- Posted by reggie on April 26, 2007
I'm sitting here at the end of the MySQL Conference 2007 waiting for "Orcas" beta 1 to uninstall. Yes, I know I should have used a VM but that's not the issue. The issue is that I'm missing a great closing keynote on Yahoo Pipes while I wait for setup to "generate setup script". Folks, it's been doing that for 30 minutes!
I'm running Vista Ultimate on this Inspiron 6000 but I know these absurdities are not limited to lower end hardware. I've got a dual-Opteron box at my house and uncompressing zip files is a joke. Right-clicking a 30 meg zip on my home system (SATA, 2 gig RAM, dual Opteron) often takes at least 10 minutes to tell me that the rest of the uncompress will take another 20. Enter 7-zip stage left and the same uncompress is done in about 90 seconds. I've code for almost 20 years and I can tell you that I would have to work very hard to write code this bad. It has to be intentional!
45 minutes - still generating setup script.
Before I left on this trip I needed to copy the Orcas ISO over to my laptop. Both machines are on my home network but the ISO is 5.5 gigs so I knew it would take some time. After showing me a "Calculating time required" dialog for nearly 1 hour the dialog simply vanished. No file copied, no error, no apology, no smoke afterward. Copying files on Vista is simply broken, whether it's across a network or local. On many occasions I've emptied my recycle bin (that had only one item in it) and stared at a "Preparing to recycle" message for 20 minutes. Hello! I'm recycling a single 2k file and you have to think about it for 20 minutes. No wonder we're the butt of the world's joke.
55 minutes - still generating setup script.
Yes, Vista does some good things. Yes, the things I mention here can and will be fixed. But for now, my best advice to Vista users is to not copy files. *grin*
1 hour - finally got the script written. Now doing the uninstall.