>Given the direction Vista is taking, an open O/S may be the way to go. > Otherwise I can foresee a dark future where Cyberboard gameboxes will >become DRM'd ... >(Besides people just saying Vista is crap and no one wants it.)
Not if *I* have anything to say about it. :) I have a Vista Ultimate DVD (courtesy of MSDN) sitting right here. I won't upgrade to it. I don't really see any benefit (except for the corporations who want everything locked down--and I'm certainly not paying for that!). My neighbor bought a cheapo laptop with 512MB running Vista Home Basic. VERY slow! I can't believe they could sell that. (Then it dawned on me.... When people return to Best Buy to complain they just sell them Geek Squad's RAM upgrade. Hmmm... not so dumb after all.) Then he added 1GB to it and now it performs pretty well. I was helping him install some software, copy some files, etc. .... Sheesh. Constant accept or deny prompts. Then I saw the Apple commercial about this. They were spot on! What a PITA. I just upgraded the moterboard on my daughter's system. It's LEGAL full retail copy of WinXP wanted activation (this I expected). It then denied activation due to too many activations. This was the third activation. Ticked me off. I used VMWare Converter (very cool tool) and cloned the system into a virtual machine. Then I slapped Ubuntu Feisty Fawn onto the machine (hey look... no activation prompt!). I now run her WinXP system inside a VMWare session from within Ubuntu. That'll show 'em! :) Her friends (she's 23) think she's cool because she's running Linux. Linux apparently gives you street cred. If young adults are feeling this way about Linux that can't be good news for M$oft. The thing is... Linux has gotten pretty damn nice over the last couple of years. Also the installs (the early bane of Linux) for major distros are getting very easy and smooth. Dale
