Our attitude towards those who once upon a time believed in the flatness of the earth is apparent in a new Microsoft advert.
Depicting an olden-days ship sailing on rough seas, presumably heading towards the "edge of the world", the advert is part of a $300m campaign aimed at rescuing the reputation of Windows Vista by comparing its critics to flat-earthers.
So Microsoft just won't give up on their bloated pig, "Windows Vista" huh?
I must say -- that is the most cynical ad campaign I've ever seen. They really insult our collective intelligence. Why don't they spend 300 BILLION on developing a decent OS instead of stubbornly promoting a failed OS with such a degree of overt cynicism?
It's intelligent techies that are making a rational decision to wait for the next Windows after Vista (if that), because Vista offers no benefits over XP while consuming FAR more resources.
The worst thing about Vista is that it tries to turn your $1500 PC into a DVD player (retail value: $50) -- and so EVERY STEP the video stream takes from the DVD to your eyeballs needs to be encrypted (read: more hardware) so there is no chance to make an illegal copy. The video card, the mother board, etc. all need to "protect" the stream of copyrighted information. This makes things slower, and requires more hardware which A) requires more expense, and B) more hardware = more chance for glitches and bugs.
All in all, there are compelling reasons to NOT use MS Vista. In fact, when I first heard about Vista (the info in the preceding paragraph) I decided I would switch to Linux before I'd use Vista. I even installed Linux on my computer, started using it almost exclusively, and found software to cover 95% of my computing needs. I had 95% switched over to Linux! I only kept Windows because I did some Windows programming for my main client. I obviously couldn't do that on Linux. But everything else was covered -- and the whole suite of software was FREE -- not pirated, but FREE!
When I bought a used laptop from my friend, I switched back to XP (I couldn't resist the urge to save 75% of my computing energy costs) -- but if I ever needed to, it wouldn't take me long to move back to Linux.
Matthew