Three times

Just as my friend John Dominik says, if I say something three times I mean it.

Vista is shit. Vista is shit. Vista is shit.

Another frustrating few hours thanks to the arseholes at Microshit who decided the aforementioned product really was 'enterprise ready' at launch. Not content with losing DVD drives and running on bloody good hardware like a man with no legs through treacle, I'm confronted today with several situations that I simply can't resolve, owing to the complete lack of drivers for 64-bit versions. And that's without mentioning of course the fact that the present version of iTunes in an x64 environment can't import or burn CD's. Let me think now, what do we think are the two most likely functions required of an audio application?

Undercurrents in the marketplace do not bode well for Gates & Ballmer. Linux in the server room is rapidly becoming the de facto standard for file, mail, web and collaborative services, with Windows servers taking ever more of a back seat required only by those unfortunate enough to have to run bespoke M$ applications such as Exchange (hawk... spit...) and whilst some continue to question the maturity of Linux for the corporate desktop, the tide is surely turning.

The old "Linux is so much harder than Windows to use and administer, our productivity will nosedive and our support costs will rocket" tale no longer holds true, those that say otherwise simply have nothing constructive to contribute to the debate and doubtless mutter such nonsense mostly whilst rebooting their Windows boxen following yet another blue screen of death.

So why the hell do we have so many problems? Surely if we're not having to use Vista then I should be unconcerned at the many shortcomings of doing so? Well, you're right, but we're stuffed as our clients run so many bespoke (and in some cases, old) applications in the Windows environment that we need to be able to replicate their configuration and even doing so within a virtual machine on a Linux host doesn't take away the need to solve the ensuing problems.

That's my buggest bug-bear with Vista. It takes such a long time to fix it, and I hate nothing more than something wasting my time.

And if you need a platform for games that supports the latest video technologies, allows multiplayer participation across LANs and WANs and can also play your audio and video libraries without missing a beat, I have the solution.

Go buy a Nintendo Wii.