Red Hat Diaries/0031

The Need For Speed II

And one can always install Linux on a Mac box. That's part of the beauty of it. And today there's a 'GNU NeXTSTEP' in the works. Their UI already looks as good as the original, but they do have a lot of rough edges to iron out.

And then there's the Linux application ports to OS X, such as the GIMP, which you can often pick up for the price of a CD ($20 or less). So there's quite a bit out there. No, the games don't come as fast to the Mac as they do to the PC, but who cares? Having a system that won't crash every hour is more than ample compensation.

I was working on some code on a PC today, cleaning someone else's code. They'd screwed up their dialog procedure humungously, pulling out the wrong default procedure call which resulted in a memory leak, they started the app with the wrong call (DialogBox when they should have used CreateDialog) and they filled in the function arguments wrong to boot (the last two must always be zero - you never pass the name of your window procedure - that will result in a wild loop).

Which is what I discovered when I tried to unravel it all. I got a crash screen the likes of which I have not seen since the days of Win16 - Windows 3.x, ten years ago. This big ugly white message box comes on, there's a big ugly button in the middle too, the box tells you there's something gone wrong with module CPE1704TKS at (the unbelievable except on these wimpy 16-bit systems) address AAB1:FEED FACE or something like that, click the button to close down the Evil Empire, you click it but the shell (shell32) is totally gone. You can't get ShellExecute to work in any program, you can't get WinExec to work either, you're lucky if CreateProcess is still alive. It's a mess - and it's the kind of mess you'll only see on Microsoft Windows.

The old MacOS might have done that; Windows NT would not. Windows NT is NT under the bonnet, meaning it's VMS, and VMS is the only non-Unix operating system out there today. All the rest are Unix, and their UIs have all taken to roads that lead to One Infinite Loop, Cupertino.

Click here »