Pain and Glory from the Trenches of the IT World

During the early 1990s, a number of developers had the opportunity to use a NeXT system. Of those people, some were lucky enough to get to actually develop applications for such systems. NeXT brought us what was essentially a revolution at the time. Objective-C began to truly make Smalltalk-style OO accessible and practical. Their well-architectured class libraries were a real masterpiece, especially compared to the cobbled-together utility libraries used in many existing C libraries. And their UI was, of course, superb.

Today I was reading about the “Reduced Functionality” capability of Windows Vista. According to that article, Microsoft has now enabled this capability, which renders a “nongenuine” copy of Windows essentially unusable.

Frankly, I just can’t see why anybody would want to use Windows Vista. I’m sure the questionable nature of this sort of functionality is quite obvious to most. And it’s also pretty obvious how the misidentification of an installation as being “nongenuine” could be quite disasterous. A completely legitimate installation of Vista locking up accidentally because of such functionality could cost an individual or business a great deal of time and money.

One computing myth we hear quite often is that of Microsoft Windows offering a “common UI”. That is, one toolkit or framework that is used by all applications, thus giving an experience that is well-integrated and shared. But anyone who has used Windows recently should know that this is clearly not the case.

A short while back I wrote about how Scala’s interoperability with Java is not necessarily a good thing. One of my main suggestions was the avoidance of Java-based class libraries. Although they may fit well with the Java way of doing things, they likely won’t be a good fit when it comes to making the best use possible of the language features that Scala offers.

Today I shared the experience a friend had with one of the companies he works with. It involved a failed transition from what was mainly a console-based suite of applications powered by Sun systems and Oracle, to an AJAX and Web-based system running on Windows, .NET and SQL Server. It seems that that entry was submitted to Reddit, and so I’ve been reading some of the comments that were left there.

Last night at the pub, a friend and colleague of mine was telling me of a recent experience he had at a company he was doing some IT work for. I think the lesson learned is a very important one, and thus I wish to share it. But first I’ll describe the situation he encountered.

There is currently an article at Yahoo! News that takes a look back on how the market has so far reacted to Microsoft’s Windows Vista. It covers a lot of the problems that many people have experienced when using Vista. And after reading the article, I find myself asking a pretty important question: Why would one subject himself or herself to the problems of Windows Vista?

As has widely been reported, Ubuntu 7.04 is now available. While I know a great many people use Ubuntu as their primary GNU/Linux distribution, I have usually avoided it as I prefer KDE over GNOME. Because of that preference, I have leaned towards Kubuntu instead. Kubuntu essentially takes Ubuntu, and replaces the GNOME desktop environment with KDE. And when there’s a new version of Ubuntu released, soon after we get a new version of Kubuntu. In this case, that version is Kubuntu 7.04.

Today I was reading an article about the One Laptop per Child project. It suggested that Linux was not a suitable OS to use on such systems. Now, I don’t know whether that is true or not. I’m more interested in what was said in this portion of the post: Don’t get me wrong - I know that stuffing a full version of Windows or OS X on one of these machines is difficult due to the hardware that’s contained within, but with that said, light embedded versions of these products could have been a possibility, and Steve Jobs even offered OLPC free usage of OS X on the laptop!

Due to a recent topic about Windows Vista on Slashdot, I decided to learn more about it. My first stop was looking at some screenshots.

Now, I want to make it clear that I have not used Windows Vista yet. In all my years, I have very limited experience with Windows in general. So what you’re reading here is my opinion about how it looks, based on my viewing of screenshots. The one screenshot I’ll focus on is this image, showing a variety of applications, what was called the Start menu under earlier Windows releases, and the Taskbar.