[geeks] Google announces Google Chrome OS

[Shannon Hendrix]

On Jul 8, 2009, at 14:18 , Phil Stracchino wrote:

> Shannon Hendrix wrote:
>> Windows really is poor at doing the required job.  It's a horrible
>> design, except some of the bits underneath it all which are actually
>> not bad.
>
> Which bits are those?  ;)

The basic NT OS was not bad.

Then after 3.51 Microsoft started removing some of its primary  
features because they claimed it was not able to do the job otherwise.

I'm not sure that was NT's fault though.  Microsoft as a whole never  
really understood how NT (and VMS) worked, and they mis-used a lot of  
its features putting Win32 on top of it and made a huge mess.

I have to figure the guys who originally designed NT are fairly unhappy.

OS/2, I think, was better anyway.  But, IBM could not market $500  
bills for $5 and sell any.

> Practically any time I try to do anything on Windows, I find myself
> ranting at how stupidly Windows does ... something.

I find the GUI pretty horrible for doing more than one task at a time,  
or even doing one that requires a lot of windows or sub-tasks.

The other issue is that if I put my standard Mac or UNIX/X workload on  
Windows, it just dies, even with a modern very vast system.  The GUI  
becomes pretty much impossible to use, managing that many apps, and  
the performance just sucks.

> Yesterday's example is that Windows' handling of optical drives - in
> fact, of multiple drives and network volumes, PERIOD - is utterly
> broken.  It is based upon the assumptions that no computer will ever
> have more than one optical drive, that said optical drive will  
> always be
> built-in and present at boot, and that no computer owner will ever
> install additional hard disks that cause the drive letter assigned to
> any drive to change.  And these assumptions are built in at the very
> lowest levels of the OS.

Windows is still CP/M with a horrid graphics hack on top of it...  :)

I'm joking, but in a lot of ways, it does behave exactly like that.


-- 
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com