topbanner_forum
  *

avatar image

Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
Did you miss your activation email?

Login with username, password and session length
  • Friday March 29, 2024, 1:22 am
  • Proudly celebrating 15+ years online.
  • Donate now to become a lifetime supporting member of the site and get a non-expiring license key for all of our programs.
  • donate

Last post Author Topic: Don't be fooled, Vista wants new hardware  (Read 20931 times)

f0dder

  • Charter Honorary Member
  • Joined in 2005
  • ***
  • Posts: 9,153
  • [Well, THAT escalated quickly!]
    • View Profile
    • f0dder's place
    • Read more about this member.
    • Donate to Member
Re: Don't be fooled, Vista wants new hardware
« Reply #25 on: April 11, 2007, 08:50 AM »
Using 3D tech for a 2D interface has been a good idea for a long time, Yoshi's Island anyone?
-Hirudin
The hardware has probably been doing that internally for quite some years already, mind you. I still haven't seen any advantage of the Vista UI, but I guess it's really meant for the eye-candy suckers anyway. There's one test I need to do, though: playing back a 720p h.264 movie split across two monitors. Maybe that'll finally be properly accelerated, instead of going to 80% CPU usage.

Who cares about boot speed? I mean, sure if you restart 5 times or more in an hour it might be annoying, but I can't imagine many of us do that very often. I think people bitch about the boot time because it's so quantitative, anyone can use a stopwatch and see that one takes longer to boot than the other, but I doubt many people can explain why it matters so much to them that one is a whopping 10 seconds slower.
-Hirudin
I don't care that much about boot speed, since I tend to boot my system when I get up, and shut it down when I go to bed, sometimes with a reboot or two inbetween for whatever reason. But Vista was touted as booting faster than XP - it certainly doesn't do so here.

Programs are starting more slow than XP? Wha? How is this possible? We can all be sure that if this is an actual problem it'll be resolved soon. I mean, it's mostly a function of how quickly the data can be read from the HDD and put on the RAM isn't it? Vista isn't making our HDDs slower is it?
-Hirudin
Ever so slightly, yes. Things like opening the control panel etc., mind you, not 3rd party apps. Imho just another sign that things have been bloated up for no good reason.

IE sucks anyway. I've heard that Firefox used to cause BSODs, but you can be sure that'll end soon (if it hasn't already). Explorer has always sucked, I actually think it looks better now (but I'll be putting Directory Opus on there anyway).
-Hirudin
Firefox causing BSODs on Vista? My oh my, what a joke... while FF is a bad-mannered pig, it's still pretty simple user-mode code, and if user-mode code can cause BSODs, well... I'll write this off as a smear campaign by super-anti-ms people until I hear about it from a reliable source. Surely Vista can't be THAT bad :)

How come "DRM" and "drivers" are always brought up together regarding Vista? Don't tell me there are driverz (like "warez") out there... Really, is there DRM with anything except entertainment media? Why are you buying music or videos.
-Hirudin
Drivers, because Vista makes it harder for me to write my own drivers. I'm not talking about hardware drivers, though, but drivers for the purpose of running kernel-mode code. This can be useful for advanced debugging, code profiling, and reverse engineering.

IMHO MS have not made it harder to protect the customer, but as part of an agreement with Verisign (or whoever grants signing licensing now). And it's not cheap. It's still possible to run unsigned drivers on 32bit Vista, but afaik not on 64bit. So, native EXT2 filesystem access from Windows? Nope, not unless somebody coughs up and buys a signing license - with all the restrictions and caveats this brings.

DRM is an issue as well, if you look at how some code paths have been designing in Vista. "Tilt bits", encryption of kernel/user communication; INCLUDING RSA public-key handshake... as if user<->kernel transitions weren't already expensive enough. Etc.

Why are you consorting with people who buy music or videos? If you can't watch Lost because you can't get a copy without DRM that's a problem with you, not the OS...
-Hirudin
If Microsoft and The MediaTM had their way, there would be NO content that wasn't DRM'ed. Not speaking up against it and following the lemmings will bring us there. I very much like being able to rip my audio CDs (especially once I get hold of a SqueezeBox), and copying movies to a harddrive and streaming across the network is nice as well - why change dvd when doing a simpsons or futurama marathon with your friends, when you can just press 'next'?

Since when is searching on your own computer so important?
-Hirudin
I do it all the time - I'm not even close to having decent organization of my files :-[. Good thing there's locate32. And no, while conceptually smart, I've never gotten to like any of those desktop searches with their meta info.

It sure is lame they removed the cool new FAT/NTFS/whatever thing they hyped the shit out of at the beginning! Of course, Linux is barely catching up with NTFS, I guess Linux users should be rejoicing...
-Hirudin
I'm glad they removed the database filesystem thing... not needed for most people, very expensive to have running, and replaced by the desktop searched anyway.

Btw, while it's a big old lie that you never need to defrag linux filesystems, there's a couple of okay ones there. Conservative but safe ext3 (which can journal not only fs metadata like ntfs, but also file data!), promising XFS, and in-it's-infancy-but-ungodly-cool ZFS (originating from Solaris).

Is the stream of consciousness thing working for anyone else? No? I'll shut up now.
-Hirudin
Works fine for me, just hope people don't mind the evolution(?) of the thread :)
- carpe noctem

JeffK

  • Charter Member
  • Joined in 2005
  • ***
  • Posts: 363
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: Don't be fooled, Vista wants new hardware
« Reply #26 on: April 11, 2007, 08:56 AM »
I'm installing Vista (Business) on my relatively new laptop today.  Wish me luck.

Jeff

I'm having a lot of trouble.  The first reboot during installation brought on a "Disk Read Error Press CAD to reboot".

I couldn't get around it so now I am having to do a fresh install rather than an upgrade.  Not happy Bill.


Darwin

  • Charter Member
  • Joined in 2005
  • ***
  • Posts: 6,984
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: Don't be fooled, Vista wants new hardware
« Reply #27 on: April 11, 2007, 09:40 AM »
Just re-read this Linux review from last month's Gizmo Newsletter and its followup from this month's newsletter. Amusing and very informative.

Hirudin

  • Charter Member
  • Joined in 2005
  • ***
  • Posts: 543
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: Don't be fooled, Vista wants new hardware
« Reply #28 on: April 11, 2007, 02:16 PM »
Drivers, because Vista makes it harder for me to write my own drivers. I'm not talking about hardware drivers, though, but drivers for the purpose of running kernel-mode code. This can be useful for advanced debugging, code profiling, and reverse engineering.

IMHO MS have not made it harder to protect the customer, but as part of an agreement with Verisign (or whoever grants signing licensing now). And it's not cheap. It's still possible to run unsigned drivers on 32bit Vista, but afaik not on 64bit. So, native EXT2 filesystem access from Windows? Nope, not unless somebody coughs up and buys a signing license - with all the restrictions and caveats this brings.

DRM is an issue as well, if you look at how some code paths have been designing in Vista. "Tilt bits", encryption of kernel/user communication; INCLUDING RSA public-key handshake... as if user<->kernel transitions weren't already expensive enough. Etc.
Oh I understand a little better now. Not being a programmer I don't know about these things...

[edit]OK, so the SnūzNLūz alarm clock isn't real... nevermind.[/edit]
« Last Edit: April 11, 2007, 02:22 PM by Hirudin »

f0dder

  • Charter Honorary Member
  • Joined in 2005
  • ***
  • Posts: 9,153
  • [Well, THAT escalated quickly!]
    • View Profile
    • f0dder's place
    • Read more about this member.
    • Donate to Member
Re: Don't be fooled, Vista wants new hardware
« Reply #29 on: April 11, 2007, 06:46 PM »
Oh I understand a little better now. Not being a programmer I don't know about these things...
And normal users won't know about this (and most wouldn't care if they knew), just like most won't care about the DRM ("I don't watch hd/bluray on my computer"). Problem is, that makes it even easier to get this technology sneaked in and locked down even tighter. And they're trying to market TPM as if it was for our convenience/safety, *sigh*.
- carpe noctem

JeffK

  • Charter Member
  • Joined in 2005
  • ***
  • Posts: 363
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: Don't be fooled, Vista wants new hardware
« Reply #30 on: April 11, 2007, 06:48 PM »
I'm installing Vista (Business) on my relatively new laptop today.  Wish me luck.

Jeff

I'm having a lot of trouble.  The first reboot during installation brought on a "Disk Read Error Press CAD to reboot".

I couldn't get around it so now I am having to do a fresh install rather than an upgrade.  Not happy Bill.



Fresh install worked fine.  Fortunately it is a new laptop so I don't have to reinstall many apps.

zridling

  • Friend of the Site
  • Charter Member
  • Joined in 2005
  • ***
  • Posts: 3,299
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: Don't be fooled, Vista wants new hardware
« Reply #31 on: April 11, 2007, 10:18 PM »
I added more to the fire here. Waiting for Ed Bott to clarify Microsoft's EULA for them, which is sad. As Ed writes: If I have a technical question about Windows, I don't call a lawyer. Likewise, if I have a question about the legal agreement that is the Windows license, I don't call technical support. The issues are completely different, a fact that has confused Microsoft's employees, its customers, and even so-called experts that claim to be Windows insiders....

MrCrispy

  • Participant
  • Joined in 2006
  • *
  • Posts: 332
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: Don't be fooled, Vista wants new hardware
« Reply #32 on: April 11, 2007, 11:07 PM »
I'm glad they removed the database filesystem thing... not needed for most people, very expensive to have running, and replaced by the desktop searched

Ah, but WinFS was so much more than just search. Even though some of the search functionality is in Vista, a lot of what they really wanted to do is gone. e.g. in the earlier beta builds, My Documents, Music etc were virtual folders that would aggregate the docs and music found on your system. That was a step in the right direction, so people wouldn't have to worry about where their content is saved (a lot of people simply save files on their desktop).

Search was just one part of WinFS. The other big thing was relationships. You could link, e,g an eamil you received in Outlook (which btw you could see in a virtual folder called Emails, and not have to open Outlook), to the people it mentioned (which would be in your system wide Contacts, not just the email address book), which would be linked to all the documents/pictures which mentioned those people. All this would be done automatically given the right metadata. The ideas behind WinFS were to expose all information in a uniform way instead of being tied to apps that understand a propietary format, and let the user make sense of it. They were very radical, and very hard to implement, and perhaps too much of a change for most users. But all this was demo'd back at PDC in 2003 when Longhorn was announced and damnit, I want that!!

zridling

  • Friend of the Site
  • Charter Member
  • Joined in 2005
  • ***
  • Posts: 3,299
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: Don't be fooled, Vista wants new hardware
« Reply #33 on: April 11, 2007, 11:36 PM »
I guess the biggest thing was that in the five years they took to develop Vista, the world done gone and changed in a big way. Microsoft was knocked on its heels by XP's original security problems and thus was born SP2 instead of a full Windows upgrade. Meanwhile, since SP2, the world went all RSS and email all but went Web 2.0. All the while, Microsoft kept quietly removing lurid features like WinFS that MrCrispy writes about, and instead we got stuck with Aero, which frankly, is a joke. If you're going to stay with a 32-bit system, there's no good reason to move to Vista. Instead, just wait for Windows 7 (Fiji, or whatever they change the name to every other month).

Darwin

  • Charter Member
  • Joined in 2005
  • ***
  • Posts: 6,984
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: Don't be fooled, Vista wants new hardware
« Reply #34 on: April 11, 2007, 11:38 PM »
MrCrispy - you've made me sad about what Longhorn became all over again. With luck, these features will be developed and released with the next version, which is due out when, next year? Actually, I dimly recall mention of WinFS being planned for release as an update to Vista later this year or next, or am I just engaging in wishful, hagiographic thinking?

MrCrispy

  • Participant
  • Joined in 2006
  • *
  • Posts: 332
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: Don't be fooled, Vista wants new hardware
« Reply #35 on: April 12, 2007, 06:11 AM »
Sorry, but WinFS was taken out back, shot, strangled and buried. There was some talk about how the code was going to be in SQL Server, but for all intents and purposes, WinFS on the desktop is dead :(

The next Windows version is codenamed Vienna (or Windows Seven) and is probably at least 3-4 years away (they have to ship Longhorn server first). Who knows what we will (or won't) see in it. Microsoft's biggest strength and weakness has always been backward compatibility, which is why Windows has to carry a lot of baggage and cater to corporate customers who pay the bills and who couldn't care less about new end-user usability features, as long as they get their yearly fix of Windows, Exchange and Office. If you only knew about the stuff that MSR (Microsoft research) comes up with that never makes it into the final product, believe me you would cry!

Do I sound bitter yet :)

f0dder

  • Charter Honorary Member
  • Joined in 2005
  • ***
  • Posts: 9,153
  • [Well, THAT escalated quickly!]
    • View Profile
    • f0dder's place
    • Read more about this member.
    • Donate to Member
Re: Don't be fooled, Vista wants new hardware
« Reply #36 on: April 12, 2007, 07:20 AM »
Yes, I know WinFS was supposed to be more than just searching, and I'm still glad they removed it - I don't like the overhead it would have introduced, the amount of bugs that would inevitably be present, nor the increased "scatter files all over" mentality it would bring.

Managing users, data, backups is already bad enough as it is, and WinFS wouldn't make it any better... and I still claim that for a lot of people, a desktop search (as an addon, please, not a stuffed-down-your-troath forced integral part of the OS) would be just fine.

But I know, I'm pretty conservative on some regards, and I'm a control freak.
- carpe noctem

Darwin

  • Charter Member
  • Joined in 2005
  • ***
  • Posts: 6,984
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: Don't be fooled, Vista wants new hardware
« Reply #37 on: April 12, 2007, 10:27 AM »
Thanks MrCrispy... I'm off to the pub to drown my sorrows   :(

Armando

  • Charter Member
  • Joined in 2005
  • ***
  • Posts: 2,727
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: Don't be fooled, Vista wants new hardware
« Reply #38 on: April 12, 2007, 08:22 PM »

Have I missed something? Since when is searching on your own computer so important? I use the windows search maybe once every 2 months... who cares?


Armando

  • Charter Member
  • Joined in 2005
  • ***
  • Posts: 2,727
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: Don't be fooled, Vista wants new hardware
« Reply #39 on: April 12, 2007, 08:26 PM »
searching my own computer....???
I mean... I use it all the time. All the time. Anybody who's into research (PhD., Science, philosophy, whatever...) uses these tools. How was I able to synthesize 20 digitalized book by/on Nelson Goodman in 2 months, have all my references right, etc., and write a 100pages paper on it ?  :)
Yep : desktop search (X1 + Copernic, and FARR).

Darwin

  • Charter Member
  • Joined in 2005
  • ***
  • Posts: 6,984
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: Don't be fooled, Vista wants new hardware
« Reply #40 on: April 12, 2007, 08:44 PM »
searching my own computer....???
I mean... I use it all the time. All the time. Anybody who's into research (PhD., Science, philosophy, whatever...) uses these tools. How was I able to synthesize 20 digitalized book by/on Nelson Goodman in 2 months, have all my references right, etc., and write a 100pages paper on it ?  :)
Yep : desktop search (X1 + Copernic, and FARR).

Yup - this pretty much sums up my own need for search capabilities. It's the thousands of pdf articles from extremely interesting academic journals, coupled with thousands of Word documents, Excel files, Access databases, and e-mails that I need to be able to sift through quickly that means that I need to be able to search my computer (and within files on my computer).
« Last Edit: April 12, 2007, 08:48 PM by Darwin »

Hirudin

  • Charter Member
  • Joined in 2005
  • ***
  • Posts: 543
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: Don't be fooled, Vista wants new hardware
« Reply #41 on: April 13, 2007, 05:02 AM »
Oh, so it's being able to search within files quickly that is so helpful...

I got the impression that it was mostly for people who are like "dur..? where did I put that file?".