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Fragmentation in the Windows World
Greyfox writes "While various members of the Industry press have been raising the spectre of potential Linux fragmentation, we've been seeing some very real fragmentation in the Windows world. This story details the fact that there are now 7 different versions of the Windows 98 second edition and they're not all the same product! Add that to the assorted versions of Wince, NT (3.whatever to 5.0 betas) 95, and the die-hard 3.1 users who are STILL out there and you have a real mess on your hands. And programs for most of these versions of Windows are much less portable at the source code level than UNIX programs are. I've got a fair shot at taking any given UNIX program (Say, Gnome) from Linux to HP/UX to SCO or Solaris and having it work without any (or any major) changes to the source code. Most of the time you'll have to write your windows code from scratch. "
Okay, I've got to address this becuase I've been painfully building GNOME on Sparc Solaris in bits and pieces since the 0.2X releases.
/dev/dsp, too.
So... it's 95% working on Solaris now, and I'm happy, but...
Do you know how many times I've found
#include linux/*.h
in gnome code?
or how many times I found that shell scripts with #!/bin/sh really meant #!/usr/local/bin/bash (sorry, linux users sh and bash are not the same!)
I'd seen some #define CFLAGS -m486 stuff in there as well or sound stuff hard coded to use
I can't blame linux developers for writing software to take advantage of linux features like glibc2.1 and linux headers, but be aware that the result is code that needs to be ported to other unices.
So when you install Office 2000 you don't think that its upgrading all your DLLs to the current Win32 API level. A classic case in point is InitCommonControlsEx which I got burned on recently since this function didn't appear in Win95 but did appear in Win95 OSR2 and all version onwards. The MSDN documentation clearly indicates that you ALL new apps should use InitCommonControlsEx and not InitCommonControls, so they are clearly insuating that someone is going to have to update COMCTL32.DLL so that your app will actually load. When you say that MS is maintaining backward compatability with new apps, they just upgrade your old system to run new apps. I bet that Office 2000 upgrades you to at least IE 4.02 if not IE 5.0, in which case you as well have just installed Win98 SE. Whilst this is all well and fine if the new DLLs are backward compatible with old apps, there have been some instances where this is not the case. WININET.DLL springs to mind. This DLL had its interface completely changed if you installed IE 4 on a Win95 box rendered all apps that relied on it useless.
Ugh.
The point is there are at least seven ways of getting something that is called Win98 SE. And each way gets you something different. Some fix some bugs, other ways fix other bugs, some methods give new features, and some don't. But they all have the same name. Let's look at these 7 versions, each of which you guys are claiming is "different." First 4, which I'll call the "real" SE's: -full version OEM -full version bought (where's his evidence that this is different from the OEM btw?) -upgrade from 3.1 or 95 -upgrade from 98 (Second Edition Updated -- $20) These all give you the full SE feature set/bug fixes/etc. Now the other 3 that he mentions, which are different than SE, which I'll call the "SP1 + other free add-ons" -SP1 (just bug fixes) -downloading the free features by hand (SP1 & free utils -- ie5, media player, etc) -downloading the free features all in one place (he calls it "Second Edition Updates" ... this is no different than the previous option) There you go. This article is FUD, through and through. There ARE NOT 7 different "fragmented" versions of 98. Just different combinations of bugfixes and free utility updates. You don't have to "track down" all the free updates like he insinuates either. You can get them all from Windows Update -- one place. And code you write for one "version" of win98 will work on all of them. Bah.
I've run Windows 98 at home for the past year. I play mostly games on my home PCs. I've only had the systems crash maybe 6 times total in that time period. If your Win 98 systems crashing a lot, I'd suggest replacing some of the crappy hardware your using, or finding some better device drivers. Most of the problems I've seen in Windows are related to poorly written 3rd party drivers. I'm not saying that Win 98 doesn't have bugs, but I in my experience I sure don't see the "it crashes all the time" problems which I keep hearing from people on this sight. I develop mostly on NT at work (I also work on a variety of Unix and RTOS systems) at work. My NT box at work stays up for weeks at a time. It has crashed a few times in the past year. It crashed when I had a bad memory DIMM, and everytime Computer Support loads a new Novell Client. Microsoft's OSs are far from perfect. I wouldn't dream of using Win 98 for any kind of critical system. Win NT may not be a bad choice depending on how much control I had over what was installed, and if I can afford to reboot when I have to install updates and change some configuration settings. Use the best OS for the application.
You don't even have to recompile. 16-bit code runs fine under win95, win98, and winNT. I've been running several 16-bit apps on my win95 (now win98) setup, and they run fine. In System Monitor it shows them as taking all the free CPU cycles due to some multitasking difficulties, but it doesn't slow the system down - the 16-bit programs just get allocated all the spare cycles.
Most code would benefit from a recompile and some minor changes, but it's not necessary.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Face it, the natives are getting restless, and are getting ready to overthrow the king themselves.
I don't know crap about coding, but after
reading this post I had a scary thought. The
problem with WINE is the fact that there really
is no documentation (or source code) available
to anybody outside MS, right? So, wouldn't it be
pretty easy for MS to make their own, 100%
compatible MS-WINE, and create Billix, which
would run both Linux and Windows apps?
Please tell me this is not so.
LND
I am no lover of Micro$oft, and I curse their products regularly. However, there are a few things they are getting better at, and Windose is one of them. I've installed Win98 SE (full blown) on two computers at home:
1) Fresh install on a Celeron 400 with an unusual zenon motherboard with built-in components. Runs fine. In fact, it is my main system which I do everything on, including software developement, and I never turn it off. It stays up for weeks at a time without any system crashes.
2) Upgrade from Win95 OSR2 on a Pentium 166MMX with standard components. This system runs fine as well. In fact, the Win98 install/upgrade went off without a single problem and it cleared up several nagging problems I was having with Win95.
I also happen to use win98 SE on several systems at work. I am quite pleased with the product and I would recommend it to anyone. I especially love the internet gateway feature they've built in. Now I don't need a linux system to get my home network on the internet.
That is my 2 bits on win98.
The thing I remember most about the 95 beta was trying to get it the hell off my machine! =) It took me quite a while to find all the files it had dumped on my harddrive. Ah well.
Pax -- Ob
I was under the impression that a.out binaries no longer ran under (most) default Linux distribution installs.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Yes, I believe this is true. I worked on a port of a VB app that was written in VB 2.0, and I had to gather all the "major" VB releases 'cause apparently VB = 4.0 uses normal text files. :)
However, even after I had a full upgrade path to 6.0 (what the customer wanted it re-coded in), I STILL had a problem with legacy controls inside the forms. It was a monsterous project, to port a simple futures calculator. After that fiasco, I decided to stick to MFC only (when I actually program under Windows
Where I work, we had problems with Word and Access macros too. If you don't upgrade version by version, you'll be left behind in the Microsoft world...
Eh.. "Slightly" off Topic, but ... This release was utter garbage. I am not surpriced that people experience problems with it.
I am sure fragmentation doesn't help either, the more fragmentation, the more codebase. In the world of Linux, fragmentation happens within several different companies (like distribution) and sometimes in various code-bases, but the fragmentation isn't covered by any one company, like with MSoft. The extra effort hurled into supporting and upgrading all these different fragmented code-bases, Win9x in all it's forms, winNT, W2k, WinCE etc. etc.
Maybe it is time for Windows to stop charter everyone and their kitchen sink, and start putting effort into releasing systems that fix things while not breaking other things. Win98 SE got the cute nick-name: Shit Edition after it refused to work on several peaces of hardware which its "old, buggy" version works just fine at.
In some 15 installs, the new edition has only worked on 2. Someone will probably scream: change your hardware, but seriously, I would rather just change to an OS that actually work with what I have (it seems like 98 SE has a special affinity for not working with various network cards).
It's about time Windows got it's stuff together, soon it won't even be good for playing games at if this is to continue, thus loosing it's usability all together.
At the end of the second sentence, I meant to say = 4.0.
Sorry...
Amen,
My experience is much the same. Win95 SR1 was crashing on me at least once every 15 minutes. I then upgraded to 98 RC 2, and crashed maybe once an hour. After further upgrading to RC 3, the machine ran better than it ever had for almost 9 months. At that point i was installing a new HD and doing general cleanup and decided "hey, while i'm at it i'll just put 98 full ver on"
Big mistake:
80% of the time the machine doesn't boot properly.
3/4 of the time i get at least 2 blue screens, even on a simple restart. every time this happens i have to reset, boot into safe mode, _then_ restart, at which point normal mode comes up fine.
But it works great after that!
And people wonder why i leave the damn thing on all the time.
RC 3 was/is far more stable than the final ver in my opinion.
No unauthorized use. Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
Yeah, but how easy is it to port an application that uses all of the 2.2.x features back to Linux 0.0.99? I don't think that is "just" a recompile either.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Linux has the same problem. Try running your q3test binaries on LinuxPPC.
This means that there are many different versions of Linux in your view. Not to mention how many hundreds of OS/processor combinations of UNIXes there are...makes Windows look positively unified.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Well, excluding Win3.1, Microsoft has to support all the major versions of Windows with Office 2000 - and thus obeying the "standards" of the Win32 API. The fact that Microsoft now has so many different versions of Windows to support is actually a good thing for us. As an example, Wine was able to run Office 2000 the day it was released. From what I have read in the newsgroup, it runs pretty well, too.
CRAP!
LESS THAN OR EQUAL TO!
I keep forgetting. (preview, PenguinDude, preview)
Sorry.....
Thank you, that is the POINT of this whole article. Sure Unix/Linux can be considered "fragmented", but so can Windows.
Although Microsoft doesn't sell a 16bit compiler anymore, Watcom does.
Who is going to go out and develop a new Win31 project who doesn't already have 16bit development tools? The last release of Microsoft's 16bit compiler (8.0c) runs fine under Win98 and WinNT, even supports long filenames.
As for "API reading from a serial port" changing, the only real changes were a few function names (open, close, read, write all changed to standard file i/o versions). All the wierd DCB stuff is still supported with no changes!
I'm near the end of porting a big Win16 program to Win32 (maintaining both at the same time from the same source). Very little of the work is API oriented. Most of the work is rewriting 16bit assembly language, and wierd 16bit specific stuff with FAR or HUGE pointers and other kludgey hacks.
However, even after I had a full upgrade path to 6.0 (what the customer wanted it re-coded in), I STILL had a problem with legacy controls inside the forms. It was a monsterous project, to port a simple futures calculator. After that fiasco, I decided to stick to MFC only (when I actually program under Windows :) I work, we had problems with Word and Access macros too. If you don't upgrade version by version, you'll be left behind in the Microsoft world. Heh. I'm developing an app that started its life in Access97, and is now being converted to VB6.0. There are so many discrepancies in calling convention, it makes me cry. Different ways of opening forms, controls have different sets of properties, etc. etc. But remember, VBA is a subset of VB. Everything will port over fine
Oh, you want to do something complicated? Complicated's not supported.
bah.
Which is a common occurence.
Take the office I just stopped working at. There were five computers there: two Dells with P166's, an older Gateway, a pair of brand new Gateways with PII's, and a no-name clone.
The old Gateway flakes out three or four times before lunch, but that's because the user is a serious 'cute little applet' freak. One of the Dell's can't run for more than 20 minutes without a GPF some days, and other days complains not at all. The new Gateways haven't had time to get twitchy and run happily all day long with little complaint. The other Dell (which used to be mine before I got a new Gateway from the boss to shut me up) once had to be rebooted 10 times in a day.
The administrative intern in the office told me I was the only person she'd ever heard complain about Windows, and that she'd been using it for years with no problems.
Fact is, there's no telling some days. It took me a long time to get over using a computer very gingerly once I installed Linux at home, because I was tired of things breaking every ten minutes. Other people use their Win boxes as functional multitasking workstations and have little trouble.
I've given up arguing with anyone about it because I've learned that 'works for me' is the great argument ender.
People will denigrate happy Windows users to the high heavens as having anemic skills and no clues, or as being brainwashed victims of the Redmond thought control sattelites, when the fact is, toy operating system or not, it gets the job done for people. Especially (but not exlusively to) people who are sort of timid about doing much but using what their box came with.
I personally don't like Win 9x much as a result of my experiences, and have the usual complaints about Microsoft's business practices, but I've learned my experiences are on the negative side of a pretty wide spectrum of opinions from all sorts of people.
I just wish people would stop worrying about Microsoft and get on with their lives. As much as I despise the apparent need some people have to define themselves in social terms based on their computer's OS, it's hard to ignore, because the fixation on the topic permeates the discourse of the community.
----------
mphall@cstone.nospam.net
----------
mphall@cstone.nospam.net
"A horse laugh is worth a thousand syllogisms"
That's right, the big, bad, monopolistic Linux Giant is beating up on poor defenseless Microsoft again. Hell, the article didn't even have to MENTION the word "Linux", but the Linux marketing machine is so strong that it broke through your consciousness and alterted you that (despite what the text of the article read) this was actually an ANTI-Microsoft, Pro-Linux piece. Good job catching us on that one. Linux actually has thousands of strongholds pretending to be pro-Microsoft, but over the next few years we'll have them start advocating Linux. For example, ZD-Net, WinFiles.Com, and even the MSDN are really Linux community plants -- just waiting for the go ahead! In fact, you know the "Freedom to Innovate" link on Microsoft's homepage that preaches that Microsoft is really helping consumers instead of hurting them? That's really the uber-powerful Linux reverse-psychology marketing machine again. It makes you see things that say, "Microsoft is wonderful," but it's really slamming Windows and boasting the power of Linux. </SARCASM> P.S. If I'm off topic, so are you.
I agree that this is being exaggerated. While there are some minor compatibility problems, they are just that - minor. I run several 16-bit programs written for win3.x under my win98 system, and they run fine.
Compare that to Linux binary compatibility. Just look at the mozilla binaries directory. Just for the x86, there's separate binaries for glibc and libc5 and libc4 systems. Plus there's the fact that none of those will run on old a.out systems.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Properly written programs on Unix use processes not threads. Threads are not necessary in Unix as they are on Windows for performance. They do help, but not nearly as much.
The only thing I really hate about Microsoft is the way they destroy competition using its marketshare to sell their products. Our guys are always answering to the "bad" reports in the media because we don't have the money to create a marketing task force to sell "the truth" as the major corporations are used to doing. But I don't think this is good. The best answer for this is working.
Note "...using the basic APIs..."
The cake is a pie
M$ is tearing their ass up to maintain backward compatibility, and that's one of the reasons they aren't getting on. And as of the different Win98
versions, what do you have to recode to get it from one to the other? The changes are cosmetic, because having no source code every little freaking change on source level needs a completely different version.
First ?
--
"The use of COBOL cripples the mind.
Its teaching, therefore, should be
When was the last time you tried wine? The recent snapshots run most of the stuff quite well. Since wine is in development, more and more things run correctly. Comapring wine a year ago and now is irrelevent.
Half of the stuff runs? Like, what might that be? From the apps I've tried, nearly all of them worked to what I expected.
-xk
A confused Win98 user, discussing the random "shutdowns" experienced under Win98 SE:
She sounded mildly surprised!
-k
Wow, I never thought of it that way, so it has to be interesting. =) Is Win3.1 really *that* fragmented from, say, NT, though? I never even thought of them under the same umbrella. Correct me if I'm wrong, but just how multiuser is 3.1 (not 3.11)?
That's absolutely correct. I can write one program and have it crash with exactly the same error code under every version of Windows! ;-)
I'd have to say from my Windows programming experience it would have been your fault. If you had followed the Win16 APIs like you had said to the dot, it would have looked fine in Windows 3.x. Remember, Win 3.x had a different look and if you hardcoded any single line of code instead of getting all metrics from Windows you would have amde a mistake.
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> Hrmm...I could have swore Win95 (original) == Win95A....of course, I might be wrong.
Don't worry. You are.
> Well, VB requires IE for documentation (plus, if you ignore the fact that its an MS product, its not a half bad browser).
While I'd dispute that IE is "not a half bad browser" (I have the strange feeling that I'm being directed to MS approved sites, which isn't half wrong since search engine CGIs can detect your browser) it has served as a beneficial piece of Microsoft's strategy beyond it's original intent (i.e. to attack Netscape). It has served as the vehicle for distributing hundreds of unseen patches to the common Windows user. While I dispute that IE is a part of the operating system (that is to say, it is as intrinsic to Windows programs as certain CORBA objects are to Linux programs.) it is useful when you want to change APIs behind developers backs (so Microsoft can keep a perpetual edge on anyone else who wants to write Windows programs). It's ironic (or rather, it's outraging) that Microsoft rarely follows the requirements it makes of Windows applications writers in order for them to get the "Windows 95 Compatible" logo; simply because they can say, "Up yours Charlie, we're Microsoft!"
Portability between different versions of Windows is trivial. Porting from win16 to win32 is usually just a recompile, and later versions of windows can run pretty much everything the earlier versions can run. + The differences between the different versions of win98 are hardly major. Much less major than the differences between Linux distributions.
>I'm not sure about AGP, but I'm not risking it. Don't bother, 95A doesn't support it either, only 95B and later.
What else need be said?
satire, n: 1) witty language used to convey insults or scorn; 2) a form of humor lost on most slashdot moderators.
Wordperfect. Coincidence?
Right? Right?? Windows 98 is much less stable than 95... But this is pretty much a mute point for Linux users...
The fact that Wince, Win98, and WinNT all have entirely different source code and are administered differently is IMHO a big liability.
If I outgrow my Linux box I can upgrade to a big SGI (or Sun or IBM) Unix box and it still works more-or-less the same way. Sure the GUI admin tools look different, but their not so radically different that I can't adapt in a day or two.
On the other hand, if my company wants to change all it's Win98 desktops for WinNT, I have to learn a different operating system entirely. Unlike Unix, the similarities are cosmetic and the differences are fundamental.
Changing technologies like this is a big deal for companies that have large existing staff that either need to be replaced (in a very competitive market) or retrained.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
Err... you might want to have your computer checked out. Windows isn't that unstable. Heck, Win95 SR1 used to run for days at a time (damn Battle.net) for me. And Windows 98 hardly crashed when I ran it last year for a couple of months.
RedK
Too lame to get an account
If I remember rightly even Windows CE has different binaries for the different processors it runs on. This means that there are different versions of CE in my view.
Ahh, the FUD word. =/ Every OS I have used has had some sort of "fragmentation" or binary compatability issues as it has rolled versions.
I think the story poster was trying to highlight that the IT media seems to be concentrating on potential linux fragmentation without looking at other OS's.
That said, as far as the topic goes, if it is fud, it is fud-light. I've personally experienced significant issues moving our source base forward from Win16->Win32, and then sprinkling "if (HIBYTE(HIWORD(::GetVersion())) lessthanssymbol 0x80)"'s arround my printing code. If I was to bitch it would be with printing and gdi in particular. (I can't seem to get the less than symbol to appear when posting "plain old text" I must be an idiot.) =)
Also, the various releases of comctrl32.dll have subtly changed certain message behavior of some controls our software uses. Admittadly it was somewhat cosmetic, but we have a commitment to making sure our UI is consistant across software releases, so it was something we had to spend time working around.
Pax -- Ob
...to just click "Save As Text" in VB3, and VB5/6 vill load and convert the forms/modules just fine.
:)
We just moved at pretty large app from 3 to 6 at work, so I know for a fact that it's possible
--
All Glory To The Hypnotoad!
As the one who asked the question ... exactly, I do not consider it good either, although I've been using Linux since 0.99.8 and counting ;-)
Well, when the binary only app doesn't work, I ldd the app and then download the libraries which it needs.
I have *NEVER* encountered programs that run under 95 that won't under NT4.0 with the exception of non-OpenGL/Glide directX games, but those games now work under Win2k.
Here's what I run on 98 (crashes maybe once
a week) and Win2k (hasn't crashed ONCE since april), and NT (hasn't crashed on my home machine in over a YEAR)
Office97, Office2000
XWin32
SecureCRT
Winzip
Quicken
Emacs
Cygwin32
Quake 1, 2, 3
Diablo
Everquest
JDK1.2
JBuilder
Symantec Cafe
Visual C++
Mathematica
WinAmp
ACT!
I'm a Linux user, but I'm really sick of the kiddies on Slashdot *lying* about NT/Windows. The vast majority of my friends run Win98/NT and they don't report BSODs as a daily occurance, or massive incompatibility.
I actually use Unix, but the desktop experience is just much smoother on Win98, and until you come to grips with that, you will never be able to improve Linux. So stay in denial, and lose.
Calm down, calm down.
Alot of what the author said was false. Alot of it was FUD. BUT.. I think everyone is missing the point. The point here is that it IS true that if a software vendor designs a program SPECIFICALLY for, say, Win95, there's a fairly good chance that it will NOT work on ALL versions of Windows.
Sure, with a little effort, you could probably solve the problem. Sure, a clueful developer would not design software that way. THAT DOESN'T MATTER.
M$ and the Linux FUD-meisters are going on and on about Linux fragmentation, yet the issues Linux faces if the distributions become much more different are IDENTICAL to the ones the various Windows distributions (NT, CE, 98, 3.x) face TODAY. ie: MINOR issues that a smart software developer can work around and/or suggest user-implemented fixes for.
So let's keep it apples to apples (no pun intended). EITHER Linux is in no danger of fragmenting OR Windows is fragmented already. You can't have it both ways and this article, in my opinion, is merely an attempt to attack Windows using the same logic and language used to attack Linux.
--- Tao
Among the two major product lines, consumer Windows (95/98/98SE) and small business Windows (NT3.51, NT4, NT2000), there are lots of differences and incompatibilities; even major chunks of the APIs are different. Then, there is CE, which is really just a completely different operating system.
With all that complexity, Microsoft's operating systems still don't scale over a large range of hardware: all you get is systems that run from hefty PDA to small server. Linux spans that range with just a single OS and API. UNIX/POSIX systems more generally run from on anything from small, embedded, real-time system to the largest scientific supercomputers, parallel machines, and mainframes.
Compared to UNIX/POSIX, I find that both the interoperability and the scalability of Windows platforms are disappointing.
In general you're making some pretty good points here, but I think it's even worse than you describe. Micro$loth doesn't even need to create their own Linux distro. For the past month or so I've had the creepy feeling that when RedHat issues it's IPO MS (or at least Bill Gates) is going to end up as a majority shareholder. Then they could build a proprietary GUI on top of it and make use of both their own and RedHat's name recognition among newbies. They would be able to seed the single most popular linux distro. with their own proprietary gratuitous incompatibilities and call it an 'enhancement'.
Might fragmentation be a good thing for Windows? The UNIX market fragmented. Each guy took a copy and rewrote it and made it better and better. Then linux came along. Now every guy could add their own improvments but keep it non-propiatary.
What if we could get the Windows market to fragment in the same fasion? Could we end up with a Windows that might actually be usable and stable?
Jack
The article comes from WINMAG.COM and NEVER even mentions Linux!
ooh that hadn't even occured to me. Now I really am scared.
Its true people, I've used it.
The difference is:
Win9x internals use ASCII
WinNT internals use UNICODE
if you decide to use the other one, it has to convert it to make use of it.
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what are you talking about: " it was simply a matter of uncommenting all of the modprobes, rebooting and then looking to see which one worked, then recommenting the rest"... Are you honestly saying that's easier than clicking a couple "ok" buttons, fishing out your win 95 CD, and rebooting? You people are out of your frickin' mind...... I program for a living. I learned assembly language in junior high. I am NOT a technical illiterate. I was all excited about actually trying linux, get RH 5.2, messed around for a week trying to get X windows working(Command line? No thanks, I lived through DOS 1-5 and my Atari - we have this new thing called a GUI), only to find it didn't support my card (ATI all-in-wonder pro, over a year old), dl'ed and installed new x-windows, still couldn't get it to work, downloaded RH 6, which included new x-windows, couldn't get it to work because my monitor (an NEC xp17, only about 3 years old) wasn't listed and no matter how many times I punched in the stupid stats for the monitor it wouldn't work. Then, I had the audacity to ask a linux newsgroup, and got flamed, despite that I had read HOWTO's and stuff out the wazoo and phrased my question politely and briefly. After all this I get to read some guy on /. say how it's easier to configure his hardware by commenting and uncommenting lines in a text file than clicking OK.... geez.
Watch it if you're running NT. The last several times I've run it on my machine, NT's filesystem has decided that it just doesn't feel like existing any more (i.e. I boot up one day to 'no operating system found', and then proceed to thank various Ancient & Powerful(tm) deities that I never kept any Real Work on there). The filesystem implosion thing has happened twice to me, and at least once to another person I know.
Am I alone in this happening to me?
(yes, well, obviously if it happened to another person I know, I'm not really alone in it, but I was speaking within the context of slashdot. I think. Anyway, it's coffee time. mmmm.... raspberry chocolate.......)
Yes, you are right. In fact, I did use the "Save as Text" option to get the form saved (cause the company I was doing this for only bought me a copy of VB 2.0 and 6.0, not later ones).
The main problem I tried to illustrate was the fact that ealier versions of VB used controls that were no longer supported in the later versions. As any VB programmer knows, when you got a ton of controls all squeezed onto one form, maintenence becomes a real bear. Anyone know of a way to port the old controls over to VB 5.0/6.0? I'd rather use the new controls for 5.0/6.0 that replaced the legacy ones, however, if there is a faster way to simply import the legacy controls, that would make the job a piece of cake.
I hate to say this, but your two examples are examples of poor coding. In both examples, you're relying on undocumented behavior in NT. Example 1: The reason you get a stack overflow is because SortItems causes OnItemExpanding to be called. This cause an infinite loop. It sounds more like this is a bug in NT than in 9x. Some day your code will break on NT as well when that bug is fixed. Example 2: You're not properly setting up the display context and relying on the way the OS initializes the context (which is different for each OS). You should always completely initialize the context to whatever you need and not rely on any given behavior that seems to be default since that is likely to change when the OS get's updated. It's like relying on a value to be initialized to 0 by the compiler. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't and that could change at any time.
Bullshit
I test Windows 2000 and every single Win32 app has worked besides games which the installers were written in a stupid way, instead of checkig for DirectX they check for Windows 9.x and then fail....Thats not Microsoft's fault, that is the people who write the software.
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Well...
I just got a full time Linux Programming job. I will be leaving a Windows only company. Here is my experiance. First let me say that I work for a realy big company. The second largest in the world. Here is what I found about windows programming and the reason I can't wait to delete all the windows programming software off my Hard drives at home.
First I will start with C code. At a large company you have a lot of programs that are old as dirt. Like one C program I had to kinda redo to get to compile with MSVC++ 5.0. When I looked at the code for the first time I thought It was very well written. There were even If defs on the reusable source files that could be re-compiled to OS/2 and Unix. It was these files that caused the most problems. Why you ask? Because Microsoft in a attempt to kill portable C code has changed alot of functions that were ANSII Standard functions to functions that Now have a underline in the frount and capitals in the function name. This turned out to be a nightmare since the Help files for Microsoft sometimes did not make the new names clear. Not to mention the fact that now the code was not nearly as portable as it was befour. since most of these functions were part of the code that should not have needed to be changed to compile on other OS's. After 4 years writing C code that should be as easy as a recompile to another OS this deeply affected my opion of Microsoft. Okay Okay... so this is a pretty easy problem to fix.... It was time consuming and still sucked. It is also a reason why I will be using a different compiler then MSVC++ in the future. ( if i ever do windows again ).
Second problem. This time MSVB. From VB4.0 16bit to VB6.0 32bit. This time a control from a 3rd party that worked perfect under windows 3.11 did not work at all under windows95. So... I had the task to compile to VB 32 bit. When trying to compile under VB6.0 I was presented with a ton of other problems. Seems that all the other 3rd party Objects that was used in the VB program would not work at all under VB6.0. Seems that Microsoft had purchased all these controls and put them into VB6.0 with the same names only now they all used the Variant data types. This nightmare extended it self to all most every method that displayed data to the user. So yet again. Not a real hard problem, but very time consuming and it sucked.
I have done quite a bit of Unix type programming in my time. Most of the time I would write things like BSD Socket services on linux first. Almost every time I would take my Linux source and move it to UnixWare, SCO, or BSD. All I had to do was to change the compile options in the Makefile. The *nix code I wrote 4 years ago can still be compiled on all most any *nix box. I can't say that for my C code for Windows. Now I don't even try to make windows code portable.
I don't think that the "Hard Core" windows programmers even care about running there code on other platforms. So maybe they are more inclined to dink around every time Microsoft comes out with a new Dev Package. I'm not. Thats why I'm leaving the world of MS Windows. Besides InfoWare ( or Web based applications ) will make the OS a client is using a mute point anyway.
Also. since I work for a really large company that has based there application on MS products there will be quite alot of programming needed to be done when they try to get the current application Security model working on Win2000. I'm glad I wont be around for that!
Last one in jail is a fascist.
- First off, Linux and Unix programs are VERY binary compatible. You still cannot copy a x386 binary to a PPC and expect it to run, but that is because the PPC uses a different chip with different assembly code and interrupt systems. They even have different number of registers, pipelines, and use very different architectures. The fact that you can copy a binary from one windows box to another is simply a byproduct of windows running on the same set of processors. Should MS port windows to the Power4, you would lose this capability. Given this information, is this an advantage of Windows? Or is it simply the same across ALL platforms.
- Second, the reason Mozilla might not compile is that it is, oh my gosh, BETA!!. That's right, there are bugs. If it didn't have bugs, then it would be a release version. You really should not use a beta version of a program as an example of how all unix programs have bugs and are non-portable. Let's consider porting a program called fetchmail under Linux. I download the source, which has been heavily tested under x386. I run make, and I run the program. Simple. -- Oh, you say they debugged it. Then let's take my most recent assembler I wrote for Compiler Theory. I wrote the darn thing, in spaghetti code, for the PPC (604e). I then compile it on RedHat for x386, and because our TA wasn't any good, I had to run it under Solaris as well. Any problems? Nope. It ran on the first shot. These two examples show that Unix/Linux programs are just as portable as anything MS makes.
What a FUD fountain.Humm... there should be a RealTek driver for Linux, but it is a slow chip anyway. (Grr. All the GOOD cheap NICs vanished the day Intel bought DEC Semi.) As for sound cards, I've found the Ensoniq-chip Creative boards (AudioPCI, SBPCI64(D/V)/128, _not_ PCI512) cheap ($30) and well supported. There are probably some other good cheap PCI sound cards too with native (no SB emulation) Linux drivers.
Yes, there is POSIX support in NT. HOWEVER...
The posix subsystem is separate from the win32 subsystem. That means that you can't make any calls to the win32 API if your program uses the posix subsystem! No graphics, none of the standard windows tools. As such the POSIX subsystem is almost entirely useless, and the only place I have seen it used is in the latest 'get administrator privs' crack.
-Cheetah
That's not really a significant problem. What's more of a problem is that Win32 programming requires a number of subtle changes to the C compiler to really do right -- i.e. Windows code in general is not pure ANSI C. "Strict" type checking comes to mind, although it's not the best example.
Now, in practice it's not that big a problem for most people (the differences are not normally a compatibility issue), but it has been a serious headache for the folks working on winelib with ANSI compilers that don't like the Microsoft-isms.
---
DNA just wants to be free...
NT is not multiuser, except in text mode. In GUI, only one user at a time can log in. I'm usining VNC client on Linux to view an NT box. Only one login, thank you. Others can log in sort of, but can only view what I'm doing.
You missed out WinCE as a branch. Valid or not, it's still there. However, this raises an interesting point, is there an embedded Linux around?
I did most of my high school programming in VB, because I was forced to. Even in the simple programs I made, Windows and VB incompatibilities really pissed me off. Some examples:
.exe, wouldn't run on the target system unless VB was installed on it. I've had this problem with VB3 as well. .exe. THAT was a bitch to debug.
-A setup program for a VB3 program made with the VB3 setup wizard works in 3.1, crashes in 95
-the grid and database controls changed significantly between VB3 and 5, requiring a great deal of recoding to port the program.
-One VB5 program which, while compiled as a
-One VB5 program which ran fine in the VB IDE, but crashed when run as a
And they wonder why they're losing developers.....
Start an install using the upgrade CD on a formatted harddrive. It will ask you to insert your Win95 or 98 CD for verification. It will proceed with a full, clean install.
Create a blank text file on your formatted harddrive called "ntldr"; no ".txt", just "ntldr". Install from your Windows 98SE upgrade CD. Win98 will see that you have NT on your system and will "upgrade" it, and replace any and all portions that are "missing".
You will need to have the CD drivers on a boot floppy or boot from the CD.
For Win95 create a text file with these lines:
[Setup]
ProductType=1
ccp=0
Run D:\win95\setup.exe C:\"filename".txt from DOS.
This will install a full version.
It's important to note that you must have a legal right to do so, but ability does not equal authority.
All of this assumes, of course, that you want to install Win 9x on a system. I personally wouldn't want major software upgrades cluttering a system regardless of the OS. If we've all followed good housekeeping procedures with regards to partitioning system and data, this shouldn't be a traumatic experience.
The party's over
Here's yet another article showing really how close minded slashdot users are. How about looking at it from both angles? The fact that you guys claim you haven't touched windows in a year leads me to believe that you have no idea what Windows is really about. Remember, we are now on internet time in the computer world. Just how much has changed in a year in Linux land? Nuff said.
My experience has been that PCI swaps pose no problems in NT4, but ISA does. It takes some finagling to get NT4 to play nice with the new configuration. However . . .
I've changed the motherboard twice on my NT4 machine with the same installation. I had to make sure that the drives stayed on the same Controller and in the same master/slave configuration. My ISA modem had to be set up again, but that was it. The only time I've reinstalled was for shits and giggles and to reconfigure where the OS and the data lived.
The party's over
"Each guy took a copy and rewrote it and made it better and better."
How would you suggest that we "[take] a copy [of Windows] and rewr[i]te it and ma[k]e it better and better"?
Without the source, we cannot improve things. It just means that Microsoft's (and their OEMS') already overworked undercapable support structures will become worse and more monolithic.
This whole situation is evenn further compounded by Windows' braindead approach and culture around shared libraries. Would any Linux users here be happy if, when an application was installed by an unprivileged user, without asking the user, it went and replaced libc.so or any of the X libs with a newer, incompatible version? This _is_ the accepted way of doing things on Windows. The net result is you have a complex system of applications, all stepping on each others' toes. Would you like to be providing the support for this system?
It's all ok what you pointed out, but try to write anything real world (not hello world or calculator) which is not slow. It always has been and is too slow, and I think for a reason -- if it was way good people would stick to it and won't buy VisualStudio
Yep, Windows can and does make a person bitter. The hours spent on an important document due in the morning, only to have a crash and file corruption ruin it all for you. Your mission critical NT webserver that's down more than it's up (the win2k failed crack challenge for example). The pain in the ass frozen mouse cursor. The famous GPF's. The Blue Screens of Death that are so popular that instead of fixing the problem, MS is planning to profit on it. (I wonder how much ad space costs) :) And there you are, hunkered over your rebooting (again) computer while we while away our time with high productivity - yes, I can understand the resentment. You believe that Microsoft will soon pull their collective heads out of their collective asses and save the day, but it never happens. And here we are, always happy, always excited, grinning all the time (almost as irritating as those bubbly Christians). What can you do but lash out? You get nothing done and in fustration go out to the beach. We get all of our work done and in glee go out to the beach. Who's going to look good on Monday? You upgrade your Windows and suddenly your absolutely needed software doesn't work and some of your important hardware doesn't work. You find out that it's either not supported anymore or you'll have to shell out more green stuff to upgrade. We upgrade Linux and, oh gee, this program doesn't work right. Oh well - make config; make; make install - and we're up and running again in no time. Now, I don't know what's up with the numerous Windows versions and differences and really don't care. All I know is everyone has a horror story regardless of the operating system. It just seems that the Win32 camp has about 95% of them... It also seems that the Win32 camp is so used to crashes that they think it's normal. The computer just wants to rest a little... And users in the Win32 camp seem to be resigned to upgrading their hardware and software every time they upgrade their OS, at great cost. Hey, if you like to be bent over a chair and raped, be my guest. But don't whine about it. You're more than welcome to cross over into the light and live a happy and fulfilling life... :) BTW - I am an avid Linux user (both desktop and sys admin) and I still find the time to be married, raise two children, go swimming, buy a house, run a business, enjoy numerous hobbies including photography and enjoy a very productive life. This wasn't the case when I was struggling under the weight of Microsoft...
This article is nothing but a bunch of pro-linux FUD. I came to Linux after 5 years programming on Win16 and Win32 and Linux is much , much more fragmented than Windows ever was. Just think about this: how many times were you unable to run something on linux due to incompatible libraries ??
...but it was win95.
it's werd to one day bootup your system and get 'error no operating system found'. this really freaked me out. and was one of the meny reasons i moved to linux.
nmarshall
#include "standard_disclaimer.h"
R.U. SIRIUS: THE ONLY POSSIBLE RESPONSE
nmarshall
The law is that which it boldly asserted and plausibly maintained..
--Colonel Burr 1783
Well, I don't really have that much exotic hardware, but I had much less problems installing, for example, my ethernet card in Linux than I did in Windows. In Windows, the first time you put it in, it "detects" it, but it doesn't always know what to do with it. I just had to fool around with it and boot it a billion times until I got everything right. And I still have like phantom drivers for it in my system devices. In Linux, it was simply a matter of uncommenting all of the modprobes, rebooting and then looking to see which one worked, then recommenting the rest. If I had known which one it was, then it wouldn't have even been that hard. In Windows, if I didn't know what I had, I would have to reboot 200 times trying every ethernet card I thought could be mine.
The only thing that was more difficult in Linux was my soundcard, but only because it comes with a special install disk for Windows. Without that disk, Windows has problems with it, even though it's a genuine SB.
The only thing I had to manually enter any settings for was my soundcard. Every thing else is automatically figured out at boot.
This is one of the worst submissions ever !!!
Complete bulshit !
"example: i'm still "fighting" with my colegue on photoshop pelettes positions and some other preferences
because adobe takes same "multiuser" policy as microsoft."
Well, I know I'm going to get flamed for this.. but..
NT _is_ multiuser. Each process has an owner (which can be any user on the system), and inherits the permissions of that owner. Processes running on the machine at the same time do not need to have the same owner. In fact, when you're logged onto an NT server, there's usually processes owned by three other users (System, WWW, and maybe Administrator) running continuously during your session. In this way, NT is somewhat like UNIX.
However, from NT 3.x to 4, there has been no way for multiple users to interactively log on concurrently. The windowing system is basically based off of the same code that was introduced in Windows 3.0, which doesn't even pretend to be multiuser. The only functionality that NT 4 really lacks compared to Linux in "multiuser-ness" are a remotely displayable windowing system, a text-based way to log in remotely (telnetd/ssh/what have you), and multiple virtual consoles.
This changed a little bit with the introduction of RConsole in NT 4 Resource Kit, which provides a text-based interactive login for remote users, and VDesk, which provides up to 9(?) multiple virtual desktops (in which you can be logged in as one user on one desktop and another user on the other).
However, Windows 2000 is where a Microsoft OS will finally have all the 'real' multiuser perks. Remotely displayable GUI (which I'm sure the Samba guys or someone else will produce a Linux/X client for) will be included (in Win2k Advanced, at least), and get this.. a telnetd. Plus the functionality of VDesk.
As for the fact that Photoshop doesn't save your settings correctly, blame Adobe and not Microsoft. In the Registry (which, yes, is evil), there's HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and HKEY_CURRENT_USER. When you log into an NT (or even 95 or 98) box, it reads in the values of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, and then overrides those values with the values in HKEY_CURRENT_USER, if they exist. Applications are supposed to store settings like window position, etc, in HKEY_CURRENT_USER, and only the out-of-the-box defaults in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE (in case a user hasn't used that particular app before). However, application vendors are often stupid and store all their settings in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, which means that no matter who's logged in, the app uses the same settings.
I don't mean to sound like an NT cheerleader here.. I actually use Linux at home and prefer it. However, it annoys me to see people bashing NT for things that (in my mind) it actually does correctly (such as multiuser-ness in the registry and dynamic web pages). One would sound much more intelligent by bashing NT for things it sucks at (such as being a mail server or not having to reboot).
NT doesn't allow any direct access to hardware. Thus, DOS games' sound often wont work, nor will DOS communications programs.
Matt
That's stupid. If anyone prime interest is in Warcraft than he/she should stay with Windows - it is completely pointless to go thru all this just to play a game that you could already play with no effort whatsoever !!
"Can anyone actually name me an app that requires specific kernel version (or at least a certain version). Oh
yeah, closed-source binary only kernel modules from don't count!"
ipchains. It requires at least a 2.1something kernel (though you can patch a 2.x kernel to work with it) and doesn't dig pre 2.0 kernels at all.
Among other things, I've had to deal with the Sun WorkShopPro family of compilers, particularly f77 and f90, versions 3.0, 3.2, 3.5, 4.0, 4.2, and 5.0. Taken pair-wise, that's 12 combinations -- no two of which are link-compatible. (Of course, Sun claims that they are... :-) I wish they'd reimburse me for about $12K in extra labor that incompatibility has cost us just this last week;-(
And the PHB's are Sun-bigots, in love with their stuff. It's hard to make them listen to reason.
fwiw
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
You are writing this from Win box , arent' you ??
Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt.
Fear that you're gonna get the 'wrong' version of these "7 versions of SE", or your programs might not work on the wrong one.
Uncertainty of which version of these "7" you need -- and what the differences are.
Doubt that one 'version' of SE is the same as another 'version'
Besides, it's false. There aren't 7 versions of SE. There's SE, then there's 98 SP1. Seems like 2 to me. And they're not significantly different.
This IS FUD people. Remember what it stands for.
Try moving any card to a different PCI slot, windows will flip out and reinstall the driver for the thing, Linux won't even care...
Move your NIC, windows will install a second driver for it, losing ALL the settings for the thing...
Install a new mother board, when you boot windows you will have no cdrom, and it will try to install drivers for the disk controller, but you can't use the cdrom to access your friggin win98 disk! To fix this, boot off a floppy and load some dos cdrom drivers, then boot windows and you have access to your cdrom again.
in linux...
Install new mother board. Boot Linux. Linux sees the disk controller just fine, finds all the hardware you had in your machine and boots without a problem.
The oxen are slow, but the earth is patient... - High Road to China
>Don't worry. You are.
;-)
Wow...a tad touchy, aren't we?
In reply to the rest of your comment:
Let me guess...you also believe that little green men abduct people on a regular basis.
MS has played a big brother role...that's not in question. But you toss out the idea that MS distributes unseen patches...now, correct me if I'm wrong but something like that would leave finger prints...such as extra packets being transmitted, changed dll's that some AV program would pick up. You might suggest that the Windows API allows for such modifications. Well, considering the quality of the rest of Windows, I think evidence to that point would have already come about. When you have proof of such calls, then you can start throwing out your "theories."
When it comes to MS specific URL requests, I ran a couple request on altavista and yahoo using both NS and IE on a Mac at my place of emplyoment. Identical results (at least the first 20).
Let me play devil's advocate for a second:
kfm:KDE::ie:Windows
Without kfm's web intergration, KDE would be a significantly different desktop enviornment. Are you telling me that KDE can do web integration, and MS can't?
As far as the "Windows 95 Compatable" deal goes, its MS..its a big corportaion, and like most big corporations, its multifacited(sp?). One comittee judges 3rd party software, and another one actually writes the OS. Such problems are to be expected.
Wow, I sound like a Microserf here. Makes me feel kinda dirty.
--------------------------
You're missing the point. The point is there are at least seven ways of getting something that is called Win98 SE. And each way gets you something different. Some fix some bugs, other ways fix other bugs, some methods give new features, and some don't. But they all have the same name.
We're not talking here about WinNT vs Win9x vs Win3.1. When a customer buys one of those products, they know what they're getting, just as customers understand that SuSE and Redhat may be considerably different. But what about two Win98SE people, who each got it by a different method? Something might work for one, but not the other, because of subtleties related to the install. Confusing, no?
Backwards compatibility isn't the same as lack of fragmentation.
Major chunks of the APIs are different or missing between the different Windows versions (even leaving CE out of the equation). What is shared is often incompatible in subtle or not so subtle ways. And a lot of the backwards compatibility is only a short-term workaround and impractical (do you really think you can use an 8.3 version of Word on NT for long before it becomes a logistical nightmare?).
Similarly, in theory, you can keep your old source code and still compile it. But in a commercial development environment, that's not really an option. When Microsoft comes out with MFC, ATL, or a new database access library, you have to use the new stuff to be able to take advantage of the new features and remain competitive, and that often requires a fundamental rewrite of your application.
Which matters to you more as a developer and user depends. But I think it is accurate to say that the Windows platform is quite fragmented, even though it may offer a lot of backwards compatibility.
And once again the Lienix kiddies resort to FUD to try to deflect a very real question about all the various Linux distributions... Whatever.
"How easy is it to port an NT/Win 2000 application back to the good ol Win 3.11? I dont think that is "just" ;)"
an recompile
What's the motivation for porting a NT/Win2k application back to Win3.11? What exactly have you been smoking? It's like porting a big Linux application to Minix.
Fact:
Cyrix chips suck.
Theory:
Crappy companies that release crappy hardware only write drivers or design hardware for Windows consider the driver bug-free if it doesn't crash within 5 minutes of light use. Then they go out of business or get bought and eviscerated by the company that bought them.
Linux does better with this crappy hardware than Windows does because many drivers for Linux are written by people who really can't afford good hardware, but hate having their box crash. Therefore, they first write drivers that expect the hardware to do exactly what it should, and then write workarounds for particular pieces of crappy hardware so that they'll work correctly, too. Ever compiled a kernel? There's stuff like this all over it, and actually, that's a very good thing. So in many cases, the Linux drivers/code actually work better than the manufacturer supplied drivers/code.
Windows sucks with this crappy hardware because (a) the company doesn't care, or (b) if you don't have money, MS doesn't really care about you, and since they can certainly afford the top of the line, they aren't plagued by crashes from crappy hardware. If MS has to write a driver, they just write code that expects the hardware to do what it should, and freaks out if the hardware doesn't.
I wrote a large VB application in VB 3.0. A consultant hired by our company said that the Access database in VB 4 worked better and had some whizzo new features, so we decided to upgrade.
The experience was vile. All our old VBX controls were replaced by OCXs. In the case of one of the controls we used (Truegrid, if anyone cares), the entire interface was rewritten. As a result, every form I had using a grid had to be rewritten. In addition, the database interface had some bizarre bugs that required major changes in the tools I used to generate SQL queries.
Suffice it to say that the whole thing was a hideous mess. My best advice after going through that is to stick to whatever version of Visual Basic you first started using. Do not upgrade under any circumstances.
D
----
The point isn't whether or not Linux is fragmented; nor is it about whether or not Windows is fragmented. It is about the fact that Bill Gates himself, who we all know and either love/hate, claimed that one of the reasons that people probably WOULD NOT USE LINUX IS BECAUSE IT IS FRAGMENTED. Now that implies that Windows ISN'T fragmented; however, seeing as how there are innumerable different versions, we ALL know that this isn't true. That's what the article is about. It is just more proof that Micro$oft is hypocritical. Don't get your panties in a wad over whether or not Linux is fragmented; Linux himself agrees with that and doesn't apologize for it. But he doesn't criticize Windows or Bill Gates because of their product having the same fragmentation as his; I realize that that is on a much lesser scale (with Windows having at most ?30? different builds including all the different CE versions and Linux having what was it? 191 versions?) But the real question is this. How MANY of those windows versions ran, and currently do run, with as much uptime as ANY of the marked stable versions of Linux? Remember, EVERY RELEASE of windows is supposed to be stable unless marked otherwise. So 95, 95b, 95c, 98, 98SE, NT3.51, NTWS4.0, NTS4.0, NTES4.0, all of these are supposed to be stable. I won't claim that the versions of NT crash as much as the 9x versions, but they aren't (in my experience) as stable as Linux. Comments?
-Chris
Alright already! So I woke up in the early morning from the pain caused by the disease that is eating my life away. So I decided to distract myself and catch up on Slashdot. So I decided to reply to a message, but between the pain and early morning fog, it came out stupidly. So I should have known better and not left any message. OK? Sheesh. Now go get a life.
satire, n: 1) witty language used to convey insults or scorn; 2) a form of humor lost on most slashdot moderators.
As a Windows programmer I can assure you that my Win32 programs run on /all/ Win32 platforms with no changes whatsoever. The only exceptions are WinCE (which runs on non-Intel platforms) and Win 3.1. And even porting from Win 3.1 to Win32 is far easier than some Unix ports. Get your facts straight before you go spouting garbage.
I see WinCE has a retarded inbred bastard child of Windows 9x(who itself isn't that great of a specimine)..I try to ignore it whenever possible ;-)
;-)
But, it is a valid flavor of Windows...so yeah, there's 4.
As far as embeddle Linux goes, I could have swore I heard something about someone trying to get the Linux kernel running on a Palm III. Of course, it might be the voices in my head again
--------------------------
"Micro~1 sucks.... Have you seen how many Service Packs are around there??????"
Linux sucks.... Have you seen how many kernal versions are around there??????
Jeez, one would think you'd be happy that MS eventually gets around to fixing bugs and adding new needed features in their products. They do it slowly, but at least they do it.. and don't charge for it more than once every two years. Better than I'd expect or hope for from closed-source binary only stuff. Moving from NT 4 to NT 4 SP5 is like moving from Linux 2.0 to 2.2.. waaaay better.
"NT doesn't allow any direct access to hardware. Thus, DOS games' sound often wont work, nor will DOS
communications programs."
That's a bad thing? Sure, you lose DOS compatability, but hey, big deal. I don't want some rogue app talking directly to my hardware. If you let a program take direct and exclusive control over one of your devices, haven't you completely defeated the point of going to a multitasking OS? Or am I just being ignorant, and old DOS games are actually a crucial component of mission-critical server operating systems?
Funny that you include the PWA version.
nice that software pirates are beta testers for Microsoft.
they don't even mention linux in the article. It *is* anti-MS FUD though.
Uhmm.. if MicroSoft was going to get into the business of a UNIX or UNIX-like clone, they might as well bring Xenix back from the dead. Yuck.
Fact:
When this box runs Linux, it NEVER crashes. Not with load averages over 10, not when playing Quake.
More to the point... anecdotal evidence shows little - on either side of the issue. Win98-SE apparently does have some (severe) problems. If it's working for you, great! That doesn't mean that it's a quality product, though.
As for the Internet gatewaying, NAT/IP masquerading have been around for ages on the sane operating systems. This is not a new feature.
Word to the wise - don't try using PPTP to set up a VPN on your home network. The "security" used is a joke compared to less proprietary protocols like IPSEC. Take a look at l0pht.
"Uhmm.. if MicroSoft was going to get into the business of a UNIX or UNIX-like clone, they might as well
bring Xenix back from the dead. Yuck."
*shrieks in terror, runs around room, falls on floor and flails about*
Xenix! Noooooooooooooooooooo!
Seriously, if Xenix is what Microsoft thinks UNIX should be like, then Microsoft is seriously warped. I've actually gotten my hands dirty with Xenix a few times in my life, and it's something I hope I never never never never never have to do again. It was obviously written by programmers who (a) hate the human race, and (b) were under the influence of extremely strong (we're talking CIA grade here, folks) mind-altering substances. Xenix radiates a "wrongness" than one can feel within a 3 mile radius of the machine that's running it, and by the time one could get close enough to the machine to actually see it, even Tux and the BSD Demon/Daemon/Cute-stylization-of-evil made physical would be renouncing their ties with UNIX and saying that Atari TOS is the only way to go.
They could have made Blair Witch Project a whole lot scarier for me by just saying there was a Xenix box somewhere out in those woods.
Thats not Microsoft's fault, that is the people who write the software.
Mac fans have been repeating the same argument for many many years. The thing is that however bad a program is, it shouldn't be able to freeze the whole system. With Linux you kill the program and if you care you can examine it's core dump. With Win and Mac most of the times you are forced to reboot because the faulty app has taken down the whole system.
So the responsibility for an unstable OS is precisely the people's that wrote it.
I read a book about programming by a prominent MS developer some years ago. In it he advised against using 'defensive programming'. This is a style of coding that makes the bugs in your program harder to track but it also fools you that there are fewer bugs present than there actually are.
It is obvious that MS programmers continue to use this technique and that makes their bugs harder to reproduce and thus harder to get rid of. If you add to that the inclination to reboot in order to avoid tackling even the most trivial of problems (like the log file that was filled up in their beta IIS2K) and what you get is a system that is indeed quite hard to debug. Add to this their bloated libraries, add the fact that they don't actually need to produce a stable OS because otherwise it would be easier for them to convince you to buy their next version three years later by promising you that they killed all previous bugs, and you'll begin to understand why their OS is inferior in terms of robustness.
This post is getting quite long but let's mention also that their code has been seen by less people literate enough to be able to correct any mistakes.
You could argue of course that they have more *features*. And you would be right. It's all a matter of priorities.
Palm III is a port, not an embedded Linux.
There are real embedded Linux projects out there (I don't have a URL, I am sure somebody else can supply them to this thread).
First off, the way he counts seven versions of Windows 98 is dishonest, since it counts the same thing bought in a store and downloaded electronically as two separate versions. Yeah, right. By my count it's more like four of five, which is still a really stupid way to release software, so it would have been better to report the sad truth honestly instead of trying to inflate the numbers.
Others have addressed the way that many Windows applications port more easily between 95/98/NT[1] than UNIX applications port between e.g. Linux/AIX/HPUX. Heck, thanks to glibc-maintainer incompetence, even portability between Linux distros is often questionable. What I'd like to point out is the issue of driver portability. Windows 98 adopted the "Windows Driver Model" which is a minor variation on the model NT had used all along. While this doesn't necessarily mean that the same driver binary will work with both, the changes required are trivial. Compare this to the situation in UNIX-land. Driver models are drastically different between UNIX versions, even between those that supposedly use standards such as DDI/DKI or DLPI. Occasionally a driver can be ported with little change, but more often 30-50% of the driver code has to be different for each platform. The saddest part is that there have been efforts to agree on a common UNIX driver model, but people right here always shout them down as a way to make it easier for vendors to ship closed binaries. *sigh* You want openness, you take fragmentation with it as a necessary consequence, and I wish everyone who tries to have their cake and eat it too (in this or other contexts) would just choke to death.
[1] As an owner of and programmer for a CE device, I think it's fair to say that CE isn't truly part of the "Windows family". Yes, it has the same GUI, mostly, but the internals are totally different.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
Why OS/2, when you could choose Coherent?
Actually, I like Sun, but I'm glad there are people who are open about their problems with it...
I'm curious. You mention making your bosses "listen to reason". What are you trying to convince them to do? Do you want to change systems (to another OS), or standardize on a few compilers? Or do you want to get rid of the Sun software altogether (move to GNU perhaps)?
Or are you considering something even more drastic, like buying a few MS products?
--Lenny, who still uses OpenLook at work.
> Properly written programs on Unix use processes
> not threads.
It depends on what you are writing. Some things demand multithreading -- SHM and fork(2) only get you so far, and fork(2), although efficient compared to the Windows equivalent, can waste resources in many instances.
> Threads are not necessary in Unix as they are
> on Windows for performance.
Untrue. The situations that demand multithreading are the same as they are under Windows; it's just that under Unix you can fudge things using fork(2) in what would otherwise be transitional cases.
(That is sometimes desirable; fork(2) is more portable and the separate address spaces add robustness, although it does cost you some speed and memory, even with copy-on-write)
The main reason you don't see fork(2)-like stuff being done under Windows is because Windows physically has no way of simply implementing a clean copy-on-write clone of the current context. CreateProcess() just creates a new blank process and does the equivalent of an execvp(2). Best you could do is CreateProcess() with the same executable as the parent, and then use CreateRemoteThread() [ that API call is EVIL! ] and shared memory to copy as much state over as you could.
> They do help, but not nearly as much.
Wrong. For some purposes, they don't really help. For others, they net very dramatic improvements in performance. The situations under which multithreading is desirable, though, are basically the same under both Windows and Unix.
---
DNA just wants to be free...
How easy is it to port an NT/Win 2000 application back to the good ol Win 3.11? I dont think that is "just" an recompile ;)
I agree that MS-FUD would be bad, but the unfortunate real world is that the article in question is badly written, but not FUD.
I agree that some posters have remarked on silly issues (like trying to run NT4 programs on Win3.1) but MS backward compatability has always been terrible, and relies on the fact that the old platform dies when the new one is released, so someone will rewrite the old program for the new platform.
I've spent 15 years (since Uni) developing shrink wrap and in-house software, and I'm sorry to say that, contrary to what a number of people have posted;
- well behaved Win16 binaries do not run OK on Win32 platforms (WoW is a virtual subsystem that emulates Win16, it's not the real thing, it's as bad, if not worse, than WABI, SoftPC, etc.) except by luck
- well written 16-bit Windows code did not simply recompile onto Win32 (and the numerous variants). Even with simple 16-32 bit word changes, numerous API calls and messages which MS claimed were "non-order dependant" would only
work called (or expected) in one order on win16 and another order under WoW (16on32) or under full Win32. The famous Unix Rabbit book about differences in key API calls would have been invaluable 5 years ago, but nobody knew enough to write one.
- NT 3.5 (especially with the "new shell") and NT 4 were very different and required significant rewrites at source level. I expect W2000 to be as different, if not more so.
- is it 7 different versions, or 7 ways of getting one thing ?? Well, at my current big company, the ONLY way we have found to reliably roll out, for example, Office97 over Office95 is to rebuild every single machine - from fdisk up, because registry keys and DLLs are just so variable across all the permutations of which SP you have now and which you're installing. Is this FUD ? Well, I was at the Office 2000 Deployment conference, and I have the business card of Robert Crissman Jr. (Product Manager for Office) on my desk to say that he agreed - never upgrade Windows or Office, always wipe the disk and start all over again.
- trying to get an inhouse build of NT4 with an inhouse build of IE4 (on a locked down desktop of identical machines) has proved possible, but only with a tweak every month for the last 18 months. Anyone who doesn't mutter "the horror, the horror" in response to the phrase "shlwapi.dll" doesn't really know about deploying NT and Office.
Is all that techie enough ??
I've done cross platform Unix work, and to honest it Unix sounds worse, but ends up easier.
Tim
I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. - George Best
Is the July 11, 1995 version "originaler"?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
"you can't exspect(sic)old versions of software to support new features in new versions."
Why not? Isn't this stuff supposed to have been written by visionary geniuses with a clear view of the road ahead?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
It's only there to keep the U.S. government happy, not to actually be of any use.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
It especially makes life easier after you've dropped the CD a few times and gotten scratches too deep to polish out. (or if you'd have to install from a big ol' double handful of floppies)
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Hence the theory. The reason it never crashes under Linux is that Linux users who wound up with a Cyrix chip got sick of their box crashing and worked around the inherent braindeadness in the chip, where as MS said "Screw that. People who can only afford Cyrix chips can't afford our latest vesion of Office. Why should we fix our stuff for them? There's no money in that."
Yet another yummy reason why open source is better =). It produces code that is not only better in terms of distribution and modifiability (I'm not even sure if that's a word, but you should get what I mean), but also code that is better in terms of working on all hardware and not just the Intel chip-of-the-week.
Uhm, the sweetness of *nix is you can statically link the KDE libs or GNOME libs and it can work on the same OS and different environments without the libraries. I had to choose between KDE and GTK and I chose KDE, because I like the Documentation for QT. I think if you actually researched the issue you would have found this out.
/proc or try to access hardware directly like the use of /dev/dsp. In a way this is laziness, coders need to learn to use libraries that work for *nix in general. The more general you get while programming the more scalable and stable programs get.
The issue of linux fragmentation comes in when linux coders use linux ONLY things like
Any compiling problems can be solved when you learn how the compiler works, and how to read compile errors. Otherwise use rpms and avoid the source.
To make a long rant short try to avoid making linux programs and make *nix programs.
---------------------------
^_^ smile death approaches.
"It's in the fact that I have copies of MSIE 3 that swear blind that they are actually copies of MSIE 4 (this when queried via Javascript under oath). "
I almost had a heart attack laughing at this. Allow me to explain.
Some coworkers of mine are doing some freelance web design and are having a hell of a time developing for IE 5 b/c if you just ask it if it's Netscape or IE it will say it's Netscape. (though if you ask it what version it is it will say it's IE 5...)
That's not linux's fault that's the developer's fault! In linux it is assumed that the source should be open. This could happen to any OS, but that is the major point of the existence of linux. Close source gives users and developers headaches!!
---------------------------
^_^ smile death approaches.
Not at all. There was some network logging in stuff, but the basis of the OS wasn't even remotely multiuser.
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
Linux developers find bugs, and submit patches to various sites and distributions within hours. They cost nothing - just a little download and install. Microsoft developers probably already know about their bugs (a profit making venture) - every few months they'll release a bugfix/update - but it's going to cost you. With Linux, you live with a bug for a few hours at the least, a few days at the most and you can fix it for free. With Microsoft, you live with a bug (thousands) for the duration of you using Microsoft, and the few that get bugfixes and updates more often than not you have to shell out for them or pay support to request them. Even just shipping - $5 bucks is a rip-off. I ship boxes for customers for less than that. Imagine profiting 1 dollar for every "free" fix shipped. I'd rather pay $5 bucks shipping to Cheapbytes for their $1.99 Linux - at least there I'm getting way more value than I'm spending. Having to pay for a fix of a faulty product is just plain stupid and it's a shame so many people don't notice that... If I build a new computer and sell it and part of it doesn't work - I sure as hell don't charge my customer for the fix. It's my product that was faulty and my responcibility to make it right. Why doesn't Microsoft operate under the same principals? (that would assume they can fix it in the first place - and they call their fixes "updates" as if you're getting something special - what a sham...)
Win 3.1 is 16-bit code sporting the win16 api. NT in all versions is 32-bit code supporting the always changing win32 api. As for multiuser, win3.1 has cooperative multitasking (not preemptive such as with linux, win9x, or NT).
It's a bit stretching it to say so, but yes, the proprietors of Slashdot do benefit when they can fan the flames.
when using such remote access tools, windows got big problems running apps (for concurently logged users) because of same reason i mentioned (as you wrote: stupidly made applications): apps compete for files/resources/... assuming they are runing in only one instance (this relates to 3rd party products but to MS' own Office suit too IMHO)
having remote access (text or GUI based) is ONE thing and having whole system (not just kernel and some services) multiuser is SECOND thing
and only "second" is usable
hany
The fact is, each of the separate Windows "fragments" represents a bigger 'market' than Free Software as a whole. So while it can be said the market is fragmented, each fragment is a big healthy bunch of customers for a product.
There was a transition period when software vendors felt it necessary to sell multiple versions (Win16 and Win32) of Windows programs in the same shrink-wrapped package. I bought a fax program packaged like that a few years back.
People hold onto and continue to use some of the more mature Win16 products (Office 4.3 is a good example) because they are solid programs that work well at what they're designed for. In a way, the high quality of Office 4 has undercut Microsoft's ability to sell newer versions. A happy customer isn't clamoring for an upgrade.
(yes, I know I've said incenderary things here. Some of the more unstable torches will doubtless go off now. Here's the first spoonful of baking soda to try to put out the fire: "Windoze~1 5UX")
Gee, that's funny. My Debian system can run libc6, libc5, and a.out binaries without any hassle. Mozilla provides these different binaries as a convenience more than anything.
The whole Linux libc "compatibility" situation is quite overblown. Usually it's a non-issue.
This sounds extremely familiar to the Warmenhovian logic used in INTERCAL's "SELECT" statement.
Warmenhovian logic has four states: True, False, Undefined (e.g. an uninitialized flip-flop) and Oscillating,
represented in the INTERCAL manual as 1, 0, ?, and F.
"Note in particular that, while NOT-0 is 1 and NOT-1
is 0 as in two-valued logic, NOT-? is ? and NOT-F is F."
Well, sorta. My VB 3 real world program was painfully slow. Then we got a Pentium/75 and it became reasonably fast. Then we upgraded to VB 4 and it was slow again.
Now that we have 400mhz machines running it, it's fast again. But of course we haven't upgraded to VB 6. My recommendation is that we don't.
D
----
They are quite important for a good object oriented library. Without threads, you just don't seem to have a logical IO system. Point me to
a single threaded IO/GUI OO system. None are
at all good OO without blocking the system.
it isn't. windows 3.1 is a shell around dos. dos isn't multi-user, neither is win3.1
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
My joystick disappeared when I added SP5. I reinstall it but it disappears after reboot. Plus, the Flight Sim 98 install did a rip and replace on my Sounblaster Drivers and removed the volume control from the tray. I now have to fly in windows 95.
Unix is in great need of reduction. The man/info split is a good example of competing solutions to the same problem (a competition that has never ended), but there are many others. I really yearn for a (GNU) Linux distribution that has the guts to dispense with some of the old baggage and redo some of the older systems in a more unified and sane manner. At times, I've considered doing it myself...
Seriously: what I feel we need is a *progressive* distribution that isn't afraid of breaking a few ties with the old Unix world. Why do we have three versions of grep? Why do we still have "edit" lieing around? Who in their right mind still uses xedit (by choice)? Why is the find command so difficult to use? (and *don't* tell me to read the docs: I've read them all) These are holdovers from the past...largely anachronistic.
Most all distros coming out these days just gank the Red Hat or Debian package list and try to differentiate themselves with a "slick" install program, or "pentium optimized" compiles. Is anyone trying to define a better base for a Linux system?
Now, I understand the benefits of backwards compatibility with Unix, and this ancestry should not be broken without good reason. However, in some cases I *do* think we have good reason. But somehow, what constitutes a "Linux install" has been set for years, and almost no one is questioning that selection. I suppose that they are happy to have some kind of "standard base", but I don't like many of the inconsistencies in that base.
*sigh* I'll get off of my soap cube now. But, please: someone inform me if there is such a project in the works.
--Lenny, who has launched off into day-dream mode.
Where is that quote from? I'm pretty sure I have already seen something very similar somewhere, but can't remember where...
Probably as many as there are Windows patches. The difference is, most of the Windows patches are MS internal. Most of the Linux patches are also Linux internal, it's just that with open source, internal only means freely available.
VBXs are Win16 shite. Of course you can't use them in 32-bit programs.
Greyfox, how about the next time you submit something to Slashdot, you just send the link and spare us the discussion on something you obviously know nothing about. Please?
"Most of the time you'll have to write your windows code from scratch." Uhhhh, sure thing, buddy...
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Before I discovered the benefits of programming in a Unix-type environment, I used to do a bunch of VB programming. (Admit it, many of you did too!)
There is a quick solution to VB's cross-version compatibility problem... use the "save as text" option in the older version's IDE, then "load from text" in the new version. They put in this feature to allow people to use better editors than the one in the IDE. It has been available at least since VB 2.
Div.
But my grandest creation, as history will tell,
But my grandest creation, as history will tell,
Was Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell.
My experience was a little different. I installed a new disk drive in my system, making the new one the primary IDE master (I do SCSI at work, don't want it at home) with the old one as primary slave. I could still boot Windows 95 - yes, 95, not 98 - via LILO off the old drive and it would figure out what happened and be happy. When I tried to boot Linux off the old partition it wasn't happy because what used to be /dev/hda was now /dev/hdb etc. So I restored the old hardware config, booted Linux, fixed up LILO and /etc/fstab and so on and so forth, and rebooted. Still doesn't work. Maybe there's some step I forgot, but if anyone here says it's my own fault for not remembering to change /etc/shove_this or whatever then I don't ever want to hear a comment from the same person sneering about config.sys and win.ini and "that just works on Linux" because there's just as much nobody-could-have-known crap on Linux as on Windows. I've been working on UNIX kernels longer than Messrs. Torvalds and Cox, and it's entirely reasonable to say that the OS should be able to figure out something as simple as this and deal with it instead of crashing. Remeber, even lowly Win95 managed it, and Linux fell over itself.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
Why is winmag spread a FUD like substance around about M$, when they have a M$ Office 2000 banner at the bottom of their page?
I'm not saying it is total FUD city or anything, kinda if to.
And what is the deal with the guy who posted the story, Now that is FUD
I just like saying FUD, neat word.
Seriously though a couple years back I used to run old DOS, Win3.1 apps on a Win95b machine, without any problems (Expect the ussually suspects).
I have a friend who runs win98 at work, I downloaded those old DOS, WIN3.1 apps from my ftp server (now running linux), ran the programs with little problems.
Try running a Sparc Solaris app on SparcLinux and see what your get..
You can run some binraries though an emulater and get them to work... x86 Solaris can run x86 Linux binairies without problems, x86 Linux can run x86 SCO binairies without problems. Provided you have a Special emulater to do this, it can work though.
As for there is 7 differant boxes of win98 SE, there was alot of win95 editions... The only think I would worry about is which win98SE edition has the correct bugs fixes... Did this version leave out the IE4.0 security fix, or did this one forget to include the OLE bug fix...
Not that I would personal use win anything
I think you missed the point. The problem isn't *abou* choice. It's about the choosing of what you wish to carry. The way it's suppose to work is you carry what experience has shown you will most likely sell. As for the rest you make it known to your customers that they are available and can be ordered if they so desire. The customer gets their *choice* the stores don't have to carry a lot of inventory. You may not get as much of a *bulk* discount but then one must always be careful when excercising that option. As you say it's about *choice*, question is who's choice are we talking about?
than my 95 users. 98 is crap, because they've broken power management. Every 98 computer that I've bought, without and with changing default settings, has gone to sleep only to never wake up a great (20-80%) percentage of the time.
...) Maybe if they opened the source, people could compile their own editions. (musique edition - Run afterstep as the window manager :)
Users come to me, "My computer always goes to sleep and won't wake up." I always ask, "Are you running Windows 98?" And amazingly they say, "Yes." A: Disable power management.
Or, "When I shut down, I get a black screen and the computer hangs." I ask: "Win98?" And the answer is always (GUESS?)
Of course, NT almost never crashes. My laptop has never crashed since SP4. I have to reboot (because NT has no way to go into administrative mode without logging out--a pain in my ass) for convienience sake to restart all of my services when the SQL Server 6.5 (Dev. Ed.) memory leak creaps up, and that's only once a week. (i.e. faster than logging out, logging in as Admin, restarting MSSQLServer, logging out again, and logging back in.
I was reading about the 19,000 NT versions in the latest issues of NT Magazine. (load ballancing edition, terminal server edition, cluster edition, enterprise server edition,
AND of course, my Linux box is faster and never crashes with a slower processor and less RAM than my laptop.
If you want MS S#1t to get better, E-mail MS and let them know that they suck. Eventually they will get the point and maybe, just maybe, make a descent OS product.
Of course, they are displayed correctly on Windows. But fortunately, not the whole world runs Windows, as you might have noticed.
--
OS lover
OS lover
> apache.org,
> the same for my windows sharing client
> (samba)
Run Debian. If you're a real zealot you can run the dselect program daily and it will download all updated Debian packages. This way you don't have to worry about recompiling, etc...
Even better, the Debian packages WORK and are conveniently and uniformly placed.
I will admit that Debian (like Redhat) does lag behind the near-weekly updates of source trees in many projects, but most maintainers do a good job!
BTW, this is not a troll, I don't want to get into a distribution holy war here. I just like to point out to many people that Redhat's shortcomings may not be shared by all the popular distributions in the Linux community.
Wondering where my registration went,
Neuronix
igotfucked@yahoo.com
I can't really attest to the accuracy of that statement, given that I compile all my own kernels, but anyway... Firstly, it doesn't matter because if you need a.out, then just recompile your kernel, with a.out support enabled. Takes half an hour, maybe. Secondly (and this is the more important point), it doesn't matter, because with open source, anything that used to be a.out is no longer distributed as a.out, because people just recompiled. Windows, on the other hand, has legacy binaries, which will never go away.
Aphrael,
I agree with your comments on Win98 as a development enviroment, but I have to disagree on the NT stuff. _What_ the hell are you doing as a developer to make NT crash? Low-level programming or system drivers?
Please add the type of programming you do to the debate. Thanks.
Gee, at my work - I'm not an IT professional - we have a Win95 box that is used for Word processing, to recieve e-mails for supply orders and periodically track packages via the internet. That machine crashes almost daily. Probably three times a week. If one of the network drives - which we never use - is unavailable because the server is down Windows crashes.
I no longer use Windows at home. I for the most part use various distributions of Linux such as Slackware and Mandrake. They kick Windows AND NT butt. So does my FreeBSD installation. I don't think that Linux and users of other open source OS's are in denial - that's the Windows users that want to convince themselves that it's OK to reboot once a week and pay $150+++ for it. I paid $1.99 each for my distros. I hear a great chorus of open source OS users laughing with glee.
#include "mysig.h"
None of the windows except the terminal server edition are real multiuser systems. Casual NT-server in Windows network can do no more than share files & printers. And act as a web-server etc. ofcourse.
I think most of us have had SOME dealing with Windows. I know I have. "Both angles"? Which other angle are we looking at it from? Windows is fragmented, but Bill & Co. are pointing fingers at everyone else saying "Look how fragmented is!" Linux has been changing pretty rapidly - improving hardware support, gaining support from hardware manufacturers, and gaining some serious applications.
How much have things changed in the Windows world of late? Not much - Windows 9x went to 98, and it still sucks - they just shoved in IE and a few bugfixes (which should have been in there LONG AGO) and USB drivers and a few other minor things. No significant changes in the GUI. It still crashes. It still bluescreens and hangs up and acts erratically. Not a huge change. NT still sucks as a serious server. No big changes there either.
Linux has its fragmentation, but for the most part, all the major distributions are staying with glibc2.x now, keeping up with the latest XFree86 releases, and there're utilities to convert packages for your distribution of choice. LSB will hopefully pull that together even more.
Linux is trying to move AWAY from fragmentation. Bill & Co. just don't care - fragmented or no, they're going to claim what they want, and market the crap out of their low-quality product.
I think this puts it best: "If buildings were built like software, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy 95% of civilization." That definitely applies to Microsoft software.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
> is Berlin supposed to be OpenGL only?
No. We're adding postscript next (think printers). However, you generally don't program directly to the OpenGL or postscript or whatever layer, there's an abstraction layer (DrawingKit) over top which is pretty much consistent. Which is not to say that you couldn't use the OpenGL stuff if you wanted to, and it is not to say that OpenGL won't be the 3d API of choice.
---
DNA just wants to be free...
Normaly all new versions of windows are downward compatible with the older versions. The only thing, where you can get such versionproblems is, when you use functions, which are only avaible on one of these versions of windows. e.g. if you compile your program with unicode, it will only run on WinNT. If you use Direct*, it will only run on Win95 or Win98. Such things are the only things, which i know to make problems. But they can of course make much trouble, if you e.g. should make your program using Unicode on WinNT, but Ascii on Win95 without recompiling it. (MsDev supports compiling a program with Ascii or with Unicode support without changing the sourcecode) I think, this is not realy the major problem of windows
Microsoft puts the NT service packs up on the net for free download. They don't cost a cent. Likewise the hotfixes for serious problems (which contrary to Linux FUD, actually do tend to get fixed within 48 to 72 hours).
Hmmm... Doesn't sound like fragmentation but version compatibility. My bad experience with this is having to pay extra for drivers for an NT box when 95 drivers came with the device. But.... IMHO, You should not make too much noise about this when issues like a.out->elf or libc5->glibc2->glibc2.1->glibc2.1.1 can be such a pain in the ass.
Davo -- Free speech, free software, AND free beer.
In ten years of reading USENET and now web postings, I don't think I've ever read anything that was so dead on as this posting. As much as I hate "me too" and "yeah, what he said" postings, I agree completely. Reading slashdot makes me want to run anything but Linux, and reading USENET now just leaves me mourning for what it once was.
Adaptec EZ CD Creator... Try installing it to NT 4: no problems. Try installing it to NT 3.5: it won't even install.
There is a lack of compatibility for programs between versions of the SAME OS. As you say, this is not true of -every- program, but neither is it 'nearly perfect'...
Also, try running a random new 32-bit binary on Windows 3.1. Let's see how far you get... there is a certain point at which new binaries will no longer work on older framework, and vice-versa, for both camps. That's why having the source code is important, cos you can tweak and/or recompile that program to get working binaries for the given framework.
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
There might be 7 different products (boxes, for want of a better term) available, but they all produce the same files/dlls/ocxs ultimately. How many Linuxes are there then? I'm betting it's more than 7, and each version of a file could be substantially different from another. Remove the mote from thine own eye. Choose linux. Choose no job. Choose no family. Choose a f***ing big monitor. Choose X10, Perl, MP3 players and electrical novelties ... choose PHP and wondering who the f*** you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbering, spirit crushing computer games, stuffing junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than a embarrassment to the selfish, f***ed up advocats you spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose linux ... But why do I want to do a thing like that?
A tip of the hat to Adminspotting.
Where's this quote from Gates? It's certainly not in the article you're replying to.
Wrong. Win16 used window messages to indicate when serial data was received. Win32 uses file handles and I/O blocking. The two APIs are vastly different.
This is why everyone I know changes their CD-ROM drive to be Z immediately after installing the sucker. Then you can later add more hard drives to your heart's content.
What you say is very interesting but why do you have to insult gamers and science fiction fans (or did you mean sci-fi?)
Just how multiuser is NT? There is Terminal Server, but most NT installations allow only one user at a time, although you can create multiple accounts.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Heheh, yeah, and you can add MacOS X Server and MacOS X (client, due next year) to the list of platforms you can easily port Unix apps too.
;)
BeOS isn't too far either (though a little tougher).
heheh... haha Windows
"Internix" was done by a third party sometime ago as a replacement for the (useless) POSIX subsystem in NT. I believe it'll be the new POSIX subsystem in W2K.
I'm not really overly worried, to be honest. VMWare and cygwin32 don't really seem to have had a major attenuating effect on Linux adoption (in fact, quite the reverse); I don't think this will either.
Is the key to Linux the apps or the kernel? If the apps are more or less present on both sides, then the kernel becomes the discriminator, and we win.
---
DNA just wants to be free...
Strictly speaking, Win3.1 used a mix of preemptive
and cooperative multitasking -- cooperative for
Win16/32s apps, and preemptive for DOS apps.
Completely cooperative multitasking wouldn't
work with DOS apps -- DOS programs don't have
a way to give up the timesplice.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Pls. don't bold your paragraphs when there is nothing really special there. It is really annoying. Thanks.
In an oss/fs world, binary inoperability is not a big issue. Source support for different platforms is. Install Linux one day and see what that means.
Who would want to run a applications through a emulation/thunking layer when they can run it natively.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
> Anybody who's not running a continuous-
> duty 'Server' application, who leaves the
> system running 24/7 in order to log those oh-so-
> important uptime hours is, well, playing a
> little ego game.
Um, either that or extending the life of their hardware. Power cycling is extremely unkind to our silicon friends.
---
DNA just wants to be free...
Of course, if you're on an Alpha, and lack
an intel machine, you could use the x86 emulator
that DEC has so generously provided us...
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
"I see WinCE has a retarded inbred bastard child of Windows 9x(who itself isn't that great of a specimine)..I ;-)
try to ignore it whenever possible
But, it is a valid flavor of Windows...so yeah, there's 4."
WinCE is no more a flavor of windows than Win95 + LiteStep is a flavor of NeXTStep. It looks like Windows. The APIs are vaguely similar. But the code underneath it all isn't..
WinCE appears to be the product of some evil goon at MS who said "Hey! I know! Let's completely re-write 95 to run on PDAs, and let's strip out %95 of the features, and then, if there's anything left that we did correctly the first time, when we do CE we'll do it in a totally backwards and ghoulish way! Then, we'll write the APIs to slightly resemble that of normal Windows but change them in ways too twisted and fiendish to discuss at the moment! We'll also throw in a bunch more of the functions from normal Windows, but we'll just set our random character generator up to put code behind those, so instead of being different and/or weird compared to our regular stuff, they'll just NOT WORK AT ALL! And then, we'll pass it off as an actual version of Windows and say that it's really easy to port to from Windows when it's actually more painful than having your nose bitten off by a VT100 emulation!"
It's kind of scary to say this, but you shouldn't associate WinCE with Win95 because Win95 deserves more respect than that.
Hopefully Embedded NT won't be done by the same evil goon.
Your experience is a little different from mine, then. When attempting to do development work or
debug under windows 98, I can't expect the machine
to stay stable for more than two or three hours.
NT, on the other hand, I manage to crash once
every two or three days.
Running desktop applications --- office, games,
win amp, etc --- win98 seems reasonably stable
(although ICQ blows up under it constantly). But
trying to do development work under it is asking
for trouble.
Pre-emptive multi-tasking? Win9x has it, except when it doesn't. Anything that hits the thunking layer fails to multi-task miserably (ISTR there's a single mutex for all of the 16-bit code in 95).
:(
Trying to do anything while accessing the floppy has routinely blue-screened every 95 and NT machine I've used (not BSOD, the 'an error has occured while writing' full-screen nonsense).
Then there's the little un-announced joys of non-compatability between versions, such as the removal of support for DOS file/record locking (SHARE.EXE functionality) in Win95 OSR2. That was fun for those running "legacy" DOS database apps (like great chunks of FidoNet, and I'm sure plenty of other folks).
It's a mess
I have had significant problems with compatibility between NT and 95/98. These problems do exist.
I develop Win32 software professionally for a very small company using MS Dev Studio (C++, MFC, ActiveX controls). We aren't using anything like multimedia, DirectX, or any of the other newer API's.
A couple of examples:
1. Last year, I discovered that in the OnItemExpanding event for a MFC tree control, you can do a SortItems in Windows NT with no problem. But that causes a stack overflow on 95. (Worked around by using the OnItemExpanded event instead.)
2. I wrote an ActiveX control this year which draws into a bitmap and then bit-blits onto the screen. This dramatically reduces flicker. It works perfectly under NT, but under 95/98 the bitblt resulted in complete garbage on-screen. Never did figure that one out. (Worked around by detecting the OS at runtime and not using offscreen bitmaps unless it's NT. Sigh.)
Stuff like this is a nightmare to debug, and often only discovered near the end of the test-fix cycle.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
It's also pretty funny for Office 2000. I work in a computer store, and when someone walks in asking for the price of the product, it's hell.. Also, I'm in Montreal, so there are french and english versions:
:)
:)
- Standart
- Professionnal
- Premium
- Developpers
+ Now, double that for the academic versions.
+ Also add 4 more for the upgrade versions. (but you can't upgrade an academic version).
* 2 because there are french translations of all the products, they are all in the same box as most linux apps do.
= Total: 24 different boxes of Ms Office 2000.
But wait! You can also buy all the products individually (frontpage, word, excel, whatever..)
Imagine how fun it is, and how clients are usually pissed when they need to buy these products.
Now that's what I call Marketting:
This forces most stores to buy a big load of Ms Products, since to get a better "cost" price they have to buy alot. But they also have to buy all the different versions. Therefore, they have to store these boxes somewhere, and that's why in all stores you see a wall full of boxes, since it's either they have alot of this crap, or they won't have any.
Therefore, stores are forced to make free publicity for Microsoft products and they make it sound very important because they have a big pile of boxes. But they don't have a choice but to have a big pile of boxes since there are so many different products to display!
(that was hard to explain, don't be too supprised if I typed it all wrong
Lineo has Embeddex (or however it's spelled). Those two names make me laugh every time.
-Ted
> USB can only be added to 95B or later
I used to work with a systems integrator setting up computers with an OS, and drivers for tons of peripherals, usually out of the mainstream ones, and a bunch of software and drivers, and getting them to behave nicely together. There was one configuration that had to be Windows 95, not 98, and using a Microsoft USB keyboard. Despite the fact that USB "support" was in Windows 95, Microsoft would only provide drivers for the keyboard that worked with Windows 98. You know you have a problem when the most substantial input device (that is usually handled by the BIOS level, plus the lowest levels of DOS) requires Windows 98 but doesn't work under Windows 95 OSR2 with USB "support."
Anyone have anything to say about the ARTICLE? RTFA -Its from "WinMag" for goodness sake.
If the application was trying to access hardware directly, it wouldn't have worked in Windows/286 much less Windows 3.X unless it was running in real mode.
Unix users make the claim that Unix code is more portable than Windows code. "Why," they say, "you can "just compile" gnu fileutils on any old unix---even on windows. But Microsoft can't port IE to Solaris without man-years of work."
Windows users say, "I can run the same binary that worked on DOS 1.0 on Windows 2000 server. Unix can't do that, Unix is not as portable as Windows."
This hilights the difference between Unix and Windows ideas of portability---Unix portability is in terms of providing the same API on many platforms and calling a recompile portable. The Windows way is by adding a new API every few years, but endlessly dragging along the old ABIs.
(Is it really true that you can't compile to the win16 ABI with recent Microsoft development tools?)
If Linux is emerging into the world of Windows, people evangelizing it either need to educate others on what we mean when we say "portable", or use the word in the way the Wintel world expects to hear it.
Except for step 4, 5, 6, etc involving playing other games besides Starcraft and Solitaire don't work...
Only half true. Windows NT (even workstation) is truly multiuser. The services run under the system account. Most people log in as administrator, and DCOM components invoked on the server are run under the account of the remote user.
Only one user can be the interactive user i.e. the one that gets a screen to play with. AFAIK there's nothing stopping you writing your own multiuser shell onto the existing multiuser kernel and running it as user mode code (the NT4 windowing stuff runs in kernel mode).
Dave.
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
man rdev
Actually, I hate people who just say "man whatever" as a response, but I'm not at my linux box, and I forgot the syntax. You have to rdev the kernel to know which harddrive has the root partition. Note, you don't have to recompile, just rdev it.
If you alreay know this and tried it, then ignore this post.
Micro~1 sucks.... Have you seen how many Service Packs are around there?????? Are multiplier!!!! VS sucks FSO sucks Windoze sucks sucks (for each version).
A) Why on *earth* are you still using win16 apps? I mean, you can't run UNIX binaries from that timeframe on Red Hat 6.0 either. What UNIXes were big in '86, anyway? AT&T? B) There are a heck of a lot more things written for Solaris that don't work on Linux or things done for Red Hat that require the latest libraries and break stuff than there are problems between Windows. I like Linux more than Windows, but compatibility is *definitely* not the reason. Get your facts straight, people arguing that Win compatibility sux.
I have only encountered one application that didn't work happily after a change for a.out to ELF, or libc5 to glibc2. This was a particularily flaky app and the tweaking of two functions fixed it. In fact, it was better for it. The two functions in question used several library functions that are frowned on as potential memory blitzing holes ...
Chris Wareham
Then why do all the non-games(DirectX)/non-low-level (direct hardware) utilities I use written for Win98 work fine on WinNT. I dunno about going the other way. Maybe WinNT binaries don't work well on Win98. But you can run just about anything for Win98 on WinNT.
Hi. I've been running several versions of the Windows 9x family. In short, I've installed and used Win95 v4.00.950, Win95 OSR1 v4.00.950a, Win95 OSR2 v4.00.950b
(aka build 1111), Win95 OSR2.1 v4.00.1212a, Microsoft Memphis (win98 developer release) build 4.10.1415, Microsoft Memphis beta v4.10.1500, Microsoft Win98
release candidate 3 v4.10.1900, Microsoft Win98 [PWA] v4.10.1998, Microsoft Win98 Retail v4.10.1998 (yes, the last two are different), Microsoft Win98 Second
Edition beta v4.10.2162 and now Microsoft Win98 Second Edition final v4.10.2222/3.
Of all these versions, i must say that Windows 98 Release Candidate 3 (build 1900) has been the most stable of all the above versions. I think I never had one single
BSOD during the two-three months of using it. Upgrading to the final version of Win98 introduced several bugs and crashes. Also, while using the SE beta, I had a
general feeling that it was a lot more stable than the "final" version of Win98 SE. Do Microsoft add bugs to the final version and keep using the release
candidates/internal builds for themselves? Seems very strange....
-- close but no sig
Step 2: Install RedHat, Debian, Slackware or any other distribution.
Step 3: Install Wine and play Starcraft.
*) In programs more complex than "Hello World" in a window.
*) In my experience. I admit I try to limit my Windows programming experience lest someone recruit me to program in it full time (Shudder.) I am responsible for the maintenance of a Win16 program that downloads fonts to a printer. Some customers want an NT port, so we'll end up rewriting it from scratch and drop Win3.1 support so that we can use a compiler written in this decade. A half-decade ago on OS/2 support, we saw the Win32* API's changing every other week, probably to break WinOS2. My Y2K people tell me Windows 3.1 isn't Y2K compliant anyway.
*) Not AIX, which tends to differ significantly from other UNIX flavors.
And for you naysayers,
*) If it's so compatable why are we going through another iteration of the 95/98 kernel with W2K desktop edition instead of going to the NT kernel? If they're binary compatable or all it takes is a recompile, I wouldn't think that going straight to the NT kernel would be any big deal.
--
Greyfox
Greyfox has been a professional programmer since 1989 and has been programming since he got his first computer in 1983.
So VB5 would (apparently) support VB4 files, but not VB3.
cpeterso
it is posible to use realmode drivers for thigns under windows 9x however. a frend of mine *could not* get his CD-ROM to work. I 'un rem'd it from the autoexec.bat file, and it worked perfictly.
also, I think that if you have a DOS driver up before windows boots, it uses that (in some cases) usualy CD-ROM, sound ect drivers are loaded in the dosstart.bat file, and run when you 'exit to dos' I'm not real sure though, but I know windows can use realmode CD-ROM drivers
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Amongst other oddities Petzold Win3x example printing source code won't work on 95 (but the binaries will) and I doubt your average Win32 program ports easily to Wince. However it's much easier to port programs between versions of windows than versions of unix.
:-( I believe there is an ACE library that includes portably *nix threads but from all accounts ACE is bloated and complicated, most people opt to use a non threading solution, luckily this is almost always possible.
Just look at the state of threading for instance. Linux has good support for threading but other *nixes don't so code intended to be portable can't use it
not 9x. sorry
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
MS has been doing this sort of thing for a long time.
if you had the august 25 1995 version of 95, that isn't strange. it was a real peice of shit. 98 is much better IMHO
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
What the hell is this? quite frankly, windows is almost perfectly compatible. I realize that UNIX code is not going to port with out much trouble, but portability between Windows programs is at the *binary* level. You might have some trouble running newer win 95/NT code on windows 3.1, but try running the latest version of Mozilla on XENIX or whatever. (there's also the Direct X issue, witch has effected me personally... rrr)
there are some issues relating to driver incompatibility between NT and 9x, but other then that, all win32 platforms are compatible. Apps don't need recompiling. NT and 9x can run win3.1 code, and 9x can run DOS code. (NT can run some DOS, but not all. I think)
I realize that a UNIX program is not going to compile out of the box, (although NT is postix compliant, I'm not sure if its a very good implementation or not though) But neither will Mac or BeOS program. what does that have to do with anything?
I've seen this type of anti-MS FUD before, in a document stating that win64 OS's wouldn't support win32 properly. This was because the original version of win NT didn't support win16 very well (NT 3.5 has an emulation layer, or something). It was blatantly false, however, considering that windows NT currently supports 16 bit code, and 9x is half built of it (not that that's a good thing....)
Please realize that when you are dishonest, it calls into question everything you say. I for one never believed anything Apple said in there information, because some of the things they said weren't true at all (or no longer true). If you don't want to alienate potential linux users, you must not tell them things that they know aren't true. If you don't use windows, or have any experience with it, don't say things about it (the same is true for win* crashing all the time. It's not 100%, but it's not 0% ether)
Disclaimer: I use win98, I hate NT, I think linux is cool, and plan to install it, and I dislike Microsoft.
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
"Windows DLLs: Threat or Menace?". If you write Win32 apps, I highly recommend you read this article. In a nutshell, it recommends that you statically link to libraries and do not use DLLs (because of their headaches and versioning problems).
cpeterso
Ever install a second drive in a Windows machine and have the CD-Rom change from D to E, causing half a million short-cuts to break? I'm glad I don't have to deal with that stuff much anymore.
I dunno. It may detect your cards again, but I don't know whether they'll be named the same thing. Espcially if you have multiple ones of the same type (common scenerio). If you picked up a couple of 3com cards to toss in a server and start swapping them around, you won't get them in the same order again. But whatever. I sorta like the Mac for this. The Linux/win approach is just to include every driver under the sun so that things work. On the Mac, you get drivers with the product, so you don't waste tons of disk space. From a driver standpoint, I have a much higher degree of reliability under the Mac, and configuration is *way* easier for everything that I can think of. I remember someone thinking that drivers didn't even exist on the Mac (and he had just installed a new drive, too... :-) ), which gives you an idea of how transparent things are.
Debian doesn't crash at this point, but it complains, then shuttles you to single user mode so you can make the changes. At least, that was how it was over a year ago.
-phantom
Why is it that their always has to be a fragmented graphics API....for windows its GDI DirectDraw Direct3D and 4 if you include the third party OpenGL... I know unix is not that much better.... but when is someone going to have a fully functional graphics API, that does not have scattered functionality.... is Berlin supposed to be OpenGL only?
I have Outlook 2000 and IE5 on my NT4 dev machine. IE5 rudely installs Outlook Express (OE5) without asking. When I try to uninstall OE5, it warns that uninstalling OE5 will break Outlook! I uninstalled it any ways (stupid) and Outlook died. sigh.. Why would the new Outlook 2000 require old OE5? They problem share some mail DLLs, but why can't OE5 Uninstall ref-count those DLLs and leave them on the machine when necessary??!!!
cpeterso
I always thougth IMHO that Linux will kill NT in the 2000.... But Linux kill NT (W2Y or what else is called now) few days ago... The world domination has begun...
Linux does work on the chip to, but you should be able to get 98 to work well, if you get really nice hardware. in theory...
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
It's still a fundamental problem Linux was made to be like UNIX. UNIX doesn't care what the hardware is. It's just one big filesystem to applications. The Mac was made from the ground up to be the Mac. The idea was that you would work with each drive, but wouldn't care about the order of detection ("C"? Get real.), so you work with drives based on their name. (Renaming drives doesn't break aliases...well, it does, but the OS is smart enough to still follow them up). The user simply never interacts with things like SCSI/IDE ids. They don't matter, because the OS was designed not to present them as part of the user interface. Windows is (IMHO) sort of a wrapper to DOS. When it was made, people were used to using DOS, which was designed around the hardware...you had to set interrupts, memory addresses, IDE relationships, etc. So in Windows you have to deal with garbage like "C" for drive names. Stupid artifacts from DOS days. Same thing with detecting devices. Setting IRQs and friends on DOS was designed to be done by hand. Plug and Play (tm) was a cheap wrapper around something *that was supposed to be done by the user*. So you run into lots of problems detecting and configuring devices. Compare that to the Mac, where the OS was *always* supposed to take care of hardware issues, without the user having to set things (SCSI IDs are an exception, but this is pretty easy compared to the Wintel world...just choose a unique number from 0 to 7, usually on a dial), and you realize where the real problems of the computer world come from. DOS. The demons of DOS. If M$ would just ax DOS compatibility for once and all, they could make a good, stable OS without this crud...but they want to maintain their market share, and not give customers a chance to go to another OS.
if val(True) = val(False) then
(reprint..hit then @.@
if val(True) = val(False) then
msgbox "Visual Basic Sucks"
endif
try to write a subroutine over 64k.
try to write datastructures into a sub. if you have over 32k of them, the program won't compile. (A stack limitation I guess)
try to pass a datastructure as an argument (not an object)
type size
byte 1 byte
boolean 2 bytes
a boolean has 4 possible values:
True
False
Null
Other (yes, other. it is used though undocumented. It indicates that multiple checkboxes in a group do not all share the same value)
Well, I use both IE 4 and netscape, although I just upgraded to IE5. The questionmarks don't show up in IE or Netscape here. Actualy, IE handles slashdot posts *a lot* better then netscape, ironicly. (I like to view them in nested mode, so I don't have to keep clicking for subcomments)
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Don't think it couldn't happen!
I also believe that M$ is building their own Linux distribution...I have seen the large number of Linux/*NIX titles in the Redmond M$ library, and I doubt they bought them so they could gather dust~
Which path would be easier to take for M$?
Folks, there are important differences between the APIs of the various versions of Windows. If you are a programmer who does not bother to account for these differences neither your binaries nor your source code will port very well. Probably the biggest example of this is the fact that the 9x API supports only ANSI (single-byte) text strings, while NT prefers Unicode (double-byte) text strings. Unicode progams written for NT become very unhappy under 9x. ANSI programs written for 9x merely run slow under NT (because NT will convert to Unicode on the fly). There are many other such gotchas as well, both small and large. Hopefully, Windows 2000 should help to alleviate this problem once it has replaced 9x/NT in a few years. 'Course that won't do anything about the CE problem, though... -- Brian
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
Wow...this is well-written.
We slam M$ for bad software. But 99% of that is two simple reasons:
a) M$ has a massive monopoly. To leverage it they tie their software together (which generally makes it worse), and are loathe to modularize. If M$ had less than 50% market share and was losing fast, they'd change quickly
b) Massive backwards compatibility. The vast majority of MS software problems go back to having to have DOS compatibility. The bloat, the instability (the reason 95/98 aren't as stable as NT is because they can't have the protection around hardware NT has without breaking old apps), the reliance on pathnames (a UNIX flaw as well), the difficult-to-troubleshoot platform....all from trying to maintain massive backwards compatibility.
There's one other possible reason. c) M$ is trying to be everything to everyone. We slam it, but if *you* made software designed to be used by corporate managers and IT administrators (I'm *not* talking about you IT people with more than half a brain out there), what would it look like? The kind of software in the Linux world is unapproachable for the average secretary. Sure, it's great for the programmer...which fits your profile well, and is why you like it so much. So Word is huge and slow. If you were making the de facto word processing program, and it had to do everything from software documentation to professional writing to thesis writing, it'd be pretty bloated too. But M$ has to do this to maintain the monolithic monopoly, rather than making lots of products for niche markets, and losing their dominance ("95% of people use MS Word!").
If a), b), and c) were eliminated, M$ software would be a lot better.
M$ may not be the world's best software company. But we forget -- it isn't all that bad. Put RH in it's shoes, and it'd be just as flavorless and corporate. Besides, M$ makes a nice scapegoat.
I agree about the M$ Linux distro. But I don't think they'll base it on anything. They'll just make enough stuff (like RH's GNOME, but closed-source) and include it in the OS so that no one can run M$ Linux stuff on other Linux distros. And, yes, they *can* put closed-source libraries stuff in a distro. Navigator wasn't open-source, and it still went in most distributions.
Why all this silly tit for tat. M$ sets up a machine to crack, so some Linux guy has to too. There is an article about fragmentation in the Linux world, hours later someone thinks there must be the same about the M$ world. Yes, I know, "My daddy has got a bigger car than your daddy" but ha, "Your daddy cannot pee as far as my daddy" ... Jesus. Lot's of people do not care but use what helps to get the job done.
As a Unix programmer for all but one year of my career (currently six years long), I can honestly say that your Trainspotting parody is completely wide of the mark. I have met far more sad, no-life Windows programmers than Unix ones, and that's not due to the prevalence of Windows, as all the companies I work for are Unix based.
I initially chose Linux for it's low cost. I couldn't afford to upgrade my computer to run the latest version of Solaris, and installed Linux on the off chance it was any good. It runs dramatically faster than Solaris, and is usually bundled with a large collection of useful utilities.
My years experience of Windows was using NT 3.51. This was reliable, but ran very slowly on what was top end PC hardware at the time. I have since heard from colleagues that NT 4.0 (which was installed after I left) is moderately faster, but crashes on a daily basis. Worse than this, they installed NT on a server - nothig heavyweight, just file sharing for 20 or so people. They have found many networking features don't work, and performance (on a dual Pentium Pro 200) is risible even over a 100Mbit network.
Lunchtimes don't exist for my former colleagues anymore, as they spend them frantically trying to do system admin tasks in the machine room. This is thanks to the non-existence of NT remote admin tools (except expensive third party addons) and the need for regular reboots. As a solution, Win32 Perl was installed, and the ActiveState extensions used to write some admin tools. This has been a partial success, thanks to the fact that only a limited number of things can be done with the API.
I wouldn't be surprised if the API's do exist to remotely administer NT, but they don't seem to be readily documented. The NT resource kit proved worthless, and the machine has now been turned into a Linux / Samba box.
As for me, I now work as a Unix contracter earning a salary that is magnitudes more than my ex-colleagues. I get a serious amount of work done with little more than C, Perl and a basic Unix setup, I go home at 5.30pm promptly, and never work weekends. I don't play computer games at work afterhours, and I don't have a sad fucking science fiction fixation, unlike all the Windows programmers I have known.
Chris Wareham
I just wanted to point out that windows didn't suck for that particular reason (large number of service packs)
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Or me. That would be a neat coup. Assuming they could afford it...and it *would* kick the ladder out from under the Linux market neatly...yeah, the hard-core Linux people might avoid M$ Linux-only apps, but MS would make them. And M$ Linux would run everything written for other Linuxes. And MS could push for people currently using Windows to use M$ Linux.
Although I expect they'd want to have a propriatory WINE-like software package...so that anyone wanting to use Windows with 100% compatibility would use M$ Linux. That'd keep their old customer base.
windows 3.11 had more support for "work groups" as well as some support for win32 code (from NT 3.51) in the for of win32s (they may have worked in win 3.1,3.0 as well, but I don't know).
so it was "multi user" in the sense of multiple users at multiple computers running peice of shit non premptive OSs...
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
The problems that the letters here describe seem more to be with how Windows handles hardware than fragmentation necessarily. I haven't run anything past Windows 95 on my machine, so maybe I'm missing something with these Windows 98 versions, but I've had similar problems just getting my hardware to load up correctly.
Of course, you almost always have to fight with Windows when you try to install new hardware. Even with a friggin' Lucent WINmodem, I had to go through probably two dozen reboots and lucky guessing to get it to figure out that there is a modem there. It wouldn't recognize it as a modem, only as a "PCI Communication Device". Ultimately, I had to let it install it as that, and then "update" the driver later.
Once you get it set up, usually everything works okay as long as you don't change anything. BUT, if you do, it goes nuts. As far as I know, with Linux, most (if not all) of the hardware stuff is figured out dynamically when the computer boots. But with Windows, it seems, this information is stored on the hard drive so if you add and/or remove something, you have to first boot up, have it recognize that something is new or gone, and then reboot again so it will have its new settings. And this is assuming that it actually works correctly. With Linux, you may have to recompile the kernel to get support for something you didn't have before, but if you just have a bloated kernel and sometimes have stuff in and sometimes out, it just says "oh well, didn't find that hardware, no big deal, moving on...".
I got completely frustrated with Windows when I used VMWare to boot my raw partition. I tried to use a separate "hardware profile" so that VMWare's simulated environment wouldn't screw up my real environment, but it simply doesn't work. I have to reconfigure my video card everytime and I boot into either, as well as my sound card. The virtual machine can't find VMWare's simulated network card, but I got it to find it when I created a clean virtual disk for VMWare. I can only imagine that it's because I had a "clean" install that it figured out everything. These profiles don't need to be stored on disk, they should just be created dynamically.
Through all of my Linux kernel upgrades, I have never had to reconfigure any of my hardware settings. I can only imagine what would happen to my hardware settings if I ever felt like wasting $100 on a Windows 98 "upgrade".
if that's not mission critical, I don't know what is.
maybe you can get by with winquake/quake2 however, but its still not the same
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Major chunks of the APIs are different or missing between the different Windows versions (even leaving CE out of the equation). I don't consider CE Windows, regardless of whether M$ tries really hard to use the Windows name on it. Win 3.1 is obsolete, and few still rely on 3.1 programs (if you do, you should have upgraded). And the API changes are only in really esoteric areas. Yes, one in a thousand really weird programs won't work. Maybe. But in the real world, it isn't that big of a deal. If we ignore direct hardware access utilities (like card option-setting stuff) and games (where you need DirectX), I've never used a single program written for 95/98 that didn't work on my copy of NT.
he had a valid point, you can't exspect old versions of software to support new features in new versions.
you're origonal post was brainless, you are the one who needs to get a clue
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
The guy wasn't talking about apps crasshing the system, but installers that wouldn't install beacuse the OS wasn't calling itself 'windows 95'. bad apps shouldn't crash the system, and on windows (NT *or* 9x) they usualy don't.
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
i was developing on win95 and the main task was to setup (for example) 100x100 pixels window and redraw all of it (i.e. no titles, borders etc.). i did use some API calls to determine title width and height, border width etc.
but
when i run resulting app (which works well under win95) on win3.1, windows did not have correct sizes thus result was "damaged" byt gray areas around each window.
when run on winNT 4, there were problems mostly with properly displaying 256 color bitmaps and from time to time with fonts/texts (not good alignment, positioning and/or clipping)
i'm not saying it's all fault of windows, maybe i did something wrong but all info about APIs i get from TP help (which i consider good).
hany
use the ampersand (shift+5) followed by an ell (L), a tee (T) and a simicolon (;)
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
. I wrote an ActiveX control this year which draws into a bitmap and then bit-blits onto the screen. This dramatically reduces flicker.
You needed an active X control for that?? what the fuck? talk about software bloat. You can easyly get a GDI device context for a CBitmap, and draw to that. then use one GDI call to blit that to the CPaintDC or whatever (if you're using MFC). I can't imagen why you'd need to use Active X....
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Your box is most likely crashing do to a bad driver. The quality of the hardware really has a major impact of stability under windows (crappy hardaware works, but it has crappy, buggy drivers)
:)
if you buy cheap *no name* hardware, problems will happen. Before I baught a Peice of shit winmodem, My 98 box probably only crashed 3 or 4 times, in months, after I put it in, it crashes every few days, but only when I'm playing an MP3. but the card cost $16 and doubled my effective bandwidth
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
it makes life much easyer
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Anyone who thinks this guy is, you're an idiot.
windows is perfictly capable of running non-MS software. Cheap no-name hardware though, can cause a lot of problems (shitty drivers that run in the kernel)
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
are you sure about that? A lot of text based functions have a whatEverU() and a whatEverA() version that get's put in when you use whatEver(), so you don't really need to worry about it. I do think 9x does have some unicode support. I can view Chinese/japanese websites in IE4...
I don't know for sure though
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Well, if you don't like notepad, you can run vi.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
well...
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Trying to do anything while accessing the floppy has routinely blue-screened every 95 and NT machine I've used (not BSOD, the 'an error has occured while writing' full-screen nonsense).
The fact that NT doesn't do a full blue screen unless the kernel has crashed proves you're full of it. You're example is purely a DOS/Win behavior.
Basically, I'm sick of hearing slashdotters try to extrapolate their 9x horror stories to NT because it makes them sound more legitimate. Hopefully people here are smart enough to see past the similar GUI.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Actually, blame Microsoft too. Just like Adobe, MS Office 95 and 97 isn't multi-user aware either. (Office 2000 is.)
So, if Microsoft can't even code their own applications to take advantage of NT features which have existed for 6 years, why would 3rd parties even bother?
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Umm, Exchange is an server application that runs under a service account on NT. It has nothing do with NT's multiuserness.
And to answer your question, it can't because MS Outlook and Exchange groups at MS are too retarded to be even on the same page, so you get a sucky client-server product. Exchange does allow server-side scripts, but they all run under the same privlege level as the server. Not good for user mailboxes.
So, your options are to either run Lotus Notes (which has a server-side security model) or a brain-dead type user-level mailstore such as traditionally found on Unix systems.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
MS SQL 7, MS Exchange, MS SMS, COM, DCOM, ActiveDirectory, ADO, CDO, IIS, MFC, WDM, DirectX, etc.
Despite this
Think of Apple a few years back. Many folks (including some on the board of directors) thought they should drop the Mac and just make high end WinTel boxes. They chose to make Macintoshes, even if meant going out of business. You don't think Microsoft is just as arrogant to do the same with Windows?
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Ahh, that brings back memories. the original august 25 1995 version...
Buggy OpenGL. Lethargic boots. daily crashes,
What a piece of shit
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
..
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
because for me "multiuser-OS" means that each user have everything separated, not just login name, password and some desktop settings. by everything i mean also every existing app preferencies to be stored separately for each user. also i mean (if remote access is possible) to be able to work with system at the same time as another user. etc.
example: i'm still "fighting" with my colegue on photoshop pelettes positions and some other preferences because adobe takes same "multiuser" policy as microsoft.
hany
Uhhh.... Microsoft hides the differences, trying to create the impression amongs not only users, but DEVELOPERS, that programming for the different versions of Win32 is seamless.
Look at how much weight they put on adverts for Excel for Wince, thus "proving" the portability. Not for develpers? What if said ads are in developer mags?
Win32s is loathed by MS. I know of one well-known Win32s app that doesn't work perfectly in Win32: SPSS 6.1.3. It has problems with ODBC.
Win16 apps work on Win32 systems in as much as what the Win16 app does is supported either by WOW (Windows-on-Windows, how NT supports WIn16) or by the thunking layer(s) in Win32. If you have a Win16 app that interacts directly with hardware, it just won't work in NT/Win2k, as that is not allowed.
Sure, these are sort of esoteric issues. But these esoteric issues limit a popular class of software for NT: Games. Wish NT4 had DirectX 5.0? Some DirectX 5 games work in NT4SP3 (which provided some semblance of DirectX3), some don't.
StarCraft works fine in NT4SP3. Civ2, Masters of Orion2 don't. Sure, they're "old" games. But NT people have to waite for Win2k to run DirectX 6.x games!
Believe what you want.
Your machines may be over-priced and may not be state of the art, but at least you aren't MS. OS 9 will be out soon, with new features that people will actually want to have, it will be $100 no matter what, whether you want to upgrade or not. And you actually can upgrade, you don't have to do a clean install.
OS X is coming, OS X Server is hear and all the people who said Apple couldn't deliver shut up real fast.
Apple has finally got it right in the OS dept. They're churning out new versions of the old MacOS nice and quick, and every one is faster and more stable than the last. And at the same time they're building the OS that some Mac users have been waiting for for 7+ years now.
Also, when Apple does bug-fixes, they don't charge $99 for them. OS 8 was $99, 8.1 had bugfixes and HFS+ support - it was free. 8.5 was $99, 8.5.1 - bugfix - free. 8.6 fixed bugs and improved support for games - it was free. At least Apple understands that they shouldn't make us pay because they did something wrong the first time around.
Well, there is an official and partial port of MFC (the most popular classes). Just cause you use some library that isn't available in another OS doesn't mean the OSs are fragmenting. It's no were near as bad as the hundreds of different library versions and branches in Linux and Unix. Generally, any program will compile for all Windows providing you don't use any new function calls not in the old version. Windows has been quite backwards compatible. Things like Win32s alow Win16 to run many Win32 apps as well. I mean, I could be just as "stupid" as say, oh well VB apps compiler straight out and run on win16 win32 and ce....but that would be silly...or would it? I'm a windows developer and am very happy.
Well, there is an official and partial port of MFC (the most popular classes).
Just cause you use some library that isn't available in another OS doesn't mean the OSs are fragmenting.
It's no were near as bad as the hundreds of different library versions and branches in Linux and Unix.
Generally, any program will compile for all Windows providing you don't use any new function calls not in the old version. Windows has been quite backwards compatible. Things like Win32s alow Win16 to run many Win32 apps as well.
I mean, I could be just as "stupid" as say, oh well VB apps compiler straight out and run on win16 win32 and ce....but that would be silly...or would it?
I'm a windows developer and am very happy.
Once upon a time there's this community called eUnuchs. This group of people are full of hacks and can't do any fucking things right. One manifestation is that they created 100 versions of mutually imcompatible and incomplete body of softwares. Fortunately, an orgy called GNU's Not eUnuchs came along and helped them achiev some upward status with Linux. /more.html
However, the eUnuchs group now led by incontinent slashdot imbeciles fear about their past frag tendency. The red eye syndrom compells them to bitch about other OS's pillar they lack.
I sympathesize these dickless man, for they sometimes have good passion about freedom. I encourage them to forget their ugly past and ditch X-widows, shebang, shell bags, c sed awk Perl Open Source shit, and embrance Berling, Python, scsh, scheme Guile Hurd Free software, and look at everything Gnu is Not Unix as a guiding hand to felicity.
Xah http://www.best.com/~xah/PageTwo_dir
does it mean i have to write new windowing stuff too? (to avoid conflicts between users)
or whole kernel?
hany
Once upon a time there's this community called eUnuchs. This group of people are full of hacks and can't do any fucking things right. One manifestation is that they created 100 versions of mutually imcompatible and incomplete body of softwares. Fortunately, an orgy called GNU's Not eUnuchs came along and helped them achiev some upward status with Linux.
However, the eUnuchs group now led by incontinent slashdot imbeciles fear about their past frag tendency. The red eye syndrom compells them to bitch about other OS's pillar they lack.
I sympathesize these dickless man, for they sometimes have good passion about freedom. I encourage them to forget their ugly past and ditch X-widows, shebang, shell bags, c sed awk Perl Open Source shit, and embrance Berling, Python, scsh, scheme Guile Hurd Free software, and look at everything Gnu is Not Unix as a guiding hand to felicity.
Xah, http://www.best.com/~xah/PageTwo_dir /more.html
I wouldn't be surprised if the API's do exist to remotely administer NT, but they don't seem to be readily documented.
:)
Back Orifice 2000! And it's Open Source(tm)!!
sorry I couldn't resist, and "Open Source" isn't really a trademark. I always thought trade marking the term Open Source was kind of weird anyway...
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I was in total disbelief. He was telling me that VB5 would not read in any of their VB3 programs. They had to first import it into VB4, and then take that and move it to VB5.
I, of course, thought the person was nuts and out of their mind. I have no VB experience but do realise that they have project files and such. The fact that it will only read its own version and the one before it, however, still has me shaking my head in disbelief.
Is this really true? I really didn't have time to argue with the user, so they got their VB4.
Of course, when VB6 came out, we had to upgrade and not skip a version again... :-(
What a racket.
I don't really use NT much (actualy, I try to avoid it), do they work an Administrator mode, or whatever?
:)
anyway the main point was just that windows is not "fragmented" and certanly not in the sense that UNIX was. Also that we should be carfull, spew FUD about windows. We don't want windows users to hate us
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Any normal (read: NOT micros~1 window~1) operating system shouldn't let a messed-up app take down another prog or the whole system with it. It doesn't matter if you have 2 apps installed or 2,000. Windows is notorious for letting one app trash the entire system. That's why I try to stick to Linux.
:) and i'll probably change the nic in a couple days.. I got some RealTek piece of crap when the guys came in to install my cable modem. Haha funny thing is that I ended up configuring and setting up my 2 boxes because it would take the loser installation guy hours to do it :)
On a side note.. I just want to make a comment about linux's (still) inadequate hardware support... I have a beautiful P3-500 box sitting at home but I can't really run linux on it b/c it won't support my pci sound card and my NIC.. I could change out the sound card but its a big expense for me (i'm looking for QUALITY hardware, ya know?
Eat shit! A hundred billion flies can't be wrong!
there the exact same thing, the even follow the same build numbers 950, 1111, 1212, 1998. each one is a little more stable. and 98 is *much* more stable then build 950.. (the august 25 1995 version). 98 also has IE4 "built in"...
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
actualy, I'd bet linux is more stable *beacuse* it supports less hardware, if we had every shitty hardware company come out with kernel level drivers for linux, it would be unstable to (when using that hardware)
Microsoft dosn't write the drivers themselfs
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Frankly, this is a silly article. Speaking as someone who writes code for both Linux and Windows and ports between them, intra-Windows porting is far easier than Unix-to-Unix porting. For that matter, Unix-to-Windows is easy as well. The only one that's really sometimes hard is porting Windows programs to UNIX, where certain functionality simply doesn't exist. If you consider, say, Win95 and Win98 to be "fragments", then you'd have to do the same for Linux 2.0 vs. 2.2, or RH 6.0 vs. RH 5.2... It's ridiculous!
if you (engeneer) did bad decisiona about software, you/your boss/your firm/... loose:
1) cost of software (not usable thus lost)
2) damages caused by bad decision (lost income, etc.)
"2nd" can't be changed (i'm talking about situation after damage) but when you (engeneer) did use free software, "1st" is $0 (or cost of CD or internet connection). and "1st" can be pretty big bunch of money when using some commercial solution!
hany
Could you finally get rid of that ? in your postings, please. It?s not that ``cool'' and it only demonstrates that you?re using software screwed up by our "friend" Microsoft.
--
OS lover
OS lover
Heh, that grammatical mistake made my day. No offense, but that was hilarious!
I don't know why 98 would be crashing so much, with that setup. I don't know for sure, but my guess would be the CPU or the mother board. Check amptrons site for BIOS upgrades (I have an amptron myself and it works pretty well).
That's funny, my guess would be the operating system ; )
chris
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
I was going to go to bed... but noooo... somebody posts something and now I gotta respond to this one. Microsoft bashing is counterproductive for Linux advocacy even when the fact are correct...... yours are not correct and they're skewed the same kind of way we've seen the enemy twist the words.
/dl the new one, compile it, then do the same for my windows sharing client /server (samba). Microsoft's way is to create a service pack that contains all that stuff. Is their method better? Probably for them. Should they get bitched at for this practice? Should Apache or Perl get bitched at for releasing bug fixes often? I don't think so. Why is it if Redhat releases a new version, they're gods and if Microsoft releases one they're stupid money grubbing, bad code writing, assholes (mind you I'm NOT saying they're not money grubbing, bad coding, assholes).
For instance:
"now 7 different versions of the Windows 98 second edition and they're not all the same product!"
Oh My God!!!!.. Microsoft puts their patches out in chunks, not individually like we do. If they did create a patch for ftp.exe and every other little app that's included in the box I'd be rich running around patching this and that. Microsoft takes all their little patches and combines them into a service pack/new version so the mindless hordes of start button clickers can do a whole lot of patching with one double click.
How many different versions of samba or apache have been released in the last 6 months? I don't know either, but there have been a couple anyway. So if I want to upgrade my webserver I gotto apache.org,
As far as backward compatibility? They win hands down.... Which is why they will eventually fail.
I've got 16 bit win 3.1 apps, EGA dos apps etc., running on a 98 FE (First Edition:) box. Yeah, it crashes daily and yeah, I don't like it but it's a necessary evil at this point. Microsoft cannot alienate their customer base without taking a serious, serious, hit. Linux shows up, it's free, no one in their right mind would ever bitch at Linus 'cause him and his group are doing us all a favor and you don't look a gift horse in the mouth. If, next week, Linus says "hey Xwindows won't work with our new kernel" the guys who are doing the hacking, hunker down and modify X. Those of us who aren't that talented, wait patiently and are very grateful when the Xwin guys get things working and we can up to the new, new kernel.
I've had this thought for months now and am amazed I haven't heard any of you guys suggest it yet......
Microsoft has painted themselves into a corner and can't seem to see a way out. They're got an unstable OS (any of them except weak old dos) and have billions of lines of code in their dlls that they've built their little house of cards on. Their oses have to continue to get less stable, unless they clean house. They have a really big house with a lot of clutter and it will be difficult if not impossible to clean without accidently breaking some windows (get it? hehe).
Here's my prediction... and you all won't like it.
Microsoft will create their own, Linux distrib. I'll bet they're working on it right now. They would get the best of both worlds that way. Let's call it micro-nix. They have some very talented people, slick installs, cpu power out the butt (they need it, you all know why), a wan that the US gov would kill for, a marketting group from hell (I think that's pretty obvious) and their gaggle of lawyers. They'll start porting office (their only decent product if you exclude Access IMHO) Now they'll start out all fine and well and stick to the GNU/GPL and with their huge marketing engine they'll capture every newbie Linux wannabe for the next 3 years. And it'll probably be pretty good. They'll create their own window manager and install/configuration app and everyone except us hardcore Open Source people will buy their distrib for $25 or $35 bucks. Next thing you know they'll start whittling away at the GPL and begin to change things just a bit to break everyone else. Just look at what they did to HTML 3.X . We'll take them to court and it'll get stalled, drug out till we're out of cash and their lawyers will rip up the GPL. Next thing you know, they're right back in the driver's seat and are busy monopolizing once again. Hey Slashdot guys, this would be a good discussion all in itself.
Just my $.002
I completely understand the Linux Advocacy HowTo FAQ, but I think some people here are taking it entirely too far.
YES - It's important not to advocate Linux to the extent of bashing alternatives...and,
YES - It's important to acknowledge Linux's weaknesses (if they do exist), as real.
But lately the comments section has turned into the bash Linux site. (And strangely enough, it seems to have happened after Microsoft started their "ANTI-LINUX" campaign). Listen, this story isn't remotely about Linux -- it's about Windows, how did the comment section get turned into an OS Holy War(TM) against Linux? This story presents a real issue with real concerns about Windows.
Why is it that, lately, any story on slashdot with even the slightest negative comment about Microsoft is treated as "Just more MS bashing?"
FUD is a real tactic. Just because someone makes an accusation against Linux, doesn't make it true. Before complying with the "Acknowledge Linux's weaknesses" step of the Advocacy HowTo, CHECK to make sure the weakness actually exists. If it's not there, STAND UP FOR LINUX! Say, "No, that's wrong. See, that is addressed right here..."
Not everything Microsoft churns out is the high holy. Many Microsoft programs (and Operating Systems) have bugs, many are error prone. On the rare occasion that Linux and Windows have the same failing, it's okay to point that out. But it's important not to limit comparisons between to two -- if Linux and SCO-Unix have the same failing, point that out too. It's not bashing until you say that Linux alternatives "suck."
To address the article at hand (and hopefully save my moderated rating), I would like to say that when I have been required to use Windows, that I have experienced problems with incompatibility between certain Windows programs and certain versions of Windows. However I would like to note that those are mostly issues of upward compatibility. But I think that IF a program requires a certain patch level to Windows, then it should say that. If the program requires Win95B to run instead of Win95A, it should say that. If it requires Service Pack 3,309,292 to run, it should say, "Program Requires Windows 95A, Service Pack 3,309,292." Not just, "Program Requires Windows 95" because that's incorrect.
Linux 2.2.10 was supposed to ix a pile of minor problems. Why, then, are so many people having trouble with it? If you have, or plan to get, Linux--read on!
I've been getting a ton of reader mail about Linux; lots of people are having trouble getting it installed and working correctly.
But before I go into specifics, let's take a second to define some terms because "Linux" can mean many different things--there are no less than 191 (in the 2.x.x series!) and they're not all the same product.
Its a matter of perspective, people...personally, I only see 3 Windows branches: Win 3.x, Win9x, WinNT. Linux, I see 3 branches: Linux 1.x.x, Linux 2.0.x, Linux 2.2.x. Although there may be 7 different version of Win98, there's been how many kernels? 191 since 2.0.x. (calculation done hastily early in the morning...I HATE mornings, but I digress).
And save me the stuff about "But 2.1.x/2.3.x is devel!!" I consider most MS products to be still in development ;-)
This article is FUD, pure and simple. Yeah, MS isn't perfect, but I don't know of any OS out there that is. I know from expierence that Linux isn't(cases: People can print to my printer through samba, but *I* can't print to it...*growl*; I wish KDE would have an option to make double-clicking icons open/run them...I haven't had a chance to look at the source to try to fix it...; i have more, but I'll hold back for now).
The way to beating MS is by having a better, easier to use, more stable product - something 90% of the people out there feel comfortable with. There is no uber OS. But one with a low learning curve for newbies, and lots of customizability for the more advanced users, and you've got it. Right now, Windows is the closest to that goal. MS R&D is smart on their design, even if the implementation is poor.
Will Linux be the MS killer? Honestly, I don't think so. Based on the trends I've seen in the industry, an OS who's based on a CLI won't be it. Yes, Win9x is based on DOS, but I can configure a Windows machines with all the given dialogs. I'd like to see a person be able to fully change Linux's config without opening up an xterm *once*.
Ah well...just my $0.02
--------------------------
How can this story possibly be considered FUD against MS? It was written by a middle aged, white, marketing director. Plus, it's loaded via an active server page. If that doesn't say PRO-MS advocate, I don't know what does!
the hardware looks good, it may be the Chip though. Cyrix's are generally pretty crapy, and not always supported well (so more bugs may show up). You might consider getting a K6-2 for when you upgrade instead. There pretty cheap now, for the sub-300mhz range. pricewatch.com lists a k6-2 300 at just $30.
I don't know why 98 would be crashing so much, with that setup. I don't know for sure, but my guess would be the CPU or the mother board. Check amptrons site for BIOS upgrades (I have an amptron myself and it works pretty well).
It's not the quality of the hardware itself, it's the quality of the drivers (except in the case of CPUs and MoBos, witch don't need drivers). If you ever get a new motherboard, look into Soyo, Abit, or Aopen, and read reviews online.
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Don't forget the multiple Windows 95s. I have one of the early (95A) versions. I couldn't use a K6 faster than about 330MHz with it (there's a patch for 95B or later fixing the dumb bug, but not for 95A). Discworld Noir apparently won't install (it uses a function added subsequently). USB can only be added to 95B or later. I'm not sure about AGP, but I'm not risking it.
Just how multiuser is NT? Not at all, from where I'm standing.... unless you count 1 user at a time.
Sure you can share disk and printers with some access control, but I can whack X screens and X keyboards on Unix and have X users on the same box... Be they dumb terminals or X terminals... Some cases I can just whack 2 VGA cards in one box to do it!
Who is Seg Fault, and what is he doing with Kernel Space?
>Only one user can be the interactive user i.e. the one that gets a screen to play with. AFAIK there's nothing stopping
:-)
>you writing your own multiuser shell onto the existing multiuser kernel and running it as user mode code (the NT4
>windowing stuff runs in kernel mode).
I think the phrase we are looking for is 'non-trivial'.
Grafting a new remote login shell onto NT is certainly possible, but it would require some hefty rewriting of all the heavily GUI-ed admin toops and apps to make running them remotely feasible.
Or you could just run an X server on NT or something, but that opens another can of flames entirely.
stu.
-- Stu
Perhaps if you ditched 95/98 and used a decent OS like NT Workstation your troubles would be reduced.
I quite happily skip between NT and Linux depending on the project I'm working on...neither OS crashes on me or blue screens almost no matter what I subject it too(Linux has been the most fragile).
I'm looking forard to VMWare for NT so I can run both OSs at the same time.
Who cares really.
Oh come on....
So why can't exchange server process rules that write to personal folders unless I am logged onto a workstation running the client?
Terminal server is vaguely multi user.... but have you seen how much memory it hoggs!
Who is Seg Fault, and what is he doing with Kernel Space?
I'm tired and its fun to flame :)
:(
He, might actualy be a windows user, just incredibly stupid himself, but it just seemed to me to be a "sarcastic take" on windows users, a la Gerold Holms.
so anyway, sorry
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I'm all for Linux, but spreading lies about Windows this way is not going to change the world for better. As for the article, it may be right about Win98SE being buggy (haven't tried it myself, but I hear it). Still, just because there are several ways to install it (full version CDs, upgrade CDs, service packs etc.) does NOT mean that there are several "versions" around!
.02 euros.
Just my
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
os/2 it is, then i don't have to worry about upgrades!!!!!!
I believe I have read that 40% of NT 4.0 programs won't run on W2K. That strikes me as pretty serious compatibility problems. Programs from my old Slackware 1.0.9 kernel still run on the same box, even tho it has been upgraded to ELF, glibc, and 2.0.3? kernel.
--
Infuriate left and right
What a load of Crap... I work on flight simulation software, a couple million LOC, (won't say which because I don't speak for my employer).. We compile it once.. runs on 95, 98, NT 4, and probably 3.51(though I've never tried).. You should stop and think about what you are writing.. Portability is for the most part in the hands of the programmer... As long as the OS designer didn't go out of there way to make API's incompatable... I can just as easily write code for any Unix that would be hell to port, as I can write code that would be hell to port between 95/NT.. My guess is it only seems Unix is more portable because Unix programmers have had to deal with portability issues for a long time..And thus avoid those pitfalls.. -JD
You'd think this was a freaking Windoze site.
"As far as I know, with Linux, most (if not all) of the hardware stuff is figured out dynamically when the computer boots. "
:-)
Sadly, no. In fact, no no no noNO NO NO!! arg. Thud.
Linux can dynamically detect far less hardware (and less reliably) than Win95+, especially if the hardware is less than a year old.
Hardware config for most things is stored in ASCII files on the hard drive, which are read during the boot processes.
-----
I've had a similar experience, but with none of your problems.
/etc/fstab and /etc/lilo.conf, and reinstall LILO. Everything worked fine (at that time I was running Slackware 3.1 with all sorts of upgrades).
I agree that it should be nice if Linux could auto-detect changes in ther layout of your Hard Disks, but when I moved my primary slave (which is the drive Linux boots from) to the secondary master position, all I had to do was change
Windows still today acts funny sometimes after the change: if I go into Windows Explorer, sometimes everything but the C: (the only thing that was not changed) do not show up. If I refresh (F5), though, all comes back to normal (I can see the D: drive, a partition in the second master, my CD-ROM, that was sec master and now is sec slave, and the Linux partition - I use fsdext2 for that, if I remember the name right).
Hmmm ....
Can anyone actually name me an app that requires specific kernel version (or at least a certain version). Oh yeah, closed-source binary only kernel modules from don't count!
Do you know why RobLimo and CmdTaco keeps on putting offensive/misinformed information in the articles posted on slashdot?
I think I heard this from here somewhere, but the intention is to get people offended so *you* will post your replys to it.
Think about it, the only thing slashdot has to offer is this forum. Without post in this forum, slashdot is worthless.
The question is: is fragmentation a technical problem or a marketing problem?
A more important question is: how does fragmentation actually harm a platform? There seems to be a general fear of fragmentation about in the Linux community. But fragmentation doesn't seemed to have harmed Microsoft any; If anything, the confusion just encourages their customers to go out and buy the very latest of everything "just to be on the safe side". In the realm of Consumer Linuxism, this would translate into the latest Redhat or the latest Caldera, wouldn't it?
Personally I want everybody to do it my way.