furrbear | (no subject)

See here.

You know. I want to bash Bill Gates over the head with my partner's PC laptop. I have been using computers since marking optically read Hollerith cards in high school. This is the first time EVER that I couldn't trouble shoot basic issues on a computer.

I HATE VISTA!!

I want to book Bill Gates on a bus in Canada.

I got a nice Toshi notebook out of hubby trying to run Vista. It sucked so bad, he gave it to me and hunted down a XP model rather than have me try to downgrade it.

Haven't tried yet, but I've got a good hunch it'll run OS X.

oooooow.. That is a good idea. What does OS X cost without a computer?

poke around for Kalyway_10.5.2_DVD_Intel_Amd.torrent or similar name.

I'll buy a copy if it works. I think it's ~$100.

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The Mojave is a desert... 'nuff said.

But it is a "high" desert.

Chuck, usually only boots Vista for the weekly anti-virus updates on his MacBook Pro

I love this option, though. I buy the Dells at work and we've been ordering them with Win XP preinstalled on a Vista license...Vista is a pain in the ass and we aren't ready to migrate over just yet...

I'm totally not surprised. Big businesses are notoriously slow about this - there are distinct advantages to having lots of essentially identical machines all running the same software. And when they've got hundreds or thousands of machines... it's not exactly a minor expense to "upgrade."

Interestingly, I remember seeing something a while back about M$ planning a Vista-based version of Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs - I don't think they DARE do that now. WinFLP has very loose keycode checking - to make it easy for IT staff repurposing/reimaging older machines. If they put out a version of Vista that actually performed decently (but only to their major license clients, as with WinFLP) - it would be SO pirated SO fast it wouldn't even be funny.

And let me ask - IS there a point to M$'s obsession with menus that rearrange themselves? I want items in the same place every time - I don't want the OS second-guessing me and moving stuff around, screwing up my habit of flicking to just there to get to a certain application. Why do I have to keep turning OFF the idiocy known as "Personalized Menus"???

I bought two new PCs (Toshiba Laptop and HP Desktop) with Vista and have had no problems.

In fact, unlike XP, I didn't even have to jump through hoops to get my Cannon GL-1 Digital Video Camera to be recognized. The first time I plugged it into the firewire port, it loaded the correct drivers without a problem. Same with my powered microphone.

To be honest, I havent stumbled upon an application that I use that had a problem with Vista...Audacity, TVersity, Game Tap, various games, etc. all work without a problem. I use my PC as a media server to stream videos to my PS3 downstairs (using powerline LAN adapters) and it transcodes video without a problem...fast too.

Maybe there's a difference between trying to upgrade an old PC to Vista versus buying a PC with it already installed?

"But politics aside, I don't see how all this Vista-bashing serves any useful purpose. Unlike in an election, we don't have to narrow the choices down to one. It seems to me that you should use the operating system you like best, and not spend a lot of time and energy dwelling on what's wrong with the one(s) you don't like. We have more viable choices in that regard than we ever had before, so what's all the groaning and griping about?"

from this blog --
http://www.vistanews.com/?id=31

I totally agree with this...but I'd add any computer/OS bashing.

Aw, yes, the "This is just Microsoft bashing" canard.

To quote Peter Gutmann, who says it better than I can:

"It's bad-technology bashing. If this had been done by Linus Torvalds, Steve Jobs, Alan Cox, or Theo de Raadt, I'd have said the same thing about it. As far as I'm concerned computers are tools to get a job done and not a platform for religious wars, and if something's bad I'll say so regardless of who's doing it. In fact Vista overall has some really nice new technology and features built into it, it's just this one aspect of Vista that's troublesome. And just for the record I run various versions of Windows on … [counting] … seven of my machines (the rest are a mixture of Linux, FreeBSD, and occasionally Solaris and QNX), so I'd be a rather unlikely Microsoft detractor if I have their software all over my machines."

My personal count is nine machines, and I'll add Tru64 Unix and VMS and remove QNX from the OS mix. I'm presently evaluating Server 2008 configured as a desktop OS - I have no use for Aero's bling. If I can, I intend to skip Vista much like Windows ME.

But maybe Microsoft can address this better than most:

“No amount of coordination will be successful unless it's designed with the needs of the customer in mind. Microsoft believes that a good user experience is a requirement for adoption” — Microsoft.

“I'm not sure how the company lost sight of what matters to our customers, both business and home, the most, but in my view we lost our way. I think our teams lost sight of what bug-free means, what resilience means, what full scenarios mean, what security means, what performance means, how important current applications are, and really understanding what the most important problems our customers face are” — Jim Allchin, Platform Products and Services Group, Microsoft.

You're doing fine with Vista and like it? Fine. Congratulations.

I'm a Software Engineer/Computer Scientist by training. There's a lot I like in the new Windows 6 kernel, but beyond Gutmann's Content Protection analysis, with which I concur, there are other things that trouble me. Vista's Aero UI shows many many traits of, what is known colloquially as, The Second System Effect.

First introduced in 1975 by OS/360 project manager Frederick P. Brooks in his seminal collection The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, the Second System Effect states that the second system an engineer designs is the most dangerous system he will ever design, since he will tend to incorporate all of the additions he originated but did not add (due to the inherent time constraints) to the first system. Thus, when embarking upon a second system an engineer should be mindful that he is susceptible to over-engineering it.

Instead of cleaning up code and programming out bugs, an entire new team was tasked with creating a "Brand new platform". From software reliability and security standpoints, that's a troubling development.

The purpose to all this discussion? Hopefully to learn from past mistakes and not make them in the future.

Edited 2008-08-08 17:21 (UTC)

Much like furrbear, I have tried Vista and found it painfully wanting. You've seen his list of problems: here's mine.

Aero. Microsoft apparently thinks OS X is as popular as it is because of the chrome and eye candy. This may be true. However, they missed the fact OS X's ease of use is because of factors that have absolutely nothing to do with eye candy. You could take today's Mail.app, drop it into a 1993–era NeXTStep box, and you'd have a mail application that was a world better than Outlook.
Simplicity and elegance matter a lot more than chrome. The XP interface was not simple or elegant. The Vista interface is not an improvement in these areas, but it has some really nice chrome plating.
(ObDisclosure: yes, I am a human–computer interface geek. This is one of my research areas here at the University of Iowa.)
Cruft. Microsoft made enough changes to Vista to break a large number of software applications — GnuPG and MinGW being the two FOSS applications which most annoyed me when Microsoft broke them.
Microsoft says this was done to improve security. I can accept that, no problem, but it doesn't change the fact Microsoft did some massive breakage of existing applications. And yet, I have applications from 1991 which still run fine on Vista.
I have to grant Microsoft this: nobody in the world does backwards compatibility as well as they do. Yet, this means a large amount of cruft is being added to the system, and design criteria of the past are still lingering. Every time I have to do Windows programming in C, I cringe. The userspace is simply that bad. I have a Master's degree in computer science with a focus on software engineering and security issues, so please don't think my problem is just that I'm a novice programmer.
If Microsoft was going to break old applications anyway, I don't know why they didn't take advantage of the chance to say "okay, let's start from a blank sheet of paper here, figure out which Windows ideas are good ones, which are bad, and make a fresh start". If Vista had been a total backwards compatibility break in order to clean up the APIs and design decisions and provide a foundation for the next two decades of computing, I would be dancing in the streets.
(Contrary to popular belief, UNIX is not a nearly 40-year-old operating system. UNIX is a nearly 40-year-old set of operating system design guidelines. The Linux kernel is about fifteen years old at this point and routinely breaks backwards compatibility along the way, which is one of the reasons why I like it so much; bad design decisions get fixed quickly.)
The marketing copy is fundamentally dishonest. Here, I respectfully disagree with furrbear. Microsoft was not aiming to create a brand new platform, they did not want a brand new platform. They wanted essentially an evolutionary step from XP, one which would compete with OS X in the looks department.
"Evolutionary step" is not the same as "small step". Evolution works so well because whatever lifeform has an evolutionary step tends to eat whatever doesn't. Vista was not, and was never designed to be, a revolutionary blank–sheet next–generation Windows.
But that's what Microsoft is telling us it is.
The amount of downright deceptive hype surrounding Vista is hard for me to stomach. If Vista is going to be hawked to us under such false pretenses, should we really have much confidence in the product? Why aren't they hawking it on its own merits?
.NET is sliding into total irrelevance. .NET 3.5 has added a lot of new assemblies to the system, assemblies which are not specified in the ECMA standard and which will not interoperate with other .NET platforms such as Mono. Yes, you heard me right: Microsoft is embracing and extending their own standard. Talk about your crummy things to do. To the extent Microsoft is pushing everything to all the new .NET 3.5 technologies (Windows Communication Framework, Windows Presentation Framework, etc.) which are not in the ECMA standard, I think it's a deeply hostile act.

But see...my point is, as long as it does what we want it to do and are happy with it, that's what counts.

I've built about 10 PCs in my lifetime starting with an XT moving up to my last frankenstein which was an Athlon. Mostly because I was a PC Gamer...now that I've moved my gaming primarily to consoles (except for my Game Tap/Adventure games and WOW), I decided to go the off-the-shelf route and now I have an HP machine made for multimedia. I use my PC primarily for Surfing the web, making Podcasts, Editing Video and as a Media Server. It works fine for those things.

I tried to go Apple a few years ago, but after about six months of "Yay this is new!" and visiting the Apple Store because I felt like I was part of this "alternative crowd", I started realizing all the applications and games that I missed..like Sony Acid and Fruity Loops and Reason..

When I climbed back onto my PC, I suddenly felt like I exhaled. I simply just like Windows/PCs better. Its not because I hate Apple...I think the Apple O/S is pretty nifty, but there's too much stuff I like on my PC that I don't want to use an alternative for. At least I tried Apple though. I still love my Cinema Display. :)

We can talk about the honest/dishonesty of the business men behind everything...but seriously...they are business men. Both Gates and Jobs are both sharks in their own way. I can pick out inaccuracies in most of the Apple vs. Windows ads (which are generalizations..they never talk about custom-built PCs) that Apple puts on TV just as much as you can point out inaccuracies in MS marketing.

It's the great Pepsi vs Coke debate all over again. (I myself learned to like both so I can buy whatever is on sale. :) )

my point is, as long as it does what we want it to do and are happy with it, that's what counts

Sure, that’s the free market in a nutshell. The individual consumer gets to decide what product best serves their needs. Neither John nor I are arguing against that. If anything, we’re both passionately arguing for that.

What I’m arguing against is the “you’re just a Microsoft basher” mentality. Not true — I think Microsoft Research is the sharpest corporate R&D shop out there; I think the .NET virtual machine design is very good; I think the Windows NT kernel, as originally conceived of by Dave Cutler, is as good or better than the UNIX kernel, etcetera, etcetera.

John has his own list of Microsoft technologies he really likes.

You can thoroughly despise Vista, as John and I both do, without being a “Microsoft basher”. It’s very possible to have principled, reasoned objections to Vista.

The trope which says “oh, new Microsoft OSes always elicit powerful negative responses” is true, but also insulting. It implies the complainant’s views may be safely dismissed as sour grapes. That’s what MS is trying to do right now. As for me, I am deeply offended by their portrayal of us Vista objectors as a crowd of sour grapes.

Incidentally, judging from what you’ve said here, you’re not a fan of Microsoft, either. You don’t like Windows more than Apple. You like the applications available for Windows more than the applications available for Apple. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that — in fact, there’s a lot right with that, individuals getting to decide what works best for their needs and all — but from what you’re saying, you’re not a Microsoft loyalist. You’re an applications loyalist. :)

Having upgraded my home PC from XP to Vista, I can vouch for the fact that it was a pain in the ass. To speed up the installation, Vista installs a new disk image onto the hard drive. The entire previous Windows installation is shunted off to a folder called Windows.old, which they don't tell you about at the time.

The result was that all the registry entries were gone, making it necessary to reinstall every piece of software I used on that machine. And, what was scariest of all, the contents of the previous My Documents folder were moved into the Windows.old folder without warning. So the first time I opened Vista's Documents folder and found it empty, I freaked out until I figured out what had happened and recopied my documents to put them back where they belonged (something Vista's install should have done for me).

I think Vista on a new PC is fine. But I would never again opt to upgrade an earlier version of Windows to Vista.

I just today got one of those spiffy HP workstations with the Vista license and XP loaded on the box. Our IT dept won't allow us to put Vista computers on the network. Which is fine with me.

Yeah, I've loved Microsoft trying to convince people that it's just bad press that has been causing so much problem with Vista.

Sure, and the Y2K bug was just hype.

Microsoft has serious problems and it had better get Windows 7 done within the next year, or it's going to start losing more to the Linux and OS X camps.

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Windows XP Still Outselling Windows Vista

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The Mojave is a desert...

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