That video puts me in a very weird place. Not that I am not normally in a very weird place.
That was intended to be humor, right? Would that it had been funny. I can see how it would totally get the intended reaction from both ends of the zealotry extreme, but who else cares?
As far as "copying" goes, how the hell is that news? Neither Apple nor Microsoft has had a leg to stand on in the infringement space since the eighties. Anybody remember the Xerox Alto? No, of course nobody remembers it, but Xerox sued _Apple_ for copyright infringement in the GUI space a good decade or more before Apple sued Microsoft for the same thing.
I can say with authority that Vista Desktop Search is not a copy of anything in OS X--I had to listen to Ian King blather on about Search in _1995_. The Vista incarnation is purty-near exactly what he was describing back then. The fact that it took eleven years (and more) to bring the vision to the customer is an indictment of Microsoft's efficiency, not of their penchant for plagiarism. (I should note that Ian King is a great guy and a fine bloke to raise a glass with--he just has a tendency to drive a topic into the ground, a flaw I imagine you have noticed in other people 'round here as well.)
Now that Vista is "out", I feel like I can mention my own opinion--Vista is significantly better at almost everything than XP, but that "almost" incorporates some pretty important caveats: - Resource usage: Vista is a glutton. Don't even try running Vista in less than a gig of memory, and I won't be putting it on a machine with less than two, myself. - Application Compatibility: Make sure your most important apps will run on Vista. Get that information directly from the application vendor. In writing, so they have to help you out when they don't. Because many will not, and many of Microsoft's Vista-certification tests are, let us say lacking. - Hardware compatibility: Vista is way different under-the-covers than XP. Most (all?) device drivers will need to be rewritten significantly. Most (definitely _not_ all) device drivers have been so rewritten--Vista supports all kinds of things out of the box that you could never get working really right with XP. But that doesn't matter to you when one of _your_ devices is one of the few that doesn't have a Vista driver yet.
My bottom line is that I won't be buying Vista for any of my current hardware, and all the existing hardware I support among the family will remain XP. But I will be most pleased to have Vista arrive on all the new hardware I'm going to be buying over the next year or so. (And I'll keep a Virtual PC or two around to run Vista.32 and XPSP2 for those games and apps that Vista just can't handle.)
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Date: 2006-12-18 12:42 am (UTC)That was intended to be humor, right? Would that it had been funny. I can see how it would totally get the intended reaction from both ends of the zealotry extreme, but who else cares?
As far as "copying" goes, how the hell is that news? Neither Apple nor Microsoft has had a leg to stand on in the infringement space since the eighties. Anybody remember the Xerox Alto? No, of course nobody remembers it, but Xerox sued _Apple_ for copyright infringement in the GUI space a good decade or more before Apple sued Microsoft for the same thing.
I can say with authority that Vista Desktop Search is not a copy of anything in OS X--I had to listen to Ian King blather on about Search in _1995_. The Vista incarnation is purty-near exactly what he was describing back then. The fact that it took eleven years (and more) to bring the vision to the customer is an indictment of Microsoft's efficiency, not of their penchant for plagiarism. (I should note that Ian King is a great guy and a fine bloke to raise a glass with--he just has a tendency to drive a topic into the ground, a flaw I imagine you have noticed in other people 'round here as well.)
Now that Vista is "out", I feel like I can mention my own opinion--Vista is significantly better at almost everything than XP, but that "almost" incorporates some pretty important caveats:
- Resource usage: Vista is a glutton. Don't even try running Vista in less than a gig of memory, and I won't be putting it on a machine with less than two, myself.
- Application Compatibility: Make sure your most important apps will run on Vista. Get that information directly from the application vendor. In writing, so they have to help you out when they don't. Because many will not, and many of Microsoft's Vista-certification tests are, let us say lacking.
- Hardware compatibility: Vista is way different under-the-covers than XP. Most (all?) device drivers will need to be rewritten significantly. Most (definitely _not_ all) device drivers have been so rewritten--Vista supports all kinds of things out of the box that you could never get working really right with XP. But that doesn't matter to you when one of _your_ devices is one of the few that doesn't have a Vista driver yet.
My bottom line is that I won't be buying Vista for any of my current hardware, and all the existing hardware I support among the family will remain XP. But I will be most pleased to have Vista arrive on all the new hardware I'm going to be buying over the next year or so. (And I'll keep a Virtual PC or two around to run Vista.32 and XPSP2 for those games and apps that Vista just can't handle.)