Is windows a virus

[Joshua Tinnin]

On Friday 28 January 2005 09:06 am, dereck <dereckhaskins at yahoo.com> 
wrote:
> I know that this is meant to be humorous, and I like
> this type of humor.  So - this made me smile and I
> thank you.
>
> But you should be aware that historically many
> computer professionals considered *NIX to be a virus.
> In terms of OS history *NIX has big problems, and its
> history is very checkered.  I use it, because it is
> the most complete and widely available OS.  But I find
> it hardly "good," either theoretically or practically.
>  I have a love/hate relationship with it, because the
> constant re-implementation of *NIX takes a lot of
> human years away from what should be a _re-evaluation_
> of the whole *NIX project.  (Yes, beginning with the
> use of C and its variants as the base language.)
>
> The spread of *NIX and its many copycats is definitely
> NOT a win-win for the computing industry as a whole.
> There is even a downloadable book on the early years
> of *NIX, which tells the whole sordid story (in user
> emails) of why *NIX has historically sucked.  I love
> BSD and I hate it.  It is the "best" of what is
> available.  Would that we could do better!

Just some comments, please don't consider this flaming, as I think the 
world has enough religious wars ...

I can understand and appreciate such sentiments, but personally I love 
*nix. Any complex software is going to be imperfect, and hardly any 
software of any size has bugs (this is also a good reason to examine 
one's favorite software carefully). The difference between graphical 
UIs and the other way around is that graphics tend to hide what is 
happening with the system. This is fine for most home users, and in 
fact this is probably the best solution for many of them, but it is not 
desirable (IMO) for system administration - some disagree. Many of the 
gripes concern lack of "idiot-proofing." Many *nixes have implemented 
this for new users, but others, like FreeBSD, assume you know what 
you're doing and don't need that. If you would rather not delete a file 
permanently (for practical purposes), use mv instead. Is this a 
problem? Well, there's always Mac, and I highly recommend their 
computers for people who don't want to open the hood and mess around.

Additionally, we can always do better, and we shouldn't stop looking for 
better solutions in deference to the devil we know, but personal tastes 
in what makes a system better does not mean the same thing for all 
people. (I do NOT want a GUI for system administration, emphatically, 
NO!) Some people find some *nix solutions to be exactly what they need, 
and some people find Windows or other solutions to be exactly what they 
need, but there are almost always problems in the implementation. 
People who understand one solution should not implement another which 
they don't. I understand companies forcing stupid changes on people, 
but lack of training isn't an issue with UNIX itself. And if anyone is 
expecting system administration or engineering to suddenly be 
completely simple, I think they are probably not thinking very clearly 
about how computers work in the first place. Are you saying spam could 
be eliminated if only we changed the protocol? Fine, go out and do 
that. And then I can agree that the protocol might need rethinking, but 
inertia is always an issue. This has more to do with how the corporate 
world works more than anything.

That being said, one of the main problems with Xorg/XFree86 is inertia. 
This is a case where the least worst solution is not very good at all, 
IMO. The commercial software world has done far better with the issue 
of how to implement graphics, although there are often sacrifices in 
other areas.

> Enjoy the link below!  Note that almost none of the
> fundamental problems are fixable - they are products
> of the original design.

I think it's funny that people still consider the use of text to be a 
problem. The first chapter is called "User Friendly?" Anyway, I've read 
this before, but I have fundamental issues with the author's premise, 
that user-friendly == good. This is only true in some circumstances, 
and I do not consider most software which is called "user-friendly" to 
be such; personally, I find FreeBSD to be far easier and more 
user-friendly than any other OS that's useful to me, but it has a lot 
to do with how I think and what sort of person I am; I do not think 
it's the right OS for my step-father, who has a hard enough time with 
anything technical. And I'm not sure how relevant a lot of this is 
anymore. Many of the problems seem to be concerning the nature of UNIX 
as a commercial distribution. Do these arguments apply to POSIX? The 
history is informative, but the question that needs to be asked is: 
what is UNIX?

However, I disagree with people who see *nix as being the solution to 
all problems, or that any solution which uses something else is wrong, 
or that Windows has no purpose in any situation (although, personally, 
I use it only for games anymore, but I work with it for clients). That 
is shortsighted. The best method is to pick the right tool for the job.

Finally, the very idea of a UNIX-haters group without an alternate, 
viable solution is just pissing in the wind. I'm not impressed by sound 
and fury, signifying nothing.

- jt