Re:Sounds like 13yr old kid rants
on
Joel On Software
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· Score: 1
Software development is such a complex process, and for anything other than some shitty little bug tracking tool, one that involves more than a few people
Interesting comment. When I read this sentence I couldn't help but think about a chap called ESR who wrote a whole book based on a shitty little mail application. And somehow, that book has turned into one of the cornerstones of the open source movement.
For many segments of this market, the operating system used becomes a secondary issue to having an integrated or working system.
Excellent point, and a point completely missed by a great many.
Re:I do not pay much attention to Joel Spolsky
on
Joel On Software
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· Score: 4, Insightful
You don't think that might be because Joel doesn't share your opinions about Open Source software?
Furthermore, Joel's "technical interview questions" are less than optimal. If you want to assess a prospective employee's intelligence, the first questions that you ask should be along these lines: "How long have you been using Linux or *BSD? How long have you been using Apache, Tomcat, Zope, mod_perl, PHP, gcc, etc.? What is the difference between TCP and UDP? What are the most salient differences between Linux distributions these days? Why do you use your particular distribution (of Linux, *BSD, etc.)? What do you know about package management?"
Well that would be great if you were interviewing them for a job developing web applications on Linux - however, since he writes most of his software for the Windows platform they would be pretty useless questions really wouldn't they?
Windows will run anything with the proper couple of letters appended to the end of the filename.
True to an extent. The only caveat is that you must have the execute permission on that file. The trouble is, it's not that common for people to deny the execute permission.
They are already the largest software company in the world, why don't they use these resources to be the best?
They're not in the business of being the best, they're in the business of being good enough... Linux is lucky in that it doesn't have a development budget that it needs to keep to, and doesn't have a release schedule that it needs to keep either.
Yeah, that would be "improvements". Not patches. There is a difference. Improvements are things like the popup blocker and the Local Machine lockdown stuff. Not security patches, which are fixes for known holes.
What does "mostly fixed" mean? Surely it either is or it isn't fixed? And for what it's worth, it's not even close to being mostly fixed in Firefox 1.0PR. Unless by mostly fixed you mean "does it consistently every time now"?
...is complete without a link to SullyWatch. It keeps an eye on some of the more obvious inconsistencies in Mr Sullivan's writing - of which there are many.
The article Windows XP Shows the Direction Microsoft is Going shows a little of the inability of Microsoft to be a good world citizen. It's old now and needs updating, but it does give a small idea of the breadth and depth of Microsoft abusiveness.
Your article is all very interesting and such, and we could debate a great many of the points that your raise, but I'm just going to pick on the command prompt stuff. For example, you say "the command line interface does less in some ways than the CLI in Windows 98 SE (Second Edition)" which is patently nonsense. The command interpreter (cmd.exe) in Windows NT based OS'es is infinitely more useful than any of the Windows 9x line ever was. Of course, since you don't provide concrete examples of what you mean, it's very hard to refute your assertation. Quickedit is also there, (I'm assuming you mean right click copy and paste) and works far better. I've pointed out to you before your inaccuracies regarding disk duplication, and your biggest complaint seems to be "Windows does it differently than I want it to".
MS makes sure that migrating away from their software is demonstratably more expensive then staying with them.
And you forgot the flip side to this as well:
MS makes sure that migrating away from their competitors software is easy, and relatively cheap. For instance - the migration tools for Lotus Notes which ship with Exchange.
There is nothing stopping other vendors (open or closed source) from writing their own tools to make migrating away from MS easier - just that they don't seem to do it. Seems to me that it would be a relatively wise strategy.
Services is a notoriously difficult business model to make money from (or at least, to make a decent amount of money from), especially if you want to do stuff like support Open Source development as well.
Amen brother. I would like to see someone try to migrate to Firefox in a corporate environment and then realise that they can't ensure that everyone has a standard configuration that is easily controlled. Don't get me wrong, Firefox is a great browser (although 0.9 doesn't seem to be as good as 0.8 was) but until we can manage it centrally it's not going to replace IE in the organisations I work with.
And yes I know it's open source and I know that I could probably write some management modules, but that's why I have application vendors. They write software, I don't (and don't want to).
This has always been a hack to me. You have to pollute winnt\inf which means you're polluting your Windows provided driver stash.
No, you can leave the inf directory intact, and provide additional directories to look for drivers. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\DevicePath: REG_EXPAND_SZ:%SystemRoot%\Inf;%SystemRoot%\Driver s\network adapter etc.
Hmm... I don't see WMIC in my windows 2000 install. That's cheating if it doesn't come with the OS.;-) Maybe it's an XP thing
Yeah, it is an XP/2003 thing - although WMI is still available from vbscript **shudder**
I never said WMIC was easy or even informative. However, it is very powerful. Here's the msdn page about it. Here's the stuff about the wmi hardware classes. Win32_PNPEntity would be the way to go I believe
Still works for me under Windows XP SP1 & SP2, Windows 2000 SP3 & Windows 2003. I just reflexively type a space anyway, but it certainly still seems to work. What version are you using?
Update your operating system with all the latest patches:
This one is tricky, not aware of a way to do this.
Install a piece of hardware with an OEM driver (not provided by MS):
You don't really need to do this as such. All you do is update a registry location which tells Windows where to look for new drivers. Then dump the driver in there, install the hardware and plug and play does the rest.
Reinstall a piece of the Windows Operating System
sysocmgr/i:%windir%\inf\sysoc.inf/u:scriptname.txt. netsh can also be useful for configuring network based stuff.
Discover information about the infamous "Unknown Device"
Use WMI - that's what it's for. WMIC.exe is the command line WMI util.
No regular expressions as such, it's all built into the command interpreter to do that though.
e.g echo %DATE% will return Fri 02/07/2004 (today anyway). If you only want the year then you do echo %DATE:~-4% (last four characters of the variable). If you want the day part only, you do echo %DATE:~4,2%. (two characters, starting at the fourth if you count from zero)
There's some quite flexible stuff built into cmd.exe if you're willing to look - some excellent for loops which are my favourite.
Why would I need to? In 2000/XP/2003 I just use the %DATE% variable, or the %TIME% variable, which are hidden environment variables built into the shell.
If you have fun twiddling with your operating system then that's cool for you. Some of us use our computers to have fun doing other stuff that isn't fiddling around with our OS, that just helps us do it (be it Windows, Linux or otherwise). Do you really get a blast from the fact that you're simply using Linux?
Until opensource developers treat API's in binary modules are sacrosanct, it means that users keep having to reinvent the wheel, or refix broken parts.
Open source developers are lead by example, the biggest being the kernel developers. They don't seem to mind breaking compatability across version releases, even minor releases. While this might be good for design/code purity, it's no good for people who happen to be using API's that break.
Even that article states that it was in a beta. You are the first person I've ever read about that claims to have seen it in a live version of Windows. You were right to be worried about QA - you were shipping beta software.
If the GOV would do their job and stop this COLLUSION and force people to buy Bill'$ O$ at Compusa for $100 bucks then there would be REAL tangible change for the better.
Cool, then everyone could pay more for Windows rather than less. You know that they only pay around $30-$40 for the OS when it comes bundled right?
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Interesting comment. When I read this sentence I couldn't help but think about a chap called ESR who wrote a whole book based on a shitty little mail application. And somehow, that book has turned into one of the cornerstones of the open source movement.
For many segments of this market, the operating system used becomes a secondary issue to having an integrated or working system.
Excellent point, and a point completely missed by a great many.
Furthermore, Joel's "technical interview questions" are less than optimal. If you want to assess a prospective employee's intelligence, the first questions that you ask should be along these lines: "How long have you been using Linux or *BSD? How long have you been using Apache, Tomcat, Zope, mod_perl, PHP, gcc, etc.? What is the difference between TCP and UDP? What are the most salient differences between Linux distributions these days? Why do you use your particular distribution (of Linux, *BSD, etc.)? What do you know about package management?"
Well that would be great if you were interviewing them for a job developing web applications on Linux - however, since he writes most of his software for the Windows platform they would be pretty useless questions really wouldn't they?
True to an extent. The only caveat is that you must have the execute permission on that file. The trouble is, it's not that common for people to deny the execute permission.
They are already the largest software company in the world, why don't they use these resources to be the best?
They're not in the business of being the best, they're in the business of being good enough...
Linux is lucky in that it doesn't have a development budget that it needs to keep to, and doesn't have a release schedule that it needs to keep either.
Yeah, that would be "improvements". Not patches. There is a difference. Improvements are things like the popup blocker and the Local Machine lockdown stuff. Not security patches, which are fixes for known holes.
What does "mostly fixed" mean? Surely it either is or it isn't fixed? And for what it's worth, it's not even close to being mostly fixed in Firefox 1.0PR. Unless by mostly fixed you mean "does it consistently every time now"?
(Firefox 1.0PR, Windows XP SP2)
...is complete without a link to SullyWatch. It keeps an eye on some of the more obvious inconsistencies in Mr Sullivan's writing - of which there are many.
Your article is all very interesting and such, and we could debate a great many of the points that your raise, but I'm just going to pick on the command prompt stuff. For example, you say "the command line interface does less in some ways than the CLI in Windows 98 SE (Second Edition)" which is patently nonsense. The command interpreter (cmd.exe) in Windows NT based OS'es is infinitely more useful than any of the Windows 9x line ever was. Of course, since you don't provide concrete examples of what you mean, it's very hard to refute your assertation. Quickedit is also there, (I'm assuming you mean right click copy and paste) and works far better.
I've pointed out to you before your inaccuracies regarding disk duplication, and your biggest complaint seems to be "Windows does it differently than I want it to".
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe your iPod will still work when it's not plugged into the USB port of your work computer?
And you forgot the flip side to this as well:
MS makes sure that migrating away from their competitors software is easy, and relatively cheap. For instance - the migration tools for Lotus Notes which ship with Exchange.
There is nothing stopping other vendors (open or closed source) from writing their own tools to make migrating away from MS easier - just that they don't seem to do it. Seems to me that it would be a relatively wise strategy.
Services is a notoriously difficult business model to make money from (or at least, to make a decent amount of money from), especially if you want to do stuff like support Open Source development as well.
Someone who should know explained it better than I ever will though...
Amen brother. I would like to see someone try to migrate to Firefox in a corporate environment and then realise that they can't ensure that everyone has a standard configuration that is easily controlled. Don't get me wrong, Firefox is a great browser (although 0.9 doesn't seem to be as good as 0.8 was) but until we can manage it centrally it's not going to replace IE in the organisations I work with.
And yes I know it's open source and I know that I could probably write some management modules, but that's why I have application vendors. They write software, I don't (and don't want to).
No, you can leave the inf directory intact, and provide additional directories to look for drivers. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\DevicePath: REG_EXPAND_SZ:%SystemRoot%\Inf;%SystemRoot%\Driver s\network adapter etc.
Hmm... I don't see WMIC in my windows 2000 install. That's cheating if it doesn't come with the OS. ;-) Maybe it's an XP thing
Yeah, it is an XP/2003 thing - although WMI is still available from vbscript **shudder**
I never said WMIC was easy or even informative. However, it is very powerful. Here's the msdn page about it. Here's the stuff about the wmi hardware classes. Win32_PNPEntity would be the way to go I believe
Or to use less mucking about, this:
set TODAY=%DATE:~-10% %TIME%
Still works for me under Windows XP SP1 & SP2, Windows 2000 SP3 & Windows 2003. I just reflexively type a space anyway, but it certainly still seems to work. What version are you using?
This one is tricky, not aware of a way to do this.
Install a piece of hardware with an OEM driver (not provided by MS):
You don't really need to do this as such. All you do is update a registry location which tells Windows where to look for new drivers. Then dump the driver in there, install the hardware and plug and play does the rest.
Reinstall a piece of the Windows Operating System
sysocmgr /i:%windir%\inf\sysoc.inf /u:scriptname.txt. netsh can also be useful for configuring network based stuff.
Discover information about the infamous "Unknown Device"
Use WMI - that's what it's for. WMIC.exe is the command line WMI util.
No regular expressions as such, it's all built into the command interpreter to do that though.
e.g echo %DATE% will return Fri 02/07/2004 (today anyway). If you only want the year then you do echo %DATE:~-4% (last four characters of the variable). If you want the day part only, you do echo %DATE:~4,2%. (two characters, starting at the fourth if you count from zero)
There's some quite flexible stuff built into cmd.exe if you're willing to look - some excellent for loops which are my favourite.
Why would I need to? In 2000/XP/2003 I just use the %DATE% variable, or the %TIME% variable, which are hidden environment variables built into the shell.
date /t & time /t
With Linux (or BSD), I'm not forced into running a GUI on a server.
Not a kernel issue. Kernel handles windowing, sure, but whether or not it has a GUI is not a kernel issue.
All services and subsystems are configurable via whatever text editor I find handy.
Not a kernel issue
Installing software (except perhaps kernels) doesn't require rebooting the system.
Not a kernel issue...
Like duh, he was talking about the kernel. The kernel has nothing to do with any of those things.
If you have fun twiddling with your operating system then that's cool for you. Some of us use our computers to have fun doing other stuff that isn't fiddling around with our OS, that just helps us do it (be it Windows, Linux or otherwise). Do you really get a blast from the fact that you're simply using Linux?
Open source developers are lead by example, the biggest being the kernel developers. They don't seem to mind breaking compatability across version releases, even minor releases. While this might be good for design/code purity, it's no good for people who happen to be using API's that break.
Even that article states that it was in a beta. You are the first person I've ever read about that claims to have seen it in a live version of Windows. You were right to be worried about QA - you were shipping beta software.
Cool, then everyone could pay more for Windows rather than less. You know that they only pay around $30-$40 for the OS when it comes bundled right?