Shattered Windoze

by Michael Paine

[Switch to Mac]
[Wish list]
[Bad vibes]
[Yank tanks revisited]
[Worse vibes]
[Nightmare!]
[Not alone]
[Links]

Switch to Mac!

8 Apr 03: Avoid the problems with Windoze - get a Mac!

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Wish list

What I am looking for in software is a common, user-friendly interface which makes it easy to work on databases, spreadsheets and documents. Something that has the same look and feel between these applications and has a fast, flexible printer interface. Something that allows me to copy/cut and paste data between applications or to convert data from one format to another.

The database should support SQL relational queries, updateable dynasets, cross-tabulations and drop-down "must match" lists for field relationships. It must have a powerful, high-level programming language for application development and record manipulation. It must also support record locking on a network. Capacity to produce licence-free runtime applications would be an advantage.

The spreadsheet should have goal-seeking, advanced statistical functions and graphics.

The word processor should have template documents, spell-checking (with "alert" mode) and print preview.

I had all that more than 25 years ago, before Windoze was inflicted on the world! "Open Access" (no relation to MS Access) is capable of running on any IBM-compatible PC (or Mac) and takes up less than 6 megabytes of hard disk space. Its main (and big) disadvantage these days is that it is text based and therefore is not WYSIWYG and fonts are pretty dull. What are we offered in its place?  

Have my wishes been answered? OpenOffice.org - "is both a fully-featured office suite compatible with leading office products, and a virtual community working through OpenOffice.org's numerous projects...a major new component, Base: an easy-to-use [SQL] database manager with a fully integrated database". But what about a programming language?

16 Mar 10 Filemaker: Filemaker Pro 11 - finally some database features like charting that I was using in Open Access nearly 25 years ago! The scripting language is still tedious but getting better. Its big advantage is the ability to open the same database in Windows or Mac OS X.


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Bad vibes!

Windoze software looks very impressive on the screen and the printout can look just as good. There are many advanced features we now take for granted. And the convenience of the mouse of course - so that, on a laptop, we can spend our time chasing the cursor around the screen (spare a thought for the visually impaired).

It takes at least one second to move the cursor with the mouse and click on the desired item - often the wrong item is clicked with potential disastrous results. By contrast, keystrokes take a fraction of a second and a competent typist can be very accurate. And yet "keyboard shortcuts" in most Windoze programs appear to be an afterthought - illogical and tedious. There are some applications where a mouse is very useful, if not essential - but word processing and database work can be much more efficient using the keyboard. No wonder office productivity has actually fallen over the past decade (see below).
 

• One word is worth a thousand pixels!
• Windows is a drag

The latest software takes hundreds of megabytes of disk space, tens of megabytes of RAM and a Pentium processor. Has it become overcomplicated? Check out the Pacman game that comes with Windoze 95. That takes many minutes to install and megabytes of disk space. And yet it runs and looks the same as the Pacman game I had running on my 48K (yes kilobytes!) Sinclair Spectrum computer in the early 80s - big deal.

Yank tanks revisited

I like to compare the development of PCs with that of motor cars ( others have had the same idea). Henry Ford's cheap and simple Model T was the equivalent of the IBM XT. The car manufacturers pushed Americans into ever larger cars, requiring bigger engines (read CPUs) to do the same job. Right now were in the age of the 1950s "Yank Tanks" (the endearing term for US cars in Australia) gaudy, overweight and ridiculously big for the main purpose. After this period the car industry had fierce competition and consumer/society pressures which led to the current generation of smaller, more efficient cars (for America).

The problem in the PC industry is that there is no real pressure to develop better, more efficient systems - they just get bigger with "add ons". The market "influence" seems to be that the CEO's secretary uses a particular word processor and it happens to be part of a suite of programs so everyone in the organisation has to use the same package - brilliant marketing but the people who actually have to use the package for "computing" don't get any say in the features of the product. Someone's done a course in "How you peddle excreta" (HYPE).

I still use Open Access (mainly for database and application development) but it seems that operating system vendors are making it harder and harder to run DOS programs. Of course, I now use Windoze software for day-to-day work, including word processing (I prefer to use the pioneering Windoze Word Processor, Ami Pro - in fact I started using Ami with "runtime" Windoze in the late 80s). Clients want data and documents in Microsoft software format so I have to use Word for Windoze from time to time - it is so tedious to use compared with Ami Pro.  Update: 2006 Since 2003 I have been running Open Access and M$ Office on Mac OS X and very rarely run Windows under Virtual PC for OS X (Ami Pro conversions and M$ Access legacy databases).

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Worse vibes

Even working solely with M$ products has its traps. I developed a comprehensive relational database in M$ Access 2.0 because my client uses that version. To my horror, when I tried to open the database under Office 97 (to demonstrate it at a User Group meeting) it gave an error message like "Compile error: unable to open database". Apparently there were some trivial Access Basic programming language changes (underscores going to dashes or something) and I need to "convert" the database (a one-way process!). Secondly, I have always been wary of the M$ Access practice of lumping data, forms and programs into one large (*.MDB) file. I should have stuck with Open Access for that job (actually I convert some of the M$ Access data to dBase format so that I can process it in Open Access to automatically produce a fancy web page - see NCAPLIST for the results - M$ Access 97 has HTML generation features but they are not versatile enough for my needs). 

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Nightmare!

As you can probably tell, I was rather angry when I started preparing this web page. Let me explain why. Due to a need to run 32-bit applications I reluctantly installed Windoze 95 on my business computer in January. After many days I finally had applications such as Ami Pro running like they had under Windoze 3.11 (those old installation disks get a bit unreliable after a few years but WIN95 insists that you use them).

The other day (early April 98) when I booted my computer I left the room. When I came back the (patronising) message "It is now safe to turn off your computer" was displayed - strange? After carefully watching the display during boot up I noticed an error message with the ominous words "You need to reinstall Windoze" before the screen went blank. Booting up with the /B switch to create a bootlog.txt file did not help explain the problem. Scandisk was no help. Oh well, looks like I have to reinstall Windoze 95!

Of course I back up my data regularly (by chance the day before - in fact 8 years of consulting documents and data compresses onto one 100Mb Zip disk - another advantage of Open Access). I decided, however, to back up all the programs. I had a spare gigabyte on another hard disk so I copied whole directories across. This took about 700Mb and one night of jumping up during the ads on TV to check progress.

Now to try reinstalling Windoze 95. Luckily the CD drive worked after I executed MSCDEX from "DOS". So far so good. Now start Windoze 95 Setup and hopefully it will keep the old configuration. No such luck. The retailer who installed WIN95 on my hard disk apparently did not use the same CD as the one that I have ended up with (was it still shrink-wrapped?). So Setup got upset when I tried to enter the registration number that came with the CD. It obviously found the ID on the hard disk from the previous installation. So I had to rename the Windoze directory (to Windows2) and make Setup think that it was a new installation. Several hours had passed by now but at least I had Windoze 95 running again. No programs working yet, mind you. They all need reinstalling from scratch - another couple of hours - you can't just copy the INI files across from the previous installation (I tried and managed to get WIN95 to crash again - this time at least it restored to the stage I had reached just before the crash).

Reinstalling and configuring the printers, networking and Internet (disabling Internet Explorer) took a few more hours and the total time spent recovering from the crash is now measured in days. I'm glad I didn't have an important project deadline at the time.

I still don't know the reason for the crash. Maybe a cosmic ray corrupted a bit of a byte on my hard disk. Maybe I have some more sinister problem that will reoccur. I certainly know that my business cannot afford to have this happen every few months.

The point is that this operating system seems to have grown too big and cumbersome for its own good. It is far too vulnerable to a variety of problems, including hardware faults, software bugs and viruses.

If you have any tips for making crash recovery less traumatic let me know and I will post them on this page. The "recovery" disk that Windoze 95 creates during installation is a joke ;) 

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I am not alone

Here are some things other people have said:

• Quote from the book Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy about the products of the (fictitious) Sirius Cybernetics Corporation: "it is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all. In other words - and this is the rock solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation's Galaxy-wide success is founded - their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws" (written by Douglas Adams in 1984 - what brilliant foresight!)
• Other quotes from Douglas Adams from a 1995 Guardian article about Windoze 95 : "...'Start Me Up', the [Rolling Stones] song which is better known for its catchy refrain 'You make a grown man cry'. This is a phrase you may hear a lot of over the next few days as millions of people start trying to install Windows 95", "Sadly, this new world software standard was actually a piece of crap." (the latter quote was about M$ DOS but the sentiments about Windoze 95 were similar!)
• The article "Taking computers to task" in the July 1997 issue of Scientific American has some good advice for corporate managers. Some interesting quotes:
"... much of the time saved by automation is frittered away by software that is unnecessarily difficult, unpredictable and inefficient".
"What puzzles economists is that productivity growth ... has fallen precipitously in the past 30 years from an average of 4.5% in the 1960s to a rate of 1.5% in recent years".
"A typical desktop PC carries a price tag of about $3,000 in the US or about $1,000 per year ... but the average annual bill is more like $13,000" (This involved $1730 for software, $3,510 for support for each user, $1,170 for network support and $5,590 for "futzing" by workers - non-productive time such as waiting for software to load, fixing problems, waiting for help, rearranging files and playing games - an average of 5.1 hours per week! [should I add editing web pages to this list?!]).
"[workers typically] take 4 to 10% of their time to help co-workers solve computer problems...this hidden support lofts the total annual cost to about $23,000".
"Sun Microsystems reportedly banned its managers from using presentation software to create fancy slides for meetings".
"The software industry frustrates long term investments by producing ever larger, slower programs that require ever larger, faster machines".
"if you get one button wrong, people can easily waste half an hour recovering from a mistake"
In 1992 M$ word 2.0 had 311 commands, M$ Word 97 has 1,033 commands!
• Another Scientific American article "ROUGH SAILING FOR SMART SHIPS:     Does commercial software such as Windows NT compromise naval ship             performance?" (November 1998):
"The controversy began when the USS Yorktown, a guided-missile cruiser that was the first to be outfitted with Smart Ship technology, suffered a widespread system failure off the coast of Virginia in September last year. After a crew member mistakenly entered a zero
into the data field of an application, the computer system proceeded to divide another quantity by that zero. The operation caused a buffer overflow, in which data leaked from a temporary storage space in memory, and the error eventually brought down the ship's  propulsion system. The result: the Yorktown was dead in the water for more than two hours.", "Using Windows NT ... on a warship is similar to hoping that luck will be in our favor,"
Postscript: In March 1999 one of the system suppliers wrote to Scientific American pointing out that the problem occurred during an "unorthodox" system failure simulation that presumably won't occur in practice.
• That last item has convinced me that Douglas Adams was one of the greatest computer prophets of the 20th century. The computer failure experienced by the USS Yorktown was described in Adams' science fiction/comedy novel "Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy; Life the Universe and Everything", written in the early 1980s. He describes how an advanced spacecraft's computer was unable to defend the vessel because it was tied up trying to compute "why humans like tea" (not unlike the problem of dividing by zero!). Adams also foreshadowed computer viruses when the Marvin the Paranoid Android  infected the battle computers of the Planet Crikket (or Krikket) with its own depressive personality (and consequently saved the Universe - oops - gave the plot away!). Some more classic WAV files from HHGTTG are here. Another relevant quote: "Technology is stuff that doesn’t work yet"
• 11 Sep 14 American Atheists: AN INTERVIEW WITH DOUGLAS ADAMS
• Has Microsoft stifled innovation? But the history of the PC shows that very few innovations originated within Microsoft.  All the software giant has done is roll them into its operating systems and drive their popularity - often to the detriment of the companies that did invent them. "We're convinced that innovation will be greatly enhanced and improved if Microsoft's heavy hand of monopoly is removed from the industry,"
• New Scientist magazine 5 June 2004: 'Hack out the useless extras' by Nicholas Negroponte. Featuritis has made compueters exasperating to use...obese software that consumes all of the benefits (and more) of the speed and memory improvements of the hardware...by no means should it send me a dancing paper clip to ask.
• 23 Oct 10 NewSci: Stuxnet: the online front line - a few lines of malicious computer code can trip electricity grids, burn out power-station generators, pollute water supplies and sabotage gas pipelines... It uses vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows to give an attacker remote control of the specialised factory-floor computers used to control industrial processes.
• 1 Jun 2015 Scientific American: Why the Upgrade Cycle Will Never End - "Eventually these companies have no choice but to add features that nobody asked for. Meanwhile bloated, overwhelming technology has a very real emotional effect on us; we feel like idiots when we can't master it. Then, as the software becomes increasingly weighed down with features, the interface must be redesigned to accommodate them all. (Such a redesign is then, of course, marketed as a new feature.) And each time you lose a few days of productivity as you learn the new layout."
• 7 Oct 15 SMH: Why Microsoft Office has had its day "This has led to products that are not only buggy, but are also bloated by features most users never use."
  
  

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Links

And some links with similar sentiments:

• Yahoo - Microsoft Humour
• General Motors Vs Microsoft - For no reason whatsoever your car would crash twice a day.
• Why Windoze 95 Sucks
• Windoze 95 Annoyances - many tips for getting your PC to work how YOU want it to!
• To disable that $#@!&@ Office Assistant in Office 97 see these tips
• Windows Sucks Forum
• Tips for running DOS programs
• CNN article - Reviewers disappointed with Windoze 98 and (sweet justice) it crashes during an important demo by Bill Gates! This CNN reviewer is not very impressed!
• PC Magazine Usability Gaffes: Things That Make You Go Arrrgh!
• Some alternatives to the dull WIN95 WAV files.
• There is an alternative - DR DOS lives!
• ZDNet Jun 08: Top 10 worst IT disasters of all time
• Washington Post Aug 08: Time for Change? Not Necessarily Too many software developers love to alter even the parts of their programs that work - Microsoft remains the undisputed leader in this sort of feckless alteration, from the "personalized" (more like disappearing) menus of Windows and older Office versions to Office 2007's dictatorial "Menus are bad for you" design, which has undoubtedly prompted a steep rise in the world's usage of foul language. And virtually every time anybody's browser undergoes an update, the designers insist on changing the look of the icons and buttons, and moving them around in ways that are always far more annoying than helpful.

Click on the image at the top of the page to download alternative startup and close-down screens for Windoze 95. See README.TXT for instructions. See Windows 95 Annoyances for some important precautions about customising your PC since YOU ARE NOT IN CONTROL - backup those files first!

Better still, you can stop Windoze 95 booting automatically and stop your PC at the DOS prompt (yes good old DOS). From there you can load Windoze 95, Windows 3.11 or just run DOS. To do this edit the system file MSDOS.SYS to change BootGUI=1 to BootGUI=0, also change/add Logo=0 (see NC World for details).

Incidentally, adding the line Logo=0 to the MSDOS.SYS file turns off the Windoze 95 startup screen, letting you see the boot process. The MSDOS.SYS file can be edited with Notepad or Edit just like the CONFIG.SYS file but you will need to change the read-only, system and hidden attributes on the file first. See Windoze 95 Annoyances for details.
 

• To get rid of the annoying Office Assistant rename the Actors directory to something else like Actorsx.
• Great news for Office 2000 - dynamically changing menus. Apparently the menus reshuffle themselves so that the most frequently used selections are at the top. What smart alec thought of that!! Imagine trying to help a user over the telephone or using another person's PC and finding the menu items are not where they should be.
Prepared by Michael Paine (email) (home page). His views and not the official views of any organisation such as the Australian Open Access Users Group ;<)
Last update 8 Jun 2000.