(Seriously: banning tools instead of banning people will only make the problem worse. Just because computers can calculate missile trajectories, they are not tools of terrorism. This logic will drive us nowhere as humanity.)
I have 2 SATA drives and they both have problems. I also have SP2 (erroneously written SP4 above) for Windows XP. I have done all the updates possible, but the problem persists. The BIOS has nothing to do with it, Windows does not use the BIOS.
I have seen others having this problem with no fix in sight.
Windows has a problem with SATA: if the data on the SATA disk exceed 137 GB, the message 'write delayed failed' appears, and the data are lost.
Searching around to see who's got the same problem on Windows XP + SP4, I found out that it's a common problem for Windows not yet solved by Microsoft.
IDE disks do not have such a problem. I was thinking of buying IDE disks instead of SATA, but seeing that companies will drop IDE, it's not a very good long term investment.
The current crop of optical chips are a mix of electron & photon devices. I wonder if totally optical chips could be possible. Is that viable? or desirable?
Yeap...Sonly said that the PS emotion engine could do 65,000,000 lighted textured polygons, the press believed them and drooled all over PS2, where in fact PS2 is only slightly better than the Dreamcast.
The human brain does one thing only: pattern matching.
More specifically, the body sensors ask questions to the brain, and the brain searches its database of experiences to find the experience which maximizes survival in the current situation. Once the experience is found, it is activated and answers are sent to the sensors.
The above mechanism has been developed because mathematical logic can not prove that a situation is dangerous for an animal or not. For example, it can not be proved that facing a lion is dangerous, because not all the facts about the environment and the lion's status are known. But pattern matching can 'prove' that something is dangerous by recalling past experiences or knowledge.
That is the reason we have religions: we could not understand certain physical phenomena around us, so we had to invent a reason for them...and since we were not able to reproduce those phenomena, someone with higher capabilities than us must have been responsible for those phenomena. For example, when we saw thunder, we did not understand how they were produced, and since we did not produce them, we had to believe that someone else did them, someone with higher powers than us.
Needing to comprehend those phenomena was crucial to our survival: by "understanding" that a god did not make thunders unless we disobeyed his rules, we could keep our dopamine levels down, and thus being calm and be able to assess the various dangers better.
In conclusion, it's all about maximizing survival. True AI will come only when the above mechanism will be transfered to mechanical devices. By AI, it does not mean machines will suddenly write poems, but that machines would not need to be programmed but taught.
What about putting giant solar panels up on the highest mountains where the clouds are (usually) below the peaks? the electricity could then be transfered using cables to ground stations. Could that be economically viable?
Shouldn't login into a web site be bi-directional? not only a user logs in a web site but the web site should log in a user by submitting to the user a password (let's name this password back-password).
The login sequence should be:
1) user submits his username. 2) site submits the back-password. 3) if back-password is correct, user submits his password.
By using bi-directional login, if the site is spoofed, the login process will fail, unless the spoofed site knows the back-password.
After login, communication should be encrypted so as that no 3rd party can eavesdrop on the communications.
FPS games are all about immersion, suspension of disbelief. A good story line will not add anything significant to the game.
I have played HL 1 & 2, Deus Ex 1 & 2, System Shock, Max Payne 1 & 2, the Quake games, the Doom games, Duke Nuke Em 3d etc...in none of this games I would care about a good story line. Just a basic storyline is good enough.
What counts in these games is how immersive they are. Max Payne was a good game not because of its story line (who gives a dime about a cop having his family slaughtered by the bad guys - much worse things have happened in reality), but because the way it presented the world: dark, snowy, with police sirens going on every minute, it really gave you that cold feeling of a New York night.
Microsoft should make one version of the O/S named 'Windows'. This new version:
1) is a completely re-written from scratch O/S with no compatibility with previous software. It is not based on C, but on an advanced C-like programming language which offers modern programming functionality.
2) contains virtual machines to run all previous versions of windows, in a similar way with Macintosh classic apps.
3) contains options for installing server modules, if it is a server.
Thus we buy a single DVD, we can run all our previous software, but new software written for this new version is outstandingly better than anything Microsoft has offered so much.
People will stay with their current O/S, i.e. xp or win2k. If they need to run 'vista' or 'vienna', they will install those oses in a vm or in another partition or computer.
I do not disagree with folks that say that programs are as good as their programmers. It's true, no one can dispute that. But it takes God-like programmers to make a C/C++ application of many thousands of lines of code without errors like buffer overflows and dangling pointers. In other words, only 10% of the programmers out there are capable of producing very good C/C++ programs. With Java, the number rises to maybe 50%, thanks to garbage collection.
"1) Everyone's been waiting for the perfect language that has all the direct power of C but with none of the deficiencies. Let me know when it becomes existant. "
ADA?
"2) NT has always had a logical microkernel design. The WDF framework makes common driver types pretty easy to write."
"3) NT already uses a single-root namespace for all named objects, not just files. (Unix still has separate namespaces for different object types.) Filesystems are in fact mounted on (and can be unmounted from) logical volume device objects. Win32 is the one with drive letters; e.g. \DosDevices\C: just a symbolic object link to \Device\HarddiskVolume1 "
The single-root namespace you propose is invisible to applications and the windows explorer. It's all the same to the users.
"4) This would be interesting, although resources other than files aren't too useful across the network. NT has always tended to use RPC for service interfaces that would be useful across the network. "
When I say "resources", I mean any kind of resources.
"5) Well, Microsoft does have an object oriented LDAP database system now... "
But I can not save my data in Active Directory. I can not create a new data type with my preferred language of choice, save it in Active Directory, then deploy my library and have the other computers access my data. I can not query AD to give me a set of objects, as in a database.
"6) In NT 3.x, winsrv.dll hosted in csrss.exe in user mode handled all the graphical and windowing stuff. They moved a lot of that to win32k.sys in kernel mode because the marshalling between the server and client processes was complex, difficult to do properly and slow. "
That's because the WIN32 window system sucks. The X-Window system does not, and NeWS was even better.
"7) MFC and now.NET were created for that purpose. "
MFC sucks big time, and it's the shittiest library ever written (I am using it for 8 years now, so I know what I am talking about)..NET is not bad, but I see no reason running a virtual machine for all my apps. And until I see big apps like SQL Server/Microsoft Office/Visual Studio written in.NET entirely, I am not convinced about it.
"8) NT has always used UCS-2 Unicode exclusively internally. The Win32 ASCII functions all convert to Unicode to call the real function. NT uses the UNICODE_STRING structure internally for all strings, which includes buffer size and data size. "
Just like other NT capabilities, they are hidden deep inside the kernel: the command console is not unicode, the search function does not support unicode searches, many fonts are not unicode etc.
And UCS2 does not support all the unicode characters.
And garbage collection is not applied at the application level handing NT unicode strings.
"It wouldn't be helpful to switch to a Unixy core: NT already does all the things that you've described that Unixes also do, plus more things. Win32 is the source of ugliness here, and I too would be happy to see it go into compatibility retirement. There was a time when Longhorn was going to do that."
As I have said elsewhere, I am not saying "NT should be UNIX", I am saying that NT should have a more UNIX-like approach, i.e. a more de-centralized, de-coupled approach. As it is right now, everything in NT depends on anything else, even if the O/S is heavily componentized.
For example, why is there a registry? if NT supports mounted filesystems, the registry should be a filesystem. Why the windows directory (C:\WINNT) contains everything in one or two directories? Why applications are not self-contained in their own directories? why we still see "c:\" ? why can't I access my desktop from any machine in the network without installing other software? there are tens of questions like this that Microsoft has left unanswered, and these are the problems I expect Microsoft to solve in the next Windows version.
"There's performance penalty in that, all those context switches when processes are communicating with other processes in the system."
Modern microkernel design is efficient, even in 80x86. You don't even need to context-switch.
"Add abstraction layer and databases above that and we need Intel to produce faster processor which sucks even more power"
The networking abstraction layer is required so as that any process can run in client-server mode. QNX does it successfully. A database is necessary because filesystems don't cut it any more.
"Object oriented toolkit? Well there's.NET for starters."
The.NET toolkit wraps over WIN32. I am talking about an object-oriented toolkit as the basis for the GUI, i.e. an object-oriented toolkit to replace WIN32.
"C# is object oriented,.NET API is object oriented, supports carbage collection,.NET strings and chars are UNICODE ect. In fact, NT has been UNICODE for ages (Win32 API 8 bit functions are just wrappers to UNICODE functions)."
I don't see why I am required to run in such a heavy environment where a simpler one could suffice.
"OS virtualization? Vista already does this. UAC virtualizes at least filesystem and registry."
"But what you are talking about here is actually figured out at MS Research. Microkernel architecture where some of the performance issues are dealt by running everything in the user land in the same process. F# compiler makes sure that thread isn't messing up with other thread's memory (which is all the same virtual memory) and provides multithreading/IPC and so on. It's really interesting idea and I'd love to see it running on my desktop some day."
F# means no raw 80x86 assembly...which is not good if you want to write things like compilers etc.
"But at the mean time I think I stick to my Windows Vista, which is built on 80's technology (in fact, first NT was released 1993), not on 60's Unix technology;)"
The model of user accounts/processes/filesystems, etc is 60's UNIX. Windows NT is based on VMS, which is like UNIX with some additional features. It is not adequate for today's computing environments, but it has a great advantage: separation of concerns. That's why I am talking about 'unix-like' technology.
There is no need to re-invent everything, especially at the hardware level.
What Microsoft needs to do is write a UNIX like O/S with the following features:
1) write the successor to the C language: a strongly and statically typed C derivative with none of C's deficiencies but allowing access to the bare metal, also incorporating functional features. They certainly have the stuff to do that. Then use this language to:
2) simplify the driver development system using microkernel techniques.
3) write a single tree file system, like in Unix, where filesystems are mounted/unmounted.
4) write a network-abstraction system on top of the file system described above, where resources of the system are abstracted over the network.
5) write an object/typed database layer on top of this network abstraction system, and offer it as the default. Use MIME as the typing mechanism.
6) write a Window System, ala X, which is a regular process sitting on top of the database system.
7) write a truly object-oriented toolkit which includes gui, xml, database, and everything else required for modern apps. See the Qt model for a good example.
8) use unicode throughout the system. Don't have 8-bit functions and wide-character functions. Make character a single 32-bit data type which can host all unicode characters, so you don't have a problem on how strings are handled. Forget C string handling, and do it in the modern way.
9) provide garbage collection where appropriate. This means that all code, except the microkernel and system drivers, should be garbage-collected.
10) use the Erlang model for multithreading. Provide userland multithreading libraries for the fastest multithreading possible.
11) virtualize the O/S for the user. Make it as if the user can read/write/execute everything, but any change will not be reflected to the system files or other users' files. Provide a ring security mechanism, like 80x86 rings, so as that networked applications can not hurt the rest of the system and can only communicate with it through specific call gates.
Microsoft's problem is entirely a software problem. They want to use 70's technology for the 21st century. It's doable, but only if UNIX like principles are followed.
(Thank God Microsoft does not read slashdot though, because there are quite a few interesting proposals here).
But Microsoft software can't mature, because it is a kludge of many things with the highest degree of interdependencies ever in software.
For example, the GUI message queue of windows has evolved to carry async socket messages, COM notifications, session management messages, and all shorts of wild things. Furthermore, the microsoft window system is severely coupled with the widget set.
On the other hand, the UNIX gui (the X-Windows System) is independent of the kernel, the drivers, and the rest of the O/S. And the widget set is a different layer on top of the window system.
On Windows, the system layout is tied to drive C:\. Drive letters are a nightmare, making it quite impossible to deploy a network of computers where the user sees the same desktop from any workstation, unless really expensive solutions are used.
On Unix, the single hierarchy system makes it very easy to deploy an infrastructure where the user's files are stored in a central place and therefore the user can see his own desktop from any machine he sits on.
On Windows, there needs to be an API for system settings. When the Windows registry goes down, you need to redeploy everything.
On Unix, all you need is a text editor, and if a file goes corrupt, the rest of the system is fine.
So Microsoft software can't mature because it's bad software.
"The problem is that the industry - especially Microsoft (and with an even worse attitude) - is pushing the limits of the current software development technology."
Not really. If Microsoft did such a thing, they would make an advanced futuristic O/S, most probably based on an advanced programming language like a LISP variant or Haskell.
What Microsoft does is to push the limits of exploitation of the most common software development technology: C as the programming language of choice, a unix-like security model based on administrator/userland done in the wrong way, a kludge of "technologies" with all sorts of problems, etc.
Until Microsoft realizes that we should move forward from the concepts of process/filesystem/desktop UI, they are doomed.
You were modded insightful, but you don't say in what way sex is different in reality from a porno movie.
I support the opposite view: excluding the most extreme porno, sex in films is the same as sex in reality. During intercourse, sex is governed by instincts, so it's not any different.
In reality, real sex is more extreme than filmed one, and that is obvious if you go around and read various testimonies on sexual experiences. And that is certainly to be expected, because you can't show everything on the screen, there are limits, even in the most extreme and hardcore sex films. But there are no limits when there are no cameras.
Slashdot Mirror
MAME would also be awesome, with both horizontal and vertical games covering all the screen.
Let's hope that this powerful but so often neglected language will become popular with iPhone!
...they can kis m ac!!!
(Seriously: banning tools instead of banning people will only make the problem worse. Just because computers can calculate missile trajectories, they are not tools of terrorism. This logic will drive us nowhere as humanity.)
I have 2 SATA drives and they both have problems. I also have SP2 (erroneously written SP4 above) for Windows XP. I have done all the updates possible, but the problem persists. The BIOS has nothing to do with it, Windows does not use the BIOS.
I have seen others having this problem with no fix in sight.
Windows has a problem with SATA: if the data on the SATA disk exceed 137 GB, the message 'write delayed failed' appears, and the data are lost.
Searching around to see who's got the same problem on Windows XP + SP4, I found out that it's a common problem for Windows not yet solved by Microsoft.
IDE disks do not have such a problem. I was thinking of buying IDE disks instead of SATA, but seeing that companies will drop IDE, it's not a very good long term investment.
The current crop of optical chips are a mix of electron & photon devices. I wonder if totally optical chips could be possible. Is that viable? or desirable?
Yeap...Sonly said that the PS emotion engine could do 65,000,000 lighted textured polygons, the press believed them and drooled all over PS2, where in fact PS2 is only slightly better than the Dreamcast.
The human brain does one thing only: pattern matching.
More specifically, the body sensors ask questions to the brain, and the brain searches its database of experiences to find the experience which maximizes survival in the current situation. Once the experience is found, it is activated and answers are sent to the sensors.
The above mechanism has been developed because mathematical logic can not prove that a situation is dangerous for an animal or not. For example, it can not be proved that facing a lion is dangerous, because not all the facts about the environment and the lion's status are known. But pattern matching can 'prove' that something is dangerous by recalling past experiences or knowledge.
That is the reason we have religions: we could not understand certain physical phenomena around us, so we had to invent a reason for them...and since we were not able to reproduce those phenomena, someone with higher capabilities than us must have been responsible for those phenomena. For example, when we saw thunder, we did not understand how they were produced, and since we did not produce them, we had to believe that someone else did them, someone with higher powers than us.
Needing to comprehend those phenomena was crucial to our survival: by "understanding" that a god did not make thunders unless we disobeyed his rules, we could keep our dopamine levels down, and thus being calm and be able to assess the various dangers better.
In conclusion, it's all about maximizing survival. True AI will come only when the above mechanism will be transfered to mechanical devices. By AI, it does not mean machines will suddenly write poems, but that machines would not need to be programmed but taught.
What about putting giant solar panels up on the highest mountains where the clouds are (usually) below the peaks? the electricity could then be transfered using cables to ground stations. Could that be economically viable?
No visible lazer beam! come on you scientists, I want my lazer weapons to emit a visible lazer beam! it's so cool!
Shouldn't login into a web site be bi-directional? not only a user logs in a web site but the web site should log in a user by submitting to the user a password (let's name this password back-password).
The login sequence should be:
1) user submits his username.
2) site submits the back-password.
3) if back-password is correct, user submits his password.
By using bi-directional login, if the site is spoofed, the login process will fail, unless the spoofed site knows the back-password.
After login, communication should be encrypted so as that no 3rd party can eavesdrop on the communications.
It's much worse to be a friend who's sole purpose is to fix your ex-girlfriend's computer, trust me.
FPS games are all about immersion, suspension of disbelief. A good story line will not add anything significant to the game.
I have played HL 1 & 2, Deus Ex 1 & 2, System Shock, Max Payne 1 & 2, the Quake games, the Doom games, Duke Nuke Em 3d etc...in none of this games I would care about a good story line. Just a basic storyline is good enough.
What counts in these games is how immersive they are. Max Payne was a good game not because of its story line (who gives a dime about a cop having his family slaughtered by the bad guys - much worse things have happened in reality), but because the way it presented the world: dark, snowy, with police sirens going on every minute, it really gave you that cold feeling of a New York night.
Microsoft should make one version of the O/S named 'Windows'. This new version:
1) is a completely re-written from scratch O/S with no compatibility with previous software. It is not based on C, but on an advanced C-like programming language which offers modern programming functionality.
2) contains virtual machines to run all previous versions of windows, in a similar way with Macintosh classic apps.
3) contains options for installing server modules, if it is a server.
Thus we buy a single DVD, we can run all our previous software, but new software written for this new version is outstandingly better than anything Microsoft has offered so much.
People will stay with their current O/S, i.e. xp or win2k. If they need to run 'vista' or 'vienna', they will install those oses in a vm or in another partition or computer.
I do not disagree with folks that say that programs are as good as their programmers. It's true, no one can dispute that. But it takes God-like programmers to make a C/C++ application of many thousands of lines of code without errors like buffer overflows and dangling pointers. In other words, only 10% of the programmers out there are capable of producing very good C/C++ programs. With Java, the number rises to maybe 50%, thanks to garbage collection.
"1) Everyone's been waiting for the perfect language that has all the direct power of C but with none of the deficiencies. Let me know when it becomes existant. "
.
.NET were created for that purpose. "
.NET is not bad, but I see no reason running a virtual machine for all my apps. And until I see big apps like SQL Server/Microsoft Office/Visual Studio written in .NET entirely, I am not convinced about it.
ADA?
"2) NT has always had a logical microkernel design. The WDF framework makes common driver types pretty easy to write."
Nope: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Driver_Model
"3) NT already uses a single-root namespace for all named objects, not just files. (Unix still has separate namespaces for different object types.) Filesystems are in fact mounted on (and can be unmounted from) logical volume device objects. Win32 is the one with drive letters; e.g. \DosDevices\C: just a symbolic object link to \Device\HarddiskVolume1 "
The single-root namespace you propose is invisible to applications and the windows explorer. It's all the same to the users.
"4) This would be interesting, although resources other than files aren't too useful across the network. NT has always tended to use RPC for service interfaces that would be useful across the network. "
When I say "resources", I mean any kind of resources.
"5) Well, Microsoft does have an object oriented LDAP database system now... "
But I can not save my data in Active Directory. I can not create a new data type with my preferred language of choice, save it in Active Directory, then deploy my library and have the other computers access my data. I can not query AD to give me a set of objects, as in a database.
"6) In NT 3.x, winsrv.dll hosted in csrss.exe in user mode handled all the graphical and windowing stuff. They moved a lot of that to win32k.sys in kernel mode because the marshalling between the server and client processes was complex, difficult to do properly and slow. "
That's because the WIN32 window system sucks. The X-Window system does not, and NeWS was even better.
"7) MFC and now
MFC sucks big time, and it's the shittiest library ever written (I am using it for 8 years now, so I know what I am talking about).
"8) NT has always used UCS-2 Unicode exclusively internally. The Win32 ASCII functions all convert to Unicode to call the real function. NT uses the UNICODE_STRING structure internally for all strings, which includes buffer size and data size. "
Just like other NT capabilities, they are hidden deep inside the kernel: the command console is not unicode, the search function does not support unicode searches, many fonts are not unicode etc.
And UCS2 does not support all the unicode characters.
And garbage collection is not applied at the application level handing NT unicode strings.
"It wouldn't be helpful to switch to a Unixy core: NT already does all the things that you've described that Unixes also do, plus more things. Win32 is the source of ugliness here, and I too would be happy to see it go into compatibility retirement. There was a time when Longhorn was going to do that."
As I have said elsewhere, I am not saying "NT should be UNIX", I am saying that NT should have a more UNIX-like approach, i.e. a more de-centralized, de-coupled approach. As it is right now, everything in NT depends on anything else, even if the O/S is heavily componentized.
For example, why is there a registry? if NT supports mounted filesystems, the registry should be a filesystem. Why the windows directory (C:\WINNT) contains everything in one or two directories? Why applications are not self-contained in their own directories? why we still see "c:\" ? why can't I access my desktop from any machine in the network without installing other software? there are tens of questions like this that Microsoft has left unanswered, and these are the problems I expect Microsoft to solve in the next Windows version.
"There's performance penalty in that, all those context switches when processes are communicating with other processes in the system."
.NET for starters."
.NET toolkit wraps over WIN32. I am talking about an object-oriented toolkit as the basis for the GUI, i.e. an object-oriented toolkit to replace WIN32.
.NET API is object oriented, supports carbage collection, .NET strings and chars are UNICODE ect. In fact, NT has been UNICODE for ages (Win32 API 8 bit functions are just wrappers to UNICODE functions)."
a 906021.aspx#EIC)
;)"
Modern microkernel design is efficient, even in 80x86. You don't even need to context-switch.
"Add abstraction layer and databases above that and we need Intel to produce faster processor which sucks even more power"
The networking abstraction layer is required so as that any process can run in client-server mode. QNX does it successfully. A database is necessary because filesystems don't cut it any more.
"Object oriented toolkit? Well there's
The
"C# is object oriented,
I don't see why I am required to run in such a heavy environment where a simpler one could suffice.
"OS virtualization? Vista already does this. UAC virtualizes at least filesystem and registry."
It's only for legacy applications, and in Microsoft's own words, "it is a short-term measure--not a long-term solution" (copy-paste straight from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsvista/a
"But what you are talking about here is actually figured out at MS Research. Microkernel architecture where some of the performance issues are dealt by running everything in the user land in the same process. F# compiler makes sure that thread isn't messing up with other thread's memory (which is all the same virtual memory) and provides multithreading/IPC and so on. It's really interesting idea and I'd love to see it running on my desktop some day."
F# means no raw 80x86 assembly...which is not good if you want to write things like compilers etc.
"But at the mean time I think I stick to my Windows Vista, which is built on 80's technology (in fact, first NT was released 1993), not on 60's Unix technology
The model of user accounts/processes/filesystems, etc is 60's UNIX. Windows NT is based on VMS, which is like UNIX with some additional features. It is not adequate for today's computing environments, but it has a great advantage: separation of concerns. That's why I am talking about 'unix-like' technology.
not many, but it's not that rare. It's certainly not abnormal...
There is no need to re-invent everything, especially at the hardware level.
What Microsoft needs to do is write a UNIX like O/S with the following features:
1) write the successor to the C language: a strongly and statically typed C derivative with none of C's deficiencies but allowing access to the bare metal, also incorporating functional features. They certainly have the stuff to do that. Then use this language to:
2) simplify the driver development system using microkernel techniques.
3) write a single tree file system, like in Unix, where filesystems are mounted/unmounted.
4) write a network-abstraction system on top of the file system described above, where resources of the system are abstracted over the network.
5) write an object/typed database layer on top of this network abstraction system, and offer it as the default. Use MIME as the typing mechanism.
6) write a Window System, ala X, which is a regular process sitting on top of the database system.
7) write a truly object-oriented toolkit which includes gui, xml, database, and everything else required for modern apps. See the Qt model for a good example.
8) use unicode throughout the system. Don't have 8-bit functions and wide-character functions. Make character a single 32-bit data type which can host all unicode characters, so you don't have a problem on how strings are handled. Forget C string handling, and do it in the modern way.
9) provide garbage collection where appropriate. This means that all code, except the microkernel and system drivers, should be garbage-collected.
10) use the Erlang model for multithreading. Provide userland multithreading libraries for the fastest multithreading possible.
11) virtualize the O/S for the user. Make it as if the user can read/write/execute everything, but any change will not be reflected to the system files or other users' files. Provide a ring security mechanism, like 80x86 rings, so as that networked applications can not hurt the rest of the system and can only communicate with it through specific call gates.
Microsoft's problem is entirely a software problem. They want to use 70's technology for the 21st century. It's doable, but only if UNIX like principles are followed.
(Thank God Microsoft does not read slashdot though, because there are quite a few interesting proposals here).
...and coming to think Seven was a Borg...perhaps the Gates Borg icon is really justified?
But Microsoft software can't mature, because it is a kludge of many things with the highest degree of interdependencies ever in software.
For example, the GUI message queue of windows has evolved to carry async socket messages, COM notifications, session management messages, and all shorts of wild things. Furthermore, the microsoft window system is severely coupled with the widget set.
On the other hand, the UNIX gui (the X-Windows System) is independent of the kernel, the drivers, and the rest of the O/S. And the widget set is a different layer on top of the window system.
On Windows, the system layout is tied to drive C:\. Drive letters are a nightmare, making it quite impossible to deploy a network of computers where the user sees the same desktop from any workstation, unless really expensive solutions are used.
On Unix, the single hierarchy system makes it very easy to deploy an infrastructure where the user's files are stored in a central place and therefore the user can see his own desktop from any machine he sits on.
On Windows, there needs to be an API for system settings. When the Windows registry goes down, you need to redeploy everything.
On Unix, all you need is a text editor, and if a file goes corrupt, the rest of the system is fine.
So Microsoft software can't mature because it's bad software.
"The problem is that the industry - especially Microsoft (and with an even worse attitude) - is pushing the limits of the current software development technology."
Not really. If Microsoft did such a thing, they would make an advanced futuristic O/S, most probably based on an advanced programming language like a LISP variant or Haskell.
What Microsoft does is to push the limits of exploitation of the most common software development technology: C as the programming language of choice, a unix-like security model based on administrator/userland done in the wrong way, a kludge of "technologies" with all sorts of problems, etc.
Until Microsoft realizes that we should move forward from the concepts of process/filesystem/desktop UI, they are doomed.
You were modded insightful, but you don't say in what way sex is different in reality from a porno movie.
I support the opposite view: excluding the most extreme porno, sex in films is the same as sex in reality. During intercourse, sex is governed by instincts, so it's not any different.
In reality, real sex is more extreme than filmed one, and that is obvious if you go around and read various testimonies on sexual experiences. And that is certainly to be expected, because you can't show everything on the screen, there are limits, even in the most extreme and hardcore sex films. But there are no limits when there are no cameras.
But please put it on a USB key so as that I can plug a different one* next time!
(*) morality