Windows 7 in contrast to Windows 1.0 is quite awesome

[Kintaro]

In all my life I have known one thing: stupid people do dumb things and reach dumb conclusions.

Yet it is when the smartest and brightest become so clenched to their ideas that they start ignoring one simple law: nothing is permanent and everything constantly changes. Microsoft as an organization has been through some of the weirdest patches of stupidity. There was Windows 95/98's complete lack of memory protection that became the standard for applications while Windows NT sat in the sidelines of 'corporate use' and it is true: Windows NT is fucking rock solid in terms of stability. By the time Microsoft got it out there as Windows XP it still suffered from the same stack protection issues and Microsoft in a grand 'FUCK YOU' to its stockholders left this alone, and didn't badger its users enough about updates so that hoards of botnets and spam plagued the Internet. Some thought Microsoft should be punished for this, yet I believe those shareholders had been punished enough.

With Service Pack 2 they brought in Stack Protection but idiots were allowed to keep running SP1, and your inbox was the greatest victim.

Yet one crew over in Redmond are always wonderful, their marketing. They managed to sell people a broken Celeron architecture that due to their complete cheap-bastardness on code auditing become a toy filled with hacks and the game publishers they assured would be fine got their products pirated to oblivion.

I could go on forever about the history of an entity, yet today I swear by Windows 7. This is my Windows, there are many like it but this one is mine. Without me my Windows is useless. Without Windows I am useless, and so on. At the moment I have running a few explorer Windows, Opera, Live Messenger, Microsoft Outlook, Pidgin, Powershell, an X server with a bunch of applications coming over good old SSH X11 forwarding, Vuze, Steam, and good old Notepad where sits a poem in the midst of being written.

Powershell is so neat that ls, mv, cp, etc are its short commands aliased to Microsofts silly non-abbreviated format, which isn't so silly when you see the command list is long as hell. I can use RPC to power down computers across the domain with the familiar 'shutdown' and the whole thing is object oriented so it looks like for bash to get up to speed it needs to be "bourne" once again.

I currently use no swap, and am yet for the system to load like its hell, and 8GB of ram is awfully cheap these days.

Personally, I think Microsoft have done an excellent job, and unlike the old days only a complete drooling moron who hates choices puts up with Internet Explorer 8.0, and I admit, that division needs the shit kicked out of it. Microsoft Office 7 is beautiful, and fast.

There is much to bitch about however, for some reason I get BSOD's once in a blue moon and because I have so much memory windows decides to cache A LOT OF SHIT and when it reboots all is lost. Maybe they need a dumpfile archaeologist to restore it from the memory image saved in the BSOD process, I dunno.

Also, its network manager kicks the flying shit out of that disaster NetworkManager which just seems like stepping back in time.

[Calum]

when it reboots? does it do it by its own choice?

also, how much does ms windows cost, and what about their deliberate continuing attempts to break standards (the recent rash of inaccessible ms office formats for instance).

I'm a PC, and I'm Fawlty.

Don't get me wrong, linux OSs seem to have lost the will to live in recent years, so they've finally become true windows replacements (ie: mediocrity personified), and i'll say this now, i haven't tried windows 7 and have no plans to. Also, the CLI sounds great, compared with everything i have heard of from MS on that front before, including MS DOS.

Anyway, i make no apology for naysaying windows on an anti-microsoft forum, but i'm glad you have something that works for you.

[Kintaro]

I believe you made a spelling mistake, Windows MAKES the standards, and once upon a time when UNIX meant something it did, and so on. What standards are you talking about anyway? Everything programmers use on Windows that matters, started with Microsoft. I don't code on Windows myself.

Also, regarding price, you get what you pay for. If you really want a system that has such a basic audio subsystem like pulseaudio, you get other users audio playing through your speakers.

Facebook often spits out non-standard HTML, and everyone deals with it.

Unless these standards are instituted by the coercive hands of the state, there is no real official 'standard' anyway.

Microsoft don't adopt many other standards these days simply because in the past, they have always had to expand upon them.

Enjoy your lack of ACLs in the 21st century anyway, it must be nice over there in the 70s. I am yet to see a Linux distribution that brings ACLs in a meaningful way to the user.

Also, enjoy avoiding Windows 7, it must be great fearing progress. At least you aren't like my cousin, who is still yet to even use the Internet.

Running older versions of Windows due to security problems like botnets is socially irresponsible.

[Calum]

sorry but you're a wanker.

i am not crusading for linux, i am not crusading against windows, however i will stand by my opinion that microsoft continuously stifle innovation in their own company, but more importantly in the software arena generally, because their marketing model tells them they can make more money this way by fucking everything up and claiming to have the solution than by truly coming up with new uses for technology.

so, once again you have misread what my position is. basically if ms windows does the job for you, fine, i have worse problems than you seem to be aware of with many linux distros. i wouldn't recommend any of the top five most popular linuces to anybody, on the basis of my own experience, but i also don't like pirated software, and i can't afford to pay for ms windows (and i wouldn't give my money to MS anyway, considering their history).

But carry on responding to a position i don't hold if you like.

[Kintaro]

I think you have misread my own position. I simply dispute that standards come out of thin air, they come out of being applied.

What do you run anyway?

[piratePenguin]

Ubuntu serves it's purpose quite remarkably.

Ubuntu is an operating system built by a worldwide team of expert developers. It contains all the applications you need: a web browser, office suite, media apps, instant messaging and much more.

Ubuntu is an open-source alternative to Windows and Office.

That is all I want on my computer. Which is now, full-time (laptop gone), my old '03/04-built computer, 250meg ram (obv should be 128*2), and god knows what other concoction of shit. It's running quite fucking substantially let me tell you.

Windows may be "good", but that's not the point. The point is I don't need it, and almost all of us don't need it. Which means, actually, Microsoft need not have a percentage of the control it does have. But why would the world "settle" for freedom? Especially when the people who understand the issues, Are Windows Users.

I'm happier to do my work in a system that does it's job, does it well, and where noone is trying to strangle me for good business. That's why Microsoft could never replace Ubuntu on my computer. Same applies to Apple. I DONT GIVE A SHIT ABOUT POWERSHELL

[Kintaro]

, Ubuntu 9.10 refuses to work (i don't even get a GUI) on my old fglrx card, it once worked with 8.04 on that machine, but that doesn't work either. Eventually I learned Ubuntu is a piece of shit and put Debian on there. It is just a spare computer, but it was easier to just get debian, and build the ATI kernel module myself. Also, despite Ubuntu calling itself a desktop OS the last time I checked it uses server premeption in the server build (bye bye FPS) and a really gay 250hz timer freqency that should also only be used on servers.

The Ubuntu guys don't even seem to understand the complexities of the Linux kernel. With my modifications to the debian kernel including the downstream patches my system runs a fuckload faster. The people who use it could testify that.

Go have a look for those options yourself under processor type and features > premption model and you will find it set to miserable old "Desktop", move it to Low-Latency Desktop. Still under processor type and features you will see TIMER FREQENCY, set it to 1000hz. To test the before and after, move your mouse wheel up and down in a browser window insanely fast, you will find it jitters along and fails to keep up with your input. Reboot after building with my options and try again, you will find everything responds better including games.

The best thing Linux has going for it these days is VMware's 3D support which means you can play far more games because you can just use Windows directly. Requires a fair bit of ram though.

[piratePenguin]

- my 2003 machine (my only machine) has a fglrx card and all sorts of ubuntus are running on it, working out of the box.
- I did your scroll wheel thing and the system did in fact keep up with my input. This is ubuntu 8.04 btw, about to install 10.04.

I laugh at the idea that the ubuntu guys dont understand the complexities of the kernel. THEY DO understand and that is why they understand that when you're shipping a kernel to millions of people, you have to be careful. That is why they dont ship the latest and greatest options, because that would cause lots of trouble. They ship tried and tested configurations, and if you wanna make changes, then you do that for YOURSELF. Not for a million other people please. Surely you understand the care needed to make those changes.

Also, despite Ubuntu calling itself a desktop OS the last time I checked it uses server premeption in the server build (bye bye FPS) and a really gay 250hz timer freqency that should also only be used on servers.

What are you saying? Is this what you meant to say? SERVER BUILD is for servers. DESKTOP BUILD is for desktops. Could it be any simpler?

If you want to run server software on your desktop, you can install the server software on the desktop build. Don't install the server build, and then use it like a desktop. Because then, indeed, it may not be optimised for desktop performance. Shock.

[Lead Head]

I too personally think Windows 7 is quite possible the best one to date, but it still has its quirks.

Ubuntu has a lot of quirks too. I have it installed on another machine, a fairly modest one: 2Ghz Athlon 64, 512MB RAM, ATI x800 XT. Sounds fairly decent right? Yet Ubuntu still gets unusably sluggish at times. I'll just be using Firefox, a couple of tabs open and suddenly the machine will completely lock up, and start flogging the harddrive for no apparent reason. It will eventually unfreeze, but will usually be very sluggish still flogging the harddrive. Probably 8 out of every 10 times I walk by the computer, the red HDD activity light will be on and it'll be flogging the drive - even just sitting in an idle state with the video output turned off. No idea why it does this?

[Kintaro]

I had that much ram in the year 2002. Anything would be a bit sluggish on it.

[piratePenguin]

I too personally think Windows 7 is quite possible the best one to date, but it still has its quirks.

Ubuntu has a lot of quirks too. I have it installed on another machine, a fairly modest one: 2Ghz Athlon 64, 512MB RAM, ATI x800 XT. Sounds fairly decent right? Yet Ubuntu still gets unusably sluggish at times. I'll just be using Firefox, a couple of tabs open and suddenly the machine will completely lock up, and start flogging the harddrive for no apparent reason. It will eventually unfreeze, but will usually be very sluggish still flogging the harddrive. Probably 8 out of every 10 times I walk by the computer, the red HDD activity light will be on and it'll be flogging the drive - even just sitting in an idle state with the video output turned off. No idea why it does this?

Are your disks slow? An old computer would have slow disks, and if they've been used a lot (as mine has), they will have none of the "performance" they used to.

If you want to run ubuntu on an old computer, run an older version of it. 8.04 is supported until April 2011: that's what I happen to have installed, and it works fine. I installed 10.04 the other day and it was much too slow for me, I think that was to a different disk and all my disks are almost dead, but by buying more ram and a reliably non-ancient disk I'd expect it to be better. THERE IS a trend of even the cheapest new computers nowadays having more ram (at LEAST one gb), therefore I don't think it is such a bad thing that modern ubunuts use that up, and crawl on the older computers.

Why do people have older computers for gnu/linux distributions anyhow in these days? I reject the idea that decade-old computers should be the target platform for modern distros. I'm not saying ubuntu SHOULD be slow on these computers, but I think if I can go out and buy a computer for 300 quid and get a perfect modern ubuntu experience, that's an important metric, but computers almost a decade old aren't.

[Aloone_Jonez]

Lol read this:
http://www.cracked.com/blog/using-windows-7-may-lead-to-murder/

[worker201]

^ That article is absolutely preposterous.  And yet, totally believable. 

[Refalm]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GWQgb015Lc

Way funnier than Friends.

[Lead Head]

I too personally think Windows 7 is quite possible the best one to date, but it still has its quirks.

Ubuntu has a lot of quirks too. I have it installed on another machine, a fairly modest one: 2Ghz Athlon 64, 512MB RAM, ATI x800 XT. Sounds fairly decent right? Yet Ubuntu still gets unusably sluggish at times. I'll just be using Firefox, a couple of tabs open and suddenly the machine will completely lock up, and start flogging the harddrive for no apparent reason. It will eventually unfreeze, but will usually be very sluggish still flogging the harddrive. Probably 8 out of every 10 times I walk by the computer, the red HDD activity light will be on and it'll be flogging the drive - even just sitting in an idle state with the video output turned off. No idea why it does this?

Are your disks slow? An old computer would have slow disks, and if they've been used a lot (as mine has), they will have none of the "performance" they used to.

If you want to run ubuntu on an old computer, run an older version of it. 8.04 is supported until April 2011: that's what I happen to have installed, and it works fine. I installed 10.04 the other day and it was much too slow for me, I think that was to a different disk and all my disks are almost dead, but by buying more ram and a reliably non-ancient disk I'd expect it to be better. THERE IS a trend of even the cheapest new computers nowadays having more ram (at LEAST one gb), therefore I don't think it is such a bad thing that modern ubunuts use that up, and crawl on the older computers.

Why do people have older computers for gnu/linux distributions anyhow in these days? I reject the idea that decade-old computers should be the target platform for modern distros. I'm not saying ubuntu SHOULD be slow on these computers, but I think if I can go out and buy a computer for 300 quid and get a perfect modern ubuntu experience, that's an important metric, but computers almost a decade old aren't.

But this computer isn't a decade old, its just barely 5 years old. What I'm asking is why does Windows XP perform acceptably on the same system doing the same non-intensive tasks, while Ubuntu 8.10 (9.04? Forgot which one) is sluggish beyond belief.

I agree that *nix shouldn't be "banished" to older systems, but for the relative lack of eye candy and bling I don't understand why its so taxing on the system.