[Pearls Before Swine]

I would add built-in support for .pdfs to that list.

I don't think that needs to be part of the operating system, as it can easily be supplied by aplications, many of which are free. You can easily add freeware viewers, and if I remember correctly, OpenOffice is thinking of adding the ability to create pdfs as well.

On another note, I think Vista is coming along. I recently bought a laptop with Vista, and it seems to work just fine. Of course, it helps that this laptop has 4G of RAM -- Vista uses well over 1G just loading up and sitting there. But, given the resources, it does perform. Its still early, but I'm beginning to believe that MS botched the introduction of Vista more than the system itself by trying to convince people it would run on the last generation of hardware. Remember the "Vista Ready" and "Vista Compatible" stickers which have led to some class action lawsuits?

[Swordmaker]

...add built in support for .pdfs... I don't think that needs to be part of the operating system, as it can easily be supplied by aplications, many of which are free. You can easily add freeware viewers, and if I remember correctly, OpenOffice is thinking of adding the ability to create pdfs as well.

If it's part of the OS, as it is in OS X, then any application can create a PDF file. Leaving it to the application is a hit-or-miss proposition.

[ReignOfError]

I don't think that needs to be part of the operating system, as it can easily be supplied by aplications, many of which are free. You can easily add freeware viewers, and if I remember correctly, OpenOffice is thinking of adding the ability to create pdfs as well.

Integrating PDF support at the OS level makes it available to any application, and easy for developers to implement. It's built into the Apple print driver architecture. I can create a PDF of literally anything I can print, as easily and a lot faster than printing.

That means I can send anything I do to anyone, viewable on just about any desktop machine and most PDAs. It's also amazingly handy for relatively simple print jobs -- if I need to print something larger than any of my printers can handle, I just print to PDF and take it to Kinko's on a flash drive. I don't have to go through all the preflighting, don't have to worry about gathering up the supporting files.

It's a much more elegant approach than making the user hunt around for freeware apps and wait for a version of Open Office that might offer PDF support someday if a programmer feels like implementing it. It's not a critical feature, but it's very very nice.

Its still early, but I'm beginning to believe that MS botched the introduction of Vista more than the system itself by trying to convince people it would run on the last generation of hardware. Remember the "Vista Ready" and "Vista Compatible" stickers which have led to some class action lawsuits?

Apple, on the other hand, released an OS revision that runs, and runs well, on the last few generations of hardware. Imagine that.