Re: Seeing VERSIONINFO under Vista?

On Sun, 20 May 2007 12:12:40 +0100, Daniel James
<wastebasket@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In article news:<lseu43pipdqngiqongtcko2lhdc3j0kmje@xxxxxxx>, MrAsm wrote:
... since Win2K and exspecially WinXP, Windows robustness and quality
is very very high ...

I've never had a BSOD in any NT version that couldn't be traced to faulty
hardware or buggy third-party device drivers.

I've never used NT. However, I read that the Win2K and XP kernel and
architecture are NT-based; these WinNT engineers must have done a very
good foundation work, very robust and quality work.


Things like plug-and-play are getting much better in linux, and seem to me
to be handled in a much more flexible way than on Windows. I mostly use
Gentoo, which is a fairly tech-friendly user-hostile distro (as these
things go), but recent releases from distros like Ubuntu and Mandriva have
been really very easy to set up -- even for completely non-technical users
-- on anything but the wackiest or most bleeding-edge hardware.

Maybe I'll try again with a new Linux distro...

But I remember that previous year I tried Ubuntu on my notebook (it
was a modern Asus machine): it was all right with Windows, but Ubuntu
Linux crashed during the install process, and some searches on the
Internet showed that it was due to lack of support to accelerated ATI
graphics card mounted in the notebook.

Then people say: you have the source, fix the bug. Are we joking? I
believe that developing (and debugging) a device driver for an
accelerated 3D hardware card is not trivial task (OK, I can program in
C, but you must know also the Linux kernel architecture, how to
develop device driver, and also the *graphics hardware*; it's too
much.)
I also posted the problem to ATI (like others did) but, of course, I
had no feed-back.

And this hardware run just fine on Windows XP partition of the same
notebook.

There are other examples, like when I was trying to develop in C++
under Linux using KDevelop: this IDE used to crash during development,
and, of course, it was very annoying! And again: you have the source,
fix the problem. It's utopian: it's hard to hack several hundred
thousands lines of code without no idea of the general architecture of
the system, the module subdivisions, documentation about data
structures, internal protocols, etc.

Moreover, when you develop for Linux, for *which* Linux are you
developing? For SuSE? For Knoppix? For Ubuntu? For KDE or Gnome
desktop? I know that there are differences between different Linux
distros... it seems a real chaos if compared to Windows platform.

And finally, I think that the open-source thing is kind of "snake
oil". You must have a real job and then code for hobby, after the job?
It's hard to build quality robust useful software like Microsoft
Office "as hobby project". You can't compete with full-time well-paid
high-level software engineers working for Microsoft (or other software
companies).

Having the source code could be useful if you're interested to e.g.
investigate how an operating system kernel works or is implemented,
but IMHO it's impossible to do a real solid business on open-source
software.


However, we're straying off-topic a bit here ...

Yes, you're right :)

Cheers,
MrAsm
.

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