Vista Musings

[BobLfoot 302]

I just saw the MAC add about Vista and got to thinking. I know I'll be holding off on going to Vista at home until work does for compatability reasons. Our VPN won't acknowledge Firefox or IE7 browsers yet so vista with IE 7 is out. What do others think.

[Ken Moore 23]

I don't think my personal PC and laptop hardware is up to Vista, from what I've seen/read, your run of the mill graphics card isn't going to make the grade. So.... I will be waiting until I buy a new PC before I have to make a decision. As for work, I think the current plan is to wait 3 years.

[JRoss 84]

"Better the Devil you know..." We don't have any particularly complicated network at work, so the upgrades will likely happen as computers get replaced. Our servers are Linux, anyway. I use a Mac at home, but most vendor software only runs on Windows. Too bad I can't convince my boss to get me a dual-boot MacBookPro...

[BobLfoot 302]

Just read the Gibson Research Security Now Transcripts about Vista and Digital Rights Management. With Vista I'll just say Big Brother is here and in a big way. Bottom Line when playing HD-DVD not only is the DVD Disk encoded but data on the motherboard data bus is encrypted and so are the signals from PC to HD Monitor. IF it can be encrypted it will be. And all this extra encryption processing once every 30 ms is going to eat up processing time. We will need new faster chips to support new encryption and all to protect the rights of the Record and Movie Industries. IMHO.

[paulengr 44]

My feelings (and I've been involved in similar discussions with the IT group) is that releasing Vista to businesses first was stupid for a number of reasons: 1. My company bought EA licenses specifically because the point was that as long as they paid the annual licensing fees, Microsoft would give them free upgrades to current and future releases of their software. With Vista, Microsoft basically said "haha...want to buy some more?" 2. Why be the guinea pigs? The only people right now that would want to touch it right now are developers. People involved in maintaining and running businesses certainly don't need the headaches of getting gigs of bug patches every week, discovering all kinds of hardware/software issues, and outright bugs. 3. As has already been stated, Microsoft changed the hardware requirements in subtle ways that means the hardware guys are going to have to do some retooling/retuning. Frequently if you try to install Vista on a PC, it will reject a lot of unexpected things (like relatively current model HP printers, at least in the betas) and the hardware vendors aren't all up to speed yet. 4. There are no compelling advantages to running it other than once again, attempts to make it look more like a Mac. Oh wait a minute...they had that very poor knock-off of Firefox's tabbed browsing feature. That's got to be worth something. 5. You will once again lose access to any and all media that you used to own because Microsoft's Deny Rights to your Media (DRM) will refuse to use any of your current stuff unless you sign a blood oath to sacrifice your first born child to Microsoft and pay them more money to release the lock on the video of your family pictures and videos (only after you call their technical support number and go through 25 reboots and 15 reinstalls of Vista before they finally pass you on to somebody with a clue). I think the best thing to do is wait until they release it for the home users. Then give it about 6 months until all the various workarounds and bug patches are out there in the public. Then buy a new PC and don't even attempt to reuse your hardware...at least at home. At work, wait at least a year after your PLC/HMI vendors have released their Vista compatible versions of everything. By then, it should be stable enough to only crash once a week or so.

[Peter Nachtwey 15]

I too am considering the same only.. I would use this. I have a Mac Mini now which I bought to examine 'alternative' computing. http://www.parallels.com/landingpage/dskd1...CFQwiggod-FjGJw I am not going to buy Vista for personal use. I use a PC at home to play games and run Mathcad ( work ). The games and Mathcad won't run any better under Vista. At work we have 2 or three computers running Vista because our software must be ready when it is released. Vista is a pain and not that compatible. What gets me is how are people going to install our software if they don't have admin privileges? This is going to be a royal pain in the butt. I can see people coming to out classes only to find that they can't install our motion control software on their laptops :(.

[DanW 41]

It isn't clear whether Microsoft will play ball with all the players who want to write a driver for piece of hardware. It's rumored that Vista will not install drivers that have not been digitally signed by Microsoft. A number of drivers I use are unsigned and come from small companies whose production runs probably do not warrant whatever the MS digital signature bureaucracy entails. To limit the installation of drivers to only the certified would effectively close down the open architecture concept that Microsoft started on Intel platforms with IBM a quarter century ago. If true, such would close down Windows connectivity except to those whose 'mass' markets justify kissing the MS ring. It might be that the industrial user might be limited to a choice of either Apple, Apple wannabe Windows, or Linux. Dan