Dim Vista: Manes Pans Windows Vista

"Vista is a fading theme park with a few new rides, lots of patched-up old ones and bored kids in desperate need of adult supervision running things. If I can find plenty of problems in a matter of hours, why can't Microsoft ? Most likely answer: It did--and it doesn't care."
~ Stephen Manes

http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2007/0226/050.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Manes

So, all you shy Microsoft developers--do you need "adult supervision"?

Defend yourselves.

Try posting for a change!

Some of these are merely opinions, like "it should be this way."  Other problems I have not experienced.  Others aren't problems at all!

Forbes wrote:

Many touted improvements, like the Web browser and media player, have been available for XP for months.

Another way of looking at that is, "Microsoft was nice an gave these features to XP also. But any way you look at it, is not a fault with Vista.

Forbes wrote:

One minor winner is Vista-only: file lists that update their contents automatically. You no longer have to hit View and Refresh to see files added since you last opened the list window. Macs, of course, have done this for years.

XP automatically updates the files contents too, so he's wrong there, and the last sentence was unnecessary jabbing/jeering/fanboyism.

Microsoft had this, but Symantec and others sue MSFT to get it removed.  If they didn't they would be sue for trying to control the market
"If malware somehow gets into your machine, Windows Firewall will not stop it from making outbound Internet connections to do its evil deeds."


All real manufactor firewalls will tell the security center the firewall settings.  If they didn't they would be sue for trying to control the market
"If you turn off that firewall in favor of a better one, the Windows Firewall control panel will admonish: "Your computer is not protected; turn on Windows Firewall." But the Windows Security Center will correctly tell you that a firewall is on and that you shouldn't run two at a time. Call it convistancy."


?????, items are orginaized in better locations, there was alot of user testing here.
"Likewise, Control Panel options have been totally rejiggered yet again for no apparent reason. "


Even on a four year old machine, Vista's search out beat it.
"The new desktop search features are a mess, thanks in part to inscrutable indexing defaults and options. A "quick search" panel at the bottom of the Start menu lets you find results whether in a file's name or its contents. But on one machine--oddly, the fastest I tested--it was far, far slower than using Start's regular search option. "



What is he talking about,  that has never happed.  Justed tested this on 6 machines.
"And if you click away to do something else while you wait for answers, Vista abandons the "quick search" and makes you start over."



Windows Mail protect against attachments, to slow for me with 40+ email accounts I use Outlook 2007.  As for wordpad the issue is their is alot of special formating in Word.  If MSFT added this to wordpad they would be sued, by corel word perfect.
"Windows Mail is a mild reworking of Outlook Express whose big new feature is a spam filter that in my tests flagged nonspam as spam and vice versa an unacceptable 10% of the time. The bare-bones word processor WordPad used to be able to open Microsoft Word files. No more. What possible rationale could there be for "fixing" that, except to force users to shell out for the real thing?"


For speech I have no idea what is problems are, but non of the business I do work for that uses speech has had these problems, I they don't even have a faster computer.


And if MSFT didn't MSFT would be sued for trying to force users to upgrade.
"Many touted improvements, like the Web browser and media player, have been available for XP for months."


And XP has done this before OS 10.2 started this.
"You no longer have to hit View and Refresh to see files added since you last opened the list window. Macs, of course, have done this for years."



Thumbnails in XP walked all over OSX as does Vista.  Safely Remove Hardware is a good idea, I have had to many people damage their USB ports by their iPods because it was not removed correectly
"The new Mac-like ability to show thumbnails of documents and running programs is cute, but it doesn't always work--typical of a level of fit and finish that would be unacceptable from a cut-rate tailor. Only in Windowsland will you find howlers like a Safely Remove Hardware button for memory card readers that happen to be hardwired into your computer."

This was the easies upgrade I have ever done,  far easier then trying to upgrade OSX +$150 every year.
"Upgrading is almost always a royal pain."


I have installed Vista on machines that were 6 years old without issues
"Many older boxes are too wimpy for Vista, and a "Vista-ready" "



When I checked OS 10.4 it did not have secure Wipe of the disk or on the machine.
His reply: "Does any other operating system do that?"


Apple Fanoys at work.  Most features in Vista were made public in 2000 before OSX stole the ideas.

alwaysmc2 wrote:

XP automatically updates the files contents too, so he's wrong there

Only difference is Vista automatically sorts the list, while XP and earlier always added the newcomers at the end.

Sven Groot wrote:



alwaysmc2 wrote: XP automatically updates the files contents too, so he's wrong there

Only difference is Vista automatically sorts the list, while XP and earlier always added the newcomers at the end.

I noticed this. Maybe just my user intertia, but I want it to be on the end because *I* knew I was changing files and I want to be able to find them fast. This is probably just my stupid programmer brain, *real* users don't care.

people can stay with XP if they really want, and Vista could have in theory been better than it is... my problem is when people use unfair rationales and standards for judging Microsoft products poorly. and its not necessarily even things they care about personally, but things they heard and picked up on i because it sounded negative. not many people will notice that Outlook uses the Word renderer by default, nor will even know the reason why that was changed. Not many people will be affected by the new limits to Wordpad. you can get a MS Word viewer if for some reason you need to. But it sounds bad that things changed, so people will use these as bullets in their arguments, because they decided it was a good idea to trash microsoft.

then you get ridiculous things like people who support open standards and are against proprietary formats like word complain that opening word files was taken out of windows mail. WTH

Sven Groot wrote:



alwaysmc2 wrote: XP automatically updates the files contents too, so he's wrong there

Only difference is Vista automatically sorts the list, while XP and earlier always added the newcomers at the end.

I actually quite liked XP's way of doing this, if I'm sorting files for example I found it handy to have the new flolders cluster at the bottom of the list.  But I guess that's just what I got use to.

There's some truth to get from this. Like no full-time technology columnist is capable of actually understanding technology.  If you're a columnist, you're not a developer. If you're not a developer, you're not qualified to discuss something as complex as an operating system.

DigitalDud wrote:



There's some truth to get from this. Like no full-time technology columnist is capable of actually understanding technology.  If you're a columnist, you're not a developer. If you're not a developer, you're not qualified to discuss something as complex as an operating system.

No, no, no. Developers have nothing to do with this. It's true that as a columnist he's not a USER. and it's true that this particular columnist is completely partisan and lacking in basic reporting skills, but it has nothing to do with developers. We developers are NOT the primary target market for operating systems - we're just a subset of users, which is. We had many a merry flamefestdiscussion with beer28 before he went completely bonkers about the drawbacks of treating all your users as developers who need to read documentation and spend time learning how to use your software.

Yggdrasil wrote:



No, no, no. Developers have nothing to do with this. It's true that as a columnist he's not a USER. and it's true that this particular columnist is completely partisan and lacking in basic reporting skills, but it has nothing to do with developers. We developers are NOT the primary target market for operating systems - we're just a subset of users, which is. We had many a merry flamefestdiscussion with beer28 before he went completely bonkers about the drawbacks of treating all your users as developers who need to read documentation and spend time learning how to use your software.

Sure developers do.  The primary purpose of an operating system is to provide a stable platform for software on top of a varying hardware platform.  It does this by managing available hardware resources and creating a consistent interface for which software can utilize them.  The operating system doesn't interact with users, its job should be to make the user completely unaware that it even exists.  The user should be able to work with applications without needing to know why they work.

An OS typically includes a shell sure, there's Explorer and Solitaire and IE.  These things interact with the user, but they are not important in the scope of what an OS does, and it is arguable that they should even be considered part of an OS.

The vast majority of Vista's feature changes are in software support (.NET 3.0, new win32 APIs, driver models) and hardware management (SuperFetch, ReadyBoost, I/O prioritzation, kernel optimizations, etc).  These are developer things not user things.

DigitalDud wrote:

If you're not a developer, you're not qualified to discuss something as complex as an operating system.

I think that's one of the dumbest things I've ever read.

Presumably you'd be there in the scenario where Windows deteriorated and deteriorated to the point where its 95% market share decided the operating system was crap and moved to Apple OSX saying "Well it's not Microsoft's fault and those damned users have no right to say it is - they have no right to discuss something as complex as Windows and vote with their money".

irascian wrote:


Presumably you'd be there in the scenario where Windows deteriorated and deteriorated to the point where its 95% market share decided the operating system was crap and moved to Apple OSX saying "Well it's not Microsoft's fault and those damned users have no right to say it is - they have no right to discuss something as complex as Windows and vote with their money".

Users are certainly entitled to their opinion, but this is about columnists who wrongly think they know it all, then go report false conclusions because of their misunderstandings of what an OS is supposed to do.  People then take what they read as fact because they think the author is an actual specialist.  The number of technology articles containing false information I've read from various "leading publications" is appalling.

DigitalDud wrote:

An OS typically includes a shell sure, there's Explorer and Solitaire and IE.  These things interact with the user, but they are not important in the scope of what an OS does, and it is arguable that they should even be considered part of an OS.

That's like saying that a car is basically an engine. All the rest - the steering wheel, seats, dashboard - these are just applications sitting on top of the engine. Since the engine's the important bit, only mechanics can discuss cars and their respective advantages.

I'll drop the analogy now and get back to the main point - the seperation of OS and Shell is technically true but mostly irrelevant. When people buy Windows, they buy Windows and Explorer and Notepad and, if they buy an OEM-installed machine, they may also have bought Roxio CD-Creator and Norton AV and maybe even Surfairy. This is the product they bought. No amount of explaining about abstraction layers will change that. And seeing as they're the customer who bought the product, they are fully qualified to discuss the relative virtues and flaws of it. They can say that their previous product worked faster, crashed more, had less annoyances or whatnot. These are all valid user observations about their product.

i think its missing the point. its not that a modern OS is a "desktop" this isnt true.

its that a modern OS is an application framework. why is explorer part of this? because, for instance, explorer objects are reused in things like common dialogs. it wouldn't make sense to not include an *.exe to bring up an instance of these things, and have it conform with the functionality of OS components. they could leave it out, but it would be stupid.

the point is that explorer functionality is part of the application framework; because common objects are needed. and thus part of the OS.

treating the end-user aspect of an OS as inessential to what the OS is, i think is an obsolete view, because developers need an end-user environment.

but i dont think many nix people understand this

in abstract, you could go as far as making the statement that creating a user environment is part of creating a foundation for applications. which is as far as MacOS goes. The 'OS' is the user environment. or you can say that creating an application ecosystem is part of creating a foundation for applications. Which is what Apple tries to do as well.