[Coco][Color Computer] Anyone following the latest Microsoftand Linux debacles?

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 14 January 2005 20:07, James the Animal Tamer wrote:
>> I disagree, Windows is going like the dodo I can't wait.
>
>No it isn't.  There are plenty of users.
>
>> Microsoft is total crap

No its not. If XP is anywhere near as stable as w95osr1 was, then its 
the flaky app that takes it down.  We had a wire server in the news 
dept than ran the wire capture on a 4 port rocketport serial card, 
captureing the news as it came in from ap, cnn, and cbs.  The capture 
software, written under contract for Associated Press would foul its 
story pointer database about once a year, delete and restart the 
newsdesk program to fix that, and we had to reboot it every 48 days 
due to the tick counter rollover bug in W95.  The only time it 
crashed was when the fan on the cpu froze up, an easily repaired and 
common fault.  Or a couple of times before the tick counter thing was 
made public.

Every crash I've been present at for any windows machine was in the 
end caused by the application we were trying to run.  Thats windows 
achilles heel in my book, its total lack of isolation between the 
app, and its own code which can be contaminated quite easily with a 
wild pointer in a poorly written app.

>I doubt that.  It's useful.  Just because you found something that
> is better, superior, and more useful to you, doesn't mean that
> Microsoft is TOTAL crap.
>
>> it would never be on top.  You can thank IBM for that, but now
>> look
>
>Funny.  IBM didn't want the MS name on its OS, so its version was
>named PC-DOS.  Later, IBM came out with OS/2 and OS/2 2.0.  In
> short, I don't blame IBM for nor credit IBM with Microsoft's
> success with Windows.
>
>> Even Sun and it's Solaris is going Linux compatible.
>
>Looking into the households of John Q. American Public, I'm not
>seeing a lot of Sun and Solaris.

For a long time the sun stuff ran only on its own sparc hardware, 
quite a bit more pricey than amd/intel stuffs.  But now solaris-x86 
is apparently going open source, so I'd expect that to change.

>> Linux
>> is the OS of the future
>
>Isn't Linux based on Unix, the OS of superminicomputers of the
> 1970s? I suppose it could be an OS of the future too.

No, as a matter of fact, the first announcement by Linus was for a 
minix clone he had written from scratch.

>> Windows is getting old
>
>Isn't Linux based on Unix, the OS of superminicomputers of the
> 1970s? Isn't Linux getting older too?
>Older doesn't necessarily mean "bad" does it?
>
>> how many times can you re-package a old dog.

That depends.  Since the kernel numbering was bumped to 2.6, and a few 
new ways of doing things incorporated, I saw some figures not long 
ago that indicated that of the about 6 million lines of code in a 
linux kernel src today, nearly 4 million lines of it has been 
massaged and improved.

I can garantee you that if and when Longhorn ever goes out the door, 
(is it another Half Life 2?, or Duke Nukem Forever?) it will still 
contain at least 2 million lines of W95 code.  Not because they were 
too lazy to take it out, but because theres no real reason to 
re-write something that works.

>How many shiny new boxes do you have?
>
>> so I repartitioned and
>> dual booted the computer with Linux.
>>  Windows XP crashes or screws up
>> almost once a week.
>> I
>> have had to fix Windows three times including a full re-install

Yeah, the thing with windows is now that they are only supplying a 
norton ghost image, meaning that for any problem whatsoever, the 
image is recopied to the drive which very effectively formats it 
wasteing all your work, and possibly even a linux install you've made 
room for.  To me, rather than actually fix the problem, its Bills way 
of saying you are gonna play the game by my rules no matter how 
unfair they are.  So it doesn't bother me a bit to blow away a 
windows install, I don't play by those rules and cannot see why the 
sheeple put up with it.

>Doesn't that mean that Windows is SO DARNED USEFUL that, even sucky
>as it is, it was worth you taking the trouble to fix it and re-
>install it?

If today you could reinstall without losing YOUR data, that would be 
fine, but see above.

>==
>We all bash Microsoft and Windows.  Windows is still good enough to
>use.  I use it.  I don't worship it, or at the altar of Bill Gates.
>But I don't try to unfairly bash it.
>
>To date, I've received only one request to port my emulators to
> Linux.

What are you emulating if I may ask?

>==
>
>But now I've gone totally off topic.
>
>Note that I'm typing this using a computer that is not a descendant
>of the Radio Shack Color Computer.  I joined this club because I
> LIKE obsolete inefficient computers that are totally things of the
> past! I enjoy playing with computers that do not have to be useful,
> to be fun!

Don't we all.  :-)

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
99.32% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
Yahoo.com attorneys please note, additions to this message
by Gene Heskett are:
Copyright 2005 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.


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