Vista bashing

DJ_Haruko said:

Hope you don't have an HP printer or scanner...

The sad thing is we all know HP is not going to be the only company doing that. Its just a matter of time and other will join them. At this point I would not be surprised if Microsoft is asking comapanys too only make Vista drivers for new devices. That way they can push Vista on us sooner.

At this point I'm doing the same thing I did when Xp came out. Wait to upgrade tell Xp is no longer supported for the most part and hope they got all the major bugs worked out in Vista by then.

Every OS Sucks

POTGIESSER said:

I want to hold off on using it, but from what I hear anything using directX10 will require vista.

Simple then. If this is the case, developers will simply avoid DX10 due to the smaller targetable market.

I just don't understand what Vista has going for it. It's too huge to run on hardware from 3 months ago, it has terrible support for current peripherals, and it has the dark cloud of hardware and software DRM looming over it. I don't understand how anybody can even take it seriously as a product. It's a package of answers to questions that were never asked. Solutions to problems that don't exist.

I pledge to never use by my own choice any machine which uses Vista.

Vista's greatest feature is the ability to run executables as given users (ala Unix) without logging in as said user. XP makes it all but impossible to do this (without exposing the user password). However, this is not enough to justify more than, say, a $50 upgrade to XP.

Other than that, Vista is nothing but a "gumdrops and lollipops" OS.

Every report I have heard or read (including news outlets) is basically saying "This is the new Windows, here are some really vague reasons it is superior to XP, it only makes sense to get it if it's loaded on your new PC."

I think Vista is going to flop. Technophiles know that is offers nothing besides more glitz and DRM garbage over XP, companies will probably not see any benefit to offset the costs of going over to Vista from XP, and your average person has no need for a new computer (which is the only reason they would upgrade their OS), as it can keep up with everything but high end games and intensive tasks like video editing.

EDIT: If there is one thing that XP has done, it has slowed the purchasing of new computers by Joe Average. Most of the non-techy people I know bought new computers when their current machine became too unstable. In my experience an XP system doesn't become a lagging, crashing hell in the same way as Windows 98 (or god forbid, ME).

i love vista

If Vista comes out with an admisitrator or Server edition, I'd gladly buy it. Win2000 and 2003Server are solid OSs. Those MS guys, when they don't have to worry about "ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO DELETE X" and big shiny buttons showing retards where to click, can write some good shit.

Dr. Zin said:

I think Vista is going to flop.

No it won't. See, you can give all kinds of reasons why you think it should, but you already know the one reason why it won't.

OK, flop is the wrong word but I doubt it is going to meet the sales MS wants. The private market doesn't see a need for anything better than XP.

But then the private market won't exactly picket the electronics stores demanding that they put XP on the new systems instead of Vista.

No, but it still means Microsoft is making less money. If Linux and Apple continue to gain new users Microsoft will be losing marketshare, and a big part of their business strategy is based on the fact that they dominate the personal computer market by a significant margin.

It may not hurt MS now, but way down the line we may look at this as a turning point in the PC marketplace.

Basically there can be a snowball effect. Other OS's gaining more marketshare makes it more viable for developers to produce software for those systems, which then makes them more appealing to the greater public, which in turn increases their marketshare etc. It levels the playing field, which would result in big changes at Microsoft.

Grazza said:

http://www.abxzone.com/forums/windows-vista/107284-heres-how-disable-zip-folders-windows-vista.html

Can't verify, as I don't have Vista, and probably won't for quite a while. But I have seen posts from other people thanking him for this fix and saying that it worked fine.

Regarding mouse control on prboom, the current prboom-plus test version has changes/improvements in the mouse handling that don't rely on Win32 stuff, so it would be interesting to know if that helps in Vista.

Ha! you are even better at Google skills than me. :)
fix works. thanks!

I'm sure the mouse accel, etc.. is configurable enough in XP or Vista that with some patience it would be fine.

Bloodshedder: the drag and drop issue, if you care:
there is a bug in the WindowsExplorer UI. if you highlight a file/folder(s) and drag them to another location(that is highlighted), it will sometimes(up to 20% of the time for me) drop it in the folder JUST above or below the highlighted destination folder.
Microsoft has identified and admitted this defect.
I can recreate it in less than a minute on any NT-kernel OS.
Why does that matter to me? I wish to sort well over a million files; cut and paste takes too long. If you cannot trust your OS, what good is it?

This sounds exactly like the doom-n-gloom surrounding the XP launch. Didn't the Doom Legacy team refuse to support XP initially?

I think the new audio stack looks neat and I'm sure some other internal stuff has changed for the better as well. I've briefly used Vista on a test machine at work, where the only differences in our .NET application we saw were positive (they fixed some glaring USB bugs from XP and did *something* to speed up loading files from disk).

That said, any new version of Windows always has a lot of junk I don't care at all about, and there's no way I would want to run Vista at home in it's current state. After a service pack and some time for developers to get a hang for it I might reconsider.

The anti-Vista propaganda linked by Quasar is just as questionable as the pro-Vista propaganda by Microsoft. It's also just people twisting the facts to support their own agenda.

That said, I have no personal need for Vista and even less desire to play beta-tester. I didn't bother with XP for more than a year after its release and I won't bother now. I think next year when I probably need a new computer things will look somewhat different. If not - well, I still have my XP installation CD so nobody can force anything newer onto me! :P

Yeah except XP had far fewer problems.

Graf: Propaganda. Haha. The difference is, FSF and GNU don't make money by making public the dangerous features of Vista like its intolerable DRM measures. Microsoft on the other hand has quite a bit at stake. Who am I a lot more apt to believe? Guys just like me, or M$?

Opulent said:

Ha! you are even better at Google skills than me. :)

Or maybe I used good ol' Altavista, which in this case brings up the relevant link a lot higher than Google does with these same natural search parameters.

Regarding mouse stuff, are you saying that there probably isn't a real problem that port programmers need to tackle, but just some possible fiddling for the user with their mouse calibration?

Does Vista still have that awfully annoying "If you change the file name extension, the file may become unusable" dialogue (no clear-cut workaround that I know of in XP)? And the rotten implementation of "Automatically adjust clock for daylight saving changes" (workaround in XP: disable it and update the time manually)?

Quasar said:

Graf: Propaganda. Haha. The difference is, FSF and GNU don't make money by making public the dangerous features of Vista like its intolerable DRM measures. Microsoft on the other hand has quite a bit at stake. Who am I a lot more apt to believe? Guys just like me, or M$?

It is propaganda: Take the latest post on the site: Out of the "gotchas", only one would affect me (The driver issue) and some are fairly minor, such as checking you can run Vista before getting, yet the FSF say "These are all a function of being dependent on a proprietary vendor."

Also, FSF says "We'll be in good company rejecting Vista -- sounds like 90% of users are doing the same thing." when that's not quite the case according to it's source "In fact, only 10 per cent of the market is expected to adopt the new operating system immediately", note how I bolded immediately. Most people didn't adopt XP right away (I adopted it in 2004, for example)

Can anyone actually state a good reason why they would want to replace their operating system at all? Nevermind whether its Vista or Linux or BSD or whatever, what exactly is the carrot that a 'new' operating system is dangling?

I seriously doubt that there is one good reason among anyone here. I only switched to Linux because I felt it was about time I started using something that I hadn't pirated...

Well, my XP computer had much fewer crashes and other issues than the 98 machine I upgraded from.

Grazza said:

Does Vista still have that awfully annoying "If you change the file name extension, the file may become unusable" dialogue (no clear-cut workaround that I know of in XP)? And the rotten implementation of "Automatically adjust clock for daylight saving changes" (workaround in XP: disable it and update the time manually)?

I'd add one more: if you rename a file to a name that already exists, can you finally have the option to overwrite it by renaming? Ok, one more still: if you copy or delete a bunch of files and operation fails at some moment (like file being used), can you still continue skipping that particular file? Hmm, I guess it stayed the same. Not that I'm gonna upgrade from win98, just curious :)

chilvence said:

Can anyone actually state a good reason why they would want to replace their operating system at all?

I'm not replacing mine: I'm getting a new computer to compliment my other one (which is a laptop). The new ones will have Vista on it by defauly, natch but I do plan to dual boot with Linux (whether I stick with SuSE or use Kubuntu is another matter, though)

I'm with david_a on this, this is the exact same crap that was flying around when XP launched. "Oh no, it can't play games! It has horrible features I never asked for! It's loaded with DRM! Run for the hills!" Now, nearly 5 or 6 years since its launch, it's pretty much the only OS the average person uses. All the problems people were having are almost forgotten about. Anyone thinking Mac and Linux will gain in marketshare is just feeding the cycle all over again.

Doesn't mean I want to adopt it right away, though. I've had horrible experiences with every Windows OS at launch, but once they work out the kinks, they are generally worth using. At least for gaming, anyway. The only people really up in arms about this are the Linux and Mac folks, who won't even use this it to begin with, so I don't understand the smoke being blown out of their asses.

TheDarkArchon said:

The new ones will have Vista on it by default

This is exactly what I'm talking about. It's not really a reason, because if the new computer had anything else on it, you still wouldn't care. Does anyone actually care? Can threads like these on the internet and their associated 'politics' just fuck off and die already? Can my computer ever stop being classed as 'redundant' before I've had a chance to touch the keyboard?

Someone, Please, Give me a reason...

If it had MacOS X on it, I'd be caring a fuck of a lot more, belive you me.

Wahhh wahhh wahh! Stop it! Don't feed these people!

http://www.digg.com/linux_unix/Father_impressed_with_ubuntu_thinks_it_s_Vista

I'll probably install it.

Heh, wheres Nathan Lineback when you need him?

Vista takes the 'Operating' out of Operating System to the point "Vista Operating System" is an oxymoron. Sheesh, if you've lived with XP for years then pay up your own money for vista and use it discovering it's the same old OS with a zillion more undesired restrictions, would you be impressed then?

Remember kids, hating Vista makes you popular!