Last time I checked, to get a speech recognition program working you had to configure it to recognize your exact voice pitch and tone, which made it difficult for others to use the program. Can Vista's speech recognition software understand anyone?

I think it's probably a bug when the microphone is acting on the sounds coming out of your own speakers — as that's definitely not a wanted behaviour (if the user can make the sound play, they can do whatever the command is more easily) and is one that an alternative algorithmic approach could have avoided (by cancelling the output from the input, as the computer knows both).

Anyway, I'm an OS X user nowadays and I haven't tried Vista but I'm generally in favour of it. I switched "permanently" because I find much of OS X a major benefit for my productivity and Vista will effectively add a lot of those features to most other computers on the planet. I'll probably get a copy to run in Parallels or Boot Camp...

The latest Linux Magazine rant.

http://www.linux-mag.com/id/2889/

I would say it was Wndows hater propaganda, but the latest Mac "I'm a pc/I'm a Mac" commercial alludes to the same theme. I am a Linux, BTW.

It couldn't be as direct as that because of the delay between output and input (which is probably at least a few hundred ms, allowing for latencies in both directions) and the imperfect reproduction but the fact that the computer knows the output and the input is enough. For example, it could run a voice recognition analysis on all sound output and if it recognises any commands, then ignore any of the same commands coming in through the microphone within the next second or so. I'm not sure how feasible that is in processing terms, but I don't think speech recognition is expensive, I think it's just hard.

You, dear Sir, have just invented the new Vista-Enabled Microphone - a vital part of every new computer purchase .

Of course, it won't be cheap anymore.

Vista is really cool. Mostly because they ripped just about every single little thing from Apple.

But hey, Apple probably ripped it from someone else who ripped it from someone else. Eventually all creative industries just mimic the music industry...

What I find really funny is the Loading screen. Apple has a bunch of little lines shooting out making a circle that have variable boldness that sort of rotates around them. Vista has the same thing but it uses a circular gradient instead. Shesh.

Vista now has a gadget system thats pretty much straight ripped form Apple.

I could go on for a while.

Dude, you cannot just change the drivers when only Microsoft has access to them and how do I know a soundblaster will work with my Dell computer.

I read some story somewhere that in Northern US, less than 10% of PC's are capable of Aero. Non-aero Vista should run on around 30% of PC's. Unfortunately I can't find that article ATM
Problem probably is that most companies haven't updater their PC's for many years.

Vista w/o aero is pretty plain.

I took a peek at Vista this morning, nothing really special other than Aero which makes the interface look pretty spiffy but yeah a lot of things ripped off from Mac. I also noticed that for about two weeks Best Buy and seemingly the rest of the world ran out of PC's to sell due to the ramp up for Vista. So strange walking in an seeing absolutely NO PC's on the shelf. Still there were plenty of laptops at Best Buy today that were running EXTREMELY choppy just playing a simple video clip. That and the high end machines with dual core processors, 2GB RAM, and Nvidia 7300 chipsets didn't run everything perfectly. I guess this was on the machine with the 24" widescreen monitor so I think the high resolution had something to do with it, the one next to it with about the same specs but a 7600GT and smaller resolution ran pretty smoothly. I still found no compelling reason to jump out and upgrade to Vista, I'll wait at least 6 months before looking into Vista again, should be enough time for hardware and drivers to mature enough.

So let me see if I got this right. Windows now has the flashy GUI that MacOS X has had for the past five years, and requires a top-of-the-line new computer to use it?

I came to the same conclusion after doing some defrags and game installs, and finding that even with a perfectly defraged filesystem, NTFS will place game files all over the place, meaning you need to do a "space optimization" defrag right after an install

The fsdriver package worked fine on one of the betas for me.

But really, no not out of the box, and that package only does ext2, so you don't get journaling.