I think what bugs me most about Vista being, supposedly, the number one OS is that simply because of the article writers ignorance about whats out there, products such as Ubuntu Linux (which quite frankly have come on leaps and bounds), a product which they will post to YOU for free of charge, doesn't even get a mention.
How can Microsoft be cheered for releasing a product so late, so devoid of promised features, and so much worse than its predecessor? My experience with Vista RTM (obtained through volume licensing at work I might add) has been truely dire.. it lasted all of a week on my PC before I came crawling back to the reliablity of Windows XP!
A few things I found that really helped speed up boot time on my Windows XP.
* RAID0 pair of SATA drives.. the XP loading progress bar thing takes less than one complete scroll before it fires into the GUI.
* Removal of mixed types of drives - I had an IDE HDD in my box along with my SATA drives, and for some reason that added 15 or so seconds to boot time. When I removed that drive, it went into the GUI much quicker.
With regards hibernate / suspend to disk - i've found it seems to break on my NForce2 based board under XP. It works the first few times fairly well and is (without doubt) incredibly fast.. but as soon as I have suspended and resumed more than about 3 times, I start to get weird errors and application behaviour and sometimes even the keyboard does not work when I come back out of hibernation. The only thing I can do to cure it is reboot it.
If all those companies can come together to produce a site as easy, unrestricted, and as free of 'red tape' as YouTube i'll eat my hat.
I'll say it here now.. nothing that the networks will ever develop (regardless of how many of them get involved) will ever compete with YouTube - just won't. Simple as.
The only way they'll ever beat YouTube is with litigation.
"We made them drink poison last night and Darl McBride's lawyers and his great employees gave IBM a lesson which will not be forgotten by history. Truly.";)
Not sure if its mentioned in TFA (have to admit I didn't look) but the reports from the BBC this week, about his poisoning (and before his death) stated that he'd met two men for lunch at a Sushi bar and began to feel seriously ill a few hours after eating there.
Not sure if they would be able to put polonium into sushi without him realising? Not even sure what it is or how large a dose you'd need to kill someone!:|
Likewise. I've owned 3 iPods and the only thing thats ever gone wrong with them is that the earbuds started to fall apart.. and Apple sent me new ones to replace them. In fact all the people I know with iPods have never had hardware problems with them (that includes a few older HDD type including Gen1, 2 and 3), 2 shuffles, and 2 Nano's.
Based on that anecdotal evidence iPods are exponentially more reliable than Creative Zen players.. I only know one person with one of those, and that developed a disk fault after about 6 months, was replaced, and then completely died after a further 6 months.
If they're such diehard fans that they're willing to wait in line for over a week to buy a goddamn games console, why the hell didn't they just preorder it instead?!
Highlight text in a file, then drag that text to the desktop and a new file is created with that content, can XP do that?
I'm sure there is a Powertoy or something able to add in such a trivial feature to be honest.
A ton of apps included
What are Microsoft supposed to do - include applications and immediately incur the wratch of the 'unfair competition' people? Look at all the stink being kicked up about Microsoft possibly bundling antivirus / antispyware applications into Vista! God knows they need to, if the shite that Symantec continue to churn out is anything to go by. It seems the easiest way to reduce a Windows machine to a crawling popup infested lag-a-thon is not to leave it unpatched and plug it into a public network, but merely install on it the latest consumer version of Norton Internet Protector or whatever the hell they call it.. customers have asked about installing it on their PC's in the past and I was frankly sitting at my desk with my jaw agog simply because of how quickly it was able to do the modern day equivalent of depressing a virtual turbo button! (remeber those?!):)
I don't want to defend Microsoft really.. years of supporting their products has left me weary and jaded but i'm not THAT off the mark that I can't see their side of the argument every once in a while.
[i]Contrast that with Win XP which was passed by KDE on XWindows some years ago.[/i]
Sorry - it one particular area is KDE superior to Windows XP?
I've used Linux (and of course desktop platforms such as KDE and Gnome) for over 9 years - and whilst I could wholeheartedly say that it has come on leaps and bounds in that time, i'd still maintain that the Window Managers still have some way to go before they feel completely integrated into the system, and as usable as Windows is.
Perhaps i'm just more used to Windows as its what I (have to) work with on a day to day basis but I simply just do not agree that KDE is better (at least from a usability, looks or performance perspective) than Windows XP.
I've now used Firefox exclusively for about a year and a half and as far as i'm concerned Microsofts neglect for IE for so long means that on principle alone, i'll never go back.
But I do some website testing and as a result felt it was in my interests to install IE7 now that it is released and see what its like.
Yes - shameless UI tweaks borrowed from Firefox and Opera (did we expect anything else?) but the one thing I do really like is the new magnifier feature for web pages. It just works really rather well and seems to handle most pages well.. and doesn't break formatting at all on any site I tried it on. It even scaled up Flash movies to 400% without making my machine die on its backside.
So certainly for people with sight issues, it'd be hard not to reccomend!
I had a fairly unexciting testing period with Vista (pre-RC1, RC1, and 5728) on my home PC (Athlon 2600+, 1GB RAM, Raid0 SATA setup, GeForce 6600GT Graphics) and have come to realise a few things..
Either... Vista desperately needs some more mature (and performance enhancing) drivers from hardware vendors OR I need to upgrade before I am able to run it (which quite frankly I just refuse to accept) OR Vista is basically a big old load of bloat and considering Windows XP runs like its supercharged on my current PC, maybe its worth just sticking with what I have for now!
Not to wheel out the old Apple Mac 'trump card' (as i'm really not a Mac user / owner anyway) but I had in the not to distant past a Quicksilver G4 800MHz with 512MB of RAM and a GeForce FX5200 retrofitted from a Powermac G5 and it used to run OSX 10.4 Tiger like an absolute charm - including all of the shiny visual effects. Why the hell then does Vista's visual performance suffer so badly on my PC when it should absolutely annhilate it?
I actually rather liked Antitrust. It was a bit cheesy in places, but certainly I can think of far worse technology type films that have tried to talk technical and just ended up sounding absolutely ridiculous.
Antitrust didn't seem entirely unbelieveable in some places - and the fact that the whole setup was far too Microsoft like, and Tim Robbins was so like Bill Gates, it was all quite funny:)
I liked a lot of little touches in the film.. like one of Gary Winstones two 'goons' wears a Half Life t-shirt.
This is pretty much my thoughts on it. If this were a MEGA affordable technology i'd be all over it but it is unbelievably cost prohibitive. A decent HDTV is around a months salary, then add on the player (about half of that?) and then factor in a completely usely 120 DVD collection that i've amassed.
Why the hell should I bother?
Not interested.. quite happy with my 28" TV.. quite happy with my crappo standard DVD player. If the prices suddenly fall by about 75% then maybe i'll consider switching.
Oh - and of course the ability to play Halo 2 on your PC - because as we all know, thanks to Vista bringing clarity to my world i'm not able to play it on Windows XP - I have to own Vista to play it.
The original MS/Bungie press release seems a little hard to find these days - no small wonder given the complete load of marketing bullshit which padded it out, living precious little room for actual technical explanations of why this would be the case, but this article sums it up fairly well with a good example quote from the release:
I feel sorry for Bungie because i'm sure they want to get this game out to as many PC owners as possible.. but the Microsoft-marketroids have clearly put their foot in and made them make it a Vista exclusive.
What a load of BS. Of course I won't be buying Vista and therefore will have to forfeit playing Halo 2. Woe is me.
Just another bit of remeniscing but I can barely believe it was 10 years ago that me and a group of friends used to stay behind after class in college in the most powerful computer room in the college, with the lecturers blessings, to fire up Quake and frag for a few hours. Both on the LAN and over the net cause back then the place had a relatively fast internet connection!
That will be another Microsoft 'innovation' there then.
If this takes any significant market share of iTunes / iPod, I will eat my hat. At the end of the day, it has to be more than 'an improvement' over iTunes - we all know how quickly Apple can roll out big changes to their products, and all it takes is one or two small updates to put Apple back on top IF do release a product which is better.. but (and lets be honest about this) I really doubt they will.
Features can only offset an astronomical cost for so long.. I think Nintendo might emerge from this whole debacle looking very good indeed and more power to them. They've stuck by a tried a tested formula for a long time, and whilst Microsoft and Sony have been beating their chests and screaming in each others faces, Nintendo have just plodded along in the background getting ready to launch another masterpiece of a console.
Lets hope that the stupid name doesnt put people off, and lets hope that this console gets the recognition that it will (hopefully) deserve!
I've not had a Nintendo console in my house since the SNES (well excluding my DS!) - i quite like the sound of the Wii though!
Exactly - and this is precisely why I feel Sony just has no idea. They justify the price because it has Blu-Ray but what if like me you are a long way off being able to afford a HD capable LCD TV, and you already have a fairly extensive DVD collection? I'm not interested in moving to a new tech like Blu-Ray for a loooong time.
It pains me really because i've owned all the different types of Playstations and i've always felt that Sony have done a good job with their consoles. But this time around corporate greed and a sheer desire to flood the market with ITS technology has got in the way of just producing a good console.
Sad and probably enough to keep me away from PS3 ownership (like the £425 price tag wasn't enough!)
Exactly my thoughts on the matter. Never done this before but here it is.. so begins my official boycott on Creative. Not that it makes any real difference to them as I buy one of their products every few years at a push but makes me feel better!
And the one that Microsoft just can never seem to grasp, and probably the reason why so many people just don't want anything to do with them, is that there always has to be a hook.
Some might argue that Google have a hidden agenda (and no-one has quite worked out what that is yet) but with their offerings such as their GMail for Businesses, regular GMail, Calendar, etc there isn't a 'hook' - its just there. You use it, you don't - You like it, you don't - so what.
With Microsoft its always something like "We want to get people to be lifelong users" or "We reserve the right to turn on adverts when people graduate" - there is always a caveat or other reason rather than "This is a damn good product - we think it will sell itself".
I can't wait to be rid of Windows at home and just be done with Microsoft.
Firstly i'm not coming on to defend my purchase. To be honest the phone was free anyway on a contract upgrade I needed to make so I thought i'd go for it.
The phone is a Nokia N70 and, for all of its foibles (including the incredibly annoying slide open camera activation / lens protection cover) the camera stands out as a superb product.
I'd love to link to an image i've taken from it but fear the slashdot effect would ruin me on hosting charges.. but under the right conditions (ie NOT night time) the camera returns impressive pictures. Yes, in low light it makes everything look incredibly washed out - yes the delay is enormous on taking a picture - but in good average daylight conditions pictures come back looking almost as good as those of my old 2MP Olympus point and shoot which i've since retired.
One of the 'points' of camera phones for me was just having a camera with you at all times in case something unusual happened - be that a car accident (and you need to record photographic evidence of the scene), a good sunset, etc - the increase in MP allows you to do this more and more - previous generations meant that the picture was only 640x480 or so and this didn't really allow you to get the whole picture across!
Excellent. Another 'convenience' feature which helps out people who are clearly far too STUPID to use a car.
I remeber reading an article recently that put people with high end, well kitted out cars in cars with NO driver aids and subjected them to a few tests such as skid pans and high speed maneuvres(sp?!) - the results were fairly predictable. Most were so used to the features that automatically kicked in when they did something stupid that when faced with a car that didn't have them, they had NO idea what was going on and lost control in all circumstances.
I personally feel that there needs to be more driver education and less dependence on these driver aids! I appreciate they might be important in an accident of course but not all circumstances where driver aids may be used could be classed as accidents!
Yes. Because one makes cars. And ones makes computers.
Besides, British cars are some of the best in the world and i'd stand by that.. TVR, Jaguar, Aston Martin, Land Rover, Marcos, Morgan, MG, Ariel.. we can make some pretty good cars when we put our minds to it!
Don't worry about concentrating on making a market leading product. When all else fails, fall back on lawsuits against companies and people that can't afford to defend themselves. Whoever said that Microsoft was working to better its image and adopt better business practices clearly was talking out of their ass.
Microsoft never fail to disgust me.. I look forward to the day when I can finally wash my hands of them all together.
Slashdot Mirror
I think what bugs me most about Vista being, supposedly, the number one OS is that simply because of the article writers ignorance about whats out there, products such as Ubuntu Linux (which quite frankly have come on leaps and bounds), a product which they will post to YOU for free of charge, doesn't even get a mention.
How can Microsoft be cheered for releasing a product so late, so devoid of promised features, and so much worse than its predecessor? My experience with Vista RTM (obtained through volume licensing at work I might add) has been truely dire.. it lasted all of a week on my PC before I came crawling back to the reliablity of Windows XP!
What a joke.
A few things I found that really helped speed up boot time on my Windows XP.
* RAID0 pair of SATA drives.. the XP loading progress bar thing takes less than one complete scroll before it fires into the GUI.
* Removal of mixed types of drives - I had an IDE HDD in my box along with my SATA drives, and for some reason that added 15 or so seconds to boot time. When I removed that drive, it went into the GUI much quicker.
With regards hibernate / suspend to disk - i've found it seems to break on my NForce2 based board under XP. It works the first few times fairly well and is (without doubt) incredibly fast.. but as soon as I have suspended and resumed more than about 3 times, I start to get weird errors and application behaviour and sometimes even the keyboard does not work when I come back out of hibernation. The only thing I can do to cure it is reboot it.
Ho hum.
If all those companies can come together to produce a site as easy, unrestricted, and as free of 'red tape' as YouTube i'll eat my hat.
I'll say it here now.. nothing that the networks will ever develop (regardless of how many of them get involved) will ever compete with YouTube - just won't. Simple as.
The only way they'll ever beat YouTube is with litigation.
"We made them drink poison last night and Darl McBride's lawyers and his great employees gave IBM a lesson which will not be forgotten by history. Truly." ;)
Not sure if its mentioned in TFA (have to admit I didn't look) but the reports from the BBC this week, about his poisoning (and before his death) stated that he'd met two men for lunch at a Sushi bar and began to feel seriously ill a few hours after eating there.
:|
Not sure if they would be able to put polonium into sushi without him realising? Not even sure what it is or how large a dose you'd need to kill someone!
Likewise. I've owned 3 iPods and the only thing thats ever gone wrong with them is that the earbuds started to fall apart.. and Apple sent me new ones to replace them. In fact all the people I know with iPods have never had hardware problems with them (that includes a few older HDD type including Gen1, 2 and 3), 2 shuffles, and 2 Nano's.
Based on that anecdotal evidence iPods are exponentially more reliable than Creative Zen players.. I only know one person with one of those, and that developed a disk fault after about 6 months, was replaced, and then completely died after a further 6 months.
If they're such diehard fans that they're willing to wait in line for over a week to buy a goddamn games console, why the hell didn't they just preorder it instead?!
Highlight text in a file, then drag that text to the desktop and a new file is created with that content, can XP do that?
:)
I'm sure there is a Powertoy or something able to add in such a trivial feature to be honest.
A ton of apps included
What are Microsoft supposed to do - include applications and immediately incur the wratch of the 'unfair competition' people? Look at all the stink being kicked up about Microsoft possibly bundling antivirus / antispyware applications into Vista! God knows they need to, if the shite that Symantec continue to churn out is anything to go by. It seems the easiest way to reduce a Windows machine to a crawling popup infested lag-a-thon is not to leave it unpatched and plug it into a public network, but merely install on it the latest consumer version of Norton Internet Protector or whatever the hell they call it.. customers have asked about installing it on their PC's in the past and I was frankly sitting at my desk with my jaw agog simply because of how quickly it was able to do the modern day equivalent of depressing a virtual turbo button! (remeber those?!)
I don't want to defend Microsoft really.. years of supporting their products has left me weary and jaded but i'm not THAT off the mark that I can't see their side of the argument every once in a while.
[i]Contrast that with Win XP which was passed by KDE on XWindows some years ago.[/i]
Sorry - it one particular area is KDE superior to Windows XP?
I've used Linux (and of course desktop platforms such as KDE and Gnome) for over 9 years - and whilst I could wholeheartedly say that it has come on leaps and bounds in that time, i'd still maintain that the Window Managers still have some way to go before they feel completely integrated into the system, and as usable as Windows is.
Perhaps i'm just more used to Windows as its what I (have to) work with on a day to day basis but I simply just do not agree that KDE is better (at least from a usability, looks or performance perspective) than Windows XP.
I've now used Firefox exclusively for about a year and a half and as far as i'm concerned Microsofts neglect for IE for so long means that on principle alone, i'll never go back.
But I do some website testing and as a result felt it was in my interests to install IE7 now that it is released and see what its like.
Yes - shameless UI tweaks borrowed from Firefox and Opera (did we expect anything else?) but the one thing I do really like is the new magnifier feature for web pages. It just works really rather well and seems to handle most pages well.. and doesn't break formatting at all on any site I tried it on. It even scaled up Flash movies to 400% without making my machine die on its backside.
So certainly for people with sight issues, it'd be hard not to reccomend!
I had a fairly unexciting testing period with Vista (pre-RC1, RC1, and 5728) on my home PC (Athlon 2600+, 1GB RAM, Raid0 SATA setup, GeForce 6600GT Graphics) and have come to realise a few things..
Either... Vista desperately needs some more mature (and performance enhancing) drivers from hardware vendors OR I need to upgrade before I am able to run it (which quite frankly I just refuse to accept) OR Vista is basically a big old load of bloat and considering Windows XP runs like its supercharged on my current PC, maybe its worth just sticking with what I have for now!
Not to wheel out the old Apple Mac 'trump card' (as i'm really not a Mac user / owner anyway) but I had in the not to distant past a Quicksilver G4 800MHz with 512MB of RAM and a GeForce FX5200 retrofitted from a Powermac G5 and it used to run OSX 10.4 Tiger like an absolute charm - including all of the shiny visual effects. Why the hell then does Vista's visual performance suffer so badly on my PC when it should absolutely annhilate it?
I actually rather liked Antitrust. It was a bit cheesy in places, but certainly I can think of far worse technology type films that have tried to talk technical and just ended up sounding absolutely ridiculous.
:)
Antitrust didn't seem entirely unbelieveable in some places - and the fact that the whole setup was far too Microsoft like, and Tim Robbins was so like Bill Gates, it was all quite funny
I liked a lot of little touches in the film.. like one of Gary Winstones two 'goons' wears a Half Life t-shirt.
This is pretty much my thoughts on it. If this were a MEGA affordable technology i'd be all over it but it is unbelievably cost prohibitive. A decent HDTV is around a months salary, then add on the player (about half of that?) and then factor in a completely usely 120 DVD collection that i've amassed.
Why the hell should I bother?
Not interested.. quite happy with my 28" TV.. quite happy with my crappo standard DVD player. If the prices suddenly fall by about 75% then maybe i'll consider switching.
Oh - and of course the ability to play Halo 2 on your PC - because as we all know, thanks to Vista bringing clarity to my world i'm not able to play it on Windows XP - I have to own Vista to play it.
The original MS/Bungie press release seems a little hard to find these days - no small wonder given the complete load of marketing bullshit which padded it out, living precious little room for actual technical explanations of why this would be the case, but this article sums it up fairly well with a good example quote from the release:
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1089
I feel sorry for Bungie because i'm sure they want to get this game out to as many PC owners as possible.. but the Microsoft-marketroids have clearly put their foot in and made them make it a Vista exclusive.
What a load of BS. Of course I won't be buying Vista and therefore will have to forfeit playing Halo 2. Woe is me.
Just another bit of remeniscing but I can barely believe it was 10 years ago that me and a group of friends used to stay behind after class in college in the most powerful computer room in the college, with the lecturers blessings, to fire up Quake and frag for a few hours. Both on the LAN and over the net cause back then the place had a relatively fast internet connection!
Oh those were the days!
That will be another Microsoft 'innovation' there then.
If this takes any significant market share of iTunes / iPod, I will eat my hat. At the end of the day, it has to be more than 'an improvement' over iTunes - we all know how quickly Apple can roll out big changes to their products, and all it takes is one or two small updates to put Apple back on top IF do release a product which is better.. but (and lets be honest about this) I really doubt they will.
Amen.
Features can only offset an astronomical cost for so long.. I think Nintendo might emerge from this whole debacle looking very good indeed and more power to them. They've stuck by a tried a tested formula for a long time, and whilst Microsoft and Sony have been beating their chests and screaming in each others faces, Nintendo have just plodded along in the background getting ready to launch another masterpiece of a console.
Lets hope that the stupid name doesnt put people off, and lets hope that this console gets the recognition that it will (hopefully) deserve!
I've not had a Nintendo console in my house since the SNES (well excluding my DS!) - i quite like the sound of the Wii though!
Exactly - and this is precisely why I feel Sony just has no idea. They justify the price because it has Blu-Ray but what if like me you are a long way off being able to afford a HD capable LCD TV, and you already have a fairly extensive DVD collection? I'm not interested in moving to a new tech like Blu-Ray for a loooong time.
It pains me really because i've owned all the different types of Playstations and i've always felt that Sony have done a good job with their consoles. But this time around corporate greed and a sheer desire to flood the market with ITS technology has got in the way of just producing a good console.
Sad and probably enough to keep me away from PS3 ownership (like the £425 price tag wasn't enough!)
Exactly my thoughts on the matter. Never done this before but here it is.. so begins my official boycott on Creative. Not that it makes any real difference to them as I buy one of their products every few years at a push but makes me feel better!
Screw you Creative.
And the one that Microsoft just can never seem to grasp, and probably the reason why so many people just don't want anything to do with them, is that there always has to be a hook.
Some might argue that Google have a hidden agenda (and no-one has quite worked out what that is yet) but with their offerings such as their GMail for Businesses, regular GMail, Calendar, etc there isn't a 'hook' - its just there. You use it, you don't - You like it, you don't - so what.
With Microsoft its always something like "We want to get people to be lifelong users" or "We reserve the right to turn on adverts when people graduate" - there is always a caveat or other reason rather than "This is a damn good product - we think it will sell itself".
I can't wait to be rid of Windows at home and just be done with Microsoft.
I have to say I feel it was entirely worth it.
Firstly i'm not coming on to defend my purchase. To be honest the phone was free anyway on a contract upgrade I needed to make so I thought i'd go for it.
The phone is a Nokia N70 and, for all of its foibles (including the incredibly annoying slide open camera activation / lens protection cover) the camera stands out as a superb product.
I'd love to link to an image i've taken from it but fear the slashdot effect would ruin me on hosting charges.. but under the right conditions (ie NOT night time) the camera returns impressive pictures. Yes, in low light it makes everything look incredibly washed out - yes the delay is enormous on taking a picture - but in good average daylight conditions pictures come back looking almost as good as those of my old 2MP Olympus point and shoot which i've since retired.
One of the 'points' of camera phones for me was just having a camera with you at all times in case something unusual happened - be that a car accident (and you need to record photographic evidence of the scene), a good sunset, etc - the increase in MP allows you to do this more and more - previous generations meant that the picture was only 640x480 or so and this didn't really allow you to get the whole picture across!
Cheers.
Excellent. Another 'convenience' feature which helps out people who are clearly far too STUPID to use a car.
I remeber reading an article recently that put people with high end, well kitted out cars in cars with NO driver aids and subjected them to a few tests such as skid pans and high speed maneuvres(sp?!) - the results were fairly predictable. Most were so used to the features that automatically kicked in when they did something stupid that when faced with a car that didn't have them, they had NO idea what was going on and lost control in all circumstances.
I personally feel that there needs to be more driver education and less dependence on these driver aids! I appreciate they might be important in an accident of course but not all circumstances where driver aids may be used could be classed as accidents!
Yes. Because one makes cars. And ones makes computers.
Besides, British cars are some of the best in the world and i'd stand by that.. TVR, Jaguar, Aston Martin, Land Rover, Marcos, Morgan, MG, Ariel.. we can make some pretty good cars when we put our minds to it!
Don't worry about concentrating on making a market leading product. When all else fails, fall back on lawsuits against companies and people that can't afford to defend themselves. Whoever said that Microsoft was working to better its image and adopt better business practices clearly was talking out of their ass.
Microsoft never fail to disgust me.. I look forward to the day when I can finally wash my hands of them all together.
Novell Groupwise.
Say no more. Its diabolical.