Tech: Bill Gates is not useful!

Subject: Tech: Bill Gates is not useful!
From: CraigS
Date: 09 Nov 02 - 08:31 PM

This thread stems from Max's thread about cheap computers. There are lots of computers out there which could still be useful for most purposes, but because of Microshit's policy of not supporting things that are more than three years old they are "useless". I'm fed up of Microshit producing operating systems that do not work from day one without help, then killing them as soon as they look like being stable and useful. I'm fed up of a company that produces software to a guarantee that allows so many bugs that it is worthless. I only use their products because they allow me to run software that runs under them, and becauseI have obtained them at discounted rates (including the licences I got out of various dumpsters). If I had a penny for every minute I have wasted because of Bill Gates' policies, I would be rich. Multiply this by the number of frustrated computer debuggers in the world, and Bill Gates new home would be a one-room country shack made from discarded packing cases. What can be done?

Subject: RE: Tech: Bill Gates is not useful!
From: curmudgeon
Date: 09 Nov 02 - 08:45 PM

Rather than depend on Microflaccid, go Mac -- Tom

Subject: RE: Tech: Bill Gates is not useful!
From: Ed.
Date: 09 Nov 02 - 08:57 PM

Your comments on Microsoft are unjustified IMO.

I've run 95/98 out of the box for the last 6 years and haven't had any significant problems.

Try writing your own OS if it's that easy...

You could, of course, use Linux.

Subject: RE: Tech: Bill Gates is not useful!
From: mack/misophist
Date: 09 Nov 02 - 09:11 PM

You could, of course, use Linux. If it were that easy.

Subject: RE: Tech: Bill Gates is not useful!
From: Bill D
Date: 10 Nov 02 - 12:25 AM

there are too many experts who AGREE with Craig for it to be just sour grapes. MS does have an attitude problem and has been taken to court for some of their practices.

It is not necessary to be able to write an operating systen to realize that there are serious flaws in both design and goals with Mr. Gates' little setup. It's like having a Mercedes-Benz with fuel injection that cuts out at random times, and only accepts a few brands of tires, and is obsolete at 4 years old.

Craig may or may NOT have overstated his case...but he is NOT alone in his frustrations.

Subject: RE: Tech: Bill Gates is not useful!
From: Willie-O
Date: 10 Nov 02 - 10:39 AM

An unlikely, sort of, competitor to MS hegemony.

WalMart of all places is selling PC's for $199 (Monitor not included, natch, among other things) which run on this new Lindows OS. That's right, Linux architecture with a Windows-type interface. Needless to say MS is not happy with this--hey, did someone say "Look and feel" lawsuit?

Lindows is on my list of "something to look into". The big question is, does Lindows really run Windows software effectively?

It's always irritated me that you buy a PC but have to pay more for the software you need to do anything at all with it. Like a car without an engine.

W-O

Subject: RE: Tech: Bill Gates is not useful!
From: Dead Horse
Date: 10 Nov 02 - 03:50 PM

Yeah, well if it wasn't for Windows I bet you wouldn't be here!
It's very easy to blame Old Bill and his empire for your own shortcomings. Go and design something better that nobody can find fault with, and I shall be more sympathetic.
In the meantime, delete Windows and go back to DOS.

Subject: RE: Tech: Bill Gates is not useful!
From: GUEST
Date: 10 Nov 02 - 04:16 PM

It's always irritated me that you buy a PC but have to pay more for the software you need to do anything at all with it

Like you have to buy some CDs for your new CD Player to be any use, or some petrol for your new car to work, or some food for your new cooker to be effective, or some dirty dishes for your new dishwasher to work or...

That's a really stupid thing to say, Willie-O.

Good point Dead Horse

Subject: RE: Tech: Bill Gates is not useful!
From: Clinton Hammond
Date: 10 Nov 02 - 04:52 PM

" In the meantime, delete Windows and go back to DOS"

Or do us one better, and turn the thing off and just go away! Ya don't like it? Don't use it... Your choices are all befor you...

Subject: RE: Tech: Bill Gates is not useful!
From: GUEST
Date: 10 Nov 02 - 05:22 PM

Exactly, Clinon

CraigS, misophist and Bill D seem to like moaning.

They are probably best ignored.

Subject: RE: Tech: Bill Gates is not useful!
From: Little Hawk
Date: 10 Nov 02 - 06:03 PM

I had an absolutely glorious time in Cuba for a week, without ever seeing or touching a computer. I'd do it again anytime, if I could escape my professional responsiblities here and afford the airfare as well. The reason I'm on this thing is because I have it, and it's an easy way to spend time, and yes, it's fun. But I can have just as much fun without a computer...or a whole lot more...depending on what else is available around me to concentrate on.

Other people are the most interesting thing in life, and my best outlet to a large number of them here (at home in Canada) seems to be talking on the Mudcat Cafe in my present situation. In Cuba I had more direct access to lots of terrific people face-to-face, it seemed. I recommend it.

- LH

Subject: RE: Tech: Bill Gates is not useful!
From: mg
Date: 11 Nov 02 - 12:22 AM

I'd love to go to Cuba someday. And the thing that bugs me most about MS is Excel, which is an otherwise truly great program..but you can type something in and it overrides you and I have never been able to make it just not do that..because sometimes you can't get back what you originally typed in..it is mostly around dates turning to numbers or vise versa and if you haven't set the format cells thing up front you can be in trouble...mg

Subject: RE: Tech: Bill Gates is not useful!
From: Troll
Date: 11 Nov 02 - 10:42 AM

Maybe you will be gratified to know that Ol' Bill is using some of the money he got from us in a good cause.
He just gave 100,000,000 to India to help fight the spreat of AIDS, especially among children. And yes, that's one hundred million dollars.

troll

Subject: RE: Tech: Bill Gates is not useful!
From: Pied Piper
Date: 11 Nov 02 - 01:23 PM

I'm still using Cubase on my old Atari and it works fine, but I export to an old PC (P120 w95) to print.
I think that no mater what the flaws of DOS and the Windows operating systems when I by a new PC in the new year it be a will have an MS operating system. The reason is simple, cost.
Macs are far too expensive initially, and to be brutally honest you can't get hold of Pirated MAC software.
It's a wicked world but what the hell.
PP

Subject: RE: Tech: Bill Gates is not useful!
From: Grab
Date: 11 Nov 02 - 01:49 PM

CraigS, you feel this and you *still* pay the money?! It's like the old joke about the patient and the doctor:-

"Does it hurt when you do that?"
"Yes."
"Then don't do it."

There are at least two viable alternatives to Windows: either a Unix derivative (pick one of Hurd, Linux or any of the BSDs) which runs on your existing PC; or a Mac which needs its own special computer. If you can run a PC, you can run a Mac (although you may need to plan some "getting-to-know-you" time on it). I haven't had the time to try installing Linux myself so I couldn't say how easy that is to use, but by all accounts it's not impossible if you arm yourself with a few books to learn about it and keep a positive mental attitude. I do have some experience of using Unix and I can tell you that whilst it's 100% reliable, it also requires a bit of brain-twisting to figure things out on occasion!

Lindows does *not* run Windows software. There are some projects in existence which run Windows programs on Linux - Wine is the best-known (and probably the most successful). It's not yet complete, but a lot of stuff works on it. But there's Linux/Unix-specific versions of word processors and the like already available anyway, so you should be able to get some similar program which is designed to work properly under Linux.

I'll second the first guest's point about Willie-O's comment (even if he said it rudely). By the same argument, every car should come bundled with a trailer, a caravan, all manner of roofracks, etc, bcos that's how you personally want to use the car. No? Then why should Windows come bundled with a bunch of stuff which other ppl might not want to use?

I'm not saying that Windows isn't buggy - there's plenty of bugs, particularly in older code. Win95 was pretty bad. But the more the code hangs around, the more they sort them out - Win98 is pretty stable, and WinXP is *very* stable. I'd certainly agree that MS have an attitude problem, and that sooner or later they'll crash and burn bcos of it, but on a technical level what they're putting out actually isn't bad. Sure, they no longer give you bugfixes on old code. So what? Word97 and Win98 run just as well on your P233 now as they did back 3 years ago, so how can it be "useless"? The software doesn't wear out! If Craig thinks that older OSes are "useless", I would question whether he knows what he wants them to do in the first place.

Graham.

Subject: RE: Tech: Bill Gates is not useful!
From: Kim C
Date: 11 Nov 02 - 04:44 PM

Is there any OS that isn't buggy?

Subject: RE: Tech: Bill Gates is not useful!
From: Clinton Hammond
Date: 11 Nov 02 - 05:02 PM

Ya... it was called OS2... it lost the marketing war with Win95 unfortunalty, and vanished...

O.k.. it wasn't totally bug free, but it was a DAMN good OS...

Like Beta was (Heh... still is for that matter!) MUCH better than VHS, but lost the marketing war...

Subject: Gates: What to say; what to do?
From: saulgoldie
Date: 12 Nov 02 - 12:45 PM

The choice to "opt out", while charming and appealing in its way carries unfortunately huge consequences, as most of the world of work is tech now, and if you want to work you just have to be on board.

If some of the other devices and systems that we enjoy were as fragile and failure-prone as a Windoze PC, we would just not stand for it. It can be made better, but it isn't. Curiously, MAC is trying to lower it's formerly high standards of operation and customer satisfaction by forcing people into OSX and removing the option of their using the preferred OS9. Also, recent versions of their machinery are less and less reliable. Perhaps they are tired of customers??

And one doesn't really have options in the marketplace like one does with cars, toasters, or musical instruments. It's "Windoze-way, or the highway." In a "same thing only different" kinda way, this is like so many other environments where it will take a huge uprising by a sizable chunk of the victims to force change. Computer consumers, voters, homeowners with HOAs, and such are just not likely to do that. So the unreasonably low quality is allowed to persist.

Subject: RE: Tech: Bill Gates is not useful!
From: Amos
Date: 12 Nov 02 - 04:00 PM

IF it weren't for Windows you wouldn't BE here? Who ya talkin' at? I have not touched a Windows machine at home -- except occasionally a laptop brought home from the office for particular projects -- for, let me see -- fourteen years. WHile I have often had to use one at work, being a dumpkopf salary man, I have, over the years, seen MASSIVE amounts of production time being lost on Wintel machines which required tweaking, re-setup, registry adjustments, interrupt settings adjustments, lengthy data-recovery hassles due to crashes, and device adjustment, driver reinstallation, etc, etc, etc. I will not say these things never happened at home on my Macs. A few of them did, most of them never did, and those that did were generally FAR easier to remedy.

Craig's viewpoint is correct in many respects -- if you added up all the time American working folk have spent trying to get Microsoft products to behave as advertised, it would be worth many of Bill Gates' billions. Unfortunately, it is considered to be a normal concomitant of the computer business, because they are "so complex".

I will say, on the other hand, that Win 2K Pro has behaved admirably well and caused very few headaches since I have been using it at work.

By the way there are "Office-compatible" software packages out there designed to run on Linux and other UNIX systems, such as the Star Suite. I do not have details on their performance, though.

Regards,


A

Subject: RE: Tech: Bill Gates is not useful!
From: EBarnacle1
Date: 12 Nov 02 - 04:49 PM

yeah, right, tell me how well developed Windows is. This is my fourth attempt to enter this note. Given the choice, I would have gone back to DOS years ago. Programs could be easily entered by typing a simple command line or by going through a menu. Operations could be controlled by switches. etc, etc.

GUI's are an illiterate's method of operating a system. If you don't know how to read, the old system ain't user friendly. Here, in my little office, 3 of 7 people are computer illiterate and brag about it. The trog we shall always have with us. Why, though, should we pander to them.

Subject: RE: Tech: Bill Gates is not useful!
From: vectis
Date: 12 Nov 02 - 06:30 PM

THE. Yes THE best operating system i've used is RISC OS. It's idiot proof (almost), reliable, stable, cheap cheap cheap and rarely throws wobbleys for its programs.

It was bought out by a big worldwide software giant who 'lost' it. Some programs designed initially to run on it have been rewritten for PC but tend to crash and bug a bit.

Acorn computers got it right first time. I'm still running hardware from 1987 and it just keeps going and going. I can't buy programs that do the same jobs as well so I will continue to nurse my lovely reliable machines until they die of old age.

PS. You can access the WWW on them too.

Subject: RE: Tech: Bill Gates is not useful!
From: dick greenhaus
Date: 12 Nov 02 - 06:38 PM

We use Windows because you use Windows. All the work involved in assembling DigiTrad involves DOS programs. Why? Because they work better.

Subject: RE: Tech: Bill Gates is not useful!
From: Bill D
Date: 12 Nov 02 - 06:51 PM

Given the choice, I would have gone back to DOS years ago. Programs could be easily entered by typing a simple command line or by going through a menu. GUI's are an illiterate's method of operating a system.

...and if all I wanted to do was work and run programs, that would be fine, but GUIs are what makes it FUN!...My wife did mainframes and DOS for many years, and I never wanted to look at it...all those command structures and asterisks and backslashes were intimidating and BORING...now I can 'see' things...and visualize relationships in data much better.

There are those who take to DOS really easily, like there are those who do math...but others do not...what we need is for those who write Windows and such to QUIT making it totally new every couple years and de-bug and polish what we have!...and that, sort of, is what the Linux people are doing. Maybe in 5-6 years, it will be ready for prime time!

Subject: RE: Tech: Bill Gates is not useful!
From: GUEST
Date: 12 Nov 02 - 07:48 PM

Linux people are doing. Maybe in 5-6 years, it will be ready for prime time!

Sooner than that Bill. I'd give it 1-2 years. One of the biggest obstacles is likely to be hardware. Maufacturers can be strangely loyal to providing MS drivers or MS with the info needed where open source people are forced into things like reverse engineering to ensure they can support printer X or scanner Y.

There are moves to prevent this under the name of "anti-piracy" but IMO a hardware maufacturer preventing another software (especially OS) manufacturer from supporting your printer or whatever device is not healthy and can only help confirm a near monopoly in certain areas.

Unfortunately, I don't suppose any concepts of a free market will include supporting totaly free products becuase there is no money in it.

Subject: RE: Tech: Bill Gates is not useful!
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 12 Nov 02 - 08:12 PM

Maufacturers can be strangely loyal to providing MS drivers or MS with the info needed where open source people are forced into things like reverse engineering to ensure they can support printer X or scanner Y.

????

Microsoft does not write any hardware device drivers.

Microsoft provides information on how to interface with Windows, and the hardware manufacturers write the drivers.

Microsoft will include drivers for common hardware on Microsoft distribution disks - but the drivers come from the hardware manufacturers.

If there are no drivers for your non-Win system, it is because the hardware manufacturer didn't write one for you. I fail to see how you can blame Microsoft for that. Microsoft gave them the information needed to write drivers for Windows. Perhaps they don't understand your system as well?

John

Subject: RE: Tech: Bill Gates is not useful!
From: GUEST
Date: 12 Nov 02 - 08:35 PM

John please re-read, I didn't blame MS, I blamed the manufacturers (though I did imply that MS may write some drivers).

I seriously doubt manufacturers have any difficulty in understanding open source software - rather more open than MS in terms of info, I would say.

I seriously doubt worries over unstable software would be a worry as Linux is more stable than any version of Windows.

Maybe it's just that manufaturers consider it not worth while to support other platforms but it is unusual not to investigate and attept to support new potential markets.

Subject: RE: Tech: Bill Gates is not useful!
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 12 Nov 02 - 11:03 PM

The UNIX kernal has been pretty much "open source" since it's inception. My understanding is that (to oversimplify) LINUX was a name change to make it easier to track who was going to "oversee" the additions to source code.

My first encounter with LINUX/UNIX was more than forty years ago. It's been an "in a few months" product since well before then.

It is a very good system, if run by knowledgeable people who exert strict control over what users try to do with/to it. Unfortunately, it is also more complex than the very great majority of people are willing, or able, to contend with.

For anyone willing to expend the necessary effort, and who feels that they gain something from it, I'm all in favor of them using it.

I've had enough experience with it to know that I'd rather stick with Windows.

The absolute number of people using LINUX (and a couple of other op systems) has been growing, simply because more people are using computers. The "market share" (percentage) has shown little growth for several decades. This is one reason why device manufacturers may tend to put low priority on writing drivers for LINUX. Another factor is that, though most of us can't, a lot of people can write drivers, and the LINUX user population is full of people who will try to "top" anything the manufacturer puts out. It'd scare me some.

There is some satisfaction to be had from being "different" from "the herd." Been there. Done that. Bought the T-shirt. Now that I've learned that I am not likely to significantly advance the state of computing arts with my efforts, I'd rather just get some work done in the fields I know and enjoy. Windows works fine for me.

John

Subject: RE: Tech: Bill Gates is not useful!
From: GUEST
Date: 13 Nov 02 - 09:34 AM

There was never a name change from UNIX to LINUX. UNIX lives on but is comercial software and I think alwasy has been. It was named afer it's author, Linus Torvalds. To quote him:

Linux is a Unix-like operating system, but not a version of Unix. This gives Linux a different heritage than, for example, Free BSD. What I mean is this: the creators of Free BSD started with the source code to Berkeley Unix, and their kernel is directly descended from that source code. So Free BSD is a version of Unix; it's in the Unix family tree. Linux, on the other hand, aims to provide an interface that is compatible with Unix, but the kernel was written from scratch, without reference to Unix source code. So Linux itself is not a port of Unix. It's a new operating system

Linux is still not easy to use but great steps have been made in improving its ease of use and installation, most notably in the commercial distributions such as Red Hat and Mandrake. More recent versions will often install without the hassle of having to tell the system what hardware you have (and having to have a fair knowledge of some hardware) and there is some plug and display support.

Software can often be installed using RPMs, often with graphical interfaces to assist with managment; other graphical interfaces exist to assist with other system tasks. All in all, it is moving slowly but surely to a point where I believe carrying out these tasks will be as easy as in Windows, perhaps in some cases easier than Windows.

There is some satisfaction to be had from being "different" from "the herd." Been there. Done that. Bought the T-shirt.
Now that I've learned that I am not likely to significantly advance the state of computing arts with my efforts, I'd rather just
get some work done in the fields I know and enjoy. Windows works fine for me.

I suppose that is one way of looking at it but it is not mine. Mine is that I believe in the software and I believe that as more interest in making Linux easier for home users develops, the software will become more and more viable as an alternative to Windows.

Maybe I'll be proved wrong but I'd rather invest a little time in such developments and the longer term prospect of free/cheap reliable software than invest $1,000s in new MS products.

Subject: RE: Tech: Bill Gates is not useful!
From: Mark Clark
Date: 13 Nov 02 - 12:24 PM

The history of UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems can be found here at Éric Lévénez's Web site.

The idea for UNIX—originally UNICS or EUNICHS—came from the Multics project in which AT&T's Bell Laboratories was a participant. As far as I know, the only commercial implementation of Multics was General Electric's OS called GECOS, a system I had the opportunity to use some in the early seventies. When Bell Labs pulled out of the Multics project in 1969, several Bell Labs engineers commondeered a DEC PDP 7 and used it to implement a time sharing OS incorporating many of the principles of Multics. This OS was used internally by Bell Labs for a number of years and is what eventually became UNIX. The interested reader can enter the words UNIX history Multics BSD GNU Mach NeXTSTEP Linux into a WWW search engine and find more historical information than they'll have time to read.

UNIX came about because of the need for many users to share the use of the same central computing system. For that reason, UNIX had to be very robust, stable and effecient from the beginning. It had to provide great power for both the user and the programmer at a time when large mainframe computers were less powerfull than today's PDAs. Keep in mind that there were no graphical user interfaces (GUIs) at this time.

UNIX prospered partly because if its power and accessability but largely because Bell Labs gave source licenses to the Computer Science departments of several important universities (e.g., University of California at Berkley, MIT, Carnagie Mellon). These universities made major improvements and sent their work back to Bell Labs. The result was a close-knit family of operating systems that could comparitavely easily be ported to new computing platforms and did a great job of assisting students in learning about operating system internals.

The Wintel group of operating systems began shortly after hobbyists discovered that a primative computer could be concocted from the nacent microprocessors that were being sold to provide a small level of “intelligence” to electronic devices. Gary Kildall, founder of Digital Research Corp., created the first personal computer operating system (CP/M) to see any widespread use. CP/M was just the minimum amount of code needed to allow a single dedicated user to get programs and data into and out of a personal computer.

DOS came about when IBM decided to build their original PC and failed to connect with Kildall to have CP/M ported to their new 8088-based computer. Since IBM had aleady been talking with Microsoft about Microsoft BASIC, the defacto standard BASIC interpreter, they asked Gates and company if they could supply the operating system as well. Gates was able to acquire control of a small company that had a grandfathered source license for CP/M and performed the port of CP/M to the 8088 processor. The first version of IBM's PC-DOS was really just a port of CP/M.

The whole idea of a personal computer was that it was used by a single individual at one time typically running a single program. If the program crashed, only the currently active data would be lost and there would be no impact to other PC users. For this reason, a lot of shortcuts were taken in the design and development of PC OSs. True, a PC wasn't as stable as a mainframe or large UNIX-based multi-user machine. On the other hand, an individual or family could afford a PC which certainly wasn't true of the larger systems.

Microsoft's philosophy was and is to allow their entire installed base to move easily to each new platform without having to rebuild all their applications between adjacent versions. To accomplish that, they've had to drag a lot of legacy code with them along the way. Windows NT was Microsoft's first attempt at building a true operating system with separate address spaces for applications and the possibility of supporting multiple users.

Today, the best operating systems employ a hardware dependent microkernel that handles only the most basic tasks in the computer. A typical microkernel manages CPU resources, task scheduling and virtual memory leaving other OS support functions to more standard service routines that operate under control of the microkernel. UNIX-like systems such as QNX, NeXTSTEP, OS X, GNU Hurd are moving in this direction as are Wintel OSs such as Windows XP Pro and OS2. Other OSs such as UNIX, Linux and NT emply a monolithic kernel that includes more of the basic services than the more modern variants.

In understanding UNIX-like OSs, it's important to remember that the 99% of the code in all these systems comes courtesy of The GNU Project. Linux is really just a UNIX-compatible kernel that became popular among hobbyists and attracted more “mind share” than the earlier, more academically oriented, UNIX ports. Everything that a user sees in a Linux system comes either from the GNU Project or one of the open-source initiatives. What the user sees is mostly the same code whether the system is called Linux or FreeBSD or Cygwin.

If you check Netcraft's survey page you'll see that the open-source Apache server (running on UNIX-like OSs) accounts for twice as many sites as Microsoft's IIS. If you did deeper you'll see that the difference is even greater when considering only the largest sites. People who's business depends on reliable computing systems use Microsoft on their employees desktops but not in the back office.

As computing systems evolve, all of this will change again and again and each time it changes there will be disruption for programmers and users alike. On the other hand, without change, where's the progress?

      - Mark