A Day Made Of Glass

[IATIA]

I'm a developer who uses Windows 7 on his laptop and dev machine predominantly. I have >10 years of experience with IT, >8 years in software development and >4 years network administration. I usually simply suspend and restore my system, instead of shutting it down. For my personal laptop, my last reboot was 9/18/2011 10:26:53 PM. The uptime before lasted a month.

My dev machine is rebooted every three days or so. Mostly due to the bloatware that was loaded into it (it's from Dell), whereas my personal laptop is a clean Win7 install, allowing it weeks to months of un-interrupted uptime.

I have over 25 years in the computer world, starting with the Radio Shack Color computer running OS9 level two which was a UNIX based system developed for the Motorola 6809 processor. No GUI.

I ended up in the MAC world because it used the 68000 processor and I was familiar with programming the 6809. When MAC switched to the PowerPC I had since lost interest in programming at the machine level. Teams were programming now and an individual could not compete at a commercial level.

I was forced into the windows world, due to company systems and started to get a taste of systems that will not stay up.

My mac-mini server has been up for running MAC OSX over three years and my 1998 PowerBook has been up running MAC OS9 for about two years before a hardware crash. It has now been up for about 8 months.

I'm a guy who enjoys the UNIX-like environments and find the half-arsed attempts at wrapping everything in a partially functional to hairbrained GUI to be inefficient, inflexible and insulting.

And yet I solved my coworkers Mac problem (he had installed an old version of Visor before it could be 'removed' easily) in no less than 5 minutes of Googling and one rename and kill -9 later, his year long problem was gone.

Using the same "non stop problems" typecasting like you've implied, I could make the argument that the over-reliance on the way Mac OSX presents things makes its users so stupid they're unable to do a proper Google search.

But that would neglect the context, an all very important context, which better paints my coworker as someone who has something better to do that develop the same amount of experience I have with IT to simply look at the problem, try a few choice search terms and use a few esoteric command line utilities to find what I needed.

The "Day of glass" systems will be GUI interfaces.

So I take up issue with your claims of Windows being unstable -- most of the common issues I've observed since and leading up to XP have disappeared since 7 came out.

I have not yet tried Windows 7.

However, you wouldn't be the first Mac user I've ran across, high off their own smugness.

In Windoze defense, however, as the MAC has transitioned to the INTEL processor, MAC OSX has become less 'user concerned'. That is, the system will process whatever before delivering output to the user. And that damn 'spinning beachball' from hell. The previous systems were completely 'user concerned', i.e., the user input preempted all but the absolutely necessary system processes.

Basically MAC OSX is more and more becoming what I dislike most about the Windoze environment.

Has Windoze 7 gone to a UNIX kernal?