David McCann wrote: > I know you're very keen on Windows, Roy, but you're missing the > point ... and this a point which applied (to some extent) to SMSQ. An > operating system is just there to run your applications and manage your > files. It's the job of the creator of a new version to make sure that it > can cope with existing applications and files.
That sounds good in principle, but in practice it's impossible. Software development in general and Windows development in particular is so difficult that most applications basically just work by chance. This is not a joke, they are riddled with bugs that just happen to work on the current Windows version. Every minor change Microsoft makes to Windows will make bazillions of applications keel over. The Windows code base is already riddled with workarounds for buggy applications, making it more and more difficult to maintain. I've read many stories about this from the Microsoft people that investigate failing applications on new Windows releases... pure horror, I say. Many software professionals actually berate Microsoft for jumping through all those hoops, saying "Do not change the code base to counter the application bugs, keep it clean and simply let the applications fail". But this would be bad for business, of course, because most people will always blame MS and not the buggy application. SMSQ/E has faced very similar problems. There are stories from TT where he described how he had to re-introduce bugs because some stupid application or extension was relying on it. > The problem with the broadband connections was not with the ISP > software, but with the drivers for the modems. There aren't that many > chipsets for these, and M$ could have tried them out. Drivers are particularly bad. Most seem to be written by illiterate apes. > M$ have always been like this. I remember in the 80s when their own > Pascal compiler failed the ISO test because of compatability problems > with MSDOS! Like MS or not, but no company spends as much time, money and other resources on application compatibility than Microsoft. You can still run Windows 1.0 applications on Windows XP. And I'm saying this as somebody who's not very fond of Microsoft, but I've read the inside stories. Marcel _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
