Re: Camera Card Reader

David J Taylor added these comments in the current discussion du
jour ...

HEMI-Powered wrote:
[]
Sorry, but if it is even minorly based on Vista, I want NO part
of it. I am NOT in the business of beta testing with my Visa
card and while I understand that you and many others say
they've seen no problems, I have many friends who are so angry
at it's complete inability to run certain key applications or
certain legacy hardware devices that they are paying extra to
have XP retrofitted onto new PCs.

If people want ten year old devices to be supported they may
either need to find a device manufacturer who takes support
seriously, or stick with their ten-year-old OS. I mean, there
has to come a limit somewhere, doesn't there, as to how long
it's reasonable to expect support for a device, and at the same
time expect to pay the minimum up-front cost for that device.
Would one really expect all OSes back to whatever, to be
retro-fitted for support for the latest USB devices, wireless
networking, iPods, SATA disks, Blu-ray or whatever? At least
now, PCs are sufficiently powerful that you can run the older OS
in a virtual machine, and keep some of the older applications
running.

That's both unrealistic and unfair. I am not about to dump a
perfectly good flatbed scanner and an HP 1220C wide-carriage
printer just because Bill Gates is too stupid or too lazy to
understand that still working HW can continue to do useful work for
a LONG time to come. The very foundation that Windows has been
built on since version 3.0 at least was that it would reasonably
support older HW and SW, at least in compatibility mode.

Now, if MS decides that it literally wants to piss off hundreds of
millions of it's existing customers by obsoleting their legacy apps
and HW, then they deserve to be eaten for lunch by the Apple and
Linux crowd.

The path they COULD take would be a dual one - One O/S to continue
to service the older stuff including DOS apps in emumlation mode,
but in a more vigorous manner and the other to intentionall start
entirely anew, and WARN prospective customers beforehand that
change is afoot. For those of us who get custom-built PCs, we could
deal with that, but IF the OEMs decided to only go with the new-
everthing-you-own-is-obsolete model, then MS might well find out
that they no longer have a monopoly. If I really have to dump every
damn program I have and all my HW, I'll be damned if I continue to
struggle along with buggy bloatware from Redmond.

To the extent that MS still has a businessman at it's helm, if not
a visionary any longer, surely HE must realize that it is a
destructive business model to intentionally destroy an installed
base that covers the entire planet!

Microsoft needs to take a fresh page look at it's O/S direction
and get it through their think heads that many/most people have
the romantic view that computers are to do useful work for THEM
and NOT to play a hobbyist's game of "will this new bug fix
really make it work this time?" In any event, I would NEVER buy
any all-new O/S until at least the first SP.

I quite agree that for production work, waiting for SP1 is an
excellent policy. However, that isn't a luxury which software
developers can afford!

My heart bleeds for these clowns! The major developers are in a
race to see how many ersatz new releases they can create per
product cycle, which is now down to a year, but NOT necessarily
with real improvement. Often, it is just glitz and/or a revised GUI
to fool the fools out there that have to have the latest and
greatest.

At one time, there was a clear and defined partnership between MS
and the developers that started with a certification procedure and
an SDK and later extended to allowing the majors to get early beta
releases to test their own apps on. So, in my mind, there is simply
NO excuse for a developer NOT to be 100% ready when MS announces a
new O/S. It isn't like this is sprung on them. There're a number of
private and public betas and from first vision to final production
release may take MS 3 years. Isn't that enough for the developers
to modify their code to work, or at least provide a usable patch.

Absent that sensible approach, it would behoove both the major
developers AND MS to work together and NOT at cross purposes to
ensure that a production launch was as smooth as possible. Again,
if one takes out the people who just like to play with a computer
as a hobby and include the mainstream users who have no clue on how
to modify a complex system but also NO desire to do so, then more
reliable O/S releases would become the norm. Mr. and Mrs. America
or Mr. and Mrs. Great Britain just going into a computer store to
pick out a new PC have the same romantic notion I do - that this is
just a TOOL to do useful work for THEM and certainly NOT for them
to become slaves of MS as unwitting and unwilling beta testers.

My comments aren't in any way a refutement of your opinion or
experience, David. They're only a statement of MY opinion.

Cheers, and enjoy your Christmas!

I appreciate that, Jerry, but you do have to ask: if devices
from manufacturer <A> and application <B> can work successfully
across multiple versions of Windows, who don't devices from
manufacturer <X> or application <Y>?

That's a good question. One reason is that X and Y are stupider or
lazier than A and B. Another is that A and B have more resources.
And, yet another is that X and Y may not even exist any longer! Or,
at least not in a form where a user of one of their legacy apps can
expect a patch. Developers take what I consider to be a short-
sighted and arrogant approach that to get compatibility with new
things and new O/S's, then first a user MUST upgrade. Hogwash! If
an app performs what a user wants, why would they subject
themselves to a brand new learning curve and a brand new nightmare
of debugging a continuously changing app?

Oh, and talking of slowdowns, one cause of this is the unwanted
"demo" applications pre-loaded by Dell, Compaq, HP and the rest.
On the PCs I have, I typically reformat the HD and install the
vanilla OS as the first step. The you have all the stuff which
users (or their family) download and never clean out properly...

You may an excellent point about not only demo apps but the
woundedware that the major OEMs foist on people at the behest of
their advertisers, the developers. But, when I say bloatware, I was
referring to Windoze itself, the "doze" meaning it gets slower and
slower and slower at the same time it gets bigger and bigger and
bigger, requiring ever more powerful PCs to even maintain
equivalent performance. Worst of all, the increase of bloat for
both size and performance slowdowns is hardly linear, often it is
some sort of geometric rise that few users can understand yet are
stuck with.

But, you and I aren't going to solve this, as we are at the very
bottom of the food chain here. Too bad that purveyors of the crap
out there from O/S to apps to hardware somehow forget that it is
their new and previous customers that pay for all of this, and
frankly, I ain't interested in paying for what ought to be mine for
free.

Think about it this way: do you expect to actually have to buy a
new car because it literally will no longer run? And, do you expect
to have to pay for some large part of the development cost? No, you
and I EXPECT that new products will be improvements but older ones
will still run fine AND we expect the development costs of our next
new car to be folded into it's price at a competitive value and NOT
at the old monopolistic "whatever the traffic will bear" notion of
Microsoft and the biggest developers.

But, let's not bicker, rather, let's enjoy each other as friends in
this most joyous time of the year. Merry Christmas, David!

--
HP, aka Jerry

"Accuracy is the degree a measurement meets a known or true value
while precision is the degree of reproducibility in the measurement
itself" - Mathematical definition


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