"A dollar or two" per-machine is ridiculous. It's going to cost more than that to do the paperwork to keep track of who donated and who didn't yet. They should either charge a reasonable amount (at least $20, I'd say $50), or just give them away.
It's really a non-issue, though... now that Intel knows about this, they'll ensure all their new product lines include the virtualization support because it's now obvious that tons of corporate users who previously didn't care will now care. Since they have something like 6 months until Windows 7 is even released, and it'll be at least another 6 months before companies begin shopping for hardware based on Windows 7, I think there's plenty of time to fix their bad decision.
If Intel can't get their shit together in a full year, then they deserve to lose all the marketshare they're likely to lose. Meanwhile, AMD already has their shit together, so if you're primarily buying AMD chips, you're taken care of.
And somehow, Slashdot manages to blame this all on Microsoft.
Possibly, but how the fuck often do you do that? Maybe once a year? "OH NOES! That task I do once every year now takes fifteen seconds instead of 3!"
If you *are* changing extensions more often than that, doesn't that indicate something wrong with the *current* system? I think the entire point of this exercise should be finding a system where you don't ever have to change extensions, any more than you ever have to change any other piece of meta-data in the file. That should all just happen without you having to think about it, like it did in good ol' Mac System 6.0.
Anyway, the extension only indicates the file type. The real problem with the current system is that I have no way of treating "a text file that contains Javascript" (.js) differently from "a text file that contains HTML" (.js). They're both text files, so the current method of changing the type doesn't make any damned sense. If we have another field, say, a field to indicate a preferred opener, then-- gasp! Suddenly the type makes sense, *and* my JS will open in Visual Studio instead of Windows Script Host. We killed tons of birds with this stone!
I still stand by my assertion that you're simply not imaginative enough to imagine a better system than the current one. You've probably had your head buried in computers (well, non-Mac computers) for so long you simply don't even recognize the possibility for improvement. And I'm not trying to be a Mac snob, the only reason I mention them so much in this topic is that they had this all down pat almost 20 years ago. (If it was something BeOS had down pat, like dynamic driver loading, I'd be talking about BeOS.)
The fact that your company has a shitty IT department doesn't invalidate the fact that the entire point of the My Documents folder is to be mapped to a network drive. (If available.)
The Search field in Vista doubles as "Start -> Run." Try it. It's not just for launching applications, you can run "ipconfig", "net use", whatever.
I wish people would actually learn Vista before bashing it. Go back to the classic menu mode if you want, but don't lie and tell us that Vista doesn't have the feature just because the feature's in a different field.
For the life of me, I've never understood why they turn off the extensions by default, and not only that,why do they keep burying the windows explorer further and further away?
The vast majority of people don't use (the explorer view of) Windows Explorer.
Don't people use that to find files?
No. Most people either use a shortcut to their My Documents folder, or they just look at the "Recent" in whatever program they want to use at the time. Ask any IT support person, they've probably had to support a user who's favorite document slid out of the top 10 in Word, and had to walk them through finding it "manually."
Start applications?
No, that's what the Start menu is for. Or, again, shortcuts on the desktop.
Or...do most people just put everything in My Documents?
Duh. It's mapped to the network drive, so your files will roam across logins and get backed-up correctly. That's the entire *point* of the My Documents folder.
Sometimes I think most people on Slashdot commenting on Windows don't even actually use Windows-- or alternatively, they use Windows in some kind of weird mutant fashion that no normal person ever would.
Does no one still get into the tree structure to create their own folders to organize things?
That's what you put inside the My Documents folder, you weirdo. DUH! You act as if using My Documents to store files makes it IMPOSSIBLE to make a folder tree-- that's the most moronic thing I've ever heard.
Where did you learn to use Windows? Mars? Where the hell are you keeping files?
You didn't specify which "it" you wanted to change.
1) You can change the default opener for, say, TEXT files in a control panel, the same way you can in every other OS-- that means if that particular TEXT file didn't have a preferred opener, it'd open in your default opener. Mac Classic included an control panel that would do this mapping, and also would map based on DOS-style file extensions (if present.)
2) Or, if you want to change the preferred opener, all you need to do is open the file in that program and hit "Save." That's it. There's no step 2.
3) If you want to change the file's type code, without corrupting the content of the file, you open it in a program that supports multiple types and hit "Save As". That's it. There's no step 2.
4) If you want to change a file's type and don't care whether the content of the file matches the type or not, and I can't imagine this would ever come up but let's just included it here for completeness, you can use a programmer's tool to edit the meta-data. In Classic Macintosh, this would be ResEdit.
Now what you're probably actually bitching about is: "well how do I do it without having to click an icon because people who click icons are LUSERS! and I heard from a very reputable LUG that icons give you cancer so I'd rather type in obscure CLI commands!!!"
The answer to that is: use your fucking imagination. Mac Classic didn't have a CLI, so therefore it didn't have any CLI tools to change any of this meta-data. That's not because it would be *impossble* to build a CLI tool to do it, it's just because Apple had no need to.
So if this filesystem is used in a hypothetical future system, hopefully designed by somebody with more imagination than you, all those tools would need to be built. Well, duh. In this hypothetical system, the entire filesystem and almost all apps running in it would have to be built, also-- building in a few tools to work with file types and preferred openers would be a drop in the bucket.
But the real flaw is that the Internet was designed by people as unimaginative as you, you couldn't think outside their narrow little Unix box, and now it's going to be utterly impossible to move away from file extensions, as there's no way to pass arbitrary file meta-data over web protocols.
You're right, but there's nothing to prevent a potential Apple-like system from indicating a file is executable in another way-- a special outline on the icon, or overlay.
That doesn't make it a bad system, that just makes it a system that hasn't been adapted to the network-connected world.
They already have that, it's called an "icon". It worked just fine on your 1984 Macintosh.
The problem is that the Internet is the lowest common denominator. Anything that wasn't envisioned by the creators of MIME types (which is a *lot*) simply cannot exist over the Internet.
Windows does that too, but it's not a great solution. There's nothing preventing the user from selecting past the name into the extension-- Windows asks "are you sure you want to change the extension?" in a dialog, but of course people frequently hit Ok to dialogs without reading them.
The ideal solution has already happened: what Apple implemented for Mac Classic, where a file had two pieces of meta-data: 1) It's type, 2) It's preferred editor
So you could have a TEXT/Word file, which was a TEXT file that was saved, or last-edited by, Word. If another user didn't have Word, they could open it with any application that accepted TEXT files. You could also have a TEXT/Word and a TEXT/Visual Studio file side-by-side in the same folder, and double-clicking the file would open up the appropriate editor for each.
Of course, then comes Windows compatibility and (even worse) the Internet, designed based on crummy Unix filesystems with no meta-data at all, and poor Apple has no way of putting all this meta-data through the wire. Sure there's hacks, like BinHex and MacBinary formats, but the Internet has a way of killing-off good ideas by making everybody conform to the lowest common denominator.
The best the Internet has to offer is MIME types, and those suck compared to what Mac Classic had.
Yah, I looked through the bug report on Ubuntu's bug tracker, and I even posted a comment about it. (They thought it was a particular Intel sound card that was the culprit, but my computer had a different vendor's card and the problem still happened.)
I refused to use that fix for several reasons:
1) The PC Speaker should be *never used* anyway. Ubuntu should follow Microsoft and Apple's example and simply pretend the thing doesn't even exist. Seriously. Until this bug, I didn't even know my laptop *had* a PC Speaker in it. Even if there's no other sound hardware available, please, just flash the screen or something... ANYTHING... rather than using that noise generator.
2) I probably wouldn't hear any alert sound at all if I turned off the PC Speaker, since it was trying to use the PC Speaker instead of the digitized alert sound. And a computer with no alert sound at all is almost as bad as a computer with an irritating 120 dB alert sound.
What really makes me annoyed is that the OS was released to the public with this bug in place-- let me say that again: this OS was released to the public with a bug that made many laptops emit a 120 dB ear-raping noise instead of the nice subtle alert sound it's supposed to be making. Oh, and it also happens every time you shut down your computer for no reason at all.
What. The. Fuck.
A bug that makes your 2009 modern OS make beeps like a copy of DOS circa 1992 is simply unacceptable. Is there any testing at all before a release? Or do they just go by the calendar, rain or shine, it's going out?
I use my laptop on buses and trains. I use it with headphones, sometimes. (One of the posters in the bug thread was almost deafened through his headphones when this bug happened.) I'm not going to subject my fellow passengers to an extremely loud noise. I'm not going to be embarrassed in public by a computer that sounds like a 386.
Since you didn't address any of my previous responses, I'm just going to decree myself winner of this particular conversation. Whee.
On a more serious note - it seems that Microsoft misjudged the market post XP. The world went small and light (netbooks, handhelds, web based computing/apps) and they went the other way with their desktop OS.
True. Could be worse, though. Apple *still* hasn't acknowledged it, other than some vague hand-wavings about making a tablet-sized iPhone-like device.
I don't just beat up on Microsoft. As much as I love Mac OS, their server products.....well, they suck. Leopard server was almost unusable for almost 6 months until they got the bugs worked out of it.
Also true.
I also wish the Linux guys put more effort into usability, and appearance.
Also: integration. There won't ever be effective competition to Active Directory and Outlook/Exchange until the open source projects all learn to work together in a more seamless manner.
I've administered networks for over a decade, I've been a self-employed consultant, I've managed networks for large financial institutions, medical institutions, and schools. I currently am an IT director for a private school. I have a BS in Computer Science, and I've developed software in multiple languages in many environments for many purposes.
And...? What do you want a cookie or something?
That said, can you give me a compelling reason to use Vista?
No. I don't even know what you do with your computer.
There are a ton of compelling reasons for me, however, and so I use Vista.
By the way - managing a network connection means lots of things (disabling/enabling/changing addressing schemes-WINS-DNS-gateways...etc) - stuff that needs to be done when servicing multiple networks for a living.
Ok; but why would you be using Vista for that instead of a server OS? (Not that I'm sure the network interface is different in the Server versions, but you're complaining that you can't use a consumer OS to do non-consumer tasks-- that's silly.)
Vista works just fine (finally) - it's just not easy or enjoyable to use.
It's much easier to use than XP in general.
Now you probably *think* it's harder to use because: 1) You do tasks that very very very few people do and you think Microsoft should behave as if the entire universe resolves around Ted. 2) You obviously are very memorization-oriented, and so you hate change of any kind. Therefore, you think Microsoft should have made no changes at all from XP.
Pick one. Or both. But neither says anything about the ease-of-use of Vista.
I've been on a mission to convert my friends and family members to Mac OS in the last year or so. Of the people I've converted from Vista (Mother in law, Father in law, sister, two cousins, and a handful of friends) - none have wanted to go back to Vista even after I offered to install it on their new Macs. Why do you suppose that is?
Because they know you'd nag the hell out of them about how evil Microsoft is and generally annoy them until they finally just let you put OS X back on them?
Good question. Microsoft has a long history of trying to convince vendors/users to use features that end up generally just getting ignored. (Features like the "Briefcase" in Windows 95, Active Desktop in 98-XP, the Games performance rating in Vista, the "Digital Locker" feature in Vista, possibly the Sidebar but it might be too early to tell.)
I think it would be smart for somebody like Netgear to adopt it, since it could potentially increase the usability and security of their products over the competitors, but the sad reality is that implementing it probably costs 11 cents more per-unit and so it'll never get done. Added to the problem is the fact that Netgear has probably already invested in their own solution to the problem, and that they still need to provide their own solution for users on older versions of Windows.
In short, I don't know, but my guess is it'll be mostly ignored by home network device makers.
AP and Reuters are primarily aggregaters of articles from those numerous local newspapers creating content. Sure, AP and Reuters keep their own reports on-staff for certain stories, but if you're reading a story about a murder that took place in Seattle in New York, and the citation is "Associated Press", it probably came directly from the local Seattle Times.
To be fair, there was a GINORMOUS pulsing icon/arrow/tooltip when you first ran Office 2007 telling you to open the that menu to find the Print and File commands. It's impossible to miss.
Haha... where do you even FIND a paint program that doesn't do at least bi-cubic when resizing? I hope they didn't use OpenOffice to resize the images, that's not exactly a glowing recommendation.
Holy shit. I've been on Slashdot for longer than 1 hour you know.
That same tired article is brought out EVERY SINGLE TIME this is mentioned, with no mention of the fact that everything in that article is COMPLETE BULLSHIT. Yah, I've seen that link-- about a million times. No, it's no less true than the first time I've seen it.
Tell you what, I'm going to write a webpage saying "Hurricane78 is a bad person who strangles kittens" on my blog and then start spreading it around every single time you post-- with no mention that it's actually unconfirmed, made-up, bullshit.
If you want to prove there's DRM in Vista, give me a test to prove it. I'm sitting in front of a Vista machine right now: show me a way to reproduce this DRM, to have it stop me from doing something or slow some operation down. Put your money where your fucking mouth is.
You're not talking about "usability", you're talking about "do exactly what I'm used to, damnit, I hate change get off my lawn!!!" That's different.:) Or wait, there's a good dose of "THE WORLD REVOLVES AROUND TED!" in there as well.
Managing a network connection in Vista is unnecessarily complicated. Why do I need to go into that damn network and sharing center to get to my network cards or to choose a wireless network? Why the hell do I need a diagram of my computer, my house, and the globe to explain how my computer is connected to my network and the internet? I connected the damn thing - there is no need to draw me a picture of how it all works.
How often do you even use that control panel? Once a month? Maybe? Did it ever occur that the networking diagram might actually be useful for non-you people who, for example, have several networked Xboxes, a networked file server, maybe a wifi printer or two in their house? But no, it doesn't help you personally, therefore it's useless and awful.
I don't know what you mean by "managing" a network connection, but you can do all the common wifi operations from the taskbar icons, as always. If you *have* to go into the Networking control panel for this, your computer is broken in some way and not at all typical.
Does renaming "add/remove programs" to "programs and features" really make me that much more productive? It takes me an extra second or two EVERY time I go between XP and Vista and the change added NO value.
Does it make you more productive? Probably not, Mr. Grumpy. I guess you're the only person ever to use Windows, and if it doesn't help you, it shouldn't ever be done. How often do you use this control panel, anyway? Maybe once a month? Max? Why are you griping about the *least*-used features of the OS?
Transparent menus - WHY? I want to look at the text in the menu, not at what is behind the menu. God forbid you have something behind the menu that is the same color as the text.
1) If your menu is obscured by the stuff behind it, your computer is broken in some way, and your experience is not typical. Actually... WTF... I'm sitting behind a stock Vista install right now, and I can't find a single application with a transparent menu in it. Even Explorer doesn't have any... Could you maybe provide an example?
2) If you don't like the feature, just turn it off and stop bitching. Although from looking at my own machine, I think you're bitching about something that has nothing to do with Vista.
I've noticed no speed difference on my MSI Wind netbook, after switching from the beta to the current RC.
Maybe you just have a driver that happened to get a slower version between those two releases, and it's affecting the performance of your machine? I don't know what your problem is, but don't imply it applies to "everybody" unless you have a pretty good survey supporting that.
The 'passcode' there is to prevent people from accidentally connecting to their neighbor's wifi-capable auto-discovery devices and then, for example, wondering what happened to their print job (which printed in the apartment downstairs.) It also applies for file-sharing and media-sharing on devices like Xbox 360s and such. I'm not sure how many non-Microsoft devices support it yet, though.
This shit happens on Slashdot every single time Vista is mentioned. The only DRM in Vista is to let you play formats (i.e. Blu-Ray disks) you can't play on other OSes. That's it. Period. The end.
Vista won't magically add DRM to all your MP3 files, nor does it give a shit whether you're playing legal or pirated MP3s or video files. No, it's not making your computer run slower, or preventing you from ripping a DVD, or whatever imaginary conspiratorial thing you imagine it's going to be doing.
If you don't like DRM, fine: don't play Blu-Ray disks in Vista. But don't blame Microsoft for adding a feature that a lot of their users *want*. Blame the media companies that demand it in the first place.
I'm also sick of this Slashdot FUD about DRM.
All of the Slashdotters pirating 20 movies a week in XP were posting this same bullshit when XP came out: about hos the XP DRM was going to stop their piracy efforts! OMG!
Only thing Joe has to make sure if he wants his old PC to work right out of the box is to have someone check his wireless chipset if he even has one. That's about the only piece of commodity hardware that's sometimes a problem with modern linux distro's.
Unless Joe has a (not that old) HP Pavilion tx1000, like I do. In which case, very few things will work: * Sleep mode won't * nor will the touchscreen * nor will the sound work correctly (instead of playing the nice digitized alert sound, Ubuntu 9.04 seems to prefer using the PC Speaker to emit a 120 dB deafening BEEEEEEEEP on every error. This is the reason I went back to Vista.) * nor will any of the media buttons on the monitor or keyboard work (except the volume buttons, which half-worked-- the mute button would mute the sound, but it wouldn't change the LED color to indicate it was muted.) * Nor will the IR remote that came with the computer work correctly when playing DVDs (once you manage to install the DVD playing software-- no easy feat!) * Nor will the wifi work by default, unless you happen to stumble across the dialog that lets you enable "non-free" drivers * The DPI of the screen will be wrong, and when you happen to stumble across the dialog to set it to the correct value (120DPI), that won't work in all applications (notably: Firefox)
The mental gulf between "what Linux fans think works out of the box" and "what actually works out of the box" is pretty wide, I find.
Now go ahead and justify my list by saying "oh that's not really that important," or "not a lot of computers have a touchscreen," or "nobody uses the media keys." No, really. I'd be disappointed if nobody did.
And it wasn't *that* long ago that Windows had fully supported and debugged Itanium and Alpha ports, either. I'm sure Microsoft at the very least is keeping those CPU issues in-mind while working on newer kernels, even just in case some miracle happens and tomorrow everybody dumps their x86 computers for Alphas.
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"A dollar or two" per-machine is ridiculous. It's going to cost more than that to do the paperwork to keep track of who donated and who didn't yet. They should either charge a reasonable amount (at least $20, I'd say $50), or just give them away.
It was just a joke, because she is so mind-numbingly stupid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj3iNxZ8Dww
It's really a non-issue, though... now that Intel knows about this, they'll ensure all their new product lines include the virtualization support because it's now obvious that tons of corporate users who previously didn't care will now care. Since they have something like 6 months until Windows 7 is even released, and it'll be at least another 6 months before companies begin shopping for hardware based on Windows 7, I think there's plenty of time to fix their bad decision.
If Intel can't get their shit together in a full year, then they deserve to lose all the marketshare they're likely to lose. Meanwhile, AMD already has their shit together, so if you're primarily buying AMD chips, you're taken care of.
And somehow, Slashdot manages to blame this all on Microsoft.
Possibly, but how the fuck often do you do that? Maybe once a year? "OH NOES! That task I do once every year now takes fifteen seconds instead of 3!"
If you *are* changing extensions more often than that, doesn't that indicate something wrong with the *current* system? I think the entire point of this exercise should be finding a system where you don't ever have to change extensions, any more than you ever have to change any other piece of meta-data in the file. That should all just happen without you having to think about it, like it did in good ol' Mac System 6.0.
Anyway, the extension only indicates the file type. The real problem with the current system is that I have no way of treating "a text file that contains Javascript" (.js) differently from "a text file that contains HTML" (.js). They're both text files, so the current method of changing the type doesn't make any damned sense. If we have another field, say, a field to indicate a preferred opener, then-- gasp! Suddenly the type makes sense, *and* my JS will open in Visual Studio instead of Windows Script Host. We killed tons of birds with this stone!
I still stand by my assertion that you're simply not imaginative enough to imagine a better system than the current one. You've probably had your head buried in computers (well, non-Mac computers) for so long you simply don't even recognize the possibility for improvement. And I'm not trying to be a Mac snob, the only reason I mention them so much in this topic is that they had this all down pat almost 20 years ago. (If it was something BeOS had down pat, like dynamic driver loading, I'd be talking about BeOS.)
The fact that your company has a shitty IT department doesn't invalidate the fact that the entire point of the My Documents folder is to be mapped to a network drive. (If available.)
The Search field in Vista doubles as "Start -> Run." Try it. It's not just for launching applications, you can run "ipconfig", "net use", whatever.
I wish people would actually learn Vista before bashing it. Go back to the classic menu mode if you want, but don't lie and tell us that Vista doesn't have the feature just because the feature's in a different field.
For the life of me, I've never understood why they turn off the extensions by default, and not only that,why do they keep burying the windows explorer further and further away?
The vast majority of people don't use (the explorer view of) Windows Explorer.
Don't people use that to find files?
No. Most people either use a shortcut to their My Documents folder, or they just look at the "Recent" in whatever program they want to use at the time. Ask any IT support person, they've probably had to support a user who's favorite document slid out of the top 10 in Word, and had to walk them through finding it "manually."
Start applications?
No, that's what the Start menu is for. Or, again, shortcuts on the desktop.
Or...do most people just put everything in My Documents?
Duh. It's mapped to the network drive, so your files will roam across logins and get backed-up correctly. That's the entire *point* of the My Documents folder.
Sometimes I think most people on Slashdot commenting on Windows don't even actually use Windows-- or alternatively, they use Windows in some kind of weird mutant fashion that no normal person ever would.
Does no one still get into the tree structure to create their own folders to organize things?
That's what you put inside the My Documents folder, you weirdo. DUH! You act as if using My Documents to store files makes it IMPOSSIBLE to make a folder tree-- that's the most moronic thing I've ever heard.
Where did you learn to use Windows? Mars? Where the hell are you keeping files?
Ok, a few things here:
You didn't specify which "it" you wanted to change.
1) You can change the default opener for, say, TEXT files in a control panel, the same way you can in every other OS-- that means if that particular TEXT file didn't have a preferred opener, it'd open in your default opener. Mac Classic included an control panel that would do this mapping, and also would map based on DOS-style file extensions (if present.)
2) Or, if you want to change the preferred opener, all you need to do is open the file in that program and hit "Save." That's it. There's no step 2.
3) If you want to change the file's type code, without corrupting the content of the file, you open it in a program that supports multiple types and hit "Save As". That's it. There's no step 2.
4) If you want to change a file's type and don't care whether the content of the file matches the type or not, and I can't imagine this would ever come up but let's just included it here for completeness, you can use a programmer's tool to edit the meta-data. In Classic Macintosh, this would be ResEdit.
Now what you're probably actually bitching about is: "well how do I do it without having to click an icon because people who click icons are LUSERS! and I heard from a very reputable LUG that icons give you cancer so I'd rather type in obscure CLI commands!!!"
The answer to that is: use your fucking imagination. Mac Classic didn't have a CLI, so therefore it didn't have any CLI tools to change any of this meta-data. That's not because it would be *impossble* to build a CLI tool to do it, it's just because Apple had no need to.
So if this filesystem is used in a hypothetical future system, hopefully designed by somebody with more imagination than you, all those tools would need to be built. Well, duh. In this hypothetical system, the entire filesystem and almost all apps running in it would have to be built, also-- building in a few tools to work with file types and preferred openers would be a drop in the bucket.
But the real flaw is that the Internet was designed by people as unimaginative as you, you couldn't think outside their narrow little Unix box, and now it's going to be utterly impossible to move away from file extensions, as there's no way to pass arbitrary file meta-data over web protocols.
You're right, but there's nothing to prevent a potential Apple-like system from indicating a file is executable in another way-- a special outline on the icon, or overlay.
That doesn't make it a bad system, that just makes it a system that hasn't been adapted to the network-connected world.
They already have that, it's called an "icon". It worked just fine on your 1984 Macintosh.
The problem is that the Internet is the lowest common denominator. Anything that wasn't envisioned by the creators of MIME types (which is a *lot*) simply cannot exist over the Internet.
Windows does that too, but it's not a great solution. There's nothing preventing the user from selecting past the name into the extension-- Windows asks "are you sure you want to change the extension?" in a dialog, but of course people frequently hit Ok to dialogs without reading them.
The ideal solution has already happened: what Apple implemented for Mac Classic, where a file had two pieces of meta-data:
1) It's type,
2) It's preferred editor
So you could have a TEXT/Word file, which was a TEXT file that was saved, or last-edited by, Word. If another user didn't have Word, they could open it with any application that accepted TEXT files. You could also have a TEXT/Word and a TEXT/Visual Studio file side-by-side in the same folder, and double-clicking the file would open up the appropriate editor for each.
Of course, then comes Windows compatibility and (even worse) the Internet, designed based on crummy Unix filesystems with no meta-data at all, and poor Apple has no way of putting all this meta-data through the wire. Sure there's hacks, like BinHex and MacBinary formats, but the Internet has a way of killing-off good ideas by making everybody conform to the lowest common denominator.
The best the Internet has to offer is MIME types, and those suck compared to what Mac Classic had.
Yah, I looked through the bug report on Ubuntu's bug tracker, and I even posted a comment about it. (They thought it was a particular Intel sound card that was the culprit, but my computer had a different vendor's card and the problem still happened.)
I refused to use that fix for several reasons:
1) The PC Speaker should be *never used* anyway. Ubuntu should follow Microsoft and Apple's example and simply pretend the thing doesn't even exist. Seriously. Until this bug, I didn't even know my laptop *had* a PC Speaker in it. Even if there's no other sound hardware available, please, just flash the screen or something... ANYTHING... rather than using that noise generator.
2) I probably wouldn't hear any alert sound at all if I turned off the PC Speaker, since it was trying to use the PC Speaker instead of the digitized alert sound. And a computer with no alert sound at all is almost as bad as a computer with an irritating 120 dB alert sound.
What really makes me annoyed is that the OS was released to the public with this bug in place-- let me say that again: this OS was released to the public with a bug that made many laptops emit a 120 dB ear-raping noise instead of the nice subtle alert sound it's supposed to be making. Oh, and it also happens every time you shut down your computer for no reason at all.
What. The. Fuck.
A bug that makes your 2009 modern OS make beeps like a copy of DOS circa 1992 is simply unacceptable. Is there any testing at all before a release? Or do they just go by the calendar, rain or shine, it's going out?
I use my laptop on buses and trains. I use it with headphones, sometimes. (One of the posters in the bug thread was almost deafened through his headphones when this bug happened.) I'm not going to subject my fellow passengers to an extremely loud noise. I'm not going to be embarrassed in public by a computer that sounds like a 386.
Since you didn't address any of my previous responses, I'm just going to decree myself winner of this particular conversation. Whee.
On a more serious note - it seems that Microsoft misjudged the market post XP. The world went small and light (netbooks, handhelds, web based computing/apps) and they went the other way with their desktop OS.
True. Could be worse, though. Apple *still* hasn't acknowledged it, other than some vague hand-wavings about making a tablet-sized iPhone-like device.
I don't just beat up on Microsoft. As much as I love Mac OS, their server products.....well, they suck. Leopard server was almost unusable for almost 6 months until they got the bugs worked out of it.
Also true.
I also wish the Linux guys put more effort into usability, and appearance.
Also: integration. There won't ever be effective competition to Active Directory and Outlook/Exchange until the open source projects all learn to work together in a more seamless manner.
I've administered networks for over a decade, I've been a self-employed consultant, I've managed networks for large financial institutions, medical institutions, and schools. I currently am an IT director for a private school. I have a BS in Computer Science, and I've developed software in multiple languages in many environments for many purposes.
And...? What do you want a cookie or something?
That said, can you give me a compelling reason to use Vista?
No. I don't even know what you do with your computer.
There are a ton of compelling reasons for me, however, and so I use Vista.
By the way - managing a network connection means lots of things (disabling/enabling/changing addressing schemes-WINS-DNS-gateways...etc) - stuff that needs to be done when servicing multiple networks for a living.
Ok; but why would you be using Vista for that instead of a server OS? (Not that I'm sure the network interface is different in the Server versions, but you're complaining that you can't use a consumer OS to do non-consumer tasks-- that's silly.)
Vista works just fine (finally) - it's just not easy or enjoyable to use.
It's much easier to use than XP in general.
Now you probably *think* it's harder to use because:
1) You do tasks that very very very few people do and you think Microsoft should behave as if the entire universe resolves around Ted.
2) You obviously are very memorization-oriented, and so you hate change of any kind. Therefore, you think Microsoft should have made no changes at all from XP.
Pick one. Or both. But neither says anything about the ease-of-use of Vista.
I've been on a mission to convert my friends and family members to Mac OS in the last year or so. Of the people I've converted from Vista (Mother in law, Father in law, sister, two cousins, and a handful of friends) - none have wanted to go back to Vista even after I offered to install it on their new Macs. Why do you suppose that is?
Because they know you'd nag the hell out of them about how evil Microsoft is and generally annoy them until they finally just let you put OS X back on them?
Good question. Microsoft has a long history of trying to convince vendors/users to use features that end up generally just getting ignored. (Features like the "Briefcase" in Windows 95, Active Desktop in 98-XP, the Games performance rating in Vista, the "Digital Locker" feature in Vista, possibly the Sidebar but it might be too early to tell.)
I think it would be smart for somebody like Netgear to adopt it, since it could potentially increase the usability and security of their products over the competitors, but the sad reality is that implementing it probably costs 11 cents more per-unit and so it'll never get done. Added to the problem is the fact that Netgear has probably already invested in their own solution to the problem, and that they still need to provide their own solution for users on older versions of Windows.
In short, I don't know, but my guess is it'll be mostly ignored by home network device makers.
AP and Reuters are primarily aggregaters of articles from those numerous local newspapers creating content. Sure, AP and Reuters keep their own reports on-staff for certain stories, but if you're reading a story about a murder that took place in Seattle in New York, and the citation is "Associated Press", it probably came directly from the local Seattle Times.
To be fair, there was a GINORMOUS pulsing icon/arrow/tooltip when you first ran Office 2007 telling you to open the that menu to find the Print and File commands. It's impossible to miss.
Haha... where do you even FIND a paint program that doesn't do at least bi-cubic when resizing? I hope they didn't use OpenOffice to resize the images, that's not exactly a glowing recommendation.
Holy shit. I've been on Slashdot for longer than 1 hour you know.
That same tired article is brought out EVERY SINGLE TIME this is mentioned, with no mention of the fact that everything in that article is COMPLETE BULLSHIT. Yah, I've seen that link-- about a million times. No, it's no less true than the first time I've seen it.
Tell you what, I'm going to write a webpage saying "Hurricane78 is a bad person who strangles kittens" on my blog and then start spreading it around every single time you post-- with no mention that it's actually unconfirmed, made-up, bullshit.
If you want to prove there's DRM in Vista, give me a test to prove it. I'm sitting in front of a Vista machine right now: show me a way to reproduce this DRM, to have it stop me from doing something or slow some operation down. Put your money where your fucking mouth is.
You're not talking about "usability", you're talking about "do exactly what I'm used to, damnit, I hate change get off my lawn!!!" That's different. :) Or wait, there's a good dose of "THE WORLD REVOLVES AROUND TED!" in there as well.
Managing a network connection in Vista is unnecessarily complicated. Why do I need to go into that damn network and sharing center to get to my network cards or to choose a wireless network? Why the hell do I need a diagram of my computer, my house, and the globe to explain how my computer is connected to my network and the internet? I connected the damn thing - there is no need to draw me a picture of how it all works.
How often do you even use that control panel? Once a month? Maybe? Did it ever occur that the networking diagram might actually be useful for non-you people who, for example, have several networked Xboxes, a networked file server, maybe a wifi printer or two in their house? But no, it doesn't help you personally, therefore it's useless and awful.
I don't know what you mean by "managing" a network connection, but you can do all the common wifi operations from the taskbar icons, as always. If you *have* to go into the Networking control panel for this, your computer is broken in some way and not at all typical.
Does renaming "add/remove programs" to "programs and features" really make me that much more productive? It takes me an extra second or two EVERY time I go between XP and Vista and the change added NO value.
Does it make you more productive? Probably not, Mr. Grumpy. I guess you're the only person ever to use Windows, and if it doesn't help you, it shouldn't ever be done. How often do you use this control panel, anyway? Maybe once a month? Max? Why are you griping about the *least*-used features of the OS?
Transparent menus - WHY? I want to look at the text in the menu, not at what is behind the menu. God forbid you have something behind the menu that is the same color as the text.
1) If your menu is obscured by the stuff behind it, your computer is broken in some way, and your experience is not typical. Actually... WTF... I'm sitting behind a stock Vista install right now, and I can't find a single application with a transparent menu in it. Even Explorer doesn't have any... Could you maybe provide an example?
2) If you don't like the feature, just turn it off and stop bitching. Although from looking at my own machine, I think you're bitching about something that has nothing to do with Vista.
Who's "most of us?"
I've noticed no speed difference on my MSI Wind netbook, after switching from the beta to the current RC.
Maybe you just have a driver that happened to get a slower version between those two releases, and it's affecting the performance of your machine? I don't know what your problem is, but don't imply it applies to "everybody" unless you have a pretty good survey supporting that.
The 'passcode' there is to prevent people from accidentally connecting to their neighbor's wifi-capable auto-discovery devices and then, for example, wondering what happened to their print job (which printed in the apartment downstairs.) It also applies for file-sharing and media-sharing on devices like Xbox 360s and such. I'm not sure how many non-Microsoft devices support it yet, though.
This shit happens on Slashdot every single time Vista is mentioned. The only DRM in Vista is to let you play formats (i.e. Blu-Ray disks) you can't play on other OSes. That's it. Period. The end.
Vista won't magically add DRM to all your MP3 files, nor does it give a shit whether you're playing legal or pirated MP3s or video files. No, it's not making your computer run slower, or preventing you from ripping a DVD, or whatever imaginary conspiratorial thing you imagine it's going to be doing.
If you don't like DRM, fine: don't play Blu-Ray disks in Vista. But don't blame Microsoft for adding a feature that a lot of their users *want*. Blame the media companies that demand it in the first place.
I'm also sick of this Slashdot FUD about DRM.
All of the Slashdotters pirating 20 movies a week in XP were posting this same bullshit when XP came out: about hos the XP DRM was going to stop their piracy efforts! OMG!
Only thing Joe has to make sure if he wants his old PC to work right out of the box is to have someone check his wireless chipset if he even has one. That's about the only piece of commodity hardware that's sometimes a problem with modern linux distro's.
Unless Joe has a (not that old) HP Pavilion tx1000, like I do. In which case, very few things will work:
* Sleep mode won't
* nor will the touchscreen
* nor will the sound work correctly (instead of playing the nice digitized alert sound, Ubuntu 9.04 seems to prefer using the PC Speaker to emit a 120 dB deafening BEEEEEEEEP on every error. This is the reason I went back to Vista.)
* nor will any of the media buttons on the monitor or keyboard work (except the volume buttons, which half-worked-- the mute button would mute the sound, but it wouldn't change the LED color to indicate it was muted.)
* Nor will the IR remote that came with the computer work correctly when playing DVDs (once you manage to install the DVD playing software-- no easy feat!)
* Nor will the wifi work by default, unless you happen to stumble across the dialog that lets you enable "non-free" drivers
* The DPI of the screen will be wrong, and when you happen to stumble across the dialog to set it to the correct value (120DPI), that won't work in all applications (notably: Firefox)
The mental gulf between "what Linux fans think works out of the box" and "what actually works out of the box" is pretty wide, I find.
Now go ahead and justify my list by saying "oh that's not really that important," or "not a lot of computers have a touchscreen," or "nobody uses the media keys." No, really. I'd be disappointed if nobody did.
And it wasn't *that* long ago that Windows had fully supported and debugged Itanium and Alpha ports, either. I'm sure Microsoft at the very least is keeping those CPU issues in-mind while working on newer kernels, even just in case some miracle happens and tomorrow everybody dumps their x86 computers for Alphas.