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Ranting with a Great View
WARNING: The following is a major rant, if you don't like rants, then read a different post, because I need to rant and this is the place I'm going to do it.
So, what is the subject of my rant? Windows Vista, which I will now officially dub the worst Microsoft Windows operating system since ME, but not including 3.0 or anything prior to that.
First on my Vista hit list is the new "Aero" theme, sometimes referred to as "Aeroglass", which I had been hearing about for ages, but didn't experience first hand until this weekend, while installing a modem in a new Dell for a client.
Perhaps my expectations had been really built up, as I really was expecting some sort of awesomely beautiful interface, kind of like the faux computer interfaces that have been cropping up in Hollywood movies for the past 2 decades. Something beautiful, new, fresh and functional!
Instead I was presented the ugliest heap of steaming donkey dung of an interface that has ever been conceived. Who came up with this crap and then sold it? Microsoft must have an amazing marketing department, because I can't imagine how anybody who has actually used "Aero" could have written all the glowing reviews that I've read in the past couple of months. Surely such writers just skimmed provided advertising copy and picked out appropriately fluffy descriptions, it's the only explanation!
And functional? No way, in XP you can add a shortcut to your desktop by right-clicking on the connection and choosing "Create Shortcut". Wanna put a shortcut to your dial-up connection on the Vista desktop? Sorry, you can't!
You have to click Start, then connect, then get a list of connections, then click on the connection to even bring up the simple dial-up window.
How is this efficient? Why stop me from placing icons on my desktop? It is MY desktop after all!
Oh, and BTW, brand new Dell with Intel Core Duo processor and Vista completely lagged, probably burning up processing power running the incredibly ugly interface!
Who ever thought that the edge of windows should be semi transparent? Did it ever occur to the designer that some people don't have happy jolly background images (yet another resource waster), which means that the edge of windows are mostly black, which means that it's impossible to see where to click and drag or resize windows! Great job interface designers!
What to run a command line program? Something useful like ipconfig or msconfig? Sorry, no run command (at least that I could find in half an hour of searching!)
And how many F-ing (yes, I won't type it here, but I'm actually thinking of a very unkind word here) time does the F-ing O/S have to ask my permission to view certain system parameters?
I'm sorry, but I simply can't agree with the dumbing down of computer interfaces, it doesn't make them easier to use! It just makes things harder for techs like me to fix when people break them!
Did I mention the "Anti-Phishing" filter that if left on brings Internet Explorer 7 to a molasses in January-esque crawl whilst surfing?
There's a permanent countdown in the back of my head since the release of Vista, counting down the days until the first real onslaught of malware hits Vista. I don't care what MS security experts say, flaws will be found, flaws will be exploited and when they do, it's going to be messy, really messy. It has taken me years to collect the tools that allow me to repair XP.
Now, I do admit, I'm an old fashion technician, I don't nuke systems at the first sign of a virus, which to me is like using an H-Bomb to cure the common cold. I prefer to remove infections with the skilled hands (software tools) of a surgeon. Yes, Yes, Vista has a rollback feature, as does XP (as was introduced in ME, bleh!) And yes, sometimes it works, sometimes, but sometimes it doesn't or sometimes you've installed piles of software since the infection took place and sometimes you spend hours, rolling back dozens of times attempting to local a pre-infection backup, which may or may not exist.
Most of my tools are now rendered useless by the draconian protection schemes built right into Vista. This is working backwards people!
Here, I'll show my age with a nice quote from the original Star Wars: "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers." Except my version is "The more you lock down your operating systems, Mr. Gates, the more users are going to switch to Mac OSX or Linux" (Ubuntu is sounding more and more attractive each time another Vista DRM horror story surfaces).
For the first time since I got into PC repairs (1992), Vista has me seriously considering options for focusing my career in new areas that won't involve wasting my days fighting just to get operating systems to behave themselves. Honestly and I never though I'd say this, as I've been against Macs ever since my beloved Apple IIGS was dumped so that Apple could focus on Macs, but Macs are actually looking very attractive since they started sporting Intel processors.
Meanwhile, my truly geeky side is actually be called by Linux as well and here and now, I am going to lay down my prediction for the future of home computers:
If Microsoft next operating system doesn't veer away from the utter uselessness of Vista, the operating system market is going to start fragment. It's going to be like the 80's all over again, where you have to check software advertisements to see if your particular brand of computer is supported (Apple II, Commodore, Atari, IBM, Tandy, Mac, etc…, remember "the good old days"?)
And what will rise out of this fragmentation? More support for Mac OS? Linux with more than 2 percent of the market? Mayhaps, but personally, I hear something rustling in the bushing, its hidden predators. They are silently watching Microsoft misstep, biding their time until they can strike at the heart of the MS Juggernaut.
Who are the hidden predators? I don't know, I'm not that informed, it could be a tri-glomerate, like IBM/Toshiba/Sony, with their Cell processor. Corporations like that don't invest resources and money in a project like Cell if they don't have more uses in mind than just the floundering Playstation 3.
It could be Google, or a Google-like entity, a company that rises out of seeming nothingness. Remember, the hardware behind Google is a special array of simple home computers, nothing special… except the custom operating system…
Boy, I'm on my third page of ranting here and I haven't even got in to other flaws with Vista, like the crazy system MS has in place where they can permanently kill hardware by revoking driver rights. It's just too much control, Microsoft wants to control too much of my experience with computers and I don't approve. I want to use my computer how I use a computer and that most certainly means that I expect a piece of hardware to be supported for as long as I care to use it!
One of the most troubling aspects of Vista's release that I have noted so far is with new computers. You can't go to Dell.ca now and order a computer without Vista, unless it's their top end gaming systems, which still has the Media Center Edition of XP. I wonder why that is? Oh, wait a second, there are issues with Nvidia's Vista drivers? Especially with an SLI configuration? Games which are stable in XP are crashing (if they run at all)? System performance for games that do run is reduced by up to 30 percent? (Anybody who's sick of being an unpaid beta tester for software companies that can't bother taking the time to locate errors in their programs before selling them to an unexpecting public, please raise your hands now!)
Oh, and if you want to play the new generation of DirectX 10 enhanced games, you'll have to get Vista? No other choice? Wow! If I didn't know better, I'd think that Microsoft ware purposefully trying to kill the PC game market; I wonder why they'd want to do that? (cough, 360, cough, cough),
Ok, the power from my rant power-up is just about expended (if only there were some tasty Japanese meat pies about from which I could gain more rant energy!) so it's time to sign off, for all the folks in the world that are going to be forced to suffer through Vista for the next few years, I am truly sorry, if I ran MS, things would be different, looks like you may have one less computer tech willing to go the extra distance to save your data when your system gets messed up, in the meantime, I'm off to download Ubuntu!
Posted by Dylon on February 11, 2007 11:19 PM |
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April 2008