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Microsoft's "Mojave Experiment" Teaser Site Goes Live
Posted by
timothy
on Sun Jul 27, 2008 05:53 AM
from the resculpting-expectations dept.
from the resculpting-expectations dept.
MojoKid writes "Earlier this week, Microsoft was reported to be arranging a kind of 'blind taste test' to get die-hard Windows XP users to try Vista. They were told that they were trying a new OS, called Mojave. The report went on to suggest that users liked the OS, though they were actually running Vista. Now it appears Microsoft has put up a
teaser site, with
plans to show the actual video footage next week. Though the footage should at least have some entertainment
value, it would be a bit of a reach to expect that the test methodologies were
real-world enough such that users had to deal with things like user account
control, driver updates, and broad application compatibility."
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Is It Windows 7, Or KDE 4? 559 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Is it Windows 7 or KDE 4? In this video, ZDNet takes to Sydney's streets to find out what people think of what they think is a Windows 7 demonstration. The results are surprising." Or maybe they're not surprising at all.
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In other news (Score:4, Funny)
Researchers have conducting 'taste tests' have found that recipients of grits in their pants preferred having cold grits poured down their pants rather than hot grits.
Re:In other news (Score:4, Funny)
The real question on everyone's minds is, of course, was Natalie Portman involved? If so, was she naked and/or petrified?
Parent
Re:In other news (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
makes you wonder (Score:4, Interesting)
makes you wonder if they used a stock install of vista, or the upcoming vista sp1 etc. 'here, it's not a pile of crap'
(with each driver being run having been fully audited by microsoft, and everything tested beforehand to make sure it works)
A good test would have been to have them install the os themselves, on a box that could be randomly chosen from a large selection each with different hardware, and to see how well they fare with getting it all going.
Re:makes you wonder (Score:5, Funny)
Repeat the experiment with a "Vista Capable" set of hardware, the stuff MS is getting sued over.
Parent
Re:makes you wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
I just did another downgrade from Vista to XP this week. A friend bought a brand new PC from Wal-Mart with Vista on it. He couldn't stand the fact that his 5-year-old machine at work running XP was more responsive than his brand new Vista box.
He wanted the downgrade bad enough that he traded me several XBox games to do the work. That is saying something right there. When I asked him if he liked the features on Vista he looked at me quizzically and scratched his head.
Never let bling interfere with usability. The "ooh, shiny" of fancy graphics and widgets lasts only a moment. On the other hand, usability issues will become increasingly frustrating over time.
Parent
Re:makes you wonder (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:makes you wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
.
The $349 Vista Basic desktop at Walmart.com ships with 2 GB RAM
Walmart.com has 30 Vista desktops and 20 Vista desktops that ship with at least 2 GB RAM. 3 or 4 GB is not uncommon. 64-bit Vista is gaining visibility as well.
The 512 MB PC runs XP Home or - wait for it - Linux.
This follows a depressingly familiar pattern. The moment OEM Linux begins to gain some traction, hardware prices fall and the Windows system with eye-popping specs becomes suddenly very affordable.
Parent
Re:makes you wonder (Score:5, Interesting)
I had serious problems on my Quad G5 when I upgraded to Leopard 10.5.0 from Tiger OS X (10.4). I kept reporting bugs to bugreporter.apple.com , stay away from any third party enhancement until something stable ships (from Apple!) and tried my best to report third party quirks.
It has nothing to do with Vista of course except one thing.
Apple actually admits the issues (which effects me) and asks for more information, samples of processes, attached USB drives list.
Now after such love-hate relationship, 10.5.4 (think like SP4) became way better on Tiger in some aspects. You also feel like someone out there cares for your issues. Whether they fix or not, that is another issue. MS have driven people to such paranoia (with Genunine advantage) that people tweaks their paid operating system NOT to send kernel crash reports.
MS won't admit any issues and does such crazy things like claiming people having problems are actually "psychologically" having them and set a site for it even. The root of problem is that.
Random, cheap hardware is their problem too. E.g. Apple did a very interesting (not sure if intentional) thing to get rid of broken RAMs. Either 10.3.x or 10.4.x (I guess 10.3) does a RAM test, a hardcore one silently and basically falls to black screen if RAM broken. Would MS dare to do such a thing? Please note that it is an experience and various random Apple service center/sales guys quote. There is no such "We are testing your RAM and will fail if it is broken" status message in installler :)
Parent
Re:makes you wonder (Score:4, Insightful)
It was probably an HP.
My HP tablet running Vista took at least 20 minutes to be usable the first time it booted. Wiped it, installed Vista again (from a Dell disk, ironically enough; Dell doesn't ship crapware), and suddenly it's a great little machine.
You can't blame Microsoft for the crapware HP puts on the machine, especially if you were one of those protesting when Microsoft tried to gain more control of the end-user experience.
Parent
Re:makes you wonder (Score:4, Informative)
I've been a die hard Slack fan for years now. Like, I first got my hands on it with the first edition of "Linux Unleashed" in 1995-ish, probably with Slackware 2.x. :)
I don't have a benchmarked number available right now, but I can tell you what I've observed in previous tests.
On the same hardware (same physical machine, different os install), a 64bit Linux OS of the same distribution will run faster than it's 32bit counterpart, regardless of the 2GB factor.
I bought my first 64 bit machine when the prices came down low enough to afford one, and at the time I was making good money. :) I installed the 32bit Slackware and then several others because Slamd64 hadn't come out yet. If I recall correctly, I ended up running Gentoo for a little while on there. Since Slamd64 came out, I use Slackware on the 32bit machines, and Slamd64 on the 64bit machines exclusively.
After a while, we had a big power hungry project. I was pushing for a good 64 bit system. I had to do a long proof of why to the powers that be, both bosses and developers of why we wanted to use a 64 bit OS for a new project. It took quite a while to prove it, but every way we looked at it, except for price, the performance was there.
What we ended up with were a pair of quad Opteron 848's with 16Gb RAM (I believe). This was just after the 848's came out, and we had a hard time even getting our hands on them, and paid the premium for buying the latest and greatest thing out there.
Then came the interesting part. I assembled the machines, burnt them in at the office, and delivered them to the colo. The developers then got their hands on them. They had been beating up on their 32 bit machines for a few months, and were looking forward to the performance, but were worried that such a new product was the wrong thing to do. The developers were using MySQL for the database, and had the hand holding support contract. Anything you need, any time, someone will be in and helping.
The developers were flipping out because no matter what they did, they could only induce 2% CPU load on one processor, and no extra load on the other 3. Something was obviously wrong. I insisted there was nothing wrong with the OS. Maybe it was a database problem, or maybe they just weren't creating enough load.
It got escalated through the MySQL support structure, to one of their guys logging into the machine to have a look. His response was "That's the fastest machine I've ever been on. It's only using 2% of 1 CPU because that's all it needs. The database is still idle. I threw a huge load test at it to make it work any harder, and never maxed it out."
He then proceeded to ask me for permission to play some more. He wanted to build cross compilers. When he was done he told me "That should have taken a week. I started it last night, and it was done by morning." I presume he was building quite a few. :)
I'm not going to try to say that the 64 bit machine is the holy grail or anything, but when you have the option, take it. At very least, if you don't like the 64bit OS, you can always go to the 32bit. All it will cost you is long enough to do the install, unless of course you dual boot. :)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
(with each driver being run having been fully audited by microsoft, and everything tested beforehand to make sure it works)
So kind of like an Apple? Do something that everyone raves about, but get put down for it. Sounds fair to me.
Vista ... rocks? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Vista ... rocks? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Vista ... rocks? (Score:5, Funny)
Vista is like Chili and Whiskey. It might seem good when it's on the tongue, but your ass will be sore in the morning.
You do know that you're supposed to drink whiskey, right?
Parent
Re:makes you wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you suggesting that Microsoft would actually go through the trouble of "stacking the deck"? The very same Microsoft whose presentations are famous with the likes of Bill Gates plugging in a scanner and getting the BSOD in front of the whole planet? To suggest this would suggest that Microsoft has learned from their mistakes which I find unlikely. In order to learn from your mistakes, you have to first admit to yourself that you even MADE a mistake which is not something Microsoft is known for doing. In fact, this whole exercise is about trying to say "you guys are all just prejudiced against Vista! You never gave it a fair chance!" rather than admitting to themselves that Vista is a mistake and that cutting off WindowsXP is an even bigger one.
Parent
It's MS, not Apple (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, you have to distinguish between
1. what MS's PR/propaganda machine does to the outside world, and
2. what MS does internally.
I remember the story linked to on Slashdot, where basically to get any new product and technology done at MS, you had to go in front of Bill Gates, hear him say that it's the dumbest thing he ever heard, then tell him that he's wrong and you're sure of it. Pretty much everything that was done at MS past some point, was done by people who told Bill Gates to his face that he's wrong or made a mistake.
It's not Apple, where everything is supposedly done because of The Great Man Steve Jobs, and everything is because of The Great Man's vision, and He is never wrong. At MS everything was done _in_ _spite_ of Bill Gates's vision to the contrary. Or at least so went that little game internally.
Their invasion of the Internet, going with DirectX instead of OpenGL, etc, etc, etc, were done by people who went in front of Bill Gates and told him that he's wrong.
And there were enough cases where they switched directions in mid-flight, instead of ploughing ahead to the hilt. E.g., they weren't going to do any Internet support, they wanted to make their own proprietary network. Some ex-Borland guy went to Bill and told him that it's a mistake, and the rest is history.
Heck, from the very beginning there's the story of the new guy who went to Bill Gates to tell him that the flood-fill function in MS Basic is crap and needs to be rewritten. So he got asked to write a better one then. Turns out that that function was written by Bill himself.
Now the PR bullshit they spew on the outside world, is a whole different story. And the kind of PR stunt in TFA _is_ probably their work. Though even that one occasionally admits that an older product had bad parts. E.g., see the Clippy spiel when they finally got rid of that annoyance.
Or you'll notice that there are more dumb ideas than that, which got silently discontinued. E.g., MS Bob. Now that was a fuckup. I don't see them still pushing it instead of admitting that it didn't work.
Now mind you, I'm not saying that MS is anywhere near perfect or ideal in any form or shape or aspect. But they do realize that sometimes things don't work as formerly planned, and some are just mistakes. You don't get to be a mega-corporation that size by being keeping doing a mistake just to not admit it.
But again, admitting it to the outside world, now that's a whole other problem. Of course they're not going to say Vista is crap, as long as they don't have a replacement. But they _are_ already working on Windows 7 and on the SP1 for Vista, and I'd be surprised if they didn't include some of the lessons learned in the design of both.
Parent
Re:makes you wonder (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:makes you wonder (Score:4, Insightful)
"I see that you don't use any windows boxes yourself. That in itself should disqualify you from judging the merits of Vista."
Just because I personally don't use any windows boxes, does not exclude the possibility I support and fix messed up windows boxes, I have personally seen computers that, for example, could not play the built in windows games when music was playing in media player, and needless to say lots of other weird ass crap. All of which wound up being drivers (primarily) or vista's fault.
In regards to people's boxes eventually getting hosed, I agree, some don't, however of the techies I know, all of them reinstall every year to two years, because it slowly degraded with the crap being installed etc. The last xp box I fixed was not 'dead' however took 20 seconds to load the start menu after the os was fully loaded... with a core 2 duo. admittedly it's usually nowhere near that bad though.
"Are consumer-grade computers even built to last 5 years without experiencing some kind of trouble."
You'd typically lose a hard drive and disc drive by then, otherwise yeah.
"What about driver support? Can I use any scanner I want in linux? Or this no-name wireless card that works just fine in Vista?"
To that I say, can you use any scanner you want in vista? if you answer yes I'd call bullshit, I have a scanner here that xp or vista wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole, as for no name wireless cards, last two random non checked cards worked perfectly fine in linux, I know there are still unsupported ones out there, but they are becoming fewer and fewer.
But still, that is not the point, no os (no matter how much it tries) will support every piece of hardware in existence
"If so, how do you think people would react if they had been given a shiny, new OS that, for instance, does not support Itunes?"
depends on how it's handled, on insertion of ipod, if they are presented with gtkpod or some other such program that will handle their ipod needs when plugged in and still complain, then they are being bitchy.
If they want it for the Itunes store, then they have obviously used it on another platform before to get hooked, why not let them continue to use it on that platform, nobody is forcing them to change (though lots of people I see only use itunes for ipods).
I just think you assumed too much about me, which is fair enough considering the amount of idiots on slashdot is non trivial. Linux is not without it's problems, anyone would be insane not to say that, however they are a different set of problems, and ones that can typically be resolved by the user if enough attention is paid.
Parent
Hardware (Score:4, Insightful)
They were probably running on top of the range hardware as well, a grahics card with 1GB of RAM, system with 4GB of RAM and a Quad core processor etc.. most people accept that Vista looks nicer, but looks are not everything to those who have to use their computer every day for work.
Would have been funny if they tried to do this when Vista was first released and one of the tests was 'delete a file' :p
Re:Hardware (Score:5, Informative)
>They were probably running on top of the range hardware as well, a grahics card with 1GB of RAM, system with 4GB of RAM and a Quad core processor etc..
Except that they were not. The linked site says they were running on HP dv2000 with 2Gb RAM.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Make the fsckers run it on a 2.4 GHz P4 with 256 MB RAM.
I've never understood this.... (Score:5, Insightful)
My (limited) Vista experience is on a laptop with Celeron CPU, 1Gb RAM and Intel graphics.
It seemed to run just fine to me, Aero included.
I wounldn't have Vista for other reasons but maybe Microsoft is right - people like you need to take a second look.
Parent
Only Vista? (Score:5, Interesting)
They gave them Vista and asked them if they liked it... That doesn't say much because nobody (most importantly THEY) knows if they'd like OSX more.
Re:Only Vista? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why didn't they give the users multiple flavors of the most colorful operating systems they never tried (Vista, OSX, Kubuntu, etc) and ask them which one they liked best?
Why? Oh I don't know really.. Maybe because Microsoft doesn't want to publish something that says that users like Mac OS X best?
Parent
Re:Only Vista? (Score:5, Funny)
Great PR job. I KNEW the Iraqi Minister of Information would land on his feet somewhere.
Parent
Re:Only Vista? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because that question is irrelevant. This isn't about trying to convince people who don't use Windows to use Windows, or about trying to convince people that Windows is the best OS ever. The message Microsoft is going for is simple: "If you like XP, you'll like Vista too."
(And I happen to agree with them: I'm not particularly fond of Windows, but having used Vista, I can't see where all the hate is coming from. My personal ranking is Linux > OS X > Vista > XP.)
Parent
Seems desperate (Score:5, Insightful)
I think this is a bad move by Microsoft. It only makes them seem desperate. By making this viral campaign, they openly admit that vista so far has failed in the consumer market.
This campaign really focus on the wrong issues. The main complaints over vista has never been that it isn't shiny and dazzling enough. The problems was that it makes older hardware painfully slow, the UAC annoyance, incompatible drivers etc. These are not things that a user notices in a 10 minute demo. This campaign shows nothing.
They have a point (Score:3, Insightful)
75% of the whiners haven't ever installed it, and the other 25% tried to put it on a 6 year old budget "Dude I got Dell" computer the first month after it went public.
I don't even think there is even a dead horse anymore to beat. You guys are just masterbating now.
Re:They have a point (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:They have a point (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, I'm going to call you on these - but first, some background.
When Vista came out, I didn't immediately jump onto it - I had no need, I was using Macs exclusively at home and XP exclusively at work, I had no spare time to 'play' with an OS.
In the past year my work role changed drastically - I was no longer the legacy systems developer that I had been for 5 years, I was moving into infrastructure support - so I decided it was time to buy a Windows laptop (Windows on bootcamp is not really decent for heavy usage, Apple haven't done a stellar job with the drivers).
So I went out and bought an XPS M1530 - 2GB ram, Core2Duo T7500. It came with Vista Home Premium. SP1 got put on as soon as the laptop hit my desk.
My first thought was 'Ok, get the drivers for XP and lets install XP Pro'. Only I didn't have the time, so I put it off. And then I kept finding other things to do, so it kept getting put off.
Until, eventually, it was several months later and I realised that Vista wasn't living up to its Slashdot hype - it wasn't getting in my way, I didn't have a slow system, it wasn't crashing, none of my apps were having issues, UAC was staying out of my way and only making an appearance when I *expected* it to make an appearance etc etc. In short, I sat back and realised there wasn't any reason for me to actually go back to XP Pro.
So here I sit, XPS in front of me, iMac on its pedistool over on one corner of the desk, Macbook Pro on another pedistool on the other corner of the desk, and a Dell Vostro 200 sat under the desk running Windows Server 2008 Standard. And I couldn't be happier.
Now, to address your points:
So, sorry but your assertion that 'Problems with Vista that you notice very quickly (but not in 10 minutes)' haven't yet applied to myself after several months of usage.
Now, its sad but all I am expecting in reply to this is the standard 'M$ shill' response - I'm no shill, just someone that hasn't had a problem.
Parent
Re:They have a point (Score:4, Insightful)
I too have noticed that Vista 64 Home Premium SP1 runs fine on top of the line hardware, such as your workstation class notebook. I have it running on an Intel Q6600 quad core, 4GB RAM, Nvidia 8800GT, and it runs admirably.
The people having problems with Vista seem to have only 1GB RAM or less, and ancient older computers without dedicated graphics cards.
I won't fault them for hating an OS that runs like molasses when XP runs just fine on anything with 1GB of RAM.
For those of us that have really top of the line PCs like you and I, sure, we can run it just fine, and for the most part, still have no major problems with it (except I still wonder why it takes 2-3 minutes to delete a lot of files... what the hell is it doing all that time?).
For the vast majority of PC users that don't upgrade every year and don't need top of the line equipment, there is a night and day difference between XP and Vista.
Oh, and by the way, I did have to spend about 4 hours turning off every single unnecessary service, background indexing, and hacking the registry to make it decent to play games in, but that was long ago and I've mostly forgotten about all of that effort...
Parent
10 minutes? (Score:5, Funny)
Stop Microsoft Violence! (Score:4, Funny)
Chevy Chase: Uh, Roseanne, that's a teaser site, not a taser site.
Roseanne Roseannadanna: Oh. Never mind.
Marketing Reboot (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft may got something here.
I don't think Vista's requirements are a problem at all for people with at least a 2 year old pc.
Vista's main problem is marketing related. They didn't stick with only one household version (ultimate) like OS X does, instead they offer you 10 versions like "starter, home basic, home premium" and people gets irritated and confused.
This Mohave thing looks like a facelift making the product less microsoftish and more Web 2.0/Apple inclined.
It may work with people who got seducted with a Macbook if they cash in good press, enough ads and TV spots.
Desperation? (Score:5, Interesting)
This smacks of some desperation on Microsoft's part. I mean, if they have to avoid telling people they're using Vista, then they're acknowledging there's a negative perception of the OS out there.
And this, IMHO, is what trips software makers up. If your product is perceived negatively, then you'd damn well better find out why and fix it. I've said this about OpenOffice for a while now. Is it slow? Maybe a little. Not terrible to me, but maybe a little, and there are certainly some people who think so. So try and work on that. The same goes for Vista. For better or worse, people don't like it, so find out why and address those issues. Don't just try to convince people that their opinions are wrong.
The problem, of course, is that MS has invested tons of money in Vista. Whether it's a turkey or not, it's perceived that way, and MS realizes it, hence this site. But when people have made up their minds, it won't be easy to solve the problem simply by telling them they're wrong. Address their complaints instead, and you might convince them.
Hands-off experience with an OS (Score:5, Insightful)
Having a hands-off experience with an OS is like examining a car in the showroom: its mileage is just great as long as you don't start the engine.
In addition, my guess is that that Microsoft ensured favourable test conditions (top-of-the-line hardware, plenty of Ram, hardware graphics acceleration, and a nice clean install without crapware).
This "Mojave" demonstration might be good publicity though, but only as long as people don't start to question what exactly was shown and whether or not Microsoft provided unrealistically favourable test conditions. For one thing seems pretty obvious: Microsoft didn't use a $498 Dell computer from Wallmart as a test platform.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
whether or not Microsoft provided unrealistically favourable test conditions.
Of course they did. The test subjects didn't have to deal with installing or registering it.
-jcr
Re:Hands-off experience with an OS (Score:4, Insightful)
I can see the purpose behind this kind of test - it's very, very popular to hate Vista even though there are very few actual problems with the OS (especially since SP1). We switched to Vista at work right after it came out and while there were a few rough edges to start with, I never felt like going back to XP. Vista is simply better in every way except performance on low-end systems.
Of course, with the anti-Vista hatefest still going on, there's little Microsoft can do but try new marketing approaches to get that message across. They're hardly running out of money, after all. Unfortunately this means that Windows 7 will likely be Vista with a new name and some of the rough edges smoothed out, to pull the same trick as the "Mojave Experiment" - give Vista a different name and people might like it.
Parent
How don't they know ? (Score:4, Interesting)
I know how Vista would look - as 90% of
So what have they changed, that those "experienced users" haven't recognized it as vista, or were they drugged before or even bribed ?
Was it really Vista or was it Windows Server 2008, which seems to be the better Vista ?
I think of this as a usual MS market scam, but it reminds me to a similar kind of annoying advertisement IBM was persuing
for OS/2 Warp 3.0.
It was on german TV, don't know if it was somewhere else on TV, featuring a small headed blondi-like secretary who was just to dumb to understand how real multitasking would make her work easier, and how OS/2 would push her climax to a new orgasm*)
By the way if it wouldn't be possible to turn off all colourfullness on WindowsXP I wouldn't use it either and
stayed with Windows 2000, or I would have poisoned the search dog, burned the wizzard and clamped the paper clip.
*Warning this is a pleonasm.
How desperate! (Score:3, Funny)
Microsoft's attempts to pull their Edsel out of the mud reminds me of a line from an old Albert Brooks movie:
"Wouldn't it be great if desperation made us more attractive?"
Rest assured, it's like the coke tests (Score:5, Insightful)
You remember the coke ads where the "randomly selected" participants invariably chose coke over the other brand? No, really? What did you think you see, a "representative average"? Or just the ones that actually chose coke, no matter whether that was 90 or 10 percent of the people "tested"?
It's like those "interviews" where they try to show just how dumb the average Joe is. Go out on the street with a world map and let people point out Iraq. Sure, 90% might find it, but when you only show the 10% who search for ages and finally point to India or even Florida, you "show" just how dumb the population is.
But let's for a moment assume that yes, 90 percent of their participants said that Vista is nice. Ok, it is. Hey, it sure looks great. Especially when you offer nothing to compare it to. Give someone who's hungry a Hamburger and he'll tell you it's great. Especially when you don't offer him some steak at the same time.
The right way to conduct such a test .... (Score:5, Interesting)
The right way to conduct such a test would be to pull a random low-end, Vista-certified PC from the shelf at Wal-Mart or Best Buy and then see what happens, starting with the unboxing process.
One of the many ways in which Microsoft aimed a BFG9000 at its own feet was certifying hardware incapable of running Vista. Hundreds of thousands of laptops were shipped with 512MB of memory. "First run" on such a system can take up to 45 minutes as Vista actually has to install itself first. Then the machine is so crippled by lack of RAM that even running Solitaire is interrupted by wild disk activity accompanied by random lockups of the user interface.
If you want to run Vista, you need to spend the price of an Macintosh on the hardware. And if you're going to do that, you might as well get a Mac in the first place.
There's nothing wrong with those half-gig laptops, by the way. They're great when running Ubuntu.
Double oops (Score:4, Insightful)
This campaign has two problems:
1. It wrecks the illusion that Microsoft believes "Vista is the most successful Windows release ever". Have you seen them talk about Vista in public? They cite sales statistics and call it their most well received release ever. Why then do that campaign in the first place, and that late into the cycle?
2. Microsoft underestimated the power of technical users forming the opinion of their less technical friends, clients, family. The marketing of Vista (the "wow" begins now and so on) was targeted to the non-technical folks, while ignoring to address the concerns raised by the more technical people they communicate with on a daily basis. This campaign fails in that as well, so it'll have a very minimal effect on Vista's PR.
I hate Vista, I have tried it. (Score:5, Interesting)
I am one of those who falls into the "die hard XP" group.
I DID try Vista. I gave it a fair dinkum go, and here's my story. I even sang it's praises for a short time (up until about point 4, which was less than 1 month in)
- Bought Vista, and an extra 1GB of memory, as I knew I'd need it.
- Installed Vista, installation and activation went smoothly.
- Had pain with sound card drivers (Creative SB Audigy 2). Couldn't change between headphones / speakers without relaunching every application that played sound. Very annoying.
- World of Warcraft (and other games) could not be run in Window mode without huge performance penalties. Found could alt-tab out of full screen with little of the normal delay you get when alt-tabbing out
- Discovered leaving a full screen 3D app alt-tabbed for more than a few minutes resulted in that app being inaccessible, requiring process kill.
- Decided to upgrade video card to get a performance boost. Vista required activation because I changed video cards. Couldn't be activated over the net, had to call Microsoft directly during business hours to get it turned back on. Ended up having to call from work and use remote desktop to enter the code supplied. WTF?
- A few days later, decided to get a second identical video card to get better performance (yay SLI!) No activation needed this time thankfully.
- Discovered Vista wouldn't run my video cards in SLI mode. Discovered BIOS update to fix this... installed it.
- Discovered despite the fix, Vista still wasn't running anything in SLI mode.
- Installed Ubuntu to dual-boot into. Discovered Ubuntu would quite happily run my video cards in SLI mode.
- Spent several nights googling, and testing things to get SLI working
- Formatted, re-installed Windows XP... no problems since.
Overall, i like Vista. (Score:4, Interesting)
I generally like Vista. Its flawed though and i hope that Microsoft will fix the silly memory management which just gobbles of all of your ram and never releases it to applications (they say it does... but it does not)
Going back to XP... is a bit primitive feeling. Vista has some nice UI enhancements, but i would rather see Microsoft do more with it. Its anoying to always switch folders to detail list mode, and some just show the music details... this is very anoying.
Even if you switch a folder to show a detail list... It would be nice for Vista to auto adjust each information column to display the information properly. I know you can right click on it, and have it adjust... but you need to do this for every folder.
XP is too barebones, and Vista is too bloated.
But i do like vista... i dont love it... and often i hate it.... but i tend to like it.
The DRM shit has to go, and they need to focus on system performance and ui rather than worry about stupid shit like weather or not i can steel movies or music from their data pathways. Especially when its at the cost of performance. Any smart computer user would know that performance is very important. Microsoft needs to get that in their head. The OS is not an interface to giant corporations, it is my desktop.
I know MS says in order to get blu-ray on windows, they had to encrypt the video pathways, thus rendering millions of crt monitors, landfill material. I find this disgusting, especially from BILL GATES, who is supposedly a humanitarian with an interest in helping man and the environment. Well Bill, you just dumped a shitload of CRT's into the ocean.
Blu-ray would have come to windows no matter what. The entire world runs windows... i think Sony would have to live with that.
Rip the DRM shit out now. Its bad for the environment, the user, and the performance of your OS. When you're more concerned with protecting IP, than PC performance, you are no longer writing an OS in my opinion.
I did say i enjoyed vista right? hehe.. I do... its got to evolve into a lighter, leaner, faster, meaner os. MS needs to make a killer OS. Vista was not it, but perhaps a step towards it. We can only hope.
Brilliant PR. And: story about blind taste tests (Score:4, Funny)
Very clever piece of PR on Microsoft's part. Nobody said ever said they weren't great at PR.
Speaking of blind taste tests, a funny thing happened a long time ago... my son was about six years old, we were at a mall where they were inviting people to "take the Pepsi challenge." My son was all excited, and so we lined up. They put two plastic cups in front of him. He tasted both. They asked which one he liked better.
"I like this one better," he said with a great air of seriousness, but, unfortunately for Pepsi, he went on solemnly, "because it's colder and it has more bubbles in it." The presenters tried to bull ahead ("You chose Pepsi!") but it was too late... everyone within earshot was cracking up.
Re:Vista isnt that bad really. (Score:5, Insightful)
yet my powerbook G4 from 2003 can run an OS with all the features of Aero, shadows, full screen , semi transparent menus etc just fine. You could install ubuntu with full compiz functionality on the same hardware as you have now.
Aero shouldn't require a third of the resources that it does, and should run just fine on your laptop. The fact that it doesn't is indicative of Vista's poor design.
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Re:Long wall of other people's writing for you. (Score:4, Insightful)
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