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Vista Is Good

mattmaroon.com

21–30 of 103 posts

Re: Vista Is Good

#21
DRM gives power to Microsoft and Big Media.

    *  They decide which programs you can and can't use on your computer

    * They decide which features of your computer or software you can use at any given moment

    * They force you to install new programs even when you don't want to (and, of course, pay for the privilege)

    * They restrict your access to certain programs and even to your own data files

Even when you legally buy Vista, you don't own it.

    *  If your copy of Vista came with the purchase of a new computer, that copy of Vista may only be legally used on that machine, forever.

    * If you bought Vista in a retail store and installed it on a machine you already owned, you have to completely delete it on that machine before you can install it on another machine.

    * You give Microsoft the right, through programs like Windows Defender, to delete programs from your system that it decides are spyware.

    * You consent to being spied upon by Microsoft, through the “Windows Genuine Advantage” system. This system tries to identify instances of copying that Microsoft thinks are illegitimate. Unfortunately, a recent study indicated that this system has already screwed up in over 500,000 cases.

http://badvista.fsf.org/

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/microsoft-learn-from... [Apple is even worse on DRM etc.]

Re: Vista Is Good

#22
post #6

The feature that Matt says he likes (searching, eg poker) is much better implemented with Quicksilver on Mac OS X.

Google Desktop is great. dunno how it compares to Vista's built-in search

Re: Vista Is Good

#23
post #11

You don't win by being "good". You win by being outstanding. MS died and stopped being relevent to anything much a long while ago. What features does vista have that XP doesn't that are worthwhile? What is pushing people to upgrade? Nothing as far as I can see. Now you can buy PCs without an OS, and some very cool portables like the asus eeepc using linux, I'd expect MS dominance to take a major bashing over the next…

like the asus eeepc using linux, I'd expect MS dominance to take a major bashing over the next years on PCs

false about Xandros. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_and_free_softw...

Re: Vista Is Good

#24
I agree Vista is good -> for my bottom line, I charged a ton of money from companies to make their software UAC compliant.

Re: Vista Is Good

#26
funny how i never cared about the OS. i program and for personal use the OS really is whatever in my opinion.

for porfessional use maybe windows has issues but really what is wrong with vista or earlier windows for the average computeruser?

Re: Vista Is Good

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it search inside of files? I did like Quicksilver a lot. But it isn't fair to compare an OS against an OS and a third party program.

OS X has Spotlight, which searches inside files. It's probably comparable to Vista's search.

Since it was released before MS' offering, Spotlight was probably inspirational to Vista's search.

Re: Vista Is Good

#28
Why do nearly all of this guy's blog posts end up on the front page of HN? Sure, a couple have been good, but it strikes me as a little "odd" that he seems to be on here all the time. Group voting, or do random people really dig opinionated blog posts that much? Honest question.

Re: Vista Is Good

#29
post #4

Too much slack in this article. Which is not to say that Microsoft didn’t make some mistakes in launching the OS. They clearly made a few. For one, they gave OEMs too much leeway in deciding what they could or could not slap “Vista Capable” stickers on. And even though it wasn’t entirely their fault that manufacturers screwed this up, it reflects badly on Microsoft. It’s just like when a program crashes your PC. It m…

Not exactly on the OEMs.I suppose it's impossible to tell who had how much fault, but there's clearly some blame on both sides: http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/02/mi... As for crashing, depends how you define "fault". If a program causes Windows to crash, where it wouldn't have without that program, it could be said to be the program's fault. I tend to agree with you, since the point of Windows…

  If a program causes Windows to crash, where it wouldn't have without that program, it could be said to be the program's fault.
The job of a good operating system is to protect itself and other processes from themselves and each other. It's only after years of Windows use (or os 9) that people have grown accustomed to OS crashes caused by rogue processes.

Re: Vista Is Good

#30
Matt sounds like he has never encountered usable desktop search before. Has he really not been exposed to Google Desktop Search or seen Mac OS X since around 2005?

I think that my basic criticism of Vista is that it's just not worth it. It adds too much to read (I really need to do a formal study of this), too many choices to make, too many new UI paradigms (on top of the XP/2000/98/3.1 pieces still kicking around), too many things to authorize, too high hardware requirements, etc. ...

And what benefit comes from taking on all of these burdens? Nothing that I have seen yet that wasn't already implemented and more refined in other operating systems years ago.

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