[Dixonary] OT: It's an Operating System about Nothing

[toni@tonisavage.com]

Headline: Microsoft Pays Seinfeld $10M to Push Vista


http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2328546,00.asp

[Judy G. Russell]

Headline: Microsoft Pays Seinfeld $10M to Push Vista


http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2328546,00.asp

Amazing, isn't it? Just think: if they put that $10M into developing a sleek, secure, workable operating system...

[Daniel B. Widdis]

TS> if they put that $10M into developing a
TS> sleek, secure, workable operating system...

Vista actually is all that. It just fails miserably on the biggest test of
any software product: backwards compatibility (including lots of hardware).

I'm still holding off on a new computer purchase. And might get a Mac when
I do. (Hey, if I have to get new hardware and software, might as well get
the best, right?)

--
Dan

[earler]

Vista shouldn't be installed on old hardware, though it can be on recent stuff. As for software, there is no problem of compatibility as long as the developer followed the rules laid down for creating applications. All developers had a couple of years to make any changes required. Most did. Some like hewlett packard didn't.

[Judy G. Russell]

I'm still holding off on a new computer purchase. And might get a Mac when I do. (Hey, if I have to get new hardware and software, might as well get the best, right?)

I'm going to have to pull the trigger soon on a new computer but at the moment have no reason not to stay with XP Pro. (I bought a retail box version before the June 30 deadline so I can do just that.)

[Paul Keating]

But they weren't rules to begin with, only conventions, and at least
in 1995 it was not at all obvious that they were sensible conventions.
In fact, quite the opposite. "Program Files" seemed a feeble-minded
notion: I don't look in a book index and expect to find entries for
"pages" or "chapters", so why should a computer, whose job it is to
execute programs, have a folder called "Programs"? Putting documents
in the hard-to-find and preciously-named "My Documents" on the C:
drive was (in 1995) just plain wrong, because there were limits to how
big a C: partition could be, so savvy users conserved that space for
things that absolutely had to go there.

As for having "a couple of years to make any changes required": the
way you say that suggests that those changes were just little tweaks
here and there. But they weren't: they could overturn fundamental
design decisions, and they had to have different implementations on 9x
and XP. That was a very good reason not to do it.

On Aug 22, 9:47 pm, earler <e... (AT) compuserve (DOT) com> wrote:
> As for software, there is no problem of compatibility as long as
> the developer followed the rules

[Wayne Scott, MD]

I did exactly the same thing. I found a Toshiba laptop with XPPro.
Wayne

[JohnnyB]

Erler

Software can be a problem. Those of us who have been developing for years -
from before Windows --tried very hard to follow all the rules that MS were
demanding - so our products got filled up with *** when MS changed the rules
time after time. Or worse, casually removed something they said was fixed. I
can give you example after example. We still operate happily on XP but no
longer operate on Vista.

After 14 years of following the rules we decided instead to make something
that will operate on any platform - but that something cost 5 years of
development and is totally new. Our old and trusted product has had to be
abandoned - sorry, to be accurate, it remains on sale for those who cannot
follow the hardware quest that Vista imposes.

I know all the so called reasons , I too have read Joel Spoelsky. I too do
not believe that MS are actually being helpful when they issue (under legal
duress) a 700+ page document that purports to be the file-spec for Word.

JohnnyB

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dixonary (AT) googlegroups (DOT) com
> [mailto:Dixonary (AT) googlegroups (DOT) com] On Behalf Of earler
> Sent: Friday, August 22, 2008 8:48 PM
> To: Dixonary (AT) googlegroups (DOT) com
> Subject: [Dixonary] Re: OT: It's an Operating System about Nothing
>
>
>
> Vista shouldn't be installed on old hardware, though it can
> be on recent stuff. As for software, there is no problem of
> compatibility as long as the developer followed the rules
> laid down for creating applications.
> All developers had a couple of years to make any changes
> required. Most did. Some like hewlett packard didn't.
>
>
> --
> earler
>
> asdffdas
> sads-er
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> Date: 22/08/2008 06:48
>

[Daniel B. Widdis]

E> All developers had a couple of
E> years to make any changes required.

That sounds all well and good for developers, but as a consumer, I'm stuck
in the middle. I teach a course using a very specific simulation software
that my students must install on their (varied) laptops. It works great
under Win98 and XP, and has for years. It doesn't on Vista.

I can wave my fist at the software company all I want, and receive
assurances that the next version out next year will be Vista compatible, but
in the meantime I'm stuck with students borrowing laptops from their friends
just to do my coursework. They can't even go out and buy a new machine for
the course now with XP (unless they get the bargain basement flavor.)

--
Dan

[earler]

Blame the developer. He had the time but was lazy or stupid, or both.

[Tim B]

> After 14 years of following the rules we decided instead to make something
> that will operate on any platform - but that something cost 5 years of
> development and is totally new. Our old and trusted product has had to be
> abandoned - sorry, to be accurate, it remains on sale for those who cannot
> follow the hardware quest that Vista imposes.

Yes, it's a very difficult life, being a software developer. I have a
range of around 150 programs, loosely described as games, that have been
coming onto the market since 1986. When we started the only
environment available was plain DOS, though given the home computers
available in those days, we were platform-independent to the extent that
they could also run on the Atari ST and the Commodore Amiga.

The cost of converting all of those to be Windows applications is simply
prohibitive. They're still on the market, and customers still buy them.
To run them on Vista, we need a "proper" DOS environment, which MS no
longer choose to provide, but DOSBox does the job adequately.

We probably will begin producing Windows applications within the next
year or so, but it's taken a colleague the best part of a year to
develop a way of doing so that will bring the cost down to something we
can afford.

Best wishes,
Tim B.

[Paul Keating]

Don't blame the developer. MS _still_ doesn't have a development
environment for Vista that actually runs under Vista without having to
use backward-compatibility mode ("run as administrator"). If that's ok
for MS, how come us developers are the villains?

On Aug 23, 10:00 am, earler <e... (AT) compuserve (DOT) com> wrote:
> Blame the developer. He had the time but was lazy or stupid, or both.

[JohnnyB]

Earler

Not sure about "blame the developer". I started writing examples but this is
not the place

Basically over the lifetime of Windows MS have continually misled software
developers, said things would be there that weren't when windows eventually
shipped (often years late) and without warning removed things from shipped
windows that had been there in late Beta. The result is that even for the
so-called "trusted developer" MS always has a headstart. They do not worry
about backward compatibility because they so dominate the market. We have to
worry about such things.

JohnnyB

[earler]

Worse with apple, which has issued new opsyses without backward compatibility for older applications.