sums of money to create and where the creator will likely not go through the trouble unless he/she has some hope of return on investment. Certain types of software certainly fall into this category. Thus some sort of compromise is in order: I would propose that current copyright law is reduced to 5 years and that copying for noncommercial purposes is legalized. This would make selling pirated software, music etc illegal but permit filesharing.
The original phrase is "Don't tase me, bro!". Google it or see a helpful summary here (not my blog).
You are incorrect. I do not consider stuff like pointers "cruft" in a programming language; C, for example, while old, is quite an elegant and cruft-free language. C++, however, is not, unless you trim off all the bits that characterize it as C++ rather than C with a few pieces of syntactic sugar added. The stuff in C++ that makes it messy is that they kept mostly backwards-compatible with C, to make it easy to port programs from C to C++, while introducing a poorly structured and horribly bloated STL. Still, there are enough differences between C and C++ to make porting a pain in the ass anyway, so it can be argued that it would have been better to drop the legacy stuff from the beginning.
Second, you may not have noticed, but none of the current big operating systems are actually written in C++. The Windows, Linux, BSD and OSX kernels are all written in straight C. You can use C++ in the kernel, but there are lots of drawbacks, google "kernel c++" for details. Now, you said "operating systems", but the kernel is the only part that's relevant here; userspace tools can be written in any language so long as there's a compiler for it.
Also "Tacking on updates to existing standards only creates ugly security loopholes, and all sort of weird hacks."? Yeah, that explains why Python 2.x is so much worse than Python 1.x and Perl 5 is so much worse than 4 and why the new versions of C, C++, C# and Java never caught on... Oh, wait.
.. but if you want another example of a language where tons of insecure and hacky cruft has accumulated over the versions, try PHP. Now there's a language that needs a complete restart if I ever saw one!
Your examples actually strengthen the point you are trying to argue against. C++ is indeed lots of new stuff tacked on to an existing language (C), with a result that is far from elegant and full of gotchas, as any newbie to C++ will know. C# and Java are both completely new languages, they can be called successors to C/C++ but neither even tries to be backwards-compatible and neither builds on the C++ standard. I don't know about Python and Perl
However, does this mean that there is an incentive for Microsoft to rush out SP1 as fast as possible, and will SP2 now be the one to wait for?
Depends. If I were Microsoft, I'd do anything NOT to put the idea into people's heads that even waiting for SP1 is not enough. They are probably losing tons of early sales as it is, because they can't manage to put out products that are stable from day 1.
I for one, however, think the biggest problem with Vista atm isn't the OS itself, but the flaky third-party drivers. On every PC with Vista I have used, the graphics drivers have been unstable, sometimes even causing BSoDs, regardless of whether they are nVidia's or ATi's.
Vista is no longer "new", so obviously there is less demand. Those who want it already own it, those who don't aren't going to buy it, but it's still being shipped on millions of new PC's. This goes for pretty much any product, sales are strong at the beginning then gradually fade. I would expect Vista sales to continue dropping, with another spike after SP1 is released and more people feel like trying it out.
Apart from not being new, this also says nothing about the relative merits of Vista as an OS. In fact, if Vista sales had continued to increase right when people are saving up for the holidays, that would be extremely impressive, and quite unexpected.
What's different is what MS has at stake. They _need_ Vista to succeed much more than they needed XP to succeed.
:) Only here will you find rabid anti-Microsoft trolls who genuinely believe that a company comprised of hundreds of thousands of individuals can be considered "evil". Also, I don't really recall those trolls being any less vocal back in the XP days. Out here in the real world, you won't find anyone preaching that "Microsoft is evil" being taken seriously. Such people are confusing religion and business.
Really? Last I checked, MS is sitting on a pretty huge pile of cash. It will take more than one "failed" OS release to kill them. And as I have pointed out in my journal, calling Vista a failure at this point is premature at best, but I'd call it flat-out wrong in addition to that. The last I've heard, Microsoft has sold over 60 million licenses. And everybody knows what (relatively minor) issues there are in Vista will be fixed at SP1, at which point Vista will take over as the dominant Windows version. We've all seen this exact sequence of events before, so I can't believe it will turn out different.
And the market perception about MS has changed too. In XP times MS was an OK company. Now they are simply EVIL.
I'm afraid you've been reading too much Slashdot.
I should know better than replying to an AC, but oh well.
.NET is no more "backwards" compatable than QT (C++). And, when I think about it, QT runs on ALL major operating systems. Your point is LAME.
.NET is a full API which handles pretty much everything, and with C#, it's so integrated you will not even notice that you are using a library. There are lots of GUI toolkits that are multiplatform, but Linux/OSX has nothing that compares to C#/.NET, Java being the closest attempt.
Vista IS a pain to develop for. It's new "lame" attempt at security has rendered writing to the file system a mess
Only if your application wants to write in places you have no business going into in the first place, such as the Windows\System32 folder. If you have legitimate business in there, then you are writing an administrative tool, and it SHOULD require admin rights to run.
Having to defrag a file system makes it very much so NOT a superior file system. Even ext3 is far better than NTFS. I have to defrag my NTFS filesystem at work at least once a week to keep my machine running reasonably.
Idiocy. Users are so used to defrag:ing being a necessity from the W95 days that Microsoft had to please them by putting defrag.exe back in rather than letting the FS handle it automatically. Only on really wasted systems does it really make a difference. NTFS, if left entirely alone, never climbs above a few percents of fragmentation in YEARS of normal use.
Apples and oranges. QT is just a GUI toolkit.
I'm a professional Windows software developer who has been there since Windows 3.0. Windows and Windows APIs are my bread and butter. And you sir, are living in a complete fantasy land.
.. looking only at the UI, it's pretty similar, except with more nice visual effects.
.NET, which is somewhat independent of what version of Windows you are using (and well-documented where it's not). If that's not an option you can still leverage new stuff in Vista by simply coding fallbacks, or disabling certain features that are not available in XP.
I am also a professional Windows software developer who has been at it for over a decade (though I can't remember the specific version) and I put it to you, sir, that you are the one living in a fantasy. You are correct on some points, because the poster you are replying to also made some stupid claims. So I'll just reply to what you got wrong, and that other replies haven't already mentioned...
Our company still, after dedicating all that effort, will not support running our product on Vista.
Then you are incompetent. I have not encountered any significant difficulties porting code from XP to Vista. In fact, we have encountered several problems that only occur on XP, becuase it has strange limitations that have been raised or remove in Vista. Overall, Vista is the superior development platform.
The fact that Vista has revised how its internal subsystems interconnect has had zero impact on the user experience,
This sounds strange coming from a developer, since you should know that even small changes beneath the surface of a program can dramatically alter the user experience. Not saying Vista really offers a dramatically changed experience from XP
and your assertation that Vista is faster than XP flies in the face of reality.
It is notably faster on my 1+ year old laptop, which shipped with XP but was upgraded to Vista shortly after (so I got to test both OSes). In particular, the Vista UI seems much quicker to respond. On my five year old PC at home, Vista is significantly slower than XP, but it seems logical that they would optimize the OS for new hardware, seeing as it is expected to be around for at least five years. In other words: If Vista runs slowly on your computer and the drivers are all OK, your computer is under-spec'd for Vista, and you should be running something older.
No developer in their right mind is going to code to an API that is not backwards compatible to XP.
The easy way around this is, of course, to use
On the other hand Vista has technologies that OS X, Linux, etc don't have yet and won't have for several years.
Name one.
Easy: ReadyBoost. To add, a proper file system (NTFS). A well-documented, built-in, backwards-compatible, object-oriented API (.NET). Good hardware support (not really a "technology" so much as a side effect of being the only desktop OS with double-digit market share). Compatibility with practically every piece of popular software on the market, because they're all written for Windows.
The poster you are replying to also mentioned that many features of OSX/Linux can be implemented in Vista via third-party applications. Of course, this goes both ways. So simply comparing features between OSes is kind of silly.
Under Aero, you cannot have a single application running within 10% of the efficiency it would have run had it been on XP. That's the problem. It's a huge step down in efficiency.
Please Google before you make untruthful statements like this. The performance impact of Aero is zero; this has been benchmarked and verified by independent parties. Aero improves subjective performance because the GPU handles graphics operations faster than the CPU, which has to do all the work if Aero is disabled.
It is more stable than XP, OS X, and Linux...
No. No, it's not. Arguing that is rid
At work, we save everything as .docx, because we use Microsoft Office 2007 internally. At home I use OpenOffice.org, so stuff gets saved as .odt. Basically, I use the defaults, because it's easiest, and it's relatively easy to convert between the formats anyway. If I need to send a document to someone, I send it in whatever format I expect the recipient will prefer; if I do not expect the recipient to want to edit it (invoices, for example) I send as .pdf.
BTW, between Office 2007 and OO.o, I prefer Office 2007. OO.o seems to have gotten more buggy with the latest release. Writer will regularly get stuck in italics mode and refuse to let me switch back to regular font. Doing anything with images in Calc is a royal pain, it does not save sizes correctly and sometimes loses images. Office 2007 has very few annoying bugs (who actually got bit by the Excel 2007 multiplication thing in practice? I didn't...) and it's much faster than OO.o. Plus I love the ribbons.
Thank you Sir, for proving my point. Your post stands as a genuine example of irrational /. anti-Microsoft fanaticism.
I bet employees of Novell will read your post and shake their heads.. maybe mutter the word "Slashdot" with an explicative prefixed.
/. against anything even remotely affiliated with Microsoft is pathetic and reflects very poorly on the people of the free/open software community. Although I expect most of the complainers have never actually written a line of open source code.
And they would be right. The enormous and irrational bias on
I'm certain they'll offer Episode 2 on its own once it's out. Likely it'll be priced the same as Ep1 was on release, which was about $30 if I remember incorrectly. So some people will no doubt whine that they are being ripped off when TOB, which contains the full game in addition to lots of other goodies, is only $15 more.
So let them whine. It's a bundle; the whole point of a bundle is that you get more value for less money. If this includes some stuff you don't want, do a simple cost/benefit and decide if it's worth it anyway; if not, don't buy the bundle. It's STUPIDLY SIMPLE. Yet some people will still whine, like Valve should be obligated to provide a good deal that fits their needs precisely. Childish and immature.