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ESR Says as PCs Get Cheaper, Windows Will Die
james writes "Eric Raymond reckons Windows will be obsolete because people won't be able to afford it soon." Owning the OS gives MS too great of
an advantage. They'd sell the client for 5 bucks if
it meant that they could still control Office, the
server market, and the zillions of other markets that
their OS monopoly lets them crush.
Wow.. professional journalism at its best.
Taco would like you to believe that MS only controls the Office market because of Windows. I guess that's why it's the most popular office suite for Macs too?
Windows lets MS control the server market? Ummm, how about (cross platform) Apache? Aren't you the one that posts surveys every two months about how Apache dominates? Maybe you mean that since MS only needs to write for one OS, they can focus their energy on things other than porting?
I of course can't really argue the "zillion other markets." I guess he means hardware, and games, and a zillion minus 2 other things.
God forbid they control those by making excellent products (mouse wheel, optical mouse), and excellent libraries (DirectX). Don't forget, Windows didn't always rule the gamers world.
This is just another story to get more /. eyeballs on their site and generate banner revenues except this time it's a pro-community piece. Couldn't we ban Windows- or Linux-based op ed pieces on ZDNet altogether? They just seem to be all hot air.
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Let's have a close look at the costs involved when running a Linux system.
An important factor in Linux' cost is its maintenance. Linux requires a lot of maintenance, work doable only by the relatively few high-paid Linux administrators that put themselves - of course willingly - at a great place in the market. Linux seems to be needing maintenance continuously, to keep it from breaking down.
Add to this the cost of loss of data. Linux' native file system, ext2fs, is known to lose data like a firehose spouts water when the file system isn't unmounted properly. Other UNIX file systems are much more tolerant towards unexpected crashes. An example is the FreeBSD file system, which with soft updates enabled, performance-wise blows ext2fs out of the water, and doesn't have the negative drawback of extreme data loss in case of a system breakdown.
According to Linux advocates, an alternative to ext2fs would be ReiserFS. Unfortunately, ReiserFS is still in beta stage. This means it is not intended for production use (although according to many Linux advocates this shouldn't be a problem, which makes me wonder how (little) valuable they find your data).
The other proposed 'solution', ext3fs, is nothing more than an ugly hack to put journaling into the file system. All the drawbacks of the ancient ext2fs file system remain in ext3fs, for the sake of 'forward- and backward compatibility'. This is interesting, considering that the DOS heritage in the Windows 9x/ME series was considered a very bad thing by the Linux community, even though it provided what could be called one of the best examples of compatibility, ever. When it's about Linux, compatibility constraints don't seem to be that much of a problem for Linux advocates.
Back to Linux' cost. Factor in also the fact that crashes happen much more often on Linux than on other unices. On other unices, crashes usually are caused by external sources like power outages. Crashes in Linux are a regular thing, and nobody seems to know what causes them, internally. Linux advocates try to hide this fact by denying crashes ever happen. Instead, they have frequent "hardware problems".
The steep learning curve compared to about any other operating system out there is a major factor in Linux' cost. The system is a mix of features from all kinds of unices, but not one of them is implemented right. A Linux user has to live with badly coded tools which have low performance, mangle data seemingly at random and are not in line with their specification. On top of that a lot of them spit out the most childish and unprofessional messages, indicating that they were created by 14-year olds with too much time, no talent and a bad attitude.
I could go on and on and on, but the conclusion is clear. Linux is not an option for any one who seeks a professional OS with high performance, scalability, stability, adherence to standards, etc.
cool dead milkmen signature. they rocked.
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Long-term effects of Bush deficits