Brian Zhang Larsen’s Blog

I have now been running with Vista for a couple of month now, and I will quickly sum up the positive and negative aspects of this marvelous OS.

(+) Flashy bling bling GUI (yes, I do like it).

(-) CD ROM drive suddenly disappears (code 39) and you have to edit some specific value in the windows registry in order to get it back

(-) Hack around in registry database in order to install web part templates for Visual studio, because it can’t see that Visual Studio is installed.

(-) While hacking around in the registry obviously is such an important part of the vista user interface, the usability of this is not adequate to the rest of the GUI.

(-) The abstraction from the REAL file system is maddening.

(-) The “Remember to run your program as administrator, even though you are logged in as an administrator, in order for it to see and use all the resources (like file system)” thingy.

This is certainly not meant as a rant in any way. I am sure there is a lot of great features laying around somewhere, but I can’t help of thinking that Ubuntu 7.10 couldn’t have chosen a better release date.

I see no reason not to participate in the “I’m” initiative from Windows Live Messenger. Yes Microsoft uses this to promote the whole Windows live thing, yes I am helping them by writing this post, yes Microsoft are very rich and powerful, no they are not trying to gain control of the planet, drain it from ressources and move on to other solar systems, and yes you can actually help somebody by doing this.