Vista Makes CNET UK's List of "Worst Consumer Tech" 484
Several anonymous readers pointed us at CNET UK's Crave blog for a list of what is or was, in their opinion, the worst consumer tech in history. Vista comes in at number 10, in company with Apple's puck mouse (number 6) and Sony's CD rootkit (number 9). According to Crave: "[Vista's] incompatibility with hardware, its obsessive requirement of human interaction to clear security dialogue box warnings and its abusive use of hated DRM, not to mention its general pointlessness as an upgrade, are just some examples of why this expensive operating system earns the final place in our terrible tech list." That's gotta hurt a little, coinciding as it does with Apple's Don't Give Up On Vista attack ad.
Think different? (Score:5, Interesting)
I wish they would go back to the ads showing how sexy the technology they offer is (like the PC with a mess of wires in the back compared to the iMac with nothing but the keyboard and mouse or the continuing awesome iPod ads with catchy tunes from bands with moderate success prior to the release of the video) instead of those crappy "attack" ads. Hell, go back to the old ads with the geek chic that was ever so popular here on Slashdot even.
Just enough talking about Vista and Windows -- they're starting to sound like politicians. In fact, they've been picking up other bad habits. My wife and I went into the Apple store at the Mall of America and while I was gawking and drooling over those huge displays, two of their employees launched a Best Buy style sales attack on her. She actually said, "you know, we used to enjoy entering this store and you're now very much like Best Buy, you might want to rethink that." The sales people actually left her alone after one replied, "sorry, I will bring that forward." Who knows if they did or not.
Think different, again, please!
You have obviously never used one (Score:5, Interesting)
Virtualization is how Linux will win. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:as much as I dislike Vista (Score:3, Interesting)
BS. The *AA members need Microsoft more than Microsoft needs them. Imagine the hurt if MS announced that their systems will no longer play anything other than Red Book audio CDs. What's Jane Teenager more likely to do: run out and buy a Mac or just download her albums from now on?
Microsoft happily caved, pure and simple. They give the excuse that "the *AA made us do it!", but that's just a convenient cover story so they don't have to admit that they want DRM (so they can be the next iTunes Music Store). If they truly didn't want DRM, they wouldn't have it and there's not much that anybody would be able to do about it.
Re:Vista is #10? (Score:2, Interesting)
And while I'm digging myself a hole here on
Re:Vista is #10? (Score:2, Interesting)
Video gets downgraded to crap if you don't have crappy DRM through the whole path. I tried recording some shows and and get sorry Charlie messages. I tried to burn the shows that I could record to DVD and get sorry Charlie messages.
Sorry, I don't want a computer telling what I can and cannot do. I switched to Mac and multimedia has been so much better. The only thing from Apple' that I stay away from is TV/Movies from iTunes since I cannot burn them to a DVD to watch.
How quickly we forget... (Score:3, Interesting)
Almost all of these complaints were exactly the same when XP was released. Memory, drivers, utility, etc... Vista runs all my games (which is why I have it) without a hitch, even the old DOSBoxed ones. I know we will have Mac fanboys up and down the aisles here so my probability of being modded down is higher, but so much software written for OS9 doesn't work on OSX any more at all. At least I can say that four OS versions later (95, 98, 2000, XP) and software CONTINUES to work (maybe not all of it) well... that's not too terrible either. I'm not saying Vista is "the shit" either -- I much prefer my Macbook for the OS use, but when I want to play my games, old and new... I can run them on Vista without a hitch.
I'll wait for SP1 to see how well Vista fares in the future, but as it stands right now, I haven't had a BSOD or a crash in over a month, and my games play fast and furious, though I do lose a few frames per second since the drivers just aren't as good for Vista yet.
I'll be patient, and remember my history.
Re:Vista is #10? (Score:5, Interesting)
They snuck it in under the guise of improved security, when the real purpose is to stop people from making drivers to intercept DRMed data. For proof of this, try watching certain DRMed content in 32-bit Vista with an unsigned driver loaded - it won't let you.
End result? People who want to still get past the DRM, developers have to pay large yearly amounts for a code signing certificate (which can be a severe cost for small-time and Free/Open Source developers), and users have to pay more to offset development costs.
Vista, MS garbage (Score:4, Interesting)
Puck mouse (Score:5, Interesting)
It may look much slicker, but Apple still could have learned from a similar design failure from a few years earlier. The old VAXstation 3100s [rwth-aachen.de] used a round mouse, and everyone hated the fucking things. As with the Puck mouse, you couldn't easily tell by feel how it was oriented, and with three buttons instead of one it wasn't difficult to accidentally use the wrong one.
At least Apple avoided the other problem with them. The VAXstation mice didn't use a ball, but a pair of cylinders mounted so as to engage the surface at right angles to each other. When you were using it at the edge of the mousepad, one of they cylinders would invariably go past the edge so that the cursor would stop moving in one direction.
Re:Vista is #10? (Score:5, Interesting)
You offer an opinion backed by personal experience.
I offer an alternative opinion, backed by John Locke's original description of the dynamics of a fair market. Here is my opinion:
Calling DRM "abusive" is redundant, but appropriate. Furthermore, "Digital Rights Management" has nothing to do with managing the rights an individual has under copyright law, nor does DRM benefit the creators of the materials it is attached to. The beneficiaries of DRM are third party corporations who once had a purpose in preparing and distributing old media like vinyl and eight-track tapes, but are now obsolete and too dinosaur-stupid to figure out how to do anything else with their resources.
DRM is at best only one more weak reason for The Revolution. It isn't a particularly good reason of itself: history will regard it as insignificant.
And that also pretty much summarizes the problem with Vista. After years of promising all kinds of significant improvements in computering, when it finally came to market, we found that Microsoft had switched focus away from the significant things that were promised, and instead concentrated its efforts on insignificant and sometimes irritating "features" like DRM.
The revolution will not be televised; you will not see it in Vista commercials. The revolution will not come from Redmond. It is, however, unfolding all around you, and you will see it if you bother to look beyond the commercials for other ways to get things done and make your life richer.
Re:How quickly we forget... (Score:3, Interesting)
It really doesn't (Score:1, Interesting)
And to really rub salt in that wound, I eventually drove 20 minutes to fetch my linux laptop. And it just worked, even with someone else's camera. No screwing around with drivers that didn't even work, just click "Import Photos."
Re:Vista is #10? (Score:5, Interesting)
You completely miss the point. It is not Vista or any other OS's business to dictate to users above and beyond the necessities of serving the users up to the capabilities and limits of the hardware. Nor is it remotely practical to attempt to enforce anything using what essentially boils down to an "evil bit", as it is so easily circumvented and so often wrong. And the rules that it is trying to enforce are themselves excessive, of doubtful utility, subject to interpretation, changeable at the drop of a large bribe, and difficult to follow. So there are 3 reasons why Vista's attempt to do so is annoying, insulting, and stupid. Vista should have stuck to the business of operating the computer, and let the users worry about the morality and legality of the uses to which they would put it. Vista shouldn't be a nagging nanny, "helping" people obey ethics that they are too "stupid" to figure out for themselves.
You saying it's a "matter of legal compliance" completely ignores the impossibilities of actually forcing compliance, even upon somewhat willing users. You might as well be implying the answer to the question "how do you put a giraffe in a refrigerator?" with "open the refrigerator door, put the giraffe in, close the door." Just about anything can be used to break the law. People can be shot, stabbed, strangled with pretty much any sort of wire (network cables, piano wire, guitar strings, etc.), run over with cars, bludgeoned with hard drives, and on and on. But you don't and you won't see "smart" knives. Even if it was possible to make a "smart" knife, circumvention is as easy as whipping up a plain old knife out of pretty much any old sheet of suitable material. Stone Age tech-- actual Stone Age as in 8000 B.C.-- can circumvent a "smart" knife. Cameras can photograph anything-- there is no way to selectively cripple them so they won't photograph copyrighted material. If such a thing as a camera that "respects" copyright could be made, few would willingly buy it even if it wasn't more expensive, slower, and prone to false positives. Before there were cameras, there have always been eyes and visual memory. Suppose there was a "smart" car that wouldn't exceed the speed limit or allow the driver to run red lights or steer into oncoming traffic. The car still couldn't tell if one of the passengers had just robbed a convenience store, or memorized a few pages out of a book. Nor could it tell when it might be time to break the rules, as for instance in a medical emergency. And the car could still be hacked. An OS is no exception to these basic facts of nature that neither copy protection nor "evil bits" work. Don't know what drugs MS was on when they actually seriously tried to make a "smart" OS capable of preventing its users from committing just one kind of crime, and, like obscenity, a very difficult to define and detect crime at that.
Re:uac = ! evil (Score:4, Interesting)
The only time you'll get -spammed- with UAC prompt is if you put user files directly in your C drive (in vista, user folders are in C:\Users, as opposed to Documents and Settings bullcrap of XP. That was one thing I was quite jealous of from Unix-style system, as they have more sensible defaults on that one, ie:
MS isn't kidding when they say the worse part of windows is bad software... Without bad drivers you can go for years without ever seeing Windows crash, without bad software you can go for weeks without seeing UAC...
TFA isn't really about Vista (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, Vista is a crappy product, but its presence on this list isn't particularly noteworthy or interesting. And Vista is lame in a mostly non-mysterious way: thanks to preload arrangements, they're guaranteed some market success no matter how bad it is. Vista doesn't make you wonder, "WTF were they thinking? Did they really think they'd be able to sell this?"
The bad mouse is the same. If you bought an iMac at the wrong time, you were going to get one of those. It's lameness didn't really endanger Apple's profitability much.
No, the true "star" of this story has to really be the Barcode Battler. That is just spectacularly bad, and makes you wonder how they imagined making any money.
Re:uac = ! evil (Score:3, Interesting)
Last time I saw the UAC prompt on my Windows machine is when Firefox wanted to update itself. Before that I haven't seen it in at least a month.
If your seeing it every other minute I have to ask - what are you doing? Virtually anything logo certified after Windows 2000 (when Microsoft really started defining what makes a good clean Windows app) should not be seeing UAC prompts - because they stipulated back then that a good application should have full functionality as a user.
Every time any app on my Mac wants to update I have to type in the password - sometimes several times. I really honestly don't think its all that different than Vista. Vista assumes if you are designated as an Admin you shouldn't have to type in the password - thus the continue/cancel dialogue.
Vista also evaluates the risk of elevating an app. If its not signed, downloaded executable - the UAC prompt will have a red with adequate warning. Heuristics are used in legacy setup applications to determine if the process should be elevated - by default all MSI projects are elevated (with the UAC prompt of course). Non signed executables trying to be elevated contain adequate warning.
Also the UAC prompt appears on a separate desktop - so if the machine is compromised an application can't simply click on the prompt for the user.
Changing the time on the machine should be considered an admin task as this affects many things on the machine. So what? Installing many apps on a Mac does not prompt you for a password.
Any app I install in a directory I have read/write/execute permissions to on Vista doesn't require a UAC prompt either - and they do exist.
Microsoft didn't fix the underlying security issues. It just shifted the responsibility to the user to constantly approve what might be a security risk.
Actually there are no underlying security issues in XP or Vista (no more than any other OS) - just bad practices. Vista enforces out of the box the bad practice of running as Admin all the time - by default users are default users - which is 99% of what keeps the Mac so secure.