Micro$oft and their ways... !OT!

[mrwiseman]

If they want portable applications at the expense of speed and power, they did the right thing.

.NET rant:

Who on Earth would use .NET? That's like saying: you waste CPU, RAM and HD with our complex virtual machine, and you don't get anything in return, because your applications will run only on the platforms we want. What the hell, if I want something that runs only on Windows, I wouldn't waste system resources on that crap; I'd go for VC++ and Win32. Besides, that .NET thing wouldn't work on smaller computers even if they wanted to, unlike Java.
Personally, I think .NET is one the most fucked up idea micro$oft had in the last decades. It's absolutely useless, it makes things even more complex (as if they weren't complex enough), and what pisses me off the most, it's a waste of system resources. .NET is something micro$oft did to create confusion in their benefit.

[SmellyCat]

Hmm I don't agree completely with you Wiseman.
The idea of a virtual machine is pretty good.
It makes the interface with the different languages used in .NET the same. Which is good when you have people using VB.NET for asp.net and C# for the services.
And at least it gives hope for cross platform compatibility in the future.

About VC++.... I hate it. C# is a very clean language (similar to Java).
C++ is a complete mess. It's some OO hack on C.
And VC++ has a horrible editor.

No, C# is a good language....
And believe me... as a sofware engineer I have no love for Microsoft.

[mrwiseman]

I haven't heard other but praises on C#, so it must be good. Now it would be a good idea to make an Intel x86/Win32 C# compiler, I hate wasting performance. Not gonna happen, though.

As for .NET turning multiplatform, do you think micro$oft will do that? They won't, unless it gets unavoidable because they are losing it. But I wouldn't count on it.

[mrwiseman]

Java is inherently slower than C++. I know of some guys who do HW 3D on Java, but it was slow.

Also, keep in mind the speed and the memory that the processors and computers may have now a days

What you're telling me is "You have all that power, let's waste it". Developers think like that and the result is an old demo doing realtime raytracing while today's games require a GeForce 19 with 4 gigs of VRAM to run. Nope, when I buy a new machine I want to see teh fireworks. I mean, look 6 years in the past. With the standard PC, you could run Excel 95, Word 95, and a First Person Shooter. Now you have 10+ times faster machines, and what can you run? Excel 2000, Word 2000, and a First Person Shooter. Don't you think there's something wrong here? Today's software waste your computer more than yesterday's, but less than tomorrow's. This results in you spending the same money every X years to run newer versions of the same software that offer 20% more features and use 100% more system resources.

And it gives real multiplatform support, so, it is a good choice to have a wide market.

But sometimes this is not needed (for example, games... I wouldn't care for Linux, 98% of gamers use Windows, plus Linux sucks for graphics), and sometimes you want max performance regardless of other benefits.

You have garbage collectors for some C and C++ compilers.

I don't know of any non-Windows .NET C# compiler; I think DJGPP is only for Asm/C/C++, though I never used it (I use either LCC-Win32 or Dev-Cpp). Besides, I'm a C guy, I'm not that fond of OO, it has its uses, but sometimes all it does is making things unnecessary complex (e.g. Windows).

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BTW, we're taking this a little offtopic, the purpose of this thread is to talk about Micro$oft's nasty practices. For technical stuff we have the technical thread over there...

<font color="#a62a2a" size="1">[ July 07, 2003 01:12 PM: Message edited by: -Wiseman- ]</font>

[melfice]

I don't think Java is slow, the truth is that it has improved a lot the speed, and perhaps, you can use 3D Hardware acceleration features with Java. Also, keep in mind the speed and the memory that the processors and computers may have now a days, so, the relative Java Slow downs can be supplied with "brute" speed.

And it gives real multiplatform support, so, it is a good choice to have a wide market.

Also, Java is much better than C++, it is the same O.O. philosophy, but, it quits a lot of work because of the memory manager and garbage managers, for example. I haven't tried C# for example, do you know if DJGPP (you know what is DJGPP right?) can compile C#? or that is only on windows environments?

[melfice]

That is true! ^^ Anyway, i'm also a "C-guy" [img]tongue.gif[/img]

After seeing what they did because of the bad sales of XBOX in Japan, my apreciation for microsoft has decreased.

[SmellyCat]

This is just one of the things Microsoft did:
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size=2 face="Verdana,Tahoma">quote:</font><table border="0" width="90%" bgcolor="#333333" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="0"><tr><td width="100%"><table border="0" width="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2" bgcolor="#FF9900"><tr><td width="100%" bgcolor="#E0E0E0"><font size=2 face="Verdana,Tahoma">
When Windows 3.1 was being introduced, Microsoft's operating system was MS-DOS. DR-DOS was a compatible competitor to MS-DOS. Microsoft added code to beta copies of Windows 3.1 so it would detect if it was being run on DR-DOS, and if so, display the spurious error message
"Invalid device interface. Unable to load." </font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></BLOCKQUOTE>

<font color="#a62a2a" size="1">[ July 11, 2003 05:34 PM: Message edited by: Smelly Cat ]</font>

[mrwiseman]

Oh, they did a lot of things like that. Here's another one:

Back at the MS-DOS days, third party memory managers were very popular. I loved QEMM, from Quarterdeck. I remember I had tuned my system driver by driver, TSR by TSR, boy I sure knew the MS-DOS internals better than my own body. (LOL, I had like 740 KB of free "conventional" RAM thanks to QEMM's Stealth ROM feature.)

Then Windows 95 came (*). When you ran the installer from your MS-DOS system with QEMM installed, it bitched about you having some baaad memory manager that wouldn't let poor Windows 95 run. (Micro$oft's Expanded Memory Manager, EMM386, was of course the only EMM that was compatible with Windows 95.)

All I had to do to boot my no-EMS MS-DOS configuration (without QEMM), so the Windows 95 installer would run. After installing it, the first thing I did was to bring QEMM back. Of course, it worked like a charm; m$ had lied. I benefitted from QEMM's features under Windows 95 for years.

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(*): BTW, Windows 95, contrary to what M$ always said, ran over MS-DOS 7.0, just like Windows 3.x had been running over previous MS-DOS versions. LOL.