>Some thoughts about the future.
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>I have found myself struggling over the years, as I suspect we all have done if we're pushing things, to keep my latest computer system from imminent collapse. I don't mean against viruses, worms and other hacks - simply to keep the operating system and major applications running for at least one whole day.
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>In every era the most useful things often haven't worked. Office 4 introduced embedded OLE objects - they just didn't work. Windows prior to 2000 used to leak memory all day until you had to reboot and reclaim it. The last couple of iterations of Word and Excel have been impressive at crash recovery - but they do lock up regularly. I drive Excel from VFP all the time and I scarcely get a session in without losing the object or COM won't start it, or whatever. Each version of Windows has been better than the one before, but it still blanks me a couple of times a week. (Don't chip in with something here about Linux ... I know it would be the same.)
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>In all of this, one application stands out and that is Visual FoxPro. When all apps are unresponsive, one isn't. That's VFP. VFP tables are vulnerable to power outages (or pressing restart deliberately), but designing a recovery tool is not hard and if (rarely) my app needs to use mine, it's back in seconds.
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>I love moving to newer technology but I can also see when older things outperform their replacements. I know we'll look back at VFP when we've bowed to the tide of progress (as we all will) and, when poised to smash a hammer through our virtual keyboards, yearn for the little application that never fell over.
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>Back when I've switched to Vista ...
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>John Burton

Amen.