Verily I say unto thee, that Erik Funkenbusch spake thusly:
> On Mon, 03 Nov 2008 01:57:21 +0000, Homer wrote:
>> Verily I say unto thee, that Erik Funkenbusch spake thusly:
>>> On Sun, 02 Nov 2008 18:32:11 +0000, Ben wrote:
> The vast majority of people who were against XP were against
> Activation.
And bloat.
Most I talked to wanted a "clean" XP i.e. without the Vole's Shovelware.
Just ask DFS; he knows what I'm talking about; after all he pruned his
Desktop to "classic" mode to make it look like something from 1995, just
to get it to run smoothly.
> Also, as with any new release of an OS (see the Ubuntu groups for
> 8.10 examples) there are problems that need to be ironed out, and
> over time the OS becomes much better for it.
But even now XP's bloat and insecurity is still a problem, despite those
service packs and hotfixes. In fact SP3 actually made XP /worse/, I hear:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/09/windows_xp_sp3_reboots_crashes/
> Notice all the people claiming that XP was the best OS MS ever
> created (seriously).
Naturally I dislike them all, but if I absolutely had to pick one, it'd
be 2K ... or possibly 2K3, but I've never actually tried the latter.
> Also, with SP2, XP had a lot more security protections than 2000 did.
Microsoft's security "improvements" seem to be one step forward and two
steps back, most of the time ... when they actually work at all.
Overall, XP probably is more secure than 2K (depending on configuration)
but then XP has had the benefit of hotfixes denied to 2K users for some
time.
>>> not to mention updates and support will continue longer for 7
>>> than Vista.
>>
>> Ah yes, the Vole does have its old "planned obsolescence" trick to
>> fall back on, to keep the Cash Cows milking.
>
> Don't be so disingenuous. All commercial (and even many open source)
> software providers EOL their products.
A Linux vendor can EOL /support/ for a /distro/, but how exactly does
one EOL Free Software? Will the developers/maintainers come round to my
house with baseball bats and coerce me to stop patching the source?
And BTW, that's not a theoretical argument either. I recently had "fork"
x264 for my own personal use (OK, I published it on my repo too) because
the maintainers had decided that CPU's without an SSE2 instruction set
no longer exist, apparently, and that I had to upgrade my media server
to accommodate their unilateral decision to commit euthanasia on all
computers over a certain age. I did something similar with Amarok some
time ago, when the devs decided that they didn't like the gstreamer
backend, but the alternatives were unavailable for Fedora due to
licensing issues.
Naturally this is simply not possible with proprietary software, for
which EOL really does mean the /end/.
> Red Hat, Ubuntu, Apple, IBM, etc.. And, they EOL their products much
> quicker than Microsoft does.
You mean they /develop/ their products much faster than Microsoft does.
We get a new /Pope/ faster than we get a new version of Windows, Erik,
that's not exactly something worth bragging about.
> XP still isn't EOL after almost 8 years!
Yes, and we all know why that is, don't we? [wink]
>>>> I know half a dozen Windows users who are planning to switch to
>>>> one Linux distro or another by the time Windows 7 is released,
>>>> half of whom aren't technically minded people, which says
>>>> something too.
>>>
>>> Yeah, it says they haven't actually done it yet.
>>
>> They will eventually, Erik. You can count on it.
>
> I seriously doubt it.
I know you do.
--
K.
http://slated.org
.----
| "At the time, I thought C was the most elegant language and Java
| the most practical one. That point of view lasted for maybe two
| weeks after initial exposure to Lisp." ~ Constantine Vetoshev
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Fedora release 8 (Werewolf) on sky, running kernel 2.6.25.11-60.fc8
02:33:46 up 24 days, 12:29, 3 users, load average: 0.08, 0.08, 0.02
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