Microsoft gaffe at USENIX Windows NT conference. Priceless.

slashdot.org ^

[chance33_98]

bwahahahahaha

[microgood]

A monumental NURD scandal.

[ShadowAce]

Leave it to MS to put its foot in its mouth

[john316]

I work w/ some developer types that I have been trying to get to migrate away from tclsh for some time. I can't wait to see the look on thier faces after they read this.

[mikegi]

A monumental NURD scandal.

No kidding. The same < 1% "dead-enders" who engaged in the OS/2 v. Windows wars in the 90's have now switched to Linux. They make the same old "Microsoft is stupid/evil/incompetent" etc. claims while MSFT keeps selling millions of copies of Windows per month. These Microsoft competitors, however meager, do serve a useful purpose by keeping the pressure on MSFT to improve Windows.

I think it would be fun for these bashers to actually produce a plug-n-play system for their favorite OS that's as good as Windows. After they've pulled all their hair out trying to create a pnp system that doesn't hang all the time, they might gain a little respect for Windows.

[chance33_98]

I don't think they were necessarily bashing microsoft, they were at a MS conference afterall :)

[microgood]

Having worked with Command Line OS Systems for many years, they suck.

One of my biggest disappointments is the slowness of adoption of ksh93.

Its only been ten years. How often does something like UNIX change?

[GOP_1900AD]

Priceless!

[Prof Engineer]

Would it be possible for someone to translate this into English for those of us nerds who aren't computer nerds?

[chilepepper]

Having worked with Command Line OS Systems for many years, they suck

Spoken by someone who doesn't have to administer 100+ machines...

GUI based application interfaces can be nice, but in general they are IMHO a poor paradigm on getting things done on a computer (flameproof suit on).

they end up being non-uniform, particularly for system applications, and worse, their purpose is actually to HIDE information from you, which means you become an "expert" a navigating a set of menus and finding "appropriate entries", rather than an expert of what options really mean to an application. command lines, even if primitive, are machine readable, machine generatable and, if put in a script, guaranteed to be reproducable (can you guarantee that you always navigate menus exactly the same way? never installed a modem under Windows, eh?). command lines are far more useful to those who have to do large system tasks.

Maintaining, or even running a program from a GUI if you need to repeat a procedure tends to seem like random or even superstitious behaviour ("pull down this screen, then go to the 5th entry...except on new versions of the application, where you go to the SIXTH entry...then go to this pull down screen...then go the the fourth entry and pick the DEFAULT FILES tab, then find the window that says TEMPORARY FILE and enter blah blah blah)

It seems to me that what happens with a GUI is that you exchange complexity for time: it tend to feed you details serially, whereas with a command line you can deal with more details at once: clearly the GUI goal is "simplification" but this works only if you really are a novice -- and frequently replaces one type a complexity (related to the application you want to run) for another complexity (e.g.- the mechanics of getting the GUI to eat all the details you need to enter, particularly if you need to generalize something for a large group of machines)

A perfect example of this exchange of complexity is what happens with these "specialized" GUIs designed for managing a large number of machines -- then you end up with a large collection of these "specialized" GUIs, some dealing with printers, some with users, some with disks and permissions, and so on...

[Dead Corpse]

Essentially, an MS rep tried to tell the guy who wrote a certain shell application how his own program ran and how identical it was to Micrshafts version of it even though there are some rather significant differences.

The irony comes in when you consider that the MS rep was obviously clueless as to who he was talking to.

[Fractal Trader]

silly Microsoft claims department here.

Pretty soon we will hear about how Netscape stole their browser from them.

[AFreeBird]

B4L8r

[TechJunkYard]

This seems to be typical behavior for most of the Microsofties I know. Arrogant and self-centered, they think they're always right, they own the industry and that their stuff is The Best in The World, based solely on the number of copies of Windows they sell to clueless consumers who don't know the first thing about the computers they use.

Makes you wonder how much contact they have with technical people outside their own realm.

[TechJunkYard]

.. I'm just thankful I'm not the son of Bill Gates!

Best,
Adam

LOL!

[lainie]

You beat me to the same exact quote and response :)

[TechJunkYard]

Great minds.... ;-)

[chance33_98]

GUI based application interfaces can be nice, but in general they are IMHO a poor paradigm on getting things done on a computer (flameproof suit on).

I have over 400 machines I manage, a mix of unix variants and MS ones. I also run both at home. The unix machines have very little problems, with the exception of hardware failures (mainly cpus). Scripting does wonders for administration - happily you can also use PERL on windows and do quite a bit.

[GOP_1900AD]

Ah, but you've got to love the commericials. A little bit of acoustic guitar. A soft folksy voice over. "Hello small business person, someday going to be great. Come and get a fix of this now. Thus far, you are too small to have an IT department. But you will become addicted now, so that after you grow, you'll be stuck...."