Die, XP, die!

Wednesday, September 17th, 2003 10:03 pm
robinturner: (Default)
[personal profile] robinturner
Epictetus was right when he said "We are not disturbed by events, but by the opinions we form about events." In this particular case, my opinion is WINDOWS XP IS THE SPAWN OF THE DEVIL!! KILL KILL KILL!!!!!

Yes, dear readers, my networking problems in my new office are ongoing, in fact I'd say I've had a bug upgrade. First it turned out that the Unix/Linux-illiterate techie who set things up and assigned us new IP numbers hadn't bothered to make sure the computer's names were entered on the nameserver, so I was panicking because I couldn't access the FTP server on my computer. A quick trip to the awfully sweet and extremely geeky Unix sysadmin sorted that one out in under a minute, so I asked her about my problem printing to the evil XP machine. She smiled ruefully and said "I'm sorry, I don't understand much about Windows - ask me anything you like about Unix, but you'd best see Uğur Bey about anything else" (sometimes I wish we weren't both married - any woman who can talk Unix turns my knees to jelly).

After yanking in our Windows techie to make sure my computer would print while it was running Windows, I phoned Uğur, the deputy director of the computer centre, who knows pretty much everything about everything. Even he was stumped, and suggested I try Google. I typed in "samba XP printing" and was greeted by hundreds of results, mainly posts to Linux lists saying "I can't get Samba to print to an XP computer." The only answers which seemed to offer hope required disabling a feature called Simple File Sharing, but this seems only to exist in XP Professional, and this particular computer is running XP Home (this in itself is indicative of the idiocy of XP - it's a bloody operating system, for Christ's sake - why does it need to be different for "home" and "professional" users? Have you seen "Debian Home"?).

Anyway, I told our unit head that if I couldn't get this fixed by tomorrow, I'd move back to my old, rat-infested office in the Science building, taking my computer and computer expertise with me. She agreed to let me wipe XP off the offending computer and install Windows 98.

On the positive side, I've had the XPerience of working with Windows XP (my only other experience was hooking up my external modem to a friend's new computer so we could register XP before it self-destructed). My suspicions that it is truly evil were confirmed. It manages to combine the complexity of Linux with the insecurity of Windows while trying to look like a Macintosh. In all my years of computing (which go back to the Atari ZX81 and the BBC Micro) I have never seen anything so vile.

Date: 2003-09-17 06:14 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] ex-myst341.livejournal.com
Wow, I didn't think anything was worse than M.E.!

Date: 2003-09-18 01:41 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] solri.livejournal.com
I've never seen ME, or met anyone who uses it. It seems to arrive in a blaze of publicity and disappear almost immediately. I mainly remember it for viewers' letters to a popular computer TV programme saying "I've just installed Windows ME and ...". Naming an operating system after a disease probably wasn't a bright idea.

Date: 2003-09-19 02:09 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] ex-myst341.livejournal.com
M.E. standing for....? Muscular entropy??

You're lucky; M.E. usually elicits condolences to anyone who confesses to using it.

Date: 2003-09-20 04:49 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] solri.livejournal.com
Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Quite appropriate, really.

Date: 2003-09-20 10:14 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] ex-myst341.livejournal.com
Hmmm; the term must be different in Britain or Turkey than over here. It's just referred to as CFS or CFIDS. Sometimes it's called Epstein-Barr virus.

Date: 2003-09-18 08:36 am (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
The problem is whoever authorised buying XP Home, rather than Pro. XP Home, by design, doesn't work on domain based networks. Pro works rather well, once you forget everything you knew about managing a Windows based machine.

Trev

Date: 2003-09-18 09:03 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] solri.livejournal.com
The impression I got from searching the web was that samba connections to XP Pro mechines are possible once you've tweaked a few things, but I have yet to find anything that will work with Home. I'd assumed it was a cracked version that one the the teachers had installed but no, they actually went and bought a licence for it.

Date: 2003-09-18 09:37 am (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
Can't say, really. I never managed to get Samba working ;-)

Date: 2003-09-18 10:39 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] solri.livejournal.com
It's pretty easy with SWAT, and a bit of pain otherwise. Apart from sharing files and printers from a Unix/Linux box, I find it useful for automated backups and virus scans (you can mount a Windows C: drive and then use seomthing F-prot for Linux to scan it for viruses - useful if you dont have adequate protection on the Windows boxes).

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Robin Turner

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