You tell ''em Dan.

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ShiningKnightDX
NovaStorm Games
Project: More demos that you can shake a stick at

OK, I am sick of hearing people tell, yes this new OS is the best thing M$ could have done. I already heard this with ''95, NT, ''98, ''2000 and now XP. What is the point ?
I am sorry, but none of those OS''es are a ''best thing''. ALL of them are unstable, full of security holes, and IMHO (as a software engineer) UNUSABLE for professional work. Irix, Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD, BeOS, OS/2: those are good OS''es. Why ? Not because they aren''t made by M$. Because they work. Because I can trust them. Because I can focus on my actual development work, instead on fighting with Windows bugs, crashes, API weirdness and other ''undocumented features''.

About the XP compatibility questions: we''ll see that, when XP comes out. I think that 0 backwards compatibility is total crap. You can tell alot about M$, but definitely NOT that they are stupid. Damn, they wouldn''t control 95% of the OS Market, if they were. XP will be 90% backwards compatible. 90%, not 100%, it''s M$, there will be alot of bugs and ''new features'' that will cause problems.

But there''s another point, that WILL be dangereous: The unique ID registration. OK, it _might_ be anonymous (we don''t know that yet !), but they will have a _unique_ ID of your machine. They will be able to identify you within zillions of other systems. Anonymous or not, this is a threat. How many of you have disabled cookies because of potential security problems and the fear of beeing tracked ? Remember the huge fight against Intel, when they decided to include a unique ID on the P3 ? Well, knowing M$ (very well), I am SURE that there will be a way of accessing this unique Windows identifier via Java or ActiveX. Here you go: the perfect, 100% working internet tracking system, and you cannot even disable it (or your Windows wouldn''t be registered anymore).

I moved to Linux a long time ago. WinXP will make alot more people take this step. And that''s the only good thing about it.


- AH

quote:

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Original post by Anonymous Poster
ALL of them are unstable

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That''s nice. My Win2k box hasn''t crashed in over a year.


~~~~~~~~~~
Martee
http://www.csc.uvic.ca/~mdill

I''ve been able to crash Win2K a lot of times, but it doesn''t crash with normal usage and/or development. Once was when I tried to sort a 10,000,000 element array (it wasn''t pretty, my RAM/Virtual Mem. usage skyrocketed, then it all stopped... ), another was when I changed the priority of a thread using the task manager, and all the rest that I can remember were due to faulty drivers that I had for a short while after installing Win2K.

But, for the most part Win2K is the only thing MS has done correctly (OS-wise).


http://druidgames.cjb.net/

Martee:

Then you never worked with it. With work I mean compiling a multi-million lines of code project, using gigabytes of RAM. Or testing a prototype hardware parallel rendering pipeline with a device driver under development. Or trying to render a 3D scene using 3dsmax and a 64-system render cluster under W2k. Yes, I did those things. And yes, W2k crashed nonstop. Productivity went down to zero, since technicians spent more time getting w2k up than doing actual development. Now we use Irix. We never had a single crash.

- AH

And I''m sure the average user (i.e. the one who would buy XP) would really be doing all those things...

~~~~~~~~~~
Martee
http://www.csc.uvic.ca/~mdill

This is a developer forum... Some of us would.

Within MS, WinXP is built under Win2K. It''s over 20,000,000 lines of code. No crashes.

There''s a review of WinXP Beta 2 at http://www.bluesmoke.net/viewArticle.cgi?id=r18.
Here''s a rather eye-catching part: "With no programs running and nothing installed, memory usage was at 86 megs."

~~~~~~~~~~
Martee
http://www.csc.uvic.ca/~mdill

quote:

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Original post by Martee

There''s a review of WinXP Beta 2 at http://www.bluesmoke.net/viewArticle.cgi?id=r18.
Here''s a rather eye-catching part: "With no programs running and nothing installed, memory usage was at 86 megs."

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OMG! I didn''t think it''d be that bad, and I''m the one digging up propoganda on WinXP! Win2K is under 64 MB when nothing running or installed, but an increasing in memory usage that large without any noticable benifits is insane.


http://druidgames.cjb.net/