Business as usual for MS.

Well, don’t believe the marketing hype. And just in case the anti-MS gang is rubbing their hands in glee, here are my experiences trying to install ubuntu. This is supposed to be the oh-so-easy, absolutely for beginners Linux, right? (and I agree, it’s easy to use, has a lot of software. I recommend it). I downloaded the latest ISO file, burnt a CD and set it to install on an old W2K machine. It crashed, couldn’t create a swap partition. I tried again. Again crash. This lasted for some hours (it takes time to reboot the ubuntu install live-cd), and I started looking at the ubuntu homepage for help. Not finding anything, I got on to google with the error message. And found this:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/107259
So, the current ubuntu install will crash if the drive is already partitioned. That’s really beginner-friendly… No one tested this?
The point is not this error (something like that is bound to happen in any major software project), the point is that this problem, which will surely affect a lot of newbies (like me) is nowhere mentioned on the download page. Not even a hint (at the time I installed it). You have to go to the support forums and find it there. At least some guy has left a simple workaround, but it sure looks intimidating and offputting to the newbie and whoever wants to give ubuntu a spin…
But that also shows that the open source community has learned something from the evil empire. Hide your bugs :-)

And people wonder why a tech like me is slow in getting MS’s latest. I have been playing with it to learn it, but not on my computers just yet, maybe never. Sure like Ubuntu though.

You do not in effect buy a new car and expect that you are a beta tester so why do we buy an OS from MS and know we are going to be doing exactly that. MS need the biggest shake up in history, they should only be allowed to sell the product when and if it becomes stable enough for release. Until then it should be classed as beta and charged for accordingly…

These are the kind of problems one expects in an alpha, not a beta, and certainly not something that has gone gold. The point I wish to make here is that Microsoft seems to have learned nothing about when to release, and what to release, in over 20 years.

They are spreading themselves too thin, with stupid projects like hi-def JPEG replacements, when they cannot even deliver a sound operating system. [one which delivers so little of what was promised in the original descriptions, therefore the problems to deal with should have, for the most part, been solved in a previous release, those sins never to be committed publicly again]

I personally don’t care less about the prospects of Vista, I’m set to go with XP for another 5+ years, as MS should have been, until they could have gotten a 64bit OS working correctly [XP64]

I do get rather irked when I see in an insider publication, one fanboy saying, that because 60 million copies of Vista have been ’sold’, it’s a foregone conclusion that we’ll all be running Vista soon. Especially when on the same browser page is the blurb of another story [full article, actually, not a blog entry] that gives complete instructions on how, and why, most of us can live with XP for the next 7 years.

Can you imagine how that frosted Microsoft when they saw that? I think it would be very fitting for a movemnt to spring up, people helping other people, to completely live without Vista, and publicly speak out against the paid beta testing we are forced to do by this greedy company.

And when a third party company tries to extend the useful nature of the atrocity they’ve foisted on us, they slam down the iron fist, allowing no one to be able to use non-signed drivers. Ostensibly, something for security, but no less in reality a method of rejecting hardware that they subjectively decide has outlived its useful life.

It’s time for Microsoft to learn the lesson that since we are paying the way, our wishes for (legal) use of the software trump any desires they have.

How many programmers busted their derriers to have Vista yanked away from them so it could be sold? It’s almost like MS has followed the path of game makers, selling buggy not ready for prime-time software. I also want Vista to work, but will wait to purchase. I played the patch game with XP, and don’t want to relive that horror again.

Thing is, Chris, these bugs still aren’t 100% is XP Pro so how do they expect to fix them in Vista.
I’m not using Vista and have no intention to, not until they finish doing all the fixing and issue SP3 for XP.
When they do that, then, maybe, just maybe, I’ll switch to Vista.

Great humor and info, thanks! Seems to me XP remains the best bet, unless you need the DRM. There are addons for virtualization of apps or the entire system.

There are still many apps that won’t work or that you have to ‘Run as Administrator’ in order to force them to work in my trials with Vista. This to me is the biggest failing for Vista in the business environment. A company cannot just upgrade all of its software to accomodate an OS upgrade. Even then not all software has versions available for Vista, yet.

Other than that I have found it to be very stable and easy to install new hardware.