I actually spoke with a guy who worked on the Virtual PC team at Microsoft (Windows Virtual PC, an evolution from Virtual PC 2007, is the software that enables Virtual XP Mode). When asked why they required hardware virtualization support in WVPC (VPC2007 uses dynamic recompilation to work around lack of hardware support) he said that back when work on WVPC started (2 years ago) Intel and AMD assured them that within 2 years, all their chips would support hardware virtualization. Thus, MS decided to require hardware support with WVPC, which not only improves performance but substantially decreases code-base complexity and amount of testing required (this is the main reason - doubling the neccessary testing was not a popular choice).
Fast-forward to today, and AMD has essentially kept that promise - even their consumer-grade CPUs support hardware virtualization, and have for years - while Intel has decided that they would rather disable VT on a bunch of their processors just for SKU differentiation (the silicon is actually in place, just intentioanlly disabled). This has caused some substantial ire within MS, apparently. I asked if it would be possible to re-introduce the software work-around from VPC2007, and was told that it could be (and was under consideration) but that if they decided to do so it would probably take at least until Win7 SP1.
First, most search engines will helpfully correct typos in domain names for you. I'm sure that the averag euser finds this behavior a LOT more helpful than a page saying "Nope, can't find it."
Second, domains don't necessarily end with any of the TLDs you listed. In fact, the path you're routing to might not end with a TLD at all - servers on your intranet, or in your hosts file, often don't have TLDs. Treating a URL that differently purely on the basis of whether it ends with a.somedamnthing seems pretty pointless to me.
So turn off the "Search from address bar" option. To most people, this approach is better - they type in a URL, and make a typo, and it takes them to a search engine that says "Did you mean XXXXXXX?"
The problem is that *until* they EoL XP, they can't EoL the browser that XP ships with. In other words, they are trying to EoL IE6, but can't for the same reason that they can't EoL XP - it's still being deployed and used! This is not that complicated... once they can get rid of XP (something they've been trying to do for years), they'll probably drop support for IE6 the same day (why support one component of an entire OS that is no longer supported?).
FYI, IE8 allows people to put the buttons back where they were in 6. Both 7 and 8 allow you to permanently show the menu bar, if you want. The new Command Bar in 7 and 8 can be turned off, as can tabbed browsing (no idea why you'd want to, but you can).
Out of curiosity, are you still using Windows 3.x because you also think that the Start menu "suck[s] donkey balls"? Have you even seriously tried to use the new interface, with or without customizing it? Most people seem perfectly comfortable with it.
Actually, I miss the older, larger controllers; Everything switched to the smaller controllers (which apparently many folks preferred, but which I found uncomfortably small), then to the 360 controller (which corrected some of the small controller's other flows, but is still physically smaller than I like). It's not even like I have gian hands - I just like holding something larger than the smaller controllers, and find the button positions more natural.
Many contracts have a clause in them allowing the contract to be changed at a later date (such right usually being restricted to one party only). However, I believe that legally speaking, you can back out of that new contract at any time if you so desire. In other words, the contract states that AT&T is allowed to change the contract (and you aren't), but the law states taht if they do change it, you get to walk away.
Acknowledging that Novell gets a lot of crap from the/. crowd, OpenSuse is a pretty sweet distro. Yast2 is easily the best configuration tool I've ever seen on Linux, with everything from package management to bootloader configuration categorized and easily accessible, even from a terminal (front-ends written in Qt3, Qt4, GTK+, and ncurses).
I'm not sure if PulseAudio is installed by default, but openSuse still allows the option of customizing the installation before actually installing. You can stick with the default package selections for the most part, and just remove the pulseaudio libraries (including anything dependent on them) in about 20 seconds during the install.
I've contemplated trying. You wouldn't get all of it, of course - SUA has no audio subsystem by default, although I've heard of people installed ESD - but at least some of it would probably work.
The two successors to Wings of Liberty *ARE* the game's expansions. The total campaign length will be 1.5x as long as StarCraft + Brood War.
In other words, you STILL have nothing to complain about - you'll get just as much campaign material per purchase of SC2 as you got for the original, except you'll be able to get 50% more campaign in SC2 than the original ever had.
Also, I really didn't feel that there was that much "story" to SC; there was some, but wouldn't it make more sense to just read a book or watch a movie if you're after story?
It's almost certainly against the contract terms that Real Host signed with their upstream provider. Net neutrality has nothing to do with this issue; this isn't packet injection or traffic shaping or anything like that. This is simply disconnecting a client who is in breach of contract and criminal law. In effect, blocking them (as you personally advocated).
Do you honestly think it should be the responsibility of the rest of the world to deal with these attacks, just because they are sent over the Internet?
You may have noticed that there have been stories recently about ISPs who *do* cut off the access of copyright infringers. Without deep packet inspection (which I'm wholly opposed to without a warrant, just making that clear) it's not like they catch anywhere close to all of it, but if they do catch you the contract you signed lets them cut off your access, and they will.
Funny you mention extensions. With a couple of nice extensions that MS actually links me to directly, Office will
* Export to PDF (originally it was built in, but Adobe threw a hissy-fit over it) * Import a plethora of formats (seriously, what does OO.o open that MS Office doesn't anyhow?) * Export (and import/edit/convert) ODF, and I was doing it with the Office 2007 beta, RTM, and SP1 * Allow me to easily install and manage extensions (out of the box)
Admittedly, it doesn't run natively on Linux. Wine will get there soon enough, but you're nonetheless correct. Students can get a copy of MS Office 2007 Ultimate for $60, which includes a lot of stuff that OO.o doesn't even *try* to copy. http://theultimatesteal.com/ No, I'm not affiliated with the site, but a lot of folks have found it very useful.
Yeha, this thing could have been too (by not installing it, for example). There's a difference between optional self-inflicted censorship (I see it as silly, but then, I don't have kids) and mandatory, externally-imposed censorship. Guess which one this story is about?
Riiiiight. Except for folks who can't host games because their school, office, or even home firewall isn't configured for it (and that's a lot of people). Or people who are somewhere without an Internet connection, or at least without connections for that many people (I play LAN games in my buddy's dorm room all the time. Aside from the fact that it's impossible to host on Battle.Net from there, there's only one working Ethernet port in the wall and it's very difficult to join the same game if we both go online through it - not sure why, probably just some weird network code thing, but a problem nonetheless.)
Requiring not only an Internet connection but the ability to host Battle.Net games is simply idiotic.
You can play all three races with the very first release. The campaign will be Terran only, but it will be three times as long, no lack of material. Besides, if you're honestly buying the game for its campaign, I really don't know what to say except that you are very, very odd. Don't get me wrong, the campaigns can be fun, but the heart of a game like SC is the multiplayer. I'll probably finish the Brood War campaign some time before SC2 comes out, but it's been a decade so far and I've never really bothered - and a lot of people didn't even bother to start it.
As for getting all the game content, that's just trolling. What do you expect, that they'll release the expansion packs for free? That's all they are; expansions just like Brood War or The Frozen Throne for WC3. You get new units, new maps, and new campaigns. You probably pay about $10-$20 less that the cost for the core of the game, but you must already have that core. Blizzard has been doing this since WarCraft 2 and your "compaint" is simply idiotic.
OneNote doesn't either, which is a shame as its menu structure could really use some improvement. However, all Office 2010 applications (including Outlook and OneNote) use the ribbon.
Re:Per-desktop activities assignments
on
KDE 4.3 Released
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· Score: 1
Um, you're confusing system RAM and VRAM (video RAM). Aero runs quite happily on 128MB of VRAM shared from the main system, as long as there is a gig or so to start with. It'll actually work on less than that (Intel Integrated) but you start noticing delays, which is either due to the sub-128MB of video RAM (still shared, so very slow too) or the fact that Intel GMAs suck.
My first Aero-capable laptop had 1280MB os total RAM, of which its graphics chip (integrated, but by ATi not Intel) would claim 128MB. The CPU was a single-core Turion64 (1.8GHz). It ran Vista, including Aero, just fine. The computer is now about 4 years old; it was over a year old at Vista's release, and was never anywhere near top-of-the-line.
Just out of curiosity, what's your beef with openSuse? My current Linux install is Mandriva (with KDE 4.2, I'll upgrade soon) but I used openSuse for years prior to that and only switched with the new system because I wanted to try something that came with 4.2 in the default install, which openSuse didn't at the time. It's a damn good distro though, and provides a *very* polished KDE experience.
The primary difference between Enterprise and other SKUs is that is uses volume licensing (no license keys, instead it connects to Windows Server box on its domain, and activates through that). However, one other thing that Enterprise has and no version below it does (Ultimate also has this, but sadly not Business/Professional) is the POSIX subsystem. Subsystem for UUNIX Applicaitons (SUA) is a POSIX-complaint user-mode subsystem on top of the NT kernel. Microsoft provides a minimal but functional operating environment called Interix that runs in SUA, and you can install a package manager and considerable amount of software for it. I use this constantly - I do more in bash on Windows than I do in cmd and powershell put together (and I actually like powershell, but bash is just quicker to do many things with despite beling less powerful). It's seriously underappreciated, and most people don't need it anyhow, but it works better than Cygwin in many cases and makes it possible to use many UNIX/Linux tools and programs without rebooting or virtualizing (I have a Linux install, but I need to do something on Windows that doesn't work in Wine more often than I need to do something in Linux that doesn't work on Interix).
Win7 contains a LOT of stuff, like Media Center, IIS, and so forth that a lot of people probably don't use. It's all installed, though; even if you use an edition of Windows that doesn't "have" those features, they are present on the drive so that you can upgrade to a higher edition without needing an install disc. It also makes the installer much faster - copy data image to disk, expand it, apply a bit of customization, and you're good to go.
Also, drivers. Win7 (like Vista before it) ships with a ton of drivers included. As in, several gigs worth. This means that there's a pretty good chance that most hardware will plug-and-play without even needign to search for a driver online, but does drastically increase the size of the install footprint. In any case, it doesn't actually *need* more than about 8.5 gigs after installation, and you can install it into about 12 (counting space to unpack the image). However, when you consider the pagefile and hiberfile - both typically several gigs (even though ther pagefile doesn't need to be, Windows still makes a large one by default) these days - you end up burning a lot of additional space in a hurry.
Not sre which issue you're referring to. If you mean the way that Vista appeared to take longer to copy, in truth that was never a problem, quite the opposite. Vista uses larger copy buffers and other improvements. The actual process of copying the bits is faster. In SP1, they improved this further - on most operations it's over 10% faster in throughput. However, where prior Windows versions would simply close the handles as soon as the WriteFile calls returned (which simply means the data has been sent to the storage driver stack, which has considerable buffering), Vista waits until the disk buffer is finished flushing before it displays the operation as complete. This means that copy appears to take longer - sometimes much longer, if there is a lot of data or the data is highly non-contiguous - but also means that one common problem people had with XP, where they would see that a copy is "complete" and pull out their external drive (before the data is actually written to persistent storage) no longer occurs.
Incidentally, one of Vista's improvements is that copy (or move, delete, or other such operations) operations executed using Explorer are now transactional. This means that you can roll back an operation if something goes wrong or you just decide to cancel. This might have some minor impact on the time an operation takes, but it is well worth it in my opinion - no more cases of a botched move resluting in a random batch of files that did, did not, or only partially transferred.
I'm pretty sure that if you want to encrypt the system volume with TrueCrypt, you can't hide the metadata. Hidden volumes are cool, but the use case for BitLocker isn't people paranoid that somebody will beat their encryption key out of them, it's people who don't want a misplaced flashdrive or stolen laptop having recoverable confidential information on it.
There's a lot more to the Vista/Win7 firewall than just outbound filtering. Some of that functioanlity uses the new network stack, which is a bit more than you would typically shoehorn into an existing OS via a service pack (since, among other things, it requires new network drivers).
Seriously, have you ever used an OS with integrated instant search? You don't even have to locate programs or control panel items in the Start menu! Shaving even a second or two off starting a program is a big improvement in user experience. Then there's things like searching your browsing history. Want to go back to a page but don't remember the exact URL, and don't feel like sifting through the hundred pages your browser's history holds for today alone? Type a few words from that page and Windows finds it for you in moments. There are more examples, but basically, until you've tried it, you're in no position to critique it.
As for drivers being broken, how about the fact that when a video driver crashes in XP (and they do crash, especially on high-end cards), it brings down the whole kernel (BSOD)? In Vista and Win7, the new display driver model runs all the crash-prone stuff in user space, and if it crashes all that happens is your screen stops updating for a second or two while the driver restarts.
Installing TrueCrypt (I assume that's what you were referring to) on every computer you want to use that flashdrive with is not trivial. In fact, it's not even trivial on your own computer, not for the average user. With Win7, literally all it takes to enable Bitlocker To Go is right-click a removable drive in Explorer, select "Turn on BitLocker", and tall it a passphrase (or other authentication method you prefer). It automatically adds a decryption utilitiy in a tiny unencrypted partition of the device.
Outbound filtering is a handy way to prevent programs from phoning home. More that that, though, Vista and Win7 firewalls are a lot easier to configure for things like allowing file and music sharing at home, but not at a coffee shop or airport hotspot (it switches for you automatically).
Runas is a very partial solution. It's fine for.exe installers, but doesn't work for.msi packages; you need to run msiexec.exe elevated manually, which is not something your average user would figure out how to do. Similar problems for the control panel and management console. Besides, plenty of people complained about the annoyance of UAC; do you really think that telling them they must use runas, either via context menu or command line, and then type in a password would make them happy? You can configure UAC to demand your password, but its main purpose is just to make it less of a pain to run as a standard user. It does that MUCH better than Runas.
Most users don't install new hardware except for things like mice or keyboards when they break, digital cameras, wireless modems (in laptops), printers, webcams (some computers still don't come with them), and lots of other little things like that. Installing the manufacturer driver is definitely a hassle when the relevant driver is for the network device you need for Internet access, and there either is no driver disc or you're on a laptop with no optical drive. For that matter, you and I might be able to get drivers off the web easily (although some manufacturers make it much harder than it should be) but a lot of people wouldn't even know to look.
No client version of Windows supports PAE (other than for NX). Although the bootloader switch is present, it is ignored because the vast majority of device drivers for 32-bit Windows assume that pointers are 32 bits wide and will crash if fed a 64-bit pointer. Besides, PAE is a bloody hack. True 64-bit is much superior, and the 64-bit version of XP is really bad and saw very little use.
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I actually spoke with a guy who worked on the Virtual PC team at Microsoft (Windows Virtual PC, an evolution from Virtual PC 2007, is the software that enables Virtual XP Mode). When asked why they required hardware virtualization support in WVPC (VPC2007 uses dynamic recompilation to work around lack of hardware support) he said that back when work on WVPC started (2 years ago) Intel and AMD assured them that within 2 years, all their chips would support hardware virtualization. Thus, MS decided to require hardware support with WVPC, which not only improves performance but substantially decreases code-base complexity and amount of testing required (this is the main reason - doubling the neccessary testing was not a popular choice).
Fast-forward to today, and AMD has essentially kept that promise - even their consumer-grade CPUs support hardware virtualization, and have for years - while Intel has decided that they would rather disable VT on a bunch of their processors just for SKU differentiation (the silicon is actually in place, just intentioanlly disabled). This has caused some substantial ire within MS, apparently. I asked if it would be possible to re-introduce the software work-around from VPC2007, and was told that it could be (and was under consideration) but that if they decided to do so it would probably take at least until Win7 SP1.
First, most search engines will helpfully correct typos in domain names for you. I'm sure that the averag euser finds this behavior a LOT more helpful than a page saying "Nope, can't find it."
Second, domains don't necessarily end with any of the TLDs you listed. In fact, the path you're routing to might not end with a TLD at all - servers on your intranet, or in your hosts file, often don't have TLDs. Treating a URL that differently purely on the basis of whether it ends with a .somedamnthing seems pretty pointless to me.
So turn off the "Search from address bar" option. To most people, this approach is better - they type in a URL, and make a typo, and it takes them to a search engine that says "Did you mean XXXXXXX?"
The problem is that *until* they EoL XP, they can't EoL the browser that XP ships with. In other words, they are trying to EoL IE6, but can't for the same reason that they can't EoL XP - it's still being deployed and used! This is not that complicated... once they can get rid of XP (something they've been trying to do for years), they'll probably drop support for IE6 the same day (why support one component of an entire OS that is no longer supported?).
FYI, IE8 allows people to put the buttons back where they were in 6. Both 7 and 8 allow you to permanently show the menu bar, if you want. The new Command Bar in 7 and 8 can be turned off, as can tabbed browsing (no idea why you'd want to, but you can).
Out of curiosity, are you still using Windows 3.x because you also think that the Start menu "suck[s] donkey balls"? Have you even seriously tried to use the new interface, with or without customizing it? Most people seem perfectly comfortable with it.
Actually, I miss the older, larger controllers; Everything switched to the smaller controllers (which apparently many folks preferred, but which I found uncomfortably small), then to the 360 controller (which corrected some of the small controller's other flows, but is still physically smaller than I like). It's not even like I have gian hands - I just like holding something larger than the smaller controllers, and find the button positions more natural.
Many contracts have a clause in them allowing the contract to be changed at a later date (such right usually being restricted to one party only). However, I believe that legally speaking, you can back out of that new contract at any time if you so desire. In other words, the contract states that AT&T is allowed to change the contract (and you aren't), but the law states taht if they do change it, you get to walk away.
IANAL, and this may vary by state anyhow.
Acknowledging that Novell gets a lot of crap from the /. crowd, OpenSuse is a pretty sweet distro. Yast2 is easily the best configuration tool I've ever seen on Linux, with everything from package management to bootloader configuration categorized and easily accessible, even from a terminal (front-ends written in Qt3, Qt4, GTK+, and ncurses).
I'm not sure if PulseAudio is installed by default, but openSuse still allows the option of customizing the installation before actually installing. You can stick with the default package selections for the most part, and just remove the pulseaudio libraries (including anything dependent on them) in about 20 seconds during the install.
I've contemplated trying. You wouldn't get all of it, of course - SUA has no audio subsystem by default, although I've heard of people installed ESD - but at least some of it would probably work.
The two successors to Wings of Liberty *ARE* the game's expansions. The total campaign length will be 1.5x as long as StarCraft + Brood War.
In other words, you STILL have nothing to complain about - you'll get just as much campaign material per purchase of SC2 as you got for the original, except you'll be able to get 50% more campaign in SC2 than the original ever had.
Also, I really didn't feel that there was that much "story" to SC; there was some, but wouldn't it make more sense to just read a book or watch a movie if you're after story?
It's almost certainly against the contract terms that Real Host signed with their upstream provider. Net neutrality has nothing to do with this issue; this isn't packet injection or traffic shaping or anything like that. This is simply disconnecting a client who is in breach of contract and criminal law. In effect, blocking them (as you personally advocated).
Do you honestly think it should be the responsibility of the rest of the world to deal with these attacks, just because they are sent over the Internet?
You may have noticed that there have been stories recently about ISPs who *do* cut off the access of copyright infringers. Without deep packet inspection (which I'm wholly opposed to without a warrant, just making that clear) it's not like they catch anywhere close to all of it, but if they do catch you the contract you signed lets them cut off your access, and they will.
Funny you mention extensions. With a couple of nice extensions that MS actually links me to directly, Office will
* Export to PDF (originally it was built in, but Adobe threw a hissy-fit over it)
* Import a plethora of formats (seriously, what does OO.o open that MS Office doesn't anyhow?)
* Export (and import/edit/convert) ODF, and I was doing it with the Office 2007 beta, RTM, and SP1
* Allow me to easily install and manage extensions (out of the box)
Admittedly, it doesn't run natively on Linux. Wine will get there soon enough, but you're nonetheless correct.
Students can get a copy of MS Office 2007 Ultimate for $60, which includes a lot of stuff that OO.o doesn't even *try* to copy. http://theultimatesteal.com/ No, I'm not affiliated with the site, but a lot of folks have found it very useful.
For the record, anybody with a .edu email address can get Office 2007 Ultimate for $60 (less than the cost in the MS company store, in fact).
http://theultimatesteal.com/
Yeha, this thing could have been too (by not installing it, for example). There's a difference between optional self-inflicted censorship (I see it as silly, but then, I don't have kids) and mandatory, externally-imposed censorship. Guess which one this story is about?
Riiiiight. Except for folks who can't host games because their school, office, or even home firewall isn't configured for it (and that's a lot of people). Or people who are somewhere without an Internet connection, or at least without connections for that many people (I play LAN games in my buddy's dorm room all the time. Aside from the fact that it's impossible to host on Battle.Net from there, there's only one working Ethernet port in the wall and it's very difficult to join the same game if we both go online through it - not sure why, probably just some weird network code thing, but a problem nonetheless.)
Requiring not only an Internet connection but the ability to host Battle.Net games is simply idiotic.
Good post, up until the last sentence.
You can play all three races with the very first release. The campaign will be Terran only, but it will be three times as long, no lack of material. Besides, if you're honestly buying the game for its campaign, I really don't know what to say except that you are very, very odd. Don't get me wrong, the campaigns can be fun, but the heart of a game like SC is the multiplayer. I'll probably finish the Brood War campaign some time before SC2 comes out, but it's been a decade so far and I've never really bothered - and a lot of people didn't even bother to start it.
As for getting all the game content, that's just trolling. What do you expect, that they'll release the expansion packs for free? That's all they are; expansions just like Brood War or The Frozen Throne for WC3. You get new units, new maps, and new campaigns. You probably pay about $10-$20 less that the cost for the core of the game, but you must already have that core. Blizzard has been doing this since WarCraft 2 and your "compaint" is simply idiotic.
OneNote doesn't either, which is a shame as its menu structure could really use some improvement. However, all Office 2010 applications (including Outlook and OneNote) use the ribbon.
Um, you're confusing system RAM and VRAM (video RAM). Aero runs quite happily on 128MB of VRAM shared from the main system, as long as there is a gig or so to start with. It'll actually work on less than that (Intel Integrated) but you start noticing delays, which is either due to the sub-128MB of video RAM (still shared, so very slow too) or the fact that Intel GMAs suck.
My first Aero-capable laptop had 1280MB os total RAM, of which its graphics chip (integrated, but by ATi not Intel) would claim 128MB. The CPU was a single-core Turion64 (1.8GHz). It ran Vista, including Aero, just fine. The computer is now about 4 years old; it was over a year old at Vista's release, and was never anywhere near top-of-the-line.
Just out of curiosity, what's your beef with openSuse? My current Linux install is Mandriva (with KDE 4.2, I'll upgrade soon) but I used openSuse for years prior to that and only switched with the new system because I wanted to try something that came with 4.2 in the default install, which openSuse didn't at the time. It's a damn good distro though, and provides a *very* polished KDE experience.
The primary difference between Enterprise and other SKUs is that is uses volume licensing (no license keys, instead it connects to Windows Server box on its domain, and activates through that). However, one other thing that Enterprise has and no version below it does (Ultimate also has this, but sadly not Business/Professional) is the POSIX subsystem. Subsystem for UUNIX Applicaitons (SUA) is a POSIX-complaint user-mode subsystem on top of the NT kernel. Microsoft provides a minimal but functional operating environment called Interix that runs in SUA, and you can install a package manager and considerable amount of software for it. I use this constantly - I do more in bash on Windows than I do in cmd and powershell put together (and I actually like powershell, but bash is just quicker to do many things with despite beling less powerful). It's seriously underappreciated, and most people don't need it anyhow, but it works better than Cygwin in many cases and makes it possible to use many UNIX/Linux tools and programs without rebooting or virtualizing (I have a Linux install, but I need to do something on Windows that doesn't work in Wine more often than I need to do something in Linux that doesn't work on Interix).
Win7 contains a LOT of stuff, like Media Center, IIS, and so forth that a lot of people probably don't use. It's all installed, though; even if you use an edition of Windows that doesn't "have" those features, they are present on the drive so that you can upgrade to a higher edition without needing an install disc. It also makes the installer much faster - copy data image to disk, expand it, apply a bit of customization, and you're good to go.
Also, drivers. Win7 (like Vista before it) ships with a ton of drivers included. As in, several gigs worth. This means that there's a pretty good chance that most hardware will plug-and-play without even needign to search for a driver online, but does drastically increase the size of the install footprint. In any case, it doesn't actually *need* more than about 8.5 gigs after installation, and you can install it into about 12 (counting space to unpack the image). However, when you consider the pagefile and hiberfile - both typically several gigs (even though ther pagefile doesn't need to be, Windows still makes a large one by default) these days - you end up burning a lot of additional space in a hurry.
Not sre which issue you're referring to. If you mean the way that Vista appeared to take longer to copy, in truth that was never a problem, quite the opposite. Vista uses larger copy buffers and other improvements. The actual process of copying the bits is faster. In SP1, they improved this further - on most operations it's over 10% faster in throughput. However, where prior Windows versions would simply close the handles as soon as the WriteFile calls returned (which simply means the data has been sent to the storage driver stack, which has considerable buffering), Vista waits until the disk buffer is finished flushing before it displays the operation as complete. This means that copy appears to take longer - sometimes much longer, if there is a lot of data or the data is highly non-contiguous - but also means that one common problem people had with XP, where they would see that a copy is "complete" and pull out their external drive (before the data is actually written to persistent storage) no longer occurs.
Incidentally, one of Vista's improvements is that copy (or move, delete, or other such operations) operations executed using Explorer are now transactional. This means that you can roll back an operation if something goes wrong or you just decide to cancel. This might have some minor impact on the time an operation takes, but it is well worth it in my opinion - no more cases of a botched move resluting in a random batch of files that did, did not, or only partially transferred.
I'm pretty sure that if you want to encrypt the system volume with TrueCrypt, you can't hide the metadata. Hidden volumes are cool, but the use case for BitLocker isn't people paranoid that somebody will beat their encryption key out of them, it's people who don't want a misplaced flashdrive or stolen laptop having recoverable confidential information on it.
There's a lot more to the Vista/Win7 firewall than just outbound filtering. Some of that functioanlity uses the new network stack, which is a bit more than you would typically shoehorn into an existing OS via a service pack (since, among other things, it requires new network drivers).
Seriously, have you ever used an OS with integrated instant search? You don't even have to locate programs or control panel items in the Start menu! Shaving even a second or two off starting a program is a big improvement in user experience. Then there's things like searching your browsing history. Want to go back to a page but don't remember the exact URL, and don't feel like sifting through the hundred pages your browser's history holds for today alone? Type a few words from that page and Windows finds it for you in moments. There are more examples, but basically, until you've tried it, you're in no position to critique it.
As for drivers being broken, how about the fact that when a video driver crashes in XP (and they do crash, especially on high-end cards), it brings down the whole kernel (BSOD)? In Vista and Win7, the new display driver model runs all the crash-prone stuff in user space, and if it crashes all that happens is your screen stops updating for a second or two while the driver restarts.
Installing TrueCrypt (I assume that's what you were referring to) on every computer you want to use that flashdrive with is not trivial. In fact, it's not even trivial on your own computer, not for the average user. With Win7, literally all it takes to enable Bitlocker To Go is right-click a removable drive in Explorer, select "Turn on BitLocker", and tall it a passphrase (or other authentication method you prefer). It automatically adds a decryption utilitiy in a tiny unencrypted partition of the device.
Outbound filtering is a handy way to prevent programs from phoning home. More that that, though, Vista and Win7 firewalls are a lot easier to configure for things like allowing file and music sharing at home, but not at a coffee shop or airport hotspot (it switches for you automatically).
Runas is a very partial solution. It's fine for .exe installers, but doesn't work for .msi packages; you need to run msiexec.exe elevated manually, which is not something your average user would figure out how to do. Similar problems for the control panel and management console. Besides, plenty of people complained about the annoyance of UAC; do you really think that telling them they must use runas, either via context menu or command line, and then type in a password would make them happy? You can configure UAC to demand your password, but its main purpose is just to make it less of a pain to run as a standard user. It does that MUCH better than Runas.
Most users don't install new hardware except for things like mice or keyboards when they break, digital cameras, wireless modems (in laptops), printers, webcams (some computers still don't come with them), and lots of other little things like that. Installing the manufacturer driver is definitely a hassle when the relevant driver is for the network device you need for Internet access, and there either is no driver disc or you're on a laptop with no optical drive. For that matter, you and I might be able to get drivers off the web easily (although some manufacturers make it much harder than it should be) but a lot of people wouldn't even know to look.
No client version of Windows supports PAE (other than for NX). Although the bootloader switch is present, it is ignored because the vast majority of device drivers for 32-bit Windows assume that pointers are 32 bits wide and will crash if fed a 64-bit pointer. Besides, PAE is a bloody hack. True 64-bit is much superior, and the 64-bit version of XP is really bad and saw very little use.