Perhaps because you can't seem to understand that I'm not a Windows bigot while you are clearly a Linux bigot. I'm merely defending Windows against false claims. As for what I like, I've noted already that most of my Windows systems are running W2K, not XP. I'm not a trendy lemming who blindly "upgrades" without a good reason.
And the point of this statement? You seem to be confusing the UI and OS, like the Mac lemmings do. If Microsoft wanted to sell a UI to run on someone else's OS they certainly could do so, however they choose to sell an OS with their UI.
Why would Microsoft want to spend money to produce a Linux version of Office and then sell a couple hundred copies? Linux bigots aren't about to shell out $500 for Microsoft Office to run on their Linux system, they'll use Open Office for free and claim it's better.
I think you're missing the fact that one of the failings of Linux is it's lack of a services organization. Also why should Microsoft get out of the OS business where they are clearly not loosing and are indeed generating substantial revenue? Do you honestly think their OS business is in any way taking resources away from their other operations?
And why would you look for alternatives if you had to run MS Office on Windows? What is so glaringly bad about Windows that you'd do anything to avoid it? Don't want to spend the modest $ for it? Believe the bogus hype about crashes every 10 minutes? What is so bloody bad about Windows? In all my years of Windows experience it has been perfectly functional and reliable. Your arguments are rather like the Ford vs. Chevy vs. Dodge arguments, and equally without merit.
Considering that while in the hands of the bell boys, unix was not in any way intended for public consumption, I can overlook those quirks on an in house system.
Plenty of other bizarre, cryptic or otherwise dumb names for functions or utilities.
In VMS you can put whatever you want in your directory and create symbols pointing to it without any assistance. Depending on what exactly your code is trying to do you may need some privs, but that would be the case with pretty much any OS.
Indeed my gripes do extend to many of the unix variants to varying degrees. Some variants have been "cleaned up" more than others and are less annoying.
A new feature such as? Some example of something you might legitimately have a reason to stick in at kernel level vs. just having a utility program?
The simple answer is you don't and you shouldn't have to. You sure as hell don't have to with any of the enterprise class OSes and the need to do so on Linux because it doesn't have a single solid company behind it is *not* a selling point.
That would be the same for any of the enterprise class OSes and it certainly has not proven to be an issue.
I'm not an AWK expert, but from what I've seen it could probably be rolled into a "search" with various options just fine.
Exactly. Microsoft's documentation also leaves a lot to be desired, but that doesn't mean the Linux docs are any better.
It's not silly at all. When your command can be spelled out in pretty much plain english and those plain english words only need to be typed to enough characters to not be ambiguous, that is very different than abbreviations that drop letters out of the middle of a word, abbreviations that are people's initials and commands that are simply not plain english.
Never heard of backwards compatibility eh? Maintaining support for old / obsolete syntax? Other OSes do it just fine.
I'm not convinced on that one. I'm not sure they've got it quite right yet, but they realized that a browser didn't need to be limited to browsing http and could provide unified access to essentially any type of resource. I expect this one to evolve a bit more.
Most everything that isn't an embedded OS / application is full of bloat these days. Most programmers have become lazy in this age of cheap CPU horsepower and cheap memory. Indeed there are plenty of "programmers" who do nothing but glue (poorly) together bits of purchased code libraries to produce horribly bloated and inefficient applications.
I've never claimed Windows was suitable for enterprise class of mission critical applications. Windows does do just fine for small scale applications. The two years of daily attacks on my little W2K web/mail/vru/storage server without a single crash or compromise can't be discounted.
Yep, documentation would be nice, perhaps it will materialize at some point when Windows morphs to "OpenWindows".
Yes, the drive letter thing is lame. In the VMS world you can redirect most anything with logicals and normally the users and programmers reference their disks / directories using logicals so it's just a matter of updating the logical to relocate them.
I regularly do all three of those things on my personal Windows systems. I just swapped a 400GB drive in in place of an 80GB drive a couple weeks ago and formatting the 400GB took far longer than the rest of the process of moving everything and I didn't have to change or reinstall anything. Not sure why you're having difficulties.
Sounds like you aren't maintaining adequate backups or backing things up before a reimage to be able to repopulate most things.
In my organization when we get a new PC or laptop in my case, it normally arrives with the standard image on it. For general users the PC support folks have a few utilities to migrate most stuff from the users old machine to their new one.
For those of us in the tech groups the PC folks just give us a hand with any issues like exchange servers, but otherwise we just port things ourselves and return the old PC when we're done. I've done this several times and it's never taken me more than two days to get everything settled in and that includes times where we moved to a new Windows version.
Sorry, but this is pretty trivial on a Windows system as well. I've done it dozens of times.
Documentation for different things clearly written by different people with different organization so you have to take extra time to sort through each section of documentation to find what you need vs. the consistent structure you get from documentation that has been cleaned up and rewritten by a proper team of tech writers.
Not at all. Windows is working just fine in numerous server applications. There is no shortage of Windows servers out there with significant roles in large companies, exchange servers being a good example. Yes, Linux and even OS X could do the same thing, but your claims that Windows can't are completely false. There are lots of Windows database servers out there as well in smaller applications.
You've yet to give any detail on these mysterious "features" you claim that Windows is lacking or provide any examples of what you can do on Linux that you can't do on Windows.
That is not a claim I have ever made.
I have also never claimed that Windows is better than Linux. While you have claimed Linux is better than Windows without providing any examples to support the claim.
Again, you have no case. Every claim you have made has come back to the cost / open source argument. You have yet to provide a single example to support your claim of Linux superiority. You seem afraid to even try, probably knowing that you can't find any example of something you can do with Linux that you can't also do with Windows. You have to keep coming back to the cost issue, which in no way gives Linux any technical superiority.
There are versions of Windows that run on pretty small systems. There is a point however when a system is so small and has so few resources that you have to question what if any benefit would Linux or Windows bring to it.
Mostly VMS, some unix.
I don't do any development. I do administrate from it very nicely.
Nope, not clear winner. Again, name one thing that Linux can do that Windows can't. I've challenged you on this a number of times and you've failed to provide an example every time. Perhaps because there isn't one.
Again claims of "more" without a single concrete example. And the fact remains that Windows is in a large number of server applications as well, not just desktop and performing just fine.
All I see is empty rhetoric, not a single concrete example to demonstrate this mythical superiority.
Windows for me has been perfectly stable since NT. 95, 98 and 2000 have all also been entirely stable on every single installation I have used.
A bad user with privileges can readily crash any system. Give your parents root on a Linux desktop and they will crash it. Give them system on a VMS system and they will crash it. Give them Administrator on a Windows system and they will crash it. All of this proves nothing about the stability of an OS. Restrict your parents to an unprivileged account on any of those systems and you'll see no crashes.
Poor example as there are slews of portable music players that work just fine with Windows (or Mac or Linux or most anything). Examples of compatibility with another companies proprietary product are meaningless.
Example?
Example?
Nope it can't do that though that's a pretty obscure thing. Not a lot of real world applications with that need.
Considering the fractional percentage of the computing world represented by a supercomputer and the unique environment surrounding one, it's just not a real good example. The people purchasing and using supercomputers bring their own unique biases to the equation.
Perhaps you should, because you've pretty much only given examples of Linux and OS X software that are equivalents of software available for Windows. I'll have to remind you that there is a tremendous amount of specialized scientific software available for Windows as well.
It also isn't less capable.
You still haven't given any real world examples of this claimed lack of capability beyond the obscure running from CD thing. Not many OSes can be run from CD in large part because there is so little need to run from CD.
Windows was designed to extract as much money as possible from its users. Linux was designed to be as powerful as possible. The results match expectations of their creators. Windows is a very poorly designed and brain dead operating system that does not even use the computer hardware very efficiently.
So you're basing your whole claim of superiority on a multi user OS?
Sorry to burst your bubble, but Windows does the multi user thing as well. It readily supports multiple users doing the client server app thing, it does have a rarely used telnet capability, it does readily support multiple users doing web or FTP of other file services, multiple users doing the whole exchange server thing, databases, etc.
So the documentation for Premiere comes from the same people who wrote the documentation for the WSH?
But not the same version of Windows- in fact, it requires a pretty massive code branch to be able to do so. Define windows; we've been talking about desktops so I'm going to assume XP.
Patience, my dear friend- they're later in the comments.
The programs aren't better, the OS isn't better, what the hell is?
More patience...
This is not a cost issue, this is a plain superiority issue. See below.
Your ignorance clearly has bereft you of sense. Linux runs efficiently in half the space of windows CE, and of course XP doesn't even come close. As somebody who clearly does not write very much code, or do very much development, let me explain some things to you:
1) It is better to have verified secure code than in-house unverified code.
2) Every time you reinvent the wheel you are wasting time, and time is money. Sure, you can make a specialized OS for every computer environment, but it saves an enormous amount of time and money to do it the other way.
3) Frequently the devices in question are cell phones, etc, where the need is not so much for the toolchain as it is for the compatibility- video, music, flash, java, etc. Since software already exists for those functions on Linux, the company saves vast amounts of development time by using an OS.
No, I mean, what do they do. All of the above?
See below...
Jesus H. Christ man, read the whole post before replying, huh? I'm gonna get carpel tunnel from typing "see below..." ; )
...
LoL then you do not live in the real world- and 2000 is a very different codebase from 95 or 98.
That was not the point, the example was anecdotal. What I was saying (and said...) is that we can't use personal experience as an effective fulcrum for this debate. Sooner or later it will just turn into "ur teh suck!1!!111" "no, ur teh sux0r!!11!!!!1"- so, I'm striving to keep it out of the hands of areas where personal opinion comes into play. It would be easy for me to say that Mplayer is superior to WMP, or that KDE is better than the Windows GUI, but I don't because theres no way that that could ever be settled in a reasonable manner.
Not "run an iPod"- "run ON an iPod".
I accidentally deleted the top part of your comment here, but it pertained to the supercomputers claim- just check the Top 500 list.
Linux deals with hardware failure and replacement much more like a server OS, with reliability being key. Hardware can fail, but the OS keeps running.
You're missing the point- the point is that windows CAN'T- one of those "features" I was talking about. It also goes to show the efficiency of Linux.
RieserFS? WikiNotes? Emacs? Vim?
See above.
... in the paragraph above....
Then back up yours. Show that 90% of the world hates the OS X interface.
On Thu, 23 Nov 2006 14:11:06 +0000 (UTC), with neither quill nor qualm, Bruce Barnett quickly quoth:
Sure, even your common, everyday -parrot- can say it.
I wish I had spent the money on the Kernighan & Ritchie C book and learned C way back when. I diddled with Borland's Turbo C for a couple months and let it go.
-------------------------------------------- -- I'm in touch with my Inner Curmudgeon. --
formatting link
Comprehensive Website Development ============================================================
This is horribly ignorant. How do you think security vulnerabilities are spotted? Its much much harder looking at the binaries than it is looking at the source code, which means that the only people able to spot vulnerabilities in Windows are those that illegally decompile it or run through it with buffer overrun generators- in short, the only people who are able to find vulnerabilities are exactly the people you don't want finding them. To assume that all code is secure until proven otherwise is just plain dumb, and the presence of companies has nothing to do with it. GCC
No, but it's a lot better written than any Linux docs I've seen.
Let's not assume XP, let's assume NT and 2K which have both been doing significant server duty for years as well as desktop duty.
I never claimed it was better, the only claims of an OS being better have been your unsubstantiated claims. I've claimed that Windows is just as capable for just about everything and you've provided no evidence to refute that claim.
Then why is cost the only advantage you've managed to cite in all this time? Face it, you're fixated on the free and open source thing, not on actual technical details.
And that's why there are variants of Windows other than XP. And before you jump in with some nonsense about specialized Windows versions vs. a do it all Linux, the fact is that when you compile a limited version of Linux you are indeed creating a specialized version. The only difference is whether you do that vs. Microsoft doing that and providing the result.
I've indicated numerous times that I do not write code, I manage systems.
Your point is? If your working on a system with enough resources to consider compiling a Linux variant for it, you can also consider using the embedded version of Windows.
You've lost me and perhaps yourself on this rant, what you just said argues against Linux where you are compiling a specialized OS for a particular environment.
Yes and there is an embedded variant of Windows available just as there are embedded variants of Linux available. Also a cell phone is not a small system. Though it is physically small, a cell phone is packed with resources, the proverbial 10# of shit in a 5# bag or in this case a 5 oz phone.
Various bank related tasks. Various systems have included wire transfer, message routing, lock box processing, plenty of database systems, trading applications, etc.
So is NT and the NT and 95/98 streams recombined to some extent with
2000. What's your point? Whether there were substantial changes between those versions, the fact remains that at various times and on various systems I have run Windows NT, Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows 2000 in addition to the more recent Windows XP and on not one of those systems did I have stability problems.
Well, personal experience has to come into play to refute the perpetual claim Windows crashes all the time when in fact it doesn't. The claims that other OSes don't crash such as the claims implied in some Apple ads are also false as I've personally witnessed a number of OS X crashes.
What difference does that make? Windows runs on an iPaq. Linux runs on an iPaq as well. Whoop de do. All that points out is the coming of the generic hardware platform to run whatever the hell you want on.
The same applies to the server variants of Windows where the features are there to support RAID and some hot swapability. Neither are up to the fault tolerance of some of the specialized systems like the Tandem and Stratus lines.
It shows more of how obscure an application that is.
Can't name good examples off hand since it's not an area I spend much time in. There are plenty of scientific process control, data acquisition, data analysis, modeling and whatnot apps available for Windows. Many of them are available for Unix as well. They are of course evil commercial non open source applications that you actually have to pay for though.
They aren't using it, so clearly it isn't that appealing to them.
The same complaints would apply to Apple which you seem to like. They don't produce a separate UI to run on others OSes either yet somehow it's ok for them?
So you're implying that Microsoft doesn't have security teams with access to source code constantly searching for vulnerabilities? Only the bad guys are doing that? That's positively laughable.
Results speak for themselves. Most spam nowadays comes from hacked Windows zombies. Access to hacked computers (controlled by networks called botnets) is sold by hackers to spammers for as little as $0.10 per zombie, because there are so many zombies.
I have a computer that I set up for my 5.5 year old son and I installed linux on it. There are several reasons (such as that it is very old and decrepit and would not run windows well), but the main one is that I did not want an infected zombie on my home network.
I much prefer the unix hierarchical file system against the MS drive letters so was interested when I read that MS introduced the ability to mount a local drive into another local file system in a similar manner. IIRC this came in with W2K. As a software developer I looked for the info about it and found virtually none, it seemed you could do it via API calls but not via any normal user interface use. I rapidly lost interest and haven't looked into it again.
Wrong. I'm a unix bigot. Not the same thing. Linux is merely one variant. My firs tpick of unix variants is still Solaris, because I generally measure the system uptime from when I commission a machine to when I decommission it some 3 or 4 years later.
Bwahahahahahahahahahahahaaaaaaa. I do nothing of the kind. You Windows guys do because the UI is so tightly integrated into the OS it's difficult to tell where one starts and the other stops. Apple is also guilty of this albeit to a lesser extent, because they also provide a full fledged X Windows code tree as well. Where's Microsoft's?
And of course, with X the UI is a matter of end user choice. Unlike M$.
Funny thing is, I don't mind M$'s UI - at least the Win2K one. I don't think all that much of Apple's. The single menu toolbar on top of the screen is damn annoying. So I'm not a UI bigot by any means. I most definitely do separate out consideration of the underlying OS from the pretty presentation layer. That's why I avoid Windows.
If Microsoft wanted to sell a UI to run on
Right, that's the point. Judging by their arguments in court WRT their inability to separate out *applications* like Web browsers from their OS, one wonders just how much cross dependencies there actually is hidden. But - I don't care.
Yep, that explains why I have a copy of MS Office on my Mac, of course. You're 100% correct.
Dunno. I'm not privy to their internal stuff, nor do I really care. As for not losing, time will tell. I think that they will lose. The absolute *best* you can say about Windows now is that it's not much worse than Linux. It certainly isn't superior in any way, so why pay money for it? The next version is gonna take *even more* CPU, memory and disk space to run. That's really gonna encourage people to upgrade, isn't it? Not to mention all the 'tattle home' fatures. You have no idea how much of a PITA that can be. We'll never run it simply because of that. Why? Try reinstalling stuff aboard a ship in mid ocean when there's no net connection because a HDD has died, or a motherboard has and you've swapepd the HDD to another machine. No thanks.
Buggy, missing half the tools I use. No decent telnet client, no X Windows, no ssh client or server daemon, no sftpd. No Apache server. No postgresql server, or mysql, or any other rdbms. No remote admin as standard including no VNC. If you're Joe Average running a word processor, spreadsheet & Web browser, you won't care. As a developer of 'always on' code, I do. ATM on this Mac I have another Mac console running in a minimised window using VNC, telnet sessions to 2 Solaris machines, more telnet sessions to a couple of Linux machines, this Web browser and an email client. The other Mac is running a long database insertion routine and acting as a test server for some new socket level code I'm writing, with the client end running on one of the Linux machines which is also connected to 2 terminal servers via tcp/ip over satellite links to serial instruments down boreholes.
Gotta be joking, I have an enormous hardware & software budget. I can have anything I want. We do have a couple XP systems about just so my guys have some familiarity with them. Most of the techs have dual-boot laptops with Win2K and Linux. I'm the only one with a Mac but I do most of the software development in Java.
Believe the bogus
Win2K is pretty stable. Which is why I still have one server running it, mainly because there's an app that only runs under Windows.
What is so bloody bad about
As a desktop system, perhaps - for you.
Your arguments are rather like the Ford vs.
No, more like a comparison of a Trabant with a 4WD truck. You're happy with your Trabant and that's fine. Really.
I used to do this to the Apple bigots too. Then Jobs got a clue, threw away their entire POS o/s, installed a new one and their market share is increasing. Windows isn't. To me, an o/s is a tool just like a programming language is. I've learnt & forgotten over 30 computer languages in my career, including scripting languages. Nothing lasts forever and a tool is only the best until something more powerful comes along. The fact is, the unix type operating systems are more powerful tools at a much cheaper cost of entry than is Windows. If that power isn't any use to you, you won't care. History moves along regardless.
Well, I measure uptime on most of my VMS systems in years as well. As for my personal Windows systems, the two that are up 24 x 365 have never crashed, the only reason they haven't had years of contiguous up time has been for periodic patches once or twice when I've reconfigured power and UPSs and of course when I've added or reconfigured some hardware.
So Microsoft only offers a single UI, so what? Their UI is sufficiently configurable for my tastes. As long as I can disable the Apple-esque stuff like animation's, hiding files and file extensions and other stupid stuff I'm perfectly happy with it.
See above.
I'm also perfectly happy with the CDE and indeed like it's consistency across platforms. I don't however get bent out of shape that Microsoft doesn't offer the CDE since once adjusted to my tastes I'm perfectly happy with the Windows UI.
I think the point is that it isn't just a web browser anymore, it's taken over the roll of file system browser as well. I also am highly offended by demands that Microsoft should not be allowed to include whatever it wants in it's products or be forced to bundle competitors products with it's own. That is in my opinion unconscionable.
If the public doesn't want to use what Microsoft bundles they are free to select other products and install them and they should not expect competitive products to come bundled. When you buy a car do you expect the manufacturer to load the truck with third party add ons just because you might prefer that gaudy Grant steering wheel to the stock one?
I'm not a bean counter, but I strongly suspect that the cost of producing a Linux or generic Unix version of MS Office would far exceed the sales revenue of such a product. Indeed were Microsoft to start selling said Linux / Unix Office suite I expect there would be all kinds of uproar about Microsoft trying to take over the Linux / Unix world.
I doubt they will loose. I don't think they're making much inroads into the midrange space, they seem to have pretty well plateaued in the general office support space. I doubt they will loose that or the desktop arena in the business world and by extension since most people work in the business world they are likely to also use Windows at home vs. something different.
Yep and I expect both will continue to evolve and that comparison will remain pretty consistent.
As does each new version of just about everything on just about every platform.
Yep since if you haven't noticed, PCs have been getting more and more powerful for the same price and storage has been getting astronomically large while it's prices keep falling. I paid a whopping $0.25 / GB recently for 400GB of Seagate disk.
Think firewall.
Not sure what variety of ship you're talking about, but you will have a full time high speed Internet connection readily available in short order. It's out now, full two way sat via active tracking phased array antenna for a couple grand. Going on all the new "Luxury coach" RVs now (also does sat TV). Given a relatively short amount of time there will be hardly any boat large enough to be called a ship that doesn't have it. Rather like nearly all the semis with sat links to dispatch.
I think you are sorely mistaken. Pretty much everything you mentioned is indeed available for Windows. Yes some of it is from third parties. Yes you have to pay for most of it.
I run an X windows server on windows from WRQ. I've also used eXcursion in the past. I've used SSH clients on Windows (forget which one) and I have some mysql component linked in with MS Access that I use occasionally. I have also used VNC on Windows to manage remote Unix systems and Windows has it's own remote management console should you want to manage Windows systems.
The Windows PC sitting next to this one is on a VPN connection to the corporate network, I have telnet sessions (WRQ Reflections client) on a number of VMS systems. I don't have any active at the moment but I've had VNC sessions active to AIX and Solaris systems. I have MS Outlook doing it's thing with an Exchange server as well as MS Office Communicator. So what you're doing on you machine is by no means unique to your Mac or a Unix system.
So you avoid MS just because you don't like them. Since it's not the cost and it's no a limitation of not being able to do something with their OS and various third party products.
I thought Linux could run all those evil Windows applications so I didn't have to use Windows? Again I had no stability issues with NT, 95 or 98 either,
As a desktop system, as a small scale server, as whatever I've needed it to do.
Nope Ford vs. Chevy vs. Dodge. You've just got that over hyped hemi (which has little in common with the old hemi) and you're just going around thumping your hemi chest while others in their Fords and Chevys continue to drive around doing the exact same things you do in your Dodge.
Same here. Indeed I bought one friend the OS X upgrade so she could at least run a real operating system even if she insisted on that terrible UI.
Exactly which is why I don't hop on the trendy anti establishment OS of the year bandwagon. Windows works perfectly fine so I will continue to use it until I find some compelling reason to use something else and cost just isn't a compelling reason for me.
Once again no articulation of what this mysterious power is. Pretty much everything mentioned has an equivalent on Windows so I don't see any extra power.
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