Newsflash: Microsoft Drops WinFS, Will Integrate Tech into Other Products

Yes, WinFS as it was, is dead. It's moving into SQL Server. From there, who knows.

Bonch, even if I did see the light and buy a Mac, you'd still be an idiot.

While there are some things that annoy me about Vista, I believe the architectural improvements to the system will provide for more successful releases after Vista, much like XP was an improvement on 2000.

Also the one thing Microsoft understands is that targeting developers creates a much richer environment of ideas and software around their platform than simply trying to produce the entire platform themselves, much like the way democracy produces a better government than a dictatorship. Good ideas work their way to the surface while bad ideas get tossed every 4 or 8 years.

"Seriously, guys, buy a Mac. You can dual-boot to Windows to keep your games and other old necessities, but for the real work you can use an OS that's kept constantly modern and up-to-date. There's just no reason at all anymore to keep buying PCs and be stuck with the dwindling Windows disaster"

buy a mac to run windows? lol. you just admited osx isn't worth the box it comes in. Apple is admitting their pc business is done for. they are becoming a media company. bootcamp is the final nail in the failed apple computer business model. proof that you can't have a closed source OS that hopes to compete with a global standard.

Now don't get me wrong. I have nothing against XP either - other than every single OS out there has been updated big time in the last few years and, besides SP2, XP is starting to look dated.

I haven't had a blue screen since the heyday of Windows 2000, it runs smooth (I don't think I've turned off my PC - installing updates aside - in over 6 months) and it just does the job. I don't run an AV program and I've never had a virus. I've also never had to deal with SpyWare: smart computing is the way to go and I wish more people followed that.

The reasons Apple gives us on their website and the reasons people like bonch spew at us here are NOT the reasons I want a Mac.

I don't care about who ripped off what and so on and so forth - I just would like something fresh and exciting to come out of Redmond and, right now, I have a sinking feeling that Vista is not going to be it.

XP is, however, starting to show that it's looking dated and I, for one, am getting worried that Vista may not be the great thing we are being promised.

Like I said though, I'm going to wait until next spring. If I'm going to drop over 3K on a mega-laptop of some sort, I want to compare them side by side.

As of right this second, however, OS X is winning.

shark:

I meant sad as in it's sad that more and more, as the weeks and months go by, I'm beginning to really wonder about MS. It has nothing to do with Paul's articles or bonch's ravings - it's the delays, the constant dropping of features, the confusion at the company and the fact that Vsta is not looking like it's going to be anything special when it comes out in January (sonetime in Q1?? WTF??).

The only thing stopping me is the price. I don't want a Mini becuase, to me, the are not worth the price you pay of what you get.

I don't want an iMac becuase they are friggin UGLY and are nothing more than notebook parts stuffed into an LCD monitor.

I like the laptops and do require some power to get what I need done. SO that leaves me with a MacBook or a MacBook Pro.

The one I want costs $3500 Canadian, after taxes. In comparison I have been thinking of getting rid of my current setup and getting a kickass desktop replacement. The few I have looked at were between $2600 and $3000 before taxes... hence the reason I have yet to do that.

The MacBook Pro is comaprible to the desktop replacemetns I have looked at and is in the same price... the diffrence now would be what I want to use it for and the OS itself.

All but two pieces of software I use can be had for Mac (I don't use Office 20007 enough to warrant worrying about that - I use Word to write. Nothing more, nothing less and ma actually looking at replacing Word with OpenOffice). Plus all the devlopment tools I use can be had for Mac too: things like PHP and MySQL, Tomcat and Java. Apache comes in cluded with OS X meaning I could forever rid myself of IIS).

Two of the music apps I use you can't get for Mac, but can be replaced.

The thing is, the more I use OS X the more I like that OS. As of right now I spend about the exact same amount of time on OS X as I do on Vista. The more I use Vista, the more I get frustrated with MS and it's new OS. The more I play with OS X the more excited I get.

That said, I'm not unhappy with Windows XP. I've not had any major problems with it. I've realized that as long as one uses their computer responsibly and creates a non-administrator account for everyone else who wants to use it, the computer runs fine. I've had people download all kinds of crap onto the computer earlier, which would screw the system. Not anymore.

Bonch, what have you done to the verification characters??