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.'"
Freak (Score:5, Interesting)
This guy really must not like open source developers.
I'm confused... (Score:5, Interesting)
What else has Microsoft meant to us... (Score:5, Interesting)
Suppressed or destroyed competition in the app space.
Dictated an artificial (e.g. unnecessarily expensive) software replacement cycle.
Empowered unscrupulous businesses to spy on your every web surfing move.
I hear people say that things aren't so bad with the current state of desktop computing. After all, Windows rarely crashes anymore and you can surf the web, play games, read email, etc. What else is there? To be quite frank, a lot. It is difficult to quantify all of the software development that hasn't been done because of Microsoft's oppressive control over the desktop. I estimate we are at least three generations of software development behind because most businesses would not risk competing with Microsoft. Just 5 years ago I can remember reading stories about companies that decided NOT to compete in a particular area because they feared Microsoft would crush them. Forget the companies put out of business or the people who had to find a new job. The loss of advancement in software technique is incalculable.
Yes, wrong to love Microsoft (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft has done a lot of things, some good, some bad, some neither. Businesses are just that way. Is Microsoft worthy of respect? Sure. They have done something that other computer companies only dream of: they own several of the markets that they are part of. But does that mean we should hate them? Does it mean we should love them? Of course not.
People who feel strong emotions towards companies that they have very little part in (having neither worked there nor been part of the founding and building of it) are misdirecting their emotions. Save your love for your neighbor, don't waste it on Microsoft.
isn't hate just a result of wounded love? (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, I've made the very same mistake. I held onto my precious Amiga until early 1995, only to find out that I've lost years of Intel PC experience by looking the other way. I also was a poor student back then too, so I wasn't likely to buy myself a new computer. But I think the OS love/hate wars are very much the same as the old Amiga/PC discussions.
My personal experience has lead me to atleast try and stay away from the religious discussion, they never lead to anything constructive. I have both Windows and Linux PCs at home, and I use them all with erhm.. almost equal passion and love.
When the OS you are using meet your needs in terms of quality and functionality, and you're satisfied with that. Then why go to the step of switching platform? If Mr. X at accounting has a PC that does the job for him, then why should he go to the bothering step of switching?
Getting a bit side tracked here, well, Microsoft and Windows. I think the problem is, a lot of people are confusing the OS with the company. The way Microsoft has been conducting business is appaling. Whether people wanna respect and give some love to their OS, or not, well.. I don't care.
Agreed (Score:2, Interesting)
Really does sound like they lost some of their 'charisma' (what was still left amongst the non
Re:"Is It Wrong to Love Microsoft?" (Score:2, Interesting)
Microsoft is a company bent on ruling the world by crushing all competition. It's a monopoly. It's taken dirty tricks to a level raw and cruel, even in their own Monopoly lawsuit.
But I like windows. It rarely crashes, is pretty easy to use and a lot of my favorite software runs on it. Direct-X works pretty well, the registry does what it's supposed to do pretty well, and if I want to share a file on the network, it's not very complicated either to set up or use.
Getting rid of viruses and malware is a problem, but I'm 100% sure it would be just as big a problem for Mac OSX or Red Hat Linux Workstation if those products had the market share that Windows does. It hasn't been a problem for me because I don't click on executable content I don't trust.
Poke holes in Windows all you want. The average person actaully kind of likes it and feels some frustration when faced with using a different platform. That wouldn't be the case if it just plain sucked. Think aout it.
TW
If it works for you... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:What else has Microsoft meant to us... (Score:3, Interesting)
Lets say tomorrow Bob 1 and Bob 2 invest some new uber fantastic computer program/hardware/whatever you pick. Now three years ago Bob 1 was working for small start up Company A while Bob 2 were working at Company B. Now Microsoft caused both companies to go out of business. So Bob 1 and 2 found each other at company 3.
Now if MS didn't "crush them", we never would have whatever it is they invent. So while I hate MS and all it stands for, they are an evil which also works in other directions.
Nothing breeds technology like war. A giant company needs a giant cannon to shut it up for a while.
So maybe it's not all "they're holding us back", they probably are ins ome areas while advancing others.
Wow, you truly do have a death wish! (Score:3, Interesting)
But seriously, I've thought this for a long while. True, it's free, and (arguably) good as a server platform. But hugely overrated - Linux nuts often (not always) seem to consider it a viable replacement to Windows or OSX for *everyone*, which it is not...especilly when you consider that users don't care about the "morals" behind their software, just whether they can share files with others and keep working the same way that they're used to.
Small flaw in the argument... (Score:5, Interesting)
So, my question to Microsoft fans is, what happened between 1990 and 2000 that turned Microsoft from hero to goat? You be the judge.
sPh
Stockholm Syndrome (Score:3, Interesting)
It's funny to think that somebody would willingly make themselves look like a doofus.
Is it wrong to love Microsoft? Do some research, like the rest of us.
This guy sounds as if he has Stockholm Syndrome, where he has become sympathetic to his captor.
Why Apple? (Score:2, Interesting)
That's not a meaningful article (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally I started respecting Microsoft a whole lot more when the developers started blogging [msdn.com] on a large scale. Few people can possibly have missed Raymond Chen's excellent blog Old New Thing [msdn.com] which really explains a lot of the things that Slashdot would consider "cruft" and "archaic design" in Windows. For those who missed it I would recommend the post about file-system tunneling [msdn.com]. On one hand it is a downright revolting workaround to make old apps work and behave as one would expect, but on the other hand one has to respect the obviously huge amounts of thought and effort that went into it.
To some part this also goes back to a bit of a reaction against Slashdot and similar places obsession with hating Microsoft. They are a lot better than they were in say, 97. With NT under the hood Windows is an a lot more agreeable operating system. Slashdot may scoff at Microsofts security effort, but in all honesty it seems to be going fairly well form my perspective. Updates are quicker and more plentiful (also most vulnerabilities seem to be announced because the fix showed up on WindowsUpdate than because an exploit was found). Recompiling large part of the system with automatic buffer checks (where possible, this is C/C++ we are talking about) has helped the severity of a lot of exploits. The new low-rights IE seems to be a good approach to insulate any problems further (borrowed from UNIX daemons granted, but the OS-level security infrastructure is sound, and applying it in a useful way to desktop applications really is a new thing), check out the IE teams blog for information about that work by the way: IEBlog [msdn.com]. They may not have had the best place to start from, but it does seem to be going the right way (I mean, hey, just getting a working software firewall in place was a huge leap forward), which I would think everyone can agree is a good thing.
Another popular blog is Michael Kaplan's blog [msdn.com] dealing with internationalization stuff like character encoding and input support.
Overall I could link blogs for quite a while, pretty much all major Microsoft products have developers blogging. It can be interesting to have a read, they are often well written, have a nice technical content and give a bit more understanding for how things work (and may help cure some of the more irrational hate for Microsoft :).
Re:Wow, you truly do have a death wish! (Score:3, Interesting)
The thing is that I want to do more than just use my computer. I want to love using my computer. And I never quite have that with Windows as a whole. But I love using Linux.
I also don't dismiss Microsoft products out of hand... I like using Windows XP although it would not work for me exclusively. Two MS products in particular I consider to be very well put together: Active Directory, and
But I do have to say that I consider many of their business practices to be unethical. That means that I will avoid MS products if I can help it, just as I would avoid being a customer of any company that I considered unethical. It means that if someone asks my opinion about software options, I will nearly always advocate for the non-MS alternative. I'm just glad that there are alternatives available, and that I've learned enough about them to make use of them.
My $0.02
Pioneers Get the arrows (Score:5, Interesting)
A good accomplisment? Probably not. Yeah it let in some innovation but not much. Mainly it sowed confusion and prevented the establishment of standards that would have moved the industry along faster. Where it did establish standards it mainly were undesirable ones. Witness all the legacy crap like parallel ports, old fashioned serial ports, and Bioses. How long did it take just to get something sensible like USB to be implemented?
On the other hand apple was a pioneer, though not always the inventor of PC methods. First (working practical) use of dynamic memory. First widepread use of memory mapped video (yes we have gone back to graphics cards but for anyone who used CGA you now what I mean), first integration of post script, First affordable Graphical user interface, first affordable mouse system, cut and paste between applications, Firewire, first consumer freindly unix desktop. first extensible files system (HFS+), metadata in file system, long liberal file names, Application oriented message passing scripting language (apple script). Self discovering local networks (first appletalk, now bonjour) If we include NeXT then we can include an OS based on Object oriented programming, Display postscript, First use of optical drives...,
Pioneering, but not settling. Not always inventing but perfrecting. They drove innovation by adopting it early and creating needs for it. Look at the first affordable desktop publishing. That required a Gui, and the ability to edit graphics as objects, and thus a mouse.
Microsoft...hmmm what can we say... they did settle the land and run on cheap hardware. Of course Cheap is why it was also so shitty. Macs were all configured at a high level. You didnlt need a pile of add on cards or figure out the interrupts and ports the card conflicts created. When you did need cards they were autoconfigured by the OS. macs had true plug and play from the day the mac II came out. Windows never really mastered plug and play till the PXI bus.
Linux on the other hand plays to a different market. Wheras macs were at the maximally configured end of the spectrum. linux allowed you to diassemble everything and configure it exactly how you wanted. Not a shrink wrapped solution like widows that tried to do it for you and consequently invented horrors like the registrtry, incompatible DLLs, and resource conflicts. Instead Linux is a tinkerer's toychest. Of course that's why it comes in third for desktop and ease of use. But it's also starting to become an innovator in software ideas as more tinkerers get linked together.
Re:What else has Microsoft meant to us... (Score:5, Interesting)
Most of the actions they use are illegal, but they either weasel off, hire better lawyers, or just pay off defendants. They're well known for entering negotiations to license technology, and if the talks break down, they just steal it.
Also, everything they've been able to do since the early-mid 90's has been due to their illegal exploitation of monopoly, such as strongarming OEMs not to include Netscape or WordPerfect.
So I'd say it's not the laws that are at fault, but a legal system that never envisioned a defendant strong and willful enough to flaunt the law because the penalties are simply part of the cost of maintaining a monopoly.
Re:Obligatory Amiga reference (Score:2, Interesting)
The Amiga had all this from 1985 when PC's still ran 16-bit singletasking MS-DOS:
32-bit OS
4096 colors
8-bit sound (14-bit interpolated)
Autoconfig (plug'n'play that works perfectly).
Preemptive multitasking.
Long filenames
640x512 resolution
DataTypes (codecs)
Resident binaries
and more...
Re:Wow, you truly do have a death wish! (Score:1, Interesting)
I've installed a ton of distros, but can never feel comfortable. I've come to feel I like KDE more than Gnome (just a personal preference, mostly because of the consistency). I've tried to be a convert for the last 5 years, and every time I end up reloading Windows. At first, it was a pain even installing applications. That was fixed pretty well. Then it was a pain to get any of my hardware working. I have good luck with that recently too. Right now, I'm just trying to replace functions from Windows I'm used to. For a long time, it was a pain to browse Samba shares. That's been fixed (at least in the distro I'm using now). Hell, even getting MP3's to play has been a pain in the past, but that was quite easy in Kubuntu.
The hardest part of the transition is that I'm a
I figure I'll eventually make the switch to Linux or Mac OS X, as Linux gets better all the time. Every year Microsoft makes some change that makes me dislike Windows more and more. I'm currently dual-booting, but I find I spend more time on the Windows side. My goal is to only use Windows for killer apps like DVD Shrink and use the Linux side for everything else until I can completely remove the Windows side.
What has Microsoft given us? (Score:5, Interesting)
2) the lowering of expectations for the reliability of computers.
Why the change? (Score:5, Interesting)
W95 was also the debut of the Registry with all it's attendant obfuscations and encrypted entries. No more of this human readable
Then there were the help files. I taught myself how to use Win3.11 to quite a high level purely from the bundled helpfiles. W95 seemed a lot less helpful. However I think the nadair was reached with WinME when I was tryng to troubleshoot my wife's PC and suddenly though "all these halp files are, are a lit of reason's why the problem is not MS's fault".
Then there was Stacker - where MS bough out just enough of the company to squash the product. Everyone has their favourite MS unfair competition story - that was the one that made me realise these guys were not playng fair
And there was the chap on USENET - demon.local - who posted a message subject "Bastards! Bastards! Bastards!". Apparently he'd found a bug in 95, reported it and was told he'd be given 30 days free credit while they looked into it. He was outraged - he spent his own valuable time tracking down a bug for Microsoft to improve their product, and in return they threatened to charge him money if they couldn't replicate it in 30 days. How to alienate your techically adept userbase in one easy lesson...
The final straw for me, was finding that getting a copy of office for my dad's new XP machine doubled the cost of the computer (which we'd already bought) and that we'd need a new printer and scanner. None of which was advertised, of course.
These are some of the landmarks on the journey from me as a MS enthusiast c.1990 to a Linux evangelist in 2005. It's not that I woke up one day and thought "linux looks cool", MS had to work long and hard before I started to think of them as the enemy.
There's a line, arguably a subtle one, between wrtiting novice-friendly software and treating your users as idiots. Further on in the same directin there's another one markign the start of treating the user with contempt. As far as I'm concerned, MS crossed first one, then the other, and have not so much as looked over their shoulder the whole time...
Re:If it works for you... (Score:3, Interesting)
a) If you over-sell Linux and imply (as some people had done to me) that it can do damn-near everything Windows can do, and is better in virtually every way, you are setting them up for a disappointment that will lead to such a bitter backlash that they will probably actively despise Linux for a long period of time. This is what happened to me a couple of years ago - people sold Linux to me as if it were the Second Coming, and when I tried it the gulf between expectation and reality made me turn against big time. Thankfully I tried it again (pretty much by force of circumstance, rather than choice; as far as I had been concerned, based on my initial disappointment, I was done with it forever) and saw the light a year or so later :)
b) A measured, educated discussion of its good and bad points will sway people far more, especially if you concentrate on the bad points. I've seen this happen time and time again, and the best theory I can come up with is that, if the person respects your judgement and doesn't just think you are an idiot zealot (the "measured, educated discussion" can help dispell this notion :)), then listing a bunch of its flaws but still continuing to use it will make people curious about the good qualities that keep you using it, and make them want to try it themselves. I suppose it's like a weird kind of reverse-psychology, but that doesn't quite hit the nail on the head, I don't think.
Re:Small flaw in the argument... (Score:2, Interesting)
They became really popular, and we all know what happens in our society when too many people start liking something... all of a sudden it's not cool anymore and we look for reasons to hate them. We all try to distinguish ourselves from the rest. When everyone else likes microsoft, all of a sudden we feel the need to be 'different'. It's funny how it's cool for everyone to hate something, but not for everyone to love something. I bet my watch and warrant on this: Let's say in 5-20 years, some linux distro finally 'gets it right' and every mom and pop and grandma out there all of a sudden starts using linux, everyone here on slashdot who is pro-linux, will suddently find something wrong with this and turn. Just look at what happens with indy artists when they go big. we're so f8cked up.
They could code (Score:3, Interesting)
This is why Microsoft became a bit of an expert on BASIC. Of course as soon as they expanded the software declined in quality and the cheese factor increased.
Can't find the original analysis, but there's an article here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/05/15/could_bil
Re:Why do you trust...? (Score:3, Interesting)
I never said there's nothing wrong.. I said there's nothing illegal about a monopoly.
However, your post strikes me as the same old 'anti-corporate anything' sentiment that's just all too common on
If a company abuses it's powers, harms consumers, destroys potential competition etc. then of course there is something wrong that. But to dismiss ALL companies or corporate entities as being malicious is also naive. Of course, it's not hard to make that assumption based on the fact that we constantly hear about MS, Intel, Enron, Martha Stewart etc. But there's even a few examples of the opposite that we hear about on
Just because a company is profit-driven or has a monopoly doesn't automatically make it evil. A companies actions are what it should be judged on, not it's position in the market.
* P.S - In case anyone misinterprets my examples above.. I'm not trying to claim that those companies have monopolies
Re:There is a price for what you want (Score:2, Interesting)
I use Windows at work because the Powers That Be said It Is So. My file/MP3 storage server at home is Ubuntu and my personal computer is a Mac running OS X - the beauty and USEABILITY of Mac with the power FreeBSD under the hood if I need it. A geek-artist's wet dream.
Re:Small flaw in the argument... (Score:4, Interesting)
It was around 1990 that Microsoft decided to abandon its partnership with IBM in developing the powerful next-generation OS known as OS/2 and instead go solo with a lightweight GUI layer for DOS called Windows 3.0.
Re:There is a price for what you want (Score:1, Interesting)
My other issue with them is, is that if a piece of software does have a problem, it seems they do their darnedest to direct the user everywhere but where the problems lay. We'll take my IE example, it overwrites the standard 404 page with a page cannot be displayed, which lists possible causes for the issue in order from least to most likely the issue. They could have just as effectively not had it do this and it would be better. Or if they were going to do this they should have had differentiated pages. Outlook and Outlook Express, if there's ever a problem it gives a cryptic hex code, which 9/10 times realerts you to a problem (generally if you get an error and don't have your messages, you already know you have a problem). At a glance it would seem that Microsoft goes to great lengths to confuse its users. I've found this type of thing to be a lot less prevalent with other platforms and non MS software.
Re:People don't hate MS because it's MS ... (Score:4, Interesting)
There was a TCP/IP stack market before Microsoft included one with the OS. Are they also to blame for the destruction of the TCP/IP stack market? Yes, the strongarm tactics they used on OEMs to kill the nascent market were unethical and quite probably illegal, but I hardly considered the allegations of mere "bundling" to have merit then, and certainly not now.
Microsoft did not "rip code from mosaic". They bought it outright from Spyglass.
Currently, the licenses for 2000 SP3, XP SP 2 and later even give MS administrative rights to the machine.
I'll admit to not having read the whole license. Could you quote the relevant parts?
Re:Would i listen to someone... (Score:4, Interesting)
I haven't seen a Windows user who *doesn't* drool over my keyboard.
Things blissfully fade in and out, a soothing animated xscreensaver is my desktop background, my window title bar and border are transparent (crystal theme (check out crystalgl and oceangl, they are stunning)). Too bad you can't run crystal gl or ocean gl with kompmgr; I'm sure that will be fixed in the future. (crystal GL, btw, does the Vista-like translucency of window borders. 1.5 years ago. )
Font rendering on my system blows away anything else, and I'm talking about graphics professionals running Windows and Mac OS X doing comparisons.
Not too mention the oohs and ahhs I hear about Project Looking Glass. It'll be fun when that's avaliable as a Window Manager for distributions.
KDE amazes most people. Kparts, all the nifty little protocols (like fish://, camera://, and ipod://), native output to PDF for an application (like OS X). Kaffeine, which plays any format under the sun.
My girlfriend saw the automatic downloading of lyrics and wikipedia entries in amarok, and decided she wanted this 'KDE' thing.
Not to mention non-KDE things that KDE builds on. Samba integration is beautiful. CUPS autodetection of network printers makes most Windows people drop their jaws in shock.
"What? You mean I can go back and forth between offices, and it only shows me the working printers I have avaliable? Where do I get the drivers?"
The *only* difficulty I have on my system is Windows applications. Wine just isn't all the way there yet. Other than that, everything, and I mean everything, works beautifully. I have to spend a lot of time explaining that Linux has problems with Windows applications only, and that Windows application performance is not indicative of Linux app performance.
Re:There is a price for what you want (Score:2, Interesting)
If the market were empty and no software existed for any platform, developers would swarm to Windows because of the good developer documentation and long-term support for APIs.
If the market were empty and software existed for all the platforms, users would flock to Windows because of the low price and good software interoperability.
If the market were empty and software existed in equal parts for all OSes, Linux, while cheapest, would have the worst interoperation between the software packages, Windows would probably still do best because hardware manufacturers would be locked out of the Mac market and make lots of cheap Windows and Linux compatible hardware.
Something like BeOS would have kicked butt in such a fantasy, or 10 years ago, OS/2.
Microsoft's Windows product is not an OS, it's the API for software and drivers, along with their support, documentation, marketing and userbase. Nobody cares about the OS, they even changed OSes and aside from some boost in stability and better PnP, most of their userbase didn't notice.
Linux is a great OS, but it has a lousy fluctuating API for software and drivers, great support mind you, poor documentation, nearly zero marketing and an insignificant userbase. Where it does have a good API, POSIX-ish stuff, it does great... which limits it to the server arena.
If Microsoft were to port Windows to Linux in a similar way as Macintosh kinda ported MacOS to BSD, now that would be a very cool "OS"
Re:That's not a meaningful article (Score:2, Interesting)
Technology wise, while I wouldn't dispute that
So, I hate neither Microsoft's people nor their technology.
What I do object to is their abusive business practices and disregard of standards, all orchestrated to lock users onto their platform. If they had 20% marketshare, I wouldn't care, but that clearly isn't the case.
Is that irrational? I don't believe so. On the contrary, it strikes me as ignorant to embrace Microsoft without considering the broader impacts on the software industry and the technologies that move us forward.
Yes, the Microsoft developer blogs are insightful. But they do not cure the disease from which Microsoft suffers.
Re:A calm and constructive response (formatted) (Score:2, Interesting)
>>"Is it wrong to love Microsoft?"
First of all, the short answer is- no, it isn't wrong.
>>"The question is why do they? I love Microsoft. Absolutely adore it and what's more, I hate Linux. I think it's the most over rated piece of software ever built and survives simply out of spite and not because it is terribly good at doing something because it is not!"
I am curious what your experience with Linux is. I agree that Linux is not for everyone, but for a developer, researcher, network manager or someone looking to build their own systems there is nothing like it. Considering the fact that you have the source to do what you choose with makes it a tremendous platform. People have ported it to the Xbox, powerpcs, palms, ipods and all kinds of other antique devices and it still works the same. There is even a version (called busybox) that is under 1Mb and can be carried on a floppy. It is this flexibility and extensibility that people love.
>>"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."
Not really.
>>"I understand the criticisms about the security of the software, the critical flaws and what not but again, we must look at things in the proper perspective. More than 95 pecent computers in the world use one form of Windows OS or another. The remaining being divided between Linux, MAC etc. now lets say MAC has 1 percent, does it make sense for a hacker to create a virus that can at best infect just 1 percent of the computers in the world? It doesn't, therefore you don't have as
many security threats for other software as most of the people developing Linux probably sit at night writing up malicious code for windows!"
What you say is true- but you require some perspective as well. There are some basic security decisions that Windows has made that people
disagree with, the most important of which is that every user and process my default runs as an administrator. For the average, home
user this is dangerous. Otherwise, your point on security is valid.
>>"Considering the fact that everyone who knows how to write two bits of code dreams of hitting windows with a virus, the guys at the "Redmond Giant" are doing a spectacular job."
Hmm... I wonder why everyone who knows programming wants to his Windows with a virus? Is it because people who program prefer other platforms?
>>"XP is such a joy when it comes to simply connecting a device and watching the pretty little bubble detecting it and saying "its installed and ready for use" makes the slightly high price absolutely worth it."
I agree- it is one of the strengths of Windows. But can you install Windows on a powerpc, or a Sparcs, or an Xbox or ANY other hardware of
your choice? You can with Linux, though not as easily. I'm just demonstrating why people like other OSes.
>>"In Linux, you have to recompile a kernel if you want to so much as change your modem! Give me a break guys, Linux is light years behind
Windows XP and I am sure it will be further back biting the dust when Longhorn (now Vista) comes out."
>>Ummm, have you actually used Linux lately? I suggest you try out a user friendly version like Fedora Core and then rewrite your column.
>>"This reminds me of the bundled issues with the antitrust lawsuits being slammed on it."
Some, but not all, of the lawsuits are justified. Microsoft has been anti-competitive. Not many people dispute that- not even Microsoft,
they settled in a lot of cases and agreed to future improvements in their behav
Re:There is a price for what you want (Score:4, Interesting)
Quoting GP:
Because MS's "tool" is actually just a rotting scrotum, flopping mercilessly at those nails, only getting damaged in the process.
and the comment is modded +5 insigthful???
Quoting parent:
. It is exceedingly terrible to use. You have to struggle with it forever to get any app to load. Can't play games unless you know that you need to DL a shitload of dependencies.
See the difference? GP is just saying a lot of bad words and swearing things about windows... while Parent says some things that are sad but half truth (YES Linux is terrible to use, at least it is EASIER to use Windows OVERALL, thats why J6P prefeer WinXP), about the app loading I think it does no thold, and the dependencies problem man.. I have passed that hell once and it is INDEED a shit.
So come on fucking mods! if parent is a flamebait then GP is more flamebait, this REALLY PISSES ME OFF ABOUT SLASHDOT! and I know my comment will be also moded down.... but noooooo when it is about Linux it is flamebait, you can see in this thread the subjectivity of this site... grow up please
Re:There is a price for what you want (Score:3, Interesting)
Completely different scenario. Apple may have acquired NeXT, but NeXT was founded by Jobs, so that was just Apple Computer v. 2.0. At least OS X recognizes that its origins come from BSD, whereas Microsoft again takes portions of BSD, hides it in Windows, and contributes nothing back (thanks to the marvelous BSD license).
That's like arguing that Apple ripped off the GUI (like Microsoft) from Xerox PARC, when in truth, Apple had a licensing agreement with Xerox, traded stock, and under Scully, almost acquired Xerox. Microsoft didn't do that, they just stole, or, "creatively acquired" if you prefer that term...just as they had stolen MS-DOS from Digital Research a few short years before.
Microsoft is not an innovative company technically speaking. They are only innovative in terms of their business practices and getting away with something even AT&T couldn't a decade before.
Re:There is a price for what you want (Score:4, Interesting)
No Xerox did. And no Apple didn't develop it.
Edison didn't invent the lightbulb. It had been demonstrated in the lab 20 years earlier. Edison made some improvements, mass-marketed and mass-produced lightbulbs, and built the infrastructure to bring them to the home and office.
Ford didn't invent the automobile. Ford made some improvements, used massproduction to bring the cost down to make it affordable for the average home and office.
The original article is a rant, with spelling and grammar errors and some weak arguments and claims.
But it has a valid central point.
Bill Gates is (approximately) the world's richest man because he, as much as anyone, made computers accessible and affordable to the average home and office.
We can whine that Edison screwed Tesla, and electric cars were better than model A's, and Sarnof screwed Farnsworth, and Sinatra killed Kennedy, and so forth, but I'm happy to be living in a world where a billion people are online.
We don't know how things would have played out if there had been no microsoft.
The open source movement at some point should give us something better than windows, but it's still not here yet. Apple is still making Volvos in a Ford world, catering to a niche market which can afford a better product at a higher price.
Windows has been the electric light bulb and the model A that made the new technology accessible to the masses.
Re:There is a price for what you want (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft's best product ever is the Win32 API. It's somewhat sad to see that they seem to be trying to replace it with something worse. But as long as it lasts, it's pretty much the developers dream (the actual implementation might not be).
I'm probably not going to install Windows any time soon. I don't like it as a user, and I can cross-compile with Mingw on Linux just fine. Wine let's me do the initial tests, and I can use my girlfriends box to do the rest.
But I don't see myself doing that much (non-server) Linux development in the future, at least not until X is replaced with something else. Preferably with something that fits into the POSIX API. At present, mixing the two is just too painful.
PS. The network transparency of X is overrated. You can't really do pretty graphics without shared memory and/or heavy console-side logic, and if it doesn't even do sound, then what's it's advantage to a tool like VNC?
Re:People don't hate MS because it's MS ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually they fucked spyglass to get it. They promised them a percent of every IE sold then they gave the thing away. Poor spyglass, next time get better lawyers when signing a deal with the devil.
Re:People don't hate MS because it's MS ... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:There is a price for what you want (Score:2, Interesting)
ok, i've had my quota of ROTF for today
let's move on...
little advice: move over from anciente things like the XLib API or Win32 to something more modern, like GTK or Qt, perhaps, and then we talk...