[Thermodyne]

StrategiaInUltima said:
Very true Aiken. Bill Gates, AKA Bill Hellgates AKA Beelzebub Gates.

No but seriously, MS has pulled some nasty tricks on PC users. Fyron summed it up very well; there is just one more thing.[/i]

Actually, my friend Nolan did not sum it up well at all. He repeated the headline rhetoric that is put forth by the nix community, then failed to support his position with an expanded statement. There are many good things happening with nix, the collaborative effort is worth mention, never has something like this occurred in this industry. But IMHO, unless the nix community applies a sustainable business model to their efforts, some large corporation will reap that majority of the profits down the road.

WinME.

It takes all the bugs from Win98 and WinXP and combines them into a pretty much unusable OS.

Win ME is a good system. Sure, it’s not as good as 2K, but it addressed a lot of the problems that remained from Win 95. Problem was that the users did not comprehend the changes, and MS didn’t protect it from unsupported code. MS learned a lot from ME and we cans see these changes in 2K and XP. ME was the first true break from DOS, and as such did not support 16 bit drivers and software not specifically adapted to run in a 32bit environment. So people saw it as the next flavor of 98, and had tons of problems because of drivers and legacy software. How many of you ever bothered to the compatibility lists for ME? From a pure performance standpoint it is the fastest 32bit OS that MS has released to date. Take a look at some of the high end benchmarks that are posted on the net. If you find some guy with a nitrogen cooled CPU putting up marks at 6 or 7 GHz, they are almost always running ME. And until recently, most top video marks were run with ME. This only switched to XP when ME driver support dried up. From personal experience, I have found that ME will do intense work like Seti of Folding at Home faster than 2K or XP. Same hardware, same reference job packets, ME wins every time. The problem with ME was that it allowed the average user to hang him with ease. When they loaded an old Win95 16/32 bit game, it just rolled merrily along until the software called a 16 bit dll, then froze or crashed. Same with drivers, it would allow you to install 16bit Win95 driver with no complaint, the fail to start after the reboot. The problem with Win ME was the failure of MS to realize exactly how much people tinkered with their systems, and their arrogant belief that these same people read directions and compatibility lists.

I still us ME for Win95 upgrades. It’s cheap and runs will on down level hardware with limited memory installed. On an old PII it will out perform 2K by a noticeable margin.

A vast amount of ME problems were caused by users, and today when you try to load that old game on a 2k box, what happens? It won’t let you. When you try to load that old 16 bit sound card driver, what happens? It won’t let you.

So when people say that ME sucks, they are really just stating that ME was too advanced and too user unfriendly for them to use reliably at the time. And if IMHO, MS should have realized this when they beta released it. Whoops, I forgot, they didn’t do that kind of stuff back then, everything was a big secret in the software business during that time. But all things change, now OS’s are beta tested, across several builds before being put on the retail shelf. I think I’m on the 3rd build of beta 64bit Windows now. In the old days they would have released it and then started patching. Things do change for the better.

And for me, being a lifetime Win95/98 user, XP was extremely user-unfriendly..... it was almost like having to re-learn working with the computer from scratch. Take, for instance, sharing a folder; in Win98 you just right-clicked the icon, clicked Share and chose a name for the shared folder, then you're done. When I try to do this in WinXP, it says I have to copy the folder into my PC's SharedDocs folder. WTF?!? I want the folder to simply be shared! Whenever I modify its contents I do NOT want to have to do it twice so that the SharedDocs version is the same as the original!

This just goes to support my post above. Many users resist learning how to use software. And strongly resist adapting to new versions. The problem you are having with shares results from the need to balance security against ease of use(mentioned earlier) and can be altered with ease.

Microsoft is the worst thing that EVER happened to this planet next to Homo sapiens sapiens.

Bold statement! I would hope that it was made in jest. If not, then I think a few hunderd words to expand on the statement would be in order. Some of you guys should use a UNIX terminal for a few weeks. Or try to do some email ala compaq AS300. Before Windows, the average person could not use a computer. I recall this state of the art 8088 we had and there was a huge book chained to the desk. The DEC tech couldn't even run it without looking up command strings. Oh it worked well, never crashed. But it would only do about 16 things and only 1 at a time. That was life before MS.