Windows is getting disgusting

[eugenenine]

Somebody beyond the legal reach of Microsoft should make their own version of Windows to keep the ecosystem healthy.  I'd be happy to pay for a non morally bankrupt current version of Windows.  Maybe others would too...

https://www.reactos.org/

[John B]

Mac is the only big OS name which seems to have considered MIDI and audio applications as a standard part of the OS. So in that sense Im willing to pay the markup for a tool that works.... As above, different OS's can be different tools for different applications.

[amspire]

Somebody beyond the legal reach of Microsoft should make their own version of Windows to keep the ecosystem healthy.  I'd be happy to pay for a non morally bankrupt current version of Windows.  Maybe others would too...

https://www.reactos.org/

It has taken 20 years for Reactos to reach a point that they can unreliably run some Windows programs on a FAT32 file system. It is not currently a useable alternative. Not the slightest threat to Microsoft.

[james_s]

Yes, but your assertion was that ATA come before IDE. ATA was the series of industry standards that followed on from (Compaq) Integrated Drive Electronics. Integrated as opposed to, in the PC-XT and PC-AT, the ST-506 interface and friends which left the controller with real work to do (timing sectors etc.) whereas IDE, ATA, SCSI and the Shugart Associates Serial Interface all use(d) Host Bus Adapters and just ship data and commands back and forth.

Yes, you're right, I worded it wrong. The IDE interface was essentially a direct connection to the 16 bit AT (ISA) bus with the controller built into the drive. The interface card in the computer being little more than some buffers and on some of them a ROM chip holding the bios. It wasn't until later that it was called ATA, however the earliest ATA was really no different than IDE, it was just renamed to reflect the greater number of uses beyond hard drives.

 

[james_s]

All the last of the Amiga's, etc had USB and many of the other industry standards, it wasn't openenss that allowed IBM (PC) to win.   

Part of it was .gov contracts which required second supplier so the Intel/AMD/etc partnership was formed to have a second supplier for the main chips.
Software was the real big win, Microsoft software.  The first question over any Amiga/Atari, etc sale was can it run MSOffice/excel/word.

Developing for multiple platforms isn't that big of a deal, look at firefox, chrome, thunderbird, ApacheOpen/LibreOffice, KiCad, etc.  Running parallel versions for win/mac/linux isn't much work that running parallel for win/mac/linux/amiga.

The openness was a very, very large part of the reason for the success. The market was flooded with inexpensive PC clones, they outsold genuine IBM machines by many times over. There may have been some part in the second source thing but consumers didn't care about that, the PC clones sold well because they were cheap and became the defacto standard, it's similar to the way VHS beat Beta.

Cross-platform development is relatively easy now but it wasn't in the old days of DOS/Win3.x, 68k Mac and Amiga. These platforms were/are all radically different, completely different architecture, graphics, filesystems, everything, software had to be written to talk directly to the hardware in many cases. If you wanted to create a Mac version of a Windows 3.1 program you pretty much had to start from scratch, it wasn't just a matter of porting some existing code. People forget how spoiled we are these days, everything has an abstraction layer that makes the intimate details of the hardware practically irrelevant.

[BradC]

The openness was a very, very large part of the reason for the success. The market was flooded with inexpensive PC clones, they outsold genuine IBM machines by many times over.

There was nothing open about it. Compaq enabled that by pouring a metric crapton of money into a clean room clone of the BIOS. *That* is what enabled the flood of clones. A whole heap of people looked at it and went "hey, we can do that". From then on there was no need for a clean-room implementation as they could pick and choose bits from both and it became very quickly impossible to figure out what bits of the mutant came from which source, and therefore pretty much impossible to prosecute.

[Sigmoid]

All the last of the Amiga's, etc had USB and many of the other industry standards, it wasn't openenss that allowed IBM (PC) to win.   

Part of it was .gov contracts which required second supplier so the Intel/AMD/etc partnership was formed to have a second supplier for the main chips.

The architecture was open. The only (read literally, ONLY) closed part of the IBM PC, the only thing IBM actually created, was the BIOS. It was all open reference stuff. It's like they took a "how to build a generic computer for dummies" kit, put it together and slapped the logo on it.

There was nothing open about it. Compaq enabled that by pouring a metric crapton of money into a clean room clone of the BIOS. *That* is what enabled the flood of clones. A whole heap of people looked at it and went "hey, we can do that". From then on there was no need for a clean-room implementation as they could pick and choose bits from both and it became very quickly impossible to figure out what bits of the mutant came from which source, and therefore pretty much impossible to prosecute.

Yes, the compatibles did start with Compaq, but so did the actual triumph of the PC. Until Compaq it was a reasonably successful business computer, but nowhere even remotely close to market dominance. IBM never truly profited from the rise of the PC. The PC rose by virtue of having been "stolen from" IBM and put in "public domain".

And as I said, it WAS open 99%. The BIOS wasn't open, and how hard was it to create a cleanroom reimplementation of that - as evidenced by all the companies who did this, it wasn't too hard. Note, this could never ever have happened to the Amiga or even the C64. Nobody could have made a 'C64 compatible'. A Macintosh compatible, that was beyond dreams. Copying an entire architecture without infringing on patents, and cleanrooming a few kilobytes of system code are lightyears apart.

Software was the real big win, Microsoft software.  The first question over any Amiga/Atari, etc sale was can it run MSOffice/excel/word.

You're confusing time periods and causality. Early Microsoft software was demonstrably inferior. Excel was inferior to Lotus, Word was inferior to WordStar.

It was the other way around. Microsoft software only became popular due to the rise of the PC, which was due to the availability of cheap compatibles. The reason that people asked in the dying days of Atari or Amiga if it runs MS Word was that PC compatibles have already won the war, and everyone ran MS Word at work by that time.

The thing Microsoft did contribute to the compatibles ecosystem was being an independent OS vendor. If PC DOS was actually an IBM exclusive product, the lack of a compatible OS could have prevented the rise of 100% PC compatibles. Since PC DOS was only a rebranded MS DOS... well we know the story.

Developing for multiple platforms isn't that big of a deal, look at firefox, chrome, thunderbird, ApacheOpen/LibreOffice, KiCad, etc.  Running parallel versions for win/mac/linux isn't much work that running parallel for win/mac/linux/amiga.

It was back then. Besides, don't compare running different OSes on the same architecture and same CPU to having different architectures, different CPUs, etc. Yes, the GNU ecosystem can live on a wide range of architectures thanks to the immense work put into their optimizing C compiler(s). But that took immense effort.

[Howardlong]

Add to the pile of turd Adobe. I installed Adobe Reader onto my new build (first for about four years) last night and it wanted a restart. I'd imagine so it can install some shitty service that'll install updates every hour or two to fix the daily offering of security vulns in its unnecessary bloat.

Adobe are another outfit heavily pushing you to their cloud and subscription services like it or not.

[slicendice]

Back in the day it was quite tricky to cross-develop for many architectures. Mostly because we did not have things like Java and .Net which run code in a managed environment. Back in the day it was pure Assembly, C, different forms of BASIC and Pascal that ruled.

FOr the Amiga part each Kickstart was different, and each Workbench was different and even the hardware was a bit different. It had a lot of compatibility issues so cross compiling stuff would have been a pain and a mess. Though still would have been possible.

MS won because of good marketing, it is as simple as that. Did not matter what crap they were selling, people were buying the lie every time. :-D

[madires]

Add to the pile of turd Adobe. I installed Adobe Reader onto my new build (first for about four years) last night and it wanted a restart. I'd imagine so it can install some shitty service that'll install updates every hour or two to fix the daily offering of security vulns in its unnecessary bloat.

Adobe are another outfit heavily pushing you to their cloud and subscription services like it or not.

There are several alternative PDF readers like Foxit or Evince for example. Adobe's free software is bloated and unsecure, and the automatic update function doesn't work reliable.

[Howardlong]

Add to the pile of turd Adobe. I installed Adobe Reader onto my new build (first for about four years) last night and it wanted a restart. I'd imagine so it can install some shitty service that'll install updates every hour or two to fix the daily offering of security vulns in its unnecessary bloat.

Adobe are another outfit heavily pushing you to their cloud and subscription services like it or not.

There are several alternative PDF readers like Foxit or Evince for example. Adobe's free software is bloated and unsecure, and the automatic update function doesn't work reliable.

I am wondering if, in practice, alternatives work well enough to be a replacement? I guess the only way to figure it out is to try it on my use cases.

One further obnoxious thing is that Windows 10 keeps reverting the default pdf reader to its Edge browser which is a very poor pdf renderer in terms of features. It does make you wonder what Microsoft think they are doing, changing users' preferred settings in such an arrogant way.

[eugenenine]

Been using okular for a long time now, haven't bothered to install adobe in years.  Pretty much don't need flash either.

[slicendice]

One further obnoxious thing is that Windows 10 keeps reverting the default pdf reader to its Edge browser

It should only revert to defaults when you get a feature upgrade (the same as Windows version change, like jumping from 7 to 8.1 but in this case from Win 10 version xxxx to 1607, which is the current one )

Windows does this because the upgrade comes as a whole package, and in order for being able to demonstrate all the new features working together, the defaults has to be enabled. It is a good idea to check these settings and many others every time you get a new feature upgrade (one is behind the corner already and will be released within a few months).

[rdl]

I've used SumatraPDF for years. No install, just unzip it to a folder and run. Very lightweight and does not run active content within pdfs. Also, the last couple of Windows 7 re-installs, I have not bothered with the flashplayer and haven't missed it a bit. Glad it's gone actually.

[rsjsouza]

I use an older version of Foxit installed a few years ago at my work computer and I like it, but the interface in later versions is a bit crowded for my taste.
Today I downloaded an old friend of mine from many years ago: Ghostscript and its companion Windows viewer Ghostview. It was a great surprise to see a clean and simple interface with a reasonable renderer (supporting also XPS and the original PS).

[Howardlong]

One further obnoxious thing is that Windows 10 keeps reverting the default pdf reader to its Edge browser

It should only revert to defaults when you get a feature upgrade (the same as Windows version change, like jumping from 7 to 8.1 but in this case from Win 10 version xxxx to 1607, which is the current one )

Windows does this because the upgrade comes as a whole package, and in order for being able to demonstrate all the new features working together, the defaults has to be enabled. It is a good idea to check these settings and many others every time you get a new feature upgrade (one is behind the corner already and will be released within a few months).

Perhaps it's changed recently, but pretty much every other week the POS would reset Edge to be the default PDF viewer. It's a pretty well documented hijacking feature (i.e., pretty much every time it did any update).

[MagicSmoker]

I use an older version of Foxit installed a few years ago at my work computer and I like it, but the interface in later versions is a bit crowded for my taste.

100% agree on this. I recently updated from 6.2.something to v8.2.something and the new UI is a hot mess. I like that I can restore my tabs after closing and restarting now, but all the notifications, cloud reader crap and bloated menu bars are a real turn-off.

Still better than Acrobat by a long shot, though.

[enz]

When it comes to PDF-Reader, I use SumatraPDF since a few years.
Very nice and reduced user interface.

[james_s]

Sumatra is great, I got so fed up with Adobe Reader that I went out searching for a replacement and found that, I never looked back. It's so much better than Adobe Reader in every way I can find. My computer is now Adobe-free and it's remarkable how much less trouble I have with it.

[JPortici]

I am wondering if, in practice, alternatives work well enough to be a replacement? I guess the only way to figure it out is to try it on my use cases.

Foxit is a true alternative. My colleague suggested that i try it because i needed a pdf printer too
you have to fine tune it a little:
-there are ads and logins but you can turn off them.. why have them in the first place i ask
-the rendering isn't 100% like on adobe but you get used to it
-you can have tabs () or different windows () for when you open a file
-you can hide all toolbars if you want to maximise the reading area without going into fullscreen
etc.

the pdf printer actually works, contrary to most other free ones.

[Whales]

Sumatra PDF is great on windows.  It uses the mupdf backend to render the documents and I've found mupdf to be a great option the past few years.  Some prior work I had involved everything from multi-hundred page text PDFs and diagrams to photo collection PDFs.  Sumatra opened and worked with everything quickly and reliably, Adobe Acrobat was the exact opposite.

It's sad to see many websites still telling people to install Adobe Acrobat to view PDFs.  All of the features that Acrobat has a foot over free alternatives for, bar it's good printing options, seem to be non-standard.

[stargonjie]

Cortana disgustingly useless, I try and try, she's always asleep or drinking tea. Slow as molasses, I give up.

[slicendice]

Cortana disgustingly useless, I try and try, she's always asleep or drinking tea. Slow as molasses, I give up.

Cortana is awesome, once you know how to speak to her (which may be a bit tricky). She's a bit stupid still though and she keep forgetting context in long conversations. Her Bing search should also be improved a lot before she would become really useful. I find searching using Google gives much better WEB results. But for overall interactions with Windows, Cortana is great. :-D

[james_s]

Pretty much all "she" does is open a search in Bing, a nearly useless search engine. I absolutely hate talking to machines too, it's much quicker and easier to simply type the search myself. Cortana is a gimmick, and a data harvesting Trojan horse.

[slicendice]

Hahhhah, you have no idea how to use Cortana then. Shes not just a search engine for the web. I bet you don't even use a fraction of the new Windows 10 features. :-)

HINT: Guys, learn how to use features before you say it's all bad and terrible.