Thursday, January 08, 2009

Sweet Onions

This from The Onion:

OS X Snow Leopard vs. Windows 7
Microsoft announced it will be releasing a new edition of its operating software, called Windows 7, while Apple is working on its new OS X Snow Leopard. How will they stack up against each other?

18 comments:

Unknown said...

Love The Onion.

H Simpson said...

VMS and x-windows.

worked 25 years ago.
works now.

h.

Lou Minatti said...

I miss my C-64. Well, I don't miss the floppy.

Jean ValJean said...

I used to miss my C-64.. until I bought one at a garage sale a year ago in Lubbock, with loads and loads of floppies.

Good times.

w said...

I miss my Amiga.

Here's a question: I have been debating getting a new computer but want to get Windows XP since I have two computers with XP already and do not look forward to having them networked on different microsoft systems. Does this make sense or should I just get with the program and get a Vista machine? TIA

Jean ValJean said...

w:

Absolutely stick with XP. You might even be able to skip vista altogether. Thats' what I'm planning to do.

If you get a PC from Dell that comes with Vista Ultimate, they will "allow" you to "downgrade" (or, as I call it, "upgrade") to XP instead of Vista on your new machine.

w said...

jvj, you inspire me with confidence.

I was going to actually get a nice XPS during the Dell "12 Days of Deals" but they would not give the $474 rebate on the XP version of the machine. I called and asked them why and apparently it was for some good reason that I could not understand. Eventually I will succumb to seeing it their way.

Jean ValJean said...

Merry Christmas

w said...

It must be destiny.

Thanks a lot!

Captain Nemo said...

What makes you think Windows 7 will be any better than Vista?

Yes, the early reviews have journalists gushing over it, but, that's their job -- to gush over new technology. They gushed over early builds of Vista too.

I prodict that Windows 7 won't solve any fundamental problems. Manufacturers who have not provided drivers for Vista won't provide drivers for W7. The only difference is that buying a PC that meets the realistic (not minimum) hardware requirements will be within more people's budgets (Moore's law).

Rob Dawg said...

Look, the entire Windows on MS-DOS concept is an incredible kludge. A technological dead end that peaked with XP SP2.

Now MS is interested in programming for two goals; DRM and integration. Any benefits to the consumer/user is purely a lucky coincidence.

I just burned x86 10.5.4. It will be an interesting experiment.

And let's face it; Win 7? Any reason you can think of? Perhaps so that they can get to Win 11 and prove they are better than Apple?

Peripheral Visionary said...

Re: OS. Even if XP SP2 is a "dead-end", it's not a bad cul-de-sac to be stuck in. Very solid, and I can actually use the computing power and RAM of my machine, unlike under Vista. I'll switch to the new code base if they promise to go run a performance monitor and figure out how Vista is chewing through impossible amounts of memory and CPU. Does anybody at Microsoft even know what the word "optimization" means?

Re: Wal-Mart (yeah, two threads ago, I'm falling behind!) Went to Wal-Mart over the holidays, and it was full--of people buying groceries. The ratio of dry goods to perishables in peoples' carts was very low. Advertently or not, groceries are keeping WMT alive. The problem is that many of them are effectively commodities, and you can't bully commodity producers. Since Wal-Mart's entire business model is based off bullying suppliers into handing all their profit margins over to WMT, their profit margins are in for a hit when it becomes apparent that commodity producers don't have margins that can be extorted.

Re: CR. I still read posts, but not comments; signal-to-noise ratio is terrible. And yes, it's much less interesting since the departure of Tanta. "Mish" is still as entertaining, though; but even there I avoid the nearly worthless comments. Best economic blog overall at this point is Naked Capitalism, excellent posts, fresh analysis, and solid comments.

Captain Nemo said...

Re: XP as a dead end.

As far as I can tell, MS is committed to providing support (extended support, not mainstream) for another 5 years. However, according to Microsoft, Windows 2000 is still in "extended support" mode -- yet, many applications no longer support Win2K.

Rob Dawg said...

PV said:
Re: OS. Even if XP SP2 is a "dead-end", it's not a bad cul-de-sac to be stuck in.

At 1:34 PM, Captain Nemo said...
Re: XP as a dead end.

As far as I can tell, MS is committed to providing support (extended support, not mainstream) for another 5 years.


This is my thinking. XP SP2 was the pinacle, the best the design they could do with the technology. It is the technology that is a dead end.

Lou Minatti said...

Rob,

As we've discussed we'll all be using mobile devices soon rather than being chained down to PCs. Windows may not be part future computing. Didja see the new Palm WebOS today? Very, very nice. It just saved the company. The iPhone finally has legitimate competition.

Unknown said...

We're all downsizing.

Forget Vista, buy a $300 netbook with XP and load a hacked version of Mac OS X if you want (you can keep both for dual-boot)

Convert it to an decent desktop by plugging in an external monitor, keyboard, & mouse.

Rob Dawg said...

NCBill,
Unfortunately, that great solution is slow. You need more Ghz.

segfault said...

Performance-wise, the original release of XP was probably the pinnacle. I think it got slower with every hotfix and service pack. My theory is that their goal with all packs and hotfixes is getting the new code released rather than making sure it's optimized as well as the original code was.

I bought my parents a quad-core Dell business machine with XP SP3 for Christmas.

While we're talking about various releases, I think Internet Explorer 3 was the pinnace of the IE brand. It was rock-solid stable (this was before you had to use a dozen plugins just to read the news). IE4 had a slick full-screen mode but was otherwise a disaster. By the time IE6 rolled around, everyone else was doing tabbed browsing, and you had to use a kludge (another plugin) to make IE6 do it.