Posted on 04/20/2007 9:52:09 AM PDT by upchuck
Ease of use is Vistas shining point. Also alot of issues in Vista have been cured, some will never be(DRM) some will take more time(XP Games).
Not being a tech geek, I don't understand why software becomes less efficient, rather than more. I understand that it becomes more versatile and more capable, but at a price. If hardware becomes more efficient (higher speed at lower cost), why not software? Makes no sense to me.
Therefore it seems Microsoft, through arrogance, is attempting suicide.
I suspect that by the time XP is obsoleted I will be able to choose on OS that is as user friendly, faster, and cheaper than the MS offering. That is, unless MS reads the writing on the wall, and goes "backward", offering something that is more efficient.
I vaguely remember the Win 3.2 days. Harder to learn to use, but so fast and efficient compared to the current bloatware.
Please ping me if you see or post any info here on FR as to that.
It seems like overkill and more like "look both ways before you come out of your room to go down the hall to the bathroom."
How? SP-1 already out?
MS has a weekly update service, plus most of the issues reported were caused by third party drivers that have since been fixed.
BUMP for more comments!
FYI
Writing small, tight, fast, low-level, optimized software is difficult. It takes much more time, it isn't as flexible, and it's a royal pain to debug and maintain. Honestly, I know someone who wrote a small program in one line of what could be considered the epitome of small, fast, tight code, but don't even ask him to debug it.
Earlier software also tended to be written specifically for one chip, and optimized for it. Today even if your software is x86 there are still tons of variations of x86 that it will be expected to run on, and optimizing for all of them is a large task. Imagine writing something that takes advantage of the Core 2 Duo's efficient architecture, but then it sucks on a Pentium 4 with its deep, fast pipeline. You even get to write different code for the different amounts of cache in the same line of processors (you can design your instructions and data to fit in the cache to make it faster). A compromise these days is as the programmers of Photoshop do it. The application is written in high-level, but core performance-sensitive libraries get highly optimized.
But all of that isn't much of an excuse. You have Windows, which gets slower with each release, yet every release of OS X has it running faster on the same machine. There is still room for code tightening and optimization these days with high-level languages, but don't expect a return to the old days where every byte and processor cycle counts.
I vaguely remember the Win 3.2 days. Harder to learn to use, but so fast and efficient compared to the current bloatware.
Windows 3.x also didn't have to worry about things expected in a modern operating system, like enforcement of a security model (you can't see the files of others), protected memory (programs can't write over memory being used by others or the OS, needed for stability) or preemptive multitasking (the OS divides up time between programs instead of them fighting it out amongst themselves, needed for system responsiveness).
Forgot about that. I wonder if it would be possible to get a legal copy of the corporate edition, with doesn't have the activation "feature."
But all of that isn't much of an excuse.
And that I agree with. There is too much human nature (i.e. Ego) involved with the whole 'puter process.
I suspect that if the ultra-geniuses can make the hardware so much more efficient, they ought to be able to get together with the software ultra-geniuses and make the $hi+ work better.
I just bought a dual core Athlon 4200/1 gig DDR2 system running Win MCE, and I'll swear to you the bootup is way slower than my previous system, which was a pathetic Duron 1.3 with only 224 MB PC-133 memory. It makes no sense to me. My new system has so many more "necessary" software programs running in the background.
As far as security goes, I'd rather rely on the outsiders that I use, Zone Alarm, Spybot, Ad-Aware, Spyware Blaster, and AVG.
Microsoft has never come close to cutting it in the security department.
Looks like next Tuesday
[..] The Redmond, Wash., software maker declined to be specific about the contributions the NSA made to secure the Windows operating system.
The NSA also declined to be specific but said it used two groups -- a "red team" and a "blue team" -- to test Vista's security. The red team, for instance, posed as "the determined, technically competent adversary" to disrupt, corrupt or steal information. "They pretend to be bad guys," Sager said. The blue team helped Defense Department system administrators with Vista's configuration .
Microsoft said this is not the first time it has sought help from the NSA. For about four years, Microsoft has tapped the spy agency for security expertise in reviewing its operating systems, including the Windows XP consumer version and the Windows Server 2003 for corporate customers.
Unless you also think that Microsoft heads are lying?
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