looking for SCSI cable ..

Fred puissante at biz.puissante.com
Wed Dec 29 16:05:01 EST 2004


On Wed, 2004-12-29 at 08:59 -0500, Benjamin Scott wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Dec 2004, at 2:22am, puissante at biz.puissante.com wrote:
> > I was actually surprised to find out M$ has not come out with their 64-bit
> > version of Windows yet -- Linux beat them to the punch!
> 
>   That's old news.  Linux was natively 64-bit on the DEC Alpha at least as
> far back as 1997 (maddog can no doubt give an exact date).  At the time, NT
> on the Alpha was still running with 32-bit code and assumptions almost
> everywhere.

Yep. I got involved with Linux in 2000, so I missed all the fun before
then. :-) Besides, as I recall, Apple made the same lame mistake with
their original MacOS, which was stuffing control information in the
upper 8 bits of the address words that ran on the old 68000. This
stupidity hung them once memory got bigger and 68020 came out...

> > There's a LOT of ugly stuff in Windows that probably had to be re-written
> > for the 64-bit platform.
> 
>   s/had/still has/

Yep. I wouldn't doubt it.

> > If they had the slightest bit of sense they'd throw out the entire
> > abortion and rewrite the OS from scratch. Oh well...
> 
>   They already did that once.  It's called Windows NT.  It didn't help.  

Considering what they had before NT was Windows 3.1, well...?!!!

Kinda like a 400 lb guy loosing 100 lbs. Well, great accomplishment,
but...!

Quite frankly, I have grown to hate Microsoft so much through my
experiences with NT. After Commodore shut its doors and the Amiga was
officially "dead", it was either Unix, Windows 3.1, or Windows NT. 3.1
was out of the question -- rather die first. NT was in Beta back then,
but was at least 32 bit. Had Unix actually running on the Amiga, but one
of the "external" SCSI drives got destroyed by (then new) wife who
didn't understand that you can't stack an exposed circuit board on top
of something metallic (I used to use index cards as spacers and this
never dawned on her -- or more to the point, it never dawned on me that
it wouldn't dawn on her, since I grew up around (and in!) electronics --
she just needed that darn index card!!!!!). Before I got a chance to
recover that, demand for NT expertise crept up and swept me away. But
this honeymoon with the devil(!) was not to last. The deeper I got into
NT, the more I hated it. It carried forward the dain-brammaged event
model from 3.1, which was A-1 stupid, as well as a lot of other dain-
brammaged baggage???!!!! Not to mention every time you had to install a
driver you had to reboot. Not to mention developing drivers *required* 2
separate systems. The infamous "blue screens of death" was quite
commonplace. Just huff and *poof*.

And don't even get me started with OLE -- what the marketdroids at M$
now call "Active-X", that technology that is making tons of $$$$$$ for
Norton, McAffe, and other anti-virus and anti-spam software developers
out there. Stoopid...

Well, enough of my rant. There are many deep systems-level reasons I
hate Microsoft. Overbloat and overcomplexity with less *real*
functionality and flexibility, forcing you to pay $2000 a year for their
MSDN crap just to be productive. Linux is such a breath of fresh air in
comparison. A lot of what they were trying to do in NT was just a bad
implementation of what was in Linux/Unix all along.

So, yeah, you're right. Old news.

-Fred





More information about the gnhlug-discuss mailing list