John Tate says Microsoft Blows

[Kintaro]

Because unlike Mike Nash, I don't work for any company.
* Poor user interface.
* Poor memory managment.
* Poor networking stack (no practical out of box profileing system for it).
* Poor command line.
* Poor swap managment.
* Poor filesystem.
* Poor vendor applications with Operating System.
* Poor out of box security.
* Poor graphical user interface themeability.
* Lack of compilers and other handy features out of box.
* Lack of control over Operating System low level functions.
* Software Update system lacks ability to handle third party software.
* Software Update system (Windowsupdate) launches popup advertising.
* Service Pack's are key specific, which creates hordes of vulnerable machines on the internet (Microsoft should be banned from the Internet).
* Poor Crypto Features.
* Poor documentation.

* Poor developers working for a rich company to enpower people to become poor by pouring all their money into Redmond, WA, USA.

[Aloone_Jonez]

Wow fuck me I never guessed Microsoft Blows, I always thaught it rulled and I supposed it does but that's the problem. Microsoft rules and it blows.

[cahult]

The only time I

[Kintaro]

I have fucked my Linux system neumorous times being stupid, but with Windows, it just fucks up. It has a massive amount of problems that need fixing before I run the shit, thats for sure. The main problem with Windows is it has the worst documentation in the world. That makes it impossible sometimes to find what went wrong, because its impossible to tell how it works.

A friend asked me if I had any programming tips once, and I said: Learn how it works, just not how to work it.

[Aloone_Jonez]

This should have been posted here

[muzzy]

Ahh... Can't resist sharing my Right Opinions(tm) regarding this list

* Poor user interface.

Disagree. Windows UI is fine, and works remarkably well with keyboard only. I don't have to touch the mouse most of the time unless I want to.

* Poor memory managment.

Agree. It only gets worse due to undocumented hacks that try to make it work better. Such as clearing the workingset of a process in DefWindowProc when window is minimized. DOH! Why the heck does this happen? Moral of the story: alt-tab away, don't minimize, things stay more responsive that way!

* Poor networking stack (no practical out of box profileing system for it).

Hmm. The networking stack itself is fine, but I have to agree with the profiling thing. Overall, I'd love to see something like linux tc in windows. That'd just make my day. Right now I have to use third party tools to do what I need to, and they blow.

* Poor command line.

Agree, but nobody forces you to use it, and you can always get alternative cli shells. The command interpreter is such a hack anyway, if you've ever looked into how .bat file processing works, it's full of dirty hacks and context dependant parsing. Backwards compatibility, eh?? They should just dump the crap and make a better cli shell. However, for most purposes, it works just fine, unless you're used to posix shell and the magic it provides.

* Poor swap managment.

AGREE! I wish I could just turn it off. Did you know that Windows has this great feature that allows it to swap out most of the kernel? YAY! Responsiveness goes out of the window (pun intended), and this only happens at times when you'd really need the system to be responsive to fix the memory hogging problem.

* Poor filesystem.

Disagree. I like NTFS. It has its issues, but imo it works just great.

* Poor vendor applications with Operating System.

Agree. Microsoft should be forced to allow people to make own distributions of its operating system. Are licenses the issue? I thought there was already activation in place to take care of this, so users of custom distributions couldn't use them without license anyway. I believe this would happen if the OS development was isolated from the rest of the company. Split Microsoft!

* Poor out of box security.

AGREE! The default configuration is BRAINDEAD! It's a lot of work to fix it, however there is a simple (yet unlikely to happen) solution: user distributions. See previous item.

* Poor graphical user interface themeability.

OMGWTFBBQ. How is this an issue? There are several skinning solutions, and applications only break if they try to do something naughty themselves. However, you can configure your windows to look pretty much like anything. Replace the gui shell with some alternative one and you get even more freedom.

* Lack of compilers and other handy features out of box.
* Lack of control over Operating System low level functions.
* Software Update system lacks ability to handle third party software.

Agree, agree, agree. If only the OS was isolated in separate company

* Software Update system (Windowsupdate) launches popup advertising.

Huh? Never seen this. Then again, I autodownload patches. Sounds fishy

* Service Pack's are key specific, which creates hordes of vulnerable machines on the internet (Microsoft should be banned from the Internet).

As if the said systems would get upgraded anyway. Idiot administrators are to blame, not Microsoft. However, I support the idea of banning known bad systems from the net.

* Poor Crypto Features.

Agree. The cryptoapi sucks big green donkey d*ck. The keys are saved in user's profile, ok. How does normal user find these, or backup these? System crashes, what happened to keys? OH NO!

* Poor documentation.

Disagree! MSDN has shitloads of good documentation. The internals could be better documented, though. That'd be great. However, the whole win32 subsystem api is pretty well documented, most of the native api is documented, etc.

* Poor developers working for a rich company to enpower people to become poor by pouring all their money into Redmond, WA, USA.

lol

I'd like to add to the list: Poor thread scheduling. It's just weak.

[Kintaro]

Disagree. Windows UI is fine, and works remarkably well with keyboard only. I don't have to touch the mouse most of the time unless I want to.

I was not just talking about keyboard shortcuts. However from your other posts you use Windows 2000 and 2003. 2003 was a little more simple then XP which made it a little better. I still prefer gnome 2.8 anyday, with all the nifty features of the panel.

Agree. It only gets worse due to undocumented hacks that try to make it work better. Such as clearing the workingset of a process in DefWindowProc when window is minimized. DOH! Why the heck does this happen? Moral of the story: alt-tab away, don't minimize, things stay more responsive that way!

Heh, wish someone told me that 3 months ago when I was running MS.

Hmm. The networking stack itself is fine, but I have to agree with the profiling thing. Overall, I'd love to see something like linux tc in windows. That'd just make my day. Right now I have to use third party tools to do what I need to, and they blow.

The networking stack itself I have had many problems with. I remember when Windows XP was new I was at a lan party, and for some reason 20 XP machines on the network started creating massive congestion. They banned XP for the remaining duration of the LAN party.

Not much of a gamer anymore.

Disagree. I like NTFS. It has its issues, but imo it works just great.

Then go symlink a file.

As if the said systems would get upgraded anyway. Idiot administrators are to blame, not Microsoft. However, I support the idea of banning known bad systems from the net.

I was talking about them banning pirate CD keys. Microsoft are to blame, because it is known idiots and pirates use the internet, and MS doing this make it harder for the rest of us when a worm comes out.

Nonetheless reading your arguments, yes distributions may help. However because Microsoft create undocumented closed source operating systems, the third party disributors would have a trouble maintaining it and keeping it secure.

Open Source, seems like it would fix a lot of problems in Windows. Open Source will assist fixing problems in anything. This is never going to happen however.

As for documentation, my philosophy is always: learn how it works, not just how to work it. I could never do this Windows very well.

[muzzy]

I was not just talking about keyboard shortcuts. However from your other posts you use Windows 2000 and 2003. 2003 was a little more simple then XP which made it a little better. I still prefer gnome 2.8 anyday, with all the nifty features of the panel.

Yeah, I can't stand XP and not least for the UI. I still believe the ability to use keyboard to navigate guis is one of the primary things that makes windows UI so great.

Then go symlink a file.

NTFS supports reparse points and I've written a shell extension you can use to create such things easily. They're not exactly symlinks, but they provide the functionality you're asking for with slightly different semantics (trying to delete the reparse point deletes where it's pointing, etc)

I was talking about them banning pirate CD keys. Microsoft are to blame, because it is known idiots and pirates use the internet, and MS doing this make it harder for the rest of us when a worm comes out.

Ah, the "no upgrades for warez copies" thing? Yes, I find this to be very very stupid. I'm secretly hoping that some future worm will replace all product keys on windows systems, making them all appear identical warez copies to MS

Nonetheless reading your arguments, yes distributions may help. However because Microsoft create undocumented closed source operating systems, the third party disributors would have a trouble maintaining it and keeping it secure.

I disagree. The OS is fairly well documented, and if security issues are found, they'll get fixed. Microsoft would still keep providing patches, ofcourse, so I can't see why it would be any trouble to maintain it.

Open Source, seems like it would fix a lot of problems in Windows. Open Source will assist fixing problems in anything. This is never going to happen however.

Well, the windows 2000 sources have leaked, and the only issues found so far have been ones already fixed by Microsoft. Ofcourse, it might get a little different if it wasn't illegal to hack with the sources

As for documentation, my philosophy is always: learn how it works, not just how to work it. I could never do this Windows very well.

Then it's time to learn x86 asm. You could start by getting the tools from http://www.sysinternals.com and perhaps their books too. They've done the reverse engineering and written books about it. Microsoft isn't going to document things like GDI pool mechanisms, but once you have a rough idea how stuff works, you can just go and read the binary. I believe this shouldn't be illegal. In EU, reverse engineering is allowed for compatibility reasons, and for purposes of running the software for how it's intended. I'm interpreting this to mean it's OK to reverse engineer windows to understand how it works, to be able to use it better. Lawyers might disagree, but this is an industry wide problem, not a Microsoft problem.

[Kintaro]

Then it's time to learn x86 asm. You could start by getting the tools from http://www.sysinternals.com and perhaps their books too. They've done the reverse engineering and written books about it. Microsoft isn't going to document things like GDI pool mechanisms, but once you have a rough idea how stuff works, you can just go and read the binary. I believe this shouldn't be illegal. In EU, reverse engineering is allowed for compatibility reasons, and for purposes of running the software for how it's intended. I'm interpreting this to mean it's OK to reverse engineer windows to understand how it works, to be able to use it better. Lawyers might disagree, but this is an industry wide problem, not a Microsoft problem.

I still prefer everything about Linux, but thats my choise. Nonetheless this would be interesting: and I think that if its on my fscking computer, the lawyers can drown and I will do what I want with it.

[Aloone_Jonez]

Of course there's NDISASM a good open source disasembler for both Linux and Windows.

[Calum]

hey doesn't windows still use the TCP/IP stack from BSD? i thought most systems used the Berkeley code, except linux, for historical reasons.

and nobody says *BSD has a crap networking stack, do they?

[muzzy]

Of course there's NDISASM a good open source disasembler for both Linux and Windows.

There's also a pretty good free (as in beer) live debugger for windows:  http://home.t-online.de/home/Ollydbg/

Ndisasm is fine, but it's quite rough and not practical for everyday tasks. Live debugging is also a lot easier approach to analyzing safe stuff than reading the cold disassembly listings.

[WMD]

hey doesn't windows still use the TCP/IP stack from BSD? i thought most systems used the Berkeley code, except linux, for historical reasons.

and nobody says *BSD has a crap networking stack, do they?

Windows NT 3.1 used the BSD stack.  After that, MS rewrote most of it for some reason.  These days it doesn't act very much like BSD - the only artifact visible is that the HOSTS file is in c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts.

[Kintaro]

* Windows is rude - The Windows Mixer does not even support modern soundcards properly it seems, in Linux the headphone socket has a seperate control to my laptop speakers. In public, like at the libary at school, it has been trouble with windows if the headphone becomes unplugged because my laptop has very loud speakers for a laptop.

[muzzy]

Windows NT 3.1 used the BSD stack.  After that, MS rewrote most of it for some reason.  These days it doesn't act very much like BSD - the only artifact visible is that the HOSTS file is in c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts.

Apparently microsoft was embarassed that it has paid to a third party to get the BSD stack?

There was some talk that winXP changed their stack at one point, as the default tcp window size changed to look suspiciously like some BSD OS, but I can't remember details on this.