[GRLUG] Linux use

[Eric Beversluis]

On Fri, 2011-08-26 at 14:07 -0400, Michael Mol wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 1:54 PM, Bob Kline <bob.kline at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Indeed.  That's where the M$ monopoly
> > really pays off.  Vendors would much
> > rather support just one version of their
> > software than three or more - windoz,
> > OS X, and Linux, for example.  Much
> > more profitable to have one near universal
> > platform.
> 
> My day job, primarily, is writing special-purpose software that runs
> on Windows. It's no wear near as idyllic a setting for ISVs as you
> seem to think it is. Your average Windows machine is loaded down with
> so many craptastic interfering software written by other ISVs, it's
> very difficult to know whether or not problems are from real bugs in
> *your* program, or whether something like Google Desktop Search or
> some antivirus program went, "Hey, there's a file that was just
> created. Let's go peek inside and see what's in there," locked the
> file exclusively, and caused a fault in your program when a piece of
> internal data wasn't accessible where it should have been.
> 
> I would far, far, far rather write an app that would run on Linux,
> packaged for and tested against a "stable" release of Debian, an "LTS"
> release of Ubuntu or just about any release of RHEL. It would be a far
> saner and more comfortable place to be. With Windows, an ISV sometimes
> get a choice as to what environment his software is going to run in
> and what other interfering apps are mandated. Throw my software in a
> secure sandbox, locked down with limited access to the rest of your
> network, and let it do its thing. Don't put me in a place where
> 
> Now, don't get me wrong; I don't hate Windows. I actually have a fair
> amount of respect and understanding of it at a low level. What I
> loathe is how badly ISV apps are written that they interfere with each
> other.

Case in point--it's not just 3rd party ISVs: I was troubleshooting an
Access&VBA app that I'm helping someone with yesterday--and in turn I'm
getting help from Sagekey. We had an issue to work on, so the Sagekey
was looking at the app on my computer. Once we straightened out
something screwy about which ADO versions should be in the references,
there was still a problem. He got off line and came back a bit later
saying that M$ had put a new version of ADO into Win 7 SP1 that was
incompatible or somehow flakey with previous versions of ADO. The app
works if compiled on my Win7 but not if compiled on Access on his Win7
SP1.


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