OT: VISTA

[Atrocities]

NEW YORK — Retailers around the world stayed open through the wee hours of Tuesday morning to sell the long-awaited Windows Vista operating system, even though most knew customers wouldn't be lining up out the door.

At a CompUSA store in Raleigh, only about a dozen people braved temperatures in the upper 20s to be among the first consumers to get Vista, despite free coffee and discounts on other items including printers and recordable DVDs

There is an ancient and often very accurate word for these kind of people... SUCKER

Or as Microsoft says "Caveat Emptor." (Let The buyer beware.)

[Atrocities]

Well you can bet your sweet arse that come the next XP update, XP will be causing many "new" problems. Microsoft will introduce a system destabilizing bug that will cause nothing but massive problems for all XP users thus forcing them to go out and buy VISTA.

[Randallw]

End of this year I may buy a new computer, leaning towards yes at the moment. I'm doing well these days what with a new job along with my benefits. I expect it'll have Vista, though I'll keep an eye on it beforehand. I'm a bit anxious actually as I hear horror stories of new computers people buy. My current one doesn't have such problems partly I think because the son of someone my mother knows custom built it. I have an Acer at work which showed me for once what a bad computer can be like.

I wouldn't be staying up all night just to be the first to buy stuff for 3 reasons, off the top of my head.

1. Why spend top dollar when with a bit of restraint and patience you can get it when the cost goes down after the initial bluster.

2. It's just a OS. I will not die if I don't have it, and I am opposed to wasting effort/making more of something beyond realistic standards. Same goes for why I do not go to midnight screenings of movies (but then I hardly bother with cinemas anyway)

3. I control my life. I decide what is important, not get carried away by bluster and hype.

[PDF]

I've switched from 98 to XP .. les than 2 years ago !
So let's wait a couple of years, we'll have a debugged Vista SP2, the DX10 hardware will be affordable and we'll have some software really using it

[Ironmanbc]

I also went from 98se to Xp pro and I think it's great.

Some of my friends got the home Xp and are having trouble with it (oh well) I'm still running an 1.4g with 1g ram Ati 9200 video Soundblaster Live

It works well playing WoW

[PvK]

When M$ says Vista has the most security ever, I think they probably are thinking about all their attempts to keep users from copying any corporate products with it...

[Baron Munchausen]

Because of DX, Windows has prety much locked up the 'flashy' games market. Not good strategy games, though. You can get lots of cool games for Linux like Free Civ. Just not the latest RTS games like Homeworld II or FPS games like Doom. But other than games, there are lots of equivalent options beyond Windows and it's getting better all the time. Linux has the most options ever: Anything important that you can find for Windows you can find for Linux. The Firefox/Seamonkey/K-Meleon and Opera browsers, for example. And Open Office is now a complete replacement for MS Office. And two other complete desktop suites are getting close to complete as well, Gnome and KDE. And you have many choices of who to buy from instead of being locked into one manipulative source. There are even dedicated sites for comparing the various distributions available:

http://distrowatch.com/

[Fyron]

I find Free Civ to be a crappy game, however.

It saddens me that there is no Foobar2000 for linux. Amarok probably comes the closest, but it just isn't the same. :-\ Then you've got sub-par multi-IM clients like Gaim and Kopete... Linux text editors are either ancient monstrosities like emacs and vim, or they are really basic like Nano or Gedit. I have yet to see any good modern gui "programmers" text editors on linux. sigh..