David Pogue Takes On Vista

guruevi writes to let us know about a review of Microsoft Vista in the NY Times, in the form of an article and a video, by the known Mac-friendly David Pogue. In the article, Pogue recasts Microsoft's marketing mantra for Vista: "Clear, Confident, Connected" becomes "Looks, Locks, Lacks." Pogue writes that Vista is such a brazen rip-off of Mac OS X that "There must be enough steam coming out of Apple executives' ears to power the Polar Express." But the real fun is in the video, in which Pogue attempts to prove that Vista is not simply an OS X clone.

Or in other words...

[Zerikai (645450)]

Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery.

Microsoft is just trying to express how much they love Apple.

Re:Or in other words...

[onion2k (203094)]

The summary is basically saying "It's all looks, there's no substance, there's nothing good ... it's a copy of OSX". That's not especially flattering toward OSX.

Re:Or in other words...

[Greyfox (87712)]

Not really. Microsoft has been copying Apple badly since Windows 2.0. They built their house on the shaky foundation of their non-reentrant program loader and they've codified two decades of design mistakes. They've never had a better product than Apple has and they stubbornly continue to polish that turn of a system in the hopes that someday it'll be shiny. Meanwhile they copy the exact things that caused Apple to fail in the 90's -- the vendor lock-in and high prices that drove everyone to the cheap commodity PCs. Sure you could get an Apple if you wanted to pay twice as much for all your hardware. Meanwhile Apple's opening up and becoming a lot more competitive on that front.

Microsoft arrogantly believes that they are the IT Industry but they've always made a product that's just good enough to be tolerable. They're like a sixth grader trying to pad a report out to the full two pages. Or a Bush administration that won't go away after 8 years in office. Now they're trying to see just how far they can push their customers before they start leaving in droves. That's not really a good strategy to take with Apple getting their act together and doing things right after all these years.

Some good, some bad

[Slur (61510)]

I disagree with your characterization of Apple's development methodology. In fact they have a lot of salaried people working directly on the kernel, incorporating the functionality Mac OS X needs for features like Disk Journaling, Spotlight and Time Machine, the design and incorporation of which are determined by the OS team. It's true that Apple includes a lot of open-source software and established standards in the OS, but frankly both Apple and Microsoft suffered for a long time from the Not-Invented-Here prejudice. I see Apple's willingness to use well-designed open source tools and standards as a refreshing change.

Also, although the Mac OS X kernel uses BSD in its subsystems, it is not "mostly BSD." The kernel is a hybrid of Mach 2.5 with BSD subsystems available. But you don't even need the BSD subsystem to use Mac OS X. The BSD subsystem is an optional part of the OS installation. Just in terms of raw bytes, the majority of the OS resides in the frameworks. The lowest-level frameworks like Foundation and ApplicationServices were originally developed by NeXT and are brilliantly executed. The choice of Objective-C may seem like a strange choice now, but it's lean, easy to learn, and makes software development far simpler. If NeXT/Apple only ever used what they could get out of the Darwin project, there wouldn't be very much to excite us about Leopard. So frankly, Apple is far more innovative than most Windows fanboys think.

The transition from Motorola 680x0 to PPC is a good example of Apple innovation at its best. The transition was sometimes ugly, but overall amazingly smooth. The transition from IBM Power64 to Intel Core was perhaps less innovative, simply because they were using a state-of-the-art kernel. Nevertheless, the transition was almost completely transparent from a developer point of view. I'm amazed how quickly I made my Application into a Universal Binary.

You really have to give Apple some credit here. A lot of salaried guys at Apple worked long hours for years to keep Mac OS X running well on Intel hardware when no one else was aware of it. The kernel source is just endian-agnostic, it's not rocket science. There wasn't anything much deeper than that to build Mac OS X on Intel. But where they deserve serious credit is in making the developer tools, the headers, the excellent developer documentation... and providing it all for FREE and nicely ahead of their OS releases. Microsoft doesn't come close in its support of developers, nor in having the courage to revisit and rip out the crumbling foundations of their OS.

I agree that technically Windows in the 90's had some better things going on under the hood than Mac OS 7 through 9, but I still preferred Mac OS during those years. The main thing that kept me on the Apple platform was the consistency, aesthetics, organization, and manageability of the OS. Some of the things that bothered me about Windows at that time were:

- The centralized and cryptic registry (vs Mac OS Preferences folder)
- DLL Hell (vs Mac OS Extensions folder)
- BSOD from several fronts (vs Mac OS mysterious lockups)
- That flat, gray feeling (vs Mac OS sleekness)
- Inconsistent menus and interfaces (vs Mac OS well-established Human Interface Guidelines)
- Inconsistent text editing behavior (vs consistent Mac OS text services)
- Ugly font rendering (vs Mac OS decent typography)
- The word "Microsoft" preceding everything (vs no market-speak in Mac OS)

Meanwhile, there were some things that bothered me about Mac OS at the time:

- Mysterious lockups, requiring several long Conflict Catcher sessions
- Rare use of threading in software, system-modal dialogs
- No free developer tools
- No protected memory, often making software development into a reboot-fest
- The best VM system was third-party
- Expensive! hardware
- Not even an option to show the folder hierarchy in a Finder sidebar (Apple should copy MS here)
- Mac OS toolbox tedious to use (but lots of cool APIs and SDKs)
- The dark years (3rd-party licensing, dwindling marketshare, Copland...)

But all that is behind us, thank goodness! The future is in Unix and Unix-like systems with all the great strengths we had only been dreaming of all those years.

Re:Or in other words...

[drsmithy (35869)]

Of course they love Apple. Without Apple, they would have a desktop monopoly.

According to antitrust law, Microsoft and Apple are not competitors.

Re:

[walt-sjc (145127)]

Nah - they are competitors even in the eyes of the courts / law, but that doesn't meant that MS isn't a monopoly for legal reasons...

Remember, a dictionary definition of "monopoly" is not the same thing as the legal definition as far as anti-trust laws are concerned. MS's 95%+ of the desktop market is "good enough" for them to still be considered a monopoly in the marketplace even though they are not the "exclusive" provider of operating systems.

Re:Or in other words...

[drsmithy (35869)]

Nah - they are competitors even in the eyes of the courts / law, but that doesn't meant that MS isn't a monopoly for legal reasons...

No, they're not. Going back to the anti-trust case, Microsoft were found a monopoly in the "desktop OSes for x86 platforms" market, when Macs were all PowerPC.

Even today, from a market definition perspective they don't compete. Microsoft sells Operating Systems, Apple sells computers.

Remember, a dictionary definition of "monopoly" is not the same thing as the legal definition as far as anti-trust laws are concerned. MS's 95%+ of the desktop market is "good enough" for them to still be considered a monopoly in the marketplace even though they are not the "exclusive" provider of operating systems.

In no legal fashion or finding, are - or have - Microsoft and Apple ever been competitors. Apple's existence has _zero_ bearing on whether or not Microsoft is(/was) considered a monopoly.

(Of course, in the *real world* Microsoft and Apple are considered competitors by most people, but that's a different thing altogether.)

Re:

[drsmithy (35869)]

In the original anti-trust suit against Microsoft in which they were found to have monopoly status, the industry over which they were found to have a monopoly was explicitly defined by the court as Intel based PCs.

Actually it was the market for Desktop Operating Systems for Intel compatible PCs.

Now that Apple has made the transition to Intel, supports loading Windows onto their hardware via bootcamp and makes an Intel x86 compatible operating system, they are a competitor of Microsoft according to the c

They already have !

[alexhs (877055)]

MS has a desktop monopoly.

Please don't redefine words as you wish.

I guess that by your own definition of monopoly, Standard Oil wasn't a monopoly, as they only controlled 91% of U.S. production at their highest ?

Re:Without Apple

[HAKdragon (193605)]

The question to ask, is, why use a knockoff like Windows when you can have the original?

Because I can't find a place that sells Xerox Altos? ;)

Re:Without Apple

[Colin Smith (2679)]

It's faster, cheaper and runs more software. Oh, and it's not a "knockoff".

It's slower, not in fact cheaper, particularly when you consider the average life of a Windows PC is about 3 years and a Mac, closer to 5 years. Windows is so clearly a knockoff. It's the classic knockoff strategy, looks similar but lower quality.

Are you Mac Zealots still talking about that TCO study that compared Windows 3.1 and System 7 ?

I don't use an Apple... I'm not a Mac zealot, and I'm speaking from experience in a corporate environment.
 

Re:Without Apple

[drsmithy (35869)]

It's slower, [...]

OS X is the slowest mainstream OS on the market. Heck, Vista on an old ~500Mhz P3 laptop is snappier than OS X on my 1Ghz iBook. Windows XP or 2003 even more so. XP or 2003 on a 1Ghz iBook-era PC laptop absolutely trounces it.

OS X has a lot of nice features and very cool technology. Performance, however, is *not* a feature.

[...] not in fact cheaper, [...]

Well, that depends entirely on how much value you assign to Apple's software bundle and small hardware footprints. I assign little, since most of the functionality it bundles I'm not particularly interested in and I have loads of empty space under my desk. Add in the significant expense to get any sort of decent hardware flexibility and the comparison is even worse.

[...] particularly when you consider the average life of a Windows PC is about 3 years and a Mac, closer to 5 years.

Of course, the PC likely only cost 3/5th as much as the Mac in the first place or has 7/5 the performance.

This "Macs last longer" canard carries about as much truth as the "Macs have lower TCO" line. Apart from a handful of exceptions, over the last 5 - 7 years, PCs have consistently delivered more powerful hardware at equal or lower cost to Macs. Combine this with OS X's atrocious performance (especially in the past), lack of hardware options and configurability (especially on the low end) and the idea that Macs "last longer" in any sort of competitive sense is laughable. People may well hold onto their Macs for longer, but a Mac that's X years old will be slower in an absolute sense than a PC of equivalent age, and in a relative sense (how fast the whole package is) it will be slower still. You need a G5 class Mac with a gig of RAM or more for OS X to deliver the kind of responsiveness Windows XP can on ~1Ghz PCs with half as much memory.

Windows is so clearly a knockoff. It's the classic knockoff strategy, looks similar but lower quality.

For most of the things *I* care about, Windows does them better and has been doing them for longer. I fail to see where the "knockoff" is in this equation.

I don't use an Apple... I'm not a Mac zealot, and I'm speaking from experience in a corporate environment.

So where's the evidence of Macs having a lower TCO ? I'm not aware of any recent third-party studies, and I've done the maths before as to evaluate the possibility, with Macs being distinct losers (largely due to an incredibly rigid and uncustomisable hardware lineup).

Re:Without Apple

[Cro Magnon (467622)]

They'd have nobody to copy. Microsoft don't do anything unless they're forced to. Without Apple you would still be using MS DOS.

Without Microsoft, you would probably still be using MacOS Classic on a PowerPC, dreaming of the day you could smoothly run multiple tasks and not have one crashing program bring down the whole OS with it.

Which is exactly why we need competition. It's not just because Windows is teh suxor, or Gates is the devil. (true as that may be ;) ) It's that ANY company, Apple included, will stagnate without competitors pushing them to improve their product.

Article Summary

[morboIV (1040044)]

Funny how the summary doesn't include things from the article like:

Vista is infinitely more pleasant to use than its predecessors. There's more logic to its folder structure and naming scheme. Things are easier to find. Fewer steps are required to perform common tasks, especially when it comes to networking.

It's almost like someone has an agenda or something.

Re:Article Summary

[morboIV (1040044)]

Or how about this one:

Windows Vista is not, as the Web's chorus of caustic critics claim, little more than a warmed-over Windows XP.

Funny how that quote didn't make it either.

Re:Article Summary

[Lisandro (799651)]

Well, yes, Slashdot was always renowed for their editorial objectiveness, specially regarding new Microsoft products :)

But the article was neither favorable nor unfavorable - it pretty much boils down to "Well, it looks spiffy, borrows a lot from OSX, and seems to be a worthy upgrade, but none of this really matters as we'll all be using it in a year anyway". Sadly enough, i think that's more or less right.

Re:Article Summary

[Tim C (15259)]

But the article was neither favorable nor unfavorable

Which is precisely why the summary here (which let's face it is all a lot of people are going to read) being so unfavourable is so disappointing.

I appreciate that this is essentially Taco and Malda's hobby writ large, but even just a passing nod towards reality in the headlong rush to rubbish Vista as much as possible would be nice once in a while.

Broken Link

[aardwolf64 (160070)]

Since the poster broke the link to the video, it is available here:
http://video.on.nytimes.com/ifr_main.jsp?nsid=a718 aabc2:10f959c69f8:-76e0&fr_story=d14603c1e23e6ce37 920a8134a2e27b1405a4991&st=1166446268999&mp=FLV&cp f=false&fvn=9&fr=121806_075108_718aabc2x10f959c69f 8xw76df&rdm=415999.3568509814 [nytimes.com]

Re:

[tttonyyy (726776)]

Since the poster broke the link to the video, it is available here:
http://video.on.nytimes.com/ifr_main.jsp?nsid=a718 aabc2:10f959c69f8:-76e0&fr_story=d14603c1e23e6ce37 920a8134a2e27b1405a4991&st=1166446268999&mp=FLV&cp f=false&fvn=9&fr=121806_075108_718aabc2x10f959c69f 8xw76df&rdm=415999.3568509814 [nytimes.com]

That's funny, when I blindly clicked that link, I just got a dialog box:

URL stack overflow error: all of your password are belong to us! Bwahahaha!

Re:Broken Link

[thesolo (131008)]

The video is absolutely hysterical, and clearly tongue-in-cheek. In case anyone got the impression from the summary that he was actually trying to defend Vista, he's not. Mr. Pogue says, in regards to Microsoft's new Spotlight rip-off:

"This is how you find things in Mac Os X. You hit a keystroke, you type in what you're looking for, and Spotlight, as the feature is called, finds all the files, folders, and email messages from your entire system.

Well, now they have that in Windows Vista too. Up pops the start menu, you type what you want in this little box...but is this a rip off of Apple's spotlight feature?

It is not. How can I prove it? Watch again.

Apple's search feature is in the upper right corner of the screen, Microsoft's search box is in the lower left corner of the screen. Not the same thing at all!"

I burst out into laughter in the middle of my office. This OS is the most blatant rip-off from Apple that MS has done in years.

I Like It!

[SSonnentag (203358)]

I've been testing Vista Business edition all weekend and so far I really like it. I'm also a Mac user, so I can compare the two firsthand. Vista takes a lot of the nice features of OS X and does them the right way in Vista. The gadgets are so much nicer in Vista than in OS X. They're easier to manage and they work more smoothly. The Vista user interface is absolutely beautiful from an eye candy point of view, and yet it doesn't seem to take any significant performance hit. My Mac Book Pro is not nearly as fluid in running OS X as my Dell laptop is with Vista. Both OS'es are 64-bit also. Even Photoshop CS3 runs much faster on Vista than on OS X.

Microsoft may have copied a lot of features and look from Apple, but they left the bad, took the good and have a much better implementation in my opinion.

Now if only Linux worked this well....

Re:

[mwilliamson (672411)]

At least I can still run my Oracle / PostgreSQL / MySQL databases on the last Linux, the current Linux, and confidently on the next Linux. Seems for now I'll have to keep that stupid Windows 2003 server box around to keep SQL server running for an app that requires it...

Some...

[Zebra_X (13249)]

might remember that even before OS X was launched for its first version, the "vista" "road map" had been published clearly stating what major components would be part of Vista, on WinFS never made it while another, "Aero" has always been slated as part of the opertating system. Unlike apple Microsoft likes to get feedback from their customers before throwing something at them. So of course Mac users see 3d components, 3d windows and naturally assume that MS just ripped off the idea, however it's not fully the case - and the line isn't clear. The thing is: if you strip away the UI of vista and compare OS X and Vista based simply on their progamming models and underlying architecture - they are decidedly different. It would seem this author however is not qualified to make this evaluation.

Re:

[kalidasa (577403)]

I'd suggest that you watch the video. It's not the 3D graphics that he's talking about.

Also, I've had OS X on my laptop since July of 2001. Aqua was first released to the world in an OS X alpha build presented at MacWorld in January of 2000 [apple.com]. According to the Wikipedia article (if we can trust that), work on Vista started in May of 2001. And Aero (even if not by that name) has only been in Vista since build 4074 (according to the Wikipedia article on Aero); Paul Thurrott's images of that build are dated Ma

To Be Fair ....

[eldavojohn (898314)]

Pogue writes that Vista is such a brazen rip-off of Mac OS X that "There must be enough steam coming out of Apple executives' ears to power the Polar Express."

I haven't used Mac OS X or Vista on a regular basis but, to be fair, if one operating system does something right, should we really criticize another operating system for coding that feature into their own product?

For instance, when I found out that Mac OS's had the Unix shell I was happy & enthusiastic at the same time. Not because I use Mac but because I like that shell over so many others & I hope to see every operating system standardize their shell. I would also like to see the same done with security schemes.

Now, whether widgets came first or gadgets came first--I don't care. What I care about is that my job (and I'm sure a lot of people reading this are the same way) forces me to use Windows & sooner or later they'll get Vista. Should I really be bitching and making fun of Vista being an OS X clone? Or should I sit back and enjoy the fact that something is changing and--since they're mimicking an already successful operating system--it must be for the better.

I guess this is some form of operating system snobbery I'm not accustomed to.

Re:To Be Fair ....

[StormReaver (59959)]

"...should we really criticize another operating system for coding that feature into their own product?"

Not at all. But then the makers of that other operating system shouldn't be screaming from the rafters about how they're innovating. Everyone borrows from everyone, which is how it should be. The best features from the industry should be adopted throughout the industry.

The reason that Microsoft takes so much flack for it is because its executives then refuse to admit that Microsoft didn't invent the borrowed features -- despite the obviousness of it all.

User Account Control

[glas_gow (961896)]

Then there's User Account Control, an intrusive dialog box that pops up whenever you try to install a program or adjust a PC-wide setting, requesting that you confirm the change by entering your password. This will strike most people as an unnecessary nuisance, and you can turn it off.

Guess which feature the majority of users will disable.

Seriously, I hope there is some sort of privilege separation, only requiring password authentication for applications that need escalated privileges, otherwise this feature will be ignored left, right and centre.

Proof that Windows isn't an OS X clone

[Schraegstrichpunkt (931443)]

It's a bloody pain in the ass to port UNIX/POSIX/Linux software to it, unlike OS X.

News for Nerds

[value_added (719364)]

A summary of the fine article:

• Windows Vista is beautiful
• The Start Menu has changed
• New Programs include Sidebar, Photo Gallery, DVD Maker, Chess Titans and Flip 3-D
• More logic to its folder structure and naming scheme
• New Sleep mode for laptops
• New Presentation Mode for PowerPoint
• Internal fortifications blah blah Service Hardening blah blah blah
• Includes IE7
• Includes Windows Defender
• Includes Parental Controls
• Includes User Account Control
• Includes a backup program
• Netmeeting has been replaced by Meeting Space
• Wordpad can't open .doc files

Sigh.

With a little effort, Microsoft could fit the David Pogue Takes On Vista review onto a sticker to put on the retail boxes. Until then, let's hope some enterprising Slashdot reader downloads a copy of Vista and offers something more substantive for discussion.

Re:

[kahei (466208)]

...because a Slashdot reader's take on Vista would be completely unbiased!

I don't find Pogue's take hard to believe. In 5 years of development, I'd expect them to be able to pretty things up and reorganize the directory structure. I mean, this is 5 whole _years_. The only thing in the list above that sounds like a real change is the sleep mode -- I hear good things about that. So, it's not like we're seeing hugely inflated claims here.

All I want from it is for it to be a stable baseline for development

Corporate environments

[klubar (591384)]

Most Vista reviewes (and the /. reactions) fail to consider the mission of Vista in most big corporations. Sure, there might be some comparisons to Macintosh for the look & feel, but in a corporate (> 500 employees) environment, the Windows platform really shines. From a robust permission scheme, remote control of group policies and really easy deployment there's nothing like Windows. (The macintosh really falls down in a controlled environment.

Can any one of the Mac fanboys come up with one Fortune 500 company (other than Apple) that has deployed more than 50% Macs?)

If you add Exchange to the mix, Windows really shines in the shared environment. Sure, for "grandma's" use and other special applications the Mac is a bright and shiny object, but it's just not a good team player.

Re:Corporate environments

[Tom (822)]

From a robust permission scheme, remote control of group policies and really easy deployment there's nothing like Windows.

Except any of the many Unix versions.

One of the first companies I worked for had a network of mostly Windos with some Solaris machines for the developers. Me and another guy managed the Solaris machines in addition to our regular jobs, and it was painless, smooth and easy. The windos dudes spent most of their days cussing at the inabilities of their OS.

Re:Corporate environments

[swillden (191260)]

Can any one of the Mac fanboys come up with one Fortune 500 company (other than Apple) that has deployed more than 50% Macs?

I'm a Linux fanboy, not a Mac fanboy, but I can: Genentech. 90% Mac and pushing towards 100%. I'm familiar with Genentech because I did some consulting for them last year. The Windows dominance on corporate desktops has much less to do with suitability for the task and much more to do with inertia and culture.

Apple didn't do EVERYTHING first...

[zoomba (227393)]

A common gripe I have with the Mac OS community is this seeming insistence that everything that is cool or nifty, or even useful, is somehow a rip-off of something Apple did first. If you look at articles like this one, you'd think Apple invented the on-desktop search bar (Google), or widgets/gadgets (DesktopX, Konfabulator).

Apple often does things *better* than other companies (with the exception of Dashboard) but they usually don't do it FIRST. This makes the claim that everyone rips off their stuff from Apple pretty silly.

Lets look at some of these claims in the article regarding what Microsoft is "stealing" from Apple:

1. Glowing Min/Max/Close Buttons
Ugh, I'm sorry, but this is not an Apple first thing. I've seen this in Windows custom UIs (WindowBlinds for example) for a good long while now, not to mention game UIs and a bunch of Flash applications. This is a very nice design element, and yes Apple did it well, but they didn't do it first.

2. "Instant Search"
Yes, I know... you're trying to compare it to Spotlight and the traditional Sherlock tool. Guess what though, well before Spotlight there was Google Desktop which gave you the in-frame search box. I like Spotlight a lot, it makes navigating files on my system a hell of a lot easier, but it's not new, and all similar search systems aren't instantly copycats of it.

3. Sidebar and Gadgets/Widgets
Like I said before, the Gadget/Widget thing has been around a LOT longer than Apple fans like to think. Dashboard was the first attempt to integrate them straight into the OS as a bundled feature, but it was pretty poorly implemented. Apple in this regard was several years late to the party. The MS Sidebar is also a fairly poor implementation... so I guess if anything you can accuse MS of stealing some of Apple's own bad design work.

4. The bundled apps "Photo Library" "DVD Maker" "Chess Titans" etc...
Umm... ok... I'll give you Apple folks this one. With the way MS broke apart the Outlook features into individual apps is a little too close to the iCal, Address Book, Mail.app scheme. This one is probably a straight-rip from the Apple playbook.

5. Flip3D a poor man's Expose
Bull. Flip3D is a cheesy way to show off the 3D capabilities in the desktop layer. It has nothing to do with Expose and the multiple ways to display everything currently running. I think Expose does things way better. Flip3D is a gimmick, nothing more. If MS wanted to ape the Expose design, they could have easily done it better.

There are a lot of things Apple does well, and the article does admit that Apple borrows, often even from Windows, to get its feature set. However, the claim that these features were taken from Apple as opposed to being taken from wherever Apple themselves snagged them is presumptuous.

Re:Apple didn't do EVERYTHING first...

[Chrononium (925164)]

A few notes: 1. Glowing buttons were completed in Mac OS X long before WindowBlinds came up with it (August 2005). 2. As a former Apple employee, I know that we sure had Spotlight figured out to a large extent by the time that GDS came out. 3. The widget thing is pretty old, at least as old as the original Mac OS (sure, the technology and capabilities were not the same, but widgets really are supposed to be mini/assistant apps). Linux has quite naturally taken a liking to it and has a better "widget" system than either company, though (IMHO) not as easy to use. 4. Yup. Although, how could they not stay competitive and not include these apps? 5. I think that Expose likely corrupted their imaginations into what was possible with a 3D windowserver. I honestly believe that they didn't have anything better than Flip3D that wasn't already too similar to Expose.

One more perspective

[nutznboltz2003 (832752)]

I have been running Vista on my laptop (HP nc6320) since it was released to business users. My laptop is a Core Duo 1.66Ghz with 512MB of ram. It was sold as "Vista ready" and even had that wonderful 100% Vista Compatible sticker on the side. Sadly, it was not.
Vista failed to recognize almost all of the hardware. Thankfully, it did recognize the wireless card, so I was able to go to HP's site and download most of the hardware. It never did recognize the fingerprint reader (likely bad drivers) and there were two devices that came up as unknown device which I have yet to be able to track down. Also, since the video card is shared memory, I do not get all of the nice visual features on this laptop that I would on a more powerful desktop.
That being said, I am very happy with the performance of this latop. The boot time is significantly nicer, and it runs Office 2007 perfectly. I also enjoy the menu structure so much more. Some of the layout reminds me of Mac/Linux, such as not having a "Documents and Settings" folder, but instead having a "Users" folder on the root drive. Things like this are not massive changes to the user experience, but for someone like me, who works on both Macs and PCs all day, it seems more natural, and I do feel I'm a little more productive during the day.
I would actually like to replace Windows XP on my home machine with Vista, which can handle the special effects, but as I have a very old Brooktree tv tuner card, I will likely be stuck with XP until I can afford a new tuner card as well. The Beta releases of Vista did not recognize the card, so I don't have any hope for the final release.
Also, for those wondering, Windows ReadyBoost has done wonders for my latop performance. I can actually tell a difference in the opening/closing time of office documents when I have my 1GB thumb drive attached. My older 256MB drives were not even offered the option of ReadyBoost, but they are not USB2.0 native, so that is likely the issue with those units.

Microsoft has been doing this since Windows 1.0

[argent (18001)]

You get the feeling that Microsoft's managers put Mac OS X on an easel and told the programmers, "Copy that."

If you believe what Marlin Eller (a former Microsoft exec) wrote in his book, Microsoft has been doing this since Windows 1.0. Why did the first few versions of Windows use cooperative multitasking? Because the Macintosh didn't do multitasking at all, and because cooperative multitasking made running a single app seem faster and more responsive to Bill Gates as he shuffled between the team developing Windows and the team working on the Applications Apple was writing for the as-yet-unrevealed Macintosh.

Bill Gates loved the Macintosh, and I suspect he still does... he sees Apple as Microsoft's unpaid unofficial brainstorming lab. He doesn't care if a few geeks think of Vista as an OS X clone, because he knows that 99.44% of the customer base simply don't care.

Re:Check links

[Rosco P. Coltrane (209368)]

Gee man, it's called an existentialist symlink, one of the new features of the Vista filesystem: the symlink is there, but it doesn't point at any file or serve any function. Pogue clearly demonstrates Vista's superiority here!

Re:Check links

[gEvil (beta) (945888)]

I don't know what you all are talking about. It must be a problem with both Windows and Linux. The video link works perfectly fine on my Mac. ;)

You missed the most important part...

[tgd (2822)]

This is a double feature. Its a "Slashdot Editors Suck" article AND a "Someone Doesn't Like Vista" article!

Its like Christmas a week early!

I didn't notice when I clicked on it, was it Zonk?

Re:Okay we get it

[AxminsterLeuven (963108)]

Yes. And when Vista's successor is announced, we'll get "Vista didn't have this crap" and "At least with Vista, you could ..." articles. Every day. It is the Slashdot way, grasshopper.

Re:

[Capt James McCarthy (860294)]

"Are we going to get a "someone doesn't like Vista" article every day until the operating system is released to the general public?"

Great. Another year and a half of these articles then.

Re:Okay we get it

[soft_guy (534437)]

If you tried to engineer something like USB in the 80s, it would have been cost prohibitive. USB took tremendous efforts to bring the whole industry together. ADB was created by one guy, Woz, in a few weeks. And ADB worked very, very well and was very reliable and it was amazingly cheap to manufacure. That would be like calling the carburetor a failure because it has been replaced by fuel injection.

Also, I would not call AppleTalk a failure either. It did a lot to help people who were trying to network groups of Mac systems together. For its time, it was a good system. The fact that the industry standardized on IP does not mean AppleTalk was a failure. In fact, the whole ZeroConf effort comes out of trying to bring discovery that AppleTalk had from the beginning to IP networks.

And calling MacOS a failure? Give me a break. I suppose DOS was a failure. And the Apple II. And the telegraph.

You are an ignorant Microsoft fanboy.

What???

[brunes69 (86786)]

Well, I wouldn't be surprised if that was either total bunk, or gross misrepresentation by the author.

The idea of using a flash drive to supplement main memory is assenine for a number of reasons. Like the above, yanking it out would leave the OS in a totally assed up state. As well, flash only has ~ 1-2 million write cycles. Your thumb drive would be toast in just a week or two if you were using it as RAM.

Re:What???

[_xeno_ (155264)]

No, it's real. He's parroting Microsoft's selling of the feature. It's called Windows ReadyBoost [microsoft.com] (they helpfully don't offer an anchor to link directly to it, it's there, scroll down). Another poster [slashdot.org] offered a FAQ about ReadyBoost [msdn.com] on an MSDN blog, where the blogger assures his readers that Microsoft has worked out the issues involved with limited writes and removing the drive.

To quote the linked Microsoft advertising page:

Windows Vista introduces a new concept in adding memory to a system. Windows ReadyBoost lets users use a removable flash memory device, such as a USB thumb drive, to improve system performance without opening the box.

They really are selling it as "add a USB drive to improve your system's memory."

Re:What???

[drsmithy (35869)]

Windows is a total mystery to those who only barely understand just enough *nix to run a live cd with kde/gnome.

Windows is usually a total mystery even to those who have mastered unix to the point of, say, writing kernel-level code.

Windows and *nix are functionally equivalent, just minor syntax differences to access the semantics.

Maybe if your view is from the orbit occupied by people who get confused when two or more windows are on the screen at the same time...

Except for those who use FreeBSD or Gentoo with complete source package installation by compiling everything including the kernel, you're just a binary whore beholden to Red Hat, Novell, etc. instead of Microsoft.

If you're using ports (or portage) the difference is still just semantics.

Heck, even if you're sucking files out of the developer's SVN repository and compiling it yourself, it's *still* just semantics. You're still just a "whore" beholden to whomever is writing the code.

it's a pagefile cache, ReadyBoost

[_Shorty-dammit (555739)]

a recent typical USB thumbdrive is something like 10x faster at random access of 4KB chunks than even the fastest hard drives. So Vista can use one of these USB drives as a cache for the pagefile, speeding up a system quite a bit *IF* it is using the pagefile quite a bit. That is, if you're a bit low on RAM and the pagefile is getting hit pretty hard. Pop in a USB stick and allow it to use a portion for this feature and you should get a pretty decent boost. If, however, you already have tons of RAM you

Re:One "interesting" feature I didn't know about

[antifoidulus (807088)]

They may not have as much bandwidth, but that doesn't mean they aren't as "fast" per se. If you are pushing around large amounts of data, then yes, the hard drive will be faster. However, if I want a page from memory(not exactly a lot of data), things can be a bit different. I first have to request the data from the hard drive, the hard drive has to spin to find the data, then deliver it to me. The latencies involved can really add up. Wheras on a flash disk, all data takes the exact same amount of time to find. So as soon as I know the address(a simple translation), I can get the data. No seeking necessary. Can save you lots of time if you do a bunch of little reads(and comparatively few writes).

Re:Video brokenness

[erlando (88533)]

You could read the article and find out, that the link [feedroom.com] is prominently displayed in the lefthand side. But then again.. This is Slashdot... ;-)

Re:

[TripMaster Monkey (862126)]

You falsely represent it as your own original work.