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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.
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?
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.
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.