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 Media
TM 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
