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They know that hardcore gamers what the best.

It just seems kind of silly to me, that if you want to curb piracy, instead of securitying the end user to death, drop the freaking price!

Same thing goes for Ebay... these guys get so greedy they forget WHY the stuff is happening. I would love to sell on Ebay and add that potentially large market to my company, but hte stinking FEES are so ridiculous it doesn't make sense.

You can throw the BIG OIL & the U.S. government in there for just TOTAL GREED FACTOR. Everyone is crying for government intervention and investigations, the bottom line why they don't do it is because the government makes more per gallon than anyone!

They have no costs whatsoever in retrieving, pumping, refining, moving the product, absolutely no infrastructure or risk involved in any way, yet take a GIGANTIC cut of what we pay at the pump.

As Gordon Gekko says, "Greed is good", but in the same token, as Doc said in Young Guns, "Billy, we're good, but this is starting to get ridiculous."

Is there a big enough difference from DX9 to DX10 for a 400$ upgrade?

you f*n said it!! Couldnt of said it any better myself. That was so right on I cant even add to it. lol

That remains to be seen, but for me... no.

Seeing the shadow of a piece of grass for the "realistic impact"... man, I can't even see the shadow of the REAL grass outside! I am playing a game to relax, I think I still have about 2% of my imagination left that I don't have to be spoon fed every last detail in the game.

I'm not spending the extra money on a video card and O.S. to support DX-10 when I can just go get a Sony PS3 and have a BluRay player and have it be good looking and simple.

Simple is the key. So many of these companies go wrong and have a great product (or pretty good one) then they come out with new versions, and at first they are really good stuff because they are fixing bugs, or adding improvements that they have listened to the customer about and added, you knoe, little things.

Then, somewhere down the road (I am going to use a really great program that now I think is bloated crap... NERO), they look back and they have added everything to it, and it's almost like you can't figure out where they added all this stuff.

I mean when you buy the thing the tech support number is a plumber becasue your O.S. or your Image Editing or CD Burning software has a freaking kitchen sink sticking out of the box!

I am so sick of Windows being slowed to a crawl because you put a CD in, and it's always, "What should I do end user? You want me to open it, you want me to play it, you want to run this or that on it, you want to burn a CD? Yea, I want you to accept a CD and shut the HELL up! I don't want a 10 second delay where the OS tries to figure out what it should do. I have a novel idea... I'll TELL you what to do! In the time it takes for the pause in the system I could do that! Now I know, you can set the "default action" but it never seems to shut Windows up, and there is still the pause where it checks and sees that it shouldn't do anything. Vista will probably have a feature that the computer pops up and says, "Are you sure you don't want to do anything? Because I can do everything... half-assed".

They leave that part out though, don't they... that it does everything, but does it half-assed. I riped on NERO, but at least they have individual programs for many of the extra crap (at least in version 6.6 - version 7 I tried and I just said forget it).

How about the image editing program that takes a day and a half to open because it is so bloated. I am not talking about Photoshop here. I expect a pro grade image editing program to have it all. I am talking about neededing a small program just for viewing files. Thank GOD I got MS though buddy. THey took care of that with the MS Office picture manager and Windows Picture and Fax Viewer. Whew, took that load off my mind (now if it could just copy out of the.... j/k).

So that's my diatribe on simplicity in the industry. Maybe if MS simplified it's OS like Apple, and offered one or two varieties, and kept the price down ($150 or less), I could almost feel sorry for the multi-billionaire (who stole all of his ideas anyway) when he's carrying a viginia ham under one arm, and a butterball turkey under the other, singing the blues that he ain't got no bread.

Now I finally circled back to where we started... the incredible cost of Vista Aero Ultimate or whatever it's called when it is released. Oh the money lost to piracy, it brings a tear to my eye matey.

Don't hold back KN, tell us how you really feel.

My silly little take on things..
The cost: It cost that much because they’ll get it; I’m sure they did a market study to determine cost. A lot won’t transition right away, but come on… eventually you will. Who still uses DOS, Windows Workgroups 3.11, and Win’95. They worked too, but your latest software won’t run on those operating systems. You may not need it right away, but eventually you will. Vista will replace XP whether you like it or not. Can they offer it cheaper? Probably, but why? They know you’ll have to buy it eventually anyway. I’m just glad they aren’t charging a grand for it; They probably aren’t simply because that would lose the entire “low/fixed-income” market since hardware has become affordable… Right now, all they need to sell you on is why you should do this today versus tomorrow. It's not of question of whether you will transition, it's when you will....

Pirating: Look around… people are pirating $15-20 dollar movies/cd’s down to $1.50 mp3's, so an entire OS regardless of price is gonna get copied illegally. They are making it tougher to do so, and I don’t have an issue with that… it’s not like the police are going to come to their rescue and stop it.

The bloated garbage: I really wish software engineers would wake up and realize that there are different levels of expertise. Software seems to be designed around people who’ve never touched a computer. That’s fine, because there are still folks like that. But a lot of people aren’t like that and get annoyed when their computer thinks it’s smarter than us. Stop making the machine guess at what I want to do next for I already know and your guessing is just slowing it up. They need to figure out how to deal with all the different kinds of users out there without defaulting to the new users.

Good point.

I guess I was looking at it from the standpoint of what "I" think the average person was willing to pay, and I should remember that this is what "I" would be willing to pay. Unless they made it all $99 everyone still is going to try to get it for free... thank God.

The best way to get a OS is to still buy a computer with it. The only problem with that is you have to strip it when you get it becuase of all the junk they package in with it.

Yea, they get extra money from those guys to offset the cheap computer cost. I leave it vanilla so there isn't 80 icons and 100 gigs of total crap on the system.

I wonder how much DELL pays for an OS? I have seen on the internet where you can buy DELL branded OS's for like $115 for XP Pro.

Ya I think they get a OEM cost but they dont have the OEM crap that comes along with it. Plus they get it at even a cheaper cost since they buy mass licenses so im thinking around 40 bucks a install. They can sell these PC's so cheap because of all the advertising that they have, hence the crap that they put in there.

Yes DELL is my favorite competitor:
Last year, to discourage people from calling at all, Dell removed the toll-free service number from its Web site...

The following is a direct quote from BusinessWeek magazine, June 2006.

Dell's laser focus on cost efficiency has long been a core strategy. But like Home Depot, Dell's cost-cutting efforts have alienated its customers. The "direct" sales model of selling computers to consumers via phone and the Internet eliminates the costs of shipping to stores and tracking inventory. But outsiders say that mentality also leads to moves that almost seem designed to put customers last. Dell, for instance, sraffs some customer service call centers with fewer than 500 workers. A center that small is almost guaranteed to be frequently overwhelmed.

Enter Richard L. "Dick" Hunter, Dell's new head of customer service. If he has his way, workers in the company's call centers will soon have a colored flag to raise when they run into trouble helping a customer. When the flag goes up, a supervisor will come running to help out. It's an idea Hunter cribbed from Dell's computer factories, where an assembler can raise a similar alarm. "In the factory, if there's a problem, he flicks on a light and the next-level [builder] comes running," says Hunter. In the call center, "why not do the same?"

An eight-year veteran who made his reputation overseeing Dell's legendarily efficient assembly plants, Hunter is remarkably candid about how hard it will be to turn things around. In 2005, Dell's customer satisfaction rating fell 6.3% to a score of 74 in the Michigan ranking, the steepest decline in the industry. Analysts say poor service is complicating the $56 billion Round Rock (Tex.) giant's struggle to get back on the growth path. Competitors have matched its prices, rolled out aggressive marketing campaigns, and raised their own service levels. In the U.S. consumer market, Dell's first quarter share fell to 28% from 31% accord to researcher IDC. "Dell has to repair its reputational damage," says Jason Maxwell, an analyst at TCW Group, wich owns about 25 million Dell shares.

Hunter thinks the solution is to treat the call center like a factory. Now, many cell center reps are trained to solve only one type of problem--say, a hardware glitch on a Dimension desktop. That explains why it's so common for the agent who answers a call to have to transfer it in search of a techie with the right expertise. Hunter estimates that almost 45% of calls to Del require at least one transfer. "That's terrible," he says. "It's like delivering materials to the wrong factory 45% of the time." Last year, to discourage people from calling at all, Dell removed the toll-free service number from its Web site, a move that Hunter says "falls into the stupid category." It put the number back a couple weeks ago.

Here is a link (that was working when posted) of the Vista 32 & 64 bit RC1, this is after BETA2 and supposedly the last release before the retail product.

Download VISTA RC1