Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Dave Barry Does Windows

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the squeegee-man dept.

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."

3 of 753 comments (clear)

  1. Dave Barry in Cyberspace by Ronin441 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:What am I missing? by nels_tomlinson · · Score: 5, Informative
    Run Win98, SAS, Excel and Word for four hours. Crash, with lost work. Repeat.
    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.
  3. The good stuff by Animats · · Score: 4, Informative
    There have been two good versions of Windows: Windows NT 3.51 Service Pack 3, and Windows 2000 Service Pack 2.

    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.