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Microsoft: The Faint Smell of Rot
happycorp writes "A business reporter for ABC/Fortune
is asking whether Microsoft is poised to collapse, based on years of industry observation
(with successful calls in the past, he notes) rather than
purely technical considerations.
A short read, with this favorite quote:
"if you sniff the air, you can just make out the first hints of rot.""
I remember a similar episode with samzenpus a couple of weeks ago. It was actually much worse...
Ding dong the witch is dead Which old witch? The wicked witch! Well, at least shes flying around in the tornado ;)
"98, the most unstable OS"
.NET integration or flowery backgrounds or transparencies or being cool for using a UNIX-derived kernel - it's about the *overhead*. It's about being able to tell your computer to only devote CPU cycles to a few things and not have to worry about 40-60 system-critical processes.
I'll apologize in advamce for being off-topic. And I realize I'm taking a position that's very unpopular here. And no I'm not a troll. And yes, ME was the worst piece of shit MS ever released.
But I've found 98se, when properly tweaked and with 98lite installed, to be incredibly reliable for a variety of applications.
Before I got a copy of 2000, I was running Apache on 98se/98lite with IE uninstalled and had, like, weeks of uptime. Of course I didn't have much traffic, either. But between 98lite and various other common tweaks, you can get three nines if you don't have your hear up your ass or a huge amount of traffic. The only time that box rebooted was when the power went out.
98se is the only OS I'll use for my audio/visual workstation just because it's the only OS a lot of high-end audio/visual apps will recognize. I used to work for a studio that spent tens of thousands of dollars on a pro-level digital multitrack system (ensoniq PARIS) that will ONLY run on 98se. Not 95, not XP, not 2K, not MacOS. Not even the first edition of 98. ONLY 98se.
Oh, and all those pesky viruses that have been hitting XP and 2000 users? Don't apply to 98. I can't think of the last virus that came out that I actually had to worry about (no IE or OE on my machine). Especially if you uninstall IE (which is one thing 98lite does). With 98 you only have to do major upgrades one every few months.
No, you wanna talk about the most unstable, porous, pink-hotpants-in-the-Mission OS ever made, you wanna talk about XP. I know people who have machines almost three times as fast as mine who run XP, and their...machines...cccrrrraaawwwwllllll... even when they're not being infected by some new 24-hour flu. My 1.2GHz athlon *screams* running 98se/lite. That means everything to somebody whose professional reputation depends partly on how many tracks you can record at once. It's not about the round buttons or
(ducks)
They will never stop until somebody makes the