THE CAKE HAS BEEN TAKEN!

Vista has successfully taken the cake:


How do you like error code 80070002, eh?

"Get help".

You know, that's great advice. FANTASTIC advice. I'm going to get help right away.

Most likely from a leopard.

Vista sucks, but the cake is so delicious and moist,
Randy

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

I'm sorry, I can't do that, Dave...

Ever since XP added the great feature where Windows now boots in less than one minute, we've all had to live with being unable to use Windows for the first 5 minutes after it's all booted up because it presents you with an inert or sluggish desktop while it continues to finish booting in the background.

It's sort of like when you cleaned your room as a kid. You know, your mom would say "Did you put your socks in the hamper?" and instead of saying "Ummm, no", you'd run back into your room, then come back out a minute later and announce "Yes!"

You can get a gadget for Vista that lets you watch the CPU usage on your computer. What I find very odd, however, is that while in XP my CPU will spin at 100% for the first 2-3 minutes after booting, in Vista it never seems to get above about 14%.

Is Vista that much faster? No. Vista is lying. If you attempt to interact with the machine, you will immediately discover that Vista isn't finished getting ready. You can click an icon to select it, but double-clicking won't launch the application for at least 30 seconds--if at all. Even better, right-clicking won't even bring up the context menu for items in the system tray. But Vista isn't busy, oh no: the CPU is sitting there at 8%.

It's like telling your kid to stop watching cartoons and go clean up their room, and having them say, "Okay, I'm done" without taking their eyes off the screen. Then if you ask them if they picked up their socks they say nothing. After the cartoons are over, they get up, go ride bikes for a while, then come back and pick up their socks. THEN they proudly announce "Yes!"

If Vista was my kid, I would become an abusive father in self defense. And no jury would ever convict me.

Posting this from Kubuntu,

Chalain

WHY ARE YOU TELLING ME THIS?

Is this really the kind of thing that merits a POP-UP WINDOW?!


I won't even bother asking WHY this has to happen. Who KNOWS why the color scheme of my entire OPERATING SYSTEM has to change when I run a particular program.

If you had an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of computers, they could code Vista in THE EXACT SAME AMOUNT OF TIME IT TOOK MICROSOFT. THIS IS NOT A COINCIDENCE.

(And if they then installed Vista on their computers, they'd never produce anything else again.)

Vista sucks more than monkey feces in my keyboard,
Randy

A Grim Outlook

So yesterday, a certain email appeared to be too much for Outlook to handle. As I tried a dozen different remedies, I kept getting the same message:


Now, there's no telling if this problem was Vista-related or not, but one of the things Vista suggested was to get the latest updates -- for VISTA -- and so I tried that. I won't go into how annoying the update process is--

Yes I will. Know how in XP, you run a Windows update, and it happens in the background, and you need to restart your computer to have it take effect? Well in Vista, the update doesn't install until after you tell the computer to shut down. Then you sit there and wait, watching this funky blue screen that tells you the installation's progress. THEN it restarts.

Used to be you could get work done while your OS updated. Not anymore.

Anyway, I finally solved the problem by downloading and installing Thunderbird, checking that email account, downloading the offending message (still no idea why Outlook choked on it), then Outlook ran fine after that.

In other news, Apple's stock price has more than doubled since I liquidated all my shares last year. OUCH.

Vista sucks, but maybe I can short MSFT,
Randy