Darren New wrote:
> Patrick Elliott wrote:
>> 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", 
> 
> There's a bunch of internal stuff, as well as things like Media Center, 
> .NET, etc.
> 
>> 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,
> 
> Sounds like One True Scotsman syndrome to me.  Because Microsoft doesn't 
> innovate, anything Microsoft does is, by definition, not innovation.
> 
>> 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. 
> 
> Actually, it's worse. FOSS actually discourages getting projects 
> "finished" and easy to use and reliable, unless it's infrastructure for 
> the people working on other projects. Apache and gcc work great, because 
> on top of *that* people can write code that you can sell without giving 
> it away (like google does, in other words). But if you actually turned 
> out a professional-quality piece of software that needed what it did and 
> it had to work well, you couldn't make money off of maintenance. Hence 
> the dearth of games, accounting software, user electronics, and so on.
> 
Why in the hell would I ever want something that is "finished", in any 
such sense. I want something where the stuff already "in it" is 
reliable, but people are still looking at how to improve it. MS stuff... 
The damn thing gets patched so often fixing things you never "see" that 
a month after you install it the entire OS must have been replaced with 
new binaries... Which means, most of it wasn't working quite right to 
start with, and probably still isn't, even after being patched 500 
times. By comparison, FOSS projects I use, usually, only send out 
"stable" patches, or ones with "significant" changes, unless they, on 
rare occasion, do have a serious bug, in which case it comes out, 
updates without rebooting, (thought XP and Vista wasn't supposed to need 
that BS so much any more?), remembers what it was doing before you did 
restart the program, if you even did, and the patch comes out the moment 
they have it, not a week later.

Either your argument is that FOSS is "just as bad" as MS stuff, because 
neither is ever "finished", or your arguing that MS stuff is, because 
they spend 5 years to come out with a whole new OS, instead of 2 months 
to come up with a patch that adds some features. Either way, I don't 
think its a winning argument.

-- 
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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