Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> Roy Culley on Wednesday
>> ed writes:
>>
>>> http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/08/04/xp
>>
>> My Windows XP installation has reached its half-life.
>> (You do know that Windows has a half-life, don't you?
>> Every installation of Windows naturally degrades along
>> a logarithmic curve until it becomes annoying, then
>> unbearable, then unusable. Each successive revision of
>> Windows has featured a slightly longer half-life. Back
>> in the day, Windows 95 would last me about 3 months,
>> while my copy of Windows XP has lasted me almost 9.
>> I'm not bitter; when you realize that you're measuring
>> on a logarithmic scale, a factor of 3 improvement is
>> really quite impressive.)
>>
>> Gates calls this bitrot and implied at the time all SW /
>> OS's suffer from it. He was wrong of course. Only Windows
>> has this feature.
>
> Last year I had this argument in alt.html. It's just
> assumed that Windows has a shelf life of 6 months. Then, it
> needs to be reinstalled (from its 'skinny' base package,
> which made this laborious). Imagine installing Linux every
> 6 months... only to find out that it comes with vi as an
> editor and tuxpaint as a graphical toolkit... now, the
> secret recipe involves getting some protective software
> within 5 minutes... or be possessed by somebody else.
I hung onto SuSE Linux 6.4 for 4 years without a rebuild,
before wiping the disk clean because Windows XP needed the
disk space. OTOH, I was rebuilding my Windows 98 partition
at least annually.
I enjoyed the article, too, very humorous and I can identify
readily. I am glad my recent install of Debian Sarge didn't
take 5 hours.
--
HPT
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