I still don't get the whole MS bash thing...



  • And also not why Developers have to be so hostile to each other about it...

    There are two "classes" of programmers in the world of software development: I'm going to call them the 20% and the 80%.

    The 20% folks are what many would call "alpha" programmers — the leaders, trailblazers, trendsetters, the kind of folks that places like Google and Fog Creek software are obsessed with hiring. These folks were the first ones to install Linux at home in the 90's; the people who write lisp compilers and learn Haskell on weekends "just for fun"; they actively participate in open source projects; they're always aware of the latest, coolest new trends in programming and tools.

    The 80% folks make up the bulk of the software development industry. They're not stupid; they're merely vocational. They went to school, learned just enough Java/C#/C++, then got a job writing internal apps for banks, governments, travel firms, law firms, etc. The world usually never sees their software. They use whatever tools Microsoft hands down to them -- usally VS.NET if they’re doing C++, or maybe a GUI IDE like Eclipse or IntelliJ for Java development. They've never used Linux, and aren't very interested in it anyway. Many have never even used version control. If they have, it’s only whatever tool shipped in the Microsoft box (like SourceSafe), or some ancient thing handed down to them. They know exactly enough to get their job done, then go home on the weekend and forget about computers.

    Now even toolsets are connected to "types of programmers."

    Some people will start shouting murder and fire if you mention a certain toolset they don't like. It is actually kind of tiring. Maybe it is not even about Microsoft anymore...

    Can somebody explain it to me?



  •  Was that a quote from the CodingHorror blog?  If it's the one I'm thinking of, then there was a huge backlash against that post and then a reply from Jeff (the author) that cleared things up.  The whole point of the post is that there are developers that "have the fire" and then developers that think it's just a job.  The author got overly specific and a lot of people felt that they themselves are good programmers but don't fit into the author's description of the 20%-ers.

    Not really sure what this has to do with Microsoft, except for the fact that the post asserts that most people stick with Microsoft products because that's what most of the world uses.  The 20%-ers have no problem going out of their way to discover alternatives.  I don't think it was a bash on Microsoft at all (except maybe the VSS part).  Instead, it was a bash against people that just stick with the same tools and don't try to learn anything new. 

     

    EDIT: Guess it didn't start out on coding horror but instead trickled down through the blogosphere.  Here's where I read it:  CodingHorror: The Two Types of Programmers 



  • Microsoft pays my bills.

     I think the majority of microsoft bashers are 80% Open source kiddies who don't have a real job and 20% former open source kiddies who got a java job and drank the sun coolaid.

    I ignore them.

     



  •  I don't give a flying fork if people consider me a "real" programmer or whether the tools I use are "legitimate development" tools nor do I really give two spoonfulls of excrement that I am considered to be "working for the man" and not some enterprising young whipper-snapper who made enough to retire before I got out of diapers.

    (looks at paycheck)

    Nope ... I really don't care :-)



  • There are certainly two distinct classes of software developers, but anybody who thinks that the not-moron kind accounts for as many as 20% of the population is laughably mistaken. I doubt it's as much as 2%.



  • @Jonathan Holland said:

    Microsoft pays my bills.

     I think the majority of microsoft bashers are 80% Open source kiddies who don't have a real job and 20% former open source kiddies who got a java job and drank the sun coolaid.

    I probably shouldn't respond to such an obvious troll thread, but...

    Java has paid my bills since 1997. It's never once let me down. I've yet to find a Microsoft programmer who doesn't have at least one story of Microsoft letting him down.

    If you don't understand why "less is more" makes Java a more professional language than anything Microsoft has ever come up with, you're in the original 80%.

    I'm not calling Java the best thing ever. It doesn't have to be, in order to be leaps and bounds above anything Microsoft has put out. Microsoft's horrid attempts at language design go back as far as the 80s versions of MASM, when they decided they could make a "better" assembly.



  • Is this a joke?

    Here is one programmer who has never had any issue with Microsoft tools, and I'm someone who came from a backround of GCC and Makefiles, not VisualBasic.

    I'm assuming you have never ever touched C#, or used any .NET CLR language at that matter.

    Java is a fine language, C# took some of java's oddities and fixed them, while adding a few more of their own. Anyone who cannot see that both langauges and underlying virtual machines are fine is a biased fan boy.

    Don't drink the sun coolaid.

    Btw, when are you guys going to get delegates/closures, real generics (that don't have type erasure problems), automatic properties, and lambda expressions?



  •  I bash M$ for multiple reasons, but Dos 4.0 would be enough reason.

    A cow-orker offered to show me the easter egg in Excel 5.0 that showed the names of the developers. I declined, giving as reason that I didn't have enough money to have them all killed. I was almost joking.

    Other purveyors of malign software products are available...

     



  • They stopped innovating after win95. Honestly I would respect them, but their numerous less than noble business practices irk me. They have more money than they can possibly spend yet insist on charging ridiculous amounts for software that isn't entirely usable. Sure their office products are nice, and allot of the free tools they offer are excellent, just wondering why the hell those tools aren't shipped with the OS to begin with. Their site is horrible to navigate, especially if you aren't used to it, i spend 5 hours trying to get the dependencies for monad so I could install it, shitty-net exploder did it's "I hate the world" routine, IE7 refuses to install for whatever reason and I don't feel like reacquiring the patches to get monad working in a VM. Why the hell can't they integrate a sane MSDN search into their desktop or website is beyond me. The default shell (XP) is a world of improvement over the DOS/9x shell, but falls short of bash's glory, they tend to hang onto backwards compatibility to the point of insanity (why carry a bug for BC?), AD is full of double negatives, odd rules which you have to memorize and they don't always follow their own best practices.



    Installing VS a while back was a pain, apparently to get a C++ program to compile in VS C++ one has to download that and an iso image that happens to let you compile C++ programs. Each and every function for GUI operation needs to be broken onto multiple lines (with 200+ columns), which is a personal pet peeve of mine. They try to be user friendly and frequently end up annoying the frick out of power users, case and point would be Clippy and word bubbles. Every time I get a fresh install of XP/Server 2003/Vista it takes me about an hour to disable/enable enough features to actually make me comfortable, whereas I can stand the defaults most FOSS programs use. The registry is absolutely horrible, thanks, now I need a specialized tool to read cryptic ini files which like to occasionally user GUIDs so I have no idea it that is windows crap or spyware crap. Window's file explorer has a lot of features that I like (built-in [s]ftp is sweet), but prompting me whenever I change a file extension (which I do frequently enough) is not cool, changing the default way icons are organized is completely counter-intuitive, and wtf is with integrating explorer with the shell?




    To each his own I guess. All my machines run linux as host, windows as guests when I need to.
    [/rant]



  • If it takes you an hour to get you rwindows settings the way you want them, you might have bigger problems.  Are you sure you didn't mean 10 minutes?  

    As for the OP...  that quote is complete bullshit.  Where I work almost nobody (except me and one other guy)  do any programming for fun.  They all program just on the job.  We use VSS (not my choice).  However, pretty much everyone there knows about CVS or SVN.  Also about half of them use windows and half use linux or sunos.   And it's not like the company makes them, it's their choice.  The person that wrote that is just an elitist.  


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @tster said:

    As for the OP...  that quote is complete bullshit...The person that wrote that is just an elitist.  

     

    Not an elitist, just wrong.  $my_language_of_choice is the best, and the rest of you aren't real programmers.  And if you aren't running $my_os then you're just making the world a worse place to live in.

    Posers. 



  • This just in, programmers are just as biased as the rest of the human race.  More at 11:00.

    Seriously, no tool is better than any other in all cases. They all have their own advantages/disadvantages - the trick is to know when to use the right one.

    I don't use Java as I develop primarily for  Windows platform and other Microsoft products, so I use .Net. But if Sun came out tomorrow with something that would drastically cut my time, I'd damn well look at.  I'd doing both myself and my employer a disservice by allowing my predjudices to get in the way.




  • @lpope187 said:

    Seriously, no tool is better than any other in all cases. They all have their own advantages/disadvantages - the trick is to know when to use the right one.
    We should get that in 1 sentence, on stickers, and stick them on everything. Maybe then this "tool/language X rules all" would finaly die.

    Windows rocks, Linux rocks. All for there own reasons.

     

    (I work with Linux, and I agree with a .NET person. Guess some would say that hell is freezing over) 



  • @lpope187 said:

    Seriously, no tool is better than any other in all cases.

    But some people are just better than others. Or more precisely, some people are just worse than others; I've never seen evidence of "intelligence", but you can't throw a stick without hitting "stupid".

    However, I do have to disagree with one thing that the OP said. The large group are not "merely vocational", they are bloody idiots.

    This is not specific to software. The stupid are in the majority throughout the species.

    The only reason that there's an observable correlation to those people who do things "for fun" is because the stupid people just aren't going to be doing that.



  • @Jonathan Holland said:

    Is this a joke?

    Here is one programmer who has never had any issue with Microsoft tools, and I'm someone who came from a backround of GCC and Makefiles, not VisualBasic.

    I'm assuming you have never ever touched C#, or used any .NET CLR language at that matter.

     

     

    I've had my own set of problems with .NET. The first subset is installing the framework:

    There's this ".NET runtime 1.1 SP1" my Windows never seems to be able to install. I've checked the log files in the usual places, nothing helps. I would check the web for solutions (unfortunately, this is the way to go with most of MS' application error messages) but this is not a machine I use for .NET development.

    More recently, I've come across a problem installing the 3.0 framework. Actually, it was a colleague who tried the install, which, according to him, failed more or less silently (with an obscure error message, I'm guessing). Anyway, he went on to try removing all the frameworks and reinstalling them. Neither 2.0 nor 3.0 would install. This is where I came in, checking the log files and monitoring registry usage, etc. to find out how and where they failed. Manually trying to fix the successive install problems turned out to be too much work. Web searches came up with nothing. We ended up discarding the machine (and the hosting service, for other reasons).

    The other subset is about .NET localization issues.

    I have to read a long article before I can even begin to understand how .NET approaches localization settings, but there seems to be some counter-intuitive approaches. For example, the developer's regional settings seem to effect the target application's runtime settings. It may very well be a case of the application using default settings, and the framework grabbing the defaults from the runtime user's control panel settings, but no amount of hacking on my part or that of my colleague's (who is a long time .NET developer) made this particular application ignore the control panel settings and just run the way we coded it.

    I realize the these issues arise because of lack of knowledge on my part, but the fact that they could have been avoided in the first place, with better-guided thinking is really annoying. Microsoft products (for the most part) integrate tightly among themselves, and occasionally present you with an intricate web that is impossible to get out of without some specific piece of knowledge. I hate wasting time trying to search around for that specific piece.



  • @Lingerance said:

    They stopped innovating after win95. ... Installing VS a while back was a pain, apparently to get a C++ program to compile in VS C++ one has to download that _and_ an iso image that happens to let you compile C++ programs. [/rant]
     

    Well, I'm as much an avd MS-hater as the next guy, but in all honesty, VStudio is the best program they've ever made. It is simply a wonderful IDE. However, the VC leaves quite a bit to be desired... 



  • @aib said:

    @Jonathan Holland said:

    Is this a joke?

    Here is one programmer who has never had any issue with Microsoft tools, and I'm someone who came from a backround of GCC and Makefiles, not VisualBasic.

    I'm assuming you have never ever touched C#, or used any .NET CLR language at that matter.

     

     

    I've had my own set of problems with .NET. The first subset is installing the framework:

    There's this ".NET runtime 1.1 SP1" my Windows never seems to be able to install. I've checked the log files in the usual places, nothing helps. I would check the web for solutions (unfortunately, this is the way to go with most of MS' application error messages) but this is not a machine I use for .NET development.

    More recently, I've come across a problem installing the 3.0 framework. Actually, it was a colleague who tried the install, which, according to him, failed more or less silently (with an obscure error message, I'm guessing). Anyway, he went on to try removing all the frameworks and reinstalling them. Neither 2.0 nor 3.0 would install. This is where I came in, checking the log files and monitoring registry usage, etc. to find out how and where they failed. Manually trying to fix the successive install problems turned out to be too much work. Web searches came up with nothing. We ended up discarding the machine (and the hosting service, for other reasons).

     

     Apparently you have never heard of aspnet_regiis.exe, also your mention of the registry shows how little you actually know. .NET uses the Event Logger to log errors, not the registry.

     

     

    The other subset is about .NET localization issues.

    I have to read a long article before I can even begin to understand how .NET approaches localization settings, but there seems to be some counter-intuitive approaches. For example, the developer's regional settings seem to effect the target application's runtime settings. It may very well be a case of the application using default settings, and the framework grabbing the defaults from the runtime user's control panel settings, but no amount of hacking on my part or that of my colleague's (who is a long time .NET developer) made this particular application ignore the control panel settings and just run the way we coded it.

    I realize the these issues arise because of lack of knowledge on my part, but the fact that they could have been avoided in the first place, with better-guided thinking is really annoying. Microsoft products (for the most part) integrate tightly among themselves, and occasionally present you with an intricate web that is impossible to get out of without some specific piece of knowledge. I hate wasting time trying to search around for that specific piece.

     

     Basicly, you couldn't figure out how to use .NET (or even install it) and you have decided it sucks? Hah



  • Holy S*it all the gobbly gook I hear.  What would happen if 100 artists had painted the MonaLisa

    Answer:   a piece of s*it just like MS software!!!



  • I was hoping my naive topic would unite and enlighten us all, and start a cease fire. Instead it seems I have reached the opposite effect.



  • @Mikademus said:

    @Lingerance said:

    They stopped innovating after win95. ... Installing VS a while back was a pain, apparently to get a C++ program to compile in VS C++ one has to download that and an iso image that happens to let you compile C++ programs. [/rant]
     

    Well, I'm as much an avd MS-hater as the next guy, but in all honesty, VStudio is the best program they've ever made. It is simply a wonderful IDE. However, the VC leaves quite a bit to be desired... 

    I never said it was a bad IDE, I only said the functionality that was expected out of the box was not present, the expected functionality would be to compile C++ programs (non-.NET), said functionality required be to actually find out what was wrong as it gave no indication that stdio.h, stdlib.h and all the normal headers we never shipped with it. Then the patch or whatever was provided as an ISO which I didn't have a blank CD and didn't want to install a CD-Drive emulator to use it. Is it really unreasonable to expect a program labeled as a C++ IDE with included compiler/linker to actually be able to do what it is labeled to do without having to spend time figuring out why it chokes?



    As for the halt of innovation, I have yet to notice then having any new technologies introduced that weren't already in existence, aside from ACPI. Aero is mostly copied from most X-Windows managers' composite extensions, start-menu incremental search is slightly innovative in presentation, but incremental searches have existed in web-browsers long before then. UAC is their attempt a gksudo, which is nice since it actually does the blocking more on the kernel level.



    As for the hour setup which was commented on a while ago; I disable the theming service, have to set my theme to something other than the default when theming service is disabled then back so it rendered correctly. I also create a LUA usually before I remember to disable the accessibility options. If I'm on a windows server box I have to adjust the security settings so it will let me download firefox, I also pin the MMCs for whatever the server box is used for, so a DHCP box will have DHCP admin pinned to the start menu. If applicable I usually also go fishing around to get my drivers up to date, specifically the video drivers so I can rotate my monitor 90 degrees. The windows updates require several reboots. I also enable viewing of file-extensions and hidden files and make sure the folders all display in normal icon mode (alla win9x) unless it's a server box because I like being able to see the owner of a file at first glance on those. Then I adjust the start menu preferences to not highlight recently installed programs, and put the My Documents and My Computer folders on the desktop. On vista I remove the sidebar as well. Generally it takes me at least the majority of an hour (if I don't update), I may have forgotten a few steps.



    Also as my stance wasn't made entirely clear, I find MS' implementations to have irritating UI issues, they do occasionally make good products, however windows (as a whole) is not one of their better products.



  • I've had this same discussion before, and the one thing that came out of it was that those who were used to Unix/Linux, and to the Unix/Linux way of doing things, have always had horrendous difficulties with the most basic stuff on Windows, whereas those who were used to Windows had the problem the opposite way.

    One thing worth bearing in mind is that even someone like Eric S Raymond will acknowledge that maybe the people who are used to the Windows way just might have a point here: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html (the CUPS interface seems to be a WTF all on it's own, and one hour to customize a desktop to your preferred personal tastes seems like nothing compared to this story of trying to get something as basic as network printing working.)

     



  • @Lingerance said:

    I never said it was a bad IDE, I only said the functionality that was expected out of the box was not present, the expected functionality would be to compile C++ programs (non-.NET), said functionality required be to actually find out what was wrong as it gave no indication that stdio.h, stdlib.h and all the normal headers we never shipped with it. Then the patch or whatever was provided as an ISO which I didn't have a blank CD and didn't want to install a CD-Drive emulator to use it. Is it really unreasonable to expect a program labeled as a C++ IDE with included compiler/linker to actually be able to do what it is labeled to do without having to spend time figuring out why it chokes?
     

    You don't need a CD-Drive emulator to open an iso file.  Programs like winRAR (and some others) do that



  • @medialint said:

    I don't give a flying fork

    If I had a flying fork, I wouldn't give it away either.

    @medialint said:

    nor do I really give two spoonfulls of excrement

    I would give that away if I had it.   



  • @mfah said:

    this story of trying to get something as basic as network printing working

    Anybody who has adminned a non-trivial Windows network with printers can tell you that Windows does not have an advantage here. It's at least as bad, possibly worse (and those old versions of CUPS were pretty damn bad - newer ones have improved on this somewhat). I'm not sure that anybody really understands how SMB network printing works.

    I've had printer "engineers" from all the major manufacturers come to deploy their top-of-the-line models, at various sites over the years, and not one of them has ever been willing to interact with the Windows network printing system - they disavow all responsibility for it, and the only thing they're willing to do is set up direct-to-printer-via-lpr mode (which Windows only supports for compatibility with ancient unix systems).



  • @shadowman said:

    @Lingerance said:

    I never said it was a bad IDE, I only said the functionality that was expected out of the box was not present, the expected functionality would be to compile C++ programs (non-.NET), said functionality required be to actually find out what was wrong as it gave no indication that stdio.h, stdlib.h and all the normal headers we never shipped with it. Then the patch or whatever was provided as an ISO which I didn't have a blank CD and didn't want to install a CD-Drive emulator to use it. Is it really unreasonable to expect a program labeled as a C++ IDE with included compiler/linker to actually be able to do what it is labeled to do without having to spend time figuring out why it chokes?
     

    You don't need a CD-Drive emulator to open an iso file.  Programs like winRAR (and some others) do that

     

     Not to mention that there is a handy 20k little utility from microsoft that makes a virtual drive out of any iso.

    http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/b/6/7b6abd84-7841-4978-96f5-bd58df02efa2/winxpvirtualcdcontrolpanel_21.exe 



  • @Lingerance said:

    functionality required be to actually find out what was wrong as it gave no indication that stdio.h, stdlib.h and all the normal headers we never shipped with it.
     

    last time I downloaded gcc it didn't come with headers either ;)  However, I have no idea what your talking about.  VS has always come with headers for me.   Perhaps you unchecked them or something in the advanced setup. 



  • I think the whole which-toolset-is-better thing misses the point, which is more cultural and political. Like many, I started with micros in the early 80's, and every time a machine came out, it was faster and nicer and had better sound...the games improved, then the business software started improving...it was all looking good. When I first heard my Amiga talk in 86, surfed the web in 87, put on a VR helmet in 89 and actually talked back to my computer in the early 90's, I fully expected to be living in Neuromancer territory by 2000. Moore's law demanded it! And then something happened - I think it was probably Windows 3.1 . MS gained dominance, and like all companies beyond a certain size, simply became a money-making dinosaur re-releasing the same product over-and-over with simple marketing tweaks. Hardware became simply a faster platform to run MS Office. I, for one, resent that. I want my hover car, and I want my virtual world.

    Linux, on the other hand, represents the new frontier for all those 80's bedroom micro hackers. It appeals politically to those with a general mistrust of large corporations (and capitalism as a whole) and is a great way of "sticking it to the man". Unfortunately, it suffers from having to play catch-up to the established MS culture, which means that as a desktop replacement, it can never win.

    As it happens though, I think the battle has already been lost to the Triumvirate of the Internet, Mobiles, and Games Consoles (the first of which is already dominated by Linux, and the 2nd and 3rd will be real soon now, I reckon). When you've got a dedicated 3D processor at home that only cost $100, and has a way cooler interface than the 2D mouse'n'keyboard (personally, I think the Wii controller is the first bit of real innovation we've seen in 15 years), and when it can plug into the biggest computer n the world and run any online app you like - and you can do the same on the train with your little talky-gadget that plays tunes and takes photos and videos and scans and everything you need - then I think the fight for the desktop will be seen historically as a minor skirmish.



  •  I suppose this thread alone is proof that these forums are not for sane people.



  • @Jonathan Holland said:

    @aib said:

    @Jonathan Holland said:

    Is this a joke?

    Here is one programmer who has never had any issue with Microsoft tools, and I'm someone who came from a backround of GCC and Makefiles, not VisualBasic.

    I'm assuming you have never ever touched C#, or used any .NET CLR language at that matter.

     

     

    I've had my own set of problems with .NET. The first subset is installing the framework:

    There's this ".NET runtime 1.1 SP1" my Windows never seems to be able to install. I've checked the log files in the usual places, nothing helps. I would check the web for solutions (unfortunately, this is the way to go with most of MS' application error messages) but this is not a machine I use for .NET development.

    More recently, I've come across a problem installing the 3.0 framework. Actually, it was a colleague who tried the install, which, according to him, failed more or less silently (with an obscure error message, I'm guessing). Anyway, he went on to try removing all the frameworks and reinstalling them. Neither 2.0 nor 3.0 would install. This is where I came in, checking the log files and monitoring registry usage, etc. to find out how and where they failed. Manually trying to fix the successive install problems turned out to be too much work. Web searches came up with nothing. We ended up discarding the machine (and the hosting service, for other reasons).

     

     Apparently you have never heard of aspnet_regiis.exe, also your mention of the registry shows how little you actually know. .NET uses the Event Logger to log errors, not the registry.

     

    Nope, I haven't. Is there a README file I've missed?

    What do you think the error messages said, apart from something completely unhelpful, along the lines of "unable to create registry key HKLM\S[message truncated, go check the event logs for errors longer than 128 characters]" 

     

    @Jonathan Holland said:

     

    The other subset is about .NET localization issues.

    I have to read a long article before I can even begin to understand how .NET approaches localization settings, but there seems to be some counter-intuitive approaches. For example, the developer's regional settings seem to effect the target application's runtime settings. It may very well be a case of the application using default settings, and the framework grabbing the defaults from the runtime user's control panel settings, but no amount of hacking on my part or that of my colleague's (who is a long time .NET developer) made this particular application ignore the control panel settings and just run the way we coded it.

    I realize the these issues arise because of lack of knowledge on my part, but the fact that they could have been avoided in the first place, with better-guided thinking is really annoying. Microsoft products (for the most part) integrate tightly among themselves, and occasionally present you with an intricate web that is impossible to get out of without some specific piece of knowledge. I hate wasting time trying to search around for that specific piece.

     

     Basicly, you couldn't figure out how to use .NET (or even install it) and you have decided it sucks? Hah

     

    Yes, definitely. Anything that fails such a simple operation silently, and can't be fixed without spending hours on the problem sucks.

    Though of course I don't know what made you think that I thought .NET sucked, or that I couldn't figure out how to use it.



  • @aib said:

    @Jonathan Holland said:

    @aib said:

    @Jonathan Holland said:

    Is this a joke?

    Here is one programmer who has never had any issue with Microsoft tools, and I'm someone who came from a backround of GCC and Makefiles, not VisualBasic.

    I'm assuming you have never ever touched C#, or used any .NET CLR language at that matter.

     

     

    I've had my own set of problems with .NET. The first subset is installing the framework:

    There's this ".NET runtime 1.1 SP1" my Windows never seems to be able to install. I've checked the log files in the usual places, nothing helps. I would check the web for solutions (unfortunately, this is the way to go with most of MS' application error messages) but this is not a machine I use for .NET development.

    More recently, I've come across a problem installing the 3.0 framework. Actually, it was a colleague who tried the install, which, according to him, failed more or less silently (with an obscure error message, I'm guessing). Anyway, he went on to try removing all the frameworks and reinstalling them. Neither 2.0 nor 3.0 would install. This is where I came in, checking the log files and monitoring registry usage, etc. to find out how and where they failed. Manually trying to fix the successive install problems turned out to be too much work. Web searches came up with nothing. We ended up discarding the machine (and the hosting service, for other reasons).

     

     Apparently you have never heard of aspnet_regiis.exe, also your mention of the registry shows how little you actually know. .NET uses the Event Logger to log errors, not the registry.

     

    Nope, I haven't. Is there a README file I've missed?

    What do you think the error messages said, apart from something completely unhelpful, along the lines of "unable to create registry key HKLM\S[message truncated, go check the event logs for errors longer than 128 characters]" 

     

    Wait....   are you telling us what the error message is? I though you didn't know the error message because you said that you were guessing that it was obscure.  However, "Cannot create the registery key <insert key here>" is not obscure at all.  In fact, it's down right exact.  The install failed because it couldn't create the registery key.  Would it be obscure if it said "could not create file <insert filename>"?  What would you do if it said could not create file?  you should probably start doing the same things for the registry key error.



  • @Benn said:

    I think the whole which-toolset-is-better thing misses the point, which is more cultural and political. Like many, I started with micros in the early 80's, and every time a machine came out, it was faster and nicer and had better sound...the games improved, then the business software started improving...it was all looking good. When I first heard my Amiga talk in 86, surfed the web in 87, put on a VR helmet in 89 and actually talked *back* to my computer in the early 90's, I fully expected to be living in Neuromancer territory by 2000. Moore's law *demanded* it! And then something happened - I think it was probably Windows 3.1 . MS gained dominance, and like all companies beyond a certain size, simply became a money-making dinosaur re-releasing the same product over-and-over with simple marketing tweaks. Hardware became simply a faster platform to run MS Office. I, for one, resent that. I want my hover car, and I want my virtual world.

    Linux, on the other hand, represents the new frontier for all those 80's bedroom micro hackers. It appeals politically to those with a general mistrust of large corporations (and capitalism as a whole) and is a great way of "sticking it to the man". Unfortunately, it suffers from having to play catch-up to the established MS culture, which means that as a desktop replacement, it can never win.

    As it happens though, I think the battle has already been lost to the Triumvirate of the Internet, Mobiles, and Games Consoles (the first of which is already dominated by Linux, and the 2nd and 3rd will be real soon now, I reckon). When you've got a dedicated 3D processor at home that only cost $100, and has a way cooler interface than the 2D mouse'n'keyboard (personally, I think the Wii controller is the first bit of real innovation we've seen in 15 years), and when it can plug into the biggest computer n the world and run any online app you like - and you can do the same on the train with your little talky-gadget that plays tunes and takes photos and videos and scans and everything you need - then I think the fight for the desktop will be seen historically as a minor skirmish.

     

    Benn, that was simply one of the single best posts I've ever read. I agree with you whole-heartedly, and being the narcissistic bastard I am, I'll turn homosexual for your sake and have your children, it was that that good! Well, ok, that was perhaps a bit too much, but I'll buy you a few pints any time!



  • @tster said:

    @aib said:

    What do you think the error messages said, apart from something completely unhelpful, along the lines of "unable to create registry key HKLM\S[message truncated, go check the event logs for errors longer than 128 characters]" 

     

    Wait....   are you telling us what the error message is? I though you didn't know the error message because you said that you were guessing that it was obscure.  However, "Cannot create the registery key <insert key here>" is not obscure at all.  In fact, it's down right exact.  The install failed because it couldn't create the registery key.  Would it be obscure if it said "could not create file <insert filename>"?  What would you do if it said could not create file?  you should probably start doing the same things for the registry key error.

    Not sure, it's been a while. Could have been a couple of each. (Registry-related messages first couple of times, more obscure ones as I fix the registry and try to reinstall)

    If I dived any deeper into the registry stuff this would truly be an MS bash, so I'm gonna leave it at saying that yes, I've had problems with .NET -- and they had to do with simple stuff (such as installing the framework*).

     

    * Of course, this is no simple matter, but the user interface (read: installer) would make it seem that way -- part of the problem. It's really sad that we ended up reinstalling the whole system, which we figured would take much less time than trying to solve the problem properly. (Luckily, it was a server and thus didn't need much reconfiguring)

    Incidentally, there's this ".NET Framework 1.1 SPn" item in Windows Update on my desktop machine which always fails to install. Never figured out how to solve that, either. 



  • @Mikademus said:

    Benn, that was simply one of the single best posts I've ever read.

    I'm flattered - thank you. (Pity about the line breaks disappearing though) . I think though, looking at your site, that there may be a slight bias, considering some of my more outspoken opinions about the state of modern gaming...blah blah...all blokes in suits these days...blah blah...when Rob & I did Monty...blah blah... :)

    @Mikademus said:

    I'll turn homosexual for your sake and have your children

    Give me a shout when you get the womb implant.



  • @Benn said:

    I'm flattered - thank you. (Pity about the line breaks disappearing though) . I think though, looking at your site, that there may be a slight bias, considering some of my more outspoken opinions about the state of modern gaming...blah blah...all blokes in suits these days...blah blah...when Rob & I did Monty...blah blah... :)

    Wait... what, really? I read the "Benn" with two "nn" and just thought it was a clever reference.

    Of course, I spend most of my time when home listening to this internet radio thing that plays only 8/16-bit era game and demo tunes, so, uh, nevermind about the whole getting the reference thing.


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