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This is pure LIES, if it was true, he would have also evolved with the skills and attibutes of Chuck Norris. As there is no mention of him, I can assume that Elvis is no more.

You didn't see the Elvis getthefacts website. Elvis beats Chuck Norris in every category.

Chuck Norris may be good in a fight (This has never actually been prooved. 1,000,000,000 dead enemies IS NOT PROOF!!) , he may even have a better singing voice than Elvis, but do you know how much he eats!

The fact about CN that they always try to hide is that he eats 40 times his body-weight every minute. What good is having the worlds' biggest badass on your side when you have to spend all your money just keeping him going. No, the Total cost of Pwnership with Chuck is 4 cow herds per enemy. Elvis however doesn't eat anything, he can exist on pure air*.

* and a gram of finest Bolivian coke per hour, but we count this as an investment, not a cost.

ROFL!

Our favourite Antipodean singer/actress is in reality a she-male?

What was included? DRM, useless eyecandy, a software "protection" platform, lots of new bugs, hardware incompatibilities and a rewritten network stack with worse performance?

LOL, sad but true.

"In conclusion, there is nothing wrong with voicing your disappointment online, but it is not okay to do so based on lies".

I don't remember having read lies in comments. There have been dropped features and you listed them in this article.

True; and lets remember, all the comments are nothing more than opinions - hence I find it funny when people take points off, all they prove is that the original poster made a point which makes them uncomfortable.

PS. your post was at -1, so I added an extra point to bring it up to 0 - I wish people didn't abuse the moderation system; its getting as bad as Digg and Slashdot.

Edited 2007-12-16 16:13

Hahahaha. I tried to +1 your comment and got:

"Uh-oh! There was an error retrieving this story."

(btw, the error url was: http://www4.osnews.com/comments/291312 )

Here is an example of the comment rating system being worse than either of those two sites. ;-P

That's the summary i could never put into words myself. Although you missed some of the retarded features that are much like the ones added in XP to fix the previous release. In XP it was System Restore! Wow, let's ADD more software to recover the system after our faulty software. And in the next version, we'll ADD SuperSystemReadyBoostedRestoreV2 to try and repair the system, when SystemRestore fails.

Things like ReadyBoost .. to squeeze back 1% of the 50% performance they removed.. by .. eeeh.. hardware accelerating the UI? now, how did we manage to make it slower with hardware acceleration.. who knows.. ..i'm still appalled that Vista is actually slower.. if i had to put my money somewhere i'd rather buy XP Service Pack 3 than Vista!

But i'd have to agree with Thom on one thing.. we should be thankful they did not release more 'features' ..but then.. what are customers paying for ?
A 50% drop in performance? despite the $2-800 investment they had to make to make the damn thing run? Don't say Aero.. it's not a feature. Don't say ReadyBoost.. It costs even more, to get back a fraction of the performance you lost..
in fact.. just.. for the love of god.. mention a useful feature in Vista.. (for customers, not hardware manufacturers moving more product).

I'm so annoyed with this disastrous product!!!

I think the sadest part - I don't even think Microsoft knows what the customer wants in the way of operating system features. When Windows Vista was being developed it appeared they were falling into the trap of rather than leading they thought that they had to have almost every bit of feedback from the 'geek elite'. They thought that 'community' entailed listening to every whim and demand of the noisy wheel.

The net result, as far as I can see, is an operating system where it appears that features are just thrown at a product in a vein hope of actually having boasting points rather than actually adding features which add genuine usefulness to the end consumer.

I look on the *NIX world with the likes of GNOME and KDE, and they continuously not only add features but question features. GNOME questions whether having hundreds of features actually adds to the end user experience or simply makes things more complex than they need to be. Better still, software developers within these communities are willing to look at Mac OS X, look at Windows, heck, even look at Amiga and adopt ideas which are good.

At the end of the day many software companies become fixated on this idea of innovation - consumers don't care who came up with who first, who invented what first, what they want is a product that works. The product will be judged not whether it is the first to deliver a certain feature but how well it actually works within the operating system.

Edited 2007-12-16 22:48

You shouldn't hold GNOME up as the paragon of good design. It's not just trimming features to keep things smooth and clean...they go far beyond that and make it hard to do simple things.

//Wow, let's ADD more software to recover the system after our faulty software.//

Faulty software written by a third-party.

Nice try.

Note: I'm pretty sure Horatio_Hellpop is Rockwell's sockpuppet. Note the distinctive, non-standard way to quote previous messages (and the same pro-MS politics).

I have a dv9000, and a friend of mine has a 17" MacBook pro. They are comparable machines and have comparable prices. When I compare my machine to other pc laptops out there, it usually comes out on top. When I compare it to the MacBook, there are HUGE differences.

1) The MacBook is half as thick, and noticeably lighter.

2) The MacBook makes no noise. Zero. When the fans are at max, you can barely hear the hum. On my machine, when the fans are at max you can DEFINATELY hear them.

3) The mac has a beautiful white finish, a glowing apple, and the lights kind of throb. My machine has a black enamel finish that you can see EVERY fingerprint on, and its lights are static (although blue).

4) The sound off his speakers, while not great, isn't terrible. The sound off of mine is kind of squelched on both the highs and the lows.

5) My DVDR drive pops out a tray when you press a button, just like every laptop made in the last decade. His acts more like a high end car stereo.

5) His FrontRow remote cannot be blocked. I don't know if they use RF or something, but if you point it in the general direction of the laptop, it works. My remote is definitely IR, and needs to be pointed at a very specific spot to function properly.

Now, my machine has two 100 gig hard drives vs one 80 gig, a slightly faster CPU, AND costed me 400$ less. Not only that, but every other laptop I compare it to usually gets blown out of the water in those categories I listed. It is comparatively quiet, it is esthetically attractive, it has friggin altec lansing speakers. Not only that, but it runs Vista flawlessly (I notice no difference in performance between Vista and XP on this hardware). But ignoring the hard drive, the macbook is better in every way.

So to sum it up, the MacBook blows a high end pc laptop out of the friggin water.

Its a shame too, because the 80 gig drive was the dealbreaker for me. I work with .net (wouldnt change that for the world either), so I would have needed to dual boot. Two operating systems and my 60 gigs of music would pretty much fill up the drive.

I have the same laptop and your comparison is bs.

The DV9000 and Macbook Pro aren't even remotely close in price. The HP starts at $849 and the Macbook at $2799. That's more than 3 times the price of the HP. Even configured as close as possible to the baseline 17 inch MBP it comes out to $1499. Less than half the price.
http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shopping/load_configuration.do?de...

For less than the baselie price for the MBP you can get 500GB's of HD space, 4GB's or ram, a TV Tuner, and a HD-DVD burner:
http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shopping/load_configuration.do?de...

HP's notebooks that compare best to the MBP are the ones in the business section of their site.

Actually, I bought this machine about 8 months ago, and my friend bought his MBP a little before that (right before the upgrade from core duo to core 2 duo). Back then, the price was about 2500$ for the HP, and about 3000$ for the MBP.

Your comment brings up another point too, Macs hold their value FOREVER, you will see the PC you bought a month ago available for half the price and feel like crying.

Edited 2007-12-16 21:34 UTC

Conversely you could say that Macs generally stay at the same price FOREVER (figuratively) and rarely go on sale. PC's are constantly evolving and giving customers more bang for their buck. PC companies are using their economies of scale to give customers a better deal today than they got yesterday while Apple is using it to get higher profits.

//So to sum it up, the MacBook blows a high end pc laptop out of the friggin water. //

Er, what? All of your points about the Macbook are purely asthetic ... you think the Macbook is prettier. That's about it.

Nice technical comparison.

Natural language search is actually included in Vista. It is just disabled by default.

http://mike.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!FBABF8E542F5D5DB!7837.entry

At what period in its history was MS a culture of innovation? MS doesn't innovate, they slowly build on tried and true ideas that others have innovated for them. Office 2k7 is probably the most innovative project that has come out of the company ever, and its "innovation" can be summed up as A UI that makes sense, and Office collaboration. Its been almost 20 years now that they have been putting out this product, and the only substantive thing they have come up with themselves is fixing a big mistake that was their fault to begin with, and adding collaborative features.

Windows is even worse, when you look at the featureset of XP compared to the competition, it was downright archaic. Vista is a huge step forward, but there is nothing new, everything has been done by other people, or simply fixes bad decisions made in the past. That massive jump still put them a year or so behind Apple when it comes to the home user experience, and several years behind linux when it comes to administrative tools and security.

Lets see, what else is there? The XBOX was basically a playstation with more power. The Wii is innovative, the XBOX is the same old thing. The Zune is so obviously based on the iPod. Even .net, which I love dearly and think is better then any other platform on the market, is obviously based on java, and has very few areas that are true innovation.

What Vista reflects is that at least once a decade, MS needs to do serious housecleaning from the bottom up when it comes to APIs, architecture, and backwards compatibility.

I would also challenge you on saying that it is too late. MS had their most profitable quarter in the history of the company, Vista is installed on more computers then OSX and linux put together, and the people who do not have any issues with it (which nowadays is the majority of people on it) actually like it. The oldschool windows priesthood will object to any major change in the OS, because they are so used to the same old thing year after year, and are incredably resistant to learning anything new. I am not a member of the old priesthood, I used to hate using windows with a passion. Now that it is in the realm of being a modern OS, I enjoy it a lot more.

Installed on ... or sold with? Just because a computer is sold with Vista does not mean it is running Vista.

The local school district here will not support any computers with Vista installed. Any computer purchased with Vista pre-installed will have it wiped and XP installed. Same with the local university. I'm sure there are other major corporations around here with the same policy. And probably a lot of home computers and laptops.

Units sold has very little relation to units installed/used.

What's really interesting, is that all the Toshiba and HP laptops we buy for the school district come with Vista pre-installed, but the restore CD is XP. Does that count as a sale of Vista or XP? And which counts for the installed numbed?

MS doesn't innovate, they slowly build on tried and true ideas that others have innovated for them.

Oh, puh-lease. Everything is derivative of ideas that evolved over the past 50-something years of computer science and, by that silly standard, nothing could be considered innovative. But that's ridiculous. Innovation isn't solely about blazing unique paths. Innovation is about putting something useful in peoples' hands. MS is in a unique position of being able to put useful things in LOT of peoples' hands; therefore, when it does so, it's innovating. I don't care whether it was done elsewhere. Deploying technology on a huge number and diverse set of machines has its own challenges that the homogenous Mac line will probably never have to face.

Windows is even worse, when you look at the featureset of XP compared to the competition, it was downright archaic.

You'll have to be a bit more specific here. Not clear what you mean by "featureset of XP compared to competition." You can't compare a 7 year-old operating system with modern day OSes.

... several years behind linux when it comes to administrative tools and security.

Huh? You actually believe that Linux is AHEAD of Windows when it comes to administrative tools? Fascinating perspective, really.

Lets see, what else is there? The XBOX was basically a playstation with more power. The Wii is innovative, the XBOX is the same old thing. The Zune is so obviously based on the iPod. Even .net, which I love dearly and think is better then any other platform on the market, is obviously based on java, and has very few areas that are true innovation.

Again, you're trapped in one-dimensional thinking of "who did it first". What matters from a practical standpoint is usefulness and iteration. MS created Excel at a time when Lotus 123 dominated the market. MS didn't invent the spreadsheet. But it did manage to keep iterating on the product until it became the pre-eminent spreadsheet.

What Vista reflects is that at least once a decade, MS needs to do serious housecleaning from the bottom up when it comes to APIs, architecture, and backwards compatibility.

Totally agree.

I would also challenge you on saying that it is too late. MS had their most profitable quarter in the history of the company, Vista is installed on more computers then OSX and linux put together, and the people who do not have any issues with it (which nowadays is the majority of people on it) actually like it.

I really get a kick when Linux and Mac fanboys predict "the end of Microsoft". Clearly, they're living in a reality distortion field that's much stronger than anything I've ever seen before. The fact of the matter is that MS could send its employees home, shutter its doors, and not do anything for several years, and it would still bring in billions of dollars in profit. It could transform itself into a GE-like holding company for various technology concerns, and it would still be the 800-lb gorilla in the industry. It ain't going away, people, no matter how much you might prefer that reality.

The oldschool windows priesthood will object to any major change in the OS, because they are so used to the same old thing year after year, and are incredably resistant to learning anything new.

I think that goes for people, in general. Most don't like change. But, sometimes, change is necessary and organizations like Microsoft and Apple who have large, entrenched customer bases need to lead the way, despite criticism and negative feedback. Because the alternative is stagnation.

Since this is the basic point you disagreed with, ill just cover it

I agree with that to a point. The thing is, MS waits until other put the "innovation" into other peoples hands, and then copy the process. Sure, Apple didn't invent the desktop metaphor, but it was only after it was being used in a mass marketed product that MS jumped on board, with a copy of the apple implementation. Sure, Sony didn't invent console gaming, but MS took their idea and ran with it, unlike (for example) Nintendo, who took a completely different direction. Nintendo sure didn't invent touch interfaces or motion detection interfaces, but they were the first to bring it to the industry in the form of the DS and the Wii. In the context of what I am talking about, THAT is innovation, what MS did is copying the existing paradigm.



I am a smart guy, I do very well on IQ tests. I don't think I'm better then someone who isn't as smart as me, but can run 10 yards in the time it takes me to run one. Or someone who can paint something that evokes strong emotion in anyone who sees it. Intelligence is one of many attributes that make up a person.

Same deal with innovation. MS is not an innovative company. Does that make them a useless company? Hardly. But the products they put out are not innovative, and never have been. That is just one aspect of what they do. Apple is a big idea company. Nintendo is a big idea company. MS is not.

XP has no I/O prioritization, its compositing is mostly done by the CPU leaving your GPU mostly unused. Its security archetecture (or lack thereof) blows. It has horrible backup tools, its multimedia and sound frameworks blow, it looks like it was designed for 8 year old girls. Its start menu sucks, its search engine is archaic, and its firewall/malware detection is a joke.

If you are lucky enough to have compatible hardware, Vista is a huge upgrade over XP.

Why did you go and spill the guy's kool-aid like that?

- Normal users don't care.

- See above.

- Apart from the addition of the UAC bandaid, Vista's security architecture is identical to XP's.

- The backup tools in Vista have actually got *worse*, you can no longer select the files you want to include/exclude from a backup, only the categories of files.

- They work fine. XP actually supports accelerated audio.

- No, the default look was probably designed for boys, it's blue not pink.

- The Vista start menu is only cosmetically different, plus the addition of the search box and the effort to make it as hard as possible to browse manually (so that you get hooked on search).

- Normal users don't care how old a technology is, only that it works. XP's search for the most part does.

- Post SP2 the firewall is fine for most users. Malware detection is not included with XP, but Windows Defender (the same one that is provided in Vista) is available for free.

So apart from some fairly minor UI improvements, how does Vista benefit a normal user?

When I first got my laptop, I would be playing a game, and notice it start to heat up REAL quick. I would shut the game down, and find AV running.

The ONLY thing I noticed was the heat. Not a massive drop in fps.

By contrast, on XP as soon as the AV starts running on the same machine, there is a noticable sluggishness to the whole system. The reason for the massive difference is that on Vista, you are able to give low priority to an I/O operation. In XP you cant. Anyone who uses antivirus on windows should care about this.



The only reason someone would not care about this is if their CPU never comes close to reaching capacity. A more responsive desktop using less resources is something anyone would care about.



The UAC "bandaid" is what I am talking about. If you think UAC is just some prompts, you should do some reading before commenting.



You can now do incremental backups of just your data, or your whole system. (XP didn't allow for that) You can also automate your backups, and choose whether to backup to a network drive or physical media. In XP, you needed to buy a 3rd party app for that.



Video in XP is downright horrible when you compare it to vista. It uses more resources for worse performance. When I resize a window playing a movie in vista, it is smooth. In XP on the same machine, it "chunks". Same deal with passing a window over a window playing a movie. As for sound, the new driver architecture allows for less latency off of the same hardware. It provides a cleaner API, and the whole per process mixer thing is just cool.



Got me there



It is easier to browse manually for anyone with a scrollwheel. And I was referring to search, I havn't manually browsed for anything since about a week after I got it. I would much rather press start, type "calc", and press enter rather then trawling the start menu. I guess it is a preference thing, but I have always found windows start menu kludgy. The addition of the search field lets you never have to deal with it.



Do normal users care that on vista, search is almost instantaneous?



Even post SP2, the firewall is only one way. And anyone who has fixed a "normal user"s xp machine will know how often they think of installing malware protection, or browse the windows download center.

Forgive me for not expounding those points on the initial post, I have written these same things here so many times that I am getting really tired of it. I am not saying vista is flawless, Im not even saying it is all that good (for every one of those points you can find a better implementation in a competing operating system), but it is a hell of alot better then XP. For those of us who use other operating systems, XP seemed dated when it came out 7 years ago.

They couldn't figure out how to make WinFS work, after more than a decade of trying.

Excuse me? WinFS beta 1 was released last year and it was working quite OK. It is just that they later decided that WinFS is not needed that much: transactions were added to NTFS and indexed search too.

Most of WinFS was moved to SQL Server 2008, hence much improved support for storing files into the database without using BLOBs, etc.

just that they later decided that WinFS is not needed that much

Watch the video. Many of the features shown there would have to rely on extra metadata in the filesystem, aka WinFS. There is no argument that WinFS could be 'not needed that much' .

Yes, but all together those features were not needed that much. Besides, of course that features that rely on WinFS need WinFS, what kind of argument is that??

WinFS beta 1 was released last year. For sure, they could have finished it for Service Pack 1 or Windows 2008 Server release if they wanted to, since it wasn't that far from being done. The whole project was simply stopped otherwise they'd be working on it even now, no?

No, they couldn't. At and following the PDC, they received feedback from developers wanting to do things that went beyond the scope they originally targeted. This is one of the reasons why WinFS couldn't use Vista as its ship vehicle. Contrary to popular belief, development has not stopped. Just as they promised on the WinFS team blog, development has continued, and the technologies are being delivered, though their names have changed, it's not one monolithic unit, and the technologies are generally better than what would've shipped as WinFS:

Items Data Model -> Entity Data Model shipping in SQL CE 3.5/SQL Server 2008
Object Spaces -> LINQ
Sync Services -> Sync Framework

That's not true. The "extra metadata" that WinFS exposed that isn't already present in Vista was relationships... which NEVER existed in the Explorer of an build (with WinFS in it or not) or any demo. The only place it existed was in separate apps. That's why WinFS beta 1 shipped with a separate app to manage relationships.

Everything WinFS was going to nearly everything supposedly do for the Windows Explorer was done with out WinFS in Beta 1:

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=115267

It was just too confusing for users so they dropped it.

I know I'm late with this reply but I can't help it.

WinFS (granted, not called WinFS, but with the same functions) was supposed to be present in the first version of Windows NT, along with a couple of other interesting features (that eventually made it into other versions of Windows actually). Well, it was actually a part of project Cairo, and as far as I can remember about Microsoft technology, it's about the only piece of Cairo that never made it into any version of Windows.

WinFS was among those which was dumped at the time, because it was dead slow and the hardware of those days (roughly 1992 if I recall correctly) couldn't run it. It seems WinFS has progressed according to Moore's law. So actually they tried to make it work for more than a decade and the results are not yet magical.

Interestingly enough, several companies have failed at bringing those same features to the desktop. BeOS failed at their relational database FS then started over and built their journaled and indexed file system called BeFS. You can read about it in Dominic Giampalo's book, which if free on his website.

Apple failed to bring their database FS to Copland and the Mac OS.

Like I said Adam, Windows Vista is a disappointment, definitely so. However, this article is about the specific claim that just about anything interesting that was promised was removed from Vista - which simply isn't the case, since only WinFS fits that description. I don't care about pillars or more of that nonsense. I mean, pillars, top secret features (hi Steve! Where are they?), they're all just marketing speak.

The video you showed, well, I'm sorry, but I've seen it before, and I'm still not exactly sure what part of it should blow my mind away.

Except for those idiots rushing to buy Win95, of course.

Like I said Adam, Windows Vista is a disappointment, definitely so.

Because.. you say so?

watch the video and tell me, honestly - if Vista is no disappointment, what is?

watch the video and tell me, honestly - if Vista is no disappointment, what is?

I have Vista, why should I watch some video?

But that is just me..

Well, a lot of the stuff they are showing off in the video - the cool sidebar, the many animations in the filemanager, the drag'n'drop stuff; and especially the communication and filesharing stuff - none of that is even close in Vista, and all that was promised for 2003. So saying there wasn't much promised but not delivered - well, these features might not have cool names like 'Avalon', but I agree with Adam: Vista sure didn't deliver on what was shown in that video.

Just because each of these features aren't clearly named or separately hyped doesn't mean it doesn't matter MS didn't deliver on them. I actually think it would be fair if you would edit your article (which is more of a blog, imho) and mention this video saying MS did indeed not deliver on 80% of what they showed was coming for 2003...

I don't care about pillars or more of that nonsense...they're all just marketing speak.

As this is about stuff promised and stuff not delivered, marketing speak is a central issue here.

The video you showed, well, I'm sorry, but I've seen it before, and I'm still not exactly sure what part of it should blow my mind away.

Well, it's actually quite easy Thom. What should have blown your mind away is how one video could show that your whole article, or blog entry, or