Re: For the Windoze haters - VS2005

On Wed, 8 Feb 2006 13:50:41 -0500, Keith Williams <krw@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

In article <dsbigv$72t$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
john@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx says...

"Joel Kolstad" <JKolstad71HatesSpam@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:11uif684h1r8c85@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

[...]

I do somewhat agree with your sentiment, though, that Microsoft and "the
computer industry" in general seem to try to force continued changes in
programming languages, development systems, etc., even when it doesn't
seem as
though such changes objectively are any better, but are really just
different.
(Microsoft Office being a good example here -- I'd estimate that for 90+%
of
users, Office 97 works as well as Office 2005.) I honestly believe that
they
do this to fuel the "IT economy," and thereby indirectly elevate their own
returns.

Last month after fitting a new motherboard and a nightmare waste of my life.
I discovered I could no longer use win98. Was forced to load something
called windowsXP.
Other than a moronic cartoon dog attached to the 'search' feature (now
disabled) and (I've read) loss of direct hardware control, I can spot no
difference at all between the 2 programs.

Well, one of the differences is that you can no longer directly
control hardware. ;-) IMO, this is a good thing.

I thought this was a good thing until today. I had to find a bug that
had been plaguing this business for ten years or so, back to the old
NT4 sp1 days. They had designed a PCI card and written a driver. This
is the single worst interface I have ever seen in my life. Sure MS
provides a defined interface to hardware, but these guys had
completely fucked it up. After seeing this, i wonder whether the whole
hardware abstraction thing works. My guess is it works fine for video
cards and the like, but custom/small time work is a different story.

By the way, there are some publicly free device drivers that allow you
to write directly to hardware. Can give any lionks off the top of my
head, but they do exist.

The other major difference is that XP (sorta) works. I prefer
Win2K, though XP has some nice features (better multi-display
support and it's *much* better at switching between docked and
mobile operation).

Win2k is a buttered up version of NT4. Now if you want a server OS,
Win2k3 is it, XP for client apps. I notice now that the licencing for
servers and MSSQL has caught up with the big players too.

.

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