10 Jan
2012
10 Jan
'12
3:15 p.m.
On 10 January 2012 14:44, David Riley <fraveydank at gmail.com> wrote:
On Jan 10, 2012, at 6:19 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
Indeed. And on servers, of course, you would generally avoid all the
fancy drivers for consumer-end stuff like 3D cards, so this is not an
issue.
On Jan 10, 2012 6:55 AM, "Mouse"
<mouse at rodents-montreal.org> 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).
If you are unable to distinguish between not reflexively bashing
Windows based on out-of-date perceptions of it and being a Windows
fanboy...well, then, I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but in
that case you deserve at least some of the epithets thrown your way.
Not that I like Windows. ?I don't. ?It's a horrible, horrible OS in
multiple respects for almost every purpose I care about.
What he said!
I dislike Windows myself these days & try to avoid it. I can use it,
support it & work with it if I have to, but I won't if I don't have too our
are not being paid to.
Even so, for all its faults, modern versions are highly reliable. 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.
Interesting - I didn't know that.
Of course, I don't like pretty much anything that
comes with the Windows user experience.
There are still a few aspects of Explorer that I prefer to Nautilus,
but Windows 7 is trying very hard to eliminate those, so soon Explorer
will fall to parity.
- 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.
8?) I'll take your word.
- 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.
Really?!
- 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.
Some kind of distributed network-aware database of text files...? :?)
- 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).
Yup.
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.
Yup.
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.
That is the one argument I am still not convinced about, frankly. Even
in Vista & 7, I think the Windows user privileges model has been
comprehensively screwed over and broken by the marketing dept in their
pursuit of something "easy" and "friendly".
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
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Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884