What a silly subject line (was: The redundancy of Dave McGuire)

On Jan 10, 2012, at 6:19 AM, Liam Proven wrote: I'll second that; for all its warts, modern Windows does tend to be reliable for me. Third-party drivers, of course, are a mixed bag and have been the cause of 100% of the bluescreens I've gotten since moving to Windows 7 on my PC (that's still only 2, for the record, about 1 per year). It's also come a long way under the hood; having written a PCI device driver somewhat recently, I can say with confidence that the driver frameworks are pretty evolved and relatively easy to work with. Of course, I don't like pretty much anything that comes with the Windows user experience. - It's ridiculous that I have to write a .ini file for a driver just to install and find the magical incantations somewhere in Microsoft's mountain of poor documentation while I try to worm out what the obtuse error messages mean. - It's patently absurd that Windows 7 64-bit won't let me develop my own drivers without having to put the system in a special mode that disables some media playback because I just might be loading a driver to capture DVD output. - The registry is just abuse. Yes, we could debate endlessly about how bad text files are in comparison. No, it's not going to change my mind. - Whoever decided that Windows Update should forcibly restart the machine, no matter what is going on, after silently installing an update and giving you 2 minutes to respond should be shot (thankfully, that feature is gone now). But none of these things reflect on the reliability of the system itself, and I'll at least throw a bone Redmond's way on that one. Now, of course, if you want to talk security, they've still got things to answer for. But the security threats for other major systems are beginning to approach those for Windows these days, and I'm not certain that a lot of the remaining difference can't be explained by the larger installed base and thus target value of Windows. - Dave