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4-6-03 Win XP: Stable and Slow
I've noticed that as time passes and I accumulate more "important updates" from
Microsoft, my Windows 2000 begins to act more and more like Windows XP.
Admittedly, this includes not crashing as often, but it also means that the
shutdown time can be amazingly long - a hallmark of WinXP, which is why I
strongly suspect my 2K is slowly morphing into XP.
A reader wrote: Try uninstalling security update 329170 using control panel. This one
specifically has a problem which causes it to hang for about a minute on
shutdown. I don't know how important the fix really is. Sure enough, it worked. And the
update system noticed it and is trying to re-install the update.
Because of the long shutdown time and greater stability, I've started using the
"hibernate" feature a lot more, which is certainly a nicer way to do things
(although not nearly nice enough. Oh, those annoying people with their Mac OSX
laptops who just open the lid and start typing).
I have mixed feelings about this. I'm glad for more stability in the OS, but the
fact that Microsoft claimed that XP would be faster and then shipped this thing
(which I suspect is slower because of all the stability code that was added on,
rather than just refactoring when necessary. That is, I think there are a lot of
exceptions being thrown and caught in order to keep the OS from crashing) bugs
me, because it feels like they think they can say anything to us and we'll just
swallow it. Maybe the bulk of their customers do, but almost all of the people I
know who used to teach Microsoft technologies have moved away from that for one
reason or another, and I think the business practices are the big issue. It's
the same reason I am hesitant about C# even though it is a very well-designed
language. I know from previous Microsoft behavior that no matter what they say,
they could change their mind at any time and leave people high and dry.
I'm slowly learning about RSS. This article seems to be a
good introduction.
I'm trying to figure out what elements are most important to users in an
<item> - especially, could I get away with a <title> and
<link>, or are <description> and <pubDate> considered
essential? I'm also pondering how to get an RSS feed in "the simplest way that
could possibly work," and my first thought is to simply put tags into the
document that are parsed into the RSS document automatically by a Zope
extension. That way, the RSS document would be created transparently and
dynamically.
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Links I Read
Cafe Au Lait
Artima
Daily Python URL
Martin Fowler
Joel on Software
Paul Graham
Cringely
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