More likely, Microsoft is just counting on the (probably naive) hope that eventually the developers of the unresponsive software will fix their goddamned bugs, and it'd work correctly in the first place. Either way, I don't see it as Microsoft's job to make buggy software look less buggy... it's not like Windows is impatient when waiting for a response, it gives you like 10 full seconds.
Although on OS X it's miles ahead of X11, which isn't even capable of separating menus from windows - so yes, in a way X11 doesn't even get menus right. Speaking of which, what exactly is your issue with Notepad++'s menus? I haven't found anything unusual but then again I run Windows XP without visual styles so it might be a styling issue I can't see.
Although, since his comment is, "making the language menu more compact," I'm thinking he still doesn't understand how the menu code is fundamentally wrong, regardless of the height of that particular menu. It's true that a more compact Language menu won't exhibit the bug, but that's not the same thing as fixing the bug.
The more fundamental question to me is, "where do you even GET a menu library in the year 2008 that flawed?" Also: "how much do you hate your users that you don't even bother to test your widgets before putting them in the program?"
I also reported a UAC issue, I haven't bothered checking back to see if that was fixed, but it was the kind of UAC bug that means Notepad++ *never* worked on a limited-user account in the past. Some software developers really just don't give a shit about the quality of their programs, do they?
BTW: there are styling issues, too. While searching for that bug, I found another that says the menu items have ugly white rectangles around the text.
Or he plays stuff like System Shock 2 (extremely difficult to properly play under XP; virtually impossible to play under Vista/7) and X-Com: Apocalypse and refuses to put a DOSBox around the latter. In fact, thinking back to SS2, just about every Dark Engine game should be problematic; that engine really didn't age well.
Well, ok, I never claimed compatibility was perfect. Wizardry 8 has issues, too, just none of them game-breaking. But if he's seriously saying 50%, then he must only own like 6 games and be the least lucky person ever. (Or more likely, he's exaggerating to make Windows look worse than it is.)
If a program does not call the event processing function then nothing happens when you try to raise or move the window.
Maybe if the program is running in some compatibility mode (there are several). I've yet to see this behavior on my machine. What happens for me is that Windows will "grey-out" unresponsive windows, but they can still be moved/focused/etc.
Oh, I kind of missed a point I wanted to make, apologies for the double-reply.
The biggest problem with cross-platform toolkits like QT, wxWindows, and GTK+ (other than the fact that their widgets are wrong) is that you have to use the lowest common denominator of every OS it supports. And if it supports Linux, the LCD is looow indeed.
For example, GTK+ apps don't work with pen input, or with voice recognition, both standard features in Vista, Windows 7, and OS X. Linux doesn't have them, so neither does Pidgin. That's actually the reason I got rid of it. Meanwhile, all apps written using Microsoft's APIs support them fine-- hell even Flash, *Flash*, has hooks to support pen input and voice recognition! (Which is why Flash is such a popular development platform for multi-touch tables, like the Microsoft Surface.)
By the time Linux/GTK+ gets support for pen input, I'll be lamenting it's lack of instant thought transference, or canine vocalization translation, or whatever other technology the rest of the computer industry has moved on to but the Linux hordes haven't found necessary yet.
Yet Windows developers often find the core Win32 API doesn't fit their needs, and waffle between toolkits like GTK, wxWidgets, Qt, and the usual cross-platform suspects. They also turn to.NET, Java (technically a whole language), MFC and others.
dotNET (typing it that way to get around a Slashcode bug) uses the GDI and the common controls, so it's a layer above what you're talking about. Ditto with MFC.
Java draws its own widgets and get them all fundamentally wrong, as it does on pretty much every OS it runs on. (Except perhaps Linux, where there are so many competing standards, it's hard to declare something "wrong.")
And from my experience, the vast, vast majority of Windows applications don't use GTK, wxWidgets or Qt, unless they've been ported from Linux. And most of those applications get the simple widgets wrong. (See: Pidgin, which gets Save/Open dialogs utterly wrong, or Notepad++ which gets menus wrong*.)
* Think about that: it gets menus wrong. *Menus*. Which have been perfected since 1985, it somehow gets wrong in 2009! Holy Christ, that's shitty software. You wouldn't even think it was possible to get menus wrong!
I constantly run into issues where I need to download a runtime to run a Windows app, because many developers don't simply develop for what is out of the box with a standard Windows install.
Constantly? Given the amount of software for Windows, and your likely preference for open source apps (like Notepad++ and Pidgin, see above), you might have a different experience than most other Windows users. From my experience, finding a copy of Windows with GTK+ installed is pretty rare-- the only apps that *might* be popular enough for people to use it with are Inkscape, GIMP and Pidgin. (And note, once again, that the GUI in all of those apps is obviously wrong.)
Sadly, there were many Windows 95 era apps that were still 16 bit, which don't work in x64 versions of Windows 7.
True. Do you use any? Do you know anybody who uses any?
Half of my games (mostly from the XP era, not Win95 era) wouldn't work properly in Windows 7.
Half? Bunk. Total bunk.
Wizardry 8, worked without a hitch. Serious Sam? Same. Command and Conquer: Red Alert? Ran fine. The original Unreal? Ran fine. Starsiege Tribes? No problems. Those are all games much older than the XP era, and they work.
Maybe you have the strangest game collection in the world, but from my experience it's closer to 90%.
Meanwhile X is still working better than Mac or Windows as a GUI framework.
It *is*?!
What planet are you posting this from? It's certainly not Earth. I think at the very best, you could say X was on-par with Windows and OS X... at best. Just because it happens to work better for this one application doesn't indicate that it's some holy perfect being, especially when it works worse with... virtually every other application ever.
Let me ask you this: when's the last time you saw a dragged window tearing in Windows? (Not since XP.) Or in OS X? (Never.) When's the last time you saw a dragged window tearing in X11? FIVE SECONDS AGO!
My experience is that of the article. I've yet to see a ERP system that was: 1) Easier than doing things the older way 2) Used by more than a tiny fraction of the workplace
I'm sure they exist, but I've sure never seen one.
Asimov's general philosophy seems to have been, "set up a logical rules and a mystery with no apparent resolution", then "alter the rules in some fashion to solve the mystery." If I had a nickel every time a robot in one of his stories had the 2nd law "strengthened" because it was too valuable, I'd have like more than 20 cents.
You could not buy it. Then they'd spend money producing a book that nobody wants. And then they wouldn't make any more. It's called a "free market," you should look it up.
Yes, but the *reason* they did that is because Java sucked, SUCKED, for GUI apps. I see it in a completely different way-- Microsoft ware trying to get Java to work the way it was supposed to work in the first place. Since Sun can't make a usable app if their life depended on it, this was necessary work (that still hasn't been done-- thus Java being dead on the desktop.)
Yeah, Microsoft should have gone through some ridiculous and complicated committee process, what the fuck ever. Still I can't hate them for trying to make Java not suck ass.
How far back has the software industry been set back by Microsoft?
Unless you have an "alternate reality generator", it would be a hard case to make.
I sure as hell wouldn't want to use a computer UI from IBM (for example) after being subjected to Lotus Notes for a couple years-- if IBM had made their own OS instead of buying Gates', how far behind would computer usability be?
How much further along would server side be if Microsoft had truly worked with the Java community instead of going it's own way with.Net?
At the time Microsoft dinked with Java, they did so because Sun was still in their fantasy world where they were trying to convince people that Java was a good fit for client-side apps. It's not, it likely never will be (if they don't have the UI sorted out in over a decade, what are the odds it'll happen next year?) but they somehow managed to convince the world that it was just around the corner.
So Microsoft looked at this and said, "wow, Java apps really suck shit when running on Windows, because it has very little in the way of integration." And they added the integration to their own version of Java. And Sun sued, and Microsoft stopped shipping it, and now Java's completely dead on the client-side. Personally? I wouldn't blame Microsoft, I'd blame Sun for telling everybody Java was suited for client-side apps in the first place.
Note: inevitable, some Slashdotter will claim that it's perfectly possibly to create a truly 100% native UI with Java. That *may* be true. But I've yet to see one and, again, it's been over a decade.
How much further along would so many areas be if Microsoft had not bought up so many experts and stuffed them in an R&D group with almost no real world output, instead of having them work on practical technologies that made it to market?
Was the world better off when Xerox was doing the same, or ATT? Maybe you should start ranting about how behind the computer is because Xerox never made a real effort to do anything with their various PARC technologies, instead allowing Apple, Novell, and Microsoft steal all their thunder.
Would the HD video market have been as fragmented as it was without Microsoft pushing HD-DVD long past the point it was obviously dead just so they would get licensing revenue from the menu system?
Who gives a shit? I don't know a single person who owns HD-DVD *or* Blu-Ray.
If Microsoft the company has lost a decade, it is Karma - for the world and our industry has lost so much more at their hands.
You haven't really provided any actual evidence that Microsoft has set anything back. I'll give you this: UIs would be more advanced now if more people had paid attention to Mac Classic. But now that Apple has since thrown their usability concepts in the toilet, that would be a pretty hard case to make, too.
It's either an open standard, meaning anybody can use it-- ANY BODY-- or it's not. There's no such classification as "it's an open standard, except we don't let companies we don't like use it because they have a big marketshare, but other than that it's an open standard believe me!"
By your argument, Microsoft should also be prevented from parsing HTML files in IE because they're a monopoly. Does that make sense? No. Does your argument make sense? No.
Yeah, but there is also a big "shit happens" component to the whole thing. Sometimes, shit just happens-- even if everybody does their job to the best of their ability, even if everything works exactly as designed, sometimes shit just happens.
Of course, being an American, you have to instantly assign blame and sue somebody, God knows.
Yes, and then they SUED Microsoft for putting PDF support in Office. It's only "open" as long as you're not big enough to compete with Acrobat. If you even get within a mile of stepping on Adobe's business, you're sued up the wazzoo.
Anybody is free to implement a reader that will allow to save filled in forms
Unless they're Microsoft. In that case, Adobe takes them to court and forces them to remove any PDF-relating features. PDF is an "open format" my ass. Adobe talks the talk, but they sure don't walk the walk.
Even worse it seems to ignore the fact that, while those 22 people may have "paid with their lives" because of the Patriot error, hundreds or even thousands of others were saved in the cases where the software worked. Is he arguing that if the Patriot system never existed, those 22 people would be alive? No, they'd still be dead, and so would hundreds of others who are alive now.
It has faulty hardware. That's about the only thing that can cause a bluescreen in Vista/Windows 7. If it's still under warranty, he should get it fixed/replaced... any OS he puts on it will bluescreen (or equivalent), since it has bad hardware.
XP could (and did, from my experience) crash from buggy video drivers. Vista and Windows 7 can recover from those errors without crashing. Buggy ATI drivers caused my Vista machine to blank out the video for a second, but it never blue-screened from it like XP would have.
Slashdot Mirror
More likely, Microsoft is just counting on the (probably naive) hope that eventually the developers of the unresponsive software will fix their goddamned bugs, and it'd work correctly in the first place. Either way, I don't see it as Microsoft's job to make buggy software look less buggy... it's not like Windows is impatient when waiting for a response, it gives you like 10 full seconds.
Although on OS X it's miles ahead of X11, which isn't even capable of separating menus from windows - so yes, in a way X11 doesn't even get menus right. Speaking of which, what exactly is your issue with Notepad++'s menus? I haven't found anything unusual but then again I run Windows XP without visual styles so it might be a styling issue I can't see.
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1865630&group_id=95717&atid=612382
Dear Lord, it's actually marked as fixed!
Although, since his comment is, "making the language menu more compact," I'm thinking he still doesn't understand how the menu code is fundamentally wrong, regardless of the height of that particular menu. It's true that a more compact Language menu won't exhibit the bug, but that's not the same thing as fixing the bug.
The more fundamental question to me is, "where do you even GET a menu library in the year 2008 that flawed?" Also: "how much do you hate your users that you don't even bother to test your widgets before putting them in the program?"
I also reported a UAC issue, I haven't bothered checking back to see if that was fixed, but it was the kind of UAC bug that means Notepad++ *never* worked on a limited-user account in the past. Some software developers really just don't give a shit about the quality of their programs, do they?
BTW: there are styling issues, too. While searching for that bug, I found another that says the menu items have ugly white rectangles around the text.
Or he plays stuff like System Shock 2 (extremely difficult to properly play under XP; virtually impossible to play under Vista/7) and X-Com: Apocalypse and refuses to put a DOSBox around the latter. In fact, thinking back to SS2, just about every Dark Engine game should be problematic; that engine really didn't age well.
Well, ok, I never claimed compatibility was perfect. Wizardry 8 has issues, too, just none of them game-breaking. But if he's seriously saying 50%, then he must only own like 6 games and be the least lucky person ever. (Or more likely, he's exaggerating to make Windows look worse than it is.)
Yes this is still true with Windows 7.
If a program does not call the event processing function then nothing happens when you try to raise or move the window.
Maybe if the program is running in some compatibility mode (there are several). I've yet to see this behavior on my machine. What happens for me is that Windows will "grey-out" unresponsive windows, but they can still be moved/focused/etc.
Oh, I kind of missed a point I wanted to make, apologies for the double-reply.
The biggest problem with cross-platform toolkits like QT, wxWindows, and GTK+ (other than the fact that their widgets are wrong) is that you have to use the lowest common denominator of every OS it supports. And if it supports Linux, the LCD is looow indeed.
For example, GTK+ apps don't work with pen input, or with voice recognition, both standard features in Vista, Windows 7, and OS X. Linux doesn't have them, so neither does Pidgin. That's actually the reason I got rid of it. Meanwhile, all apps written using Microsoft's APIs support them fine-- hell even Flash, *Flash*, has hooks to support pen input and voice recognition! (Which is why Flash is such a popular development platform for multi-touch tables, like the Microsoft Surface.)
By the time Linux/GTK+ gets support for pen input, I'll be lamenting it's lack of instant thought transference, or canine vocalization translation, or whatever other technology the rest of the computer industry has moved on to but the Linux hordes haven't found necessary yet.
Yet Windows developers often find the core Win32 API doesn't fit their needs, and waffle between toolkits like GTK, wxWidgets, Qt, and the usual cross-platform suspects. They also turn to .NET, Java (technically a whole language), MFC and others.
dotNET (typing it that way to get around a Slashcode bug) uses the GDI and the common controls, so it's a layer above what you're talking about. Ditto with MFC.
Java draws its own widgets and get them all fundamentally wrong, as it does on pretty much every OS it runs on. (Except perhaps Linux, where there are so many competing standards, it's hard to declare something "wrong.")
And from my experience, the vast, vast majority of Windows applications don't use GTK, wxWidgets or Qt, unless they've been ported from Linux. And most of those applications get the simple widgets wrong. (See: Pidgin, which gets Save/Open dialogs utterly wrong, or Notepad++ which gets menus wrong*.)
* Think about that: it gets menus wrong. *Menus*. Which have been perfected since 1985, it somehow gets wrong in 2009! Holy Christ, that's shitty software. You wouldn't even think it was possible to get menus wrong!
I constantly run into issues where I need to download a runtime to run a Windows app, because many developers don't simply develop for what is out of the box with a standard Windows install.
Constantly? Given the amount of software for Windows, and your likely preference for open source apps (like Notepad++ and Pidgin, see above), you might have a different experience than most other Windows users. From my experience, finding a copy of Windows with GTK+ installed is pretty rare-- the only apps that *might* be popular enough for people to use it with are Inkscape, GIMP and Pidgin. (And note, once again, that the GUI in all of those apps is obviously wrong.)
Sadly, there were many Windows 95 era apps that were still 16 bit, which don't work in x64 versions of Windows 7.
True. Do you use any? Do you know anybody who uses any?
Half of my games (mostly from the XP era, not Win95 era) wouldn't work properly in Windows 7.
Half? Bunk. Total bunk.
Wizardry 8, worked without a hitch. Serious Sam? Same. Command and Conquer: Red Alert? Ran fine. The original Unreal? Ran fine. Starsiege Tribes? No problems. Those are all games much older than the XP era, and they work.
Maybe you have the strangest game collection in the world, but from my experience it's closer to 90%.
Take a look at the fundamental model. When you move a window in Windows, the app is notified and it has to respond.
How about you use a modern version of Windows and then come back?
Meanwhile X is still working better than Mac or Windows as a GUI framework.
It *is*?!
What planet are you posting this from? It's certainly not Earth. I think at the very best, you could say X was on-par with Windows and OS X... at best. Just because it happens to work better for this one application doesn't indicate that it's some holy perfect being, especially when it works worse with... virtually every other application ever.
Let me ask you this: when's the last time you saw a dragged window tearing in Windows? (Not since XP.) Or in OS X? (Never.) When's the last time you saw a dragged window tearing in X11? FIVE SECONDS AGO!
Heroes?
I'm more amazed Heroes even got a second, or third, season and is still on. Heroes season 1 was by far the worst-written TV series I've ever watched.
Your Tauntaun'll freeze before you reach the first marker!
My experience is that of the article. I've yet to see a ERP system that was:
1) Easier than doing things the older way
2) Used by more than a tiny fraction of the workplace
I'm sure they exist, but I've sure never seen one.
As an aside, when I give my car to service, the employees of the dealership/repairshop can conceivably search through my glovebox.
Your car (likely) has a valet key to prevent exactly that. Just FYI.
it is projected to increase internet traffic capacity between the two regions by over 20%, a wonderful boost to transpacific relations!
Man, I hate those Japanese! And they hate us too!
(More internet bandwidth)
Suddenly we both love each other! Awww...
Asimov's general philosophy seems to have been, "set up a logical rules and a mystery with no apparent resolution", then "alter the rules in some fashion to solve the mystery." If I had a nickel every time a robot in one of his stories had the 2nd law "strengthened" because it was too valuable, I'd have like more than 20 cents.
You could not buy it. Then they'd spend money producing a book that nobody wants. And then they wouldn't make any more. It's called a "free market," you should look it up.
Ok, so maybe someone can help me out here, but how exactly do you anonymize travel data?
You have a table of GPS tracks. And you have a table of cars. And the two tables have no columns in-common that could be used to join the data.
Me.
Make sure I'm on the list. Me me me.
Yes, but the *reason* they did that is because Java sucked, SUCKED, for GUI apps. I see it in a completely different way-- Microsoft ware trying to get Java to work the way it was supposed to work in the first place. Since Sun can't make a usable app if their life depended on it, this was necessary work (that still hasn't been done-- thus Java being dead on the desktop.)
Yeah, Microsoft should have gone through some ridiculous and complicated committee process, what the fuck ever. Still I can't hate them for trying to make Java not suck ass.
How far back has the software industry been set back by Microsoft?
Unless you have an "alternate reality generator", it would be a hard case to make.
I sure as hell wouldn't want to use a computer UI from IBM (for example) after being subjected to Lotus Notes for a couple years-- if IBM had made their own OS instead of buying Gates', how far behind would computer usability be?
How much further along would server side be if Microsoft had truly worked with the Java community instead of going it's own way with .Net?
At the time Microsoft dinked with Java, they did so because Sun was still in their fantasy world where they were trying to convince people that Java was a good fit for client-side apps. It's not, it likely never will be (if they don't have the UI sorted out in over a decade, what are the odds it'll happen next year?) but they somehow managed to convince the world that it was just around the corner.
So Microsoft looked at this and said, "wow, Java apps really suck shit when running on Windows, because it has very little in the way of integration." And they added the integration to their own version of Java. And Sun sued, and Microsoft stopped shipping it, and now Java's completely dead on the client-side. Personally? I wouldn't blame Microsoft, I'd blame Sun for telling everybody Java was suited for client-side apps in the first place.
Note: inevitable, some Slashdotter will claim that it's perfectly possibly to create a truly 100% native UI with Java. That *may* be true. But I've yet to see one and, again, it's been over a decade.
How much further along would so many areas be if Microsoft had not bought up so many experts and stuffed them in an R&D group with almost no real world output, instead of having them work on practical technologies that made it to market?
Was the world better off when Xerox was doing the same, or ATT? Maybe you should start ranting about how behind the computer is because Xerox never made a real effort to do anything with their various PARC technologies, instead allowing Apple, Novell, and Microsoft steal all their thunder.
Would the HD video market have been as fragmented as it was without Microsoft pushing HD-DVD long past the point it was obviously dead just so they would get licensing revenue from the menu system?
Who gives a shit? I don't know a single person who owns HD-DVD *or* Blu-Ray.
If Microsoft the company has lost a decade, it is Karma - for the world and our industry has lost so much more at their hands.
You haven't really provided any actual evidence that Microsoft has set anything back. I'll give you this: UIs would be more advanced now if more people had paid attention to Mac Classic. But now that Apple has since thrown their usability concepts in the toilet, that would be a pretty hard case to make, too.
Bullshit.
It's either an open standard, meaning anybody can use it-- ANY BODY-- or it's not. There's no such classification as "it's an open standard, except we don't let companies we don't like use it because they have a big marketshare, but other than that it's an open standard believe me!"
By your argument, Microsoft should also be prevented from parsing HTML files in IE because they're a monopoly. Does that make sense? No. Does your argument make sense? No.
Yeah, but there is also a big "shit happens" component to the whole thing. Sometimes, shit just happens-- even if everybody does their job to the best of their ability, even if everything works exactly as designed, sometimes shit just happens.
Of course, being an American, you have to instantly assign blame and sue somebody, God knows.
Yes, and then they SUED Microsoft for putting PDF support in Office. It's only "open" as long as you're not big enough to compete with Acrobat. If you even get within a mile of stepping on Adobe's business, you're sued up the wazzoo.
"Free and open" my ass.
Anybody is free to implement a reader that will allow to save filled in forms
Unless they're Microsoft. In that case, Adobe takes them to court and forces them to remove any PDF-relating features. PDF is an "open format" my ass. Adobe talks the talk, but they sure don't walk the walk.
Even worse it seems to ignore the fact that, while those 22 people may have "paid with their lives" because of the Patriot error, hundreds or even thousands of others were saved in the cases where the software worked. Is he arguing that if the Patriot system never existed, those 22 people would be alive? No, they'd still be dead, and so would hundreds of others who are alive now.
"Perspective" seems to be in short supply.
It has faulty hardware. That's about the only thing that can cause a bluescreen in Vista/Windows 7. If it's still under warranty, he should get it fixed/replaced... any OS he puts on it will bluescreen (or equivalent), since it has bad hardware.
XP could (and did, from my experience) crash from buggy video drivers. Vista and Windows 7 can recover from those errors without crashing. Buggy ATI drivers caused my Vista machine to blank out the video for a second, but it never blue-screened from it like XP would have.