David Cohen Sunday, 07 December 2008 at 11:17

I’ve got Vista on my main laptop and don’t hate it. What’s interesting is that the things that are most annoying about it (particularly its insistence that I have to use a Administrator password to install a new program) are a response to all the criticisms of Windows for being insecure. They announced that every decision they made in developing Vista was going to be subjected to a security review so it would be ultra-safe. It’s also an ultra pain in the ass.

Annoying Old Guy Sunday, 07 December 2008 at 12:04

That’s one thing I don’t mind — there’s just no other way to have real security. It’s precisely what Unix/Linux does as well, the only difference being that in Unix you provide the password first, then do the install.

The fundamental failure is that the Dark Empire still doesn’t grasp the concept of multiple users of a computer. For instance, there’s no standard way for a user to install programs just for himself and so avoid many of these security issues. There is only the entire machine place for programs, which must then be highly secure because once you’re in there for anything, no matter how trivial, you have access to everything. It would be like have the Pentagon have only one key pattern for all doors, cabinets, and safes. A real security review would have dealt with that underlying problem.

Overall, though, my problem with Vista is not that it’s so horrible but that it costs so much for so little. I can feel the pain of businesses who look at the cost of upgrading all of their computers to be Vista capable and looking the net improvements from all that cost and deciding it’s just not worth it. While hardware is always getting cheaper, it’s not getting cheaper fast enough to justify Vista. If Windows 7 manages to consume roughly the same resources, it has a good chance.

Hey Skipper Sunday, 07 December 2008 at 12:24

Just about a year ago, I was experiencing an epic fail with Vista and games. I hope your Boy 1 has better luck than my man-child did.

Vista is not that it’s so horrible but that it costs so much for so little …

Mac OS X 10.5 is a little less than half the cost of Vista ($135 IIRC)

Gronker Sunday, 07 December 2008 at 16:45

Mac OS X would be expensive if it were free. The Mac tax for hardware is not as bad as it was but it still exists. Seems like most everyone I knew who got all excited about Mac (its UNIX!) all were boocamping into XP or Vista and never touching the MAC OS world within 6 months. Mac is not a player in the the corporate desktop world and in a nutshell, they dont care. They want to be the “cool in-crowd” PC. That market is resession proof and is willing to pay “first adopter” tax for everything they do. Apple keeps a limited share but reaps a sickning profit from that share. They dont want to be bigger, and its not a bad business plan.

Vista is …OK. I run it and Im happy. In the corporate computing world (managing my (l)users) it is superiour. It eats resources like they were free, which is a concious design “feature”. MS made the call that disk and memory are approaching free for desktop computing, so they made the assumption they were. People try to run Vista at minimum recommended (or less) hardware and get grumpy when it doesnt run well. Well, duh.

Windows 7 will deliver all the real reasons people wanted an XP upgrade: faster boot, better access to more memory, sexier interface, touch interface, etc…Vista improved the guts like enterprise management features (group policy), security features, and a soft rewrite of the UI. Different purposes. I think people expected too much from Vista.

I like to think of Vista as the engine upgrade but the same chassis and interior. Windows 7 will be the new handling package. Remains to be seen if the “interior” will make cut.

Annoying Old Guy Sunday, 07 December 2008 at 19:43

We’ll see. It’s not a big deal if games don’t work. I set up the system primarily to test stuff like that on a system that’s nice to have but hardly essential.

Annoying Old Guy Sunday, 07 December 2008 at 19:49

Gronker;

Yeah, that’s what I was getting at with the “too early” comment. I think the Dark Empire forget the normal businesses aren’t replacing all their desktops on a yearly basis. I would agree that getting a Vista capable machine today is quite affordable — the box I am using was less than $600 and seems to run Vista fine. It would only have been another $60 to have gotten 4G and that’s for fast (800Mhz DDR2) memory. So, if Windows 7 has the same footprint as Vista, it will be perceived as smaller for that reason.

David Cohen Monday, 08 December 2008 at 08:29

I’ll give Vista this: my computer finally as an “off” button.

Annoying Old Guy Monday, 08 December 2008 at 10:27

That one actually bugs me. I would much prefer a “restart” button. The physical off button has always worked fine for me.

Hey Skipper Tuesday, 09 December 2008 at 12:48

The Mac tax for hardware is not as bad as it was but it still exists.

Yes, it still exists.

However, there are a few payoffs.

For my desktop iMac (which, due to living in a smallish house, must reside in the family room) it offers the several benefits of being completely self contained, quite, and not looking as if someone just smacked it hard with an ugly stick.

No doubt due more to market share and less to greater OS security, there are no Mac viruses. The only worry in the Mac world is inadvertently passing on an infected Office file to a Win box user.

I manage a home network consisting of three Macs and a winbox. Absolutely painless to setup, and the management issues since have been almost nil. (Except for a virus issue with my son’s winbox)

Finally, and perhaps most important for almost everybody (which is to say, all but the half dozen people on the planet whose OCD issues cause them to routinely backup their data), Time Capsule is the total solution. It kicks so much a** that Cupertino ran out and had to import some more.

2.66 GHz Intel Core Duo, 750 GB HD, 4 GB RAM, 1TB / 811.2n Time Capsule, $2300.

I figure about $800 of MacTax there.

Annoying Old Guy Tuesday, 09 December 2008 at 13:10

Here’s my Vista box —

A close up where you can see the glowing lights inside shining through the grill (yeah, Skipper, does your Mac memory blink red and green for Christmas?)

It’s very quiet. It’s a 2.5Ghz AMD Athlon 64 ×2 with 2G of 800 Mhz memory and 160G SATA drive. Built in video, sound, USB, yada yada. A bit less than $2300.

I have some in-case neon lights that I haven’t hooked up yet, but I think they’ll end up as office decorations rather than inside a computer.

Hey Skipper Tuesday, 09 December 2008 at 13:50

Very cool.

To be clear, though, my iMac was $1800; the Time Capsule (1TB HD and 811.2n integrated wireless hub) was the other $500.

Hey Skipper Tuesday, 09 December 2008 at 14:11

This looks like a call to dueling photos.

Can I post one here, I do I have to do it on TDD?

erp Tuesday, 09 December 2008 at 15:24

Cool. Yellow keyboard. We have Vista in the house, but I don’t have to use it, so I don’t care how many times you have to reassure it that, yes, you really, really mean it to do what you have instructed it to do.

Thanks for the definition of Sturgeon’s Law. Why couldn’t one of the Google hits find that?

As time goes by, the percentage of good stuff that lasts probably goes up to about 00.01% if that.

Annoying Old Guy Tuesday, 09 December 2008 at 15:40

erp, did you notice the size of the letters on the keys? That’s my high visibility keyboard, which I originally purchased for The Spawn. I like the way you phrase that, the same way you’d talk about unwanted rodents that didn’t get in to your cupboard.

And it was somewhat less than $1800, although it might break $1000 if you counted the cost of Vista (for which I have a different sort of license than standard retail, so per copy costs are a bit vague). That’s also a very nice monitor if you have kids. Tempered glass front, very impact resistant, and no bevels to accumulate child emissions (or, my case, kitty snot).

Hey Skipper Tuesday, 09 December 2008 at 20:24

This is what the MacTax gets:

Dead silent and, to my eye, brilliantly minimalist — the front of the computer is completely smooth (tempered glass where it isn’t aluminum), the keyboard doesn’t hog desk real estate, and the mouse is the best I have ever used. Other than the power cord, not a wire to be found.

There is an obvious downside to the tight packaging: absolutely no expansion capability.

What you can’t see, though, is that ownership costs are more than just upfront money — not having to get on ongoing subscription to Norton Antivirus goes some way to closing the difference. Apple’s customer support is the best in the industry. And, IMHO, the OS just plain works better. Since I can be gone for a couple weeks at a stretch, I need something that is very low maintenance and provides the capability to control machines on my network remotely (full disclosure, since low maintenance has so far translated into no maintenance, I haven’t tried it yet to know if reality matches hype. For all I know, Vista can do this, too). Also, from what I have heard, it runs Vista better than a winbox does.

Does this all compensate for the MacTax (hard to say what it would be compared to AOG’s machine, since mine is spec’d differently — slightly faster, twice the memory and bigger display, but I wouldn’t be surprised at 30%+ for an equally configured winbox)? Clearly, I thought so. But as they say, your gigahertzage may vary.

erp Tuesday, 09 December 2008 at 21:35

How come you guys don’t use laptops. Sitting at a desk would be like needing to stay tethered to a phone cord like the old days.

Skipper you take the high ground when it comes to scenic surroundings. Is that a photo of your pup?

BTW - my last comment, I meant that the good stuff goes DOWN to 00.01% - senior moments are getting longer and longer.

Annoying Old Guy Tuesday, 09 December 2008 at 22:56

I do use a laptop. I like being tethered, or rather cocooned in my array of displays (my primary setup is two computers with two 21” screens each — the computer in the picture is my tertiary computer on another part of my desk). You just can’t get that from a laptop. I need wide open display spaces.

Hey Skipper Tuesday, 09 December 2008 at 23:49

I also use a laptop, when I’m on the road.

With the wireless network at home, I can use it to get out of range of the TV, but I don’t very often.

I like the big display too much.

erp Wednesday, 10 December 2008 at 08:03

Is it a guy thing? My husband still sits in his cocoon even though he now uses a large screen laptop and only very rarely moves it out to the porch.

Annoying Old Guy Wednesday, 10 December 2008 at 08:17

That’s not a large screen.

This is a large screen —

You can see my laptop on the far right.

Hey Skipper Wednesday, 10 December 2008 at 10:01

As my son just said looking at this:

“Dad, you have been so pwned.”

erp:

I don’t get to have a cocoon.

Annoying Old Guy Wednesday, 10 December 2008 at 12:15

It’s payback for the “office window” pictures.

erp Wednesday, 10 December 2008 at 13:46

Skipper, isn’t your cockpit a cocoon? Tell your son everyone else is so pwned (whatever that means) it’s pathetic.

aog, do you have all screens blinking and beeping at the same time, or does each have a particular function? Darn, I was born 50 years too early.

BTW - I tried pasting the HTML code for a picture into a comment, but blogger didn’t like it. How do you get a picture into a comment?

Annoying Old Guy Wednesday, 10 December 2008 at 14:37

Hmmm, a raw IMG element should work. Let me see

<img class="post"
 src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3133/3097959683_1520a1ff9b.jpg"
 />

That seems to work. The post class puts a white border on it and makes it float left. On Blogger, you should omit the class="post" but it’s quite possible that Blogger doesn’t allow pictures at all — there are some serious risks to that on a website as public as Blogger, which don’t apply here because I read all the comments and dispose of inappropriate ones.

You can also do that using Textile formatting (there’s a link at the start of the coments with much more detail) to get a nice centered picture, which is what Skipper used. In that case you want the std class.

p=. !(std)http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3028/3098004119_821a3a1040.jpg!

That will center the image in a separate paragraph but not float it.

Water colored Nickelodeon Hotel

erp Wednesday, 10 December 2008 at 16:37

Thanks and I’m glad you posted a picture of the adorable Ms Aog.. She’s as cute as ever.

Here’s the light of my eyes on vacation in Italy last summer.

Neither code worked in Blogger.

Annoying Old Guy Wednesday, 10 December 2008 at 16:59

Oh, I forgot to answer erp’s question about the monitor.

No, they don’t beep at me, but I have them up all the time. The left most screen is my primary web cruising screen, with the right for code editing (I use the entire display for that). Or, the left is my photo editor and the right my photo gallery. The other two I use for doing web development, which involves multiple machines, editors, browsers, and other things (I like to test my web concoctions in a different browser and machine than my primary work machine — you can see code from my Webiki plugin plus the Movable Type administration page I was using to test it). There are times when I am coding in multiple languages in different code editors, one on each of the vertical displays, with the other displays used for reference materials, command lines, test output, etc. Work always expands to fill all display surface. It’s just the modern form of a professor with a large blackboard.

P.S. Is that a child or grandchild?

erp Thursday, 11 December 2008 at 06:52

Impressive array. It’s my eleven year old granddaughter.

Hey Skipper Thursday, 11 December 2008 at 17:59

Skipper, isn’t your cockpit a cocoon?

I have been way too scared far too often to ever consider the cockpit a cocoon.

erp Friday, 12 December 2008 at 07:55

Skipper, we civilians don’t want to hear that.

Hey Skipper Friday, 12 December 2008 at 11:09

Well, all but a few of those times were in a fighter.

As for the rest, replace “scared” with “deeply concerned”.