The Gradual Disintegration of Windows?

Posted April 21, 2008, 11:04 p.m.

I do basically all of my computing these days (excluding time at work) on either Mac OS X or Ubuntu Linux. I also have high-hopes for the Haiku OS, even though it’s not ready for prime time just yet. I am not a fan of Windows, as any long-time reader will be well-aware, and only use the wayward Microsoft operating system on the computer provided by my employer and in a Parallels Desktop testing environment.

I just read a really interesting article by Peter Bright at Ars Technica that provides a great—albeit technical—background of Windows and Mac OS as they exist today from the perspective of a former software developer on the Windows platform who has left for the greener pastures of Mac OS.

All-in-all, I agree with Bright. Apple and Microsoft both had aging operating systems in the mid-to-late 1990s that were not well suited for modern applications or for the constant networking (and networking threats) brought by the Internet. Apple started over with Mac OS X, a ground-up redo of Mac OS based on the work of the UNIX community and NeXT. Microsoft, while leaping forward with the technically advanced NT Kernel (the ‘core’ that runs Windows NT, 2000, XP, and Vista) long before Mac OS X made it to market, failed to remove all the cruft that surrounds it and continues to hobble Windows today. Here’s hoping the next version of Windows goes back to the drawing board and brings us something great.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.

Quotes

If I am asked, as a purely intellectual question, why I believe in Christianity, I can only answer, ‘For the same reason that an intelligent agnostic disbelieves in Christianity.’ I believe in it quite rationally upon the evidence.

G. K. Chesterton

What hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor but the silence of the bystander.

Elie Wiesel

You cannot save people, you can only love them.

Anaïs Nin

All pagan religions begin with the teachings of adults, but Christianity begins with the birth of a child.

Fulton Sheen

While there’s life, there’s hope.

Terence

Socialism of any type leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their Constitutions of Government. But the Constitution which at any time exists, till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all.

George Washington

When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?

John Maynard Keynes

Modernists have undermined faith far more effectively than atheists. The wolves in sheep’s clothing have carried away many more sheep than the honest wolves.

Peter Kreeft

Churches . . . that are nothing more than a loosely bound assembly of individuals committed to finding their own ‘truth,’ are no longer the church in any meaningful sense, because there is no shared belief.

Rod Dreher

The heart of the liberal philosophy is a belief in the dignity of the individual, in his freedom to make the most of his capacities and opportunities according to his own lights, subject only to the proviso that he not interfere with the freedom of other individuals to do the same.

Milton Friedman

If men could only know each other, they would never either idolize or hate.

Elbert Hubbard

[Violence] does not always, not necessarily, openly throttle the throat. More often it demands from its subjects only . . . complicity in falsehood.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Appearance too often takes the place of reality—the stamp of the coin is there, and the glitter of the gold, but, after all, it is but a worthless wash.

William Jennings Bryan

Behind many contemporary affirmations of the freedom of love is a false rationalization, for although love involves freedom, not all freedom involves love.

Fulton Sheen

Some people think God is infinitely demanding. Some think he is infinitely forgiving. He is both.

Scott Bradford

If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.

Sylvia Plath

Some of the sharpest men in argument are notoriously unsound in judgment.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

I appeal to you, brethren, to take note of those who create dissensions and difficulties, in opposition to the doctrine which you have been taught; avoid them.

Paul the Apostle

And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God?

Thomas Jefferson