>> I mean, come on, Windows is pretty flexible, given that my mum can do 
>> stuff on it, I can use it to run CFD simulations and design LCD screens, 
>> also I can play 3D games and even write 3D games on it, plus raytrace :-)
>
> Apart from your mum being able to work it, the same could be said for just 
> about any OS.

The CAD software and CFD software we use only works on Windows.  The games I 
want to play are only for Windows.

> (And even Linux isn't that hard to work these days. Damn hard to set up, 
> but not that hard to operate once you eventually get it working.)

And when my mum tries to plug in her new camera...?  I was actually very 
impressed that my mum managed to install the software for her camera and get 
it working without even a single phone call to me :-)

> True story: One of our users was working on a vital report. She hit 
> "Save", and Word crashed. From that point onwards, any attempt to access 
> this file caused Word to instantly crash.

Did you try using "Open and Repair" from the open dialog box of Word? That 
has worked before when I was sent a corrupt file.  Also, tell her to save 
more often than every few hours.

> Any idea how many people are switching away from IE? Enough to provoke M$ 
> to start development work on it again.

And yet funnily enough since Vista/IE7, I've seen people who previously were 
using FF now going back to IE - "well it has tabbed browsing already doesn't 
it?"

> Sadly, it seems we are stuck with M$ Windows forever. I mean, M$ is too 
> powerful to beat. They're unstoppable. We're all doomed...

Get a life away from computers :-)

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scott wrote:
>> Personally, I don't think so. People have created products like 
>> OpenOffice and KOffice and so forth, and they work. Reliably.
> 
> For me MS Office works reliably - and it's not like I only use 5% of its 
> features.

I find that rather interesting - Word's inability to not crash is 
legend. Everywhere I've ever been that uses Word has had endless 
reliability issues.

>> Interesing you should say that. You're aware of course that the fist 
>> Amiga was a 16-bit machine, and the later ones were 32-bit? Or that 
>> originally the graphics hardware only supported 12-bit colour, and 
>> later added 24-bit colour? Or that originally you could only have 6 
>> bits per pixel and later you could have 8?
> 
> And you could use the same OS version with all these hardware 
> configurations?

No - principly because much of the OS is in ROM. If it weren't, they'd 
have probably designed it so you can.

>> So Windows is designed to do a bunch of unecessary stuff in the 
>> background by default. I consider this a design flaw. What *useful* 
>> stuff does Windows do that AmigaDOS doesn't?
> 
> Virtual memory

OK. The Amiga lacked the necessary hardware for that.

> automatic updates

Which is only necessary because the software wasn't done right in the 
first place.

> protecting itself from nasty programs 
> that try to access things they shouldn't

Hasn't UNIX been doing this for the last 40 years?

> providing common dialogs for all applications

AmigaDOS does this. (Indeed, I found a program to replace the standard 
dialogs, so I *know* it does this.)

> plug and play

The hardware for that didn't exist at the time. (Although AmigaDOS does 
support hot-swapping PCMCIA cards seemlessly.)

> CD/DVD-RW access

Wrong. My Amiga has a CD-RW drive, and it works just fine.

> wireless networking

Or, indeed, *any* networking. That kind of thing used to be expensive...

> remote desktop

Finally, something useful. Yes, well, if you take it that we don't have 
networking, this is clearly a non-option.

> configuring machines remotely
> network file systems, 
> network printing,
> offline files

...and so are those...

[Although with the right hardware, you could in fact set up primitive 
"network" file systems under AmigaDOS. And they work like local ones. 
Just need the hardware to connect and a driver.]

> hibernating

Doesn't really require much OS support, does it?

> file type associations

OK, that one AmigaDOS did lack. And it was actually annoying.

> encryption

Would be fairly trivial to add.

> working in multiple time zones, working with different 
> region settings,

Nope. AmigaDOS had those.

> firewall.

No network, remember? ;-)

>> And how in the name of God do you find out what *causes* one?
> 
> Gulp.  Look in the event log.  Use Google.

The STOP messages give generic error codes. Google will just tell you to 
check your hardware isn't faulty, uninstall any new software, etc. The 
event log tells me nothing except the STOP code.

>> All the STOP messages I get are either UNHANDLED_KMODE_EXCEPTION or 
>> IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. Could be anything.
> 
> Those are usually due to bad hardware drivers or bad hardware itself.  
> Given that you're seeing this on several machines, I'd place my bets on 
> some bad drivers that you've installed on all your machines.

Well, given that none of the PCs are remotely the same, it's gotta be 
printer drivers. That's the only thing where the same software is 
installed in more than one place.

We had a Toshiba printer that caused endless crashes in anything that 
touched it. We got rid of that! (I used a generic PostScript driver 
instead.) However, the rest of our printers are all HP. I was under the 
impression they're quite good at software...

>> If there were anything I could do to find out, I'd do it. 
>> Unfortunately, there isn't.
> 
> Of course there is something you can do.  How do you think other people 
> sort out problems like this?

They don't?

> It is *not* normal behaviour, no matter what you might think of MS.

Ah, I see. So all PCs that use M$ products do this, but it's not 
"normal"? Interesting definition. ;-)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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> Ah, I see. So all PCs that use M$ products do this, but it's not 
> "normal"? Interesting definition. ;-)

All PCs where *you've* worked... ;-)

Post a reply to this message

scott wrote:

> The CAD software and CFD software we use only works on Windows.  The 
> games I want to play are only for Windows.

Another big part of why everybody [including me] is still using Windows.

>> (And even Linux isn't that hard to work these days. Damn hard to set 
>> up, but not that hard to operate once you eventually get it working.)
> 
> And when my mum tries to plug in her new camera...?  I was actually very 
> impressed that my mum managed to install the software for her camera and 
> get it working without even a single phone call to me :-)

50% chance it will just do the right thing.
25% chance it will do nothing at all unless you type in some Geek gibberish.
25% chance it's impossible to make it work at all.

>> True story: One of our users was working on a vital report. She hit 
>> "Save", and Word crashed. From that point onwards, any attempt to 
>> access this file caused Word to instantly crash.
> 
> Did you try using "Open and Repair" from the open dialog box of Word?

And how do you do that?

[FWIW, I did spend quite a lot of time researching the options. There's 
a Word experts website that tells you all the little tricks for fixing 
corrupted documents. Sadly, none of them work for a document so broken 
it won't even open at all...]

> Also, tell her to save more often than every few hours.

As I'm sure you know very well, the number one time for Word to crash is 
exactly when you hit Save.

And yes, she saves much more than every few hours. But once the file is 
corrupted, the only resort is to restore from last night's backup - if 
it's there at all. So the whole day's work is gone. Users tend not to be 
amused by that stuff.

I mean, sure, I could use Recover Text. But the formatting is the part 
she's just spent 3 hours adjusting. We've already got the *text*!

>> Any idea how many people are switching away from IE? Enough to provoke 
>> M$ to start development work on it again.
> 
> And yet funnily enough since Vista/IE7, I've seen people who previously 
> were using FF now going back to IE - "well it has tabbed browsing 
> already doesn't it?"

Yes. Because the only difference between IE and FF is tabbed browsing. 
It's not like FF is 98% more efficient or secure or standards-compliant 
or anything like that...

>> Sadly, it seems we are stuck with M$ Windows forever. I mean, M$ is 
>> too powerful to beat. They're unstoppable. We're all doomed...
> 
> Get a life away from computers :-)

And that is an entire *other* story...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

Post a reply to this message

scott wrote:
>> Ah, I see. So all PCs that use M$ products do this, but it's not 
>> "normal"? Interesting definition. ;-)
> 
> All PCs where *you've* worked... ;-)

Oh, right. I missed the white elephant: I make PCs crash.

Hmm, new T-shirt idea. "I crash PCs"...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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nemesis wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> How recently has UNIX not used source distributions for programs? How
>> much UNIX shareware could you download as executables, say, in 1998?
> 
> I don't quite understand how this has to do with anything in the discussion.
> But source has always been available in some way or another in the *nix
> community.
> 
>> DOS, Win98, WinXP.
> 
> Win9x did not support DOS programs: they simply had DOS included to handle
> those.  So, basically, M$ can afford backwards compatibility by simply letting
> old code handle old code, because old code everyone's using is M$ code, not
> someone's else.  Single vendor, single solution.
> 

IIRC Win95 ran on MS-DOS 7.  It actually booted to DOS and then loaded 
windows.  The reboot to DOS only set up the environment customized to 
the application you were trying to run.

The same went for Win98 & ME.  Just that DOS become less and less 
important.  But I remember that they all ran on top of DOS.



Tom

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"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:47b166c6$1@news.povray.org...
> Darren New wrote:
>
>> Nowadays, I get stuff that's too complicated to do that. Several 
>> instances of looping over a result set and building a "Select from X 
>> where X.blah in (....)" where the .... is built programatically based on 
>> another SQL call.  Or places I'm pretty sure I could figure out but don't 
>> have the half a day to spend.  Or stuff I'm pretty sure SQL can do, but I 
>> can't figure out how to (mostly with GROUP-BY selection type stuff).
>
> Given time, you could probably integrate the entire thing into one giant 
> SQL statement. You'd probably find that you can actually simplify it down 
> to something rather smaller once it stated all in one operation. And that 
> the DB engine can do some pretty impressive optimisations after that too.
>

In the application I work on, we produce Financial Statements (not solely, 
but as part of the overall application).  In the old application, this 
involved several SQL statements, each run at various times, as the 
application traversed a simple SQL statement.  Part of the problem was bad 
database design in the old system.  In our new system, it took us perhaps 3 
days, but we was able to combine it all into one long SQL statement.  It was 
the hairiest SQL I'd ever seen, but it now produces statements in seconds, 
whereas the old system would take several minutes.

I'm not an SQL guru by any means, and the knowledge that I gained in those 3 
days was enormous.  It helped me to understand what SQL was actually capable 
of, rather than simply assuming, "SQL can't do that!"  And moving forward to 
other reporting nightmares made many of these new issues seem almost trivial 
by comparison.

It made me a better developer as well as producing a better product for the 
consumer, but the company I work for has a difficult time understanding the 
long term benefit, very much like Gail and others have stated in this 
thread.  Sometimes I even have to hide my time while I make something 
better, for fear of getting reprimanded.  If feature A gets implemented 
quickly, I spend time fixing B to make up the difference, but then don't 
report it.  It's sad.

Post a reply to this message

Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Because you had lots of OSes called UNIX that weren't compatible with
> each other, even at the source level.  (See autoconf)

that only happens when you exchange a common API for platform-specific APIs that
do the same thing faster or funkier.  It happens even in Java.

It doesn't really happen in M$ because there really is a single vendor with a
single set of solutions and they can cram old APIs to handle old code in their
newer products with newer incompatible APIs.

> > Win9x did not support DOS programs: they simply had DOS included to handle
> > those.
>
> DOS programs ran in a window, just like they do now.

It runs in a window because that's how graphical ambients run console programs:
by opening a window terminal and letting the console program do their job.  It
doesn't magically transform them into full graphical programs with graphical
drop-down menus.  The OS calls such programs did were DOS calls and such calls
are still supported these days by letting an emulated DOS handle those.

So, there's your secret for backwards compatibility:  let old code handle old
code.  or just let user old code die...

> > Single vendor, single solution.
>
> Yes? So?

So they can afford to provide their older APIs together with the new.  It's
their own code, it's not really "2 different OSes"!

> So, different operating systems. You're making my point for me. :-)

old code still handled by old code, not new.

> So you agree with me, but think MS is bad.

Yes, because MS is a monopoly.  That's what is bad about it.  The fact that the
programs are buggy is not as bad, every software has bugs.  What makes it
particularly annoying is the fact that this giant SOB with some of the
brightest minds behind it and tons of money *still* has bugs and steals so much
ideas from other sources.  Or just buy them.

So, it's a giant complex software with tons of interdependencies?!  It should
have bugs?  Linux distributions are also giant complex software with tons of
interdependencies and to get it worse, such software is made by thousands of
little contributions from developers around the world with almost no contact
with each other.  I've been using the likes of Ubuntu, OpenSuse and Fedora the
last few years and while the bugs are certainly different than those of MS
software, there doesn't seem to be as many or as little as those.

So, why is the single largest and richest developer in the world with so many
bright minds and a single set of enforcement rules over their developers about
code quality and API standards get rivalled by ad-hoc developers from around
the world working on many different little pieces of software that eventually
get assembled into a Linux distribution?

It seems to me MS crappy, crippled software is such by design, so people have
always a reason to update.

Post a reply to this message

"scott" <sco### [at] laptopcom> wrote:
> They are a
> company - they act to generate maximum profit for their shareholders.

and are able to get around delivering crappy software to their customers because
there's no competition around.  Linux is a different beast with a different API
and mindset and so is Mac, which is even worse because of the different
price-range.

Real competition for MS would be when someone tried to support applications
written for MS Windows and make sure they run fine in their platform.  They
could use wine and mono for a headstart and perhaps run a Linux kernel
underneath.

Until then, all that's left for consumers are the offerings from a monopoly.
And consumers are ok with it because there's no way around it and besides they
want to make sure shareholders are happy. :P

Post a reply to this message

> Warp wrote:
> 
>>   That seems to be a rather common thing people do. It's like they read
>> the first page of the SQL book they were given and skipped the rest 
>> because
>> it "works".
> 
> I find this deeply depressing...
> 

I don't know much SQL, but at least I know I don't know :) Although I'm 
definitely not as stupid as to do a SELECT * without WHERE clause and 
filtering what I want in the code! Geez...

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