Vista Named Year's Most Disappointing Product 842
Shadow7789 writes "No surprise here, but to complete its humiliation, PC World has declared that Windows Vista is the most disappointing product of 2007. Quoting: 'Five years in the making and this is the best Microsoft could do?... No wonder so many users are clinging to XP like shipwrecked sailors to a life raft, while others who made the upgrade are switching back. And when the fastest Vista notebook PC World has ever tested is an Apple MacBook Pro, there's something deeply wrong with the universe.'"
Boo Vista, A common theme for 2007? (Score:5, Informative)
Here is the full PC World Magazine's list http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,140583/printable.html# [pcworld.com]
*The 15 Biggest Tech Disappointments of 2007*
#1. No Wow, No How: Windows Vista
#2. What Is It Good For: The High-Def Format War
#3. The Anti-Social Network: Facebook Beacon
#4. In a Sorry State: Yahoo
#5. The Great, The Bad, The Ugly: Apple iPhone
#6. Un-Neutral: The Broadband Industry
#7. Cannot be Completed as Dialed: Voice Over IP
#8. Needs To Change Its Spots: Apple "Leopard" OS 10.5
#9. Sorry, We Already Gave: Office 2007
#10. Is Anyone Listening?: Wireless Carriers
#11. Singing an Old Familiar Zune: Microsoft Zune
#12. Just Another Oxymoron: Internet Security
#13. Web 2 Woe: Social Networks
#14. Screwed up to the Max: Municipal WiMax
#15. Box Unpopuli: Amazon Unbox
No surprise here, but ... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I didn't find it disappointing (Score:2, Informative)
Someone Forgot About Cairo (Score:0, Informative)
M$ is losing it's temper with people laughing at Vista this way [slashdot.org].
Re:Going somewhat against the slashdot 'groupthink (Score:5, Informative)
So, I decided to downgrade (upgrade?) back to XP. HP's own website basically said "DON'T DO IT, MAN, IT'LL NEVER WORK" and provided exactly no XP drivers, only Vista. Yeah, like I'm going to believe that. So I did, and after nearly ten hours of collecting drivers from other sources (occasionally having to change vendor IDs and the like to get them to load), I had it running perfectly.
The thing that bugs me most is that HP has the drivers - the hardware in this new box isn't anything all that revolutionary, or different from what was found in their old XP offerings. There's no reason they couldn't have put up the necessary XP drivers - most of them I got from HP's site, just under other models. The only possible explanation is that MS is sitting in the background, threatening to flog them mightily if they dared not do everything possible to push this steaming pile known as Vista upon us.
Oh, and yes, it dual-boots into Ubuntu 7.10 just fine.
Re:Going somewhat against the slashdot 'groupthink (Score:3, Informative)
From my experience with my wife's DV9015, HP has XP drivers for all of their hardware. They just don't let you get to it if your system identifies itself as having Vista when you connect to support. That's where using Google to find the XP drivers comes in. HP will let you download the files even if your system is running Linux if you ask for a specific file. It's just that they've idiot-proofed their support site so you can't easily get an XP driver for a Vista system by mistake. Download the driver files, stick them on a thumb drive, install XP, load drivers from thumb drive and you've got a fully functional XP system.
Cheers,
Dave
Note: I stopped at the Linux step for my HP zv6015. See my blog if you want the details: http://davenjudy.org/wordpress [davenjudy.org]
Re:Macbook Pro (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What about the iPhone? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Great Expectations (Score:4, Informative)
Re:disappointing, it is relative! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It's called a consensus opinion. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What about the iPhone? (Score:5, Informative)
That doesn't work for those iTunes songs that are still DRM-protected. There is no *legal way (according to the DMCA) to convert such songs to ringtones without buying them again or going through the cumbersome process of burning them to CD and then ripping them back to MP3 before editing. Also, Apple has tried several times to block users wanting to put in their own home-made ringtones.
Re:this list stinks and I don't like it. (Score:5, Informative)
No way to auto install security updates w/o also auto installing all other updates.
No built in support for hd-dvd or bluray playback, even with Microsoft's own hd-dvd hardware.
The price.
No support for unencrypted digital cable tuners in media center.
No good visual configuration options for REALLY BIG displays (I'm on a 47" at 1080p and it is always difficult getting the fonts balanced for readability and usability) Now, most of the issues exist in xp and linux as well. I'll reserve my final judgment for vista until it gets a bit past sp1.
P.S. I'm not an MS fanboy nor an MS apologist, I just call them like I see them. I am a professional Solaris/Linux system administrator with over a decade of nearly exclusive use of linux. I think that there just really isn't much serious innovation left to be had on the desktop, but vista makes a pretty decent living room OS...
Re:What about the iPhone? (Score:1, Informative)
The recommended types for this are intptr_t (an integer type required to be wide enough to cast to and from a pointer without loss of information), and ptrdiff_t (an integer type required to be wide enough to hold the difference in value between two pointers).
As mentioned by another poster, stdint.h (combined with proper typedefs; you should still never use the stdint types directly) is a great solution to the "how wide is this type" conundrum. The proper technique is to define a header somewhere with a typedef based on the semantics of a given type. Instead of describing variables as being an "int" or a "long" or a "uint32_t", use typedefs like "BeanCounter_t" and then assign a primitive type in one place. (You can do the same thing with macros, of course, although I wouldn't recommend it when you can just use typedef.)
That said, there are also legitimate cases where it's fine to use the naked types. Generally, if a variable isn't going to hold values over a couple thousand, it doesn't matter what integer type it is. (Most loop counters come to mind.) Using typedefs is ideal for maintainability in many cases, but is also overkill in many other cases.
Re:Start menu has always sucked (Score:3, Informative)
Re:have you even tried 64 bit Vista? (Score:2, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WOW64 [wikipedia.org]
It's quite efficient too
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1857484,00.asp [extremetech.com]
Sysadmin hell (Score:5, Informative)
One user got a new Lenovo top of the line T61, with nVidia Quadro in September this year. With Vista Business. To support possible future Vista installs, I got and installed Vista Ultimate on a Mac Pro tower (Quad Xeon), where, after careful tweeking, it runs quite well, albeit far slower than OSX or WinXP on the same machine. Vista on the Lenovo Laptop, coupled with the usual insane amount of crapware that comes with Thinkpads preinstalled, is an absolute abomination. The GUI is actually less responsive than the first release of OSX 10.0 was on my old 333MHz PPC Lombard Powerbook 6 years ago. You can cure the slashdot "I'm sittnig here at my freelncer gig.." trolls here.
Vista on that laptop, a 2.2Ghz Machine, 2GB Ram, etc, is so bad, it almost makes me cry. The UAC nightmare, while supposedly making the system more secure, also makes it almost impossible to do any normal work (any control panel stuff requires a UAC clickfest from hell). Turning UAC and Lenovo's Account management crap off is an improvement, but it brings up the point of why one would use Vista anyway. A lot of software, such as our Inventory clients, will simply not run. Working through custom DNS or DHCP settings is a major PIAS.
Every time I have to use Vista, I am more convinced that Microsoft has lost its edge. I can not see ANY company interested in productivity and efficiency using Vista. Microsoft has more than enough cash to last it through years of losses, but if that does in fact come to pass, MS will lose its standing business and get a bad reputation that will be harder to fix than merely better products will do.
Re:this list stinks and I don't like it. (Score:3, Informative)
Mine here measure their uptime in fraction of a power maintence interval :) That's normaly less than a year. And my Linuxes measures uptime on fraction of kernel updates interval.
Windows measures it on fraction of a week.
Re:Start menu has always sucked (Score:4, Informative)
You have apparently managed to seriously screw up your menu. I suggest you go back to the defaults, which are much, much easier to use that what you describe. Look at my current K menu (Kubuntu 7.10):
At the top level, we have three sections:
The Applications sections contains:
The only thing I think could possibly be improved there is perhaps the "Settings" and "System" -- it's not always clear which one I'm going to find the setting I'm looking in.
Now to address the core of your complaint, let's look at the contents of one of the categories. I'll pick "Multimedia":
How much clearer and simpler can it be?
Of course, this being KDE, it's configurable. If you don't find the application names useful, you can turn them off and have only the description. In fact, there are four options:
The second is the default, obviously.
GNOME handles things differently, of course, but uses the same concept. Programs are categorized sensibly, and then both names and descriptions are available.
So, please tell us, just how can this be improved? And in what way could either the Windows or OS X approaches possibly be better?
You seem to have chosen to criticize one of the things that the major Linux desktops get most right.
Re:I didn't find it disappointing (Score:3, Informative)