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Dave Barry Does Windows
retrosteve writes: "Well, it's finally happened. Someone (Dave Barry) in the popular press has finally, explicitly and with a sense of humour, pointed out that Microsoft Windows doesn't get any more reliable or usable, no matter how many versions you buy."
If you liked this, you'll probably like Dave Barry in Cyberspace (1996, Crown Publishers Inc, ISBN 0-517-59575-3). Despite the impression that he deliberately gives in this column, he does in fact understand what's going on, and the book comes across as one geek's very humorous spin on computers, the internet, and the industry.
...is sending Dave Barry a copy of linux!
Do you like Japanese imports?
Win98? You must be fucking kidding. I got my laptop "upgraded" from Win96 (OSR 2, I think) to Win98 SE, and it sucks much worse than it did before.
I would much rather have WinNT because that's really more stable, but that doesn't support a lot of the things my laptop is able to do (no drivers, no USB). Finally, Win2000 is not supported by my company, for laptops, yet.
So I am stuck with Win98 which is crashing on me twice per day, expecially while using IE 5.
Sigged!
I'm not sure what an MSCE - did you mean an MCSE?
Not that the guy in the article is one of those either.
Most career newsies I have ever met were Mac people, who loved stability, well-engineered applications that got the job done, and abhorred a command line. Mac has been the standard for newsrooms for a long time, so it's no surprise if the media has been slow to notice how little Windows sometimes delivers.
/. from people who say they are journalists, so maybe there's hope.
I find it ironic that many people who make thier living as professional communicators appear oblivious to things that shape the state of communication technology overall. But then I've seen a number of posts on
There's a set of ATM/Bank Machines on Numancia around the Sants train station in Barcelona with some sort of "fatal exception error" message on the screen for all of last week.
:-)
Who in the world would use NT as the OS for an ATM? And do you think they've kept up to date with their security patches?
I want your system. I have 6 computers here, 1 Dell bought, the rest hand made. All hardware I have was selected explicitly because a combination of reviews and recommendations suggested it as having excellent drivers. Not one, NOT ONE sytem has lasted longer than 6 months. All are quirky and crash randomly. I have tried all flavors of windows, from 95 to ME, including NT 4->2000. NT is more stable, but not rock solid.
3 of my machines are now linux only, and never crash, have no quirks, and work 100%. Of course, I can't find all the software I need to run on Linux, so I must leave the other 3 for games.
I have been using PCs for almost 20 years, I have never seen mainstream PC operating systems get this bad.
You sir are a liar.
Switch to Linux, R, Latex and emacs. No crashes and no lost work in two years. AND I get better results with less effort.
See what I've been reading.
I have not claimed to use Solaris as a workstation os.
Check my homepage. My wife and kids think you are very funny.
I suppose Unix lets you use fucking mindcontrol, rather then a keyboard/mouse/monitor.
No, but it is a feature of UNIX systems that users are able to operate any given computer on a network remotely and quite seamlessly. I am writing this in the bedroom using a small, rather elderly thinkpad, but the web browser I am using is running on a system downstairs. I get better response than I did when I ran a browser such as Mozilla (or even Opera) on this tiny laptop. If the host machine ran Windows, I would not have the choice (though I guess I could muddle along with vnc for this particular purpose).
Not true. I know this may not fit into your thinking patterns but get this. Linux does not need to reboot if I upgrade mozilla or opera or konqeror. Linux does not need to reboot if I upgrade libraries for mysql, postgres, interbase, oracle, db2 or what have you.
The linux kernel almost never needs to be ugraded for security reasons and that's the only reason you need to reboot. The only time people upgrade their kernels under normal circumstances is when they upgrade their distro.
The windows service packs usually fix things in the user space but require a reboot anyway in linux this does not happen.
War is necrophilia.
Nonsense. (MS)DOS is not free, I've seen "abandonware" sites beeing shut down just because they had MSDOS 5.0 on it.
And did you ever use KDE, huh? I explained to a newcomer in one hour how to surf, browse, send emails, access a newsnet server, and play little games on it, don't talk about nonsense crap for having to learn weeks.
(Yes it takes weeks (or more) to understand HOW it works, but that's nat different on any other OS, except on most even impossible if your not working in that company and have access to the internals, but I also can drive my car very well without having an idea what an engine is)
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Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
NT 3.51 SP3 was the result of the NT effort under Dave Cutler, before they let the kode kiddies from the Win95 group put code in. That was a dull, but solid system.
Windows 2000 SP 2 represents all the fixes to date to the NT code base, but doesn't yet contain the control-freak stuff from Windows XP. It's what you want to run if you have work to do and have to use Microsoft.
So actually, for about six months or so every five years, Microsoft ships something that works.