I'm... I'm angry and frustrated. I want to be angry at something. At someone. At people who use Windows to get anything done.

It took me four hours to get my exercise bike setup working on Windows, specifically, Windows Vista. This, purportedly on:

• Identical hardware, which should exhibit no peculiarities or differences between them.
• Identical Perl modules, such that their implementation and interfaces should exhibit no inconsistencies or oddities.
• Identical driver software, which, being on Windows, the OS which everyone loves to support, should be fine.
• Identical VLC implementations.

Mais non.

Drivers leave the COM3 port such that you can't access it lest you are running the command prompt as Administrator.

Win32::SerialPort module behaves ever-so-slightly differently than Device::SerialPort, in that it gladly returns undef values rather than blocking and then timing out, creating fun busy-wait-and-maybe-fry-your-USB-port loops.

The oldtelnet module on VLC in Windows behaves slightly differently than VLC on Linux and Mac, forcing me to have to tediously go back through and rework the "looking for response X" states I used successfully on two other platforms.

I feel like someone should answer for this. That Microsoft has created a platform that defies programming, development, and basic systems diagnostic information at every step, and said platform continues to be successful at all... it just blows my mind.