So in summary, you are just one of the general whiny anti-MS Linux bigots who can't help but bitch and complain about a system that they aren't even proficient with or been keeping up to date with and gives the rest of us Linux users a bad name. Please shut up, die and take your Linux opinions with you because it really pains me just to read your elitist garbage. Especially since you use Gnome and anyone who uses that should die the slow fiery death of being forced to use old versions of Lindows.

All in all, there was ONE comment you made that was actually spot on and that was in regards to the DRM that Microsoft is trying to introduce. Not that things haven't been clearly moving that way for the last two years and the bitching has only started now because people have realised that it is probably going to become the way of the future or anything though.

For the record, I dual boot Windows and Linux, use both regularly and beta test a lot of stuff on both systems, so I probably have more of an idea of what I am talking about than you do. There is a lot of GOOD solid things that Microsoft are working on at the moment and quite a few of them you can beta test for yourself if you are willing to visit http://ideas.live.com and sign up. Even though Vista is going to be a bit of a memory hog - most people with a clue these days will not go below 2 gig of ram on their systems, so upgrading to Vista won't be that much of a chore. Especially once it gets modded a bit like my WinLite XP cd I have sitting next to me that was tweaked for gaming and its total ram usage once installed is under 90mb. Oh and the actual cd itself clocks in at under 300mb.

I'll do a point-by-point reply just because I hate you now.

Aero: I said it's cheap eye-candy, but it's some pretty amazing eye-candy. I just don't think it should be a selling point for an operating system, specially since window management (And therefore eye-candy) shouldn't be part of the operating system.

Search: I reiterate, can Windows search dynamically pick out things it can do with your input and automagically provide you with actions? (Type an email address, call a mail client; type a web address, call a browser; type a string, get several choices of search engines, plus desktop search.) Is it easily expandable? Is it open so I can write my own extensions for it? If not, it's inferior to deskbar.

Windows Mail, Calendar, DVD Maker: Because it's just Microsoft Being Microsoft: they're bundling applications with their operating system and making them part of the operating system. Besides being useless cruft that doesn't add to the operating system and doesn't let the user really choose, it's the IE x Netscape debacle all over again.

Internet Explorer 7: Firefox with the AdBlock extension blocks anything I tell it to block, and it blocks popups wonderfully; so does Opera. IE7 by itself doesn't have anything innovative (And remember, it's Microsoft that claims Open Source stifles innovation, not the other way around). You're saying that it works better with third-party software; I'm saying Firefofox works good enough out of the box and better with a single extension that intgrates transparently with Firefox and is free.

Media Player 11: iTunes has a brand name that is hard to beat. And most important of all, it integrates neatly right out of the box with your iPod; that by itself means people will use it, and I trust Apple to compete directly with Microsoft.

User Account Control: It's very commendable and all, it's just that they call it a new feature. I call it catching up with the competition. It's something everyone else has had for years.

Protected-Mode IE: I thought that the comment would be taken humorously, but apparently I need to use tags to clearly mark it for some people. ActiveX isn't the best of web technologies, but I know people use it, mostly because they can't be bothered to replace it with something better (Which would take time and effort which they can't spend.) Microsoft, on the other side, has to support their own technologies for PR reasons, for the same reason all their mail servers run Windows. Oh wait...

Windows Firewall: It's a new thing. It'll be buggy simply because of that, but it'll definitely be safer than any previous Windows version, more thanks to the implementation of a real multiuser system. Like I said, Vista is going to be the safer Windows version ever, but it still won't be as safe as the competition, particularly open-source systems where bugs are habitually found, tracked, and often fixed in a matter of weeks, days, or even hours after they're found. Microsoft just can't compete with the sheer amount of programming power, spread liberally over all time zones, that the community around the Linux kernel and its important security software have; they've been improving their bug tracking and support a lot, but it's still not as good as the open model.

Session 0 Isolation: I reiterate: They shouldn't point at it as an innovative new feature when all they're doing is implement tried and true security concepts. My issue is with the marketing, not engineering of it, since for once, it seems Microsoft is getting a few things right by giving up on being stubborn and learning to copy and learn from previous systems. Of course, it annoys me that they're doing it while supporting software patents.

Windows Defender: If Windows could provide its users with reasonable safety, it wouldn't have given rise to the massive amount of adware and spyware that now makes this kind of thing necessary and worse, a 'feature'. It's not a feature, it's fixing past mistakes. Again, my issue in this bit is with Microsoft's marketing and management, not engineering. Also, are you seriously comparing what me and other 20 guys could make to the efforts of a multi-billion dollar corporation for over 10 years?

Parental Controls: I don't trust Microsoft to keep my files safe, to build operating systems I can rely on, or to act with respect to a free enterprise and free market economy; I'm definitely not going to trust them with my children. I also think that giving 8-year olds unsupervised internet access is crazy, and that people nowadays expect the world to be rubber-padded so they can drop their young children and not pay attention to them. I'd rather stick to NetNanny, or even better, actually pay attention to what my putative children do online.

Symbolic links: Again, except that you can call this a feature, although barely. It's an improvement, but I seriously don't see it as a selling point when I already have a system that implements it beautifully and maturely.

Oh, and I don't use Gnome or KDE exclusively - I switch between the two fluidly depending on what I feel like, and which one has cool software I want to test. The good thing about Linux is freedom of choice; I can switch desktop managers without worries. People who pick Gnome or KDE over one another and stick to them like they're the One True Desktop Manager should be repeatedly poked in the eye with red-hot multimeter probes.

And I don't bash Microsoft gratuitously - They've been improving, and improving a lot. Windows XP wasn't nearly the piece of crap ME, NT and 2000 had been, and Windows Vista will probably pass for a decent operating system - But Microsoft operates in a way that chokes the market, stifles competition, and kills freedom of choice. Microsoft's software isn't nearly as bad as their business practices, and in fact, Microsoft's management is responsible to a lot of the issues with Windows - It's closed, it doesn't support open and public standards, it doesn't have proper bug tracking, it works on arbitrary release cycles, it costs too much, it's deliberately crippled to make cheaper versions, it inflates system requirements artificially to support hardware vendors. And most of all, it both cultivates the myth that you don't have to know anything to use a computer (You do. Present someone who has never seen a computer to a PC with any operating system installed. Watch learning process. Hence, you need to know stuff to use a computer. We're working on it, but we haven't reached the point in which interfaces are truly intuitive and have no learning curve; we likely never will.), and limits users by putting walls around them for their own protection. This doesn't harm most people, but it makes being a coder in Windows harder than it should be. Other people have explained why being able to casually open a text editor and write some code to automate something is important.

All sequals or based on a "successfull" franchise... even Lusternia.

So yes.

Even stores like EB which use to be 100% computer games are now reduced to two shelves of Computer games, and most of those are pre-owned.

I don't know of a single store that sells just computer games in my area. Plenty sell only console games.




What operating system again is it that you love to use? Mac or Linux? And which one is it thats owned by Microsoft again?

Microsoft software doesn't conform to open standards. That means developers who develop for Microsoft platforms are locked in and have trouble porting for other platforms. It also makes porting to Windows, and simply developing for it in the first place, harder to do. They lock in every component of the operating system - If you choose to use Windows (Which some people have to, for one reason or another) you're stuck with their desktop, their file manager, and several other things which shouldn't be part of the operating system. You can switch with third-party applications which are unreliable since Windows wasn't written with several possible window managers and UI shells in mind. Microsoft bundles as much trivial applications with Windows so they can choke any potential markets - The only way to compete is to be free. Adobe profits and survives due to the sheer quality of their products and their huge user base, and because Microsoft hasn't bothered to try and replace it. Smaller software developers survive because they make niche products; Open-source software thrives in the Windows platform because it's good and it's free. But Microsoft's policy is, basically, to let as few people as possible profit from their operating system and make users and software as dependant on what they use as possible. They call it 'integration', I call it gluing stuff together when you're supposed to be attaching cables between them. Both the Gnome and KDE desktops have better integration than Windows, and they're made of independent components. This is possible thanks to open standards and common libraries. Microsoft tries to accomplish the same by jumbling everything together, turning the operating system, GUI shell, web browser, email reader, calendar application, instant messenger, PIM and media player in an unholy, promiscuous mess that integrates by sharing code and generally being the same thing. This is ugly, hard to mantain, buggy, slow, unsafe, and worse, it forces you to carry useless cruft around if you don't want to use a particular component and use a third-party application.

BS.

First, stop being condescending and flaming. That's not argumentation either.

Now, ahem, I wasn't 'backpedaling'. I was doing things point-by-point because each point is separate and discrete; some of Window's issues are engineering problems, some are management idiocies.

Aero: Again, eye-candy is no standard to base buying an operating system on, and I still think that thick window titles hurt my eyes. But it's a personal, aesthetic choice.

Search: Deskbar did all that in beta, and Google Desktop Search did more than Windows Search does now a long time ago. I'll be impressed when I see it working better than those two. Vista was already stripped of several planned features because of time constraints.

Windows Mail, Calendar, DVD Maker: There's still the issue of how they work promiscuously with the operating system in ways which are closed. Even as 'add-ons', they would work better as fully separate applications using open standards to communicate. Gnome and KDE proved that a long while ago, because, you see, Gnome and KDE applications crash, and Windows component applications crash - But only Windows applications take the whole OS with them. A Gnome/KDE application will generally crash itself, sometimes cause a minor crash on the desktop system, and only in extremely rare instances (Never actually happened to me on this distribution, and I use beta software) make the system so unresponsive you cant control-shift-f1.

Internet Explorer 7: No, but Firefox doesn't claim to be innovative and doesn't accuse the competition of stifling innovation - And there are plenty of innovative features in extensions which, unlike separate Windows software, can be installed and managed transparently and are often cross-platform. Microsoft would need a serious change in its business practice and quality standards to create the kind of community that exists around Firefox - They're not exactly known for well-documented, APIs that work or at least have documented bugs.

Media Player 11: People buy iPods. iPod people will use iTunes if they can. That simple. No matter what Microsoft does, people will always keep on using iTunes, even if they're not a majority of users. I don't think the new Media Player will be that great, and even if it is, it'll just start Apple on doing something better. From what I see, it looks like an awfully clumsy interface, but I haven't used it; if Microsoft puts its marketing weight behind it, we'll see what happens.

User Account Control: My original statement on that was "Unix has had it since the 70's". I didn't say it sucks, I didn't say it's not useful, I simply said I wasn't impressed. Your point is?

Protected-Mode IE: So, you can't make a point and you say I'm 'backpedaling' because you're incapable of reading subtle humour? Even when I made a follow-up joke (Which was taken seriously, too. )

Windows Firewall: The Windows XP firewall did go through some serious improvements (Remember how SP1 couldn't take five minutes online without being infected?). But again, it's still not up to the standard of Unix software. Maybe the third or fourth security patch for Vista will be somewhere close, but vulnerabilities will always take longer to correct in Microsoft software than they do on Linux.

Session 0 Isolation: Again, I said "We've had that since the seventies". I didn't say what you apparently read, "OMG VISTA IS TEH SUXX0R". I'm just saying that I'm not impressed at all, and that they should have implemented this back in the early nineties when personal computers became powerful enough to support multitasking and true multiuser systems. Unfortunately, Windows was never ready for networking until the strapped networking capabilities on it thoughtlessly. The lack of foresight, and the fact that Microsoft hurried tcp/ip support back then basically doomed every single version of Windows to be insecure until they decided to implement a true multiuser system, which is, you know, just now. So basically, I'm really, really not impressed by Microsoft cleaning up its own mess now.

Windows Defender: Windows' crappyness is the consequence of both management and engineering flaws. Some of my points talk about bad management, some talk about bad engineering (Which, in general, is a consequence of bad management anyway) but I was always talking specifically. Also, Windows' popularity is wildly overrated when it comes to virii. First, there are more Unix web servers than there are Windows ones; second, it's easier to write code for Unix than it is for Windows. Third, Unix operating systems are in general Open-source and therefore, in theory, you can find vulnerabilities in the code and exploit them more easily. And still, the most successfull virii distributed for Linux lasted less than weeks and caused negligible damage. Compare that to the massive downtime caused by some major Windows worms, in servers and desktops. And don't say it's because there aren't enough Linux machines to infect; there are plenty of web servers with fast connections and plenty of processing time running Linux, and people running Linux usually leave their computers online constantly or for longer uptimes than people running Windows. Conclusion: Linux and Unix in general is inherently safer than Windows. The 'people write more Windows viruses' argument is flawed, too; you apparently don't know anything about how Unix security works. Only an extremely major vulnerability would allow a worm to kill your operating system; even if a worm does get in, it generally won't have user privileges to do much harm to the operating system, and will kill only your personal files (Which you should back up anyway, since hardware fails.), while a Windows worm can kill both your personal files and your operating system, and get in through any application (Windows used to let you catch a virus from email, word documents, excel spreadsheets, websites, and numerous other sources, and those viruses all got access to the operating system. I mean, come on, how much more promiscuous can you get?)

Parental Controls: I don't have children, so my arguments here are pretty much academic, but yes, I do think that a parental filter implemented by Microsoft has a high chance of not blocking things it should and blocking things it should not. Microsoft has a history of software coming out with bizarre flaws and non-deterministic bugs. I used NetNanny as the first example that comes to mind. And yes, I'm serious, don't let your eight-year old use the 'net unsupervised, and poke through the cache and browser history of your twelve-year-old occasionally. Technological measures are complementary and never a replacement for parental attention.

Symbolic links: True, but I'm saying that it doesn't compel me to switch. It won't help Microsoft regain any of the market share they lost to Unix operating systems (I'm including MacOS X on this because that, too, is Unix.) Oh, and user-friendliness is an illusion. People find Linux difficult because they're used to the way Windows works and Linux is different (Because Linux's purpose, despite what some people think, is not to replace Windows. Linux exists to be a good operating system at everything it does, and if it's better than Windows at nearly everything, it's only because it does things differently.) Younger children, particularly ones that haven't used Windows much, usually show no difficulty with Linux, and anyone who wants to spend the time and learn how to use the system can pick up Linux over the course of a weekend. Ubuntu is, in some respects, more user-friendly than Windows (There is a single interface for finding, downloading, and installing applications, for example). And it doesn't make you install each application, one by one, painstakingly after you reinstall the system. Linux simply isn't built around the assumptions that computers are simple things that require no knowledge to use - Unfortunately, computing as a whole hasn't reached that level yet; there's no point in pretending we did.


Games are an exception because they can use OpenGL instead of the Windows API - But the only thing that lets you run DirectX games on Linux is third-party software (Crossover), and you need Wine to run Windows applications. Using closed APIs that are incompatible and poorly documented might be sound business practice, but it hurts users, hurts programmers, and hurts third-party software vendors.

And will you please provide actual arguments instead of just saying 'Your arguments are flawed and you're a crazy Linux fanboy'. I'm not a crazy Linux fanboy. I think Linux, BSD, MacOS X, and the (late) BeOS are all different with their own advantages and issues, and will work for different people. WIndows too, even though it generally has more security and back-end issues (Just like Linux has issues with eye-candy and MacOS had issues with running on cheap, open hardware) but Windows causes problems for its users and indirectly hurts everyone else by making things more difficult; it might be good for Microsoft, but it's definitely evil.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=7832

since 1998 computer game sales have been on a decline. (meaning each year they sell less and less)

The average score a PC game got, in PC gamer has declined since 2000.

I havn't seen new content for PC games in two years. (meaning, not a sequal, and not part of a franchise)


Hmm, correction, GuildWars did come out, last year.


@Verithrax... Why exactly should File manamgent and Window appearance NOT be part of an OS? *boggle*

So, if I had $40 million and now I have $20 million, it means I'm poor? Right.

The little article you provided doesn't tell much. Decline, ok. Consoles gain more market (sadly) and we all know it, but saying PC games market is dead for years now is absolutely wrong.
Also:


I won't bother looking up stuff, but first place that came to my head:
http://pc.ign.com/e3/2006/games/
There doesn't seem to be particularly less PC games than any console games.

And I see nothing wrong with sequels, it just has to be a good game and that's all.

You mean they scrapped WinFS? Why SHOULD they introduce it when Linux can't even handle NTFS fully yet? Not to mention that there were too many bugs with it to think about introducing it - what would you have had them do? Introduce something full of flaws instead?

Just as a side note - they have just released the public beta of Windows Media Player 11 - XP version, and with it you can get a 14 day free trial of the new Urge music service for which you don't need a credit card.

hmm, probabbly needs its own thread, but.. Sequals means lack of new creative ideas being given money to creat new computer games. Lack of creativity in new games, means smart creative people no longer want to work on those games. (instead they are now starting Console game companies) Computer games have barely hit thier infancy in complexity of what they could create as an artform, and its allready being stifled by alternative forms of innovation (such as the Wii and Nintendo DS)... So to get back to the point of my hyperbolic statement, The computer is a less likely tool to be used for good games in the future, (unless something turns the investor back to the mouse and keyboard) So Windows vista will probabbly cause more people to buy better graphics cards than new computer games will. Which is an interseting thing overall.

Untill this point, Computer games(and the porn and military industry- but nobody likes to admit those) have been the driving force for Computer inovation and hardware inovation, and I think Vista is a sign of what to expect from computers in the future as games bring less reason for innovation. Instead we have a focus on Music Dowloads, Video broadband casting, Blogging and the like. (just look at Mac's newest laptop and thier advertisments)

My biggest problem with Vista is that its turning your computer into another Television where you mostly recieve other people's work, instead of a place to foster people to be engaged with creation and thinking. Its all, downloads, and file sharing. I'd hate to have to keep my kids away from a computer the same way I'll have to keep them away from Television.

First, Linux doesn't have to support NTFS. Why is it a flaw? Linux supports FAT32, NFS, Samba, XFS, and several others. Windows doesn't support Ext2, Ext3, nor Reiserfs. And NTFS isn't open nor documented; writing drivers to support it is basically reverse engineering. And yeah, sure, they've been delaying the Vista release while scrapping features. They'll be releasing less, and they'll take longer to do it than they previously said. Open Source coders don't make promises and don't write silly schedules; things are done when they're done, and they're not rushed out the door to make a quick profit, which seems to be the standard with closed-source software and Microsoft so far. Vista has been delayed a lot, so it might come out much more clean and complete than previous Windows versions. Or it may not; they're rebuilding stuff from scratch.

Veri, still havn't answered my question... I'm curious. (about file managers)

Linux has to support NTFS because Fat32 is a shit FS and having that as the only FS that is able to be shared with windows is pathetic - yeah they got the NTFS read down fairly well, but the sheer amount of problems you can get with writing to NTFS is horrible. Yes, they are releasing less - but show me one feature besides WinFS that was wanted as much as that was and has been scrapped.

Oh and on the note about learning curves - the Linux curve even today is way too steep for the general user to try and handle. Even something as simple as editing grub to make windows the default boot (yay for read only files that don't have a clear easy way to edit them) or mounting partitions or cdroms and then wondering how to eject them without realising that they have to unmount them first (unlike windows or mac where the process is fairly seamless and easy either way you do it.

People buy Ipods because they were the most aethestically pleasing of the originals. However, most Ipod users I know are soon switching to new availabities as soon as they have to replace their Ipod. With the beautiful exterior of an Ipod you also gain the fact that it's freaking fragile. Honestly, I see Ipods losing a lot of market share once the original owners go, "Oh crap, I can't transfer MP3's back to my computer to re-load onto my Ipod after I clean it out," and just have to end up wiping out the Ipod because of the proprietary technology and have no record of the mp3. Anyways, plus some of the new mp3 players are seriously amazing. Sony's got one that is amazingly small that I love and Philips has one whose interface is just purely beautiful.

First, because it forces people to use that GUI shell and that file manager; you don't get to pick one that suits your tastes and processing power. On Windows, all you can do is change where the taskbar is, move around icons, and change whether you want pretty and slow or fast and ugly. On Linux, you get to pick among several GUI shells, some more complete than others, some slow, some fast, some pretty, some ugly. You have freedom of choice, and freedom of choice is easy. WIndows Blinds doesn't count - It's purely aesthetical. And even all the other software that goes with Windows Blinds, it still isn't as customizable as Linux window managers can be, and is considerably slower. Other replacements are usually slow and unstable because Windows wasn't meant to switch GUI shells.

The other, more techie reason is that it means that if you crash one thing, you crash the OS. It also means that vulnerabilities in software bundled with the OS are vulnerabilities in the OS itself. It's simply promiscuously unsafe and doesn't have any tangible advantages I can discern compared to the Kernel -> GNU tools -> X Server -> Window Manager -> Desktop - > Application layered model used on all operating systems currently in production but Windows; the reason is that Windows was originally a GUI shell that ran on top of DOS. Another issue is that components can't be developed and updated separately, which slows down development cycles and worse, it means you buy everything all over again when you buy Windows - You're paying for the operating system, file manager, desktop and GUI shell (Neither of which, in the switch from 2000 to XP, were substantially different besides eye-candy lots of people turned off, including me) Web Broser (Which lots of people don't even use) and mail client (Which only dumb people use because it's about as safe as wearing black with a white strip across your chest and lying down on the highway). For Microsoft, it makes business sense; they don't want people making money by selling better components for their own OS, so they lock everything together. From an engineering standpoint, it's dumb and the Microsoft people know it. For some of the users, it's a ripoff.

I'm sure I don't have a 'normal' computer user's perspective, having studied Computer Science as a major for a few years, but it strikes me as stupid to have the OS do anything more than it absolutely has to, or any other component, for that matter. The more you have it do, the more that can go wrong. Have it do what it needs to, and have it easy to work with for other programs and other developers. That's it.

And I'm not so sure about the usabilty gap between Linux and Windows. A lot of it, I think, is that people are used to Windows, and have been for years. Yes, Linux is harder to use, but not nearly so much that you can't pick it up if you give it a half decent try, and know anything about computers. I decided to install Ubuntu this weekend, and when the partioner crapped out on me, I just deleted Windows entirely and jumped in headfirst. I've had no problems a simple Google search couldn't fix, so far.

Apparently you are both unaware of how windows works....

For example, you can forcequit Explorer (the file management system and the OS will not Crash, instead it will reboot Explorer and the computer will work just fine...)

i.e. Such software is bundled with the OS, it is developed by the same people who develop the OS, but from a techincal point of view, it is not part of the OS.

I think it would be rediculous to get an OS without having all the supporting software come with it.

Speaking of ubuntu, the Live cd won't work for me :S. Little help?

God I've become more and more computer illiterate over the years.