Stack working in MACOS, not in Windows.

[Bob Sneidar]

On Feb 19, 2010, at 11:48 AM, Jim Bufalini wrote:

> But what most people don't know is that the "big" mistake MS made with Vista is they allowed hardware manufacturers to "mess with the OS." Large hardware manufacturers like Dell, HP, Lenovo (IBM) and hundreds of others put in their own versions of, for example, UAC and other features of the OS to support things like finger print hardware and other proprietary hardware and drivers. This opened up a Pandora's box and is the real source of most of the complaints against Vista.

Oh I have to wholeheartedly disagree! Not to start a MS flame war here, but we purchased and installed Open License versions of Vista, which have NOTHING to do with any hardware manufacturer. It's straight from MS. The problems we experienced led me to ban Vista on our network. 

One thing they did without really saying much about it, is they put a virtual bridge between the OS and the LAN connection. Sure they can control network traffic better, but unbeknownst to me until recently, there are certain devices that can interfere with bridges on networks, one of which is the Spanning Tree Protocol, which uses bridging to accomplish some of it's magic. That cause our Vista machines network connections to mysteriously fail, and nothing I could do would fix them. 

I kept having my Airports crash on a regular basis and could never figure out why. Finally the combination of adding a bandwidth management device which had a bridge built in, and the spanning tree protocol on my switches interacting with it led me to the place where I realized why my airports were crashing, because after adding this appliance, ALL my airports went down and stayed that way. 

So all that to say this: MS seems detached from the real Windows computing world. They implement certain things that turn out to be really bad ideas in the end. They seem to have some really bad decision makers that run development over there. I suspect a large part of MS doesn't even use Windows, but instead uses Unix of some flavor. 

I could go on and on. The good news is that almost everyone agrees that Windows 7 is really Vista done right. I liken Vista to Windows ME, an intermediate OS release to say they actually did SOMETHING about a particular problem, while they were working on the real release that they could never get out in a timely fashion. 

Bob