6 responses to “Time’s Biggest Losers”

1. 

   Richard May 20th, 2009 at 15:41

   It is fascinating that bloggers bother to parrot a Time Magazine headline/story. Who reads Time Magazine anymore? No one I know. It is irrelevant, as is this story.

2. 

   Liz May 21st, 2009 at 03:29

   Hi Woody,
   Thanks for that. I have Windows Vista on my machine and it works well. I may not be a computer expert, but I am happy to know that I won’t have to deal with things like Conficker and well, now rootkits. I also know that I don’t get freeze-ups, blue screens or mad mayhem on my computer like I do with the XP systems at work. I really do wish people would give Vista a break. I like it.
   Any issues I’ve had on my machine have had to do with Windows Updates. Any chance they’ll fix them someday?
   

3. 

   woody May 21st, 2009 at 08:28

   They keep getting better generally, but it’s a tough problem. Windows 7 fixes a lot of the old problems, but no doubt will introduce its own.

4. 

   woody May 21st, 2009 at 08:32

   I found it particularly interesting that the Time stable of writers didn’t write this story. It’s from 24/7 Wall St, which seems to be focused almost exclusively on stocks. Time’s content has been deteriorating slowly, IMHO. But it’s still worth a read. You could probably say the same thing for almost any printed newspaper or magazine: they’re all having problems keeping up.

5. 

   Yuhong Bao May 22nd, 2009 at 04:08

   Yep, the 9x to NT transition dramatically boosted the security and reliabity of Windows.

6. 

   sethness May 22nd, 2009 at 14:08

   I think both Woody and 24/7 Wall Street have missed the point of Vista.

   Vista wasn’t written merely because MS wanted to make more money off the end-user, and its biggest problem for acceptance is not its slowness (though it does run slower than a racehorse holding up a 300 pound jockey).

   There’s an elephant in the room, that both Woody and 24/7 are pointedly ignoring: DRM. Vista is big, fat, slow, and fragile BECAUSE OF its digital rights management– its anti-piracy, anti-end-user-freedom layer. It’s got a whole new layer of file-checking and hardware-signature-pinging to ensure that you, the end user, are not pirating.

   Vista was written partly as a way to extract money from the end-user, yes… but very clearly, it’s also aiming to get a “killer app” that open-source Linux can’t imitate: becoming the standard home theater and home shopping network.

   To do that, MS has got to convince Hollywood and the software industry that Windows is a secure platform, from which piracy is unlikely.

   In short, Vista wasn’t written to please YOU, the end user. No, it was written to please RIAA, MPAA, and the rest of the piracy-paranoid entertainment industry.

   Read more about this in the excellent article “A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection” by Peter Gutmann ( http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt )

   Vista, and in its wake Windows 7, significantly erode your rights to increase DRM invasiveness. WGA and WAT are just the beginning of looking into YOUR computer and taking action if Microscoffed doesn’t like what it sees.

   My prediction for Win7 is that its Service Pack 1 will be a huge O/S replacement, in the same way that XP Software Patch #2 replaced massive sections of the original XP. Imho, Win7’s relative slimness and speed (compared to Vista, not compared to XP) will disappear in future Software Patches. We’ll soon see in Win7 the return of Vista piggishness and the DRM elephant-in-the-room.