[rescue] NeWS

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Richard wrote:
> Its obviously fashionable to bitch about Windows, but I'll counter that
> I am a happy Windows user and have been since I first purchased a P90
> with Windows for Workgroups 3.11.  Each successive release has been an
> improvement for me over the previous one and I am looking forward to
> Vista as well.  IMO, you get an incredible array of functionality for
> what you pay for Windows.

You are doing something common: mistaking a dislike for bad software as 
a dislike of Windows.

Windows just happens to be popular, and has so very many faults, that it 
gets a lot of attention.

But everyone I know who hates Windows on purely technical issues also 
hates a lot of other similarly poor products, and that includes open 
source as well.

Windows is expensive, and for that price I expect a whole lot more than 
it gives me.  I can get UNIX for the same price or cheaper, and it comes 
out of the box with tools that would cost me thousands to get running on 
Windows.  So even as a value proposition, Windows loses.  So did MacOS 
until OS X came out.

By contrast I buy UNIX, or get it for free, and it is instantly useful 
for things which Windows can only do after fairly large investments.

I dislike Windows because of its flaws, not because it is a popular target.

NTFS is broken, and has been for 15 years.

Windows networking stinks.

Applications in Windows are responsible for managing their windows and 
desktop UI elements.  When they hang up, they often disable your desktop 
partially or totally because they can't get out of the way.  How damned 
stupid for a busy application to be unable to minimize.

Windows inherited the default locking policy of VMS, but not the 
engineering to implement it without show stopping problems.  That's why 
you get so many "partial crashes" in Windows, have to restart for every 
trivial change to the system, and why Windows performance often goes to 
hell when nothing is really taxing the machine.

Windows task scheduling is terrible, just terrible.

Each version of Windows has gotten more and more big brotherish and 
imposes more restrictions on me as a user.  With Vista, Microsoft plans 
even more of this.

The Windows driver system allows layered drivers which not only allow 
software houses to install viral programs which hurt my system and my 
ability to use it, but open up security holes all the way to ring zero.

After NT 3.51, Microsoft started shooting holes in the foundation to add 
more feature and "cool stuff".

Those are all real technical problems with Windows, not random hate.