I dunno about that Verithrax. Vista's supposedly has better hooks into the 3d gaming. And it's likely the Microsoft-owned companies like Lionhead, Bungie, and the like will show what others can do with it. (Of course, they may deal with X360 first).

I just don't have the hate for MS that you do. (As far as Gates goes--I think the man's doing more good with his charity work than anything Richard Stallman is doing with his "free code so geeks can change it" stance. Both men might be arrogant, but who's gonna be judged by St. Peter at the gates as the better follower of Jesus' teachings for instance).

The biggest problem I have with the FOSS movement is the lack of motivation for some projects (things die on the vine all the time), the arrogance of the coders (want something fixed, hack it yourself--that's like telling car owners to become engine designers), and especially the lack of well written documentation. They've gotten better, but I still see better documentation in the MSDN collections or with commercial software like Cold Fusion then I ever saw from Perl or PHP. It's only after years and third-parties writing books that they caught up.

I do think things won't be so Microsoft-oriented in the future, but that will be a slow process that takes several years or perhaps even decades. I'm not sure Linux will be the one to beat it though. The Mac is an example of an alternative computer system that is friendly.

And rest assured--people will start hating whoever is bigger. Some people are starting to hate Google. It seems to be human nature to be jealous of the most popular thing.

This threads kind of fun, I get to sit and watch everyone argue about tecnhical details that I havn't got a clue what your talking about.

So is like vista worth buying when it comes out really or do people like suggest you leave it or something?

Honestly, I would wait to get Vista until you need a new computer. That way you know the hardware specs are supported.

Hm, true, Lionhead and the other Microsoft-owned software houses might release games for the Vista earlier than most companies, but that won't necessarily drag them in - Any game released while Vista has only barely been released isn't going to do well on the shelves. The high system requirements Vista has will stop people from upgrading very fast to it; Vista might come out on schedule in 2007, but most people will only see it in their computers much later.

As for Gates... I don't make moral judgements; I'm not used to thinking of someone as 'morally superiour,' or think that someone has done 'more good' than another. Gates' charity is important and a good thing, but doing charity doesn't justify being nasty. Microsoft has set back technology, choked the market with its monopoly, bought or killed all competition, blatantly ignored standards, and created an user culture which revolves around the assumption that the computer knows better than the user. And Stallman is helping the way he can - Thing is, he doesn't have several billion dollars coming in every minute to dump into charity funds. He does good by trying to protect certain basic rights which, for some reason, some people don't believe apply to digital media. Yes, he goes overboard and is completely insane, but good insane. He doesn't speak for the movement (Nobody does, it's an anarchy), though.

Third, yes, sure hackers are arrogant, but hacker culture is old. It's still based in the assumptions that all users can and are willing to learn how to code to a certain extent (The first assumption is true). Hackers are also volunteers - they're not being paid by you, so whenever they implement a feature you requested, consider it an act of kindness. There are numerous companies that work with customising open-source software to suit someone's needs, and most large projects have a '0' priority in their bug tracking systems for requested features; you can even set a bounty on a feature and wait for someone to code it and claim it. FOSS makes easy things trivial and hard things possible.

And we've been catching up quite a lot. FOSS documentation is complete and better-written than the typical MS market-speak documentation, and Windows programmers know that until very recently, it was against company policy for a Microsoft employee to admit that Windows or its API had bugs. Bugs and the actual API behaviour was undocumented, or occasionally made into the 'official' software behavior. Microsoft got out of doing that, since they're not that stupid, but it shows their regard for proper standards and documentation.

*sigh*

1) View Vista's website
2) View Mac OS X 10.4's website (incidentally, it was released about a year ago)
3) Compare.

Come back when you're done.

Yeah, but...

That kinda sums up my feelings about those comparisons.

The reason why Windows gets most of the viruses is because it's the most popular OS. Yes, I know Windows has inherent weaknesses, but you can bet if/when Linux or the Mac got over 50% of the market share the amount of viruses would go up.

And getting back to Vista for gaming.

I think the fact that they are building a new driver system will be helpful. It might lead to more "windowed" gaming, which could always be a problem before-hand.

Well, among other things windows has viruses because it's much easier to grab control of the system using a virus in windows than in linux, due to the way privileges are handled, and execute the stuff you want executed.

Also, the fact that linux is open source means that there's much more people able to "debug" it whereas code in windows is a blackbox.

I can't view Vista's website because it doesn't render properly on Opera, one of the most standards-compliant browsers there are.

As for MacOS X, it's a very good OS and definitely as good as Linux, and better for some tasks (Graphic design for print media, for example) while worse at others (Such as the all-important task of running on cheap hardware and costing nothing, or automated package management). MacOS X is also Unix, which explains a lot of its success (People in general only look at eye-candy. I've used MacOS-like window decorations under Linux which come quite close to the real thing. Not easy on the eyes, but pretty. I like something that looks polished and not too ugly, but light. The next two versions of Ubuntu should come with great enhancements in that respect.

In the end, operating systems are just sets of abstraction layers, and each fits to a different mindset. Microsoft Windows is truly botched, but there's no doubt that there is a mindset that it accomodates nicely (I can't fathom what goes through the mind of a Windows user, but it's true some people feel comfortable with it.) Linux fills another niche, and MacOS X a different one; I personally like Linux. No matter how much eye-candy other operating systems can offer, they can't offer me the customisation, power, flexibility and elegance that Linux provides. And my eyes get tired of that kind of stuff real quick. You'd think text gamers would have more respect for the command line. I've worked with prettified, transparent desktops before, and it hurts. They're clumsy, unpleasant, slow on most machines, and distracting. I can't get any real work done with them, and I can't get anything done without multiple desktops to resort to - something neither MacOS X nor Windows implement natively, even though the X Window System has had it for over a decade. And since prettifying is the only real improvement Vista is making (Besides, you know, catching up with technology that has existed elsewhere for at least 10 years, and over 35 in some cases) I don't see why people should spend their money on new computers and new software to get the same old functionality with new bugs and a thin veneer of attractiveness layered over it, but I know they will. And those who don't are going to be pushed by Microsoft's monopoly on office software and gaming back-end technology (Unless OpenGL comes to dominate a substantial section of the market. Vista will leave a sort of generation gap in DirectX development, while OpenGL improves fluidly and with backwards-compatibility.). Frankly, I like staying out of that as much as I can (I still occasionally venture back into Windows to play games. Spore is probably going to drag me kicking and screaming into it; Windows does make a decent gaming platform, despite everything, because of how hardware vendors and DirectX support it by design.

Also, what Iridiel said - Unix is inherently more secure than Windows, which is why Microsoft is adopting the Unix model (Disguised as their own invention, of course. And the bastards dare to support software patents.) Vista will probably be the safest version of Windows ever thanks to that, and even though it'll probably still catch billions of infections, they won't mess up your computer nearly as much as they used to.

What they advertise is eye candy, as that is what most users care about, however, Vista is not backwards compatable because they have COMPLETELY redone the OS. The Core of the OS is now protected and programs do not have access to it. (as apposed to all other windows where programs HAD to have access to it) Security in general has been re-looked at from the ground up, and issues of stability (which XP has almost none) have been revamped also. I read an article about this in a print magazine so I can't give you a link, but I'm sure there are plenty on the net.

Vista has been redesigned to be more like *nix machines.

and yes, you will need 2GB of ram and 256MB video card. God bless Microsoft for revitaliziing the computer manufacturing industry.

All those security changes are just implementations of the security model Unix systems have been using since the seventies. Next up: Microsoft announces Windows Vespa will be POSIX-compliant.

Know those wheels on your car, been there since the stone age....

Whats your point?

I have tried Linux, and when I use it, I can tell that its free.

My point is, what do you think of a car factory that spends ten years making cars without wheels?

I have used Windows, and I can tell that it is a bloated black box primed to burst and spill its guts out messily.

You're working on some silly preconceptions about the relation between price and quality - Linux has had more man-hours of work put into it than Windows, and since it is made to be modular and customizable, it varies a lot between distributions. Get the latest release of Ubuntu, and you'll see how polished, efficient, and powerful a Linux system can be.

By polished and effecient, you mean.. looks like crap

Oh, and I'm refering to the programs made for the OS, not the OS itself.

Sun Java microsystems does
and I think that Norton antivirus might...

There's several games in the works outside of the Microsoft arena that have announced that are specifically being developed to run on Vista. Although I could be wrong, I believe Conan is one of the nicer pieces of eye candy that is being developed by someone outside of said entity. Of course, my luck Funcom is a subsidiary or something. Anyways, I view Vista as just like the upgrade from ps2 to 3, or Xbox to Xbox 360... yes it can do all the old things, but you can't play the new games on the ps2 or xbox and people are gonna stop making games for them to focus on the future.

I find this extremely annoying because it just kills one of the greatest advantages of PC gaming: the fact that a state-of-the-art computer has plenty of longevity and usually you'll only be forced to upgrade your video card, which isn't all that expensive because fierce competition drives hardware prices down to the minimum. Now Microsoft is forcing us to pay their price to play games, but I don't see any advantage in buying a new computer over buying a game console. This will hurt PC gaming as a whole and cause more people to flee over to dedicated platforms which are getting cheaper and better in comparison, to the point where there's no advantage in buying a new computer when you can buy a new PS3 and keep your old one for another year.

I just hope Spore comes out for the Wii. That way I can get the console I like and the only game, in my opinion, that is worth upgrading for.


Youre just used to the way Windows XP looks. Windows XP is infinitely prettier than classic Windows, but Linux can beat that, usually with smaller window decorations that take up less space and distract the eye less. Although Mac OS X is probably the eye candy champion right now; it looks gorgeous. Vista will look very pretty, too, but it will be even less easy on the eyes than Mac OS X, and it spends valuable system resources that could be going towards gaming, or even better, SETI@Home.

As for the software, yes, quality in FOSS software varies a lot. There are several cases in which the FOSS program is clearly better than the Microsoft alternative: Firefox and Mozilla are superiour to IE, although IE 7 is catching up with features that should have been implemented three or four years ago, even though Opera was just as good for a long time. Open Office is better in many ways than Microsoft Office, and KOffice is lighter and soon will be implementing a user interface model that doesn't replicate MS OFfice/StarOffice. Our music players can't beat iTunes, but they whip Window Media Player's arse in terms of functionality and speed. We have issues playing video because of patents and non-free codecs, which force us to reimplement whole codecs just to view a DVD - But we do it all the same, and it works. Nearly every single back-end, system administration, IT or programming tool in existance comes from the Unix word, works better there, or just has superior counterparts that run on Linux. Apache is decidedly safer than IIS, and the internet can't work without bind. New features and true innovation tends to show up on our side - Tabbed browsing, anyone? And we generally support open standards much better; arguably, Gecko has the best CSS support, or second best, with Opera running as a close second/first. Right now, I'm quite satisfied with all the applications I use on my Linux box. They do what I need, look pretty, have better or equivalent functionality to proprietary tools, and I didn't pay for them.

WHA???

Computer games have been dead for a few years now...

Civ4, battlefield 2, world of warcraft (which I have never played, nor do I intend to.), and last but not least, technically Lusternia IS a computer game. Must I continue?

Strategy gaming pretty much only lives in the PC gaming world right now, and first-person-shooters are clumsy in consoles, generally speaking (Hopefully the Wii will fix this. A Wii version of Spore would simply be awesome; imagine 3D modeling using a 3D controller.)