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Vista isn't crap but the 'leccy is

Hide your doodles!

Comments On Tuesday the UK's electricity network was shaken by the failure of two major power stations within minutes of each other and a further seven succumbed as the day went on. The crisis is over, but there's chatter over power-rationing, only made stronger by these events.

Cospiracy Theories will no doubt abound.

(Nice to see the Scottish Parliament rushing through permission to use gas at the 'Gannet. Boiler Burner mods have been done there quite recently too. How terribly convenient!)

Having worked, albeit breifly, at Longannet a few years ago, it's a bloody miracle that this decrepit old plant is still functioning, LONG after it's expected lifespan, like a large proportion of our larger generation sites.

We need new generation capacity in this country NOW. And at the moment, if you want it to be relatively pollution free, then it'll have to be nuclear.

dervheid


For yonks the Greenies have been telling us that Nuclear power will cause our kids to have two heads, whereas factually, every single X-ray dept (several hundred) in the UK releases a similar amount of radiation as a typical nuclear plant with no apparent outcry.

This, er, misunderstanding of the facts by the greenies has paralysed the government for fear of scaring voters. So we end up in the mire once again thanks to a combination of lying greenies and terrified politicians.

What we need is a bundle of nuclear plants. What we'll get, no doubt, is a rush of Russian-gas-powered generators.

I despair.

O


Tinfoil hat time. No one's remarked on the fact that all these "coincidental" shutdowns have ramped the wholesale price of power up 35%. Very profitable, I'm sure.

I worked on Sizewell B back in the early 90s. It was a huge, and hugely prestigious, civil engineering project. The people who built it felt, and feel today, very proud to be able to say they worked on it.

The tragedy we face now is that if we wanted to build anymore PWRs like Sizewell B, they'd have to be built by foreign companies and foreign engineers. I suppose there'd be one or two jobs for the natives, as they'd need people serving in the canteen and the toilets would need cleaning.

Lazy Gun


This is just another area of the British infrastructure that this Administration has dithered, avoided discussing and pointedly ignored; the Government knows it will have to embrace nuclear power into the power generation map and that's going to alienate some core votes. Which is the last thing they want right now. Maybe, just maybe, they'll start to put the long-term future of this country ahead of their miserable backsides - but having seen the way politics has evolved over the last few years that's very unlikely. Let's face it, after the utter lies in trying to introduce retrospective taxation of motor vehicles just recently, would you trust them to get anything right?

I may well be alone here but I really do find the buying and selling of electricity and gas on an open market to be rather immoral. This isn't some optional commodity, it's an essential aspect of living. Why should any population be subjected to the whims of a few? Perhaps we'll only learn when the markets make power a luxury good out of the reach of the poor, the elderly and the socially disadvantaged - or has new Labour completely forgotten it's heritage?

Sir Christopher Hinton must be doing a triple twist with pike over all this nonsense.

Pete James


"And at the moment, if you want it to be relatively pollution free, then it'll have to be nuclear."

A nuclear plant can produce "relatively" cheap leccy for twenty to fifty years, with "relatively" little pollution escaping, as long as the plant is well maintained. It will stop producing leccy after fifty years max and will still release "relatively" little polution, for as long as the plant is well maintained. Great, except that someone will have to pay to maintain the plant even when it no longer produces leccy, and they will have to keep paying to maintain the plant for fifty to one hundred thousand years. That is longer then human beings have been recognisably human.

Still think they are a good idea?

Paul Smith


Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates this week defended Windows Vista and made noises about the next Microsoft OS, Windows 7. The much-maligned Vista is "not a failure and it's not a mistake.", says Steve. You tended to disagree:

"The goal with Windows 7 is that it will run on the same hardware as Windows Vista..."

Every version of Windows has been "capable" of running on the same hardware as its immediate predecessor, as long as the hardware far exceeded the minimum spec, but not without a performance hit.

What MS should be aiming for is a version of Windows without the bloat, that will OUT-PERFORM Vista on a minimum spec machine. But that would break the back-scratching arrangement with the hardware makers where a new OS needs the latest hardware and new hardware needs the latest OS. Then the dreaded penguin might get a look in...

Red Bren


I think they should really allow users to take advantage of the "modular" (hold the jokes till later, please) nature of Windows' core by letting users control the kind of setup they want/need.

Instead of shoving/forcing us their idea of what we want/need (read: Home, Business, Ultimate, etc), they should tweak Windows' core to allow a more barebone setup to function. By doing so, they can accommodate alot more users, from the uber/cash-strapped to the budget-concious users, in terms of the kind of hardware the users have/can afford.

Let's take a look at Vista's services. Let's face it, alot of these services just don't provide enough, tangible benefit to most common users, more so when one considers the cost in terms of performance drain. These services should be easily customized before installation. But how do you control the experience of the user w/o forcing them these services, you ask? Simple, you already have two ways of doing so: 1) Default Settings: if you truly understand your typical user, you'd know that they would hardly tweak things, leaving things as it is; 2) Simple warning messages/pop-up message boxes: these should give them some idea as to what is being traded-off.

Again, give the users control of what they want to install. DRM-infected components? I'm happy w/ DVD (won't bother w/ Bluray, atleast in the near future). Indexing? I don't need it so why force it to me in the first place (before installation, that is).

Sorry for the long message.

Anonymous Coward


Ballmer contended: "Vista's not a failure and it's not a mistake."

Gate said that the company could learn "plenty of lessons" from its handling of the spurned OS. "We have a culture where we need to do better,"

Customers are waiting for Windows 7 because by 2010 Microsoft will have learned and can release a definitive failure with better mistakes.

Anonymous Coward


I can only shake my hand when I read all the comments posted here...

Yes, I'm using Vista -admittedly the 64bit version, which meant that I could forget about ssome of my old apps-, at home, and quite frankly, I have very little issues with i, especially now that SP1 is out. The only thing I'd appreciate for Ms to fix would be that explorer crashes randomly when unplugging a usb drive, but I can live with it.

Apart of that, it is STABLE, ,I am still to get a blue screen, and my box usually stays on for weeks without a reboot.

But, of course, I also bought decent hardware. If you plan on having it run on some exotic 20€ motherboard, with a Trident or Virge graphics card (am I showing my age? ), 512MB Ram, and dodgy drivers, don't expect anything positive of it.

Rememmber how people ranted at Win95 ? Sure, it wasn't very good, and sure, it waas only a DOS with some bad graphical interface, but that's what Linux is today, in more stable. People also ranted about 2000, about XP, well, today, they don't want anything else.

A stripped OS ? sure, that might be nice in a business environment. Oh, wait, would it mean I'd have to buy some ACDSee license to view pictures, winzip for compressed files ? Find some video player that wouldn't install spyware? Install that nightmarish thing called Firefox, and at least 20 other programs that my users need ? Been there, done that, did add at least 150€ on a PC, and it was a nightmare to get it all ready. And then to explain to users why they all had different interfacess. No, thanks, in a corporate environment, I'd rather have an integrated OS, even if some functions are a bit reduced compared to specialized software. Users won't notice anyway. (But I could do wihout the DRM stuff).

So, if you hate Vista so much, go buy a Mac (and don't try to inplement even a new service inside, it is a jungle of non standard Linux in there), or be happy with the latest X11 interface of your choice, but please, stop whining about an OS that you openly admit not to use.

And before anyone starts making comments, NO, I don't work for any Redmon affiliated company, and yes, I do exist. I'm also confronted to Linux systems all day, and also use XP on a daily basis, which isn't any better or worse than Vista.

So... get real, guys!

Frank

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