[Beowulf] Sidebar: Vista Rant

[Bruno Coutinho]

2007/7/16, Jim Lux <James.P.Lux at jpl.nasa.gov>:
>
> At 03:36 PM 7/16/2007, Robert G. Brown wrote:
> >On Mon, 16 Jul 2007, Peter St. John wrote:
> >
> >Wrongo.  Win2K was never REALLY pushed as a consumer product.  But now
> >try getting a new system over the counter with anything but Vista on it.
>
> over the counter "consumer" you're right.
> over the counter "business" XP still dominates. But you're not going
> to find it at category killers like best buy or office depot (which,
> though catering to businesses, appear not to sell business computers)
>
> >Sure, if you special order or buy online you can get XP -- probably at
> >full retail.  But seriously, the market is being saturated with Vista
> >systems.


Only new systems. Memory prices dropped so high this year because Microsoft
convinced memory manufactures that everyone will switch to Vista
(as it did with almost entire industry every time a new dos/windows version
was launched),
so they increased production but this not occurred and market saturated.

>From Dell, as of about a month ago, XP and Vista were the same price.
>
> >Consumers will forgive a lot, but not poor interactive performance.
> >That's why Linus has made excellent interactive performance a design
> >mandate from the very earliest days of the kernel (and why linux plus X
> >on 486's was peppier -- much peppier -- than Vista on multi GHz multi
> >cores).


When machines start coming with 8-16GB RAM this will be forgotten.
More than ten year ago everyone said that NT was bloated, but when
machines went with 128MB RAM, everyone switched to 2K, XP.

But Linux plus X on a 486 with a 640x480 VGA is a very different
> matter from digital rights managed 1600x1200 HD on that
> multicore.  It's not really an apples/apples comparison.  You have to
> burn a lot of compute cycles to make sure that your content is
> legitimately being viewed <grin>.


Really this is a very unfair comparison. :-)
I read that Vista multimedia system has 7 modules:
 2 to playing multimedia content and 5 to ensuring DRM.
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