I've been using Firefox since it was 0.something, and Netscape before that. I've used IE off and on, but never liked it much.

But my work has internal network applications that were apparently written by a bunch of MSFT tools, so it doesn't work so well with FF. I really hate using the default IE6, so I figure I'll give MSFT a chance and go try their latest IE8.

So I go download IE8 RC1. I'm actually looking forward to seeing what it's like. maybe i'll actually like it and switch.

Of course, during the install it complains that theres an Update missing, and I'll need to install that manually before continuing.

I go to install the update, but then the MSFT website says it needs to verify i have a "Genuine" windows, and i need some Windows Genuine Advantage Installer

getting a bit annoyed, but okay... i'll install that too. it goes in and does whatever it does.

now... back to installing the update.

first thing the update does is starts "inspecting my system configurations and settings" ... then gives me a gray bar with what looks to be about 1% complete

and sits there

and sits there

and sits there

and sits there.


son of a bitch. you know what? Fuck You Microsoft. This is why nobody wants your shit any more.

i hit cancel. go to the MSFT website and their forum and i'm gonna post a complaint about how bad their shit sucks.

in order to post any thing on their forum, I have to register an account with Windows Live.

LOL.

yeah, right. like i'm going to register on your shitty company site, just so i can tell you how shitty you are.

what a joke this company is. I mean who even thinks this kind of behavior is acceptable?

back to FireFox. back to extentions. back to using Fedora Linux on my desktop at home. and one of these days im going to wipe that piece of shit Vista off my laptop and replace it with Ubuntu or something similar.

fuck Microsoft and all their grabassery.




[Edited on February 2, 2009 at 4:07 PM. Reason : ]

2/2/2009 4:02:23 PM

Quote :

"RC1"

2/2/2009 4:06:12 PM

a Release Candidate should be damn near a completely finished product. It should (theoretically) *be* the distributable release.

ive installed plenty of betas and RCs with FOSS applications like Mozilla and whatnot using their windows distribution kits I've never had any problems like this. And dont even get started about Microsoft Beta releases... that requires the shit that is called "Silverlight" running up your overhead

of course, i probably have more patience with FOSS developers because they're not Microsoft developers and if theres a snag its probably with porting a non-native app to Windows.

good lord you'd think Microsoft could manage their own fucking OS with a minimal amount of competency.




[Edited on February 2, 2009 at 4:13 PM. Reason : ]

2/2/2009 4:12:13 PM

I'm so mad I'm going to go home and use an even crappier operating system!

THAT WILL SHOW THEM

2/2/2009 4:13:44 PM

vista is horrible

2/2/2009 4:15:11 PM

I like it. Better than XP.

SO THERE.

2/2/2009 4:16:20 PM

vista is an embarrasment. they're already planning to ditch it. theres a reason why major corporations all over the globe are refusing to use Vista and demanding OEM copies of XP SP2

Vista is the "Windows Me" of this decade

2/2/2009 4:18:14 PM

Nah, it's actually pretty good. It's only major problems were marketing problems. Most of the reason people think it sucks balls is because bloggers told them it did because they read it on other blogs.

2/2/2009 4:20:39 PM

oh. well, i didnt think of THAT.

thanks for clearing that up.

2/2/2009 4:21:45 PM

y/w.

2/2/2009 4:22:13 PM

From what I've seen MSFT and Mac are trying to incorporate Linux style objects/applications into their own system anyway. Almost as if they realize that it looks and/or works better. Granted I prefer Win to Mac, but given the choice yeah I'd totally go with Lnx and FF over anything else.

2/2/2009 4:44:47 PM

i wrote vista off when it wouldn't let me rename a folder even after disabling UAC, unchecking read-only, and messing with the folder permissons

i mean what the fuck, vista?

(note: this may just be limited to vista home)

[Edited on February 2, 2009 at 4:47 PM. Reason : i porky pigged there a bit]

2/2/2009 4:47:10 PM

that's pretty bizarre, can't say I've experienced anything like that. what'd it say when it errored out?

2/2/2009 5:07:19 PM

Quote :

"Nah, it's actually pretty good. It's only major problems were marketing problems. Most of the reason people think it sucks balls is because bloggers told them it did because they read it on other blogs."

i hate to say it, but without any external influence on my opinions, i installed Vista and had major issues, it's not all marketing. SP1 was a good step in the right direction but still lacked the speed of XP in a lot of ways. there's a reason why it's stuck in "single digit enterprise adoption"... it's not worth the upgrade. it's not just all hearsay. it's not just blogs copying blogs.

you got duped by the mojave experiment didn't you?

Quote :

"Vista is the "Windows Me" of this decade"

i wouldn't go THAAAAAT far.

[Edited on February 2, 2009 at 5:24 PM. Reason : .]

2/2/2009 5:22:18 PM

Quote :

"Nah, it's actually pretty good. It's only major problems were marketing problems. Most of the reason people think it sucks balls is because bloggers told them it did because they read it on other blogs."

i stayed away from vista because of all the crap i heard about how bad it was. then ms sent me a free copy of the ultimate premium (or whatever it is), so one day I got bored and installed it. I've been really impressed. It's fast and stable as hell. I don't think I've ever had it crash.

2/2/2009 5:44:39 PM

This is why I abandoned Windows and M$ products long ago. Never been happier then on my Mac.

(still have to run windows xp and vista in parallels for work but no way around that)

2/2/2009 5:47:58 PM

Quote :

"you got duped by the mojave experiment didn't you?"

lol, no. I got a free copy of ultimate from MS, and installed it originally to play bioshock with directx 10, though I think this was after sp1 had been released.

ever since, though,

Quote :

"I've been really impressed. It's fast and stable as hell. I don't think I've ever had it crash."

2/2/2009 6:09:37 PM

Quote :

"Never been happier then on my Mac."

i know what you mean, i love throwing money away too.

2/2/2009 6:14:33 PM

joe_schmoe,

If I register for a Windows Live account can I post a complaint on your forums about how bad your post sucks?

2/2/2009 7:01:09 PM

i use vista at work and dont have any major issues. it really isnt that bad eh.

2/2/2009 7:01:17 PM

While not to this extreme, I agree with you about IE8 joe.

I just ended up having the completely wipe my work machine trying to uninstall IE8 Beta2. That's right... in order to get rid of it, I had to completely format and reinstall Vista.

I will not be installing IE8 RC1, or IE8 RTM. IE8 on Win7 is the only part of the entire experience that blows balls. I've sent so many bug reports to the team, for HUGE bugs in the betas, I am absolutely amazed they are pushing to RC1 now.

It isn't an RC1 ready product. Plain and simple.

--------

However, you are being stupid going past that. One product does not define a company. I know it's much easier to rationalize that, but it's not the reality. Hell you WORKED THERE, so you should know how vast the company is, and that groups operate damn near independently.

2/2/2009 7:31:17 PM

i love nerdrage

2/2/2009 7:42:58 PM

i love nerdrage

2/2/2009 7:43:33 PM

Quote :

"i know what you mean, i love throwing money away too."

Another lame attempt at trolling, you need to step it up a notch if you are going to troll.

2/2/2009 7:45:39 PM

I have Vista - no crashes, no major problems, faster than my XP machine (which isn't slow).

2/2/2009 8:59:01 PM

I've been using Vista Home Basic for almost a week.

Took some getting used to, but no problems yet for me.

It helps that I had terrible expectations but its a $200 somewhat modern Dell that replaces my Athlon from 2001

2/2/2009 11:06:36 PM

IE Tab:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1419

2/2/2009 11:09:31 PM

Quote :

"Vista is the "Windows Me" of this decade"

This is only said by people who either never used Windows ME or have forgotten how bad it actually was. There was one glitch, for example, where a range of nVidia nForce chipsets would not actually be able to shutdown. They would start the shutdown process but go black without actually powering off or even displaying the old "it is now safe to power down your system" screen. Apparently this only happened to people using pci ehternet and/or certain graphics cards. It was not a problem with 98 nor XP but persisted with 98SE and ME up until and even after XP's release.

At least Vista doesn't have a problem where it can never actually shut off properly if you're using a certain fairly common set of hardware. At least they have patched nearly all the major hardware issues that were Vista related and not driver related.

2/3/2009 12:01:58 AM

one feature of windows me was that it locked up every 30 minutes.

2/3/2009 12:17:41 AM

Quote :

"and that groups operate damn near independently."

ah the bullshit that comes along with working at a large software company. infuriating to the end user expecting all the end products to play nice together and function similarly (or IT manager)

2/3/2009 7:11:53 AM

okay.

i rescind my comment equating Vista to Me.

Vista is not that bad.

2/3/2009 10:19:06 AM

2/3/2009 10:36:08 AM

Quote :

"IE Tab: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1419"

2/4/2009 8:49:43 AM

Quote :

"vista is an embarrasment. they're already planning to ditch it. theres a reason why major corporations all over the globe are refusing to use Vista and demanding OEM copies of XP SP2"

If I were a business owner I'd want XP simply because it's lighter on the system resources. I wouldn't want to go through and upgrade everyone's PC to a gig-a-rig so they can continue to run Outlook and MS Office (though you probably need a gig of memory just to run outlook anyway). I was hoping that they would have addressed that in Windows 7. So far it looks like they took Vista, slapped on a new taskbar, decided to nag you less, and everyone loves it.

2/4/2009 9:10:00 AM

Vista sucks, but now that I think about it, the WinME comparison really is unfair. Vista is annoying bloatware, but it does seem to be pretty stable.

To segue into my dislike of Windows, it's because of mostly the outrageous memory and disk footprints, ridiculous over-commercialization of basic functionality, and difficulty in achieving network transparency.

Most of my systems use an 8GB partition for OS and applications, and I have an 8GB NFS share that hosts my portage distfiles cache. I don't mean the basic OS with Notepad, Calc, Solitaire, with everything else on an apps partition for the "real stuff". I mean 8GB is enough for the OS, OS source, all libraries, Java installs, C/C++ compilers, debuggers, Anjuta, Eclipse, Netbeans, Maple, PCB design software, network analysis software, Firefox, Pidgin, Skype, and a bunch of shit I can't even remember off the top of my head with several gigs leftover for builds and scratch space. A seperate 8GB partition is adequate to hold 3-4 years worth of compressed source archives, multiple versions of each package. Until the last couple years I used 4GB root partitions

I was never able to do this w/ Windows. In fact I wasn't even able to use a seperate partition for program files and an 8GB OS partition. Too many installs assume that C:\Program Files or some other path in C: is the only place in the world it can install something and so the OS partition inevitably fills, while many applications refuse to install in a non-standard Program Files location because Windows fails at filesystem mounting transparency for even local disks.

Less flexibility with more overhead = FAIL.

[Edited on February 4, 2009 at 9:47 AM. Reason : .]

2/4/2009 9:44:57 AM

8gb? really?

http://www.slickdeals.net/permadeal/17969/Hitachi-1TB-7200RPM-Serial-ATA-Internal-OEM-Desktop-Hard-Drive-85

2/4/2009 11:16:26 AM

Yes, 8gb. Using a smaller partition reduces the random access seek latency over a filesystem on that partition to the ratio of disk surface it occupies. Many of these partitions are on RAID-1 or RAID-5 arrays of older SCSI disks that are fairly small, and my NAS is also RAID-5 and backed up, so wasted disk is pretty significant. Most of the rest of the 8GB root partitions are for VM images that, being preallocated for performance reasons, would be a pointless fucking waste of storage if sized larger.

so why don't you http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=stfu

and save yourself some typing with one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm there captain hook?

[Edited on February 4, 2009 at 11:54 AM. Reason : .]

2/4/2009 11:46:56 AM

Quote :

"I was never able to do this w/ Windows. In fact I wasn't even able to use a seperate partition for program files and an 8GB OS partition. Too many installs assume that C:\Program Files or some other path in C: is the only place in the world it can install something and so the OS partition inevitably fills, while many applications refuse to install in a non-standard Program Files location because Windows fails at filesystem mounting transparency for even local disks. Less flexibility with more overhead = FAIL"

this is largely due to poor application packaging rather than the OS. you can do symlinks and mounts just like you can in linux, in windows. you just need to know what you're doing. if you want a separate \program files partition so bad, mount another drive/partition/nfs as your c:\program files directory

talk about off topic

2/4/2009 1:08:47 PM

Tiberius is right, i use the same principle in all my machines, except more like 30GB instead of 8GB. but in general it keeps systems running fast for longer periods of time, and when you need to format you only have to format one small partition. i do the same for my pagefile, it has it's own partition, it reduces fragmentation to a smaller portion of your drive

[Edited on February 4, 2009 at 1:12 PM. Reason : .]

2/4/2009 1:10:24 PM

Quote :

"Vista is the "Windows Me" of this decade"

While I can agree that almost everything MS has is 'broken', even their tech support, equating Vista to ME is just retarded.

Overall Vista is not that bad. I personally don't have any problems with it. But in all fairness I did not install up SP1 was released.

[Edited on February 4, 2009 at 1:20 PM. Reason : /]

2/4/2009 1:16:40 PM

^

Quote :

"okay. i rescind my comment equating Vista to Me. Vista is not that bad."

2/4/2009 1:18:55 PM

Yeah, I saw that after I made my post. Haha. It was obviously and overstatement (by joe) WAY out of the ballpark.

2/4/2009 1:21:20 PM

joe never makes overstatements, exaggerations or absurd analogies.

2/4/2009 4:08:30 PM

Quote :

"I was never able to do this w/ Windows. In fact I wasn't even able to use a seperate partition for program files and an 8GB OS partition. Too many installs assume that C:\Program Files or some other path in C: is the only place in the world it can install something and so the OS partition inevitably fills, while many applications refuse to install in a non-standard Program Files location because Windows fails at filesystem mounting transparency for even local disks."

Let's be clear. This is not the fault of Windows. It is the fault of Microsoft.

Microsoft hasn't had a client application deployment standard really until Vista was mid-stream. Even today, application deployment is still a pretty big hole in the story (compared to Linux, at least). The reason for all your problems is shitty 3rd party installation wrappers that do all kinds of wacky shit to get programs onto your computer and meet minimum requirements from the OS.

And for your 8gb analogy, it's another unfair comparison. Windows and *nix are two completely different types of systems. If you want to do a real Apples to Apples comparison of binary storage and organization, compare OSX with Windows. Guess which one is more compact out of the box?

2/4/2009 5:39:33 PM

^considering that iLife which comes pre-installed is 4gb...I can't imagine Mac OS X being more 'compact' with default installation. And printer drivers which are also pre-isntalled are well over 1gb. thats over 5gb not including the OS.

2/4/2009 5:57:47 PM

Quote :

"i hate to say it, but without any external influence on my opinions, i installed Vista and had major issues, it's not all marketing. SP1 was a good step in the right direction but still lacked the speed of XP in a lot of ways. there's a reason why it's stuck in "single digit enterprise adoption"... it's not worth the upgrade. it's not just all hearsay. it's not just blogs copying blogs."

qft. enterprise IT departments don't make their decisions based on bloggers' opinions. yes, some individuals may be swayed by the negative press vista continues to receive, but any decent department would have done a small-scale rollout and determined through an objective process that it was a better decision from a business standpoint to stick with xp for the time being.

vista x64 was a step in the right direction. server 2008 x64 was actually pretty decent. this being said, if i have to use windows, i'd much rather use a windows xp machine. i normally use OS X, however.

i will also say that i've used windows 7 at work and (so far) i like it better than xp.

Quote :

"And for your 8gb analogy, it's another unfair comparison. Windows and *nix are two completely different types of systems. If you want to do a real Apples to Apples comparison of binary storage and organization, compare OSX with Windows. Guess which one is more compact out of the box?"

are you not aware that OS X is, at its core, BSD?

2/4/2009 6:23:15 PM

^ Vista x64 = Server2008 x64. Same codebase.

^ and ^^ My points exactly. If it's installed by default (iLife), it's part of the default install. OSX, out of the box, on a new computer sitting in front of you uses 6-8gb of storage. Is that bad? No. It's correct for its audience.

Saying something is bloated because it takes up space is completely missing the point. Bloat is being there when you don't want it, not being there at all. Compared to a core BSD install, OSX is bloated as hell if you are a pure developer, or if it's being run as a server.

2/4/2009 6:50:25 PM

Quote :

"you can do symlinks and mounts just like you can in linux, in windows."

It's honestly been so long since I've explored the full functionality of Windows that I feel more comfortable referring to a third party to confirm my recollections:

Windows symlinks don't work across networks, but are strictly local. And Windows symlinks work only on NTFS 5.0 or later. They don't work on variations of FAT, though NTFS symlinks can point to paths on a volume of variations of FAT.

Microsoft still has barely documented it, and hasn't exposed it in Windows except in the most cursory way. It is still a far bigger chore than necessary finding information about this functionality in Microsoft's knowledge base. Anyone who want to learn about it can only resort to scrounging across the web. Links on Windows exist, but they are useable only due to the efforts of a handful of third party tools developers.

Incidentally, there will be no native mounting of NFS without (I believe) paying for Unix Services for Windows.

You're probably right about mount points, I never really explored them.

Quote :

"This is not the fault of Windows. It is the fault of Microsoft."

I refer there to Windows as a platform, and these issues not as a faults but as shortcomings, but other than that I do agree that it's related to the lack of deployment standards. I think to an extent legacy issues also plague attempts to establish deployment standards.

2/4/2009 9:12:39 PM

also OSX sucks and is for gays

just to keep the three-way holy war rolling

2/4/2009 10:10:17 PM

→

2/4/2009 10:43:49 PM