Would you call Windows Vista: ME 2 (Mistake Edition 2)

You need to read Microsoft's history. compatibility is not what they aimed at. They have always released product that is for the new and future stuff. Though comparing with XP's release, Vista is actually. OS X with its much smaller universe should not be compared with Windows. And I don't think linux's compatibility is very high too. In fact, I see frequent regression in the 2.6 version, from release to release.

Not sure if you can compare it that way. OpenBSD like Linux is straightly speaking a kernel. What sits on top of them are those X, bind8/9, sendmail etc. So far, the holes in Windows is in the later category.

That is a myth, may be the things controlling airplane is but definitely not typical desktop software. And I don't think say ubuntu is as polished as XP or Vista.

This I agree though.

And this is not a Microsoft only thing. This is a very normal business practice, long before Microsoft exists. They called it parallel run or whatever terms, i.e. a period to iron out the bugs or incompatibility.

 

I guess they forgot to tell the users (and all the software manufacturers) about the whole compatibility thing.

The very latest OSX (which is fully 64-bit I might add) is fully backwards compatible with the earliest of OSX software (which was all 32 bit BTW). Why shouldn't OSX be compared to Windows? I don't understand that argument.

As for the world of OSS, that's the beauty of it - you can take your old software packages and re-compile them for the new environment. As an example, I can run doom (the first one) and Duke Nukem 3D on my fully up-to-date Gentoo system. Will those run on Vista? Will they even run on XP? I doubt it. How about Quake 1, or Quake 2? Runs perfectly (and oh so fast!) on my Gentoo system. Get those things running on Vista with full hardware 3D acceleration and then we'll talk.

Not quite. OpenBSD is not just a kernel like Linux is. It's a full UNIX-type operating system. Not sure where you got the idea that it was only a kernel, like Linux.

Apples and oranges. I'm not talking about testing or QA type stuff. I know typical business IT practices, believe me. Most business completely refuse the latest Microsoft products based solely on the fact that "there aren't any service packs or patches for it yet". That's a whole different reason, and very telling as to the general perception of Microsoft's initial software quality.

Edit: And further, most IT shops will even put Microsoft patches and updates through their testing and QA processes before putting them into production. It's because of Microsoft's awful track record with patch management - they release a patch to fix one problem, but applying it breaks three other things.

This doesn't happen in the UNIX world. When patches come out, admins routinely apply them to their production systems because they know they've been fully tested and will work without issue.

There's two different standards for software quality. The 'Windows universe' standard, and 'everything else'. The Windows universe quality standard has its bar set much, MUCH lower.

 

I have said that their universe is much smaller. If I have one programs to deal with, the chances are that I can spend more times with it to polish it more. The things would be different when I have 100K programs to deal with. Adding more people unfortunately won't help(Brook's mythical man month).

Not sure I understand what you want to say.

May be I used the wrong term. Do you mean they have implemented their own Windowing system, their own file server code, their own browser software, their own instant messaging software, their own office like product, their own email client ? their own web server ?

Because the windows universe is very different from the rest. It is from a desktop oriented company, targeting desktop with a desktop culture. And that standard can afford to be lower. Though not anymore because of its sheer size of the market.

Their server based stuff is something I would touch with a ten foot pole, given this desktop culture.

Being a debian user, its bug tracking database also have lots of bugs opened. But that doesn't mean its quality is bad. Software have bugs.

The problem of Microsoft to me is not their product quality(a few glitches here and there on a desktop is no big deal to me though I have said that my XP never gave me any trouble in the past 8 years) but culture.

 

vista hasn't done so great, but the compatibility issues are being worked on and everything should be fine by SP1. This forum is filled with too many people who think vista is superior because it clearly hasn't shown that so far. Some attributes of it is better, some are worse..

 

I had Vista, went back to XP...now I'm planning to try Vista again in December (after SP1) and report back. I might even write an article on it.

 

This link is not talking about compatiblity of OSX but I found the following quote interesting :

"But Gavin Whatrup, group IT director at marketing agency Creston, said that Fruitzilla's hardware still cost far too much and it was a barrier preventing more widespread deployment of Macs.

He said that Fruitzilla's OSX may be improving but it still has a long way to go to be as robust as Windows XP."

So contrary to common believe it seems that some of the Mac users(who apparently use both OSX and XP) thinks that XP is more robust than OSX.
Now if cooperations don't trust Microsoft's product quality, what does it say about OSX(which is built on top of BSD) ?

I haven't used OSX before so cannot verify how valid the claim is and honestly speaking, I don't trust Mac users telling me how great their Mac is.

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=41036

 

I remember XP prior to SP1 and it was awful.. I had BSoDs most days and probably did system restores most weeks. There were forums full of similar moans as with Vista.. 98se is better than XP, XP sucks, I'm waiting for SP1 etc etc .. It's just one of those things with new Microsoft OS.. (unfortunately). No doubt when Vistas replacement comes along history will just repeat itself! Actually come to think of it no one ever said ME is better than pre SP1 XP.. strange that...

Given probably the most difficult number of hardware permiatations going Vista doesn't do too bad and for that you can only really compare it to Linux.. which definately is tempermental with some hardware (ATI graphics cards for a start). Apple has a fairly standard set of hardware to run on so OSX isn't really a fair comparison in my book. If Apple made an OS for PCs then it would be a fair contest.

 

I feel since vista RC1 has been out.. It looks pretty and runs well for the first few weeks then it bogs down. It has been proven Vista has memory leaks all over the place. Microsoft needs to repair this. Also i noticed vista hurts my games. Some people will agree and others will say im an idiot. But i have vista and xp on my computer and when i play the same game with the same aps runing i get completely diffirent frame rates. XP steady 60 fps vista 20-25. And with xp i can switch between game and desktop easily with vist theres alot of lag.

 

Proven that it leaks memory? Since when? High memory usage does NOT mean it's leaking, contrary to popular belief. It just means that it's more efficiently using the resources available. It DOES still have a much larger minimum memory footprint than XP, though.

And for the OSX comments: OSX is kinda flaky if you want to tweak with it. You either use it very simply, or you learn to be a Unix guru. There's no real space on OSX for a "power user". It's essentially either admin or basic user.

That said, OSX still runs programs made for OS9, on a completely different processor architecture. If that's not backwards compatibility, I don't know what is. You won't get any NT4 for Alpha applications running on any Windows version now. And, Apple does backwards compatibility (and 32/64 bit compatibility) MUCH more elegantly than Windows, mostly because Microsoft has undocumented, obfuscated API's all over their system that are used by various important applications. A bunch of mis-named functions, multiple functions that do very close to the same thing, but not exactly, functions that do things incorrectly but some applications depend on the incorrect functioning so it's never fixed, and not documented, etc. I've done work with Cocoa, Win32, MFC, Qt, you name it... Windows native API's are at the very bottom of the "list of windowing and system API's that I like".