Vista Sucks

voipscout · Post by **voipscout** » Fri Jul 13, 2007 8:41 pm

fuzzylunkin1 wrote:QUOTE (fuzzylunkin1 @ Jul 13 2007, 09:28 PM) I don't have time to read all this.

I don't hate Microsoft, I just hate Windows. Vista uses more high end hardware then it should need compared to Windows XP (yes, XP does too but not as much in my opinion). I don't like Vista because its a bad attempt to get more money from Microsoft. I would use it if it didn't require so much and it was worth the money (I'm 16, I need money for other things).

I happen to love Xbox and Halo /mrgreen.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":D" border="0" alt="mrgreen.gif" />! Allegiance too!

For me Linux is better because its free and requires less high end hardware to run on. You get more bang for your buck with Linux.

If you want something easy to use just get a Mac. It's basically halfway between Linux and Windows in my book.

Last thing:

I STILL think we should be able to attatch ASGS to some necessary process in Linux (or something of the like) so we can play on Allegiance.

Fuzzy, you nailed it just about right without the technical mabo jumbo

voipscout · Post by **voipscout** » Fri Jul 13, 2007 10:26 pm

batman wrote:QUOTE (batman @ Jul 13 2007, 09:28 PM) I was going to wirte a smartass post along the lines of "Do you REALLY think MS is going to be around in 50 years?" to go with what I thought would be a laugh riot look at fortune 500 companies from 50 years ago that no longer exist.

Instead, I looked at saw how little the Fortune 500 list had really changed. Sure, there are ups and downs and new entries, but the number of companies in the top 10 is pretty amazing for longevity.

The other question I wanted to pose was this:

Do you think that the technology would have advanced if MS was not so large and omnipotent? Does MS's ability to impose a standard OS (through sheer market share) make it easier or more difficult to quickly put out 3rd party software that works for most people?

Or, does that dominance in the marketplace stifle creative approaches to computing and software development?

Ahh great, food for thought and debate.

To answer the first one: 50 years ago, the fortune 500 have already recovered from 1930s great depression, so it isn't really a good measure of corporate longevity, you have to take a timespan, that includes at least a single crisis to be able to tell who is the survivor and who is the looser.

Now the second question is truly great, shall we examine what led to MS popularity in a first place ? Here we go: Software Pirating (read again if you think you misred it).

During the 80s, there was IBM with OS/390 and a whole bunch of unixes. The largest problem was always the fact, that the computing model of the 80s was server centric, i am not sure if you remember the Communication Controllers modules for AS390 servers, the SNA network architecture that mainly worked with X.25/LAPd and later on with Token Ring as it's primary physical link layer technology and a whole other bunch of stuff that makes me nostalgic for 800KB harddrives, that made a noise of a fighter jet executing an evasive maneuvre on combat boost at supersonic speed. Ahh... the good days, you could light up in the office or right infornt of your terminal, the screen was pleasantly green and black no distracting colors to contend with, it was idylic.

Well, IBM decided that server centric model was no longer hi-tech, so they produced the first IBM PC JR, that was even before XT, it ran IBM PC DOS 1.0 (actually i still have a single 180KB per side 3.5 inch original PC DOS floppy) At the time of this new and exciting development a guy named Bill Gates (a very average programmer, without any clout back then) was plugging away in 8088 assembler code the PC DOS 1.1 version. Billy was getting a paycheck from IBM and he didn't feel like it compensated his efforts sufficiently. A very legitimate greivance, might i add.

Well, back then if you happened to mention DMCA, people would ask you if you were referring to a great american hit "Y, M, C, A" with those strangeley gay looking faggots with mustashes and rayban aviator sunglasses on bikes. In short, there simply was no DMCA, not even the beginnings of this bothersome legislature was passed into action.

So our average coder, named Billy, takes the sources of PC-DOS 1.1 home, buys an IBM PC JR and sets to work on removing every line of comment or code where the word IBM figured. You can imagine, it didn't really take him long.

Well, meanwhile, we have the client centric computing model in full swing, IBM PCJr gets replaced by XT in 1983 and out of the blue comes MS-DOS 2.0, binary compatible with PC-DOS, works great on every IBM PC machine and what do you know ? It's FREE, Billy cannot charge money for it yet, because it does not belong to him on paper, well he must have gone to some kind of private investor and then before you know it, SCP has relinquished all right to 86-DOS to a company named microsoft.

And the saga basically starts here, we are having for money version of PC DOS and free version of MS DOS, now it was officially free ofcourse, but Billy just made sure he copied it to every freind he knew and uploaded a copy to every pirate BBS in his area code (yes a 300 baud modem rate and stuff)

And what do you know ? By the august 84' version 3.0 of PC-DOS and MS-DOS comes out, PC-DOS costs money, while MS-DOS you can get for free from your neighbour, ofcourse later on, it was also possible to have a pirated version of PC-DOS, but it started to drop in popularity because of some obscure feature in it's API (we didn't actually have an API back then, but the concept is similar), something to do with interrupt handling, i don't remember much from back then, aside from the fact, that, i myself preffered MS-DOS to it's PC-DOS counterpart, since i was an assembler coder back then, i figure i must have had a very good reason for my preference, but shoot me, i don't remember the details.

Anyways, the "official" account of inception of microsoft is pretty different, but i had a freind working for IBM back in those days and he had no reason to lie back then, about Billy and his microsoft, the point is rendered moot by today, who stole what from whom, but i remember it the way i just described.

Now let's get back to our question: "Do you think that the technology would have advanced if MS was not so large and omnipotent?" I think that the pace of technological progress back then was certainly not defined by microsoft, we had other players. But, once the PC became a real commodity (ie. practically anyone could afford it) MS-DOS was the predominant operating system running our XTs, ATs and 3 and 486 models later on. The userbase always saw "microsoft" in front of their eyes, not IBM, i think that microsoft's popularity stems from those days.

Anyways, when IBM was developing it's OS/2, Billy saw an Apple Macintosh and was amazed, that the user was not required to do much typing, unless using a word processor, Mac users used a pointing device and were able to navigate and accomplish things with operating system at a much faster pace, then the DOS users.

Now it struck Billy like a bolt of lightening - Why don't i steal from both the Apple and IBM this time ? Brilliant idea, simple to execute really... since IBM was on it's way with OS/2, Billy just took it and threw out the parts relating to performance, reliability and scalability (those were the goals of IBM OS/2), put his MS-DOS at it's core and created a slipshod copy cat of Mac OS interface.

This is the official account:

The history of Windows dates back to September 1981, when the project named "Interface Manager" was started. It was first presented to the public in November 10, 1983, renamed to "Microsoft Windows"; the two years of delay before release led to charges that it was "vaporware". The initially announced version of Windows had features so much resembling Macintosh interface that Microsoft had to change many of them: overlapping windows, although supported by the GUI engine, weren't allowed for exactly this purpose. The announcement of Windows' imminent arrival in 1985 probably did not help the sales of VisiCorp's Visi On environment which debuted at the same time. However, even when finally released, Windows 1.0 aroused little interest as well, showing the market was simply not yet ready for a switch-over from MS-DOS.

So, as you can see, from 1981 to 1985 microsoft managed to capture significant market share and since PC and MS DOS versions were binary compatible, the games on CGA grpahics could run fine on both versions. In my opinion, the development of computer games and lack of any copy protection system led to a very wide spread adoption of IBM compatible computers running MS-DOS operating system.

The hardware push initially always came from IBM, but IBM was unwilling at the time to fully concentrate on it's relatively new PC buisiness and was much more oriented towards it's corporate customers, still running OS/390 machines. At the same time, microsoft was pushing IBM PCs to it's own corporate clientele, mind you, back in those days, only IBM actually manufactured PCs, we didn't have commodity hardware, we just bought whatever IBM has been kind enough to provide us with. So did Billy, he just reselled IBM boxes with his own MS-DOS.

Well, it was a combination of factors that led to rapid technological progress, most incredibely so, the change in coding phylosophy, when we had little RAM (64Kib) we had to make our code lean and mean, optimized to a fault, polymorphic and compressed. Quite a task. Well, Billy hooked up with a marketing genius what's his name.... and they decided on a plan: we pressure hardware OEMs to manufacture equipment which would not require expenditure of valuable development time on testing, QA and optimization routines.

That slipshod approach in my opinion is what started the rapid "arms race" in PC industry, i also think, that it helped to open a door for 3rd party OEMs to start producing same spec PCs as IBM itself, but the most crucial part was - i remember IBM running out of it's either sales or production capacity to satisfy high demand, my memories fade a little with time, but i think i can remember pretty good the frustration i experienced, when one of my PCs was delivered 4 months after i made the purchase.

So, the flood gates were opened together by microsoft (with it's free for personal use policy) and IBM (by what probably could only be described as gross negligence) for the mainstream adoption of commodity PC hardware.

Next one: Does MS's ability to impose a standard OS (through sheer market share) make it easier or more difficult to quickly put out 3rd party software that works for most people?

I would have to bite my tongue and agree that, YES this oppresively imposed "windownization" (standartization) does indeed make it easier to put out 3rd party soft on the market quicker AND easier. Ofcourse it also depends on what exactly is the software supposed to do, but having been a windows coder myself once, i must admit that there are quite a few advantages (especially probably nowdays) that make windows the OS of choice for slipshod "rapid" development.

Frankly i was searching for a reason to give you, that would arbitrarily declare MS evil/bad and very difficult to code for, but alas, i couldn't lie and i had to admit the truth.

What i would also like to add is that with this kind of windownization the quality of our software became lower, performance slower and scalability almost all but dissapeared until .NET framework started to make noises, that's microsoft's answer to JAVA.

My account is not the most accurate and most likely is biased, but since you posed specific questions for us all here to answer, i feel that expressing one's own opinion is ok.

Anyways, good questions, i hope i was able to provide you with some small insite.

btw: IBM PC Junior:

Kap · Post by **Kap** » Fri Jul 13, 2007 11:10 pm

Reading those long posts reminds me of @Cadet. I always tought, holy @#(!! im not reading all this! but in the end, I did read all of it.

zecro · Post by **zecro** » Sat Jul 14, 2007 1:02 am

tl;dr

Microsoft doesn't really bring that much innovation to the table. Watch Pirates of Silicon Valley, which is a pretty good documentary. Xerox had the first mouse/GUI (which apple got for free from them and Microsoft copied), networking, and something else that's standard. MS really took off with an IBM deal where they were supposed to write some software. They couldn't do it, and instead bought DOS from some guy in Seattle for a fraction of the price that they sold it to IBM for.

That being said, the whole area where I live literally breathes only because of Microsoft and the business it brings. (Also, Nintendo is here and Google moved to Kirkland not too long ago.) If it went out of business, there wouldn't really be that much to do jobwise around here =\

Post by **FreeBeer** » Sat Jul 14, 2007 5:13 am

Actually, IBM had no problem coding an OS for their PC (they had, and still do to this day, a massive code repository). However, they didn't feel the need to develop their own OS for a machine that would have limited market appeal. (They imagined only a few hundred sales or something like that.)

What I also think (apart from voip's post) that led to their dominance in the OS world was their interest in providing value-added resources with the OS. (Something, sadly, I think they've long lost sight of.) Back in the 80's and very early 90's the OS was a basic traffic cop.. it did the work of interfacing with hardware but provided very few additional services. With the release of Windows MS provided a plethora of MS-made fonts. Prior to this, if you wanted a special font you had to pay for 'em and in many cases you had to pay for each and every variant and size (want 18 pt? pay for it. Want an italic version, too, cough up some more.) MS with their True-Type font family made all kinds of fonts available as part of the basic OS/GUI purchase. This is just one simple, yet subtle instance.

They also made available networking services... limited in scope but it was reasonably easy and CHEAPER to network computers (peer-to-peer, mostly) with MS's offering than it was to buy and administer a Novel or an IBM Token-Ring network.

Again.. they provided some pretty good value-added and there was a real reason to want to upgrade to the next version.

Alas, it seems that MS has long forgotten the value-added that they once provided.

Post by **Tigereye** » Sat Jul 14, 2007 5:37 am

wow this thread is TLDR.

But... are we still talking about Allegiance and Vista?

As easy as it is to hate mega corporations, remember that Microsoft gave us this game which spawned this community. Without them, we wouldn't be here!

--TE

batman · Post by **batman** » Sat Jul 14, 2007 2:22 pm

FreeBeer wrote:QUOTE (FreeBeer @ Jul 14 2007, 01:13 AM) Actually, IBM had no problem coding an OS for their PC (they had, and still do to this day, a massive code repository). However, they didn't feel the need to develop their own OS for a machine that would have limited market appeal. (They imagined only a few hundred sales or something like that.)

What I also think (apart from voip's post) that led to their dominance in the OS world was their interest in providing value-added resources with the OS. (Something, sadly, I think they've long lost sight of.) Back in the 80's and very early 90's the OS was a basic traffic cop.. it did the work of interfacing with hardware but provided very few additional services. With the release of Windows MS provided a plethora of MS-made fonts. Prior to this, if you wanted a special font you had to pay for 'em and in many cases you had to pay for each and every variant and size (want 18 pt? pay for it. Want an italic version, too, cough up some more.) MS with their True-Type font family made all kinds of fonts available as part of the basic OS/GUI purchase. This is just one simple, yet subtle instance.

They also made available networking services... limited in scope but it was reasonably easy and CHEAPER to network computers (peer-to-peer, mostly) with MS's offering than it was to buy and administer a Novel or an IBM Token-Ring network.

Again.. they provided some pretty good value-added and there was a real reason to want to upgrade to the next version.

Alas, it seems that MS has long forgotten the value-added that they once provided.

I vaguely remember novell networks and token ring networks and not being able to get my dot-matrix printer to work.

Wordperfect and lotus 123 were the queens of the office. Guys with pony-tails were cursing their fate having to keep the novell network working. My memory is bad, though.

voipscout · Post by **voipscout** » Sun Jul 15, 2007 2:29 am

batman wrote:QUOTE (batman @ Jul 14 2007, 04:22 PM) I vaguely remember novell networks and token ring networks and not being able to get my dot-matrix printer to work.

Wordperfect and lotus 123 were the queens of the office. Guys with pony-tails were cursing their fate having to keep the novell network working. My memory is bad, though.

Hehe, actually it was split evenely between lantastic and novell back then, arcnet was the primary network architecture, since token ring was expensive as hell... And i still do have a pony-tail, albeit it's getting gray and shabby little by little and my wife told me, that if i don't cut it by the age of 40, she'll do it by herself while i am asleep ;-) Thanks flying spaghetti monster, i no longer have to curse my fate, today i have a bunch of fresh pony tails in my company, who curse their fate and me (mostly me, though)