@Iago
I see that 'side-effect' as a subjective advantage. Personally, I find the "status quo",
MyContainer<MyObject> myObjectContainer = new MyContainer<MyObject>;
To be just as readable, if not more so. A possible disadvantage would be someone coming in behind the original programmer, unfamiliar with C# 3.0 and it's 'var' and making the assumption that it is an object or variant. I actually did the same thing until I gave the C# designers the benefit of the doubt and did a search for it. In any case, its real purpose appears to be allowing for anonymous typing "Does that mean you have random people on the Internet hit the keys for you??" :)
Taevin
@Taevin
Best posts made by Taevin
Latest posts made by Taevin
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RE: Heavily typed
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RE: Microsoft goofs up again...
Well if your X is freezing/crashing that much I can see why you would say that it is worse than Windows - and I would agree with you. While the rare occasion Windows dies completely, it's only a day of indescribable frustration of re-installing, restoring backups, and re-installing applications. X crashing constantly would cause nearly the same level of frustration every day. The only thing I can say to that is look at your version and configuration because X on my home desktop has crashed/frozen only about as many times as my WindowsXP installation has locked up (3-4 that I can think of). I guess for the purposes of an average user experience, there is little difference between rebooting for Windows and restarting X. Probably one of the only differences is time: it will take about 3-5 seconds to get back to my KDE login prompt whereas it will be 30-60 to get tot he Windows login prompt even on my beefy gaming system. That and KDE programs in general seem to be fairly good about restoring their previous states (of course Microsoft seems to do a good job on this with Office as well).
That said, I agree with TheDauthi on some of the X/KDE problems. Now that I think about it, the fonts in X are part of what makes it feel less 'clean' than Windows. You can of course change them but that seems prone to problems as well. The other thing that frustrates me is that it doesn't have great support for some screen resolutions. I have a 24'' widescreen monitor that supports 1920x1200 resolution but the highest X supports is 1600x1200. I've heard it's possible to get the full resolution but you have to play around with modelines or something equally time consuming :) But like TheDauthi said, XOrg is getting better all the time and hopefully in the near future it will be able to rival the power of the Windows UI. -
RE: Microsoft goofs up again...
(Insert redundant comment about how much of a WTF the forum software is...) It won't let me quote you Whiskey so use your imagination :)
Oh, no doubt. Wine has made a lot of progress and is invaluable when trying to run simple Windows applications. Cedega (previously WineX) is doing a great job on the DirectX implementation as well. However, I've never been successful at getting Office or Visual Studio to run well if at all using Wine. This is partly due to the fact that I have no interest in making any significant effort to solve that problem. Codeweavers has done a good job making Office work well with CrossOver Office but it's not really worth the money to me. I use office suite products so rarely that the minor deficiencies of OpenOffice do not hinder me. And of course there are more than enough development tools for Linux (KDevelop, or the old standby of Vi :) ).
I'm not denying that the overall quality of the Windows user interface is quite high. It's consistant and relatively easy to use. That being said, are you sure you have used one of the latest versions of KDE? Its user interface is also consistant and easy to use and can easily be configured to behave and look like Windows or OSX. I would consider them almost equal in UI quality (I must admit I would give the win to Windows; it just seems to be a tad bit... cleaner may be the right word), but when you add in the extra functionality (think KIO-slaves - I've yet to see anything in Windows remotely like them), KDE easily takes the cake. (I'm hearing good things about Gnome too, but I've never liked their UI design principles and I have an irrational hatred of GTK... kind of like Java...)
So I'm willing to give anyone who prefers the Windows GUI over a X-windows GUI a pass, but stability? Honestly, WindowsXP is by far the best consumer OS Microsoft has released in terms of quality and stability but it is still riddled with problems. As with many of the other problems with Windows, a large portion of the problem may be the poor yet tight integration. On my Linux box, if KDE crashes/freezes/whatever I can simply kill X with ctl+alt+backspace and kdm will restart KDE in seconds and I'm back to work (unless of course it was a kernel issue in which case I would be dead in the water but I've yet to have my Linux kernel die). On Windows on the other hand, if the GUI locks up or the kernel dies (whether directly or as a result of the myriad processes touching it) I am mostly screwed and my only recourse is a hard reboot. The one exception is if explorer dies and the OS is still responsive; fortunately WindowsXP allows you to kill and/or restart explorer.
I have quantitavely few problems arise with either Windows or Linux, they mostly differ in severity. When problems do pop up with my WindowsXP installation they tend to be system killers (like my previously mentioned examples of DirectX and the registry). The absolute worst I can see happening on my Linux system would be having to recompile my kernel (and I would be extremely curious to find out how it was able to be damaged in the first place) and typing 'cd /usr/src/linux && make && make modules_install install && shutdown -r now' takes a hell of a lot less time and effort than reinstalling Windows.
Anyways, my point is not that Windows and Microsoft are the evil abominations that some Linux fanbois like to believe. It's really more that those that deny the technical superiority of many (not all) aspects of a Linux-based operating system are no better than the former. And that I wish the best qualities of both operating systems could be combined to make a computing experience that was truly enjoyable on all levels. -
RE: Microsoft goofs up again...
@Alex Papadimoulis said:
@rsynnott said:
See? They're VERY good at marketing. Their software ranges from average to completely unusable, but that doesn't really matter much from the marketing point of view. Sad but true.When I read statmeents like this, I know it's from someone who has never used anything but Microsoft products. If you've ever used other vendors' software (especially in software that costs more than cars), you'd really be praising them for releasing software that's top-of-the-line.
Seriously, what MS product is completely unusable? I can't think of a single product. I can think of quite a few products that are best-of-class. Office 2003 ... lightyears ahead of anything else out there. Visual Studio ... nothing comes even close.
Sure, there are lots of products that aren't the best (Source Safe) but what do you expect for the cheap price you're paying.
This is a fairly old thread but eh, what the hell :)
My own opinion is this: Microsoft should get out of the operating system business and stick to writing good (or at least acceptable) applications. I am a huge fan of open source software but I can admit that some of their software (the Office suite and Visual Studio in particular) are pretty impressive. Sure they have their quirks, many of which are likely more of the OS's fault, but they are at least as good as comparable OSS products. If I absolutely have to be on a Windows box, Visual Studio is by far my editor of choice - I even use it on occasion to write parts of OSS projects I may be working on (shh, don't tell :)).
Of course it's not all roses, Source Safe and Internet Explorer are both horrendously bad. Source Safe... let's not talk about. I had an 'incident' where Source Safe 'had it's way' with my code... Internet Explorer just makes designing web pages a major pain in the ass. There is all this wonderful stuff you can do with properly formatted HTML and CSS but half of it doesn't work because Microsoft hates standards compliance. And of course since IE is packaged with Windows, the vast majority of people use it meaning I have to spend 4 hours finding out that putting a non-breaking whitespace above a list of floated links with CSS hover attributes makes it all work 8-)
Without the defacto-standard of Windows on the average user's PC, Microsoft might actually have even better software. It's amazing what competition can do to improve a product. If IE was not the defacto web browser, they would have to compete and improve it in order to maintain sales. Just look what the surge in the popularity of Firefox has done: IE7 is supposed to a much more standards compliant browser, and implements things like tabbed-browsing which the rest of us have been enjoying for years. Before Firefox, the only improvement made on IE that I can think of was some minor improvement in PNG handling.
But please, Microsoft, stop making Windows - or at least fix it. A complete rewrite if necessary. The problems with Windows range from the stupid and annoying (rebooting after installing a program or updating non-kernel parts of the OS? why??), the frustrating and mind bending (the very tight integration of IE and DirectX into the core of the OS - DirectX install failed one time but reported completion, Windows and games did not work properly but Windows does not let you uninstall it and the installer just said it was already installed so I had to reinstall Windows), to the tragic (... Registry... and any major problems nearly always require complete format and reinstall of Windows).
I just look forward to the day when operating systems are interchangeable and I can happily run Office and Visual Studio from the comfort, safety, and sanity of my Linux box.