All bloated GUI apps are unstable. Really. I know some of you are
out there thinking "No, but not such-and-such an application! This
application is very stable." Well, sure, compared to (for instance)
Outlook. Compared to a daemon that runs in the background, though, or a
command-line tool, it's downright vertiginous. I mean, compare Firefox
and IE for a moment: in that context, Firefox looks rock-solid. On the
other hand, I clicked on a link about half an hour or so ago and the
entire program VANISHED, taking a dozen or so web pages in tabs with
it. I hope none of that was important. This, of course, would account
for how unstable Windows itself is. It is, after all, a gigantic,
monolithic GUI application tied together with other gigantic,
monolithic GUI apps.
Windows Mobility 2003 is friggin' ridiculous. Here's this GUI
desktop-on-a-palmtop miniature OS, with no less than four different
built-in wireless networking options, and it includes no functionality
for network browsing. None. I had to find this out the hard way,
futzing with it, reading documentation, finding more documentation to
read, and eventually calling the vendor of the device to ask them about
it. Finally, what I found out is that in order to access any network
resource you need to connect to it by direct ActiveSync, then (if you
still feel like it) by ActiveSync over the wireless network, or by
setting up Windows Terminal Services to allow you to directly connect
to one particular Windows machine. Even accessing the Web requires
something like that, as you need to specify a proxy server! This is
insane. Seriously. What good is this crap? The real joy of all this is
that the only reason I found out about WM2k3's shortcomings is that I
have to somehow get PerlCE installed on this thing and write a network
client for an inventory tracking system. More luck: I don't have an
ActiveSync cradle for the device.