PDP-8/L value

Dave McGuire wrote: Is it really? I guess I just don't understand why the discussion keeps popping up seemingly out of nowhere all the time. (This topic started on a discussion of the value of a PDP 8/L.) Usability is subjective, and people tend to like what they're accustomed to, so it does seem more like a religious argument there. I've had no stability problems with my Windows machines in years, aside Labs). Then again, I don't administrate high-load servers so I can't comment from the trenches there. There are lots of smart developers at Microsoft. Never underestimate the ability of management to screw with the ideals of developers. (I have had some *really good* managers in my time, but these are offset by the *really bad* ones...) If you're truly needing to reinstall Windows at all often, you're doing something wrong. (Unless it's Windows 95, in which case keep at it, I guess.) I know, old history, but the Morris worm infected what OSes? Written by what smart people? Viruses will always exist as long as humans are writing operating systems and software -- people do make mistakes and buffers get overrun or information gets leaked. Microsoft unfortunately does not have a good track record here (they did not learn from history), and I'm not going to attempt to candy coat it. We do try to make things better, I think for the most part we are heading in the right direction. We still have far to go. Windows 7 runs users as unprivileged by default (about time) and Internet Explorer 7/8 actually runs at even lower privilege than that (it does not have permissions to write to the filesystem or registry except in blessed locations, etc...) so even browser plugins that are vectors can't do any damage (other than possibly crashing the browser process.) (Not that this excuses Windows. Why all user accounts until the middle of this decade were in the Administrators group is beyond me. Well, I can guess -- most software pre-NT assumed a user could do anything since it wasn't written for a networked, multi-user system. Management decreed "thou must be backwards compatible" and so *poof* every user has to be able to do everything. And as a result, most Windows software is written to assume it can do anything (and thus *has* to run as an Admin).) The scarier thing I think, is that a lot of viruses (such as they are) these days are actually trojans or social engineering rather than code exploits. Where I used to work, people would get e-mail attachments -- in *password encrypted* ZIP files with instructions on how to unzip the files and install them -- that contained spyware. Meaning it required real work to get yourself infected. Despite the difficulty of the installation, despite us telling people constantly not to open them, not to run the program, to just delete the mails, we still had to clean peoples' machines constantly. (We eventually got better mail filtering software.) The number of true virus attack vectors (faulty APIs, etc...) in Windows is dwindling, but the social aspect is what is worrisome, and affects every OS as long as it gives unwary users enough rope to shoot themselves in the foot with. (i.e. a mail that asks the user "To see nekkid girls, type "su" at the prompt, type your Ubuntu administrator password, then type chmod u+x "naked-girls-not-really-a-security-exploit.sh" ...) Vista was damned slow. (I'm sorry.) Windows XP or 7 runs snappily on my underpowered netbook. (I know, it's no 486, but then, Solaris doesn't run well on that either :)). Best of luck. Sorry for your pain. Hope none of it is my fault :). (Also sorry for derailing this thread further. If anyone wants to discuss, feel free to mail me offlist...) - Josh