Re: Microsoft throws in the towel on Vista

"Maverick" <Sun@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:yaKdna8Y396B-TfanZ2dnUVZ_qCunZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Daniel Johnson wrote:
I couldn't! I'll lose my WinTroll certification! I'll have to give up my Secret Decoder Ring!

You mean you aren't going to be honest about it?

Ah, suddenly you seem more familiar!


[snip- Leopard's missed promises]
I don't know what Steve promised.
[snip]
But "64-bit top to bottom" was in there, and 64-bit Carbon was explicitly part of that. That got canned.

Not according to the ADC (Apple Develper Connection).

Well, you asked what The Steve promised, not what ADC promised. :D

(I imagine he was just lying when he said "... to bottom", and Apple never meant to ship a 64-bit kernel. But clearly he really intended full 64-bit user space.)

Yes he intended that, and also for those that use the Intel processors will appreciate it very much.

They would have, had he shipped it. But what he shipped, while more than useless, was rather a lot less than "64-bit top to bottom".

[snip]
But 10.5.2 is not out yet, is it?

Not yet that I know of. Of course both sides of the fence are always waiting for the next patch.

Of course!

Though SP1 is a little different from 10.5.2: it's mostly a rollup, and (if you aren't Google) it doesn't really do much for you that you can't do now with hotfixes that you download.

Of course, it will be nice to have everything delivered in one easy lump via Windows Update, instead of having to find and download fixes for bugs that trouble you. But it's a convenience.

[snip]
The similarity is striking, which is just the problem for Vista-bashing.

But there are differences. Leopard actually goes *farther* overboard than Vista in a few places- sure, they both have silly translucency effects, but only Leopard has The Galaxy That Time Remembered.

That's part of the glitz that marketing loves.

Perhaps. But Leopard's glitz didn't go over all that well. Some of it seems disturbingly Vista-derivative, for an audience that wants to stand out from the crowd. Some of it just wasn't attractive.

[snip]
That's the part I like about Vista the best. You can always ditch the flashy UI.
Actually, Vistas UI look can be changed by purchasing 3rd party software called WindowBlinds. Nice concept there.

Windows occupies the middle ground here: in between Apple's strict "Steve's way or the highway" UI and Linux's "total customization" UI.

Windows offers a limited set of customization choices, which mostly make Vista behave more like previous versions of Windows. For more than this, you must go third party.

[snip]
"His"? If you mean The Steve, you are right, but it's not particularly attractive when Apple demonstrates its capriciousness in this way.

Anyway, my real point is that it's hard to damn Vista for its real compatibility woes when Leopard is doing this.

Well, lets face it, he ditched OS 9 for OS X rather than change the internals of OS 9 to make it more stable.

It's easier to forgive this; fixing OS 9 was plainly hugely difficult, and time was limited. 'Classic' and 'Carbon' seemed like a reasonable effort under the circumstances.

M$ has been around too long and has too many users to keep in mind. Doubt he'd bite the hand that keeps feeding him.
At least not directly anyways.

I don't follow this.

[snip]
There are always a few of those. Vista can be faster than XP on the same hardware too; you just need some pretty generous hardware. I imagine this is true of Leopard as well.

But you need more memory for Vista and a better GPU. But that is part of progress anyways.

Well, if you don't already have fairly good hardware, you do.

Vista is a larger jump in requirements over XP than Leopard is over Tiger, without question. But XP's requirements were very low by modern standards; the big jump has put Vista's requirements near OS X's- at least if you want all the features turned on.

Had OS X got a lot faster in Leopard, then the tables might well have turned. But actually it is slightly slower.

[snip- upgrading apps]
Sure. But Microsoft's users just *hate* that. Hate Hate Hate.

I know, but they'll find that the newer version will only be better... usually. It all depends on whether the vendor wants to hang in there and support his product.

The new version may be better, but it may also be strange and unfamiliar- many Windows users have a hard time with UI change.

[snip]
I dunno. MFC is not really competitive with .NET anyway. It's not like they want to encourage further adoption of it.

I'll have to look into that part. Which book would you recommend that is equivalent to the old Petzold book on windows programming? It is a confusing issue here.

I can't really make a recommendation; I haven't looked. I learn this stuff from first-party reference documentation mostly.

[snip]
It's trivial next to the amount you have to pay to get a programmer to use the thing.

That part I wouldn't know about. Are you saying that commercial programmers don't like to program for windows?

No. Commercial programmers are quite expensive, however. Compared to the tools.

[snip]
I can honestly say that I've never seen any references to Fluffy in any Microsoft documentation.

No, but the interjection of side street editorials in their documentation has no place in any technical documentation. I've seen plenty of it.

I've never seen anything that struck me as a "side street editorial" in MS documentation. Can you give me an example? Or a link?

But it is true that the deluge of new APIs over the last few years seems to have left the MS documentation guys behind. They just haven't kept up, and the documentation is too often quite sketchy.

Must be why they want you to subscribe to the MSDN. Not my cup of tea there.

MSDN subscription does not include any documentation you can't get for free, as far as I can tell.

[snip]

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