I find VNC very quick on 10Mb lan, even some interactive games like xboing are very playable, and not even a quarter of the 10Mb bandwidth used. It was fairly usable even using my 28.8 modem at home. Much quicker than PCAnywhere. I did some tests though and found it wasn't very quick when the server was running on platforms other than Linux (e.g. Windows.) Connecting to a Windows session was much closer to PCAnywhere slowness. I do run icewm though, which is much lighter than gnome or kde. I've never used terminal services, so I can't really compare it - but in general, Windows was just not designed to stuff like this at all, and X is; so Windows is almost inherently going to be slower.
I understood Moores law* as applying to conventional silicon-based transistor circuits, not to other technologies like quantum computers. If thats the case then Moore's "law" has held up pretty well so far.
* Yes I know its not a law in the conventional scientific sense.
I'm kind of surprised noone has called this as flamebait, which it basically is
I couldn't figure out if you were talking about my post or your own as being flamebait.. ?
Anway, regarding public transport, I live in South Africa (Pretoria), and our public transport is simply not nearly on the same level as it is in developed countries. I need a car, the public transport isn't good enough. We simply don't have busses running after about 6 or 7 in the evening (I usually go home from work much later than that, plus I usually go pick up my girlfriend in the evenings), and we have only a very limited train transport system running through the center of town and out to the townships etc, mainly for the poorer "cheap labour" blacks (ugly legacy of the past here). The trains don't run past near where I work or where I live or anywhere in between, and the trains are considered dangerous anyway (they are prone to sporadic violence, shootings etc.)
Simple traffic fatalities (not considering pollution effects etc.) in the USA alone kill 4-5 times the number killed in the Bhopal disaster every single year
Not nearly 4-5 times. Sorry, I've done my research:) In 1998 car accidents in the USA resulted in 7468 deaths (http://webapp.cdc.gov/), while Bhopal killed somewhere from 5000 to 10000 people ("8,000 people were killed in its immediate aftermath and over 500,000 people suffered from injuries" according to http://www.corpwatch.org/bhopal/) Even by the lowest Bhopal death counts you'll find its only maybe a factor of 2. Anyway, yes, 10000 is not all that much in the big scheme of things, but my point was that as man progresses, these statistics of accidents are getting bigger exponentially, not linearly.
Hardly flamebait, but anyway. I didn't mean that a few sterile moths has much potential to do damage, in fact I doubt it's liable to do any damage. I was speaking more generally about the underlying technologies and the direction it is going. No, I don't have kids, but I may still, I'm only 24 now. Even if I don't have kids, I still care greatly about whether or not our descendants will be able to see a real rainforest or a real tiger. I'm not some tree-hugging anti-technology hippie, I'm all for technology. But the fact is, all our technology and smarts allow us the potential to have the best of both worlds, so there is no reason why we shouldn't just put in the bit of extra effort it takes to not completely plunder our natural resources, and to put in the bit of effort and caution it takes to strike a good balance. Believe me, speaking as someone with a 50/50 chance currently of having inherited a serious brain-degenerative genetic disorder, I know all too well just how powerful and useful genetic technologies will become in the future. Genetic technology gives mankind the potential to finally reverse the damage that thousands of years of having nearly no natural selection has caused (how many people do you know would be able to survive primitive caveman type life without some benefits of modern medicine? You can rule out diabetics, many asthmatics, people who can't see well enough with glasses/contact lenses, many mentally ill people, and many many other ailments that modern medicine have made sufferable). I'm all for it. But come on, we must at least be cautious about it.
Hehe.. a "me-too" post, how sad. Anyway, I also kept my e-mail address at geocities. Can't remember having any problems. There was a problem when they tried to change their TOS to that draconian "we own your stuff" one, but enough people bitched about it and up and left geocities (I was busy packing myself) that they changed the TOS back to more friendly terms. Thats the only problem I remember having. I must say though I get an absurd amount of junk email on my geocities address. Although I haven't been very careful with it in the past (newsgroup and webbots:( ), so I can't rightly blame Yahoo for that.
I'm sorry, but apparently I missed the part of human history where oppression and human rights violations were extinguished. I guess there really is, as you say, nothing worthwhile left to protest against. Oh well. I guess I'll have to find another outlet for my (ooh some big words here so erudite lets mod it up) isolationist paranoid hot-headed tendencies.
It's fine and well for you to stand there and say "hey lets just try it and if it turns out to be a big fuckup we'll fix the mess afterwards". As you say, mankind has been following this strategy for progress for thousands of years. And time after time after time, almost without exception, experiments of new things have resulted in harm to other people (very often harm that could have been averted with even rudimentary precautions, but then, what the hell, as you say, lets throw all caution to the wind.)
Except the only problem with this is quite simply that as technology progresses, the stakes get higher, and the damage wider. A few hundred years ago, no matter what new technology you tried, the best you could probably do if you messed up was a bit of localized damage and a few people dead. Nowadays if you mess up, you mess up big (e.g. chernobyl, or the accident at a pesticide plant in India in the 80's which killed something like 10000 civilians.) Mistakes now have much bigger implications than ever before - if there was ever a time to be cautious, it is now. You are seriously naive if you believe that what we do now will take hundreds and thousands of years to show up. After all, it only took a few decades to rip a huge fucking hole in the ozone layer, and only 150 years of industrialization to set global warming off (assuming that this is the cause of course.) The genetic manipulation techniques that will be developed in the next 50 years or so can most definitely result in catastrophic screw-ups with the potential to wipe out millions of people. Nobody is saying "stop progress". But we *can* be cautious about it. If we can prevent accidents that could very well directly affect our own children (you don't have any, do you?) or grandchildren, then why shouldn't we? It's a pretty selfish attitude to say "hell we'll all be dead, let our descendants suffer". I'm there are many people here who have children who feel differently about what sort of legacy they'd like to leave to their offspring.
In the loosest sense, cross-breeding IS "genetic engineering" (as you say). Although most people don't think of it as such. I remember reading about when people first began hybridising plants to produce better crops - apparently even back then there was a lot of public protest from people afraid of what might be wrought. Not one person today though seems to think that the great crops we have now are a bad thing. Yet now there is much protest against "genetically modified foods", some countries even attempting to ban them. I suspect that in a couple hundred years, not one person will think its a bad thing.
Making moths that glow is going to be a field day for birds
I don't think it was intended for the glowing moths to be released. I understood it to be that the glowing moths were part of the experimental test group, presumably so that the researchers can locate 'em easily.
biological pest control (which is considered politically correct and envirronmentally sound for reasons which baffle me
Well, biological pest control is by no means considered a panaceia, and a great amount of research and care must (and usually is) taken when attempting it (not sure where you get the idea that it might be considered as being as wonderful as you imply it is.) Anyway, biological pest control is often merely preferred over pesticides because it usually tends to have far fewer other negative effects on the environment (pesticides certainly don't disappear once they've killed the pests - they're a big problem - ending up in other natural wildlife (e.g. birds which eat the pests), in groundwater etc.) I've certainly never heard anybody say that biological pest control is "environmentally sound". It does have its own risks. But when properly researched and implemented, it is often less damaging to the environment than pesticides. Thats all. Not brilliant, amazing or perfect, merely slightly better.
Even windows 95/98 never gave me problems with crashes
You don't use your system for C++ (and/or DirectX) development, do you?
Geez, when I was doing DirectX programming on Win98 I had to reboot on average 2 to 5 times a day, and it was *extremely* rare (e.g. maybe once a month) that I managed a whole day without a reboot. I'm now doing the same work on W2K (on exactly the same hardware, so don't give me the "hardware problem" BS story) and it's been 100% stable. Win9X is a f%#^$@# pile of stinking, rotten sh&*@#. Not proper use of protected mode, combined with a Win16Mutex == crap.
I use W2K on my work box (Pentium III 677, 512 MB RAM, GeForce2). I use it pretty heavily for development, and it's VERY stable. I was doing exactly the same stuff on Win98 a few months back, and it froze up, crashed etc, required rebooting, on average 2 to 5 times a day. But with W2K it's truly "rock solid".
I must say though W2K on my home machine (Celeron 333, 128MB, TNT) did *not* go down well. The setup was flaky from the start. There was in particular a lot of problems with sockets - every time I went online, the thing would mess up after an hour or two and refuse to create any new connections until I rebooted. I would have the occasional complete lockup (while doing OpenGL development.) Generally there were problems. I'm currently only using Linux on that machine.
The motherboards for the two machines are the same brand but different models (earlier version on the celeron system), so my suspicion is that perhaps there was some problem with W2K not liking the earlier motherboard. Both had latest M/B drivers.
I've only recently started using Outlook. It took me about 10 minutes to find the %#@$$@# headers. It's in the most illogical of places. "Options". WTF? @$#%@# crack smoking MS software designers. "View/Headers", yes. "Options", no. And its one of THE most basic features of an e-mail program! The entire Outlook is generally poorly structured - there seems to have been extremely little thought put into what should go where. As far as I can tell you can't even set it up to reply to e-mails in text always, even if they were sent to you as html. After quite a lot of digging around I found you could do this *per contact*, this is about as useful as a hole in the head. And the problem with changing the format every time *after* you've clicked reply is that that line in front of the original e-mail doesn't become a row of ">" (even if you've set Outlook up to reply like this), it just vanishes. Even Outlook Express made more sense, so I don't know where the Outlook team fell off.
It sounds like he may have known in advance that his company was going to want to do this work. If he did, then he may also have a problem, even if the work was done on his own time. If he had known that the client was going to want it, then he may have done it just to get in ahead of his own company on getting the money from the client. In this case he would have effectively been trying to "compete" against the company he works for, which would put him in the wrong, even if the work was done on his own time and own equipment. If done on work time, it definitely belongs to his employer. If done on work equipment, maybe. If your employer asks you to do a task, and you go and do that task *on your own time and equipment*, then your employer usually still has rights to that work under the law, tough luck for you, but this is because this is usually a case of the employee trying to screw the employer. The terms of his contract could make a difference though.
Yes, the Win16mutex is probably one of the most braindamaged things spawned by MS. I would confidently say that that #%$@#%$@$# alone has resulted in more than a week of my life wasted. In fact, one of the bugs happened to be winsock involved - I wasted about two days on it, eventually figuring out that winsock apparently grabs the Win16mutex, and I had a deadlock involving our network stuff and some GetDC locking on a DirectDraw surface. I began to suspect the Win16mutex at some stage, and I compiled the program on Windows2000, and voila, no deadlock. Geez was I pissed.
I'm sure we could make a veeery long list. How about the use of CR/LF pair for text files, wasn't that MS's idea too? And geez, somebody should explain protected mode to the Win9X team. I'm sure I could go on for days about the pain and damage that MS has inflicted on the computer industry. I must say though I'm a reasonably happier programmer now that I've started doing almost all of my work development on Win2K. It was not possible before due to the limited support of DirectX on NT. But when doing this sort of work on Win98, it is quite rare to manage a single days work without a reboot, and not uncommon to have the computer lock up more than 5 times in a single day. Problem with Win16mutex and DirectX - application crash between a lock/unlock? Sorry - hit reset. It is so fucking pathetic it is not even funny. When people start telling me "ah Windows isn't that bad" and "mine doesn't crash that often" or "mine never crashes" or "you must be doing something wrong", it drives me nuts, I wish I could force them to do months of DirectX development on Windows98. There is not one person on the planet who could possibly do more than a few months DirectX development on 98 and still come out not hating Win9X for the piece of shit that it is.
With the Open Source movement, there are plenty of non-MS alternatives
Maybe today the situation is approaching something you can call "choice", given the existence of projects like KDE and Gnome. But back around the time this whole netscape/IE thing was brewing, I remember still having to recompile the kernel just to get my sound card to work. That doesn't even begin to compete, for average computer users, with Windows95. Gnome did not exist, and KDE was an early alpha obscure blip on the horizon. Apple at that time looked like a seriously dying company, IBM had all but completely pulled out of the OS market, and the only other "platforms and altervatives" were the extremely expensive Unix mainframes, such as the SGI's and SUN's. SGI only fairly recently began to produce "affordable" computers, and this trend is still slow to take in big Unix companies. Alternatives? Hardly. The situation is starting to improve. Apple is back on its feet, and Linux is really getting there in terms of applications and usability. But the situation was quite different when the antitrust problems began. The damage has been though, and the law broken. Of course the new IE beats the old netscape - but that is exactly because of the damage inflicted by Microsoft. Many people look back now and say "oh IE is now better, so that must be why it beat Netscape out". Puh-lease - IE 3 stunk like shit, and IE 4 was as unstable and shitty as netscape 4, I remember using all of them. By the release of Netscape 4, though, Netscape was pretty much already dead, and couldn't afford to put the same development effort into NN. IE 5 is basically IE4 with bugfixes, which is hardly groundbreaking given the number of years it has taken them to do only that. That is what happens when a competitor uses cross-funding from other products to drastically undercut your main products pricing - no income, no programmers. No programmers, crappy software (NN4).
Many people (you included) seem to think that Microsoft was the only company who ever wanted to try produce affordable software for the masses on consumer PCs. I've heard this argument a number of times before - basically, the argument is that if Microsoft hadn't been around, nobody would ever have had the "vision" to try develop anything in this market, and that we'd still be sitting with computers being expensive primitive mainframes.
This argument is, of course, completely ridiculous and laughable. Really - there were *hundreds* of people and companies who ALL saw that PCs were going to be BIG MONEY. Plenty of companies tried to get on this bandwagon. IBM was one of the big ones (but they had antitrust worries of their own back then.) But the fact is, if Microsoft had never existed, EVERYTHING that they have done, and more, would have been done by now by other companies - and most likely cheaper and better. Other companies would (and have, so this is a huge "duh") have made databases. Other companies would have made friendly GUI environments (and had (Mac), so this is another huge "duh"). Other companies would have produced cheap, easy to use spreadsheets. Other companies would have produced good word processors. Other companies would have come up with the "easy administration" thing long ago already. Microsoft is *not* the only company that ever thought these things would be big. Get real.
Yes, it does seem to be getting better. But how long should it take? Should it really take so many years to produce only slightly better versions of an OS? We should really be asking ourselves, what could it be like? Is it really acceptable that even in 2001 we still have MFC application toolbars that cannot handle more than 16 colours? It's ridiculously primitive.
I must say I also get the feeling that DOJ pressure is helping them put in a bit more effort, and right now most people would just be happy to settle for a little stability/quality in MS products. But do we really even want to settle for a stable, quality "operating system of the early/mid 90's"? Stable but years behind. I think we should be reaching a little higher than that. MS has had plenty of chances to "do the right thing", and every time they've just rejected it in favour of dirty underhanded anti-competitive tactics. We should stop giving them the benefit of the doubt. They've held computing back for long enough now.
To say that crashing machines and daily reboots are such a horrible problem, caused by Microsoft, is just a plain lie - or maybe you just haven't used anything Microsoft has made in the past couple of years.
The VAST MAJORITY of PC users are using Windows9X, which is PRECISELY "crashing machines and daily reboots". Forget about NT - only a small minority of PC users know about it. Microsoft's products have caused a HUGE amoung of damange to millions of people. It would be fine if this was some esoteric applications that a few engineers were using, but it isn't, it's Microsoft's *biggest application*. Go and learn what the Win16mutex is, and then try come tell me that Windows9X isn't a stinking pile of shit. Go do some Direct3D application development on Windows9X, and then try come tell me that Windows9X isn't a stinking pile of shit.
But to say "oog, I reboot windows every day" or "oog, blue screen!!!!" just shows ignorance and the inability to think objectively for yourself.
No it doesn't. It shows that the person uses Windows 9X (rather than NT or an NT derivative). The vast majority of people who buy PC's happen to be doing so because thats what came with their PC's.
And the windows API ? Winsock ? The API where you need a hidden window to receive data on a socket ?
Not to be anal or anything, but I've got quite a lot of experience with the winsock API, and this isn't true, you don't need an HWND to use sockets. You can even write winsock console applications. I think that you might be confusing the low-level winsock stuff with those horrible MFC socket wrappers, that will do stuff like send you a message in the windows message queue to notify you of new data.
There are plenty of true reasons though why winsock sucks though (and the documentation is pretty lousy too), so why not just pick from the many of them? No need to use falseties! In fact, ANY Microsoft API has literally hundreds of valid things you could complain about. I've used Win32, Microsoft Frustration Classes, DirectX, WinCE Toolkit, winsock - they are all just brimming with braindamaged design and obfuscated, often outright incorrect documentation.
Re:I think we'd have more important problems
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Rebooting The World?
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I would go so far as to say that hacker/engineer types would actually be the ones best at surviving. They are the ones who have the smarts to actually invent and build things that are useful to survival, e.g. crude weapons and traps. I suspect that when the bow and arrow was first invented, it wasn't by the "popular jock type" primitive caveman with an IQ of 50 - it was the "nerdy weeny type" caveman with an IQ of 70. The same goes for guns, just up those IQ values a little.
Take a look at every major invention of mankind that "regular" people use and rely on every single day (from cars to books to computers to phones to TV to electricity to reinforced concrete to planes) - virtually every single one was invented by the smart "nerdy" type people - the other 99% of us have (throughout history) just been "riding along" on the inventions of others - never actually creating anything new, just using other peoples inventions.
If survival was primarily about physical strength, then it might have been true that hacker/engineer types would have a tough time. But for the past 10000 years or so, physical strength has played a secondary part in human survival to intelligence. Dammit, why haven't women's instincts caught up yet?:)
Re:Does no one here have respect for language?
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Uplifting Dolphins
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If apes or dolphins had anything approaching a human-level ability at language, we'd observe them spontaneously using it
We have. They do. Duh. Try to do at least the most basic amount of research before posting. We don't know how complex their language is because we don't understand it, but the fact that it is there is not under dispute.
Slashdot Mirror
I find VNC very quick on 10Mb lan, even some interactive games like xboing are very playable, and not even a quarter of the 10Mb bandwidth used. It was fairly usable even using my 28.8 modem at home. Much quicker than PCAnywhere. I did some tests though and found it wasn't very quick when the server was running on platforms other than Linux (e.g. Windows.) Connecting to a Windows session was much closer to PCAnywhere slowness. I do run icewm though, which is much lighter than gnome or kde. I've never used terminal services, so I can't really compare it - but in general, Windows was just not designed to stuff like this at all, and X is; so Windows is almost inherently going to be slower.
I understood Moores law* as applying to conventional silicon-based transistor circuits, not to other technologies like quantum computers. If thats the case then Moore's "law" has held up pretty well so far.
* Yes I know its not a law in the conventional scientific sense.
I'm kind of surprised noone has called this as flamebait, which it basically is
I couldn't figure out if you were talking about my post or your own as being flamebait .. ?
Anway, regarding public transport, I live in South Africa (Pretoria), and our public transport is simply not nearly on the same level as it is in developed countries. I need a car, the public transport isn't good enough. We simply don't have busses running after about 6 or 7 in the evening (I usually go home from work much later than that, plus I usually go pick up my girlfriend in the evenings), and we have only a very limited train transport system running through the center of town and out to the townships etc, mainly for the poorer "cheap labour" blacks (ugly legacy of the past here). The trains don't run past near where I work or where I live or anywhere in between, and the trains are considered dangerous anyway (they are prone to sporadic violence, shootings etc.)
Simple traffic fatalities (not considering pollution effects etc.) in the USA alone kill 4-5 times the number killed in the Bhopal disaster every single year
Not nearly 4-5 times. Sorry, I've done my research :) In 1998 car accidents in the USA resulted in 7468 deaths (http://webapp.cdc.gov/), while Bhopal killed somewhere from 5000 to 10000 people ("8,000 people were killed in its immediate aftermath and over 500,000 people suffered from injuries" according to http://www.corpwatch.org/bhopal/) Even by the lowest Bhopal death counts you'll find its only maybe a factor of 2. Anyway, yes, 10000 is not all that much in the big scheme of things, but my point was that as man progresses, these statistics of accidents are getting bigger exponentially, not linearly.
Hardly flamebait, but anyway. I didn't mean that a few sterile moths has much potential to do damage, in fact I doubt it's liable to do any damage. I was speaking more generally about the underlying technologies and the direction it is going. No, I don't have kids, but I may still, I'm only 24 now. Even if I don't have kids, I still care greatly about whether or not our descendants will be able to see a real rainforest or a real tiger. I'm not some tree-hugging anti-technology hippie, I'm all for technology. But the fact is, all our technology and smarts allow us the potential to have the best of both worlds, so there is no reason why we shouldn't just put in the bit of extra effort it takes to not completely plunder our natural resources, and to put in the bit of effort and caution it takes to strike a good balance. Believe me, speaking as someone with a 50/50 chance currently of having inherited a serious brain-degenerative genetic disorder, I know all too well just how powerful and useful genetic technologies will become in the future. Genetic technology gives mankind the potential to finally reverse the damage that thousands of years of having nearly no natural selection has caused (how many people do you know would be able to survive primitive caveman type life without some benefits of modern medicine? You can rule out diabetics, many asthmatics, people who can't see well enough with glasses/contact lenses, many mentally ill people, and many many other ailments that modern medicine have made sufferable). I'm all for it. But come on, we must at least be cautious about it.
I tHiNk yoU bEtter get a NeW 1nE.
Hehe .. a "me-too" post, how sad. Anyway, I also kept my e-mail address at geocities. Can't remember having any problems. There was a problem when they tried to change their TOS to that draconian "we own your stuff" one, but enough people bitched about it and up and left geocities (I was busy packing myself) that they changed the TOS back to more friendly terms. Thats the only problem I remember having. I must say though I get an absurd amount of junk email on my geocities address. Although I haven't been very careful with it in the past (newsgroup and webbots :( ), so I can't rightly blame Yahoo for that.
So I'll have to vote for A as well.
I'm sorry, but apparently I missed the part of human history where oppression and human rights violations were extinguished. I guess there really is, as you say, nothing worthwhile left to protest against. Oh well. I guess I'll have to find another outlet for my (ooh some big words here so erudite lets mod it up) isolationist paranoid hot-headed tendencies.
It's fine and well for you to stand there and say "hey lets just try it and if it turns out to be a big fuckup we'll fix the mess afterwards". As you say, mankind has been following this strategy for progress for thousands of years. And time after time after time, almost without exception, experiments of new things have resulted in harm to other people (very often harm that could have been averted with even rudimentary precautions, but then, what the hell, as you say, lets throw all caution to the wind.)
Except the only problem with this is quite simply that as technology progresses, the stakes get higher, and the damage wider. A few hundred years ago, no matter what new technology you tried, the best you could probably do if you messed up was a bit of localized damage and a few people dead. Nowadays if you mess up, you mess up big (e.g. chernobyl, or the accident at a pesticide plant in India in the 80's which killed something like 10000 civilians.) Mistakes now have much bigger implications than ever before - if there was ever a time to be cautious, it is now. You are seriously naive if you believe that what we do now will take hundreds and thousands of years to show up. After all, it only took a few decades to rip a huge fucking hole in the ozone layer, and only 150 years of industrialization to set global warming off (assuming that this is the cause of course.) The genetic manipulation techniques that will be developed in the next 50 years or so can most definitely result in catastrophic screw-ups with the potential to wipe out millions of people. Nobody is saying "stop progress". But we *can* be cautious about it. If we can prevent accidents that could very well directly affect our own children (you don't have any, do you?) or grandchildren, then why shouldn't we? It's a pretty selfish attitude to say "hell we'll all be dead, let our descendants suffer". I'm there are many people here who have children who feel differently about what sort of legacy they'd like to leave to their offspring.
In the loosest sense, cross-breeding IS "genetic engineering" (as you say). Although most people don't think of it as such. I remember reading about when people first began hybridising plants to produce better crops - apparently even back then there was a lot of public protest from people afraid of what might be wrought. Not one person today though seems to think that the great crops we have now are a bad thing. Yet now there is much protest against "genetically modified foods", some countries even attempting to ban them. I suspect that in a couple hundred years, not one person will think its a bad thing.
Making moths that glow is going to be a field day for birds
I don't think it was intended for the glowing moths to be released. I understood it to be that the glowing moths were part of the experimental test group, presumably so that the researchers can locate 'em easily.
biological pest control (which is considered politically correct and envirronmentally sound for reasons which baffle me
Well, biological pest control is by no means considered a panaceia, and a great amount of research and care must (and usually is) taken when attempting it (not sure where you get the idea that it might be considered as being as wonderful as you imply it is.) Anyway, biological pest control is often merely preferred over pesticides because it usually tends to have far fewer other negative effects on the environment (pesticides certainly don't disappear once they've killed the pests - they're a big problem - ending up in other natural wildlife (e.g. birds which eat the pests), in groundwater etc.) I've certainly never heard anybody say that biological pest control is "environmentally sound". It does have its own risks. But when properly researched and implemented, it is often less damaging to the environment than pesticides. Thats all. Not brilliant, amazing or perfect, merely slightly better.
Even windows 95/98 never gave me problems with crashes
You don't use your system for C++ (and/or DirectX) development, do you?
Geez, when I was doing DirectX programming on Win98 I had to reboot on average 2 to 5 times a day, and it was *extremely* rare (e.g. maybe once a month) that I managed a whole day without a reboot. I'm now doing the same work on W2K (on exactly the same hardware, so don't give me the "hardware problem" BS story) and it's been 100% stable. Win9X is a f%#^$@# pile of stinking, rotten sh&*@#. Not proper use of protected mode, combined with a Win16Mutex == crap.
I use W2K on my work box (Pentium III 677, 512 MB RAM, GeForce2). I use it pretty heavily for development, and it's VERY stable. I was doing exactly the same stuff on Win98 a few months back, and it froze up, crashed etc, required rebooting, on average 2 to 5 times a day. But with W2K it's truly "rock solid".
I must say though W2K on my home machine (Celeron 333, 128MB, TNT) did *not* go down well. The setup was flaky from the start. There was in particular a lot of problems with sockets - every time I went online, the thing would mess up after an hour or two and refuse to create any new connections until I rebooted. I would have the occasional complete lockup (while doing OpenGL development.) Generally there were problems. I'm currently only using Linux on that machine.
The motherboards for the two machines are the same brand but different models (earlier version on the celeron system), so my suspicion is that perhaps there was some problem with W2K not liking the earlier motherboard. Both had latest M/B drivers.
I've only recently started using Outlook. It took me about 10 minutes to find the %#@$$@# headers. It's in the most illogical of places. "Options". WTF? @$#%@# crack smoking MS software designers. "View/Headers", yes. "Options", no. And its one of THE most basic features of an e-mail program! The entire Outlook is generally poorly structured - there seems to have been extremely little thought put into what should go where. As far as I can tell you can't even set it up to reply to e-mails in text always, even if they were sent to you as html. After quite a lot of digging around I found you could do this *per contact*, this is about as useful as a hole in the head. And the problem with changing the format every time *after* you've clicked reply is that that line in front of the original e-mail doesn't become a row of ">" (even if you've set Outlook up to reply like this), it just vanishes. Even Outlook Express made more sense, so I don't know where the Outlook team fell off.
It sounds like he may have known in advance that his company was going to want to do this work. If he did, then he may also have a problem, even if the work was done on his own time. If he had known that the client was going to want it, then he may have done it just to get in ahead of his own company on getting the money from the client. In this case he would have effectively been trying to "compete" against the company he works for, which would put him in the wrong, even if the work was done on his own time and own equipment. If done on work time, it definitely belongs to his employer. If done on work equipment, maybe. If your employer asks you to do a task, and you go and do that task *on your own time and equipment*, then your employer usually still has rights to that work under the law, tough luck for you, but this is because this is usually a case of the employee trying to screw the employer. The terms of his contract could make a difference though.
Yes, the Win16mutex is probably one of the most braindamaged things spawned by MS. I would confidently say that that #%$@#%$@$# alone has resulted in more than a week of my life wasted. In fact, one of the bugs happened to be winsock involved - I wasted about two days on it, eventually figuring out that winsock apparently grabs the Win16mutex, and I had a deadlock involving our network stuff and some GetDC locking on a DirectDraw surface. I began to suspect the Win16mutex at some stage, and I compiled the program on Windows2000, and voila, no deadlock. Geez was I pissed.
I'm sure we could make a veeery long list. How about the use of CR/LF pair for text files, wasn't that MS's idea too? And geez, somebody should explain protected mode to the Win9X team. I'm sure I could go on for days about the pain and damage that MS has inflicted on the computer industry. I must say though I'm a reasonably happier programmer now that I've started doing almost all of my work development on Win2K. It was not possible before due to the limited support of DirectX on NT. But when doing this sort of work on Win98, it is quite rare to manage a single days work without a reboot, and not uncommon to have the computer lock up more than 5 times in a single day. Problem with Win16mutex and DirectX - application crash between a lock/unlock? Sorry - hit reset. It is so fucking pathetic it is not even funny. When people start telling me "ah Windows isn't that bad" and "mine doesn't crash that often" or "mine never crashes" or "you must be doing something wrong", it drives me nuts, I wish I could force them to do months of DirectX development on Windows98. There is not one person on the planet who could possibly do more than a few months DirectX development on 98 and still come out not hating Win9X for the piece of shit that it is.
With the Open Source movement, there are plenty of non-MS alternatives
Maybe today the situation is approaching something you can call "choice", given the existence of projects like KDE and Gnome. But back around the time this whole netscape/IE thing was brewing, I remember still having to recompile the kernel just to get my sound card to work. That doesn't even begin to compete, for average computer users, with Windows95. Gnome did not exist, and KDE was an early alpha obscure blip on the horizon. Apple at that time looked like a seriously dying company, IBM had all but completely pulled out of the OS market, and the only other "platforms and altervatives" were the extremely expensive Unix mainframes, such as the SGI's and SUN's. SGI only fairly recently began to produce "affordable" computers, and this trend is still slow to take in big Unix companies. Alternatives? Hardly. The situation is starting to improve. Apple is back on its feet, and Linux is really getting there in terms of applications and usability. But the situation was quite different when the antitrust problems began. The damage has been though, and the law broken. Of course the new IE beats the old netscape - but that is exactly because of the damage inflicted by Microsoft. Many people look back now and say "oh IE is now better, so that must be why it beat Netscape out". Puh-lease - IE 3 stunk like shit, and IE 4 was as unstable and shitty as netscape 4, I remember using all of them. By the release of Netscape 4, though, Netscape was pretty much already dead, and couldn't afford to put the same development effort into NN. IE 5 is basically IE4 with bugfixes, which is hardly groundbreaking given the number of years it has taken them to do only that. That is what happens when a competitor uses cross-funding from other products to drastically undercut your main products pricing - no income, no programmers. No programmers, crappy software (NN4).
Many people (you included) seem to think that Microsoft was the only company who ever wanted to try produce affordable software for the masses on consumer PCs. I've heard this argument a number of times before - basically, the argument is that if Microsoft hadn't been around, nobody would ever have had the "vision" to try develop anything in this market, and that we'd still be sitting with computers being expensive primitive mainframes.
This argument is, of course, completely ridiculous and laughable. Really - there were *hundreds* of people and companies who ALL saw that PCs were going to be BIG MONEY. Plenty of companies tried to get on this bandwagon. IBM was one of the big ones (but they had antitrust worries of their own back then.) But the fact is, if Microsoft had never existed, EVERYTHING that they have done, and more, would have been done by now by other companies - and most likely cheaper and better. Other companies would (and have, so this is a huge "duh") have made databases. Other companies would have made friendly GUI environments (and had (Mac), so this is another huge "duh"). Other companies would have produced cheap, easy to use spreadsheets. Other companies would have produced good word processors. Other companies would have come up with the "easy administration" thing long ago already. Microsoft is *not* the only company that ever thought these things would be big. Get real.
Yes, it does seem to be getting better. But how long should it take? Should it really take so many years to produce only slightly better versions of an OS? We should really be asking ourselves, what could it be like? Is it really acceptable that even in 2001 we still have MFC application toolbars that cannot handle more than 16 colours? It's ridiculously primitive.
I must say I also get the feeling that DOJ pressure is helping them put in a bit more effort, and right now most people would just be happy to settle for a little stability/quality in MS products. But do we really even want to settle for a stable, quality "operating system of the early/mid 90's"? Stable but years behind. I think we should be reaching a little higher than that. MS has had plenty of chances to "do the right thing", and every time they've just rejected it in favour of dirty underhanded anti-competitive tactics. We should stop giving them the benefit of the doubt. They've held computing back for long enough now.
To say that crashing machines and daily reboots are such a horrible problem, caused by Microsoft, is just a plain lie - or maybe you just haven't used anything Microsoft has made in the past couple of years.
The VAST MAJORITY of PC users are using Windows9X, which is PRECISELY "crashing machines and daily reboots". Forget about NT - only a small minority of PC users know about it. Microsoft's products have caused a HUGE amoung of damange to millions of people. It would be fine if this was some esoteric applications that a few engineers were using, but it isn't, it's Microsoft's *biggest application*. Go and learn what the Win16mutex is, and then try come tell me that Windows9X isn't a stinking pile of shit. Go do some Direct3D application development on Windows9X, and then try come tell me that Windows9X isn't a stinking pile of shit.
But to say "oog, I reboot windows every day" or "oog, blue screen!!!!" just shows ignorance and the inability to think objectively for yourself.
No it doesn't. It shows that the person uses Windows 9X (rather than NT or an NT derivative). The vast majority of people who buy PC's happen to be doing so because thats what came with their PC's.
And the windows API ? Winsock ? The API where you need a hidden window to receive data on a socket ?
Not to be anal or anything, but I've got quite a lot of experience with the winsock API, and this isn't true, you don't need an HWND to use sockets. You can even write winsock console applications. I think that you might be confusing the low-level winsock stuff with those horrible MFC socket wrappers, that will do stuff like send you a message in the windows message queue to notify you of new data.
There are plenty of true reasons though why winsock sucks though (and the documentation is pretty lousy too), so why not just pick from the many of them? No need to use falseties! In fact, ANY Microsoft API has literally hundreds of valid things you could complain about. I've used Win32, Microsoft Frustration Classes, DirectX, WinCE Toolkit, winsock - they are all just brimming with braindamaged design and obfuscated, often outright incorrect documentation.
I would go so far as to say that hacker/engineer types would actually be the ones best at surviving. They are the ones who have the smarts to actually invent and build things that are useful to survival, e.g. crude weapons and traps. I suspect that when the bow and arrow was first invented, it wasn't by the "popular jock type" primitive caveman with an IQ of 50 - it was the "nerdy weeny type" caveman with an IQ of 70. The same goes for guns, just up those IQ values a little.
Take a look at every major invention of mankind that "regular" people use and rely on every single day (from cars to books to computers to phones to TV to electricity to reinforced concrete to planes) - virtually every single one was invented by the smart "nerdy" type people - the other 99% of us have (throughout history) just been "riding along" on the inventions of others - never actually creating anything new, just using other peoples inventions.
If survival was primarily about physical strength, then it might have been true that hacker/engineer types would have a tough time. But for the past 10000 years or so, physical strength has played a secondary part in human survival to intelligence. Dammit, why haven't women's instincts caught up yet? :)
If apes or dolphins had anything approaching a human-level ability at language, we'd observe them spontaneously using it
We have. They do. Duh. Try to do at least the most basic amount of research before posting. We don't know how complex their language is because we don't understand it, but the fact that it is there is not under dispute.
Ok, my mistake. Sorry about that.