Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Good versus Evil

The long awaited first service pack for Vista has been finally released. Our PVR here at home is running Ultimate and is a bit buggered (long story short, I tried to get TVersity running and pooched some connectivity) and will no longer register on the Xbox360. As such, I have to rebuild it anyhow so why not pooch it now completely and get it over with? I have had great success with MS SPs before and I have had major horrow stories where a recover of my files were necessary after I bought a new drive and built a clean system. I know, I know. You should be rebuilding a clean system every year when using Windows anyhow. Famine will have a field day with this I am sure. Bring on the open-source POV my friend!

Anyhow, as this article states, this service pack is already known to break currently working commercial software. If this were Apple or UNIX or Linux, there would be an uproar and people pointing and laughing at the non-windows users and all the usual rhetoric. However, because it is the monopolistic group, there will be no more of a shrug as people wait yet again for the commerical folks to come up with patches to fix what MS broke. Imagine that. GM makes a car that no longer works with the gasoline you always bought for it and they want the gasoline companies to fix it. how likely do you think that would be? Exactly, so yet again, WHY do we all continue to put up with this?

One simple answer is that, for some of us, we simply have no other choice. I cannot install Ubuntu on my work laptop and say I am not using Windows any longer. Besides the support issue, there are the licensing issues and liability and security. All of which our internal support people will balk at. So, I am stuck. At home, I am simply lazy to be dead honest. Sure, I can get my four tuners in my PVR machine working under Sage or MythTV but they are a pain in the ass to configure and get everything working correctly. Vista Ultimate simply works for the function I need it to perform. Snapstream's BeyondTV simply works on any windows to perform as we need it to. Simplicity does have its price but it is sometimes less than the alternative.

I long for the day when whole departments in Canada will say enough and start the exodus to open source the way European communities have done (i.e. an entire city in several countries have banished anything but open source from ALL levels of government). Alas, there are too many golf games, hockey games, basketball games, football games and hockey games where deals are done to allow this to happen. One day the king will be dethroned but today is not yet that day.

Ciao.

Microsoft releases Vista update pack for download

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