Archive for November, 2007
Vista is terrible, C-Net UK
Online tech publication C-Net UK has unveiled its top ten terrible tech products of all time. Many of the products were so bad that they didn’t survive long enough to make it out to South Africa – thankfully. For example, top of the pops in the top ten list is the 1985 Sinclair C5 battery-powered tricycle.
Unfortunately, two most certainly did make it here: Sony’s infamous root kit, which C-Net describes as “the worst product anyone has ever released in the history of the music industry”. Rounding out the top ten is another recent product, Microsoft Windows Vista. Here’s the summary:
“[Vista's] incompatibility with hardware, its obsessive requirement of human interaction to clear security dialogue box warnings and its abusive use of hated DRM, not to mention its general pointlessness as an upgrade, are just some examples of why this expensive operating system earns the final place in our terrible tech list.”
Read the full entry here.
Microsoft shows disdain for consumers
Almost everywhere you look these days Vista is being criticised. I’ve posted numerous stories here since starting this blog in July (click on the Windows category alongside), the general consensus of which is that Vista wasn’t ready when Microsoft launched it. The advice is almost unanimously to wait for Pack 1 or, in some cases, wait until SP2. Surprise, surprise.
That businesses are heeding the advice is made clear by recent reports in ComputerWorld UK here and here. Even computer maker Dell reversed its policy shortly after Vista’s launch. And yet, despite this, Microsoft continues to ram its clearly incomplete operating system down consumers’ throats. The attitude seems to reminiscent of Henry Ford: you can have any Windows you like as long as it’s Vista. Thanks for nothing.
But there is one bright spot. A Dutch consumer group has forced Redmond to back down and provide consumers in that country with a downgrade path back to XP. Wouldn’t it be grand if South African consumers had such effective representation?
It’s all Windows’ fault
There’s a great post on exo-blog that shows how the Microsoft upgrade cycle constantly negates the periodic performance improvements made by hardware manufacturers. Go figure. It’s written by a former Intel staffer who posts under the “Research Staff” moniker. I can’t seem to find out any more about him (or her).
Here’s an excerpt:
Such has been the conventional wisdom surrounding the Windows/Intel duopoly since the early days of Windows 95. In practical terms, it means that performance advancements on the hardware side are quickly consumed by the ever-increasing complexity of the Windows/Office code base. Case in point: Microsoft Office 2007 which, when deployed on Windows Vista, consumes over 12x as much memory and nearly 3x as much processing power as the version that graced PCs just 7 short years ago (Office 2000).
It’s a fascinating read: “What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away.”.
Ubuntu Rocks; Vista Sucks; No surprises
ZD Net tech journo Rupert Goodwins has blogged an interesting comparative evaluation between the latest version of Windows (Vista) and the most recent release of Ubuntu (Gutsy Gibbon or 0710). Unsurprisingly, he concludes that Ubuntu rocks and Vista sucks (my words, not his). Here’s an excerpt:
On Friday, I decided to update [Ubuntu] from 7.04 to 7.10. That took a single click – no, honestly – in the system software manager, and about ten minutes downtime, most of which was me playing about. While most of the software was downloading and installing itself, I could carry on working.
Maybe Goodwins has a faster internet connection – oh hell, of course he has a much faster internet connection because he doesn’t have to suffer Telkom – but when I did the same upgrade myself (last Friday) it took about an hour to download everything. And while I was able to continue working too, the local bandwidth problem meant that anything net related was slow as molasses – but I can’t blame Ubuntu for that. On Vista he writes:
… mostly: it’s slow, it’s intrusive, and it’s arbitrarily different. It takes minutes to wake up from various sleep states or from a restart; minutes in which parts of the system seem to get going only to lapse into an unresponsive state where you’re not at all sure whether your mouse clicks are registering.
Now I can’t comment on that because the copy of Vista Microsoft gave me to review in January is still sitting on my shelf, neatly shrink-wrapped. That’s not because I don’t want to evaluate it; I simply don’t have a spare PC with enough horsepower to do so – other than my ThinkPad which is my production machine so there is no way I’m risking it. I’m hoping to get a Vista-capable PC shortly and I’ll be able to report my own experiences thereafter.
Anyway, for the whole story read Goodwins’ blog here.
Linux vs Windows: African style
An interesting battle up in West Africa. French Linux vendor, Mandriva, closed a deal with the authorities to supply software and support for 17 000 desktop PCs destined for schools in Nigeria. That was in mid-August.
Behind the scenes Microsoft struck a deal with the local company installing the PCs, Technology Support Center (TSC), to wipe Linux and install Windows on instead. Apparently, Redmond was going to give TSC a $400 000 marketing rebate for doing so. Now, however, a government agency funding 11 000 of the PCs has overruled the supplier. Read the whole story here.
