Re: M$ kills Christmas 2006

Chris F. Willoughby wrote:
> "Borgholio" <[email protected]> wrote in message 
>>>
>> Combined with how much "Big Brother" bullshit is in Vista...do you smell 
>> something burning? 
> 
>  > http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1931913,00.asp
 >
 > Read that before berating Microsoft.

So, now that I have read it, can I berate them?  I mean marketing-wise, 
it sound fine, although a lot of items that were being promised a year 
or two ago seem to have disappeared from the features list as the 
timeline for the release keeps stretching out into the future.

So more secure?  Well, that recent nasty security hole, the wrong sized 
mp3 and wmv one, apparently also required patching in the Vista beta 
versions, so it doesn't seem like everything has been made more secure. 
  Like the article said, they can't change a lot of stuff without 
hopelessly breaking backwards compatibility.  I noticed it said non 
administrative accounts will be the default.  Of course, I assume that 
it will continue to be pointless to run that way since things will 
continue to mysteriously and silently fail and the only way to resolve 
that is to just give yourself more privileges.  Why can't Windows ever 
get a handle on making a system that is truly able to handle multi users 
with varying levels of security.  When I can telnet into frozen Windows 
box and kill off a few runaway processes, then it seems like Windows 
will finally get it.

I've heard conflicting things about how good it will be to move some of 
the code in or out of the security rings.  I think I saw a debate on 
where video drivers should live and whether moving those items, written 
by third parties, will make the system more or less stable.  I guess it 
all remains to be seen then.

And the rest of the changes are the standard wizzy marketing spiel. 
Flashy 3D interfaces, built in applications to replace all those that 
most people have already found third party, media player improvements 
(yeah, with tighter restrictions on what media you can play), and a few 
other things that made me yawn.  Most of that is crap that I will have 
to figure out how disable because I detest things that flash and are 
distracting and mostly just waste memory and cpu cycles.

What I would like to see, but will likely not see, is it is completely 
inexcusable that a computer with 1 gig of memory and and whatever super 
fast CPU would ever freeze, but I expect that I will continue to sit and 
wait for 30 seconds, a few minutes while some virus checker freezes my 
desktop while it madly scans for threats.