Vista the offical pronouncement?

[canon_fodder]

Someone who has got Vista what are your thoughts on it?

I've been told that it is awesome and rocks etc, by a friend, but i wana know if he's just saying it cause he's to proud to say its crap.  Also whats the deal with the games, i've heard that its hard to play games on vista and that its easy? which is true.......hmmm... what else do i want to know.

AH the RAM thing, apparently you can plug in a USB flash drive and use it as RAM... whats the dealo with this?

[zizdodrian]

(I ran the RC1 version for a while, BTW.)

Well, in my opinion, they were pretty behind with XP, and this version of windows barely only catches up with the competition. Most of the 'new features' are consolidated plagiarism of existing functionality in Mac and Linux/Unix, except coded much less efficiently.

It costs an arm and a leg, both for the OS and the hardware to run it on. It doesn't look that great. The graphical effects are overrated. Wanna see something cool? Check out Project Looking Glass, or Beryl/XGL.

The one thing that I really feel makes windows a pretty hostile environment (regardless of how'easy' and 'friendly' they purport to have made it) is its lack of good humour - it has - and does feel very cold, heartless, and corporate - which on some levels I understand - but on others, causes me to despair. Most other operating systems feature a bit of fun - Apple and Linux developers have traditionally engaged in quirky wordplay and bad puns, created cute, fuzzy mascots, and on the whole, dont take themselves too seriously, which make the operating system a whole lot more hospitable and accommodating to human users.

Purely based on the reactions on slashdot, and the pages and pages of negative or neutral comments, and the apparent lack of Microsoft supporters, I have the feeling that this OS revision has pushed a lot of people over the edge.

And with every revision of the OS, the EULAs get worse, and worse, and worse.

They used to annoy me - but now I really feel sorry for windows users unaware of choice.

[µ]

The one thing that I really feel makes windows a pretty hostile environment (regardless of how'easy' and 'friendly' they purport to have made it) is its lack of good humour - it has - and does feel very cold, heartless, and corporate - which on some levels I understand - but on others, causes me to despair. Most other operating systems feature a bit of fun - Apple and Linux developers have traditionally engaged in quirky wordplay and bad puns, created cute, fuzzy mascots, and on the whole, dont take themselves too seriously, which make the operating system a whole lot more hospitable and accommodating to human users.

Quoted for truth.  Every time that MS tries this, it backfires horribly.  Think of the Office paperclip (or any of the other mascots), the Search puppy, etc., all of which have been the butt of thousands of jokes and the cause of much annoyance.  I suspect that the puppy is only there in an attempt to guilt you into not hating the substandard search engine in XP

It's important to note that the cute fuzzy mascots and good humour in other OSs don't have a habit of getting in your way and impeding your workflow.

Purely based on the reactions on slashdot, and the pages and pages of negative or neutral comments, and the apparent lack of Microsoft supporters, I have the feeling that this OS revision has pushed a lot of people over the edge.

And this is the reason that I adore Vista, for its price tag, UI bloat, cracked-before-release security, and all.  It encourages switching.  I think that the bad reactions to Vista will filter down even to the "unwashed masses", such that more of them will consider their future OS plans more critically than before.

(µ's first-hand Vista exposure: I tried one of the betas of Vista, but only briefly on a friend's computer before he wiped it.  Neither of us were impressed in the slightest.  Even with 1.5GB of RAM and a Core Duo, it was very much the opposite of snappy.)

[zizdodrian]

I suppose, if this hurts people, they will learn.


Something else I feel about Vista is that it really gets in the way. Every single thing you do, you have to wait for either an 'animation' to complete, or a 'security feature' pops up and tells you that you aren't allowed to delete items from your desktop, and yet doesn't even ask for a password if I were, say, to delete a user on the system.

How secure.

[canon_fodder]

The one thing i really wana learn about is this apparent easy plug in RAM... does anyone know about this?

[Axilon]

You mean the, I think, Ready Boost concept.  You need a very VERY VERY fast flash-drive and windows will run its free-space as extra ram. 

[Liquidmark]

Well, Vista has only been officially released for about a day.

I say, give it a week.

Personally, I like the idea of using flash memory as spare ram.

[SPNKr Punk]

Well, Vista has only been officially released for about a day.

I say, give it a week.

Personally, I like the idea of using flash memory as spare ram.

Sounds too much like ramdisk to me. Gimme good old chip RAM anyday.

[zizdodrian]

You'd think that USB RAM would be ridiculously slow, give it is limited to 480MBps.

In a real world situation USB doesn't even run at half that. It has an OK burst speed, bust sustained IO? Nuh. Firewire ram would have been a lot nicer.

[Knightslugger]

You'd think that USB RAM would be ridiculously slow, give it is limited to 480MBps.

it is compared to on-board ram.  LOL!  A hand written note on a snail shell sent across a pool of molasses in the middle of February in Canada would be faster. i can't see how it would be very useful

[zizdodrian]

You'd think that USB RAM would be ridiculously slow, give it is limited to 480MBps.

it is compared to on-board ram.  LOL!  A hand written note on a snail shell sent across a pool of molasses in the middle of February in Canada would be faster. i can't see how it would be very useful

Maybe its used for a slightly faster kind of pre-vm memory caching or something.

Still sounds pretty weird - why would you choose a bus as slow as USB2? I'd understand if you could use one of those new solid state disks internally... but...

[Liquidmark]

Well, Vista has only been officially released for about a day.

I say, give it a week.

Personally, I like the idea of using flash memory as spare ram.

Sounds too much like ramdisk to me. Gimme good old chip RAM anyday.

Nah, Ramdisk worked the other way around. It turned the ram from your chips into a temporary HD.

Anyhoo, with high enough data transfer, using flash memory would be better than using virtual memory. Think about it, there's time lost everytime your machine resorts to virtual memory. It has to read and write information to and from a spinning disk, which can be much slower than rapidly reading and writing the same info to a Flash Drive. Of course, a solution is to buy more ram, but what if your machine is already maxed in the ram department?

[µ]

Here's a fun thought.  Everyone knows USB is plug'n'play, right?  And most of the people I know on the Windows side don't bother safely ejecting a USB key as long as they've closed open documents on it.

So what happens when you unplug your USB key without unmounting it?

I'd laugh SO DAMN HARD if someone crashed Vista by doing that.  For sure you'd lose data, at the very least.


edit: RamDisk was one of the few OS 9 features I was sad to see go.  So good for anything that needed lots of disk access.  Sure, if you lost power you were out of luck, but that wasn't a problem on laptops.  Rebooting a PowerBook 3400 in 10 seconds flat was not something to sneeze at, especially when you were having Extension troubles and kept having to reboot every 2 minutes or so to try a new set...
</nostalgia>

[SPNKr Punk]

Well, Vista has only been officially released for about a day.

I say, give it a week.

Personally, I like the idea of using flash memory as spare ram.

Sounds too much like ramdisk to me. Gimme good old chip RAM anyday.

Nah, Ramdisk worked the other way around. It turned the ram from your chips into a temporary HD.

Anyhoo, with high enough data transfer, using flash memory would be better than using virtual memory. Think about it, there's time lost everytime your machine resorts to virtual memory. It has to read and write information to and from a spinning disk, which can be much slower than rapidly reading and writing the same info to a Flash Drive. Of course, a solution is to buy more ram, but what if your machine is already maxed in the ram department?

I was thinking of a swap partition. Behold! FOR I AM STUPID!

[canon_fodder]

Well, Vista has only been officially released for about a day.

I say, give it a week.

Personally, I like the idea of using flash memory as spare ram.

Sounds too much like ramdisk to me. Gimme good old chip RAM anyday.

Nah, Ramdisk worked the other way around. It turned the ram from your chips into a temporary HD.

Anyhoo, with high enough data transfer, using flash memory would be better than using virtual memory. Think about it, there's time lost everytime your machine resorts to virtual memory. It has to read and write information to and from a spinning disk, which can be much slower than rapidly reading and writing the same info to a Flash Drive. Of course, a solution is to buy more ram, but what if your machine is already maxed in the ram department?

I was thinking of a swap partition. Behold! FOR I AM STUPID!

Beheld!

but what if your machine is already maxed in the ram department?

You mean 16GB's of RAM!  If you need more you need it to power your time machine so it can go into the future and get a faster computer to power your time machine!