Programs written correctly, following the documentation for Windows 95+, still work fine in Vista. There aren't a ton of these.
The problem Microsoft is dealing with is the thousands of applications written using undocumented functions, diving directly into implementation data structures without using the API, saving files in places they shouldn't (i.e. blithely saving temp files into/Program Files without using the API which returns the correct folder for temp files-- lots of video games do this), relying on specific undocumented side-effects of API functions, etc. In short, for every way something COULD have been done wrong, it HAS been done wrong sometime in Windows history.
The reason Vista is incompatible is that Microsoft finally took the plunge and changed the layout/size of those internal data structures, had to remove 16-bit support (for 64-bit CPU reasons), and started enforcing the correct permissions (no write access to Program Files) for security purposes.
Many of those thousands of buggy applications can never be fixed-- the source code is gone, or the company responsible is out of business. So the XP layer helps users run those applications, while also letting Microsoft actually *improve* their OS in the way that Apple and Linux (systems who don't give half a whit for backwards compatibility) can.
I don't get why people like you always have to complain instead of just saying "huh," and going on to *ignore* the thing you don't like. If you don't like it, don't use it. Period. The end.
Now, if you wanna invent the Next Big Thing in online collaborative problem-solving that will obsolete vBulletin and phpBB and all the rest, please get back to me!
I think StackOverflow (http://stackoverflow.com/ ) is DAMNED close, for programming problems at least. My only complaint is their pig-headed refusal to use anything but OpenID to log in to the site.
Windows 2000 Pro is well-known to have had over 64,000 bugs on release, and it's widely considered one of the best Windows versions ever made. I don't see how the bug count is relevant.
It almost makes you wonder if it's some incredible troll, with tons of preparation time involved... especially considering the content of the site, once you do get a chance to click through to the articles.
Your site doesn't work in Firefox, either: http://schend.net/images/screenshots/treatvist_com.png You're probably in violation of Google's terms of use by obscuring their ad block, although I'm not 100% certain on that.
And the usability of it is GODAWFUL. Who decided it was a good idea to randomly swap copy on your homepage, thus moving its links all over the fucking place? "Oh that article looks interesting, let's click!... Missed. Try again, click!... Missed."
In short, maybe you shouldn't be such a snob about IE until you get your site working on at least *one* browser.
I did a ton of work in THINK C 5 on Mac OS 7. Programming in C on a computer with no memory protection is something I never want to experience again. Misplace a single character, and it's reboot time-- for the 13th time today.
What's *really* weird is that at the time I didn't think that was particularly strange or difficult. It was just the way things were.
another good idea is reduce the number of "run on startup" lists to one. theres a billion options for running your stuff on startup. should be just one place.
To be fair, there should be two. One for services (which don't necessarily need a logged-in user), one for desktop applications (which do).
So in short, you were completely full of shit and when someone called you on it you had to Google the answer and then back-track when you found out exactly how full of shit your original post was. Oh, and to try to compensate for your full-of-shit-ness you ended up writing a post predominately about IE6, which isn't relevant at all.
Oh, and IE8 has minor rendering bugs like all browsers ever made.
My original point was that claiming that IE8 is just as good at rendering standards-compliant pages as WebKit- or Gecko-based browsers simply isn't true.
When you get around to actually providing a concrete example to demonstrate your point, please let me know.
Only if you manually visit windowsupdate.com in IE will XP use IE to install updates. (Duh.) If you use the auto-updater service that ships with the OS, IE is never invoked in the updating process.
Seriously, stop spreading misinformation. At best, you can say "IE can be used for updates in XP." It's not required for updating XP, and it never has been.
I've been working with IE8 for a couple weeks, and maybe I have particularly lucky/simple JS and CSS, but I've seen no (important) differences between it and, for example Safari as far as rendering goes. Some of the legacy IE DOM stuff is still around, but you can simply ignore it if you don't want to use it and it's harmless.
Whatever the justification for not knowing the meaning of the word "sufferage", the *point* is that people are signing a petition for something they know nothing about. Same thing as the pranks you see every so often when people ask to sign a petition banning the chemical di-hydrogen monoxide.
Ever seen Vista? That can-do-nothing-right-OS is heavyer than any microkernel implementations that I have ever seen.
Vista has one point going for it that no microkernel OS ever has: you can use it to surf Slashdot and write an email. "Heavy" or not, at least it fucking works.
I think the real problem is that, generally, Doctors and nurses don't like computers and aren't willing to figure them out. I worked IT in a hospital, and rolling out an barcode-based computerized prescription system was a nightmare. There was basically a revolt of nurses who simply refused to use it, and kept shuffling paper around.
We finally managed to push its usage, but it took a long time and there was tons of resistance, for a system that literally saves lives. (Medical records is one thing, but barcoded prescriptions that make it virtually impossible to give the wrong drug to a patient, and a computer that automatically flags drug interactions are a no-brainer.)
Frankly, if I were in charge of more than a dozen computers, I'd get the Fluke tester (or something like it) anyway.
It'll save your life a year down the road when you're trying to figure out why the label printer occasionally prints a half-label because the data going to it is getting scrambled. Plug the Fluke NetTool in as a 'pass-through' mode, and it'll tell you right away what the problem is. *Before* you replace the $5000 label printer, thinking it'll fix the problem.
True, but the crummy Classic mode, along with the horrible mess they made of Finder and the UI in general, were the primary reasons I'm now using a Windows computer as my main computer. I mean, if I can't run the Classic apps I love anyway and have to buy/learn new ones, why bother paying the premium for a Mac?
GUIs certainly are mutually exclusive with server environments that don't have a GUI. As in no X, no framebuffer console.
Possibly... but that's a teeny market. Why don't they have a GUI? I mean, what's the point? It only consumes memory or CPU when a user's actually logged-in to it, and you wouldn't expect servers to have people logged-in very often, if at all. Is it because Linux GUIs are shitty and crash constantly? I mean, seriously, what the hell is the point of that?
Automation and flexibility of the sort I'm interested in is also sort of mutually exclusive with a GUI.
That's the argument you're trying to make, but you haven't convinced me.
My kind of "automation" is one which happens in response to external events or on a timer, can be done in a fully automated manner without any interaction with the user, doesn't interfer with usage of the computer by popping up windows on the screen, and generates logs that can be examined later.
You can do all of that using Windows. Look into the Scheduled Tasks control panel. Every single thing you just typed up there. Maybe your Linux distribution doesn't have those features, but they do exist in other GUIs.
My kind of "flexibility" is one that allows stringing up multiple applications to perform complex tasks.
There's nothing preventing you from doing that with a GUI, in theory. Older versions of Mac OS that supported AppleScript, for example, could. (Newer versions of OS X have a tool called "Automater" which might be able to, but I don't know enough about it to say for sure.)
Write support for that into your Linux GUI, and you'd have a competitive advantage over Windows.
Example: How do you count the number of options in the mencoder manpage?
Example: Why the fuck would I ever want to do that?
You're misquoting me. I said "ease of understanding of the full list of actions being performed".
But who gives a shit what "the full list of actions" are? If it works, it works. If it doesn't, it doesn't. I know know "the full list of actions" when I start my car, and, as long as am updated on whether it successfully started or not, I could not care less.
I don't however think that GUIs are always superior for every possible task, sorry.
But they *could* be, if there weren't so many scared-of-change, memorization-over-spatial-reasoning, hates-the-user people like you in the Linux community.
Slashdot Mirror
Programs written correctly, following the documentation for Windows 95+, still work fine in Vista. There aren't a ton of these.
The problem Microsoft is dealing with is the thousands of applications written using undocumented functions, diving directly into implementation data structures without using the API, saving files in places they shouldn't (i.e. blithely saving temp files into /Program Files without using the API which returns the correct folder for temp files-- lots of video games do this), relying on specific undocumented side-effects of API functions, etc. In short, for every way something COULD have been done wrong, it HAS been done wrong sometime in Windows history.
The reason Vista is incompatible is that Microsoft finally took the plunge and changed the layout/size of those internal data structures, had to remove 16-bit support (for 64-bit CPU reasons), and started enforcing the correct permissions (no write access to Program Files) for security purposes.
Many of those thousands of buggy applications can never be fixed-- the source code is gone, or the company responsible is out of business. So the XP layer helps users run those applications, while also letting Microsoft actually *improve* their OS in the way that Apple and Linux (systems who don't give half a whit for backwards compatibility) can.
You could just... not use the feature.
I don't get why people like you always have to complain instead of just saying "huh," and going on to *ignore* the thing you don't like. If you don't like it, don't use it. Period. The end.
Now, if you wanna invent the Next Big Thing in online collaborative problem-solving that will obsolete vBulletin and phpBB and all the rest, please get back to me!
I think StackOverflow (http://stackoverflow.com/ ) is DAMNED close, for programming problems at least. My only complaint is their pig-headed refusal to use anything but OpenID to log in to the site.
Windows 2000 Pro is well-known to have had over 64,000 bugs on release, and it's widely considered one of the best Windows versions ever made. I don't see how the bug count is relevant.
Uh, maybe you don't remember the last article about this:
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/18/0255254&from=rss
In short, piracy cost them plenty, in time and money.
Which one of them set fire to the bush? I wanted to eat those blueberries!
If I were a Cubs fan, I'd look forward to the end of the world, too.
Why bother to run a site if you don't care about getting traffic to it?
I mean, if you're not going to remove a "usability hit" to your pages, why even have pages? It seems pointless.
It almost makes you wonder if it's some incredible troll, with tons of preparation time involved... especially considering the content of the site, once you do get a chance to click through to the articles.
Your site doesn't work in Firefox, either: http://schend.net/images/screenshots/treatvist_com.png You're probably in violation of Google's terms of use by obscuring their ad block, although I'm not 100% certain on that.
And the usability of it is GODAWFUL. Who decided it was a good idea to randomly swap copy on your homepage, thus moving its links all over the fucking place? "Oh that article looks interesting, let's click! ... Missed. Try again, click! ... Missed."
In short, maybe you shouldn't be such a snob about IE until you get your site working on at least *one* browser.
I did a ton of work in THINK C 5 on Mac OS 7. Programming in C on a computer with no memory protection is something I never want to experience again. Misplace a single character, and it's reboot time-- for the 13th time today.
What's *really* weird is that at the time I didn't think that was particularly strange or difficult. It was just the way things were.
another good idea is reduce the number of "run on startup" lists to one. theres a billion options for running your stuff on startup. should be just one place.
To be fair, there should be two. One for services (which don't necessarily need a logged-in user), one for desktop applications (which do).
But yah, I agree generally.
So in short, you were completely full of shit and when someone called you on it you had to Google the answer and then back-track when you found out exactly how full of shit your original post was. Oh, and to try to compensate for your full-of-shit-ness you ended up writing a post predominately about IE6, which isn't relevant at all.
Oh, and IE8 has minor rendering bugs like all browsers ever made.
My original point was that claiming that IE8 is just as good at rendering standards-compliant pages as WebKit- or Gecko-based browsers simply isn't true.
When you get around to actually providing a concrete example to demonstrate your point, please let me know.
Only if you manually visit windowsupdate.com in IE will XP use IE to install updates. (Duh.) If you use the auto-updater service that ships with the OS, IE is never invoked in the updating process.
Seriously, stop spreading misinformation. At best, you can say "IE can be used for updates in XP." It's not required for updating XP, and it never has been.
Uh, like what?
I've been working with IE8 for a couple weeks, and maybe I have particularly lucky/simple JS and CSS, but I've seen no (important) differences between it and, for example Safari as far as rendering goes. Some of the legacy IE DOM stuff is still around, but you can simply ignore it if you don't want to use it and it's harmless.
Whatever the justification for not knowing the meaning of the word "sufferage", the *point* is that people are signing a petition for something they know nothing about. Same thing as the pranks you see every so often when people ask to sign a petition banning the chemical di-hydrogen monoxide.
Ever seen Vista? That can-do-nothing-right-OS is heavyer than any microkernel implementations that I have ever seen.
Vista has one point going for it that no microkernel OS ever has: you can use it to surf Slashdot and write an email. "Heavy" or not, at least it fucking works.
I think the real problem is that, generally, Doctors and nurses don't like computers and aren't willing to figure them out. I worked IT in a hospital, and rolling out an barcode-based computerized prescription system was a nightmare. There was basically a revolt of nurses who simply refused to use it, and kept shuffling paper around.
We finally managed to push its usage, but it took a long time and there was tons of resistance, for a system that literally saves lives. (Medical records is one thing, but barcoded prescriptions that make it virtually impossible to give the wrong drug to a patient, and a computer that automatically flags drug interactions are a no-brainer.)
Frankly, if I were in charge of more than a dozen computers, I'd get the Fluke tester (or something like it) anyway.
It'll save your life a year down the road when you're trying to figure out why the label printer occasionally prints a half-label because the data going to it is getting scrambled. Plug the Fluke NetTool in as a 'pass-through' mode, and it'll tell you right away what the problem is. *Before* you replace the $5000 label printer, thinking it'll fix the problem.
If you have a decently modern intelligent switch you can also monitor the port for data errors, and if you don't have any errors it's good enough.
That seems like a bad idea. You'd be much better off testing it in a stand-alone device, like a Fluke tester, before plugging it into the switch in the first place. Something like this: http://www.flukenetworks.com/fnet/en-us/products/NetTool/Overview.htm
They aren't expensive.
Once people's knees stop jerking, they might actually realize they like Windows 7. What they hate is change, or any kind.
I asked my company's IT for a Vista box, and they were fine with it. New desktop gets delivered Monday.
True, but the crummy Classic mode, along with the horrible mess they made of Finder and the UI in general, were the primary reasons I'm now using a Windows computer as my main computer. I mean, if I can't run the Classic apps I love anyway and have to buy/learn new ones, why bother paying the premium for a Mac?
Obviously, I'm not typical.
It wasn't funny back then, either.
GUIs certainly are mutually exclusive with server environments that don't have a GUI. As in no X, no framebuffer console.
Possibly... but that's a teeny market. Why don't they have a GUI? I mean, what's the point? It only consumes memory or CPU when a user's actually logged-in to it, and you wouldn't expect servers to have people logged-in very often, if at all. Is it because Linux GUIs are shitty and crash constantly? I mean, seriously, what the hell is the point of that?
Automation and flexibility of the sort I'm interested in is also sort of mutually exclusive with a GUI.
That's the argument you're trying to make, but you haven't convinced me.
My kind of "automation" is one which happens in response to external events or on a timer, can be done in a fully automated manner without any interaction with the user, doesn't interfer with usage of the computer by popping up windows on the screen, and generates logs that can be examined later.
You can do all of that using Windows. Look into the Scheduled Tasks control panel. Every single thing you just typed up there. Maybe your Linux distribution doesn't have those features, but they do exist in other GUIs.
My kind of "flexibility" is one that allows stringing up multiple applications to perform complex tasks.
There's nothing preventing you from doing that with a GUI, in theory. Older versions of Mac OS that supported AppleScript, for example, could. (Newer versions of OS X have a tool called "Automater" which might be able to, but I don't know enough about it to say for sure.)
Write support for that into your Linux GUI, and you'd have a competitive advantage over Windows.
Example: How do you count the number of options in the mencoder manpage?
Example: Why the fuck would I ever want to do that?
You're misquoting me. I said "ease of understanding of the full list of actions being performed".
But who gives a shit what "the full list of actions" are? If it works, it works. If it doesn't, it doesn't. I know know "the full list of actions" when I start my car, and, as long as am updated on whether it successfully started or not, I could not care less.
I don't however think that GUIs are always superior for every possible task, sorry.
But they *could* be, if there weren't so many scared-of-change, memorization-over-spatial-reasoning, hates-the-user people like you in the Linux community.