Aah the joys of Vista

[pgrmdave]

Alex, what do other operating systems have to do with Windows? It doesn't matter to me what other systems can do, it doesn't matter which is the best. What are the pros and cons of Vista in particular without comparing them to other operating systems?

[alexander]

Alex, what do other operating systems have to do with Windows?

Did i not just spend 2 or three paragraphs describing what few, right off the top, visible features have been stolen and implemented in Vista, just like back in time? Besides switch to another OS and you will find out for yourself :hihi:

 

But if you ask, what i did and did not like about Vista...

 

Ok what was nice?

The new interface provides a better user experience then the older, classical windows interface. Search as you type is nice to have. Transparency is neat, but ends about there...

 

What is screwed up?

First, insane hardware requirements for the OS.

Permissions also lag a bit, like "You don't have enough permissions to view the contents of this folder", click ok and view the contents of the folder...

Endless radial buttons and prompts will drive you insane if you had to work on the machine for a few hours.

Resources, like plan on having over a gig of ram for Vista, and that is enough to do only minor work, something that does not take up too much ram. If you are planning to do graphics edditing, you want 1.5gigs or more and a real good graphics card.

Gaming experience is totally killed by the shiny working environment.

OS kernels are not supposed to be object oriented for the simple reason that something that is meant to work linearly, should be programmed as such.

 

dubbed insane fanboyism

dub it whatever you want, the information regarding microsoft copying Mac's interface has been leaked by windows dev's for years now, it applies as much to win 98 as it does to vista. Infact if you have ever been to an office of microsoft dev's, like one in 5 have a windows machine that they code on and a Mac that they use for their personal, home and getting UI ideas from. If you have not visited any such offices, i strongly urge you to.

 

All of the improvements Microsoft has made, both graphically and functionally, could be suggested by any independent individual who has never used a Mac.

Could be, but was most definitely not, simply because that is the way M$ operates. If you do not believe me, please, name 1 M$ product aside from DOS that was solely an M$ idea? And by no means do i want to defend Mac here either, they have in turn stole ideas as well, windows were stolen from Xerox, widgets were also stolen, form where i can not recall at the moment, but they are not as good as the original, i remember that.

Have you looked at a computer running Windows 98 recently? The colour grey gets boring fast and with computers being as powerful as they are now, who would not round a few of the edges, filter the fonts, and add some colour? If such logical changes are, in your opinion, cloning Macintosh's innovative approach to computing, then your position is just ridiculous and I think you really should reconsider.

How did we get from reason to complete and utter childishness so quickly and in one sentence....

Yes i have seen a 98 machine last week, infact i work with 2000 at work almost on a daily basis.

Yes computers are powerful today, and anyone would round edges and add a few fonts and colours, so why would they do this again, for which purpose i mean? If you are relating that to the only changes in Vista, well then you have not used it, i will say that much...

And now to the blatantly weird part. What do fonts and round edges have to do with Mac's innovative approach to computing? What is Mac's innovativa approach to computing? And if there is an innovation that mac has made in computing, aside from creating a mouse, where does microsoft fit into the picture, last i knew M$ was not producing hardware aside from XBoxes and Zunes (if i am not mistaken neither of which they actually physically assemble at MS facilities, may be wrong though).

 

Linux has not copied features of Windows, Linux kernel was modeled after the BSD, AT&T and other Unix kernels of the time, and actually as an improvement on a Minix micro kernel system that Linus disliked in his OS class. And although both Linux and Windows kernels have certain features that fulfill similar functions, it is simply wrong to say that those features were copied from Windows, Unix was not only there before Windows, the term kernel implies certain actions (aka features) of the program.

 

In your opinion, the upgrade from Windows 95 to Windows 2000 was an advancement in the direction of cloning Macintosh. More so, Microsoft copied Macintosh further with XP when Microsoft did away with the mono-colour-scheme of their Windows Classic environments.

No, WinXP further implementation of a Mac-Like features had to deal more with UI then color schemes.

According to you, Macintosh invented colour, search functions, calendars, chess, shiny finishes, command lines, and just about everything known to man. They even invented turning on and off a PC!

Let's be rational now and not fall into the childhood, k?.. Macintosh invented the mouse, that is about all they can be really credited for.

If this is the case, Macintosh should sue Google for being a search engine, Linux for being glossy and colourful, the Incan Empire for having a calendar thousands of years before them, cavemen for playing chess, and last but not least they should clearly sue the original inventors of Gadgets for stealing Macintosh’s invention from the future and inventing it years earlier. Oh, yes, I almost forgot -- the egyptions built pyramids a few thousand years ago and they need to be sued too, Macintosh invented the triangle.

I could have really deleted that part of your post, but found it funny and in some spots historically inacurate.

Chess were invented in India, far after cavemen walked out of the caves, and became more civilized.

The Inca Empire fell with the spanish conquest in 1533AD and arose from the highlands of Peru in around 1197AD or so, it has not been 1000 years for those guys at all...

The earliest calendar known to us was actually a Egyptian lunar calendar from around 4000BC.

 

Besides, it is Microsoft that is paying 1.35 billion dollars to a french-based company for infringing their MP3 encoding and sound compression pattent in Windows Media Player not Steve Jobs or Linus or Stallman for that matter...

 

Oh and please keep your responses professional, i really have no time to deal with childishness, i mean i appreciate the humor and all that, just please remember that this is a science forum...

 

P.S. I know that you don't know anything about me, but I am not a Mac person, even though i recently got a mac, i still prefer Open-Source platforms over the proprietary closed-source ones, hence why my mac is dual booted with gentoo. And i deal with windows every day at work, I am not one of the people who will biasly spealk about something without any fair understanding of what exactly he is talking about. I am not one of these Linux guys who does not know or havent used windows in a decade...

 

its like 1 in the morning again...i'm off to sleep, gotta get up in 5 hours :(

[Fatstep]

I may be wrong, but, I think what alexander is trying to say is; Why is everyone up vista's *** when almost everything on it has been out for years. If people weren't windows fanboys then that wouldn't happen.

[C1ay]

If you do not believe me, please, name 1 M$ product aside from DOS that was solely an M$ idea?

 

Actually MS-DOS was a clone of Digital Research's CP/M OS ported to the 8086 architecture. M$ is not an "original ideas" house....

[Tormod]

Actually MS-DOS was a clone of Digital Research's CP/M OS ported to the 8086 architecture. M$ is not an "original ideas" house....

 

I thought it was based on QDOS, and that the IBM deal made CP/M obsolete? I may need to get my facts straight.

[C1ay]

Well yes. Seattle Computer Products originally wrote SCP Dos, aka QDos, which was a clone of DR's CP/M ported to the 8086. When DR wouldn't license CP/M-86 to IBM Microsoft bought the rights to SCP Dos and licensed that to IBM as IBM PC-Dos. DR threatened to sue so IBM agreed to market CP/M-86 as an alternative but forgot to mention they would sell it for about 6 times the price. This caused DR to produce MP/M, a multiuser, multitasking version of CP/M they called Concurrent CP/M. This eventually lead to the release of DRDos by DR around '87 or so. That pushed MS to add some of the features offered by DRDos into MS-Dos and they subsequently released versions 5 and 6 since DRDos was cutting their sales. DRDos was eventually bought by Novell whom was more interested in the network side of things and did nothing with it. Later, Novell's CEO Ray Noorda stepped down and formed Caldera. Caldera then bought DRDos from Novell, turned around and sued MS over the whole anti-competive practice thing. That was eventually settled out of court with M$ paying Caldera an estimated $150-200 million to Caldera.

 

Google Gary Kildall, the founder of Digital Research and author of CP/M, and Tim Paterson, the original author of SCP Dos, for more info on the players.

 

Bottom line, none of the DOS idea was due to Microsoft's originality....

[Tormod]

Bottom line, none of the DOS idea was due to Microsoft's originality....

 

Does it matter, though? It's usually not creativity that wins the market, but a mix of timing, luck, and resources. I think we can agree that Microsoft did own the OS market for a long time. Whether they will keep owning it is a different question and I think the answer is likely to be "no".

[Zythryn]

I think that the problem stems from Buffy and the others feeling like you are unwilling to accept that other people have had major problems with vista, even though you haven't.

 

While this is probably true in some respect, I think the opposite is also true. Some who have experienced trouble are unwilling to accept that other people have not had major, or minor, problems, even though they have.

 

We have Vista running flawlessly. Two printers worked after unplugging the usb cord from the old computer and plugging it into the new one.

 

Now, just because I have had no issues with software or peripherals doesn't mean I am trying to imply that no one else has. I am just chiming in here to say that not everyone is having trouble.

[Tormod]

Now, just because I have had no issues with software or peripherals doesn't mean I am trying to imply that no one else has. I am just chiming in here to say that not everyone is having trouble.

 

My guess is that most Vista adapters have little problems. The power users who have jumped on the Vista bandwagon are probably more likely to experience issues and shout about them.

 

I almost bought Vista a few weeks ago, but found out that there was no Vista support for my audio card. Since that would mean no music production it ruled out Vista at this time. That is however *not* Microsoft's fault, but M-Audio's fault for not bothering to be prepared for the Vista launch.

[C1ay]

Does it matter, though?

 

I don't know, I was just pointing out the Alex's remark about MS having something original wasn't really there :)

[Buffy]

My guess is that most Vista adapters have little problems. The power users who have jumped on the Vista bandwagon are probably more likely to experience issues and shout about them.

The real bottom line is YMMV: Everything depends on your luck of the draw on your existing software and hardware AND how time critical the issues are.

 

Certainly some or even many have had no problems:

We have Vista running flawlessly. Two printers worked after unplugging the usb cord from the old computer and plugging it into the new one....

If you run popular peripherals, of course MS is not going to skip them. Old versions of Office will run just fine as far as I've seen. And obviously if its an all new system, and you have no legacy apps, you're going to have a "great user experience." Who can argue with that? :)

Some who have experienced trouble are unwilling to accept that other people have not had major, or minor, problems, even though they have....I am just chiming in here to say that not everyone is having trouble.

"Unwilling to accept" it? As we all know around here, the religious fanatics will do this, but they're really a small minority (they have other issues to deal with in their lives too). Moreover, even big fans are stumbling on bugs to key pieces of Vista and are starting to complain. So, I'm just chiming in here to say that complaining doesn't mean I'm saying *everyone* will have a problem! ;)

 

So OTOH, if you have lots of legacy apps that break, the expense and the down time can be a killer:

A client of mine that uses Quickbooks for his small business called me because a power surge in the neighborhood took out his motherboard so he went and bought a new PC...His Quickbooks wouldn't run after it was installed. His Palm wouldn't work. His printers wouldn't work. By the time he priced new software [for vendors who are requiring upgrades to get Vista support] and hardware to work with the copy of Vista that came on his new $700 PC he found that he was looking at another $1500 minimum to get the rest of his functionality back so we rolled his new PC back to XP.

And that's just a small business/home user! Many of the home users can afford to be down for days or weeks at a time due to these kinds of glitches, but small business users cannot, and C1ay's friend probably lost at least some business because of that "little problem" and was bitten primarily because the warnings about potential problems have not been publicized enough. Moreover, XP was *comparatively* painless, so many simply assume Vista will be as well, when its clearly not.

 

So to be clear most of my opinions on this topic are really coming from the commercial software development for F500 IT shops, which represent most of the real money to be made in software, and its *this* area where Vista simply isn't ready for primetime. This isn't guessing: most of us have had Vista for a long time, and had plenty of chance to test it and find lots of problems up front. The problems I quoted from C1ay's post above are magnified when you consider the number of older, in-house or custom applications that are not in active development, where fixes aren't just sitting there ready to go. This requires a bunch of development work that is not budgeted in addition to buying new versions of everything.

 

Now to a certain extent, those of us who live in Microsoft-land are used to it. My own company skipped ASP.Net 1.x and boy are we glad we did: In a completely boneheaded design decision .Net 1.x provided almost no modularity. I personally built a few custom sites in it, and VisualStudio fought me every step of the way. Now .Net 2.0 comes along and fixes it but requires you to basically rewrite your 1.1 applications so extensively to take advantage of it, that its basically a rewrite. We've got a couple of competitors struggling because they bit the bullet on rewriting to 1.x and now their facing having to do it all over again, and some can't afford it. After a year or so of being called "behind" in the technology, we're now seen as visionaries because we didn't blindly do what Microsoft recommended. They've done this endlessly before with multiple versions of MFC and now a complete switch to CLR.

 

Given this, its hard to fault software vendors who have had problems updating like the one Tormod mentions:

I almost bought Vista a few weeks ago, but found out that there was no Vista support for my audio card. Since that would mean no music production it ruled out Vista at this time. That is however *not* Microsoft's fault, but M-Audio's fault for not bothering to be prepared for the Vista launch.

I know of more than a few vendors--including Symantec/Norton Anti-virus--that got bitten because the software worked fine on the last beta but then bit it on the gold disk. That's incompetence from Microsoft, not the software vendors, and its *not* the first time this has happened.

 

Bottom Line: you have to be either a masochist or forced by the market to use Microsoft as a development platform. Most of us are in the latter camp.

 

So, far be it from me to tell anyone what to do, but it does behoove *everyone* to do their homework before the jump into Vista. The only thing that's obvious is that enterprise-IT decided long before Vista shipped that there was no way they were going to move. I hope for the sake of my stock in Microsoft that the idiots in Finance aren't betting on faster corporate adoption than I'm seeing in my customer base or its going to be an ugly couple of quarters.

 

No irrational hate, just love of a positive bottom line,

Buffy

[Tormod]

you have to be either a masochist or forced by the market to use Microsoft as a development platform. Most of us are in the latter camp.

 

I guess I camped across the river (but I stole the cookie jar). :)

[Buffy]

I guess I camped across the river (but I stole the cookie jar). :)

Sadly, no cookies for Microsoft development shops, except the one's that break your cache...

 

Now Mac, that's a dream. And the tools are free! Whoo-hoo!

 

Please sir, may I have another,

Buffy

[CraigD]

The real bottom line is YMMV: Everything depends on your luck of the draw on your existing software and hardware AND how time critical the issues are.

Well, I learned yesterday that my only surviving significant (>1000 concurrent user) piece of Win32OS software - an ugly, invisible OLE server that telnets, https, and SOAPs various places, plus exposes the local desktop, for the benefit of any COM app that wants to instantiate it - installs and runs fine under our prototype national Vista desktop, so I appear to be in the “lucky masochist” camp. I was actually hoping it would completely belly up, as it would have given me an excuse to poke around in Vista. :P

 

Having now had my first actual physical contact with a keyboard attached to a Vista box, I must confess that, no matter from whom or what the once and future pirates of Redmond stole or did not steal to make the new API, or what obscene amount of CPU it requires, it’s damn pretty from a user POV. In particular, though I’m inexpert in it, its multidevice desktop features seem much enhanced from their old, Win16 roots – the box I touched had a whole wall of 4 monitors clamped to some sort of stand, and somehow aware of the spacing of the monitors’ bezels, so a window dragged to span several monitors kept their correct size, with a strip hidden by the bezels. :hihi: Nothing documented in the old Win32 API could do that! – and some non-me people get to have all the fun :(

 

As a person who’s technical esthetic is offended by Unix, Windows, any PalmOS >3, and all the more obscure ones except 1 extinct old one (MIIS), I’m no more snobby about OSs than I am rental cars. Until I get around to actually coding (or, as seen in occasional daydreams, commanding a personal army of codemonkeys to code) the OS of my dreams and fragmentary notes, I’ll probably remain neither enthused nor outraged by any OS I encounter. I’m saving my snobbery for my own baby. :shocked:

[alexander]

Why is everyone up vista's *** when almost everything on it has been out for years. If people weren't windows fanboys then that wouldn't happen.

I believe that I have actually stated that in one of my earlier posts, but i may be mistaken and i could have mentioned that in those similar words to my friends at some point...

Actually MS-DOS was a clone of Digital Research's CP/M OS ported to the 8086 architecture.

Thank you for the info.

 

I will tell you this, FreeDOS was released a week after MS DOS was released and it had all the same features and command lines as well as it was capable of running all the same applications, it was however free and still is.

 

Lastly, shouts for Buffy, Craig, C1ay and T for their wonderful 30 minutes of entertainment they have provided in their responses, you guys are all real cool people, and if this radio show i am working on takes off, i will invite all you guys to join the "When Geeks Talk", PM me if you are interested in hearing more details, because i'd love to give them to you :)

[Thorshammer]

I have a new Sony Vaio notebook with Vista.

The only problem I've run into so far is the lack of support for win32hlp.exe, which is used by the KeyCreator software I need to run, lol. Fortunately, this isn't a vital issue, as I have other pc's. Microsoft will also be supporting it in the future (I do wish they'd do that support before they release the software, the age old gripe ;)

Other than that, I've been running Office 2003 Pro, Warcraft 3 Frozen Throne, and Age of Mythology with success. I haven't tried first-person games on it yet, but I have doubts that there will be any problem.

Aero turns off automatically when incompatible programs are started, so Aero isn't a problem at all as far as I can see.

[alexander]

Thors, could you try some resource-demanding games like HalfLife2 or Doom4, and some simulators, preferably XPlane, of Lock On if you must shoot, dont do MS Flight Sim, the flying engine is too lame and Toca3 for a driving sim. And I'd like to see some figures to compare that to if possible, is there any way you could install WinXP and try those games on there and get some FPS and then the same games on Vista?