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Yeah, this should really be taken to another thread.Solar wrote:<rant offtopic="true" ignore="on">
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Just as Solar points out, it is often based on their activities during the 80s and 90s. This was when I had to cope with their products that had many serious problems from a technology point of view. MS launched fix after fix for their old bad products (VCPI, DPMI, XMS, EMS and DOS-extenders). The worst one was probably DPMI, since this interface promised interoperability, but it was never delivered, and instead MS broke the whole thing. Their proprietary network protocols was another "feature" that probably made many people unhappy. We also have the aspect of how MS competed. The issue of the web-browser being so tightly intergrated into Windows that it was "impossible" to remove is another factor that contributes. Especially since this tight intergration has many stabillity-related problems.OSwhatever wrote:I never understood the hatred towards Microsoft among many software developers.
Maybe it should be put somewhere on the front page or given a wiki page. That's a really good explanation Solar, thanksOSwhatever wrote:Yeah, this should really be taken to another thread.Solar wrote:<rant offtopic="true" ignore="on">
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.The whole idea of *A and *W function make me go nuts. They could have think twice and designed it better and use utf8 instead of doubling the APIs (and require you to recompile and maintain multiple binaries for deployment).OSwhatever wrote:I never understood the hatred towards Microsoft among many software developers. Microsoft have problems and some products have been bad. However, I wouldn't call Microsoft kernel engineers incompetent.
UTF-8 was developed as a standard (by the Plan 9 guys) in January 1993. Before then, you had UCS-2 or UTF-1. UTF-1, while a variable length 8-bit coding like UTF-8, was an absolutely stupid standard which was, IIRC, incompatible with ASCII. It was certainly a horrendous mess to encode and decode (requiring multiplication and division by non-power-of-two values). Windows NT 3.1 (the first release) was released in July 1993. Using UTF-8 throughout NT would have required a time machine, or a major redesign which would have pushed back the release date significantly.bluemoon wrote:The whole idea of *A and *W function make me go nuts. They could have think twice and designed it better and use utf8 instead of doubling the APIs (and require you to recompile and maintain multiple binaries for deployment).OSwhatever wrote:I never understood the hatred towards Microsoft among many software developers. Microsoft have problems and some products have been bad. However, I wouldn't call Microsoft kernel engineers incompetent.
UTF-8 is superior for most languages, simply because it preserves ASCII-compability, which unicode and UTF-16 does not do. If it is harder to decode for odd characters is not an issue.Owen wrote:Also: Standardizing on UTF-8 presupposes that it is a better character set than UTF-16. I would disagree. (UTF-16 is far simpler to decode)
Doesn't really fit into the OSDev Wiki, so I put it on dev.rootdirectory.org for reference. If I find the time, I'll juice it up with a couple of contemporary screenshots and other artifacts.eddyb wrote:Maybe it should be put somewhere on the front page or given a wiki page. That's a really good explanation Solar, thanksOSwhatever wrote:Yeah, this should really be taken to another thread.Solar wrote:<rant offtopic="true" ignore="on">
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question is, was that choice a good thing in terms of standards?Solar wrote: Once upon a time, there was a real choice of operating systems. MacOS, AmigaOS, RiscOS, AtariTOS - the competition fueled quantum leaps in OS design, look & feel, functionality, and interoperability.
OpenSource showed a way how this monopoly could be broken - until that path was monopolized by the GPL/Linux community in their own, special way. Well, at least their pressure made Microsoft move again, but as far as choice is concerned...
umm...MacOS...Well, we're stuck with "pay-per-view" Windows (with the "pay-per-view PREMIUM" bastard MacOS), and "wontfix" / "works-as-designed" Linux.
Not sure what assimilate means in this contex, but it largley depends on who or which company is using Linux and which distribution. Linux is in mess, but it's getting cleaner and cleaner.And that won't change anytime soon, if at all: You play proprietary, Microsoft will crush you with patent sues as soon as you show up on the radar. You play OpenSource, Linux will assimilate you.
Well, Solar said it right....you are so used to it that you cannot see beyond it. When you pay for your Windows box, you never own that software, but only premission to use it. They would sell you the brick if they weren't forced to advance.OSwhatever wrote: I never understood the hatred towards Microsoft among many software developers.
Solar wrote:..."pay-per-view" Windows (with the "pay-per-view PREMIUM" bastard MacOS)...
I'm not sure if I agree with that. What I've seen of the US, the standard of living is quite good and just as good as parts of Europe. I guess it really depends where you live in Europe and USA. I haven't observed the differences of Mac usage between Europe and the US but I would definitely say that it depends on the profession so maybe the concentration of different professions in different areas would have an impact.UX wrote:Just an observation....maybe not very accurate...but why MacOS is way more popular in US then in Europe? I mean...here it's more exotic then...uugghh..OpenVMS.
Yes, they make expensive hardware, but man...Switzerland, Sweeden, Finland, Holland, Germany...all have much higher standard then US.
Yeah, but there's no China (where the computers are actually assembled) in the US either. It's at least not a matter of shipping distance. I would probably point to advertising instead.berkus wrote:I guess it's because there's no California in Europe?