First impression of Vista

[ted leslie]

bought a ps3 tonight at future shop, but I had some questions regarding
its interfacing to my 1080i tv (that doesnt receive 1080p),
so they told me i could surf on their computers set up in the computer
section to find my answers for the PS3.

Well in the puter section they had vista installed.

the first thing i noticed is that vista does look way better then XP.
in fact it looks a bit better then OSX10.4, but perhaps not as commonly
theme'd, but its a far way off a good beryl/compiz xgl set up , but i
was told i might not be looking at the highest graphical version of
Vista, and I didn't want to spend time to figure it out, i was there to
buy a PS3.
So the sales man tells me, by the way if your looking at upgrading my
home pc to Vista, I might want to think twice, he says Vista is 
really bad as it , he claims, takes your initial EULA (Acceptance) and
will nuke your shit if it doesn't like it (or something to that extent),
i was thinking, WOW if every future shop salesman was like that, Bill
isn't going to sell to many copies!

Anyways one thing stood out really bad in Vista,
I have to assume it was the portable it was installed on, nice portable,
BUT, I was using IE (on Vista) to get some google results, and I noticed
that when i click the mouse into the text boxes to enter my url and
search terms, no I-bar appeared, so i didnt think much of it at first, 
because I wanted to get my answers about the PS3, but once i got my
answers (or lack of), i tooled with Vista, and all though in some places
i got a I-bar, no mater what i did in the IE browser in the URL and
google search text box, no I-bar occured ... i could type and cursor in
the text box, but no I-bar, which is freaky because  i dont try to type
something into a text box until i see my I-bar flashing.
Holy crap thats one serious freaking bug,
I am assuming its a driver issue between the portable and Vista, but
still,
this shocked me. I don't think futureshop put on any other software to
screw with something so basic?, and unless they installed some google
tool bar stuff that broke I-bars in text entry boxes?? anyways if I was
looking to by a portable with Vista (Assuming I know nothing about the
existence of Linux, or OSX), I could hardly have been happy taking that
particular combination home.

To evaluate the Debian NTFS new Linux install ability off the standard
MS boot sequence (i.e. install linux in a image on a NTFS, and boot into
it off of the MS boot chain), I get to tool with Vista at a later date
to make sure Debian can do that on Vista, so I will be force to play
with Vista, but at least I can better eval it.
In our company , we wanted someone else to eval Vista as well, so we
oferred them a free copy to the obviously lucky person that volunteered
first. They are all XP users by the way, I am the only Linux user (but
most of our none management staff use a linux boot DVD environemnt).
So anyways not one managment (or greater) level employee wanted the free
Vista copy, they simply are not going to try it .... so we have to buy a
new machine and install it and give it out, and for that everyone put up
their hands, but to just get a free copy of Vista and install it over
your XP, no one was going to have any of that.

I thought all the negative stuff i was hearing about Vista, was overhype
by the linux community (hate Bills shit no matter what), but so far I am
actually surprised just how scared the real XP users (i work with) are
of it.

On another interesting note, a company that provides us with our
Telephony equipment (handles about 400 lines or so at this time), and
does IVR, VOIP, etc, it was originally sold for the Win32 and Sun
platforms. (ours runs on about 30 Billy servers)
The product maker just told us that .....
We'll be focusing mostly on the Linux platform now, the win32 based
system will not be the way to expand in the (ours/their) future.
So here I am , the IT guy , outfit our shop with all Linux, but I don't
have any authority over the Telephony side (else they would be linux
based), and now they have been told their platform will eventually be
changing over to Linux ... you can imagine just how sorry I feel for
that department ... NOT! ahhh life is good!


-tl

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