Micro$oft Windows is S#*T

[Meecro Hyperion]

--------------------------:devilfire: :devilfire: :devilfire: :devilfire:
:director: Having reinstalled Micro$oft Windows for the third time this year (predominately because it is the only platform to run VP), I am officially giving up, joining IBM, and banning it from my hardware permanently.

Linux is now easier to install and maintain, has ALL the major application functionality you'll ever require (openoffice3 for MSOffice, k3b for Nero, eclipse for SDK, apache, firefox, thunderbird, gimp for photoshop, and the rest), and works. All day, every day. Once it works, it works forever. Never again will I switch on to discover that windows has randomly decided to shit it's pants.

How can an operating system that has earned it's corporation a Trillion Dollars be so c.r.a.p, compared to one that grew out of the toejam of the GNU crew and a young scandinavian called Linus Torvalds?

Yes I'm mad. Mad because I have paid for this software over and over and over again, and at it's heart it is still largely the same msdos (originally called Q-DOS - Quick and Dirty Operating System - true story) I bought 20 years ago. IBM should never have rented it (should have bought CP/M when they had the chance).

Mad because Micro$oft (morally) owes me over $50,000 in unpaid labour troubleshooting my own system and everyone I know for the last 20 years....

Yeah ok the third party driver writers(e.g. graphics, graphics, and, er..graphics) can take their share of the blame, but I reckon that only accounts for 10%. The O.S can and should be able to recover from a driver failure, and it is micro$oft's own drivers which are mostly to blame for my problems with windows (most recently mup.sys). And WHO thought up the idea of putting every configuration variable into a single, non-transactional flat-file database called the 'registry'. And don't tell me system restore equates to that because it doesn't (even when it works). crap crap crap crap crap architecture. Don't these guys learn software architecture at university????

So no more VP for me, until the source code becomes open source (heard of sourceforge?) and is ported to Linux.

I will still hang out here though.

 

[TheMcD]

Snipped a lot here...

Yes I'm mad. Mad because I have paid for this software over and over and over again, and at it's heart it is still largely the same msdos (originally called Q-DOS - Quick and Dirty Operating System - true story) I bought 20 years ago. IBM should never have rented it (should have bought CP/M when they had the chance).

So no more VP for me, until the source code becomes open source (heard of sourceforge?) and is ported to Linux.

Well, now let's disregard the fact that I don't keep paying for a new Windows, but I keep wondering where those problems come from.

I have been using Windows for about 10 years now, and the only problems I had were either my personal fault (fucking around where I shouldn't have, getting myself some viruses and stuff) or hardware fault (dead RAM just a while ago). I've had my share of fun with Vista, but hey, that's what a dual boot is made for. Running XP again and there's no signs of any problems.

Windows is kinda like Oblivion or Fallout 3. If you really fuck with it long enough, it becomes enjoyable. I may stress the really here.

And you won't see VP on Linux. I can go out and predict that there will not be a code release until, say.... 15 years perhaps? Maybe 10. Basically, you have two possibilities: 1) Nanotech releases the code (might be probable when they move on to FP, but that's far in the future from now). 2) Randy re-surfaces and releases the code (Yeah, right.)

So, I'll be sticking to Windows as long as I don't pay for it. Microsoft is a bullshitting company and can get on your ass and nerves quite easily, but what they have put out still works.

The McD

 

[Meecro Hyperion]

Windows is kinda like Oblivion or Fallout 3. If you really fuck with it long enough, it becomes enjoyable. I may stress the really here.

Lets settle on Oblivion....

I'll respect your opinion McD, but I've been messing with MS products professionally and as a home-user for nearly 20 years. If the CEO of Commodore hadn't been off on holiday sailing way back when in '85 and if IBM had just waited 'til he got back, little Billy would still have the Altair OS as his major achievement, still be a virgin, and MS would still be writing crappy games....

So, I'll be sticking to Windows as long as I don't pay for it.

Organisations can't steal from MS, AND they pay through the nose for support (an obvious conflict of interest).

Even regularly backing up the registry, locking down viruses, setting system restore points, and without installing _anything_ I absolutely don't need, the longest I've ever been able to keep a windows box alive between reinstalls is 6 months. The longest I've ever seen one stay _on_ is two weeks (windows server 2000).

How about you?

Is this the best we can expect? As a professional Electronics and Software Engineer (specialising in configuration management) I think not.....

Ok, so VP source won't ever be released - I believe your prediction. But here's another:

It has taken a while, but MS cannot hold the world to ransom with their poorly designed software any more. Linux has finally become a serious contender (Try Fedora 10 or _any_ modern Linux distribution), and no corporation which has to pay it's employees wages can compete with 100's of thousands of developers working for free.....

The clock is ticking....

 

[TheMcD]

Snippity snip...

Even regularly backing up the registry, locking down viruses, setting system restore points, and without installing _anything_ I absolutely don't need, the longest I've ever been able to keep a windows box alive between reinstalls is 6 months. The longest I've ever seen one stay _on_ is two weeks (windows server 2000).

How about you?

It has taken a while, but MS cannot hold the world to ransom with their poorly designed software any more. Linux has finally become a serious contender (Try Fedora 10 or _any_ modern Linux distribution), and no corporation which has to pay it's employees wages can compete with 100's of thousands of developers working for free.....

The clock is ticking....

I've managed to run about five years on a old 98 machine, 2 years on a XP machine. With installing a ton of crap and not backing up anything. Am I just that fucking lucky? Why can't I win the lottery instead....

Anyhoo, I've been thinking about using Linux for a while, but I am pretty much a moron when it comes to installs of OSes and I really would screw up my current installation if I tried. Maybe the next time I have to reinstall. Which apparently is only around the corner...

The McD

 

[Meecro Hyperion]

98 was more reliable than XP...

Installing Fedora 10 is easier than installing XP.....

Everything is graphical. The partitioning is automatic. You select what applications you want and go to bed. The bootloader is friendly and actually lets you choose to load a foreign operating system!!!! Windows just pretends my Linux partition doesn't exist. But dual boot is not the problem. The work machines I mentioned were dedicated windows servers. DESIGNED as servers, sold as servers, and fell down - but until a few years ago the only serious contender was Suns Solaris, and you have to be BIG to afford that and the support it needs. Linux used to require a lot of knowledge (when I first started using it in 96 it was diabolical), but not any more....

I give MS 10 years (max) in the OS market. 5 years ago, 10% of web servers were running on Linux, because it's reliable and cheap(!). Now that figure is over 40%, and climbing. I'm now to do some research on the PC stats....

 

[Phoenixx]

The stability of Windows can be a problem, but unfortunately the same goes for a Linux system too. Have the right thing happening at the wrong time and your OS goes bye bye because there was no failsafe that prevented it from happening.

Little story about something that happened on a Win system just a few months ago: I did something on Vista that required a reboot, driver update or something, nothing special at all. So i pressed the obligatory 'Reboot Now' button and waited for the system to go down. Well, it didnt, it just sat there and did the loop, no idea what it computed during the 3 or 4 minutes i waited, probably the theory of relativity. In any case, i finally had to push the power button because it was obvious that the system hangs. When it came up again i was being greeted by a nice fresh 1st-boot desktop, (meaning none of my icons, none of my settings, standard wallpaper, etc.), only because the tiny little file that holds my user config was out of order. From that point forward there was absolutely no way to get into my own environment anymore, i could boot into safe mode, i could boot into the fallback user, i could do anything and everything to my hearts desire, except for booting into my own darn account. Now if you think since it was clearly due to a damaged file i simply should have sicked chkdsk/chkntfs at the drive and the ordeal would have been over, think again, because Vista didnt run it period. It didnt run it on its own even though i rebooted several times, which is the 1st master flaw right there. I also couldnt run it myself because it doesnt work with an online OS partition, and the option to run it on next reboot didnt work either, dont ask me why, it just didnt. In other words i was royally screwed and there wasnt a damn thing i could do about it. At this point i was mentally already in the process of a complete OS reinstall.

It is only thanks to good fortune that i could fix it anyway, namely because i happened to have an XPSP3 on the same drive as well. Actually i booted into that only to get to the files Vista wouldnt let me access while the system was online, so imagine my surprise when it (unlike Vista itself) suddenly detected a file error on the disk and fired up chkdsk and fixed the broken file in no time. After at, no more problem, i could boot into my acct as always. But if it wasnt for that XP install being on the same drive i wouldnt have had a chance at all, i would have had to format the partition, reinstall the OS, and setup everything from scratch. And why? Only because there were no failsafes that prevented it from happening in the 1st place and then because the means that are supposed to fix things like that failed miserably as well. I mean the user cfgs obviously belong to THE most important files on the system, so why this file, (which is really not large), is not being copied at least three times to three different areas on the drive is way beyond me. That way, if the master is broken there would still be three valid copies in three different physical locations to fall back to. But no, that would make much too much sense, apparently it is way more important to develop nonsensical and futile HiDef-Content DRM mechanisms that can be circumvented literally in a second by anyone smart enough to press Play on a $30 standalone player. Thats Windows in all its glory,...


I could tell tons of similar stories about Windows as well as Linux systems, but i think the point is obvious. There are so many variables in play, all it takes is for one thing to happen at just that right moment and the whole thing goes nose down into ground. If youre lucky you might be able to recover some of it, maybe even all of it, but more often than not all you can do is count your losses and start over. Lets face it, operation systems have come a long way since the invention of the software-driven computer, but all in all they are still a long way from becoming what one would call mature. And given the circumstances this is probably a total impossibility anyway because the already high demands are getting more complicated practically by the hour. New hardware, new apps, practically infinite constellations of devices and programs, dealing with all this is no easy task for any operation system. So in a sense a OS will always be a WIP. But still there are many things that can be done to ensure at least a basic form of reliability. The fact that this doesnt yet work as many would expect is probably because the devs quite simply dont know yet how to do it themselves. Heavy-multi-tasking systems that are supposed to run a practically infinite number of different apps on an infinite number of different HW constellations are still pretty new after all, before Win95 brought it to the masses it was practically never a subject in that form at all. Hence what the devs need is time and experience, and that means it wont come over night. Maybe in 10, 20 years OSes will be out of their adolescence, provided of course the devs stop holding on to the old ways of doing things. There is little sense in releasing MSDOS 25.8 with a 15th generation GUI plus some extra gadgets and addons every few years if the aim is to make things better (as in doing them right) from the ground up. If that is what they want then the 1st thing they need is a plan that sets the goals. The 2nd thing is then to develop the necessary standards, and the 3rd thing is to have a dedicated group start to program the whole thing from scratch. One thing after the other, basement to roof, strictly according to plan, just like you would build a house. Once the house stands the people can move in, put their own furniture in, etc., and no matter how wild their parties might be the house itself wont ever be affected because it has smoke detectors, sprinklers, and all the other stuff that prevents it from ever getting damaged by anything the people inside it might be doing. 'Shell' is probably the proper word here, a shell with enough security measures to be 100% invincible against outside influences of any and all kind, plus, (to get back to the specific problem mentioned above), the necessary extra measures to ensure that every person in the house will always be able to get into their own room. The circumstance that some guy thought it funny to stuff a bunch of bubblegum into the doorlock must not be leading to the persons not being able to get into their own rooms anymore. For that event there has to be a fallback, a secondary means, like a keypad that opens the lock with a passkey instead of a physical key, or in the case of a user cfg, a couple of copies on physically seperated spots on the drive so the person will get in even if the regular way is compromised. All of this IS doable, it only takes the will to innovation.


As for Linux in particular, i too think that it might not be long until many people will go away from Windows entirely, but not necessarily for reasons of system stability. With distros like Ubuntu even the most unexperienced user can setup a Linux these days, and seeing how the Redmonders come up with more ridiculous concepts almost every day it probably wont be too long until the users are finally fed up with that crap. The latest coup is filed under 'Modular Operation System', which means if you want to add one stick of RAM to your system youd have to pay MS a handsome sum for a 'RAM Upgrade Mopdule'. And that is only the tip of the iceberg, virtually everything in the OS is supposed to be modular, meaning it will cost you extra, and all of it is supposed to checked for validity on a regular basis so you wont be able to use that bigger harddrive unless you have payed Redmond a 'permission-fee' by acquiring the proper module necessary to run drives of that size. This is total madness if you ask me, and i see it coming that many people wont be playing along with this crap for much longer. Linux will be gaining market shares for sure, that much is virtually safe to say, the question is only how much and how fast. After all it is completely free to begin with and is also doesnt send your every action to some people who then use it to force-feed you ads, which brings us right to another MS coup that is planned, namely so called 'sponsored OSes', which cost less or are free but will bother you with ads all day long and you wont be able to do a thing about it. Gee i could go on for hours but i really have to take a break now, perhaps i will be telling some more later,...

 

[Meecro Hyperion]

Well put, phoenixx. A modern OS is more complicated than a Jumbo Jet.
The point (which you make well) is that Linux has finally caught up with windows, and as it gains market share more developers will write applications. The DirectX reverse engineering project will become more feasible, and gamers will be the last hold-out group until this happens.

Having said that, Unreal tournament runs faster on my Linux box in an emulator (wine) using the OpenGL interface than native windows using DirectX - because the code is better written and optimised, and doesn't have to deal with legacy code (like there are 25 ways to open a file in NTFS!!!!)
VP doesn't work in wine because VBscript isn't implemented, but it may come, or another scriptting language could be used to interface with ActiveX.... not my area of expertise..

As the licensing costs spiral, more and more people will switch, until a tipping-point is reached, and windows eventually dies. I still think a decade will do it....

 

[Phoenixx]

The only problem i see with Linux becoming the major platform is this clause that Linux apps, (and please correct me if im wrong), must be either totally open source, or that a publisher that wishes to sell their product must at least offer a free open source version of the software in question (perhaps functionality-reduced but still generally usable) as well. This makes it pretty much pointless for any commercial software producer to even think about making something for Linux, (especially when there is a Windows that gladly lets them persue the closed source pure-commercial model), and that of course goes particularly for games, which are still one of the number one reasons for using a Win platform at all.

Seems like it once again leads us back to the finding that the only true problem this world has is money and commerce. How much better the world could be for ALL people if only the mindless hunt for money and wealth would stop. But then what can you expect, the people are being hypnotized into that state of mind from their earliest childhood on, so...

 

[mrschultz]

The only problem i see with Linux becoming the major platform is this clause that Linux apps, (and please correct me if im wrong), must be either totally open source, or that a publisher that wishes to sell their product must at least offer a free open source version of the software in question (perhaps functionality-reduced but still generally usable) as well.

I don't belive this is true, we have a commercial computational chemistry program on one of our Linux servers and if there was a free version we would have jumped on it. That package also required a proprietary compiler that there was no way around paying a licence for....

My current computer had it's roots back in Windows 95, then 98, then XP. Only part still around from back then is the huge full tower case, everything in it has been upgraded many times. So I've always found a solution to any problem that didn't require a reinstall of the OS.

But nothing beats Linux for stability, the 2 Linux boxes at work run for months between reboots, but the few XP machines we need running all the time need to be rebooted a couple times a month. And it's usually the networking that gets fouled so I can't use remote desktop to reboot them, royal pain when it happens on the weekend. One XP machine that needed to collect data from a USB port would only run a few days, had to use a scheduled task to reboot it every morning.

 

[sleepy]

Let me tell you my story. I have a dual-boot Win98SE/XP Pro system using two drives, one for each OS.

About the end of April I was running XP and noticed that XP did not list my other drive.
So I shut down and adjusted the IDE ribbons. This brought my 98SE drive online in XP, but then I was unable to open it in XP.

So, I tried booting the troubled drive in 98SE and the system could not boot. I then ran a floppy boot and used fdisk /mbr and A: sys C:. This allowed the 98SE drive to boot, but then I could not open any of my personal or media files.

I found the program TESTDISK online and ran the analytical tools. It said the partition table was damaged and found a backup copy. BIG MISTAKE.

So I ran Scandisk. BIG MISTAKE. It claimed to have found a long filename and asked to truncate it. The next thing I knew, I had truncated dozens of filenames while Scandisk merrily turned over 15 Gb. of files and data into a hash of .CHK files with no immediate means of recovery, not after truncations.

Man, I was STUPID. I KNOW from past experience that you should NEVER allow Scandisk to truncate or move data after partition damage recovery. Instead, boot from a second drive OS and copy whatever you can from the damaged drive FIRST.

There is a command for Scandisk /undo, but Scandisk wants to write this procedure to floppy disks. How the hell do you write over 15 Gb. of data changes to a floppy? I'll plead ignorant here.

I downloaded the demo for Ontrack's Easy Recovery Professional. It claims to allow recovery of one file in demo mode and wants $500 for the full version, except all that this fat sucker did was to recover an. avi file that I can already open by myself, and then because the header is possibly corrupt, Windows Media Player throws up a "cannot play" message in front of the very same video clearly playing in the player screen behind the message, so this $500 program cannot even get it right.

And now for the smoking gun. The likely cause of the problem from the start is what M$ labels as " Write Caching". Take a look at the attachment and what it says about enabling "write-caching" and remember, this feature is installed and enabled by default without a prompt. Needless to say, I now have it disabled (Control Panel > System > Hardware > Device Manager > Disk Drives > Policies tab. You are right Phoenixx. M$ is liable for this defective program which eats our data and can destroy our partition tables and master boot records on a power outage.

And again, if you mean to save your data, NEVER allow Scandisk or chkdsk to "Automatically Fix Errors", especially on drives with different OS on them, not even M$ OS. Use the version that came with the OS if at all possible.

 

[mrschultz]

I found the program TESTDISK online and ran the analytical tools. It said the partition table was damaged and found a backup copy. BIG MISTAKE.

So I ran Scandisk. BIG MISTAKE. It claimed to have found a long filename and asked to truncate it. The next thing I knew, I had truncated dozens of filenames while Scandisk merrily turned over 15 Gb. of files and data into a hash of .CHK files with no immediate means of recovery, not after truncations.

Man, I was STUPID. I KNOW from past experience that you should NEVER allow Scandisk to truncate or move data after partition damage recovery. Instead, boot from a second drive OS and copy whatever you can from the damaged drive FIRST.

Ouch, yes, when there is damage to the partition table or file allocation tables the worst thing you can do is let tools automatically try to repair them (especially if you are accessing the drive from a different OS). Although depending on the damage you often have to let some tool do something just so you can see the drive. First thing I usually do is download the appropriate disk testing software from the drive manufacturer, they all have utilities you can run to test the drive to find if there are physical errors.

Next is to try to get the drive mounted as a secondary drive using the same OS, then try to get files off before more damage occurs.

And now for the smoking gun. The likely cause of the problem from the start is what M$ labels as " Write Caching". Take a look at the attachment and what it says about enabling "write-caching" and remember, this feature is installed and enabled by default without a prompt. Needless to say, I now have it disabled (Control Panel > System > Hardware > Device Manager > Disk Drives > Policies tab. You are right Phoenixx. M$ is liable for this defective program which eats our data and can destroy our partition tables and master boot records on a power outage.

Write caching or delayed writing shouldn't cause damage to the partition table, it should only cause damage to the particular file(s) being written to when a power outage occurred. Really bad if it's the registry or some critical OS file.... The partition table doesn't get written to much, but gets read a lot so the heads do travel over those sectors a lot.

 

[Kiaininja]

I had the drive dissapearing act happen before to me. The trick I used that worked for me was to cut off power to the PC for a couple of hours or more. What this does is that it flushes the memory completely that has the corrupted code, which stays in the memory if it's still has some leftover backup power in it. So by shutting down a couple of hours it looses the backup power along with the corrupt code and is able to read the drive freshly again. I learned this from reading tech forums online a long time ago and it seems to almost always work for me.

 

[Meecro Hyperion]

Linux apps, (and please correct me if im wrong), must be either totally open source, or that a publisher that wishes to sell their product must at least offer a free open source version

mrSchulz is right. You can still charge for closed source applications (like games). The GPL license placed on software upon which your code rests only stipulates that any modifications to GPL code be shared with the rest of the community.
So you can copyright your application, even if it requires code released under GPL.
The 'free' concept behind GPL is 'free speech', not 'free beer'. It means that If I want to share my code with the world and not copyright it, there is a legal framework to stop others copyrighting my work in the absence of my claim. So to stop that, I invoke GPL, and if anyone improves, adds, optimises, modifies my code then by law those changes must be released back into the community.
I worked on a computer voting project and we used Linux because the voting server and booths had to stay up (we had 1/8 of the server drives die the first year - another story), but the machines stayed up. We were paid $200,000 (cheeeeeeeap) to develop and test the system.
The customer (electoral commission) wanted to publish the code on their website for outside scrutiny, but agreed that we would retain copyright, so we used a modified two-tiered GPL license, stating that the code could be released but not sold.
This type of license slows development, though, because it discourages others from improving or adding to the codebase, and is not in the true spirit of GPL.

But you can still charge as much as the market will bear for any software product which runs on any platform. The incentive is the installed user base of that platform........

I'm going to try VMWare and/or virtual box and try to install XP on it, so if XP commits suicide it can't simultaneously murder Linux(which it did in March - leading to a complete reinstall of both OS's and the loss of a weekend). I want to be able to run 2 pieces of irreplaceable windows-based software (VP and canon CD Label Print).

About the end of April I was running XP and noticed that XP did not list my other drive.
So I shut down and adjusted the IDE ribbons. This brought my 98SE drive online in XP, but then I was unable to open it in XP.

So, I tried booting the troubled drive in 98SE and the system could not boot. I then ran a floppy boot and used fdisk /mbr and A: sys C:. This allowed the 98SE drive to boot, but then I could not open any of my personal or media files.

Yeah - what is WITH that? In XP, my 500G SATA drive was C (boot) and my old 80G IDE was D. In repair mode, the IDE was C, and SATA D..... Seriously screwed up.
I tried to get into the hidden repair mode which you can access after choosing to install after booting the install disk, but the installer couldn't detect my SATA drive windows installation and since it was an upgrade (from the IDE installation which I have since reformatted) told me I wasn't eligible to install (or enter the hidden repair mode)!!!!! That's what pushed me completely over the edge. I can still mount the windows partition under Linux and ALL the files are there, the MBR is clean, chkdsk reports no problems but the boot gets stuck on trying to load 'mup.sys' in normal or safe mode. It doesn't freeze up in normal mode but the little blue bar just circulates endlessly. It's some networking component which I don't need but the registry wants it to load....

The trick I used that worked for me was to cut off power to the PC for a couple of hours or more

eventually I hard-reset and boot into linux. If that doesn't flush the memory I don't know what would :)

10 years MAX, Microsoft - and you'd better hope X-box sales keep rising.....

 

[Joe]

It's too bad that apple locks mac osx to it's over priced and limited hardware choice.

There are hacks but the each update that apple puts out can make them not work.

 

[Meecro Hyperion]

yeah, macs are pricey....
What I like about linux is you can run it on pretty much any hardware out there. Sony actually modified the PS3 chips to aid linux execution. People string them together and make supercomputers out of them. With 128 microprocessors apiece that adds up fairly quickly.
And for regular multi-core PC's, there's a standard kernel to get the most out of them (the xen project) that comes with most distributions.

Anyway, still haven't tried virtual box to emulate XP inside Linux yet - will report.

 

[Shadow]

90% of EVERYTHING is shit, mate . . .

. . .Sturgeon's Law train:

 

[Meecro Hyperion]

90% of EVERYTHING is shit, mate . . .

true, except shit.

Got XP running in an emulator (virtual box) under Linux. Yet to try VP. Will report.

 

[Meecro Hyperion]

VP works in VirtualBox 'Guest' XP hosted by Linux

Well I've (almost) completely banished microsoft from my machine and guess what - I can still play pinball! :)
I installed Sun's VirtualBox from

http://www.virtualbox.org/

and installed XP as a 'guest' OS inside a tightly restricted sandbox. Everything just works - even activated the guest OS over the net through the Linux connection.

There is a performance hit but my machine is 4 years old. A better box would fix this, I suspect.

I only use XP now to produce CD labels and run VP and friends....