Vista Wins on Looks. As for Lacks...

The New York Times ^ | December 14, 2006 | David Pogue

[Zakeet]

After five years of starts, stops, executive shuffling, feature rethinks and delays, Windows Vista is finally complete. It’s available to corporations already, and starting Jan. 30, it’s what you’ll get on any new PC. Its programmers, who probably haven’t seen their families in months, will have an especially merry Christmas this year.

So after five years, how is Windows Vista? Microsoft’s description, which you’ll soon be seeing in millions of dollars’ worth of advertising, is “Clear, Confident, Connected.” But a more truthful motto would be “Looks, Locks, Lacks.”

Looks

Windows Vista is beautiful. Microsoft has never taken elegance so seriously before.

Discreet eye candy is partly responsible. Windows and menus cast subtle shadows. A new typeface gives the whole affair a fresh, modern feeling. Subtle animations liven up the proceedings.

If the description so far makes Vista sound a lot like the Macintosh, well, you’re right. You get the feeling that Microsoft’s managers put Mac OS X on an easel and told the programmers, “Copy that.”

Here are some of the grace notes that will remind you of similar ones on the Mac: A list of favorite PC locations appears at the left side of every Explorer window, which you can customize just by dragging folders in or out. You now expand or collapse lists of folders by clicking little flippy triangles. When you’re dragging icons to copy them, a cursor “badge” appears that indicates how many you’re moving. The Minimize, Maximize and Close buttons glow when your cursor passes over them. There’s now a keystroke (Alt+up arrow) to open the current folder’s parent window, the one that contains it.

[Echo Talon]

RTM is a relative term. Microsoft's 1.0 is another company's -- almost any company's -- beta.

well... everyone will be buying Vista at the end of January if they buy a PC from Dell, HP, Gateway etc...

[Swordmaker]

You get the feeling that Microsoft’s managers put Mac OS X on an easel and told the programmers, “Copy that.”

PING!

If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.

[Echo Talon]

here comes the apple trolls... ;)

[HAL9000]

here comes the apple trolls... ;)

[ReignOfError]

RTM is a relative term. Microsoft's 1.0 is another company's -- almost any company's -- beta.

well... everyone will be buying Vista at the end of January if they buy a PC from Dell, HP, Gateway etc...

I never said it wasn't a well-seeded beta.

[ReignOfError]

But if you have 2GB of main RAM, and a max of 1GB of additional RAM on the motherboard doing all the nice caching stuff, that strikes me as a marginal improvement hardly worth talking about. Multiply it by ten, and then it might be interesting.

[aruanan]

As far as "touch, feely' goes, we use PCs (Dells) and Macs in our lab. The Dells we have to use because they're required to run the Applied Biosciences sequencing machines. Everything else we do on the Macs. They're more reliable, easier to use, nicer to use, and less clunky. It's the Dells that have to be babied along.

[ReignOfError]

You get the feeling that Microsoft’s managers put Mac OS X on an easel and told the programmers, “Copy that.”

They did a horrible job, then.

Hey, be fair. Art students go to museums to study and copy famous paintings. None can match a Leonardo or a Renoir or a Monet. Only one in a thousand can get within 33%. But that's how they learn.

I'm all for anything that makes Windows suck less. Not because I intend to use it, but because my day is a bit nicer when I have fewer grumpy people to deal with.

[the invisib1e hand]

Actually, it's pretty nice...

...well, that was my point.

On the other hand, the world runs on MSFT. That's just the way it is, and I'm not stating a preference. If Mac was ubiquitous, had 95% penetration, and was the most useful standard for the purpose, I'd probably us it.

If windows is the backbone, organs, and muscle of the technological infrastructure of today, Mac is the designer jeans and prada bag.

Oh, and those guys who make all those really necessary video games and porn swear by macs, too. Can't forget that.

[Tribune7]

My office has run on Macs for more than a decade, and our current computers are at least 4 years old.

I've had the same general experience although we have a few newer computers.

[CheneyChick]

It's Starbucks Extreme Hoity-Toity Latte on a screen.

LOL

[zeugma]

I'm all for anything that makes Windows suck less. Not because I intend to use it, but because my day is a bit nicer when I have fewer grumpy people to deal with.

LOL. Good point!

They'll be grumpier from DRM fatigue though. 

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

But if you have 2GB of main RAM, and a max of 1GB of additional RAM on the motherboard doing all the nice caching stuff, that strikes me as a marginal improvement hardly worth talking about. Multiply it by ten, and then it might be interesting.

My brother has an XP computer with 1G of main RAM. I was thinking that a seperate RAMdisk of 1G of flash RAM would be nice - but certainly not world-transforming. To get serious benefit, you would not even consider the 512M el cheapo unit . . .

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

If you have a spare U.S.B. flash drive, your PC can use it as extra main memory for a tiny speed boost.

You can use a flash drive for swap space? That might be a little faster than using a hard drive, but overall it strikes me as about as useful as teats on a boar hog.

My brother's XP Pro system is for Dragon Naturally speaking, and has a fast (SATA, I believe it is) hard drive on that account. I'd consider giving him a USB flash drive for Christmas, if it'd nudge up Dragon's performance enough so's you could tell it. But if they mention this as a feature of Vista, XP Pro probably isn't smart enough to take advantage of it.

Even if it isn't on the motherboard, at least a USB flash drive would be available in more than 1 GB . . .

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Memory chip breakthrough for electronic devices ~ "phase-change" memory 500 to 1,000 times faster

That sounds like what you want to accellerate mass data access. Coming Real Soon Now.

[Echo Talon]

But if you have 2GB of main RAM, and a max of 1GB of additional RAM on the motherboard doing all the nice caching stuff, that strikes me as a marginal improvement hardly worth talking about. Multiply it by ten, and then it might be interesting.

boot times, and all sorts of other neat things will start happen...

[Richard Kimball]

...it is better than WinXP and will be out shortly

Isn't that kind of like like being better than the Detroit Lions?

[antiRepublicrat]

yep, its a solid product(sure it will need updates and patches

You forget the two rules of Windows:

1. Do not use any new Windows version until at least Service Pack 1. Anything before that and you're a post-beta tester.
2. Any new Windows version will not be relatively stable with all features working correctly until Service Pack 2.

Now given the extended beta stage of Vista, we might be able to violate rule #2 and pull the stable stage to SP1, but you still shouldn't use Vista until then unless you want to be a post-beta tester.

[antiRepublicrat]

You can use a flash drive for swap space? That might be a little faster than using a hard drive, but overall it strikes me as about as useful as teats on a boar hog.

I always thought that was an extremely stupid idea. The actual throughput on USB 2 to a flash drive can be about 25 MB/s read and half that for write, with a latency that in cases goes far higher than that of any modern hard drive. And compared to main memory, it's dead slow.

However, hard drive manufacturers are expecting to ship their hard drives with flash memory built in, so you get the boost of what is effectively a huge L2 cache for your hard drive over SATA speeds. I can see this feature, which is also expected for Leopard, to boost speeds quite a bit with that setup.

[antiRepublicrat]

and as far as flash goes wait till Robson and Snowgrass comes out, I believe mid-'07 then we will start seeing some neat stuff with Vista.

And Leopard (which will be out by then) is supposed to take advantage of flash too. There's also the rumor that Leopard will continually save your current working state to flash in case of a power outage, so you're instantly right where you left off when you turn the computer on again. Couple that with the "Time Machine" and you'll probably never lose any work you ever did unless your hard drive blows up (and you didn't do anything to mitigate that possibility).