Bill Clinton should be hanged for the existence of oral sex. He is single-handedly responsible for the semen of young men on the faces of so many people. Because that makes about as much sense as Woolsey's tortured logic.
The success of something does not depend solely on how good it is. How well it is marketed plays a huge role as well. I will freely admit that Bill Gates is a world class genius when it comes to marketing software. When it comes to writing well designed, easy to use software his ability is far more modest.
Spot on! And there's something else, too.
If IBM hadn't selected Microsoft to provide an operating system for it's IBM PC, I think it's safe to say that the computing landscape would look quite different right now. IBM approached Microsoft to do an operating system for the IBM PC in 1980. Microsoft then referred IBM to Intergalactic Digital Research (remember them?), where Mrs. Kildall (who ran business affairs for IDR) turned them away because she didn't want to sign IBM's confidentiality agreements. If IDR hadn't dropped the ball, we'd all be worshiping at their altar instead of Microsoft's. Remember, Microsoft was a computer language company at that time; they had no Operating System. After IDR dropped the ball, Microsoft bought what would become DOS from another company, modified it to fit IBM's specs, then licensed it to IBM and, as it turned out, other companies as well. Microsoft's initial success in the O/S market was pure luck. It's continuing success is marketing. Plus, it was an easy call for users (individual and corporate) to stick with Microsoft Operating Systems since most everyone went to IBM-compatible computers in the 80s, so it was easy to retain users for compatibility reasons.
Today's Microsoft is the Frankenstein's Monster that IBM created. Bill Gates was smart enough to seize on an opportunity and ran with it. None of this has anything to do with the quality of Microsoft's software. People endure Microsoft's software quality, design deficiencies and screw-ups because most feel like they don't have any other choice and, in many cases, they really don't.
Every desktop software they have made has been terrible since Ballmer arrived.
Let's be clear; Ballmer had been at Microsoft for a long time. He wasn't some stranger they hired off the street when Bill Gates retired, he was a seasoned Microsoft veteran (he started there in 1980). But he certainly didn't have the edge that Bill Gates had. Also, Steve Ballmer was a business guy, whereas Bill Gates was a hardcore geek. Perhaps Bill Gates understood Microsoft's business better than Steve Ballmer (he certainly did from a technical point-of-view).
This is the same nonsense they tried to advocate in the 90s with the key escrow stuff. They're counting on people having short attention spans and short memories.
Well, the answer was "NO" then, and it is still "NO" now! Deal with it! Do you jobs! And stop being so goddamned lazy!
No, it isn't. In the 90s, there was an effort by the Clinton Administration to implement a key escrow system whereby all encrypted transmissions would have been required to submit encryption keys to some agency, so that the government could eavesdrop on those transmissions. The IT community here in the U.S. had a shit fit, and eventually defeated that idea, even though the Clinton Administration tried to scare us into thinking that if they couldn't monitor such transmissions, all sorts of awful things might happen. Except for the attacks on September 11, 2001, nothing has happened here, and our government still had plenty of warning about those attacks even without these system in place.
There have been other stories more recently where large telecommunications companies have been cooperating with the U.S. Government in essentially making a copy of all transmissions over the Internet. While those companies were not required to comply (and there were a few who chose not to), they did anyway. There was a huge stink made about that as well, and as far as I know, those operations have been shut down (I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong).
As far as I know, nobody here in the U.S. is required to install back doors into their systems so that government agencies can gain access at-will. After the kerfuffle in the 90s, I seriously doubt such a measure would pass into law. In a way, this highlights the silliness of the UK undertaking such a measure in their law. If UK concerns are required to put in back doors, but nobody else in the world has the same requirement, it means the UK government is essentially spying on their own citizens. They are also increasing the likelihood that a foreign concern (government, company or individual) could break into these systems and make it easier for them to effectively spy on the UK. This would drive people to host their email and web sites (among other things) on foreign servers (likely US or Canada), and could put UK hosting providers out of business, along with other consequences.
If I were a British subject, I would complain to my representatives, LOUDLY, that this is a really bad idea.
It was revealed that Bill Gates was "surprised" that IBM was not prepared to "jointly and exclusively promote Microsoft products [and] reduce shipments of OS/2".
This in a nutshell is Microsoft's culture; so self-assured of the superiority of their products when nothing could be further from the truth. OS/2 was a great operating system, and ran circles around anything Microsoft put out until Windows NT (which, as it happens, shares lineage with OS/2). IBM was ultimately too big and too slow to prevent what happened to OS/2, but one thing they know how to do well is design stuff.
This paragraph also gave me a good chuckle:
When Microsoft was described by Lou Gerstner in Business Week as 'a great marketing company, but not a great technology company' Mr Gates was furious according to evidence presented. He is said to have complained about 'smear campaigns' against Windows 95.
Truth hurts, doesn't it Billy Boy? Microsoft's ability to market it's products is the only way to explain how they can get away with putting out really mediocre products when there are so many better alternatives (in terms of stability and quality) out there.
It will save an instruction or two with appropriate compilers, by using the JC instruction rather than a CMP/JZ and in really performance critical code this will matter...
Not necessarily. Just because a snippet of machine code contains fewer instructions doesn't mean it will be faster. Case in point, (and I apologize in advance because this was 25 years ago and it's been a while since I've delved into Assembly code, so I may not remember the fine details exactly) the 80486 (I think) introduced an instruction which handled hand-off of a function call. This meant that what used to have to be done with 5 instructions could be done with just one. The problem was that the new instruction took 35 clock ticks to perform it's magic while the 5 instructions took 10. This is why Microsoft compilers at the time stayed with the old way of passing off to a function call, but Borland (the other big player in compilers at the time) went to the new way. No surprise, Microsoft-generated code was faster than Borland-generated code.
That's not true. My grandfather worked at IBM for 25 years as an Electrical Engineer, designing and building computer hardware. He retired with a pension and everything. But he started working for them in the 60s, and retired in the 90s. He was the tail-end of the old-fashioned IBM where you worked there "for life".
Even when I started in the IT industry in the early 90s, there was still some degree of companies making commitments to their employees, investing in their success and striving to earn their loyalty, even at start-ups. Although it wasn't unusual for people to move on to different opportunities after a few years.
It's only more recently (within the last 15 years or so) that companies no longer felt compelled to invest in their employees. Now IT companies want turn-key labor, where they can get exactly what they need for only as long they need, and then cut them loose. Some of this has to do with the expanding popularity of the H1-B Visa program. But much of it comes from sociopath bean-counters who look only at the bottom line and see expenses associated with retaining employees, and fail to take into account the intangibles that come from fostering loyalty and teamwork within their companies.
Corporations today (IT and otherwise) are nothing more than money making machines for investors. This is why working at IT companies in particular has become a living hell. The people at the top don't really care about the people or the product, they only care that they make money. This isn't a good mix, especially for innovative Silicon Valley types. The people who attempt to play politics for their own benefit are not only overlooked for their arguably bad behavior, but are in fact encouraged, because it is essentially what the people at the top are doing.
This is why I no longer work at a corporate setting. Ever since I started freelancing 13 years ago, I've been much happier. Yes, it's hard to get started, but once you do it's a great thing. I do sometimes miss the camaraderie of going to work and working with others. But I don't miss those personality defects that make an otherwise pleasant job impossible.
As for "just working", that is true, OS X just works, but so does Windows, and has since Windows 7.
I'm sorry, but I cannot agree with your assessment of Windows 7. I run a Windows 7 VM, and I find that it suffers from the same affliction that all Windows before it suffer. It works great at first, then it starts to slow down until it grinds to a crawl over time. That to me isn't "just working". I never see this behavior in Linux or MacOS. I've had Linux installations running for 9 years with no upgrade and daily use, without any performance hit at all. Microsoft has had 20 years to address this issue in Windows, and they have yet to do so. I find it unlikely they will ever address this issue in the future.
Linux had its chance of the desktop market 15 years ago, that ship has sailed and it isn't coming back. Yes, you found something that works, and it does indeed work. But for various reasons that have nothing to do with technology, it isn't going to happen. But you may keep using it of course and it isn't going away, it just isn't going above the 1-2% market share that it has and has had for awhile.
Why do you say that? What are these "various reasons"?
I see a future without Windows.
I don't, and there is the difference. Nothing wrong with your point of view of course, it is colored by your perceptions and biases, as is mine.
Time will tell, but in fairness, nothing you've said is new. Most of those points were made 15 years ago when Win XP launched and forced the mass consumer off of the DOS/Win 9x line, that was the time to make it happen. We're well past that point.
I find your reasoning flawed. Since most Windows 9x/Me applications were compatible with Windows XP, there was no compelling reason for people to switch from Windows to something else at that point. In fact, Microsoft went through great pains to ensure backward compatibility with Windows XP. So I don't understand why you think that was the time for people to switch to something else. Perhaps you can elaborate?
MS has gone back to its truly evil ways and - funny enough - its starting to make apple look good in comparison! wow, just wow.
Okay, I'm going to ask a really naive question. I really want to know the answer, I'm not trying to be a troll or start a flame war.
What is so bad about Apple? Is there something about their practices and policies that everyone should be wary of? I keep seeing digs about Apple and their policies, but nobody ever elaborates. It would be nice to know the nitty gritty details so people can make a more informed decision about whether or not to patronize Apple.
I would buy your explanation if this investigation was initiated by the Executive branch. It wasn't. It was initiated by the Congress which was investigating the Benghazi Embassy attack. They didn't find anything, so now they're investigating something that is tangentially related (at best), hoping they find some smoking gun to hold Clinton accountable for the Benghazi attack.
Only now, since she used her own server (again, bad call on her part), they're accusing her of compromising national security. They may be right, and she should be held to account if it is found that she did compromised national security. But this was not the original scope of the investigation. This all started with an attack on our embassy in Libya, and holding Clinton (and, by extention, Obama) accountable for bumbling our defense and response there, to which there was no wrong-doing found. Yet the investigation continues. If that isn't a fishing expedition, I don't know what is.
Congress's track record on investigating people they happen to not like is not good. In fact, during this investigation, Congress cutting the budget was found to be partially responsible for the Benghazi defense failure, even though the Department of State requested more resources at that embassy. You see, when I say there's no there there, I'm using things like facts and data to support my claims. In 20 years of Republican Congresses investigating Democrats in the Executive Branch, the worst they've been able to uncover is a sitting President receiving oral sex from an intern. Calling me a moron and a sociopath doesn't change the facts. It would be nice if the Congress would investigate the people who lied us into a war with Iraq, arguably the root cause of the Benghazi attack. If they were as thorough with that investigation as they are with the Benghazi investigation, they might actually send some people to prison. But they won't do that, because they like the people who were in charge at the time. Who's the sociopath again?
Snowden makes a good point. Clinton's decision to use a private email server while conducting business as Secretary of State shows bad judgement. Besides, if she was privy to classified information, presumably she would have had to read email from her DOS email anyway. So, the whole story about her using a private email system for convenience just doesn't wash.
Having said that, this whole investigation is just yet another fishing expedition by the Republicans. There's no there there, and they're just wasting tax dollars on some stupid vendetta. The mere fact that they keep investigating the Clintons (and the Obamas) and keep coming up empty only diminishes their own credibility on, well, pretty much everything. It's been going on for over 20 years and I'm tired of it!
Microsoft called the Windows 3.x family an Operating System, even though it needed DOS to boot up. I just passed that notion off as more Microsoft marketing hype. In fact, back in those days I was in college, and my Operating Systems professor scoffed at the idea that Windows 3.x was an operating system.
I agree that NT 3.51 was the best Operating System Microsoft ever made. It's debatable whether or not the UI was the best, but the underlying kernel for NT 3.51 was rock solid. I ran that OS for as long as I could until people stopped supporting it. It's been downhill for the NT line ever since Version 4. That's when they started poking holes in the NT architecture to put things at ring 0 and/or ring 1 that didn't belong there for better performance. I've seen a lot of stability problems with the NT line ever since; stability problems I never saw with NT 3.51.
I ran DR-DOS for a while, and always had problems running Windows 3.1x on it; problems that magically went away when I switched to MS-DOS. So DR-DOS and Windows was never a great combo anyway.
I remember Windows 95 before it was Windows 95...
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I was working for a start-up software company in Silicon Valley back then. I was charged with compatibility testing with different environments and operating systems. I got to see Windows 95 in Beta. I also remember the various proposed names they were going to give Windows 95. First they were going to call it Windows 4. Then they went to Windows 94 (which I thought was a stupid idea). Then they settled on Windows 95 when it was clear that it wasn't going to be released until later in 1994.
Although Windows 95 was a significant step-up from Windows 3.11, I never liked it very much. The UI bugged me and the stability wasn't that great. Plus they removed Schedule+ which came free with Windows for Workgroups, and sold it as Outlook. I was heavy into OS/2 back then, and it was much better. I never really used Windows 95 and later Windows 98 that much. In fact, it was the combination of Windows 98 and NT 4 which drove me to switch to Linux. I've been using it as my personal desktop OS ever since.
Re:"Start me up" - What was Gates thinking?
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Windows 95 Turns 20
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IIRC, Gates paid the Rolling Stones $12M for the rights to use their song "Start me up" which to this day I don't understand why he'd pick a song with the lyrics "You make a grown man cry!" in the chorus.
They conveniently cut those parts of the song out, at least for their commercials. But, yes, that was pretty funny.
As the old saying goes: "If it's too good to be true, it probably is."
Microsoft basically giving away Windows 10 upgrades smelled fishy to me, and now I know why. Then again, I think Windows should be given way for free anyway since I think it's worth less than Linux (pick your flavor) and Linux is free for the download, but I digress.
I run Windows 7 under VMWare, and that's the way it's gonna stay. If nothing else, I want to prove to Microsoft that they can't give that shit away...
I couldn't believe how much crapware I had to disable with Windows 10, though, especially from the menu. WTF would I want an "XBox" account tile for when I don't own a gaming system of any kind, much less one susceptible to the "red ring of death"?
It's called advertising. They're hoping people will see that and have an uncontrollable urge to go out and buy and XBox. Because people always do what Microsoft wants.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, CompuServe was bought by AOL a long time ago. So, in fact, AOL *is* CompuServe (or the other way around?).
Apple will also be dumping the speakers from iPhone 7, in an effort to make it quieter.
<smh>
Bill Clinton should be hanged for the existence of oral sex. He is single-handedly responsible for the semen of young men on the faces of so many people. Because that makes about as much sense as Woolsey's tortured logic.
Dumbass!
The success of something does not depend solely on how good it is. How well it is marketed plays a huge role as well. I will freely admit that Bill Gates is a world class genius when it comes to marketing software. When it comes to writing well designed, easy to use software his ability is far more modest.
Spot on! And there's something else, too.
If IBM hadn't selected Microsoft to provide an operating system for it's IBM PC, I think it's safe to say that the computing landscape would look quite different right now. IBM approached Microsoft to do an operating system for the IBM PC in 1980. Microsoft then referred IBM to Intergalactic Digital Research (remember them?), where Mrs. Kildall (who ran business affairs for IDR) turned them away because she didn't want to sign IBM's confidentiality agreements. If IDR hadn't dropped the ball, we'd all be worshiping at their altar instead of Microsoft's. Remember, Microsoft was a computer language company at that time; they had no Operating System. After IDR dropped the ball, Microsoft bought what would become DOS from another company, modified it to fit IBM's specs, then licensed it to IBM and, as it turned out, other companies as well. Microsoft's initial success in the O/S market was pure luck. It's continuing success is marketing. Plus, it was an easy call for users (individual and corporate) to stick with Microsoft Operating Systems since most everyone went to IBM-compatible computers in the 80s, so it was easy to retain users for compatibility reasons.
Today's Microsoft is the Frankenstein's Monster that IBM created. Bill Gates was smart enough to seize on an opportunity and ran with it. None of this has anything to do with the quality of Microsoft's software. People endure Microsoft's software quality, design deficiencies and screw-ups because most feel like they don't have any other choice and, in many cases, they really don't.
Every desktop software they have made has been terrible since Ballmer arrived.
Let's be clear; Ballmer had been at Microsoft for a long time. He wasn't some stranger they hired off the street when Bill Gates retired, he was a seasoned Microsoft veteran (he started there in 1980). But he certainly didn't have the edge that Bill Gates had. Also, Steve Ballmer was a business guy, whereas Bill Gates was a hardcore geek. Perhaps Bill Gates understood Microsoft's business better than Steve Ballmer (he certainly did from a technical point-of-view).
This is the same nonsense they tried to advocate in the 90s with the key escrow stuff. They're counting on people having short attention spans and short memories.
Well, the answer was "NO" then, and it is still "NO" now! Deal with it! Do you jobs! And stop being so goddamned lazy!
Is this like American law?
No, it isn't. In the 90s, there was an effort by the Clinton Administration to implement a key escrow system whereby all encrypted transmissions would have been required to submit encryption keys to some agency, so that the government could eavesdrop on those transmissions. The IT community here in the U.S. had a shit fit, and eventually defeated that idea, even though the Clinton Administration tried to scare us into thinking that if they couldn't monitor such transmissions, all sorts of awful things might happen. Except for the attacks on September 11, 2001, nothing has happened here, and our government still had plenty of warning about those attacks even without these system in place.
There have been other stories more recently where large telecommunications companies have been cooperating with the U.S. Government in essentially making a copy of all transmissions over the Internet. While those companies were not required to comply (and there were a few who chose not to), they did anyway. There was a huge stink made about that as well, and as far as I know, those operations have been shut down (I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong).
As far as I know, nobody here in the U.S. is required to install back doors into their systems so that government agencies can gain access at-will. After the kerfuffle in the 90s, I seriously doubt such a measure would pass into law. In a way, this highlights the silliness of the UK undertaking such a measure in their law. If UK concerns are required to put in back doors, but nobody else in the world has the same requirement, it means the UK government is essentially spying on their own citizens. They are also increasing the likelihood that a foreign concern (government, company or individual) could break into these systems and make it easier for them to effectively spy on the UK. This would drive people to host their email and web sites (among other things) on foreign servers (likely US or Canada), and could put UK hosting providers out of business, along with other consequences.
If I were a British subject, I would complain to my representatives, LOUDLY, that this is a really bad idea.
Interesting read. Thanks for sharing it.
This paragraph made me chuckle:
It was revealed that Bill Gates was "surprised" that IBM was not prepared to "jointly and exclusively promote Microsoft products [and] reduce shipments of OS/2".
This in a nutshell is Microsoft's culture; so self-assured of the superiority of their products when nothing could be further from the truth. OS/2 was a great operating system, and ran circles around anything Microsoft put out until Windows NT (which, as it happens, shares lineage with OS/2). IBM was ultimately too big and too slow to prevent what happened to OS/2, but one thing they know how to do well is design stuff.
This paragraph also gave me a good chuckle:
When Microsoft was described by Lou Gerstner in Business Week as 'a great marketing company, but not a great technology company' Mr Gates was furious according to evidence presented. He is said to have complained about 'smear campaigns' against Windows 95.
Truth hurts, doesn't it Billy Boy? Microsoft's ability to market it's products is the only way to explain how they can get away with putting out really mediocre products when there are so many better alternatives (in terms of stability and quality) out there.
It will save an instruction or two with appropriate compilers, by using the JC instruction rather than a CMP/JZ and in really performance critical code this will matter...
Not necessarily. Just because a snippet of machine code contains fewer instructions doesn't mean it will be faster. Case in point, (and I apologize in advance because this was 25 years ago and it's been a while since I've delved into Assembly code, so I may not remember the fine details exactly) the 80486 (I think) introduced an instruction which handled hand-off of a function call. This meant that what used to have to be done with 5 instructions could be done with just one. The problem was that the new instruction took 35 clock ticks to perform it's magic while the 5 instructions took 10. This is why Microsoft compilers at the time stayed with the old way of passing off to a function call, but Borland (the other big player in compilers at the time) went to the new way. No surprise, Microsoft-generated code was faster than Borland-generated code.
So, if I were to Google "Dexter Morgan is my hero", will the men in white coats come knocking at my door?
Oh, you mean like the United States of America?
That's not true. My grandfather worked at IBM for 25 years as an Electrical Engineer, designing and building computer hardware. He retired with a pension and everything. But he started working for them in the 60s, and retired in the 90s. He was the tail-end of the old-fashioned IBM where you worked there "for life".
Even when I started in the IT industry in the early 90s, there was still some degree of companies making commitments to their employees, investing in their success and striving to earn their loyalty, even at start-ups. Although it wasn't unusual for people to move on to different opportunities after a few years.
It's only more recently (within the last 15 years or so) that companies no longer felt compelled to invest in their employees. Now IT companies want turn-key labor, where they can get exactly what they need for only as long they need, and then cut them loose. Some of this has to do with the expanding popularity of the H1-B Visa program. But much of it comes from sociopath bean-counters who look only at the bottom line and see expenses associated with retaining employees, and fail to take into account the intangibles that come from fostering loyalty and teamwork within their companies.
Corporations today (IT and otherwise) are nothing more than money making machines for investors. This is why working at IT companies in particular has become a living hell. The people at the top don't really care about the people or the product, they only care that they make money. This isn't a good mix, especially for innovative Silicon Valley types. The people who attempt to play politics for their own benefit are not only overlooked for their arguably bad behavior, but are in fact encouraged, because it is essentially what the people at the top are doing.
This is why I no longer work at a corporate setting. Ever since I started freelancing 13 years ago, I've been much happier. Yes, it's hard to get started, but once you do it's a great thing. I do sometimes miss the camaraderie of going to work and working with others. But I don't miss those personality defects that make an otherwise pleasant job impossible.
As for "just working", that is true, OS X just works, but so does Windows, and has since Windows 7.
I'm sorry, but I cannot agree with your assessment of Windows 7. I run a Windows 7 VM, and I find that it suffers from the same affliction that all Windows before it suffer. It works great at first, then it starts to slow down until it grinds to a crawl over time. That to me isn't "just working". I never see this behavior in Linux or MacOS. I've had Linux installations running for 9 years with no upgrade and daily use, without any performance hit at all. Microsoft has had 20 years to address this issue in Windows, and they have yet to do so. I find it unlikely they will ever address this issue in the future.
Linux had its chance of the desktop market 15 years ago, that ship has sailed and it isn't coming back. Yes, you found something that works, and it does indeed work. But for various reasons that have nothing to do with technology, it isn't going to happen. But you may keep using it of course and it isn't going away, it just isn't going above the 1-2% market share that it has and has had for awhile.
Why do you say that? What are these "various reasons"?
I see a future without Windows.
I don't, and there is the difference. Nothing wrong with your point of view of course, it is colored by your perceptions and biases, as is mine.
Time will tell, but in fairness, nothing you've said is new. Most of those points were made 15 years ago when Win XP launched and forced the mass consumer off of the DOS/Win 9x line, that was the time to make it happen. We're well past that point.
I find your reasoning flawed. Since most Windows 9x/Me applications were compatible with Windows XP, there was no compelling reason for people to switch from Windows to something else at that point. In fact, Microsoft went through great pains to ensure backward compatibility with Windows XP. So I don't understand why you think that was the time for people to switch to something else. Perhaps you can elaborate?
MS has gone back to its truly evil ways and - funny enough - its starting to make apple look good in comparison! wow, just wow.
Okay, I'm going to ask a really naive question. I really want to know the answer, I'm not trying to be a troll or start a flame war.
What is so bad about Apple? Is there something about their practices and policies that everyone should be wary of? I keep seeing digs about Apple and their policies, but nobody ever elaborates. It would be nice to know the nitty gritty details so people can make a more informed decision about whether or not to patronize Apple.
Inquiring minds want to know...
I would buy your explanation if this investigation was initiated by the Executive branch. It wasn't. It was initiated by the Congress which was investigating the Benghazi Embassy attack. They didn't find anything, so now they're investigating something that is tangentially related (at best), hoping they find some smoking gun to hold Clinton accountable for the Benghazi attack.
Only now, since she used her own server (again, bad call on her part), they're accusing her of compromising national security. They may be right, and she should be held to account if it is found that she did compromised national security. But this was not the original scope of the investigation. This all started with an attack on our embassy in Libya, and holding Clinton (and, by extention, Obama) accountable for bumbling our defense and response there, to which there was no wrong-doing found. Yet the investigation continues. If that isn't a fishing expedition, I don't know what is.
Congress's track record on investigating people they happen to not like is not good. In fact, during this investigation, Congress cutting the budget was found to be partially responsible for the Benghazi defense failure, even though the Department of State requested more resources at that embassy. You see, when I say there's no there there, I'm using things like facts and data to support my claims. In 20 years of Republican Congresses investigating Democrats in the Executive Branch, the worst they've been able to uncover is a sitting President receiving oral sex from an intern. Calling me a moron and a sociopath doesn't change the facts. It would be nice if the Congress would investigate the people who lied us into a war with Iraq, arguably the root cause of the Benghazi attack. If they were as thorough with that investigation as they are with the Benghazi investigation, they might actually send some people to prison. But they won't do that, because they like the people who were in charge at the time. Who's the sociopath again?
Snowden makes a good point. Clinton's decision to use a private email server while conducting business as Secretary of State shows bad judgement. Besides, if she was privy to classified information, presumably she would have had to read email from her DOS email anyway. So, the whole story about her using a private email system for convenience just doesn't wash.
Having said that, this whole investigation is just yet another fishing expedition by the Republicans. There's no there there, and they're just wasting tax dollars on some stupid vendetta. The mere fact that they keep investigating the Clintons (and the Obamas) and keep coming up empty only diminishes their own credibility on, well, pretty much everything. It's been going on for over 20 years and I'm tired of it!
No, this was more than just an "error message". I had stability problems left and right. It was unusable. All that went away when I moved to MS-DOS.
Microsoft called the Windows 3.x family an Operating System, even though it needed DOS to boot up. I just passed that notion off as more Microsoft marketing hype. In fact, back in those days I was in college, and my Operating Systems professor scoffed at the idea that Windows 3.x was an operating system.
I agree that NT 3.51 was the best Operating System Microsoft ever made. It's debatable whether or not the UI was the best, but the underlying kernel for NT 3.51 was rock solid. I ran that OS for as long as I could until people stopped supporting it. It's been downhill for the NT line ever since Version 4. That's when they started poking holes in the NT architecture to put things at ring 0 and/or ring 1 that didn't belong there for better performance. I've seen a lot of stability problems with the NT line ever since; stability problems I never saw with NT 3.51.
I ran DR-DOS for a while, and always had problems running Windows 3.1x on it; problems that magically went away when I switched to MS-DOS. So DR-DOS and Windows was never a great combo anyway.
I was working for a start-up software company in Silicon Valley back then. I was charged with compatibility testing with different environments and operating systems. I got to see Windows 95 in Beta. I also remember the various proposed names they were going to give Windows 95. First they were going to call it Windows 4. Then they went to Windows 94 (which I thought was a stupid idea). Then they settled on Windows 95 when it was clear that it wasn't going to be released until later in 1994.
Although Windows 95 was a significant step-up from Windows 3.11, I never liked it very much. The UI bugged me and the stability wasn't that great. Plus they removed Schedule+ which came free with Windows for Workgroups, and sold it as Outlook. I was heavy into OS/2 back then, and it was much better. I never really used Windows 95 and later Windows 98 that much. In fact, it was the combination of Windows 98 and NT 4 which drove me to switch to Linux. I've been using it as my personal desktop OS ever since.
IIRC, Gates paid the Rolling Stones $12M for the rights to use their song "Start me up" which to this day I don't understand why he'd pick a song with the lyrics "You make a grown man cry!" in the chorus.
They conveniently cut those parts of the song out, at least for their commercials. But, yes, that was pretty funny.
As the old saying goes: "If it's too good to be true, it probably is."
Microsoft basically giving away Windows 10 upgrades smelled fishy to me, and now I know why. Then again, I think Windows should be given way for free anyway since I think it's worth less than Linux (pick your flavor) and Linux is free for the download, but I digress.
I run Windows 7 under VMWare, and that's the way it's gonna stay. If nothing else, I want to prove to Microsoft that they can't give that shit away...
I couldn't believe how much crapware I had to disable with Windows 10, though, especially from the menu. WTF would I want an "XBox" account tile for when I don't own a gaming system of any kind, much less one susceptible to the "red ring of death"?
It's called advertising. They're hoping people will see that and have an uncontrollable urge to go out and buy and XBox. Because people always do what Microsoft wants.
Yes!
And Julia Child prepared an entire Thanksgiving dinner, with all the fixings, using nothing but a cheese grater.