[Beowulf] Sidebar: Vista Rant

[Gerry Creager]

And you mean to tell me that seeing the cursor slide over each painful 
pixel on a 2.3GHz dual core machine with a gigabyte of memory, after 
waiting for almost 7 minutes (a little over 400 clock seconds, yes, I 
was watching) to start my user, isn't a design goal?  Or asking me about 
every potentially security-sensitive operation, when I'm logged in as an 
administrator? -- Oh, wait!  That's right, while it's a "Good Idea" 
(c)/TM administrators don't need passwords in vista, and there's really 
no documentation telling them to even really be careful, so I guess the 
annoy-ware is also a design feature.

My experiences have been similar to RGB's but I've got to really worry: 
I just got this laptop for my wife, and one of the first things I heard 
(right after, "Oh! It's pretty! Why's it so heavy?") was, "Our desktop 
doesn't take this long to start up my account!"  As the fall guy for 
Microsoft foibles in our house, I'm really less than pleased.  I'd like 
to go a week without feeling like their crummy OS decision was my fault. 
  I'm gonna give them a dual boot system with XP and either FC or Ubuntu 
and see how well they do.

gerry

Robert G. Brown wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Jul 2007, Peter St. John wrote:
> 
>> RGB asks, "...On my nice new dual core 2 GB laptop, Vista Home runs 
>> like --
>> what?  What is a
>> suitable metaphor for a system that can't even keep up with a moving 
>> mouse?
>> ..."
>>
>> Jabba the Hutt. Evil, devious, immobile.
>>
>> I'm reluctant to say that MSWin(any) is badly designed; OS's are designed
>> for purposes, and some purposes don't suit some of us. Unix was 
>> designed for
>> development. Mac for usability. VMS for data processing. Tandem for
>> fault-tolerance. Microsoft for Market Share.
>>
>> MS is really really sucessful at it's design target. People are 
>> willing to
>> say that Vista is not worth getting, but they said that about Win2000 
>> also.
>> Correct was to keep 98 & NT and wait for XP.
> 
> 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.
> 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.
> 
> Vista is seriously more broken than W2K (which really wasn't bad -- just
> expensive and not that much better than NT).  The interesting thing is
> that it is such a RADICAL departure from XP -- and so easy to mock.  I
> mean, it really, really sucks.  Even by MS, W3.2, W95 standards.
> 
> It would be very interesting to see how many consumers chose Vista over
> XP given a free choice.  But Microsoft isn't about freedom, it is about
> control, and a high level corporate decision has been made to push a
> seriously broken system onto the MAINSTREAM user.  This could have some
> fairly serious long term repercussions.  As did Slow-aris for Sun.
> 
> 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).
> 
>    rgb
> 
>>
>> Peter
>>
> 

-- 
Gerry Creager -- gerry.creager at tamu.edu
Texas Mesonet -- AATLT, Texas A&M University	
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