Again, it's a tradeoff. Matte screens, because they scatter/diffuse incident light, are less vulnerable to external light sources changing the color representation and throwing your calibration off. (It's the same reason most color calibration software lets you switch between various configurations, e.g. day/night/etc. based on how much external light is coming in to your office). Hence why they're used for monitors intended for calibrated work. But the emitted light is scattered as well and is not as pure when it reaches your eye. A tradeoff.
My main point is that all the scuttlebutt about glossy displays being cheaper to produce because they wash out colors is just misinformed. They each have their advantages and disadvantages, but the claims you sometimes read of grotesquely poor color representation on glossy displays for some undefined reason are not accurate.
With matte screens, emitted light is more diffuse, a disadvantage (less color accuracy, potentially more long-term eyestrain). With glossy screens on the other hand, you have the disadvantage of specular reflections, which some people may find distracting.
At any rate, the conventional wisdom that glossy screens are just a fancy way to sell computers to unwitting masses is uninformed. There are engineering tradeoffs both ways. I personally find the diffuse light transmission of matte screens more tiring than specular reflections, but it obviously depends on the person.
I'm not sure that this isn't legal. There is no property in bodies at common law, but you could sell a "chose in action" (technical legal term) granting a third party the right to obtain your corpse after death.
It's a good idea. With the aging of the baby boomers and looming medical care costs for families, it makes sense.
I'm serious... for typography geeks, the differences are fairly large. Arial is viewed in the typography community as a less beautiful knockoff (though they do share a common ancestor face). Google around.
Yesterday I received an advertisement using 36-point Arial Bold with the first word beginning with a lowercase "c"... drove me nuts. Even office documents distract me though, especially 14-point and larger.
I used to have real trouble understanding why some people put so much emphasis on ridiculously unimportant stuff like coordinating shoes with your belt, but I found it helpful to reframe the concept to similar things I care about but others probably don't. For instance, someone using Arial instead of Helvetica is very distracting to me. Most people don't care. Inconsistent capitalization or punctuation anywhere is also very distracting to me, but in most cases ordinary people never notice. Etc... My guess is that things like belt and shoes are distracting in similar ways to people who care about those things. I don't understand why they care, but just as they don't understand why I care about typeface minutia, I still recognize that it might be distracting to them and try to dress appropriately. It's a courtesy to people's quirks in order to avoid distraction from the message, not a bowing to fashion.
Re:Fresh Kimchi?
on
Kimchi in Space
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Believe it or not, those kind of high-tech kimchi refrigerators are *huge* in Korea now. They're pretty much the #1 "must have" home appliance in Korea. There's a good Wikipedia article:
Kimchi fridge
You can get around this by periodically running "hdiutil compact" on the backup disk image. This reclaims deleted space properly and allows you to use TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes safely.
While ZFS' claim of never becoming inconsistent sounds incredible, they also have an extremely impressive test suite and test rig.
Their nightly "ztest" program does all of the following in parallel: - Read, write, create, and delete files and directories - Create and destroy entire filesystems and storage pools - Turn compression on and off (while filesystem is active) - Change checksum algorithm (while filesystem is active) - Add and remove devices (while pool is active) - Change I/O caching and scheduling policies (while pool is active) - Scribble random garbage on one side of live mirror to test self-healing data - Force violent crashes to simulate power loss, then verify pool integrity
They claim this is probably more abuse in 20 seconds than most people would see in a lifetime and that ZFS has been subjected to over a million forced, violent crashes *without losing data integrity or leaking a single block*.
It's not just checksumming either -- now that ZFS has ditto blocks (replicating active blocks into "free" disk space), it can now self-heal in some circumstances on a single drive configuration.
You're mistaken. ZFS RAID-Z is definitely "raid" -- in fact it's RAID without the RAID-5 write hole on non-specialized (no NVRAM in the controller) hardware. Contrary to what you said, you *can* easily go from a single drive to a pair of mirrored drives (see ZFS admin guide, p. 59) or a RAID-Z (p. 60). The only real limitation is you cannot add an additional disk to an existing RAID-Z configuration, the idea right now being that you'll add another set of disks in RAID-Z as a top-level vdev. This is not optimal for a lot of scenarios but they're working on it. ZFS mirrored configurations are more flexible.
The data integrity advantages of ZFS over traditional RAID-4 and RAID-5 are hard to argue with... it validates the entire input-output path.
It's so that you can bring a ZFS volume to any old Mac running Leopard, plug it in, and read data off it, without having to install any extra (currently beta) software.
This is also why, when you create a ZFS pool using the read/write drivers, it defaults to creating a pool with ZFS version 6 on disk, so that it's compatible with the version of ZFS shipping with Leopard. (You run "zfs update" to transform your pool to the most recent on disk version if this kind of compatibility isn't an issue for you.)
BTW, Leopard also reads from BSD and Solaris-created ZFS drives just fine.
It wasn't that easy to set up a RAID in Linux the last time I tried (admittedly long ago), but even in comparison, setting up a RAID-Z in ZFS is just a single line: "zpool create mypool raidz disk4s2 disk5s2 disk6s2"
I've been running ZFS on my home Mac server since the old developer seed. It's generally stable as long as you disable Spotlight indexing on the volume (it's not supported yet). Everything on the command line works, as does accessing the ZFS pool over AFS. It's *very* easy to set up btw, much easier than setting up a RAID in Linux. There were issues deleting files from the Finder in the last release; I haven't installed the 102A release yet. Still, if you're just using it for a server volume, you'll probably be happy with it.
I agree with your discipline points, but LaTeX has all sorts of other oddities that are quasi-markup. My biggest beef is the algorithm for determining when sentences end. You have to know what the algorithm is in order to properly mark up every period (i.e. lowercase period space is end of a sentence by default, uppercase period space is not, period no space is never the end), which isn't hard, but having to think about the algorithm at all is by definition not clean. It's also a little unfortunate because it's becoming unnecessary. Neither Hermann Zaph (arguably the most famous senior living typographer) nor Robert Bringhurst (author of "The Elements of Typographic Style") recommends using slightly longer spaces after sentences any longer, so it's all for naught really. Plus it's sort of ridiculous to go to the trouble of microtypographic character expansion to ensure uniform grey density of a justified paragraph while explicitly countering this by adding uneven whitespace. If people insist on the old house style of slightly longer spaces after periods, I'd prefer if TeX just used the simpler algorithm of two consecutive spaces mean the end of a sentence, which then on output get transformed into the equivalent of a single space plus a typographic thin space. That would be cleaner. Similarly, having to separately mark up the beginning and end of quotations differently using open and close quotations rather than just having the software infer typographers quotes is a pain.
Neither of these is major issues, and I still very much like and respect LaTeX. Getting fonts installed is still a bear, but once you install them and then manually create margin kerning data files for the given font, the margin kerning is slightly better than InDesign's optical margin kerning. On the other hand, creating those data files manually is a pain in the rear, so I usually restrict myself to Adobe Minion Pro and the MinionPro package when I'm using LaTeX.
Still, InDesign is a surprisingly good alternative for people, especially those in the humanities, who will never be able to grok LaTeX. There is no other modern system that comes close to these two in terms of both separation of content and markup and extremely high output quality.
I actually really like InDesign as well. Its "story editor" (raw text markup editor) is *much* cleaner than using LaTeX provided you don't have to do math. The problem with LaTeX is there is not as clean a brick wall between markup and content as I'd like. InDesign's story editor keeps it clean, and being able to collapse footnotes is very nice (though Scrivener's footnote ghosting is better). Also, now that InDesign incorporates TeX / hz-Program justification algorithms and microtypography, its output is essentially identical to LaTeX in quality. The only thing it doesn't do is merging vertical spacing between paragraph styles, and vertical spacing expansion/contraction, but for that one feature alone it's not enough to justify LaTeX.
I still like LaTeX though, but InDesign is remarkably nice. Word is useless once you start working exclusively with styles... who needs all the features when all you're doing is using it as a glorified style markup tool, and the output quality is inferior. It's been more than a quarter century since TeX, it's not too much to ask for them to improve the justification and hyphenation algorithms, let alone incorporate microtypography and margin kerning.
BTW, in case you're interested, since Scrivener has been mentioned a lot in this thread, it's pretty easy to write an XSLT that moves Scrivener / MultiMarkdown right into InDesign cleanly, including footnotes, using Adobe's InDesign tagged text format. You can also bring in the XML directly, but CS3 still doesn't support footnote generation directly from XML. This may or may not matter to you.
What's even better, and this isn't clear from the documentation, is that you can write arbitrary XSLTs to transform Scrivener/Markdown output to any format you want. Scrivener even includes a bunch of alternative LaTeX XSLTs for various document classes but you have to do some digging on the forum to figure out how to gain access to them. Once you find out, it becomes brilliant. It makes Scrivener not just into a tool for writers, but also a tool for geeks as well. Plain text formatting, nice organization tools, typewriter scrolling, and XSLTs to LaTeX or whatever you want.
CalDAV is much more flexible than just downloading and publishing iCalendars. It's a complete groupware server. For instance, your secretary can make changes to your calendar if you authorize her to, you get free/busy time slot viewing/finding for team members, everyone in a group can schedule a fixed resource like a meeting room, etc. Most of this is difficult with just iCalendars, which are fundamentally just files.
CalDAV is indeed the holy grail. Finally we have something open source that supports all the major user-visible features of Exchange (time visibility, resource scheduling, etc.), is standards-based, and is supported by multiple vendors. There has been nothing like this for far too long.
Thank you for the Greenspun link. I never would have read that article without someone suggesting it (the title "Women in Science" does not adequately describe the content), but he is absolutely, 100% spot on. Unfortunately the truth of much of what he says doesn't become apparent until you've spent several years in a graduate program in the sciences, but there are strong reasons why rational, smart people are selecting careers in fields like law, medicine, and management over science.
It's in there. Apple uses it in many of their demos, screenshots, and movies, and it's one of the features mentioned on the Leopard material up on Apple's developer site. They haven't included a GUI to turn it on, but it's easy enough to do for us geeks. And yes, that means you can finally use those awesome radiology displays without everything being hyper-small.
I won't comment on the quality of the programmers -- both companies draw from similar pools -- but the way they manage those programmers is significantly different. Probably the biggest beef I have with Microsoft's management is their devotion to Jack Welch's (of General Electric management fame) idea of doing a company reorganization ("reorg") roughly every 16 months. Not everyone moves around, since certain people don't make sense to move, but there is disruption. This kind of management "theory" makes sense when everyone is viewed as unskilled, interchangeable production units, but it doesn't make sense in software where the value is in slowly acquired knowledge of the source code base, and knowledge of how to interact with everyone on the team to minimize team issues. Reorgs flush some of that away, every time. I realize they teach from Jack Welch's playbook in most MBA programs, but Microsoft needs to abandon this practice. There are other major differences between the two companies attitudes and group dynamics as well. You really have to have worked inside one (or preferably both) to get a good comparison.
Another, more minor beef, is Microsoft's philosophy that others will put up with things that they wouldn't personally put up with. For instance, internal to Office, Clippy is known as TFC_* in function names... based on a comment from Bill Gates that "I don't want to have to deal with That F*cking Clip every time I want to print." Bill hates it, but he nevertheless still shipped it. In contrast, Jobs would never ship a feature he hated; he'd view it as a personal affront. This attitude pervades Microsoft. For instance, everyone at MS realizes the overly tiered pricing scheme is customer hostile -- they know many customers realize they're being either nickle and dimed or had -- but they still ship it because it maximizes revenue in the short term, regardless of damage to long-term company goodwill. Jobs won't dish out something he wouldn't personally put up with. Perhaps it's ego, or perhaps he understands that Apple's success depends almost entirely on goodwill. This all sounds handwavy, but it's another major difference in the the two company philosophies.
I could spend all day comparing the two companies; it's fascinating. And no, not everything about Apple's culture is superior.
Just exclude your homemade porn folders from the Time Machine backup set. Easy. If you forget to do this, just delete the files on your Time Machine drive; it uses the standard.snapshot-style folder layout. No binary databases or big backup blobs that you can't parse and delete yourself.
If you want public key encryption of the backups, set an encrypted DMG to be your Time Machine target. You can even use AES-256 in Leopard.
You nailed it. "She's 13" was a perfect response, because it those two words cut directly through the corporate/marketing speak.
If anything, Ballmer's response was the non-sequitur. What "lot of value" could anyone have gotten from an operating system that had to be uninstalled two days later? Joy? Productivity? It doesn't make any sense at all. Sometimes I wonder if Ballmer is a net negative to Microsoft, with this type of canned response that only damages the public's perception of the company, as well as his coining of inappropriate terms (like "squirting" for the Zune).
I agree with you about the Vista brand being damaged in the minds of ordinary people. One anecdote: I'm in law school, and on Tuesday I noticed the girl sitting next to me had brought in a new MacBook Pro. I started chatting with her about it, and she told me the reason she had got it is because she needed a new laptop and didn't want to move to Vista. I've heard similar things (though not in such point-blank language) from other non-technical users. It's surprising to me. The word of mouth problems with Vista aren't just confined to OS bickering among nerds... there seems to be genuine negative buzz about Vista among ordinary, non-technical users.
If you've ever run a business, word of mouth is the most powerful way to acquire or lose mindshare... no amount of advertising claiming "the WOW is now" will counter genuine, grassroots word of mouth.
Will this have an impact on Microsoft? Probably not. But it's a sign that there are real limits to what users will put up with, even from a vendor with extraordinary market power.
Slashdot Mirror
My main point is that all the scuttlebutt about glossy displays being cheaper to produce because they wash out colors is just misinformed. They each have their advantages and disadvantages, but the claims you sometimes read of grotesquely poor color representation on glossy displays for some undefined reason are not accurate.
http://www.screentekinc.com/pixelbright-lcds.shtml
With matte screens, emitted light is more diffuse, a disadvantage (less color accuracy, potentially more long-term eyestrain). With glossy screens on the other hand, you have the disadvantage of specular reflections, which some people may find distracting. At any rate, the conventional wisdom that glossy screens are just a fancy way to sell computers to unwitting masses is uninformed. There are engineering tradeoffs both ways. I personally find the diffuse light transmission of matte screens more tiring than specular reflections, but it obviously depends on the person.
It's a good idea. With the aging of the baby boomers and looming medical care costs for families, it makes sense.
I'm serious... for typography geeks, the differences are fairly large. Arial is viewed in the typography community as a less beautiful knockoff (though they do share a common ancestor face). Google around. Yesterday I received an advertisement using 36-point Arial Bold with the first word beginning with a lowercase "c"... drove me nuts. Even office documents distract me though, especially 14-point and larger.
I used to have real trouble understanding why some people put so much emphasis on ridiculously unimportant stuff like coordinating shoes with your belt, but I found it helpful to reframe the concept to similar things I care about but others probably don't. For instance, someone using Arial instead of Helvetica is very distracting to me. Most people don't care. Inconsistent capitalization or punctuation anywhere is also very distracting to me, but in most cases ordinary people never notice. Etc... My guess is that things like belt and shoes are distracting in similar ways to people who care about those things. I don't understand why they care, but just as they don't understand why I care about typeface minutia, I still recognize that it might be distracting to them and try to dress appropriately. It's a courtesy to people's quirks in order to avoid distraction from the message, not a bowing to fashion.
Believe it or not, those kind of high-tech kimchi refrigerators are *huge* in Korea now. They're pretty much the #1 "must have" home appliance in Korea. There's a good Wikipedia article: Kimchi fridge
You can get around this by periodically running "hdiutil compact" on the backup disk image. This reclaims deleted space properly and allows you to use TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes safely.
There are no manufacturers of 13.3" panels who currently manufacture 8 bit panels. All of them in that size, from every manufacturer, are 6 bit.
While ZFS' claim of never becoming inconsistent sounds incredible, they also have an extremely impressive test suite and test rig.
Their nightly "ztest" program does all of the following in parallel:
- Read, write, create, and delete files and directories
- Create and destroy entire filesystems and storage pools
- Turn compression on and off (while filesystem is active)
- Change checksum algorithm (while filesystem is active)
- Add and remove devices (while pool is active)
- Change I/O caching and scheduling policies (while pool is active)
- Scribble random garbage on one side of live mirror to test self-healing data
- Force violent crashes to simulate power loss, then verify pool integrity
They claim this is probably more abuse in 20 seconds than most people would see in a lifetime and that ZFS has been subjected to over a million forced, violent crashes *without losing data integrity or leaking a single block*.
It's not just checksumming either -- now that ZFS has ditto blocks (replicating active blocks into "free" disk space), it can now self-heal in some circumstances on a single drive configuration.
You're mistaken. ZFS RAID-Z is definitely "raid" -- in fact it's RAID without the RAID-5 write hole on non-specialized (no NVRAM in the controller) hardware. Contrary to what you said, you *can* easily go from a single drive to a pair of mirrored drives (see ZFS admin guide, p. 59) or a RAID-Z (p. 60). The only real limitation is you cannot add an additional disk to an existing RAID-Z configuration, the idea right now being that you'll add another set of disks in RAID-Z as a top-level vdev. This is not optimal for a lot of scenarios but they're working on it. ZFS mirrored configurations are more flexible.
The data integrity advantages of ZFS over traditional RAID-4 and RAID-5 are hard to argue with... it validates the entire input-output path.
It's so that you can bring a ZFS volume to any old Mac running Leopard, plug it in, and read data off it, without having to install any extra (currently beta) software.
This is also why, when you create a ZFS pool using the read/write drivers, it defaults to creating a pool with ZFS version 6 on disk, so that it's compatible with the version of ZFS shipping with Leopard. (You run "zfs update" to transform your pool to the most recent on disk version if this kind of compatibility isn't an issue for you.)
BTW, Leopard also reads from BSD and Solaris-created ZFS drives just fine.
It wasn't that easy to set up a RAID in Linux the last time I tried (admittedly long ago), but even in comparison, setting up a RAID-Z in ZFS is just a single line: "zpool create mypool raidz disk4s2 disk5s2 disk6s2"
I've been running ZFS on my home Mac server since the old developer seed. It's generally stable as long as you disable Spotlight indexing on the volume (it's not supported yet). Everything on the command line works, as does accessing the ZFS pool over AFS. It's *very* easy to set up btw, much easier than setting up a RAID in Linux. There were issues deleting files from the Finder in the last release; I haven't installed the 102A release yet. Still, if you're just using it for a server volume, you'll probably be happy with it.
Neither of these is major issues, and I still very much like and respect LaTeX. Getting fonts installed is still a bear, but once you install them and then manually create margin kerning data files for the given font, the margin kerning is slightly better than InDesign's optical margin kerning. On the other hand, creating those data files manually is a pain in the rear, so I usually restrict myself to Adobe Minion Pro and the MinionPro package when I'm using LaTeX.
Still, InDesign is a surprisingly good alternative for people, especially those in the humanities, who will never be able to grok LaTeX. There is no other modern system that comes close to these two in terms of both separation of content and markup and extremely high output quality.
I actually really like InDesign as well. Its "story editor" (raw text markup editor) is *much* cleaner than using LaTeX provided you don't have to do math. The problem with LaTeX is there is not as clean a brick wall between markup and content as I'd like. InDesign's story editor keeps it clean, and being able to collapse footnotes is very nice (though Scrivener's footnote ghosting is better). Also, now that InDesign incorporates TeX / hz-Program justification algorithms and microtypography, its output is essentially identical to LaTeX in quality. The only thing it doesn't do is merging vertical spacing between paragraph styles, and vertical spacing expansion/contraction, but for that one feature alone it's not enough to justify LaTeX. I still like LaTeX though, but InDesign is remarkably nice. Word is useless once you start working exclusively with styles... who needs all the features when all you're doing is using it as a glorified style markup tool, and the output quality is inferior. It's been more than a quarter century since TeX, it's not too much to ask for them to improve the justification and hyphenation algorithms, let alone incorporate microtypography and margin kerning. BTW, in case you're interested, since Scrivener has been mentioned a lot in this thread, it's pretty easy to write an XSLT that moves Scrivener / MultiMarkdown right into InDesign cleanly, including footnotes, using Adobe's InDesign tagged text format. You can also bring in the XML directly, but CS3 still doesn't support footnote generation directly from XML. This may or may not matter to you.
What's even better, and this isn't clear from the documentation, is that you can write arbitrary XSLTs to transform Scrivener/Markdown output to any format you want. Scrivener even includes a bunch of alternative LaTeX XSLTs for various document classes but you have to do some digging on the forum to figure out how to gain access to them. Once you find out, it becomes brilliant. It makes Scrivener not just into a tool for writers, but also a tool for geeks as well. Plain text formatting, nice organization tools, typewriter scrolling, and XSLTs to LaTeX or whatever you want.
CalDAV is much more flexible than just downloading and publishing iCalendars. It's a complete groupware server. For instance, your secretary can make changes to your calendar if you authorize her to, you get free/busy time slot viewing/finding for team members, everyone in a group can schedule a fixed resource like a meeting room, etc. Most of this is difficult with just iCalendars, which are fundamentally just files.
CalDAV is indeed the holy grail. Finally we have something open source that supports all the major user-visible features of Exchange (time visibility, resource scheduling, etc.), is standards-based, and is supported by multiple vendors. There has been nothing like this for far too long.
Thank you for the Greenspun link. I never would have read that article without someone suggesting it (the title "Women in Science" does not adequately describe the content), but he is absolutely, 100% spot on. Unfortunately the truth of much of what he says doesn't become apparent until you've spent several years in a graduate program in the sciences, but there are strong reasons why rational, smart people are selecting careers in fields like law, medicine, and management over science.
It's in there. Apple uses it in many of their demos, screenshots, and movies, and it's one of the features mentioned on the Leopard material up on Apple's developer site. They haven't included a GUI to turn it on, but it's easy enough to do for us geeks. And yes, that means you can finally use those awesome radiology displays without everything being hyper-small.
I won't comment on the quality of the programmers -- both companies draw from similar pools -- but the way they manage those programmers is significantly different. Probably the biggest beef I have with Microsoft's management is their devotion to Jack Welch's (of General Electric management fame) idea of doing a company reorganization ("reorg") roughly every 16 months. Not everyone moves around, since certain people don't make sense to move, but there is disruption. This kind of management "theory" makes sense when everyone is viewed as unskilled, interchangeable production units, but it doesn't make sense in software where the value is in slowly acquired knowledge of the source code base, and knowledge of how to interact with everyone on the team to minimize team issues. Reorgs flush some of that away, every time. I realize they teach from Jack Welch's playbook in most MBA programs, but Microsoft needs to abandon this practice. There are other major differences between the two companies attitudes and group dynamics as well. You really have to have worked inside one (or preferably both) to get a good comparison.
Another, more minor beef, is Microsoft's philosophy that others will put up with things that they wouldn't personally put up with. For instance, internal to Office, Clippy is known as TFC_* in function names... based on a comment from Bill Gates that "I don't want to have to deal with That F*cking Clip every time I want to print." Bill hates it, but he nevertheless still shipped it. In contrast, Jobs would never ship a feature he hated; he'd view it as a personal affront. This attitude pervades Microsoft. For instance, everyone at MS realizes the overly tiered pricing scheme is customer hostile -- they know many customers realize they're being either nickle and dimed or had -- but they still ship it because it maximizes revenue in the short term, regardless of damage to long-term company goodwill. Jobs won't dish out something he wouldn't personally put up with. Perhaps it's ego, or perhaps he understands that Apple's success depends almost entirely on goodwill. This all sounds handwavy, but it's another major difference in the the two company philosophies.
I could spend all day comparing the two companies; it's fascinating. And no, not everything about Apple's culture is superior.
Just exclude your homemade porn folders from the Time Machine backup set. Easy. If you forget to do this, just delete the files on your Time Machine drive; it uses the standard .snapshot-style folder layout. No binary databases or big backup blobs that you can't parse and delete yourself.
If you want public key encryption of the backups, set an encrypted DMG to be your Time Machine target. You can even use AES-256 in Leopard.
You nailed it. "She's 13" was a perfect response, because it those two words cut directly through the corporate/marketing speak.
If anything, Ballmer's response was the non-sequitur. What "lot of value" could anyone have gotten from an operating system that had to be uninstalled two days later? Joy? Productivity? It doesn't make any sense at all. Sometimes I wonder if Ballmer is a net negative to Microsoft, with this type of canned response that only damages the public's perception of the company, as well as his coining of inappropriate terms (like "squirting" for the Zune).
I agree with you about the Vista brand being damaged in the minds of ordinary people. One anecdote: I'm in law school, and on Tuesday I noticed the girl sitting next to me had brought in a new MacBook Pro. I started chatting with her about it, and she told me the reason she had got it is because she needed a new laptop and didn't want to move to Vista. I've heard similar things (though not in such point-blank language) from other non-technical users. It's surprising to me. The word of mouth problems with Vista aren't just confined to OS bickering among nerds... there seems to be genuine negative buzz about Vista among ordinary, non-technical users. If you've ever run a business, word of mouth is the most powerful way to acquire or lose mindshare... no amount of advertising claiming "the WOW is now" will counter genuine, grassroots word of mouth. Will this have an impact on Microsoft? Probably not. But it's a sign that there are real limits to what users will put up with, even from a vendor with extraordinary market power.