Rick wrote: > As one who daily monitors the various OS issues, I had seen both of the > articles beforehand. The PCMag article gave you a comparison of sorts. I > think they were a bit light on Vista. They need to discuss the invasive > issues of DRM which some claim is taking up a lot of computer resources, > among other things such as "phoning home". I don't know what it is doing > for sure, but the hard drive is rarely not doing a read or write every > second or so. XP does not do this. > Folks need to know, there are some pretty severe design decisions which impact usability of Vista for ham radio usage. This has nothing to do with driver availability, old code, etc.
One prime example involves MS design decisions capitulating to big media. As I understand the problem, soundcards can no longer be opened for read and write simultaneously. A form of full duplex operation so to speak. This is due to the chance that a pirate could playback protected media and also record it via analog loopback to an MP3. Now every previous version of windows, macs, linux, etc all allowed that. And it turns out that most soundcard based ham programs require that capability, as you need to have both open even if not running full duplex. So many just simply do not work without major rewrites. I'm sure Dave, Simon, Patrick, and the other developers are aware of this, and some may even have already addressed. But the issue is that it's a conscious design choice which broke many sound applications from speakerphone type operation to ham radio apps. And for what? If you were going to do an audio loopback and pirate, you could do it with two Vista machines. Or just about any other single computer. Or an Ipod. Or phone, etc. Or just rip the CD, which is what real pirates do. So they seriously broke something without offering any serious protection, much less an advantage to the user. Or how bout the same anti-piracy vista issue that had 100Mbit lan performance drop to a crawl if an mp3 is played, due to the new anti-piracy DRM hooks. There is a whole laundry list of compromised design decisions in Vista all to appease Big media. For corporate users, it's worse. I work for the largest computer supplier in the world. We sell vista to consumers, not by choice, but because MS required us to. It was a fight to be able to still sell XP only recently won. So here's the kicker. hundreds of thousands of company computers in operation. Due to a combination of functionality, unaddressed defects, and (yet even more) bad MS design choices, the IT department has elected to push off moving to Vista indefinitely. To the point that if possible they may wait for a successor. So Vista has the real possibility of being the next Windows ME dead end. The IT decision centers around the expense of moving to new infrastructure due to MS design changes with no functionality increase, and in many aspects, some decreases. The only one who benefits from the change is MS. But then, guess what. Large corporate users don't get locked out of XP if it does not pass validation due to a replaced hard drive, etc. So there was already a precedent where consumers have to accept MS constraints which would never fly with corporate users. At any rate, Vista issues are more than anti-MS linux zealots slinging mud. There are real issues that are going to be very difficult for developers to resolve. MS's answer is "sorry, just deal with it". Me, I use XP on the work laptop, and will indefinitely. Most of the house PC's are (licensed) W2K, running just fine. If they are forced into retirement due to non-support, they will move to Ubuntu. Main email/web/ebay/programming/drawing house pc is Ubuntu. My family uses it, and does not know it's not windows. It's that close. But it runs for weeks rather than days without reboot. MS Office runs transparently under WINE, as do many of my ham programs. I recently moved an older laptop from XP to Ubuntu, and was stunned at how smoothly it operates. Meanwhile, my old scanners and printers are 100% supported plug and play under Ubuntu, yet drivers are not available for Vista. (and even XP on my flatbed scanner and graphics tablet) I'm not a Linux zealot, and will readily admit it was not ready for desktop usage in the past. I'd use XP across the board if I did not have to be concerned it may stop working when MS discontinues support for it. But I'm slowly being forced to alternatives by stuff like the Vista design choices, the bizarre "Genuine Windows" phone home validation schemes, etc. My dad is using Vista, and it works for him. Huge learning curve, but he's happy. I'm sure others will post that logger32 works fine for them, etc. But there are some fairly well respected ham programs which do not, and it's not the developer's or user's fault! :-) Have fun, Alan km4ba
