Not even Wednesday yet...

[altivo]

Long, cold day. The library revolt is almost a certain success now, just one or two more big meetings to get through. One of those is tomorrow. The boss gets cold feet and starts to hyperventilate and we have to reassure her that she's made a good decision (which she has, just six months too late, which is the cause of the fear now.)

Really cold here. Arctic chill. Woodstove going full tilt, and the woodpile is starting to look skimpy. Probably we'll order another cord of wood, and that will be the cue for the weather to warm up for good.

Looks like Microsoft is shooting itself in the foot good with Vista. Having read about its behavior by design, I can't imagine why anyone would saddle themselves with it. Microsoft seems to be getting cold feet now too. They started work on the first service pack even before releasing the OS. And they've extended the support period for XP significantly beyond the normal two years after the next version policy. I think they realize that a lot of people are not going to see any advantage in moving to Vista. It looks like a crucial error to me, and one that would be difficult to back out of as well.

Off to my spinning cuz I can do that near the stove. And then to bed, where it's warm; especially when two dogs and three cats pile on top of the blankets.

Comments

[quickcasey.livejournal.com]

I was going to rush right out tonight and buy Vista. I have a 64 bit machine waiting in the wings. I've read the reviews. It's even dumber than Windows ME. I suspect it may be replaced sooner than later.
Don't worry, It will be a dual boot system with Linux.
Why waste my money? See countless previous posts about reckless spending.
And I like a challenge.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Challenge? The challenge may be keeping it running at all.

Microsoft has proven yet again that it is not interested in providing service to the customer, but rather prefers to eat up hardware capabilities without producing anything, in order to help hardware vendors sell more expensive hardware.

[tinbender.livejournal.com]

I've seen all this "wonderful" stuff that it's supposed to do and I think I've decided that these are my last Windows machines. Not sure what I'll work with in the future, but it won't involve Microsoft.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Mostly it twiddles the cpu and memory trying to find imaginary piracy, using up the capabilities of your hardware to produce nothing. And if it mistakes something legitimate for an attempt at "illegal copying" you will be the one who suffers. Undoing the damage will be difficult.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

I remember all the work we got with sp2 :D

*rubs his paws* Vista should be good for some work.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Remember how crappy ME was/is? That's going to be Vista.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Things are looking up for data recovery *hums a happy tune*

[dongstyle-ltd.livejournal.com]

Heh, I have to say I'm very interested in this library rebellion epic, it actually gives me some vague sense of greater hope.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

On a very tiny scale. It shows, just as the 2006 election did here, that people do finally wake up when someone is trying to pull the wool over their eyes, but they only do it when it is too late or nearly so.

[miktar.livejournal.com]

I think, just like with XP, a lot of media are bandwagon jumping on the 'Vista Sucks' shtick.

But face it: Dell don't sell PCs with XP anymore, it's all Vista now. Give it a few years, and Vista will be as prolific as XP is now, despite the wishes of the OpenSource cabals and other various groups who still insist on spelling Microsoft with a dollar sign.

Personally, I dig Vista and I have no problems with it. I've watched several people in the office switch over to it (and we're a tech-heavy office that produces several high-level computer magazines), with no problems.

It's a bit like when the Xbox 360 came out. One person had a Red Ring of Death, suddenly one million people had it, but not really, since they were just lending their misaligned support against 'the man'.

These trends are tiresome.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Dell sells PCs with no OS at all, which is by far the best deal for price and value. ;p

[miktar.livejournal.com]

Well, that's subjective opinion. ;)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

As are they all. I don't see any advantage for the end user in Vista, though, and I do see a lot of major disadvantages.

[miktar.livejournal.com]

*shrugs*

We're busy doing a massive feature on Vista for one of our magazines, and the opinion of the staff of our company is the exact opposite.

It really depends on who you are, and what you do. Considering you're not exactly what I would label as a high-end (or even medium-end) computer user, you're right - it has no relevance to you whatsoever, to use Vista.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I suppose I could take that as an insult, given the number of hours a day I spend dealing with computers and their irritating design flaws and issues, or the number of people who insist on treating me as the "expert" on these matters.

If I'm not a "high end" user it's because I don't consider computers to have a high end. Like a telephone or a fork lift, they are a tool to serve a purpose. You and I don't choose the same purposes, but our ends may be equally complex.

[miktar.livejournal.com]

It wasn't meant as an insult, just an observation based on my own empirical nature in the industry I'm in. I'm not arguing Operation Systems here, because it always ends with crap like this - people assuming I mean one thing, or it becoming an argument with no possible right/wrong.

I use Vista. It does everything I need it to do, in ways I enjoy doing it. It has no problems or flaws in my installation, or in those installations around me.

There is nothing more I can say on this matter.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

But going back to the real question that inspired all this discussion:

What does Vista do for you, as a user, that XP did not do?

Vista attempts to do a lot for sellers of media content, and for Microsoft's own treasury. But what does it do for YOU? That's the question that I have yet to see answered explicitly by anyone, Microsoft included.

[miktar.livejournal.com]

It does everything XP did for me, just twice as fast. We've been running benchmarks for the last few months since RC1 and the early betas.

Vista is faster, more economical on memory, and it runs exceptionally well on laptops that could barely run XP.

I'm a geek. It's new. It's shiny. I'm tired of using the same old OS for so many years, I want a change in my life. This is a personal viewpoint, and it's not one I tell others usually because I know how people respond to it. But it's how I work. I get bored with things, and Vista is new.

But on a technical level, like I said - it's XP, but faster and stronger.

I enjoy the MacOS 'stacks' ripoff, and use it constantly.

Here at the office, we use the shadowfolders during the layout process, since it allows us decent redundancy.

Of course, Desktop Gadgets, another MacOS ripoff, are fun and functional.

I love that I can set volumn levels on an application-specific level.

Networking is much faster - considering we copy around 1000 GBs a day here at the office, more when the layout process kicks into high gear, we're all quite happy at the improved speeds.

Does that answer any of your questions?

[miktar.livejournal.com]

The idea of "what does it do, that XP did not do" doesn't apply here, and I'm surprised it even came up. I don't switch to newer versions of software just to chase new features - I do so for additional stability and fixes, for the most part. In fact, I hate it when new functionality is added, because usually it means the whole thing ends up breaking again.

Vista is a nice, big, bugfix for me, despite having come from a new seperate codebase. I like that it was rewritten from the ground up, because a lot of improvements have been made, as I mentioned earlier.

I love using XP, and as a result, Vista is applicable to me and I've not been dissapointed.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

But for most users, the question of what Vista will do for them that they don't already have will indeed come up. Especially so if they have to lay out cash and suffer through a painful upgrade process to get to Vista.

I don't like XP. It gets in the way of what I want to do more often than not, and has always seemed sluggish and draggy to me compared with other versions of Windows even, and certainly compared to Unix derivatives.

Your statement that Vista is faster and more efficient does surprise me. Even Microsoft's own statements of the minimum hardware requirements would suggest otherwise.

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

I strongly agree that the question of "what will Vista do that XP doesn't" is going to be important for users. Individuals and companies can't invest in something new at the risk of undoing all the progress they had made with their computers. Especially companies, where the issue is not just one Vista license but hundreds. And especially since Vista costs a lot more than previous Windows releases. Even if you could trust that the software itself is going to be good -- and with Microsoft's track record, that's an understandably debatable point -- you just have to know what you're gaining for the costs of the disruption.

Which is to say only that knowing is good, and the list of pluses Miktar supplied does make me, at least, think a little more favorably of Vista.

Myself, I specifically ordered my new Dell before they stopped offering XP. I had no plans of being a guinea pig. I'd rather use my computer than troubleshoot it. But that's just my mileage. I did sign up for the cheap Vista upgrade, though I would certainly wait a while in case there's a patch soon.

[miktar.livejournal.com]

*shrugs*

I don't care anymore.

[calydor.livejournal.com]

I am still waiting for nVidia and ATI to stand together and say 'Hell no!' You see, for graphics card to work in Vista under all the new DRM rules, the manufacturers would have to basically let Microsoft and Hollywood dictate how the card is made. That would result in slower cards for a good while to come, a situation I can't imagine the two top makers accepting.

And just imagine the failure Vista would be if you can't play a single modern game on it.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

If they haven't done it now, it's too late I'm afraid.

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

I have read somewhere that Vista is the OS equivalent to a paranoid schizophrenic, sitting in a corner shaking at the thought of an attack on it. Luckily where I work, we tend to skip every other OS release, so I doubt we will be rolling this out organisation-wide.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

We will certainly not be installing Vista on any equipment where I work either. That's the issue. It offers almost nothing to the end user that would be any kind of improvement. It is entirely a sellout to the media industry paranoids.

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

The stand off between corporations and consumers is as old as time itself. The question in this case is, who will throw their toys out of the pram first?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Consumers are notoriously slow to react, even when they are obviously being treated as lemmings. There seem to be an amazing number of machines that still run ME, for instance. Corporations know this, and don't hesitate to take advantage of it for their own greedy ends.

[farhoug.livejournal.com]

On the whole Vista thing, mostly I'm worried that the hardware vendors won't keep their systems open enough for them to work in the open source environments too... but I'd expect to see some crippled Linux drivers in the future, at least, or some other odd behavior.

I've been looking for a new laptop for a while now, I guess I could try Vista on that, but it'll be one or two years still before I'm willing to try that one on the main box. And I'm short on memory already, I don't need an additional burden on top of that.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

This is a major concern, of course. But hardware vendors haven't exactly been cooperative with open source environments anyway, for the most part. I'm confident that it is a small part of Microsoft's overall strategy to perpetuate that situation. The hardware designer who is torn between following open standards and being compatible with Windows is almost certainly going to go along with Microsoft simply because Microsoft has a strangle hold on the market.

[farhoug.livejournal.com]

Strictly Linux/Open Source-based hardware would be an interesting idea though, maybe we'll see something like that in the future too, now that Microsoft is leaning heavily into forcing manufacturers to the signed drivers and issuing other draconian demands on the driver codebase and policies over its openness.

I don't think the new DRM systems would increase the price significantly, but in bigger companies (with more computers) every dollar counts, I guess. Would be a nice opportunity for some reliable, low-cost hardware, to give more incentive for switching to Open Source software too.

We live in interesting times. =)