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Windows 95 Turns 10
ColdGrits writes "It's hard to believe it, but 10 short years ago today saw the launch of Windows '95.
Here is an archive of the Washington Post's story on the day. As part of the launch, Microsoft paid $12,000,000 for the rights to use the Rolling Stones' song "Start Me Up" (containing the prophetic line 'You make a grown man cry'). "
From TFA:This passage is especially amusing, since I gained most of my knowledge of Windows 95 through needing to reinstall it repeatedly on various systems.
Another gem from TFA: Yes...I vaguely recall IBM's OS/2...but Apple? No....I'm drawing a blank. ^_^
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
How true... If those poor saps had only know what lie ahead.
"Simplify, simplify, simplify!" Thoreau
"10 sort years ago "
Maybe i am new here, but what other kind of year is there other than sort years
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
That's a new one...
I wonder when we'll see Lindowsz....
The Slashdot Project was our last, best hope for unbiased news.
It failed.
But in the year of the Linux War, it became something greater: our last, best hope - for blinding stupidity.
Grow up Taco...Windowsz?
What's a sort year? And what's this Windowsz 95 thing?
You are not root, go away.
"You make a grown man cry."
Well, if it could make a "dead man come", that would be really special.
...and in further news, windows 2000 is now 5 years old.
While I'm sure many people here will make jokes about Windows 95, it was quite a leap in stability and usablility from windows 3.1. I don't think windows has had such an upgrade since then, nor do I think Vista will be that much of an improvment over XP/2000.
Can't believe it's been 10 years since I attempted to do a seamless upgrade on my p90... Ah yes. I must truly thank M$ for releasing it though, because without w95 I would have never sought out linux.
Later,
Phil
Our top story: 1995 was ten years ago! Also, 2+2=4. Details at 11.
you weren't tough enough to handle Slackware's 50-floppy installation.
Oh how right he was...
"I think the hype has been excessive," said Philip Kotler, a professor of marketing at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. "If there are bugs in this program, or if the extra performance doesn't deliver substantial benefits, this could be a disaster."
Actually, that quote should read...
Microsoft is delivering the same features they developed for us seven years ago.
Who do you think WROTE OS/2?!?
Besides, NT was already out and gaining popularity during this timeframe.
I was running Windows 95 Beta (And Alpha's) for a year and half before its release, and running them EXCLUSIVLEY.
I have one of the Alpha disks around ( one that was distributed within MS that I am 90% sure dates to 93, and I have one that dates to 1/1/94, I always will remeber that one because I thought shit these guys are working on NEW YEARS ????
14 1.44 floppy's (for the upgrade if I remeber right (maybe 13). The sad part was the last RC I got was SUBSTANTIALLY more stable than the Initial release was
I actually reverted to it until it expired
It was explaine to me by a buddy at MS (the one who got me the Alpha's and the Beta's , it was driver issues, that I wouldnt doubt, but it sure beat the HELL out of Windows 3.1
Back when that dinosaur OS was the current thing, I used to see want ads in the information systems section of newspapers demanding ten years of experience in Windows 95. Back then, they had not dont their math, but now, there are a few people who can actually answer that ad!
How ya like dat?
...lost productivity from Solitaire and Minesweeper. Yeah, it was in earlier versions, but Windows 95 made it even easier...
Government's view of the economy: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving,regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it.
The IE dev teams blogs (nay, boasts!) about tabbed browsing in IE7 -- saying nothing of the fact that tabs are years old.
MS brags and boasts about Monad, which is still vaporware, but it sure will be the best shell ever -- saying nothing of the fact that this has been available forever in *nix.
I'm sure we can come up with more. In the end, MS is very good at marketing. People just love their koolaid.
Rumour has it they've been tapped again for the Windows Vista launch. The new theme song?
"Under My Thumb".
*ba-dump-bump-ting!*
Wanted: One witty yet thought provoking
So, if you consider that Microsoft shipped 100 million copies of Windows 95 in its first three years, that works out to $0.12 per copy for the song rights. Of course you could argue that the 12 cents could have been better-directed towards bug fixes, but it's not a lot of cash in the whole scheme of things.
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
...Windows 95, despite all it's many flaws, was a lot of fun. It was stupidity to use it in a situation requiring stability, but as a gaming platform and all around PC OS, it was great to have at the time. Especially with the freeware that became rapidly available, it was a big laboratory for computer users. Remember, MS didn't have an app for everything back then, so if you needed one, you bought it or sought it out on the freeware sites. Though I'd used Unix in school, my first exposure to IRC was on Win 95, and I relied on the freeware IRC clients to learn. Same with the utilities and such.
I'd never owned an Apple, so I can't speak to what it was like to use one back then (were they using, what, system 6 at the time? I don't remember...), but while XP is more reliable, and I get a tremedous sense of "do it yourself" satisfaction with Linux (my primary laptop OS), I don't think I'll ever have as much pure fun as I did playing around with Win 95 when it first came out, warts and all.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I never did. My 486 computer (with 8MB RAM) came with Win3.11 and DOS6.2, and most of the time I had Windows turned off. It was just distasteful how much resources it wasted to make the thing "pretty".
When Win95 was launched it heralded an age of "user-friendliness", which to me sounded too much like "dumb-downness". And besides, the system boasted features that were useless to me (Autoplay? Who cares! I know how to run things in my CDROM).
I boycotted Windows95. I never ran it. Of course I had to give in at one point, when most software required the new Win32. But that was in 2000, when I started using...Win98. And Linux. And finding that I spend more time in Linux day by day.
Now I use Linux as my primary OS, with a Win98 partition which I still keep around for games (works well enough for that - I think of it as a massive shared library required for games). But then again, I don't even play games that much any more.
This is same as today. Windows 95 came, all the features that were there were all available in Apple's OS. Today, Vista will be released soon, Vista's features are already available in Apple's OS. But who do you think will make the money?
I remember there were stories about people buying Win 95 who didn't even have a computer. Unbelievable. How can people not have a computer?
-- Cheers!
standing in line at the local egghead software at midnight to get my copy. Ended up getting Office, Plus, and an ergo keyboard too. Marketing people love guys like me. lol.
2008: 10 year anniversary of Windows 98
....
2010: 10 year anniversary of Windows Me
2011: 10 year anniversary of Windows XP
1015: 20 year anniversary of Windows 95
2020: 20 year anniversary of Windows Me
Didn't the lead singer for Coldplay die once he realized he was just an even wussier version of Radiohead's Thom Yorke?
Here's every Coldplay song, ever:
I HOPE SOME GIRL WILL LOVE ME, BECAUSE I'M A HUGE PANSY
Hilarious
More
If you start me up
If you start me up I'll never stop
If you start me up
If you start me up I'll never stop
I've been running hot
You got me ticking gonna blow my top
If you start me up
If you start me up I'll never stop
You make a grown man cry
Spread out the oil, the gasoline
I walk smooth, ride in a mean, mean machine
Start it up
If you start it up
Kick on the starter give it all you got, you got,
you got I can't compete with the riders in the other heats If you rough it up
If you like it you can slide it up, slide it up
Don't make a grown man cry
My eyes dilate, my lips go green
My hands are greasy
She's a mean, mean machine
Start it up
If start me up
Give it all you got
You got to never, never, never stop
Never, never
Slide it up
You make a grown man cry
Ride like the wind at double speed
I'll take you places that you've never, never seen
Start it up
Love the day when we will never stop, never stop
Never stop, never stop
Tough me up
Never stop, never stop, never stop
You, you, you make a grown man cry
You, you make a dead man come
You, you make a dead man come
Can anyone figure out what the hell Microsoft Marketing was thinking when they selected this song?
"But Microsoft is unlikely to suffer a similar fate because it took precautions, such as delaying its launch date and sending out a few hundred thousand copies to testers across the country."
These are called precautions? I'm going to tell my client that next time we're delayed on a release. And as far as testing, was that something that was new in software at the time?
Is it really correct to keep counting age after it's dead? When was the last time Windows 95 was available to buy? When was the last one someone actually used it(I'mnot counting museums here)?
I'd rather be flying
MS is still trying to match the functionality of having a system that is composed of small scriptable programs that interoperate using human readable text interfaces, connected by pipes and redirected IO.
Their solution is to have the shell make a huge tree of objects that call each other. The objects aren't text, you can't load them in notepad, and you can't pipe them like you can with UNIX. Instead you've got a pile of goddamn API's. Plus, these fucking things are objects, so you can call them and they execute code. The good guys will use them to dig out information that they want. The bad guys will examine them for buffer overflows.
What do Microsoft developers drive? Easy - a Pontiac Aztek. They love ugly cars just as much as they love ugly operating systems. "But you can go camping in it!" is their reply when you criticise their ride. I agree. All the bugs make you feel like you're stuck in the fucking woods without any toilet paper.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Windows 95 still had a crappy FAT filesystem (even though Microsoft had developed HPFS years before) and it was still a pile of 32-bit DLLs (or VxDs) running on top of DOS instead of a compartmentalized 32-bit OS with a classic kernel/shell design.
Microsoft's older version of OS/2 was a 16-bit solution that wasn't all that competitive, but at least it had a real filesystem and an architecture that made a little bit of sense to someone with a comp sci background.
Besides, by the time Windows 95 was released, OS/2 had been an IBM product for over three years (OS/2 2.0, 2.1, and Warp 3.0 had already been released), and it had been almost completely rewritten by IBM during that time (new 32-bit kernel, new WPS desktop, new VDM subsystem, new WinOS2 subsystem, and new network stack).
NT was around then, as you say, and it had a good native 32-bit core, but it still used the Windows 3.1 desktop and had such poor support for DOS apps that many people couldn't use it effectively (at least for a few more years).
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Well I bought it up
...
...
.... (ring it up)
.... you got me, you got me
...
... I 'm making software buys. ... It's making Bill Gates come... ... your making a rich man come....
Brought Windows home and tried to boot it up
But when I load it up
It says my memory is not enough
I've been running out
I need Some Extra RAM to fix me up
I have to cough it up
Open my wallet up, it never stops, never stops, never stops, never stops
Its Windows 95
It's sucking up my drive
It makes a Pentium fly
But my PC is obsolete
I'll have to buy myself a brand new machine
Just stick me up
You suck me in then you got me hooked
There's so much stuff to buy
I need a new hard drive
I'ts gonna suck me dry
My 386, Don't have the speed
It takes an hour just to bring up the screen
Oh no
Woow
Yo Yo
Technoli
I was the same... when games started to be written for win95, I was like "WTF?! Games *IN* Windows? Why not stick them in DOS for more speed. My 4MB can't handle this shiz!" I also upgraded to 8MB shortly afterwards.
You create your own reality - Leave mine to me.
Billy's Windowzberg Address:
;)
1/2 Score and 10 billion crashes ago, our programmers brought forth on this server a "new" program, conceived in PARC and dedidcated to the proposition that all software can be ripped off.
I'm too lazy to complete the joke and I think you get it by now anyway.
... I can't believe this name wasn't already taken!!!
Seriously, check out nLite, and also at the nLite forum, especially this FAQ. This is a free Win2k and XP customisable installer. You can use this to get a seriously stripped down install that should run on your old dogs. Worth checking out other parts of this site if you've got to admin Windows.
I'd like to nominate "Oops I did it again" to be the official launch song for longhorn.
You seem to have pretty rose coloured glasses for Win95. You talk about it like you used it in 1999, not 1995. Let me refresh your memory!
:)
:-D
Win95 was terrible for games. None of my games worked with it. None! Not until DirectX 5 and 6 could DirectX be said to have matured enough for general use. Nothing really good came out until then, either. Quake was still something you'd "Exit into DOS mode" for.
As for the Freeware, most of it was dreesed up Win32s apps or NT apps now able to be run (thanks to Win95 implementing full Win32). The MS Plus pack was a good example of the sillyness of the era: IE 1.0 came with it. That thing sucked. People were desperate for uninstallers that wouldn't hose the system (cleansweep, etc, came out around then). And the memory managers for DOS still sucked -- keeping QEMM 7 around was much better than using DOS 7's emm386/himem.sys!
If you had 16mb of RAM, Win95 was noticably bitchy compared to Win3.1. You needed at least 32mb of RAM, and at least a Pentium 120 to really have it go decently. That was a top-of-the-line computer until fall 1996.
Thankfully, Netscape 1.x was available and 32-bit then. Plus you could run it just as easily on an Indy or DECStation or Linux
The best thing about Win95 was that it included its own 32-bit Winsock implementation.
PS: System 7 came out in 1990! By the time Win95 was out, it'd been updated to 7.5ish (7.5.1 came out in March, 1995; 7.5.2 in August, 1995). This was a pretty decent OS for not having real guts to it -- Quicktime, Applescript, PowerPC support (for the "new" PowerPC CPUs), Powertalk, and easy to add/remove TTFs. Windows just barely got the TTF part with Win95. Windows Media Player in Win95 didn't come close to Quicktime!
Mock mock mock mock mock mock mock
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
...are either truly inexperienced with OS/2 or they are demented or both. I supported OS/2 2.1 and Warp 3 on a Token Ring LAN and there was nothing more excrutiating in my desktop/software support years than that. The ONLY things it excelled at were inflicting mental distress and running multiple DOS sessions without crashing. Whoopie-frigging-do. If I wasn't being paid to jump in the line of fire, you'd not have been able to force me at gunpoint to do it.
Windows 95 for all its issues was not as bad as people have made it out to be. First, MS did warn people that a fresh install rather than upgrade over Win3.x was advised. Second, the vendors like IBM did their level best to act like it was still the days of DOS/Win3.x or has it been forgotten that their Craptivas tended to use every freaking IRQ there was knowing that IRQ sharing was not remotely ready in that first release? Compaq, et al, had their own dufus-level driver and build issues.
Major corporations actually using it daily and not being able to take major efficiency disruptions did yeoman work bughunting and suggesting workarounds and fixes to Microsoft and some actually paid serious cash to Redmond for code access to work their own builds of it. Meanwhile people threw stones at those big corporations heedless of how much of their Windows headache was steadily being addressed by those corporations. To this day people still don't get it and still have a "tail wags the dog" mindset that the home and school are the real influence.
Nope. Business, where we all work, is where the PC market is guided along more than at home and the NT/2K touches in XP Home bear that out. I don't use a glitzy ego booster for Jobs at work, I use an OS that all things taken into account, is the best choice for my work. It offers things that our proprietary app writers find get their job done better than any other platform.
So in addition to hoisting a cold one to MS for a job well done in the end and congratulating them on ten years out from Windows 95, I also salute the corporations that adopted it in droves so long ago and all the work they and my fellow techs and coders did to fix things up. I was not and am still not happy about their basically selling beta code as finished product rushing it to market, but it did set the stage for a much easier desktop experience that only encouraged rapid personal computer adoption after years of doldrums and facilitated widespread Internet usage adoption to boot. If Apple or IBM had their way, never mind the Unix geeks, we'd have had personal computers that remained as inaccessible to the average user as what went before and not seen the renaisance that we did.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
When it comes to the relation of how much disk space it needed and what functionality it provided with a default installation then it's one of the best Windows versions ever.
I liked it very much back then. It responded very direct and fast. All other Windows version I used since felt kind of slow, no matter what kind of hardware configuration they ran on.
Regards,
Dennis B. Schramm
Sigs suck!
The OS I still write code on for a living (OS2200) was first born as EXEC 8 on the UNIVAC 1108 and was first announced in 1966.
:-)
It ain't pretty, but at least it's old!
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
MS brags and boasts about Monad, which is still vaporware, but it sure will be the best shell ever -- saying nothing of the fact that this has been available forever in *nix.
.NET objects on which you can execute methods, examine properties, and pass them to other applications for further processing.
Oh really? Perhaps you should go get a clue about Monad. If you have trouble reading, you can even watch a pretty moving picture.
Monad turns the command line into an object oriented environment where instead of having to do error prone parsing through text piped though app after app, you treat the output from one app as one or more
This is, in fact, far ahead of anything currently available on Unix or Windows. In fact, it's so far ahead of what is currently available it will take quite a long time to get all parts of the OS and the apps that run on top of it to fully support the concepts Monad introduces. It's pretty damn innovative, if you ask me.
Oh, and it runs quite well for vaporware. I've been running it for a couple of months now (in beta form) and it's pretty damn cool.
I'm sure we can come up with more. In the end, MS is very good at marketing. People just love their koolaid.
Ya, when you're making shit up you can pump it out like a champ.
- 640kb Memory troubles - WTF shouldnt I have 8 MB ???
- Multimedia confusion, The PC was a multimedia PC because it had a sound card and CDROM !!! , I had those for years on my Amiga and we didnt hype about it.
- Windows 3.11 - WTF is this, give me my Workbench with features that were years ahead of its time, and that windows 95 inovated by copiying them...
finally i made enough money in the PC business to buy my self my DREAM AMIGA 4000T
Not wanting to start a flame war, but i must say that the Amiga and several others were doing the things that windows is now innovating several years ago...
Jorge Canelhas http://www.retroreview.com/ -The retrocomputing magazine.
Oh come one. Sure, there are lots and lots of problems with Windows, but scripting objects is not one of them.
Ever try to work with filenames containing spaces? Ever need to manipulate data that represents a graph or tree (other than a directory tree)? Ever need to manipulate a bunch of spreadsheets (including layout)?
I've done each of those in bash and in WSH and I infinitely prefer the latter.
Using plaintext when possible is a great idea that I support 100%, but for some things it just plain sucks. And as soon as piping objects is made easy (as MS claims to be doing with Monad), objects will become more desirable still.
Honestly, the *nix world is rediculously smug when it comes to these things. For ages scripting was way better under *nix, but in the past years it seems that MS is where all the progress is being made. They're still not entirely there, but they're gaining ground fast.
You can get some relief by installing cygwin. You can then have whatever shell you want, and it will also launch windoze programs. Or, do what I finally did when I am forced to use windows. VMWare on a linux host :)
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Quicken 95 turned ten too. ...
So did Norton systemworks 95 and antivirus 95 and
My memories of Windows 95 are hardly fond. My worst one involves getting Windows 95 OS/R2 installed and configured on some VP's IBM ThinkPad 600. Not even IBM could get it to work properly! Eventually, I got it to work, but only after having spent over a month, including two all-nighters at the office, installing the damned thing over and over and over again. There were so many devices crammed into that laptop, each one wanting its own interrupt, that Windows 95 could hardly handle it.
Eventually, I got it to work, although I'm not sure how, so I made an image backup just in case. The VP received his laptop, but then complained bitterly that it would crash on him every few hours. Yeah, well duh: it's Windows! What did he expect? Join the club. Ungrateful bastard.
To top it all off, some other VP, having heard of my success with the ThinkPad 600, came by later to have me fix his. Great. Well, at least I had that image backup, right? Wrong. It didn't work, even though his laptop was exactly the same model and revision number. I still have no explanation for this. I'd start it up after copying the image to it and it would have exactly the same device and registry problems that I had before getting it right. This kind of thing was never a problem on the Compaq and Toshiba laptops -- just on the IBM ThinkPad 600. I swore never to use an IBM ThinkPad again.
Fast forward to the present. Guess what kind of a laptop I have now? An IBM ThinkPad A21m. And I'm actually happy with it. So, what changed my mind? Simple:
Linux.
last week to use a legacy program on it and was surprised at how quickly it booted up. I also noted with some interest that the 1 Gig HD was only half used, even with some applications installed. As I navigated around the HD with Windows Explorer and moved some files, I further noticed that it didn't really feel any different than using XP. Then I loaded Firefox and connected to the Internet via the Linksys Pcmcia ethernet card and found that browsing didn't feel much different either. Somebody want to explain again how far we've come in the past 10 years with Windows? Sure there are some conveniences and minor improvements, but at what cost in bloat and memory requirements?
I just checked the stats on my relatively busy web site and saw that of the 16,640 Windows machines that visited last week 94 of them were using Win95. Just below that was NT with 42 visits and WIN32s with 10 visits. Oh, I even saw one single OS/2 visit..
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
According to wikipedia:
On Aug 24 in the year 79:
Mount Vesuvius erupted, burying the cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae with volcanic ash.
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous.
Sounds a bit overcomplicated to me, really. At least with the error prone parsing through text piped through app after app, I'm at any point able to thow a tee in the script and send the output somewhere that I can visibly read it and interpret it. I can also take that output and modify it slightly and send it manually back through the next step in the chain to do some additional testing. I'm not sure that simply examining the properties of the .NET object affords me the flexibility.
I'd also point out that I personally disagree with a lot of this obsession over object oriented code in everything these days. In a short script with a defined start and end, there's no need for the obfuscation of object orientation. I hate it when I see a huge generic class included by default on every page of a web application, even though some pages may only use 1 (or even NONE) of the functions within that class. At that point it's just a bunch of uneccessary overhead. It begins to seem like developers get use to that style of $this->crap and they can't get out of it
Microsoft distributed "Windows 95 - It sucks less" T-shirts to Macintosh developers during the run-up to Windows 95.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
``Token Ring LAN''
...'' Those calls were a piece of cake.
Heh, I remember when some idiot at the brokerage firm I worked at tried to install Windows 95 on the Broken Ring network the weak after 95's release. It took down the whole network. He got escorted out on the spot. Long story short: Broken Ring was a nightmare to support regardless of the OS on the clients.
Later, when I worked at a Help Desk, I loved our clients that ran OS/2. For the most part, they never called. When they did call, the problem was almost always a training issue, ``Yeah, it works that way in Windows, but in OS/2, you have to
Supporting Windows 95 was a mixed bad. For the first two years after release, supporting the OEM version was a nightmare. To this day, I'm convinced that the original OEM version of Windows 95 was nothing more than an expanded beta test. The retail version, however, wasn't bad to work with at all. At least not at the time of release.
Of course, a couple of years down the road with OEM SR2, the OEM version of Windows 95 became vastly superior to the retail version. At that time, OEM SR2 was the best, easiest to support, Microsoft operating system ever. IMO, its reign as the King of the MS operating systems lasted until 98SE. NT 3.x and 4 were fiendishly difficult to support, mostly because of hardware incompatibility.
At least with the error prone parsing through text piped through app after app, I'm at any point able to thow a tee in the script and send the output somewhere that I can visibly read it and interpret it.
.NET object affords me the flexibility.
You can do this with Monad as well. I can simply send the output of any monad command directly to the console window, just like you would if it were text, and it will output it using a default text output mode.
I can also take that output and modify it slightly and send it manually back through the next step in the chain to do some additional testing
You can do the same with Monad. You can easily serialize the output from a Monad command, do with it as you will, and feed it back in... but usually it's not necessary.
I'm not sure that simply examining the properties of the
As far as I can tell, anything you can do with a text-based command line app can just as easily be done with Monad. Monad supports all the ideas behind text based interaction, but adds the ability to work with the output as objects as well.
I'd also point out that I personally disagree with a lot of this obsession over object oriented code in everything these days. In a short script with a defined start and end, there's no need for the obfuscation of object orientation.
I agree, and with Monad you don't *have* to take advantage of the object-based interactions. If you want just text, you've got it.
Well, one question I asked myself while struggling with Win95 in 1995 was "Will I feel the same nostalgia for this in ten years that I feel for homecomputers from the 1980s?"
I can finally say: "Not a single bit! I am glad it's dead. And I am looking forward for it's brothers to die too."
Not to take anything away from Monad, but you've been able to script objects interactively with Python for well over a decade. There are other languages like that as well (Ruby is, I believe). I don't think Monad is really far ahead of what is already available on Unix and Windows.
...isn't this called AppleScript?
And yes it is innovative, just don't mistake it for a Microsoft innovation. (should also probably give props to BeOS messages as well...)
Try this simple task using Python:
Get the list of processes on the current machine and a remote machine. Compare the two and find out if the versions of the processes on each machine are different.
Once you're done with that, stop the services which have older version numbers, update them, and restart them.
Can this be done with Python? Sure. Is it "easy"? Um... hell no. It's about 30 lines of script code in Monad.
And it's not just about the number of lines of code, obviously. It's also about how easy it is to maintain and add features to your script.
To properly parse that sentence I think a comma should appear after "4-bit microprocessor" since otherwise it would kinda read as applying to Inte....
oh, wait, never mind...
(with apologies to Apple)
Hmmph. I can never understand how Linux zealots are so enamoured with cryptic command-line tools. Man pages are pretty-much opaque, and require a Man page themselves to understand. GUI materials are self-documenting - you can see what you can do with them just by looking at them. Other platforms have perfectly intelligent methods for scripting GUI objects - it's nothing inherently flawed in the paradigm.
Plus, once again, buffer overruns are a function of a particular bad implementation of programming, not OOP in general.
Personally, I think the platform I can do the best scripting in is Python. Easy, sensible help system, good tools, nice syntax, etc. But also consider things like LabView, that can make a perfectly functional programming language and GUI-and-program system just by wiring diagrams together. Apple apparently has some goregeous innovations coming in the world of user-scripting.
But meanwhile most Unix nuts are still convinced that Bash is the be-all and end-all, despite having utterly bizarre gotchas (like the recent story where someone described how having a file called -r can result in rm * having the very unexpected sideeffect of deleting recursively).
Learning to do a new task in a pure-text environment is like trying to learn how to spell a word with a dictionary - you can't look it up until you know how to spell it. Likewise, you have no idea what tool you use for a task until you already know what that tool does, and then you have to read confusing documentation of how to use it. Meanwhile, a nice GUI lets you figure it all out just from checking out the widgets.
Unfortunately, just because _one_ company decides to leave it's GUIs without any coherent standard for scripted GUI access, all most other guis make this same omission.
All I know is that the win2k "find" screen makes 10x more sense than the grep command.
I can never understand how Linux zealots are so enamoured with cryptic command-line tools.
.NET that did things like statistical analysis of characters in large text files, because the input was minimal and it took less time than making a GUI. For the analysis of the actual encrypted text though, I wanted a GUI because it let me make changes in the decryption options and see the changes update across the screen, rather than comparing two text files of output from a command line tool.
The *ix command line is what I miss most when I use Windows systems (which is most of the time, currently).
It takes a little getting used to, but it lets you do all the things you *think* you should be able to.
For example, using tr I can replace characters or strings in a file or text stream as part of a batch process. On Windows I'd have to write a script or a program to do that.
Another *huge* benefit is that you can do massive batch processes without depending on a GUI app supporting it. If I have a command line tool that converts TIFF -> PNG or whatever, I can do tiff2png *.tiff *.png and be done with it. Some GUI apps like Photoshop might be able to do the same thing, but it would take more time to set up, and I may not have an app with that capability.
Man pages are pretty-much opaque, and require a Man page themselves to understand.
That I'll agree with you on. I've never been fond of man pages, even though I can usually dig out what I'm after eventually.
There are a lot of situations where a GUI is preferable, but a powerful command line is a great tool to have at your disposal.
Another example: For a personal hobby project, I needed to make some tools to help me figure out how some text was encoded. I wrote some command-line tools using
I ended up doing a quick and dirty solution in Excel (quick and dirty being relative since I had to implement binary XOR in VBA =P), but if this were something I'd be using frequently I'd make a proper GUI app out of it.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
It doesn't seem so bad if you used the wmi module:
h tml
http://tgolden.sc.sabren.com/python/wmi_cookbook.
My point wasn't to say that Monad wasn't good, simply that the idea of an interactive object oriented shell is nothing new.
I also agree with your statement about ease of maintaining and adding features to a script. I think Python does alright in that department.
you mean before, not after.
win 98 came out in 97
win 2000 came out in 99
win me came out in 2000
xp same out in 2001
the history of the world
How can a process have a version number?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Monad turns the command line into an object oriented environment where instead of having to do error prone parsing through text piped though app after app, you treat the output from one app as one or more .NET objects on which you can execute methods, examine properties, and pass them to other applications for further processing.
This is, in fact, far ahead of anything currently available on Unix or Windows.
You mean like Perl? People treating a OO language like the second-coming of Christ. Geesh, shit worked without being totally OO. Perl is great language and it has been doing what you just described since 1987 which is far earlier than .NET
You mean those are cars????
Watch for Penguins, they eat Apples and throw rocks at Windows.
I can never understand how Linux zealots are so enamoured with cryptic command-line tools.
Because once you're used to them they're _really_ fast to do stuff with, and they usually come with good, concise man pages explaining how to use them (much better then your usual Windows online help).
Man pages are pretty-much opaque, and require a Man page themselves to understand.
Uh, I dunno what man pages you've been reading but most of the ones I've ever read are very concise and tell you what you need to know assuming you have the slightest clue what the tool you're looking at the man for _does_.
GUI materials are self-documenting - you can see what you can do with them just by looking at them.
Mmm.. yes.. right... Having used Unix exclusively for about 5 years I have been pushed back to using windows as a workstation (but thankfully not for my actual work - that gets done through an ssh and X session into boxes running a proper OS) and I can tell you that most of the GUIs are written by people who clearly think they're self documenting... and they're wrong (unless you count opening every single menu and dialogue box to find an option that they've stuck in some non-obvious place as "self documenting").
Going from being purely commandline based to having to use a GUI for stuff I can tell you that using a GUI feels sooooo slow - I was 5 times as productive doing stuff at the commandline as doing stuff in a GUI with all that pointing and clicking.
But meanwhile most Unix nuts are still convinced that Bash is the be-all and end-all, despite having utterly bizarre gotchas.
No, I certainly don't consider Bash to be the be-all and end-all of scripting - there are far better languages about. But for hacking up a quick script to do something relatively simple, it's very fast to develop in and you can pretty much guarantee it's going to be on almost all systems. I think the thing I find most powerful in bash is the ability to knock up quick scripts to do things on the commandline - the number of times I need to do an operation to a number of files and hack up a quick for-loop at the prompt.
Also, pipes have got to be one of the most useful inventions for doing some reasonably complex stuff in a hurry.
Learning to do a new task in a pure-text environment is like trying to learn how to spell a word with a dictionary - you can't look it up until you know how to spell it.
Yes - there you're right. If you've never before done anything like what you're currently trying to do then there is some effort involved. However, if you're used to the environment then a lot of concepts are transferrable - you can see similarities between tasks and reuse the knowledge you gained the last time. And more to the point, once you _know_ how to do something then it's just so much faster to do it at the CLI than in a GUI.
Maybe a CLI isn't for everyone but for me I couldn't use an OS which didn't have a powerful CLI - even in Windows I fire up Bash very frequently to do stuff because it's just easier and faster.
Meanwhile, a nice GUI lets you figure it all out just from checking out the widgets.
Again, I agree - a GUI lets you figure it out by opening every menu and dialogue box and probably reading the help on obscure widgets... as opposed to a 2 minute flick through a man page to find what you're after - I'll take the man page every time since I just don't have the time and patience to click through a GUI.
All I know is that the win2k "find" screen makes 10x more sense than the grep command.
Yes, and it's about a billion times less useful. Turns out that if you remove almost all the useful features in a program it's easier for people to understand... and almost completely useless to everyone too.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Check out Andrew Schulman's "Inside Windows 95" some time. But the "on top" makes it sound like DOS was still in charge under the covers, which it wasn't - it's pretty much a pile of dead code and thunks by the time vmm32.vxd got its tentacles inside.
They did a pretty good job of making it backwards-compatible enough so folks could still most of the DOS and Win16 apps they wanted.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
Why python? That problem would be a simple sh script.
But... processes don't have version numbers. We assume that you mean the files containing the executables. We assume that you are running linux, and the gnu utilities.
ls -l -L --full-time $(which $(ps --noheader -c | cut -c 35-)) | cut -c 44-
Of course, you are going to want to restart the commands, so "ps -c" would not be appropriate, but I will leave that to you.
Also, to run this on a remote machine, add "ssh user@remote" to the front of the command.
30 lines? 2 lines, followed by a diff, and uniq, followed by 2 lines of scp. I am not sure what a "service" is (vs. a process) in your context. I don't think that you meant "process".
But its really only 10ish lines of sh script (I would say "service", list the running "services", and use rpm to extract the versions, and scp the rpm to the partner machine, install it, and restart the service. Since the rpm doesn't back-date without forcing, ALL running services could be so updated. Of course, installing the "service" restarts the service anyway).
Ratboy.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
WOW SUCH A NEW AND INVENTIVE ORIGINAL JOKE! I've never heard that one before! Certainly not about 30,000 times a goddamned year between 1995 and 2005. And yet Slashdot moderators, obviously on crack, moderate it up regardless... maybe Slashdot does something to people to just suck their sense of humor out and replace it with hatred of RFID tags.
Comment of the year
I have to work providing remote support over very slow links. A good CLI, with history and editing facilities (like bash with the vi option) is the only way to work sometimes.....
PENAROL: Seras eterno como el tiempo y floreceras en cada primavera.
first of all: Man pages can be easily found for what you'd wish to do, by using apropos
second: man pages are reference pages, mostly. Read a tutorial and you will understand, consult a man page an you will recall.
(bashing): consider posting on slashdot would be object-oriented. write three class inheritances that would eventually instantiate in three post lines. write a wrapper class that handles the concatenation and outsource the type of concatenation to an interface that the reader is left to choose...(/bashing)
gtkaml.org
Win95 was terrible for games. None of my games worked with it. None! Not until DirectX 5 and 6 could DirectX be said to have matured enough for general use. Nothing really good came out until then, either. Quake was still something you'd "Exit into DOS mode" for.
Windows 95 was the platform I first saw GLQuake running under the 3dfx Voodoo - I can still remember my remarks cleary "holy shit this is awsome!" Sure the very first direct 3d game (monster truck madness - which ran in directx 3) was kinda crappy, but a lot of that was targeted for video cards like the S3 Virge.
I did have a mac then - System 7.5.x could multitask as well as Windows 3.1 - which was poor at best. 95 was much better at multi-tasking in every way. Remember System 7 (os 8 and os 9 for that matter) still had the "allocate memory" kludge that Windows never had to deal with. Anyone who has done support for System 7, 8 and 9 knows what a pain that little feature was.
When I said 5 years, I was on my slashdot custom crack pipe. I was meaning 10 years. I suppose that's karma for being an arse.
...is the fact the basic interface design pioneered by that OS has not really changed dramatically even with the release of Windows XP. After all, Windows XP's Luna interface has the majority of the look and feel of Windows 95, especially the Taskbar with its Start button on the left side, a tray area showing all active programs, and a right side area showing a list of running accillary programs.
This is why everyone will be very interested in seeing how Windows Vista runs, because I think Microsoft will come up with a totally new look and feel for Windows XP's successor.
No, no, calm down. It doesn't have that specific bug. Even microsoft can't fit every single bug into their software (why do you think longhorn is taking so long?), I'm sure it's got plenty of other bugs.