I was amused to find that retailers are selling a “Bill Gates Signature” version of Microsoft Vista. For a premium of more than a hundred dollars, one can buy Microsoft’s DRM-crippled operating system with Bill Gates’s scribbling on the box.
So what’s wrong with this picture? For starters, who would want Bill Gates’s signature? Yeah, as a young 14 year old geek I admired the brash, young 30-something geek that Bill Gates once was. Somewhere along the line he turned evil and that was that. In the words of the great Chapel Hill philosopher Mojo Nixon, Bill Gates has no Elvis in him. I don’t think I’m alone in saying the Cult of Bill Gates was short-lived if not stillborn.
Now a copy of OS X autographed by Steve Jobs (or even better, the God of Geekdom Steve Wozniak), now you’re talking. I’d pony up a few extra bucks for that! It’s because Jobs and Woz have something all of Gates’s billions can’t buy him: Hipness. Legions of devoted, fanatical customers. Great products that Just Work. Ingenuity. These guys don’t just spout the word “innovate” like Bill does, they live it.
OS X has its own share of DRM crippleware, though for the most part Apple still provides what its customers want, not what Hollywood thinks its customers want. At any rate, OS X users seem to be smart enough to work around any roadblocks Apple may put in front of them.
If Microsoft Vista is where things are headed, I’ll make The Switch to OS X, or perhaps stick with my trusty Linux.
Linux may be free, but Linus Torvolds’s signature is still worth more than Bill Gates’s.
Why or how is Bill Gates evil? If you don’t like his company’s products, do what you did and don’t buy them. Please enlighten me on the evils of Mr. Gates.
BTW-I see no added value in his signature either and I will let others work out the bugs in the new OS.
It’s a geek thing. You wouldn’t understand.
Someone’s already broken the Vista DRM, so no worries there. And that’s not nearly as bad as the EULA or the baffling 37 different copies of Vista they’re making. That said, it does look like a nice, cheap rip-off of OS X.
Why not switch to UBuntu? It’s coming close to doing everything OS X can do, and it’s completely open source.
it does look like a nice, cheap rip-off of OS X.
Vista is cheap all right, in every way but the price:
Full Version
$399 – Vista Ultimate
$299 – Vista Business
$239 – Vista Home Premium
$199 – Vista Home Basic
Upgrade
$259 – Vista Ultimate
$199 – Vista Business
$159 – Vista Home Premium
$ 99 – Vista Home Basic
Two hundred to four hundred bucks, just for the operating system?! I can buy an entire PC for less than $400 (after the mail-in rebates). Not to mention that you’ll need a fairly beefy system to make Vista run well: 2-GHz CPU, 1GB of memory, video card with dedicated memory (for Aero Glass), a DVD-ROM or RW drive (Vista doesn’t ship on CD, but you can special-order it that way).
Maximum PC summed it up best: We waited 5 years for this?
I’ll be Frank, even though I’m Greg: I have NO USE for Windows anything at home. If I need a PC to run Linux I’ll purchase a purpose-built single board system, like my Soekris machines, or I’ll build my own PC using quality parts. I object to purchasing a PC and having to pay a tax of sorts to Redmond for the privledge of having Vista pre-installed. Yuk! And no thanks.
I switch my home over to pure OS X over two years ago and I have been the happiest I’ve ever been in terms of a home network administrator. I sometimes miss having a Linux box around but I can always boot up an the old P4 running Debian if I need access to pure Linux tools.
As for Ubuntu being on-par with OS X? Not yet. They are making huge gains and massive headway and my within a few years get there but not yet.
As for Vista? My take on it is… whatever, who cares. I’ll let the unenlightened go down that path. There are open and closed source alternatives that will work just as well if not better in every way then Vista.
A note to the lemmings: there are many poeple who will help steer you away from the cliff but if you insist on running full-steam at it, I won’t try to stop you.
And Mark is right, Bill Gates is evil.
In general most of us have not had a choice when MS does a new operating system. They quit supporting new devices or support them badly. They offer some new support that is too nifty to ignore. The old operating system quits working well after a couple of MS maintenance installs.
Well after XP, I found that I could run my server on Linux. I found that a SUSE distribution of Linux worked just fine, giving me a MySQL database and an Apache server. The whole thing met my needs simply. I also found that I could hack my way through the vagaries of these new environments about as well as I could the MS environments.
On the other hand, my experience with the Linux server did not make me want to change my personal PC environment. Everything that I do there has become automatic. I didn’t (and don’t) want to break in a new set of “automatics”. I am used to all the Office products. On the whole my media edition of XP works well. I use Firefox and Thunderbird for browser/mail support. MS networking is a pain (I would love to have a long talk with someone there about using finite state machines to get closure on their network protocols). But, on the whole XP has been good for me.
Now MS has be worried. I have not heard anything good about their DRM. It will apparently require hardware with specialized interlocks that prevent me from playing video that has not been vetted through the MS permitting process. The new Office has changed all of its interfaces making it easier for newbies and harder for power users. The major features of this release appear to be oriented toward imitating another OS. Maybe it’s time to go with the OS they are imitating? I suspect that I will be able to stay with my “old” XP system for some time as MS hasn’t got VISTA stable enough to force a move. But, when I have to move they may have made the choice broader by making their new operating environment uncomfortable.