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Looking Back on Five Years of Windows XP
david.emery writes "In an article in the Washington Post entitled If Only We Knew Then What We Know Now About Windows XP, post technology columnist Rob Pegoraro points out the 5 year legacy of Windows XP. The article starts 'Windows XP is turning five years old, but will anybody want to celebrate the occasion?' This is (IMHO) a very well-reasoned critique of WinXP, although it does fail to credit XP as being markedly better than its predecessors." More from the article: "Consider stability, the single biggest selling point of XP. The operating system was meant to stop individual programs from crashing the system, and it succeeded. It takes an especially malignant program to send my copy of XP to a 'blue screen of death.' But that's not the only way XP can crash. Drivers, the software that lets XP communicate with hardware components, can still lock up the system. If you've seen an XP laptop fail to wake up from standby, you can probably blame it on buggy drivers."
The early 21st century saw an unprecedented array of attempts to dislodge Microsoft from its dominant position in PC operating system market share. From Linuces of may sorts to Apple's new OSX, word was, the time for Microsoft's fall was at hand.
Then came Windows XP.
Right away, Microsoft's revolutionary new revision of the Windows operating system was a hit with home and business users. It is no exaggeration to say that the modern computing world as we know it, the innovations of bittorrent, the deep and involving fun of World of Warcraft, the wide ranging social networks of Myspace and Facebook, none of these would have been possible without Windows XP.
From the stylish new interface, to the easy-to-use features, to the vast improvements in security and reliability, Windows XP has proved to be worthy of the title Greatest Operating System of All Time.
"(1) This is (IMHO) a very well-reasoned critique of WinXP,
although it does fail to (2) credit XP as being markedly better than its predecessors"
IMnotsoHO, these two statements contradict each other. Not making myself popular around there, I'd say that WinXP, about the third greatest thing to happen to PC users (after MS DOS and Windows 3.1). Finally a real operating system for PC's without serious limitations, with enough backwards compatibility for the enormous installed base of Windows software. I can race through Need for Speed Most Wanted while downloading the latest, errr, content plus webserving my site. Without ever crashing. Sure, I have to reboot every week or so with some patches, but that's the price of any main-stream OS. Lunix-ers will have to pay later too... So: Hooray for the Borg! Cheers, Richard
Here I am, Jerking off to Microsoft hate/Linux love, and then you bust out with your Linux can crash too bullshit. It is like I was just staring down Jenna Jamisons tits, as they delightfully flop back and forth, when, just at the moment of climax, the camera focus shifts to sweaty balls slapping her ass hole. Except this was worse.
You take it, I don't want it...
And Linux is like a house, but you used to have to build it yourself, but not so anymore! Because every two weeks some company or other makes a new house that is always so much better than the other companies houses, and the other houses made by that company, but it's usually designed so that only scientists or people with 500 children or people who keep angora rabbits can use it because it's the angora rabbit house distribution.
Anyway, the house is free and you don't even have to build it yourself anymore, the company comes around and arranges everything perfectly depending on the size of the land you have and the available power and water. It looks really great! Then you try to get in the house, but the doorway is bricked up. You look for an easy way to open the door but it just isn't going to happen. Turns out the only way to get that door happening is for you to wander up and down the street looking for other people in Linux houses to find someone who knows enough about masonry to teach you how to rebrick the area around the door so you have a doorway that works right. One all-nighter with a bunch of bricks and cement you've gotten yourself into your new house!
So you go out and you buy a sink for your new kitchen, it's a really popular sink and everyone in the Windows rental houses has one. You try to install your new sink and the pipes are all wrong! But your neighbour has a linux house and he had a similar sink, it's easy, all you have to do is get a metal pipe and an oxy-acetaline torch...
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
Because it's not done ye.