XPect the Worst [Derbyshire on Windows Upgrades]

National Review Online ^ | October 30, 2001 8:40 a.m. | John Derbyshire

[dfrussell]

in 4,000 bytes

This is nonsense and the preson sounds like a clueless wannabe..

The io routines required to read/write a single sentence from a flat ascii screen would take more than 4000 bytes... and that assumes a reasonably tight language.

COBOL, that the author mentions, would require substantially more -- not to mention a *lot* more typing.

As far as calculating pi with COBOL, I suppose one could do it if you were really demented. COBOL's reason for existing is that it is a good string processing language and fairly readable (intended to be self-documenting). That's why it was used in a lot of legacy business apps.

Anyone in old-tek with much sense would have used some variant of Fortran for arithmetic calculations - maybe PL/1 if they spent too much time at IBM.

Sitting at the console of an old mainframe wasn't like star trek and it's unlikely that the owners would let anyone jack around with their **VERY** expensive baby. If they were so inclined, the small army of systems programmers required to keep the OS running and patched would nix the idea.

Systems hacks on old mainframes used mostly assembler or possibly PL/1 for programming languages.

COBOL is what the application weines used.

[CheneyChick]

Are you always this grumpy?

[CheneyChick]

I have no idea what you said, but it sounded really cool.

Cheers, CC :)

[Leroy S. Mort]

One complaint re Win2000 - the one line message after install that said "Windows 200 does not support VIA IDE USB bridge." That's it... no support. No USB ports. Looking for a fix.

Just a thought..have you applied the latest Service Pack to your Win2k installation? These often include hardware fixes.

[general_re]

Go to Via and download and install the latest 4-in-1 drivers for your system - they'll fix a great many problems you're likely to run into over the next few months ;)

[Harrison Bergeron]

Thanks. Yeah, since Win2k is a mature platform, the first thing I did was install SP2 and the security updates. I was just surprised to see that MS didn't address the USB issue in the SP. I downloaded a USB driver fix from VIA this week - haven't installed it to see if it fixes the prob yet.

Does anybody know if there are any salient points to WinXP that would make it desireable over Win2000?

[Moridin]

Yep, HP sucks--their drivers are useless. As for WinME, it's sucks beyond belief. I'm going through the process of setting up WinXP on my laptop and so far I like it so much I bought 512Megs of memory for my desktop so I can install XP on that. It is definitely better than ME. All I need now is to find something like TweakUI so I can move My Documents to the D drive.

[Doug Loss]

I think you missed his tone in describing his mainframe days. He said he wrote the Pi program in COBOL on a bet. He talks about using MASM on a PC and seems somewhat distainful of Turbo-C, which sounds entirely like an old-time systems programmer to me. And if he's running the boot deck himself, he is the system operator and can do whatever he wants with the system.

[Capt. Tom]

· An operating system, of course: this one is Windows ME.

Up to that point I thought he knew what he was talking about. -Tom

[Leroy S. Mort]

I was just surprised to see that MS didn't address the USB issue in the SP.

It would be up to VIA to write the appropriate driver, not MS. Apparantly they have done so.

Does anybody know if there are any salient points to WinXP that would make it desireable over Win2000?

Just a bunch of convenience features and better compatability with Win9x apps and games. I prefer XP personally, but if you're otherwise satisfied with Win2k, it's not worth the upgrade. However, moving from 9x/ME to XP offers significant advantages.

[Moridin]

What do you expect from a COBOL programmer? LOL

[general_re]

Does anybody know if there are any salient points to WinXP that would make it desireable over Win2000?

Why, sure - that warm fuzzy feeling you get from helping BillG to expand the deck on the back of his house.

Oh, wait - you probably meant desirable to you ;)

I haven't seen anything that makes me want to upgrade - fast-user switching is not an issue, and neither is the eye-candy. And don't think you can upgrade from win2k to XP-Home - you can't. If you have 2k installed, you can only upgrade to XP-Pro (which lists for $299, IIRC) unless you want to wipe it and start from scratch.

[monkeyshine]

This is coming from a guy who upgraded 98 to ME. HAHAHAHA. Even I knew that ME was a downgrade from 98.

I got XP now, and although I put it on a brand new machine hand-built from scratch, it seems to be much better than 98.

[Dr.Deth]

Ah... those fondly remembered Days Of Disasm. Bootstrapping. Knuckleheads leaving their symbol tables in production binaries. Peek and poke. If you couldn't speak 6502 or 68000 you were a 'looser'. The first fumbling forays into BASIC. Ultima & Wolfenstein & Baseball Sim in study hall.

Sigh. We shan't see days like those, ever and anon.

[Leroy S. Mort]

All I need now is to find something like TweakUI so I can move My Documents to the D drive.

PowerToys for XP is now available and contains TweakUI for XP.

[Moridin]

...or graduated from Edlin. :-)

[Moridin]

Thank you, thank you, thank you. *g*

[Leroy S. Mort]

If you have 2k installed, you can only upgrade to XP-Pro (which lists for $299, IIRC) unless you want to wipe it and start from scratch.

The XP Pro upgrade can be used to install a clean XP. All you have to do is insert your Win2K (or other qualifying media) during the installation process when prompted. There, I just saved ya a 100 bucks.... ;-)

[jpl]

Shouldn't the damn thing work out of the box?

Haha, that's the funniest thing I'm likely to read all day.