I've played around with 64bit Windows a few times and, remarkably enough, it suffers from all the same problems that Linux does! No decent driver support! The bulk of the driver support is for 32 bit Windows. As a result you get a pretty awful experience. 64 bit Windows takes away arguably the strongest advantage Windows has - everything just works.
Linux makes up for it, because while you have to wade through lines and lines of obscure config files and things, if you're Linus Torvalds you can possibly get the device to work for you. Windows on the other hand, you really have no chance!
Ahh... yes there's two places that icons and settings can reside in that context for a user's experience - they can be settings particular to that user, or they can be settings that apply to all users.
Obviously while there is a distinction between a setting that applies to all users, and a setting that applies to only one user, that distinction is not apparent to the end user at all.
Practically, it would be impossible to administer an environment with multiple users without having settings that do apply to all users. Imagine trying to deploy software without an "all users" setting! Say you install an application on a corporate workstation with multiple users - every morning you would need to log on to that workstation and copy all the shortcuts into each user's profile (just in case someone new shows up, you would need to copy the shortcuts into their profile as well!). Or, we have the "all users" profile that other users inherit their settings from - you just have to change that and it applies to everyone!
Now, what happens if a user doesn't like seeing Word on what he considers his desktop - so he deletes the shortcut (you can do this now on XP, it will generally warn you if it applies to multiple users, but it will let you do it). Suddenly everyone else who logs onto that workstation will raise a helpdesk call because the Word icon is missing! That's no good. So Microsoft sets up UAC in Vista to prevent users from making changes to the system that would impact other users, unless they have the privelege to make those changes.
Maybe there's a way this is handled for corporate linux desktops designed for multiple users, but I'm not sure what it is, especially given there are multiple desktop GUIs any one of which might be employed, or even a mix of them in one environment.
It makes perfect sense to me! You're just not looking at it the way Microsoft does. When you design an OS like Linux, simplicity (we have to work with this code ourselves, lets make it easy), functionality (it needs to do this stuff now), compatibility (we need to make sure our linux works with their linux), stability (it better not fall over), openness, those are some of the crucial design goals.
Microsoft operating systems are designed with goals different to Linux.
Microsoft goals include things like integration (one browser, one media player, one virus scanner etc), bundling (we put our browser in to stop their browser from going in), interdependence (we make our browser part of the basic file handling UI so you can't stop using it), leverage (we make our office package interface at really low levels with the OS so nobody else can make one that does the same stuff).
Now on one angle, that's kind of cool because when it's all working, you get a great look and feel from using Windows, everything just "works", double click a file and it plays or opens or edits or whatever you generally wanted it to do - and even better, when it's playing or editing or whatever it still feels like you're in the same environment. Using Linux I have always felt a jarring transition when I move from the desktop GUI to an application GUI because all of a sudden the conventions change and you know right away that you're using some app that was made by completely different people with completely different agendas to the people who made the OS, and there's often no feeling at all that the OS and the app are working together to get your file edited nicely or whatever you want done (it's just a feeling I have but flame away and tell me I'm not really experiencing what I do, go on)
Of course from the other angle, it's a dispicable business practice and MS has been slapped on the wrist many times for abusing their monopoly, and it hurts companies like Netscape and other competing office products, so in some ways the consumer might be seen to have been hurt by this practice as well. And for sure it does breed a rather peculiar kind of operating system.
There will be many changes! But of course, Intel is again CPU king (and still outperforming AMD on price performance even after the AMD pricecuts). NVidia are making a nice NForce setup for C2D.
We will know from the actions of Intel and NVidia if whatever AMD and ATI are off planning will be a decisive move or not. I trust that Intel and Nvidia corporate spies are going crazy right now.
MMX isn't very good... sure we all have it and it's probably a mainstay of CPU instruction sets but it didn't really achieve what Intel wanted it to, which is why we have seperate GPU's. Specialisation is king, and this merger doesn't change it. A CPU is a great general purpose processing engine, but throwing GPU instructions at it is more like putting lipstick on a pig in terms of graphics processing performance.
Now here's an idea... AMD have proven to be quite good at slapping CPU cores on a chip. The real estate of a GPU isn't wildly different from that of a CPU. What kind of performance would you get integrating a GPU and a CPU on the same die with hefty on-die interconnects? (Not to mention a presumably integrated memory hub for both of those cores, AMD style).
Now all you need is an ultra-fast memory interface (graphics memory is always speed hungry) and you can do away with graphics cards altogether.
What about SLI and dual graphics solutions? AMD is already on 4 cores in the very near future.
Again, it's Microsoft's size and scale of distribution that stops them from winning here. It's easy to build an impregnable fortress if it's hidden away in obscurity, and nobody sees any value in breaking in anyway. But if you have to build an impregnable fortress, and put one every few meters, and fill it up with gold, and be assured that millions of robots will constantly hammer away at it 24/7 looking for any little nook or cranny... there's a whole new story.
Nobody has built an operating system that was totally unbreachable. People expect Microsoft to do it. I don't believe it's possible. Microsoft has taken a pretty reasonable course of action to try fix it, and the public despised every step they took.
Firewall on by default in XPSP2 - users complained that apps didn't work when they were firewalled off from the internet unless you open a hole for them (duh). Bundling A/V and antispyware software - Microsoft is trying to crush Symantec or something now? They're just trying to fix up the mess. Regular patches and Windows Update - People whine about the frequency at which patches come out! Oh no another 7 patches this month, can't MS do anything right? UAC - The thing isn't even out of it's second beta and people have assumed it's broken.
Microsoft can't win on this one. They're pivoting on the axis of Usability vs. Security.
If they lean towards security, vast numbers of gibbering idiots in the community will lambast them for poor usability. If they lean towards usability, vast numbers of gibbering idiots in the community will lambast them for poor security.
Because Microsoft is so big, the publicity they get in either case is tremendous and negative. Still... the only thing worse than being talked about...
WGA is only a problem for people who've purchased Windows. If you're a decent copyright infringer (the poster of this statement does not recommend or endorse circumvention of copyright blah blah blah) you'll infringe a non-activation VLE of Windows and use Autopatcher or similar to keep it up to date, and probably firewall off www.microsoft.com so you don't have to worry about it hassling you ever again, and use a decent firewall and A/V scanner to keep your system virus free (I'm going to assume that there are things you can't do with Linux or OS X so you need to keep Windows around). A quiet, happy end user experience, Microsoft excluded.
Now if you have a legitimate activation required license of Windows, that is when you have to deal with WGA spying on your every keypress and sending the data off to Redmond with your credit card number.
I see the importance of compatibility with the environment, but the "Ask slashdot" question was more along the lines of "Citrix and VMWare don't work together", which is a little misleading. I work for a sizeable, you could say world leading resource company, and we use Citrix and VMWare in our development environments on a daily basis. No Novell stuff. Maybe that was just the editor who posted the story.
Now I know the integrated MS client for Novell is awful, but does that work at all? Or would it be possible to "gateway" the Novell access through another system?
Brilliant, this is something Novell can do that other Linux contributors wouldn't do. Novell are veterans at battling with Microsoft, heck, Novell were the first big losers to Microsoft on the server front. So they know a thing or two about tangling with MS. Allowing a linux client to, out of the box, connect transparently to Windows resources and live happily in a Windows dominated environment is something I would believe Novell would advocate highly.
Linux advocates often alternate wildly from pretending Windows doesn't exist, and deceiving themselves about the sheer juggernaut of market dominance that Windows represents by downplaying the advantages that Windows has. Things like, "Oh, well, Windows can do games but there are Linux games too!". But when they say that, they're comparing WoW and GTA:SA to a tetris clone and Tuxracer.
The true secret to achieving a significant level of enterprise and home Linux desktop penetration is two easy to say and difficult to accomplish objectives:
1) Do everything that Windows can do 2) Do it better than Windows can
We don't have 1) - we won't have it until there is a freely available DX10 compatible interface for Linux, for starters. We won't have 2) until we have 1).
Now, here is where the Linux advocates will pretend that Windows doesn't exist and downplay Windows instead of admitting there's a problem. I'm waiting for "We don't need DirectX compatibility, OpenGL is better, Windows games are awful, nobody plays them, etc". This won't work, because it's the method in use at the moment that is not changing anything.
What more can be said? In order to compete with Windows, one must embrace and extend. Embrace Windows functionality, then leverage the greater development capabilities that open source provides to outperform Windows, in the same way that Linux often outperforms Windows in various areas where the same functionality does exist.
Actually that's a pretty common joke we play on people at the office here. Another "fun" thing to do with Windows is to force the title bar up to 100 point fonts, which totally breaks the UI and looks bizarre.
In other news, Google Inc have announced they are changing their logo to a more classical look. Spokesman for Google's marketing department said "We find the new glowing eye in a pyramid logo to be more appealing to a broader range of customers."
Well yes... in fact, there's a company that fully supports all aspects of the RIS product, and even offers a series of training certifications that allow certificated individuals to demonstrate a passable knowledge of the product. The company is called Microsoft.
This whole article is FUD. Does this guy honestly believe it's possible that nobody understands how to use a pretty fundamental Windows technology? Wait, wait... he's used to asking for support from Linux forums, where the easiest way to get support is to troll it by posting "Linux is bollocks, it doesn't work half as well as Windows and it's twice as complex." then wait for PhD open source developers to start emailling him. Windows support works differently! You can just ask Microsoft (cost = arm + leg), or hire any tier 1 IT services company (IBM, HP, CSC, Unisys etc). But at least the regimented support and training infrastructure is there, and some of the best the corporate IT world has to offer.
But seriously, if you don't understand Windows technology and you're trying to administer a Windows environment, there are two options. 1) Replace it all with a *nix system you do understand or 2) Hire an MCSE (there are some talented ones as well as some idiots, so hirer-beware).
Actually, TFA in this case had little or nothing to do with Vista at all. The guy is a journalist who had to do a computer article, I think, from his attitude and presentation he doesn't know a whole lot about IT at all.
Let's look at what really happened for this guys "worst OS experience ever".
1) He tries installing a Beta OS on unsupported hardware - it doesn't work 2) He blames Microsoft for Lenovo not providing drivers for an unreleased Beta OS 3) He tries installing a Beta OS on a laptop with a faulty internal battery - it doesn't work 4) He blames Microsoft for an unreleased Beta OS not working on his faulty hardware 5) He tries installing a Beta OS on a laptop with a faulty hard drive - it doesn't work 6) He blames Microsoft.... you get the idea.
What does this guy want? Microsoft technicians to come out and give him a brand new laptop, or train him in a semblence of IT know-how? The guy is clearly an idiot who wanted to bash MS to cover up the fact that he pissfarted around with faulty hardware for three days because he didn't know how to install Windows properly (or, heaven forbid, choose some pretty normal hardware to install it on instead of a heavily proprietarised laptop).
I think, wishful thinking if you like, there would have been a meaningful article if they had found someone who knew how to install an OS (It's not even that hard, come on, most people know the hardware should be working OK before you try installing the OS). Then the reviewer could have spent three days actually doing the review on the OS. This is just an article about how bad at IT the journalist is. But he does try to spin it so that "Vista sucks and I am a great journalist/IT guy wannabe!"
The plan to do an Academy series with a young Kirk and Spock has been around for a very, very long time, even predating the Motion Picture. It didn't even get as far along as the "Star Trek 2" TV series concept in the 70's, not all that long after TOS was cancelled. Prior to Enterprise, the other big alternative to Enterprise would have been a TV series again based at Starfleet Academy, but with a whole new crew (possibly following the whole Red Squadron or whatever it was that represented the elite cadets).
Personally, no matter how many people flame Enterprise, a lot of the episodes were better than any of the Ferengi madness and we love the Bajoran religion episodes of DS9, and certainly better than some other schlocky Sci Fi that we've had lately (Threshold, Andromeda, gah).
I've seen a few of those bootlegs, my friends often have them, but a lot of the time they're really shoddy cam jobs and TS's. Better to download from a community vetted torrent site, where you can trust the community that rates the disk quality as a proper DVDrip etc.
If Apple sold OS X Server to as many market segments for as many purposes as Microsoft does, Apple would have a similar number of pricepoints and products.
It might seem complicated if you're used to 10 person office environments, but the wildly different scopes for Windows and Linux servers require some degree of differentiation of product. Especially if you intend to get some cash back for the product. With Linux the differences are all functional, a humble home linux router for two people will be configured way differently to a server designed to be part of a supercomputer cluster. Microsoft does this too, from Small Business Server to Datacenter, but they also have to factor in price and profit. This is business. It's not good business if you can sell a product for $10,000 but you decide to sell it for $100 because then it's the same as all the other ones you sell.
Wait a second - why would OpenGL performance be crippled (this is a serious question, I didn't know MS was intending to cripple OpenGL at all)? How do we know that indexing will be worse than the other vendors pushing it, when we haven't seen and tested the final product(ok, rhetoric)? Why isn't the Windows shell environment usable? The ability to shell script in Win2K3 surpasses any previous version of Windows to date. Every single administrative task in Windows 2003 Server can be performed from the shell.
As for the security enhancements, well honestly I find it laughable. The reviewers probably never used Linux or OS X, so they probably aren't used to the limitations of not running as Admin/Root/whatever. So of course they're going to whine. Everyone is going to complain about Windows Vista for exactly the same reasons Linux advocates advocate Linux.
The other big complain from Mr Thurrott? It's taking too long, it's not delivering on promises, blah. I'll give you two opposing statements that apply to *every* bit of software ever released, and you can pick where on the axis Windows Vista sits:
"The software is taking too long, it's missing too many features because they're paranoid about getting it right" "The software was rushed out the door, it's too buggy."
Slashdot Mirror
I've played around with 64bit Windows a few times and, remarkably enough, it suffers from all the same problems that Linux does! No decent driver support! The bulk of the driver support is for 32 bit Windows. As a result you get a pretty awful experience. 64 bit Windows takes away arguably the strongest advantage Windows has - everything just works.
Linux makes up for it, because while you have to wade through lines and lines of obscure config files and things, if you're Linus Torvalds you can possibly get the device to work for you. Windows on the other hand, you really have no chance!
Oh, so the police officer is copyrighted...
Ahh... yes there's two places that icons and settings can reside in that context for a user's experience - they can be settings particular to that user, or they can be settings that apply to all users.
Obviously while there is a distinction between a setting that applies to all users, and a setting that applies to only one user, that distinction is not apparent to the end user at all.
Practically, it would be impossible to administer an environment with multiple users without having settings that do apply to all users. Imagine trying to deploy software without an "all users" setting! Say you install an application on a corporate workstation with multiple users - every morning you would need to log on to that workstation and copy all the shortcuts into each user's profile (just in case someone new shows up, you would need to copy the shortcuts into their profile as well!). Or, we have the "all users" profile that other users inherit their settings from - you just have to change that and it applies to everyone!
Now, what happens if a user doesn't like seeing Word on what he considers his desktop - so he deletes the shortcut (you can do this now on XP, it will generally warn you if it applies to multiple users, but it will let you do it). Suddenly everyone else who logs onto that workstation will raise a helpdesk call because the Word icon is missing! That's no good. So Microsoft sets up UAC in Vista to prevent users from making changes to the system that would impact other users, unless they have the privelege to make those changes.
Maybe there's a way this is handled for corporate linux desktops designed for multiple users, but I'm not sure what it is, especially given there are multiple desktop GUIs any one of which might be employed, or even a mix of them in one environment.
It makes perfect sense to me! You're just not looking at it the way Microsoft does. When you design an OS like Linux, simplicity (we have to work with this code ourselves, lets make it easy), functionality (it needs to do this stuff now), compatibility (we need to make sure our linux works with their linux), stability (it better not fall over), openness, those are some of the crucial design goals.
Microsoft operating systems are designed with goals different to Linux.
Microsoft goals include things like integration (one browser, one media player, one virus scanner etc), bundling (we put our browser in to stop their browser from going in), interdependence (we make our browser part of the basic file handling UI so you can't stop using it), leverage (we make our office package interface at really low levels with the OS so nobody else can make one that does the same stuff).
Now on one angle, that's kind of cool because when it's all working, you get a great look and feel from using Windows, everything just "works", double click a file and it plays or opens or edits or whatever you generally wanted it to do - and even better, when it's playing or editing or whatever it still feels like you're in the same environment. Using Linux I have always felt a jarring transition when I move from the desktop GUI to an application GUI because all of a sudden the conventions change and you know right away that you're using some app that was made by completely different people with completely different agendas to the people who made the OS, and there's often no feeling at all that the OS and the app are working together to get your file edited nicely or whatever you want done (it's just a feeling I have but flame away and tell me I'm not really experiencing what I do, go on)
Of course from the other angle, it's a dispicable business practice and MS has been slapped on the wrist many times for abusing their monopoly, and it hurts companies like Netscape and other competing office products, so in some ways the consumer might be seen to have been hurt by this practice as well. And for sure it does breed a rather peculiar kind of operating system.
There will be many changes! But of course, Intel is again CPU king (and still outperforming AMD on price performance even after the AMD pricecuts). NVidia are making a nice NForce setup for C2D.
We will know from the actions of Intel and NVidia if whatever AMD and ATI are off planning will be a decisive move or not. I trust that Intel and Nvidia corporate spies are going crazy right now.
MMX isn't very good... sure we all have it and it's probably a mainstay of CPU instruction sets but it didn't really achieve what Intel wanted it to, which is why we have seperate GPU's. Specialisation is king, and this merger doesn't change it. A CPU is a great general purpose processing engine, but throwing GPU instructions at it is more like putting lipstick on a pig in terms of graphics processing performance.
Now here's an idea... AMD have proven to be quite good at slapping CPU cores on a chip. The real estate of a GPU isn't wildly different from that of a CPU. What kind of performance would you get integrating a GPU and a CPU on the same die with hefty on-die interconnects? (Not to mention a presumably integrated memory hub for both of those cores, AMD style).
Now all you need is an ultra-fast memory interface (graphics memory is always speed hungry) and you can do away with graphics cards altogether.
What about SLI and dual graphics solutions? AMD is already on 4 cores in the very near future.
Imagine that!
Bah! IBM stole that research from SCO and integrated it unlawfully into the Linux kernel that SCO owns.
Again, it's Microsoft's size and scale of distribution that stops them from winning here. It's easy to build an impregnable fortress if it's hidden away in obscurity, and nobody sees any value in breaking in anyway. But if you have to build an impregnable fortress, and put one every few meters, and fill it up with gold, and be assured that millions of robots will constantly hammer away at it 24/7 looking for any little nook or cranny... there's a whole new story.
Nobody has built an operating system that was totally unbreachable. People expect Microsoft to do it. I don't believe it's possible. Microsoft has taken a pretty reasonable course of action to try fix it, and the public despised every step they took.
Firewall on by default in XPSP2 - users complained that apps didn't work when they were firewalled off from the internet unless you open a hole for them (duh).
Bundling A/V and antispyware software - Microsoft is trying to crush Symantec or something now? They're just trying to fix up the mess.
Regular patches and Windows Update - People whine about the frequency at which patches come out! Oh no another 7 patches this month, can't MS do anything right?
UAC - The thing isn't even out of it's second beta and people have assumed it's broken.
Microsoft can't win on this one. They're pivoting on the axis of Usability vs. Security.
If they lean towards security, vast numbers of gibbering idiots in the community will lambast them for poor usability.
If they lean towards usability, vast numbers of gibbering idiots in the community will lambast them for poor security.
Because Microsoft is so big, the publicity they get in either case is tremendous and negative. Still... the only thing worse than being talked about...
WGA is only a problem for people who've purchased Windows. If you're a decent copyright infringer (the poster of this statement does not recommend or endorse circumvention of copyright blah blah blah) you'll infringe a non-activation VLE of Windows and use Autopatcher or similar to keep it up to date, and probably firewall off www.microsoft.com so you don't have to worry about it hassling you ever again, and use a decent firewall and A/V scanner to keep your system virus free (I'm going to assume that there are things you can't do with Linux or OS X so you need to keep Windows around). A quiet, happy end user experience, Microsoft excluded.
Now if you have a legitimate activation required license of Windows, that is when you have to deal with WGA spying on your every keypress and sending the data off to Redmond with your credit card number.
Ehh... where does that put Linux UIs? The Linux UI's always look slicker than the Windows ones!
The american illusion of democracy boil away when this case is mysteriously, or not so mysteriously boiled away.
I see the importance of compatibility with the environment, but the "Ask slashdot" question was more along the lines of "Citrix and VMWare don't work together", which is a little misleading. I work for a sizeable, you could say world leading resource company, and we use Citrix and VMWare in our development environments on a daily basis. No Novell stuff. Maybe that was just the editor who posted the story.
Now I know the integrated MS client for Novell is awful, but does that work at all? Or would it be possible to "gateway" the Novell access through another system?
The problem seems to be Novell drivers, not anything else. Try running it without Novell connectivity first.
Brilliant, this is something Novell can do that other Linux contributors wouldn't do. Novell are veterans at battling with Microsoft, heck, Novell were the first big losers to Microsoft on the server front. So they know a thing or two about tangling with MS. Allowing a linux client to, out of the box, connect transparently to Windows resources and live happily in a Windows dominated environment is something I would believe Novell would advocate highly.
Linux advocates often alternate wildly from pretending Windows doesn't exist, and deceiving themselves about the sheer juggernaut of market dominance that Windows represents by downplaying the advantages that Windows has. Things like, "Oh, well, Windows can do games but there are Linux games too!". But when they say that, they're comparing WoW and GTA:SA to a tetris clone and Tuxracer.
The true secret to achieving a significant level of enterprise and home Linux desktop penetration is two easy to say and difficult to accomplish objectives:
1) Do everything that Windows can do
2) Do it better than Windows can
We don't have 1) - we won't have it until there is a freely available DX10 compatible interface for Linux, for starters.
We won't have 2) until we have 1).
Now, here is where the Linux advocates will pretend that Windows doesn't exist and downplay Windows instead of admitting there's a problem. I'm waiting for "We don't need DirectX compatibility, OpenGL is better, Windows games are awful, nobody plays them, etc". This won't work, because it's the method in use at the moment that is not changing anything.
What more can be said? In order to compete with Windows, one must embrace and extend. Embrace Windows functionality, then leverage the greater development capabilities that open source provides to outperform Windows, in the same way that Linux often outperforms Windows in various areas where the same functionality does exist.
Actually that's a pretty common joke we play on people at the office here. Another "fun" thing to do with Windows is to force the title bar up to 100 point fonts, which totally breaks the UI and looks bizarre.
In other news, Google Inc have announced they are changing their logo to a more classical look. Spokesman for Google's marketing department said "We find the new glowing eye in a pyramid logo to be more appealing to a broader range of customers."
"Does anyone have experience with RIS?"
Well yes... in fact, there's a company that fully supports all aspects of the RIS product, and even offers a series of training certifications that allow certificated individuals to demonstrate a passable knowledge of the product. The company is called Microsoft.
This whole article is FUD. Does this guy honestly believe it's possible that nobody understands how to use a pretty fundamental Windows technology? Wait, wait... he's used to asking for support from Linux forums, where the easiest way to get support is to troll it by posting "Linux is bollocks, it doesn't work half as well as Windows and it's twice as complex." then wait for PhD open source developers to start emailling him. Windows support works differently! You can just ask Microsoft (cost = arm + leg), or hire any tier 1 IT services company (IBM, HP, CSC, Unisys etc). But at least the regimented support and training infrastructure is there, and some of the best the corporate IT world has to offer.
But seriously, if you don't understand Windows technology and you're trying to administer a Windows environment, there are two options. 1) Replace it all with a *nix system you do understand or 2) Hire an MCSE (there are some talented ones as well as some idiots, so hirer-beware).
Actually, TFA in this case had little or nothing to do with Vista at all. The guy is a journalist who had to do a computer article, I think, from his attitude and presentation he doesn't know a whole lot about IT at all.
Let's look at what really happened for this guys "worst OS experience ever".
1) He tries installing a Beta OS on unsupported hardware - it doesn't work
2) He blames Microsoft for Lenovo not providing drivers for an unreleased Beta OS
3) He tries installing a Beta OS on a laptop with a faulty internal battery - it doesn't work
4) He blames Microsoft for an unreleased Beta OS not working on his faulty hardware
5) He tries installing a Beta OS on a laptop with a faulty hard drive - it doesn't work
6) He blames Microsoft.... you get the idea.
What does this guy want? Microsoft technicians to come out and give him a brand new laptop, or train him in a semblence of IT know-how? The guy is clearly an idiot who wanted to bash MS to cover up the fact that he pissfarted around with faulty hardware for three days because he didn't know how to install Windows properly (or, heaven forbid, choose some pretty normal hardware to install it on instead of a heavily proprietarised laptop).
I think, wishful thinking if you like, there would have been a meaningful article if they had found someone who knew how to install an OS (It's not even that hard, come on, most people know the hardware should be working OK before you try installing the OS). Then the reviewer could have spent three days actually doing the review on the OS. This is just an article about how bad at IT the journalist is. But he does try to spin it so that "Vista sucks and I am a great journalist/IT guy wannabe!"
The Uncanny Valley attacks again! This one gives me the creeps!
At least this one looks slightly less creepy than that SimPal thing from 6th Day.
The plan to do an Academy series with a young Kirk and Spock has been around for a very, very long time, even predating the Motion Picture. It didn't even get as far along as the "Star Trek 2" TV series concept in the 70's, not all that long after TOS was cancelled. Prior to Enterprise, the other big alternative to Enterprise would have been a TV series again based at Starfleet Academy, but with a whole new crew (possibly following the whole Red Squadron or whatever it was that represented the elite cadets).
Personally, no matter how many people flame Enterprise, a lot of the episodes were better than any of the Ferengi madness and we love the Bajoran religion episodes of DS9, and certainly better than some other schlocky Sci Fi that we've had lately (Threshold, Andromeda, gah).
Well... no.. Australia, for instance, was Federated with agreement from the previous British government. No blood lost at all!
I've seen a few of those bootlegs, my friends often have them, but a lot of the time they're really shoddy cam jobs and TS's. Better to download from a community vetted torrent site, where you can trust the community that rates the disk quality as a proper DVDrip etc.
If Apple sold OS X Server to as many market segments for as many purposes as Microsoft does, Apple would have a similar number of pricepoints and products.
It might seem complicated if you're used to 10 person office environments, but the wildly different scopes for Windows and Linux servers require some degree of differentiation of product. Especially if you intend to get some cash back for the product. With Linux the differences are all functional, a humble home linux router for two people will be configured way differently to a server designed to be part of a supercomputer cluster. Microsoft does this too, from Small Business Server to Datacenter, but they also have to factor in price and profit. This is business. It's not good business if you can sell a product for $10,000 but you decide to sell it for $100 because then it's the same as all the other ones you sell.
Wait a second - why would OpenGL performance be crippled (this is a serious question, I didn't know MS was intending to cripple OpenGL at all)?
How do we know that indexing will be worse than the other vendors pushing it, when we haven't seen and tested the final product(ok, rhetoric)?
Why isn't the Windows shell environment usable? The ability to shell script in Win2K3 surpasses any previous version of Windows to date. Every single administrative task in Windows 2003 Server can be performed from the shell.
As for the security enhancements, well honestly I find it laughable. The reviewers probably never used Linux or OS X, so they probably aren't used to the limitations of not running as Admin/Root/whatever. So of course they're going to whine. Everyone is going to complain about Windows Vista for exactly the same reasons Linux advocates advocate Linux.
The other big complain from Mr Thurrott? It's taking too long, it's not delivering on promises, blah. I'll give you two opposing statements that apply to *every* bit of software ever released, and you can pick where on the axis Windows Vista sits:
"The software is taking too long, it's missing too many features because they're paranoid about getting it right"
"The software was rushed out the door, it's too buggy."
Which would you prefer?