The Road to Vista
I'm a Windows Vista user. I bought it the day after it came out, installed it on my primary business/gaming machine, and never looked back. I've been using Microsoft products religiously since Dos 3.3, not out of any love for them or their company, but because it's the standard. I'd love to run other operating systems, but I live in a Microsoft dominated world. I would say it sucks, but I've gotten this far, so I can't complain too much.
I do however have to quietly raise my hand and clear my throat and ask, "Excuse me?" when it comes to just what I paid for here with this new fangled piece of software from our buddies in Redmond.
Vista is targeted at a number of individuals, and there were three specific "features" in this operating system that were widely touted that I really wanted:
#1: Aero, the new DirectX accelerated desktop. Basically some really nice eye candy which makes your window borders transparent and some other fun tricks.
#2: An improved security model, because even though I'm one of a handful of people in this world capable of fully recovering from a major virus attack without reinstalling their operating system, it still sucks up a week of my time every time it happens.
#3: DirectX 10, their next generation graphics framework. Forget that my video card won't support it, and that there isn't actually one in existence that will yet... this is the future of graphics in gaming, and I want to be sitting on the bleeding edge.
Aero is very pretty. And after the 5th day, it got turned off because TradeStation 8.2, my broker and automated testing framework keeps locking up with it on. And if it comes between looking pretty and making money, you know making money will win every time.
The improved security model isn't. They got this new thing they call User Access Control: Basically any time you do anything, like launch a program or access the internet, it blanks your screen for a second, and asks you if you want to "Allow" or "Deny" what you just asked it to do. And it'll do it's best not to ask you again until you run a different program. There's no, "Allow, but don't let it do anything dangerous." or "Allow, but ask again next time this program tries to do this.", or "Allow, but only allow these pieces of functionality.". So after the 3rd day and the 800th time of telling it to allow Firefox to access Google.com, that got turned off in a fit of complete anger and frustration that I'm still bitter about. Apple got it right with their ad on the subject:
Which leaves this whole default setting of "run as unprivileged user", which prevents programs from doing anything really scary, unless you explicitly grant them administrator privileges. I'm totally cool with this... I've been doing this on Linux with sudo for years and I'm really looking forward to having my programs not be able to clobber each other no matter how hard they try. Except I just found out that the wall of safety that this provides has holes the size of Montana in it, and doesn't actually provide "security" as we the software developers understand it.
Which leaves me with DirectX 10. For which no game/graphics card yet works. And now a lot of my other games don't work either, or have weird bugs in them.
I guess this is the cost of being on the bleeding edge.
I do however have to quietly raise my hand and clear my throat and ask, "Excuse me?" when it comes to just what I paid for here with this new fangled piece of software from our buddies in Redmond.
Vista is targeted at a number of individuals, and there were three specific "features" in this operating system that were widely touted that I really wanted:
#1: Aero, the new DirectX accelerated desktop. Basically some really nice eye candy which makes your window borders transparent and some other fun tricks.
#2: An improved security model, because even though I'm one of a handful of people in this world capable of fully recovering from a major virus attack without reinstalling their operating system, it still sucks up a week of my time every time it happens.
#3: DirectX 10, their next generation graphics framework. Forget that my video card won't support it, and that there isn't actually one in existence that will yet... this is the future of graphics in gaming, and I want to be sitting on the bleeding edge.
Aero is very pretty. And after the 5th day, it got turned off because TradeStation 8.2, my broker and automated testing framework keeps locking up with it on. And if it comes between looking pretty and making money, you know making money will win every time.
The improved security model isn't. They got this new thing they call User Access Control: Basically any time you do anything, like launch a program or access the internet, it blanks your screen for a second, and asks you if you want to "Allow" or "Deny" what you just asked it to do. And it'll do it's best not to ask you again until you run a different program. There's no, "Allow, but don't let it do anything dangerous." or "Allow, but ask again next time this program tries to do this.", or "Allow, but only allow these pieces of functionality.". So after the 3rd day and the 800th time of telling it to allow Firefox to access Google.com, that got turned off in a fit of complete anger and frustration that I'm still bitter about. Apple got it right with their ad on the subject:
Which leaves this whole default setting of "run as unprivileged user", which prevents programs from doing anything really scary, unless you explicitly grant them administrator privileges. I'm totally cool with this... I've been doing this on Linux with sudo for years and I'm really looking forward to having my programs not be able to clobber each other no matter how hard they try. Except I just found out that the wall of safety that this provides has holes the size of Montana in it, and doesn't actually provide "security" as we the software developers understand it.
Which leaves me with DirectX 10. For which no game/graphics card yet works. And now a lot of my other games don't work either, or have weird bugs in them.
I guess this is the cost of being on the bleeding edge.
Labels: apple, directx, directx10, disruptive technology, microsoft, vista, windows
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