On 10/1/06, Randy Edwards <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The first thing that hit me when I booted XP was how bad the initial
Windows graphic is. It sucks. It's grainy and shitty looking!
This is probably the Acer laptop. The XP logo boot graphic is
displayed in 640x480 on in a VESA standard mode. It looks okay on a
CRT. But on any LCD made in the past ten years, it's going to have to
interpolate ("stretch") the image to the native resolution of the LCD
(LCDs really only run at a single resolution; anything else has to be
transformed to fit that native resolution). I've noticed that the
quality of the interpolation varies quite a bit from vendor to vendor.
Com'on, this isn't the video hardware.
Err, yah, it is.
I was amazed that despite me owning a legal copy of XP there was no way I
could generate a Windows CD/DVD.
That's Acer's fault. While Microsoft supposedly "encourages"
distributing a system image, I've had no trouble getting "vanilla" Win
XP CDs from either Dell or some local OEMs. With Gateway, this was a
big hassle, and is one of the many small reasons that added up to
"Don't buy from Gateway" for me.
Why do people put up with such abuse?
I don't. See above about Gateway vs Dell. I guess you do, though,
since you bought an Acer. :-)
Instead, I opted for Acer's system backup routine. That worked to create a
DVD image of the machine, but it includes all of Acer's software and the
install options aren't as flexible as they should be.
That's one of the reasons I always do a clean install of the
"vanilla" Windows CD. At work, I've got this setup with RIS
(Microsoft's Remote Installation Services) so all I have to do is hit
F12 during POST, it will boot off the network, and automatically
install our standard Windows image with all our local customizations.
Believe it or not, Acer includes the "wrong" video driver with this
machine!
And this is the fault of Windows?
And reboot?!?! Every time I watched the BIOS count its memory on a reboot,
I had an immediate, strong memory: THIS WAS WHY I HATED WINDOWS 95!
There are still *way* too many reboots with Windows.
A lot of this is "forced" by third-party companies (ISVs, or
Independent Software Vendors, in Microsoft terminology). Rather than
do anything right (like figure out how to start a service, or write a
proper driver, or even just know if they need a reboot), they just
reboot whenever they feel like it. Grrr.
Microsoft is *far* from innocent in this department, though. They
still need a reboot for most Internet Explorer updates, which is
nothing short of ridiculous. It's a freaking web browser, for crying
out loud. Even with the shell integration, they should be able to
just restart the shell. Grrr.
There's also plenty of other Microsoft stuff that gets updated and
leads to a reboot that should really be a service restart. For
example, anything that on Linux would mean restarting Samba usually
needs a reboot on 'doze.
From everything I've read, most of Microsoft still doesn't get this.
They talk about trying to "bring the system to a safe place" to do
file replacement without a reboot, but don't know what it should be.
Apparently nobody's told them about "single user mode". The idea
that, hey, maybe file sharing shouldn't be integrated into the kernel
is overruled in favor of increased performance. (Of course, we've got
knfsd on Linux, so I guess that's a popular argument, but it's far
less common on 'nix.)
Updating Windows itself was a dream in comparison. Windows Update almost
has the functionality of apt-get or Linspire's Click-N-Run.
Or urpmi, or yum, or up2date, or yast, or... Pretty much everybody
figured this out years ago.
WHAT THE F**K?! Doesn't .NET 2.0 provide .NET 1.1's functionality?
That is hardly unique to Windows. I've got many different versions
of many libraries and frameworks installs on all my Linux boxes,
including the Debian "etch" system I'm running as I write this.
KDE/Qt and GTK/GNOME are particularly good at this. It appears Python
is, too -- I've seen multiple versions of Python installed on my
system for awhile, now.
Why didn't the system tell me that removing a "dependency" would hose eRecovery.
This is another area Microsoft loses. Dependency management, or
indeed, any kind of package management that goes outside of the
package currently being installed. I cannot tell you how many times
I've wanted to be able to do "rpm --verify --all" on 'doze, but that
is simple not a concept anyone entertains. A big part of the problem
is they've got 15 years of (lack of) design weighing them down.
There's nothing at all like a standard for any of this on 'doze.
Software installation is a crap shoot. This is one of the reasons
change management is *critical* on Windoze systems. Installing a new
version of a file copy utility might update a system DLL that breaks
your Exchange server. Great design, that. The problems can be
overcome with careful attention to detail, but it raises the cost of
administration (part of that "TCO" value that Microsoft likes to fling
around with abandon) significantly.
Supposedly, .NET is/was going to fix all that, but it has yet to
materialize. The fact that you've discovered that fact when dealing
with the .NET runtime itself is particularly ironic.
To set the MTU -- obviously a techie thing, but not unheard of -- you have
to fire up the Registry Editor.
A'yup. "GUI" doesn't mean automatic, or easy, or obvious, or
documented, or any of those other things that people seem to think it
does. Computers are enormously complicated, and I don't see that
complexity being addressed in anything like a rational manner. As
long as that is the case, computer administration will be the domain
of experts only.
It took 10 times longer than Debian's method of editing /etc/network/interfaces
and adding "mtu 1452" with a text editor.
That's just because you already knew what to do for Debian. Someone
coming from 'doze would have the same problem on 'nix. Hell, someone
coming fresh from a Red Hat background wouldn't know to look there
(Red Hat puts network config under /etc/sysconfig/net*).
I've noticed that when people say "intuitive" or "easy", what they
really mean is "what I'm used to".
I doubt that is from the Acer or Microsoft best practices manual, but WTF?!
After all, I'm a legal Microsoft Windows XP Home edition licensee ...
I find your some of your conclusions rather illogical.
Not that long ago, I encountered some really horrible accounting/ERP
software that ran on Linux. It needed a config file for each
"terminal" it ran on -- which is real fun when you're using SSH! The
software provider also recommended just having everyone run it as
root, since that eliminated problems with permissions and ownership.
I'm a legal Debian licensee, so I guess I should blame the above on
Debian, right?
-- Ben
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