[Beowulf] Sidebar: Vista Rant

[Robert G. Brown]

On Mon, 16 Jul 2007, Peter St. John wrote:

> RGB asks, "...On my nice new dual core 2 GB laptop, Vista Home runs like --
> what?  What is a
> suitable metaphor for a system that can't even keep up with a moving mouse?
> ..."
>
> Jabba the Hutt. Evil, devious, immobile.
>
> I'm reluctant to say that MSWin(any) is badly designed; OS's are designed
> for purposes, and some purposes don't suit some of us. Unix was designed for
> development. Mac for usability. VMS for data processing. Tandem for
> fault-tolerance. Microsoft for Market Share.
>
> MS is really really sucessful at it's design target. People are willing to
> say that Vista is not worth getting, but they said that about Win2000 also.
> Correct was to keep 98 & NT and wait for XP.

Wrongo.  Win2K was never REALLY pushed as a consumer product.  But now
try getting a new system over the counter with anything but Vista on it.
Sure, if you special order or buy online you can get XP -- probably at
full retail.  But seriously, the market is being saturated with Vista
systems.

Vista is seriously more broken than W2K (which really wasn't bad -- just
expensive and not that much better than NT).  The interesting thing is
that it is such a RADICAL departure from XP -- and so easy to mock.  I
mean, it really, really sucks.  Even by MS, W3.2, W95 standards.

It would be very interesting to see how many consumers chose Vista over
XP given a free choice.  But Microsoft isn't about freedom, it is about
control, and a high level corporate decision has been made to push a
seriously broken system onto the MAINSTREAM user.  This could have some
fairly serious long term repercussions.  As did Slow-aris for Sun.

Consumers will forgive a lot, but not poor interactive performance.
That's why Linus has made excellent interactive performance a design
mandate from the very earliest days of the kernel (and why linux plus X
on 486's was peppier -- much peppier -- than Vista on multi GHz multi
cores).

    rgb

>
> Peter
>

-- 
Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb at phy.duke.edu