It was a pretty big improvement though it did suffer from the issue that win16 stuff was still cooperatively multitaasked and hanging win16 would hang the entire gui.
C++ used sensiblly is IMO a far better language than C, it is one of the few languages i'm aware of that gives you the ability to create custom types that really fit in.
Whether that type is a fixed point type for good performance without a FPU or a complex type for some mathematical stuff or even a variable size type with automatic reference counting and copy on write it can be copied and operated on as easilly as a built in type.
the trouble with C is as soon as you want a custom type life gets painfull. There are structures but you can't make operators behave how you want to one them, afaict they can't be copied using the assignment operator and I don't think you can return them either (this may have changed in later versions of the C standard, sadly it seems most stuff I end up doing in C is aimed at shitty compilers).
I'm not so hot on templates, they have thier uses but when misused they can easilly lead to huge code bloat.
there is a lot to be said for a highly controlled constant light in an office, it is a place where there are likely to be a lot of monitors all of which create thier own light (which means you don't want wide variation in ambiant light levels or colors) many of which are also annoyingly reflective (so you need to carefully control lighting direction).
and office lighting is nearly all flourescent which is one of the more efficiant types of lighting.
so the big questions are 1: can you collect enough natural light during a reasonablly large proportion of the working day? 2: can you control the light in a way that almost completely eliminates brightness, direction and color variations caused by variations in the incoming light 3: can you route the light arround the building without your light routing stuff wasting large ammounts of space. 4: can you do all of the above at a price that gives payback in an acceptable period (5 years is proabblly a reasonable line to draw)
1. Different burners have different formats. You have to be sure that when you have completed a backup, that it has been "closed" and prepared for use as a generic CD-ROM. Your worst nightmare is being in some remote location unable to get a replacement drive that reads the exact same formats (Roxio/DirectCD/Nero) as your previous one. Afaict theese are usually dependent on the software package not the burner and both roxio and ahead are quite happy to sell you non burner locked versions of their software both through major computer stores and directly.
sure if you are doing a monthly full backup it is not a problem. But for many people a full backup to optical media on anything like a regular basis just isn't practical. The cost both in terms of media and time of backing up a full modern hard drive to DVD R (either variety) regularlly would be pretty damn high. As for rewritable optical media i've never found that very reliable.
many people (and i'm guilty of this myself) copy a file to optical media once and assume it is backed up. When thier hard drive fails they go back to the optical media only to discover they either can't find what they want or there are disk read issues.
This is why my preffered means of backup is to keep copies on multiple computers, if those computers are physically seperate so much the better. if one of the computers dies it will be noticed and replaced quickly and the data copied back from other machines.
not really, windows 3.x (I really don't know what previous versions offered but I know they were never very popular) brought us PC users the very usefull ability to run our apps in a multitaskin environment albiet a cooperative one. By 3.1 they even had the ability to run multiple dos apps at the same time provided you had a 386 or higher CPU.
9x was a dirty hack but a nessacery one, it gave good compatibilty with badly behaved dos/win16 apps while having much better support for modern 32 bit apps than 3.x. It also introduced plug and play which really made life easier for anyone adding/removing hardware.
2K was the birth of modern windows, it brought together the stability of the NT line with the ease of use and hardware support of 9x.
Since then windows seems to have largely stagnated. I belive this is simply because it now does it's job easilly and pretty reliablly and there haven't been any really radical design changes to the PC architecture (the most radical was x64 but given the previous alpha port I bet most of microsofts core code was already 64 bit ready, driver updaing must have been a bitch though).
MS will apparently provide you with downgrade media if you ask nicely but they have also claimed they are under no obligation to do so so YMMV. Big brand OEMs (ones who use the bios locked no activation required versions of windows) are allowed to provide downgrade media but not all of them do so.
You can also excercise your downgrade rights using your existing media/key but if you do and that media/key is whitebox OEM or retail or big brand OEM of the wrong brand then afaict you are going to have to call the activation line for every machine.
XP does support IPV6, there are some issues with the implementation (you have to use two sockets if you want to listen on both v4 and v6, you have to use the command line to configure it and your dns servers must be ipv4) but it is certainly usable.
What they did do was make classic usable but painfull enough that users would strongly preffer native apps (unlike the transition from win16 to win32 which was invisible to users meaning that win16 apps stuck arround for a VERY lonh time). That meant that when it came time for the intel switch they could drop classic without causing thier users too much trouble.
You can *IF* the computer came with an OEM copy of vista buisness or ultimate. Afaict retail and retail upgrade copies don't come with downgrade rights and neither do home basic and home premium OEM.
So if the machine had vista home basic or home premium from the factory and you don't have a volume license scheme you are SOL (especially when the end of retail availibility passes).
Even if you do have downgrade rights you have to have the media to excercise them. That means if you don't have legit VLK media or big brand OEM media of the right brand you may end up making a lot of phone calls to the MS activation line.
I found going from the 9x line to 2K/XP to be a massive improvement. Suddenly I could fill a multi-row taskbar with browser windows and have the windows GUI keep working properly throughout. Suddently I could change network settings without the need for a reboot (9x had some crazy characteristics like it could detect a new PCMCIA network card and make it operate without the need for a reboot but if you needed to change any settings for that card it was reboot time).
Oh it doesn't. We're running XP now and will likely continue to do until 20xx (xx being an arbitrarily high number) when MS shuts down support for XP. Likely sometime after Service Pack 6 is shipped. I very much doubt there will be any more service packs for XP, frankly I was surprised that even SP3 ever materialised.
There is no urgent need to migrate off XP just yet but if you require secuirty updates or other support the clock is ticking.
Well as a power user and programmer (though I've never done desktop apps commercially) some compelling features for desktop apps (whether clients to a service of standalone) which are primerally influenced by the development tool choice.
1: easy deployment. If it can work with just the applications executable and nothing else while still keeping that executable to a reasonable size that is great. DLLs or othere support files in the applications folder are tolerable. Anything that makes your app require an installer which in turn requires admin rights is a pain. 2: reasonable size, who wants to ship hundreds of megs of data arround for no reason. Even tens is a pain in the arse if some people will have to download your app over dialup. 3: native GUI using the proper widgets, imitations like the swing windows PLAF and the similar GTK theme that look mostly the same but don't behave the same piss users off. 4: for smaller apps quick startup time, If a simple app can't start from cold in a few seconds I find that a major annoyance.
Of course the challange is to find a language that provides this while also making life easy for the developer and preferablly giving good performance too so that the developer doesn't need to mix languages.
The older versions of delphi really did well in all of theese categories while still being a nice quick way to develop desktop apps. Sadly the more recent versions of delphi have been crap (lots of "enterprise" and other bloat, while not bringing us a unicode version of the native VCL).
VB used to be pretty good in this regard too, but the runtime support DLLs gradually grew in size (which was important at a time when removable media generally meant floppies) and MS introduced activex controls which had to be registered preventing running without being installed first (and of course also making it hard to use VB to write the installer;) ). Then MS took VB into the.net direction requiring a framework install (over 20 megs of installer which i'm pretty sure requires admin rights to run) before your app could be used.
The IE5 installer at least would not install windows desktop update unless you used an undocumented command line parameter. I'm not sure if IE6 was availible for 95/NT4 and if so what it's behaviour was.
windows 98 and 2000 came with the features of windows desktop update out of the box and later versions of the windows desktop clearly still have most if not all of them.
MS isn't exactly killing off XP though they are certainly making it more awkward/potentially more expensive to get.
System builder (whitebox OEM) packs will remain availible until next january and there is nothing preventing stockpiling of either whitebox OEM or retail copies should you so wish.
Vista buisness and ultimate OEM come with downgrde rights and big name OEMs are now allowed to ship downgrade media and even supply the downgrade OS pre-installed.
Volume licenses have worked on the priciple of buy the latest version and get downgrade rights to install whichever version you want for quite a long time.
And of course there is the exception MS made for XP home on very low end machines in the wake of the EEEPC.
And many people would like to pay $40 to make sure their software is supported and their feedback listened to. Do you really belive $40 will buy you that? It might buy you a few hours from a bottom level support drone and/or put you marginally in front of the freeloaders in the bug report system but it certainly isn't going to ensure you will be listened to in any meaningfull sense.
Afaict many (possiblly most) are pretty much stuck with windows. Low end employees are likely to be using windows only custom internal apps while higher end employees are likely to be using windows only specialist software. Virtualisation is an option but it's not exactly a smooth user experiance.
The fact is there is no pressing reason for buisnesses to move away from XP yet. They can buy the machines with OEM vista buisness and run XP pro instead at no extra cost. A number of major hardware vendors still supply XP drivers and will presumablly continue to do so as long as buisnesses demand XP support. XP does not become unsupported for over 5 years.
Which afaict is exactly the same as the situation under 32 bit XP SP2.
It seems that XP without SP2 actually supports more memory but MS disabled that feature because many drivers didn't get on with it and bluescreened. And XP without SP2 is not supported anymore.
So afaict if you wan't more than 3.something gigabytes of usable memory on a supported 32 bit version of windows you have to go for a server edition:(
Maybe a few people who have no geek contacts (and therefore have to use commercial PC support buisnesses who will not supply pirate software) or buisnesses that need to stay legit and screwed up at purchasing time are.
I doubt it is significant though. I suspect home machines that get downgraded will generally be done with warez copies and buisnesses that don't subscribe to SA for other reasons will be good enough at forward planning to either buy the machine with XP or buy it with vista buisness and use the downgrade rights.
If your 56k modem, which already uses voice frequencies, can't get more than 8Kbps out of a poor line, what makes you think anything else will do better? A 56K modem is hamstrung by the device at the other end which means it can't use frequencies above 4khz at all and it has no easy way to avoid noise spike frequencies.
This isn't a nice comparison to make, but in England there is more 'broadband' (there is a somewhat higher standard to the definition there) in the country than the city. Of course, like most of Europe, all wires are underground. Not true, in many urban/suburban areas of england the final drop to the house is overhead and in some rural areas phone lines run overheaf for miles..
BT used to offer a service called BT home highway/BT buiseness highway which had a BT supplied box on the wall providing you with ISDN ports and a couple of analog ports. I think that box was exchange powered but I don't remember for sure.
Unfortunately it seems they recently dropped that product.
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It was a pretty big improvement though it did suffer from the issue that win16 stuff was still cooperatively multitaasked and hanging win16 would hang the entire gui.
C++ used sensiblly is IMO a far better language than C, it is one of the few languages i'm aware of that gives you the ability to create custom types that really fit in.
Whether that type is a fixed point type for good performance without a FPU or a complex type for some mathematical stuff or even a variable size type with automatic reference counting and copy on write it can be copied and operated on as easilly as a built in type.
the trouble with C is as soon as you want a custom type life gets painfull. There are structures but you can't make operators behave how you want to one them, afaict they can't be copied using the assignment operator and I don't think you can return them either (this may have changed in later versions of the C standard, sadly it seems most stuff I end up doing in C is aimed at shitty compilers).
I'm not so hot on templates, they have thier uses but when misused they can easilly lead to huge code bloat.
there is a lot to be said for a highly controlled constant light in an office, it is a place where there are likely to be a lot of monitors all of which create thier own light (which means you don't want wide variation in ambiant light levels or colors) many of which are also annoyingly reflective (so you need to carefully control lighting direction).
and office lighting is nearly all flourescent which is one of the more efficiant types of lighting.
so the big questions are
1: can you collect enough natural light during a reasonablly large proportion of the working day?
2: can you control the light in a way that almost completely eliminates brightness, direction and color variations caused by variations in the incoming light
3: can you route the light arround the building without your light routing stuff wasting large ammounts of space.
4: can you do all of the above at a price that gives payback in an acceptable period (5 years is proabblly a reasonable line to draw)
1. Different burners have different formats. You have to be sure that when you have completed a backup, that it has been "closed" and prepared for use as a generic CD-ROM. Your worst nightmare is being in some remote location unable to get a replacement drive that reads the exact same formats (Roxio/DirectCD/Nero) as your previous one.
Afaict theese are usually dependent on the software package not the burner and both roxio and ahead are quite happy to sell you non burner locked versions of their software both through major computer stores and directly.
sure if you are doing a monthly full backup it is not a problem. But for many people a full backup to optical media on anything like a regular basis just isn't practical. The cost both in terms of media and time of backing up a full modern hard drive to DVD R (either variety) regularlly would be pretty damn high. As for rewritable optical media i've never found that very reliable.
many people (and i'm guilty of this myself) copy a file to optical media once and assume it is backed up. When thier hard drive fails they go back to the optical media only to discover they either can't find what they want or there are disk read issues.
This is why my preffered means of backup is to keep copies on multiple computers, if those computers are physically seperate so much the better. if one of the computers dies it will be noticed and replaced quickly and the data copied back from other machines.
not really, windows 3.x (I really don't know what previous versions offered but I know they were never very popular) brought us PC users the very usefull ability to run our apps in a multitaskin environment albiet a cooperative one. By 3.1 they even had the ability to run multiple dos apps at the same time provided you had a 386 or higher CPU.
9x was a dirty hack but a nessacery one, it gave good compatibilty with badly behaved dos/win16 apps while having much better support for modern 32 bit apps than 3.x. It also introduced plug and play which really made life easier for anyone adding/removing hardware.
2K was the birth of modern windows, it brought together the stability of the NT line with the ease of use and hardware support of 9x.
Since then windows seems to have largely stagnated. I belive this is simply because it now does it's job easilly and pretty reliablly and there haven't been any really radical design changes to the PC architecture (the most radical was x64 but given the previous alpha port I bet most of microsofts core code was already 64 bit ready, driver updaing must have been a bitch though).
MS will apparently provide you with downgrade media if you ask nicely but they have also claimed they are under no obligation to do so so YMMV. Big brand OEMs (ones who use the bios locked no activation required versions of windows) are allowed to provide downgrade media but not all of them do so.
You can also excercise your downgrade rights using your existing media/key but if you do and that media/key is whitebox OEM or retail or big brand OEM of the wrong brand then afaict you are going to have to call the activation line for every machine.
XP does support IPV6, there are some issues with the implementation (you have to use two sockets if you want to listen on both v4 and v6, you have to use the command line to configure it and your dns servers must be ipv4) but it is certainly usable.
They don't.
What they did do was make classic usable but painfull enough that users would strongly preffer native apps (unlike the transition from win16 to win32 which was invisible to users meaning that win16 apps stuck arround for a VERY lonh time). That meant that when it came time for the intel switch they could drop classic without causing thier users too much trouble.
You can *IF* the computer came with an OEM copy of vista buisness or ultimate. Afaict retail and retail upgrade copies don't come with downgrade rights and neither do home basic and home premium OEM.
So if the machine had vista home basic or home premium from the factory and you don't have a volume license scheme you are SOL (especially when the end of retail availibility passes).
Even if you do have downgrade rights you have to have the media to excercise them. That means if you don't have legit VLK media or big brand OEM media of the right brand you may end up making a lot of phone calls to the MS activation line.
I found going from the 9x line to 2K/XP to be a massive improvement. Suddenly I could fill a multi-row taskbar with browser windows and have the windows GUI keep working properly throughout. Suddently I could change network settings without the need for a reboot (9x had some crazy characteristics like it could detect a new PCMCIA network card and make it operate without the need for a reboot but if you needed to change any settings for that card it was reboot time).
Oh it doesn't. We're running XP now and will likely continue to do until 20xx (xx being an arbitrarily high number) when MS shuts down support for XP. Likely sometime after Service Pack 6 is shipped.
I very much doubt there will be any more service packs for XP, frankly I was surprised that even SP3 ever materialised.
There is no urgent need to migrate off XP just yet but if you require secuirty updates or other support the clock is ticking.
Well as a power user and programmer (though I've never done desktop apps commercially) some compelling features for desktop apps (whether clients to a service of standalone) which are primerally influenced by the development tool choice.
;) ). Then MS took VB into the .net direction requiring a framework install (over 20 megs of installer which i'm pretty sure requires admin rights to run) before your app could be used.
1: easy deployment. If it can work with just the applications executable and nothing else while still keeping that executable to a reasonable size that is great. DLLs or othere support files in the applications folder are tolerable. Anything that makes your app require an installer which in turn requires admin rights is a pain.
2: reasonable size, who wants to ship hundreds of megs of data arround for no reason. Even tens is a pain in the arse if some people will have to download your app over dialup.
3: native GUI using the proper widgets, imitations like the swing windows PLAF and the similar GTK theme that look mostly the same but don't behave the same piss users off.
4: for smaller apps quick startup time, If a simple app can't start from cold in a few seconds I find that a major annoyance.
Of course the challange is to find a language that provides this while also making life easy for the developer and preferablly giving good performance too so that the developer doesn't need to mix languages.
The older versions of delphi really did well in all of theese categories while still being a nice quick way to develop desktop apps. Sadly the more recent versions of delphi have been crap (lots of "enterprise" and other bloat, while not bringing us a unicode version of the native VCL).
VB used to be pretty good in this regard too, but the runtime support DLLs gradually grew in size (which was important at a time when removable media generally meant floppies) and MS introduced activex controls which had to be registered preventing running without being installed first (and of course also making it hard to use VB to write the installer
BULLSHIT
The IE5 installer at least would not install windows desktop update unless you used an undocumented command line parameter. I'm not sure if IE6 was availible for 95/NT4 and if so what it's behaviour was.
windows 98 and 2000 came with the features of windows desktop update out of the box and later versions of the windows desktop clearly still have most if not all of them.
MS isn't exactly killing off XP though they are certainly making it more awkward/potentially more expensive to get.
System builder (whitebox OEM) packs will remain availible until next january and there is nothing preventing stockpiling of either whitebox OEM or retail copies should you so wish.
Vista buisness and ultimate OEM come with downgrde rights and big name OEMs are now allowed to ship downgrade media and even supply the downgrade OS pre-installed.
Volume licenses have worked on the priciple of buy the latest version and get downgrade rights to install whichever version you want for quite a long time.
And of course there is the exception MS made for XP home on very low end machines in the wake of the EEEPC.
And many people would like to pay $40 to make sure their software is supported and their feedback listened to.
Do you really belive $40 will buy you that? It might buy you a few hours from a bottom level support drone and/or put you marginally in front of the freeloaders in the bug report system but it certainly isn't going to ensure you will be listened to in any meaningfull sense.
did they just add more indexes or did they change the actual structure of the database?
UAC would be nicer if it were actually as secure as su or sudo
So is the one behind su and sudo
Afaict many (possiblly most) are pretty much stuck with windows. Low end employees are likely to be using windows only custom internal apps while higher end employees are likely to be using windows only specialist software. Virtualisation is an option but it's not exactly a smooth user experiance.
The fact is there is no pressing reason for buisnesses to move away from XP yet. They can buy the machines with OEM vista buisness and run XP pro instead at no extra cost. A number of major hardware vendors still supply XP drivers and will presumablly continue to do so as long as buisnesses demand XP support. XP does not become unsupported for over 5 years.
Which afaict is exactly the same as the situation under 32 bit XP SP2.
:(
It seems that XP without SP2 actually supports more memory but MS disabled that feature because many drivers didn't get on with it and bluescreened. And XP without SP2 is not supported anymore.
So afaict if you wan't more than 3.something gigabytes of usable memory on a supported 32 bit version of windows you have to go for a server edition
Maybe a few people who have no geek contacts (and therefore have to use commercial PC support buisnesses who will not supply pirate software) or buisnesses that need to stay legit and screwed up at purchasing time are.
I doubt it is significant though. I suspect home machines that get downgraded will generally be done with warez copies and buisnesses that don't subscribe to SA for other reasons will be good enough at forward planning to either buy the machine with XP or buy it with vista buisness and use the downgrade rights.
If your 56k modem, which already uses voice frequencies, can't get more than 8Kbps out of a poor line, what makes you think anything else will do better?
A 56K modem is hamstrung by the device at the other end which means it can't use frequencies above 4khz at all and it has no easy way to avoid noise spike frequencies.
This isn't a nice comparison to make, but in England there is more 'broadband' (there is a somewhat higher standard to the definition there) in the country than the city. Of course, like most of Europe, all wires are underground.
Not true, in many urban/suburban areas of england the final drop to the house is overhead and in some rural areas phone lines run overheaf for miles..
BT used to offer a service called BT home highway/BT buiseness highway which had a BT supplied box on the wall providing you with ISDN ports and a couple of analog ports. I think that box was exchange powered but I don't remember for sure.
Unfortunately it seems they recently dropped that product.
I would consider a factor of 4 improvement and the abity to use the phone and internet at the same time a major improvement.