elrohir

I have, over the last few years, seen numerous complaints from newcomers to Linux over the lack of media support in Linux, even though it is present. They are just new, and don't know how to do things themselves. For a while now, I have been following a project called Ubuntustudio. It's based on Ubuntu, my favourite distro, and since it was released only this week, I had to try it. Now, since it's based on Ubuntu (and uses the same repositories as the Fiesty Fawn Ubuntu release), it's nice and stable (I haven't had a single problem yet), as well as being absolutely perfect for media editing. Cause that's what it's made for. Ironically, the site went down due to high traffic just after the release, though it is on several mirrors, as well as a torrent. Beware, however! This is NOT a livecd. It's the INSTALLATION dvd. It installs ubuntu studio on your system, without regard for the partitions it's overwriting. Not bad in itself, but kinda sucks for everything on that partition. I'll post my personal reactions here. Ubustu comes with the common *buntu apps - well, the common GNOME apps, really - or in other words, the Firefox(v.2), Gaim, GIMP and OpenOffice.org set. Just like Ubuntu, you have to replace evolution with thunderbird, but that's no big deal. So, on top of that, you get a full set of auido, image and video editing tools. There's the famous and awesome Inkscape, of course, as well Blender3D, various animation editors, as well as some other stuff that I personally would never use. Then there's the audio section. They decided to use both the standard ALSA/OSS as well as this awesome thing called JACK as audio plugins. This means that for normal use, you just boot normally, with ALSA, and listen to your nice music, watch your DVDs, w/e. If you want to get fancy, for example by plugging in an amp, then applying effects to it from your computer, you fire up the JACK server, and do it all from there. What's special is that it runs in a separate layer, so that all the programs that need the JACK server can share the same in/out put. It's pretty neat. I got addicted to "Hydrogen", this drum simulator program that actually works properly... Due to the Ubuntu/Canonical legalities, most propriety codecs aren't included in the install itself. But as soon as you try playing something that needs one, it lists the good codecs and you just tell it you don't give a s**t about the legal b$. If you specialise in a specific field of media, it has a choice during the installation process that asks you what groups of programs to install, which I thought was pretty neat. (I just chose them all). Speaking of the install, there was a slight quirk with the X server. (When something goes wrong for me, it's always X.) All I did was copy over the configuration file from a ubuntu installation (you can even boot from the livecd and copy the live xorg.conf from there onto the hard-drive). It booted perfectly, after that. The theme took some getting used to. About three hours of it. Less than it took me from Breezy to Dapper, so not bad at all. The theme seems to have taken some inspiration from Vista, but since Vista just ripped off Mac in the first place, I'll let that one pass. It does feel odd in the beginning, but trust me, it's well worth it. The installer was not a graphical one - I'm not sure whether it was meant to be or not, though it seemed to attempt to start a graphical server of some sort before resorting to ncurses. I presume that was for the same reason X didn't start after the install, whatever that reason may be. Even so, it was extremely easy, and I had a working system in under twenty minutes, including fixing X. Very respectable. Boot time is good, and other than that it's pretty much the same as the standard Fiesty Fawn install, just without the $H*TTI Feist partitioner. Wireless support looks good (I haven't tried connecting to a network yet, I use ethernet to exclusion of all else), with all the networks appearing in a little drop-down under the networking icon in the taskbar. Including some that Windows doesn't see, for some reason If you are looking to change to linux, this is the time to do it. The Ubuntuforums have a thread for it if there are issues, and ubuntustuidio.org should be up sooner rather than later. The posted pic was taken as soon as I installed (fixed X, started gaim... ) and is basically the first impression you get of ubustu... Questions, comments, concerns?

Mary Stewart's Crystal Cave series altered my perspective to fantasy, which in turn got me into; THE WORLD OF TIME by Robert Jordan That is something I will always cherish Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye" was monumental, as well. There's a lot to be learned from any book that was written because the author had a story to tell, rather than for the sake of writing a book. Because if the author went to the trouble of writing a book based on this idea, there is a valididty to the story that grows around it that just doesn't appear elsewhere. -E

For me, my all-time fav series has to be the World of Time series by Robert Jordan. It's composed of tweleve tomes, each equivalent to my all-in-one LotR edition. And very, very well written. Can't express how much I love these books. Other than that, I also love the Dragonriders of Pern series by Anne McCaffrey, though they vary in "greatness". Then there's the Crystal Cave, etc. by Mary StewartSeveral by Rosemary Sutcliff, including "Knight's Fee" and "The Eagle of the Ninth"I loved Catcher in the Rye, which has been mentioned earlier in the post, and it was only a little while after I read it in 9th grade that I really came to appreciate all it means, and the truth in what Salinger writes. Very deep :unsure:I'll give most fantasy a try, so long as it doesn't sound too retarded. I also hate things that try to put fantasy in a modern setting (Kingdom of the Golden Gragon, Artemis Fowl) as well as those that mix time period (eg the Wintermark b$). Has to be pure epic :(But WoT gets first place. w00t!-E

Read the book, read Eldest. The writing style is a bit simple, the plot a little... obvious... in some places... but all in all it's a great series. And it's not long. 800 pages * 3 is nothing. On the other hand, there's the movie. I can't say how dissappointed I was at how much was left out. Fox really raped a good story there. Paolini really sold himself there... There's a forum for it here. For those who kinda liked it, perhaps enjoyed LoTR, mebbe some other good fantasy as well, and are interesting in reading some serious fantasy, you might want to have a go at the World of Time series. I'm on the second reread... It truly is a masterpiece of the fantastical genre. The books are each about 900-1000 pages long, and there are currently eleven of them (Robert Jordan, the author, is working on the twelth, though he is having some serious health issues) as well as a prequel. Somehow, Jordan managed to place seeds in the very first book (The Eye of the World), that are only maturing now, 17 years later. I can honestly say it's the most extraordinary work I have ever read. Tolkien made a world, Feist made two, but Jordan has a universe from which, quite frankly, you re-emerge and are startled that things in the real world don't work in the same way. It's damn amazing writing - as well as the best fantasy plot of all time, of course... Most libraries (even here in Norway) have WoT (they actually had the whole series, both in Norwegian and English, thankfully), and if not, they can probably order it from another library. Here they sometimes buy books at request (they got New Spring, the prequel of the series, for me when I asked ) There are several great communities for WoT, starting with dragonmount.com and tarvalon.net The first book is quite similar to the LotR, with the classic image of innocent Rand al'Thor (Frodo) and his partners-in-crime Mat Cauthon, Perrin Aybara and Rand's girlfriend Egwene (other hobbits) snatched away in the night by the mysterious Aes Sedai (magician) Moiraine Demandred (aka Gandalf). The only person who knows about their departure is Tam al'Thor (Bilbo Baggins), assumed to be Rand's father, who gives Rand a sword (aka Sting). That's about where the direct similarity ends. Obviously, they face several things before the end of the book, most of them pretty classical, with villages and stuff. There's even a Minas Morgul (called Aridhol or Shadar Logoth), though it is not the Dark One that owes it. It comes back later - pretty much everything does. Their aim turns out to be in the Blight (Mordor), but of course that's only the beginning. It's only the first book. In some ways, it's not the plot that matters as much as the way the story is told. Jordan says that the resemblance to LotR in the first book was deliberate, to instill in the reader as sense that they knew the story, and felt, to some degree, at home in it. But even so, it's much more than LotR, spesifically character development - and you get to know each character better than anything Tolkien ever managed. But then, perhaps that was not Tolkien's aim. In short, it's ****ing awesome. So... what does all this have to do with Eragon? Hmm... It's the same sort of style. I enjoyed both, and I think that most people who like that sort of thing, as well as being willing to give up quite a few weeks of their time to reading these monsters, will enjoy it. I really must make a reading recommendation list someday...

This isn't just your imagination, actually. It was proven a while ago that the amount of light the body is exposed to has a very slight influnece on this. There is a certain chemical in your body (can't remember what it was, it started with "m", I'll try to find it) that slows down physical (mental to a much lesser degree) development. The rate of production is inversely proportional to the amout of light the body is exposed to, so less is produced the more light you are exposed to. It's also supported by the fact that the average entrance aged dropped significantly after the electric lighbulb was intoduced in homes. Another possible cause is weight gain. Read the appropriate Wiki page for more details on that...

Eclipse, anjuta and netbeans IDEs. Since they all run on linux as well ANjuta is even in the repositories.

It's like PHP, if that tells you anything...

The specs issue is rather interesting. Microsoft seems to be assuming that every single one of their customers can afford to upgrade their hardware every five years. (Though, I guess that if you can afford Vista, you can afford the hardware upgrades..)Instead of getting the "all-new" (not...) Vista B$, and having to buy a new comp (I would have to) to run it, I figured out it's possible to load partitions into ram on boot. I've been using Linux for quite a while, now, but this was new to me. Basically, since accessing RAM takes a lot less time than accessing the hard-drive, you can load, say, /lib into ram, and pretty much all of your programs will load instantly. It's pretty awesome, and you don't need much RAM (I have 512MB) to do it. Just takes the know-how :unsure:I would avoid Vista as much as I can. It just seems so inefficient when you are using it. -E

may have them? It's a fact. The iPhone, for starters...

Google already has their own OS. It's called Goobuntu, and is based on Ubuntu. They aren't planning on releasing it, but are active in the *buntu community, as explained here by Mark Shuttleworth.

I stand... not quite corrected, but something close, anyways. I'll blame it on the time of night it was when I posted.... It is, isn't it... Hope nobody took offence. (Do I need to add a little :snigger; here?) Another thing I should have thought of is: Do "we", as linux users, really want Linux to become mainstream? Dell are starting to release computers with Ubuntu preinstalled, but my first reaction was not good. Is is really a good thing that Ubuntu is on it's way to commercialism? Even if the Ubuntu devs don't seem to have much to do with it... Fails? Linux does not fail as a desktop operating system. My computer runs it. Technically it's not a desktop, but my mum's computer runs it. Nothing has "failed". All fault lies with the user. And I won't stand corrected on that one. Well, isn't it? You call it soccer, so football must be european? No, wait, you have the football where you pick it up all the time. At least, I assume that you were being international when you called football football (appreciated!) ? That's still covered by the modem -> router, before going into the comp. (And just so you all know it, most of the networking hardware available has some cut-down barebones of linux installed on it.) I'll take the "configuring of ISP client" to mean connecting the computer to a network, which yes, can cause some oddities. So you're saying that Linux should be made easier, simpler... etc, just because the people who have spent two days with some random distro can't spend a couple weeks getting into it? That just doesn't figure. I'm not going to argue anything further... I just hope a couple people took the time to read that article I linked to. It's pretty famous, by now, and I really think it gives a good explaination. -E

Seriously. Do your homework before posting. Yes, Linux is on average harder than Windows. Why? Because people have been learning to use Windows for years. I used Windows when I started using computers, and used Windows at school in my first computer classes. We are born and bred, as the saying goes, into a completely Windows environment. And you are surprised that it takes two days to install a driver (shadowx)? Did you try that kind of thing two days after the first boot of Windows? Hell, no! "The plethora of distributions"- what's wrong with that? I personally like Ubuntu best - and by no means have I tried every distro out there - other people like Fedora Core, yet others are even more advanced users and use Gentoo. You just need to find something that you like best. Not really that hard. that hurts. It makes me wonder whether you actually figured out about the repositories. It's a great thing that no commercial OS will ever have, simply because of the way their marketing strategies work. You can update the system from the repositories. It's not hard - in fact, it notifies you when updates are ready, even with an annoying little pop-up if you want it to. The only possible reasons you would want to re-compile everything installed is a) You swapped processors to something drastically different, in which case the processor would most likely fail to operate at all You are re-compiling the entire system instead of just updating the core, in which case I would like to take this opportunity to label you i. sadly misinformed ii. extrememly lucky that you actually managed to compile a system. However, after recompiling everything, all the programs in the repositories would be updated, so you wouldn't have to "recompile" anything. "Until these factors are resolved, there is no way anybody can even think about Linux competing with Windows for the desktop market. Only in dreams." Linux isn't competing with Windows. How could it? What does, say, the Ubuntu foundation, gain from me using Ubuntu. Nothing. Yes, there are distros that aim to take market share away from Windows, but so long as Windows doesn't bother Linux (see: DRM), I think you will find that the majority of Linux users are content not to bother Windows. I'm happy with Ubuntu. Why should I care what everybody else uses. Treat it the same way you do freedom of speech. First of all, there is perfectly good documentation for all distros of Linux that have made much of themselves. It's the user's responsibility to inform themselves, rather than having the OS give you all the information at once, when you don't actually need it (see: force-feeding). You have to understand that Linux is not a corporate adventure, and that the configuration, settings and methods of use depend on a usually small group of people who are making things the way they like them. So, since people have different tastes, different flavours of Linux have appeared, and since they are different, not everything in them is the same. Normally, however, unmounting a thumb drive is as simple as right-clicking the icon that appears on the desktop and clicking eject. Not hard. "You have to give windows the credit, they've set a, more or less, a good standard for operating systems, security problems and other things aside." yes, it has. It has enabled people who do not want to put effort into learning anything to user computers for various tasks. As they say, "It's gone from smart people in front of dumb terminals to dumb people in front of terminals that tell them what to do and how to do it." Even so, I'd strike out the "good" in that. Why? I set a download going overnight, and in the morning I have a new OS ready to install. No black magic, just navigating the distro's site. Larry Ellison once said something about the senselessness of software in little card-board boxes. He also, coincidentially, said "I hate the PC, with a passion" in the same sentence, but I'm sure the two have nothing to do with one another (see: sarcasm). "Maybe if some hardcore linux coders programmed some automated installers it would help the masses to adopt it." There have. They are the funny-looking things that appear when you boot with the CD for the first time. That says more about the intelligence of the tech people than it does about Linux. As you have correctly noted, it is nothing do to with Linux when your Windows install breaks (see: redundant), in which case you should have the brains not to mention Linux. For Linux, in case you hadn't figured it out, nobody employs idiots to try and help people that are smarter than them solve things if anything breaks. We use the forums, making use of the knowledge of those with more experience. "Also I would like to say what I have read in one PC magazine is the thing that in windows they are actually using linux based system although a bit adjusted for their needs. So that says much about windows and security. Why don't they use their own software" I wish you had a few more details about that. See, the roots of windows were laid ages before Linus Torvalds started linux. If you are not talking about the core OS of Windows, then things like additions to Vista in regards to functionality bear strong resemblance to the GNOME window-manager, eg the "waiting" cursor (which appears rather too often), the way you toggle sections in the open/save boxes, the way you enter the administrator, aka root, password - the screen even dimms! - and so on. I tried a copy of Vista Ultimate for a while, but even in that short time I was rather distressed at the extreme rip-off. Damn good thing I hadn't actually paid money for the thing! Configure your ISP? That's the most ridiculous thing I have heard so far. You don't configure your ISP. If you have dial-up or something, you configure your computer according to the settings given to you by the ISP, but most people have a modem and router in between, so nothing at all is done that relates in any way to the ISP. "The newer versions have made it simppler to install applications but for that you need an internet connection. A fast one at that." What can you download on Windows, Mac, Unix, *BSD, Solaris, or ANYTHING, without an internet connection. Or do you buy every single app you have ever used in a little cardboard box? In that case, stick like hell to Windows. No-one in the FOSS communities ships their programs in cardboard boxes any more. Ten years? Seriously. That's if you want to invest your fortune in stocks or something. What does it matter if development stops tomorrow if I have a good operating system installed? The software is still yours "Now compare that shiny XP or Vista box on the shelf to your favorite flavor of Linux. Which do you think the consumer would choose?" Mine! That's why I have it. Of course, I realise that not all "consumers" are ready to digest the amount of information needed to set up something like this, but still. I think that with your argument strategy, it might be a bit more effective to say that 98% of home computers come with Windows pre-installed, and that most consumers have no idea what an operating system is, or heard of linux. You are looking for help about some random issue, right? Why are you looking for money? Ever heard of the "Wealth of Knowledge"? That's something no Linux forum lacks. "linux itself it is just not so nice and it is certainly not user friendly." That takes me back to my first point. How long have you used Windows. How long have you used Linux? I'm sure most people posting in here have at least tried some flavour of linux (if they haven't, they should run as fast and far as they can while they still have a life) but I'm not convinced that all of the posters have actually taken the time to use Linux until it became a routine. Until you not only know the power of linux, you realise it, you understand it. I'm not completely sure whether I'd compare Windows to a Porsche, but I get the message. It's all a matter of taste. Personally, I would hate to have a Porsche, since you can't use it for anything useful, for fear of screwing up the paint or something (the Porsche-Windows analogy wasn't so bad after all, it would seem...). I also just don't have that kind of money. And I'm sure as hell not paying for a nasty OS like VISTA (fyi, vista means chicken in latvian. I found humour in that.) "click here click there and if you don't destroy your system you probably get what you searched for. but with linux you have to sit down and type and then learn a bit more programming and then type again and so on[" I get the impression you are referring to the process of searching either for a file on your system, or perhaps information in general. For files, in most GNOME configs, it's "Places -> Search for Files... " or something similar. Not sure about KDE, but I'm sure it's something simple like K -> Search. No programming involved. For other info, I would use google, or the help files (which, by the way, actually contain useful information). I see you are from Slovenia, so I don't think you should be saying what people in the US think (no, I'm not from the US either, I live in Norway). I don't know what the truth of this is, though I plan to investigate the matter this summer, and before that I will hold my general opinion concerning the US firmly to myself, unless I'm ranting about it specifically. (btw, have you seen the latest Vista sales in China. You should Last time I checked, they were at around 250 XD ) I guess there should have been some final point, somehow explaining why I took the time to do all this typing (and no, I won't sue anyone if I get RSI because of it), but there is none. Besides, of course, the chance to say that: YOU ARE WRONG and I am always right. This time I'm just even more right than usual (Quote: Linus Torvalds). Sorry I did not put all the quotes in quote boxes, there appears to be a limit... :-? Further reading: "Linux is NOT Windows" Thank you, and good night.

it doesn't seem to me that there are any benefits to having a desktop. Some of them are more powerful, but there is really nothing about desktops that I find superior to laptops. About dell vs, HP, I'd say it's more the induvidual machine that counts, not the manufactorer. For reliability, I would probably go with HP, but then I have never had one, so I can't say much on that front. I like the bois settings tool in the dells...

erm... check?

yeh, lol. In basic you can only have three apps open at the same time. Wtf is that about?

OMG!! I loved his sarcasm! grass vs. ceramic chess board, gg! I must say that the first time I saw the vista aero gui, I immediately thought of mac, even though I hadn't (and still haven't) had much experience with Macs. It seems that a lot of little applets are based on stuff from apple, but the thing I find a little scarier about vista is it's similarity to many of the linux distrobutions. I have mainly used debian based distros, preferably with the Gnome window manager, and I was looking over someone's shoulder the other day, while he was messing with his newly installed vista... and SO much of the file management seems COMPLETELY ripped off nautilus and Gnome. Like how you add "favourites" to the bar at the side. The pane at the left... looks like gdesklets... there was a similar system to gksu for performing options as the "Administrative" user, aka root. The list goes ON AND ON AND ON! I am rather shocked, to say the least... Aero, now... For SOME, ODD reason, it reminded me of compiz. Yes, I know, the windows tile on a flat surface in compiz (so that you can actually see them), and they have a thing in aero that hides half of the window, but it is the SAME THING! What I'm worried about is when people see linux, they will say "that's such a rip-off from windows!", JUST LIKE THEY DID WITH MAC, back when M$ became popular. You should check out wikipedia and make a timeline of dates, just to see in what order things came out... As to applel sueing M$, that's not going to happen. It already has. Just after Windows 3.1 was released, apple sued M$ for the copying of their interface. Apple sued for copyright, and since copyright is for COMPLETE copying (eg if a M$ employee had gone in and cp mac_source win_source'ed ), they were not granted this "patent-like protection, as apple had not filed a patent for the use of a gui, since the xWindows project (in no way related to M$ Winblowz) had been going on several years prior to Apple's first GUI. It's just like saying that xerox park can now come and sue M$ for using a GUI, just because Xerox Park was first. (Which they were, btw). So there is no way that anybody is getting sued, though I do thing that the average user should be entitled to suing M$ for trying to make them think that windows is a neccessary part of their computer. An interesting connection I have seen there is actually to cigarettes. Who needs it? Who wants it? And it is also not original. People smoked long before companies made it a big, corporate affair that was more about the money than about producing the product - (the companies of course being M$.) Well, so long as no-one forces Vista (or indeed any windows) on me, I'm happy. I have a roof, walls and several doors, in addition to windows, without living with the accursed and miserable failure of DMR.

As you say, just like *NIX Yup, it looks like a mac and wasn't even made by Microsoft themselves (They got another company to do it - where do you think aero comes from?) You mean, a little bit like Gnome and KDE under linux? Yeah, not everyone has money burning their pockets. A gig of ram? I'm on a cheap Dell... No sh*t! It's been five years (well, soon six) since they released XP. Obviously poor little M$ needs some cash! If I really wanted it, it's also available on torrents. But do I want it? Do you?

And anyone with lower specs can burn in hell...? In my personal opinion, things start faster because there is now less crap on your hard drive - Settins files and such. They do take a remarkable amount of space, and obviously a clean install will run faster than a clogged up one. I wouldn't have thought it would be faster when going to vista, though. "Programs start faster and I can open dreamweaver, photoshop and word example and things run together smoothly..." Ooh! I could do that in XP, and under linux I can have NVU, The GIMP and OpenOffice Writer open at the same time, as well as run a http,mysql and ftp server without lag. AND? Seriously, what is it that is so much better about it? Windows fanboys ask that about linux a lot, so I thought it might be time to return a favour...

Yeh, by the time you need a new computer, you will be forced to pay the extra for Vista...

I have used it, as I said earlier, though only for a short amount of time. It is not worth it. Even if you get a torrent, the time spent is a total waste.

That's the most retarded thing I have heard. Offence meant. If Iran is as bad as YOU say it is, they wouldn't be bothered wasting their time on a crap OS in the first place. Nobody needs it. I am extrememly surprised that people consider Vista being cracked so soon a surprise. It happened to every Windows OS I can remember, and that is more than XP and Vista, seemingly unlike some posters here. I honestly wish people would educate themselves on subjects before starting random threads. OK, first of all, what the hell did that mean? I presume it is supposed to say something like: Do you think that Microsoft lowering their prices to a proper level for non world-raping nations would prevent people from aquiring pirate copies of their products? I would say no, it wouldn't. Simply because half the people who get the 'illegal' copy (illegal in the 'Almighty and extremely democratic Country of North America', that is) don't use it for using the system. Most people who are computer literate enough to get hold of an cracked copy are intelligent enough to recognise the fact that Vista is a complete waste of time. They just want to play with it (did you know that XP can be cut down to 50mb and have almost FULL functionality?). And the fact that they are doing so illegally just makes it all the more fun. So making Vista cheap won't change anything, unless it also goes free and open source. Will that ever happen? Now, take linux. Most linux distrobutions have a computer literate communtity surrounding them, making the distro better and better. Can anyone say that about Vista? Vista is kept to the few developers who work on it - not thousands of users from all over the world. Now, computer illeterate as you appear to be, you may say "yeah, but Linux is maintained by illegal hackers from terrorist countries". That's nice. I won't prick your bubble of innocence, and hope to hell that you don't ever gain power over a living creature at any point in your lives. Remeber, if anybody does, through some absurd loophole, remember that you have to feed it. Sincerely A non-u.s. citisen, and glad not to be so.

I hate to be pedantic, but have you noticed that your keyboard has a range of PUNCTUATION MARKS?So, you are getting vista because it comes with the XPS. Last I checked, the XPS had about the same specs as my laptop which came for about half the price. But that's a different matter. Is there any reason you would go over if it didn't? Don't those disgusting shiny graphics attract you? Or the availability of thousands of completely new, next-generation packages of malicious code that will be able to infect your system? Sounds great to me...

personal opinion: everyone who downgrades is retarded or otherwise mentally impaired in some fashion that prevents them from seeing the glaring stupidity in what they are doing. Thank you. truth: There is absolutely NO benefit of downgrading to vista (which, FYI, means chicken in latvian). Do you all remember what it was like a little while - say, half a year - after XP was originally released? I do. People weren't so happy about things. Even that was not a good thing. And I'm just saying that from my VERY, VERY BRIEF experience with vista that this will be worse. 1000$, you say? You wish. In your sweet dreams. It's cheap in the US compared to Norway. But then everything is. I would like one of the people who are considering downgrading to vista (or who have already done so) to take a quick read through the 100 best things that was posted in the first post(I'm not going to waste my time doing it), and write down every one of the items on the list that:1) are actually new. 2) are actually an improvement. Good luck. From my POV, there are two things about Vista: 1) It hasn't changed much 2) It has changed TOO much Those may seem to contradict one another slightly, but they don't. They apply to change in different ways: On the outside, to the common average user Joe, vista is nothing revolutionary. There is no change, beyond the nastily shiny (and may I say terribly ugly) UI. Aero isn't actually even usable by all systems. For the 30minutes I used Vista for, I found out that my computer wasn't even powerful enought to run the 'great new graphics'. AND IT DISABLED THEM FOR ME. How retarded is that? I should be able to control what goes on in my own computer, with an O/S that I have given BLOOD to buy (well, I didn't, but that's another matter). It's rather sad that they won't run on my laptop, which runs every combination of the FOSS equivalent (beryl, compiz, etc) perfectly. But that they don't trust that a user can make a descision on their own is absurd. I should be able to take the consequences of my own actions, and if I'm stupid enough to do something with my system that I shouldn't have, then I deserve to take the full consequence of my actions. I consider myself a responsible person. Clearly, Microsift doesn't. So there is nothing new about that. And did you know that Aero wasn't actually made by M$ themselves? Smooth sailing. On the other hand, MS seems to be trying to take over your computer COMPLETELY, now. DRM; HardDrive Lock; WGA - all methods that take your control and dump it right in MS's hands. It is a complete change in direction for the people who actually know what they are doing with a computer. With XP, they prided themselves that you could take a HDD out of one computer, dump it in a box of a completely different configuration and after 15 minutes and one reboot you could have a fully operational machine. It also worked with 98 (I know from experience). And that is a remarkable feat, I must admit. Not many Linux distrobutions can claim as much (also from experience). With vista and it's WGA, you can't change a component of the machine without it locking. Your processor dies on you (most likely BECAUSE of vista) and you have to get both a new processor and a new license. The latter likely twice the price. DRM. Digital Rights Management. You can't watch something vista doesn't think you own. If it thinks you don't, vista will pwn you and your system. How *BLEEP*ed up is that? I can understand that they don't want people DLing unauthorised media and the likes, but a computer shoudl do what YOU, the USER wants it to do. Vista isn't an improvement for the user. It's an improvement for the producers of content. An interestingly relevant quote: As indeed we are. Excuse me. As indeed YOU are. Stick with what you have. I have recently been told that shell is switching to vista sometime soon. Just had all the software ported from UNIX, which worked fine for all our needs, to Red Hat linux, which worked slightly faster - though admittedly not much, and it was probaly not worth the change for most employees. Every little bit of speed is needed for big operations - they get left on overnight as it is. And now they say port all that *BLEEP* software to Windows Chicken. Not gunna ask what the people who USE it think. The only possible reason I can think of is that the higher ups want to impress people with having their sections running vista. Impress? the only thing that's impressive is the PRICE. But I guess that however little it makes sense, some people will always think that the expensive things are somehow better than the free stuff. I'm SO glad Vista isn't the best thing available, and I'm SO glad I still have the choice in my own home to choose the O/S I want to use all inside my stupid little retard user brain, with no uncle bill to tell me. But how long will it last? Vista comes with a very interesting new feature HardDrive Lock. I didn't explore this feature AT ALL, and for obvious reasons, beyond confirming that it does indeed exist. It sat there in the top right corner of the Control Panel (which of course hasn't changed more than any other part of Vista) looking at me with this evil stare... 'Click Me, I want to pwn your HDD and destroy non-M$ files....' I left it well alone, as mentioned. Unforteuneately, not everyone did. And as often as not, it gave no information as to what it was going to do. Now, I understand that what I said about being responsible for my actions, but there is a difference between crashing the GUI and LOCKING THE HARD DRIVE. I assume from the anguished posts by the less forteunate that they could no longer edit the partitions. I believe that they have taken this feature further since, but I can't prove it So... What changes are there in Vista that are new AND good? I am asking the world: What good lies in Windows Vista?

no duh, people, no duh.Even many of the people who study the older civilisations somehow thing them less civilised than we are today. Somehow more stupid? How are the medicines (or anything that we use today, for that matter) any more developed than the ones they had all these thousands of years ago? It's a pity to know that by that very logic, humans have ALWAYS been that arrogant, as well as stupid. Sad.

I can't stand itunes either, the way it wants to convert your files all the time... but I still don't see why people want things to look all shiny and stuff... oh well, each to their own trade