On 10/8/2011 3:52, Jim Henderson wrote:
> In Windows, you have the entire ecosystem to support it.  It's called
> "Windows".

Plus, the tendency is to bundle all that stuff together with the program, 
because you can't rely on the people having access to a "repository". So 
every install disk has IE6, Adobe Acrobat, mvcrt.dll, and DX9 on it, along 
with the program.

> That's because in Windows you have one desktop environment, and one set
> of dependencies.  Choice comes with a cost.  If you don't want the
> choices, use Windows.  Or Mac.

Oh, and because people programming Windows know you don't have a repository, 
so they either bundle specifically what they need, or they don't reuse code 
they could because of dependencies, or they buy a version to include with 
their code that doesn't have the dependencies they want to avoid, or etc.

Why do you think the initial install of Windows takes so long and reboots so 
often? It's installing a bunch of stuff that you'd otherwise have to grab 
from a repository during installs of other stuff. You get .NET even if 
you're not going to use it, because you might in the future.

>> or had my entire Windows installation completely cease
>> functioning to the point where I have to reinstall.
>
> "Orchid XP v8" - you once said that the "v8" indicated how many times you
> had reinstalled Windows XP.  So I call BS. ;)

Bazinga.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   How come I never get only one kudo?

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On 10/8/2011 5:40, Jim Henderson wrote:
> It's hard to understand why people have trouble affording a single hard
> drive when you buy in such bulk quantities.

And remember that you're not really their big customer. When 85% of your 
sales go to the OEMs, worrying about whether this one guy can afford to 
upgrade his disk doesn't really make sense. Especially since if you can't 
afford a $50 disk, you can't afford a $200 OS. :-)

> After all, on Windows, you have CIFS/SMB available on all systems by
> default.  You take it for granted on Windows, but for the rest of the
> world, there is a choice.

Actually, it's there by default, but it doesn't have to be. You don't need 
to have any networking installed at all if you don't want. Not even TCP/IP.

> upgraded to each incremental pre-release alpha, beta, and release
> candidate on several of their internal servers.

I can imagine that would screw stuff up. Most people don't design upgrades 
to deal with every intermediate release of the software.

> RPM does a pretty good job of dependency management,

I think it's more that the programmers don't. They assume you have enough 
disk space, a fast connection, and etc.  I bet the people writing the 
editors would avoid the need to include SAMBA if you said "we'll give you 
$1000 for every package you don't depend on."

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Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   How come I never get only one kudo?

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>>> or cooperative shared editting.
>>
>> It's news to me that /any/ version of Office has that.
>
> That's kind of my point.

So... how do you do that?

>>>> In fairness, I'm not aware of anything else that does what Outlook and
>>>> Exchange do.
>>>
>>> And that is why the world still runs Microsoft. :-)
>>
>> Well, no, that's /one of/ the reasons...
>
> Fair enough. But I think that's one of the *main* reasons small
> businesses without a bunch of money still use it on the desktop.

Major reasons include:

- They've heard of it.

- Everybody else is using it. (Easier to interact with clients, easier 
to find people who know how to use it, etc.)

- Because everybody else uses it, it gives some people the impression 
that it's the "correct" choice because that's what all the "big boys" use.

- Because it's so popular, there's a lot of software for it.

These arguments would all apply to /any/ product which has captured the 
majority of the market. And then, yes, there are a few things that MS 
product do that I haven't seen a comparable competetor for.

-- 
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On 10/7/2011 21:47, Jim Henderson wrote:
> Well, no, it's more about advanced usage.  And CLI in Windows these days
> is also for advanced users.

And for anything above the level of really simple BAT files, you're better 
off using wsh, which is much closer to bash than cmd.exe.

> Like you said, it's an extra install.  sed/grep/awk/perl/vim are standard
> tools in most Linux installs.

I'd argue the entire Linux install is a free, extra install. ;-)

> I can edit text files without installing tools that are non standard.

You can edit the registry without installing non-standard tools too. If 
you're going to argue that a developer having to download the free developer 
toolkit is a significant difference, then you really shouldn't be a 
developer on Windows. ;-)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   How come I never get only one kudo?

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On 08/10/2011 05:42 PM, Darren New wrote:
> On 10/8/2011 5:40, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> It's hard to understand why people have trouble affording a single hard
>> drive when you buy in such bulk quantities.
>
> And remember that you're not really their big customer. When 85% of your
> sales go to the OEMs, worrying about whether this one guy can afford to
> upgrade his disk doesn't really make sense. Especially since if you
> can't afford a $50 disk, you can't afford a $200 OS. :-)

That's a point. As far as OEMs are concerned, the more hardware it takes 
to run Windows, the more likely and users are to buy more hardware.

This, I suspect, is one of the main reasons OEMs love MS...

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

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On 08/10/2011 05:34 PM, Darren New wrote:

> Why do you think the initial install of Windows takes so long and
> reboots so often? It's installing a bunch of stuff that you'd otherwise
> have to grab from a repository during installs of other stuff. You get
> .NET even if you're not going to use it, because you might in the future.

On which version of Windows?

(I ask because of the amount of time I've spent installing .NET because 
it wasn't already there...)

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

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On 10/8/2011 4:08, Jim Henderson wrote:
> I have yet to see a text file change on a Linux system that can hork the
> system up as badly as Microsoft wants you to believe Windows can be
> messed up with a single registry change.

echo > /etc/fstab

> Because with Linux it's pretty rare to have to reboot to affect the
> change.  It's sometimes easier, but to this day, I continue to be amazed
> at how frequently a Windows system has to be restarted.  Twice during
> installation, and if you're applying system updates, sometimes multiple
> times to get everything current (certainly with XP, later versions are
> somewhat better).

Because nobody but Linux weenies care whether they have to reboot their 
system to upgrade their software?

> Trivial.  No scripting required.

These are relatively recent tools in Linux, you must admit. UNIX went 40 
years before getting such support, and only because it started to get 
targeted at less tech-savvy people.

>> If you wanted to do any of this with Linux, you would have a whole bunch
>> of scripting ahead of you. Under Windows, it just takes a few button
>> presses to set up. You just can't do it from the end-user versions of
>> Windows; it requires a server OS. (Three guesses why those cost so much
>> more.)
>
> Wrong, again on the Linux front.  I personally know people who administer
> *thousands* of Linux servers.  I worked for a company that has a product
> to apply updates on a schedule to remote Linux systems.

Is it included standard in Linux? ;-)

But yeah, this stuff happens fine in Linux. Probably easier in Linux than 
Windows, actually. I can't imagine the kind of operations Google does in 
their data centers working on something proprietary like Windows.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   How come I never get only one kudo?

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On 10/8/2011 5:40, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Well, in the days before computer networks, security was pretty much a moot
> point.

Except Windows always had security for network connections. Heck, MS network 
connections had security before Windows was even around. It's just the local 
machine that didn't have security, because it was a *personal* computer.

> What's UAC? Is that new in Windows 7 or something? (I've only used Vista.)

It's the box that pops up and says "you're trying to run this as an 
administrator. Are you sure?"

> It's all too easy to break them though, or to end up with cryptic
> error messages and need to look under the hood to find the "real" error and
> how to fix it.

I never had YaST break something, or mess up manual configurations when I 
invoke the GUI.

> whereas the registry typically doesn't.

*Because* you're supposed to be using the GUI. :-)

> Ubuntu seems to contantly want me to reboot when I install updates too. I
> think the problem is more that Windows requires updating more often.

There's more stuff that's "always running" and can't easily be shut down 
programmatically under Windows.  If you have some COM server dealing with 
some background job that needs to be updated, there's no clean interface to 
ask it to exit and restart itself with a new version. UNIX, always having 
had background services, tends to make it easier to figure out what needs to 
get restarted and what doesn't.

> That's just it. Windows is one product, with one set of management tools.

Well, XP, Vista, and Win7 are all quite different management-wise, methinks. :-)

> The original Unix, as best as I can tell, has almost no management features
> at all. You're supposed to roll your own. So every major distro builder has
> built their own independent system of management tools.

Yes.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   How come I never get only one kudo?

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>> What's UAC? Is that new in Windows 7 or something? (I've only used
>> Vista.)
>
> It's the box that pops up and says "you're trying to run this as an
> administrator. Are you sure?"

Oh. What, you mean EXACTLY LIKE LINUX? Yeah, I can see how that's such 
an annoying Windows feature. :-P

Far more amusing is the fact that if you take, say, Notepad.exe and 
rename it to Setup.exe, suddenly Vista thinks it needs elevated 
privilages to run...

>> It's all too easy to break them though, or to end up with cryptic
>> error messages and need to look under the hood to find the "real"
>> error and
>> how to fix it.
>
> I never had YaST break something, or mess up manual configurations when
> I invoke the GUI.

Really? That's impressive. I've lost count of how many times the nice 
shine GUI for something or other has got confused or crashed or whatever 
and I had to spend an hour or two reading manpages to figure out where 
the *real* configuration files are and how to edit them to achieve what 
I actually wanted...

>> whereas the registry typically doesn't.
>
> *Because* you're supposed to be using the GUI. :-)

That was my point, yes.

>> Ubuntu seems to contantly want me to reboot when I install updates too. I
>> think the problem is more that Windows requires updating more often.
>
> There's more stuff that's "always running" and can't easily be shut down
> programmatically under Windows.

RPC.

I have no idea what this service does, but if you ever try to restart 
it, Windows crashes. No idea why. (One wonders why they even gave you 
the option to restart it in the first place...)

>> That's just it. Windows is one product, with one set of management tools.
>
> Well, XP, Vista, and Win7 are all quite different management-wise,
> methinks. :-)

Really? I haven't used Vista or 7 extensively, but I wasn't aware that 
anything had changed...

Regardless, *every* copy of (say) Vista has the same management 
capabilities. It's a "standard" part of a Windows system. Which I guess 
is just another way of saying "there's more than one Linux distro"...

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

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On 10/8/2011 9:47, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>>>> or cooperative shared editting.
>>>
>>> It's news to me that /any/ version of Office has that.
>>
>> That's kind of my point.
>
> So... how do you do that?

You stick it on a share and you go to the menu that says something like 
"cooperative editing" or some such. You're sitting in front of a 
google-enabled computer just like I am. :-)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   How come I never get only one kudo?

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