But doing things efficiently is hardly Wintel philosophy. The whole PC business is based on imposing bigger and bigger hardware requirements in the name of a feature bloat. (and I was part of it for some time too...)
Actually, I'm not sure this is totally true. The nature of computing is "I need something faster and better" And it's not just Microsoft that's the root cause of this. It's guess what? Games! Games require better hardware all the time, if you don't keep up then you're not going to be able to play them, or at least not get the full experience. So don't go blaming Microsoft alone for this.
I know as I once had been an avid gamer myself. I'm for all that responsible too. But at one moment I just got enough of it. In other words I got exhausted because of this constant strugle with hardware/software upgrades.
(and how many FPS games you can really play and don't have enough?)
And I'm not blaming Microsoft for having an effective business scheme. I just don't like where is it coming as "faster, bigger" isn't that needed to pursuit so much today.
And it can be discussed if the Vista features like flashy gui is actual good for a system productivity. It all look like a nerd type feature. And hardware tax is heavy, too heavy imho as I know examples of apps what are doing similar things at fraction of resources.
I know what people are going to say next: The operating system should be the slimmest use of the computer system, giving 99% of the hardware over to the applications. But, the operating system these days is so much more than a basic file and application manager.
Actually even windows kernel isn't taking that much resources itself. It's a whole enviroment what is eating most of it.
Myself I see this as progress, it doesn't matter that the hardware requirements are higher, we will all eventually have the minimum hardware to be able to run vista eventually anyway. You can't go backwards when designing something new, whether is be the latest OS or the latest game, both usually are designed for something better than the hardware you are presently running.
For games how the screenshots do look is an everything. Obviously developer has to be competitive here and it will push an envelope. Sometimes even too much hence some insane hardware requirements for some games.
(I consider "Doom3" prime example of it where its stencil type shadows putted a very heavy strain on GPUs)
But for productivity type apps it's not good thing imho. Applications should have just enough of functionality for a given task. But it's not so and prime example is MS Office. Rarely anyone is using even 10 percent of its functionality and what MS is offering for more basic (but not primitive) word processing? The Wordpad? Oh my...
Edit: Can I just add, that there are people who will slag off Microsoft no matter what. Microsoft could bring out an identical package as a Linux distro and these people will still say it's cr*p. I find this quite annoying, I have said before and I will say it again, the marketplace has an opening for all. On another point, Linux will never take over the home market. The home user wants simple connectivity to media devices such as cameras etc. Okay so Linux can do this, but not without a lot of playing around, if
Never say never. Empires were falling before and Microsoft isn't invisible.
So far its greatest asset is 3rd company support. But Linux is gaining here too albeit slowly but it is. Linux has also a great advantage being completely platform indepedent. I know that there was WinNT for Alpha but MS can not match such flexibility. Even because of bureaucratic reasons. It's an elephant or perhaps I should say a dinosaur.
you want to know what I mean, go out and buy the latest firewire video device and plug it in to your Linux box, I bet it's not a matter of throwing in the supplied CD and you're away! It's a bit like your television, you want a TV that just works and you click a button and you are viewing BBC! You don't want to know the real channel number or how the UHF or digital decoder works. This is where Microsoft has cornered the market. Plain and simply, Linux is not designed as a multimedia system and windows is not as secure as Linux, but both have their place in the market.
The driver support is important but imagine a hardware manufacturers would make an agreement for making a platform indepedant (even at low level) protocols for such devices? X11 is very good example of such protocol.
There are also things like I2C and 1-wire for communicating between even simple chips. (but not revelant for os level things)
Put a RISC cpu into a GPU (Rendition had been offering such GPUs) and you could implement some higher level protocol for 3D graphics not unsimilar of X11. With such method all hardware components would be basically network devices and with upcoming acceptance of IP6 it will became a real possibility.
Then all this driver/3rd party support MS's advantage will be gone. Remeber that Microsoft wasn't really that good forecaster of market trends. The web got it surprised and we know it could only dominate Netscape just including IE in every Windows install.
(and making outrageous claims that IE is a part of os when faced with possible antimonopoly prosecution).
The same goes for Windows Mediaplayer.
There is also a factor that many emerging markets (such as China or India) will be far more price sensitive than we are in the west. Then also it's worth keeping in a mind that such hardware requirements of Vista will impose higher everall powerconsumption of a computer. Multiply those extra watts by tens milions of machines and it's stopping being funny.
Now 500W psu is quite common thing. Few years before it'd be unthinkable for a personal computer.
