Vista Rant

[alexander]

from what i have seen so far, in the system requirements for XP it said minimum of 1.5 gb of free space, xp takes a little over a gig to install, vista free space requirement is 15 gigs, I will however check with my friends who run vista in VM...

[Southtown]

Skipping over most of the ramdrive stuff, I did not see any mention of this new development posted in this thread yet:

"

Here’s the exact text: “The first user of the software may reassign the license to another device one time.” That means that if you purchase a copy of Vista at retail—be it the $200 Home Basic or the $400 Vista Ultimate package—you have the right to install that OS on one machine. When you retire that machine, you can install the OS on a second PC, but that’s it. Unlike the Windows XP EULA, which permits you to continue transferring the OS indefinitely (as long as you remove it from the previous machine), Vista’s EULA restricts each copy of the OS to two computers.

" --

Microsoft’s Licensing Madness, MaximumPC, 10/06

And yeah, I'm hot. Anyone know the best Linux distro for x86 MacBooks?

[Boerseun]

Skipping over most of the ramdrive stuff, I did not see any mention of this new development posted in this thread yet:

"

Here’s the exact text: “The first user of the software may reassign the license to another device one time.” That means that if you purchase a copy of Vista at retail—be it the $200 Home Basic or the $400 Vista Ultimate package—you have the right to install that OS on one machine. When you retire that machine, you can install the OS on a second PC, but that’s it. Unlike the Windows XP EULA, which permits you to continue transferring the OS indefinitely (as long as you remove it from the previous machine), Vista’s EULA restricts each copy of the OS to two computers.

" --

Microsoft’s Licensing Madness, MaximumPC, 10/06

And yeah, I'm hot. Anyone know the best Linux distro for x86 MacBooks?

Obviously because they're a greedy bunch of leeches. And you'll note there isn't even the slightest hint at subtlety from their side. There could be no other reason for this than that half the world's GDP simply ain't enough.

[Southtown]

I mean, not even if it were feather-lite and bulletproof...

[Southtown]

Big D., For businesses, there are Linux support firms. You just pay for consulting and support. Software is free. Run those numbers by your execs. :confused:

 

http://tldp.org/links/consult.html

http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/32844.html

[Qfwfq]

The sad fact is that nobody is out there competing with them in any serious way. If is is so damn easy to write and support an OS then where is the viable alternative?

The sad fact is that the monopoly amongst OSes and the near-monopoly amongst some kinds of app (see Office) go hand in hand with each other. It's a technical issue, but while apps can be made (at least recompilable) for many OSes, they can also be made so that they run on only one. Now it is feasible to make another OS implement the Win32 platform according to specs published in MSDN but this is not enough to guarantee that any app developped by the same maker of the Windoze will run fine the othe OS. Uncle Bill knows more than what's published in MSDN. This is what the antitrust rulings failed to solve.

 

The only way to offer a viable alternative to windows would be to also defeat the preponderance of formats of apps that are proprietary to the same maker of Windoze.

[alexander]

dudes, go read yesterday's slashdot post, there is a link to one of the Vista developers who explains why it took them a year to develop the shutdown menu... its so hilarious!

[Southtown]

Couldn't find it. Didn't look long.

[CraigD]

dudes, go read yesterday's slashdot post, there is a link to one of the Vista developers who explains why it took them a year to develop the shutdown menu... its so hilarious!

 

Couldn't find it. Didn't look long.

No disrespect to Alexander, but I think the Micrsoft developer’s blog and related comments would be surprising only to someone who either hasn’t worked in a large software house, or believes that MS’s legendary corporate culture – it’s puzzle-interviews, etc. – rendered it immune it against the bureaucratic creep suffered by nearly all large shops.

 

Basically, it’s a tale of too many layers of management, poor communication, too few coders (1 in 25, by the blogger’s calculations) stretching a few man-weeks of work effort into a couple dozen man-years – the classic “too many chiefs, not enough Indians” scenario. The part about them using a Mac as an example of “elegance” does draw a chuckle from even a jaded industry sort like me.

 

MS has its own library of management theory literature, available to the outsider in several books for the general reader (I’ve read only “How would you move mount fuji?:Microsoft’s cult of the puzzle”). One of the central principles by which MS hoped to avoid bureaucracy was illuminating to me: be careful not to hire unproductive people, or they’ll hire more of “their kind” faster than you can fire them. It doesn’t take too much intuition to see that this describes an unstable system, like a ball balanced on the top of a pyramid – eventually, you’ll slip up and violate the principle, and lacking a effect means of self correction, the predicted will occur.

 

In my not-very-expert (being more of an indian than a chief) opinion, while it’s not yet circling the drain, for Microsoft, the drain is visible, and the circular motion apparent.

[Southtown]

Basically, it’s a tale of too many layers of management, poor communication, too few coders (1 in 25, by the blogger’s calculations) stretching a few man-weeks of work effort into a couple dozen man-years – the classic “too many chiefs, not enough Indians” scenario. The part about them using a Mac as an example of “elegance” does draw a chuckle from even a jaded industry sort like me.

I am too familiar with the situation. I work at Masterbrand Cabinets. New people are trained by other new people. When problems inevitably pop up, new layers of management are inserted to supervise the situation, whom the new employees must first train. :rage:

[alexander]

if you really want to be synical, craig, it is not to be surprising, the post is to be indightful :) Merely stating to go and read the blog, that menu came out crappy as it is anyways...

 

here is the link to the blog:

http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html

 

I just have a question, if they had a Mac to copy the UI experience, why the hell did they make the shutdown button so painfuly stashed away and hard to get to?

[alexander]

besides its not the fact that it took a year to develop that i really laugh at, whatever, that is fine, one developer, it's their code management... read on that blog, craig

[CraigD]

besides its not the fact that it took a year to develop that i really laugh at, whatever, that is fine, one developer, it's their code management... read on that blog, craig

The “Source Code Management” scheme Lettvin describes strikes me as rather tame and sensible – one of the ones I regularly work with is like it, but, since the product (a clinical healthcare system) is implemented in 6 different regional corporations, adds a whole slew of “regionalization” layers, so that what actually happens to produce a product build is more or less what Lettvin describes, followed by the “root” revisions being dropped in lap of 6 geographically separate “regionalization teams”, who must essentially look at the diffs introduced by the new revs, then make the same changes to in the regional revs. This costs over $100,000,000 anually. If the code in question were actually compiled into objects and executables, I doubt the scheme could work at all – fortunately, it’s purely interpreted MUMPS, a language capable of absorbing an amazing amount of organizational crap without going belly-up.

 

I got “guru-ized” in SCM in the late 1990s, when code management was deemed essential to surviving the impending Y2K infocalypse. For me, this constituted learning some cool algorithms (the LCS approach implemented in most diff utilities being, IMHO, the coolest), lots of management philosophy, and writing a lot of kludgeware. Last year, I got a chance to unkludge it (mostly), under the guise of a language/platform migration project and due to a successful application of the ‘ole “I’m the expert, and I say the old stuff is too nonstandard to possible be migrated, and must be rewritten from scratch” ploy.

 

Versioning, SCM, whatever you call it, raises deep algorithmic questions. Although nearly every enterprise (even ones that don’t actually use even a free copy of SourceSafe) claims to “have it down to a science”, in my experience, nobody, even academics, does. It’s a subject full of actual and potential coolness.

[alexander]

Showed beta of Vista to yet another hardcore Windows person, and with no input from me (i went to the bathroom) the guy declared that he didnt like the user experience at all, and all his expectations for the OS completely failed, and then he checked out the resource usage...

 

I am pretty familiar with a few code management schemes myself, i find that many times it is not the scheme that screws things up, its the implementation in a certain environment. I fell in love with Darcs while i was helping out a friend of mine with his project, but at the same time i also found how even such a great concept as using diffs can become a pain when multiple people work on the same code with very little communication, i think it was 4 days of debugging after he rewrote a core datastructure that had more datastructures based on it, and one i wrote and implemented and then started testing, and its like, what's going on, this is supposed to work, but a patch that had no description later on revealed the plan of the devil :).... That really came up in my mind after i read that part about code management. any episodes in your bright past that come to mind, craig?

[Buffy]

M$-haters rejoice! Here's the site for you: BadVista.org. Run by the Free Software Foundation, it has all the latest reasons why Vista totally bites the big one. Don't expect any FairNBalanced coverage here of course...

 

Me, I have no choice: gotta do what my customers do no matter what (I even have to support Groupwise! :phones: )....

 

Good Santa,

Buffy