On Mon, 16 Jul 2007, Peter St. John wrote:
RGB asks, "...On my nice new dual core 2 GB laptop, Vista Home runs like --
what? What is a
suitable metaphor for a system that can't even keep up with a moving mouse?
..."
Jabba the Hutt. Evil, devious, immobile.
I'm reluctant to say that MSWin(any) is badly designed; OS's are designed
for purposes, and some purposes don't suit some of us. Unix was designed for
development. Mac for usability. VMS for data processing. Tandem for
fault-tolerance. Microsoft for Market Share.
MS is really really sucessful at it's design target. People are willing to
say that Vista is not worth getting, but they said that about Win2000 also.
Correct was to keep 98 & NT and wait for XP.
Wrongo. Win2K was never REALLY pushed as a consumer product. But now
try getting a new system over the counter with anything but Vista on it.
Sure, if you special order or buy online you can get XP -- probably at
full retail. But seriously, the market is being saturated with Vista
systems.
Vista is seriously more broken than W2K (which really wasn't bad -- just
expensive and not that much better than NT). The interesting thing is
that it is such a RADICAL departure from XP -- and so easy to mock. I
mean, it really, really sucks. Even by MS, W3.2, W95 standards.
It would be very interesting to see how many consumers chose Vista over
XP given a free choice. But Microsoft isn't about freedom, it is about
control, and a high level corporate decision has been made to push a
seriously broken system onto the MAINSTREAM user. This could have some
fairly serious long term repercussions. As did Slow-aris for Sun.
Consumers will forgive a lot, but not poor interactive performance.
That's why Linus has made excellent interactive performance a design
mandate from the very earliest days of the kernel (and why linux plus X
on 486's was peppier -- much peppier -- than Vista on multi GHz multi
cores).
rgb
Peter
--
Robert G. Brown http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567 Fax: 919-660-2525 email:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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