Slashdot Mirror
Is It Wrong to Love Microsoft?
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.'"
"most of the people developing Linux probably sit at night writing up malicious code for windows!"
This guy really must not like open source developers.
Why is this in apple.slashdot.org?
Illegally destroyed competition in the OS space.
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.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Yes, absolutely it is wrong to love Microsoft. For that matter, it is wrong to love any company that you are not directly a part of, and even then loving a company is fraught with pitfalls. Love is something that must be reciprocated in order to have any meaning. It is a shame that English has evolved to the point where we "love" or "hate" things that we enjoy or dislike.
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.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
It is very easy, when you live in your own OS world, to reach out your hand and point at all the other OSes and say, 'they are bad!", and I'm not saying that people hasn't tried that other OS they are pointing at. I'm saying that they've dug themselves into a religious trench holding their position in fear of discovering something new or to have let go of their hate for the other, different things.
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.
I definately agree. I know I am probably going to be modded troll for saying this, but Windows is a VERY reasonable OS. Crashes all the time you say? My computer hasnt crashed for over 3 years. Don't get me wrong, I use linux as well, but this site seems to be far too rabidly anti-MS.
/. crowd) by taking so long for making Vista, which from what I heard did not live up to its hype.
Really does sound like they lost some of their 'charisma' (what was still left amongst the non
+1 funny, -2 overrated. Life isn't fair.
Hey, is it possible to dislike Microsoft, but actually like Windows?
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
I've stopped trying to defend Linux from my pro-windows colleagues (and yes they are all techies), and just adopted an attitude of saying 'if you prefer Windows, use it'. Strangely enough since starting to do this they all start coming to me with pro-linux comments, and a couple even with questions on how to get started. My personal explanation for this is that they felt threatened by something they did not know, which is the only reason I can think of for someone becoming that defensive.
Heheh, kidding.
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.
sig:- (wit >= sarcasm)
One small flaw in the argument: Microsoft wasn't always hated. During the 1980-1990 time period (approximately), they were seen as one of the "good guys". In particular, during the movement of PCs into large corporations in the 1984-1990 period, Microsoft was viewed by many as a strong supporter of personally-directed computing resources against the tyranny of the Data Processing Department. While their technology was never the best, it had its good points (MS-DOS 3.3; even Windows 3.1), and as Steve Gibson has pointed out its openness allowed a huge industry of improvements to spring up, which formed the basis for today's software industry.
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
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!
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.
Linux/Open Source/Anti Microsoft News
Why is this in the "Apple" category? Apple is mentioned once in TFA.
Personally I started respecting Microsoft a whole lot more when the developers started blogging on a large scale. Few people can possibly have missed Raymond Chen's excellent blog Old New Thing 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. 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. 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 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 :).
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.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Agreed. Microsoft hasn't given us anything new.
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...
2) the lowering of expectations for the reliability of computers.
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...
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Bill Gates was a good coder, as were many of the early Microsoft coders. Look at analysis of Altair BASIC and see how they used all kinds of optimisation tricks to get as much as possible into the limited RAM of the Altair.
l _gates_write_code/
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
Your point, "there's nothing wrong with a monopoly" strikes me as naive.
/.
/. all the time too ... Google, AMD, Apple * etc.
.. just that they don't resort to illegal or unethical practices to advance their positions.
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
Same here.
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.
My issue with Microsoft has more to do with standards and when it does have a problem the kind of feed back it gives. I am a technician for a web hosting company, and I run into cases every day, where if Microsoft had just opted to use the standards that everyone else uses, their product would be more stable, and easier to use. For example, why is it that IE still does not read Wc3 compliant code correctly. The front page extensions could easily have been written to use port 21 rather than port 80, which would eliminate about 99% of the problems associated with FP. Just simple little things. The list goes on.
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.
A timely case in point is how it broke into and gained dominance in the web browser market: it is a fact well documented in court records that this was purely because of being able to leverage it's desktop monopoly into control of the newly established web browser market. Yeah, both MSIE and Netscape sucked, but MSIE wouldn't have gone anywhere without the desktop monopoly and, oh yeah, ripping code from Mosaic.
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?
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
I dunno about him, but my GUI is there. Suse 9.3, KDE 3.4, and an Nvidia graphics card.
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.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
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"
This is my constructive response to your column at CoolTechZone on the 5th of August titled "Is it Wrong to Love Microsoft?" To give you a little perspective, I have a WindowsXP desktop dual booted with Fedora Core 4 Linux, Windows XP Professional laptop, and Mac Powerbook at home and so have sufficient experience with all of them.
>>"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
Wow wow wow give me a break mods
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
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
"BZZZZZT! Thanks for playing. Remember that your beloved Apple is now using a purchased OS, from Next!"
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.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
Did they develop the GUI?
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.
As a long time Linux user and developer, I recently started learning a bit of Windows programming as well. It wasn't a good choice. It made me envy every single Windows developer.
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?
Software should be free as in speech, but if we also get some free beer, all the better.
"Microsoft did not "rip code from mosaic". They bought it outright from Spyglass."
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.
evil is as evil does
well isn't IE now part of the operating system? Windows XP? sounds like spyglass should just get some lawyers now if they aren't getting 5% of something..
"Microsoft's best product ever is the Win32 API"
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...
I don't feel like it...