>> OTOH, USB flash drives don't have a seek delay, which may or may not 
>> counter the slowness of the bus.
> 
> Yes. Large reads come from the disk, while small reads come from the 
> USB. Plus, by reading from the USB, you don't have to move the head of 
> the disk that someone else might be trying to use also.

Isn't flash quite slow to write though?

>> It seems to me that the only "new" thing about Vista is
>> 1. It's more pretty to look at.
>> 2. They added several hundred minor improvements to various things.
> 
> Except that all the minor improvements really do add up, yes. Whether 
> you think they're overcharging is rather a different question.

Yeah, I guess that's it. And also whether the minor changes really are 
"improvements" or just changes for the sake of changes. (Or changes to 
make M$ customers happy, rather than M$ users...)

>> There doesn't seem to be anything radically new about it. They just 
>> took XP and tweaked it slightly.
> 
> If it were *radically* new, old software wouldn't run. You can say the 
> same thing about every UNIX variant since 1970, and every VMS variant 
> from before that. :-)  If you want "radically new", go grab a copy of 
> Singularity.

Well, for example, when Windows NT came out, they added *file security*. 
That's a pretty major addition. When Windows 2000 came out, they added 
USB support. Not quite so major, but still pretty significant. When XP 
came out, they added... well it's pretty? And Vista seems to have added 
even less. It's like Windows NT already did most of what you want an OS 
to do, so what else is there to add? Let's put in some eye candy!

> Yes, there's a whole bunch of stuff going on that you, as a home user, 
> probably won't see. Shadow copies

Added in NT over ten years ago.

> transactional file systems

Added in NT over ten years ago.

> stuff like that that lets things like your database 
> engine running in the virtual machine know that it needs to complete all 
> its transactions and hold off starting new ones and flush its buffers 
> *in the virtual machine* because you're about to take a snapshot of the 
> host's disk for backup purposes.

...and I care because?

> Or that lets you lose power halfway 
> through upgrading a program and not have half the changes on the disk 
> and the other half blown away. (I'm not sure how Linux handles such a 
> thing, actually. I always assumed I had to do that sort of reliability 
> work manually and without any support from the OS. :-)

I'd be pretty surprised if it actually works properly.

>> It's nice that they're trying to make improvements to the thing, 
>> but... uh, you want *how much* for a few minor tweaks? No thanks.
> 
> You need to run *something* on your new machine. :-)

Fortunately, XP is still on sale. ;-)

> As they say, "We're number one! Why try harder?"

Heh. Yeah, that seems to be about the sum of it.

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