For me the crashes ended, but the weird silent issues that you don't notice until it's too late are what have plagued me since 2001 on every XP-based PC I've tried. Everything from screwed up registries to the general slowdown of Windows after 6 months
I read the article, I could not find the source of this information. The memo that was included does not speak about this 60% figure. They have not mentioned any other sources. Now why is this making news!!!??
RTFA, it says a Microsoft source claims "up to 60%" could be rewritten with the addition of the XBox team.
Regardless of your personal experiences with a beta build, Vista is far from complete and in an emergency state.
When Forbes magazine is criticizing your announcement event and calling your upcoming major product "not people ready," it's indicative of the emergency state that Microsoft finds itself in. That may make the Microsoft fanbois on Slashdot cry, but it's the truth and deserves to be reported.
Not only does this ignore the fact OS X Leopard is due out at the end of the year/early next year, it ignores that Apple already considered and rejected Windows NT in the 90s. Apple also doesn't need to port the Carbon APIs to Windows, because the Mac Toolbox is already packed into Quicktime for Windows, which is where Carbon was first originated. And iTunes is not implemented in Windows using packed in Carbon APIs; it's a port to Win32. Finally, Apple doesn't want to wait on Microsoft for OS updates. Six years is too long for Apple.
You're taking a facetious post from MacRumors and turning it into actual speculation.
Maybe because it's not the first line but the title of the article, and nowhere in the "article" does it mention this magical "60%" number, nor does it provide any real reasons for how that number came about.
It states right at the top of the article that a Microsoft insider is claiming "up to 60%" will be rewritten with the addition of the XBox team.
Actually it's NeXTSTEP that dates back to 1988. OPENSTEP was the later API (that was ported to numerous other platforms as well).
And OpenStep was a renaming of NeXTStep. If semantics is all you can offer, I've clearly already won this debate.
There are some fairly significant changes. Different version of Mach, different BSD base, completely new display system, completely new GUI, new APIs (Carbon, Quicktime), major emulation environment (Classic), etc, etc.
But the API framework was mostly unchanged. The rest was ports of old Mac technologies.
The changes from NeXTSTEP -> OS X are *major*. It's not just a few tweaks here and there and a new GUI skin thrown on.
Not as major as you're trying to portray them for your own agenda.
Right. Vista will have taken 4 - 6 years (depending on how you want to count) to arrive (and its successor will probably take another 3 - 5), but is undergoing the same "rapid development" that sees OS X releases with major new features every twelve months...
Once again, do you people even *think* before saying stuff like this ?
Do you even attempt to comprehend what you're responding to? You claimed OS X was still undergoing major, unstable changes, and I pointed out that Vista is doing the exact same thing. Lacking any counterargument, you purposely decide to latch onto something unrelated to score some sort of strawman point. Bonus points for the "you people" remark, lumping me in with some unnamed mass of people to further try to dismiss my opinion.
Which APIs ?
It's on the Wine mailing lists.
Development that's been occurring over a period of *6 years*, not *12 months*.
And this nugget of information has nothing to do with anything. Next.
The changes from Windows 2003 -> Vista are, ironically enough, similar to the changes from NeXTSTEP -> OS X (although not quite as extensive). The rather important point - the crux of my whole argument - you seem to be missing here is the *timeframe* involved. Once again:
NT - ~13 years old, releases averaging about every 3 - 4 years.
OS X - ~5 years old, releases averaging about every 12 months.
And the point you purposely ignore--because it completely shatters your foaming-at-the-mouth, pro-Microsoft agenda--is that OS X is based on OpenStep, which dates back to 1988, just as much as Windows XP is based on NT.
Can you not see the difference, for developers (especially) and users, between OS releases every 12 months vs OS releases ever 3 - 4 years ?
It's amusing for pro-Microsoft fanbois to in one breath claim every new revision of OS X is just minor changes being sold at $120 a pop, and in the next, attempt to argue that each revision is actually an entire new version of the OS in order to make Windows development look less rapid. Pick a side. At least make your biased agenda consistent, or else you end up looking as foolish as you do now.
Point releases (that would be, say, Windows 2000 -> XP -> 2003) *very* rarely break things on Windows. Even drivers will typically work between them.
Once again, completely wrong. I notice you totally ignored the Norton example. Typical.
Next.
Not to mention, *AGAIN*, that these changes in Windows take place over a period of ~5 *years*, not 12 *months*.
You use "take place" as though the 5-year development cycle of Vista is some sort of standard Microsoft policy. Amusing.
OS X hasn't seen a 12-month development cycle in quite a number of years anyway, so that's another strawman argument you've totally invented.
Next.
Are you really so buried in anti-Microsoft rhetoric you can't even see the difference between having to upgrade software every 12 months as compared to every few years ?
Now, lacking any counterarguments for my points, you have to try to dismiss my points as "anti-Microsoft rhetoric." Hey, if you think it's a great idea
OS X's recent arrival and subsequent lack of legacy code (relatively speaking) are *often* touted as advantages (which they are, in certain contexts).
No, they're not. Mac zealots often lament the lack of Classic support in new Intel Macs, in fact. You're actually making stuff up here. It's amazing.
I knew that already, thanks. Doesn't make any difference to what I said.
Other than the pesky proves-you-wrong thing.
Maybe you need to open your other eye. OS X's relatively lack of legacy code is frequently touted as an advantage, particularly when comparing to Windows.
OS X's touted advantages are its lack of spyware, antiviruses, and its vastly superior interface and infrastructure (Cocoa totally rapes Win32/.NET, and OS X's hardware Quartz compositing was released way back in 2002...congrats to Microsoft for catching up four years later).
Funny, here I was thinking all I did was point out comparing the release cycles of a well established 13 year old product to a 5 year old product is silly. I don't recall making any attempt to jump into the irrelevant, petty "who has the newest OS at the moment" rhetoric you're spouting.
Ah, the "rhetoric" dismissal again. See, here's what's silly. You call Windows XP a 13-year-old product and OS X a 5-year-old product. Windows XP was the first consumer release of NT, just as OS X was the first consumer release of OpenStep merged with the Mac Toolbox. By your logic, Windows XP is only 5 years old, but you've decided to count Windows 2000, NT, and Workgroups in the lineage of XP, yet you purposely don't count OpenStep and NeXTStep in the lineage of OS X. It's a clearly biased premise that you require for your argument to look like it holds water.
Such a disaster that it owns most of the market. Damn, I wish I could have disasters like that...
Ah, the "market share" rhetoric of the typical Microsoft fanboi. Lacking anything else, you have to resort to this tired cliche. Quantity apparently equals quality in the Windows user's mind. Of course, Ashlee Simpson sells more CDs than concert recordings of Mozart, and McDonald's sells more Big Macs than health food stores sell salads. And cancer kills more people than the common cold.
The most amusing part of this cliche is that it ignores the situations that lead to the market dominance of Microsoft, up to and including its illegally coercive OEM deals that prevented superior competing products from having a chance on the market. In your mind, any monopoly automatically means it's a good monopoly, no matter its quality. History, of course, tells otherwise.
Next.
Windows *NT* is mature (heh, and you accuse _me_ of strawman arguments).
Of course. You've spouted nothing but. You refer to Windows NT when talking about XP but ignore NeXTStep when talking about OS X. It's the funniest bit of denial I've ever read. Next.
Not to mention your FUD...
Wow, can't argue with that kind of research. I love how you ignored my point about registry cleaners, antispyware, antivirus, and firewall software. FUD is a Microsoft-originated term, by the way, used to describe a campaign of misinformation they planned against competitors. Amusing.
I don't think anyone advocating the UI train wreck called the Dock is in any position to criticise UI.
Oh my GOD, if all you've got is criticism of the Dock, I've clearly already won this debate. The Dock is much less of a disaster than that horrible airplane wreck called the "Start menu" and "taskbar" combo. Every time I have to coach a user through the idea that the programs they see on the Start menu aren't actually the programs they're seeing on the Start menu, I scratch at my eyes to distract from the pain.
XP was releaased in 2001.
AHAHAHAHAAHAAA! What does that have to do with Windows still running people in admin accounts in the year 2006?
After all, massive security holes in the #1 dominant platform in the world aren't worth reporting to the IT community. It might make the Microsoft fanbois cry.
I'll tell that to my grandma, thanks. When she calls back utterly confused and lost in Windows dialog boxes, I'll just take her down to the nearest Apple Store instead.
OS X is based on OpenStep which dates back to 1989. Stop FUDing. By your logic, I could just claim Windows is only 5 years old since XP was the first consumer Windows based on NT.
OS X is still undergoing relatively rapid feature development and major changes, with things like API stability and backwards compatibility of secondary concern.
Just like Vista.
Windows NT development, OTOH, is more focussed on refinements and improvements to the existing codebase with things like API stability and backwards compatibility considered much more important.
Rriiigghhtt. That's why Microsoft is dropping APIs in Vista? That's why they're plopping a bunch of 1.0 APIs into the system and reorganizing the kernel?
It hasn't been at all uncommon for OS X's major point releases to break applications - particularly applications delving more into the lower levels of the OS.
Oh my GOD. The exact same is true for Windows, you troll. Shock and horror, you have to upgrade Norton when you upgrade to a new version of Windows.
*That* is why OS X releases have been more frequent, and more significant. To put it bluntly, they've had more things that needed fixing and implementing.
So how does your theory explain new tech like Expose, Spotlight, CoreData, CoreVideo, CoreImage, and such?
Your logic also applies to Windows. Unless you're actually going to argue Windows XP doesn't have things that need fixing and implementing. For Christ's sake, Windows is still not a true, functioning multi-user system in 2006. That's one broken OS.
Vista will be finally catching up to where OS X was April of last year. It's sad and hilarious.
I've certainly heard yours. The typical Mac Zealot schizophrenia that allows you to turn everything into "OS X rulez".
"Hey, check out OS X, man ! Latest and greatest OS on the market. Completely new. None of that krufty old code like Windows has".
"Unstable ? No, OS X has been around for ages. It's mostly NeXTSTEP, you see, so everything in it has been around the block a few times and is well tested."
Typical Windows fanboi strawman argument. Who said OS X was "completely new" or praised it for being such? If you had any CLUE at all about the Mac community, in fact, you'd be amused to know a lot of people stuck with OS 9 for a couple of year after OS X's release. "Newness" was certainly not a factor in the Mac community's minds.
But, hey, if all you've got to defend this three-year-late OS X clone called Vista is to invent crap to mock, have at it. Every point you've brought up has been soundly crushed in these discussions, especially your hilarious attempts to call NT "mature" and OS X "immature" despite the age and robustness of the OpenStep APIs compared to the disaster that has been Windows XP.
I mean, seriously, Windows XP is mature? The security nightmare that requires registry cleaners and disk defragmenters and antivirus and antispyware and 20 wizards to do everything is "mature?" The OS with the ultra-clunky interface and ridiculous security policies (hey, let's run everyone in admin accounts in the year 2006!) and broken APIs? With Vista being restarted back in 2004, it means it's now Windows Vista that is the immature, unstable product with the rapidly changing codebase. All those 1.0 APIs are going to be fun to break.
You've just bought into the Microsoft marketing machine, and you decided to obsessively respond to every anti-Windows comment you could find to defend your baby. Please, get a life.
OS X is based on the mature FreeBSD, with the OpenStep framework on top of it, which has existed since 1989. OS X is every bit as mature as Windows NT.
You make other ignorant claims elsewhere like "OS X is still undergoing relatively rapid feature development and major changes, with things like API stability and backwards compatibility of secondary concern." The API in OS X is frozen. What "relatively rapid feature development and major changes" are you talking about? If anything, it's Windows that's currently undergoing these kinds of unstable changes, with all its 1.0 managed APIs coming out in Vista. In fact, Microsoft is dropping APIs in Vista. You'll have to install CHM and WinHelp support as a separate download now!
"Most of the code in OS X as it exists today, was *not* in NeXTSTEP." This is just ridiculous. Most of OS X is OpenStep code. The big additions are Carbon, which was ported from the baked-in Mac APIs in Quicktime for Windows, and subsystems like Quartz, CoreAudio, etc. Certainly, code has been updated since then, but it all comes from the NeXTStep APIs dating back to 1989, even down the NS* class prefixes.
I've noticed that you've responded obsessively to nearly every anti-Windows comment you can find in this story. Perhaps you should take a deep breath and take a walk. It's okay that people don't like Windows or think it sucks! You've clearly got an agenda here, but you're going about it the wrong way and coming off as a zealot. Believe it or not, there are a lot of smart, educated people who have very negative opinions about Windows, and for good reason. You don't have to be Bill Gates' crusader and yell at them all just because they sent you a shiny MSDN brochure.
Often, I hear people say OMG DIGG IS TEH PRETTIER: I'd rather have a site which is fast and easy to navigate than a site which is all eye candy and takes an hour to load.
Digg is compact and easy to navigate. It doesn't take an hour to load. In fact, it's faster to use thanks to its extensive use of AJAX. Just rating a comment on Slashdot requires reloading the entire slow page of comments.
I don't think Slashdot's layout works at all. In fact, for years, it often displayed incorrectly in Firefox.
Yep, that's been thrown out the window. Now, any old line of kernels might have some bleeding edge hack thrown in or new replacement code that hasn't been well tested. You can no longer trust any line of kernels.
It was forked before (dvdrtools), and will doubtless be forked again. The forks will die out once the maintainers realise that it's not Schilling being awkward, it's the kernel people. Last I knew, the fork you mention was depending on ide-scsi, which had a witch hunt against it towards the end of 2.4, was declared obsolete a few times as the latest poorly-thought-out replacement arose, and when this didn't get people to abandon it, was intentionally crippled around 2.6.9 or 2.6.10 time. Whoops. CD writing on linux is bloody hard - the only other project which has lasted any amount of time is cdrdao, and that uses Schilling's libscg for drive access. The sooner people stop their hero-worship of Linus, stop the persecution of Schilling, and start looking at the facts, the sooner something can be done.
All this crap is why I stick with the BSDs. They actually act professional and make it a point to retain common sense and stability in their operating systems. I've watched Linux over the years become something like a spiraling rocket that looks a little out of control.
In a bid to capture the huge audience for handheld entertainment gadgets, Microsoft is designing a product that combines video games, music and video in one handheld device, according to sources familiar with the project.
I'm confused. I thought that's what Origami--er, sorry, "Ultra Mobile Personal Computers"-- were supposed to be? So Microsoft is now going to invalidate UMPCs with another handheld gadget. That is, if it ever sees the light of day. Microsoft has been promising digital media competition every year now.
This is just showing how unfocused Microsoft is, to release a handheld computer, then work on another handheld computer for a different target market.
What, and remove the sensationalistic headlines that generate hits and therefore higher ad rates for the OSTG employees that run Slashdot? Never! Everything new is a "kiler," goshdarnit!
And people say they stay at Slashdot for the journalism...ha.
No, virtual memory. Remember when nobody knew which scheme to use?
Re:Yet Again, the BSDs get Snubbed
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Sure, I love bsd as much as the next guy, but seriously - the bsds have more rigid professionalism? more emphasis on correctness over features? Given the amount of improvement in the linux kernel over the past 10 years, compared to that of the bsds, that seems a curious statement.
I guess by improvement in the Linux kernel, you mean broken 2.6 development or bleeding edge hacks that break things. Yes, the BSDs have a much more professional approach. They actually try to retain stability instead of hacking in the latest gee-whiz device driver or VM scheme that breaks things.
Re:Summary gets anarchism wrong
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· Score: 4, Insightful
That's because language and therefore definitions reflect usage. Dictionaries are hardly "irrelevant" just because they contain common definitions you have some anal disagreement with society over.
Re:Summary gets anarchism wrong
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· Score: 3, Informative
From Wikipedia:
"Anarchism as a political philosophy, is the belief that rulers, governments, and hierarchal social relationships are unnecessary and should be abolished, although there are differing interpretations of what this means."
Sounds like another one of those -isms that people have adopted and modified from its true original meaning to make themselves feel different, like Satanism. Anarchy means chaos and lack of organization. Oxford says "a state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority."
"ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: via medieval Latin from Greek anarkhia, from anarkhos, from an- 'without' + arkhos 'chief, ruler.'"
Funny, I thought Wikipedia is what it is today because of the frighteningly large number of people willing to explain Super Mario Bros. continuity or the mechanics of Klingon spaceships.
Can't argue with that kind of research! Especially the way you find one single freely released movie. Wow! That totally removes the other 99.9% of PirateBay's illegal piracy, including their "Piracy is great!" t-shirts.
Seriously. BitTorrent piracy is a myth. Yes, there are a small percentage of files pirated using that protocol, just like http, ftp, e-donkey and other file transfer protocols can be abused.
A "small percentage?!" ROFL! The majority of Bittorrent traffic, like the majority of eDonkey traffic, is illegal piracy. Not only has this been proven before, it's just plain common sense. Which do you think you'll find more sources for in an ED2K search--a Linux ISO or the latest #1 music album? For every legal tracker, there are 100 illegal ones.
Slashdot Mirror
For me the crashes ended, but the weird silent issues that you don't notice until it's too late are what have plagued me since 2001 on every XP-based PC I've tried. Everything from screwed up registries to the general slowdown of Windows after 6 months
I read the article, I could not find the source of this information. The memo that was included does not speak about this 60% figure. They have not mentioned any other sources. Now why is this making news!!!??
RTFA, it says a Microsoft source claims "up to 60%" could be rewritten with the addition of the XBox team.
Regardless of your personal experiences with a beta build, Vista is far from complete and in an emergency state.
When Forbes magazine is criticizing your announcement event and calling your upcoming major product "not people ready," it's indicative of the emergency state that Microsoft finds itself in. That may make the Microsoft fanbois on Slashdot cry, but it's the truth and deserves to be reported.
Us Slashdot idiots don't want you here if the most constructive thing you can come up with is "We're already discussing it on digg".
It's "We Slashdot idiots."
Not only does this ignore the fact OS X Leopard is due out at the end of the year/early next year, it ignores that Apple already considered and rejected Windows NT in the 90s. Apple also doesn't need to port the Carbon APIs to Windows, because the Mac Toolbox is already packed into Quicktime for Windows, which is where Carbon was first originated. And iTunes is not implemented in Windows using packed in Carbon APIs; it's a port to Win32. Finally, Apple doesn't want to wait on Microsoft for OS updates. Six years is too long for Apple.
You're taking a facetious post from MacRumors and turning it into actual speculation.
Maybe because it's not the first line but the title of the article, and nowhere in the "article" does it mention this magical "60%" number, nor does it provide any real reasons for how that number came about.
It states right at the top of the article that a Microsoft insider is claiming "up to 60%" will be rewritten with the addition of the XBox team.
Its well known that while Mac users do not have as large a market share as linux users, we set the direction of the industry.
Um, what? Mac's install base far outnumbers that of Linux on the desktop.
Actually it's NeXTSTEP that dates back to 1988. OPENSTEP was the later API (that was ported to numerous other platforms as well).
And OpenStep was a renaming of NeXTStep. If semantics is all you can offer, I've clearly already won this debate.
There are some fairly significant changes. Different version of Mach, different BSD base, completely new display system, completely new GUI, new APIs (Carbon, Quicktime), major emulation environment (Classic), etc, etc.
But the API framework was mostly unchanged. The rest was ports of old Mac technologies.
The changes from NeXTSTEP -> OS X are *major*. It's not just a few tweaks here and there and a new GUI skin thrown on.
Not as major as you're trying to portray them for your own agenda.
Right. Vista will have taken 4 - 6 years (depending on how you want to count) to arrive (and its successor will probably take another 3 - 5), but is undergoing the same "rapid development" that sees OS X releases with major new features every twelve months...
Once again, do you people even *think* before saying stuff like this ?
Do you even attempt to comprehend what you're responding to? You claimed OS X was still undergoing major, unstable changes, and I pointed out that Vista is doing the exact same thing. Lacking any counterargument, you purposely decide to latch onto something unrelated to score some sort of strawman point. Bonus points for the "you people" remark, lumping me in with some unnamed mass of people to further try to dismiss my opinion.
Which APIs ?
It's on the Wine mailing lists.
Development that's been occurring over a period of *6 years*, not *12 months*.
And this nugget of information has nothing to do with anything. Next.
The changes from Windows 2003 -> Vista are, ironically enough, similar to the changes from NeXTSTEP -> OS X (although not quite as extensive). The rather important point - the crux of my whole argument - you seem to be missing here is the *timeframe* involved. Once again:
NT - ~13 years old, releases averaging about every 3 - 4 years.
OS X - ~5 years old, releases averaging about every 12 months.
And the point you purposely ignore--because it completely shatters your foaming-at-the-mouth, pro-Microsoft agenda--is that OS X is based on OpenStep, which dates back to 1988, just as much as Windows XP is based on NT.
Can you not see the difference, for developers (especially) and users, between OS releases every 12 months vs OS releases ever 3 - 4 years ?
It's amusing for pro-Microsoft fanbois to in one breath claim every new revision of OS X is just minor changes being sold at $120 a pop, and in the next, attempt to argue that each revision is actually an entire new version of the OS in order to make Windows development look less rapid. Pick a side. At least make your biased agenda consistent, or else you end up looking as foolish as you do now.
Point releases (that would be, say, Windows 2000 -> XP -> 2003) *very* rarely break things on Windows. Even drivers will typically work between them.
Once again, completely wrong. I notice you totally ignored the Norton example. Typical.
Next.
Not to mention, *AGAIN*, that these changes in Windows take place over a period of ~5 *years*, not 12 *months*.
You use "take place" as though the 5-year development cycle of Vista is some sort of standard Microsoft policy. Amusing.
OS X hasn't seen a 12-month development cycle in quite a number of years anyway, so that's another strawman argument you've totally invented.
Next.
Are you really so buried in anti-Microsoft rhetoric you can't even see the difference between having to upgrade software every 12 months as compared to every few years ?
Now, lacking any counterarguments for my points, you have to try to dismiss my points as "anti-Microsoft rhetoric." Hey, if you think it's a great idea
OS X's recent arrival and subsequent lack of legacy code (relatively speaking) are *often* touted as advantages (which they are, in certain contexts).
No, they're not. Mac zealots often lament the lack of Classic support in new Intel Macs, in fact. You're actually making stuff up here. It's amazing.
I knew that already, thanks. Doesn't make any difference to what I said.
Other than the pesky proves-you-wrong thing.
Maybe you need to open your other eye. OS X's relatively lack of legacy code is frequently touted as an advantage, particularly when comparing to Windows.
OS X's touted advantages are its lack of spyware, antiviruses, and its vastly superior interface and infrastructure (Cocoa totally rapes Win32/.NET, and OS X's hardware Quartz compositing was released way back in 2002...congrats to Microsoft for catching up four years later).
Funny, here I was thinking all I did was point out comparing the release cycles of a well established 13 year old product to a 5 year old product is silly. I don't recall making any attempt to jump into the irrelevant, petty "who has the newest OS at the moment" rhetoric you're spouting.
Ah, the "rhetoric" dismissal again. See, here's what's silly. You call Windows XP a 13-year-old product and OS X a 5-year-old product. Windows XP was the first consumer release of NT, just as OS X was the first consumer release of OpenStep merged with the Mac Toolbox. By your logic, Windows XP is only 5 years old, but you've decided to count Windows 2000, NT, and Workgroups in the lineage of XP, yet you purposely don't count OpenStep and NeXTStep in the lineage of OS X. It's a clearly biased premise that you require for your argument to look like it holds water.
Such a disaster that it owns most of the market. Damn, I wish I could have disasters like that...
Ah, the "market share" rhetoric of the typical Microsoft fanboi. Lacking anything else, you have to resort to this tired cliche. Quantity apparently equals quality in the Windows user's mind. Of course, Ashlee Simpson sells more CDs than concert recordings of Mozart, and McDonald's sells more Big Macs than health food stores sell salads. And cancer kills more people than the common cold.
The most amusing part of this cliche is that it ignores the situations that lead to the market dominance of Microsoft, up to and including its illegally coercive OEM deals that prevented superior competing products from having a chance on the market. In your mind, any monopoly automatically means it's a good monopoly, no matter its quality. History, of course, tells otherwise.
Next.
Windows *NT* is mature (heh, and you accuse _me_ of strawman arguments).
Of course. You've spouted nothing but. You refer to Windows NT when talking about XP but ignore NeXTStep when talking about OS X. It's the funniest bit of denial I've ever read. Next.
Not to mention your FUD...
Wow, can't argue with that kind of research. I love how you ignored my point about registry cleaners, antispyware, antivirus, and firewall software. FUD is a Microsoft-originated term, by the way, used to describe a campaign of misinformation they planned against competitors. Amusing.
I don't think anyone advocating the UI train wreck called the Dock is in any position to criticise UI.
Oh my GOD, if all you've got is criticism of the Dock, I've clearly already won this debate. The Dock is much less of a disaster than that horrible airplane wreck called the "Start menu" and "taskbar" combo. Every time I have to coach a user through the idea that the programs they see on the Start menu aren't actually the programs they're seeing on the Start menu, I scratch at my eyes to distract from the pain.
XP was releaased in 2001.
AHAHAHAHAAHAAA! What does that have to do with Windows still running people in admin accounts in the year 2006?
To recap:
Me: Windows XP is having everyone running
After all, massive security holes in the #1 dominant platform in the world aren't worth reporting to the IT community. It might make the Microsoft fanbois cry.
I'll tell that to my grandma, thanks. When she calls back utterly confused and lost in Windows dialog boxes, I'll just take her down to the nearest Apple Store instead.
Windows NT = ~13 years old.
OS X = ~5 years old.
OS X is based on OpenStep which dates back to 1989. Stop FUDing. By your logic, I could just claim Windows is only 5 years old since XP was the first consumer Windows based on NT.
OS X is still undergoing relatively rapid feature development and major changes, with things like API stability and backwards compatibility of secondary concern.
Just like Vista.
Windows NT development, OTOH, is more focussed on refinements and improvements to the existing codebase with things like API stability and backwards compatibility considered much more important.
Rriiigghhtt. That's why Microsoft is dropping APIs in Vista? That's why they're plopping a bunch of 1.0 APIs into the system and reorganizing the kernel?
It hasn't been at all uncommon for OS X's major point releases to break applications - particularly applications delving more into the lower levels of the OS.
Oh my GOD. The exact same is true for Windows, you troll. Shock and horror, you have to upgrade Norton when you upgrade to a new version of Windows.
*That* is why OS X releases have been more frequent, and more significant. To put it bluntly, they've had more things that needed fixing and implementing.
So how does your theory explain new tech like Expose, Spotlight, CoreData, CoreVideo, CoreImage, and such?
Your logic also applies to Windows. Unless you're actually going to argue Windows XP doesn't have things that need fixing and implementing. For Christ's sake, Windows is still not a true, functioning multi-user system in 2006. That's one broken OS.
Vista will be finally catching up to where OS X was April of last year. It's sad and hilarious.
I've certainly heard yours. The typical Mac Zealot schizophrenia that allows you to turn everything into "OS X rulez".
"Hey, check out OS X, man ! Latest and greatest OS on the market. Completely new. None of that krufty old code like Windows has".
"Unstable ? No, OS X has been around for ages. It's mostly NeXTSTEP, you see, so everything in it has been around the block a few times and is well tested."
Typical Windows fanboi strawman argument. Who said OS X was "completely new" or praised it for being such? If you had any CLUE at all about the Mac community, in fact, you'd be amused to know a lot of people stuck with OS 9 for a couple of year after OS X's release. "Newness" was certainly not a factor in the Mac community's minds.
But, hey, if all you've got to defend this three-year-late OS X clone called Vista is to invent crap to mock, have at it. Every point you've brought up has been soundly crushed in these discussions, especially your hilarious attempts to call NT "mature" and OS X "immature" despite the age and robustness of the OpenStep APIs compared to the disaster that has been Windows XP.
I mean, seriously, Windows XP is mature? The security nightmare that requires registry cleaners and disk defragmenters and antivirus and antispyware and 20 wizards to do everything is "mature?" The OS with the ultra-clunky interface and ridiculous security policies (hey, let's run everyone in admin accounts in the year 2006!) and broken APIs? With Vista being restarted back in 2004, it means it's now Windows Vista that is the immature, unstable product with the rapidly changing codebase. All those 1.0 APIs are going to be fun to break.
You've just bought into the Microsoft marketing machine, and you decided to obsessively respond to every anti-Windows comment you could find to defend your baby. Please, get a life.
OS X is based on the mature FreeBSD, with the OpenStep framework on top of it, which has existed since 1989. OS X is every bit as mature as Windows NT.
You make other ignorant claims elsewhere like "OS X is still undergoing relatively rapid feature development and major changes, with things like API stability and backwards compatibility of secondary concern." The API in OS X is frozen. What "relatively rapid feature development and major changes" are you talking about? If anything, it's Windows that's currently undergoing these kinds of unstable changes, with all its 1.0 managed APIs coming out in Vista. In fact, Microsoft is dropping APIs in Vista. You'll have to install CHM and WinHelp support as a separate download now!
"Most of the code in OS X as it exists today, was *not* in NeXTSTEP." This is just ridiculous. Most of OS X is OpenStep code. The big additions are Carbon, which was ported from the baked-in Mac APIs in Quicktime for Windows, and subsystems like Quartz, CoreAudio, etc. Certainly, code has been updated since then, but it all comes from the NeXTStep APIs dating back to 1989, even down the NS* class prefixes.
I've noticed that you've responded obsessively to nearly every anti-Windows comment you can find in this story. Perhaps you should take a deep breath and take a walk. It's okay that people don't like Windows or think it sucks! You've clearly got an agenda here, but you're going about it the wrong way and coming off as a zealot. Believe it or not, there are a lot of smart, educated people who have very negative opinions about Windows, and for good reason. You don't have to be Bill Gates' crusader and yell at them all just because they sent you a shiny MSDN brochure.
Often, I hear people say OMG DIGG IS TEH PRETTIER: I'd rather have a site which is fast and easy to navigate than a site which is all eye candy and takes an hour to load.
Digg is compact and easy to navigate. It doesn't take an hour to load. In fact, it's faster to use thanks to its extensive use of AJAX. Just rating a comment on Slashdot requires reloading the entire slow page of comments.
I don't think Slashdot's layout works at all. In fact, for years, it often displayed incorrectly in Firefox.
Yep, that's been thrown out the window. Now, any old line of kernels might have some bleeding edge hack thrown in or new replacement code that hasn't been well tested. You can no longer trust any line of kernels.
It was forked before (dvdrtools), and will doubtless be forked again. The forks will die out once the maintainers realise that it's not Schilling being awkward, it's the kernel people. Last I knew, the fork you mention was depending on ide-scsi, which had a witch hunt against it towards the end of 2.4, was declared obsolete a few times as the latest poorly-thought-out replacement arose, and when this didn't get people to abandon it, was intentionally crippled around 2.6.9 or 2.6.10 time. Whoops. CD writing on linux is bloody hard - the only other project which has lasted any amount of time is cdrdao, and that uses Schilling's libscg for drive access. The sooner people stop their hero-worship of Linus, stop the persecution of Schilling, and start looking at the facts, the sooner something can be done.
All this crap is why I stick with the BSDs. They actually act professional and make it a point to retain common sense and stability in their operating systems. I've watched Linux over the years become something like a spiraling rocket that looks a little out of control.
In a bid to capture the huge audience for handheld entertainment gadgets, Microsoft is designing a product that combines video games, music and video in one handheld device, according to sources familiar with the project.
I'm confused. I thought that's what Origami--er, sorry, "Ultra Mobile Personal Computers"-- were supposed to be? So Microsoft is now going to invalidate UMPCs with another handheld gadget. That is, if it ever sees the light of day. Microsoft has been promising digital media competition every year now.
This is just showing how unfocused Microsoft is, to release a handheld computer, then work on another handheld computer for a different target market.
What, and remove the sensationalistic headlines that generate hits and therefore higher ad rates for the OSTG employees that run Slashdot? Never! Everything new is a "kiler," goshdarnit!
And people say they stay at Slashdot for the journalism...ha.
I assume you're talking about Xen here?
No, virtual memory. Remember when nobody knew which scheme to use?
Sure, I love bsd as much as the next guy, but seriously - the bsds have more rigid professionalism? more emphasis on correctness over features? Given the amount of improvement in the linux kernel over the past 10 years, compared to that of the bsds, that seems a curious statement.
I guess by improvement in the Linux kernel, you mean broken 2.6 development or bleeding edge hacks that break things. Yes, the BSDs have a much more professional approach. They actually try to retain stability instead of hacking in the latest gee-whiz device driver or VM scheme that breaks things.
That's because language and therefore definitions reflect usage. Dictionaries are hardly "irrelevant" just because they contain common definitions you have some anal disagreement with society over.
From Wikipedia:
"Anarchism as a political philosophy, is the belief that rulers, governments, and hierarchal social relationships are unnecessary and should be abolished, although there are differing interpretations of what this means."
Sounds like another one of those -isms that people have adopted and modified from its true original meaning to make themselves feel different, like Satanism. Anarchy means chaos and lack of organization. Oxford says "a state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority."
"ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: via medieval Latin from Greek anarkhia, from anarkhos, from an- 'without' + arkhos 'chief, ruler.'"
Funny, I thought Wikipedia is what it is today because of the frighteningly large number of people willing to explain Super Mario Bros. continuity or the mechanics of Klingon spaceships.
That's a myth.
Can't argue with that kind of research! Especially the way you find one single freely released movie. Wow! That totally removes the other 99.9% of PirateBay's illegal piracy, including their "Piracy is great!" t-shirts.
Seriously. BitTorrent piracy is a myth. Yes, there are a small percentage of files pirated using that protocol, just like http, ftp, e-donkey and other file transfer protocols can be abused.
A "small percentage?!" ROFL! The majority of Bittorrent traffic, like the majority of eDonkey traffic, is illegal piracy. Not only has this been proven before, it's just plain common sense. Which do you think you'll find more sources for in an ED2K search--a Linux ISO or the latest #1 music album? For every legal tracker, there are 100 illegal ones.
Talk about spinning for an agenda, man.