Darren New wrote:
> The list of new things they've done recently is widely available, so I 
> won't bother going thru it.
> 
Seen the lists, seen the rebuttals. Still not impressed. Especially when 
some of them are things like "Added a mess of new features to DirectX", 
which would be available without it, except that they insisted you "had 
to" make them only work in DirectX. A lot of the time, the problem with 
OpenGL isn't that it "can't" do something, its that the hardware doesn't 
let it use those features. The other issue is a correlary, "If you can't 
use those features, it takes longer to replicate them the hard way, than 
if it could just "use" them in the first place.

And again. I have "never" seen any case, personally, where someone said, 
"Ooh! MS is doing that with their OS? Better put it in Linux!" Not 
unless it is something in the class of user interfaces, and those tend 
to be used to "hide" things you don't want people mucking with, as much 
as making it easier to use. Its.. taking a 1940's engine, slapping a 
2009 body on it, applying a fancy new kind of paint, then saying, "Look, 
look! Isn't the new version great, compared to that ugly hack over 
their?", while the people you are pointing at have a brand spanking new 
turbo charged, fuel efficient, bio-diesel, electronic fuel injected, 
monster, sitting in a basic frame and a cheap plastic shell. Only... 
That is rapidly changing, and one side still has the better "engine", no 
matter how many gadgets the other one glues onto theirs, without 
fundamentally changing it.

Windows borrows, Linux evolves. The only time it ever seems to work the 
other way around is when MS decides that Windows needs to poison the 
well, and Linux has to adapt by developing resistance to the poison, 
like all the attempts made over the years by MS to "obfuscate" 
protocols, with the clear, and often within internal documents, intent, 
of sabotaging compatibility.

The problem isn't Windows per-say. Its the entire philosophy behind it, 
and the compromises made to a) rush it out the door all the time, or b) 
undermine others, just to get a slight edge over everyone else. Its 
better to work towards a fully usable solution, not keep tacking on half 
assed ones, the way they end up doing it, from their "new" security 
model, which just causes people like me, who "despise" storing data on 
the same partition as the OS, to pull our hair out, to defraggers that 
still, to this day, don't have the common sense to defrag the "unused" 
space, or optimize program access (never mind all the third parties that 
figured that one out as far back as Win3.11), to.. an endless list.

FOSS has an excuse for this, they don't have thousands of developers 
working 24/7 on *one* project, trying to make it bloody work right. 
MS... doesn't. Their goal is just to make things look impressive, and do 
enough to sell the product. Its not until it becomes obvious that they 
have problems, or someone else is biting their ankles, or something 
never did work, and enough people are annoyed, that they even "attempt" 
to fix it.

-- 
void main () {
   If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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