Normally I don't jump into others' arguments but here I have to agree with Woodinville - I recall that when he first joined he requested no more prodding into his identity, which is understandable for a resident of Redmond. It's good for this board to have an insider programmer's perspective - I mean, who better to know how the audio internals of Vista and WMA are set up? And Rjamorim comes along with a fat banner just for the cheap fun of revealing that Bruce Wayne is Batman

As far as Vista itself goes, well I'm still on 256MB RAM and a 1.4Ghz P4 with 80+40GB HDDs, and running Win98SE (with ongoing 3rd-party security patches linked from MSFN.org). While far from ideal, my system is stable enough and fast enough to handle the wide range of things I do. Truly, not counting high-end business applications, and not interested in the editing of personal videos, Vista could do nothing more for me as long as my current hardware stays intact.

I remember when Win95 was being developed, and word from MS was that they were doing all they could to make it possible to run it on systems with 4MB RAM. RAM being so much more abundant these days, it looks like MS has forgotten that 1994 ethos. Vista's minimum system requirements are obscene, and what are they for? That "flip 3D" thing must look awfully gauche to consumers in third-world countries running yesterday's hardware (Aero is snazzy but ultimately useless in terms of real productivity, or from the bottom line, except to hardware manufacturers).

I appreciate Vista's incremental improvements, e.g. in speech recognition, security, support for vector icons (moving towards a solution to the problem of LCD resolutions being too high for readable text), but somehow hardware requirements ballooned out of all proportion.

edit - also i don't like how native support for DOS programmes has been dropped in the 64-bit version. DOS!! Like a trusted grandpa.

First, I don't remember him asking people not to investigate his real identity or not.

Second, he spilled the beans himself when he used his indefectible signature in this very forum.

Third, I find it very low when someone with obvious bias (in this case, bias towards his employer) hides this situation and tries to pass off as unbiased. Woodinville does mention he lives in Redmond in his profile, but as far as I know, he never admitted working at Microsoft in this forum (I might be wrong, I'm not as active here as I used to be).

I believe in full disclosure to give people means to evaluate how valuable is the information I put forth. That's why I informed right away I was an intern at Microsoft and, therefore, all opinions on Microsoft coming from me should be taken with a grain of salt, no matter if these were good opinions or bad opinions.

Touche, about disclosure regarding working for the company being discussed. I just felt your iconoclasm was a bit excessive (and gleeful). With legalese the way it is these days, and all this emphasis on corporate secrecy (cf. that Microsoft VP's "I'd rather use a Mac" e-mail), bosses can't help being paranoid these days about what their charges do online. (I know folks firsthand who were fired for their blogs.) Ought government sources speaking under condition of anonymity to reveal their identity whenever they leak something to the press?
I guess it's natural for an expert in a field to try to draw a compromise between joining discussions/sharing expertise and protecting his/her career...

Regarding the bit about disclosure, I recall someone asking who he was and he merely (and purposefully) replied, "You may call me Woodinville "

you are working there now? sorry to hear

Memory requirements quadrupled with all "major" new windows version. With win95 you better had at least 64mb. With win2000 you better had at least 256 MB. With Vista you better have at least 1 GB.

"Minor" upgrades like win98 didnt up the requirements that much - as for winME.... better forget that it ever existed.

But in the past, every major upgrade offered significant improvements for the user. The problem with Vista is that from a critical user POV it does more "worse" than "better". And if you find most of the GFX irritating, then the few advantages get literally crushed by the disadvantages. And it is designed for adding even more limitations in the future via updates.

Will most users upgrade to it when the get a new PC? Yes, simply because they are stupid and noncritical. They just obey orders and do what they re told to do.

To me, there does however seem to be an unusually high chance that it will alienate a significant amount of critical users - which may switch OSes. Thus resulting in a society of dumb MS Windows users and advanced other-OS users.

Why does MS do this? Because they arent just power-drunk anymore - they ve become power-mad. They are so certain about being invulnerable now, that they think that they can pull anything off without caring about the users desires at all. MS is now certain about their marketshare and foothold, so they think that now is the time to make unpopular advancements "since we re now invulnerable anyways".

- Lyx

I fully agree with Lyx.
MS is, now, out of the real word. I hope more people will switch, at least, to Firefox or Opera, to OpenOffice, and so on; and I see in my businnes area more and more people ask "so, what do you think about... ... you know, the windows with the penguin(!)"

In that case they're not leaking opinions, they are leaking facts. Therefore, being biased or not makes no difference as far as the value of whatever information they leaked is concerned.



Quite honestly, I'm not enjoying it. But it'll look good on my CV, so I endure...

Besides, it's not work, it's a temporary internship. Won't last long...

Honestly, besides of the "power-drunk"-aspect, linux is not much different than windows regarding the effects. Windows is designed from a corporate POV. The linux-architecture is designed from a programmers POV. Both lack understanding about the actual purpose of a tool: "using it to get stuff done". Windows gets bloated via corporate-greed, Linux gets bloated via decentralized architecture and everything-depends-on-everything.

Macs possibly come closest to this goal - though, still suboptimally. Macs though have other issues in turn - especially regarding easy availability of 3rd party software which can be found, installed and used by average-joe.

I dont like any of those three options. Though, if i'd be forced to pick one, because my XP became unusable, it would currently be a Mac.

(currently) every OS sucks.

- Lyx

Either produce evidence of this alleged "bias" or stop making such accusations.

The article you keep pointing to is seriously flawed, and appears to have taken a set of assumptions leading to the worst possible position. I can not speak for the author or why that is the case, but that appears to be the situation. You have not addressed this at all, you simply continue to spread scorn and derision, without measurement or example.

Show me your measurements.

Not suppositions, or 3rd party hearsay, your actual, repeatable measurements.

(edited for typographic errors)

Interning for MS means absolutely nothing. Back when I was in college, the president of the local LUG interned at MS for a summer. He loved it!

---

I've never touched Vista, but from what I've read, its audio chain is quite superior to Windows XP's. A full floating-point processing chain? Built-in DSP effects that are actually useful and well-written, like dynamic range compression and room correction? A better interface for low-latency audio? Are all of you people who claim that Vista doesn't have anything for you smoking crack? Or are you just too stuck up not to recognize good things when they pass by?

It humors me considerably to shill for MS like this, but it seems like they actually has people working on the audio chain who know what they are doing, and implemented competitive features that really do matter to people. Don't get me wrong, I think the rest of Vista's features suck. I don't care at all about Aero, I'm worried about the future of OpenGL on the platform (but I'm not convinced MS is trying to bury it yet), the DRM is abominable, the driver architecture is an train wreck waiting to happen. And don't get me started on tilt bits. But the audio chain seems pretty reasonable to me.

Again, I say all this not having any real experience in it. But judging by the "evidence" that Roberto and others have provided, nobody else here does either. Woodinville almost certainly does, but he hasn't been particularly forthcoming in any rationales or insights. I wouldn't exactly call his behavior astroturfing, although it might appear like it. So I'll respect it.

One can argue that MS is playing catch up to CoreAudio, but again, I haven't delved into OSX enough to make a fair comparison. Superficially, MS has done a much better job with integrating DSP effects than Apple has. But Apple was, as usual, first with a modern high-performance audio interface, and probably has a leg up on many things. I'm not going to make a judgement between the two.

But what's going on in this thread is hyperbolic frothing at the mouth. Trusted computing could sacrifice your firstborn, just like Windows XP Home could have disabled users' machines due to spurious hardware changes. By "could", I mean "doesn't". Nobody's actually shown real-world evidence yet that Vista's audio chain will spontaneously combust when not playing protected content. Show me a real example, then I'll get scared. The floating-point path will not conduct an illicit affair with your FLAC collection and deprive them of their bit-perfect virginity. And if it does - who cares? Go to Exclusive Mode and forget about it. Otherwise, show me a successful DBT or get the hell out.

Another thing. I haven't touched Linux audio for about 5 years, but what I recall is that it's an absolutely stone age interface that was maybe competitive with Windows 98. I feel that ALSA, XMMS, JACK and esound all suck at a technical level. The only thing that was remotely nice about it is PortAudio, which also happens to be crossplatform... LADSPA is sort of nice too, but it too is not really Linux-specific. So remind me why people defend Linux audio on technical grounds?

FWIW, I don't work for MS, and never have, and I don't work for an all-MS shop, and I generally avoid shilling for my employer (who shall remain happily nameless). I used Linux as my primary desktop for about 5 years, but all my environments are Windows now, for no important reasons.

Well, you know, I haven't said everything that I could say simply because I thought that would be rude, and would look like I was shilling for the product.

It seems that merely pointing out errors in a horridly flawed article, however, is now being presented as deliberate shilling. It is not. The article is wrong.

Gutmann's article is, as the blog that whazzisname points out, wrong in some particulars, and pretty much as uncharitable as possible in the rest.

The simple evidence that people can, and do, easily play music over Vista ™ shows that the article is wrong, and the claims silly. This is called "evidence", as opposed to "flaming" or "assertion" or "bias" or hearsay from articles.

I COULD say more about the room correction, loudness EQ, etc, but I frankly do think that would look like shilling on this board, no matter what. So I won't. I have tried to avoid saying who I am, because I am NOT trying to speak from a position of personal authority, even though I could choose to do so, because everyone's claims and ideas should be examined and tested, even Gutmann's and rjamorjims.

In short, I haven't said more because my perception is that it, and I, am pretty much unwelcome here.

Rjamorjim(sp?)'s performance just reinforces that perception.

And, having said this, I expect an apology from rjamorjim and a return to technical discussions. This is a waste of time.

While eveyone else was beating each other with sticks, I got some work done:

My computer (according to them)
Intel Pentium 4 CPU 3.20 GHZ
2.00 GB RAM
nVidia GeForce 6800GT
Windows Experiance Index: 4.3
Processer 4.3
RAM 4.5
Graphics 5.9
Gaming 5.1
Primary HD 5.2

RAM USED:
Just Windows: approx. 470MB
Adding Media Player: 500MB meaning 30MB for WMP (compare to foobar or winamp, he he)
Opening Media Center : down to 375MB, which means it dropped some things.

that's all for now. I'll have more later.
PS: I am intrested to see the effects on a sub-par system, plaese don't make me kill Linux on my PIII in the name of science...

Don't get so worked up. Bias is natural. I'm personally biased towards and against a lot of things. Quoting Al Gore quoting Upton Sinclair:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."



Let me clarify one thing: not in any moment you pointed out errors in Gutmann's article. You told me to read the replies and look more deeply into his claims, and that's all.



Yes, play music, but not ANY kind of music. Protected music, that is. Or "premium content" as the documentation puts it.



Keep expecting. I only apologize when I genuinely repent for something I did. And I didn't do anything in this thread that warrants my repentance, IMO. And you still didn't point out where I insulted you.

I think you are dangerously close to trolling.

Personally, I think revealing real-world information about a member in an anonymous enviroment is quite rude. Perhaps your political or religious beliefs impair your objective opinion and should be "investigated"...

I also think accusing a member of bias with no evidence other than a knowledge of that person's employer is improper. I have had the misfortune of having to read this whole thread, and all I have seen is Woodinville ask members for evidence of their statements (something HA has always been keen on) and an open mind.

Before using windows XP I was all like "oh, that looks so cool compared to windows 2000". Then after I used it, it didn't seem that great.

It will probably be that way for Aero too.



I dont know much about speech recognition, but I doubt vista has better security. Based on what microsoft has said in the past about improving security (which I think fixed some problems but made more problems), its all just them saying stuff. Nothing real. Though I havn't studied vistas security, so I cant know for sure.

Though vector icon support is great



Ive never noticed that before... Odd, and kinda scary :/



I had always thought 98 was something big, as people still use it now (but not many use 95). But I guess it is minor compared to 95 and 2000.



That is, in my opinion, the worst part of it all.

Microsoft willingly doing whatever the big movie/music corporations tell them to do. "Just following orders" didnt work to well at nuremburg, and if people were rational, it wouldn't work now.



Good take on it.

That careless attitude has been the downfall of many empires, and hopefully...



Heh, I think linux seems to get it done better then windows. Unless the user is a really basic user.



Macs, in my opinion, don't come close in the usability department. What I mean is that the interface doesn't seem that logical. I cant point anything out specificly right now, but just the way it is... This might be from my use of windows for so long, but heh.

Linux is most of the time logical, aside from the "do it our way or dont do it at all" attitude the linux community sometimes takes as a whole towards some things.

Windows is kind of logical, but when you think about it, it doesn't generally seem to have that many complicated (not in terms of complicated code, but in functionality) things to do. But that may be from the fact that linux has more (usefull, not the OEM trial bloat stuff) software that comes with it.

Come to think about it, if microsoft did something like APT or YUM with repositories and all it couldn't do that well because it doesent have alot of credibility among developers.

I dont know if I made much sense in that whole thing, but oh well.

Maybe we can publish this in a compilation book called "Indecent Forum Behavior 2: Extreme Moderation". We could make HUNDREDS! (Dr. Evil theme music)


I couln't stand the look is XP as well, let alone Vista. IMO, it's like an anorexic model wearing too much make-up, prompting the question, 'Is that supposed to be sexy?'. The answer is, for me at least, a resounding 'no' and Windows Classic mode it is.

It should be noted that rjamorim HAS been warned for his behavior in this thread. You know very well rjamorim that name-calling and other techniques you like to apply are not welcome here.

I really think that we should have the warn status displayed for all members, as it would help in situations like this.

Anyway, rjamorim please stop pushing your luck and let the conversation continue in an acceptable manner.

Aw cmon! A little while more at this and I could make a concrete compatison between Roberto and Todd Krieger.

A couple of questions on the experiment.

1) What RAM measurement are you using? The nature of shared DLLs causes some uncertainty, and the values reported by the task manager are (apparently) horribly misleading under manu circumstances. Then throw in the system cache issue...

It might be somewhat more useful to use Process Explorer and track the several separate values of: Private Bytes, Virtual Size, Working Set, WS Private, WS Shareable, WS Shared.

2) Are you rebooting in between experiments?

-brendan

I'm also sceptical of the worth of those figures, as Vista's supposed to be better able to scale its usage with the amount of available RAM -- unused RAM is wasted RAM -- and 2GB is a lot for it to play with.

I agree with you 100%, but I have yet to DL any extensive memory and benchmarking tools. Any tool recommendations would be apprecieated. I'll look into the Process Explorer if you have doubts about Task Manager.


I rebooted before loading the Media Center enviornment. Even if I didn't, for Media Player / Media Center I'm sure they share a lot of the same code anyway.


I'm actually kinda jaded because I was originally going to get 4GB, I actually got 2GB, and I've never gone over 1GB in XP even with beefy games and media apps running. I agree that unused ram (for the most part) is wasted ram, but I'm not whining about ram use because I don't have enough, but because the average consumer PC just now started shipping with 1GB+ of ram and most will need to upgrade the memory, if not their whole machine, for Vista. I still would like to see Vista on a sub-par 256-512MB PC, ya know, one that would run XP/2K just fine.

Not to be too pedantic, but...the third quote you attributed to me (see above) was actually text posted by euphonic.

-brendan

Noted and fixed.

I have to admit, I use photoshop a lot. I just fill up memory...

The operating system isn't even much of a factor there...

I agree. After using vista for a month, i removed it and went back to xp; i just couldn't justify the extra bloat. Looks like Vista is the new Windows ME.

Windows has always been the new ME, hasn't it?

Oh, now we're going straight down fanboyville. /me goes looking for a padlock

well, it seems that in the people there is some sort of updater thingy waiting to sc*** the current stable system..., i have killed the wish for a while by installing zune theme for xp sp2 (oh, and i got a new cpu, that will do it for a while)

I will wait until the comany release some decent Vista driver...Creative, nVidia is a mess right now with Vista driver situtation :/

I luuuuurve my Windows-2003-as-a-workstation

Seriously. Windows NT 5.1 is really stable and uses less resources than Windows NT 5.0

Is Vista = Windows NT 6.0?

Yep Windows Version 6.0

Windows Vista is NT6 in kernel "revisions", Yeah. Longhorn Server and eventually Vista (after SP1) will be NT6.1, though.

I liked it when I had it, but it didn't reconize my external acomdata hard drive. Anoying :/

I realize this topic hasn't been touched in a while but I've just made the move to Vista 64 after SP1 became available. I have two issues so far that I really haven't been able to resolve. I have a fairly decent system which I built myself with the following specifications :

AMD64 x2 4600+ processor
4GB Super Talent DDR-II 800 memory
Gigabyte GA-MA770-S3 motherboard
Asus 8500GT video card

The motherboard has a RealTek 888 audio chip which is pretty good as far as I can tell. I've also tried the Creative PCIE X-Fi Extreme Audio (a Audigy 2 under the hood I'm told). Both devices have the latest drivers available for them and the motherboard has the latest BIOS revision available.

1) Vista is indicating a high amount of CPU utilization when playing any audio. FB2K is using about 15~25% over the 2~10% that Vista alone uses. WinAmp uses a little more generally speaking though this could be due to the somewhat active graphics in that applications. Of course Windows Media Player is just plumb pathetic using about 50% more than WinAmp and frequently pings one of the cores over 75% utilization.

2) Another problem I've had is getting 5.1 sound for my Logitech Z5500's from either sound card via the SPDIF optical cable. It simply won't work. I get 2 channels and that's it. And that's from both cards.

Note that I'm not entirely incapable when it comes to computers and I've optimized many Win95 ~ WinXP systems for end users. I've also made a couple of tweaks to drop the CPU usage down slightly on this system as well. Still, there is some reason for this high usage that I simply can't figure out. Any recommendations short iof rolling back to XP are most welcome.

P.S. I forgot to mention that the audio files are .wav's ripped directly from CD's and stored on an internal hard drive though I found no difference when I tried MP3's as well. Also there is no antivirus installed as I don't bother with such things.

Oh well. Like so many opthers, I just dumped Vista. Now playback takes 0~1% of the proc. under XP x64.

Diggin' this thread outta the dumpster, huh?



Putting off building my next computer because I'm STILL using XP...

So am I. I stick to XP, and stay away from Vista like the plague.

Oh, and I'm part of this growing movement:

For MS's sake, I hope Win7 doesn't flop as well.

Anyways, it has been a very good few years for Apple and Linux

Indeed!

Ive moved to Linux pretty much fulltime (sure i cant play crysis but thats a good thing) and have installed it on everyones box that used to bother me with computer problems (even my grandparents!). Yes my grandparents are using Xubuntu! Probably the most computer illiterate people i know and they say its easier then windows. No pop ups, firewalls, doesnt fragment, doesnt crash, runs on last decade machines (xfce). . . it works! Average joe with a $400 box just needs someone to set it up for them. . . get all the codecs/plugins and then just click on the update icon when they see it till their computer brakes.

I don't care about Windows Vista.
I havn't tried Vista.
Not for as long as I can help it.

Only Microsoft has a need for Vista. Of course they opt to sell Windows to everybody over again rather than provide service packs for free. The interface must be different and the whole package must be bigger in order to justify the purchase in eyes of the consumer. If the product looked like normal Windows (Win98/2k), some wouldn't understand why pay again. But bigger is perceived as better the same way as louder is.

I have not tried to play with Vista yet, because there is no free computer for experiments of this kind. I've interacted with it a little on a client's computer and was offended that nothing in the interface is where it used to be.

Tried Vista, hated it. I'll wait for Windows 7, gonna be built around Windows Server 2008, which kicks ass

For now I'll stick to OpenSUSE 11.0 and OS X

My main reasons for not wanting to use Vista:
0) The high system requirements - especially the CPU.
My Athlon XP system works fine for me still but would throw a huge fit if asked to run Vista. Next year will be 8 years if memory serves for my main winXP box and win2k crash box (with upgrades along the way of course).
1) The cost - I have no intentions of paying for a microsoft operating system, unless that 'Windows 7' is available in a form resembling *nix. As in a more modular kernel with a better variety of GUIs available ranging from minimal to full blown eyecandy.
For that matter I would just dual boot WinXP and BSD/Linux/whatever else and incur no additional cost in the OS area whenever I move to the world of PCIE slots and SATA.

Vista is in the 'no real need for it personally' category that covers Internet Explorer and MS office as well.

Speaking of interface bloat, I don't understand the concept of "server core" they're pushing (server editions of Vista only). Why these two extremes? The choice is between Vista gui with huge fat icons, and no gui at all. Why the heck we can't have normal graphic interface with icons that are just big enough to relay the message? A normal work computer, not a 3D game. They criticized nLite for providing modularity, yet failed to deliver a comparable installer themselves.

Update: Still not running Vista and still no plans to ever do. In the meantime, because of my job, i've interacted with over 100 vista boxes, and while i like that microsoft is providing me with income because of all the vista problems, my problem is that the most frequent "solution" i propose to customers, is to "upgrade to XP", simply because vista considers itself to be so perfect, that i have little flexibility in manually correcting or overriding stuff. Vista knows whats best, so no need to let the user/technician decide. Seriously, without drastic modifications, vista has some remarkable similarity to a trojan horse - a fully automated remote control, disguised as an OS.

I find that there isn't enough improvement in Vista, and as such to me upgrading to it seems quite pointless unless one really likes the eyecandy. Especially since most software released for Vista will also support XP for quite some time.

I value a solid stable system above anything else. For that I run Arch Linux as my main and XP x64 for when I need windows.