Charlies's Electronics Page

Good Books- Windows Undocumented File Formats; Working Inside 16- and 32- bit Windows

Linux online
Linux Journal
Linux News archive
Linux Resources
Linux Headquarters
Other languages www.linuxfocus.org
www.slashdot.org- good luck with this one!
Compilers www.pgroup.com
Linux documentation www.sunsite.unc.edu/LDP/
CAD

VIRUS HOAXES
Department of Energy Computer Incident Advisory Capability at
<http://ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/CIACHoaxes.html

Those people who are still symptom free can help inoculate themselves against the Gullibility Virus by reading some good material on sources, such as:

Bibliography on Evaluating Internet Resources at
<http://refserver.lib.vt.edu/libinst/critTHINK.HTM

Why !Microsoft?
My Opinions on Microsoft: Microsoft makes good software. But it is slow and it is unreliable. Back in the good old days of programming, there was such a thing as optimization. Optimization was done from the top down, because you cannot optimize a program which has poor structure to begin with. Microsoft may have an optimizing compiler, but that is not what I am talking about. A computer should be a servant to it's operator, not the other way around. Bitmaps look all nice and pretty, but do I really need 20k of them so I can have a pretty picture to look at when I am downloading a file? There are many beefs that I have with MS software.

  1. Stick to what you do, and do it well... For example.. a Disk operating system should take care of the SYSTEM, ie. The DISK! All versions of UNIX perform clean-up to avoid disk fragmentation- automatically. It took Peter Norton and company to come up with a utility which would overcome the DOS bug of fragmented files. Yes, it is a bug. Still today, Windows 95 and 98 does not handle file fragmentation like it should.
  2. Excessive graphics. Way too many slow graphics. I like windows programs that use text, because they run much faster... Get a clue MSFT, Efficiency IS the name of the game, not "a better quality of life" like your bozo programmer on the ad says. I do not consider waiting 5 minutes to type a single word of HTML while my hard drive thrashes "a better quality of life". I just want something that works..and yesterday.
  3. Making other vendor's software run slow or unreliably. Undocumented features. Rumor has it that there is a hook in NT which intentionally makes Novell systems run slower than a similar Microsoft Network system.
  4. Non-standard keystrokes. Admittedly MSFT is pretty good about this, but when we went from 3.1 to 95, we had to learn all of our accellerators over again.
  5. You can't get there from here. For example, back in the old days, you could upload a file with Netscape 2.01 to a web server. Now with the latest version of Internet Exploder, you cannot. Another thing, you cannot easily change a file's extension in 95. There is no program manager to ALT-TAB to.

 If you agree or disagree, please e-mail me- I am interested if there are solutions to the problems which I describe.

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