Posts by Zorba

Microsoft veteran demystifies Abort, Retry, Fail? DOS error

Re: because MS-DOS was "heavily inspired" by 70s CP/M

OTOH, Apple won't talk to you if your hardware or software is more than 2 or 3 years old - sometimes less! The entire Apple ecosphere is that way. I'll take backwards compatibility, thank you.

Re: because MS-DOS was "heavily inspired" by 70s CP/M

So true. I always said that the IBM PC combined the worst features of the Apple ][+ and the Model 1 TRS-80 - and the best features of neither. All-in-ones such as the NorthStar Advantage, the Intertec Superbrain, and countless others were the future trend, until IBM saddled the world with its crippled PC that took us back to Model 1 TRS-80 days - 3 ugly boxes connected by cables. At least the TRS-80's components looked like they belonged together, IBM's did not. Why IBM didn't go with the 68K family has always frustrated me. Even for an 8088 based system, it was crippled - the chip was good for 8MHZ, IBM used 4.77 as their clock speed. Tiny floppy drives that couldn't even hold a memory dump, a bad clone of CP/M that made TRS-DOS look good, a hole in the memory map for video (Just like a TRS-80), bastardized or ignored industry standards, the list of fail goes on.

To make it worse, the "serious" Microcomputer users of the day (Largely S-100 systems, but there were others) laughed at the PC as the toy it was, so the early adopters were from the Apple and TRS-80 worlds - and they brought their amateur hour programming practices with them. This kept the PC realm crippled for at least 10 years, by the time "serious" Microcomputerists (were forced to) migrated to the PC, these practices were firmly entrenched, and it took many years to purge them from general acceptance.

Google veep calls out Microsoft's cloud software licensing 'tax'

While I agree that "the cloud" has its uses, this insistence on EVERYTHING being "cloud based" is ridiculous. We've come full circle - wasn't the "Microcomputer Revolution" of the late 1970s all about owning and using our OWN computers, not ones located elsewhere and controlled by others? As for Office, I've hated Word ever since I first saw it. Crashed all the time, all our secretaries were constantly yelling about lost data, etc, etc. I never had that problem with WordStar on MS-DOS or CP/M. I still use a WordStar clone to this day.

What you need to know about Microsoft Windows 11: It will run Android apps

XP was a piece of crap - buggy and unstable. Even Vista was an improvement - but Win 7 was "Peak Windows". M$ and Apple both are on a smartphone kick - wanting their respective products to mimic the smartphone user experience, removing features and trashing the UI to accomplish that.

I use computers, not smartphones. No thank you.

Start or Please Stop? Power users mourn features lost in Windows 11 'simplification'

This is entirely possible. I don't know about the Windows team specifically, but as a (now retired) professional programmer, its obvious to me that many/most of these "coders" didn't pass CS-101 - and a large subset of those didn't even *take* CS-101. And yes, I can think of some examples from M$ that showcase this phenomenon.

You see it all the time in embedded systems, that - despite having multi-gigahertz processors and scads of memory - still exhibit not just buggy behavior, but latency, latency, latency everywhere! I see crap all the time that I would have been fired for - justifiably so - if I had written something that bad. I could get better responsiveness out of a 2 MHZ 8080 processor than these code monkeys get out of modern hardware!

Never mind that this is a COMPLETE security hole! I don't know about now, but at one point, M$ was encouraging the use of PINs for logins! Friggin' PINs! Every black hat hacker out there just LOVES PINs!

Smartphones are the worst thing to ever happen to IT. Completely useless beyond playing (some) games and watching yootoob videos - and they're sub-optimal for that. I DO NOT want my computer to look like, act like, or have the limitations of a smartphone. I'll go back to CP/M before I'll use a smartphone, or anything that looks/acts like one. Crippled UI, brain-dead OS, fugly block graphics in primary colors that would look crude on an Atari 2600, crippled "Apps" that mostly can be replaced with a simple webpage in leu of "Software" or even "Programs".

No thank you.

Re: Guessing the 11, in Windows 11 represents two dominos...

"Don't be Apple"...

Yep. Anything older than about 2 years is anathema to the entire Apple infrastructure. Perfectly good software won't run, this year's hardware won't interface to last year's hardware, etc, etc, etc. I'm "over" both Apple and Microsoft. I don't own a smartphone, consider them worse than useless so I sure don't want my computer to be crippled like one, or mimic its "look and feel". I don't want "Apps" on my computer either, and lets NOT install "XBox" and other smartphone junk either...

As for "peak Windows" - As far as I'm concerned, that was Win 7. XP was an unstable, buggy pile of crap. The Win 8.x fiasco was Balmer's smartphone religion nonsense, 10 is as ugly as home made sin but works, performs well, and is pretty stable - tracking nonsense not withstanding.

Re: Telemetry

Exactly. Firefox has been in a race to the bottom with Chrome for years. Following the "decontenting" craze as started by Apple, and furthered by Microsoft; Firefox has become increasingly like Chrome, with features stripped out left and right.

MacOS wakes to a bright Catalina sunrise – and broken Adobe apps

I'm out.

Apple breaks everything with every release, dumbs down (or removes entirely) useful software (I'm looking at YOU, "Photos" vs iPhoto as but one example), and tries to turn my expensive computer into a crippled cell phone. We won't even bother to discuss the stupid religious aspects such as the one button mice that everyone threw away for decades nor the lack of .WEBP support. I'm done, I'm out. Moving to strictly open source and cross platform software. I realize not everyone has that luxury, but for those who do, I advise it. The one thing I'll say for Microsoft is their backwards compatibility record is light years above and beyond Apple's.