I was thinking this morning, lying in bed, half asleep, about writing two articles: ten things I like, and ten things I don’t, about Windows Vista.  I got to about number three on the “don’t” list -DirectX 10 – and the more I thought about it, the more I realised that it could actually turn out, in the long run, to be the biggest mistake Microsoft’s ever made with the Windows platform: worse that Bob, worse than Windows ME, worse even than the behated Windows Genuine Disadvantage.

So what’s wrong with DirectX 10?  After all, it supports a load of smart new features, such as XInput, XACT, ShaderModel 4 and so on.  It also contains a Direct3D 9 layer, and can run Direct3D 9 games without a problem.

Yes, but not everyone plays just the latest games, do they?  After all, the hardware requirements for most new games tends to be quite beefy – I personally didn’t buy Doom 3 when it first came out, despite my desperate longing for it, because it would have required me to spend about £300 just to meet the minimum required hardware, even though my computer at the time wasn’t that old.

Besides which, everyone has their favourite games from yesteryear that they still play – this is why the Playstations still have backward compatability mode, and why these controllers with hundreds of built in Commodore 64 or Atari games are still so popular.

Take, for example, Carmageddon 2, one of my favourites.  Because DirectSound has been deprecated, and sound is no longer hardware-accelerated (a surefire way to get games to run slower, by the way), C2 runs in total silence.   What’s the point in running over pedestrians if you can’t hear them squelch?  And it really takes the fun out of the pedestrian electro-bastard ray…

And companies are now making both DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 versions of their games.  This is a bit of a disaster for Microsoft, really – it’s back to the days when DirectX was just starting and they were trying to get everyone onto Windows 95 instead of DOS and Windows 3.1.

Oh all right, I know what you’re thinking: I’m whining just because  I can’t play Carma2.  Well, actually, I can.  I just install it in a VirtualPC session on Windows 2000.  What I lose in hardware acceleration (and C2 used to run smoothly on a 300MHz processor with no 3D acceleration) I gain in being able to hear what’s going on.  Problem solved.

But what’s got me thinking that this is a big mistake is something I saw in the supermarket the other day.

Round the corner from me is a shopping park, complete with supermarkets and PC World.  Now the supermarket I usually go into used to have a big display of PC games that took up the same shelf space as the PS3, Wii and XBox 360 allocations combined.  About a week ago, all that changed.

The supermarket has expanded its games range, from two racks to three.  One for PS3, one for Wii, and one for Xbox 360, PSP and Nintendo DS (essentially, that one’s unchanged from before).  PC games are – apparently – stocked on the bottom shelf of the PS3 rack (a rack being about 16 shelves high and 3 feet wide.)  However there isn’t a PC title in sight any more – all the PC titles are now in the bargain section, round the corner.  All one of them.

Well, maybe it’s competition from the PC World round the corner.  After all, they don’t sell console stuff, do they?  Oh, they do.  Ah.

So obviously the supermarket are selling more games, but to console buyers.  And it’s obviously the PS3 and the Wii that are increasing sales.  What Microsoft really don’t need is for their own developers to pull the rug out from under the Windows gaming market, potentially persuading people to go elsewhere.  Especially when your own console is having problems of its own.

Sales of Vista haven’t been going well, by all accounts.  Microsoft have had to capitulate and allow manufacturers to start selling XP once more.  It’s like Windows ME all over again.   For something so hyped, with the advertising suggesting that Vista has the “wow” factor, it’s looking more and more like Vista has the “ow” factor.

What with CNet rating Vista as one of the ten worst tech products of all time (along with the C5,  Atari Jaguar and the Amstrad em@iler), sales of Vista massively down on XP,  grumbles about WPA, moans about poor performance that SP1 won’t solve, five year old bugs coming back to haunt you and the recommended minimum memory for Vista being more than for Windows for Supercomputers,  I’d suggest that if you own shares in Microsoft, now would be the time to sell them, before things get any worse.

So if I were in charge of policy at Microsoft?  It’s quite simple.  I’d be round to the DirectX and SP1 developers with a big stick with a nail through it and a pile of old games.  Then I’d – shall we say suggest? – that until these don’t run, their work ain’t done.

I’ve just been planning a journey for next week, and have been struck by the difficulty of actually planning it online.  Bus companies produce timetables, and they have them online, right?

Well, the ones I was looking at were in my pet hate for this sort of thing: PDF.   Compared to a database based solution like the National Rail Enquiries website it’s unsearchable, unusable and just plain irritating.  Surely the data that was used to create these timetables can be loaded into a database somewhere and used to plan journeys?  You’d think so, wouldn’t you…

Eventually I had to phone up, and they obviously checked a database right then and there and told me the service I needed (which wasn’t in the slightest bit obvious from the website).  So it would seem to me that they have an application that already does that somewhere, don’t they?

So, if someone wants a really nice idea for a business, here you go: an online journey planner using public transport.  One that actually works.  Enter your start location and  end location, and it should look at bus, train and tram timetables to work out exactly what transport you should catch and when.

Of course, nobody is actually going to do this unless it’s government: there’s just not enough money in it.  So, sadly, unless governments across the world get their acts together (very unlikely), you’re never going to see this sort of thing happen, at least not in the near future.

Which is a pity, because if we’re going to do anything about the very scary prospects raised in the recent IPCC report on the subject, we need to be promoting public transport as not only an affordable alternative to using your car (which generally it isn’t, if you do the sums) as well as a cleaner alternative.