[Gllug] Linux on Desktop

[Nix]

On 5 Feb 2007, Christopher Hunter verbalised:
> On Sun, 2007-02-04 at 22:00 +0000, Anthony Newman wrote:
>> Vista, on the other hand, seems to be utterly shit and slow, despite my 
>> hardware vastly exceeding the published minimum requirements.
>
> It's truly abysmal.

I think MS may be in real trouble here. With all previous Windows
releases they could rely on their bought-and-sold computer trade press
banging the drum for them, followed reliably by the mainstream press
and a large army of MCSE-et-al supporters on the ground.

This time around, it doesn't seem to be happening. The computer trade
press is defying the advertising pound and saying it sucks. BBC News
Online says it sucks, `wait for service pack 2' (amazing defiance!)
Worst of all, the army of supporters has seemingly deserted, with
everyone I've talked to or heard from saying either `I won't upgrade
yet' or `I upgraded and it was horrific and now I'm trying to downgrade
again'. A frequent complaint seems to be that expensive audiovisual gear
Just Doesn't Work Anymore (Vista DRM, of course, just as Peter Gutmann
predicted it's not as seamless as MS said it would be by a long chalk).

And this is *before* many of the activation hassles and driver
revocation and format-variation annoyances kick in. And MS's stock price
is stagnant.

Whatever are they going to do? (Other than launch patent and proxy
attacks on everyone in sight, of course; that's a given.)

> highest specification hardware, and is NOT "completely rewritten" as MS
> claim - it's little more than a "skin" for XP with added DRM.  

Oh, very large amounts of the stuff under the surface *did* get
rewritten: there was huge code churn (despite the lunatic version
control system inside MS and its equally lunatic bureaucracy doing their
level best to slow things down). The problem is that except for the DRM
(a hugely expensive big step backwards) most of this isn't visible on
the surface: all we can see is the decidedly derivative Aqua and *gasp*
the ability to *make windows translucent* which was in the XP API
anyway, just not exposed in the GUI unless you installed something
non-MS.

> MS spent about five years exploring various blind alleys, and quietly
> dropping all the clever stuff they were supposed to include as they
> found that they couldn't achieve them.

I'm especially impressed by WinFS. It was dropped, sure, but it was
originally slated for release in *1995* if I recall. This is a feature
that's slipped almost as much as _The Last Dangerous Visions_.

-- 
`In the future, company names will be a 32-character hex string.'
  --- Bruce Schneier on the shortage of company names
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