Vista and Operating Systems

[KevinStecyk]

Hi Noel, I am glad that we are able to exchange views with keeping the in a humorous light. Neither of us is getting too worked up over this thing.

Originally Posted by Noel_Carboni

Your points are well-taken.

Thank you. My observations are prima facie evidence that Vista is severely flawed.

Originally Posted by Noel_Carboni

Microsoft is moving Windows 7 precisely in the direction of an "operating system for the masses".

Wasn't Windows 3 was evidence of moving in that direction? And that was in reaction to the Mac. The old line entry DOS system was rather user unfriendly. They've been at this thing for a while Noel. This ain't a new strategic thrust by Microsoft.

Originally Posted by Noel_Carboni

In doing so they are beginning to forget that a computer operating system needs to be an operating system for a computer, and making it into more of an "entertainment system", all the while actually LOSING features that people who know computers and need a real computer operating system rely upon. Try to determine the time a file was changed down to the second, for example.

Can't Macs do that? I honestly don't know the answer. But it seems to me that Macs are used for serious scientific and business applications, so they should qualify as an operating system. Yet, they also appear to be much easier to use by the masses.

Originally Posted by Noel_Carboni

They actually started on this path with Vista, but it's been possible to outfit Vista with enough extra software (and tweaks to the config) to make it serious.

The real problem here is that a computer is a complex and powerful device, and simply ISN'T an appliance. No matter how much you want the world to be simpler, it simply will not be.

To you and I and many others, we regard computers are these wondrous technical marvels that allow us to do many fascinating things. We (and you still might?) used to buy magazines just to view the advertisements to see what is upcoming and new. We reveled in learning how to work with new software programs. We thought we were on the cutting edge when we got our Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect programs with their huge cardbox boxes and detailed instructions. Young kids--who have no respect--now don't care anymore about all that stuff. To them, using a computer is like opening the fridge. If the food is warm when the fridge is opened, something must be wrong with the darn fridge. They don't last forever, you know. And similarly with PCs, they just expect them to work.

Most people today are not interested in the latest specifications for computers and its various settings. They just want to plug it, turn it on, and use it. They accept that occasionally software will need to be updated or upgraded or upsomething. But they have no desire to ferret out obscure settings and commands.

Let me give you a good example of an actual frustrating moment a friend and colleague experienced this past week before heading to Africa. He received a document by email that he spent copious hours working on. He saved it. Unfortunately, he didn't save it to his documents folder, but rather he saved it to his Outlook temporary folder. He had no clue on how to find his Outlook temporary folder and was getting frantic about retrieving this document. Time was ticking.

According to various websites, he had look at the registry to find the actual path to his temporary folder.

Attachments remain in the Outlook Secure Temporary File folder when you exit Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007

So rather than digging in his registry, I had him try three things first:

1) Did he have Google Desktop? If so, try searching for a folder called content?

2) Try Opening another attachment in his email inbox and do a Save-As. Don't save anything, just look at the directory where the document is going to be saved.

3) Find his "Temporaray Internet Files" directory and then append the magic phrase "\Content.Outlook\" to the file browser. Often that will reveal the hidden Outlook folder.

....Temporary Internet Files\Content.Outlook\

His results: 1) Like me, he doesn't have Google Desktop; 2) Didn't work because his Save As commands saved to his My Documents; 3) Worked like a charm.

Why the temporary Outlook Folder even hidden? And why can't the average user find it easily without being instructed to look at registry settings?

And this is real example from this past week.

Originally Posted by Noel_Carboni

You clearly have the desire to have your operating system work well or you wouldn't be posting here.

No. It's only because it is so bothersome and irritating that it draws unwanted and unnecessary attention.

Originally Posted by Noel_Carboni

I may not seem to have a life, but I surely don't spend the time I do have installing and reinstalling my operating system, and the time I spend keeping it well tuned is negligible. It just works.

Yes, for Jane Average, the time and effort required to get to your level of proficiency to tune her pc to where it just works would be formidable.

Originally Posted by Noel_Carboni

Ever hear this phrase? "Work smarter, not harder."

Yes, and I am employing that now. I can go from a pc is screwed up to a prior state when it did work in less than an hour. With my mirrored images, I can go back to when it did work. And like Martin, I plan to do a complete rebuild every twelve months. That is, wipe the hard drive and start fresh. I love the feeling of a new pc. This, to me, is the most efficient use of my time. But even these series of steps is onerous for the average computer user. All users should have their data backed up. But to expect people to know how to partition their hard drives to separate their data and software, and then employ a back-up strategy to mirror partitions and backup data is asking too much.

Originally Posted by Noel_Carboni

Take the time to even do the very first thing I mentioned (setting IE to avoid running everything in sight) and it will bring you a long way toward giving you back that time.

I rarely use IE. I much prefer Firefox.

Microsoft still has a long ways to go. It's lost its focus.

Even in the phone wars, it's doing a poor job. Windows Mobile has been out for how long? Along comes Google Droid and, once again, Microsoft is having to play catchup--even in this case where it has had a product out for much longer.

[Jerry Skrocki]

Operating systems should run flawlessly in the background so you can concentrate on the application at hand.

I don't want to be concerned with tweaking my system for optimal performance or worry about viruses, I just want it to work.

Aside from that, the interface is a matter of personal preference and I find that Mac OSX is designed to my liking with minimalist style and intuitive graphic actions.

[Noel_Carboni]

It occurred to me I might have accidentally insulted Mac users backhandedly. Let me assure you that wasn't my intention.

Whatever system you like, that's your choice! More power to you. My top software engineer - a BRILLIANT man - prefers Macintosh, and runs Windows in a Virtual Machine so as to be able to develop Windows software with me. Meanwhile, I do the converse to develop Mac software. It's a mixed-up world.

It's good that we have choices. Without them things undoubtedly will get worse.

Speaking of which, I'd imagine Microsoft is sweating a bit about antitrust issues now... Obama isn't so pro-business as Bush was.

-Noel

[drew]

Originally Posted by Noel_Carboni

It's good that we have choices. Without them things undoubtedly will get worse.
-Noel

For sure.

I haven't read all the entries here, but I can see both sides of the "argument." Such, as it is.

It should just work. Whatever "it" is.

The thing is none of them work all the time. Some are better than others. But, they all break.

I probably spend more time tinkering with the linux box (8 core Xeon) that this site runs on, than I do anything else. I can't even recall what distro we're on right now. But, I can tell you that linux, or unix for that matter ain't no security panacea. I finally gave up and now pay for some security experts to harden the system every month. You should see the number of updates they have to perform every month just to keep things up to snuff.

I have had very little trouble out of Vista 64 or 7 64. Macs are cool too. But, I'm a tinkerer by nature, and I just don't like being hemmed in by the paltry number of hardware choices offered by Apple. I also don't like overpaying for outdated hardware. I have been running a core i7 for almost a year now with win7. Absolutely love this box. Running at 3.8 ghz rock solid with a 2 minute bios tweak, on air. Where is core i7 on mac, oh yeah, finally announced in a closed box that is difficult to upgrade and overpriced, forget about overclocking.

Now, the iphone, well I love that little gadget. But, I have had my share of issues with that device, as well. Computers ain't nothin but a bunch of dumb 1 and 0 number crunching machines that we humans provide the patterns for. Guess what, we humans screw up. A lot. The ones at Apple probably screw up about as much as the ones at Microsoft. Apple has just seriously limited the number of variables it has to account for.

A wise decision, maybe. Depends on your goals I guess.

[Noel_Carboni]

Well said.

If you think about it, way back in, say, the '80s the early versions of Windows might run a few hours under load without crashing or needing a reboot. Indeed, they built the requirement to reboot right into the system (before NT they didn't think there needed to be a deallocate for every allocate; just use up the resources - the computer will be shut off at night and rebooted in the morning). Let's say that system booted up in 3 minutes and maybe they planned on a 12 hour workday.

Okay, let's also say for the sake of comparison that the PC system I am describing ran at a whopping 10 MHz. Note that I'm not talking about the earliest PCs; this was a fairly advanced system. Middle-late '80s vintage.

Now let's fast forward to today. Say a modern system runs at, say, 4,000 MHz with, say, 4 cores. That's something like 2,000 times as many instructions being executed per second as on that old PC I described earlier.

So...

If the very same software from yesteryear were to be run on a modern system, you might expect the system to boot up in ::: 0.06 seconds ::: and run for all of ::: a whole 21 seconds ::: before needing a reboot.

Put another way, if a modern computer runs for 2 days straight without crashing (quite common), that would be the equivalent of an '80s computer running solidly for over a decade.

We've come a long way, baby, on all fronts.

-Noel

[Noel_Carboni]

By the way, don't kid yourself. All hype aside, across the world Windows is FAR more popular than OSX (by something like 10 to 1), and so it is a much more attractive target for malware writers. One payoff to being in the minority is Apple users get overlooked by the creators of badware.

Justin Long ("I'm a Mac") and John Hodgman ("I'm a PC") might try to lead you to believe the Apple is inherently better and more secure, and it clearly is in some ways - and less in others, but the simple truth is it simply isn't being hammered as hard by the world.

-Noel

[KevinStecyk]

Originally Posted by Noel_Carboni

Put another way, if a modern computer runs for 2 days straight without crashing (quite common), that would be the equivalent of an '80s computer running solidly for over a decade.

We've come a long way, baby, on all fronts.

Noel, baby, you missed your calling--you shoulda been a spin doctor for one of the political actors. Just goes to prove, if you torture numbers long and hard enough, with a bit of water boarding thrown in, they'll confess to anything.