Ignoring that, Hayek's viewpoint on the relationship between the state, private enterprise and the individual was (paraphrasing The Road To Serfdom somewhat) that the state could, by its actions, only harm individuals since it impeded their freedoms to act: private enterprise, driven by consumer demand, would and should take over many of the roles of the state since it could provide for the individual without restricting his choice.
To which I (and others) can only say: "Up to a point, Lord Copper".
While there is a valid argument against a collectivised and centrally controlled market, there's an equally valid argument against a completely laissez-faire neo-liberal market. At some point, the state must intercede in order to protect the powerless from the powerful (this is, after all, the fundamental reason behind all law). Read Leviathan (Hobbes) which is still, three hundred years later, one of the best explorations of what has been more recently called the social contract.
A true laissez-faire attitude would be to allow any corporation to data-mine the individual such as yourself to within an inch of his or her life: after all, why shouldn't they? While they are richer and more powerful than you, they are just looking after their own interests. The fundamental role of the state, as prescribed in statute, is surely to mediate in this relationship and protect the individual.
In general, laws, and hence the social structures they underpin, do evolve organically: certainly in the UK, laws are created or amended on a daily basis. Furthermore, once they leave Parliament, they're refined in courts across the country: British law is a heady mixture of statute and precedents.
Furthermore, since we exist in an environment where the state and (large) private enterprise often seem worryingly (to me at least) interchangeable in their viewpoints and aims, there is a pragmatic case to be made for cheering each and every piece of legislation which is aimed at protecting the fundamental human rights of individuals: IM(NS)HO, privacy is one of those rights.
[BTW, before anyone gets me wrong and also IM(NS)HO, the right to own assault rifles, grenade launchers, semi-automatic pistols etc does not come under the heading of "fundamental human rights". Certainly not round here, anyway.] -- Cheers
So should the DoJ take up cudgels against Ford, GM, Daimler-Chrysler et al. on behalf of Blaupunkt and other ICE manufacturers because the big motor companies have integrated the same product? -- Cheers
In this economy, if you can't find a job doing something interesting, you've nobody but yourself to blame. After the stock market bubble bursts I may possibly end up writing VB to put food on the table, but I can't see any reason to do it now.
Consider, for a second, that I may be in a country and an employment space different to your own. I contract: that means that (win one) I earn a reasonable living and (win two) I get to take four months holiday a year.
The downside (fundamentally) is that I only get paid if I'm writing code: no code - no cash - no food. It's not difficult to understand.
Now I take it from your blinkered worldview that you're a resident of the US of A: since I have no intention of uprooting my entire life to go and live surrounded by a bunch of slackjawed Yanks, the state of your job market and your economy is entirely irrelevant to my getting a job in my economy: I get probably two or three C/C++ jobs a week coming through against 30 to 50 VB ones. The only big C/C++ shops over here that are hiring contractors are the financial institutions and here, as a contractor, I'm hampered by a lack of a background in financials.
You sound like a Cobol programmer, quite frankly.
On the other hand, we recently interviewed somebody with about the same skill set you describe. He advertised himself as a C++ programmer: "Oh, I spend about 10% of my time at work in C++. It's my favorite language." So we gave him our entry-level pop quiz on C++. After he spent an hour struggling to come up with wrong answers to a five-minute quiz, we began to doubt that he'd ever written a line of C++ code in his life. That's not the only time I've seen VB programmers lie outrageously. In fact, in every case where I've been able to check their claims against reality, they've been full of shit. VB seems to attract people who don't really give a damn about programming; they just want to get a respectable job and make a quick buck. They're con artists, for the most part.
That said, at the moment, what I do is come in here every day and write C++ code, since that's what the job I'm doing at the moment requires (I'm writing a NT service that builds and serves.SWF files on the fly from details held in a relational database) - you're welcome to come and peer over my shoulder at the code to verify that it's real genuine C++ with classes and overloaded operators and semicolons and all...
If you're so certain that I wouldn't know a vtable from a iterator, mail me your C++ pop quiz: who knows, I may even be able to read it (assuming I can hold my finger to the screen long enough and avoid drooling on the keyboard)
As all the highly productive VB "programmers" out there would find if they ever got a job where minimal competence was expected of them, those of us who earn our salaries don't have much patience with "filthy hacks". Comprende?
Finally, you're assuming I put "filthy hacks" in my production code: this, sir, is an insult to anyone who ever submitted an entry for the IOCCC and I expect you to retract it immediately. Or do you just find the concept of programming for pleasure (even in VB) alien? -- Cheers
You're both sort-of right: since CE exposes a good 90%(ish) or the Win32 API and NT (for the sake of argument and to save typing, I'm treating W2K as NT5) is the reference Win32 API implementation it'd be fair to say the CE kernel is based on NT (i.e. it exposes similar functionality in a lot of cases although some of Win32 isn't implemented - no-one's yet (AFAIK) built an SMP handheld...).
However, the internals of the kernel aren't from NT: it's a whole different set of code (unsuprisingly, since hardware on the desktop is somewhat different to hardware in the palm) and, as Mr Burdick points out, this project was Pegasus, intended as a successor to the WinPad and Pulsar. Meanwhile (and more recently), Microsoft Israel (IIRC) have built Embedded NT, which is a cut-down NT kernel for embedded use (although not intended, I think for handhelds, palmtops and other such pseudo-computers ) - here, there is commonality between the code-bases. -- Cheers
Wrong, wrong, wrong, absolutely brimming over with wrongability.
Win32 is implemented as a subsystem on top of the NT kernel in a similar way to the "OS/2" (sic) and "Posix" (sic) subsystems - there's no particular reason why you couldn't build a subsystem which implemented the POSIX and X/Open specs (and, from a pragmatic point-of-view, supported the whole of man(3) fully), but why? After all, if you want a Unix box, you buy one.
Agreed re. the on-kernel implementation: since several Unices have been built on the Mach kernel, it would probably not prove exceptionally difficult to build one on the (similarly-architected) NT kernel. IMHO it would, however, be fairly pointless. -- Cheers
This [the performance boost slider] is, IMHO, one of the funnest things in the NT UI: on NTWS, it works (IIRC, it "++priority"s all threads in the FG app, though MS can and do change this behaviour arbitrarily between SPs) but on NTS, it does absolutely bugger all, and it always makes me wet myself when I see "expert" pundits recommending that this slider be moved to "improve the server performance".
That said, I'd certainly recommend running nothing more outre than the VGA drivers on a production server anyway, simply because there's no need for anything more (do people ever get disappointed: "I've spent $400 000 on this Proliant 7500 and it's only got a VGA card and no SoundBlaster"?) -- Cheers
My major beef with ColdFusion (or at least it was last time I looked - have they changed it) is that it doesn't round-trip: you build your ColdFusion site, tweak the generated pages and then, when you rebuild the site, tweak them again. Forever. Which gets rather boring.
It's great if you're able to buy fully into the whole ColdFusion lifestyle, but if you need to step outside the bounds Allaire set - even for an instant - you're SOL. -- Cheers
OK - I'll rise to the bait, and list the real languages (I'm not counting markup languages and scripting languages) I'm fluent in, and the (approx.) percentage of my time I spend writing each:
VB - 60%
TSQL/PL-SQL/Informix 4GL - 15%
C++ - 15%
C - 5%
Java - 5%
Perl - ~0%
Fortran - ~0%
68K assembler - ~0%
Why? Because this is what my employers pay me to write. And why do they pay me to write VB? Because (with a few exceptions) I can build the same functionality in VB about twice as fast as in C++ and at very little cost in terms of performance.
As all the 3733T Linux gods out there will find once they leave school, those of us making a living in the Real World end up doing what the client pays for because otherwise we don't eat. Comprende?
BTW - one great advantage of VB which no-one's mentioned here yet is that it's possible (with a bit of lateral thinking) to come up with far filthier hacks than are available in most any other language -- Cheers
... which has absolutely no imact on the speed of the console - what do you think Dreamcast or PS2 are running? 1 GHz silicon? Or a chipset designed so that the hard work is taken off the CPU and handed to custom A/V silicon. Sega's Naomi board is IIRC running a 200MHz SH4 and yet it still throws plenty of polys around.
What's going to be interesting is what nVIDIA delivers: given that MS/nVIDIA have been in a position to design this kit from the ground up, how about a high-bandwidth (4096 bit wide) bus to dual-ported main memory with the whole rendering pipeline (geometry calculations, T&L, polygon filling and rendering) in hardware. In that case, the processor's reduced to doing little more than scanning the ports and running the AI, which a 600MHz x86 piece is more than capable of.
Consider: your 600MHz PC has to run Windows 98/Windows 2000/Linux (with all that entails) underneath any games - all those other processes running in the background certainly aren't helping your main aim of throwing lots of polys around. It's got to communicate with its video hardware via either the (slow) PCI bus or the (slightly faster) AGP bus, but both these are still horrible bottlenecks.
Let's face it, if you were going to design a hardware architecture to play video games on, the PC's probably about as far from ideal as you can get. Similarly powered hardware in a properly architected system will blow a PC out of the water - compare a SNES (running a modded 6502) with an AT. -- Cheers
Erm - CBM 8016. I'd been coding (at a fairly low level) for two years when the Spectrum was released (when I was 11), although it helped that my dad lectured in FE and they had a PET lab at the college where he worked. -- Cheers
What BugNet forgot to mention is that in the case of number 30, when you try and install Intellipoint 2.2, W2K says (effectively) "you really don't want to do this, you know. Get a fixed version of the software and we'll try again" - I know because it did this to me. Since I'm not a moron, I avoided the "ignore the advice and go ahead anyway" button in favour of going to Microsoft's web-site and downloading the patched drivers.
I know this makes the story far less exciting, but hey... My favourite from the list is number 18: "On a Windows 2000 computer with a wimpy power supply, an Adaptec ANA62044 64-bit 4-port PCI Fast Ethernet adapter may not be able to automatically negotiate network connection on two of the ports. The only "fix" is to upgrade to a computer with a greater power supply." Now can someone with a greater knowledge of PC hardware than myself explain how a change in OS can cause changes to the power levels provided by the PSU? Damned if I know... Oh, and who are they to call my PSU wimpy? My PSU can kick sand in their PSUs' faces any day of the week... -- Cheers
It sound like you're confusing "safe mode with command prompt" (useful when you've managed to really fsck up you're video drivers ) with the recovery console, which you get when you reboot a 2K box off the installation media and choose "Repair" or, if you install it, on the list of available OSs at boot time. -- Cheers Jon -- Cheers
Millennium is a last, desperate attempt to wring a final few dollars out of the corpse of the W95 code-tree: like W98 and W98SE before it, it's a mound of bug fixes with a little bit of new functionality. Anyone who goes out and buys it retail (rather than getting it preinstalled) is probably too stupid to own a computer anyway.
For those who were too busy chuntering to themselves (you know who you are) to actually take any notice of what been going on in NT for the last five years, listen up:
The Windows NT operating system bears absolutely no comparison to the Linux kernel: the NT equivalent of linux would be the small group of DLLs (KERNEL32.DLL, WINSRV.DLL, NTDLL.DLL, NTKRNL(MP).EXE, WIN32K.SYS and HAL.DLL) which makes up kernel-mode Windows.The rest of the behemoth which is a modern day W2K Server install is implemented on top: the relationship is similar to that which sendmail, Apache, X, Gnome/KDE, Netscape, all the GNU tools et al have with the Linux kernel.
Now, over the last five years, Microsoft have moved away from the concept of implementing their OS as a bunch of APIs in the classic C style (i.e a bunch of headers which you include as necessary, and monolithic components under those headers which you linked to directly) and towards building it as a collection of COM components. While this isn't the place (or the space) to embark on why COM is a deeply cool philosophy and how, over the last decade, it's become deeply cool in real life too, suffice it to say that this opens up all kinds of doors: consider a fully componentised operating system in which you can merrily swap all the bits for newer bits as they appear without anything breaking. This, in my book, is a kick-ass OS. Unstable? Not particularly in my experience (beta1 sucked mud on a regular basis, beta 2 was far more stable and from beta 3 onwards through the RCs I've been using it on both clients and servers without problems (except for the fact it didn't want to talk to my £20 no-name Chinese NICs so I went out and bought some real NICs instead) Bloated? No more so than Linux + X + windows manager + desktop + Apache + and X.500 server + sendmail + wu-ftpd +... yada yada yada. Security flawed? Probably, but at least they're trying to get it right.
In the last five years they have produced a first cut of the kick-ass operating system my AC friend requested and, more importantly, they've built it to a plug-compatible specification: they're moving away from a monolithic 'release earth-shattering quantities of code twice a decade' approach towards 'release components when they're ready and release often'. Sound familiar?
The result is that DOS is finally going to breathe its last (no flowers, donations to the home for distressed 8-bit operating systems) and there'll be two NT tracks from here on in. One track will see the punter/corporate buying an W2K (or derivative) and then getting service packs which contain nothing but patches - no new functionality whatsoever. They'll be able to get all the new functionality by getting a new copy of the OS (say Whistler for W2K users). The other track will allow the user to add new functionality as and when it becomes available, similar (in concept) to the Option Pack for NT4, which added a transaction monitor, resource dispenser, message queuing software, certificate software and indexing server to the base OS (and this isn't intended as a snide dig, but are there any players in the transaction monitor/resource dispenser/message queue spaces on Linux/BSD yet? Has anyone heard anything about Tuxedo (now there's an apt name) or MQ - given the latter's IBM, I wouldn't be suprised to hear a port's in the works) for the cost of download - all this stuff has now been integrated into the W2K code tree.
As an aside, this might also help explain the confusion about why no-one gets to see the whole source tree: it's mainly that there isn't a 'whole source for NT' tree. Rather, there's vast swathes of IDL defining all the inter-component interface in NT and then small teams, each owning their code, developing to those interfaces. -- Cheers
Be fair: NT on laptops (at least modern laptops) sucked big-time. It's a *huge* win being able to swap CD-ROM and floppy drive without rebooting.
The USB support's nice too (though as far as I'm concerned it's mostly because of the enhanced resolution for playing Quake/Half-Life etc w/ a USB mouse)
That said, I'm still holding onto my (very stable) 98 install for Cubase purposes (Yamah still hadn't released final drivers for the SW100XG or DSP Factory) but I've migrated all my home NT Servers over to W2K Server and the NTW install on my primary workstation hasn't been booted in several months. -- Cheers
Surely you don't mean Roger was less flashy and more understated than Sean...
Apart from that (horrible) howler, I've got a certain amount of sympathy with what you're saying - from where I'm sitting the name of the game is to pick the right language for the job. I'm currently working as part of a team delivering a big chunk of extranet functionality: it's a Microsoft shop, so the architecture's fairly standard: IIS onto MTS/MSMQ/JRun onto SQL Server/Exchange Server with a few 'interesting' bits wedged into the middle (Flash compiler, anyone?). The result is that we've got development being done in VB, VBScript, Java, JavaScript, C++ and TSQL on the horses-for-courses basis. It's my contention that, as highly distributed systems become more prevalent over time, this sort of code base is going to become more and more common. The result is that the inability of a single monolithic VB executable to handle high processing/transaction volumes becomes largely irrelevant since the framework in which your components are deployed provides the support necessary to allow your systems to scale.
So, use Delphi or VB (both have their strengths and their weaknesses) for what they're good at (and, let's face it, GUI development with raw, unadorned gcc is (like COM development in C) best left to those people without painfully tight deadlines). If (when?) you get asked by your management to deliver a chunk of fairly complex GUI and processing functionality which doesn't need to have the last.01% of performance squeezed out of it and doesn't need to get intimate with the machine architecture but which does need to be delivered by Friday (sound familiar, anyone) I, for one, would be firing up Delphi or VB rather than vi. -- Cheers
Lying is the most abhorrent thing in the universe.
Bzzzt - wrong
The correct answer is "being sanctimonious is the most abhorrent thing in the universe"
Did they show you graphs demonstrating that Photoshop, VST, Quake or Microprose Grand Prix would run faster on a Cyrix 166 than a P166? Or did their graphs show that it could run (say) Word faster?
Personally, I'm waiting for the plague of 1000 years to fall upon telephone sanitisers, PHBs, people who say that free access to guns make the world a safer place, the morons who believe salespeople and other such. It hasn't happened yet but that doesn't mean I've stopped hoping. -- Cheers
Slashdot Mirror
Ignoring that, Hayek's viewpoint on the relationship between the state, private enterprise and the individual was (paraphrasing The Road To Serfdom somewhat) that the state could, by its actions, only harm individuals since it impeded their freedoms to act: private enterprise, driven by consumer demand, would and should take over many of the roles of the state since it could provide for the individual without restricting his choice.
To which I (and others) can only say: "Up to a point, Lord Copper".
While there is a valid argument against a collectivised and centrally controlled market, there's an equally valid argument against a completely laissez-faire neo-liberal market. At some point, the state must intercede in order to protect the powerless from the powerful (this is, after all, the fundamental reason behind all law). Read Leviathan (Hobbes) which is still, three hundred years later, one of the best explorations of what has been more recently called the social contract.
A true laissez-faire attitude would be to allow any corporation to data-mine the individual such as yourself to within an inch of his or her life: after all, why shouldn't they? While they are richer and more powerful than you, they are just looking after their own interests. The fundamental role of the state, as prescribed in statute, is surely to mediate in this relationship and protect the individual.
In general, laws, and hence the social structures they underpin, do evolve organically: certainly in the UK, laws are created or amended on a daily basis. Furthermore, once they leave Parliament, they're refined in courts across the country: British law is a heady mixture of statute and precedents.
Furthermore, since we exist in an environment where the state and (large) private enterprise often seem worryingly (to me at least) interchangeable in their viewpoints and aims, there is a pragmatic case to be made for cheering each and every piece of legislation which is aimed at protecting the fundamental human rights of individuals: IM(NS)HO, privacy is one of those rights.
[BTW, before anyone gets me wrong and also IM(NS)HO, the right to own assault rifles, grenade launchers, semi-automatic pistols etc does not come under the heading of "fundamental human rights". Certainly not round here, anyway.]
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Cheers
Well, Macromedia have released the Flash File Format SDK: now it's up to the Open Source advocates to build the authoring tool...
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Cheers
So should the DoJ take up cudgels against Ford, GM, Daimler-Chrysler et al. on behalf of Blaupunkt and other ICE manufacturers because the big motor companies have integrated the same product?
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Cheers
Consider, for a second, that I may be in a country and an employment space different to your own. I contract: that means that (win one) I earn a reasonable living and (win two) I get to take four months holiday a year.
The downside (fundamentally) is that I only get paid if I'm writing code: no code - no cash - no food. It's not difficult to understand.
Now I take it from your blinkered worldview that you're a resident of the US of A: since I have no intention of uprooting my entire life to go and live surrounded by a bunch of slackjawed Yanks, the state of your job market and your economy is entirely irrelevant to my getting a job in my economy: I get probably two or three C/C++ jobs a week coming through against 30 to 50 VB ones. The only big C/C++ shops over here that are hiring contractors are the financial institutions and here, as a contractor, I'm hampered by a lack of a background in financials.
You sound like a Cobol programmer, quite frankly.
On the other hand, we recently interviewed somebody with about the same skill set you describe. He advertised himself as a C++ programmer: "Oh, I spend about 10% of my time at work in C++. It's my favorite language." So we gave him our entry-level pop quiz on C++. After he spent an hour struggling to come up with wrong answers to a five-minute quiz, we began to doubt that he'd ever written a line of C++ code in his life. That's not the only time I've seen VB programmers lie outrageously. In fact, in every case where I've been able to check their claims against reality, they've been full of shit. VB seems to attract people who don't really give a damn about programming; they just want to get a respectable job and make a quick buck. They're con artists, for the most part.
That said, at the moment, what I do is come in here every day and write C++ code, since that's what the job I'm doing at the moment requires (I'm writing a NT service that builds and serves .SWF files on the fly from details held in a relational database) - you're welcome to come and peer over my shoulder at the code to verify that it's real genuine C++ with classes and overloaded operators and semicolons and all...
If you're so certain that I wouldn't know a vtable from a iterator, mail me your C++ pop quiz: who knows, I may even be able to read it (assuming I can hold my finger to the screen long enough and avoid drooling on the keyboard)
As all the highly productive VB "programmers" out there would find if they ever got a job where minimal competence was expected of them, those of us who earn our salaries don't have much patience with "filthy hacks". Comprende?
Finally, you're assuming I put "filthy hacks" in my production code: this, sir, is an insult to anyone who ever submitted an entry for the IOCCC and I expect you to retract it immediately. Or do you just find the concept of programming for pleasure (even in VB) alien?
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Cheers
Quick heads up: object-oriented design != C++ implementation (ask all the old Simula hackers out there... or read D&E some day)
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Cheers
However, the internals of the kernel aren't from NT: it's a whole different set of code (unsuprisingly, since hardware on the desktop is somewhat different to hardware in the palm) and, as Mr Burdick points out, this project was Pegasus, intended as a successor to the WinPad and Pulsar. Meanwhile (and more recently), Microsoft Israel (IIRC) have built Embedded NT, which is a cut-down NT kernel for embedded use (although not intended, I think for handhelds, palmtops and other such pseudo-computers ) - here, there is commonality between the code-bases.
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Cheers
Win32 is implemented as a subsystem on top of the NT kernel in a similar way to the "OS/2" (sic) and "Posix" (sic) subsystems - there's no particular reason why you couldn't build a subsystem which implemented the POSIX and X/Open specs (and, from a pragmatic point-of-view, supported the whole of man(3) fully), but why? After all, if you want a Unix box, you buy one.
Agreed re. the on-kernel implementation: since several Unices have been built on the Mach kernel, it would probably not prove exceptionally difficult to build one on the (similarly-architected) NT kernel. IMHO it would, however, be fairly pointless.
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Cheers
See here for a discussion of the similarities and differences between VMS and NT
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Cheers
That said, I'd certainly recommend running nothing more outre than the VGA drivers on a production server anyway, simply because there's no need for anything more (do people ever get disappointed: "I've spent $400 000 on this Proliant 7500 and it's only got a VGA card and no SoundBlaster"?)
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Cheers
Coom ere an say that, lad, an ah'll flatten thee!
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Cheers
It's great if you're able to buy fully into the whole ColdFusion lifestyle, but if you need to step outside the bounds Allaire set - even for an instant - you're SOL.
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Cheers
VB - 60%
TSQL/PL-SQL/Informix 4GL - 15%
C++ - 15%
C - 5%
Java - 5%
Perl - ~0%
Fortran - ~0%
68K assembler - ~0%
Why? Because this is what my employers pay me to write. And why do they pay me to write VB? Because (with a few exceptions) I can build the same functionality in VB about twice as fast as in C++ and at very little cost in terms of performance.
As all the 3733T Linux gods out there will find once they leave school, those of us making a living in the Real World end up doing what the client pays for because otherwise we don't eat. Comprende?
BTW - one great advantage of VB which no-one's mentioned here yet is that it's possible (with a bit of lateral thinking) to come up with far filthier hacks than are available in most any other language
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Cheers
What's going to be interesting is what nVIDIA delivers: given that MS/nVIDIA have been in a position to design this kit from the ground up, how about a high-bandwidth (4096 bit wide) bus to dual-ported main memory with the whole rendering pipeline (geometry calculations, T&L, polygon filling and rendering) in hardware. In that case, the processor's reduced to doing little more than scanning the ports and running the AI, which a 600MHz x86 piece is more than capable of.
Consider: your 600MHz PC has to run Windows 98/Windows 2000/Linux (with all that entails) underneath any games - all those other processes running in the background certainly aren't helping your main aim of throwing lots of polys around. It's got to communicate with its video hardware via either the (slow) PCI bus or the (slightly faster) AGP bus, but both these are still horrible bottlenecks.
Let's face it, if you were going to design a hardware architecture to play video games on, the PC's probably about as far from ideal as you can get. Similarly powered hardware in a properly architected system will blow a PC out of the water - compare a SNES (running a modded 6502) with an AT.
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Cheers
I should clarify: that's 'low level' as in 'simple', not as in '6502 assembler'
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Cheers
Erm - CBM 8016. I'd been coding (at a fairly low level) for two years when the Spectrum was released (when I was 11), although it helped that my dad lectured in FE and they had a PET lab at the college where he worked.
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Cheers
I know this makes the story far less exciting, but hey... My favourite from the list is number 18: "On a Windows 2000 computer with a wimpy power supply, an Adaptec ANA62044 64-bit 4-port PCI Fast Ethernet adapter may not be able to automatically negotiate network connection on two of the ports. The only "fix" is to upgrade to a computer with a greater power supply." Now can someone with a greater knowledge of PC hardware than myself explain how a change in OS can cause changes to the power levels provided by the PSU? Damned if I know... Oh, and who are they to call my PSU wimpy? My PSU can kick sand in their PSUs' faces any day of the week...
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Cheers
preview
PREVIEW
PREVIEW!!
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Cheers
It sound like you're confusing "safe mode with command prompt" (useful when you've managed to really fsck up you're video drivers ) with the recovery console, which you get when you reboot a 2K box off the installation media and choose "Repair" or, if you install it, on the list of available OSs at boot time. -- Cheers Jon
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Cheers
Millennium is a last, desperate attempt to wring a final few dollars out of the corpse of the W95 code-tree: like W98 and W98SE before it, it's a mound of bug fixes with a little bit of new functionality. Anyone who goes out and buys it retail (rather than getting it preinstalled) is probably too stupid to own a computer anyway.
For those who were too busy chuntering to themselves (you know who you are) to actually take any notice of what been going on in NT for the last five years, listen up:
The Windows NT operating system bears absolutely no comparison to the Linux kernel: the NT equivalent of linux would be the small group of DLLs (KERNEL32.DLL, WINSRV.DLL, NTDLL.DLL, NTKRNL(MP).EXE, WIN32K.SYS and HAL.DLL) which makes up kernel-mode Windows.The rest of the behemoth which is a modern day W2K Server install is implemented on top: the relationship is similar to that which sendmail, Apache, X, Gnome/KDE, Netscape, all the GNU tools et al have with the Linux kernel.
Now, over the last five years, Microsoft have moved away from the concept of implementing their OS as a bunch of APIs in the classic C style (i.e a bunch of headers which you include as necessary, and monolithic components under those headers which you linked to directly) and towards building it as a collection of COM components. While this isn't the place (or the space) to embark on why COM is a deeply cool philosophy and how, over the last decade, it's become deeply cool in real life too, suffice it to say that this opens up all kinds of doors: consider a fully componentised operating system in which you can merrily swap all the bits for newer bits as they appear without anything breaking. This, in my book, is a kick-ass OS. Unstable? Not particularly in my experience (beta1 sucked mud on a regular basis, beta 2 was far more stable and from beta 3 onwards through the RCs I've been using it on both clients and servers without problems (except for the fact it didn't want to talk to my £20 no-name Chinese NICs so I went out and bought some real NICs instead) Bloated? No more so than Linux + X + windows manager + desktop + Apache + and X.500 server + sendmail + wu-ftpd + ... yada yada yada. Security flawed? Probably, but at least they're trying to get it right.
In the last five years they have produced a first cut of the kick-ass operating system my AC friend requested and, more importantly, they've built it to a plug-compatible specification: they're moving away from a monolithic 'release earth-shattering quantities of code twice a decade' approach towards 'release components when they're ready and release often'. Sound familiar?
The result is that DOS is finally going to breathe its last (no flowers, donations to the home for distressed 8-bit operating systems) and there'll be two NT tracks from here on in. One track will see the punter/corporate buying an W2K (or derivative) and then getting service packs which contain nothing but patches - no new functionality whatsoever. They'll be able to get all the new functionality by getting a new copy of the OS (say Whistler for W2K users). The other track will allow the user to add new functionality as and when it becomes available, similar (in concept) to the Option Pack for NT4, which added a transaction monitor, resource dispenser, message queuing software, certificate software and indexing server to the base OS (and this isn't intended as a snide dig, but are there any players in the transaction monitor/resource dispenser/message queue spaces on Linux/BSD yet? Has anyone heard anything about Tuxedo (now there's an apt name) or MQ - given the latter's IBM, I wouldn't be suprised to hear a port's in the works) for the cost of download - all this stuff has now been integrated into the W2K code tree.
As an aside, this might also help explain the confusion about why no-one gets to see the whole source tree: it's mainly that there isn't a 'whole source for NT' tree. Rather, there's vast swathes of IDL defining all the inter-component interface in NT and then small teams, each owning their code, developing to those interfaces.
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The USB support's nice too (though as far as I'm concerned it's mostly because of the enhanced resolution for playing Quake/Half-Life etc w/ a USB mouse)
That said, I'm still holding onto my (very stable) 98 install for Cubase purposes (Yamah still hadn't released final drivers for the SW100XG or DSP Factory) but I've migrated all my home NT Servers over to W2K Server and the NTW install on my primary workstation hasn't been booted in several months.
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Can you spell BSD?
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Surely DAMTP - wasn't it the Dept. of Applied Maths and Theoretical Physics. We're talking the one down behind the Anchor, right?
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Erm ... Windows NT?
Agree with you about the ease-of-use. And, since MS agree with you too, that's all fine and dandy then.
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Apart from that (horrible) howler, I've got a certain amount of sympathy with what you're saying - from where I'm sitting the name of the game is to pick the right language for the job. I'm currently working as part of a team delivering a big chunk of extranet functionality: it's a Microsoft shop, so the architecture's fairly standard: IIS onto MTS/MSMQ/JRun onto SQL Server/Exchange Server with a few 'interesting' bits wedged into the middle (Flash compiler, anyone?). The result is that we've got development being done in VB, VBScript, Java, JavaScript, C++ and TSQL on the horses-for-courses basis. It's my contention that, as highly distributed systems become more prevalent over time, this sort of code base is going to become more and more common. The result is that the inability of a single monolithic VB executable to handle high processing/transaction volumes becomes largely irrelevant since the framework in which your components are deployed provides the support necessary to allow your systems to scale.
So, use Delphi or VB (both have their strengths and their weaknesses) for what they're good at (and, let's face it, GUI development with raw, unadorned gcc is (like COM development in C) best left to those people without painfully tight deadlines). If (when?) you get asked by your management to deliver a chunk of fairly complex GUI and processing functionality which doesn't need to have the last .01% of performance squeezed out of it and doesn't need to get intimate with the machine architecture but which does need to be delivered by Friday (sound familiar, anyone) I, for one, would be firing up Delphi or VB rather than vi.
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Bzzzt - wrong
The correct answer is "being sanctimonious is the most abhorrent thing in the universe"
Did they show you graphs demonstrating that Photoshop, VST, Quake or Microprose Grand Prix would run faster on a Cyrix 166 than a P166? Or did their graphs show that it could run (say) Word faster?
Personally, I'm waiting for the plague of 1000 years to fall upon telephone sanitisers, PHBs, people who say that free access to guns make the world a safer place, the morons who believe salespeople and other such. It hasn't happened yet but that doesn't mean I've stopped hoping.
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