Microsoft is a Monster

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by jammies

Should it be doing more "under the hood", though? You know what would have impressed me as a new release of Windows? If they had taken XP, dropped its memory footprint down by a third, tightened the security, cut the bootup time in half, increased the speed, increased the stability, and left the interface alone except for maybe some snazzy transparency effects. And done it in late 2005/early 2006.

We don't *need* an OS that takes up hundreds of megs of memory just to run, and we don't *need* any more "features". What we *do* need is stability, security and usability.

Most of the memory footprint of Vista is taken up by Superfetch, which pre-loads system and application libraries into memory to improve application launch speed and performance. If you disable Superfetch, you'll see that Vista doesn't take much more RAM than XP did. Superfetch does also slow down boot times - you'll see a lot of hard drive activity when you boot up, and for a couple minutes after loading the OS, as it pulls in those libraries. That's also why power management is vastly improved in Vista - you should be sleeping machines regularly, not always shutting them down.

Your also ignoring so many of the advances in Vista that position it well for machines released now and in the next few years. The GDI has been largely replaced with new graphics libraries that are finally accelerated, Vista actively uses the Shadow Copy technology that debuted in XP to backup your files on the fly, it's got a better, although not perfect, security layer bolted in, etc. Not to mention a better network stack, vastly improved wireless networking, etc. Wait till SP1 hits, and you got hot-patching (no more reboots for patches interrupting your work), plus lots of the inevitable bugs worked out of a .0 release.

So maybe you don't need or want an OS that is maturing with hardware capabilities, but to dismiss Vista out of hand is silly.

-Scott

[Hakan]

One of the only reasons I saw to upgrading to Vista, WinFS, was canned.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS

I've used Vista, it's basically bloated XP with a bunch of crap I don't need. What else is new with MS.

As usual, I'll wait until one or two significant revisions of the OS has been completed before I install it. XP works just great for me.

[llama64]

Originally Posted by Hakan

One of the only reasons I saw to upgrading to Vista, WinFS, was canned.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS

I've used Vista, it's basically bloated XP with a bunch of crap I don't need. What else is new with MS.

As usual, I'll wait until one or two significant revisions of the OS has been completed before I install it. XP works just great for me.

Vista is good if you are buying a new PC designed for it. Upgrading an existing PC from XP to Vista is usually a bad decision. Vista is a better OS, but it requires more horses to power it.

That all said, I get the feeling Vista was primarily a test bed for Microsoft in that it lays the groundwork for the next version. Vista really needs to get some good tools installed into it. SSH, a decent shell (Power Shell comes close), easier application installation (the registry needs to be ditched). Then it would probably be the best OS on the market. For now, OS X meets all my needs better and for cheaper.

There is a sense going around the industry that the open-source products are starting to become mature enough to challenge the desktop. People are beginning to "seriously" predict that within 5 years most home users will be running an open-source OS with open-source office products. The corporate world would not be far behind. This kinda puts the Microsoft+Yahoo event into perspective. MS may be forecasting the same thing and is taking steps to branch away from a strict software sales model and more into web based products. Could be interesting to watch

[McG]

Originally Posted by llama64

Vista is good if you are buying a new PC designed for it. Upgrading an existing PC from XP to Vista is usually a bad decision. Vista is a better OS, but it requires more horses to power it.

That all said, I get the feeling Vista was primarily a test bed for Microsoft in that it lays the groundwork for the next version. Vista really needs to get some good tools installed into it. SSH, a decent shell (Power Shell comes close), easier application installation (the registry needs to be ditched). Then it would probably be the best OS on the market. For now, OS X meets all my needs better and for cheaper.

There is a sense going around the industry that the open-source products are starting to become mature enough to challenge the desktop. People are beginning to "seriously" predict that within 5 years most home users will be running an open-source OS with open-source office products. The corporate world would not be far behind. This kinda puts the Microsoft+Yahoo event into perspective. MS may be forecasting the same thing and is taking steps to branch away from a strict software sales model and more into web based products. Could be interesting to watch

while I don't want to challenge your last paragraph too much, because I do think that there is a sense out there that M$ doesn't always know best, for the forseeable future I cannot see corporations going away from M$ on the desktop or internally. There is way too much invested in the M$ environment to move away from it. Forever? who can say. but certainly i cannot see this in the next 5 to 10 years.

M$'s acquisition of Yahoo is to try to consolidate and grow revenues via internet channels, and to expand reach. Most companies reach a critical size and it becomes difficult for them to organically grow...and so they are forced to use acquisition to expand. what else would M$ do with all that cash anyways?

[Azure]

I read somewhere yesterday that Yahoo wanted to reject Microsoft?

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php...show_article=1

[Clarkey]

Can someone explain the 32 bit vs. 64 bit difference? Is this a hardware or software differentiation, what does it mean to me, the user?

[llama64]

Originally Posted by Clarkey

Can someone explain the 32 bit vs. 64 bit difference? Is this a hardware or software differentiation, what does it mean to me, the user?

In a practical sense to us as end users, going to 64bit means unsupported hardware, crappy drivers and endless headaches. Supposedly it means a faster system but in all my experience with XP64, Vista x64 and Ubuntu x64, I've never noticed.

It really comes into play if you're doing a lot of media work with video or large sound files. It means the the amount of instructions that are fed into the CPU is essentially doubled over x32bit leading to faster processing on more of the data.

If you feel like giving yourself a technology migraine (), check out this explanation at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64_bit#32_vs_64_bit

[Barnes]

Heard an interesting piece of information on a podcast I listen to. Microsoft would have to borrow money in order to purchase Yahoo. Apparently they only have about 30 billion in cash. Compared to Apple who is a much smaller company but with 18 billion in cash on hand.

Microsoft has been buying up their own stock recently so I guess that would explain some of it.

[Bobblehead]

I'm thinking my next machine will run a 64-bit OS. Drivers have come a long way - unless you still want to run that 10 year old dot-matrix printer you shouldn't have much trouble with newer hardware.

What blows my mind is people who tell other people how to turn off all the security measures in Vista. Microsoft has been raked over the coals for years about their security model (justifiably in most cases), so they start getting one in place to address the issues and people turn it off. C'mon, the only time it pops up it is probably a very good thing that you are being warned about what happening. If this is happening so much that it becomes obtrusive, you had better sit back and think about what it is you are doing.

And as for memory footprint, Vista took a different approach this time. They try to predict what you are using and load as much into memory as they can. If you have the memory, why not try to use it?

I like many of Microsoft's products, their programmers a VERY intelligent, yet despise Microsoft's marketing/licensing practices.

And I also run a home machine with linux (Fedora, and Ubuntu for a while), and am very comfortable doing things from command line (a la MS-DOS, Commodore DOS). Haveing worked in software development, all I can say is for a program as complex as any version of Windows to work as well as it does is amazing.

[Clarkey]

Originally Posted by llama64

In a practical sense to us as end users, going to 64bit means unsupported hardware, crappy drivers and endless headaches. Supposedly it means a faster system but in all my experience with XP64, Vista x64 and Ubuntu x64, I've never noticed.

It really comes into play if you're doing a lot of media work with video or large sound files. It means the the amount of instructions that are fed into the CPU is essentially doubled over x32bit leading to faster processing on more of the data.

If you feel like giving yourself a technology migraine (), check out this explanation at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64_bit#32_vs_64_bit

No comprende ?

[llama64]

Originally Posted by Clarkey

No comprende ?

Basically, if all you need a computer for is emails, internet and the occasional game, going 64bit will not result in anything different then a standard 32bit system. Really, going 64bit will just increase the likely hood of coming across problems on your system.