re-thinking LUGs and early planning for the first Canadian LUG summit

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Nov 08, 2007 at 11:16:08AM -0500, David J Patrick wrote:
> me too ! and for that to happen we need to... stay home and write drivers?

Well writing drivers and better code does make for a better system.
There are plenty of people saying "Microsoft sucks", but unless you have
something better to offer as an alternative it doesn't really matter if
microsoft sucks at writing code.

I feel sorry for microsoft really.  For years they got away with sloppy
code that was quickly thrown together, and as long as it generally
didn't crash to much people just lived with it.  Then the internet came
along and suddenly it didn't just matter that it worked most of the
time, now there were people actively trying to abuse the mistakes rather
than users actively trying to avoid triggering bugs.  Now they are left
with a pile of legacy apis that they need to keep supporting so that
people can keep running their programs, while at the same time trying to
make a secure system that isn't going to break all the time.  Backwards
compatibility with crap is hard to do without the result being crap too.
DOS was lousy, but by allowing backwards compatibility with DOS in the
early windows versions, people could keep using their DOS programs while
slowly migrating.  OS/2 which was much better designed but didn't
support running most DOS applications (it did later, but too late)
couldn't compete.  Backwards compatibility sucks.  If people were
willing to drop everything and get all new, we wouldn't be using x86
systems anymore.

--
Len Sorensen
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