Vista Is Hitting Its Stride

[firebane]

well being more stable than xp isnt too hard also 4 MONTHS isnt too long either depending on what your running ofcoruse , 4 MONTHS of running a screensaver isnt too hard . I'm talking about uptimes in years

If people think XP isn't stable they need to look at their hardware/software setup. I've ran XP with absolutely no bluescreens unless a piece of hardware or software has done something to screw it up.

XP is a very stable OS but unfortunately it took time and time is not what Vista has cause in 2009 or 2010 Microsoft is already planning their next OS

 

[DOpamine]

If people think XP isn't stable they need to look at their hardware/software setup. I've ran XP with absolutely no bluescreens unless a piece of hardware or software has done something to screw it up.

XP is a very stable OS but unfortunately it took time and time is not what Vista has cause in 2009 or 2010 Microsoft is already planning their next OS

XP is stable compared to what ? is there only me that remembers the welchia worm ?

 

[ShadowWolf]

I've been using Vista on two gaming machines (mine and my wife's) for quite a while. I started using mine in November of last year and upgraded my wife sometime early this year after she fell victim to one of the various trojan injecting javascript exploits.

The complaints I've seen from people on UAC are, in my opinion, unfound. If you're seeing a lot of UAC prompts in your day-to-day activity then you are doing something really wild or running development software. You don't even have to run VS 2005 in Administrative context to make it work. Or if it's really that big of a deal, just set the local security policy to auto-accept administrative prompts for administrative capable users.

As far as stability is concerned - I haven't seen an issue on two computers. Nor have I noticed any substantial performance loss either. It's just like the 2k -> XP move. Back then everyone complained that performance on XP sucked or whatever. Eventually driver development caught up and everything was grand.

Don't blame Vista because there are a number of crapplications that have been ignoring Microsoft's rules for about 8 years now (most of these rules started in Win2k days and are only enforced now!). And if you authored an app that doesn't work on Vista, the real issue is YOU and not the OS.

People complained that Linux was much more secure blah blah blah and Mac was more usable etc etc etc. Now when you get it delivered to you, all you do is complain and whine.

The only true issue I'm aware of is power-related type stuff. Other things are patched and the power issues are soon to be patched.

Some Vista machines ARE stable -- some are not -- with the more of the later than the former. It is primarily a function of the drivers -- which is not an excuse IMHO.

I wholeheartedly agree. The real question is, though, an excuse for whom?

As far as Bit-Locker goes, it's actually pretty simple to me. Have you tried to use it?

 

[firebane]

XP is stable compared to what ? is there only me that remembers the welchia worm ?

Welchia Worm? That was a simple exploit in a system service and became widespread due to people not having firewalls or routers implemented; again software/hardware.

 

[DOpamine]

isnt it supposed to be backward compatable ? or do you have to go out and buy all new software as well as a new computer ? what a scam

just wait for all the malware fun....

 

[DOpamine]

Welchia Worm? That was a simple exploit in a system service and became widespread due to people not having firewalls or routers implemented; again software/hardware.

so simple that ms missed it and many other loopholes and thats my point , ms are useless when it comes to security , they always have been because their underlying system is based on a single user environment

 

[firebane]

so simple that ms missed it and many other loopholes and thats my point , ms are useless when it comes to security , they always have been because their underlying system is based on a single user environment

Oh I totally agree! And thats the biggest security flawin Vista is their silly UAC. Its been shown it causes blind clicking and people pay no attention anways!

And remember the whole microphone fiascal with Vista?

 

[DOpamine]

Thats the thing , they name these exploits viruses / worms / infections to give you the impression that they are in someway related to diseases when infact its just that ms didnt see a gaping security hole and some other nice person saw it and decided it would be a good idea to show them that it exists so in the end you end up paying even more for 3rd party anti-virus software which ofcourse speeds up your computer no end and doesnt always work
Its a sad fact that people think that these "infections" are part and parcel of modern computing when infact its just ms failing badly without so much as a sorry

 

[firebane]

Thats the thing , they name these exploits viruses / worms / infections to give you the impression that they are in someway related to diseases when infact its just that ms didnt see a gaping security hole and some other nice person saw it and decided it would be a good idea to show them that it exists so in the end you end up paying even more for 3rd party anti-virus software which ofcourse speeds up your computer no end and doesnt always work
Its a sad fact that people think that these "infections" are part and parcel of modern computing when infact its just ms failing badly without so much as a sorry

Exactly and working in IT I find that a lot people come in with their computers infected and when you look to see what they have installed its like 3 different anti-virus, 2 different spyware and 4 things for registry and system mechanic and they wonder why their system runs crappy? Because of them and as you said the understanding that viruses/spyware is part of everyday computing.

 

[Blitzrommel]

The biggest headaches I have had with Vista, other than funky driver and network issues, have been with software compatibility. There are still a lot of apps that just do not work properly with Vista -- many of which like never will. The other point is that the upgrade from 2000 to XP is a lot easier to do than the XP to Vista transition. The inner workings of 2000 and XP are a lot more alike and right now I honestly can't even think of a standalone software package for 2000 that won't work properly with XP.

I seriously thought for a while that Cisco would never fix their VPN client so it'd work with Vista properly. The thought of having to give up using Outlook 2003 to use OWA 5.5 gave me the chills...

Shudder....you are "preaching to the choir" on this one. Been there, done that. Until you actually have to do IT support for a while you have no idea just how clueless the "average" user really is.

Amen to that, ten-fold.

And downtime and retraining cost money -- which is why the cost/benefit ratio of upgrading to Vista needs to be looked at very carefully -- with the issue being, for a business environment exactly what does Vista bring to the table that is worth the investment and downtime.

This is also why we haven't rolled out Vista yet.

Bit-Locker Encryption? A disaster waiting to happen.
Ever tried explaining how to backup their keys to the average user?
It is a lot safer to use something like PGP Desktop or TrueCrypt.
They are both also a lot easier to explain to the end user.

Funny you should mention that, we employ PGP Desktop heavily here and have enough issues with it as-is. Actually, it's seldom related to PGP itself although we have some compatibility issues to iron out with Symantec's newest Enterprise Vault client, but that's another story. What pisses us off the most about PGP is how, from a support point of view, mercilessly secure it is. From an infrastructure security point of view, it rocks. But if a hard drive is failing and the Windows partition gets botched, PGP effectively prevents us from recovering any lost data. Which idn't a real big deal, because it reinforces our point about saving your important data on your laptop and not to have Personal Folders on your laptop!! Owned.

 

[Blitzrommel]

I've been using Vista on two gaming machines (mine and my wife's) for quite a while. I started using mine in November of last year and upgraded my wife sometime early this year after she fell victim to one of the various trojan injecting javascript exploits.

The complaints I've seen from people on UAC are, in my opinion, unfound. If you're seeing a lot of UAC prompts in your day-to-day activity then you are doing something really wild or running development software. You don't even have to run VS 2005 in Administrative context to make it work. Or if it's really that big of a deal, just set the local security policy to auto-accept administrative prompts for administrative capable users.

As far as stability is concerned - I haven't seen an issue on two computers. Nor have I noticed any substantial performance loss either. It's just like the 2k -> XP move. Back then everyone complained that performance on XP sucked or whatever. Eventually driver development caught up and everything was grand.

Don't blame Vista because there are a number of crapplications that have been ignoring Microsoft's rules for about 8 years now (most of these rules started in Win2k days and are only enforced now!). And if you authored an app that doesn't work on Vista, the real issue is YOU and not the OS.

People complained that Linux was much more secure blah blah blah and Mac was more usable etc etc etc. Now when you get it delivered to you, all you do is complain and whine.

The only true issue I'm aware of is power-related type stuff. Other things are patched and the power issues are soon to be patched.



I wholeheartedly agree. The real question is, though, an excuse for whom?

As far as Bit-Locker goes, it's actually pretty simple to me. Have you tried to use it?

Yeah I kinda brashed Vista, but only from my corporate point-of-view. As I'm responsible for quite a few desktops, I can't afford to be liberal when it comes to new software and what-not.

As for home use, as I previously said, I love it. The interface is catchy, everything seems responsive and stable, but of course that's my individual results. Obviously, people here aren't so lucky in that regard!

 

[firebane]

Yeah I kinda brashed Vista, but only from my corporate point-of-view. As I'm responsible for quite a few desktops, I can't afford to be liberal when it comes to new software and what-not.

As for home use, as I previously said, I love it. The interface is catchy, everything seems responsive and stable, but of course that's my individual results. Obviously, people here aren't so lucky in that regard!

In my company we deal with a lot of people who are either new to Vista or have used XP in the past and then "forced" to use Vista based on a laptop they purchased or because its the most easiest route to go with an OS and probably in less than a week we'll have a call from they saying how much they dislike Vista.

 

[mdburkey]

As far as Bit-Locker goes, it's actually pretty simple to me. Have you tried to use it?

Yes -- and it is not difficult to use. However, my own experiences with users and the entire concept of needing to backup keys is beyond most of them. It also means that from a corporate standpoint those keys have to be maintained somewhere.

Password based encryption is every bit as secure as long as the password is long enough and complex enough. It also is MUCH easier to recover or work with in the case of a migration to a different machine or setup.

PGP Desktop is fine -- but I have had headaches with it as well (actually their volume/disk/file level encryption work pretty good -- but their e-mail encryption has had major issues since V9).

For simple, robust, solid encryption TrueCrypt is pretty dang hard to beat -- and I can set it up for a user, give them a mandated password and explain to them how to use it in about 5 minutes. It also works quite nicely to setup separate secure volumes as .tc files on USB Thumb Drives.

 

[mdburkey]

well being more stable than xp isnt too hard also 4 MONTHS isnt too long either depending on what your running ofcoruse , 4 MONTHS of running a screensaver isnt too hard . I'm talking about uptimes in years

4 months of running IE (intelligently), CodeWright, VB6, VS2005, CygWin, Keil, SiLabs IDE, and CodeWarrior doing software development WITHOUT crashing....

Unless it was setup by an idiot, does not have the current set of patches installed, or is infested with Spyware/Adware/Virii -- XP is generally stable as bedrock these days.

That said, even as recently as yesterday I had to try fixing a pre-SP1 XP box that hadn't received any updates in 4+ years and was so infested with Spyware that it was using almost 1Gb of memory without anything else running (on a 512Mb box). Even so, it was still stable -- of course this is probably because it was running so slowly due to swapping that it never had time to crash -- or if it had crashed yesterday it would have taken til today to actually get the error message on the screen!

 

[Cyrilix]

As usual, this is the typical clueless response on the DRM issues.

Yes, non-DRM media like MP3's playback just FINE under Vista 99.9% of the time.
That is not the problem.

It is DRM protected stuff (DVR-MS, WMV, WMA, etc) that often has problems unless all of your hardware and drivers are 100% perfect. And woe be it upon you if you have some piece of software or hardware installed that the system considers compromised or questionable -- then it will refuse to playback the video at all or possibly just downgrade the quality.

The issue is NOT for the people stealing massive quantities of files off the Internet -- it doesn't effect them! Similarly, if you rip video content to disk first and remove the encryption and CSS, etc. it works just fine. So all of the brilliant DRM and PMP is Vista does nothing to actually protect the media providers content -- the only thing it does is cause inumerable headaches for those people who do purchase their content legally.

It's a lot like gun control -- the criminals are going to ignore it anyway and the people who do respect it are the ones you didn't need to worry about in the first place.

I have to agree with this -- makes you wonder if you're not better off always having the criminal mindset anyway.

 

[CptFalcon]

<crap removed>

Imma big enough man to know when I am wrong. However I will not switch back to XP or Linux just because you say so.

(BTW I was having fun tweaking your quote.)

EDIT: Stop being a dick or imma gonna give you a vacation. - Lethal

 

[CptFalcon]

I've been using Vista on two gaming machines (mine and my wife's) for quite a while. I started using mine in November of last year and upgraded my wife sometime early this year after she fell victim to one of the various trojan injecting javascript exploits.

The complaints I've seen from people on UAC are, in my opinion, unfound. If you're seeing a lot of UAC prompts in your day-to-day activity then you are doing something really wild or running development software. You don't even have to run VS 2005 in Administrative context to make it work. Or if it's really that big of a deal, just set the local security policy to auto-accept administrative prompts for administrative capable users.

As far as stability is concerned - I haven't seen an issue on two computers. Nor have I noticed any substantial performance loss either. It's just like the 2k -> XP move. Back then everyone complained that performance on XP sucked or whatever. Eventually driver development caught up and everything was grand.

Don't blame Vista because there are a number of crapplications that have been ignoring Microsoft's rules for about 8 years now (most of these rules started in Win2k days and are only enforced now!). And if you authored an app that doesn't work on Vista, the real issue is YOU and not the OS.

People complained that Linux was much more secure blah blah blah and Mac was more usable etc etc etc. Now when you get it delivered to you, all you do is complain and whine.

The only true issue I'm aware of is power-related type stuff. Other things are patched and the power issues are soon to be patched.



I wholeheartedly agree. The real question is, though, an excuse for whom?

As far as Bit-Locker goes, it's actually pretty simple to me. Have you tried to use it?

What this guy said!

 

[DOpamine]

4 months of running IE (intelligently), CodeWright, VB6, VS2005, CygWin, Keil, SiLabs IDE, and CodeWarrior doing software development WITHOUT crashing....

Unless it was setup by an idiot, does not have the current set of patches installed, or is infested with Spyware/Adware/Virii -- XP is generally stable as bedrock these days.

That said, even as recently as yesterday I had to try fixing a pre-SP1 XP box that hadn't received any updates in 4+ years and was so infested with Spyware that it was using almost 1Gb of memory without anything else running (on a 512Mb box). Even so, it was still stable -- of course this is probably because it was running so slowly due to swapping that it never had time to crash -- or if it had crashed yesterday it would have taken til today to actually get the error message on the screen!

I thought an idiot could use ms products?

one thing is certainly true - i'll never go back to any form of ms product , i was an ms user from the days of dos 6.22 ( which wasnt a bad lil OS imo ) but the gui boys took over and now its an abstract mess

 

[pxc]

one thing is certainly true - i'll never go back to any form of ms product

You could have saved a lot of typing by just stating you're an anti-MS zealot to begin with, one who doesn't even use the products you're criticizing.

plonk.

 

[DOpamine]

You could have saved a lot of typing by just stating you're an anti-MS zealot to begin with, one who doesn't even use the products you're criticizing.

plonk.

Didnt i say that already ? didnt you notice ? is there something wrong with being anti-m$ ?
i deal with vista quite abit - i have to and as i've already stated i started using m$ products since dos 6.22 and like crack they should be given up

gobshyte.

 

[CptFalcon]

Didnt i say that already ? didnt you notice ? is there something wrong with being anti-m$ ?
i deal with vista quite abit - i have to and as i've already stated i started using m$ products since dos 6.22 and like crack they should be given up

gobshyte.

Godfuckingdamnit, we are arguing over the fucking internet!

Extremely short version: Use the damn OS that works for you. I like Vista alot, you like Linux, that guy likes MAC OSX. Who gives a fuck anymore?

Can we all just let this all down. No one has to justify why they used the OS that they chose.

 

[mdburkey]

I thought an idiot could use ms products?

one thing is certainly true - i'll never go back to any form of ms product , i was an ms user from the days of dos 6.22 ( which wasnt a bad lil OS imo ) but the gui boys took over and now its an abstract mess

I'll agree that a lot of idiots do use MS products -- however, not everyone who uses their products are idiots.

Linux -- as a kernel -- is probably the best OS out there. But it's strengths -- customization, various distributions, tweakability -- are also it's weaknesses. These features make it very hard to standardize and tend to slow adoption by the rank and file.
Additionally, due to the nature of the GPL itself, it makes it very difficult for a lot of businesses to support and release products for -- specifically because it can be quite difficult to release Linux products that do not become "infected" with the GPL itself -- which means that companies may end up living in fear of someone demanding their source code. This in turn makes them much less willing to sink large sums of money into a Linux based project because they fear that work could potentially end up as a starting place for another company that ends up replacing them. The end result is that the Microsoft and Apple camps look much more promising in terms of long term return on investment -- so that is what they chose to support.

The other major point I will make in Microsoft's defense is very simple. The world needs a standard for a PC operating system. When you go out an buy a software package, you don't need to have to pray that it will work on your system -- especially as a business user. You want all your files to be interchangable and all your training to be applicable company/industry wide. For good or ill, Microsoft Windows is, defacto, this standard platform. Love it or hate it, it's there and -- at least for the moment -- it's not going anywhere.

Personally, at least in the US, I have long advocated that computer interoperability has become far too critical to our infrastructure to allow it to exist in the state that it does. If it were up to me, I would recognize in law that Microsoft does have a defacto monopoly on the OS market and place it under regulation. Basically, it is too important a piece of our economic well being to allow it to continue being driven strictly by market forces. It's deficiencies in terms of stability, security, data reliability, and future capability should have been mandated as the priorities that needed to be fixed -- with frills like the pretty UI and DX10 marked as "to do" when the other issues were done. Once regulated as a monopoly, their prices could also be regulated and fixed -- at a level that was affordable to the consumer yet still profitable for Microsoft.

A lot of people may disagree with me, but I feel that the PC OS has basically reached the point where it must be considered almost as a "utility" and treated as such. When you realize that almost all of our true utilities like water, power, etc. are controlled by and dependent upon systems that run on PC OS's it is quite frightening that such platforms are NOT regulated like any other utility would be.

 

[DOpamine]

Godfuckingdamnit, we are arguing over the fucking internet!

Extremely short version: Use the damn OS that works for you. I like Vista alot, you like Linux, that guy likes MAC OSX. Who gives a fuck anymore?

Can we all just let this all down. No one has to justify why they used the OS that they chose.

I just give back what gets given to me , as for which OS you use and why you should give a fuck read this quote &#8595; and read on... but please do pay attention

I'll agree that a lot of idiots do use MS products -- however, not everyone who uses their products are idiots.

Linux -- as a kernel -- is probably the best OS out there. But it's strengths -- customization, various distributions, tweakability -- are also it's weaknesses. These features make it very hard to standardize and tend to slow adoption by the rank and file.
Additionally, due to the nature of the GPL itself, it makes it very difficult for a lot of businesses to support and release products for -- specifically because it can be quite difficult to release Linux products that do not become "infected" with the GPL itself -- which means that companies may end up living in fear of someone demanding their source code. This in turn makes them much less willing to sink large sums of money into a Linux based project because they fear that work could potentially end up as a starting place for another company that ends up replacing them. The end result is that the Microsoft and Apple camps look much more promising in terms of long term return on investment -- so that is what they chose to support.

The other major point I will make in Microsoft's defense is very simple. The world needs a standard for a PC operating system. When you go out an buy a software package, you don't need to have to pray that it will work on your system -- especially as a business user. You want all your files to be interchangable and all your training to be applicable company/industry wide. For good or ill, Microsoft Windows is, defacto, this standard platform. Love it or hate it, it's there and -- at least for the moment -- it's not going anywhere.

Personally, at least in the US, I have long advocated that computer interoperability has become far too critical to our infrastructure to allow it to exist in the state that it does. If it were up to me, I would recognize in law that Microsoft does have a defacto monopoly on the OS market and place it under regulation. Basically, it is too important a piece of our economic well being to allow it to continue being driven strictly by market forces. It's deficiencies in terms of stability, security, data reliability, and future capability should have been mandated as the priorities that needed to be fixed -- with frills like the pretty UI and DX10 marked as "to do" when the other issues were done. Once regulated as a monopoly, their prices could also be regulated and fixed -- at a level that was affordable to the consumer yet still profitable for Microsoft.

A lot of people may disagree with me, but I feel that the PC OS has basically reached the point where it must be considered almost as a "utility" and treated as such. When you realize that almost all of our true utilities like water, power, etc. are controlled by and dependent upon systems that run on PC OS's it is quite frightening that such platforms are NOT regulated like any other utility would be.

You've almost hit the nail on the head , please dont think i'm being condescending or looking down on you
Linux is a kernel , it is one of hundreds of components that go into a FREE unix like operating system , i say FREE and not free for this reason - free means free of charge like freeware or free beer and FREE means freedom. What does freedom in a software context mean ? . It means the end user has the freedom to access the source code so he or she can independently verify what the end product does exactly and how it does it. It also means that the end user can make changes to the source code and publish the changes if he or she wants to. However the changes he or she makes must also be FREE as stated in the GPL licence ( http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html ) so the source code is not quite public domain. As a result of the source code being almost ( but not quite ) public domain there is generally no charge for FREE software.
Proprietary software vendors can link against FREE software , for example the orca webbrowser uses the gecko engine but the rest of the browser is proprietary. There are other examples of this such as games using SDL and openAL or gtalk using the jabber protocol , its becoming quite common place infact. If by some legal mistake ( which is highly unlikely ) a proprietary software vendors source code is forced to become public they can easily opt to release it under the GPL which would guarantee that the code involved could not be used in another proprietary context. As far as proprietary software goes its no better than FREE software in many cases it is worse if only because of the freedoms that it lacks , a few examples of "peerless" FREE applications are Amarok , Blender , Konqueror , xine , compiz , SDL and a mass of others , infact if you only use free software you'll want for nothing other than certain games and a few other things. Why do these applications / games not exist on free platforms ..? because of a monopoly ( you can get them to run 8 times out of 10 in wine which is improving daily )
You are right when you say the world needs a standard platform to work around but the question is who should say what the standard should be ? a very very rich guy who has shareholders to satisfy ? - not really a good idea , pretty soon they'll be charging for service packs just changing the name from vista to ? , The government ? but which government - the world is far far larger than the united states and its not like they all get on , The end users themselves ? to me this seems like the sane option as we know what we do and dont like , just look at DRM for example did anyone want it ? i'm sure one or two out there thought it was a good idea but they wouldnt be pirates in the first place , they just thought it would be a good idea for everyone else to have it. If windows vista was FREE you could get the source code , take out the DRM and recompile it and you wouldnt have it.
Microsoft have never made a good operating system imo , dos was an easy to use command line which was its best quality. They tried to take the ease of use concept and bring it into their guis whilst leaving the relatively dumb dos at its heart so you end up with a highly complex gui system running on a dumb operating system which is always going to be a disaster. Ms have got to the top imo by virtue of dos and to a lesser extent the early win like 3.11 for workgroups and the rest has been pure manipulation and using its market position to crush rivals , they have been to court for this and lost on more than one occasion.
FREE software is also known as open sourced software , i think this was an attempt to get people to use it as people associate FREE with being free and therefore inferior.
I comment in threads like this because the people who think this kind of software is so wonderful are totally wrong they are being lied to by the people from redmond , to them you are just another sheep to be manipulated / divided / dominated and then screwed for the price of their latest endeavour , people repeating or worse still loving these lies are doing nothing but re-enforcing the monopoly that grips the industry and the monopoly is totally wrong and i WILL say something about it ( FREEdom of speech first of all ). People should take an objective view about what is correct and what isnt in these matters , granted it is harder to do with regards to microsoft because their source code is locked away

if you've read this much and arent sure :

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay...259&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0

its a good 90 mins long so put something in the oven

P.S. if i'm a zealot then i'm a zealot about my freedoms not a fanboi or whatever other terms you young 'uns use these days , comment like that if you will - i'll just make sheep noises and buy you lubricant to ease your pain

 

[movax]

I just moved to 64-bit Vista Business from using 64-bit Fedora, and I'm really pretty happy about it (I would consider myself an advanced linux user) Things working straight out of the box, being able to play games (other than Blizzard titles through Wine and PSX games through pSX), not suffering from the horrible latency of ALSA which really sucks hard when playing PSX games. Also, not having my GUI shell randomly crash after being left running too long is nice as well (compiz-fusion sure looks pretty, but you have to realize that it took *months* for it to get to the stage where you could lock your machine without having to drop to Metacity or Heliodor...not practical). I can use VS2005 again now too, and NOT in a VM!

I prefer MS Office over OpenOffice any day of the week; they're proven apps, that most (like >95%) of the corporate world uses ('sides, I like them, and am completely 100% used to them since Word 5), the Windows APIs, etc. And having games again makes me very happy as well (can't say that about drivers though, nvidia's linux drivers were pretty good also).

Also, I would go so far to state that the stability arguement has been dead since Windows 2000 or so. BSODs may happen, but more often than not, its a result of driver incompatibility/bugs, and are usually easily resolved; I'd say most [H] users here, once their Windows install is tweaked & ready, don't shut down unless its planned... Sure, Windows may sometimes "force" or 'require" a restart after driver install/system updates, but Linux requires that you shut down X to do video driver updates for one; may not techinically be a "reboot", but you still had to save & quit in all applications.

Also, hasn't calling Microsoft 'M$' or 'Micro$oft' been like a decade old now? They happen to be doing pretty well in the free market, I'm not going to complain. Brings me a stable OS that I can do damn near anything on. And if I can't, it gives me the ability and docs to write something that can.

 

[DOpamine]

I just moved to 64-bit Vista Business from using 64-bit Fedora, and I'm really pretty happy about it (I would consider myself an advanced linux user) Things working straight out of the box, being able to play games (other than Blizzard titles through Wine and PSX games through pSX), not suffering from the horrible latency of ALSA which really sucks hard when playing PSX games. Also, not having my GUI shell randomly crash after being left running too long is nice as well (compiz-fusion sure looks pretty, but you have to realize that it took *months* for it to get to the stage where you could lock your machine without having to drop to Metacity or Heliodor...not practical). I can use VS2005 again now too, and NOT in a VM!

I prefer MS Office over OpenOffice any day of the week; they're proven apps, that most (like >95%) of the corporate world uses ('sides, I like them, and am completely 100% used to them since Word 5), the Windows APIs, etc. And having games again makes me very happy as well (can't say that about drivers though, nvidia's linux drivers were pretty good also).

Also, I would go so far to state that the stability arguement has been dead since Windows 2000 or so. BSODs may happen, but more often than not, its a result of driver incompatibility/bugs, and are usually easily resolved; I'd say most [H] users here, once their Windows install is tweaked & ready, don't shut down unless its planned... Sure, Windows may sometimes "force" or 'require" a restart after driver install/system updates, but Linux requires that you shut down X to do video driver updates for one; may not techinically be a "reboot", but you still had to save & quit in all applications.

Also, hasn't calling Microsoft 'M$' or 'Micro$oft' been like a decade old now? They happen to be doing pretty well in the free market, I'm not going to complain. Brings me a stable OS that I can do damn near anything on. And if I can't, it gives me the ability and docs to write something that can.

FREEDOM!!

 

[mdburkey]

You've almost hit the nail on the head , please dont think i'm being condescending or looking down on you Linux is a kernel , it is one of hundreds of components that go into a FREE unix like operating system , ......(etc)....... P.S. if i'm a zealot then i'm a zealot about my freedoms not a fanboi or whatever other terms you young 'uns use these days , comment like that if you will - i'll just make sheep noises and buy you lubricant to ease your pain

Yes, Linux is free. There is nothing wrong with the OS itself being free. Actually, I think that is a good thing. Unfortunately, a lot of companies PERCEIVE danger from the GPL in terms of releasing software for Linux -- not wholly without merit. There are portions of the GPL that apply even when linking to certain libraries -- and the entire patent licensing issue with GPL4 is likely to send even more companies packing (whether the risk is real or not).

Yes, you can get many good free applications for Linux and, with effort, run a lot of Windows applications via Wine. There are a lot of better, more polished applications for Windows, Mac, etc -- simply because that is where the profit is.

The problem is, many companies will never release a product if there is even the slightest chance it could run afoul of the GPL "copyleft". The entire purpose of being a business is to make money -- and if there is even the slightest chance that you might have to release your source code to the world where another company could build upon your own work and possibly steal your market and customers then it is NOT a chance worth taking.

I still think a standardized OS platform is a good idea -- and one that should be regulated. If Microsoft was regulated as a monopoly, they could be forced to open up their source code.

On the flip side of the coin, the Linux world needs to come up with a clear cut set of tools and rules that specifically exempt a given software package from the GPL as long as certain provisions are met -- even if they are later found to have inadverently/unknowingly "touched" some GPL'ed code along the way.

Open source is a wonderful concept, but "FREE" doesn't pay the bills and I like to eat occasionally.

 

[DOpamine]

just watch the video , all shall become aparrant

 

[CptFalcon]

just watch the video , all shall become aparrant

FREEDOM!!

Stop acting like a 16 year old teen who has nothing better to do with his time. BTW, I have used Linux before and it's fine, nothing new to me. It's fine.

 

[CptFalcon]

Damn I cannot edit my posts!

To add to my other one; DOpamine, that is how you can be labeled as fan boi if you start shouting FREEDOM!! and other shit like a lunatic.

 

[MrGuvernment]

isnt it supposed to be backward compatable ? or do you have to go out and buy all new software as well as a new computer ? what a scam

just wait for all the malware fun....

it is, and even if you did, you DONT have to buy anything, it is YOUR choice, no one is forcing you get to Vista.

 

[DOpamine]

yeh but hands up whos watched the video

 

[mdburkey]

Here is a comment from the Inquirer this morning (taken from comments from Forrester Research Group):

"Application incompatibility is a big, big headache," says Gray, noting that the companies surveyed estimated that applications incompatible with Vista accounted for between 10 and 40 percent of their software. "That's causing a lot of XP shops to take a wait-and-see approach to Vista."

Although it varies by company and which applications they use -- between 10-40% of their applications are incompatible with Vista. This is a HUGE percentage to have compatibility problems -- and explains why so many people feel the Vista rollout has been a lot worse than the XP rollout was. When going from 2K to XP there is nowhere near that many incompatible applications. Even when going from 98 to XP there aren't that many incompatible applications!

 

[DOpamine]

oddly enough thats around the same percentage as wine incompatability

btw wine is available for vista , that might help with your woes

also movax , why were you using heliodor with compiz fusion ? hardly surprising you had stability issues seeing as heliodor isnt part of compiz fusion rather part of the older ( and better imo ) beryl package

 

[mdburkey]

btw wine is available for vista , that might help with your woes

Yep. I truly believe that with enough Wine, I will be able to completely ignore all my Vista woes.
(say, maybe a good Riesling...)

 

[Martyr]

Here is a comment from the Inquirer this morning (taken from comments from Forrester Research Group):



Although it varies by company and which applications they use -- between 10-40% of their applications are incompatible with Vista. This is a HUGE percentage to have compatibility problems -- and explains why so many people feel the Vista rollout has been a lot worse than the XP rollout was. When going from 2K to XP there is nowhere near that many incompatible applications. Even when going from 98 to XP there aren't that many incompatible applications!

tell programmers to use propers api's instead of haking solutions that break when system files are updated.

 

[mdburkey]

tell programmers to use propers api's instead of haking solutions that break when system files are updated.

Tell Microsoft to actually fix the API so that they don't have to...

Or, better yet, totally flush the entire .NET infrastructure and go back to standard libraries -- the Win32 API isn't perfect, but there are a lot of things that simply cannot be achieved via .NET. Additionally, the new .NET3/WinFX implementation in Vista doesn't impress me either.

I have never been a fan of dynamic linking and I am less of a fan of dynamically compiled code. It makes final code validation that much more difficult. Any code on any project I have worked on has, whenever possible, statically linked every library it relied upon -- or at the least forced a specific revision to be linked in and made sure that that specific revision was included in the release. Yes, the library in question might have bugs, but they are bugs that have generally been accounted for and worked around -- any new libraries will have new and different bugs of their own. I am also not a big fan of managed code -- as it is less efficient in many ways and the actual executable cannot be fully predicted or validated as it may vary from instance to instance at runtime. Quite frankly, it is nothing more than yet another crutch to help allow poorly designed and written software to attempt to operate properly (and to help out programmers who do not know how to properly design and architect a system with robust memory management and exception handling in the first place).

C# is a good language, but it's reliance on .NET does not make me happy. Generally speaking, C++ is still hard to beat.

 

[msny]

Vista sales are boosted due to things of the following:

1) DX10 : Crysis, Bioshock etc
2) Forced to buy it due to no options when purchasing desktops or laptops

Why do you think Dell went back to selling desktops with XP for? Customers were whining about having to buy a desktop with Vista and now we have to comfort the users into letting them know XP will soon be a non-supported product.

Game based PC's are very small part of overall market worldwide.
Business wise I work for a company that is planning on 2000+ new PC's next year off from lease.

Dell and some others are giving corporate deals of up to 50% off retail
for Vista Business or Vista Home Premium. Our IT manager states that will cut his over all price by a few thousand dollars over next year.

What incentive is the for XP now?

 

[DOpamine]

doesnt dell also offer P.C.s with ubuntu pre-installed ? i'm sure lenovo do the same thing with SUSE , if the P.C.s that come with vista installed are cheaper than the ones that come with ubuntu installed does that not say something ?

 

[mdburkey]

Game based PC's are very small part of overall market worldwide.
Business wise I work for a company that is planning on 2000+ new PC's next year off from lease.

Dell and some others are giving corporate deals of up to 50% off retail
for Vista Business or Vista Home Premium. Our IT manager states that will cut his over all price by a few thousand dollars over next year.

What incentive is the for XP now?

Absolutely none as far as a business is concerned.
The point is, Vista Business is effectively an XP Pro license -- so it makes no sense not to just get Vista Biz in the first place and then run XP Pro anyway. As most larger business's have a standard system image that they roll out anyway -- this is trivial to do.

 

[DOpamine]

Absolutely none as far as a business is concerned.
The point is, Vista Business is effectively an XP Pro license -- so it makes no sense not to just get Vista Biz in the first place and then run XP Pro anyway. As most larger business's have a standard system image that they roll out anyway -- this is trivial to do.

So wait....let me get this right in my head .... the only people that "benefit" from windows vista are the dx10 users who get 5-10 fps less performance and the people who want DRM ? is there anyone else ?... is vista really hitting its stride ? i think its being pushed on new computers with the computer mfrs given kickbacks to do it...