[Beowulf] Sidebar: Vista Rant

[Jim Lux]

At 03:36 PM 7/16/2007, Robert G. Brown wrote:
>On Mon, 16 Jul 2007, Peter St. John wrote:
>
>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.

over the counter "consumer" you're right.
over the counter "business" XP still dominates. But you're not going 
to find it at category killers like best buy or office depot (which, 
though catering to businesses, appear not to sell business computers)

>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.

 From Dell, as of about a month ago, XP and Vista were the same price.

>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).

But Linux plus X on a 486 with a 640x480 VGA is a very different 
matter from digital rights managed 1600x1200 HD on that 
multicore.  It's not really an apples/apples comparison.  You have to 
burn a lot of compute cycles to make sure that your content is 
legitimately being viewed <grin>.

James Lux, P.E.
Spacecraft Radio Frequency Subsystems Group
Flight Communications Systems Section
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mail Stop 161-213
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena CA 91109
tel: (818)354-2075
fax: (818)393-6875