Re: How workable is Vista?

Vladimir Vassilevsky wrote:


Didi wrote:
Vladimir Vassilevsky wrote:

Paul Keinanen wrote:

The Microsoft 9x family was quite useless for any serious
applications,

Like what?

Like any :-).

Linuxopathia: cursing Bill Gates and M$ at all occasions, and preaching the greatness of Linux :)


Bill Gates and Microsoft have earned more than a little cursing, as they have repeatedly broken laws and abused their monopoly position to gain more power and money at the expense of everyone else (that's not opinion, it's easily verified fact). You can argue that they are a business, and thus making money should be their prime concern - not customer satisfaction, value for money, quality, or dealing fairly with other players in the industry. But people are going to curse them for that behaviour anyway.

Linux *is* great - both technically, and as a social and economic phenomenon. And even if you never use it (or *think* you never use it - in reality, it turns up all over the place, just as the bsd's and other *nix do), you still benefit from it. The competition from Linux is forcing Microsoft's prices down, especially for big contracts, and it's keeping XP available!. Internet Explorer development stagnated until Firefox gave it serious competition (and ideas to copy). Open office has lead to a standardised document format that even Microsoft is in the process of adopting rather than closed and undocumented proprietary formats.

Windows is certainly not all bad, and the computer industry has a great deal to thank Microsoft for - but it also has a great deal to curse them for. Linux is great, but it's far from perfect - there are uses for which it is ideal, and uses for which it is not suitable.


If Linux is so good, and free, and Windows is so bad, and it is 2008 already, then why the vast majority of developers and users prefer M$? :)


If you are thinking of targeted PC platforms, things are changing:

<http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080622-news-that-developers-prefer-xp-linux-not-all-bad-for-vista.html>

Come on, you will not call this joke an OS?

I consider Win95 to be the excellent work for what it was intended to. M$ did a significant leap forward while maintaining the 100% compatibility with DOS/Win3.x legacy and keeping the performance.


The first Win95 was laughably slow and unstable - it made Wfw3.11 look like a rock. Win 95 OSR2 was not bad, however. It wasn't a patch on OS/2 Warp, but Microsoft's business brilliance combined with IBM's total incompetence to put an end to OS/2. An example of the difference is that Win95 ran every 16-bit program and driver, including the graphics system, in a single memory space. This ensured that when a 16-bit program (and virtually all PC software was 16-bit at the time) crashed, it took down the whole system. It also ensured that there were artificial limits to the number and sizes of programs (albeit larger than on Wfw3.11). OS/2, on the other hand, kept processes properly separated, and could give each 16-bit program access to a large memory area.

Most famously, Win95 has a bug that causes it to hang or crash after 49.7 days of uptime. This was only discovered after many years (at least 5 years, but I can't remember exactly) because no one had run Win95 for that long without it hanging or crashing earlier.

XP is a lot stabler and might be called "a vastly bloated
and inefficient - but sort of working - OS", I suppose.

The NT/Win2k/XP was a path of small useful improvements. Unfortunately, Vista seems to be away from this path.


Agreed.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: the business side of linux suse
    ... >> Windows 95 Shell for DOS came in and stole the show. ... > stop marketing OS/2, before they'd be allowed to get a decent price on ... Win95 was released. ... linux - genuine windows replacement part ...
    (alt.os.linux.suse)
  • Re: Linux? Youre kidding right????????
    ... >> Why on earth would anyone consider using Linux? ... > Microsoft Office documents. ... Most people use Windows and MS Office in their personal and work ... it has almost complete control of the OEM market. ...
    (alt.os.linux)
  • Re: Linux? Youre kidding right????????
    ... > Why on earth would anyone consider using Linux? ... Microsoft Office documents. ... Their Windows Applications are actually Linux ... server on the market. ...
    (alt.os.linux)
  • Microsoft soft *CAN NOT* acquire Linux...
    ... I think Microsoft should acquire ... They already *CAN* acquire a Linux distro and improve/redistribtue it ... some Linux distributions are wholly supported by ... Non-Profit organizations with charters that require the that the distro ...
    (Debian-User)
  • Re: what does "serialization" mean?
    ... Randy provided, in commonly accepted fashion, the information you ... why should I let your lies stand? ... > Microsoft software, and not incompatible versions of Linux. ... a large number of businesses are turning to Linux to provide ...
    (comp.programming)