jamezpolley.com

I’ve been away on hol­i­day, so I’ve slipped behind in the blo­gos­phere a little.

I only became aware last night that there’s been a flap over a poten­tial cannot-be-easily-disabled startup sound in Vista. Peo­ple are in a tizzy over the thought that there might be a sound they can’t con­trol — although as arstech­nica and Scoble, amongst many oth­ers, have pointed out, Macs have always done this, most gam­ing con­soles do this — it’s really not a new idea at all, so why the flap?

I per­son­ally think every­one is miss­ing the point here.

Scoble has spo­ken to “Steve Ball, group pro­gram man­ager for the Win­dows Audio Video Excel­lence team (basi­cally, the team that builds the stuff that plays audio and video in Win­dows)” who says:

The cur­rent plan … is that there will be a pre-wired sound that plays when the sys­tem is ready for you to logon. This is the plan of record for quite a few months.

You can do other things with your atten­tion and your eyes dur­ing cold boot with­out feel­ing like you have to watch and wait.

To me, the issue isn’t that there’s going to be a sound alert­ing me to the fact that the com­puter is ready to use. The issue here is that MS con­fiently expect that the Vista boot process will be so long that the vast major­ity of users will have drifted away and won’t notice that it’s ready.

Wow, talk about a qual­ity product.

Tiger boots on my 4+ year old lap­top, an old 866mhz job­bie with 512mb of ram, in around 60 sec­onds. On the newest Intel iMacs, it boots in some­thing like 20 seconds.

Given the choice between an OS that boots before I can lose inter­est, and one that assumes i’m going to be away get­ting some cof­fee while I’m wait­ing and will need an audi­ble alert to tell me to come back — I’ll choose the for­mer, thanks.