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What Intel Giveth, Microsoft Taketh Away
Ralf Maximus:
What I found interesting was the conclusion of the article, the weird symbiotic nature of hardware and software vendors. When Vista was delayed for so long, Intel was left with a product line of powerful new CPUs that nobody wanted. It really hurt their bottom line, and one might assume was one of the pressures placed on Microsoft to kick Vista out the door when they did.
As soon as Vista hit the streets and people learned that the "minimum requirements" were, shall we say, optimistic... then Intel's fortunes improved. Apply that same economic pressure to all of Intel's customers -- Gateway, Dell, HP/Compaq, etc -- and it's easy to see how our whole IT industry is driven by (cue trumpets) software bloat.
On the up side, I love the idea of a dual-CPU quad-core ~4GHz workstation on my desk, and such wouldn't exist without stuff like Vista + Office2007. So in that, I thank you, mindless marketing morons and greedy software executives.
Darwin:
:-[ I've now read the article and the comments - REALLY interesting stuff. My main concerns reading the piece were voiced by a number of posters to the comments section: it would be interesting to see the various versions of Windows and Office combined and tested as well and it would be more meaningful (to me) if the tests were conducted on actualy hardware, rather than VMWare.
nontroppo:
Apply that same economic pressure to all of Intel's customers -- Gateway, Dell, HP/Compaq, etc -- and it's easy to see how our whole IT industry is driven by (cue trumpets) software bloat.-Ralf Maximus (November 17, 2007, 09:39 AM)
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Except quite a number of PC manufacturers have grumbled pretty loudly over Vista (and pushed for XP retention). Considering the morasses of molasses Vista is, by the bloat argument, Vista must the best OS ever crafted, and PC sales rocketing up like never before. Do I suspect a fracture in the cyclical inevitability of bloat-dharma?
And after just helping install Leopard on an 867Mhz consumer ibook from eons ago, and having it smoothly work (including the eye candy), bloat-dharma is not inevitable. I do fear for what may arrive when MS release the version of Office 2007 for Macs in a month and a half though...
it would be interesting to see the various versions of Windows and Office combined and tested as well and it would be more meaningful (to me) if the tests were conducted on actualy hardware, rather than VMWare.
-Darwin (November 17, 2007, 10:01 AM)
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I'd like to see earlier versions of Office on Vista. But as to the virtual machine, I doubt that will make much difference (unless Vista has some kernel bug which triggers problems on a VM, though nothing has been described), and certainly would greatly complicate the process of testing.
Darwin:
My concern WRT the VM is that on my notebook, booting Win2k with 1GB virtual RAM into VirtualPC takes longer than booting Win2k on a PIII-E notebook with 512MB RAM. The author of the piece states that he virutalized some installations but used a P4 machine with 256MB RAM for others. I guess I should re-phrase my concern as being limited to wishing to see the tests run either on the same hardware or all virtualized on the same machine.
Darwin:
Er, the above should read on my 1.4GHz Centrino notebook with 2GB RAM vs the PIII-E which clocks in at 600MHz...
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