Is It Wrong to Love Microsoft? 1643
vd writes "Given most comments on Slashdot, it would appear that anyone with even a slight knowledge of computers hates Microsoft. An article on CoolTechZone, though, argues that not everyone should dismiss Microsoft outright. According to Varun Dubey, Linux is over-rated, Macs aren't worthy and Windows deserves respect and some love. From the article: 'What has Microsoft given us? It has given us Windows, sure, it was buggy earlier and a lot of things didn't work like they were supposed to (plug and play springs to mind) but it was a pioneering effort. No one was even close to the ease of use that Windows offered. Sure, Mac OS was a lot prettier but then it cost the moon and the stars along with both your arms and legs.'"
Drumming up advertising revenue (Score:3, Informative)
Taco have you guys on some kind of a quota system? Or do you get bonuses for generating a certain amount of page hits?
Mac OS costs more? (Score:2, Informative)
wrong (Score:5, Informative)
This "ease of use" includes people running as Admin with all the services running and basically wide open to the universe. That's "ease of use".
I won't pretend that Linux or BSD is any easier but I really don't think this "ease of use" label is meaningful.
"Chainsaws are easy to use!" -- Said the current reigning king of the one armed people.
Tom
Re:Drumming up advertising revenue (Score:1, Informative)
1. Post flamebait article
2. ???
3. Profit!!!
Re:There is a price for what you want (Score:5, Informative)
Or perhaps runs Windows XP and uses QEMU for Windows 2000 and Linux or runs Linux, and uses VMWare for Windows XP and PearPC for Mac OSX?
My point is that all of these OS wars, and I use - actively - all three major flavors. And I know I can't be alone. Why use only a hammer to build a house when you have so many different tools in your toolbox?
Porting to Windows (Score:3, Informative)
Turn off the compiled headers option, and watch out for "include" discrepancies in the header files you are using. For example, in some compilers might include , so when you are using functions from and you might mistakenly include only . This would then compile on the compiler you're used to, but would not compile on a different compiler. Neither compiler is broken in this scenario - it's your code that's broken.
However, the compiled headers option in Visual Studio is a "bug", IMO.
Porting to Windows (boy, that was bad) (Score:3, Informative)
That'll teach me to use [Preview]. At least, until I forget again. :P
Re:Freak (Score:5, Informative)
Say for instance you develop a unique product that no one else has ever developed before. As long as your company is the only one to develop that product you automatically have a monopoly on that product. How can you be punished for something that's beyond your control ?
Microsoft has done a lot of shady business practices.. no one is arguing that. But having the monopoly alone does not make them criminals. It's how they abused their monopoly to wipe out future competition and to screw over their customers that got them in trouble.
Re:Terrible article (Score:3, Informative)
This is nothing but baseless speculation. Are you trying to tell me that if MS never existed or succeeded that no other computer company would have filled the gap? If so, you are forgetting a lot of history.
Think of IBM, Be, Amiga, NeXT, etc., etc. Had Microsoft not existed, these companies might have had a chance to secure more market share. Further, if there were more than two players on the PC realm, interoperability and standards might have been more important and faster in coming.
Now, all of this is just baseless speculation as well, but it makes at least as much sense as your, or the CoolTechZone troll's, ramblings.
Taft
Re:Obligatory Amiga reference (Score:3, Informative)
Mmmmmm...Amiga. I have fond memories of my young Amiga zealotry. The truth is that while it was a superior platform at inception, Amiga was far behind the curve by the time that the AGA architecture was rolled out. Wintel boxes eventually had a better implemented (completely native) retargatable graphics system, and you could pick up 24-bit graphics cards for under $100 (remember that AGA didn't do 24-bit graphics. They had that sorta 18-bit Ham8 and a 24-bit palette. The onboard graphics on the Amiga which used to be its trump card became a hinderance. The 24-bit Wintel cards were much faster than the AGA chipset could (I remember how incredibly slow an 8-bit color desktop was on my 1200...it was unusable).
Amigas still had great blitter, but by this time, it was nearly useless unless you were really into animating sprites and scrolling massive bitmap screens. It did make for some cool games, like Gravity Wars however.
Once Windows 95 was released, it was all over for the Amiga, as Windows 95 sported usable multitasking and some protected memory, while the Amigas would have (what would normally be) userland applications bring the system down...Guru Meditation. The Windows OS caught up to and surpassed AmigaOS 3.x.
None of this was the fault of the platform or its engineers. I believe that it came down to Commodore's management. The company wes too slow to release technology and failed to market what they had. Of course, I'm sure that it also had something to do with Microsoft's dominant marketshare as well as the depth of their third-party development base. /p
8.3 (Score:5, Informative)
put down the crack pipe and step away from the keyboard. Are you kidding? Apple had long filenames on Windows disks long before Windows 95 did. How did they manage that? It was pretty easy, and in fact the same way windows 95 later copied. they just wrapped the old 8.3 names with a layer that looked up the short name as was actually stored on the DOS disk.
What do you think would happen to the world economy if Microsoft only would release longhorn for PPC?
Uh dude, apple has switched many times and many processors and never left their currentusers behind. I was playing crystal quest, a game from the mid 90's on my OSX computer, just yesterday. When apple switched to intel they are still going to be compiling apps for my present computer.
Re:There is a price for what you want (Score:2, Informative)
Get your facts straight (Score:2, Informative)
In 1983-84 the list price for an IBM XT was $7,495 [ed-thelen.org]. The initial price of the first Macintosh was $2,499.
The IBM AT which was also released in 1984 retailed at $4,000.
The Mac 512 was then released for something over $3000 but with twice the memory of the AT. The Mac Plus was later released back at the $2500 price point.
Even in 1987 the high end macs continued to be a deal compared to other name brand PC's. To quote Dan Knight:
You can read the rest of his article [lowendmac.com] about the Mac-PC price relation at LowEndMac [lowendmac.com] As far as I can tell, Microsoft had absolutely NOTHING to do with the eventual affordability of PC clones. The price dumping was due entirely to IBM's failure to patent their architecture, thus allowing anyone and their dog to carve out their own share of IBM's retail profit margin.
The Original IBM PC's had THREE OSes! (Score:3, Informative)
I would take issue with this statement; when the PC first came out there were three operating systems available for it (PC/MS-DOS, CPM-86 and UCSD). IBM wanted the marketplace to decide which was the best one. Microsoft did not have any kind of leg up with the other two competitors initially, all three were established software vendors.
Microsoft very quickly established itself as the most popular OS for the PC (I will refrain from saying "best") and went on from there.
myke
Steve Jobs said it best (Score:3, Informative)
tfa- plug and play (Score:3, Informative)
Well, let's see, ADB, SCSI, FireWire... for the most part even ancient Macs you could plug in devices and they just worked.
And don't forget seamless networking. In the 80s over LocalTalk/AppleTalk, we were plugging in computers, printers, and such and they just worked. And we were playing network games too... I fondly remember playing SpacewardHo with 6 buddies in my backyard.
The Megahertz Myth. (Score:3, Informative)
--grendel drago
Re:Evidently not (Score:1, Informative)
Crystal Quest (Score:4, Informative)
I know because baby, I WAS THERE!! (that game was great. and I've used macs since 12/84...)
"File system tunneling" - wrong answer (Score:3, Informative)
The right answer first appeared in Jerry Popek's UCLA Locus in the 1980s, and has been in some IBM UNIX systems since IBM bought the technology. It really ought to be in Linux.
It works like this. When you open an existing file for writing, you actually start to write a new file. But unchanged blocks are shared, using a copy on write approach. If you close the file normally, the new file replaces the old file.
If the program or system crashes, the old file remains intact and unchanged. So there's always a good copy of the file. No special action is required in the program to make this happen.
The program can also call "commit", to force the new version to replace the old one immediately, or "revert", to roll the file back to the "old" state. But that's optional. A program might do this after finishing some transaction, for example.
That's how to do it right.
That's nice, but... (Score:1, Informative)
I wouldn't mention it, but it undercuts your message when you're blatantly wrong about something right off the bat, even if you're substantially correct about the rest.