...and by that time Quark will have finally released a version of QuarkXPress that doesn't corrupt files in the OS X Classic environment. Boy will they be pissed to find out the creative professional OS of choice has changed *again*!
Hehe.
Quark is going to be disembowled by Adobe one of these days if they keep dicking around.
Seriously, (actually that first paragraph was half-serious), has everyone forgotten that every six months (since 1986!) Ziff-Davis predicts that Apple will be brankrupt by the end of the year? Clearly, they know what they are talking about.
Mmmhhh. That a prediction is wrong doesn't necessarily mean that it was a particularly stupid prediction or that the predictor didn't know what they were talking about. I might be hit by a meteor one day, but my refusing to leave a subway station because I predict I might get hit by a meteor is just paranoid.
Hell, there were a couple times (okay, not from 1986) that I though that Apple was going to go down for the last time too.
Only just recently they have started claiming that Linux will take over the desktop; which, as a Linux advocate, I think is just silly. Then again I'm just a programmer, not a journalist. At least they have finally realized that it won't *ever* have a larger desktop user base than Windows. I don't ever expect them to realize that open source simply cannot tackle proprietery software until we have some sort of major economic and social revolution.
I think that revolution consists of "cheaper is better" and already happened.:-)
mainstream media (WiMP, QT, Flash 6, Real)
mplayer. Does all of 'em (except the newest version of Sorenson). Doesn't package well, but it's the best media player out there, for any platform.
Microsoft Office
A couple things can read Office docs now. I'm not keeping too up on the situation, but the one or two times I've needed to read Office documents, OpenOffice has sufficed.
DirectX (negotiable, but witness how many games use the "industry standard" OpenGL),
Well, there is WINE. DirectX is not that much of a benefit in and of itself, unless you can run Windows binaries, which entails WINE anyway.
*I* use OpenGL. [shrug]
Sure WINE is an incredible and useful hack, but it'll be another 2 years at least until setup and compatibility are useful to semi-computer-literate folk, forget about grandma
Compatibility is actually pretty good -- a big change from two years or so ago. Lots of cosmetic quirks, though.
Windows XP, as much as I hate to admit it, is a fairly versatile and well-rounded OS.
Well, the NT line beats the snot out of the 9x line, I'll grant it that.
[snip bit about media idiotically drooling over Linux for lack of other news]
Yup.
I know this is Slashdot, but can we please try to be realistic? The computer indutry is and always will be extremely volatile, but Microsoft, Apple, and Linux have endured the test of time
The test of time. I love the computer world. "Linux: Proudly Serving the Computing Community for Ten Years". I remember a Hotline server once with the description "Serving the Hotline Community for Over Six Months".
I had a packet of soy sauce that read "Since 1405". *That*'s the test of time.:-) I'll trust someone that's been around that long.
People who want a UNIX desktop but still want to run Photoshop, Quicken, Office, etc.? MacOS X can.
WINE with Crossover runs these as well.
Not that I care -- I have the Gimp, I don't really have the faintest idea what Quicken does (Personal finance or something like that?), but I'm sure there's an equivalent, and while I don't really use office suites, there's gnumeric, OpenOffice, whatever KDE offers, blah, blah, blah.
The Zealots(TM) have a hard time springing for wash day money, as it is.
The "Zealots" don't care one way or another about whether they have "24/7" support, because they've happily fixed their own problems for years, and anyone brought out on a support call would be someone very much like them.
CIOs care very much, because they may not *have* a Zealot handy, and are interested in covering their ass (not to ensure that the *system* keeps working...to have someone *else* to blame if something hypothetically goes wrong).
To expand on Jeremy Allison's excellent comment, the NFS security model relies totally on the UID at the client.
Might this have changed when they moved to NFSv4? It uses GSSAPI, which presumably means it uses Kerberos principals instead of UIDs to identify users on a client machine.
There are no free software, open source, or non-crippled NFS clients for Windows
Yup. But if you're willing to use AFS instead of NFS, there's OpenAFS , an AFS client that's available for Windows, MacOS X, Linux, and just about every platform out there. It's free and open source, plus pretty well designed. IBM pushes and supports it, and MIT and CMU (plus a lot of other places, but it gives you an idea of how much approval it gets from people in the know) both use it for their storage system.
AFS will also buy you a seriously secure system and better performance (thanks to leases and other good design features) than you'll get from CIFS (Windows filesharing). I'm pretty sure that NFS, despite the large number of changes in recent versions, is still outperformed by AFS.
It can be more a bear to set up, since you'll probably want to also set up a dedicated KDC, but at least you're doing things the Right Way.
Coda is supposed to be the successor to AFS, but I really haven't heard of people using it much, and Intermezzo doesn't have the backing that AFS does.
Oh, yes. AFS can do distributed storage, so it can (magic boss-exciting word approaching) *scale* really well.:-)
Think of how cool it would be if HP, DELL, Alien Ware, etc. shipped all of their computers with a Linux interaction kit full of programs that would allow windows users to interact with Linux boxes
Yeah. That would be cool. Then they'd get their OEM licences revoked by MS and every Windows user out their would be stuck buying...uh...
Hmm. Now that Compaq is gone, who makes overpriced, crummy computers? I don't think Gateway charges quite enough to qualify...
I think it's probably more to do with tools wanking themselves to some "cyberculture" delusion than his writing.
This is probably true of the majority of genres. Romances, anything particularly nationalistic, anything in the Tom Clancy vein. People want to identify with the protagonist.
I mean, few people read only historical documentaries.:-)
One suggestion I'd add to this is making a *single* screen with all the config options on it, so that the user isn't going click, click, click, click through a series of dialog boxes.
Then you slap an "OK" at the top.
And, of course, retaining a non-interactive mode would be nice as well, where the defaults are simply used.
It creates dependencies at install time for stuff that can be determined with ldd...so if you try to uninstall a library package that the new package depends on, RPM will complain.
Granted, this doesn't help if the packaged program calls an external program through fork()/exec(), but it sure beats nothing.
Mandrake packages are on rpmfind, you need both checkinstall [rpmfind.net] and libcheckinstall1 [rpmfind.net] [Note they seem to have a circular dependency so you need to install one --nodeps]
Weird -- can't see how libcheckinstall would depend on checkinstall. Anyway, you can handle circular dependencies by installing both at the same time. RPM will work out whether things are kosher.
RPMs never seemd to work across distros, quel suprise. This is one thing that I really like about slackware's.tgz files.
And some things aren't RPM-packaged.
One tool that *no* RPM user should be without, IMHO, is checkinstall. This runs a normal "make install" after you're done with./configure and make, but monitors what locations files are being "install"ed to. It then builds an RPM package and installs it. This lets you cleanly uninstall tarballs, and handles library dependencies. In many ways, it gives you the flexibility of Slackware's approach with the nice features of RPM.
I'd like to see front ends be a bit better. I was quite impressed with apt-get, and use it with RPMs on a RH system. RH's up2date is really awful -- it's sluggish, doesn't give much feedback on what's going on, fragile (rpm hangs or a download fails, and it isn't very smart about it), doesn't resume failed transfers, and doesn't let you download non-RH packages. It simply feels flaky, which is not good for a tool that, for many users, may be their only look into the management of their system.
Oh, and it grabs an exclusive lock on the rpmdb the entire time the thing is downloading. I *really* think this is a bad idea -- at the very least, there should be an option to flip this off. Novice users aren't going to be running rpm manually anyway at the same time, and more experienced users *really* get annoyed when they can't query or modify in unrelated ways the system while up2date is slowly sucking something down over a modem.
Apt-get is nice...if there isn't something like it, it might be a good idea to have a Red Carpet-like GUI for it to make it really appealing to new users. Hell, most people don't use Windows Update because they consider it too intimidating or don't know about it...
# Compatibility - RPMs never seemd to work across distros, quel suprise. This is one thing that I really like about slackware's.tgz files. They are nothing but a.tar.gz with some extra info, so no matter what system you use, you could just download the slackware.tgz and use it, right? Gentoo doesn't have packages, but "ebuilds". These are nice because they are small little text files, and your computer goes and fetches the latest version of the package (or whatever version is specified). It uses the standard source and it gets it the same way you might.
I can understand and even live with binary RPMs not working across distros. I find it really annoying, however, that *source* RPMs are frequently not buildable on other distros. Mandrake's and PLD's frequently don't rebuild for use on RH, which is quite frusterating. They use slightly different macros in their.spec files...
This is an area where standardization would make things *much* better, particularly since the differences between the formats isn't that big.
The rpm version that ships with RH 8.0 is pretty buggy and can lead to lockups. RH has an unsupported fixed version of rpm that fixed these problems for me (I was only impacted by one of the bugs). They haven't put out an official update yet.
Note: do *not* upgrade to the version of RPM in Rawhide or Phoebe, RH's current beta. It's a *pain* to get back -- you get moved to hash-version 8 if you --rebuilddb at any point, and db4 as packaged by RH doesn't grok hash-version 8. You'll need to grab db4 from Sleepycat and use it do dump your rpmdb and reload it with RH's db4 if you want to get back (this happened to me).
I'm running galeon, pan, sawfish, and a buncha rxvts along with xmms right now. xmixer. gkrellm. sawfish's pager. Solid dragging in sawfish. And that's on a slower system (PII/266 instead of PII/333).
It runs fine, and there are gtk2 apps with antialiased text in there. Granted, I'm not using E's "reflection" plugin or anything like that, and it wasn't too long ago that mozilla ran too slowly on a system like this, but it's fine now.
If the bit about requiring financial benefit for espionage charges is correct, probably not. I can't see ESR making much money off the Halloween documents...matter of fact, he probably loses money on hosting costs.
OTOH, if he was doing it to let RH gain an advantage over Microsoft...
One vaguely nice thing about the Open Source community is that some laws simply don't apply -- they were crafted to deal with *companies* going after companies.:-)
It also sounds as if he may have violated the attorney-client privilege between the law firm that employed him and their customer DirectTV.
Good point. It sounds like (possibly) they may have only the attorney-client privilege violation. The industrial espionage charges require that either he profit or he be doing it for the profit of someone else.
Now, it sounds like he's just another card hacker, so I doubt he's out for profit.
And ironically enough, I would have thought that this sort of leaking-as-an-attack claim was ridiculous, but DirectTV (who is trying to nail the guy for this) is apparently supposed to have done this against NDS recently.
That's the problem with old boxes : a lot of noise.
I gotta disagree. Fans tend to get noisier over time, but as long as you're PIII/K6 era or before, you have far less heat generated than an Athlon or a P4. Which means you can run quieter fans.
I figured that some poster had managed to sucker the editors into putting an ad up, but apparently people are really into this.
Can anyone tell me why people *care* about this? There's nothing particularly significant about this computer. It's not on the level of people introducing case windows for the first time, nor is it a never-before-done hardware hack. Some guy tossed a bunch of stuff that's already been done into a case, and is selling it for a *lot* of money. Big whoop.
This doesn't have unparalleled performance, since Sun sells systems that can smoke this thing.
It doesn't let home users do anything they couldn't do before, since no software requires this, and in two years it's going to be a middling system.
It's just another currently high-end x86 system. You can get things like this from a *ton* of vendors, with overclocking even.
No, the system wasn't hosed -- MFC42.dll certainly did not always ship with Windows, though it happens to be part of XP. XP has its own requirements. (Does it ship with a JVM? How about SDL? DivX libraries? I can definitely get missing dependencies. The Windows approach is "have a developer manually determine a minimum OS to support, bundle everything we think of and can get a license for, and hope that the OS bundles everything else we need, except for DirectX, which we can redistribute").
*nix counter part, another programmer I work with decided to updated his glibc, then build our server component, and gave it to me to update a server. Lo and behold, atoi (no that's not right anyway, some relatively standard library call) didn't exist. It appears someone decided to move it from where it was in the glibc package that shipped on RedHat 7.3.
Sure, but I'm not talking about a bunch of developers that are modifying individual libraries and not using the installer system. I'm talking about for-end-user packaged software having issues at install time. Heck, I've done similar things while doing Windows development ("okay, I need a modified version of this library to get things working"), but that's sort of expected when you're working on that level.
(if they need a different older version of mfc42 they're screwing something up)
No, it just needed mfc42. Though I do remember two apps that required different version of a runtime once...it was six or so years ago, when I was using NT 4.0, though, so I don't remember the names of the two apps.
Changes to libraries or replacements by crappy installers...happen on both Linux and Windows, thanks.
Not if you're using an actual package management system, they don't. Sure, I can manually run in with root/Administrator privs and deliberately screw up libraries. I wasn't going that far. My point is that InstallShield has led to problems for me, whereas simply apt-getting RPMs has not.
Blame shitty QA at Adaptec maybe, not the operating systems in question.
Well, that too, but I still think that you should have a package management system that handles dependencies (*without* a developer remembering to do this and manually putting in effort, a la InstallShield).
Slashdot Mirror
...and by that time Quark will have finally released a version of QuarkXPress that doesn't corrupt files in the OS X Classic environment. Boy will they be pissed to find out the creative professional OS of choice has changed *again*!
:-)
:-) I'll trust someone that's been around that long.
Hehe.
Quark is going to be disembowled by Adobe one of these days if they keep dicking around.
Seriously, (actually that first paragraph was half-serious), has everyone forgotten that every six months (since 1986!) Ziff-Davis predicts that Apple will be brankrupt by the end of the year? Clearly, they know what they are talking about.
Mmmhhh. That a prediction is wrong doesn't necessarily mean that it was a particularly stupid prediction or that the predictor didn't know what they were talking about. I might be hit by a meteor one day, but my refusing to leave a subway station because I predict I might get hit by a meteor is just paranoid.
Hell, there were a couple times (okay, not from 1986) that I though that Apple was going to go down for the last time too.
Only just recently they have started claiming that Linux will take over the desktop; which, as a Linux advocate, I think is just silly. Then again I'm just a programmer, not a journalist. At least they have finally realized that it won't *ever* have a larger desktop user base than Windows. I don't ever expect them to realize that open source simply cannot tackle proprietery software until we have some sort of major economic and social revolution.
I think that revolution consists of "cheaper is better" and already happened.
mainstream media (WiMP, QT, Flash 6, Real)
mplayer. Does all of 'em (except the newest version of Sorenson). Doesn't package well, but it's the best media player out there, for any platform.
Microsoft Office
A couple things can read Office docs now. I'm not keeping too up on the situation, but the one or two times I've needed to read Office documents, OpenOffice has sufficed.
DirectX (negotiable, but witness how many games use the "industry standard" OpenGL),
Well, there is WINE. DirectX is not that much of a benefit in and of itself, unless you can run Windows binaries, which entails WINE anyway.
*I* use OpenGL. [shrug]
Sure WINE is an incredible and useful hack, but it'll be another 2 years at least until setup and compatibility are useful to semi-computer-literate folk, forget about grandma
Compatibility is actually pretty good -- a big change from two years or so ago. Lots of cosmetic quirks, though.
Windows XP, as much as I hate to admit it, is a fairly versatile and well-rounded OS.
Well, the NT line beats the snot out of the 9x line, I'll grant it that.
[snip bit about media idiotically drooling over Linux for lack of other news]
Yup.
I know this is Slashdot, but can we please try to be realistic? The computer indutry is and always will be extremely volatile, but Microsoft, Apple, and Linux have endured the test of time
The test of time. I love the computer world. "Linux: Proudly Serving the Computing Community for Ten Years". I remember a Hotline server once with the description "Serving the Hotline Community for Over Six Months".
I had a packet of soy sauce that read "Since 1405". *That*'s the test of time.
People who want a UNIX desktop but still want to run Photoshop, Quicken, Office, etc.? MacOS X can.
WINE with Crossover runs these as well.
Not that I care -- I have the Gimp, I don't really have the faintest idea what Quicken does (Personal finance or something like that?), but I'm sure there's an equivalent, and while I don't really use office suites, there's gnumeric, OpenOffice, whatever KDE offers, blah, blah, blah.
The Zealots(TM) have a hard time springing for wash day money, as it is.
The "Zealots" don't care one way or another about whether they have "24/7" support, because they've happily fixed their own problems for years, and anyone brought out on a support call would be someone very much like them.
CIOs care very much, because they may not *have* a Zealot handy, and are interested in covering their ass (not to ensure that the *system* keeps working...to have someone *else* to blame if something hypothetically goes wrong).
Are people (besides the Distros) actually pushing for Linux on the desktop?
:-)
I'm coming to not care whether the public decides that Linux is a "desktop OS" or not. It's working wonderfully as a desktop OS for me.
To expand on Jeremy Allison's excellent comment, the NFS security model relies totally on the UID at the client.
Might this have changed when they moved to NFSv4? It uses GSSAPI, which presumably means it uses Kerberos principals instead of UIDs to identify users on a client machine.
I've seen Alan Cox, Bruce Perens, Sam Lantinga and a ton of other people, plus now Jeremy Allison, posting to Slashdot.
Are there any Open Source luminaries that *don't* read Slashdot?
There are no free software, open source, or non-crippled NFS clients for Windows
:-)
Yup. But if you're willing to use AFS instead of NFS, there's OpenAFS , an AFS client that's available for Windows, MacOS X, Linux, and just about every platform out there. It's free and open source, plus pretty well designed. IBM pushes and supports it, and MIT and CMU (plus a lot of other places, but it gives you an idea of how much approval it gets from people in the know) both use it for their storage system.
AFS will also buy you a seriously secure system and better performance (thanks to leases and other good design features) than you'll get from CIFS (Windows filesharing). I'm pretty sure that NFS, despite the large number of changes in recent versions, is still outperformed by AFS.
It can be more a bear to set up, since you'll probably want to also set up a dedicated KDC, but at least you're doing things the Right Way.
Coda is supposed to be the successor to AFS, but I really haven't heard of people using it much, and Intermezzo doesn't have the backing that AFS does.
Oh, yes. AFS can do distributed storage, so it can (magic boss-exciting word approaching) *scale* really well.
Think of how cool it would be if HP, DELL, Alien Ware, etc. shipped all of their computers with a Linux interaction kit full of programs that would allow windows users to interact with Linux boxes
Yeah. That would be cool. Then they'd get their OEM licences revoked by MS and every Windows user out their would be stuck buying...uh...
Hmm. Now that Compaq is gone, who makes overpriced, crummy computers? I don't think Gateway charges quite enough to qualify...
I think it's probably more to do with tools wanking themselves to some "cyberculture" delusion than his writing.
:-)
This is probably true of the majority of genres. Romances, anything particularly nationalistic, anything in the Tom Clancy vein. People want to identify with the protagonist.
I mean, few people read only historical documentaries.
I took a look at this a while ago -- the features list sounded really, really nice, but I'm waiting for something more mainstream to adopt it first.
One suggestion I'd add to this is making a *single* screen with all the config options on it, so that the user isn't going click, click, click, click through a series of dialog boxes.
Then you slap an "OK" at the top.
And, of course, retaining a non-interactive mode would be nice as well, where the defaults are simply used.
(I wonder how it gets on with dependencies etc.)
It creates dependencies at install time for stuff that can be determined with ldd...so if you try to uninstall a library package that the new package depends on, RPM will complain.
Granted, this doesn't help if the packaged program calls an external program through fork()/exec(), but it sure beats nothing.
Mandrake packages are on rpmfind, you need both checkinstall [rpmfind.net] and libcheckinstall1 [rpmfind.net] [Note they seem to have a circular dependency so you need to install one --nodeps]
Weird -- can't see how libcheckinstall would depend on checkinstall. Anyway, you can handle circular dependencies by installing both at the same time. RPM will work out whether things are kosher.
Mongomusic.com used to do an awesome job of this, but Microsoft bought them and they vanished.
RPMs never seemd to work across distros, quel suprise. This is one thing that I really like about slackware's .tgz files.
./configure and make, but monitors what locations files are being "install"ed to. It then builds an RPM package and installs it. This lets you cleanly uninstall tarballs, and handles library dependencies. In many ways, it gives you the flexibility of Slackware's approach with the nice features of RPM.
And some things aren't RPM-packaged.
One tool that *no* RPM user should be without, IMHO, is checkinstall. This runs a normal "make install" after you're done with
I'd like to see front ends be a bit better. I was quite impressed with apt-get, and use it with RPMs on a RH system. RH's up2date is really awful -- it's sluggish, doesn't give much feedback on what's going on, fragile (rpm hangs or a download fails, and it isn't very smart about it), doesn't resume failed transfers, and doesn't let you download non-RH packages. It simply feels flaky, which is not good for a tool that, for many users, may be their only look into the management of their system.
Oh, and it grabs an exclusive lock on the rpmdb the entire time the thing is downloading. I *really* think this is a bad idea -- at the very least, there should be an option to flip this off. Novice users aren't going to be running rpm manually anyway at the same time, and more experienced users *really* get annoyed when they can't query or modify in unrelated ways the system while up2date is slowly sucking something down over a modem.
Apt-get is nice...if there isn't something like it, it might be a good idea to have a Red Carpet-like GUI for it to make it really appealing to new users. Hell, most people don't use Windows Update because they consider it too intimidating or don't know about it...
# Compatibility - RPMs never seemd to work across distros, quel suprise. This is one thing that I really like about slackware's .tgz files. They are nothing but a .tar.gz with some extra info, so no matter what system you use, you could just download the slackware .tgz and use it, right? Gentoo doesn't have packages, but "ebuilds". These are nice because they are small little text files, and your computer goes and fetches the latest version of the package (or whatever version is specified). It uses the standard source and it gets it the same way you might.
.spec files...
I can understand and even live with binary RPMs not working across distros. I find it really annoying, however, that *source* RPMs are frequently not buildable on other distros. Mandrake's and PLD's frequently don't rebuild for use on RH, which is quite frusterating. They use slightly different macros in their
This is an area where standardization would make things *much* better, particularly since the differences between the formats isn't that big.
The rpm version that ships with RH 8.0 is pretty buggy and can lead to lockups. RH has an unsupported fixed version of rpm that fixed these problems for me (I was only impacted by one of the bugs). They haven't put out an official update yet.
Note: do *not* upgrade to the version of RPM in Rawhide or Phoebe, RH's current beta. It's a *pain* to get back -- you get moved to hash-version 8 if you --rebuilddb at any point, and db4 as packaged by RH doesn't grok hash-version 8. You'll need to grab db4 from Sleepycat and use it do dump your rpmdb and reload it with RH's db4 if you want to get back (this happened to me).
Wasn't talking about price/performance, just performance. Blades were *not* what I was thinking of. :-)
Getting a "prettied" up system is not what you would get if you were just going for a bang for the buck system.
My point was simply that the system isn't breaking new ground.
I'm running galeon, pan, sawfish, and a buncha rxvts along with xmms right now. xmixer. gkrellm. sawfish's pager. Solid dragging in sawfish. And that's on a slower system (PII/266 instead of PII/333).
It runs fine, and there are gtk2 apps with antialiased text in there. Granted, I'm not using E's "reflection" plugin or anything like that, and it wasn't too long ago that mozilla ran too slowly on a system like this, but it's fine now.
If the bit about requiring financial benefit for espionage charges is correct, probably not. I can't see ESR making much money off the Halloween documents...matter of fact, he probably loses money on hosting costs.
:-)
OTOH, if he was doing it to let RH gain an advantage over Microsoft...
One vaguely nice thing about the Open Source community is that some laws simply don't apply -- they were crafted to deal with *companies* going after companies.
It also sounds as if he may have violated the attorney-client privilege between the law firm that employed him and their customer DirectTV.
:-)
Good point. It sounds like (possibly) they may have only the attorney-client privilege violation. The industrial espionage charges require that either he profit or he be doing it for the profit of someone else.
Now, it sounds like he's just another card hacker, so I doubt he's out for profit.
And ironically enough, I would have thought that this sort of leaking-as-an-attack claim was ridiculous, but DirectTV (who is trying to nail the guy for this) is apparently supposed to have done this against NDS recently.
I avoid the whole mess by not watching TV.
That's the problem with old boxes : a lot of noise.
I gotta disagree. Fans tend to get noisier over time, but as long as you're PIII/K6 era or before, you have far less heat generated than an Athlon or a P4. Which means you can run quieter fans.
I know someone with a 486 and no fans.
I think it's absolutely STUPID to say that a P2 333 is 'fast enough' for home use.
All depends on what you're using, doesn't it?
XP is pretty awful on something like that, but Linux is more than happy on a system of that caliber.
Why are people remotely excited about this?
I figured that some poster had managed to sucker the editors into putting an ad up, but apparently people are really into this.
Can anyone tell me why people *care* about this? There's nothing particularly significant about this computer. It's not on the level of people introducing case windows for the first time, nor is it a never-before-done hardware hack. Some guy tossed a bunch of stuff that's already been done into a case, and is selling it for a *lot* of money. Big whoop.
This doesn't have unparalleled performance, since Sun sells systems that can smoke this thing.
It doesn't let home users do anything they couldn't do before, since no software requires this, and in two years it's going to be a middling system.
It's just another currently high-end x86 system. You can get things like this from a *ton* of vendors, with overclocking even.
Hmm, the MFC .dll is part of windows.
No, the system wasn't hosed -- MFC42.dll certainly did not always ship with Windows, though it happens to be part of XP. XP has its own requirements. (Does it ship with a JVM? How about SDL? DivX libraries? I can definitely get missing dependencies. The Windows approach is "have a developer manually determine a minimum OS to support, bundle everything we think of and can get a license for, and hope that the OS bundles everything else we need, except for DirectX, which we can redistribute").
*nix counter part, another programmer I work with decided to updated his glibc, then build our server component, and gave it to me to update a server. Lo and behold, atoi (no that's not right anyway, some relatively standard library call) didn't exist. It appears someone decided to move it from where it was in the glibc package that shipped on RedHat 7.3.
Sure, but I'm not talking about a bunch of developers that are modifying individual libraries and not using the installer system. I'm talking about for-end-user packaged software having issues at install time. Heck, I've done similar things while doing Windows development ("okay, I need a modified version of this library to get things working"), but that's sort of expected when you're working on that level.
(if they need a different older version of mfc42 they're screwing something up)
No, it just needed mfc42. Though I do remember two apps that required different version of a runtime once...it was six or so years ago, when I was using NT 4.0, though, so I don't remember the names of the two apps.
Changes to libraries or replacements by crappy installers...happen on both Linux and Windows, thanks.
Not if you're using an actual package management system, they don't. Sure, I can manually run in with root/Administrator privs and deliberately screw up libraries. I wasn't going that far. My point is that InstallShield has led to problems for me, whereas simply apt-getting RPMs has not.
Blame shitty QA at Adaptec maybe, not the operating systems in question.
Well, that too, but I still think that you should have a package management system that handles dependencies (*without* a developer remembering to do this and manually putting in effort, a la InstallShield).