ready to go. Vista works fine. I don't like all the stuff it does in the background without telling you what the hell it IS doing, but it recovers from drivers faults pretty well, and it is far more bullet proof than is XP. At least at home - my work Dell laptop with xp is rock solid, but I try to keep crap off the work machine.

Jake

I've yet to fall in love with the various OS X felines, at least in terms of UI.

I'm happy to stick with XP, to the extent one is "allowed to" on a new machine, which unfortunately is not much.

The only thing I like on Vista is the chess game, which does a good job reminding me of how badly I've forgotten how to play.

Also, you gotta love the helpful, paternalistic warnings like "The shift key can cause viruses, are you sure you want to type capital letters?" The interruptions prevent unhealthy obsessive behaviors like completing a thought or any work whatsoever. Combined with Norton, it will get even more suffocatingly, naggingly protective. What's not to like?

you just ignore them. :)

Jake

Vastleft, you just reminded me of Harrison Bergeron...

George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel’s cheeks, but she’d forgotten for the moment what they were about.

On the television screen were ballerinas.

A buzzer sounded in George’s head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits from a burglar alarm.

“That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did,” said Hazel.

“Huh?” said George.

“That dance – it was nice,” said Hazel.

“Yup,” said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren’t really very good – no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn’t be handicapped. But he didn’t get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts.

George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas...

But I still believe
And I will rise up with fists!!

I first encountered it as an element in "Between Time and Timbuktu," and the 2000 election brought it to mind -- as the media decided it needed to make a horserace out of a sleazy, moronic frat boy vs. a genuine, humane, and accomplished statesman.

Wingnut welfare and a thumb on the electoral scale -- why is that Republicans are so politically correct?

little cheer here for the OS that has not once yet bogged me down with spyware or viral gifts and even manages to get prettier every time i see her, thank ya. hope your troubles subside soon, lambert.
___________________________
.delusions of un mundo mejor.

... is that the PC has become so commoditized that the big box retailer made its margin by selling me the removal of "features" that shouldn't have been there in the first place.

MS sells bloatware, the manufacturer loads the machine up with useless crap from marketing, and the retailer charges me to clean up the mess.

I'd call that a win-win situation!

And where the heck is the shell? I need to get some work done!

Then again, maybe the holidaze are getting to me. It's been an irritating few days.

We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!—Xan

... is a true leap forward in the general utility of the UI? My experience is one or two cats out of date, so maybe I've missed some big improvements.

I was a crazy LISA/Mac guy up through System 7, migrated to PCs with Windows 3.x and beyond, and came back to light use of Macs in the iMac era.

Before Win 3.x, I was a huge pro-Mac bigot but gradually found the differences much smaller than billed, with increasing advantages going to the PC (like right mouse-button support everywhere) and as always commodity hardware.

I've had substantial reliability issues on both types of systems, and I frankly found the OS X interface innovations not that inviting to someone with early Mac and PC background.

Though I'm mostly on a PC these days, I switch between the systems with reasonable ease (though, again, I have more of a handle on the XP interface than either the latest Mac ones or Vista), and I just don't feel all that religious about it either way anymore.

In my workplace, I'm still trying to get rid of the last of the Windows 98 boxes.

OSX is solid, but I still prefer OS9, there was a simple elegance to it, not so gimicky.

I know XP pretty thoroughly so that's what I use the most, but I have to be able to support whatever ends up at work.