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The Only Way Microsoft Can Die is by Suicide
Bitseeker writes "Robert X. Cringley's latest article is online. He opens with: 'When I wrote last week about my conclusion that the legal system -- any legal system -- is unequipped to change Microsoft's monopolistic behavior, I had no idea that within 24 hours, Sun Microsystem would be throwing in the towel, trading its so-called principles for $1.95 billion in cash. So I guess I was right. Only now, a few thousand readers out there expect me to blithely produce an answer to the problem of what to do to bring Microsoft into the civilized world. Well, I say it can't be done.'"
The industry needs a good dictator to keep peace, snuff out resistance, and generally keep order in an otherwise disorderly arena.
Yes, Microsoft is Bad like saddam hussein, but are we willing to replace him with a viable alternative?
We will end up bleeding like we do today.
Microsoft is a necessary evil. Period
Well, there's always Linux, of course.
I think the public, especially business users, are aware of these alternatives and have been for many years.
Anti-Microsoft advocates can't stand the fact that buyers have chosen not to buy the alternatives and instead largely stick with Microsoft, but all of these users have alternatives and they know about it, if only that there are Macintoshes.
Do you contend that large businesses are apathetic about these things? They obviously know about Linux and UNIX.
The day Microsoft dies is the day the United States of America dies. They are both the two greatest empires of our time, two towering beasts of stagnation and corruption. But these towering cespools will both inevitably collapse, giving way to the new. I only hope it happens within my lifetime. May we never forget the greatness of the Romans, the Brittons, AT&T, and IBM.
OM MANI PADME HUM
Just declare all copyrights from Microsoft alone unenforceable. It's all basicly a premature end to the life of copyright and patent from a specific company.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
Everyone does this. Your kidding yourself if you think otherwise. 2 examples, KDE, and OS-X. Apple is utilizing OS-X to force safari on people wheather they want it or not. The same is said for quicktime. KDE does the same thing with Konquer. Please, stop with the utilizes monopoly crap, its really sad.
Don't waste time... procrastinate now!
The major difference between Windows and Linux is that in Windows stuff works at default, while in Linux its broken by default.
Sure throubleshooting, ie. getting from a broken way to a non-broken one, is way easier in Linux when you get proper error messages and have a 'strace' at hand thats helps you look under the hood.However in Windows pretty much everything can be done with a click, I don't need to care what the chip on my soundcard is called and how the module for that chip is called, if I should use Alsa, OSS or whatever, I just insert the CD, click myself through a few non-brainer menus (license, registry form, etc.) and reboot and the soundcard will just work. Thats how pretty much everything in Windows can be installed and configure, I don't have to think and I don't really have much to know, I can click around and get stuff to work with pretty much no knowledge at all.
Sure there are some Linux distros around that for the basic installation do something similar and provide a half working system, but thats only the basic installation. Soon people will want to add another soundcard, change their graphiccard or just install some nifty software utility that they found on the net. So what now? Now the people either have to wait until there distro catches up to the new hardware and software, pretty much inacceptable, since this can take ages sometimes, depending on the distro of course or they have to do their installation manually, ie. configure && make, make install and/or configure a custom kernel, patch it in the worst case and stuff like that. Alone the fact that the people have to know that their isn't a single-click installation ala Windows in the Linux world is enough to keep Linux of from the mainstream. I mean just look at some forums filled with newbies, they got hell a lot confused by all these gazzilion ways to install software under linux, rpm, deb, compile from source, static binaries, click-through installiers, etc.
And all this has nothing todo with 'learning the OS' or whatever. One can't learn the Linux way of doing stuff, since there simply isn't a single way to do stuff in Linux, there are gazillion different ways to do stuff and they even change every second year. After all people switch distros, new soundarchitectures arrive, an ATI graphic card has to be installed quite different from an Nvidia or a Matrox one, etc. In Windows however it pretty much boils down to just clicking stuff, with my rosty Win98 knowledge I can configure an WindowsXP box without ever having used WinXP ever before. Same goes even with MacOSX, I didn't have any problems in MacOSX with configuring basically stuff, pretty much a no brainer. Yet, while using Linux as my main OS for something like 6 years I still fear touching another distro or another piece of hardware, since it always ends up that I have to learn a shitload of new stuff before I can even get the basic features to work, and no, this isn't usefull knowledge, since it gets outdated often even quicker then I learned it, so its just a waste of time.
You'd be amazed at what could be accomplished with a .45 and a full 12-round clip.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers