I have forever claimed to be tolerant of Microsoft products.\u00a0 As a user of both Windows and Unix based operating systems for many years, I can say I’ve seen both sides of this particular battle.\u00a0 I give both Microsoft and Unix credit for many things, and I see tremendous superiority on both sides, but in different areas.<\/p>\n
Unix stands as the true lineage of virtually all computing.\u00a0 It represents an operating system worth using when the choices were non-existent.\u00a0 To that end, they have a bit longer history than their personal computing counterparts, and thanks to a deft avoidance for a great many years (intentionally or otherwise) of personal computing, their focus was vastly different.\u00a0 Operating systems spawned like rabbits over the ideas of networking, speed, efficiency, flexibility, and above all, stability.\u00a0 Craziness like unifying them into a single operating system or end user happiness with pretty graphics were left out entirely.<\/p>\n
Microsoft stands in my mind as the effective godfather of personal computing.\u00a0 Without the near monopoly status of Windows (and of course DOS before that) as a computer platform, software development would simply never have gotten to where it is today.\u00a0 Only in a world dominated by a single unified platform is it possible to sell a single product to so many people.\u00a0 If Unix had its way, there would be 700 flavors of an operating system each with its own strengths and weaknesses, and each with an equal market share.\u00a0 Imagine what software engineering would be if a single product had to be made so many times to make it work on each platform instead of the reality provided by Microsoft.\u00a0 Write it once and instantly have literally millions of people available on your supported platform to sell it to.<\/p>\n
For these reasons, Windows became pretty.\u00a0 It learned to support the amazing amount of consumer level hardware.\u00a0 It sidestepped durability and stability in lieu of usability.\u00a0 In a word, it created the face of computing most of us know.\u00a0 Unix continued to become faster and leaner and solid as a rock, but paid a price most fans argue was no real loss.\u00a0 The price of usability.\u00a0 Commands entered in some text mode console or other consisting of almost random pairs of letters predominated the operating system.\u00a0 A graphical front end showed all the signs of being an after-thought.\u00a0 It was ugly, slow, and offered some hardcore features that all but the most extreme of users would never need and usually they never even knew those features existed.<\/p>\n
The battle raged on.\u00a0 Swears and smearing of reputations from fanboys on both sides abound.\u00a0 I stand on my soap box to proclaim loudly, “who cares?”\u00a0 Both camps have their places.\u00a0 Both have done greate things to the world of computing.\u00a0 That’s good enough for me.<\/p>\n
This story begins with a computer that is relatively new, running Windows XP x64.\u00a0 Things worked for a while, I managed to avoid the problems you hear about all the time with Vista, and I got to enjoy the clean speed and smoothness of a GUI almost everyone is familier with at this point in history.\u00a0 Basically every version of Windows ever created has a problem I’ve come to call “Rust.”\u00a0 In simple terms, the usable life expectancy of a computer running Windows is limited by the fact that Windows will eventually clutter itself up into not working correctly.\u00a0 The rust can be washed away by simply wiping the computer clean and reinstalling everything.\u00a0 Not a task for the weak, and certainly not for the people that merely use computers instead of managing them.\u00a0 It gets worse however.\u00a0 The rust itself can, if not detected soon enough, get bad enough to all but entirely prevent proper data backups which are a crucial step in reinstalling.<\/p>\n
In my case the rust manifested itself as a sudden inability to burn DVD’s.\u00a0 I use DVD’s as backups of almost everything important to me.\u00a0 They are cheap, durable, and store a relatively decent amount of information.\u00a0 My symptom was my burning software claiming drive incompatibility with the discs I was using.\u00a0 Not especially likely considering how many of them I’ve burned with this drive and software combonation.\u00a0 If that wasn’t good enough, it also locked up my computer, wouldn’t let the disc out of the drive until a reboot, and neatly produced an impressive number of coasters as I tried adjusting my configuration over and over.<\/p>\n
Fortunately I have a solid local network and several computers.\u00a0 My backups would have to go over that instead of onto DVD’s while I got this situation figured out.\u00a0 A swift evening of reinstalling my operating system, setting up my drivers and restoring backups back over the network fixed literally everything. \u00a0By swift of course I mean “it was running in a couple hours” and “it had everything I need back on it within about a week.” \u00a0Naturally adding things back is was on an “as needed” basis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have forever claimed to be tolerant of Microsoft products.\u00a0 As a user of both Windows and Unix based operating systems for many years, I can say I’ve seen both sides of this particular battle.\u00a0 I give both Microsoft and Unix credit for many things, and I see tremendous superiority on both sides, but in different areas. Unix stands as<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-venting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.trollserver.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.trollserver.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.trollserver.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.trollserver.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.trollserver.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.trollserver.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43,"href":"https:\/\/blog.trollserver.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions\/43"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.trollserver.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.trollserver.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.trollserver.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}