Yep. And you know what? I think that this gene is actually located on the Y chromosome, seeing how there are relatively few females frequenting these sites. :P

I think there is a gene in geek DNA that causes a natural attraction to User Friendly, Tom’s Hardware and Slashdot . . .

LOL!

Btw, I subscribe the the UF RSS feed so I already saw that a while ago. I think they had a whole batch of Vista upgrade jokes in there.

Shiny stuff makes screenshots look better, thusly attracting the people who don’t understand the computer stuff enough

as demonstrated:
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20061213

(I had to spend a long time looking for that, appreciate it or else! :P

LOL! It’s settled them – Vista is the new ME!

You know, Areo doesn’t really do anything for me. I really don’t care that much how my desktop environment looks. My XP box at home is running with the classic theme, and all the graphical effects turned down to the minimum.

But I guess shiny stuff is their main selling point – and dumb people out there will definitely fall for it.

I believe the GUI is the reason. AFAIK aqua uses OpenGL, a far superior graphics API. There is also the fact that Apple makes hardware with software in mind and software with hardware in mind whereas windoze is one big cludge that attempts to run on any old POS ix86 PC.

Vista is the worst failure I have seen from MS in years, it reminds me of when ME came out.

I think I read somewhere that gaming on Vista sucks ass. Apparently given the same game, and same hardware you will get much better performance on an XP machine than on Vista. I mean, that would be expected from an OS that requires minimum 2Gigs or RAM to run smoothly.

I don’t think anyone writes stuff for the new DirectX and they probably won’t start doing major things with it for the next year or so. And even if they do, no one in their right mind would break compatibility with XP in the next 3-4 years because at the current upgrade rates it will still be the dominant OS out there.

Btw, how come OSX can have pretty graphics that run on modest software, but when MS tries to copy them, they create a memory eating, GPU hugging behemoth?

I have had to work with this stuff a few times already in consulting. It is just a stupid marketing scheme, obviously. The only upgrade that is “kinda cool” is aero, but even that fails due to directx being garbage.

Well… They could just offer a single version costing same as the super duper ultimate silver extra edition. People would still buy it cause Microsoft has the market cornered with the captive OEM distributors and all.

I think the real reason is to fool people into spending more money than they need. MS hopes that people will buy the cheep upgrade from XP, and then find out that it does not have all the features they want. So they will need to buy another upgrade.

Then when they buy a new computer it will come with another cheap OEM version, that is not going to be compatible with their old upgrade.

Oh, and the upgrade versions will probably be buggy and not work correctly, so you will most likely need to buy a full version anyway. :P

well yeah, isnt that the point of all these multifarious upgrades – confuse people until they say “look, fuck the cost, just give me the one that does everything”