Raging against MS, was Re: Mandrake 8 NIICE

[foodog]

This is a worthless rant but it was therapeutic :-)

Craig White wrote:
> 
> 4. While it's nice that raging against Microsoft sends people to linux -
> it's the opensource community that keeps you or loses you. Best to
> participate, share some efforts to help push the thing along. Linux isn't
> the anti-Microsoft - it's a spirit.

I've realized the real reason I despise Microsoft so: those
non-documenting, bug infested hosers killed my will to code.

My final "DOS" project was going to get in the middle of disk I/O under
Win95 for it's own good. It was such a cool idea.  My driver should have
been a VSD and used the undocumented* ILB_InternalRequest interface -
just above the calls that talk to the disk controller.  Clean, simple,
fast.

Due to the undocumented or misdocumented APIs and mystery data
structures, my project was forced to mutate insanely.  Study new stuff,
redesign, code for a month or two, hit a blackhole, repeat.  It floated
higher and higher up in the system until it became a filesystem hook,
mostly ring3, almost usercode - a twisted, pathetic shadow of the
original concept; roller-skates versus teleportation.

I also learned about MSVC. Mysteriously crashing the linker by declaring
static data, one version that *couldn't* create a VxD but MS didn't
document it anywhere (I finally learned about it in newsgroups).  Tease,
tease, tease, *gotcha*!

Many months into that fiasco Costco started selling Caldera, then
Redhat.  Operating systems with source code, but it was already too
late.  My spirit broken, I surrendered to full-time sysadmin.  SoftICE
and VToolsD gather dust on the shelf.  

The servers are generally happy, VMS, Netware, Linux.  The users
continue to crash and burn on the periphery, Windows and the occasional
Mac.  Someone else nurses the NT servers so they kinda run; they make me
queasy if I get too close.

Keep the children away from Windows. It might look pretty, but it
destroys brain cells at an alarming rate.

* ILB_InternalRequest is "documented" in that they tell you it's name
and hint about some of the data structures.  Docs written for someone
familiar with the source code.

Walter Oney (Systems Programming for Windows 95) is Microsoft's
crackwhore.  Geoff Chappel is an advance scout for superintelligent
aliens who apparently plan to settle in Australia.