Oh, Come ON! No RAR support?

I can almost... almost... understand why they'd leave Windows Vista with no built in graphics program better than Paint, which remains basically the same as it was in Windows 3.1. You have all these bedfellows who sell graphics programs -- Adobe, for instance -- and you tell them, "Hey, if you promise to release your next versions ONLY for Vista, we promise to not include any real graphics programs with our OS."

I'm not saying that happened -- I'm just saying I could imagine it happening, which would explain why something as simple as a robust image editor isn't included in Vista. It makes sense from a certain twisted perspective.

But no support for RAR and TAR files?


You of course know what I'm talking about. RARs and TARs are types of zip formats, like ZIP. If you have a file named blah.zip, Vista knows how to open it. It CAN open it. It unzips it. But if you have a RAR or a TAR -- formats that, granted, are more common among the Linux and Max crowds -- Vista plays dumb.

Historically, Windows has always tried this. "Don't support other systems." Has it worked? Has it locked people into Windows somehow? Of course not. Is it even a logical business tactic? No. It's just Microsoft being a bully, throwing its weight around because it can. "Why should we provide a service that isn't an absolute requirement? Why facilitate the sharing of information with other systems? That would somehow acknowledge that we don't have a monopoly -- and if folks realize that, they might begin to think they have other choices."

An operating system doesn't HAVE to include image editors, sound editors, movie editors, games, word processors, or even web browsers. It DOES have to include the ability to see your files, though. By deliberately NOT supporting a standard compression format, Vista is failing on a fundamental requirement.

Vista sucks, but not in the cool Vampire way -- rather, more like a leech,
Randy