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Why Does Windows Still Suck?
RatBastard writes "SF Gate's Mark Morford asks: Why Does Windows Still Suck? After wtaching his significant other's Windows PC drown in a sea of viruses and worms after only 4 minutes on her new DSL connection, Mark Morford wonders why the masses have not stormed Redmond waving torches and scythes in anger over the never-ending security flaws in Windows. Why haven't they jetisoned the foul beast from Redmond and migrated en mass to the Macintosh or even Linux?"
They don't know of anything else, and Windows came with the computer.
They don't care
Sounds like too easy of an answer, but for non-tech savvy people, a computer is just a tool for email, web, etc. If computers were a vital part of people's lives, they might care. Corporations can pay administrators to keep their computers clean, but joe twelvepack doesn't use his computer for anything that he can't do without. QED.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Why would you let your SO attach an unpatched and unprotected PC to the Internet?
To download security patches from Microsoft? There is a real chicken and egg situation here; you need to go online to patch your machine, but as soon as you are online you are hit by worms.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
The worms and viruses are designed to be hard to detect. People have infected machines that they don't know are infected. Out of sight, out of mind.
Remember the days when Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility?
It's the same reason why people don't storm the White House...
It's the same reason why people don't storm the RIAA headquarters...
It's the same reason why people don't storm the *insert whatever you like*...
Sure, Slashdotters might get angry and send off snail mail/email/faxes to whoever they're angry at. But we're a minority.
The MAJORITY are just too complacent with their lives. They're happy within their immediate environment. They may think it's not right, but they'll never take the action against it. It's too much of a hassle.
So instead they just acceot it. Windows crashing is obviously not so much of an inconvenience that they must storm Redmond. It's easier to push the reset button.
Why do people eat at McDonald's? They definitely don't make the best burger in town.
Things like consistency, convenience, perceived value, brand recognition, etc., all play a big role.
Even easier: http://www.linksys.com/products/product.asp?grid=3 4&scid=29&prid=561
There's no chicken and egg about it as the other poster seemed to think. Whatever OS you're running, make sure you're behind one of these routers - there's a huge choice and they're fairly cheap these days (less than the cost of 1 month on DSL for a lot of people).
If all the software that people ran was available on linux and macs, games included, then more people, including myself, would switch. And honestly, I am computer savvy, but I am not even sure if there are still many different versions/releases of linux outhere, where to get them from, wether they are free or I gotta buy them. I know IT guys are all over linux, but I don't think the article, and the question is poses are aimed at IT/programmer types. So in a nutshell, being a regular guy using my computer, if there was more software available for linux, and it was clear how to acquire it, I would be switching. Most people, like myself just want to put a disc in a drive,install and not worry about it any more.
" Maybe if his S.O. was a little more competent, Windows wouldn't suck so much."
Think about it. If it was a TV.
"My SO plugged the brand new TV into the cable system and 4 minutes later it stopped working." You SO is a moron. Why wasn't your SO smart enough to open the back of the TV and rewire the power supply!
Or if it was a car.
"My SO just got a new car and the engine was trashed after driving it 4 minutes."
Why was your SO so stupid to drive a brand new car with out first opening the hood and setting the valve clearance!
You statement is just dumb and insulting. She is not a moron. She is just not a system admin. What is moronic is that people are selling Windows XP boxes that are so insecure that they can not live on the Internet long enough to download SP2.
Maybe every Windows Box should come with the network stack inactive. When you want to connect to the Internet a special super restricted TCP/IP stack pops up and downloads the latest updates for you. Windows is being pushed as a consumer item it should be expected to act like one.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The whole topic of games development using DirectX vs OpenGL has been discussed to death here. Sure, the game writers could do it in OpenGL instead of DirectX, but Microsoft has apparently made using DirectX extremely easy. Maybe what it will take is someone to write a translation library that will basically translate the DirectX calls into OpenGL calls. Once that's out there, more games can be done for non-Windows systems. While all that's going on, OpenGL must be made friendlier to use than DirectX.
OK, it's a lot... but if you really want to lure the games developers to the side of platform independence, you have to give them a good reason to do so.
OCO is Loco
As a long time Mac user and developer, I'd have to agree. While the original article mentions that 97% of tasks can be performed by Macs just fine, it's that confounded 3% that Microsoft has been able to exploit in the marketplace. Games, enterprise business apps, and obscure in-house projects have pretty much sustained the Windows platform up to this point. Creatives, home users, and students (the Mac's historical user base) have not had the financial or political clout to compete with the technological preferences many IT organizations have.
Those who complain about affect & effect on
Yeah, a more interesting discussion would be:
"Why does Linux still suck?"
Talk about presumptuous.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
But why would I, one of the unwashed, game-playing masses, start using another OS?
Sure, I could stop playing 95% of the games I like, install Linux, and then let my computer sit idle (I really don't use my home computer for anything other than playing games) while I wait for game developers to start producing games for my new OS of choice. But I'm not that altruistic. And neither is anyone else.
The fact of the matter is that Windows is currently by far the best platform for playing PC games, and, with a little bit of technical sense ("use a firewall"), it's "good enough" for pretty much everything else. There is currently no compelling reason for gamers to switch OSes, and as a result, no compelling reason for the bulk of publishers to release games for anything other than Windows.
So I was reading /. when I came across a typical 'OMG Windows SuXors' article..
I casually sipped my afternoon coffee, set it down, and clicked the article link, bracing myself for the deluge of mind-numbing numbers and references to obscure studies.
After reading the article, I looked to the right side-bar for a list of other recent articles by the author. Trying to get a feel for the authors views, I decided to peruse a few of them.
Well, I must say. Mark Morford has to be one of the most rabid, extremist, over-reactive, leftist, tin-foil hat wearing, Moore wannabe's I've had the displeasure of reading.
Now, before the flames begin to rise, please understand the last paragraph was a simple reciprocle example of Mr. Morford's diatribes. Basically take a simple statement, and make it appear so sensationistically over-the-top.
So now to my point. How can this article be used on a news site, when it is simply nothing more than a rant? I use Linux and Windows, and on occasion Macs. I rarely have any problems with any of my systems. I have never had my Windows boxed filled with virii/trojans, nor have I had a crash in as long as I can remember. Am I just one of the lucky ones, or do I simply ignore the little monkey moving back and forth in a feeble attempt to evade my mouse click for a Free iPod
Why bother? As a gamer, 80% of my home computer-using time is spent playing games (90% of which don't run in Linux). The remaining 20% is taken up by web browsing (using FireFox) and email (using Thunderbird).
As I said in another post, if you're primarily a gamer, chances are that Windows is "good enough" for any non-gaming application you want to use. If you've got a firewall installed and don't use IE, chances are good you've never run into anything like the author of the article describes. At which point, there's really no appeal to the bother of rebooting every time you want to switch between game and non-game applications.
paraphrased: firewall, etc.
Red herring. What portion of the 91% of computer users infected with spyware were infected by an inbound attack? I'll give you a hint. It's probably smaller than the number of Linux workstations in use currently as personal computers. The vast majority of infected users got that way as a direct result of the hideous security flaw that is IE. All they had to do was visit the wrong web site. Windows firewall can do NOTHING to stop that.
In order to be sure the computer worked in the first place, they had to install Windows to test the peripherals and other devices!
That may have been an excuse in 1999, but Knot anymore.
Fuck, 800 plus comments as of now, and no one with any real insight gets modded up? Perhaps that is the problem, in itself? No one, not one person that I saw, attempted to take the arrticle and make a decent discussion out of it.
Premise 1: We have a computer user, who is a journalist, has been using Macs for nigh on 15 years, is not extremely tech savy (Get to that in a mo') and sees that his fellow computers users, most of them on one of the millions of brands of PC and one of the various flavours of Windows, be it from Win98 to WinXP, have, in general, more problems with their computers than he does.
What does all that tell me?
I am a Mac user myself (well, I use a PC as well with Linux and Win2000 on it and I used to be a Windows shop sys admin). I agree with his OBSERVATIONS 100%. I mean observations because apart from his subjective ranting on why the world doesn't string BillG up from the rafters, which is his OPINION, his article has a good point.
I have seen and expereienced the same problems with Windows machines, until learning better, such as the 20 seconds till being hacked when first going online with WinXP and the numerous bugs in the OS over the years. Yes, I know as well as you that putting a simple router in front of the machine stops 90% of the bugs and being careful about mails and what you download and keeping up with pacthces will stop the rest, but it is a real pain and, in my experience, one has to ask the simple question: why?
In that I agree with the article. Using Windows is more complex than a Mac with OSX. Now on to the tech savy bit. The author writes about the prize that was offered for hacking the webserver Webstar, which was the only real webserver on classic Mac OS. It was never used widely in the server world and thus is not a good example of application security. The guy reveals his lack of expertise because, all those who know that OSX is based on BSD know that the webserver shipped with OSX is Apache, the same one that upsets the numbers game of OSS with respect to commercial offerings when compared to IIS.
Also, the argument that Windows has more software available is a real one, especially for gamers and for CAD and specialised business applications and the situation will stay that way while Windows has such a dominating marketshare.
And that is a reason for staying with Windows, but it isn't the reason why 90% of the world's computer using public uses PC's and Windows. That reason is simply because PC's are more available and most people have no idea that there are alternatives and are only interested in getting a "computer" with which they can chat, browse, mail, write letters, store photos, listen to music etc. Although a Mac arguably, in my experience, does all of this much better than Windows does, most people will simply go to the nearest shop and use what is there.
Ahmen.