From: Charles Hixson (charleshixsn@earthlink.net)
Date: Sun Oct 20 2002 - 08:08:54 MDT
On Saturday 19 October 2002 12:40, Randy Smith wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Phil Osborn" <philosborn2001@yahoo.com>
> To: <extropians@extropy.org>
> Sent: Saturday, October 19, 2002 10:17 PM
> Subject: Re: Tech centralisation
> > Those who might be reading this thread without a
> > background in how we got to where we are (As in just
> > how unbelievably BAD the MicroSoft products actually
> > are
> No. They are not that bad. I have computers on both Windows NT and
> Mandrake, and NT is better in just about EVERy respect.
Mandrake does tend to push the bleeding edge. They've got too few people
trying to do too much. And they need work on quality control.
But every problem that they ship with, you can fix. Whether it's worth it to
you or not may be a different matter, but its problems are fixable. If
problems bother you, then stay away from the *.0 editions. (I've also heard
reports that SuSE is having a few QA problems. Nothing heard yet about Red
Hat, and I wouldn't hear about the others.)
That said, MS produces the technically worst programs I've seen being sold
recently. They're pretty, but really no prettier than Linux themes. If you
want something that's pretty problem free, give a look at Red Hat 7.3 (note
the .3 at the end?). This will give you an almost uptodate system that has
very few problems. Of course, the 8.x series breaks binary compatibility
with the 7.x series. So you can't install rpms from one onto the other.
The reason that I'm so down on MS software has to do with some experiences I
had two weeks ago at work. First one of my programs that had been working
for over a month quit cold. The only solution was to recompile. No program
changes were needed, the original was fine. It just needed to be recompiled.
(I think it compiles the code in-line with the program text or something, and
doesn't necessarily notice if the editor corrupts it.) Then I heard about
another of my programs had started giving wrong answers. No warning. Just
wrong answers. Again, recompiling fixed the problem. But it also started me
wondering, I'd known for years that sometimes programs spontaneously broke,
but everytime I'd noticed it, it had been because they started failing. How
many silent errors were being propagated. And I realized that I had no way
to even estimate... And this behavior has persisted over three versions (of
MS Access, but probably applies to all of their code that uses VB scripting).
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