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20th Anniversary of Windows
UltimaGuy writes "When Windows first shipped, 20 years ago this month, it was considered nothing more than a slow operating environment that had arrived late to the party, well behind the industry leaders, Apple and Xerox PARC. Now, it's the operating system used on nearly 95 percent of all the desktops and notebooks sold worldwide. Take a look at Window's past and present, and what lies ahead in the future, including an interview with Mr. Bill Gates himself."
"When Windows first shipped, 20 years ago this month, it was considered nothing more than a slow operating environment that had arrived late to the party,"
Okay.....so how is it any different today? Viruses/spyware and/or anti-virus/spyware software continually slow it down, and all that Microsoft seems to do lately is copy the innovative things that its rivals do, so its still always late to the party.
Hero of Allacrost, a FOSS RPG for *NIX/*BSD/OS X/Win
20th post
Man, if there were EVER an article that Slashdotters weren't going to RTFA...
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
After using GNU/Linux for three years, it was kind of a relieve to return back to Windows. I still use tools like emacs, gimp, gcc, latex, etc. But Windows is very stable now, and it supports all the hardware you can throw at it. Now I don't have to sit for days at end trying to get my TV tuner, printer, etc. to work.
There is a problem when you get barrels near Balmer , He starts throwing them at short Italians wearing plumber outfits
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
With 20 years and 95% market share they had the time, money and resources to create the most advanced operating system ever. Instead, all they ever produced was "good enough" - never on the leading edge, never innovative.
What good have they done? They made the PC a commodity, accessible to all but the most poor. Gone are the days of $7000 proprietary machines that didn't operate with other different computers. These are all good things but they came as a result of market share and fate rather than purposeful design and innovation.
I look back at the last 20 years of Windows and say - what a waste. What a colossal monument to greed and complacency.
Clippy says: You look like you typing a letter in French. Would you like help with that?
I used to get really exited about Windows. Betas of Windows 98 and NT 4 at home, Systernals tools, things like TweakUI, an NT 4 era MCSE, caring about the differences between Windows 95 OSR2 and OSR1, etc.
...what? A crap web browser, an IM that only does MSN (Linux does AOL, ICQ, Yahoo, and Jabber, aka Google), a crap mail client (compared to Evolution - check hotwayd if you need to check Hotmail), OpenOffice 2 (yeah, I think OO 1 was crap too) a good firewall out of the box, no spyware hassles, and the ability to install and upgrade my apps/hardware without rebooting for every single one, over and over again. Sure, you could install all this stuff in Windows, but you have to find it and pay for it and reboot and reboot and reboot. If Linux fucks up, all the config files are documented and I can fix it. There's even useful shit like strace in the OS. If Windows fucks up, most of the registry isn't documented and Systernals tools are expensive as hell.
I kinda stopped being interested shortly after Windows 2000. What happened? Well nothing. Before Windows 2000, you had Windows 98, which was unstable, and Windows NT 4, which was a bastard to use (in particular, it had no Plug and Play support).
Then there was Windows 2000, and it was more stable and still easy to use.
Windows XP could hav been a Windows 2000 service pack. A better themable UI, a minor IE update, some utilities to do things like registry snapshots that were useful, but always available as cheap third party tools. No big deal. XP SP 2 was the same, except the firewall was so bad you still needed a third party firewall. And yeah, spyware got more popular in the last few years, so you need antispyware tools now too.
There have been no significant improvements since Windows 2000. Meanwhile, about 1998, I saw a screenshot of Enlightenment. I wanted Enlightenment. Linux came with the bargain. Linux was tweakable to my hearts content. And also really difficult. And I'd use it for a little while,. then mess it up or find something I couldn't do, then go back to Windows.
The thing is, Linux seemed to be improving. Things that seemed to buy me about Linux were bugging other people too. I went from Red Hat 5.2 to Mandrake, which had a nicer GUI, KDE. Then Red Hat 6 came out, and it had KDE plus a simpler GUI installer. Woo. And tools to notice new hardware and configure it. And I started learning about Linux, cause it was nice and tweakable and interesting.
After a while, I'd want to do something in Linux I couldn't do in Windows. First it was pull down sequences of files using wget. In Windows you'd need to fetch and install some trialware crap to do that, and Linux came with the tool. Then it was use Evolution. Then I found smssend, which was cool as hell. Meanwhile, Gnome got quite decent, so I switched to that. These days, Windows has
Meanwhile, I and my Linux buddies had finished Grand Theft Auto on the PS2 while most of my remaining Windows using mates were waiting for it to be released.
I'd much rather read Wikipedia's History of Windows[Wikipedia] entry instead.
What's changed is that, as the article says, 95% of computers run Windows. It may not be the fastest. (But then again, I'm writing this in Konqueror on a Gnome desktop, and... well, it seems to me that Windows XP on my gaming machine does boot faster, and renders a lot faster. Maybe because it doesn't render and antialias everything in software.) It may not be _the_ one that discovered the wheel. Etc. But a lot of people like it anyway. It's an achievent they can be proud of.
In a sense, the old wisecrack "Saying that Windows is better because more people use it, is like saying that McDonalds is the best restaurant" actually applies there. For a lot of people, McDonalds _is_ the better choice, or they would go eat somewhere else.
Choosing a restaurant isn't just a matter of who has the best cuisine and the rarest wines, but a compromise that also includes stuff like:
- price (self-explaining)
- time (maybe I just want to pick my hamburger and be on my way, not wait an hour while the chef prepares a complicated 5-star meal)
- accessibility and/or personal effort involved (if the 5 star restaurant is in the next town, and the McDonalds is right around the corner, you can guess where I'll eat. Doubly so if I have to drive home first and get a suit and tie for the 5 star restaurant.)
- familiarity (I already know what a cheeseburger and a Cola taste like. Maybe I don't have the time or inclination right now to figure out wth 'escargot provencal avec champignons' or 'canard a l'orange' even mean, or which of them I might even like, and if I want a Chateauneuf Sauvignon or a Valadilene Pinot Gris with either.)
- personal taste (maybe I actually _like_ a chickenburger, or not wearing a tie while I eat it.)
- social perception/acceptability (if I were a teenager taking my punk gang to a restaurant, chances are some snotty Chez Lex establishment would just make them uncomfortable)
Etc.
Yes, McDonalds didn't invent hamburgers or Cola, they're latecomers, etc. But people choose to go eat there anyway. Go figure.
Well, the same applies to OS's. If you factor in the whole mile-long list of reasons, and not just take one aspect out of context, for a lot of people Windows actually is the best choice. So, well, I'd say MS has reason enough to celebrate there.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Someone insert some witty windows-creaks-like-an-old-person comment.
Windows is not old. UNIX is old, and behaves as many older people do, working calmly and quietly in the background, running everything.
Windows is 20 years of age, and like most 20-year olds, is annoying, unable to multi-task well, and thinks the world revolves around it.
I wish I had mod point to mod you all down to hell.
All I could make out of that was something about surrendering.
Or about as long as the Serenity poll has been up.
Actually, Clippy would say, "It looks like you're typing a letter in French. Would you like me to apply some formating that you'll never be able to modify, making you delete the file and start over from scratch?
It would be presumptuous to conclude that Americans have no right to know what is being done in their name
I hope you do realize that there's a difference between "spyware", "virus" and "worm". Hint: "spyware" is usually installed with the user's unknowing "consent". E.g., I can assure you that all the buggers who got Claria/Gator on their computer, didn't get it via ActiveX, but got it buried in some other piece of software's installer (e.g., even DivX helpfully offered a variant with Gator) and usually barely mentioned on page 27 of a 50 page EULA.
/home/joe for example. If he installs that cutesy toolbar as non-root, that's all I need to steal (and if I'm malicious: destroy) all his data.
So if I offered some spyware as some super-duper Mozilla toolbar instead of an IE toolbar... how would the Unix architecture prevent Joe Clueless from installing it? No, seriously.
Even if my hypothetical malware needed root access to really do the dirty deed, want to bet that a simple "You need administrator (root) rights to install this software" would get 90% of the Joe Clueless population to dutifully su and try again? What advice have you given Joe? "Only run as root when you install stuff", maybe? Well, he'll do just that: run as root to install my stuff.
Would that make Joe suspicious? Chances are, it won't. But if I really were worried about that, I'd wrap it neatly in something that looks legit enough in its need to be installed as root. E.g., as a driver. "Our patented InternetAccelerator (TM) drivers use special compression to double your internet's speed!" Watch a batch of Joes rush to install it. "Or EvidenceEliminator (TM) drivers act as a low level gateway, ensuring that none of your porn surfing habits are even written on the hard drive at all!" Watch another batch of Joes install it. And if I'm really evil, I'll pack it as an Anti-Virus/Anti-Spyware/Firewall package, and say it needs to be installed as a driver to scan everything as it's transferred through the network, before it even reaches your hard drive. Yep, watch another batch of Joes install it.
And if that doesn't get Joe, maybe I'll target a weaker link. E.g., his wife, Jane Clueless, with some cutesy screensaver or puzzle game. Or maybe his kid, little Timmy Clueless, with some Counter-Strike wall-hack. I'll just tell Timmy that it needs that to hide itself from the HL executable, so PunkBuster doesn't catch it. (And it's even truth in advertising. It'll be a rootkit that hides itself all right, that he installs there.) Chances are one of the three, I don't even care which, will be less savvy enough to actually do it.
That is, if Joe even bothers about not running as root. Chances are at some point he'll decide it's too big of a hassle to keep su-ing back and forth, and just run as root anyway.
But do I even need root access to rape Joe's privacy? Nope. I don't give a damn about his executables, which are just what was on the distro CD anyway. Any data I'd want to steal is in Joe's own files, in
Etc.
Basically, please. Unix design and architecture mean jack squat when you have a far weaker link to attack: the untrained users. For that architecture to keep anyone safe, their own knowledge would already need to be a lot less weak a link. I.e., they'd need to be at a clue level, where, well, then they'd have no problem keeping their Windows machine clean too.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.