Invisible wrote:
> So what you're saying is that if hardware is complicated, it is 
> impossible to develop quality software?

Obviously not. But it's impossible to develop it for the same price in 
the same timeframe with the same quality.

>> Ha.  Compare what Windows XP does with your Amiga OS.  Think about 
>> hardware support, multi-processor support, multi-user support, 
>> multi-APIs for everything, wireless networking, and a million other 
>> things.
> 
> Why do we *need* multi-APIs for everything in the first place?

Because otherwise your older programs won't run. We need it because 
people don't give away the source for their commercial software.

> Leaving aside hardware [bad drivers can screw up any OS], what does 
> Windoze actually do that AmigaDOS doesn't? Well, let's see now. It has 
> networking. It's multi-user and has access permissions.

Remote desktop. USB. Networking. 3D accelerated graphics. Memory 
protection. Virtual memory. 64-bit OS support. Remote management. Access 
control policies. Performance monitoring. Clustered drives. RAID. 
Multi-OS boot. Support for about 63,417 different chunks of hardware.

> It... uh... no, 
> I'm struggling to think of anything else new it has. That seems to be 
> able it, really. (Unless you count IE as part of the OS.)

You're struggling to think of something *you* use.

> The point is, some bugs are more serious than others. Where I work, Word 
> is constantly crashing.

Aren't you the one that's still using 10-year-old Word97?

> Interesting. When I got my laptop, it crashed within 14 *seconds* of 
> being turned on.

One would think that would be either a misinstalled OS or a hardware 
problem.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

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Invisible wrote:
> Personally, I don't think so. People have created products like 
> OpenOffice and KOffice and so forth, and they work. Reliably.

Yet, funny enough, when I boot Linux, it screams "FAT support is ALPHA!" 
  Depends on your priorities. I haven't ever had Word actually crash on 
me, either.

> 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?

If you're going to go along that line, the first Windows machine was 
8-bit, and now they're up to 64-bit. :-) The first Amiga was a 32-bit 
machine running on a 16-bit bus.

> And - most importantly - you can take an application written back when 
> we only had 6 bits per pixel, and run it on a screen operating at 8 bits 
> per pixel. And it can share the screen with other applications and 
> change parts of the colour table and so on and so forth, and WORK.

Yeah. Better than X-Windows used to be at the same time.

> [Assuming it does all this through the OS. The Big Problem the Amiga had 
> is that since the hardware is "always" the same, a lot of software 
> bypasses the OS. Obviously this breaks horribly when the hardware 
> changes...]

Yep. On the other hand, the original Amiga books described how to frob 
the hardware.

Note that Windows supports DOS programs that bypass the OS in exactly 
the same way, and it WORKS.

> 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?

It depends who you are. Aren't you the one complaining about lack of USB 
support in your NT machines?

> I mean, sure, it tells you what was happening at the exact instant the 
> crash happened, but how do you find out what the actual problem is?

Same way you do for Linux errors. You google the text of the error 
message, or search for it on MSDN.

> If there were anything I could do to find out, I'd do it. Unfortunately, 
> there isn't.

There's lots you can do. You just don't know how. That's why they give 
you the stack dump and such.  "Wow, if only I could read a core file, 
I'd be able to tell which program is dumping core!" :-)

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

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Invisible wrote:
>> 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.

Probably not.

>>> 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.

Unnecessary, obviously.


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

Which is why only one version of Kickstart was ever released, yep yep.

>> protecting itself from nasty programs that try to access things they 
>> shouldn't
> 
> Hasn't UNIX been doing this for the last 40 years?

Lots of machines did. Amiga didn't. That's the point.  You didn't ask 
for what MS did that nobody else did. You asked for what MS did that 
Amiga didn't.

>> plug and play
> 
> The hardware for that didn't exist at the time.

Yes it did. It was called SOTS (Slap On The Side). And the Amiga even 
had a very clever mechanism for finding the drivers and initializing a 
change of devices. Few vendors used it, tho.

> (Although AmigaDOS does 
> support hot-swapping PCMCIA cards seemlessly.)

Not the A1000. Oh, wait, everything was perfect, so they couldn't have 
added that.

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

It requires a tremendous amount to do it right.

>> encryption
> Would be fairly trivial to add.

You would be surprised.  It requires, amongst other things, protected 
memory.

>> 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. ;-)

But not all PCs that use MS products do this. Maybe all *yours* do, but 
there are global businesses that run on Windows machines. I'm working 
with one that actually abandoned Linux because it was too unreliable for 
their purposes, and they have something like 30,000 computers running 
24x7 scattered across the USA.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> DCOM launch, I can't disable this one,

That means you need it.

> Machine Debug Manager (C:\Program files\Common files\Microsoft 
> Shared\VS7DEBUG\MDM.EXE), which I don't need since I use gdb, not Visual 
> Studio debugger. Why is this even *installed*??

Because you asked it to be at one point. I think it's also a kernel 
debugger, btw.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

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Invisible wrote:
> So why bother making a quality product when people will buy crap?

Right.

> Of course, if there were actually some viable competition, people would 
> realise that it is *not* "normal" for computer software to be buggy and 
> unreliable, and people would switch.

What's not "viable" about Linux et al?

> Unfortunately, thanks to M$, this 
> situation will never arise. If anybody starts making really good 
> software, they'll just get bought...

And how does MS "buy" Linux?


-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

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Invisible wrote:
> No - but selling cars which you know are going to crash at least once 
> every 52 days... well, if a company tried to do that, they'd be shut 
> down. However, for software it seems it's OK to sell a malfunctioning 
> product.

I don't know what you're doing, but I've had production servers that ran 
for years on Windows without a problem.

> Well, sure, if there were an alternative,

And why isn't Linux an alternative?  Why isn't Mac OS X an alternative?

> But what about, say, Word? There's quite a few other word processors out 
> there - and in past times there were even more. And most of them were a 
> lot more reliable than Word...

So why aren't they alternatives? MS isn't buying every word processor 
company.

> Apple requires you to buy new hardware, so it's not purely a software 
> decision. Linux is nice, but... well, it's fundamentally designed for 
> UNIX nerds. So if you're not, good luck... Besides, I'm not convinced 
> that the whole UNIX design is particularly coherant. (E.g., autoconf 
> exists.)

Ding ding ding!  MS's product advantage is that it *can* be used by 
naive users without a lot of expense.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

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Darren New wrote:
> Invisible wrote:
>> Personally, I don't think so. People have created products like 
>> OpenOffice and KOffice and so forth, and they work. Reliably.
> 
> Yet, funny enough, when I boot Linux, it screams "FAT support is ALPHA!" 

hi, I can't help but notice your timezone is wrong.  This is 2008.  We 
can write to NTFS partitions from LiveCDs, let alone simple FAT which 
BTW is the standard format in thumbdrives, which work just fine as well.

Perhaps it's time to test a new Linux distribution?  From the 2000's?

Post a reply to this message

Darren New wrote:
> Aren't you the one that's still using 10-year-old Word97?

yeah, he should update Word and you should install a decent modern Linux 
distro.

Post a reply to this message

Darren New wrote:

>> [Assuming it does all this through the OS. The Big Problem the Amiga 
>> had is that since the hardware is "always" the same, a lot of software 
>> bypasses the OS. Obviously this breaks horribly when the hardware 
>> changes...]
> 
> Yep. On the other hand, the original Amiga books described how to frob 
> the hardware.
> 
> Note that Windows supports DOS programs that bypass the OS in exactly 
> the same way, and it WORKS.

The PC has the hardware necessary to do this with sane performance 
levels. The Amiga didn't.

>> 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?
> 
> It depends who you are. Aren't you the one complaining about lack of USB 
> support in your NT machines?

OK, so USB support goes into the list of useful things Windows can do 
that AmigaDOS can't.

>> If there were anything I could do to find out, I'd do it. 
>> Unfortunately, there isn't.
> 
> There's lots you can do. You just don't know how. That's why they give 
> you the stack dump and such.  "Wow, if only I could read a core file, 
> I'd be able to tell which program is dumping core!" :-)

Only hyper-nerds are going to be able to get anything remotely useful 
out of a dump file. To everybody else, it's just wasted disk space.

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

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Darren New wrote:
> And why isn't Linux an alternative?  Why isn't Mac OS X an alternative?

Linux is cheap but doesn't run Windows software or ports of major 
popular commercial software like Photoshop, AutoCAD or World of Warcraft 
without Wine and crashes.

Mac does run ports of most of them but is too expensive.

I'm still confident Linux will make more inroads in the desktop to the 
point of Adobe feeling an urge to port its major apps.

> So why aren't they alternatives? MS isn't buying every word processor 
> company.

The issue is that any word processor coming by should handle doc format 
perfectly -- no matter how good it is at an open format like ODF -- 
because that's what people send you and expect from you.  Not an easy 
task reverse enginneering an obscure, undocumented format like that.

I've never had any trouble opening any doc, xls or ppt from email 
attachments friends mail me, but those are hardly office production 
examples, so I can't be 100% sure.

OTOH, I've successfully opened older doc formats with OpenOffice while 
Word was complaining the format was too old. :)

Post a reply to this message

Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Yet, funny enough, when I boot Linux, it screams "FAT support is ALPHA!" 

  I must have missed that. Where does it say it?

  I have never had any problems with FAT support. Maybe it's just me.

> Yeah. Better than X-Windows used to be at the same time.

  Yes, Unix sucks big time. You should never use it. Demand your money
back immediately.

> Note that Windows supports DOS programs that bypass the OS in exactly 
> the same way, and it WORKS.

  I believe the list of DOS games which don't work anymore in current hardware
with the current Windows is larger than the list of DOS games which do.

> > I mean, sure, it tells you what was happening at the exact instant the 
> > crash happened, but how do you find out what the actual problem is?

> Same way you do for Linux errors. You google the text of the error 
> message, or search for it on MSDN.

  Yes, like once I tried to install some modem drivers into a WinXP
system, and at the end of the installation it said "failed to install
driver", nothing more, nothing less. Not a single hint about why it
failed.

  Now, try to google without an internet connection because you just
failed to install the driver necessary for the internet connection.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Invisible wrote:
> OK. The Amiga lacked the necessary hardware for that.

I do find it interesting that you ask what Windows does that the Amiga 
doesn't, and when given an extensive list, everything is dismissed as 
either "The Amiga didn't have the hardware for that" or "I don't use 
that so it doesn't count."

> The STOP messages give generic error codes.

Fortunately, the Amiga was far superior in this regard. ;-)

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

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Darren New wrote:

>> Leaving aside hardware [bad drivers can screw up any OS], what does 
>> Windoze actually do that AmigaDOS doesn't? Well, let's see now. It has 
>> networking. It's multi-user and has access permissions.
> 
> Remote desktop. USB. Networking. 3D accelerated graphics. Memory 
> protection. Virtual memory. 64-bit OS support. Remote management. Access 
> control policies. Performance monitoring. Clustered drives. RAID. 
> Multi-OS boot. Support for about 63,417 different chunks of hardware.

OK then. Most of what you just listed is *hardware*, not *software*. Let 
us examine what's actually software...

Networking, and anything that requires networking. AmigaDOS can't really 
do this. (There is a facility to do some primitive thing with the 
parallel port to set up a sort of 2-node NFS. And it works 
transparently.) If the hardware had existed, you could probably set up 
real networking. But, out of the box, there is no TCP/IP. So that's a 
useful thing that AmigaDOS doesn't have.

Multiple users and access control is missing.

Hardware support is... down to 3rd parties. If they write the drivers, 
you can use it. If they don't, you can't.

Performance monitoring? I can do that. Oh, wait, aren't you the guy who 
claimed that AmigaDOS doesn't have premptive multitasking?

Multi-OS boot? Strange - I also run Debian Linux on my Amiga. :-P

>> It... uh... no, I'm struggling to think of anything else new it has. 
>> That seems to be able it, really. (Unless you count IE as part of the 
>> OS.)
> 
> You're struggling to think of something *you* use.
> 
>> The point is, some bugs are more serious than others. Where I work, 
>> Word is constantly crashing.
> 
> Aren't you the one that's still using 10-year-old Word97?

We were using Word 97. We're now [mostly] using Word 2003. [At least, 
certainly the report writers are - and nobody else uses it very much.] 
Still crash-happy. Mainly due to our customer's corrupted document 
templates, but that's no excuse; software should NOT crash just because 
you fed it bad data. Graceful failure, anyone?

>> Interesting. When I got my laptop, it crashed within 14 *seconds* of 
>> being turned on.
> 
> One would think that would be either a misinstalled OS or a hardware 
> problem.

If that were the case, visiting Windows Update a few times presumably 
wouldn't have fixed it...

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

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Invisible wrote:
> It's not like FF is 98% more efficient

You're right. It isn't. FF is the number one sucker-up-of-useless-memory 
-and-cycles on my machines.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

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nemesis wrote:
> "scott" <sco### [at] laptopcom> wrote:
>> 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 :-)
> 
> On Linux she wouldn't need to install any software on CD whatsoever.

You don't on Windows either. The extra software provides extra 
functionality, like printing picture albums, or marking the pictures on 
the chip to be printed, so you can hand the chip to the folks at Costco 
and say "here, print the ones I marked."

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

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>> M$ doesn't *own* Novell. They merely agreed in principle to cooperate 
>> in their design strategies. That's all. SuSE is still powered by OSS 
>> and so on and so forth.
> 
> It's crippled with M$ tech and IP, like mono and all tools which more 
> and more depend on it.  That's what Ballmer meant by Linux using M$ IP.

Er... Mono is an free reimplementation of M$ proprietry technology to 
allow people to use it without being tied to M$?

Isn't that like complaining that including a free Java implementation is 
"crippling the system with Sun IP"?

>> How do you even pronounce that? [Not that it matters I guess...]
> 
> there's an ogg video of Nelson Mandela -- as if you would know who is he 
> -- in the Examples directory.  He speaks about the ancient Ubuntu 
> african concept...

Uh, yes, I think I *might* have slightly heard of Mr Mandela. :-P

> (Ooboontoo, emphasis on middle syllable, t pronounced kinda like in 
> "bottle")

OK.

>> Isn't DeCSS illegal?
> 
> is it legal to make backup copies of stuff you buy?  Is it legal to get 
> rid of stupid mechanisms that don't play well with OSes that don't act 
> according to the RIAA and others best interests?
> 
> You can make up your own mind or just follow their rules...

Fact: The law is the law, regardless of what it "right" or not.

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

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Gail Shaw wrote:

>> there's an ogg video of Nelson Mandela -- as if you would know who is he
>> -- in the Examples directory.  He speaks about the ancient Ubuntu
>> african concept...
> 
> If he doesn't, I'm contemplating shooting him!

Uh, that won't be necessary.

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

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Invisible wrote:
>  [It is after all *designed* for experts.]

"It is not so much user friendly as it is expert tolerant."


-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> You're right. It isn't. FF is the number one sucker-up-of-useless-memory 
> -and-cycles on my machines.

  Yes, everything not made by Microsoft is by definition bad, horrid,
heavy, a memory-hog and a CPU-hog. Everything made by Microsoft is
just perfect.

  You must have a different version of Firefox, as mine is taking 0%
of CPU time right now.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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nemesis wrote:
> Phil Cook wrote:
>> Depends on what you want to run. Again, as has been pointed out 
>> before, for basic clerical work Linux works. The problems can be 
>> summed up with Nicholas's "That's the *basic* installation method on 
>> Linux. If you don't even know how to unpack a .tar.gz... you don't 
>> know Linux."
> 
> no, this is just plain wrong.  Unless Nicolas is running Slackware, the 
> Linux community as a whole has moved from basic 
> tarball-source-compile-install to automated dependency-tracking 
> repository packages installs.  There's no command-line involved, unless 
> you want to.

And if you do, it's usually something like "emerge povray" or whatever 
the distro in question uses.

> What I think Nicolas means is that gzip is the *nix standard packing 
> format, which it's always been indeed.

The best part is when you say "make configure", and it says 
"Unrecognised arch 'i586/SuSE 10.3'". And you're like "WTF? Now what do 
I do??"

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

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nemesis wrote:
> Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> (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.)
> 
> hmm, what have you been running?  Linux from Scratch?

SUSE 10.1 would crash during install on my machine unless I managed to 
interrupt it in the 0.75 seconds before it installed the buggy USB 
driver that would take out the system.  It took me literally two days of 
trying before I could get to a login prompt after an install.

On the other hand, Windows has been managing basic installs without user 
expertise for decades. :-)

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

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"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message
news:47b1993e$1@news.povray.org...

> > 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. ;-)


I've got 4 Windows PCs (one 2000, one 2003, one XP and one Vista) and none
of them have blue screened in so long, I can't remember the last crash.
I have a large number of servers ( all running windows OS, either 2000
server or 2003 server) with uptimes in months and the only reason we reboot
them at all is for patches or hardware reconfigs

I'd actually love to have a look in your system's event logs, see why
they're crashing so often. It's certainly not normal.

Post a reply to this message

Warp escribió:
>> Note that Windows supports DOS programs that bypass the OS in exactly 
>> the same way, and it WORKS.
> 
>   I believe the list of DOS games which don't work anymore in current hardware
> with the current Windows is larger than the list of DOS games which do.
> 

And also, I believe the list of DOS games that run on DOSBox is larger 
than the list of DOS games that run on current Windows.

Post a reply to this message

nemesis wrote:
> It's crippled with M$ tech and IP, like mono 

Mono is an implementation of an ECMA standard, just like Javascript is.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

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Warp escribió:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> You're right. It isn't. FF is the number one sucker-up-of-useless-memory 
>> -and-cycles on my machines.
> 
>   Yes, everything not made by Microsoft is by definition bad, horrid,
> heavy, a memory-hog and a CPU-hog. Everything made by Microsoft is
> just perfect.
> 
>   You must have a different version of Firefox, as mine is taking 0%
> of CPU time right now.
> 

Firefox indeed eats a lot of memory (it has been already identified to 
be memory fragmentation, and has improved lots in Firefox 3). But it 
only eats lots of CPU when Flash is running...

IE, on the other hand, has great performance and no standards 
compliance, and since it hasn't been updated much for years... it was 
made for older machines :P

Post a reply to this message

Phil Cook wrote:
> and yet prior to Windows 95 there were quite the number of competing OSs.

Afterwards, too. Just not on the same hardware. And not really offering 
a whole lot more.

>> Apple requires you to buy new hardware, so it's not purely a software 
>> decision.
> 
> Yet everyone loves their monopolistic ways :-)

And the software is subsidized by the hardware, which *would* be 
monopolistic if Apple split into two companies. And it *still* costs 
roughly the same for Apple software as MS software, in spite of the subsidy.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

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Darren New wrote:

> What's not "viable" about Linux et al?

It's still not [yet] as easy to use.

Most hardware companies don't supply drivers for it, and refuse to hand 
over the information required for anybody else to write those drivers.

If you're into gaming, forget it. Almost no big developers target that 
platform.

>> Unfortunately, thanks to M$, this situation will never arise. If 
>> anybody starts making really good software, they'll just get bought...
> 
> And how does MS "buy" Linux?

They can't buy Linux. They can, however, pay the hardware guys to only 
supply new computers with M$ Windows preinstalled, make them sign 
agreements not to develop drivers for other platforms, and so forth.

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

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Invisible wrote:
> M$ is the largest and richest corporation ever to have existed in 
> recorded human history.

Only in today's dollars.

>> and yet prior to Windows 95 there were quite the number of competing OSs.
> Really? That's news.

That's why people take your opinions on the subject with a grain of 
salt. :-)

> BTW, have you ever used a Windows Live CD?

Yes.

> If you thought it was slow running from your HD then... you ain't seen 
> nothing yet! B-b-b-baby, you just ain't seen nothing yet!!

Yeah. Don't do that. :-)

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

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nemesis escribió:
> Darren New wrote:
>> And why isn't Linux an alternative?  Why isn't Mac OS X an alternative?
> 
> Linux is cheap but doesn't run Windows software or ports of major 
> popular commercial software like Photoshop, AutoCAD or World of Warcraft 
> without Wine and crashes.

You got that backwards. "Photoshop, AutoCAD or World of Warcraft don't 
run on Linux". It's not "Linux doesn't run them". It's not Linux's fault 
that they don't run.

Post a reply to this message

>> Well, sure, if there were an alternative,
> 
> And why isn't Linux an alternative?  Why isn't Mac OS X an alternative?

Linux is designed for nerds, but Joe Average. Sure, they're trying to 
retarget it, but fundamentally that's not what it's about.

Mac OS X is an alternative - if you have several thousand pounds laying 
spare...

> Ding ding ding!  MS's product advantage is that it *can* be used by 
> naive users without a lot of expense.

So can products like Firefox and OpenOffice. And Apple stuff, actually, 
but that's very expensive...

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

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scott <sco### [at] laptopcom> wrote:
> 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?"

  Sometimes it scares me the power Microsoft has over people.

  Back when Netscape was approximately the only web browser in existence,
with something like 99% of market share, Microsoft published their first
version of IE and in something like *one month* it surpassed Netscape's
marketshare.

  Netscape back then was rather horrid, but Microsoft's IE was even
more horrendeous. It broke about every possible standard and RFC in
existence and was completely full of security holes. It was IE which
introduced the concept of going to a website and getting your system
infected with a trojan.

  Microsoft made six versions of IE, yet they still failed to support
even the most basic of standards, such as CSS and PNG, and the list
of serious security holes is just endless.

  Yet, regarldess, IE became almost overnight the industry standard.
Because IE broke almost every single standard in existence, IE-only
websites started to spawn. IE was the measurement by which the correctness
of websites were measured. If something worked in IE but didn't work in
another browser, it was that another browser which was broken, not IE.
Nobody dared to make websites which wouldn't work with IE, no matter how
many hoops they had to jump through to achieve that. It was simply better
to have an IE-only website than a website which wouldn't work with IE.

  Yet IE was so horridly broken that even the US government advised
their citizens to use another browser. Any browser except IE.

  It took something like 5 years or more of complete cessation of the
development of IE before people finally started to slowly migrate to
other browsers. Many people wouldn't let go even then. IE was like
some kind of brainwashing, like some kind of addictive drug: They just
couldn't let it go.

  It's really scary that one company can have this kind of power.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Gilles Tran wrote:

> Of course, in the real world, food is actually more important that software, 
> now how does *that* compute? :P
> 
> (Also, I said that the Maersk group shipped bananas, but that was a joke; 
> indeed, they may ship more profitable stuff such as oil, cars and Chinese 
> Christmas toys http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_M%C3%A6rsk; freight is a 
> gigantic business that made billionaires such as 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onassis, who was more famous than Bill Gates in 
> his time).

Now that makes more sense. I was wondering how the hell you could make 
any significant profile *just* by shipping bananas. If you'd said wheat 
or rice I'd have been more convinced... And if this one company actually 
ships all those different kinds of goods, I can see them making quite a 
lot of money.

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

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Nicolas Alvarez <nic### [at] gmailisthebestcom> wrote:
> IE, on the other hand, has great performance and no standards 
> compliance, and since it hasn't been updated much for years... it was 
> made for older machines :P

  Much of IE's "performance" is deceiving.

  For example, IE seems to take much less memory than other browsers
because many of its components are system components already loaded
into memory, and they are not listed under IE in the task manager.
This means that IE is taking quite a lot of memory, but you won't see
how much using task manager.

  That's also the reason why IE seems to start faster than many other
browsers: Most of its components are already loaded when Windows start,
and thus the *real* launchtime for IE is hidden by having part of it
launch at system startup.

  IE is rather slow at rendering pages. In page rendering speed tests
it performs poorly. (AFAIK in Windows the currently fastest "big" browser
is probably Safari.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Invisible wrote:
> Partly it's the whole "everyone runs only Windows, so we only need to 
> develop for Windows", which creates the whole "people only develop for 
> Windows, so I can only run Windows". 

That's the whole "natural monopoly" sort of thing. That's why there's 
really only one eBay, only one PSTN, and why Linux is really very 
UNIX-like in its APIs.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> On the other hand, Windows has been managing basic installs without user 
> expertise for decades. :-)

  Yes, Windows is clearly superior. Don't you even use anything else.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Orchid XP v7 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> > What I think Nicolas means is that gzip is the *nix standard packing 
> > format, which it's always been indeed.

> The best part is when you say "make configure", and it says 
> "Unrecognised arch 'i586/SuSE 10.3'". And you're like "WTF? Now what do 
> I do??"

  Yes, it's clearly a problem with *linux* when some software you are
trying to install is broken.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Darren New wrote:
> Invisible wrote:
>> OK. The Amiga lacked the necessary hardware for that.
> 
> I do find it interesting that you ask what Windows does that the Amiga 
> doesn't, and when given an extensive list, everything is dismissed as 
> either "The Amiga didn't have the hardware for that" or "I don't use 
> that so it doesn't count."

Well, if the hardware doesn't support it, how is the software supposed 
to offer that feature? Let's be realistic here. Given the available 
hardware, the software did almost everything you could expect of it. 
There's only a few things it could have provided but didn't. (Like 
multiple users and security. Or a real network stack.)

>> The STOP messages give generic error codes.
> 
> Fortunately, the Amiga was far superior in this regard. ;-)

Yes. It didn't crash. ;-)

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

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> If that were the case, visiting Windows Update a few times presumably 
> wouldn't have fixed it...

Drivers.

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v7 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Mac OS X is an alternative - if you have several thousand pounds laying 
> spare...

  How much did your Windows cost you, *including* the PC it's running in?

  Besides, the "several thousand pounds" is BS. A fully-working Mac mini
(with MacOS X) is $599, which is about 307 British pounds.

  "Yeah, but it's a slow machine which you can't do anything with."
Maybe, if you consider an Intel Core 2 Duo with 1GB memory "slow".

> And Apple stuff, actually, but that's very expensive...

  You simply refuse to let go of the old myth, don't you?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:

>   It's really scary that one company can have this kind of power.

You know, if IE was actually a great product, I wouldn't mind so much... 
But, how can I put this? It isn't.

Very amusing thing: I said to a friend one time "IE really sucks; I'm 
using Firefox". And she was like "OMG, Firefox sucks!"

"You're not using IE are you?"

"Don't be daft - I'm using Avant."

Irony... much?

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

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Warp wrote:

>> The best part is when you say "make configure", and it says 
>> "Unrecognised arch 'i586/SuSE 10.3'". And you're like "WTF? Now what do 
>> I do??"
> 
>   Yes, it's clearly a problem with *linux* when some software you are
> trying to install is broken.

Right. And the fact that the design of Unix is overly complex and 
incorporates several decades of backwards compatibility is unrelated? ;-)

I do take your point - broken software exists on *all* platforms. 
However, I do feel that Unix really doesn't help matters by being so 
wildly complicated...

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

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Warp escribió:
> Nicolas Alvarez <nic### [at] gmailisthebestcom> wrote:
>> IE, on the other hand, has great performance and no standards 
>> compliance, and since it hasn't been updated much for years... it was 
>> made for older machines :P
> 
>   Much of IE's "performance" is deceiving.

Well, I can't tell for sure. Been a long while since I used it :)

Post a reply to this message

> On Linux she wouldn't need to install any software on CD whatsoever. 
> Digital
> cameras are just USB devices and USB is an industry-strength standard.  It
> works on Linux out-of-the-box.  And it comes with plenty of image 
> visualizers
> to see the content.

So when she plugs in the camera (without installing any drivers or special 
software), a box will pop up asking her if she wants to view a slide show, 
open the folder or print some of the photos?

Post a reply to this message

>> It requires you to connect to the
>> Internet, manually download a tar.gzip file, figure out how to unpack 
>> it, do the whole configure/make/install trip,
> 
> That's the *basic* installation method on Linux. If you don't even know 
> how to unpack a .tar.gz... you don't know Linux.

And you guys are trying to convince me my mum could use Linux .... ha!

Post a reply to this message

Warp wrote:
> Orchid XP v7 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> Mac OS X is an alternative - if you have several thousand pounds laying 
>> spare...
> 
>   How much did your Windows cost you, *including* the PC it's running in?

The PC that runs it: £500. Windoze itself was something like £200 at the 
time, IIRC.

OTOH, last time I saw a Mac on the shelf, they wanted £1,999. Which is 
quite a lot more...

>   Besides, the "several thousand pounds" is BS. A fully-working Mac mini
> (with MacOS X) is $599, which is about 307 British pounds.

According to Apple.com, "from £399". Everything else on that page is at 
least twice the figure.

>   "Yeah, but it's a slow machine which you can't do anything with."
> Maybe, if you consider an Intel Core 2 Duo with 1GB memory "slow".

I don't particularly. In fact I'm actually moderately tempted with a Mac 
Mini.

OTOH, I have many hundreds of pounds worth of software that won't work 
on it. Which is fine I guess - I just keep *that* software on my PC 
instead. But then... what exactly am I going to use this shiny new Mac 
for? I guess there's a way to run POV-Ray on it, and it has a nice big 
dual-core CPU in there, so that looks good. But... I don't know... Do I 
really want to spend basically £400 just to find out what a Mac is like?

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

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scott escribió:
>>> It requires you to connect to the
>>> Internet, manually download a tar.gzip file, figure out how to unpack 
>>> it, do the whole configure/make/install trip,
>>
>> That's the *basic* installation method on Linux. If you don't even 
>> know how to unpack a .tar.gz... you don't know Linux.
> 
> And you guys are trying to convince me my mum could use Linux .... ha!
> 

Will your mom convert her machine into a print server?

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"Orchid XP v7" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message
news:47b1efb6@news.povray.org...

> They can, however, pay the hardware guys to only
> supply new computers with M$ Windows preinstalled

Which clearly explains why the haedware companies (like say, Dell, HP, IBM)
would never sell a computer pre-installed with Linux.

Oh, wait....

Post a reply to this message

scott wrote:
>>> It requires you to connect to the
>>> Internet, manually download a tar.gzip file, figure out how to unpack 
>>> it, do the whole configure/make/install trip,
>>
>> That's the *basic* installation method on Linux. If you don't even 
>> know how to unpack a .tar.gz... you don't know Linux.
> 
> And you guys are trying to convince me my mum could use Linux .... ha!

I'm afraid I have to agree here...

[Well, no, I'd say that once everything you want is configured, Linux is 
actually quite easy to use. But every time you want to plug something 
new in... hmm.]

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

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scott <sco### [at] laptopcom> wrote:
> And you guys are trying to convince me my mum could use Linux .... ha!

  I wouldn't not recommend Linux for your mother. I would recommend you
buy her a Mac mini.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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scott wrote:
>> If that were the case, visiting Windows Update a few times presumably 
>> wouldn't have fixed it...
> 
> Drivers.

Yeah. Every train should have one.

Oh, wait, what are we talking about here? ;-)

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

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