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Windows 10 - Deeper Impressions


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On Wednesday, July 06, 2016 at 11:45 PM, rn10950 said:

At least with XP, Vista, and 7 you had the option to fall back to Classic if you didn't like the theme they provided. With 8 and 10, you're stuck with their ugly idea of how an OS should look.

Yup.  :angry:

--JorgeA

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10 reasons to reject Microsoft's free Windows 10 upgrade

A pretty good rundown, except for one thing:

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Likewise, if you’re a big fan of Windows 7’s gadgets and widgets for the desktop, they aren’t available in Windows 10. Which is good, because they’re horribly insecure.

I've never understood how the Gadgets that Microsoft itself offered, and which depend on events that occur exclusively on my PC (CPU Meter, Clock, and the like) could conceivably be called "insecure." Given that the campaign against the Gadgets started within weeks of the Windows 8 launch, I've always suspected that in reality it was an attempt to make the Windows 7 screen look static and lifeless in comparison to the Win8 Start Screen with its bouncy and ever-updating tiles; and that the "insecure" angle was merely FUD.

And BTW, I do have several gadgets installed on my Win10 test system, so it is not true that gadgets are not available for that OS.

--JorgeA

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On Thursday, July 07, 2016 at 8:09 AM, ralcool said:

I can't remember how I saw this link today, sometimes I can't even trace my own history....
http://blog.zorinaq.com/i-contribute-to-the-windows-kernel-we-are-slower-than-other-oper/

The second paragraph in that long anonymous post:

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Windows is indeed slower than other operating systems in many scenarios, and the gap is worsening. The cause of the problem is social. There's almost none of the improvement for its own sake, for the sake of glory, that you see in the Linux world.

And therein also lies the problem with Linux development: they seek out the "glorious" shiny new stuff and neglect the mundane aspects of the OS that would make it a viable competitor to Windows. As Dedoimedo has pointed out many times, bugs and basic usability flaws persist in Linux from one version to the next, never getting fixed. IIRC he most often mentions the inability to network printers. Dull, routine stuff that, however, is the kind of feature that makes for a serious (work) operating system.

Reading further down, we see:

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These junior developers also have a tendency to make improvements to the system by implementing brand-new features instead of improving old ones. Look at recent Microsoft releases: we don't fix old features, but accrete new ones. New features help much more at review time than improvements to old ones.

Ah, the same kind of dynamic at work.

--JorgeA

Edited by JorgeA
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NuMicrosoft in operation:

Microsoft posts more details for botched permissions in MS16-072

Microsoft: Here's how to fix the Group Policy mess caused by our security update

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Microsoft basically blamed affected users for the issue, which, as one might expect, went over like a lead balloon.

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What Wilson didn't post is an apology or a promise to fix the problem. Instead, he says quite clearly that the fixes he outlines will only work [temporarily] ...

Say goodbye to "the customer is always right."

--JorgeA

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13 hours ago, dencorso said:

That's why I think if unix is the solution (I'm not saying it is...) then FreeBDS or maybe NetBSD must be the solution not linux, nor illumos, nor OpenBSD.

That's interesting. How is the development of FreeBSD or NetBSD different from OpenBSD or Linux generally? I'm not familiar with the details.

--JorgeA

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In a nutshell:

1.) Linux was written from scratch by Linus Torvalds & al., when Andrew S. Tanenbaum refused to let MINIX become more than a didactic OS, around 1991.

2.) All 3 xxxBSDs are derived from the original BSD 4.3, but OpenBSD strives to attain "true openness" (whatever that may be), NetBSD tries to run evrywhere and FreeBSD tries to run everything (it can run linux executables unmodified, and even some windows network devices!). Both FreeBSD and NetBSD are from 1993, while OpenBSD forked off NetBSD 3 about years later. Most of the xxxBSD users do run FreeBSD, at this point in time. Perhaps the most adequate FreeBSD distribution to try (for a 1st contact with the OS) might be PC-BSD, maybe the one using the KDE desktop environment.

3.) Illumos descends from OpenSolaris, and is still just a promising OS, ATM.

800px-Unix_history-simple.svg.png

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINIX_3#/media/File:Unix_history-simple.svg

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22 hours ago, dencorso said:

That's one big nut.

With a full 10 different Unix derivatives along the bottom (which per the graph labeling along the left is 3 years ago) how the heck could anyone reasonably choose a path to follow?  I'm against oversimplification, but I'm also against overcomplication too.  :-O

>Perhaps the most adequate FreeBSD distribution to try (for a 1st contact with the OS) might be PC-BSD,
>maybe the one using the KDE desktop environment.

Thanks.  I may try that.

Is OS X really Mixed/Shared Source?

-Noel

Edited by NoelC
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48 minutes ago, NoelC said:

That's one big nut.

Sure thing. :D

Let's see if I can grind it some, for you: thre are really just 4 unixes created from scratch: the original Bell Labs one, which reached its most influential point at (and is usually refererred to as) System V, which is the source for the early Solaris from which OpenSolaris (IA-32 and AMD64) was derived and, when Oracle decided to kill it, became Illumos, which is now in the process of ridding itself from the last trace of proprietary SUN (err... Oracle) code, in orfer to be truly free. It sure has potential, but is not really mature yet. Then there is the Berkley Software Distribution (BSD), the ancestor to all xxxBSDs, of which FreeBSD seems to be the most mature, and also the ancestor to Mac OS X. It has no Bell Labs (err... AT&T) proprietary code in it, as of version 4.3, its most influential point. Then there is MINIX, created from scratch by A. S. Tannenbaum explicitly to be ans educational tool, and Linux, which 1st alpha version drew heavily on MINIX, but after Tannenbaum said "enough!" rid itself from all MINIX code and, from that point, was written from scratch by Linus Torvalds et al. and uses GNU Project userland, so it shoud be rightly called GNU/linux. Then there are the distributions, which are the unix equivalent to the MS concept of "home", "professional", "enterprise", "ultimate", "fantbulous", etc., but which are legion, since nothing is really prohibited in the unix universe. So, in a peanutshell: Illumos, the BSDs, MacOS X and GNU/linux... the rest is just a mountful of air, so to say.

48 minutes ago, NoelC said:

Is OS X really Mixed/Shared Source?

Yes. The key concept here is Mixed, though. But it does use some bona-fide open source things, like the (great) Bash shell, which was created by the GNU Project. Then again, most every other unix nowadays does so, too. It's one of the few consensuses (if there is any) among developers: Bash rocks!

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True. I do too. I love awk and colrm. But their main contribution to the unix community surely is Bash, the best unix shell of them all. Even MS has folded, as you've seen, and now Win 10 :puke: does run Bash too, at long last... :D

And others gave some definitive contributions, too. SUN's ZFS, developed for Solaris, is probably the best unix FS of all, and is used by the xxxBSDs (of which PC-BSD is a distribution), Mac OS X and, of course, Illumos... and more recently Ubuntu (one Linux distribution) has adopted it, too. So one can safely say ZFS is becoming a de-facto standard, just as Bash already is. :yes:

Now, if you bear in mind that iOS is a derivative of Mac OS X and that Android is a derivative of GNU/Linux, things become simple: one can look at the marketshare for desktops as 88.5% Windows, 11.4% unix, 0.1% whatever else, while the mobile marketshare is 84.5% unix and growing (and some believe that's where the future of computation lies, which may even be true, for the masses, at least...). Now, is this food for thought, or what? :w00t:

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Many decades ago the pundits predicted Unix would ultimately be The One that would take over..

Personally I think the ex-DEC basis for Windows NT is better, architecturally.  I can only imagine another derivative of Mr. Cutler's kernel might ultimately rise again after Microsoft drives theirs into the ground (and that's pretty much a foregone conclusion given what they're doing with Win 10 :puke:).  I can't be the only one to think this.

-Noel

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