Vista anybody?

[Stracius]

I realized that there has been zilch for discussion about Microsoft's operating system Vista, despite the fact that it's already been released. I even confirmed this with a forum search that showed exactly just 5 times that the name was even used . So as a lot of us are PC users (grats to you Mac/LinuxFlavor/Unix/etc. fellows), this "new" operating system from Microsoft is going to be affecting us all very heavily, be it good or bad.

I've got my own apprehensions about it, mainly from what I've read thus far, such as the Limited User Access (You may own it, but you won't be able to have true administrator access anymore ) , along with a slew of DCMA and DRM issues, and quite a few others I could probably rant about. Fortunately I have yet to find any good reason for me to upgrade to Vista from XP. Seeing that XP thus far works well enough for me (and probably will for some time) I doubt I'll be inclined to get Vista for a few years... Hell, I'm toying with a linux distro atm with the thinking that I might go back to using that OS rather than face this upgrade.

However, I came across this article (courtesy of /. as usual ) which brings up several more issues I was not even aware of.

The article is an opinion piece so take it with a grain of salt as you see fit, but more importantly it is written by a game publisher(/developer?). The author specifically discusses the potential impact on smaller game developers. Especially those that distribute their content online vs. retail stores. I know we have a few people in the house that work for a small game software company *cough*QuizEsd*cough*, and am curious as to how this might affect them. Or if they were even aware of these possible problems

Then there's the bit about how Vista is going to handle games via this Game Explorer? Anyone know if you can install games without using it? I'm sure it's bound to cause headaches to any parents here that have kids that play/might play some day. Vista enforced ESRB, Woo. Go redmond.

Thoughts? Options? And I'm trying to keep my ranting to a minimum (without abolishing it entirely ^,^ ) so I expect the rest of you rational adults to do the same . Topic given, discuss.

If you haven't even given any thought to it yet, I'd encourage you to start. It's either that or we'll all have to migrate to consoles

[Ambush]

Honestly im in no rush to jump to a new OS just yet, I mean it was problem enough from 98 to XP (drivers, games, etc not working). Im in no mood to troubleshoot every little problem that Vista is going to bring. I'll wait a few years untill the rest of the market (games, apps, etc) get on Vista bandwagon and leave XP, untill that day, im staying with good ol reliable XP .

[BlackDove]

I'll just wait for a patch or an instruction manual compiled to remove the inane crap, and then I will upgrade.

[SSX-Ava]

I'll wait a few years untill the rest of the market (games, apps, etc) get on Vista bandwagon and leave XP, untill that day, im staying with good ol reliable XP .

I'm inclined to share the same opinion as Ambush on this one. I doubt I'll be jumping over to Vista until I have to, to play the games that are being released.

[esd]

I won't be switching to Vista for a long while, and any game developers that tow the Microsoft line and write for only Vista are going to be shooting themselves in the foot, DX10 be damned.

What's not covered in that article is whether you can simply disable the parental control aspect of this game explorer.....


..if not, it's just another bit of nanny-state-ish "we know best" behaviour from MS.

[Inquisitor]

The ESRB is voluntary, developers/publishers request ratings. Nobody requires games to be rated, esepcially those distributed online.

So it would be hard to measure the possible impact on games that are not rated, like many of ours. I've not seen this parental control feature, the article seems to indicate its self reported during install, if the kid is admin on the system, why wouldn't he just rate them all E for Everyone?

I am however, in general in favor of not doing things against parents wishes. If mom doesn't want you to play un-rated games or M-Rated games, I am all for it. She's the one with the credit card, not little Bobby, Age 11 (for the record Lore was rated "T for Teen" when we were put in a box compilation last year). The video game industry SHOULD be giving tools to parents, since are biggest complaint is "parents need to be doing the parenting." If mom doesn't want Bobby to play Lore, its not my place to tell her she should. She owns the PC, the has the CC, and its her kid until he ticks over to age 18. If the kid is saavy enough to own his own PC with his own money prior to that, I can imagine he's also saavy enough to work with his parents (or against them) on this particular issue.

After 18, then I'll assume he'll have his own PC with these things turned off

Dunno, there was alot of hullabaloo about XP before it was released, big brother, yada yada. The reality of it was much, much less sinister when it was released, and even less sinister after SP2.

I'll wait and see. You won't see widespread Vista implementaions until about a year after its out anyway.

I am in no hurry to upgrade. I don't have a PC capable of running it anyway. Maybe after Vista Service Pack 2

[esd]

I am however, in general in favor of not doing things against parents wishes.

I agree completely, but this goes for being able to turn the sodding thing off altogether, too. Is the implimentation on all versions? Is it entirely optional? If not, there's going to be a 32yr-old batchelor out there shouting at Vista because it won't let him play an unrated game without convincing the system he's allowed to.

[Thunderbird]

Given that I only recently decided to move from Win2K to XP, I doubt I'll be moving off of XP anytime soon. I haven't bought a PC game for quite some time now, so I doubt I'll need to worry .

While my experience with stuff carrying parental controls is limited (the only thing I have that even has them is the Wii, and I have them off there), if Vista is similar, I don't really have any worries about its system. But then again, as far as I know, all of the console companies require licensed games to carry a rating.

I have one question in regards to this though, for both consoles and Vista: What if a game gets re-rated like GTA: San Andreas and Oblivion (granted, I think SA's re-rating was stupid because it was based on something that you had to hack the game to get...there was a conversation on this during one of the dull moments at work in September).

[Inquisitor]

Why would a 32 year old bachelor enable parental controls on his account?

Read the article again

[Fenavian]

At this point i see no reason to upgrade to vista. Many of the security features offered in Vista, I already have. All vista has done is push me to that Mac that much faster.

[BlackDove]

Why?

[Isileth]

Nope, even it wouldnt bring my poor little comp to its knees. Just seems to be no real advantage in switching. Ill go when its required for to many things to be without it. Hopefully by then it will be worth having besides being a requirement to run certain programs.

[requiemdreamer]

I'll be getting it simply because my university offers all microsoft software to its student for free, including operating systems. That's where I got my XP Pro from.

But if I had to pay for it, I wouldn't upgrade to Vista until I see a clearly significant advantage over XP.

[Stracius]

I'll just wait for a patch or an instruction manual compiled to remove the inane crap, and then I will upgrade.

My concern is that there may not be any good way to remove said inane crap . Otherwise I'd consider taking the same approach.

Isilith : yeah, I imagine a lot of home PC users are facing the same dilema. Vista will require a substantial hardware upgrade/requirement to run well, and the cost to do so will be undesirable for quite a good portion of home users. I wonder what the current percentage of PCs capable of running Vista is.

[Ambush]

At this point i see no reason to upgrade to vista. Many of the security features offered in Vista, I already have. All vista has done is push me to that Mac that much faster.

Whoa Whoa Whoa, now that seems a little harsh eh?

[Isileth]

My college also offers it for free, although right now we can only get the basic version. But we are looking into to getting the full thing. Even then I wont be getting it. Got somes things my comp struggles to run with everything switched off as it is, throwing in something like vista just isnt going to work.

[Padishar]

I havn't spoke much of Vista because it would have been quite pointless 2, tbh.
All info on it (even the beta versions) kept changing drastically from week to week.
Every thing from the initial moronic-what-the-heck-are-they-thinking-about ULA...
to...
the " no no we don't have time to squeeze that in so lets scrap those features" list...

Don't feel like going off in detail on M$ right this moment, so will just give my quick skinny:
Likes: DX10, Upgraded Telemetry and Performance Monitor
Dislikes: Obscene Pricetag (X multiple wacked versions), DRMA, FORCED to own to use DX10, extremely shaky/shady ULA & LUA, Still very buggy (esp w/security and program allowance nonsense).

Conclusion? Currently either staying with XP, Linux, or OSX are better current alternatives...

[The Baron]

You know why Alex St. John is complaining? Because WildTangent is a spyware company. He went from DirectX "evangelist" (in the days of DX2 and DX3) to making a product that relied on the poor security in Windows for its very existence. Now that the security is threatened, he's whining. Screw him. Limited user accounts are a Very Very Good Thing. Ask anyone who runs *nix on their desktop (yes, including Mac users) whether they run as a superuser for general use. If you suggest such a thing, you will receive a look of shock and horror and then a warning to use su or sudo only when you need to change system settings.

Limited user accounts were absolutely terrible in RC1. They were improved considerably in RC2. It's still possible to turn them off completely. I haven't installed Vista yet--I've had a disk image and a key from Microsoft sitting on my drive for over a month, but I can't use it yet because of no Vista drivers for the GeForce 8800 cards--but even I, the guy who hasn't had a virus since 98 and spyware since 03 or 04, will probably not run as an admin all the time. Horror of horrors. It's simply a good practice.

As far as D3D10 goes... you have to tie it into the OS. Calling it "Direct3D" anymore is almost a misnomer. With unified shaders and even fewer restrictions on shader programs than in SM3.0, it's basically a stream processing language. I spoke with a few engineers on this, and there's not any good reason why a Clearspeed chip (a vector coprocessor that is basically only used in high-performance computing applications) couldn't have a D3D10 driver. Output to a screen isn't even required anymore.

D3D10 introduces two really big and really forward looking features. First one is video memory paging. Basically, you can dynamically swap chunks of memory back and forth from video memory to system memory. This is quite good, and it lets you do something even more important--real context switching on the video card. Just as your processor runs multiple programs at the same time by interleaving the execution, the video card now can do the same thing. So, combined with the push for improved general-purpose computation on GPUs, this means you can have a game that does both rendering and real physics on the GPU at the same time.

So yeah, it really does need a new driver model. The protected path stuff sucks, though, I agree.

I'd buy a Mac if I wasn't locked into their video cards. I don't want to have to wait an extra year for a GF8800 and then pay an even greater premium for it just because it's a Mac card.

[Svarog]

I can make my OS looks beta' then Vista...thats all Vista has - improved visuals...