Everybody’s touting Vista nowadays. That it’s better than XP [I know some who will disagree] and better than Mac OS X, tried and true Windows technology. That it now looks good and macheads should cry in shame looking at their own system. It’s finally beautiful inside and out.

Bullshit.

First off, a professional disclaimer: I recognize - after speaking with a few MS employees and just paying attention to most of the tech world - that most of these decisions are up to management to make. That when implementing a new system, the architects would do things in their own way rather than copy something that’s already out there - it’s a Geek Thing™. Especially when you’re starting up with something fresh, why not? This and all my other rants are directed towards some of those people that make these decisions and, unfortunately, give Microsoft its image.

Imitation is flattery. Everybody in tech has taken things from everybody else and put out their own version with some changes. There are too many examples in tech history to go over at this point. The problem with most of what Microsoft has tried to copy is that they haven’t managed to quite make the mark - and rarely [if even, I can't think of an example] exceed it. They’ve been playing catch because of their complacency as a big company - stability over innovation.

How did they miss the mark this time around?

Vista needs you to buy a supercomputer. That would be fine if it was doing something remarkably shocking.

• UI? I’m doing everything that Vista does on a 1.33 GHz G4 PPC on 32 MB VRAM and 1.5 GB RAM. It’s going quite fine, thank you [to note that the RAM is needed for me keeping open about a dozen apps at any given time; UI can be pulled in just as well on the default 512].
• Multimedia? Well, provided you manage to play any video content on Vista at all, it shouldn’t be that demanding: HD is handled quite spectacularly by any mactel [I'm doing fine with H.264, haven't played with anything above that.] On Vista, though, you need a big CPU to handle all that intensive polling that the DRM system is doing 30 times a second to make sure you’re not trying to - e.g. - splice into the video signal.
• Games? Some BSoD-ing is in order, just to keep in check [MS should change their logo and tag line to "General Protection Fault: You were trying to use the computer"] I assume this is another one of the exciting features [excitement is one way to describe your state post-BSoD].

Photos… Gadgets…