Most of your problems seem to be from the OEM not Vista specific at all. I got a Fujitsu tablet T4215 with one 1GB RAM with Vista Business pre-installed over 14 months ago. Recently upgraded the RAM to 2GB mainly due to the Firefox nightlies cloggin up the RAM. 1. Have not had any issues with the Firewall or Symantec (have corporate version instead of Norton). Only serious reason to see the UAC was the daily Firefox upgrades - but even that is gone now since that code has been fixed.
2. The power management has always worked out of the box and is much more informative than my earlier Fujitsu with XP - not sure whether to give MS or Fujitsu credit for this.
3. Never had an issue of overheating. The power saver mode actually reduces maximum processor speed to 50%. And this can be changed under the advanced power setting options.
4. Not enamored by IE7 - but do need to use and have never had a problem with it.
5. Wireless UI has become a lot more user-friendly compared to XP and it has been flawless in my experience.
The only serious issues I had out-of-the-box was (a) the in-built card reader was not SDHC compatible - which Fujitsu fixed many months later with an upgrade. (b) The delete/copy stuff takes too long. Personally, I think it is still pathetically slow.
Having said all that, I think if I installed XP on this machine, it will probably run faster but (a) For most purposes, I am the rate limiting step on the computer right now so not sure if putting XP would help. (b) I don't expect newer versions of software to run faster than the older ones. As hardware gets cheaper, there is little benefit developers and users derive in most scenarios by optimizing code infinitely. Plus newer versions typically do more things than older ones do. e.g. Office 2007 is significantly slower than Office 2003, but its drawing capabilities and live previews and the ribbon grouping has improved the overall experience considerably.
And this has been my experience with most software. We still have a couple of iMacs that used work before I upgraded to Tiger and they slowed to a crawl and everyone stopped using them. I know...I know...I shouldn't have upgraded them if they were working but it was getting difficult to maintain different software versions on different machines and I fell for the usual hype that OS X gets faster with each upgrade. Dumb me!
If Intelligent Design were true, we'd see similarities and patterns in the design of a variety of species. Even similar design patterns in the genetic code and make-up across a variety of species on various levels. I am not sure where you get this prediction from. Evolution from natural selection predicts that extant species evolved from simpler common ancestors - as a result, you expect to see similarities and patterns in the design of a variety of species even in their genetic code and make-up. This is routinely taken as evidence of evolution from common ancestor. You also run into vestigeal functions that have equivalent functional organs or proteins in related species. because as divergent branches evolved some functions became redundant.
On the other hand, ID does not make any such prediction. If you see a similarity in design you can propose that this Intelligent Creator re-used an optimal design that s/he had found works best. If you completely different designs, you could say that the Creator was bloody genius and instead of getting bored reusing old working versions, s/he started from scratch every time.
Unfortunately, if you take Science and scientific thinking to its conclusion, belief in God is actually incompatible with it since the idea of God is illogical and untestable. However, many scientists grow up with religious customs, which they are comfortable with and therefore never take scientific thinking to that extreme. Plus in the vast majority of science, scientists do not confront God versus natural selection sort of debate - so they are never forced to make a choice. Apart from the untestability, the incompatibility becomes obvious if you study evolution and you actually "believe" natural selection - which insists things start simple and then add features. To fit this with an extremely complex being like God which pre-dates everything else is intrinsically impossible. Also, in your own example, you say "the matter that makes-up the universe had to come from somewhere". I am really surprised your advisor also invokes God for this purpose. There are (in my inexpert opinion, rather tenuous models - quantum mechanics and string theory) that provide a solution for getting something out of nothing. As of now, these are close to untestable right and arguably close to religion. But unlike religion, the aim is to make them testable and rule them in or out as possibilities. On the other hand, if you are satisfied with God created matter, then that raises the two-fold point - (a) what created God and (b) why do you need science, since pretty much everything can be answered by the same answer. But I say all this as a biologist. Maybe things are more logical in physics but once you look at the inner workings of an organism or a cell or even a single protein and the inherent sloppiness with which everything is strung together, there is no way you can go away thinking that it was made by an all-powerful Creator.
The biggest problem I have with CSI is how their experiments always work. Yesterday I saw a show where they do DNA fingerprinting from a solitary sperm head they find in the vagina of a murder victim. As any biologist would tell you, in real life, that reaction would have never worked because you forgot to add the polymerase or something dumb like that.
I think the most awkward aspect of this is that they need some outsider to code the database and DRM. And this guy gets to see everything and according to their tradition most probably this guy should not be getting to view all of it in the first place anyway. Hopefully, one day all individuals will learn enough about computers to upload their own material and then set DRM as they wish.
Knowing that one of the copies is imprinted helps in three ways -
(a) It helps provide people with genetic counseling e.g. helps in deciding if you want to continue with a pregnancy if you know that your fetus has a genetic defect on the paternal copy (and the maternal copy is silenced) by sequencing an amniocentesis sample.
(b) More fundamental to this is that, is that this might help pin down a gene defect as the cause of a disease. For example you might find some locus often associated with a disease but in the patients you sequence the genes, it turns out one of them has got a perfect copy and the other has a mutation. Since it is difficult to say for a majority of mutations if they would affect function or are simple polymorphisms in the population, you continue searching other genes. OTOH, if you know one of the copies is shut down, and you see one copy has a mutation, you promptly analyze this candidate gene a lot more.
(c) Finally, of course for proper cure, it helps to know what the defect is. e.g. if you know it is a defect in an ion transporter, you might try some types of drugs and if it is an inflammatory defect you will try something else - so (b) is useful in guessing plus making animal models to test them.
(d) there is the hope that one day we will be able to fix things gene therapy which again is dependent on figuring out the molecular defect by (b).
Studies in India have shown that the best way to reduce population growth in a democracy is to educate women. Percolation of computers and cell phones into the rural areas have allowed significant (class room/world exposure type of) education to happen even outside the schools. This has been a more recent phenomenon and while these have had definite economic advantages (e.g. google - kerala fishermen cell phones). It is not clear as yet whether this type of education will also help in the same way but it definitely seems plausible. In the absence of coercion there appears to be no other reliable way to reduce the growth rate. Needless to say, the benefits of education and access to computers has obvious advantages in things like agriculture, etc.
"And that holds especially true for those businesses that follow the every-other-release rule"
In summary, if a business has XP and upgrades every other release, it will not upgrade to Vista. (Could it be because Vista does not fall in the "every other" pattern with respect to XP.) Pure Genius!
Alternatively, next you want to run a presentation in Vista use the "Presentation Mode" (under the Mobility Center and that allows to keep the sound off, stop all notifications, set a "more professional wallpaper (so that everyone does not get to see your kiddies bathtime photos), turns off the screensaver and keeps the machine awake. All that in 5 seconds (three clicks on my Fujitsu tablet).
But if the prerelease product has been cherry-picked and tested specially for the review, its quality might be much better than a store-bought average and therefore make the review very misleading.
Most biologists use MS Word and don't submit camera-ready typeset documents except a few Biophysics labs. MS Word can handle templates but there are not anywhere close to camera-ready.
And at least with Nature and Science (I don't think with Cell), the editors actually chop and rewrite major portions of your manuscript to make it more readable to the general reader and even re-draw model figures, etc. So they do do serious editing that require a talented person even on a computer.
Again, I want to reiterate this not true for all journals and there many journals even in biology that open access at a small publication charge. The ones that are both open access and free to publish are usually electronic but they do exist as well.
I agree funding open access journals publishing is somewhat better than paying for journals for reading a paper. But this needs to be pointed out in some discussion. People tend to assume that open access is going to bring down costs.
This is definitely true for many mid-rung journals but not for the three journals I mentioned that PLoS is specifically trying to compete with. These charge much lesser - unless you have color figures when it can be hugely expensive.
I agree with most of what you but need to add a couple of points. Before I proceed, let me start by saying that I am all for free access and whenever there is a choice I try to publish my stuff in open access journals.
The big deal in open access (at least in Biology) has been the introduction of PLoS which attempts to compete with the top three journals (Nature, Science and Cell). And there is still no evidence that this can be economically feasible - primarily because such journals have genuine editors who are paid a lot of money to do the editing. So unlike most other journals, these editors actually can summarily decide to reject a paper for weird policy reasons like it is not flashy enough or popular science enough (even if the reviewers recommend publication). Whether you like the policy or not, the journals want to assure that they have editors who have a clue and are committed. So these are full-time jobs which are well-paid. In addition, most journals do have to pay copy editors, printers, etc.
The only way PLoS has been able to circumvent this is by (a) huge donations )primarily from a couple of donors (b) Charge the authors money to publish their work. This used to be $1500 and now has been increased to $2000 or $2500. Of course, some argue that the high cost is primarily because the PLoS offices are located in San Francisco. (But that belongs to a different offshoring story.
Unfortunately, recently HHMI was trying to decide what to do about this open access but did not end up doing the right thing. The reason this is important is that HHMI is the largest private funder of biomedical research in the US and probably the world - and HHMI investigators contribute a significant chunk of papers in top journals. HHMI investigators are evaluated every few years and it is a scary process because if you get kicked out, there is not way you can get back in. HHMI started off by saying that they will only count open access journals in this review process but then eventually after a lot of backdoor politics - primarily because the stupid scientists did not want to stop publishing in the top journals - it was decided that HHMI was going to pay publishers a truckload of money to allow open access (eventually) to papers from HHMI investigators. They had so much negotiating power that if they had stood their ground, they could have easily got open access for everyone in a year or so. But sadly, not going to happen.
On the funny side of things, the context-sensitive spell check in Office 2007 would have taken care of we're vs were and except vs accept kind of problems.
Just in case you are not just trolling, (other than the ones already mentioned below) four improvements I have found with 2007 is
(a) Live preview of formatting, e.g. the table format in the actual document changes as you scroll through different options in the dialog box.
(b) Context-sensitive spell check - so it can actually distinguish between their and there (or were and we're - which caused a coronary to burst in some spell/grammar nazi in some earlier comment.
(c) In-built pdf maker so that I actually do not need the full Acrobat any more. I realize this is already there in other OS, etc but that was not the question you asked. I just point this out as one of many reasons to upgrade from version 2000 to version 2007
(d) When you copy and paste, a floating text formatting toolbar appears right next to the pasted text, making it a lot faster in actual use.
This was definitely not true when we upgraded our 3 year old iMacs from Panther to Tiger (when it was released. We did this to three computers at work because my boss really believed that they would become faster. They slowed down to a grinding halt and eventually people started bringing their own laptops to work before we could convince him that the machines were unusable. Not sure if it was the amount of RAM or whatever. Did not bother to check since I am just the unpaid "guy who knows about about PCs so should be able to handle our computers" guy. But it was not a one off thing. All three computers were significantly slower with Tiger compared to Panther. On the other hand, my 6 year old $400 Compaq still does everything it used to just like the day I bought it. It won't run Vista I am sure but why would I buy a retail version of Vista and upgrade. If I really was dying to use Vista, I would buy another $400 or so computer and be set for another bunch of years.
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I thought it was the lifetime of the author not of the owner of the copyright. Therefore, the lifetime of the corporation should not relevant.
Most of your problems seem to be from the OEM not Vista specific at all.
I got a Fujitsu tablet T4215 with one 1GB RAM with Vista Business pre-installed over 14 months ago. Recently upgraded the RAM to 2GB mainly due to the Firefox nightlies cloggin up the RAM.
1. Have not had any issues with the Firewall or Symantec (have corporate version instead of Norton). Only serious reason to see the UAC was the daily Firefox upgrades - but even that is gone now since that code has been fixed.
2. The power management has always worked out of the box and is much more informative than my earlier Fujitsu with XP - not sure whether to give MS or Fujitsu credit for this.
3. Never had an issue of overheating. The power saver mode actually reduces maximum processor speed to 50%. And this can be changed under the advanced power setting options.
4. Not enamored by IE7 - but do need to use and have never had a problem with it.
5. Wireless UI has become a lot more user-friendly compared to XP and it has been flawless in my experience.
The only serious issues I had out-of-the-box was
(a) the in-built card reader was not SDHC compatible - which Fujitsu fixed many months later with an upgrade.
(b) The delete/copy stuff takes too long. Personally, I think it is still pathetically slow.
Having said all that, I think if I installed XP on this machine, it will probably run faster but
(a) For most purposes, I am the rate limiting step on the computer right now so not sure if putting XP would help.
(b) I don't expect newer versions of software to run faster than the older ones. As hardware gets cheaper, there is little benefit developers and users derive in most scenarios by optimizing code infinitely. Plus newer versions typically do more things than older ones do. e.g. Office 2007 is significantly slower than Office 2003, but its drawing capabilities and live previews and the ribbon grouping has improved the overall experience considerably.
And this has been my experience with most software. We still have a couple of iMacs that used work before I upgraded to Tiger and they slowed to a crawl and everyone stopped using them. I know...I know...I shouldn't have upgraded them if they were working but it was getting difficult to maintain different software versions on different machines and I fell for the usual hype that OS X gets faster with each upgrade. Dumb me!
On the other hand, ID does not make any such prediction. If you see a similarity in design you can propose that this Intelligent Creator re-used an optimal design that s/he had found works best. If you completely different designs, you could say that the Creator was bloody genius and instead of getting bored reusing old working versions, s/he started from scratch every time.
Unfortunately, if you take Science and scientific thinking to its conclusion, belief in God is actually incompatible with it since the idea of God is illogical and untestable.
However, many scientists grow up with religious customs, which they are comfortable with and therefore never take scientific thinking to that extreme. Plus in the vast majority of science, scientists do not confront God versus natural selection sort of debate - so they are never forced to make a choice.
Apart from the untestability, the incompatibility becomes obvious if you study evolution and you actually "believe" natural selection - which insists things start simple and then add features. To fit this with an extremely complex being like God which pre-dates everything else is intrinsically impossible.
Also, in your own example, you say "the matter that makes-up the universe had to come from somewhere". I am really surprised your advisor also invokes God for this purpose. There are (in my inexpert opinion, rather tenuous models - quantum mechanics and string theory) that provide a solution for getting something out of nothing.
As of now, these are close to untestable right and arguably close to religion. But unlike religion, the aim is to make them testable and rule them in or out as possibilities.
On the other hand, if you are satisfied with God created matter, then that raises the two-fold point - (a) what created God and (b) why do you need science, since pretty much everything can be answered by the same answer.
But I say all this as a biologist. Maybe things are more logical in physics but once you look at the inner workings of an organism or a cell or even a single protein and the inherent sloppiness with which everything is strung together, there is no way you can go away thinking that it was made by an all-powerful Creator.
And so should the environmentalist (if possible).
The biggest problem I have with CSI is how their experiments always work. Yesterday I saw a show where they do DNA fingerprinting from a solitary sperm head they find in the vagina of a murder victim. As any biologist would tell you, in real life, that reaction would have never worked because you forgot to add the polymerase or something dumb like that.
I think the most awkward aspect of this is that they need some outsider to code the database and DRM. And this guy gets to see everything and according to their tradition most probably this guy should not be getting to view all of it in the first place anyway. Hopefully, one day all individuals will learn enough about computers to upload their own material and then set DRM as they wish.
Knowing that one of the copies is imprinted helps in three ways -
(a) It helps provide people with genetic counseling e.g. helps in deciding if you want to continue with a pregnancy if you know that your fetus has a genetic defect on the paternal copy (and the maternal copy is silenced) by sequencing an amniocentesis sample.
(b) More fundamental to this is that, is that this might help pin down a gene defect as the cause of a disease. For example you might find some locus often associated with a disease but in the patients you sequence the genes, it turns out one of them has got a perfect copy and the other has a mutation. Since it is difficult to say for a majority of mutations if they would affect function or are simple polymorphisms in the population, you continue searching other genes. OTOH, if you know one of the copies is shut down, and you see one copy has a mutation, you promptly analyze this candidate gene a lot more.
(c) Finally, of course for proper cure, it helps to know what the defect is. e.g. if you know it is a defect in an ion transporter, you might try some types of drugs and if it is an inflammatory defect you will try something else - so (b) is useful in guessing plus making animal models to test them.
(d) there is the hope that one day we will be able to fix things gene therapy which again is dependent on figuring out the molecular defect by (b).
Studies in India have shown that the best way to reduce population growth in a democracy is to educate women. Percolation of computers and cell phones into the rural areas have allowed significant (class room/world exposure type of) education to happen even outside the schools. This has been a more recent phenomenon and while these have had definite economic advantages (e.g. google - kerala fishermen cell phones). It is not clear as yet whether this type of education will also help in the same way but it definitely seems plausible. In the absence of coercion there appears to be no other reliable way to reduce the growth rate. Needless to say, the benefits of education and access to computers has obvious advantages in things like agriculture, etc.
"And that holds especially true for those businesses that follow the every-other-release rule" In summary, if a business has XP and upgrades every other release, it will not upgrade to Vista. (Could it be because Vista does not fall in the "every other" pattern with respect to XP.) Pure Genius!
Alternatively, next you want to run a presentation in Vista use the "Presentation Mode" (under the Mobility Center and that allows to keep the sound off, stop all notifications, set a "more professional wallpaper (so that everyone does not get to see your kiddies bathtime photos), turns off the screensaver and keeps the machine awake. All that in 5 seconds (three clicks on my Fujitsu tablet).
But if the prerelease product has been cherry-picked and tested specially for the review, its quality might be much better than a store-bought average and therefore make the review very misleading.
Most biologists use MS Word and don't submit camera-ready typeset documents except a few Biophysics labs. MS Word can handle templates but there are not anywhere close to camera-ready.
And at least with Nature and Science (I don't think with Cell), the editors actually chop and rewrite major portions of your manuscript to make it more readable to the general reader and even re-draw model figures, etc. So they do do serious editing that require a talented person even on a computer.
Again, I want to reiterate this not true for all journals and there many journals even in biology that open access at a small publication charge. The ones that are both open access and free to publish are usually electronic but they do exist as well.
I agree funding open access journals publishing is somewhat better than paying for journals for reading a paper. But this needs to be pointed out in some discussion. People tend to assume that open access is going to bring down costs.
This is definitely true for many mid-rung journals but not for the three journals I mentioned that PLoS is specifically trying to compete with. These charge much lesser - unless you have color figures when it can be hugely expensive.
I agree with most of what you but need to add a couple of points. Before I proceed, let me start by saying that I am all for free access and whenever there is a choice I try to publish my stuff in open access journals. The big deal in open access (at least in Biology) has been the introduction of PLoS which attempts to compete with the top three journals (Nature, Science and Cell). And there is still no evidence that this can be economically feasible - primarily because such journals have genuine editors who are paid a lot of money to do the editing. So unlike most other journals, these editors actually can summarily decide to reject a paper for weird policy reasons like it is not flashy enough or popular science enough (even if the reviewers recommend publication). Whether you like the policy or not, the journals want to assure that they have editors who have a clue and are committed. So these are full-time jobs which are well-paid. In addition, most journals do have to pay copy editors, printers, etc. The only way PLoS has been able to circumvent this is by (a) huge donations )primarily from a couple of donors (b) Charge the authors money to publish their work. This used to be $1500 and now has been increased to $2000 or $2500. Of course, some argue that the high cost is primarily because the PLoS offices are located in San Francisco. (But that belongs to a different offshoring story. Unfortunately, recently HHMI was trying to decide what to do about this open access but did not end up doing the right thing. The reason this is important is that HHMI is the largest private funder of biomedical research in the US and probably the world - and HHMI investigators contribute a significant chunk of papers in top journals. HHMI investigators are evaluated every few years and it is a scary process because if you get kicked out, there is not way you can get back in. HHMI started off by saying that they will only count open access journals in this review process but then eventually after a lot of backdoor politics - primarily because the stupid scientists did not want to stop publishing in the top journals - it was decided that HHMI was going to pay publishers a truckload of money to allow open access (eventually) to papers from HHMI investigators. They had so much negotiating power that if they had stood their ground, they could have easily got open access for everyone in a year or so. But sadly, not going to happen.
On the funny side of things, the context-sensitive spell check in Office 2007 would have taken care of we're vs were and except vs accept kind of problems.
Just in case you are not just trolling, (other than the ones already mentioned below) four improvements I have found with 2007 is (a) Live preview of formatting, e.g. the table format in the actual document changes as you scroll through different options in the dialog box. (b) Context-sensitive spell check - so it can actually distinguish between their and there (or were and we're - which caused a coronary to burst in some spell/grammar nazi in some earlier comment. (c) In-built pdf maker so that I actually do not need the full Acrobat any more. I realize this is already there in other OS, etc but that was not the question you asked. I just point this out as one of many reasons to upgrade from version 2000 to version 2007 (d) When you copy and paste, a floating text formatting toolbar appears right next to the pasted text, making it a lot faster in actual use.
This was definitely not true when we upgraded our 3 year old iMacs from Panther to Tiger (when it was released. We did this to three computers at work because my boss really believed that they would become faster. They slowed down to a grinding halt and eventually people started bringing their own laptops to work before we could convince him that the machines were unusable. Not sure if it was the amount of RAM or whatever. Did not bother to check since I am just the unpaid "guy who knows about about PCs so should be able to handle our computers" guy. But it was not a one off thing. All three computers were significantly slower with Tiger compared to Panther. On the other hand, my 6 year old $400 Compaq still does everything it used to just like the day I bought it. It won't run Vista I am sure but why would I buy a retail version of Vista and upgrade. If I really was dying to use Vista, I would buy another $400 or so computer and be set for another bunch of years.