Vista Sucks

[mdvalley]

And I dual-boot XP and Ubuntu and everything worked out of the box in Linux for me. That, I think, is Linux's biggest obstacle right now. There's no guarantee that everything will work right away like in Windows. That's the hardware manufacturers' fault. The Linux geeks have to use experimentation and reverse engineering to write drivers, whereas Windows has them handed to it on a silver platter.

I'll never understand how people think that the amount of choice in Linux is a bad thing. “Compiling your own system if you wanted to is so hard, and Windows is better because you can't.” What?

On the MS side of things, Vista's biggest competitor isn't Mac or Linux, it's XP. This is the longest MS has ever gone without releasing a new OS, and in the meantime XP has received so many tweaks and improvements. You have a flashy new OS vs a tried and true one with substantially lower system requirements.

[Saikon]

QUOTE (mdvalley @ Jul 13 2007, 09:46 AM) I'll never understand how people think that the amount of choice in Linux is a bad thing. “Compiling your own system if you wanted to is so hard, and Windows is better because you can't.” What?

Whenever I downloaded a program to use in Ubuntu it came as source. You had to compile it first. This is a problem for me and most non-IT folk. Windows on the other hand comes with an installer. And because linux supports so many types of hardware it can be become a pain to install something a simple as a printer or a network card. Took me days to finally figure out a work around for my network card. I never did get my printer to work. But it worked in windows, so its not a compatibility problem, just a problem with how linux dealt with drivers that I just couldn't figure out. Also having a lot of choice makes it easy to break something. Hard to re-install linux once because I did something and still don't know what I did.

[ImmortalZ]

There's a fatal flaw in your reasoning Saikon.

Windows supports more hardware than Linux. Plainly because GNU demands that the drivers be made open source if it is to be included in a GNU distribution. No major manufacturer (especially video card) wants to show its secret FPS juice to the competitor. So, the Linux community is left to fend for itself or use the woefully outdated and broken drivers the manufacturers release once in a blue moon

[deschain]

I always thought smeg was an abbreviation of Smegma.

[voipscout]

QUOTE (Saikon @ Jul 13 2007, 04:12 PM) I don't understand the hatred Microsoft gets. A lot of people seam to have a problem with the fact that they make insane sums of money. How does a company make that much money? They provide a service that is needed by a large percentage of the population. If their product was crap people wouldn't use it.

If it wasn't for these huge global companies the world would not be what it is today. Actually these companies are owned by thousands of individuals and organisations around the world, they aren't a single evil entity. They help to increase the wealth of individuals in society. What happens to all that tax they pay? It goes back into society for health, education and infrastructure. These companies support us and create thousands of jobs. And I can't stand it when people complain that they make too much money.

Anyway back to windows. Windows products aren't actually very bad at all. I think Windows is the best operating system I have used. (never used a mac tho) I have a dual boot system with ubuntu, and that thing is a pain in the ass to use. I'm not an IT expert. And because the damn thing supports so much stuff it is a pain to get things working because you need to tell it what to do a lot of the times. It took me hours to figure out how to install programs on it. Why do I have to compile the damn thing. I just want to click, install, use it. Took me ages to figure out how to mount my hard drives. I shouldn't have to do this. Took a week to find the workaround for my network card. Worked first go in windows.

I WANT user friendliness. Linux takes up too much time, Windows just works! Sure they have their own codecs and other IT jargon stuff they want to become the industry standard, but hey, if its easy and works first time then I'm all for it. I can see how Linux would be useful to IT pros because of the amount of control you have over the system. But for your average user it's too time consuming.

MICROSOFT FTW!

Oh... Oh.... you asked for it and i can't hold it in:

It is not about the amount of money MS is making, it is about where does that money go, let's see here: Marketing, Marketing, Marketing, Advertising, New sales channels creation (think xbox, windows mobile, multimedia PC), More Marketing, More Advertising, Internal Marketing, Global Brand recognition, Marketing, Advertising. Does that sound like a software development company ? Not in the very least. What it reminds me of is the once a 4 years presidential campaign (it's all farce anyways, since the ellections are fixed, but it gives you a good fuzzy feeling inside, that you participated in "democracy"), but with unlimited funding and global reach.

Where should the money be spent ? Here: compatibility, stability, scalability, testing, more testing, QA, more QA, large scale alpha, testing, QA, public beta, QA, service pack 1, QA, sp2, testing, QA, a bit of Marketing, small Advert on the MS web site. You get the idea, right ? That would actually resemble a software house.

You claim, that if MS products were crap, nobody would be using it, well, what do you do if you want to take a dump and you are in a bloody desert, 500 miles away from toilet paper and facilities ? You take a dump anywhere in the desert and wipe your arse with sand, that's it, it hearts, it doesn't feel civilized and it certainly is as irritable as hell, but you still do it, because you just HAVE to take dump and it IS your only choice. That's MS products for you. Any of them and all really. You use it, because you have no viable alternative (Mac is too expensive and not enough geekeness to run Mac OS on commodity PC). Notice i haven't even touched linux yet. Since it can stand a few serious improvements, before a regular user will be able to handle it as easily as windows.

Ok, The ownership of large multinationals is concentrated among an elite few, download MS latest FEC filed report and you'll see, that only about 15% or less of shares of MS are in "public circulation" the rest of the stock is owned by proxies. Do you even know how those big corporations are controlled ? Let me rephrase a bit: I didn't mean that you are mentally impaired for thinking that the control of such an immenense economical resource would be trusted to the "massses" be it masses of smaller companies or those mixed in with private shareholders. No, i simply wanted to say, that you are ignorant of facts or just naive. One of those two options.

There is a board of directors, who control the company, there are shareholders, who do NOT directly control the company, but only thrue a special representetive on the board of directors. Shareholders can NEVER influence marketing or strategic decisions in such large companies. It just doesn't happen, because the piece of the pie, every board member holds is worth going into a 20 year legal battle with shareholders many times over and then some.

Now, let's get to the bottom of it: How can MS keep it's shareholders happy, so that they would never even think about interfering with the market direction the company chooses to take ? Ahhh, simple - Make sure, your shareholders get the maximum possible return on their investment. That's it, the ONLY responsibility microsoft has is ONLY again ONLY towards it's shareholders. Nobody else, nothing else. No other purpose of existance other then to maximize ROI and achieve higher dividend yield. That's it.

Microsoft does NOT care about it's userbase, be it corporate or individual. MS does NOT care about the quality of their software as long as the Marketing machine keeps churning thrue money like there is no tomorrow. Plus, if you don't want to subscribe to MS slavery, you can simply shoot yourself right now. No other choice, games run mostly on MS, MS-Office is the norm and i am sure you can site many different applications you are using yourself all the time, that have no euivalent under linux or mac.

You claim, that those multinationals support you and create jobs for you, are you living in eastern europe or china ? India ? From the feel of it, i'd say you're as american as they come, but i might be mistaken. Even though, you might not be an american, you are infected with the american propoganda.

Every multinational is OUTSOURCING to India/Russia/Ukraine/Zcheck Republic/China/Indonesia etc... Want to ask why ? Answer - to MAXIMIZE their profits. Those companies take jobs away from americans and give those jobs to those who don't need social benefits, retirement packages, at least 45K annual salary, 401k, dental care, child care, travel expenses, company car etc... Get it ? 1 american = 5 to 10 quality specialists in cheaper countries. The amount of outsourcing grows tremendously every year and the amount of jobs in western countries shrinks proportionally. That's capitalism for you. Basta.

You mentioined, that big multinationals give back taxes ? Hm.... i wonder why do those large co., have so many offshore subsidaries, bank accounts, chartered accountants, lawyers ? For the same purpose: To MAXIMIZE profits, by practicing "creative accountancy", remember EnRon ? Ken Lay ? Meryll Lynch ? Goldman Sachs, Bank of NY, Charles Shwabb ? All of those companies were in on the enron scam, they all shared in the profits. How about completely legal tax reduction schemes ?

You say, that those companies help increase the individual's wealth, YES, but those are select few individuals and trust me, we have nothing to do with them. MS creates wealth for it's shareholders, remember ? Not for public, not for me or you, for shareholders. So the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, that's it, the gap is widening.

The only legitimate thing so far you said is "I can't stand it when people complain that they make too much money", well, you are most certainly entitled to your own opinion in this matter, you are welcomed to it. It's good to have an opinion, really, i salute it.

Now, as to the rest of your post, I WHOLEHEARTEDLY agree with you, that everything BUT windows is way beyond what a regular user should be able to handle, even on Macs, lots of stuff needs to be done on command line, like in any other UNIX. So as far as windows being the best for you, YEP, IT IS. No argument from me, in fact, probably the only compratively good thing that came out of MS was their desire to appeal to the end user, albeit they stole the whole concept from Apple, but hey, MS made it usable on their crap OS and who's counting what MS stole anyways ? (started out with PC-DOS....)

Linux sucks for the end user during the whole duration of it's existence, do NOT site different distros (novell suse, rhel5 etc), they are ALL unusable by non-IT people. Yes, mostly it's the drivers issue, you know to tell the truth i am myself immensely frustrated by those quirks in Linux: If the hardware is not supported out of the box, then you have to jump thrue hoops and defecate bricks in order to try and configure it properly, well... i no longer jump thrue hoops and expell concrete rectangular objects, since messing around with any UNIX-like os has become a second nature to me over the years, BUT i DO CURSE A WHOLE LOT and i find it frustrating, that my dad or mom have trouble installing a web cam on linux or using printers or like in your case making the most essential element of the system function, ie. Network Card.

YOU ARE RIGHT on all acounts of greivances with Linux today, all of your accusations are true. No don't tell me, that an Office Joe should know how to use sed,awk,grep,make,configure,gcc,lspci,modprobe and a bunch of other apps and know how to write in bash,perl or lisp (emacs stuff) for that matter. It just ain't right, it is NOT fare to the Office Joe, our Joe has his hands full already just trying to keep up with his own workload and certainly I (as a sysadmin) would NEVER want an Office Joe to be able to mess around with Linux at the expense of his primary job, which might just happen to be sales, you know.... no sales no revenue, no revenue, no margin, no margin, no profit, no profit = no need for sysadmin. I want my dearly beloved Office Joe to enjoy himself as much as possible (happy sales ppl = placated clients + more sales) and concentrate on his primary job: SALES.

You should really explode / unload all your frustration on Linux developers, who think that they are l33t allegiance whorez, for whom having to play nicely within a team is too much of bother to ask. Yeah, the linux developement process can very much be compared to allegiance pickup game play. Sometimes different comms (even during a single game) ie. Linus saying that BNI in kernel is very bad idea and Alan Cox vehemently disputing the issue or simply continueing to plug away at the code, without ever paying attention to Linus's admonitions. Actually i quit the kernel dev team just because of that chaos, i still do submit small patches, but i no longer follow the mailing list wars. It's too thick for my blood, if you know what i mean.

Anyways, i didn't mean to offend or to incite hatred or a flame, no, i just was disturbed by the fact, that so many people have absolutely no clue as to how global economy works and what's even more disturbing, that some people beleive what they are told, without getting the facts straight themselves.

Best of luck

[mesial]

I was a beta tester for Vista and I loved the OS. Still needs some tweaking though. I use XP as my main OS right now and don't plan on changing back to vista for quite a while. I ran Allegiance on (Vista) just fine, but Saitek did not make a driver for my command pad until recently, so it made Allegiance a bit more difficult.

My suggestion; don't run Vista unless you have a brand new, tits-out, mac-daddy of a computer. And still at that point, get the XP OS that comes with the free upgrade to Vista. You can upgrade at any time, whenever you're ready.

QUOTE (Deschain @ Jul 13 2007, 11:09 AM) I always thought smeg was an abbreviation of Smegma.

Dear god! I didn't need to see that picture... /rolleyes.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":roll:" border="0" alt="rolleyes.gif" />

[Saikon]

Nice reply. What I said was quite over simplified. I understand how these big companies are run. I have done economics and international business. So I know these large organisations outsource a lot to cheaper countries. I think its great. It's a boost to their economy. I'm not an American, I live in Australia. We are seeing it more and more in our country. International businesses are buying up our Australian brands and companies. And manufacturing is heading to countries with cheaper labor. Though our economy is still booming, more and more hi-tech jobs being created. As a countries economy evolves it moves from industry and agriculture into services. Look at the modern economies of today, many of them have massive service industries. I know a lot of people dislike this notion of labor employment moving to cheaper markets, but they fail to notice the increase of management and hi-tech roles that are being created in their own country.

The influx of huge sums of money into these undeveloped nations is creating jobs which provides a higher standard of living. This means they now have disposable incomes. This encourages more foreign direct investment into the country and opens up new markets for development countries to penetrate. This helps both sides of equation.

My point about companies being owned by individuals was to point out the wealth that these large companies create for them. Sure it may not be in the millions of dollars that the small percentage of the population are receiving but they are still benefiting from the success of these large companies in some way.

I actually do think that Microsofts products are good, and I will continue using them until something better comes along. And if you are business minded like myself you really do have to admire Microsofts marketing. It may not be looked upon as the best business practice but it sure as hell works!

Anyway I only wanted to make two points really.
1. Money is good.
2. Microsoft is a good.

Note. These are just my opinions. Please feel free to ridicule me and point out my flaws.

[batman]

I was going to wirte a smartass post along the lines of "Do you REALLY think MS is going to be around in 50 years?" to go with what I thought would be a laugh riot look at fortune 500 companies from 50 years ago that no longer exist.

Instead, I looked at saw how little the Fortune 500 list had really changed. Sure, there are ups and downs and new entries, but the number of companies in the top 10 is pretty amazing for longevity.

The other question I wanted to pose was this:

Do you think that the technology would have advanced if MS was not so large and omnipotent? Does MS's ability to impose a standard OS (through sheer market share) make it easier or more difficult to quickly put out 3rd party software that works for most people?

Or, does that dominance in the marketplace stifle creative approaches to computing and software development?

[fuzzylunkin1]

I don't have time to read all this.

I don't hate Microsoft, I just hate Windows. Vista uses more high end hardware then it should need compared to Windows XP (yes, XP does too but not as much in my opinion). I don't like Vista because its a bad attempt to get more money from Microsoft. I would use it if it didn't require so much and it was worth the money (I'm 16, I need money for other things).

I happen to love Xbox and Halo /mrgreen.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":D" border="0" alt="mrgreen.gif" />! Allegiance too!

For me Linux is better because its free and requires less high end hardware to run on. You get more bang for your buck with Linux.

If you want something easy to use just get a Mac. It's basically halfway between Linux and Windows in my book.

Last thing:

I STILL think we should be able to attatch ASGS to some necessary process in Linux (or something of the like) so we can play on Allegiance.

[voipscout]

QUOTE (Saikon @ Jul 13 2007, 08:20 PM) Anyway I only wanted to make two points really.
1. Money is good.
2. Microsoft is a good.

Note. These are just my opinions. Please feel free to ridicule me and point out my flaws.

You are correct essentially, but i would rephrase it:

1. Power is attractive (money is probably the wrong term, when applied to big multinationals, since they have more money then they can possibly utilize to any extent other then dividends payouts)
2. Microsoft is a major market player (good or bad.... it's a matter of opinion)

if you felt that i rediculed you in my earlier reply, that was not intentional and i shall double check my phrasing in the future in order not to offend anyone.