Posts by Mark Reed 6 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Nov 2008
Vista is rubbish. It's bloated, fat code with delibrately-designed-to-annoy features such as UAC, and far too many memory-hogging, value-taking features. Too many shadows, animations, high redraw rates, Aero, the appalling Windows Flip 3D, : too much eye candy, not enough function.
Vista out of the box is designed to please an ADHD child who is impressed with whizzy graphics, and not someone who wants to get the job done with a minimum of fuss, quickly. It's a toy, not a tool.
This sounds similar to my experiences. My Acer was crippingly slow until I paged the VM off the HD to 2GB + 1GB Memory. However, when my hard drive fills up, I have to do a spring clean. It took me hours to dial back all the Vista settings from 'whizzy' to 'fast', switch off all the animations and redraw ratios, so it looks like XP on a Vista chassis. Being a propellorhead is ace. Even my 512MB XP goes like a caffeine-crazed Ramones compared to the 1GB Vista.
(The laptop was a preinstalled present, before you ask.)
Aside from IE browsing, I'm happy with a Windows 3.11 platform actually. I don't do much with Vista but Thunderbird, OpenOffice, iTunes (now that is crippingly slow), and Firefox.
What Redmond have missed is that I'd much rather have something go fast than something be flash. I couldn't give a fig about a glass-interface : I want it to open a menu bar or document when I click on it, and FAST. Speed is a function in itself.
...I was suggesting that as they reissue all / most titles on BR consumers will feel pressure to upgrade from DVD to BR... the industry has tried on 'rebuying all your stuff in a new format' with the LP, the CD, the MC, the DAT, the MD, the VHS, the LD, the DVD... why not the BR as well?
People won't be dumping DVD just because Blu-Ray offers a higher quality image if you've got a TV the size of a house. Most people don't have gazumps of money to buy fab new hardware that's expensive. Eventually people will buy BR instead of DVD's, but only when their current DVD player blows up and they need to buy a new one. The market penetration of BR will be slower and smaller than DVD. The fundamental format shift from big poor-quality tape to smaller, higher quality DVD is like going from old cassette C-90's to CD's. Huge. The format shift to BR is a small step, not a big leap. As long as people can watch DVD's on their BR players they will not be restocking their libraries. Not only that, but the percieved quality increase is not always realistic : some people have bought Godfather on BR and are complaining about image quality not being up to the BR standard. Get real. This is film stock from the 70's, not a digitally shot George Lucas CGIfest. They're called "films" for a reason!
It seems every few years the industry comes up with another format, and wants us to dump all the old stuff and buy the same catalogue again and again and again and again and again in their new format. Most people, quite rightly, will tell them to stuff off. There's only so much money in the world. And I still have an record player and a VHS player because there's so much great stuff that will never be on DVD or CD due to rights and licensing issues, and I'm not losing that stuff just because of format fetishism.
I refuse to buy downloaded music. It’s not music : its data. You can’t fall in love with a data file. You can’t admire the artistry of a sleeve on your iPod. An album maybe a ‘dying concept’, but it is a work of art, and humans will always need art.
I refuse to pay £7.99 for a string of highly compressed, low quality, DRM’ed-to-hell rubbish. If the CD disappears, the idea of seeing an interesting name on a shelf, or a intruiging cover in a sale, and picking it up cheap and taking a risk is over. The random purchase will cease. Many times I have picked up great records cheap in sales and loved them forever.
Ten years ago, I was advocating that labels should release everything instantly, without restriction, at 20p a song. They should have sales and bargains and operate in a retail environment where slow shifting stock is marked down and cheaply available.
And also, I am insulted by the RIAA thinking a single song can be worth thousands of pounds when it’s leaked by filesharers. If a single song is worth so much, how come most artists – even those at reasonable levels of success – earn peanuts from their recorded work and only make money touring? How come a downloaded song at 79p results in an artist getting about 2p? It’s mass corporate hypocrisy. Rather than line the pockets of corrupt and inefficient labels, I frequently buy direct from the artist and see the shows. Trent Reznor has this business model succinctly captured. (As indeed does Prince, who made more money from the a small selling independent release with a 50% royalty rate than he did from a 1,000,000 selling album on Warners)
As it stands, I buy the stuff I want on a physical format because CD’s don’t have Hard Disk Crashes and don’t have DRM authentication errors. I like the idea of owning what I buy. Whatever it is. In a durable format that won’t expire when the provider decides to switch off servers, or a hard disk crashes.
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