OT - IDC Explains Linux Went Right

[Michael Leone]

Brendan wrote:
> On Monday 14 April 2008, Nigel Ridley wrote:
>> Michael Leone wrote:
>>> On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 11:31 AM, Ignazio Palmisano <ignazio_io at yahoo.it> 
> wrote:
>>>>  > well ... Longhorn was a code name, not an official release name.
>>>>  > That's a bit different ...
>>>>
>>>>  Vista is not a code name
>>> It's the official release name.
>> I thought they'd changed the name to 'hastalavista' (since loads off win
>> users are switching back to xp).
> 
> I think most Windows users use whatever they have loaded on the machine, and 
> then say "My computer is broken" when it's Vista malfunctioning. 

Also .. and I don't run Vista, so I can't say for certain, but have 
heard this from people whose opinions I respect .. a lot of Vista's 
problems are driver-related. And MS doesn't write the drivers; the 
manufacturers do. So a good portion of the blame sort of shifts off MS. 
As to the other big complaint - the User Account Control (UAC), the 
security feature that limits users to run as *users* and not 
administrators - apparently UAC asks "Is this what you want to do?". 
Meaning, of course, that the program that you're trying to run is trying 
to do something that requires elevated privileges. MS has explivitly 
said that UAC was designed to *annoy* the end-user, as a way to force 
3rd party developers to re-write the software properly. Instead, it 
pisses off users at MS ...

> Most Windows users don't even know how/when/why they could go back to XP. So, when I 
> think "Loads" in the Windows world, we should be talking about tens of 
> millions, and I think the switch-back crowd is far less than that.

I used it a couple times, to install some software (an office suite, and 
an anti-virus program) for my cousins. It wasn't *that* terrible, to me. 
Of course, I was on it for maybe 15 minutes ...



-- 
Michael J. Leone                  Registered Linux user #201348
<mailto:turgon at mike-leone.com>    ICQ: 50453890     AIM: MikeLeone

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