PC Magazine Editor Throws in the Towel on Vista 816
MacNN caught this incredible defection and loss of faith by a former Vista booster, PC Magazine editor-in-chief Jim Louderback, as he steps down from his position. "I've been a big proponent of the new OS over the past few months, even going so far as loading it onto most of my computers and spending hours tweaking and optimizing it. So why, nine months after launch, am I so frustrated? The litany of what doesn't work and what still frustrates me stretches on endlessly. The upshot is that even after nine months, Vista just ain't cutting it. I definitely gave Microsoft too much of a free pass on this operating system: I expected it to get the kinks worked out more quickly. Boy, was I fooled! If Microsoft can't get Vista working, I might just do the unthinkable: I might move to Linux."
Makes sense to me, AC. Vista users are unhappy. (Score:5, Insightful)
A silly AC writes:
Apparently there are more people reading Distrowatch with Vista than they are with Debian, ... The ultimate irony here - Distrowatch.com. It just kills me.
Vista owners are looking for a new OS. Why does this confuse you? If Vista is as bad as Louderback says it is, gnu/linux is the only upgrade option that will work. Large numbers of Windoze users looking at a site like Distrowatch is bad news for M$ and good news for software freedom.
I guess all this nonsense about Vista being a flop is far from true.
Visit the Vista failure log [slashdot.org] and wake up. M$ can't push Vista. It's SP1 won't fix things and I doubt they can come up with a new OS people will really want. They have gone too far down the digital restrictions path to recover.
Re:Tomorrow on slashdot.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Just a skin (Score:2, Insightful)
This is not to say that Linux or OSX or anything else is perfect. The problem is that Vista was billed as 'all new' and 'rewritten from the ground up'. It wasn't. THAT is was sucks about it.
People will wait for Vista SP1, or XP SP3 or... (Score:4, Insightful)
People keep saying this is the year for the Linux desktop because of Vista's failures, when most people don't care because XP and 2003 run just fine for them. They aren't looking for change from Vista or Lunix or anything else for that matter.
Re:Makes sense to me, AC. Vista users are unhappy. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Makes sense to me, AC. Vista users are unhappy. (Score:3, Insightful)
Outside of that, I think it's silly to try and use overall numbers as a gauge of how successful it is as an operating system people LIKE. Vista's numbers are going to go up regardless, since almost all new PC's and laptops you buy will have Vista installed.
But it's clear that not everyone is happy with it. Check out a site like notebookreview.com, and notice how for almost every new laptop that has come out, there is invariably a thread or two about getting XP running on it.
I suspect Louderback wrote that review months ago (Score:5, Insightful)
As Molly Ivins said: "Ya gotta dance with them what brung you."
Louderback's job was to keep his advertisers happy and I'm sure that was a big factor in how he chose to color his experience with Vista.
Not surprising.
-S
timing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Unthinkable? - Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you pander to just one operating system, as a supposed computer professional, your simply not up to the job in the first place.
A true, passionate PC user (and by that, I mean Personal Computer User, NOT just windows), you owe it to yourself to be up to speed on as much as possible. You should have at your fingertips either virtual or full iterations of Windows, Linux and MacOS.
The name of this magazine is "PC Magazine", to me, that means "Personal Computer Magazine" - of course, we all know the reality is that it's 90% windows based. (A personal irritation of mine is assuming that a PC is a windows box - akin to calling computer criminals hackers)
That the ex-editor should declare using Linux unthinkable is unthinkable in itself.
Lets hope the new editor has a bit more savvy, not that I care, I don't read computer magazines anymore, now I know why...
Doing the unthinkable (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank you very much, but Linux doesn't need "friends" who use it as a Horrible Fate that they'll threaten to inflict on themselves as a way to get Mommy Microsoft's sympathetic attention.
Funny and close to the truth (Score:1, Insightful)
At the risk of destroying a good joke by examining the kernel of truth in it
Microsoft is a marketing company. They do marketing. That is their specialty.
When I worked at Intel I quickly realized that Intel wasn't an engineering/design company, but a manufacturing company. AMD might make a better chip but Intel could make their chips for less and sell them for more.
Re:Makes sense to me, AC. Vista users are unhappy. (Score:5, Insightful)
However, it seems to me that it's likely that there are people who dislike Vista who've never even touched it, nor are informed about it. They dislike it because others, whose opinions they're willing to trust, do.
Tha'ts what viral marketing is all about ... trusted people influencing others. But it works both for you and against you.
Lightweight magazines are doomed (Score:5, Insightful)
I used to get PC Mag years ago, but stopped because I felt that the magazine was too biased in favor of MS.
I think all the big paper magazines around these parts have fallen for the same trap there. I gave up PC World, and later PC Pro, because their reviews of new versions of Windows, Office, etc. just seemed like sucking up to MS. That and the fact that in the latter case, they went to cover-DVD-only and more-or-less doubled the price, so I was paying more for a disc mostly full of junk and pretty much all of which I could just download if I wanted it than I was for a magazine that was half ads anyway. Oh, and the fact that most of their news stories were light on details, and those light details had been reported on the Internet weeks earlier.
The only point of still having magazines like this is if they can supply quality, in-depth reviews of products and industry analysis by people with the connections to find the material and the writing ability to report it well. If all they do is publish fluff reviews and sound-bite news, why on earth would I pay for that when I can read the same for free on-line?
Allegedly? Do Tell... (Score:5, Insightful)
Allegedly? So are you saying that vista adoption is not slow?
Gotcha. So it's not selling slowly, but that's only because it's a resource hog. I guess MS have realised that what the consumer really wants is bloat, and that if they hadn't made the OS so greedy then no one would be buying it?
Or did you just mean that it is selling slowly, and that's because it does need too many resources, but that it's very rude of us to go around saying so. Perhaps you meant yes it's not selling, and yes it's bloated, but don't go around bad mouthing DRM?
The trouble is, really, that to pin Vista's woes (alleged, if you insist) on any single factor is probably a gross oversimplification. Vista's problems include patchy driver support, a confusing pricing scheme, the lack of any compelling "must-have" feature for the OS, the fact that a lot of people don't want to change from XP, dislike of the licence terms, fears of added expense in terms of new software and hardware that may be needed to run the damn thing.
The that fact that it's a resource hog isn't helping, either, and neither is the DRM (because like it or not, an awful lot of XP users also use P2P) and neither is the fact that it's had some scathing reviews, many of them from writers normally counted among the Redmond faithful.
Still, at least the resource problem will go away as machines get faster. I suppose if you had to pick a single cause that's the one that lets the OS still seem like a viable concern. Maybe sales will take off next year if and when XP really gets retired.
Re:Works fine for me. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nothing's perfect (Score:3, Insightful)
That's not the unthinkable option (Score:5, Insightful)
P.S. - I too am a Linux supporter, and know "cramped" is a poor description of something that really is more free and liberating - but that's the intitial feeling Windows users get.
Re:Just a skin (Score:5, Insightful)
If a driver initializes the device in the windows "powered on" message but not the "resuming from sleep" message, then the pc might never return from sleep.
Sleep and hibernate both work on my amd/nvidia machine (in both Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux). Intel generally handles sleep well, I don't know about ati graphics cards or other chipsets (via, sys, etc).
Re:Common mistake. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:People will wait for Vista SP1, or XP SP3 or... (Score:4, Insightful)
Who? No seriously, who is this guy?
I trust magazines 100% as well. Surely, magazines would do nothing so distasteful as promoting products of their corporate sponsors? In fact, I'm 100% sure that products these magazines review are tested to the highest standards, and that these "journalists" are objective and give fair scores to their products.
Does anyone still read the trash that these magazines produce and believe it? I find it hard to believe that in an age where you can find so much information about any subject (especially technical information), you'd choose to limit yourself to the opinion of magazines that have full page advertisments for said products and expect anything but biased opinions.
For what it's worth, I've worked with an "IT journalist" in the past. Great guy, good writer, didn't know anything about the more complex things in IT (which is a really bad omen if you'll be reviewing IT products that do "complex" things). One of the rules of "IT journalism" is that you're not allowed to trash something completely, no matter how bad it is. The reason for that is that people stop sending your products to review, and potential advertisers don't send their money in your magazines direction if their product gets a bad review.
This guy is either going to change his opinion soon, or will be looking for another job. End of the story.
Re:The ONE good thing about VISTA: (Score:5, Insightful)
If only there were some alternative means of playing video games in one's own home. Like an appliance for video games, a console if you will...
And on that subject, this Amiga ex-user is taking enormous pleasure in seeing Windows relegated to "games system" status.
12 years earlier (Score:3, Insightful)
I suppose that sooner or later everyone will learn.
Whenever PC Mag Touts an OS (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Makes sense to me, AC. Vista users are unhappy. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not an OS X troll. I have a Gentoo desktop, a MacBook, a RHEL install, and the Windows laptop I mentioned, and they all get regular use right now for the big project I'm working on. For the average consumer, OS X is the killer, hands down.
Re:Nothing's perfect (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:People will wait for Vista SP1, or XP SP3 or... (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems obvious to me that Vista has reached "critical mass" in bug fixing. This concept is based on the average number of bugs accidentally generated by a bug fix. This value is always greater than zero, but a well-designed product keeps it very low. At all costs, you have to keep it well away from one. Once you're past this point, there's just no point point in fixing any more bugs — yours just making things worse.
Microsoft products have always been too complex and baroque. That's a good formula for the bug critical mass scenario. I'm only surprised it didn't happen before.
Re:Allegedly? Do Tell... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:timing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I feel his pain (Score:4, Insightful)
Notice the guy is leaving his job there too (Score:5, Insightful)
1) As an editor he HAD to push Microsoft products for the ad revenue. When he couldn't any longer, they dumped him.
2) Same as the above, except pushing crap products finally got to him and he quit.
Wonder how many other well-known PC zine employees are getting fed up with being forced to push Microsoft's shit when they know it isn't worth the bandwidth bits or CD pits it came on.
Re:Allegedly? Do Tell... (Score:5, Insightful)
And, I found a way to dispose of my license for Vista which recouped some of the additional cost.
I'm really happy with XP Pro, Vista didn't give me any new feature that I had to have, and, number one on my list, on a given E6300 w/ 2gig RAM and an X1950, I get much much better performance and fewer headaches with XP Pro than I did during the few hours that Vista ran on this machine.
I don't think Microsoft's going to be able to pull this one out of the fire. Even an SP1 won't save Vista. We're going to have to see an entire new nameplate before people are going to line up in droves to buy a new Microsoft OS. Vista was a bomb. Period.
Vista sucks, and most Win users are thieves, so? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yea, I know the mantra,"If they didn't have to provide backwards compatability for third-party hard/software, it would be a better system." Wake up. They DON'T provide backward compatability! They're just tacking new crap on top of old, and they break shit all the time! If your app from DOS or Win95 still works you're lucky, that's all. I've had several apps that broke on new OS releases,
just like they're doing with Vista, and XP before that, and NT before that. If you want backwards compatability, the only good way I can think of to do that is to run the old OS in a VM. That way you get the benefits of the new OS, and can run all your old stuff on the old OS.
I've talked about Linux with my family and friends, and they all bring up the same points: their games (or Apps) won't play on Linux; who cares about whether it's free or not, they just pirate windows and its' apps anyways. When I point out that Linux has very few (effectively none) virus or spyware weaknesses, they just say that they use (pirated) Norton. Why should they use GIMP when they've got the latest (pirated) Photoshop? Windows has built up an accepted culture of theft in modern society, and conditioned people to think that it's okay.
I used to pirate. I used to collect software and cracks and trade them with others. Then I found free/shareware programs that were really good, and I started looking for and using more of it. It felt good to not have to be afraid of getting caught with $80K worth of stolen software on my machines. I've gradually moved to using legit and free software, and it feels good. It wasn't quick or comprehensive, there are still apps we use that are proprietary, but they are getting fewer as I find freeware replacements.
MS has given us a fairly consistent (fairly F*ed up) computer environment for the last 20 yrs, yet it has also made thieves of most everyone I know. Has it been worth it?
No.
Well, thats all Microsoft needs... (Score:2, Insightful)
MS doesn't care to have friends, fans or enthusiasts, a huge number of long term "for the last time" customers is just as good to them.
After all, a business model that works, some Jim Louderbacks notwithstanding
The upgrade treadmill does not work for you. (Score:5, Insightful)
You might be happy with a seven year old OS, but most of us would like something a little more modern. Most GNU/Linux distributions have been through two stable releases since 2001 and each brought real improvements and features.
I don't begrudge your happiness but that kind of thing is short lived. Sooner or later XP users are going to join w2k, ME, 98, 95, 3.1 and DOS users who can't find new software or replacement devices that work with their OS. The non free software forces are working on new formats and devices that won't work with XP. If you wait too long, your work harder to transfer and your losses will mount. The waste of your time and effort is intentional and is the way the upgrade treadmill works. Those who think otherwise live in a fool's paradise.
Free software is the only upgrade that escapes the non free data trap and upgrade treadmill. The purpose of non free software is to make money for it's owners. To do this, the owners must keep users helpless and divided. Free software has a simpler purpose, to do what users want.
Re:Makes sense to me, AC. Vista users are unhappy. (Score:5, Insightful)
Poor little windows users must feel so trod upon.
The only thing is Linux is ready for prime time. And users can run it dual-boot if they still need their wondows training wheels.
There is a really good GUI interface for configuration and the stuff isn't that hard. Really. The fact that Linux allows people to customize and configure doesn't mean they have to or have to know all about it. Microsoft hides that stuff from users and makes it hard to do your own configuration. There was another thread here about how all the ad servers slow down web page loading and it was mentioned there that Vista won't let you add offending sites into the hosts file. I did it on a Linux machine and an Apple laptop running OSX - and it was easy. now I don't have any more offending popups or ad junk and my pages load really fast - just with blank spaces where the ads would have been otherwise.
But people don't need to know how to do that stuff but they can if they want. Lots of stuff comes with step by step instructions. People can go with the stock setup - which right out of the box is much more secure and capable than windows - or they can *if they want* learn more and actually administer and configure their own computer. I will take the path of choice rather than have my hands tied by Bill and Steve.
But the windows crowd needs to take a powder. Their fav OS is getting knocked because it sucks. They need to accept that and get on with their lives.
Louderback is a good person to ask. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm starting to wonder at this point is... how much of the Vista hate is just hype-driven? ... [people] dislike it because others, whose opinions they're willing to trust, do.
No one hates Vista, it's just software. Only tools from M$ talk about "hate" when people have the nerve to say Vista does not work. That kind of talk makes me think you have a strange definition of "happy" when you say are a happy Vista user.
Trusting someone like Louderback is entirely reasonable. He's a M$ fan. He gave Vista nine months and worked hard to make it work for him. As Editor in Chief of PC Magazine, he has access to resources that should have made him happy. If M$ can't make him happy, they won't make you happy. It's a lot more reasonable than listening to some random dude from Slashdot who looks like astroturf.
There are clear risks and no benefit to Vista and it's hurting PC sales. Are you going to spend $300 and play application roulette for something with bugs the size of Manhattan? Are you going to buy a new computer with it? Few of us will. I'm not, unless it comes with gnu/linux on it. M$ fans are not because they can't be sure XP will work with it. You are going to have to produce a big list of cool stuff Vista does to convince even M$ users to migrate when other M$ fans have such negative opinions.
Re:Makes sense to me, AC. Vista users are unhappy. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not saying Microsoft Windows is bad, just that it's not ready for prime time. Maybe Microsoft will catch up to other O/S vendors in another 10 or 20 years. It's fortunate for them that they're a protected monopoly and they'll probably have that time.
Why listen to this guy? (Score:3, Insightful)
I have to ask, "Well why the hell did you do that?"
You shouldn't give a good review to something that isn't working well simply because you THINK or HOPE it will be fixed in the future. Doing so is selling yourself out and isn't responsible journalism.
Re:Makes sense to me, AC. Vista users are unhappy. (Score:3, Insightful)
to be brutally honest with the Mac fandom crowd, a hell of a lot more inexpensive than the Macbook
Mac fans are not disturbed by the fact that your cheap-@$$ laptop is only semi-functional.
Re:If he's such an MS whore (Score:4, Insightful)
And before you go ranting about me being a pro-MS whore or whatever, remember, the worst thing you can do is underestimate an enemy.
Re:Makes sense to me, AC. Vista users are unhappy. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:7 year-old OS (Score:5, Insightful)
Calling Windows XP a 7-year-old OS is like calling modern Linux systems nearly 4 years old because the 2.6 branch was released in late 2003. Or that servers are running 6-year-old OS's because the 2.4 branch was released in 2001.
Re:Makes sense to me, AC. Vista users are unhappy. (Score:2, Insightful)
Or if they actually want to play games... I used Linux exclusively for 3+ years. I went back to Windows because I'm a gamer, and could never get this system to dual boot properly. I use race sims which would require my game to work, my wheel and pedals to work etc... It has nothing to do with "training wheels" and everything to do with functionality. I love games. That is STILL the one arena Linux falls over in. Yes, someone will list a bunch of games that run in Linux, and you know what? Most will suck. It doesn't run the games I WANT TO RUN. rFactor, GTR2, Battlefield 2 etc...
Please don't think I'm a Windows supporter because I'm not (well, read my other posts for this story) but to think that the only reason to keep Windows around is because you're a newbie is flat out wrong.
There's a difference between being a Microsoft supporter, and being a realist about Linux.
Re:The upgrade treadmill does not work for you. (Score:4, Insightful)
You might be happy with a seven year old OS, but most of us would like something a little more modern.
Who cares? Software doesn't rust. XP does most everything I want (although OSX is nice, too), so what does Vista offer? Making things deliberately break on XP will most likely push me away from MS entirely.
Re:The ONE good thing about VISTA: (Score:3, Insightful)
OT: why use computers for gaming at all? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think we'll see Civ 5 on xbox, or NWN 3 on playstation.
Fung-fu games need controllers, strategy games need mouse+keyboard, c'est la vie.
I personally prefer mouse+keyboard FPSs instead of a controller, but I know many people disagree.
Re:Makes sense to me, AC. Vista users are unhappy. (Score:4, Insightful)
I see this sort of comment flying around on here, unchallenged. As much as I love MS bashing, does anybody have any links to articles that verify this? Doesn't the DRM only come in to play when you want to watch HD-DVD or Blu Ray movies (or some Windows Media format)? How can it be sitting there chewing cycles at any other time?
Another poster on here insinuated that user's would not want to move from Vista to XP because they like to use P2P programs. How on earth does Vista prevent that?
Re:Allegedly? Do Tell... (Score:4, Insightful)
Just yesterday Stu posted about this problem in WServerNews "More On Thumbs Down On Vista For Admins". [wservernews.com]
Installing the Windows Server 2003 admin tools actually is said to help very much. Read http://4sysops.com/archives/install-windows-serve
This is funny in at least two ways:
1. The dreaded command prompt, so arrogantly looked down onto by 'we-are-so-advanced-Windows-GUI'-users comes in
2. So you are buying crap software for a hell of money, and then you have to share tips on the Internet, on how to nicely dissect pieces from here, and others from there, in order to gobble together a functional operating system !?
Welcome to the world of GNU/Linux before 1998 !
Re:If he's such an MS whore (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed. The problem is, this time, Microsoft is attempting to force the issue by removing XP from the market. I have spoken to no less than 7 people in the past WEEK alone that are buying new computers now so they can get XP instead of Vista. People don't get to wait the 2 years until the software is stable, Microsoft is forcing them to buy the unstable version so that it can improve its quarterly earnings. When XP was released, Microsoft waited over 2 years to pull 98 from the market. This time, they tried to do it a mere 4 months after releasing Vista, only to extend it to the end of the year (a mere 9 months) after the consumer outcry.
While Microsoft is entitled to pull a product if they don't want to sell it anymore, the flip side of that is that the only reason they can get away with it is because of their power over the market. When a company removes from the market a product for which there is huge demand, to replace it with something with little demand, you can be assured there's something seriously wrong with the competitive status of that market.
Re:Allegedly? Do Tell... (Score:3, Insightful)
Fair comment then; I mis-read your earlier post.
The interesting question is: how great an adoption rate does it need to be a success for Microsoft? The sales due to new computers wasn't enough to save WindowsME, after all. And if Vista does turn out to be the train wreck it looks as if it might become, how many will go back to XP and how many migrate to another OS?
Re:Vista development (Score:3, Insightful)
Undoubtedly the biggest waste of money was most likely in the (FU)DRM, who knows hoe many trial versions were scrapped due to failure before the settled on the one that only mostly fails rather than always fails. PC Magazine editor-in-chief Jim Louderback has to be congratulated for his efforts, I got pissed of with Vista after fours hours, reformatted drive and settled on stale piss for the game boot.
Ballmer is desperate to get across the board licence fees into the windows OS just like the xbox, this failure is just another indication of his technical incompetence.
Re:Makes sense to me, AC. Vista users are unhappy. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Just a skin (Score:3, Insightful)
At a minimum, you would have to make all applications close all open FDs because the only mapping from open FD's to actual files is in the kernel. You can't really throw that away, now can you?
Considering that I've actually DONE it in Linux (and so has condor), I'd say I can! I intercepted open calls and saved the pathname to fd mapping as structured data in userspace. Then when the checkpoint function is called, grab the current position of all files. Then open a checkpoint file and dump the context. On reload, the first thing it does is reopen the files and seek to their previous location using dup2 to make the handle values the same and fdopen to restore the FILE based I/O state. The app never knows the difference. Now if X were a bit more friendly to that...
There is a ton of "application" state which is really kept in the kernel.
That would make it application context then yes? File context can be read out in uspace. VM state is just a matter of re-doing mmaps and saving anonymous pages. Dirty pages should just be flushed immediatly so they don't need to be tracked. Various scheduler and vm stats can be tossed since they won't be relevant on restart anyway and can be rebuilt.
Swap state can be tossed by demand paging everything in as it is dumped to the context file. Network connections are a lost cause, so just close them.
If it's so hard, why has Apple been able to do it so well for so many years?
Because it has top notch developers and a management team willing to give them as long as it takes to do it right?
Re:Jesus, Slashdot, this is Low (Score:3, Insightful)
If there is a difference, its that you get more standard and higher quality components if you buy/build it yourself. Pre-build companies use the cheapest shit they can find (profit margin) and make stuff non-standard on purpose so you have to buy their overpriced servicing and replacements. On example is Dell's cross-wired power connector. All the same wires as a standard power-supply and same connector, just wired on different pins. Replace your Dell's blown PSU with an off-the-shelf one and its goodbye PC.
Actually I would expect a home-build PC to be more likely to run Vista properly than a pre-built PC, not less.
Re:Makes sense to me, AC. Vista users are unhappy. (Score:4, Insightful)
So yes, it is an upgrade, but unlike the Windows world, it is also a full install. I understand you are disgruntled because you want to use OS X on cheap PC hardware (or you want to buy a Mac without paying for OS X being installed), but that doesn't make your post correct. You are playing word games and not looking at the issue objectively.