Windows Vista: Death to Menus?

I tend to like the way that OS X blends the menus into a permanent top-taskbar that updates the options (file, Edit, View, etc.) eveytime you switch apps. Also OS X makes the drop-down windows slightly transparent so they fell less intrusive and more modern feeling. Windows does a pretty good job of making the menus functional, but as this column suggests, they could do a better job of making them easier to work with; both visually and contextually.

There are a number of difficulties to overcome if you want to abandon menus. The advantage of menus, althought they are confusing, is that they do reduce the memory load required of the user. People often can't describe where a command is within a menu, but give them the mouse and they will find it quickly; a bit of the remembering task is done for you by the menus themselves. Also, menus are always there, whatever you are doing. The ribbon risks creating frequent "mode errors" where the user can't find something because the application is in the wrong mode, so it is not actually there. This, like the failed "personalized menus", can make learning harder. However, if Microsoft can design it such that the modes are clear and unambiguous, this effect is minimised. But then again, this is the same challenge when trying to create successful menus; finding a clear, unambiguous arrangement. The strength of the ribbon vs menus is that it can present pictures instead of words, which removes the difficulty of naming functions that people haven't heard of, and you can see the effects of your choice before you choose it. This is why Microsoft has chosen the ribbon over menus.

They should keep the menus. It might intimidate non-geeks and prevent them from upgrading. If that were to happen, then Microsoft could lose $$$. At least an option to use the menu style would be nice.

I don't care either way. As long as I can to what I need quickly then I don't care. In some places a ribbon might be the best solution and in other places a menu might be the best. As long as M$ uses common sense in placing the different elements then it could very well be an improvement over XP.

As long as it works and gets the job done then I will use it.

Hi,
I was wondering about the Defragmentation on Vista? Is it the same on Window's XP Home Edition?
Also, what is the best way to do a Deragmentation? Is it better to do it in the Safe Mode? Also, sir I am having trouble figureing out Defragmentation. Turn off all running programs, what does that mean? To turn off Screensaver,Antivirus,Firewall, and Automatic Updates (all these should be turned off to do a defragmentation, right?) Or is it OK to do a defragmentation by just turning off the screensaver? How is the proper way to do a correct and more effective deragmentation?? Please help me with this, I have heard that in Vista I won't have to worry about this! I have Microsoft Window's XP Home Edition for my OS, and it's preinstalled by HP.My email; address is tennws@yahoo.com , my name is Teddie.
--Thanks,

What's so bad about menus? If it's just that they're hard to navigate, then instead of trying to find a different way to display them that may only make them even MORE confusing, can't you just get smarter developers to develop programs that don't HAVE a million menu options, as though they JUST figured out how to do menus and are having WAY too much fun with it? I HATE the way WMP tries to get rid of the menus...

Sorry. In my opinion, both Vista and the hardware it requires would be too expensive (for me at least). So I have migrated to Linux a while ago and have no plan to go back to Vista and whatsits.

I think Vista will turn out to be a great OS

Menus are good. Let's not forget the days of DOS when there were no menus.

It's like anything... make it easy to use and people will use it; complicate it and folks will look for alternatives... hello Macintosh?

Bob - your days of command line applications may not have featured menus, but those of us on decent operating systems have had menus in cli apps for *years*.
Cage Fighter Pretend - you come anywhere near my menus with that crazy global menu idea and there'll be trouble! ;)

HMM GOOD WORK

I have 3 versions of Linux on CD that I won't reinstall. I have a Mac and it just sits there and as long as there is an XP Pro machine in the house, that won't change. I like the Windows look and feel. I like the menus. A wise man once told me, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". Menus are fine...by the way, how do I rearrange the icons on my Mac? Right click and then.....?

lefty click and drag my friend.

click anywhere on the desktop to switch the menu bar to 'finder'. then just click on View and arrange icons :)

ChrisJones - just because it works from a text terminal doesn't mean it's CLI... I personally make a distinction between no-interface no-menu command lines (ls -l | grep ^d) and screen oriented text-GUIs (e.g. emacs, lynx, mutt, etc.).

I can't wait for the new features of Vista. While Windows might not be as secure as some other operating systems (or even work properly, in some cases - such as plugging in a usb mouse) it's good to know that the geniuses there are focusing on the *other* bane of civilization: confusing menus.

Seriously. WTF. Release date late 2006? You should go try OSX. Release date: oh, sorry 5 years ago.

a

Windows messed up menus from day 1. The point of having a GUI was that it was supposed to make the usage of applications consistent from app to app. By making the core 60% or so of every applications menu consistent from app to app, the end user could learn new apps quickly.

Windows mucked this up from day 1 by implementing menus on a "per app" basis. Each application has it's own menu system. This allowed developers to make basic tasks like closing windows. preferences and printing use different keyboard shortcuts (and put them in different menus). This is why there is no consistency in the Windows interface.

The original Mac OS tackled this task better than any OS before it or since it (even OS X isn't quite up to the rigid UI standards of the original Mac OS). Windows (and Linux) fail miserably in this regard.

I applaud Microsoft for trying to attack this problem from a new vantage point, but so far what I've seen is actually worse than what they had previously.

And Dave - yes it is broke. And if you want to move an icon, you click on it and drag. Nice concept, huh?

It's been a long waiting, i hope it's worth it

I think many are missing the point here ... it isn't that menus are evil or that they should go away, but that in Vista even the reprensenattion of them is no longer consistent, let alone the menus themselves.

It will just complicate things for Windows users. I would suggest to Microsoft to different programs such as Windows Explorer, Internet Explorer, Notepad, Windows Media Player 11 and other programs under Accessories or System Tools should have a standard menu system. For example, like what you mentioned, the Ribbon system is the most viable option, then it should be available on every tools or programs on Windows. Since Windows 95, a lot of users are having hard time on how to find menus, such as Scandisk, it is totally different from different programs such as Defragmenter and other utility programs.

Consistancy is not a problem for me. I found it easier to have menus in per-app basis than the menu that sticks up at the top of the screen.

I say "to hell with the menus". Everyone is so focused on standardized menus across all programs and, personally, I think thats horrible. Different apps work in different ways and not all of them will benefit from the same menu structure/concept. Its the same reason why different programming languages exist: you use the right tool for the right job, there is not one-size-fits-all. As long as an application has an intuitive interface for what it is supposed to do, then I couldn't care less if it did or didn't have menus. A lot of simple applications get borked because they were molded to fit the interface, not the other way aroud.

Oh, and as for OS X, the only thing consistent about their interface is the menu on the top. After that, color scheme, button size/layout, etc differ widly between programs. That doesn't bother me either but you can't argue that OS X has a more consistent interface than XP. I'd argue its the opposite.

I think some innovation around using menus is necessary. As features continue to expand in everyday software, menus as a static method of accessing specific functionality are responsible for perceived feature-bloat. Instead, intelligently displaying options to a user in place is interesting - let's see how it works out.

However, I agree that consistency is key!

Mac OS X is WAY more consistent in UI guidelines (hence HIG) than any other operating system on the planet. Windows can be as bad as Linux (if not worse) in some cases. Especially since Apple almost dictates to 3rd software developers how to strategically place and identify UI elements in any application. Microsoft on the other hand does not, I mean, trying to find the preference utility within any application on Windows can be a nightmare on its own; there is no consistency at all in that regard!

From the looks of these screenshots, Vista is going to be dated even before it's released! What's up with the blue glow stuff?

While the ribbon idea sounds cool, I think in practise it's just going to offer one more thing to confuse the user (with multiple windows open, why is "save" an icon on some, a menu on others, a button in yet another, etc. etc.?)

At least on OSX you have an application menu (with stuff like 'about/preferences/quit'), the File menu (for 'open/close/save'), Edit (for 'cut/copy/paste'). With Windows it's up to the developer, and with Vista they'll have yet *another* version to mess up.

Besides, aren't we missing the point that IS THIS ALL WE'RE GETTING??? We wait 5 years with an embarrassment of an operating system, and now they're gonna tout redesigning menus as a main update?? Hello? What about a decent file system, security or actual performance???

I don't particulary have problems with menus. The thing that drives me nuts is when a particular menu item is greyed out for some reason or the other. I mainly see this in photoshop, and it's frustrating if you're trying to perform an action on a photo but you have no idea why the program is not letting you do it.

From what you've described, MS isn't really getting rid of menus ... they're just hiding them, while making them available in another form.

Am I not correct?

Personally, i doubt that the way the new "menus" in Vista look now are they way they're gonna look when it ships, and the fact that there are different types in the various apps means that quite simply, each of the apps are in a different stage of their respective development. I'm fairly positive everything will flow at least as good as XP when it ships. I use Linux btw (I work for Novell) - SUSE10...

I think context menus (including this ribbon stuff) is a positive thing, but it shouldn't replace the locked menu options of an app.

I think there's some benefits to the OS X menu approach, but in my opinion you could just plunk all the common application commands under a SINGLE menu (new, open, close, save, cut, copy, paste, preferences, view, print) and then leave the rest of the top level of menu for application specific options. Laying out functionality varies greatly from program to program and it just seems silly to cram them under menus that might not make sense.

You can bash the non-Mac operating systems in UI all you want, but it certainly doesn't fit everyone and the main device for interaction has been severly lagging for years. The right click on a mouse is instantly intuitive, fast and powerful. The mouse evolved in the PC realm years ago with more buttons, scrollwheels and wirefree hassle.

I almost never use the toolbars in Office, remembering what the icons do is much more annoying than clicking on the menu.
Menus are great for complex apps, but a bit overdue for the simple ones (such as notepad). I don't think it's a good idea to pull them out alltogether and replace them with buttons(just think of Photoshop and it's zillion features - they could never fit onto tool bars). It should be the developper's choice, as it is now.
What I'd really like to see is the menubar merged with the title one (like in Win iTunes) - the title bar is the real waste of visible space - so much space just for a title and three tiny buttons.
The real usability features should be within the main apps : the Taskbar, Windows Explorer, application layout on the desktop; - that's where the real innovation should come from.

Menus do a lot more than just provide a place to click for an function. They can be disabled, the can have default options, icons and keyboard defaults. They also have a common structure that makes learning a new app easy: File, Edit, View, Tools and Help all do similar things in different apps. I'm afraid that all this is about to go away.

as long as they have a setting to revert back to a more 'classic' windows look then i see no problem with trying a new approch

I have to point out the worse culprit with menus: Windows Media Player/Real Player. 90% of the time, I just want to play a freakin' CD, but instead, I'm assaulted with an AOL-level of advertising, and then forced to scan roughly 300 menu options to figure out how to play a CD, retrive album info or turn off the freakin' advertising, etc. Itunes/Napster never would have happened if they had got this right to begin with. And I haven't even mentioned the inconsistent interface, the bloatware or the memory hog of these apps. AND I can't move the WMP toolbar anywhere else?

I can play any music clip in a web browser, but playing a CD takes a software suite? Unbelievable.

I don't care about the menu ..it's windows!...microsoft doesn't really care about user interface...windows is the only game in town ...and if it's good ..we are lucky....if it sucks.... man.... it going to suck for any computer I use...so vista ? longhorn?..whatever...who is coming up with those names? ...I don't care...they know we have no choices but to buy windows .. monopoly?? you say......menu or no menu? it's doen't matter we are at theire merci...good luck windows users....good luck....

Leave the menus Microsoft assholes!

Do you have no moderators for these comments? A nice little puff piece by Harry is being hijacked by idiots. Since Apple has the best OS, why do they not license it to OEMs to expand their market? Why are they not doing that?

Why do away with the menus? I've gotten used to them. Seems like everyone wants to do away with all of the old stuff. And by the way, I dread Windows Vista. Pentium 3s and even a few lower level Pentium 4s won't be able to use Vista because of it's high memory requirement: 512MB! Outrageous! 2000 and XP both are the best that OSes that M$ has come out with ever, and I don't think they can come out with anything better.

What ever happened to Compuserve?

Since most people run at at least 600x800 these days, there is a lot of space across the top to support of thin line of classic menu categories. I think MS should first put a lot of effort into re-thinking and standardizing a classic menu foundation that would always exist at the top of each application and be extremely consistent. Under that, they can experiment with a variety of intuitive graphic menus or what ever generates progress. The classic menu strip across the top would be the consistent rock you could always depend on and it would avoid too much content senstive ommission and be fairly complete.

I like text ... a bit of well-chosen text is almost always going to be easier for a new user to decipher than some obscure 16 pixel graphic (some graphic software commands being a notable exception). And because text takes up a lot of space, and menu structures are so, well, spacious, then I would hate to see Vista throw away the menu.

Tool buttons work well as shortcuts to frequently-used menu items, and as such are great to speed the mouse-use of users who know the basics of the software. But I think it's wrong to assume that because GUIs are "graphic" that the ultimate goal should be to use graphics for everything. For a lot of design problems, text is about the best UI device available. Attempting to replace every text item with a graphic, just for the sake of change and to differentiate the product from the competition (which I think is what's going on here) is seriously misguided.

where's the catfish?

Until Microsoft puts windows on a more stable platform such as..*cough* Unix. They will always be behind in the game against Apple. Come on seriously it takes a lot longer for a Mac to become obsolete. However, I work in a PC repair industry and I am soon to get MSDN subscription. So I may take a look at Vista myself.

To Ted and a few others: don't blame MS for the UI issues of 3rd party software, blame the software developers.

You are completly fooling yourself to expect a magical '60% or so' similarity from such a wide variety of applications. An OS is supposed to be a platform for a wide variety of applications, not about standardizing the menu systems and UIs of all the software that runs on it. That's a job for software developers and most apps already have similar menus for the features that are actually the same/common.

I don't like UI based Menus... Textual is good...
Copy is Copy, Play is Play, Eject is Eject...
I find it difficult to use applications which have their own different way of 'picturizing' things...

Consistency will be an issue I think...
But I am eagerly waiting for new version of Windows

One of the problem that M$ try to solve is that you want to do something but you doesn't know where is it, so you do it in a different and more complicated way. There's the real potential of the Ribbon thing.

BUT, it's not the ultimate solution, I'm used to the current menus, and the menus is (almost) standarized across the applications, so if I have a new App, I know where are the Options, Preferences, Copy, Paste, etc. and I'm not driven by what the app thinks I want.

For me, a combination of both ideas would be the best.

I am almost certainly in the minority here but as an old school AutoCAD user toolbars and icons do nothing but slow work down they NEVER make anything faster, or easier. In my CAD programs as well as most others I have keyboard shortcuts for every command I use often and use menus for the rest. Screen real estate is at a premium for many apps CAD and graphics spring immediately to mind here. Toolbars and icons eat space, they are not faster and they never will be, regardless of how cleverly they are arranged.

I don't think menus are that bad, at least for its consistency.

With the new ribbon thingy, they'll need some new way to make plp access all function regardless what their're doing. Else i don't think its a good idea at all.

i am a technical support, what if plp ask how to bold a text and the there is no one fix way to access bold function regardless what their doing? how will u tell them?

I agree with vikas, above. I have absolutely no use for icons. Who wants to try to remember what all those arbitrary shapes stand for? Life is too short for anything but plain English. I have a digital camera with all buttons marked by completely meaning-free geometric symbols. I cannot do anything with that camera without poring over the manual first.

Seems like we're going back to the pre-Windows, pre-Mac era of old. Every program was totally different, had totally different menus or whatever... Remember Lotus 123, Wordstar, Harvard Graphics circa 1988? That's how it's gonna be, all over again! I'm not buying, and neither is my company!

It does not matter what Microsoft does to Windows Vista, it will never be up to the standard of Apple's OSX. Microsoft had lost the battle a long time ago. I used to be the hard core PC user, until I used a Mac at school for projects and stuff. Now I own two Macs and the pc is the closet collecting dust. Ha...Ha...

......uuuuuuum, while you are waiting for another "blindoes" OS, hoping that it will be... lets say better than xp (keep the faith),... there we are, the mac users, praying for you to get in the right way ;)

Apple does menus right, reliable and consistent: i can always find preferences, print, or copy when i need them. Text is the fastest and simplest form, you can glance down any list and pick out what you want instantly.

I couldn't begin to find preferences, or options as office calls them, in the new office menu system, but in any mac os x application i know it will be the second or third item in the application menu. always.

If it does or doesn't use menus doesn't bother me so much. I just hope that it has backward compatibility like XP. A few of my progs still run through Win 95 so I need XP's capabilities. The display looks nice tho. :)

and this is just one of the many reasons i finally switched to mac a few months ago. windows will hype something up, make you wait for it, and then dissapoint you. i will not be part of that anymore. so long windows world, i will not miss you.

People will use Vista only if Microsoft uses some hooks like the DRM technology to force everybody to move to the new OS. Linux, already allows the user to customize the "look and feel" of the whole desktop. And OpenOffice shows the appropriate toolbars for the appropiate object you are manipulationg. For example a picture. The one thing I liked about Vista was the potensially usefull FS but they took it out of the next release.

i think microsoft has really dropped the ball the last few years, while their expansion into the server market has been more successful the change of focus seems to have really damaged windows desktop, as it seems there is no Major alteriative (while linux and mac OS are out there not many companies are useing them on the desktop in large scale) so for our sake lets hope they can grab the ball before it hits the ground.

When I do something in PowerPoint like select a drawing object on the screen, there is a known set of things I am likely to want to do. Today, I have to either right click (and hope I actually select the option I want) or go hunting in menus or toolbars for what I need. So, to have something pop up that has the choices I am likely to want -- right there -- would be a great feature. And, I could use it out of the gate with no training.

Here's an example: I select three rectangles. And the ribbon that pops up includes an 'Align' section with the align options listed out, and I can click on them. "One click alignment." That would save me from having to select the objects, find the 'draw' button in the lower left, select 'Align' and then the option I want. It's worse if the menu doesn't have align listed because I haven't used it lately. Tell me that you haven't wondered if you are in the wrong menu when that happens.

I can tell Vista is going to be more intuitive than OS X

I don't mind menus at all. What I hate is now MS, WordPerfert and countless others, move things from one menu to another when a new version comes out. One version Perferences is under Tools, a version later it is under File. If MS had guidelines for consistency menus would not be the change they are today.

1) For me consistency is number one.
2) As someone mentioned a user has no idea why a tool is grayed out. At application should allow a right click on a grayed out item that would display why the item is disabled, ie what the user must do to enable it.

I would like the OS / software industry to enhance/tune products that work from version to version. Why does Word (fill in the application here) have to have a new "improved" interface with each version? Is it so users will spend money on the lastest version? I certainly don't.

I think that the new look of 'vista' (Still reckon that sounds like a codename) is just another way of them covering up the huge delay. As people have been saying, it has been a five year wait, and what for?

This isnt a brand new operating system, there is not a spiffy new architecture, it's just another fix over a fix over a mistake *win9x*.

Anything which is to be changed is purely to make people think that they have put a huge effort into creating an exciting new operating system, and therefore worth the 600$ or so that they will market it for.

It's not a choice for some to move to a new operating system, as many people would not be comfortable even learning the basics all over. So I simply don't know who it is M$ is marketing too, if you want to keep basic users, dont change anything. If you want to pull in the geeks again, change the architecture

Microsoft is taking a heckuva chance by de-emphasizing menus. IMHO, the adoption of the Ribbon in Office 12 is designed to give enterprise customers a reason to upgrade. But the retraining costs will be significant. If I'm an enterprise user, the Ribbon is the most compelling reason not to upgrade.

If MS tries to force upgrades, open source alternatives like Open Office look very attractive. OO is designed as an MS Office work-alike, and would impose minimal retraining costs. All that's missing is an enterprise user consortium created to support the product.

Today in the build there is too much inconsistency.

We are working on this everyday, going over the builds, to make the UI more consistent and clearer... fixing bugs, etc. & we are busy ;-) .
Also listening to the blogs. It is pretty overwhelming to see so many responses to this post --- & hear your feedback, so please keep the comments coming.

The goal with menus is the same as it has always been, for people to be able to use the common tasks in the same way and for people to discover tasks which relate to what they are doing (so if I am viewing pictures, things like "slideshow" would appear).

That said, there are also things we are changing... and there are some differences which are intentional.
In the past, tasks and menus have been different things in different places. We are combining tasks and menus in the UI (on the top) because people don't think of them as 2 different things. Also, menus have been static. We'd like to make them more contextual to what you are doing. Of course this needs to balance with predictablilty, and not having too many options across the top which will just clutter the UI and confuse people.
These changes are what you are starting to see in the builds.

Office is a great example of where will be heading over time.
The ribbon does a good job of balancing common tasks (open, print, etc.) and putting them upfront. Tasks that changing based on what you are doing (when you are editing text, you get text edit controls-- if you are fixing an image, you get image controls, etc) show up after. This has really improved discoverabilty of features and we think this is the way to go long term. That said, this model will be new to a lot of people and developers. We want to understand how people really use it over time & we want to understand how editing tasks (which tend to be more complicated) differ from simple tasks (like opening files in explorer). So you should expect that the Office ribbon will not appear everywhere, but the concepts start showing up across the board.

Not sure if that answers all of your concerns.. & this is getting long... but wanted to chime in-.

Lili

A little acception here, please.
Vista is losing more than that, apparently.

It's turning into a modernized, glassy and glossy new turnover of Windows XP. Apart from the new icons, apparent new features and apps still lay the same.

The moral of Microsoft is money. I'm defently not buying Windows Vista, Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP2 is fine thankyou.

How about the registry? That's what sucks the hardest in a long list of things about the planet's worst OS. Vista is just a bunch of superficial catchups (mainly to OSX) that won't solve any real problems at all.

This all sounds like going back to a time before the Windows 9x model . . . because it all is starting to look like Windows 3.11 to me. Personally, it took me 18 months to switch from Win 3.11 to 95 - this Vista thing looks like a MAC OS copy . . . which is what 3.11 looked like to begin with.

Quoted from Jonathan Duhig:
>>Also, menus are always there, whatever you are doing. The ribbon risks creating frequent "mode errors" where the user can't find something because the application is in the wrong mode, so it is not actually there. This, like the failed "personalized menus", can make learning harder.<<

Interesting you should mention this. I read an article highly relevant to this in either Spectrum or Discover some time back - I apologize in advance if my fuzzy memory gets some of the details wrong.

As I recall from it: When word processors were first invented, the engineers came up with a system where you were always in a specific "mode", which affected what you could do. E.g. to replace a word, you would 1) switch to 'navigate' mode, 2) move the cursor to the word, 3) switch to 'delete' mode and delete the word, 4) switch to 'insert' mode and type the new text.

The same guy who invented the computer mouse was one of the first people to evaluate this UI, and the first thing he did was grab the nearest secretary (used to working on a typewriter) and sit her down to use it. They quickly discovered the 'mode' system was abysmally unintuitive, and he went on to invent 'modeless' editing (where you can move the cursor around, and insert/delete freely, like we're used to today).

This ribbon idea sounds like deja vu. I hope I'm wrong about that.

I do phone tech support and I shudder at the idea of trying to navigate people through the "ribbon" when trying to fix their systems. It's not too hard to tell people what word to click on, but describing teensy icons? What if the printer icon looks like a refrigerator to them?

I know nothing we say will change Microsoft's mind, but I hope to god they at least make it easy to find the "classic menu" button because if they don't, my job just got hella harder.

It seems that Windows Vista will make people more ignorant/illiterate than they are about computing. The more you use Micro$oft OS the more you become an idiot. Now people will go back to the Middle Ages where most people did not know how to read. Or they think that we are children and we need only images to operate a computer. Leave this Windowns thing. Leave Redmond an go for GNU/Linux. This is your salvation!

The main issue with doing away with menus is the usage base demographic. In other words, there are those of us who’ve been using menus for most of our lives, and wouldn’t have it any other way. Then, there is the newer, younger generation that would have no difficulty in adapting to something new. By this, I recommend a middle ground; the new operating system would give users the option to use either a non-menu or a menu-based interface. Microsoft has done something similar in terms of backward compatibility by including all its older OS API’s as well as all DirectX versions (of course, DirectX, by design, has been always doing this) in XP. Extending this trend to interfaces would definitely be a good thing.

can't wait for the new features of Vista. While Windows might not be as secure as some other operating systems (or even work properly, in some cases - such as plugging in a usb mouse) it's good to know that the geniuses there are focusing on the *other* bane of civilization: confusing menus.

Been using Office 12 Beta 1 since it's release to testers. The "ribbon" is a great idea, takes a little getting used to but it's good, and "live preview" is just superb.

Just wish they'd put the ribbon and preview into Frontpage 12, but I'm waiting for Quartz anyway.

I say they should just put more research into designing programs that can do the same with fewer commands. A few commands, draw a line, and make this a boundary, could replace many featurs in MS Word for example. You could do all sorts of advance layout as easily a drawing a sketch on paper.

"Or they think that we are children and we need only images to operate a computer"

I know, man, those newspaper writers were so macho for writing all their articles in a CLI. I sure feel like a pussy for using a mouse.

Lotta yall keep ranking on linux. Linux isnt one appearence. There is many interfaces for it. Gnome and KDE are just one. There is IceWM, WindowMaker, FVWM to name a few. They all have thier feels to them. They can be more intuitive then OSX and a hell of alot less resource intensive then XP. But thats not the point of this thread.. Menus be damned..make things mind controled!

are you all stupid?

your going to be using a OS with the following
restrictions meaning what you do with you pc now
you wont be-able to do with this version

New output content protection mechanisms planned for the next version of Microsoft® Windows® codenamed "Longhorn" protect against hardware attacks while playing premium content and complement the protection against software attacks provided by the Protected Environment in Windows Longhorn. These output protection mechanisms include:

• Protected Video Path - Output Protection Management (PVP-OPM) makes sure that the PC's video outputs have the required protection or that they are turned off if such protection is not available.

• Protected Video Path - User-Accessible Bus (PVP-UAB) provides encryption of premium content as it passes over the PCI Express (PCIe) bus to the graphics adapter. This is required when the content owner's policy regards the PCIe bus as a user-accessible bus.

• Protected User Mode Audio (PUMA) is the new User Mode Audio (UMA) engine in the Longhorn Protected Environment that provides a safer environment for audio playback, as well as checking that the enabled outputs are consistent with what the content allows.

• Protected Audio Path (PAP) is a future initiative under investigation for how to provide encryption of audio over user accessible buses.

This paper discusses output content protection mechanisms planned for Windows Longhorn and future versions of Windows.

Included in this white paper:

• PVP-OPM: Protected Video Path - Output Protection Management

• Graphics Subsystem Authentication

• PVP-OPM Initialization and Play Sequences

• Output Protection Management Mechanisms

• Content Industry Agreement Hardware Robustness Rules

• PVP-UAB: Protected Video Path - User-Accessible Bus

• Protected User Mode Audio: PUMA

• Protected Audio Path: PAP

• Acronym Reference

there ya go you wanna buy a OS that
restrcts every single thing you wanna do with it?
and on the top of this actually pay for them
to shaft you like this hahaha.

people of this forum will you all get a clue
vista is nothing but the end of freedom.

dont know about you guys but i dont buy stuff
that restricts everything i ever wanna do

I use windows at work and OSX at home. While my mac is far slower, I would much rather use that than windows any day of the week. Simply because, it is more LOGICAL and makes more sense. If I want to change application settings, I go to the application menu. If I want to change my view settings, I go to teh view menu. Developers can build in other shortcuts, but this basic layout is present in most apps, and is very strongly encouraged by Apple. On the other hand, in the described implementation in Vista, can anyone predict where the settings options is in IE? The difference is that in Vista you have to learn how each application works, whereas in OSX the application places it where you expect an option or command to be.

no , ya bad , fuck denmark , fuck danish ppl

I must applaud Microsoft for reinventing the wheel once again, having this time decided that the wheel is easier for end users if it is four sided.

Suck my bags, Vista will be good. You are all dissapointed by bad security flaw, and yet you complain that Microsoft is doing something about it. If you can hack, break and destroy each part of a system then why would you buy it?? Vista will help to stop virus' and will most definitely shorted the number of exploits avaliable to hackers, so im going to buy it. Getting cracked copies is for the week and cheep.

Wellcome to the real world.

IS THIS ALL WE'RE GETTING???

Of course not. You're also getting a totally locked-down, unusable, infuriating, "Digital Rights Management" scheme. That's where all the research $ have gone.