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Bill Gates: Windows 95 Was 'A High Point'
BobJacobsen writes "CBSnews.com has an article about Bill Gates and Steve Balmer answering questions at the 'All Things Digital' conference. When asked about 'high points' in his time at Microsoft, Gates replied 'Windows 95 was a nice milestone.' The article continues 'He also spoke highly of Microsoft SharePoint Server software, but didn't mention Vista.' Was there really nothing else that Gates considered a high point?"
Seriously tho' - take a look at the photo of Bill & Steve answering questions - have you ever seen such defensive body language? I almost felt sorry for them - but then I remembered they were responsible for Windows 95.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
How about right before Mozilla was released?
Property is theft.
They were high when they developed it?
That would explain Windows ME.
The Mothership
How about Windows 2000? I still use it and have no real issues with it, unlike when I've used XP.
Ballmer tried to counter Vista's reputation as a mistake and failure. CBS did not miss this.
The Register has an article that focuses on this and what it means.
I agree with Gates, Win95 was as good as Windows got. No, I'm not Bill Gate's sockpupet. Their vision of a unified desktop and web browser has been better implemented by KDE since. XP's copy protection and Vista's digital restrictions were tremendous mistakes. The seeds of M$'s demise were expressed early on.
Free software has done all of these things better than non free software.
The time that Windows 95 came out was probably the transition from him being somewhat known outside of the computer industry, to being really well known (It was the time during which he bacame richest person). So he probably felt that he had a lot more baggage to carry after that and perhaps it wasn't as fun.
I am not a fan boi (IANAFB), but I would say Windows 2000 is Microsoft's best operating system. I know there are those who would disagree, but the reason I say this is:
-Win2k was an improved no non-sense version of WinNT 4.0
-No special "genuine" advantage program
-No DRM
-It has all the features of XP, but none of the "rest power from the user" sludge
but alas I no longer use Microsofts products. I now work in place that has all macs (not a fan boi there either) and recently converted my household to Ubuntu with no side effects.
A favorite quote of mine that I don't know the author of:
"It was easier for Apple to make Linux user friendly than it was for them to fix Windows"
IMAGE VERIFICATION IS EVIL!
Bob?
But if I were being absolutely honest, I'd probably say that XP was a high point--possibly the high point for Microsoft. In many ways, it doesn't suck quite as much as its predecessors. A lot of people and a lot of companies like it.
Bill Gates can't say that, though, because Vista's biggest competitor right now is Windows XP...
He has so much money that the amount of money he has is no longer relevant to him. He is much more interested in how successful his efforts are.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
As much as it pains me to admit it, Windows 95 was a big moment in PC history. The death (slowly) of DOS, plug and play, functional networking, Direct X, gateway to 32-bit computing--all were huge at the time. Yes, OS/2 was as good or better, yes, Mac OS was still better in 1995, and yes, BeOS was soon to show everyone up. But for the needs of the many (and the needs of a world who would soon crave the Internet and 3D gaming) Windows 95 was huge: warts, blue screens and all.
Windows 95 actually wasn't that bad. If you ignore all the random BSODs, it was a decently advanced OS for the time. Though just about everyone knew that Macs were better, it offered a cheap, easy-to-learn GUI for DOS that could run older Windows applications. And other then OS/2 (which really wasn't much different then Windows...) and a few obscure variants of UNIX (remember, this was before Linux could be installed without being a technology wizard) you didn't have much choice if you had an Intel computer other then to use '95 and honestly, compared to recent failures, '95 wasn't so bad....
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Anybody who doubts the veracity of this claim obviously isn't old enough to remember Windows 3.1.
>but didn't mention Vista
Curious, but he didn't mention "Bob" either. I would have thought meeting, romancing, and marrying Melinda would rate a mention as well. Might make for a rough night in the Gates household over that.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
It may not be, its generally only people who dislike their jobs that consider their paycheck a high-point.
If someone likes there job, the completion of the task is the high-point, the money is a benifit, and when the income gets to a certain point, especially in cases such as Bill Gates, the money becomes self-sufficient, and therefore completely arbitrary, and taken for granted, like breathing air, its only when you dont have it that it becomes precious.
Well, I don't feel like deciphering the exact context of the assertion (by reading TFA of course), but in a way, yeah, 95 was a high point. I remember all the excitement people had when 95 was about to come out. Long lines, news reporters hyping it up. When, since then, has a new Windows release generated so much genuine excitement? They were rock stars back then.
Now a Windows release is greeted with a 'thanks, but no thanks'. Yeah, I'd look back with longing at '95 too if I were them.
Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
Windows 95 was freaking advanced. Sure, yes, not compared to the awesome *nix but in the Windows world it was a HUGE step forward. It also laid the groundwork of the awesome delivery of XP.
Windows 2000 was an overly of 98 on NT. I loved it.
XP was simply an updated version of Windows 2000 with a greater hardware support.
Vista is a mess, but it's getting better. I'm not happy with Vista nor do I recommend it.
The next version of Windows will be a big turning point. I would like to see Microsoft cut some of the 'cords' of the old OS and backward compaitibility.
In reality, they can push the Windows API into a new direction. Have TWO versions of Windows.
Windows World - Windows with all the compatible stuff to make it run yesteryear software.
Windows Beyond - Windows, smaller, faster, lighter with NO legacy support.
There you go. Much like an SUV and a sports car. Both nice and can easily merge into the market as needed.
D~y
What you're hinting at is "how Bill made history" or infamy depending how you see it.
...ya gotta admit, Windows95 was a huge improvemnt. WFW was really nothing more than a crappy shell plastered on top of a not so great OS. With Win95, it seems MS really came up with something much more modern and different (please note, I'm comparing Windows to earlier iterations of itself, not Mac, Unix, or anything else). It finally implemented a TCP/IP stack, Explorer (for better or worse), 32-bit filesystem, and a workable interface. The stupid start button was still eons behind what Apple had (and still has), but it was a huge leap from WFW.
I always remember Windows NT4 transitioning into Windows 2K. This was the first time I felt like a version of Windows actually worked. I only had to reinstall it once a year to clean up the crud. It most of the time shut down when I asked it to. It for the most part let me run my programs without blue screening. I think others would agree with me it was a high point Windows 2K. I would also bet a lot of people are still using it over XP.
while windows 95 was freaken terrible, it did introduce the windows interface that is still in use today (start button, taskbar, desktop) the interface in vista might be shinier, but the functionality is still about the same.
While everything up to 3.11 was just a fancy shell for DOS, windows 95 was (almost) a real OS. (mainly because you didn't have to type 'win' in a DOS prompt after start-up, it loaded on its own, like magic)
While 2000 and XP were huge steps forward, from a general users perspective, they weren't much different than 95. the start menu is in the same place, the taskbar is the same. the clock and system fonts are all the same.
as far as visuals and GUI design are concerned, win95 was a highpoint, and they haven't really moved beyond that.
as far as stability is concerend, windows 2000 was the highpoint. when one program crashed, the rest of my system didn't crash with it! amazing!
-I only code in BASIC.-
His big fat pay cheques and becomming one of the wealthiest men in the world? That's not a highpoint?
I couldn't agree more. I remember my problems with Widnows 95. I had a hard drive die. To reinstall it, I had to install DOS3.21, Windows 3.1, and then the Windows 95 upgrade. Bill Gates at that time had my money. It was the time I decided to no longer do any upgrade on an upgrade.
Fastforward to today. Vista is out. With Signed Drivers, WGA, etc.. I upgraded from Breezy Badger to Gutsy Gibbon, to Hardy Heron. My dad bought a Mac. The Vista release is nothing like the Windows 95 release.
To make matters worse, Most people here know what OS I am talking about in my upgrade without even mentioning it. In the Windows 95 days, most people knew of nothing in operating systems but Microsoft software or Apple Software.
The truth shall set you free!
Has Bill already forgotten about the Softcard. That was a pretty good product from when Microsoft was in their prime.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I honestly thought NT 4.0 was a great OS; it was the paradigm shifter that brought down OS/2 and really lasted for a while.
As anyone who has actually used Windows knows, Bill wasn't talking about OS quality, features, security or stability; he was talking about adoption rate and profit. Windows 95 rode the new wave of consumer PCs and access to the Internet. MS made bundles of money on it and 98 (which was little more than an incremental update to Windows 95.)
I'd figure the major high point would be Bill Gates buying Tim Patterson's 86-DOS for $50,000 and selling it to IBM and the clones for bazillions.
Before Win95, Apple has a small but real Market, IBM made noise with OS/2, someone was pushing GEOS (came with my multimedia upgrade kit at some point), and most computers booted to DOS and ran Wordperfect 5.1/DOS and or LOTUS 1-2-3 and connected to the Netware box. Even if most OEMs shipped with Windows 3.11, computers didn't always boot it. The real data was a 3270 terminal away. Microsoft's high-end OSes NT Workstation was a novelty, NT Server was an also ran.
With Windows 95, they took over the desktop... DOS was hidden, OS/2 defeated, and with Office 95 shipping WELL before Wordperfect ported to Win32... With Win95 they grabbed a desktop monopoly, Office monopoly, and pushed NT Server as highly competitive with Netware and inevitably overtaking them.
It'd be another 2 years before Netscape made Microsoft wet-itself, panic, and get itself into anti-trust trouble... the SAME anti-trust trouble that caused IBM to use a third-party OS and off-the-shelf processor when creating the PC.
Microsoft's profits might grow, Win2K might have gotten NT capable of replacing the DOS/Windows combo (XP with XP Home edition finally banished it), but the high water mark was hit. When Win95 launched, everyone was excited, the cheap PC Platform got a lot of expensive Mac/Amiga capabilities. The next few years, Microsoft spent floundering around for expansion (most of which didn't pan out), focused on suffocating competitors like Netscape, and Bill Gates spent time being deposed for court cases...
So yeah, it was the pinnacle of their success financially, and the peak for him before he went from geek hero to generally appreciated business hero, before his downfall as tech villain... It was the end of his being able to focus on technology and products, and the beginning of managing legal problems.
Not sure if I've got all the history right, but if I do, I can see why this would be a highlight for dear old Bill. Windows 95 at first shipped without IE, then included it and by 1998, Bill was embroiled in a nice stressful antitrust case with the DOJ. So Windows 95 represents the height of his power-grabbing, smash-the-competition days. Also, Windows 95 was the first time Bill became cool -- remember the Rolling Stones singing "Start me up" over the start button? They were high in those days, for sure -- high and mighty.
Windows XP is/was nice... but it wasnt really an exciting achievement, I mean it could be said that XP is just an advanced Windows 95...
Whereas Windows 95, was a HUGE step over DOS and Windows 3.x
The first time you drive a Ferrari, its exciting as hell, the second Ferrari you drive is nice, but not quite as exciting. You'd need to climb into an F1 to get that thrill back, and... Microsoft really hasnt done that since 95...
Microsofts ability to become a defacto monopoly by utilizing some pretty heavy handed tactics... AND get a settlement in court that actually improved its market share. Now THAT is a high point. Most companies that end up in court as a monopoly end up getting cut up into smaller companies, but not Microsoft. Nope. They actually were able to write parts of their settlement. They "gave away" software... as part of the "monetary" settlement. Which shows that not only did M$ master the market economy, but the judicial system as well (creating customers for life via lock ins). Did I mention that after a certain period of time those "customers" had to start paying to continue to use the software???
20th century Marxism is not progress...
right... the VxD and virtual driver model that 95/98/ME used was a steaming pile of donkey turd. In the grand comparison of things, it was a security nightmare.
But consider that it was the first MS OS (for consumer!) that was 100% GUI. Yes, it was really running on top of DOS 7.0. But it also installed and booted up to a GUI, and all of the configuration/tweaking/etc. was a major step forward.
You need to compare it against the alternatives in 1995, not the alternatives in 2008. Yes, NT 4.0 came out in 1994 and had basically the same user interface, but NT was intended for an enterprise and server environment, and was never marketed towards consumers until Windows XP came out.
So.... yes. Windows 95 *was* a high point for MS. It was an enormous step forward for the company.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
95 was effectively the near-fatal blow to Apple and nearly sent the company into a death spiral. Of course, Vista seems to be their near-death experience.
Windows 2000 should get an honorable mention, one most stable OS's they put out to date.
Compared to Windows 2K XP was a failure from the user's standpoint. Though, the upgrade path was from ME to XP for the home users making XP much, much, much better. But for those of use on Windows 2K, XP was just extra bloat. XP also suffered from major security holes, I can't remember how much spyware I remember taking off of people's computers before Service Pack 2 introduced the concept of basic security. Windows 2K also didn't suffer from WGA or other DRM nonsense.
I predict that when the next desktop version of Windows is released, all the Lunix Zealots will be whinging about how terrible it is compared to Vista, and how Vista was the Greatest OS EVAR.
Actually, I don't think that will be the case. I think that MS has learned the lesson that DRM-laden OSes will not sell and remove the DRM and bloat from Windows 7, if it goes according to their plans (which I honestly doubt it will....) it may be a decent OS. But if it is inferior to free products (such as Linux) of course those using it are going to complain.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
It was a time of hope, promises and expansion.
It was all down-hill from there. To this day, the best way to secure a Windows box is to unplug the network cable. And if you can't do that, remove TCP/IP. (Can you run Exchange over IPX or NetBEUI?)
The ride ain't over yet though... the disappointment of Vista was gradual since they started breaking promises before they released it... and Windows 7 is no different since we're not going to break binary compatibility in order to get away from the virus and malware ridden environment that INCLUDES Vista in spite of all its security enhancements.
I can understand how he'd consider 95 a high point, at least in terms of excitement. It was a bit of a cultural phenomenon and extremely popular. It was the first widely-adopted even-your-grandma-can-use-it OS. They had taken Windows beyond a glorified file manager, and it was used by lay-people and techies. There was a zeitgeist around it that I haven't really felt until OS X in the last few years. I'd count that as a high point.
Was there really nothing else that Gates considered a high point?"
Could we keep the Micro$oft bashing relevent please. This is nonsense.
Actually, I would say that hiring Steve Balmer was the greatest thing that happened to Bill, since, next to Balmer, Steve looks like an absolute saint. Because of this, he probably won't go down in history as a complete asshole, Steve will take most of the blame.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
No, I don't remember that. I remember the Rolling Stones singing "Start me up" in their 1981 album "Tattoo You". I have that album in four different versions, LP, cassette, CD, and mp3, so I should know.
Fourteen years later, microsoft bought the right to use that music in their marketing, but that's a different story.
For some reason I doubt they love 95 for the technical leap ahead it was. Else they'd probably love 2k more, which was truely a revelation. Finally you didn't have to choose between stability and compatibility. 2k was the OS Microsoft can be proud of.
I think what they love 95 for was the hype it created. It was a huge success, not because it was so terribly good (it wasn't bad, actually, but it was anything but a pinnacle of OS design), but because of the hype surrounding it. Hell, people who didn't even have a computer bought it. It was a hype success if there ever was one. The world loved them. Of course that's something anyone would enjoy.
Since then, the criticism has increased. Before 95, there was hardly anything really noticable of MSs attempt to monopolize everything and use their market share muscle to force companies to do their bidding. And this of course reflects on the reception of their products. Of course people start looking for the bad things. It feels good to badmouth someone you just love to hate.
When 95 came onto the market, they were not hated in the IT community. They were liked by many, actually. They offered an easy to use OS that you could code for in a fairly easy way (if you disagree, you never tried to code for Macs before 2000). What else could you ask for?
The decline of MSs goodwill started after 95. When they muscled into the browser market, when they tried to push Linux off the shelves with adhesion contracts, that's when their star began to decline.
So I can well understand why they see 95 as their favorite OS. Back then, the MS world was all fun and candy.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
TFA quotes Gates as saying "We got to dream about a software industry and the greatest tool of empowerment ever - the personal computer - and be part of creating that in terms of the platform and the applications,"
I wonder if the fact that MS is now decisively on the wrong side of the computer-as-tool-of-empowerment bothers him? I don't mean as a CEO or shareholder, obviously MS' strategy has made him giant piles of money; but personally. It can be argued that MS had a considerable hand in making cheap and common x86 gear a reality, back in the bad old days of fragmented consumer gear and hyperexpensive IBM suitware; but it has been a while now. Perhaps more than ever, MS is working against empowerment(and no, I'm not just fudding about Vista DRM-OMG!, I'm talking about things like Rights Management Services, and mandatory driver signing.) Even when they feel charitable, their notion of empowerment is "like corporate; but cheaper".
I wonder, does that bother Bill? What does he feel, privately, about the fact that MS has become the tyrant it overthrew, and has basically settled down to make money by offering software for enforcing corporate control? Does he like that or would he, off the record, admit a certain desire to be on the other side?
There is something Zen about the parent post.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
And compared to NT4, Windows 2K was a failure from the user's standpoint.
Lather, rinse, repeat. The collective long term memory of the internets is so ephemeral that it doesn't surprise me we have these conversations every time Microsoft releases a new OS, but it does tend to get old.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
I was able to run an OS that was like OS/2 Warp but actually had mainstream applications for it.
Good lord how old were you when Win95 came out? Win95 needed special drivers for everything be it a mouse wheel or sound card, Win95 still needed a form of DOS to boot from, there was NO USB SUPPORT in the initial Win95, keep in mind. Windows XP is a very, very mature OS that has a lot of things built into it that were simply hacked or patched onto the Win95 kernel. The XP Kernel has an almost entirely different (NT) code base. Yes they both have animated boot screens, but other than that they're generations apart in OS design. XP has a ton of UI tweaks, especially at the driver level that you don't really notice until you start working with W2K and XP boxes side by side. Microsoft may be a HUGE company, but it takes years to go back and tweak litterally every part of the OS from basic functionality to help menus and 3rd party driver installs. I'd say XP is what 95 became, after seven years of hard work.
moox. for a new generation.
I'd like to see you switch from Windows XP to Windows 95... you'd be begging to go back after a couple of hours.
No sig today...
maybe most people on slashdot. if you start talking about breezy badges, gutsy gibbons, and hard herons in the average convenience store most people will just think you are some kind of pervert
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
>"Compared to Windows 2K XP _was_ a failure from the
> user's standpoint. "
No it wasn't. XP was a finished version of 2000.
>"Windows 2K also didn't suffer from WGA or other
> DRM nonsense. "
WGA came as a "free update" sometime after SP2.
No sig today...
Yes?
The best OS from Microsoft was Win2000 (sp4). DirectX, no WGA/paranoia checks, highly polished UI (the standard Windows theme peaked with 2k), true multitasking and real software compatibility (compared to the only other earlier worthwhile OS.. NT4 workstation).
Well, maybe the developers...
XP didn't have WGA or DRM, they were added later (WGA was after SP2).
:-)
>"none of the 'rest power from the user' sludge"
They came via Windows update, which is also in Win2k.
PS: The word you want is "wrest"...
No sig today...
"Microsoft sucked at it, but their goal of usefulness for an interface over perfecting the "humanity" of it pushed them ahead."
I wonder why the HELL msoft claims mshlp32.exe doesn't "meet their standards". Could it be it is the new place that the NSA/CIA backdoors reside? Or, is it something else.
I use Lotus SmartSuite 9.5 & 9.8, and they are hamstrung in vista. I am considering ways to ask my computer maker to replace my vista disk with XP, if they'll do it if i send in the original media. I don't know why Lotus Approach is one of those apps that has problems running correctly in vista when most of the other SmartSuite apps work fine (for me, so far as I can tell, and other than any official listings in the Lotus knowledge base...)...
This really is a shame. I wish Lotus would do something... like release to Open Source whatever code they DO own, and let Linux hacks restore the functionality that is missing after removing the non-IBM/Lotus-owned code. If they update the tools making the GUI, then SmartSuite could probably have a resurrection/renaissance of sorts.
But, killing the winhlp32.exe and it not working correctly. I went to:
http://searchwincomputing.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid68_gci1244222,00.html
and still have not been able to get it to run from WITHIN SmartSuite, but at least the thing runs help files if I click them externally. Seems some of the charting elements are opening slowly. I may have to manually rebuild all my database forms one by one to determine the problem. Would be nice if I could find a GUI that TOTALLY mimicked Approach so I could bolt it on top of any underlying db I want or allow others to use, but be OS agnostic. I may have to resort to some of the tools in Linux, finally. But, man, if only IBM/Lotus would allow a handful of Linux programmers privileged access to help IBM do what IBM seems reticent to do, or too loathe to do it with its own resources. Still, the WordPro and Approach, and even 1-2-3 combo would be nice, and seem to offer more than the resurrected/misnamed Symphony is able to do for most users of SmartSuite.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Win95 was crap, especially if you had a mac. It was a joke so bad it was sickening. Rev C win95 actually worked so then it was just a bad rip-off.
Win2k was the best OS MS EVER made and ever will make and I wish I could still be using it if some apps didn't force XP.
Windows has always come across as the Volga (Russian car) that we are forced to buy.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Seriously, what is the fucking deal with Sharepoint? Why do people really like this thing? At my last job we had just started making headway getting people to start using Wikis and then in comes the Sharepoint servers. The wikis get abandoned and now Sharepoint works great...for everyone using Windows and IE. Everyone using Macs, Linux, and Firefox tough luck.
Oh and every little department got their own Sharepoint site, which you needed to be separately granted access to, only they never remembered that and would constantly send out Sharepoint links that nobody else had permissions to access. And we had no cross-site search facilities (I assume *that* at least is possible, our people just didn't implement it) so if you didn't know which of a dozen different sharepoint sites your document was on, tough luck.
Yeah there's nothing I like better than wanting to look up a list of networks, which should be nothing more than a few lines of text, but instead I get to download an MS Word document or an Excel Spreadsheet and load up the respective clients, in my browser, from my office 2,000 miles away from the Sharepoint server. Several minutes later I can now read a dozen lines of plain text! WOOO!
Thanks, Bill!
Windows 2000 took the NT codebase and made it way friendlier, which was far easier than taking the "DOS in Windows" codebase (95/98/ME) and making it stable. Yeah, I know that ME came after 2K, sue me, but it basically was the same deal. It was downhill after 2K, as it was irresistible to Microsoft not to encrust the next operating system with more useless eye-candy and cruft.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Well-written apps should have worked equally well on both branches, by sticking to the common subset of Win32 that was available on both, but in reality they didn't; there was common software that would run on 9x but not 2K, and vice versa. Windows XP's major achievement was to unify those branches into a single NT-based OS that was both shiny enough and compatible enough to serve as a 98/ME replacement for average consumers.
Maybe the eye candy was "extra bloat", but I do think it helped attract customers who would've stuck with ME otherwise. And that's a good enough goal in itself: the DOS branch was fundamentally less reliable and less secure than the NT branch. If a little bloat is what it took to get people off of the weaker branch, giving them a more solid OS and making developers' lives easier, then so be it.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
All you old farts going on about how 95 blows chunks are missing the big picture, Windows 95 was so far removed from 3.1 from a usability standpoint that it made PC's what they are to millions.
When my parents threw out their dos disk-boot comp and brought home a packerd-bell with 95 it was a new world. AOL, and computers, were like a whole new branch of literacy. Things like Encarta were just boondoggling. I can see why this would be a high point to Gates, to me it was a high point, when comps. were like like exploring a forest full of unknowns.
--- Do you believe in the day?
Smoking reefer with all the Apple guys, Doing acid with all the Apple guys, Eating Peyote with all the Apple guys, Drinking enough alcohol to sink a battleship with all the Apple guys, and then stealing all their good ideas!! 1.)??? 2.)??? 3.)Profit!
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
Except...
The ONLY time I have EVER read anything saying that a version of Windows was ready to go before it was actually released was in a review of Windows 2000 RC3.
I think damn near every other version, there was a comment that said to wait for SP1 (or whatever the equivalent at the time was.) Maybe 3.10 is an exception.
In general though, Windows 2K is much faster then XP and so if more bloat == complete then I guess I know why Vista is so Bloated... I mean complete.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
'95 was really the moment where the hype had to work. And it did. I remember lines out the door at midnight. Had it been less functional or cool than it was, competitors could have emerged and carved a niche, and the Windows lock-in wouldn't have happened. BeOS, unfortunately, was just a little late in the game and 95 was solidly entrenched by the time Be came out on commodity hardware.
Windows 2000 was the other pretty-good-OS. All the geeks took it home and installed it on parents machines, etc. Thus, we forget that it was never a home OS. The upgrade path was ME->XP (more likely 98SE->XP) for Joe Sixpack, so they never thought of W2K. It's finally starting to creak to an end (software packages that won't install for whatever reason).
The other OS that is really good is one you can't legally get. It's called "Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs". Only available (legit) for big corporations. XP stripped the heck down. No BS, no activations, updates work. Best Microsoft OS yet. And they won't sell it to anyone. At, say, a $30 price tag (probably less than they're getting from Dell for OEM Vista), I'd buy ten copies today.
If someone likes his job; indefinite pronouns are singular. ("His or her" if you have to be politically correct.)
Regarding XP being more bloated than 2K: this is just simply not true. Most people on Slashdot (who don't like Windows enough to actually pay attention to it) share this view.
Windows XP was much faster than 2000. Yes, 2000 had the "bare essentials," but XP had internal improvements all over the place (system call performance anyone?) that made just about everything faster. Of course, most people just look at the theming and assume that it was a shitty layer of bloat "tacked on" to 2000 that completely destroyed the performance of the OS, when that wasn't the case at all.
Probably the best thing they are putting out right now. Microsoft has never focused on it, but they may be beginning to realize its value. If they don't screw it up, Sharepoint could own corporate intranets the way that Google owns the web.
SpyDock: Scientific Python in a Docker container
at our organizaton we have several sharepoint servers. I have to say that as a typical MS product they do not work with anything other than IE and they have problems with Active Directory authentications....highpoint indeed
XP wasn't considered the very good OS it is today until after its 2nd major service pack.
That bit of information is kind of important to your story.
Windows ME. Harbinger of doom. Up until then, each step forward seemed like sort of a... step forward.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Would you rather that they copy the Mac, or come up with their own ideas. Now that's a scary thought...
I'm no fan of either Apple or Microsoft, but can you please back up your claims of horrible evil on Apple's part? Besides, it's not cute.
W2K also handled driver installation better, and didn't need a reboot every time something new was installed.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
Am I the only one here who thinks that milestone and high point are not synonyms? Windows 95 was definitely one, and definitely not the other.
I'd actually have to argue that Windows '98, 2nd. edition was Microsoft's real "high point" - though I get the reasoning behind picking '95. (It was such a big jump from the look and feel, plus functionality of Windows 3.x.)
My experience with Windows '95 was that it tended to "self destruct" due to memory leaks and poor design choices for the internal "stack" it kept. It was pretty typical that a monthly reboot for Win '95 was required, if you didn't want it to progressively get unstable and sluggish.
It seemed like by the '98SE version, they'd hammered out a ton of those types of glitches and bugs. It wasn't perfect, but was probably about as close as they could get on that basic foundation.
Actually NT was the best OS that Microsoft ever created, even though a lot of its C code was "lifted" from other sources. It was an object-oriented DESIGNED OS with NO object-oriented code (Think C, not the crappy C++). It was release several years before Window 95 (i think in 1993) and is the foundation for Windows 2000 and XP. IMO the best OS of all-time is still Unix. I believe the biggest money-making OS is NOT any flavor of Windows, it is actually IBM 0S360 which made IBM billions and billions in 1960s Dollars.
Windows 95 was so high a point for Microsoft that it got Microsoft officially declared an abusive monopoly, violating its consent decree with the Justice Department by the way it bundled and sold Windows 95.
In fact, as abusive and monopolistic as Microsoft might have been before or since, only with Windows 95 did the corporation ever reach that "high" point.
--
make install -not war
No, I'm not smoking anything funny.
The reason why Win95 is fondly remembered by Bill may be because it created or at least gave more strength to the bonds that anchor the users to Microsoft. It was a good OS for that reason (it gave MS the foundations for at least 10 more years of market dominance).
However, with the web evolution, Bill is now sure that no other OS will ever be in that position, therefore it goes for the next best thing: hold the users data locked in Sharepoint server (without easy conversion tools to get them outside) and he may prevent those users from fleeing to Google or other competitors (including Open Source tools). So yes, Sharepoint is to take the same role as Win95 in cementing (as in binding) the Users/MS relationship.
Honestly, most commercial software just plain sucks.
There are a few really polished pieces of software out there, but the vast majority of commercial software sucks ass. At least if I find out open source software sucks I'm not out any money. There isn't any truism that works in the software industry, whether commercial or OSS. I've seen good and bad commercial software, good and bad OSS. But if you think commercial is better simply because it costs more, you're deluded. I use GIMP, OpenOffice, Blender...work fine for me. I also use Photoshop, Audition, and Vegas.
Software isn't a religion any more than tools are a religion. Use what's appropriate for the job.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
No, that's better for you and 99% of all users like you, and an undefined amount of all users in general. Do not presume to believe you know what is best for other people.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
It was Microsoft's finest product, ever. It made it possible to run CP/M on your Apple ][.
Up until the X box, hardware was what they did best.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Win95 was also my high point because that is what finally convinced me to switch to Linux. Thank you Patrick Volkerding!
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
I'm talking about the population at large, not specific companies. A company can go to great lengths to hire people, they don't have to be already in the company. Contracts are a very common way to get work done without taking somebody on board permanently.
Sam ty sig.
> > Best of all is that it could run on a 386 with only 4 megs of ram. No major OS since has been able to top that.
Linux was DEVELOPED on a 386 with only 8 megs of RAM, and with its page-to-disk feature it could run easily on the system you mentioned.
If you're going to make bold claims, at least be correct.
If Vista becomes better than it is to the same extent that XP did, then I'm sure everyone will. it's not there yet, and until it is it sucks.
As for people pointing out that 2k->XP was exactly the same... yeah, XP blew nuts when it came out. I refused to even install it until Vista was a few months from (actual) commercial release because my early experiences with it could be best summed as "just like 2k, except that it's complete shit and does nothing useful." With that said, once I used it significantly in 2006/2007 I found that it simply blew my 2k install out of the water, and prejudices which hadn't been updated since 2003 evaporated in a few days.
Vista may be worth installing some day, but for this moment, if you need or want Windows installed, XP is simply better than it and every other version currently available (including those available only in backups). One day Vista might get there itself, either that or it actually will turn out to be ME 2.0: now with more shiny.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
So I'd guess WGA will stay. It's hardly draconian anyway. WGA on XP meant you can still use your pirate OS, and you will still get security updates. What you couldn't do was download IE7 or any other optional stuff from the Microsoft site. But if you paid for the OS you could. Being genuine is an advantage, as the acronym suggests. I know people that used pirated XP for ages. They had to wait for a crack before they could install each service pack, but they installed both of them in the end. Actually I think MSFT will tighten it up so you can't use a pirate OS in future. People will crack it of course and Microsoft will patch to defeat the cracks. So if you really, really want to use it and not pay you will be able to but it will take a lot of your time. But most people will opt to pay instead because it is more convenient.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Windows 2000 was the best they ever did. Well, besides msdos5.
Heh. Crappy release names is my one major reason for avoiding Ubuntu like a plague. Seriously, what idiot names that damn thing?
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
The problem was dos apps were little operating systems. Games, WordPerfect, Autocad, lotus, etc had their own drivers. If you had Novel Netware then you had redirectors and other drivers that all conflicted in non protected memory.
Programmers used peak and poke and assumed people would 1 run app at 1 time.
Windows had to support that backward compatibility. One good thing with Windows 7 is that every app will run in a vm to prevent this backsupport hell.
If dos were a real operating system in the first place we never would have had this problem. However I believe the 8086 and 8088 were not capable of protected memory but I cold be wrong.
God it was terrible and IBM picked these processors on purpose so businesses would buy more mainframes if they wanted a *real* stable OS/Hardware.
http://saveie6.com/
Win95 was a high COMMERCIAL point. But NTWorkstation was a much better os to work with. And the Win95 GUI also borrowed heavily from a precious little thing called "Norton Desktop" for w3.1, if anyone cares to remember.
MSDOS 2 was when I thought Microsoft might do the right thing. They really modified their CP/M clone to add Unix/Posix style api, when there was absolutely no business reason, it was only to make it a nicer machine to write software for. And they did it in just a few months.
/dev and thus no file can be named "com" (until they finally fixed that crap about 2 decades after they should have).
Of course they did not really finish it and it has gone downhill ever since. I believe IBM insisted on a totally paranoid level of back-compatability, which is why we have backslashes in the filenames and no escape sequences in the stdio and no
But even seeing what they attempted it was unbelievably refreshing.
Anybody else have any thoughts about MSDOS 2.0?
I do agree that Windows 95 is their other high point. They really did some innovations in GUI design which you can see if you compare to contemporary X and Mac and NextStep:
1. The task bar which has an "icon" in it for a window *whether or not* the window was "open". *EVERYBODY* else only had the icon when the window was "iconized". This is a HUGE deal but everybody is so used to it now that they don't see it.
2. The start menu. Everybody else relied on searching through folders or using a shell command to start a program.
3. Removal of a graphical line between the resize window borders and the contents. I personally did this a bit earlier on Next (but not using Nextstep) and thought it looked really good, and was both very happy and also a bit mad to see my idea used by Microsoft. Compare Windows95 window borders with earlier ones and contemporary X ones and you will see how much cleaner they look.
Now get off my lawn.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
One pattern does seem clear: once FLOSS gets a start in an area, it appears to attain supremacy within about five to ten years. And once FLOSS takes a niche, proprietary software never takes it back.
There will probably always be proprietary software, but days of Microsoft's primary niches are numbered.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
1. Games
2. Games
and my favourite answer to all "Why use Windows?" questions,
3. Games
The End.
Whatever some people say, I LIKE WINDOWS, Because it's the only commercial rootkit available!!!
"RMS is about extending your access control scheme onto my device." Not *your* device, bear in mind that there are places in the world where people work from company owned devices...
in her diaper. Seriously. A wiki, only you have to pay for it and search is broken. WTF?
I think the high-point in Microsoft during Gates' carerr definately has to be when they decided to remove the paperclip from Microsoft Office.
“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with nuclear bombs. We have a protractor.” — Neal Stepnenso
- what Microsoft's priorities were. Compared to Windows 2 and 3, 95 was a revelation. It looked better, the interface was far better, there were even a couple of technical improvements. W95 is probably what made Microsoft's commercial success more than anything else; I remember a lot of people resisted moving away from it for a long time despite its all too many, all too obvious flaws.
But this comment from Gates really highlights that Microsoft's main priority has never been to produce a technically good product; to them look and feel are much more important. As I recall, they spent a lot of resources getting the user interface right - one can only assume they didn't spend nearly as much on getting it to actually work.
As a communo-socio-anarchist... who can charge five figures per speech.
There is nothing disreputable about figures of some renown accepting renumeration for giving talks. Bill Clinton has made literally hundreds of millions during the Bush presidency, mostly for giving short talks at foreign companies for 6 figures each. Far lower on the ladder are public figures like Bill Cosby, or famous academics, etc.
I fully support Stallman's right to be compensated for the value of his services, at any price mutually agreeable to him and his customers. Sadly, he believes it is morally obligated to confiscate the value of my services, and that the laws should be altered to make this confiscation compulsory. Curiously, he calls this state of affairs "freedom".
Quoting from the GNU Manifesto, with the words inserted to make sense of his metaphors, which often involve a lot of setup:
"[Programmers] deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of [the programs they write]."
"[The government] really ought to break them up, and penalize [people who develop proprietary software] for even trying to [restrict access to their software]."
"Pay for programmers will not disappear, only become less."
Then check out his proposal for a Software Tax. Its four paragraphs long, and if you think about it for more than about a minute you'll realize its like hell on earth for software development. Essentially, the idea is that there will be a transnational IRS which determines software development priorities and allocates fundings on the basis of votes of the largest American corporations. (He describes it differently, because he is totally ignorant of economic reality, and I am not.) He argues that this will result in encouraging creativity.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Windows 95, with all its warts and issues, was something of a high point. And, honestly, I do consider this from the vantage point of hardware built for Windows 95, running Windows 95 OSR2, or its closely related followon, Windows 98SE.
The launch version of Win95 was awful and nobody was really prepared for it and it caused plenty of problems. It didn't understand USB at all, etc. etc. etc. But, it eventually matured, and it really represented a fundamental mental shift for everyone: DOS is well and truly going away. You could manage things from a GUI. You don't have to set jumpers to install a card.
This was the first Windows that didn't boot into an obvious DOS first. It was the first Windows that started to feel more like a lot more than a graphical version of DOSSHELL.EXE. It was the first version you could credibly manage almost entirely by GUI, rather than editing obscure .INI files to comment out incompatible VXDs.
In terms of bringing the state of PC computing forward, Win95 was definitely one of the larger, more successful steps forward. If I had to rate the more successful steps on Microsoft's part, they'd be, in roughly chronological order:
I'm not sure whether Win2K and WinXP both belong on the list as separate bullets, or if they really kinda form a single bullet point. Their biggest contribution together was to kill DOS and force everyone to finally program with at least some hardware abstraction. <soupnazi>No direct hardware access for YOU!</soupnazi>
At any rate, if I were to name the highlights of the Microsoft path in terms of actually advancing the state of PC computing for most people, those would be the points I pick.
I'm not a Microsoft fanboi. I was something of a fan, if a bit timid about it, back in the early 90s. I quickly became disillusioned when I got to college and was exposed to UNIX. Here I was with a 386 all to myself that I could barely use without crashing, and I was logging into a timeshare AT&T SVR4 UNIX box with dual 486s, sharing it with 100 other people. In late 1993 I installed Linux and dual booted for a few years, but eventually I was running Linux only. So I'm no Microsoft apologist.
That said, you'd be
Program Intellivision!
I once had to install w95 on several 4mb ram computers... it kept on bitching warnings about the 'convenience' of adding more ram... The 4mb minimum was a lie.
When I installed Windows 95 on a virtual machine (just for the hell of it) I was baffled: that OS was much better than I recalled! I liked Explorer especially: the windows were intelligently sized and as little as it would get the UI would never feel crowded.
Snappy, screen efficient, running decently with as little as 4MB of memory... whoa. Installing using an (USB) floppy was a pain, sure, and I had to install and configure TCP/IP manually, still I was very impressed.
Then at some point for absolutely no reason, Windows decided to install Internet Explorer 4. And I went back to the Windows Experience I recallled...
"Optimising performance..." my ass.
When ideas fail, words become very handy.
I think that developers believed Microsoft's announcement that the 95 line was over. If your software didn't run on XP, your sales were over.
So, developers forgot about 95 and made their shit run on XP.
I'm sure Gates also considers his first billion a high point. And his 5th, his 10th, his 20th and finally his 50th. Also, 50% market share, 80% market share, 90% market share.
Come on people! Anyone here really believes these guys are driven by anything besides greed, for both money and power? The corporate culture of microsoft, its predatory and evil business practice, didn't spring up with Gates fighting it every step of the way. These guys made microsoft what it is, and all its greed and evil is but a reflection of their personalities.
Their high points are very likely related to what's important to them. No surprise not much they could state on record came up.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
1) Solitaire
2) Windows 98 se
3) Windows XP sp1
4) Getting that contract with IBM
5) Strong arming governments through bribes
6) Bundled monopolism (Internet Explorer 5)
7) Copying Apple
8) Not being brown like Ubuntu
Other than that, I don't really see many MS high points, and I've kind of been watching them the whole time. I kind of liked Qbasic for a minute. It was handy, but I think they bought that from somebody when it was mostly feature complete, then fucked it up later. I can't remember now.... Oh the weary and toil of years of tech support have ravaged me, Microsoft, you bloated, retarded, retarding, evil, slow, relentless monopoly. Would somebody please make a Linux distro to put you to rest indefinitely.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
When NT4 arrived I felt that this is the future. It had the features that Windows 95 had combined with stability. It convinced me that Unix would be dead few years and I prepared to switch my professional focus from Unix to NT4. I had seen so many people praising dying architectures (IBM System 36, BTOS from Burroughs, DEC 10/20 and so on).
Luckily a guy named Linus from the other side of the Baltic sea proved me wrong and I have been running Linux as my main OS since about RedHat 6.0 or 6.1.
For a nice date: Call strftime(3C)!
Compared to the Microsoft software du jour, that's an entirely different story.
Usually, buggy software caused *some* application to stop abruptly. In worst-case scenario the whole K Desktop Environment would crash, bringing down you whole GUI and throwing you back to the shell. Nonetheless, everything running in the background kept running, completely unaffected by whatever problem you had with the GUI : The Samba shares, the Squid Proxy set up to share the modem connection, telnet & ssh, etc...
On Windows 9x/ME, whenever it crashed, you got a bluescreen and *absolutely everything* was down with it. In addition you could really do a lot of things with it. It was supposed to be multi-tasking, but you couldn't load more than a couple of apps at the same time anyway. Loading a CD Burning application and an Office Suite and a web browser was beyond its capabilities.
Windows 95 was the reason I switched to Linux.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The purchase of Thawte resulted in a wad of cash that Mark Shuttleworth used to do some nice things with.
!
I find it interesting that some lightweight Linux distros are still cloning the Win95 look and feel, sometimes to pixel precision. I remember when Red Hat was practically a copy of the Windows interface.
Popular? Arguable. A milestone? You bet.
Windows XP came with the Secure Audio Path "functionality" which meant that if a flag was checked on WM-DRM files, the file could only be played through audio drivers which were WHQL signed.
Windows ME also had this "functionality", different from Windows 98.
Pretty much, other than Secure Audio Path, activation in the non VLK editions, the Luna XP theme, improved EFS capability, more settings controllable in group policy, and the firewall, there wasn't that much changed. The kernel went from 5.0 in Windows 2000 to 5.1 in XP.
I suppose you have benchmarks to back that claim up...
?
No sig today...
For example, lots of people bought a cheap printer or scanner to go with their PC prior to the launch of Vista, bought a new PC with Vista and discovered that their peripheral wasn't supported. You can say "buyer beware; don't buy cheap shoddy peripherals" all you like, but Windows users haven't had to worry about whether or not the peripheral they're buying will be supported under their OS in 10 or 15 years - certainly not to the same extent that they have with Vista.
I suspect hardware advances will solve the performance issue, and I doubt Microsoft will repeat the same "half your peripherals no longer work" crap again.
And compared to NT4, Windows 2K was a failure from the user's standpoint.
Huh? As tempting as it may be to suggest that GP ignores history repeating, it's just not the case.
Transitioning from 2K to XP: pretty much the same kernel, stability, APIs, features, plus DRM, more running services without apparent added value and a GUI that looks like kids dishes.
Transitioning from NT to 2K: pretty much the same kernel and stability, but Plug&Play and DirectX Compatibility at last, to name two improvements. No downsides that I could recall.
Notice a difference?
The point with the WGA is that corporate customers, the ones who have volume licenses and paid-for servers and are MS Certified Gold shops, are getting hit as well. Sometimes there's a validation server outage, or you change a network card or something like that, and Windows will stop working or, worse, will still work but stop receiving updates.
There's a fine line between tightening up security and making people pay for your software the hard way, and pissing people off in such a bad way that they might look for an alternative.
Your point is valid, and I think MS has gained paying customers for it. They've also lost a couple, and are making people aware of the DRM/WGA issue. In the end, if they sell more than they lose, the WGA stays. I think it's jarring that a piece of software, installed on my computer, is actively working against me, mistrusting me, waiting for the moment it can cut me off. It even updates itself all the time.
Instead, couldn't they have built a better ?
Windows proved to be a very bad horse. If there was a different OS that has become popular instead, then PC would have being adopted more heavily and people were more RELAXED. But common, Windows makes people angry and not relaxed. Here and now is the perfect time for Apple OS to go for the whole market. No need AT&T for that :-)
When you see 5 comments in a row from the same person, then someone else adds one pointing this out, who is causing the bulk of the disruption?
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
You seem to have no idea what SharePoint actually is...
Windows 95 sucked giant testicles. It was inferior to Apple's System 7, and it was a poor joke compared to IBM's OS/2 Warp 3, and Gates knows it. The only reason Microsoft emerged from the dredge of civilization was that IBM and Apple were run by business suits who knew precious litte about technology or the needs of the average user.
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
Most home Windows machines are infested with spyware. People that understand it can avoid it, on any version of Windows.
You know what? I've been hearing Windows users say this for a long time. It's rubbish
Put identity in the browser.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
On a software project I was working on last year, two computers with XP Professional per site had to exchange data via a network share (mapped to a drive letter and treated much like a local drive). Buying server licenses was considered too expensive.
Now, with lots of data in the shared directory, performance sucked. So we did a lot of testing with various Windows versions as "server" and client. Both with the "main" software project and with a small test application one of us whipped up.
XP Professional -> XP Professional was the worst by far. The test application showed delays that depended on filesize, with the filesize/delay curve showing some really weird peaks.
Windows 2000 Professional -> Windows 2000 Professional was better. But still inferior to what I'd expect from sharing data over a 100Mbit/s LAN.
Using an actual Windows 2000 Server to serve the data was fastest. This test case actually showed the sort of performance I expected over a 100Mbit/s LAN.
Finally and to our surprise, Windows 98 as client performed best with the test application. As if the later versions performed some time-consuming negotiations that Windows 98 simply did not bother with.
I conclude that XP Professional (and to a lesser degree 2000 Professional) has either design issues or the performance was intentionally crippled, to make it less attractive for use as a "small server".
C - the footgun of programming languages
Actually, from Bill's viewpoint, Win95 really was as good as it got. Remember, Bill's a marketer, not a techie. W95 had iPhone style queues of people waiting to buy the new OS. Here in the UK they reported how the first customer to buy a copy got handed a phone so Bill could talk to him, personally. People were excited by the release. They wanted to use it.
It really was a triumph of marketing.
The trouble lay in the aftermath. Outside the hype zone, people quickly discovered that their existing systems weren't powerful enough to run the OS and that their existing software ran either much slower, or not at all - thus setting the pattern for future Windows releases. Of course, once you'd spent the additional money on a new computer, and new versions of the programs you used, there's no question that Win95 was in a great many ways superior to 3.1.1. But I don't think MS have since enjoyed that level of public trust.
No wonder Bill sees it as a high point. Happier times for Microsoft all round.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
I meant that you can't avoid the infestation. One drive-by install of a trojan and it's over. If they root you, you'll never know.
This is true on all OSes, not just Windows. "I'm safe because I know my business" is just BS. No one is safe.
Put identity in the browser.
The question is not whether his speeches remain libre, but whether he can be compelled to make them libre. I write OSS. That isn't good enough for Stallman -- he wants everything I write to be "free software", including the stuff I have not chosen to release under OSS licenses. (Like, say, the stuff that pays the rent.) Stallman makes some speeches available free as in beer. In one of them, he lays out his grand theory of IP.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Free_Software_and_Beyond:_Human_Rights_in_the_Use_of_Software
Way down in that document, he divides IP into 3 segments, and says how he would deal with them.
1) Useful IP: Programs, recipes, instructions on how to do things, must be free.
2) Works that state the views of certain parties: Stallman's speeches fall here, as well as op-eds, etc.
Let me quote directly: "Now here my answer is different, I don't think modified versions of these works contribute to society, all they do is misrepresent the authors. So I propose a compromised copyright system which says that everybody is free non-commercially to redistribute exact copies. But modifications require permission and commercial use require permission."
So there you have it, Stallman is free to remix, derive from, and commercially exploit the fruits of my labor (whether I like it or not), but I am not allowed to modify, derive from, or commercially exploit the fruits of his labor (unless he lets me). That sure sounds fair.
Not relevent to the discussion, but for completeness' sake:
3) Arts and entertainment: movies, paintings, & etc. 10 year exclusive rights to modification and commercial use.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
This is true on all OSes, not just Windows. "I'm safe because I know my business" is just BS. No one is safe. But you can make it prompt you before installing ActiveX controls. And a non privileged browser process has so few rights it's very hard for malware to spread out of it. Almost all of the filesystem and registry are off limits for example. Even if it did Opera is not common enough for malware to bother targetting it. Actually you can see if a machine has malware because some non signed process is usually hogging the CPU or thrashing the disk. Or if I debug something I can see an unsigned DLL has been injected into every process.
At least I can see the difference in performance between my machine which is probably malware free and my parents' or brother's girlfriend machines which I'm sure or not. Most of the malwate I've seen is not at all subtle - it just wants to get off the machine into as many machines as possible as quickly as possible.
And come to think of it, if I can't see the malware, is it really that bad that I have it? It's reminds me of that puzzle about "if a tree falls but there is no one to hear it, does it still make a noise?"
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
He said it in that interview with Walt Mossberg and Steve Jobs: Before Win95 there was still a debate wether text UI or grafical UI was the way to go. After Win95 that debate was concluded in favour of the grafical UI.
The Windows line since 95 has one thing going for it (and I really can't believe I'm actually saying something like this) in that is has a strange way of rounding up all the manufacturers. Wonder why Vista is such a performance hog? So vendors can justify selling new hardware. That's why they go along with it. Remember when those bizar Windows Keyboards popped up all over the place with Win95? Same thing. Now they are commonplace.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Anyone remember Windows 95 B or whatever it was called? I think I even have one of the installation discs lying around somewhere. That "milestone" was so brilliant that they had to make and sell an updated version of it. Not even service pack, new subversion. Just stop doing business with Microsoft, Mkay?
No Windows 2000 could play games, Windows NT4 could not. It was the first and last secure windows desktop operating system.
Seriously, sharepoint? Costs way too much, is buggy, hard to extend (workarounds workarounds workarounds) and looks like crap.
Some people make a bunch of money because they 'know' SharePoint... they are SharePoint 'developers' or even SharePoint 'Architects'
(rethorical)Did you ever came across a well architected, customized, extensible SharePoint implementation?
For a usability/stablity prospective I think I have to agree with most that 2000 Pro was the high point. I think in some ways VS .Net/.Net Framework should be on the list too. It gave them a competitor to Java, a multi language virtual machines, and after several revisions still remains a solid competitor.
I'm guessing you replied to the wrong post?
-The search engine in sharepoint is crazy powerful. Read up on it. It's very programmable and has some of the best full text capabilities on the market (without paying hundreds of thousands) and 2007 added the ability to powerfully query structured data as well. You do know that MS has actually spun off the search engine as a seperate product, right? And that there's a LOT more to sharepoint search than just the little search box, right?
-What do wikis have to do with sharepoint? WSS 3.0 added the ability to add a wiki to a site, but it's neither the focus of sharepoint nor something you'd use in most situations. It's like saying, about ubuntu (what I'm posting this from...):
"Seriously. A program that lists the files in a directory, only it takes an hour to install and my mouse is broken. WTF?"
While ubuntu does have the "ls" command, it is not what ubuntu is about, and if you don't plug in your mouse it won't work. Does that mean your daughter shits out better software than ubuntu as well?
I know I'm feeding the troll, but flat out FUD is pointless.
GUI elements from NeXTSTEP, TrueType from Apple :)
There was an unknown error in the submission.
I always liked the Weird Al version.
http://www.mp3-download-lyrics.com/music/Weird-Al-Yankovic/Windows-95-Sucks_220634.html
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
BUT, the reason why Gates liked Win95 was that it marked the beginning of their illegal contracts with the OEMs, which prevented the OEMs from putting any other OS or desktop on their PCs, thus beginning 13 years of monopoly which created the massive stockpile of cash that made Gates the richest man in the world.
...
Win 3.11 FWG offered 32 bit protected mode, true apartment model multitasking, built in networking, remote desktop connections, and minimized the need for DOS. It was much better than Win 3.1 and, as history has shown, was superior to Win95 in speed and stability. Win95 was SO buggy, unstable and insecure that the ONLY WAY they could force people to stay with it was to make sure that it was their ONLY CHOICE. Monopolies do that.
Where was the FTC and the DOJ while this was taking place?
During Clinton's last term the DOJ brought action against Microsoft, not for violating the Sherman-Clayton Anti-Trust Act, which they surely did, but for "bundling" some apps with the Win95. Regardless, they won the case and the appeal, and Judge Jackson was sure that the only way to protect the American public was to break up Microsoft, just the way AT&T was broken up some years before.
Bill Gates must believe in miracles because he got one. George Bush defeated Al Gore and one of his first acts was to replace the successful DOJ team with a new team and changed their mission from one of prosecution to co-conspiracy.
Seizing the opportunity, and being the scofflaw that they are, Microsoft created a phony "grass roots" campaign (James Pendergrast led it and it became known as "astroturfing") accusing the government of "attacking" Microsoft because it was a "successful" corporate enterprise and the government was infested with anti-capitalist socialist. Congressmen even received letters with signatures of people whose place of residence were cemeteries! Despite that blatant abuse, and through political back room deals and payoffs, they got Judge Jackson replaced on the bench with a hyphenated name judge who was more compliant and had been given paid vacations to resorts where "law seminars" were taught on how to circumvent, from the bench, the codified restrictions on illegal and/or immoral business practices. This replacement judge was "successful" (how hard could it be to give up?) in negotiating an "agreement" with Microsoft which was so weak it was worthless precisely because it was toothless. And, to make sure Microsoft abides by this "agreement", the judge assigned three monitors to watch over Microsoft to be sure they didn't violate the "agreement", even though it was toothless. Microsoft didn't mind because they were given the privileged of choosing two of the three monitors. Not only that, the monitors were given offices on Microsoft's campus, where Microsoft could watch over and control them! Such a deal. One every convicted felon could only wish for. Not only that, the "agreement" effectively ended any chance of prosecuting Microsoft for other crimes and gave them carte blanc to continue similar crimes without fear of prosecution.
Strangely, Enron Chief Executive Officer Ken Lay publicly stated that the best way to view Enron was as the Microsoft of the energy field. Let's trust Lay, a Ph.D. economist, and examine Enron through a Microsoft-style window.
The most important tool Enron used to inflate its earnings was its ability to pay wages and other expenses in stock rather than cash.
More than 90 percent of all the wages paid to Enron executives were paid in stock, not cash. Investors often forget that all it takes to create new stock is a resolution of the board of directors and a photocopier.
Remarkably, the Internal Revenue Service allows a tax deduction for wages paid in stock, yet these same wages are not required to be charged as an expense to the income statement the public sees.
If you were operating a business, wouldn't you love to give your banker an income statement that excluded half of your wage ex
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
The reason was that for some reason, you couldn't count on certain registers being preserved in programs for Windows 2k/NT, but you could in 95. It wasn't so much about sloppy coding, it was about different procedurs.
It does indeed work alright for very simple customizations, but beyond that it falls flat on its face. Try decompiling it sometime and see what a joke it is. You don't even have to go that far really, just look at the libraries. The utilities namespace might as well be named SharePoint.IDoNotKnowWhereThis MethodGoesButWeNeedITBecauseOtherwise TheProductDoesNotWorkAlsoIUseItToReinventTheWheelEvenInMyOwnAPI.
As an interesting aside, I wrote some SP code for MS internal. Our code had to code through strict reviews and panels. The code analysis tools and review boards told us we had problems. When I asked, they said the following assemblies failed: Microsoft.SharePoint.dll, Microsoft.Office.Server.dll, etc. My reply of course was that MS owned the code in those assemblies, not my group, so take it up with them. Our code passed with flying colors and several internal people actually "asked" for our source (read: copy and steal). Funny they can't even pass their own code reviews.
I'd like to see you try to implement a forms auth SharePoint deployment properly and get all the functionality to work. It's documented by MS that it doesn't. Part of the reason is how windows auth works with their products, and another part has to do with the fact that when they went "gold," we found out that no one had properly tested forms authentication. I know this because I was on a call with their dev team at the time trying to implement an internal MS product that required it. Our call incited a shouting match with their own people for not testing it. It's still broken to this day.
I have no doubt that it works for your purposes which is great, but if you're out there doing a lot of complex implementations, you will soon find that there are so many wtfs you lose count. It seems to me you're judging without the proper experiences to back it up. Personally, I really do wish it worked like you said, but I can point to specific code that has no prayer of ever working. For instance, there are blatant logic and statistical errors in the KPI web parts, the SPDateTime control is all but broken for post backs and dates before 1900, the event model for lists and list items is almost useless by design, and the workflow engine crashes randomly because there are too many errors to even begin to count, That's just a short sampling. Shall we continue?
Plus, you can turn off most of the "eye candy" in XP. Right-click on the taskbar->Choose Properties->Click on the Start Menu tab->Choose Classic Start Menu. Combine that with the Windows Classic theme in Display Properties and you have an OS that looks like more like Win2K did. It's the first thing I do with any Windows XP installation.
Of course, I don't exactly keep my XP system in "Classic Mode." I've installed LClock and Free Launch Bar. The former changes the look of the system clock and lets me change the Start Menu button to another image (a Windows logo that I mocked up). The latter changes my QuickLaunch bar to allow for submenus and other visual improvements.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
...Gates' perfection of vapour-ware when he sold DOS before it was created. I think that THAT was the high point.
*** Don't be dull.***
Open source is a guarantee that things can be fixed legally and practically.
That depends on your company size, though. If you're big enough, your SLA with the vendor says that they will fix the problems legally, practically, and quickly (and you've probably got the source in escrow, just in case). With open source, you have to hope that the code base is transparent enough that you can find someone to understand and fix it.
I remember times when we had problems with the operating system of a large, high-end vendor; they flew out the "father of the OS" to troubleshoot on-site and fix them for us. Try doing that with Cyrus IMAPD. Sure, there are some open-source projects where you can do that; there are also many you can't, because the authors have day jobs, college careers, existing contracts, etc.
There's a reason Apple bought CUPS; it's because their OS depends on it, and they want to make sure they have someone who understands the internals on staff. But if you have to buy out every open-source project you use, you've lost the advantages of open-source.
No one checked the documentation in three years, so it was a shock that it was written in the DOS / Win95 era. (What was the original thought when you bought the software and saw that the documentation was written for systems 10+ years older than current OSes?)
No one followed up with the vendor, perhaps to keep current on support contracts, over the course of the past three years? (Do you even *have* a support contract?)
Only a year into the use of this "critical program", database backups ceased to be performed by your company.
And it's the vendor's fault, and the vendor who offers a crappy product??? Riiiight....!
mmm... yeah... You see, we're putting the cover sheets on all TPS reports now before they go out...
If you call finally managing to make Windows not work with Novell Netware or drDOS ..)
:)", Jim Allchin 1991
"the way to shut out novell in the base is to either ship a full client or make it so there is no network connectivity", Brad Silverberg 1994
"drdos has problems running windows today. And I assume will have more problems in the futire" Brad Silverberg
"You should make sure it has problems in the future
davecb5620@gmail.com
Windows 2000, stablity speed, eyecandy with window blinds installed. Easy to administer, and office 97. It has all been downhill in the Windows world since then.
"so far, MS server OSes have lived up to the task of being solid and operable day and day out"
.. :)
Why is it that here we keep having to remake exchange profiles and the fax server keeps crashing. Not a good sign for a multi-national consultancy. I suppose you are also one of those people that never got a virus
davecb5620@gmail.com
"Windows 95 was awesome... but the first versions were crap the 95b was the best one"
.. :)
Yea, it finally got back to a buggy version of Xtree, drDOS, Novell Netware and Win3.11 Yea I know you could do it with Citrix, but MS bought out Citrix didn't they
The main innovation being you could no longer load WinDOS from a Netware server onto a diskless client, you had to buy licenses and upgrade the memory and install a harddrive on each client, costing a lot if you were cash starved college.
davecb5620@gmail.com
Correct! IMHO, DOS was a decent OS for a very limited chip. The 386 was probably the first Intel chip that could support a "real" operating system.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
For all that it was and was not, Win95 was the platform most of us were using the first time we logged on to the Internet and used a browser (probably Netscape). The web would have developed differently and more slowly without it.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Deep down Bill Gates knows that he's about as innovative as duckweed.
Proverbs 21:19
You would think meeting her would qualify as a high point for Bill :)
If you're able to make Win95 more secure than Win2K+.
then that you subscribe to ID then? :-)
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
I would disagree. Compared to NT4, 2K had a lot of features that did not seem to detract from the stability of the host (overly much). 2K seemed like a logical progression in the family line.
However, XP seemed like the STD laden but garrulous and affable epileptic nephew of NT.
"Honestly, most software just plain sucks"
if you start talking about breezy badges, gutsy gibbons, and hard herons in the average convenience store
You have a good point, but the chances of meeting someone who does know is increasing everyday. Where I work, I know 3 coworkers who use it and there is a lot of interest in others who hear us talking about it or see us using our personal laptops on break. The number of unwashed masses is starting to shrink, especially since several manufactures are now offering machines with some version of Linux. At work this week, a friend got a new Vista laptop and was asking what a good replacement for Vista was. As long as Vista remains a problem, the knowledge of alternates will continue to grow. Keep you ears open at the local convience store. You may be suprised. Bring up the subject and see if anyone has heard of it. I have had a convience store discusion on Ubuntu. It happens.
The truth shall set you free!
Seriously, what idiot names that damn thing?
I don't know, but I do know that some have better names than others. I was waiting for Feisty Fawn to come out, partly for the upgrade, but mainly for the name change. I skipped Edgy altogether. Feisty came out and gave Microsoft fits. I loved it. I'm still running it on my laptop.
The truth shall set you free!
We're talking about Bill Gates here-- remember that the quality of the OS is probably not his measuring stick-- Windows 95 was probably when they signed a bunch of lock-in deals with PC manufacturers. Also it was likely the last OS they shipped before they finally got dragged kicking and screaming into creating a QA department (according to G. Pascal Zachary's "Showstopper!" anyway)-- with all those extra employees and shipping delays!
He's not saying Win95 was the best OS that Microsoft ever released. I think we can all agree that 2k and XP are far superior, and really, Vista is as well.
But Windows 95 was a high point, a nice milestone, any way you slice it. It was the first OS that was readily accepted by the masses, I believe -- before that, consumer-level computers, whether at home or at the office, were basically limited to DOS or 3.1 (which was DOS anyway), and a few random cranks with these "Mac" things nobody paid attention to. They were a pain to set up and a pain to use and except for those of us who grew up to be Slashdot users, nobody wanted 'em if they didn't need 'em.
Then here comes Windows 95, which for all its retrospective faults, was astonishing at the time. Want a hardware upgrade? Jam the hardware inside the box and let Windows figure out the drivers, IRQ settings, and everything else. Maybe use an installation disk or CD for drivers. It didn't always do it perfectly, but it was decent, and leaps and bounds ahead of toggling jumpers with toothpicks and trying to remember which comm port mapped where.
It brought the PC up to date and made it accessible to the masses, who by now have made "Windows" synonymous with "computer", at least to them. It came out at a time when the internet (and the Web) were becoming to seep into the conciousness of society at large, and made it possible for any schmuck to experience it without knowing a lot about computers. Business was booming, people liked the product for the most part, and the main competitor, Apple, was a nobody. A huge economy was growing around Windows 95, from games to business applications to support, and market penetration was off the scale.
Definitely sounded like a good time to be in Gates' position, or to be involved with Microsoft at all.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
Just to agree with some of the other posters; Windows 2000 was an amazingly fantastic time to be a windows user. Somebody on here stated that 2k was bad simply because Microsoft was trying to market ME to home users at around the same time, but I don't see how that makes 2k bad.
Lots of people here are discussing XP as the upgrade path from ME, but I don't believe that at all. EVERYBODY I knew who had used ME jumped ship years before XP came out. They either reverted to Windows 98 Second Edition or upgraded to Windows 2000. Don't forget that Windows 98 was selling very well at the time and was liked for its stability (compared to 95 and ME) and adored for its compatibility (lots of people were still avoiding NT at the time).
The way things worked out, it's as if ME never existed. People were upgrading from 98SE directly to XP, and that's only if they didn't have 2000 already (those who did avoided XP for a good couple years after it came out).
Looking back on all this, it strikes me as a bit humorous how, with the release of every MS Operating System, there seems to be this little game of "what can we do to avoid upgrading?"
It may be that Windows 95 really was their high point since it seemed to have the best reception.
640Kb? You'll never need more than 640Kb!!!!
I think it was introduced in the 286.
I personally feel if they held off and introduced Windows 95 with the same "upgrades" as Windows 98, it would have been better. I am surprised NT 4.0 was not mentioned. Flame-bait aside, I used that before I went to Windows 95, and I personally had a better overall experience. All I did was do term papers, go on a few BBS's and my system really was fine doing next to nothing. Everything since then has been pretty much a fix upon a fix IMHO. I haven't really "experienced" much of an improvement, and the GUI has generally looked the same since I was at NT 4.0 give or take a few modifications here and there. I went OSX a few months back, and that works for me too. It seems whenever I introduce games to any environment I am in, that's when things get unstable. Since I used to work for a gaming company, I generally blame the game makers themselves for not doing a thorough enough QA process before a release, but I understand ultimately a lot of things get fixed after a few patches. Windows 95 pretty much brought over the Windows games (more than they had ever been), so I guess I can agree. XBOX 360 is doing alright, so maybe that's why it's Bill Gate's high point. I say stick to a console for games, though.
I think a lot of people who like their jobs still consider money the high point because ultimately they find things outside of work even more pleasurable. If they have a family then the money might be a high point for things like food and vacation. Or maybe theres a local hooker they like just a bit more than testing software.
There was initially resistance to using the windows 95 UI on NT 3.51 where I worked, but for the most part, every OS MS has released has been better than the last, to the W2K series, and XP is the pinnacle of their consumer brand. Windows Server 2003 is definitely a major improvement over W2K and I expect the same of 2008.
Of course, if they do it anonymously we wouldn't really know, would we?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Hm,
remember that year. I was forced to used Linux back then (without even knowing *it* was Linux), and considered it bullshit.
Wasnt until 98 until i actually installed it on my own box. Geesh, you wouldnt even believe the reason i tried it. While waiting during a job application i read some stupid manager magazine. The only article that was interresting was about some strange OS, which was free of charge and better. Well, i disliked Windows since 3.1 (the first version i used, i at first thought my computer was defective because of the poor performance of windows).
Well, only a dial-up connection back then, so i bought a copy of SuSE.
With my DOS background it took a while to get used to this new thing. After getting used to bash this was really getting fun. I pretty soon realised the real multitasking (even Novell DOS only had Task-switching) and was getting really excited.
About a week later i recompiled my kernel to get audio and video to work and eventualy started my first own X-Server. Boy, i was suprised to see the fvwm2 i used in the uni. But from that day on i already knew enough to take advantage of the power of linux (unlike the uni-days where i considered it some "wierd windows").
From that time on the only reason to use Windows was for gaming, and even that is a point that is growing increasingly irrelevant.
Yes, 95 probably was the high time of windows.
People are already asking about linux in the small computer shop i work. Not everbody wants it, sure, but its getting more popular by the day.
Sco Xenix at least had multitasking and the mac with its 6800k was light years ahead.
.... sigh
:-)
Os/2 in 1986 was already fully 32-bit if you had a 386 and could be used by mere mortals unlike the skunkware version of unix back then.
MS killed and win16 with its hungarian notation was just
Don't get me started. This time when 64-bit computing came SuSE Linux and Net/FreeBSD were already there before MS.
Thank god for competition today. If it were not for Linux I doubt winxp 64 would ever be a reality.
Bad dark days of computing indeed.
http://saveie6.com/
The high point was when Gates bought the source code that formed the basis for MSDOS. He paid less than $100K and made billions.
As a programmer, .NET was certainly a high point for me, not only introducing a vast array of coding and web standards to the development environment - as well as actually providing an environment in the first place - but pretty much introduced a whole new paradigm to online development.
.NET at all? As a milestone, I'd put it up there with the first introduction of Visual Basic for Windows.
:)
That's my take anyway; but exaggeration or not, no mention of
Perhaps the audience wasn't into that back-room stuff so it didn't get a mention. hmph.. story of every programmer's life.
OS/2 was not just a little better that Window 95. . .it was YEARS ahead. Microsoft didn't even start to catch up with 1994 vintage OS/2 until they released Win2k, and in a number of respects, they still have not caught up.
OS/2 users were on the Internet before Windows users even knew it existed. In fact, most Windows users can't even tell you the difference between the Web and the `Net, even now. Essentially, Windows and AOL users were the same crowd. When Microsoft finally patched W95 so that it could get on the `Net, it was like someone had unlocked the gates to the trailer park and all the trash spewed out and polluted the place. Windows users are now, and have always been, the lowest common denominator of computer users.
Sure, this post is flamebait, but these comments about how great W95 was are pure historical revisionism. People need to face up to the facts, stop making excuses for their past stupid behavior and realize that they were suckered by a slick campaign that leveraged their own ignorance against them. They bought the snake oil, and in order to avoid facing the fact that they allowed themselves to be taken by con men, they pretended that the crashes never happened, the maintenance was easy, the performance was stellar, the interface was "intuitive", etc. Like the simple townies in Samuel Clemens "Huckleberry Finn", they were "Sold". They bought into "The King's Camelopard" and the only way to save face was to make sure everyone else was "sold" too. Thus the perpetual and repeating "Windows is GREAT" campaigns, and the "OS/2 is dead", "BeOS is dead", "Macs are dead", "Linux is dying", "The next version of Windows will fix EVERYTHING" campaigns.
Face it, folks, you were "Sold". The next version (or the next, or the next, or. . .) of Windows NEVER delivered what you were promised in 1995. To this day, Microsoft has not delivered what they promised you'd get if you held off committing to an architecture (OS/2) until Win95 shipped. Still, with every version, you bought the hype and then made lots of noise that, unlike the previous version, "This one doesn't suck!" Now, a few years on, you idiot Windows users are claiming that W95 was the best?!?! Perhaps it was the best thing Microsoft ever produced, but it was still garbage and you were all ignorant suckers for buying into it.
You Windows users who are actually old enough to remember Win3.1, yet are still faithful: Tell me how much more 'responsive' Vista is on contemporary midrange hardware (with the required virus scanners, trojan sniffers, malware cleaners running in the background) than Win3.1 was on a 386SX with 1 meg of memory doing typical tasks (editing documents/email, surfing the Web, etc). Actually, don't tell me. . .tell yourself. I already know.
Sure, now you can do stuff like render video animation on a Windows PC. . .stuff people did on Amigas a decade and a half ago. Go ahead and brag about it, morons. You have a one-size-fits-all word processor with tens of thousands of features that almost no one ever uses, but in which it takes you fifteen minutes to figure out how to change the line spacing (BTW, don't bother trying to memorize that sequence of keystrokes and mouse clicks to change the line spacing as the next version of that word processor (which you will be convinced that is an absolute NECESSITY that you have) will have a completely different sequence of keystrokes and mouse clicks to do the same thing).
Sure, bleat that the bandwagon you jumped on didn't turn out to be the right one down the road, but it was a good one at the time. . .You know that's bullshit and I know that's bullshit. Windows has NEVER been any more than what it is now: Barely functional trash. You were scammed, and the scammers co-opted you into defending their scam. Give it up, already, and move on.
I agree that Win2k is the best windows that microsoft ever made - I'm even writing this reply on a Win2k box. However, I would say that if you want the best OS that microsoft ever wrote, you just need to put a D in front of OS.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.