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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."
Dave Berry also pointed out in a newspaper clipping that there was no one left living in North Dakota, well i usually see at least 2 or 3 people every day wandering about on this side of the border (not including myself), so take his arguements with a grain or salt...
With a few exceptions, secrecy is deeply incompatible with democracy and with science. --Carl Sagan
I've been using Win98 since 1998, and it's just as stable as any OS I've come across. It doesn't crash every four hours or anything like that, in fact, I keep my Win98 machine running for weeks on end...with negligable memory leakage.
Windows runs all the software I care to run, and the games I wish to play, so frankly, as a consumer level computer user (with a self-built system (so as to dispel any notion that I'm totally ignorant)) who has given Linux a try, Windows is just fine by me because it does what I want to do.
I can't help but wonder how many people choose other OSes just because they're not Windows...
Leveling up builds character.
... that someone explain to end users that by it's nature, Windows is unstable.
I'm not saying it's a bad product, but for those of us who support users, we know a machine DOES crash once in a while.
When a user tells me a machine crashed, and it's only happened once, they've been using the machine for a year, I explain that is a better then average track record, and they want it fixed.
oy.
Barry was quick to point out that manly computer users such as himself didn't want a computer they could use, and so the Macintosh has a pitiful market share, even to this day ; )
Funny how the MSCE in his story has to call tech support and it takes 2 days. Dammit, anyone can call tech support. Do they need a degree too? And why should they get paid for that?
See "humor". See also "sarcasm".
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?
The large monty python foot next to the article means it's humor.
"I've had uptimes for weeks before rebooting for the obligatory auto-update security patches."
...and that's a GOOD thing?
The best way to accelerate a windows box is at 9.8 meters per second square.
And its unfair to talk about the fact that the previous 40 versions of Windows did not seem to get any more stable unless we have also reviewed version 41? You know, the version which needed a patch before it was released. Well... only if you wanted to use the internet, and who wants to do that?
Give me a break!
The point is, it's funny. The point of posting this article is NOT for Slashdot to be taken seriously. Note the topic: "It's funny. Laugh." This topic wouldn't exist is Slashdot wanted to be taken seriously all the time.
The second point is that the lack of reliability of Windows is actually getting some mainstream national media attention, instead of just the usual articles in tech publications. This doesn't happen too often.
Lighten up, get over it, and move on.
Darryl
http://www.darrylballantyne.com
----------
Darryl Ballantyne
http://www.darrylballantyne.com
Things that you've never seen before. Things that you would have told yourself, "There's no way anyone would release something with a hole that obvious."
There's a whole world of possibilities out there. As long as we allow Micros~1 to be free to innovate, they will continue to find them!
Free software is evil. If you don't pay money for something no matter how bad it is thent he terrorists win!
Microsoft (and friends) have taken a long time but they have basically trained the average computer user to expect and accept computer crashes - instead of going back to the store and demanding a refund for a defective product!
This can be both good and bad. Maybe less people will rely on non-fault-tolerant systems for ultra-important issues like emergency/military/banking?
Or maybe people will get desensitized to the crashing. Programmer's don't need to fully test their products anymore since people accept the crashes. People just go along thinking that it is the normal way, wreaking havoc in the world with a simple blue screen on a computer that had no business being in a critical system.
read The Risks Digest for scary stories.
--jeff
ipv6 is my vpn
Win2k and XP are actually quite stable.
I think pretty soon. Windows and linux will be on equal footing for stability and security... we can't ride the "more stable" horse (ha ha, get it?) forever.
So linux is free, which is great, but what else?
The way Dave Barry keeps on talking about how the computer "blames him" reminds me of the way Alan Cooper said that error messages are often worded to make "The User" feel responsible when something goes wrong.
Personally, I just think of error messages as "status indicators" -- much like a "paper jam" light on a copy machine. Apparently lots of other people don't feel this way.
My Blog: http://nic.dreamhost.com/
Better, but always "not quite there yet". So is Windows not getting better ? no, it is getting better, only it's always at a level of "betterness" that's 10 years behind what Un*x users have come to expect. M$ has fought so hard over the years to brainwash people into thinking that computers naturally and unavoidably hang regularly that people actually believe it ! (remember that famous quote supposedly from a M$ support guy saying to a customer that "memory is like gasoline, you use it up then your computer has to fill up the tank again by restarting" ?)
To M$' credit though, they did design Windows to be run by computer idiots, so I'm not surprised that the OS has a lot of tradeoffs that make it unstable so it's easier to use, but then OS/2 was also designed to be run by anybody and it was a lot better than Windows. So I'd tend to think that Microsoft engineers either (1) suck, (2) are instructed to adopt shitty designs because Microsoft prefers to win battles on the marketing front than on the technical front, or (3) both
Dude - it's a humourous piece - not scientific fact, and yes - he's not bought XP yet - that's the point of the article - windows has never changed over the last umpteen releases in terms of reliability - but somehow he still feels ready to beleive the statements about it being more relible this time around and that it will somehow be different than the last 10 times they said this, and the last 10 times he felt this one was gonna be different.
I mean you said it yourself "uptimes of weeks" - this is not something to be proud of - and neither is having to restart the entire machine to apply a patch.
The point is, most people have come to accept that their computer will crash on a regaular basis (as opposed to say, their VCR or Washing machine) and this is becuase of Windows - there's no denying it's history. Yes NT is more stable than Win9x but most folks' experience is of Win9x and it's ancestors.
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
I was in that boat for a while... Get your friend a copy of PC-Geos. It kicks Windows' butt, and does so without needing a 386. Back when the community college I used to go to had only 286es, it was the only way to get any real work done.
:-). And, of course, current versions of Windows FAR outdo Geos in every way. Although I still find myself using or wanting to use GeoWrite instead of the comparatively unfriendly Microsoft Word (GeoWrite is a frame-based word processor -- very impressive).
Unfortunately, Geoworks (the company that makes it) doesn't kick Microsoft's butt
There's a demo version, named something like NewDeal Office.
-Billy
I say this not because Dave Barry is a humorist. It is possible for humorists, comedians or whatever, to really get people pissed off motivated, or at least make people think: think Lenny Bruce; think "A Modest Proposal". But Dave Barry and Dilbert are not that kind of humor. They are both the kind of humor that makes its reader laugh at himself, giggle at the funny things people do, the funny stuff we get ourselves into, without thinking for a moment that any real change is necessary. I've always felt that Dilbert is an oppressive force, because by making people think that incompetent management is normal and funny, it keeps people from bothering to actually demand competent management. Same thing with this column: by commiserating about Windows, by poking fun at the flaws that it has on every level, from technological to social, it serves only to further entrench people in a Windows monopoly. I'm sure this column is making the rounds at Microsoft, and I'm sure it is universally loved. I bet Bill Gates tapes it to his monitor, or invites Dave Barry to his next keynote. The message here is "Windows is crap, but there are 200,000,000 people in America who will NEVER SWITCH TO ANOTHER OS, NO MATTER WHAT. Ha ha ha."
This is not to say that humor necessarily trivializes an issue: maybe it's a distinction between "parody" -- which, we'll say, gently pokes fun without suggesting alternatives, thereby reinforcing norms -- and "satire" -- which, let's say, savagely disillusions people and has at least a shot at changing their minds.
95, the first release, was atrocious. Gradually enough patches and services packs fixed it up. Then came Win95SR2. This code was good stuff. Never had alot problems with it. Then came 98 -- it sucked. 98SE was rock solid (unfortunately, $100 upgrade for no more features, just reliability increase). Then WinME -- ick. How did this get out of QA, one wonders.
NT4 and Win2K have been great to me. Just use WHQL'd drivers for everything and your problems vanish (well, at least for my usage patterns). NT4 reliability was cyclical in service pack releases, but at 6a, it was rock solid for a desktop OS.
NT4 and Win2K and for the most part Windows 98SE, were OSs that I could sit in front of and get work done and not worry about the machine dying of some ill conceived crash from Windows. A feeling I had only known before as a Solaris workstation user. I'm not sure what some of the people here used nt4/win2k on that gave them such a bad experience or bad uptime for a workstation, but your habits must not fall to the areas as mine, as I don't hit them.
What about Linux you ask, since this is slashdot. Well, my experience with linux as a server has been that the kernel and daemon apps like samba and the appleshare IP stuff are rock solid, handling heavy loads and delivering long uptimes. But the "modern window managers" like KDE and GNome suck bad, like the bad versions of Windows I mentioned above. I never know when the window manager is going to die, leaving me with the only choice of CTRL-ALT-BKSPC to get out (and sometimes that even doesn't work, I have to ssh into the machine and kill X the hard way). I may reinstall X on a machine in the near future, but I am staying well away from the new glitzy window managers. They are all up on features, down on performance and reliability.
TurboD
Huh? You mean like the Red Cross getting a bunch of M$ junk to deal with the results of 9/11 in the field? While Dave laughs at the 18 words a day he might lose, I can only imagine what the Red Cross has been dealing with since. Ignorance is always bad.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It doesn't get hit by viruses, and do to the true multiuser nature of a *NIX system, a virus would be completely ineffective unless run as root by a very foolish person that would have to consciously do so. Feel free to point me out one that isn't a story by a company trying to sell a virus software product. In regards to your second point, my system has NEVER crashed. I've done extensive CD burning, DRI-enabled gaming, and played around with peripherals regularly (USB camera, SCSI scanner, printer), all without ever a crash or a glitch. I'm kinda curious...what ARE you talking about?
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
here is what I've seen happening whenever a negative microsoft related article gets posted on slashdot (xbox,windows,.net,etc).
first few hours most comments that spike up to 4 or 5 generally make a few good humored comments, ranging from neutral to chiming in with similiar microsoft dismay stories.
then a few hours later, lets say about 5 or 6 hours since the original post, those posts get sent back to 2 or 3 land, and a new crop of 5's crops up. The strange thing about this new bunch is that they are _all PRO microsoft_!
it is a strange phenomena to say the least. the posts themselves, at least some of them could be genuine, but the way they are moderated is _very_ suspicious.
anyway, my prediction holds that the same will happen today, watch for it.
A program, no matter how badly written, should not cause your entire machine to crash, unless it's integrated down as far as a driver.
Windows simply should not let a program like PGP freeware get that close to the OS. The program should crash, leaving the OS untouched.
When encryption is outlawed, ?o'AZ-,++o+i++##4AoA+-/-C++bI+/.+~
The changes we need to make in software are far greater than just having "the most reliable Windows experience ever".
I just found my new .sig:
"I bring this all up because now Microsoft has a new version out, Windows XP, which according to everybody is the ``most reliable Windows ever.'' To me, this is like saying that asparagus is ``the most articulate vegetable ever.''
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 wouldn't be surprised to learn he's got a low=end pentium or pentium 2 with a whole lot of crap shareware and software toys installed - that's probably what's killing his system stability. I've got no love for Win98, but it isn't as bad as Barry says.
I'm the stranger...posting to
Windows 3.1/95/98/ME were all horribly unstable - there just isn't any denying that. But the *nix crowd is starting to look incredibly silly sitting over in the corner snickering about the reliability of Windows today.
I hate to break it to you guys, but as far as stability is concerned - Windows 2000/XP are VERY stable operating systems. NT was pretty good, but 2000 and XP will seriously give any desktop OS out there a run for its money.
I'm not claiming 2000 or XP are the most secure OSes out there - far from it. And I still don't think a server should be running a GUI. But zealotry aside, Windows XP is a very good desktop OS.
[Note: For what it's worth I use 2000, XP, and Mandrake for the desktop and Debian or one of the BSDs for servers.]
So once MS catches up in the stability dept (all the while, doing the whiz-bang stuf people want), how will linux be marketed? This isn't a troll, a serious question - in my own opinion it will boil down to price, as linux will likely have no technical advantages by mid-2003.
what a fucking troll - what will linux have to offer? how about freedom from the upgrade yolk that microsoft has you on. how about peace of mind that the time you invest into it, won't be thrown into the garbage in two years when ms dumps what you were working on for the next cools sounding technology.
give me a fucking break. if you want to live in a microsoft only world then just admit it, otherwise grow up and use some real technologies that can be used outside of ms's little pee see sandbox.
oh by the way, I understand quite well that this comment is bound to rise to 5 and stay there, no matter how many times it gets modded down. sometimes I think there are more ms shills on slashdot than actual linux supporters anymore.
2 years ago I picked up my phone. No dial tone. Huh. Did I forget to pay my bill? No. Checked the wiring and the phone. 15 minutes later still no dial tone. My cell phone worked though, so I called the operator and asked her about my phone.
The problem was that Spice Girls tickets just went on sale. The phone call load to the nearby Ticket Master outlet flooded the system. No one in my area had a dial tone for half an hour. No one could call 911 on a land line!
Problems happen even with properly engineered systems. When an improperly designed system is put into place, all hell will break loose.
I'm not just talking Microsoft here, there is a real problem with companies/programmers seeing their system work once, and then assuming it is good enough to ship.
--jeff
ipv6 is my vpn
I've used '95 and '98 quite a lot over the past six years or so and found them reasonably stable. I did C++ and Oracle development on Solaris and HP-UX using the Hummingbird Xceed X server, and would only switch the Windows box off at weekends. I have also run a mix of Netscape and IE browsers, installed jdk and dozens of Oracle tools including Designer 2000, played rather too many Quake death-matches, and generally flogged Windows about as hard as any other developer in a similar environment.
It bombed rather more often than any UNIX I have used (that is to say, a system crash was not so unusual an occurrence as to occasion earnest headscratching and bug reports) but it was not one of these reboot-before-lunchtime jobs, and I didn't start each week in the expectation of an enforced reboot before Friday.
I've also used NT and found it even more reliable. But I tired of Windows because it's an old fashioned, blinkered and wasteful system.
Microsoft, it seemed to me, had wasted over a decade pursuing a wasteful paradigm for desktop computers--the single user computer. If I wanted to do something that in a UNIX system would require me to run one single application with root privilege (or some lesser, more specialised UNIX privilege, such as the mysql database administrator), I could be sure that in NT I had to log the entire system out of my own user and log it into Administrator or another account with the appropriate privileges.
Then, as often as not, I would be required to reboot the entire system. That is not only wasteful in computer time, it turned out to be very wasteful of my time, because I had to sit by through the incredibly slow NT boot sequence. If the machine in question was a server, this meant a server outage, which to my mind seems quite barking mad.
Then there was the problem that I had to be physically sitting at the computer in order to perform many tasks. The contrast with the UNIX environments I was used to using was very marked.
I encountered these problems during a period when I was actively investigating the possibility of giving Windows development a go, and it was the frustration caused by these problems, as well as the frustration of dealing with Microsoft's rather lacklustre development tools, that finally turned me against Windows. I simply burned out as a Windows user.
Hmmmm,
does anyone know where I can get a copy? Just for eval, of course
I don't like big words..., does that make me anti-semantic?
Not many people can say they know the entire system, every program, every lib, dll or driver.
.net. I like being in control of my OS, and Linux isn't ready to take over the Desktop yet. Maybe in 10 years Games and Applications will run on any OS, but until then, M$ will keep the market.
Windows and Linux(or BSD) for the whole distribution take hundreds of megabytes. Yes, Even thou linux the kernel can boot up under a meg and give you a shell its rather useless other than a rescue disk.
Windows XP is a great workstation os. There is just so much going on you need 3rd party utilities to see whats happening. Tasks running in the background, files loading and unloading, registry updates/calls, files trying to update themselves, etc.. And then there is all the tweaks you have to put on for common sense options, tcp/ip QOS at 80% wasting 20% of your bandwidth, Explorer and Internet Explorer sharing the same memory if 1 crashes they both crash, Turning off Last access attribute in ntfs for performance, etc... Play around with sys-internals utilities you can see programs looking for missing fonts, updates to the registry, all kinds of system functions.
Linux on the other hand is rather up front with what it needs. You see what libs a program needs with ldd. lsof shows all files open and what program is using them. Good for a server, more secure when you know whats running. Bad points are the software releases, even thou most of the software is free, it can either not compile, not like the version of libraries you have, or need libraries you cant find. You don't have these problems on the windows os.
Even thou things are getting more complex, things are getting better. Good linux distributions that install and detect most hardware, X configuration, less configuration and more operation. Windows XP has a nice GUI, very intelligent user interface, more stable, great workstation os.
Only thing that scares me, is if M$ goes totally
I dont see the OS as perfected yet, but its come along way since DOS.
-
The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials. - Chinese Proverb
Most people don't even realize it's the defective OS. Most people fall into 3 catagories;
1) Think it's the hardware
2) Think it's the programs
3) Know it's the OS, but think all OS's do this because the problem is so complex.
I've heard media reports of predictions of new computer technology of the future that will give us stable computers--they have no idea the *nix has been stable from day 1!!
nohup rm -rf ~/. >& zen &
Thats more the equivelent of a Denial of Service attack NOT a system malfunction.
If you have a system which can handle 5000 phone calls, and those around you place 10000 phone calls YOU will not be able to make one because it's over capacity.
Happens in real life too. Rivers can take x litres/second through. When you send down 10x water, the river will flood as only x is going through.
If a highway can send through Y cars at 100Km/h, and you start trying to send through 5Y cars, problems will occur (like a traffic JAM)
Rod Taylor
Don't confuse the issue. There's a big difference between failing because of an overload and just never working.
The New York Times ran dozzens of articles about what a pain it was for victims to get help. Collection became a full time effort as they wandered from agency to agency and filled out horrendous and mind numbing forms with exactly the same information! They did this instead of finding loved ones, shelter, clothes or food.
While agencies not sharing information is nothing new, you have to wonder how much more could have been done if those agencies were using reasonable software. Nothing M$ talks to anything else M$. I know, because we use the junk at my Fortune 500 company. What proportion of innacurate, duplicate, non shared data came from inadequate tools, and what share from the nature of the organizations themselves? It's had to tell about there from here, but where I work it's hard to share information you want to share with other departments in the same building, much has to be entered multiple times and is often corrupted, and data sometimes just goes away on it's own. No, our tech support folks are not incompetent. No, the people I work with are not incompetent. We simply have second rate tools. Pity those same tools have been used in an emergency situation.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
How the fuck did this get a mod of funny? What the...
"Look where we worship" -- Jim Morrison
These exchanges are specifically designed to communicate back to other COs when a crush of calls happen. Those COs back off and return busy to everyone in the CO trying to get that number for a period of time to prevent the end-point CO from going down. ie, they don't even attempt to complete the call.
Ever wonder why all the radio station contest lines are all in the same exchange in your area?!
I suspect the spice girl ticket number was not on a choke exchange like it was supposed to be.
Here's a tip. Next time you need to get a call through to a choke exchange number, get a friend from out-of-the-area to try it. If Philadelphia is having tickets go on sale for some big act at 9am, chances are there won't be people from Nebraska calling in. Their CO won't be "choked."
Tell that to anyone who needed to call 911 during that time!
In my opinion a Denial of Service of 911 emergency services IS a system malfunction. The 911 system has fault tolerance everwhere. But if the phone company cannot provide a dial tone, you're out of luck.
--jeff
ipv6 is my vpn
Yes, somebody screwed up big time. The problem though is that I am in the same exchange as Ticket Master. Everyone in this exchange could not call ANYONE or even 911 because there was no dial tone.
--jeff
ipv6 is my vpn
No, it is that bad.
/. crowd, AC's not included, but he is a normal user. But I believe he is a Mac loverrr, ah enthusiast.
Windows of all versions [yes XP and 2000] have problems. One could say it's the closed source-we can't fix it-we have to wait till they do- aspect. One could also say there is certain things MS can't predict. Windows is used by so many types of users doing so many types of things [usually all at once after '95].
For me my current XP woes is that it likes to kill my VNC clients, USB devices die on their own, and it still doesn't always shut down.
But we were talking about Dave Barry. He does know things about computers. If you'd remember [or scroll up] you'd know he wrote a book called Dave Barry In Cyberspace.
Now, he may not be as skilled as the
He's on point I believe. Nothing in that article hasn't happened to other Windows users.
At least he doesn't think that the 'Illegal Operation' error is somehow connected to the police. [my grandma STILL thinks the website she's viewing is illegal. I've tried to explain it. "Yahoo? How can it be illegal to check stocks on Yahoo?"]
--
Get your Unix fortune now!
So, did you get your Spice Girl tickets? ;)
"Yeah, well, Dracula called and he's coming over tonight for you and I said okay."
It isn't confusing the issue. If you can't dial 911 then people can die. Overload of phone calls, overload of www.cnn.com, overload of a buffer, what is the difference? In a non-critical system no one cares. In a critical system they are all problems.
Criminals could synchronize their attacks near ticket masters with the timing of spice girls ticket sales. Guaranteed 30 extra minutes!
--jeff
ipv6 is my vpn
Lol!
I didn't even know they went on sale before it was too late! Darn!
--jeff
ipv6 is my vpn
Of course, it really had nothing to do with MS - just a problematic motherboard that got cranky. But it was enough to frustrate me to no end for a couple weeks.
-
I usually don't read the paper too much as we can get everything it in faster in digital form, but I did manage to catch his article. I was a little bit suprised he bashed Windows as bad as he did. Hes always joking but he went pretty hard on Microsoft. Interesting.
I doubt he's busy with that movie. It was in the can in late August, and the release was delayed due to the terrorist attacks because the movie has a scene where a bomb is on a plane. They had to delay it since all the CGI people in the movie industry were already busy excising images of the WTC from every movie and TV show at the time and chucking them into memory holes.
I think they bumped it back to a spring release.
~Philly
Admittedly it's more stable than the 9x series, but it still crashes every couple days. The big difference is that it just automatically reboots instead of displaying a blue screen. Initially I was running it on a K6-400 with 128mb of ram and the rebooting was so bad I couldn't get anything done -- it was literally rebooting itself every 5-10 minutes.
Then I got myself a Athlon 1700+, motherboard, and 256mb for xmas and upgraded the machine. It runs better now. It's only rebooted itself 3 times in the last week.
By the way, Mandrake 8.1 ran great with the K6 and still is running great the Athlon on the same machine.
I know one other person using it and he's very impressed with the stability. He said he usually gets a week of uptime and he's very impressed. Of course, he's a been a big Windows fan as long as I've known him and getting several days of uptime is a big deal to him.
A question: I seem to remember reading somewhere that there is an option in XP to have it randomly blue-screen like previous versions instead of the default random reboot behaviour. I'm serious. Is it true? If so someone please tell me how to get my old familiar bluescreens back. TIA.
numb
Yes, I'd tend to agree with that. I believe that they're required to give 4 9's (Canada anyway) reliability on 911 and other emergency services (barring acts of god I believe). Meaning they would have used up atleast that years down time.
Rod Taylor
We run both FreeBSD servers and Win2k Servers for hosting platforms, granted FreeBSD is still by far the most stable, however I must admit that Win2k is rock solid when compared with NT4, I would usually reboot NT4 at least once a week just to get it back on its feet again. Now I can usually just leave my Win2k servers and maybe reboot once a month or once every 2 months.
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
Only one linux distro out of zillions i tried played nice with my OPL3-SA2 sound chip (redhat), no matter how many gurus pointed at it. The most intuitive distro (mandrake) is not regarded as the best, and the installer won't finish on my system. ever. The debian installer still is hairy enough to make most 1st timers cringe. SuSE has a similar problem. I have yet to see an office suite that doesn't suck. StarOffice is close, but has a long way to go.
"but wait" i hear you say, "there are too many different types of hardware to support to get linux to work with everything perfectly..."
well, same is true with windows. so what point exactly is trying to be made with this article? no software is perfect, duh.
the biggest problem with windows are the number of people that don't patch their systems, that are still running the 9x code base as opposed to the NT code base, and those that are running a ton of crappy registry thrashing shareware.
windows 2000 is great, i have had insanely long runtimes, and am very happy with it. XP moreso, although i have had problems with office XP running on it.
zealotry is not an effective weapon. you are not going to win any converts to *nix by loudly claiming how much windows sucks. really. trust me here. the key is to make your side look so much better, people flock to it.
or shock horror, DUAL BOOT. jesus. every OS has a potential use or niche. get over this weird belief that there can only be one OS. if windows went away and all you had was linux, what would your arguments for using linux be? you are left with a non-centralized, fairly slow moving, non standard army. wow. I think i will stick with FreeBSD as my *nix. they don't yell as much, and they rock harder.
And every service pack, ie upgrade, mdac upgrade, driver upgrade etc. In other words about twice a month.
War is necrophilia.
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.
This is unfounded Microsoft bashing at its worst. Anyone who has used Windows over the years knows that each version has improved reliability and usability over its predecessor. Most people fail to realize that their computer problems are due to faulty hardware and/or buggy device drivers, not the OS.
No matter how you architect an OS, at some point you have to rely upon a device driver (coded by someone else) to do the underlying work. That "someone else" part is the biggest problem, because you never know the quality of the code that comprises the driver.
The only way to assure the quality of a mystery box is to test the hell out of it. Microsoft has a "WHQL" certification program that is supposed to test driver binaries for correctness and completeness, but the label is meaningless in practice. Microsoft grants WHQL certifications to crappy drivers all the time in an effort to please device manufacturers.
Device manufacturers make money off hardware, not software. Drivers are always an afterthought, and their quality is always subject to the shipping schedule of the hardware. Drivers are often stamped WHQL and shipped along with the finished hardware even when the manufacturer and Microsoft know full well that the drivers aren't yet finished.
Computer reliability won't improve until device manufacturers realize drivers and devices are equally important. And that will only happen when consumers behave as if they are equally important. So stop whining about buggy drivers and actually do something about it. If substandard drivers prevent a device from working as advertised then take the manufacturer to court. False advertising is a crime, so why should device manufacturers get away with it? Usually there are thousands or millions of other consumers who would eagerly join a class-action lawsuit, if someone would just start one.
- "It's just a matter of opinion!" - PRIMUS
Well, it's the same with Linux, only they're all rolled into kernel revisions. Still the old upgrade and reboot cycle.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I meant: Since when is a bunch of rabid spice girls fans NOT a natural catastrophe?
-----
Score 3? For what? Being wrong, at length? - smirkleton
He certainly could. And for the title, "The more things change" the more they stay the same. He's just trying to punch out a column, probably in Word, and is thank full, not for such a great word processor running on a great operating system, but that he gets it done without crashing and saves it on disk and forwards it onto his editor and it shows up in the paper rather than a bunch of gobble-dee-goop. Ever get the feeling that the cost of upgrading is actually rent on the same ol-same ol? For him, it would be.
Oh, and by the way, "Monty Python Institute of Customer Service" would be a great name for a rock band.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Look, I don't know what the deal is with Linux geeks talking about how windows is unstable and will always be. If you read the artical, he never mentiones an NT based systems, which are much, much more stable then 9x based system, and which XP is. Windows XP will be much more stable then windows ME.
I've had windows 2k crash (and by crash I mean 'weridness that requires a reboot') maybe 20 times. On my laptop Iv'e had to reboot only once.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Dear AC,
I am a linux supporter. I run linux on my web server, it's great for that. (I had to rewrite some of my network services though, because they were full of security holes and I was sick of patching.) I hope that some day I can run a free OS on my desktop computer too, but in order for that to happen, I need apps, and in order for that to happen, linux needs a stronger desktop user base.
Linux is not a technologically advanced OS. This is another common misconception on slashdot. It is a clone of Unix, a very old (and rather good) idea. There have been loads of new ideas and technologies since them, and I wish that hackers would implement these in new operating systems. (Do we *really* need to be running our network services as root just so that they can bind to a low-numbered port?) But the operating systems world (much like the rest of computer science) is very fad-oriented, and a good idea is worth nothing unless there is good marketing.
Linux has pretty good marketing. Windows has great marketing. But linux marketing is based on stuff that's starting to be less and less true. linux kicked the ass off of Windows 95 in terms of stability and security. (I remember rebooting to linux when the rest of my dorm was getting WinNuked all day.) But, Windows has practically caught up. 2000 is very stable; it crashes about as often as X does for me (and I do a lot more daring things with 2000, like play Quake and watch DVDs and burn CDs and do video capture). As linux has become more and more complex, certain major distributions are just as insecure as (or even more insecure than, perhaps) Windows. My question was, when joe consumer doesn't care about stability because his computer doesn't crash, and doesn't get hacked (Win XP has a personal firewall now, no?), why would he want to use linux?
The post wasn't intended as a troll, merely to stir the waters. Complacency is a terrible thing.
(PS: 12 moderations done to my post! Jeesh!)
I still use Win98SE. It doesn't usually crash, but I do usually reboot it every couple of days to make sure I clean any memory leaks. But other than that, it's pretty decent. I'll switch to Linux as soon as there is enough of a market to justify developing programs for it.
But XP? Never.
A friend of mine just bought a new laptop which, of course, came with XP installed. I had heard that XP was as much as 40% slower than 98 on the same hardware. I have a Pentium II-550 (bought it 1.5 years ago) and he has some new fangled 1.0GHz+ machine. The details are unimportant. The fact is, we did some speed tests and my machine ran several tests faster using the same software. And his hardware is at least twice as fast as mine!
Another friend of mine purchased a new desktop system, I believe it was HP. Came pre-installed with XP (his coice). The hardware came and we tried to get some of his favorite games working. They would not, or executed too slowly. He later tried to get the thing to dual boot between Win98SE and WinXP. He couldn't make it happen. A few days later he emailed me and told me he had returned the machine to HP and he would be receiving a "custom-built" system from HP... With Win2K, I believe.
There is nothing in WinXP that is worth your time and money. It is slower than previous versions of Windows. The look-and-feel has changed (again). It looks like a kiddie cartoon, not a serious OS. I don't believe it to be any more reliable than the uncounted times in the past that MS has said their new OS was "the most reliable yet." They've said that with every release of Windows since 3.1.
I'll be helping my laptop friend install either Win98SE or Win2K on his laptop sometime in the next week.
The only cool thing about WinXP is the Ray of Light music they play in the commercials. Unfortunately, they have ruined that song for me since I can't listen to the song without thinking of XP.
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.
Geeks generally reserve the word "crash" for a program/OS kernel doing something naughty in memory and brining execution of instructions to a grinding halt (and thus requiring a restart/reboot).
Most end users in my experience, when they use the word crash, refer to problems that cannot be fixed with a reboot, problems like their hard drive going south, the network connection being down, or most often, Windows getting corrupted in some way that prevents them from doing their valuable work no matter how many times they reboot. There is such tremendous fear of their computer being permanently screwed up that anything that can be fixed with a simple reboot simply viewed as a minor annoyance.
End users do complain about defective products, but they generally do it an a more passive and general way: they say "I hate computers" and try to do as little with their computers as possible. And they stop buying neat computer gadgets. And then the tech sector as a whole starts losing money and multi-billion dollar tech companies start laying off programmers. And you ultimately end up with the really big mess we have today.
I used to live in Huntsville and it is a great city. Don't discount it because it is located in Alabama as it is a city with two distinct faces. One is the intellectual, high per-capita PHD super tech and the other is good ol' boy. Believe it or not it makes for a decent mix.
However as a young guy you might not find it is the place for you. The city is not geared for younger people who are not of the "southern" lifestyle.
The living is cheap. There is a good abundance of decent food. Nice scenery and shopping abound. In short it would a great place to head in your early 30s with a starting family. Earlier than that? Try to risk NYC or SF. Then again SF is the deadest market I have ever seen so don't bother unless you are exceptional. If you must stay in the south head over to Atlanta or maybe even somewhere in NC. I don't know enough about the midwest to make a recommendation but I hear some parts of Coloraro are up and coming.
--- I do not moderate.
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Frankly I've had 95, 98, NT, Linux, Solaris, SCO, and Tru64 all crash at some point for differnet reasons. Some are stupid and are my fault like an improperly lined kernel . . . others are plain uncceptable.
.it could be a buggy driver. . .but you'll never know and you don't have the ability to ever find out. All UNIXes that I've used let you at least figure out what happened easily and fix it.
The thing that pisses me off more then anything alse about Windows is that fact that YOU CANT TELL WHY IT CRASHED and you can't fix it!
It could be a slightly incompatible library. .
To fix windows it's either trial and error or a format and re-install. No other option.
Frankly I really don't care if XP is about as stable as Linux. They'll both crash at some point for somthing stupid. What I really care about is that I can fix the reason why it crashed.
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The odds of anyone managing to read this(without plugging around my post history or googling long in the distant future) are pretty miniscule, but heh.
Cars have existed for what, ninety years now? Guess what, they still crash.
--Dan
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.
Even though, as a hard core UNIX person who would rather never touch Windows and who has not run any Microsoft product at home (And rarely at work) I can dick around in the Windows settings whenever people around me break it, I have finally hit upon the correct combination of scorn and faux-cluelessness that generally keeps Windows users from asking me questions twice. Generally it goes something like "Ahh SHIT! I have to REBOOT? AGAIN?"
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
You're right, except in this case I am TG rather than female. :)
Hence the 2 days on hold to Micro$haft "support" line.
Using the word "engineer" in the title of MCSE is like describing what they put in cheap hamburgers as prime steak. In fact, I'd be surprised if it didn't contravene most civilised countries advertising regulations.
[1] Yes, I meant that.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
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Yea, Windows is unreliable.. although Win2K, I will admit, *is* pretty reliable.
XP reliable? Ahem.. well, it's less reliable than any OS which *doesn't* deliberately crash itself after 90 days (WPA). I won't even get into the stories about spyware, the mysterious unauthorized Bandwidth usage, or the Helpassistant account (because I don't know if they're true or not). Reliable means it reliably does WHAT THE USER WANTS IT TO DO, not anything else.
The point is, though, that this is what users *want*. Gasps of shock? Users want an unreliable, slow operating system with lots of extra baggage. It lets them feel like they're using a really impressive computer, lets them blame the computer for not being able to get work done, etc. You can see this in modern UIs, where the UI has stopped trying to be friendly to the user and instead concentrated on adding fluff to make the user feel "wow, I'm using a computer!".
1) Do not upgrade from Windows95. Do a fresh install.
2) Install a minimum amount of software. Each new package that you install undermines the stability with extra DLLs and registry hacks.
3) Do not use exotic, state-of-the-art hardware. Use slightly older hardware with more mature drivers.
If you follow these simple rules you to can run Windows98 for months at a time. I have a small fileserver at my job which has been rebooted twice in as many years.
If you can afford it, get another computer or install a hard drive tray. Make one your works system and the other a "sandbox". Use the sandbox to evaluate new software and incorporate it into your work box once you completely understand it. Most of Win98's problems seem to happen to people that install all kinds of different software that they never use. The problem is that many vendors give you a computer that is pre-fucked (much useless software already installed). Your best bet is to reformat these disks and reinstall.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
I despise Windows as much as anyone else but the Linux situation is not as rosy as you let one. I've had bad luck with older versions of DRI for the Matrox G200/400 cards. Descent II would often corrupt the screen very badly. I could ssh into the box and kill Descent and even restart or kill X but that would get my screen box. I suppose you could point out that since I could ssh in that it didn't crash....but I still had to reboot to put the video card back into a sane state. The video card most certainly did crash even if the rest of the machine didn't. I've had other driver problems now and again even lock me out of the console. Driver code is loaded directly into the kernel. It has more privledges than God.
Now I understand that systems like the HURD are supposed to protect even against bad driver code but even that is no bulwark against freaked out hardware. There are more and less robust systems. I will agree that Linux is generally more robust than Windows but it isn't perfect. NOTHING is.
Anyhow, she needed a new computer, but didn't want to spend much money. So, she goes down to Fry's, and they sell her a $300 machine with "Fast Windows" preinstalled. You guessed it...it's some sort of weird Taiwanese Linux distribution!
Someone figured out they could hit a price point by eliminating the most expensive item in a PC today: Microsoft software.
How many of the people responding to statusbar actually read his whole post? He's NOT claiming MS quality is OK or as good as the phone company:
.99999 reliable telephone system that 1/3 of families can't afford, or a .999 reliable (in two tries at dialing) phone in every house?
Problems happen even with properly engineered systems. When an improperly designed system is put into place, all hell will break loose.
I'm not just talking Microsoft here, there is a real problem with companies/programmers seeing their system work once, and then assuming it is good enough to ship.
We've all seen examples of that. (And to be fair, MS does put it's products through quite a lot of testing -- the trouble is, they've made it possible to have far more configurations than it's possible to test, give the users few tools to figure out where things are going wrong, market the software as NOT requiring knowledgeable users or administrators, and create code that is beyond any one person's comprehension.)
But the phone company does maintain pretty good service, and no system can handle a 1000% overload well. But as someone else pointed out, they do have exchanges that handle a single-point overload without blocking other calls; the problem is that Ticket Master bought the wrong kind of service. I agree that phone availability in many parts of the US is less than what I'd really want for life-critical emergency services, however would you rather have a
an AC (why?) flames,
> so your a linux supporter eh? but you don't think
> it's so hot, so that would not really make you a
> linux supporter then would it? interesting how you
> try so hard to pretend to be one then.
Yes, I am. I support the cause, and I run linux on both of my computers at work. BUT, I don't think there is room for complacency, and I don't think it is the best thing since sliced bread. That makes me a linux supporter, rather than a linux zealot. Is that wrong?
>> Linux is not a technologically advanced OS.
> what? you offer almost no explanation for this,
> other than that it would be nice not to have to
> be root to bind to low ports. the reality is that
> your just spreading FUD by saying that linux is
> just a copy of 30 year old unix.
OK. I am not a systems guru, so I don't know all the ways in which linux could be more modern. But I have taken enough classes to know that it could be improved:
- a microkernel architecture would increase portability, security, reduce the trusted code base, and facilitate code development
- capability-based security WOULD MAKE A HUGE DIFFERENCE.
- not writing the standard internet services in C would also make a huge difference! (I don't know if you consider these "part of the OS")
Anyway, it really is true that it is based on a 30 year-old design. Make of that what you will. (I did in my post say that it is a tried-and-true design, which I believe.)
> first, that has yet to happen, XP and 2000 are
> still rife with security flaws.
Now who is spreading FUD? =) I feel much safer about a default install of Win2k than I do about a Redhat install... Security issues exist in spades on both sides, and it is hard to say which one is really more "rife"...
> in the end though, talking about an immaterial
> 'joe user' who doesn't exist is counter
> productive.
OK, then Joe User is my dad. He is a smart guy, he can learn how use something if he cares enough, but he doesn't think that Win2K is that bad, and would never consider investing weeks to figure out linux. That is the kind of person I'm talking about. How do you convince him to use it?
> let's talk about reality, a real and
> growing number of users choose linux because of
> trust and freedom. the code garuntees that they
> are in control of their computer, that they will
> stay in control of it, and that the time they
> invest will not be turned agaist them in a
> vicious upgrade cycle. security and stability and
> performance are just icing on the cake when you
> look at it like that.
Well, like I said, it is free, and that's great. That is why I hope it succeeds. What I'm saying is that success is seeming more unlikely as the typical windows user is becoming less and less frustrated with how their windows box works. And I am hoping that linux zealots do not get too complacent!
(By the way, you mean to say "you're" many of the times you say "your".)
The nielsen program is *far* from being the only piece of software that is Windows-only.
Here, I'll give you a list of software I've used recently that I'm pretty sure does not run on linux:
Quake 3 1.31 (linux point releases always lag by several days or weeks)
Several other games
GB gamejack link software
Steinberg Nuendo
Steinberg WaveLab
Photoshop 6 (GIMP is ok for web graphics, but it does NOT have good support for print, which I need. Also, slices in ImageReady rock. GIMP should get this.)
Illustrator 9 (the linux alternatives are crap.)
VirtualDub
PowerDVD
Fontographer
...
Some of those, I bet, could be made to work in linux with a day of fooling around. But I don't have time to do that if linux is not going to offer me anything substantial in return. (And joe user, who cares much less about having source for his software, and doesn't know how to figure out how to run things in linux, is going to be even less likely to use linux.)
(NOW... for a unix that will soon support most/all of these: OSX. That will be interesting.)
Name calling like this is a really good way to take credibility away from your post. ...
I don't use Office, so I can't comment on how stable it is. All I can comment on is my own experience with 2000, which has been very good. (Others have given similar reports...)
Well, you are right the name calling was dumb. Allow me to explain.
Lies make me angry, and there's plenty of them aroun here. There are so many microturds around these days pumping up stuff that I know is terrible. They post all day about how wonderful this and that M$ junk is, try to make flames where they can, and are outrageous in general. If M$'s history of Astroturfing is a guide, most of these folks are paid to post their dishonesty. It makes me angry to hear people say that NT, w2k and what not are "solid", stable, or anything like that. I know that they are not and I know that the instability extends further than Office. In fact the instablilty applies to just about everything non M$ and a few M$ things. Applying the razor, we see that the root of the problem is what they all have in common, M$. Your experience is atypical or your standards of "very good" are low.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Case in point: OS/2. Far more stable that the Windows versions it compete against and with a much better UI, victory seemed assured for OS/2. Just as we started seeing news articles about OS/2 taking market share away from Windows, Microsoft came out with Windows 95, which was just enough more stable and had just enough of an improved UI that it wasn't worth installing OS/2 for most users. Especially since all the device drivers were being written for Windows first and OS/2 last (if at all.)
One of the biggest "selling points" of Linux is that it is so stable. It's no coincidence that Microsoft is playing up the stability and security of XP. They'll try to shore that up with some proprietary vendor lock-ins (.net anyone?) and it wouldn't surprise me if they start pursuing patent cases against individual open source developers as well.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Has it occurred to anyone that it took someone with the initials "J.C." to get his windows up and running? Apparently JC often performs miracles.
From a few points of view...
1. Freedom for the fear that your "skill" will be obsolete in 2 years as the person noted.
2. Freedom from being forced to upgrade(lack of hardware support like usb and NT firewire and NT usb and some Win95 etc)
But most importantly
3. Freedom to spread "legally", software to people who otherwise could not afford it at home for the kids (tuxtyping or tuxmath etc) or in a new a company that is just a low bidget simple effort or even schools.
Actually the last bit applies just as much to those who can "afford it". One way of bosting the profits of a commercial enterprise is to cut down on outgoings. To everyone, except software companies, software is something they spend money on...
Similar results, though...
-Ben
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Interesting... in this argument, Windows is playing catch-up! Hasn't it always been the Penguin catching up?
Roll the clock forward 5 years, and you'll find that Microsoft is more like AOL/Time Warner than a software company.
"Use MSN! 40,000 Free Hours! *for 30 days"...
-Ben
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I hate to reply to my own post, but what are the moderators out there smoking?
Don't like the post, fine.
But redundant?
How can something posted within a few minutes of the story itself be redundant? It's the later posts, pal, that are redundant. Check your dictionary if you don't know what the word means.
I don't see systems exceeding their engineered capacity as a failure of engineering. It would certainly be possible to build a switch which can handle the spice girls tickets plus the normal traffic, or a highway which can handle 5Y cars. However these would cost money. What would be a failure of engineering if the system didn't handle the extra load gracefully. If picking up the phone caused the switch to crash and loose all the calls.
Dave made his point pretty easy to understand.
Here's my reason guys chose Windows over Mac.
Here it is...
Guy: Hey Geek, I'm looking to get a computer, but I want to make sure I can upgrade it and get all the good toys with it. What kind of computer should I get?
Geek: Hey Guy. Upgradablility and toys? I can get you a great price (Geek bragging rights) from (insert favorite PC manufacturer here).
The PC had all the good toys and games. Even if it was harder to use (see Dave Barry's point), a guy will still buy the one that's upgradable and has the best toys.
Remember, Geeks recommened upgradable PCs with the cool toys, because they remembered how fscking annoying it was that you couldn't run game X on the Mac, and you couldn't upgrade the video card, or run this specific program, yada yada yada yada...
Bonus: Figuring out thier PC gave a man bragging rights back in the day...
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
i managed to get my fathers brand new compaq machine with XP on it to hard reboot itself just by clicking "Switch Users" 15 minutes after starting to use it.
What are you trying to prove here - that you suck at working with computers.
Windows stability is simply a myth, anyone who says otherwise is either blinding themselves or doesn't have a lot of experience using it.
Seriously, pal, you're a moron. I'm posting this from my XP machine at home right now. A month ago I was getting occasional crashes. You know why? Because I run bleeding edge video drivers. Since the new ones came out from nVidia I haven't had a single crash - not one. And my Win 2K machine at work hasn't locked up in months.
I'm done arguing with you - you obviously don't know what you're talking about.
From kernel.org:
"The latest stable version of the Linux kernel is: 2.4.17"
I wouldn't call 17 kernel upgrades "almost never."
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
These exchanges are specifically designed to communicate back to other COs when a crush of calls happen. Those COs back off and return busy to everyone in the CO trying to get that number for a period of time to prevent the end-point CO from going down. ie, they don't even attempt to complete the call.
No exchange should devote it's last resource to a non emergency call. Sort of like the filesystem reserve for root in Unix. They should be designed so that you can allways get a dialtone, and if you dial 911, you get through, even if a non 911 call must be dropped to do it. If the call turns out to not be to 911, then give the circuits busy message and drop the call.
Mac OS X, which is about the only modern desktop OS I can think of that uses a microkernel, has been badly slated for its performance by a number of people, and I would be surprised if their decision to opt for the Mach kernel was not at least partly to blame.
That may be true. I actually think it's all of the fancy GUI stuff that makes it seem slow, but I don't have any way to back that up. I do believe that performance of the kernel itself (except for a few very important parts) is not all that critical these days. Computers are damn fast, and time spent in the parts of the kernel I'm talking about (ie, file systems) is not particularly significant.
What would you want to write the standard internet services in if not in C? As a system-level programming language it has retained its commanding place for good reasons, especially its excellent performance. Please explain what you believe would be better?
Well, I think any modern language would be better. Java (natively compiled) would be ok if the programmer needs the language to be C-like, but personally I think SML (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=6343&cid=9296 97) or O'Caml would be a much better choice. These languages are safe (NO more buffer overflows or memory leaks, not even "null pointer exceptions"), powerful, AND fast.
You can read a long post about this here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=24271&cid=2629 013. (being a student of languages I admittedly get fired up about this stuff, but I do think my points are more than just dogma!)
The short version is: My ftp daemon is 3000 lines of SML (including MD5 crypt implementation). I wrote it in one weekend and it has no buffer overflows. WU_FTPD is 24,000 lines (not including PAM MD5 implementation), took a long time (?) to write, and has had buffer overflows (and other bugs not possible in my program) in the past, and probably still does.
I will bet that my ftp server is about as fast as wu_ftpd, and could be just as fast with some tuning (the post above has links to C vs SML benchmarks). But most importantly: speed is a total non-issue in network apps, because the real bottleneck is the network itself. I can easily saturate my 100 megabit connection with my ftp server and the CPU load won't go above a few percent.
agree that the basic Win2K setup is probably roughly as safe as a RedHat install.
I think all point-oh redhat versions that I can think of shipped with remote root holes, right? Even the first version of win2k doesn't ship with default remote holes (though it is easy to get IIS by accident). I guess XP does, though. (I am not claiming that Windows *or* linux are typically secure!)
Historically, Microsoft has had a hell of a lot more by the way of "issues" than anyone else.
They have had more widespread fallout from issues because of unsophisticated users and because more people use it, but I don't think they have had more issues. I read bugtraq, and holes in linux apps are just as common as Windows (in my estimation).
Linux will win, not because of having finer ideals, nor because it espouses open standards and public liberty, but because its' cheap.
Lots of people pointed this out (microsoft's new licensing schemes), which I wasn't really thinking about in my new post. Maybe that will be enough to sell linux. But Microsoft is pretty good in the marketplace; what makes us think they won't be able to compete with a free product? (Remember, it doesn't cost them anything to duplicate their OS, either.)
You're wrong about this. I won't try to convince you about subjective things, like it being "easier to use" (but really, 3000 lines to 24,000 lines should speak something...), but I want to clear up your misunderstandings:
1. Since algorithmic changes can make such a difference, if you read the page closely you'll see that some of the benchmarks are "same way" benchmarks, some of them are "same thing" benchmarks. "same way" ones specify an algorithm and make you implement it that way. The fibonacci one is like that, not because the author doesn't know that you can use an accumulator or memoization, but because he wants to test the speed of that style of recursion. There is NOTHING about SML that makes you unable to easily write an efficient (algorithmically and instruction-level) fibonacci function.
Here, I really want to prove this to you, so I ran mlton (a fast ML compiler for linux) on the following code for factorial (the same accumulator technique applies to fib, and it's the way you'd want to write the function):
(* fact (n,a) with n >= 0 gives a * (n!) *)
fun fact (0,acc) = acc
| fact (n,acc) = fact (n - 1, n * acc)
Here is the (important part of) the assembly code you get out:
fact_0:
movl (32*1)(%ebp),%esi
testl %esi,%esi
jz L_84
L_23:
movl %esi,%edi
decl %edi
movl (28*1)(%ebp),%edx
imull %esi,%edx
movl %edi,(32*1)(%ebp)
movl %edx,(28*1)(%ebp)
jmp fact_0
Just for kicks, here's gcc -O3's version of
int fact(int n) {
int acc = 1;
while (n > 0) {
acc *= n;
n --;
}
return acc;
}
fact: .L3
.L4:
.L4
pushl %ebp
movl %esp,%ebp
movl 8(%ebp),%edx
movl $1,%eax
testl %edx,%edx
jle
imull %edx,%eax
decl %edx
testl %edx,%edx
jg
GCC did a really nice job with this one, the main differences being the block layout and register allocation. I don't even know if using the stack instead of registers is a big deal on the x86, since I seem to recall that it will make pseudo-registers out of stack slots. Either way, these are both back-end issues that could be fixed (the mlton native backend is only a few months old); they don't have anything to do with fundamental properties of the language.
SML is coming in at something like half the speed of C at best on almost all of them, and in most cases far far worse than that.
All right, I think this is a real exaggeration, so I really have to call your bluff on this one. I went and compared all of the tests. SML, is in these benchmarks, on average, 1.91x slower than than C. O'caml is 1.44 times slower. At best, SML is 5.88 times faster than C, at worst, 5.22 times slower (it does badly in the highly array-intensive code like matrix multiplication because of bounds checking). O'Caml is at best 4.5 times faster than C, at worst, only 2.65 times slower. (I wish I had also tabulated g++; but my guess is that it falls around where SML is.)
So, even if you hate SML, I hope you will reconsider your notion that it is inefficient!
Of course, I still maintain that actual program speed is meaningless for network servers (how many CPU seconds has your ftp server used?). Having 0 buffer overflows is extremely meaningful, though, and *that* would get linux a reputation as a secure OS.
I should clarify; didn't really mean features, but library functionality. Try writing an SML GUI for X.
Well, there are GTK bindings and stuff, but I'll agree that library support is not good for interactive apps. For writing network servers, library support is just fine, and it is easy to interface to C libraries.