Comments

1. Nick White

   
   Posted on: June 12, 2007 at 8:27PM  

   Hey everyone -- I inadvertently stated the wrong month for this release; this has been corrected.  Thanks for all your notices calling out the error :)
2. mervhob

   
   Posted on: June 13, 2007 at 5:38PM  

   Sorry Nick, I do not feel envious. As an old fashioned systems engineer with an unblemished record for innovation, who has just spent the last two months struggling with the appallingly poor performance of Vista, if I were you I would feel a deep sense of shame. After 25 years of trying, Microsoft has singularly failed to produce a satisfactory operating system. From MSDOS (kills all known interest in computing) to Vista, the record has been a steady line of zeros. You have to explain to me why with a 64 bit machine, 2GHz internal clock, 1Gbyte of DDR2 runs slower, with less functionality than a Macintosh Quadra of 1994? Or why it requires 15Gbytes of badly written code to emulate a Macintosh SE30 of 1989 running 8Mbytes of memory, at a clock speed of 15MHz? At the keyboard end of my experience that is what I perceive - don't you guys really understand the concept of user bandwidth? Vista is dreadful - if you guys were on my team I would sack the lot of you and hire some half decent people, you have really lost the plot if you think that this geekified rubbish represents progress. For goodness sake will all you people at Microsoft get your act together and deliver some value for money!

   Mervyn Hobden
3. Apollo29

   
   Posted on: June 14, 2007 at 7:21AM  

   I feel sorry for you mervhob.  I have been using Vista for day to day work activities for a while now and I have nothing but praise for it.  I am currently running on a 64 bit machine and I think the performance is great.  This is coming from someone who usually has no less than 10 programs running at the same time.  I give kudos to the Microsoft team for their hard work put into this operating system.
4. mervhob

   
   Posted on: June 15, 2007 at 4:25PM  

   Hi Apollo29,

   Run 10 programs at a time? Hell, we could do that on a VAX, 25 years ago. So is there anything new? I have to say, precious little that I can find. Speaking with the experience of over 30 years, I think there is a fundamental weakness apparent with all the Microsoft products that I have used. Microsoft has never had anyone on the books that could really be classed as a true systems engineer - someone with the breadth of vision and understanding to impose a really good architecture, and make their team comply with it. There is about all Microsoft product, a hastily cobbled together aspect, that we, your end users have to contend with, and suffer from. Your own technical literature gives weight to that conclusion - I have never seen an architectural overview for any of the operating systems produced - lists of functions and features, with no hint of a coherent structure. Could you put an architectural structure together for Vista, showing how all the functional elements interact? I am well aware that geeks like to randomly tap keys in the hope of an outcome, and discover the underlying structure that way, but for most of us that process is unpleasant, and extremely costly in terms of time. You would be deeply distressed to find that the surgeon in your hospital or, the airline pilot on your holiday flight had such a trivial approach to the task in hand. At least Nick is honest - he plays with toys on his own admission. A real engineer is expected to have a somewhat deeper appreciation than that.

   Cheers,

   Merv
5. qball1972

   
   Posted on: June 18, 2007 at 11:33PM  

   it's about time, i've been pulling my hair out trying to get vista to read any of my card readers so i can get the pictures off my sd card. ever since i made the move for vista i have been trying to find a card reader that works. i am currently up to 5 readers not including the one that is built into my machine. not one of them will install properly - they search for drivers on the disk and then search windows update site, then tell me it can't find them. funny how every one of them will work with XP, or even on my old '95 computer. i wouldn't mind buying a card reader for vista if i knew it was going to work - THE FIRST TIME. A card reader is something that is very common so why won't microsoft fix the problem.
6. whuza

   
   Posted on: June 19, 2007 at 3:09AM  

   this update was released on June 12!?

   http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb%3Ben-us%3B936825&x=23&y=5
7. Nick White

   
   Posted on: June 19, 2007 at 1:40PM  

   Hey whuza:  you're right, the date in the post above is incorrect -- sorry for getting that detail wrong :)
8. hitmouse

   
   Posted on: June 19, 2007 at 5:16PM  

   @Merv: (1) I doubt that the 10 programs you were running on the VAX were anywhere near as complicated as those running on a PC today. (2) Whose 1989 Mac Emulator are you running? I doubt that Microsoft produced that. (3) Architectural diagram? Google is your friend. (4) Microsoft has never had systems engineers? Based on what evidence? Does Dave Cutler not count, just to name one?
9. hitmouse

   
   Posted on: June 19, 2007 at 5:16PM  

   Oh and 1-4 above notwithstanding, I still think Vista sucks.
10. mervhob

    
    Posted on: June 21, 2007 at 7:46PM  

    Hi Hitmouse,

    We ran a whole heap of programs on our VAX, Surface Acoustic Wave design software that would run for days, IC design programs, RF circuit design software, management tools, all pretty complicated stuff. Not much fancy graphics, but thats all child's flip book stuff anyway, nothing clever about it. No emulator, I am running original MAC hardware and software, system 6.08 and 7.5.5. Where on Google....? Evidence for lack of competant systems design engineers - MSDOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows XP. Windows NT and 2000 are bearable, and CE is pretty good - what went wrong? Dave who? And Word - any claim that design was involved in Word could be subject to a class action!But Word on the Mac was pretty good - written by Microsoft too! I belong to a generation that spent their days struggling with XTs and ATs, then went home to find their kids with Amigas and Ataris. Now that hurt! But one day in 1991, somebody gave me a Mac.....

    Cheers,

    Merv