MasterPlanSoftware:

slyadams:

That's true, however, if you buy a piece of hardware and all there is available is an unsigned driver, your choices are somewhat limited!

 

You shouldn't be buying that hardware then. MS goes through a lot of trouble to post the HCL (Hardware Compatibility List). Use it, or don't be surprised if you have issues. At least certainly don't blame MS.

 

I don't blame MS. I was simply pointing out that the cheapest (and hence most affordable) hardware often have unsigned drivers and the common man on the street buys the cheapest.

I don't blame MS for dodgy drivers and I've not had a BSOD in over 2 years in WinXP.

slyadams:

I don't blame MS. I was simply pointing out that the cheapest (and hence most affordable) hardware often have unsigned drivers and the common man on the street buys the cheapest.

I don't blame MS for dodgy drivers and I've not had a BSOD in over 2 years in WinXP.

 

Right, but as I stated originally there ARE a lot of idiots who go out and buy the cheapest hardware, and then go online flaming away that MS sucks when the device breaks or the buggy driver causes a BSOD.

Like this ZiggyFish dumbass.

MasterPlanSoftware:

slyadams:

I don't blame MS. I was simply pointing out that the cheapest (and hence most affordable) hardware often have unsigned drivers and the common man on the street buys the cheapest.

I don't blame MS for dodgy drivers and I've not had a BSOD in over 2 years in WinXP.

 

Right, but as I stated originally there ARE a lot of idiots who go out and buy the cheapest hardware, and then go online flaming away that MS sucks when the device breaks or the buggy driver causes a BSOD.

Like this ZiggyFish dumbass.

Yeah, but you should just use my tactics with them: Eviscerate them with purely the power of your mind.

slyadams:

Yeah, but you should just use my tactics with them: Eviscerate them with purely the power of your mind.

 

Or the handy GreaseMonkey script. Lysis and crew are much more bearable now that I cannot see a word they say.

ZiggyFish:

slyadams:

ZiggyFish:

I use linux because it does what I want it to do and is free. Whether windows does what you need is you opion. But I think people should have a choice, not one single company making an OS (does not encourage inervation). 

Am I the only one wondering whether someone who can't even get close to spelling everyday words should be taken seriously in any kind of intellectual debate? A typo I can understand, but this is obviously a lack of education.

Right click in the field, from the context menu, choose "Spell check this field". How difficult is that?

I'm use to having firefox, tell me when I've spelt something wrong it's only this forum editor that doesn't tell you. 

slyadams:

You seem to have what you want:

ZiggyFish:

not one single company making an OS

 There is more than one company making an OS.

 

But this clearly isn't what Microsoft want's. 

 

RayS:

Can actual people be nominated for the mug, or just threads? 

Well we could make a new mug.  The one bstorer made applies only to threads.  

Maybe call the new one one a glass, or a brandy snifter (sans brandy).  Maybe make a billboard.  There is a local radio station that would probably put up a billboad that simply says "You suck." with a picture of a troll.  Or do one of those church signs.

ZiggyFish, have a sign

Feel free to come up with a better one.  

PS I just realized I capitalized home.  Can't be buggered to fix it.  Maybe You can get into the Source and change it.  Jam it!

MasterPlanSoftware:

slyadams:

Yeah, but you should just use my tactics with them: Eviscerate them with purely the power of your mind.

 

Or the handy GreaseMonkey script. Lysis and crew are much more bearable now that I cannot see a word they say.

Then why do you respond to him?

ZiggyFish:

But this clearly isn't what Microsoft want's. 

So you've lost the "Windows doesn't do all these things Linux does" argument and now choose to go after MS as a company.  

Here's a quarter.  Buy a clue. 

Physics Phil:

MasterPlanSoftware:

slyadams:

Yeah, but you should just use my tactics with them: Eviscerate them with purely the power of your mind.

 

Or the handy GreaseMonkey script. Lysis and crew are much more bearable now that I cannot see a word they say.

Then why do you respond to him?

 

When do I respond to him?

ZiggyFish:

 Also I'm not a linux fanboy...

 

Okay, really, how do you expect anyone to take that seriously with that signature?

shadowman:

ZiggyFish:

 Also I'm not a linux fanboy...

 

Okay, really, how do you expect anyone to take that seriously with that signature?

 

Not to mention he signed up and start spamming everything vaguely MS or *nix related with Linux fanboy crap.

There is no better definition for Linux fanboy troll than this guy.

I dunno. It was quite awhile ago, and the building was quite new (a few weeks? months?) from what I remember. But it was DEFINITELY a kernel panic. Maybe they switched to Windows after they realized how f'ing obnoxious and unneciserily difficult to run such a setup on anything other than Windows.

ZiggyFish:

I could give you more information, but are irrelevant to this discussion. Linux (or Unix for that matter) provides an file based(although they ant like normal files stored on disk) interface to devices(these files are normally 'mounted'(and I say mounted because it's a file system) at /dev). This allows software like X to run outside of the kernel.

<snip bullshit/> 

 

 

A while ago I promised not to get involved in this crap, but I can't resist here... Dude, do you realize where you're posting? Take a moment to think about the user base on this website. Probably 98% of us are IT professionals with either years of experience and certifications or high-fallutin' degrees in things like Computer Engineering and Computer Science (or both in some cases :p).

Please don't try to lecture us on how unix/linux filesystems work, as I'm sure a lot of us were even forced to hack them apart during college. We know all this stuff already.

Windows and unix/linux all have just as much support for dumping memory to disk. What differs between them is default configuration and implementation. When used properly, most varieties of unix/linux, and most varieties of Windows can all run equally well. I'm sure many of the people here have achieved fine uptimes (as if this was really a great measure of anything on a home pc) on their computers. I've never had any problems configuring either Windows or linux on my machines, and furthermore I've never run into problems with malicious programs, except for one time that someone walked into my dorm room in college, managed to gain admin access under Windows on my PC (I had been doing some maintenance and forgot to lock it before I went out), and decided to use Internet Explorer to view a large amount of porn.

This thread makes me cry. In a good way. It's so nice to see sensible people on the internet, all I ever meet are the kinds who spell MS with a $.

 

In the year since I've bought this laptop, I've rebooted maybe half a dozen times. I hibernate constantly, I run photoshop, play video games. It's never gotten slow or unstable.

I haven't seen a BSOD in five years or so. Except in pictures. On this website. 

Isuwen:

This thread makes me cry. In a good way. It's so nice to see sensible people on the internet, all I ever meet are the kinds who spell MS with a $.

 

In the year since I've bought this laptop, I've rebooted maybe half a dozen times. I hibernate constantly, I run photoshop, play video games. It's never gotten slow or unstable.

I haven't seen a BSOD in five years or so. Except in pictures. On this website.

Yeah, I know what you mean.  I've used Linux exclusively on the desktop for about 6 years now, but it truly amazes me how often Linux or OS X fanboys will mindlessly trash Windows without knowing a goddamn thing about any of the three platforms.   I have my reasons for using Linux, as I imagine you have yours for preferring Windows, but I've never had any major problems with any version of Windows built on NT.  The 9x line was a complete mess, but so was every other major OS at the time.  In 1999, Mac OS looked like Windows 3.1 and crashed if you tried to do anything (co-operative multi-tasking!) and Linux looked like crap and required a significant amount of knowledge to use.

 

I've been an avid Slashdot reader since 1998 and I think it's a good way to keep up on tech news.  Also, if you are willing to dig, there are some truly insightful, thought-provoking and educational comments.  I rarely engage in discussions there (I didn't even register an account until 2003) because there are so many mis-informed, trolling fanboys that will derail any serious discussion.  I think TDWTF is better because so many developers here make their living off of MS.  I think people in the M$ (sorry, couldn't resist) environment are far more pragmatic than a lot of Linux or OS X users, and they are willing to listen to reason because they choose their tools for practical and not ideological purposes.  Honestly, I've been flamed on Slashdot so many times I hardly even bother commenting any more, and I'm an advanced Linux user!  I've noticed that people who use Microsoft products are far less likely to engage in mindless bashing of others' choice of platform.  So, yeah, I think the TDWTF forums are a pretty decent place to engage in civilized discussion.  Let's hope it stays that way...

morbiuswilters:

Isuwen:

...Good Stuff...

...Good Stuff...

 

I'll drink to that!

morbiuswilters:

In 1999, Mac OS looked like Windows 3.1 ...

Odd, I don't see anything close to a similarity. I switched from 3.11 to System 7.1 and the differences were pretty profound, to a degree visually, and in particular conceptually. Mac OS and Windows 3.1 are radically different systems, especially when you're comparing Win 3.1 vs Mac OS 9.

Granted, Mac OS 9 wasn't the prettiest system around, all chunky and grey, but it was elegant with its simplicity. Besides, by 1999 it had had 32-bit icons for a while, so that helped a lot. The only thing I wish I could hack in is a 32-bit Apple menu icon :(

morbiuswilters:

... and crashed if you tried to do anything (co-operative multi-tasking!)

Could you elaborate on why co-operative multitasking leads to substantial instability?

Mac OS was unstable for at least two reasons. The kernel was very fragile -- make a broken API call and it could easily poo itself. Even having done no C coding for Mac OS in my life, I've personally discovered two API calls that, with wrong arguments, crash the system. One is an overly lengthy hostname for resolution, and the other is a negative scroll bar thumb position. Mixing up and breaking resource handles for notification would also crash the kernel.

That is, harmless bugs in code will actually trash the internal state of the kernel and bring it all down. Mark Russinovich of SysInternals has a program that will fire a steady stream of totally random data masquerading as API calls at the NT kernel and the kernel is competent enough to field them all and just kill the program if it gets irritated enough -- this is a crucial step in preventing OS crashes. The user/kernel barrier is only worthwhile as long as the kernel sanity-checks all API calls as well as its internal state, and has solid recovery contingents if anything goes wrong. (Even Windows subsystems can easily be knocked into an irrecoverably broken state, e.g. I've managed to kill DNS resolution outright before, something to do with anti-virus.)

Mac OS also lacked virtual memory, so all applications shared the single, flat address space (in later versions I imagine this was just one page table, so you could accomplish page swapping) so programs could easily overwrite each other and the kernel, and that would also cause major trouble.

Co-operative multitasking though is not a cause of instability, it's just a real irritation at times.

Daniel Beardsmore:

Odd, I don't see anything close to a similarity.

I'm not talking about UI design, I'm talking about it's fugly, plain windows.   Check out this screenshot.  This was the state of Mac OS in 1999.  Beautiful.

 

Daniel Beardsmore:

Could you elaborate on why co-operative multitasking leads to substantial instability?

Um, because any program that encounters a bug can consume all of the CPU resources and overwrite the memory of other programs, including the kernel?

 

Seriously, OS 9 was ugly, slow and every other time I tried to open or close a program the whole system just stopped responding and ending up giving me a "sad Mac".  I've used all kinds of OSes and I can find something positive to say about all of them, except OS 9.  Hell, it was hard even getting pissed off when OS 9 crashed for the 10th time in the same day, because it wasn't like you were using a real computer.  It would be like getting mad at a retarded kid in a wheelchair who craps his pants, you just can't expect him to function on the same level as normal people... 

 

morbiuswilters:

Check out this screenshot. 

 

You mean this one?

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /mac/oshistory/images/macos9.jpg on this server.

 

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

---

Apache/1.3.41 Server at www.kernelthread.com Port 80

 

 

 

 

 

I had good hopes for you as an intelligent, well-read forum contributor but your foot appears to be bullet-ridden now.

morbiuswilters:

I'm not talking about UI design, I'm talking about it's fugly, plain windows.   Check out this screenshot.

It both amuses and saddens me that you felt the need to show me a screenshot of an OS that I'm clearly familiar with. Yes, I know what Mac OS 9 looks like. I know what Windows 3.1 looks like. I don't consider either to be fugly. Not everyone gets to marry Miss Universe and drive a Ferrari. Mac OS was rather elegant in its simplicity. By comparison, I am disturbed by the number of people who seem satisified with XP's Fisher Price theme.

morbiuswilters:

Um, because any program that encounters a bug can consume all of the CPU resources and overwrite the memory of other programs, including the kernel?

Being able to overwrite other processes is an issue with the memory model, not the scheduling model, and resource starvation is a problem on any system. My PC has 512 MB of RAM, and when I open a Google search result that ends up being some jackass's blog archive that makes Firefox choke down 800 MB of RAM, you can bet that having a program using 100% CPU and 150% of my RAM is going to cause problems. The hard drive is pwned by all the page swapping and the system grinds to a halt as more and more apps are desperately clawing back pages of memory. I even remember Netscape spiralling out of control and nearly killing a Solaris box -- even typing "kill" at a shell was nearly impossible. I also locked Linux up hard with the old crashme.com site -- the only OS I couldn't crash with crashme.com is classic Mac OS. I miss crashme.com.

If a Mac app does get stuck in a loop, you can kill it easily -- cmd-opt-esc. The real problem with co-operative multitasking is that frozen programs hold the system hostage until you have to make a judgement call -- has the program crashed? If you kill it now, you lose your work/workspace state. If you decide it's just taking its time, you can't get any other work done.

The stability issues you're referring to sound far more like extension conflicts, honestly, which are a whole other matter entirely.

MasterPlanSoftware:

You mean this one?

Goddammit, they pulled the image after I linked to it.  Meh, just found it through GIS and was too lazy to mirror it myself. 

morbiuswilters:

Goddammit, they pulled the image after I linked to it.  Meh, just found it through GIS and was too lazy to mirror it myself.

Actually it's a 403 and not a 404, try copying the url and going to it manually, that tends to work better.

MasterPlanSoftware:

morbiuswilters:

Check out this screenshot. 

 

You mean this one?

Forbidden

Odd, it works here...