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Microsoft At Middle Age
gordyf writes "The Seattle Times has an interesting article concerning Microsoft's current position in the market. It describes how its customers and parners are reacting to its heavy-handed tactics, and how 'you can point to Linux being one of the major drivers for this decade.' An interesting read."
For those interested , it's a weeklong "series" in the SeattleTimes.
are we there yet?!?!
Never going to happen. The main reason being that OS X runs on apple's hardware, not x86. x86 hardware rules market share because it is cheap and readily available from a great number of merchants. Mac hardware is expensive and hard(er) to find.
:)
"Mac OS X is a single OS, as opposed to a set of OSes that may or may not work together."
OS X is no more a single OS than Linux is a single OS. Linux interoperates just fine with other Linux machines. Don't confuse the operating system with the applications.
"Also, OS X also has the backing of a long established company that will probably be around in the foreseeable future."
And Linux has IBM. At least they're not constantly going out of business
"OS X is also a BSD, which is a much better OS than Linux. "
Mod -1 Flamebait. BSD is not a better OS than Linux, nor is Linux better than BSD. Make your arguments based on credible facts, not personal opinion.
"Lastly, Apple is adopting a less proprietary model and much of the operating system is open source, so many of the benefits of a completely open source OS are there too."
A less proprietary model than Linux, where ALL of the OS is open source? I doubt that.
I like and use OS X, but it's not competition for Linux. It's a good OS, and has it's places, but it's no threat to Linux or MS.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
Yes, actually he is. He's given over $3 billion to global health alone. You can't expect Bill to give away close to his full net worth, especially at the young age of 47. People don't get to be multi-billionaires by spending everything they have no matter what the cause.
No you don't. Tomshardware just did some Windows XP benchmarks on a Pentium 100.
I don't know why you think its so bad that they have added features. Thats a pretty natural progression of software development. Look at Linux, KDE, Gnome, Mozilla, etc.
"The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
Actually, Gates is probably the biggest humanitarian in the world -- he founded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is dedicated to fighting for health improvements in the 3rd world. The endowment of that foundation is ~$24 billion. I've also heard that Gates plans to gradually denote the remainder of his money to charity before he dies.
Regardless of what you think of Gates, accusing him of not being a good humanitarian just demonstrates that you really don't know what you're talking about.
Chef Raekwon said, "try running your RedHat 8.0 on a 486, or better yet, an early Pentium 1 (with KDE or GNOME). Please post results."
:)
I don't know about Red Hat 8.0, but I'm running Red Hat 7.3 on a Pentium 167 laptop with 96mb of Ram and about 3GB of disk space... It runs everything pretty well, albeit not as quickly as I'd prefer... The only problem I've noticed is that you can pretty much forget about running anything java-based on it (Forte, for example, dies a morbid death). This doesn't affect me that much, though -- almost everything for Linux is written in C++, so the stuff I'm using runs fairly well.
I think it comes down to what sort of apps you're running. If you're just using productivity stuff, and doing programming (in anything except java, that is) you're probably going to be fine.
In contrast, man, I wouldn't even TRY to get Windows 2000 or XP running on one of my pokey little laptops. 'Course, Windows 98 seems to run ok, if you're into that sort of thing. And, I have heard a rumor about a friend of mine putting Windows XP on a Pentium 100, and he swears it works, but then, he and I are always fencing about windows vs. Linux, so he may just be toying with me.
FYI...
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
I believe this is a good indication of split from how Bill Gates sees the world and how the rest of the world sees itself. The problem is a touch of reality. One where the business is not technology but the use of technology for business. An area that MS seems to fail at way too often, given their scope. Instead, their success tends to be from the hard work of developers outside of the products themselves.
... you can go back and get that information."
From the article:
"...It will be common sense that you can correspond with your doctor and ask him questions electronically. It will be common sense that if you go to a meeting that's recorded digitally
It is not common sense. My doctor does not correspond electronically for two reasons. He is busy and he gains no revenue from it. Doctor's do not sit in their office waiting for someone to show up.(Try to see your doctor the same day you call). As for recording digitally that again is economically available today, but it fails to meet a wide business need. Instead, I call up Jane and ask "Was that two foobars or three you wanted?" I don't go to the archives and pull the video. Perhaps it is just his lawyers talking, in which case the video will expire in 30 days and be self destructive.
as for
If it works as planned, an airline would be able to update a passenger's on-line calendar if a flight were delayed, while notifying the passenger of the change with an e-mail and a phone message. One goal is to create a standard format so that data could be read by whatever device the passenger uses.
Again, a solution looking for a problem. Since a flight is not legally "late" until it does not push off, do you really expect an airline to send you an email in the morning?
As for a standard message format, they could have that today. They selected to remain proprietary, no one is holding a gun to their head. Let's see support for a universal open document standard and we would all be happy.(Well, except MS.)
"In addition to creating new software to entice people to buy more powerful computers, Microsoft is designing new types of computers, encouraging PC makers to build them."
Yes, the do this and not for the business' that is using it. Who wanted to go to an OS who's base requirements were four or five times the previous release? Hardware makers. Do I like having a 2.0ghz chip and a gig of memory for compiles? You bet. Does business appreciate needing to update an entire administration pool to run W2k and XP? Not even a little.
and finally, the "lost leader" thrown in to later claim "everyone knew it was coming:"
One key feature is expected to be a new file-storage system for better organizing things stored on a Windows-based PC. It could finally make it easy for people to search and find all sorts of files -- contacts, printers, documents, programs, photos -- with a single search tool.
Sadly, almost no one in the mainstream recognizes this for what it is. A shutout of other devices, services and software. I predict this is going to be a 100% legally encased product that will prevent or impede anything from interacting that is not MS. Anyone (i.e. SAMBA) trying to engineer a solution can look to DCMA for guidence. Nothing more complicated than that.
I do run Win2K and Office2k on an older machine...a P200 MMX with 128 MB ram and 2.1 GB disk. It runs fine. Take out even 16 meg of memory though, and forget it. I would try to run it with 256 meg of memory, but the board is so old it only supports 4 32MB simms. YMMV, though.
Geek used to be a four letter word. Now it's a six-figure one.
Guess what? You don't have to use the newest Microsoft OS either, as demonstrated by the many small businesses and government offices that are still running Windows 95 or 98. On a related note, next time you go to your insurance agent, look at what OS he/she is running (most of the industry hasn't left DOS or Windows 3.1 yet).
In the recent CPU overview article, they tested 65 CPUs all with WinXP. It runs just fine on an P1 100, but it needs some RAM (TH put 512MB into the machine - ok, maybe its hard to find a mobo which supports both P1 and 512MB RAM).
That is hardly comparable.
I can tune the current CURRENT release of Linux to run with lesser resources. This means that I get contemporary kernel features and device driver support. I am also not limited to legacy applications.
How well does USB or Firewire work with Win95?
With your example, you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Actually, the Linux kernel is itself the OS. You don't need init scripts, they're just really useful. Same with all of the non-core gnu utilities. I understand what you were saying as far as the full operating system, but as far as Linux goes, the kernel IS the OS. That's all Linux is really,.. a kernel. It's really just imprecise usage of Linux.
Directory layout and file placement should generally be POSIX compliant, but The details of init's processes and file layout are distro dependant, though. RedHat 7.3 will be the same with every install of RedHat 7.3. Mac OS X is a BSD distro. BSD ditros can vary as widely Linux, so it's really not fair to say Mac OS X is any more consolidated than any other distro.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
There's LiteStep, and there's Geoshell.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.