opinions about MS Vista

[Derek Broughton]

Matthew Nicholson wrote:

> my comments, bellow. bear in mind i've been reading about vista since the
> longhorn days and am not planning on buying it since there is nothing new
> and/or exciting.
> 
> On 11/21/06, Mustafa Ozkaynak <mozkaynak at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I just received an email from a friend (Actually he is a windows lover).
>> He attended a session organized by Microsoft to introduce the most recent
>> OS.
>> Some of the shining stuff he mentioned about the Vista is as follows:
> 
> 4. USB drivers can be use as an extention to RAM
> 
> this would be very, very slow "RAM"

I suppose I could do that in Linux now - just set /dev/sdb1 as a swap file!  
> 
> 5. BitLocker security system. The data in the system is encrypted  with a
>> BIOS information so the Harddisk can not be read on any other computer.
> 
> this require special hardware, that costs "A LOT", and is something that
> isn't included with the os, but is an add on "eventually"

It sounds like a way to ensure that your copy of Windows only ever runs on
one machine...  I see no reason it should cost "A LOT", though.  You could
even do it in software - of course, if all you're doing is using fixed BIOS
information as (part of) the encryption key, all it would take to break it
is a system that could duplicate the exact BIOS info.
> 
> 7. XPS Document Printer. Iexplorer can show all kinds of documents without
>> any extra software (e.g. you can see pdf files without Acrobat).
> 
> Envice does this. openoffice can even create pdfs on windows sans adobe.

More Explorer bloat.  What's _wrong_ with invoking "extra" software?  KIO
slaves!
-- 
derek