I hate Windows. Everyone hates Windows. Some people have made a career out of hating Windows.
But that's not really the point. All things being equal, Windows isn't so bad, not compared to Network Solutions taking your domain hostage for a prolonged period of time, or sitting in front of a terrorist at 40,000 feet. Taken in perspective, Windows is nothing more than a condensation nucleus. What makes it frustrating is that it's a pretty grotty nucleus that does a fair job of obscuring other condensation nuclei.
My latest gripes with Windows concern WinME and Win2K. Microsoft finally clued in that their "operating platform" is really a house of cards, so they've implemented a "feature" in WinME that will restore your OS to a previous state. System Restore works in the background, making periodic snapshots of the system just in case you forget. This is supposed to be an improvement on the times when Windows gets so hosed that it bluescreens while booting(!). At least the OS has a chance of recovery before getting the installation media and going medieval. Wonderful feature. Why not make it stable and immune to crashing on boot in the first place?
The other befuddling problem that occurred recently was on a laptop running Win2K. We were watching a DVD off of the battery, stopping about half of the way through. Forgetting to recharge the battery, it gets down to 5% during normal wear and tear. The wonderfully intelligent laptop decides to power itself off (or hibernate or something) whilst dialed up online. No big deal, except that it won't boot anymore. Even plugged into the wall. It makes the motions during the POST, but never exactly finds the bootable hard disk (it does try and find something bootable on the DVD still left in the drive though). Fortunately, walking away from the problem (while the laptop recharged) solved it.
There's no point to these two stories really. The last week has been clouded by a couple of petty frustrations such as these. However it is giving me a newfound appreciation for things that are just done right, like Oxo kitchenware. (Reading Cockburn's latest book is also inspiring me to think more about the software I write, so the next person can avoid these petty frustrations.)
