Re: CP/M Source

no.spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Wed, 04 Feb 2009 12:09:22 -0500, Jack Crenshaw
<jcrens@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Bill Buckels wrote:
"Udo Munk" <umunk@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

<snip>

I like Unix and Linux just fine. But it's sure as heck isn't superior as a desktop environment by any wide stretch and the world at large including grandmothers uses Windows.

<snip more>

My two cents: My dear mama always warned me, "Never debate with people over politics or religion." Today, I guess we should add "Operating systems."

;) it is an issue.


Elitism can raise its ugly head in many venues, from the sforementioned religions and politics through nationalisms and regionalisms (e.g., north v. south), to appliances like cars, computers, programming languages to you name it.

I've seen guys get in fist fights because one drove a Ford, the other a Chevy. The disdain displayed by Harley riders towards rider of anything else is legendary.

IMX, such elitism has little or nothing to do with truth, technical excellence, or any such, but is all about the herd mentality -- the "them against us" syndrome. I've been fighting it most of my life. I guess that's one reason I look back so fondly on the days of CP/M and the CP/M Users Group. Nobody ever accused CP/Mers of being elitists.

Lest there be any doubt, I'm about as far removed from a Windows partisan as it's possible to get. I've been an outspoken critic of Microsoft since TRS-80 Level II Basic. IMNSHO nothing good has ever come out of that organization. I have personally seen progress in the personal computer area, so alive and dynamic in the late 70's, come to a virtual halt in 1981. With the exception of Windows -- itself a ripoff of the Apple MacIntosh GUI -- there's been little change since, except for the astonishing improvements in hardware capacity and performance.

Microsoft's applications are no better. I use the Office suite -- mainly Word -- to write my columns. I use it, but I pluperfect hate it. I rarely get through a monthly column without at least one crash of Word -- often with loss of some or all of my file. The dread "Disk Full" error is well known to most Word users.

My attitude about Word (and my other oft-used tool, Mathcad) is the same as that for Windows itself: I hate it, but I use it.

Linux users can justifiably crow over its ability to keep running without a crash -- something that could _NOT_ be said for BSD Unix. Windows has a known bug that causes it to fail every 49.7 days, when the 32-bit clock rolls over (yes, I know, this shouldn't be a problem. But someone forgot to tell the Microsoft programmers how to measure time intervals). Fortunately(?) for me, I never see this bug. My uptime tends to run more like two days. Beyond that, and Windows goes all flaky on me.

Well I hate winders too but my NT4 box averages 200+ days uptime with
power failures being the leading cause. However Word and it's kin
(power point, visio, Excel, and Access) are banned from systems I want
uptime on.

You make a good point, and it's one you've made before: That it's not so much Windows that's the problems, but some of the Microsoft apps like Office and Outlook. But then, what good is an OS with no apps?

I run Office 97 (refusing to upgrade until forced to do so), MathType, Mathcad, Matlab, Simulink, Visual C++, Visual C#, and Visual SlickEdit. Also Firefox and Thunderbird. They definitely don't play nicely together.

IMO it all has to do with the registry -- surely the worst idea anyone's had lately. Registries go bad on the shelf, like milk and cheese. Even moreso when you uninstall apps, as I often do. A coupla months ago I installed Mathcad 13, and then Mathcad 14. After giving 14 a trial period, I deleted v13, which promptly broke v14 <!>. It seems that the two shared some dlls, which got deleted.

When I tried to re-install 14, it wouldn't install. The Mathcad people tried to help, but in a fit of pique, I just ripped out all vestiges of 14, circular-filed the CDROM, and re-installed 13 clean.

And _THAT_, dear children, is how my OS got flaky.


Just last night, I made an error in Visual C++ that caused a stack overflow. No error message, no nothing. The app seemed to terminate normally, but without the expected output. The next time I tried to launch Firefox, nothing happened. I get that a lot. So much for the vaunted protections from memory range violations and ring violations that modern hardware supports so well.

Protection? What protection!


This, by the way, is precisely why I don't write Windows apps. If Microsoft can't manage to keep their apps running without crashes, on their own operating system, what hope is there for the rest of us.

So why do I keep using Windows? Because it's difficult to use anything else. Try to buy a new computer with anything but Vista already installed. Also, as a writer it's important for me to be able to exchange files with my editors. Like it or not, Windows and its apps represent the Lingua Franca of the 21st Century.

That is not true, there are many vendors (increasing numbers too)
offering linux in one form or another and often the machines are lower
cost as well.

Please don't go there. You're talking to someone that bit on one of those cheap boxes with Lindows installed on it. What a great idea _THAT_ was!

At one point in my eventful life, I had a nice box with NT and Linux, in a dual-boot situation. That was on a DEC Alpha system from Microway. Not long after, Dell issued a "commitment" to support Linux. I immediately called them and ordered another dual-boot system. But they told me that I couldn't have one. Thanks to pressure from Microsoft, I could either get Linux, or Windows, but not both. I ordered the system with Linux, figuring that Linux would not mind if I did my own dual-boot installation, whereas Windows would surely resent it, and actively try to stop me. That turned out to be a mistake. Windows 98 wanted the whole box, or nothing. So I ended up installing Windows on top of Linux, then Red Hat in another partition. Problem was, the Red Hat that came from Dell, on their distribution disk, wasn't the same one they had shipped with it. And some of the drivers -- notably the Sound Blaster driver -- didn't work.

When I called Dell's tech support for help, they told me in all earnestness that not only did Dell not support Linux, they never had. When I told them that, um, they had shipped it to me with Linux installed, they assured me that the whole thing must have been a figment of my imagination.

Don'cha just love it?


If I seemed to be reluctant (as I am) to download yet another app like Cygwin or 7zip, it's precisely _BECAUSE_ of the fragility of Windows. It's already, and always, teetering on the brink of disaster. I've already had to wipe the hard drive and re-install everything, twice. My wife, whose most complex activities are exchanging emails on AOL and surfing the web, had to wipe and re-install Vista. The last thing in the world I need is more apps that don't play nice together.

Therein lies the rub, winders stability is at best poor and some apps
make it terrible.

Yep.


Seeing how little I admire Windows, you might think I'd be a great candidate for Linux, and you'd be right. Ever since I first heard about the Unix design philosophy -- many small apps interacting through scripts, pipes, etc. -- I was sold. That philosophy is so much in line with my own, it seemed to be a no-brainer.

That was before I spent two years surrounded by Unix Wizards -- insufferable, elitist bores whose attitudes rivaled even those of the Multicians. I had another, similar experience, with Linux users in 2001-2006.

Linix is not unix and the linux community is very different. However
the linux docs can be intimidating again depending.

In all honesty, I was probably too harsh on both Unix folks and Linux folks. I know that many of the folks from the CP/M users' group, were using Unix. Folks I admired very much, like Chuck Falconer, Rich Conn, and many others. I'm willing to admit that the ones I was forced to be near (because I managed them) were not typical. They were mostly new grads out of UVa's comp. sci. dept., and were convinced that their intellectual superiority was exceeded only by their ability to hack the Unix kernel. It was my first encounter with the Unix-as-a-religion set, and I didn't think much of it.

As for Linux, I'm quite willing to believe that Linus, as well as many other movers and shakers in the Linux community, is one of the good guys. Hey, anyone married to the national champion martial artist can't be all bad. I'm prepared to admit that the Linux people I encountered were atypical. They, too, were fairly young and shared that feeling of intellectual superiority. They were indeed quite good at what they did, which was writing software in a command-line environment, using vi <g>.

They were just no fun to be around.

Now that I've agreed with you that Linux folks are not the same as Unix folks, I hope you'll grant me that many of the people contributing both software and attitudes to the Linux community _ARE_ the same ones that did the same in the Unix/Usenet community. To wit, the insufferable boors.


Those experiences reminded me of my experiences in some church denominations: "You know, it wouldn't be a bad place to go, if it weren't for the people in it."

Further, although I know that Linux systems are famous for long uptimes (though I suspect that they tend to depend on command-line, rather than GUI, interfaces), that was not our experience. Our BSD 4.3, running on a VAX, typically crashed on the order of once per day -- sometimes more. In 2005 I spent some time on a dedicated Linux desktop, running the StarOffice tools and one huge, proprietary app. I found at least as many bugs in the StarOffice "Word" as in the Microsoft version, and it crashed pretty much as often. I understand that Linux is becoming more and more reliable and more of an "appliance" OS every day, unlike its main competitor, which seems to be going the other way.

Linux really can be divided oin to application camps. Servers built
for robustness and uptime. Desktops where security is desired and
flexibility but tolerates lower uptime. Some like Ubuntu do a fair
job on the desk and for one system of mine has displaced winders.

But face it: Unix was conceived around 1965, as the third time-share system in the world (after TSS and Multics),during a time when the only terminal was a Teletype ASR-33, and large RAM meant 8k. For someone to try to tell me that a Unix clone represents the bleeding edge of computer technology, strikes me as more than a little odd. Only a couple of years ago, I had a Linux guru tell me, with a straight face, that the only screen editor anyone would ever need, was vi. 'Nuff said.

IT does and doesn't. The internal design is bleeding edge, the
outside is the same but has a few new tweaks.

As to the vi crap, I've never used it willingly, there are far easier
to use editors on linux boxen and I get to pick rahter than be stuck.

Look, in my career I've written serious programs in 16 languages, for 16 operating systems. That doesn't count different environments, such as multiple compilers and IDEs. I'm about as far from a partisan as you can get. I don't want to join a fraternity. I haven't got time for that "Harley rider" crap. My goal is not be an _ANYTHING_ guru. I just have work to do, and I want to get it done as quickly and easily as possible, using whatever works, and works reliably.

Just so you know.

I can relate to that. For some systems I want to be in the guts
others are simply a way to do things and I'd rather not be bothered
with whats inside. Some like winders fool you into not looking only
to ruin your day for not paying attention. That gets my scorn even if
I have to use it.

Allison, you just put your finger on the central issue. There are two things I do with computers. One is the things I _MUST_ do, to earn a living. When I'm trying to do that, the last thing in the world I need is for the OS to force me to either jump through hoops, or fumble around trying to figure out how to defeat it. I just want to get my work done.

The other is what I do for fun. In 1986, I bought two computers, for that very reason. One was a PC/286/DOS machine for work; the other was a 68K homebrew machine for fun. I had a _LOT_ of fun with the PT-68. One of the pieces of software I wrote was a linker-loader. Not an easy feat, when the assembler didn't support relocation. It was great fun. It was also completely useless and a total waste of time, money-wise.

To use a different metaphor: As an old spelunker at heart, I'm real comfortable with exploring a maze of twisty little passages. It's a fun thing to do. But when there's work to be done, and a goal to be met, I don't want to have to navigate those passages.

Jack


Maybe thats why I have systems that run from simple bag and tag OSs
like NS* dos to something with real security and staying power like
VMS and a wide assortment inbetween. Each one fits a task or many
well and as needed. However the most vile and least represented is
winders here.


Allison
Jack

.

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