Ranting to /dev/null

Vista is awful. It's the best thing that Apple could've asked for, seeing that MS had the potential to make an operating system better than Mac OS X, which really hasn't changed all that much in several years (and several versions).

Oh, and for the record, Office 2007 (esp. Outlook) is laggy too. I don't know what it is - MS must've lost all the people who know how to write streamlined code somewhere along the way.

I remember when Windows 95 came out. I remember how it actually worked, and how excited I was about future MS operating systems, to be based on Windows NT. Of course, they (and their mysterious codenames) never materialized in the form that the magazines previewed them. Instead, we got 98 (what was its advance again?), XP (which was OK, but not anything to write home about), 2000 (which was sketchy), and now Vista (which is atrocious).

Here's hoping that Apple will open their architecture, or open-source a version of their OS, or both, so that something good can finally gain market dominance.

I find, especially looking back, that XP is a reasonably good offering for a closed-source OS. The interface isn't terribly flashy to begin with, which is good, but you can turn off all the bells and whistles, which is better. It does most things I ask it to, but most importantly, almost nothing that I don't ask it to. XP is a good balance, I think, of power with accessibility. If you want more stability or control, you really need to start looking at Linux, and I just haven't the time.

Vista is so chock full of the things the user doesn't want that I'm hopeful we'll see a repeat of WindowsMe. Notice that didn't even make your list there. I think Vista is perhaps too big a release to be quite the footnote that Me was, but with any luck, it will be accepted by consumers at about the same rate.