Vista to be released in October come Hell or high water.

[hm_murdock]

Yep.

http://winsupersite.com/showcase/winvista_ready.asp

I think it's bad for them, great for us. It'll probably suck.

[H_TeXMeX_H]

Oh I hope it will suck so much everyone will wake up and install a real OS ... well, I'm probably being really optimistic ... everyone will buy it like mad and love it too.

[GenuineAdvantage]

I don't even care anymore. The more I use a different OS the more I come to think of how unlikely that they will just suddenly disappear off the face of the Earth because of Windows. It's even clear now that MSCK actively tried to do this for years, and they haven't succeeded up to now.  In fact Linux and other desktop OSes are growing. That's really all I care about -that there will be other OSes that will be sufficient. So who cares when or if Vista pops up. I predict that on the desktop most of what it will be is a platform for all the latest DirectX 10 games.

[davidnix71]

The computer industry seems to have hit a wall. Dell is in trouble with lower earnings, exploding  batteries, an SEC probe and is being forced to use AMD chips. M$ upped its stock buyback from $16B to $36B by 2011, and Intel has much lower profits than last year and laid off 1000 managers. Sun MSys laid off people, too.

Even Apple agreed today to pay CTI $100M to settle patent infringement issues over iPod music navigation.

If they release Vista in October, maybe there will be enough time to get out a service pack by Christmas.

The Republicans will lose a lot of seats in November, unless there is another 9/11 and they declare martial law, so the upheaval in the economy will probably continue into next year.

[piratePenguin]

The computer industry seems to have hit a wall. Dell is in trouble with lower earnings, exploding  batteries, an SEC probe and is being forced to use AMD chips. M$ upped its stock buyback from $16B to $36B by 2011, and Intel has much lower profits than last year and laid off 1000 managers. Sun MSys laid off people, too.

+5 Insightful

Honestly, it's about time the computer industry hit a wall! Only the very cheapest Dell Desktop machines have less than a gig of RAM. Very few people need a gig of ram for christ sake!

The industry is all about perpetual upgrading and has been for a long time.

/smiles down at his Athlon XP 2600+, 256 Mb RAM machine

[worker201]

The computer industry seems to have hit a wall.

A wall made of what, though?  Here's my theory:

Computers have to be bigger and faster to run bigger and faster applications.  But the applications are so bloated already that they can't get any bigger.  Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop are pretty much at maximum density, and would explode if new features were added.  And a decent P4 is more than enough to run them both at the same time.

Somebody probably noticed that a few years ago, and started hyping video and music manipulation.  Cd burners, cd rippers, dvd burners, dvd rippers, music library programs, id3 editors, transcoders/converters, media players that play everything, etc.  And where are they headed?  Dual-layer dvd recorders are dying on the shelves, since the only reasonable use for the damn things is illegal.  Ripping and burning dvds and cds is legal, but only for certain applications, and the applications the average person wants them for ("borrowing" movies and music from friends) are very illegal.

So where does this leave us?  If you've got a Pentium 4 with 1GB RAM and a dvd/cd burner/player, then you've pretty much got everything you need.  There's not a lot out there on the consumer market that will make your system work at full capacity.  Now, science people and digital filmmakers need multiple TBs of storage and TBs of RAM and processor clusters for their applications, and those markets are still doing big business.  But consumer hardware and consumer software requirements have pretty much peaked together.

In short, Dell isn't selling many computers because not too many people need new computers.  

That's my take on it, anyway.  And if I'm right, US politics won't make much difference.  The American economy lives on hi-dollar consumer purchases.  First it was suburban houses, then cars, then refrigerators, then TVs, then home audio systems, and now computers.  Somebody is going to have to come up with something to sell pretty fast, or we're going to hit a pretty serious recession.

[WMD]

The computer industry won't hit a wall.  People are still buying new computers because their old ones have spyware...and the average user isn't getting any smarter.

[piratePenguin]

The computer industry won't hit a wall.  People are still buying new computers because their old ones have spyware...and the average user isn't getting any smarter.

Exactly. Malware helps Dell etc in a big way.

[Dark_Me]

Honestly, it's about time the computer industry hit a wall! Only the very cheapest Dell Desktop machines have less than a gig of RAM. Very few people need a gig of ram for christ sake!

Windows.

[solemnwarning]

Exactly. Malware helps Dell etc in a big way.

I use 1GB of ram, but yes machines are going overkill

My machine:

AMD Athlon XP 3200+ (2.2GHz, 512KB L2)
1GB DDR400 RAM
250GB Seagate barracuda 7200.10, 16MB cache (I bought this for the speed, not the space)
nVidia GeForce 6 6600GT, 256MB memory

[pofnlice]

what if it rox?

[cahult]

Someone once said that what the average man or woman only need is a computer with about 100 MHz. about 3 GBs of storage and 32 MB of RAM.

[pofnlice]

Has that person been in my spare room?

[piratePenguin]

Someone once said that what the average man or woman only need is a computer with about 100 MHz. about 3 GBs of storage and 32 MB of RAM.

Someone once said that nobody will ever need more than 640k RAM. Oh yea that was Bill Gates. Of course that was before MS was very big - before they needed to push perpetual upgrading.

[adiment]

In short, Dell isn't selling many computers because not too many people need new computers.

Dell is selling many computers. Unfortunatly, the world is so technophobic that Vista would a create a need and MS to get out there again.

Unless they fixed all the problems with the Betas, it'll suck. It uses way too much ram and it's a new kernel, what I was looking forward to; WinFS, was scratched out.

It'll be like WindowsXP over again, cept most people won't be able to run it, and they will most likely buy new computers... lets face it, too many people are ignorant.