Matrix Games Forums

I found this about XP SP3...  

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Official ... 2231.shtml

shows to go ya,, If the good people won't deal with the illegal,,and the hackers are just waiting for the next challenge,,and ya cannot beat them,, then one shouldn't wast time and money on this,,and put your resources to better use.  The only ones who truly suffer from this is the honest people,,having to put up with security stuff that the hackers have already bypassed,,

I know,, I know this prolly isn't hacked,,but ya all know what i mean... games or OS,, makes no matter..

Lol,, if Linux was a pay type OS,, then all the myriad of flavors would be called "illegal hacks" instead of "flavors"  [:D]

anvil

It's just a contraction, like "it's".

One thing that does make me happy about Vista is how much money it's saving me currently...  Several times, I've almost splurged and bought a new computer, except ALL of them were loaded with Vista and didn't offer any way to "customize" them to WinXP instead.  Nice computers as well, low-priced and not requiring much tweaking of my own to become a pretty decent game rig.  After watching a friend of mine suffer with Vista and hearing the reviews of it online, it's managed to save me a good $900-1500 over the last 6 months [;)]

Vista should have put a nail in death of Macs now that they're just an intel box, but instead it increased Mac sales, only Microsoft is dumb enough to come up this marketing plan. [8|]

Some day when we have true 64-bit applications and after 3 or 4 service packs Vista maybe worth it, but not today.

Wow interesting that I actually disagree about Office 2007. In that space Im purely and enduser and Ive never before found so much value in an upgrade. The old menus are awful to navigate in fact i hate menus which is why after research MS did away with them in favor of whats now called "ribbons". Thats really a build on the ole context sensitive menu thing accept as populated in the ribbon.

So when I click a table its editing options show up in the ribbon that werent there before. Live preview shows me my changes on the fly as I scroll through things instead of having to click each style/font etc and see if I like it or not.

The list goes on.. These are all much more useful and applicable things to the average user than simply adding more complicated excel formula possibilities and the 10th layer of mailmerge complexities.

I guess it all comes down to what you have to do with a product. But in this case I can see where their research has paid off though most of those useful features require a pretty good hardware setup.

I must confess though, that MS certainly does rename and move things between versions far far too much. Sometimes for what even if better would seem like a ridiculously minor improvement compared to the annoyance of it not being like it was before.

Its almost like they keep redesigining it for those who have never used any of it ever at all. Perhaps somehow marketing wize that still makes sense. The rest of us dont have much of a choice but to adapt and what really matters are the untapped demographics. Much the same reason I suppose the Nintendo WII is so freakingly ridiculously successful. Now if only someone would find a way to market wargames to woman.....

I don't mind the UI in Office 2k7, the crashes and broken search function in outlook bother me though.

I just caught an episode with Leo Laporte (too lazy to check the name of the show - the old Tech 2 guy) and he gives IE7 a big thumbs up with Vista, cliaming it gives what IE6 should have all along but only with the protection features endowed by Vista. Interesting. IOW XP users should stick with Mozilla.

ORIGINAL: Adam Parker
I just caught an episode with Leo Laporte (too lazy to check the name of the show - the old Tech 2 guy) and he gives IE7 a big thumbs up with Vista, cliaming it gives what IE6 should have all along but only with the protection features endowed by Vista. Interesting. IOW XP users should stick with Mozilla.

I actually LIKE IE7 - I just have to get used to it. I still click on things expecting the new window to pop up in front of what I was doing. Some times I'll do the click 3 times and find that I have 3 copies of the new tab ..... Other times on sites that still do the new Window for the click I get what I expect [;)] so I suppose many of us have some larn'n to do!

ORIGINAL: Veldor
Wow interesting that I actually disagree about Office 2007. <SNIP>
I guess it all comes down to what you have to do with a product. But in this case I can see where their research has paid off though most of those useful features require a pretty good hardware setup.

I must confess though, that MS certainly does rename and move things between versions far far too much. Sometimes for what even if better would seem like a ridiculously minor improvement compared to the annoyance of it not being like it was before.

Its almost like they keep redesigining it for those who have never used any of it ever at all. Perhaps somehow marketing wize that still makes sense. The rest of us dont have much of a choice but to adapt and what really matters are the untapped demographics. Much the same reason I suppose the Nintendo WII is so freakingly ridiculously successful. Now if only someone would find a way to market wargames to woman.....

That's OK Veldor - I'm here to be disagreed with. You should see what happens on Religious threads You are right however about what M$ appears to be doing. it will take me a while to get used to M$O 2k7 just like it did M$O 2k3 but I will get there. I still have a machine with Office 97 on it as well as WP 5 - I used to love them - especially WP5 but life moves on. I still save all my documents in RTF however for compatibility sake because I do know some people who still use WP5 ???? [;)] Although I also know a larger number of people that use Open Office which also likes RTF & does not yet like .DXML or whatever M$O 2k7 puts out. I can deal with the UI changes much easier that the Document incompatibility between versions. i used to have a program that did conversions between documents but 2 & 3 grand just got too much and the company I now work for doesn't see the need when I can just feed a document into Program A and spit out a more or less compatible version.

The new format for the office files is far far more efficient than the old ones. They take up about half the space, if even. That is especially useful to corporate customers or anyone who works on a lot of files.

ORIGINAL: Veldor

The new format for the office files is far far more efficient than the old ones. They take up about half the space, if even. That is especially useful to corporate customers or anyone who works on a lot of files.

More efficient - Maybe. Smaller - yes - just harder to share with friends and family much less business associates who aren't ready to upgrade yet. Business moves on the smooth flow of paper. [:)]

I'm sure this will appeal to some factions within corporate-land. It's amazing how much people piss and moan about file space when you consider how cheap storage has become.

ORIGINAL: Jeffrey H.

I'm sure this will appeal to some factions within corporate-land. It's amazing how much people piss and moan about file space when you consider how cheap storage has become.

Storage hasn't become any cheaper thats just it. Maybe to the home user because they are willing to buy low performance/high failure rate drives but for businesses that need to protect their data and get good performance they are still ridiculously expensive drives. Plus the amount of files and average size of many files is much much larger. As is the need to keep historical information for legal purposes.

Low performance? Just what are you calling low performance with 10000 rpms and 500gig size drives?? I've worked in businesses and seen their hard drives and backups and they aren't any better than what I use at home. I've got a 10 year old hard drive to boot, so what's with this "high failure" stuff? Sometimes I think you exaggerate.

ORIGINAL: ravinhood

Low performance? Just what are you calling low performance with 10000 rpms and 500gig size drives?? I've worked in businesses and seen their hard drives and backups and they aren't any better than what I use at home. I've got a 10 year old hard drive to boot, so what's with this "high failure" stuff? Sometimes I think you exaggerate.

We put Storage Area Networks (SANs) or worst case Network-Accessible Storage (NAS) into even lower medium sized organizations these days. These setups give the performance, stability, and recoverability amongst other things that even mid-sized businessess need today. If I were exaggerating it wouldnt be one of the fastest growing IT segments and one of the highest paid and sought after skillsets. Even without either of those you would typically spend much much more for a quality speedy and reliable local server hard drive. For the EMC stuff we sell 146GB Fibre 15K use to be around $800 each. I think they are a bit cheaper now though. But even at half that its far higher than your cost per GB at home, thus my point.

And you more or less make my point too !

I work in a small part of a big company, we do around 2.5 billion/year and the parent does around 30.

Yet I hear these IT weenies squablle about adding another storage drive....puuuhhhlease.

And not we get to waste all this time by changing our OS an relearning all sorts of new apps for Vista, because of storage efficiecny ? Stupid ! Stepping over dollars to pick up pennies !

ORIGINAL: Jeffrey H.

And you more or less make my point too !

I work in a small part of a big company, we do around 2.5 billion/year and the parent does around 30.

Yet I hear these IT weenies squablle about adding another storage drive....puuuhhhlease.

And not we get to waste all this time by changing our OS an relearning all sorts of new apps for Vista, because of storage efficiecny ? Stupid ! Stepping over dollars to pick up pennies !

Well to add though.. Its not just the cost of the drive. You have to factor in the chassis cost. Which can be several thousand dollars per 15 drives or so.. Then there is storage controllers and cache memory. Then there is the storage on the DR (Disaster Recovery) side to account for that in replication. Then there may or may not be Simulated Tape Drive Space and/or Real Tape Capacity, Bandwidth issues for replication, archiving issues for compliancy, consultant issues (to me) to design and put that all together.... And so on.

If your IT Weenies didn't squablle I'd be outta a job [:(]

ORIGINAL: Jim_H

ORIGINAL: Terminus

I might not say the things I said about Vista and Micro$oft in general with regards to a Matrix game, but then Matrix doesn't force me to buy their games if I want to run a computer that I can use for playing other computer games on. Micro$oft does; the two are not comparable.

But, nobody forces you to use Windows. That's the perception you have because you've been conditioned to think like it. You can play games on Linux or OSX too. You have Wine in Linux to play Windows games, without Windows. You have native Linux games and cross platform games (Quake and UT for example).

And you've still missed my point. I was talking about how you'd react to Matrix if they released a game in as poor condition as most Microsoft OS's are. That was the comparison I was trying to illustrate. People do complain bitterly about Windows and are up in arms, but they still use Windows instead of going elsewhere. They are taken in by the hype and marketing to really think there are no alternatives to Windows. The fact is, they are wrong.

Regards,
Jim

"People do complain bitterly about Windows and are up in arms, but they still use Windows instead of going elsewhere."

Exactly!

ORIGINAL: ravinhood

Thing is your average joe consumer doesn't build their own systems. You have a majority of users out there scratching their heads because their games and/or other programs aren't working when they PLUG them in. So, that's why I say most of the Vista lovers posts on here have no merit you aren't the norm and the norm is what will decide if Vista makes it or not. Not the techno dweebs.

The same could be said in spades about Linux.

ORIGINAL: Adam Parker

ORIGINAL: Jim_H

Windows is simply a cash cow and MS are milking it. Good for them and good for those like you who enjoy the experience with Vista. I can think of many better things to spend my money on.

Regards,
Jim

You know Jim, I honestly agree with you on that. I still can't get over a company that sells a product that requires its owner to invest further in security software because it's software has vulnerabilities. Further, a company that provides things such as Windows Firewall and the new Windows Defender that must be turned off to run marginally better specialist security software like Norton or McAfee etc.

And then has the gall to launch its own separate Anit-Virus software, one has to buy because it knows its own OS is at risk!

To me there are laws being broken here: "Buy Windows, we know its unsecure, so now go buy our extra software to make it secure!" [&:]

Security software isn't like Microsoft Office! It's not an extra! MS is informing us that a fundamental aspect of its OS is broken, "so now buy something extra to fix it - or we warned you"?

Now that's what I don't like.

But as a new PC buyer, someone unskilled in DYI IT, statements saying how bad Vista is, can really have an affect on my purchasing decisions. The opinions here nearly did.

And all I'm saying is: "Hey let's stop the hype. Vista in November 2007 is different from Vista in January 2006. Buy the right hardware from a capable vendor and you will have a great time".

Kind regards,
Adam.

One of the reasons that you have to buy extra security for MS products is because when they include too much then they are accused of being a monopoly. It is not the only reason but when the only way competitors can compete with you is to get governments to oppose them then you have to take it seriously.