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20th Anniversary of Windows
UltimaGuy writes "When Windows first shipped, 20 years ago this month, it was considered nothing more than a slow operating environment that had arrived late to the party, well behind the industry leaders, Apple and Xerox PARC. Now, it's the operating system used on nearly 95 percent of all the desktops and notebooks sold worldwide. Take a look at Window's past and present, and what lies ahead in the future, including an interview with Mr. Bill Gates himself."
Plus que ca change, plus que c'est la meme chose.
In Redmond, all windows are wide open.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
"When Windows first shipped, 20 years ago this month, it was considered nothing more than a slow operating environment that had arrived late to the party,"
Okay.....so how is it any different today? Viruses/spyware and/or anti-virus/spyware software continually slow it down, and all that Microsoft seems to do lately is copy the innovative things that its rivals do, so its still always late to the party.
Hero of Allacrost, a FOSS RPG for *NIX/*BSD/OS X/Win
20th post
Huh? A /. post about Microsoft Windows WITHOUT bashing?
Can't help but congratulate Bill and Balmer on their success :)
When Windows first shipped, 20 years ago this month, it was considered nothing more than a slow operating environment that had arrived late to the party, well behind the industry leaders
So, nothing has changed then!
20 years and billions in R&D and the only change is in Longhorn we have RSOD aswell as BSOD. 20 years well spent I think./
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
Age does not beget quality. By that virture octogenarians should be the best quality people around, and they aren't! Someone insert some witty windows-creaks-like-an-old-person comment.
I gave up after the fifth page. Damn, I hate these micro-page articles with more ads than text. And the way it's laid-out makes it difficult to read. For me, at least.
Stuck down a hole! In the middle of the night! With an owl!
Am I the first one to wish them a happy birthday?
Ugh. 20-odd pages, each with only three paragraphs of text? Massive great ads in the middle of the text? Seems like just a glorified way of getting more adverts seen. I'll pass, thanks.
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
I'm sure it's going to be one heck of a kegger at the Balmer house.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
...sounds like there is something to be celebrated. I see no such thing.
Perhaps a rephrasement is in order: "20th year of rule of Windows" or "20th installment of Windows".
... how well Gates likes his Mac? Becuase it's widely known he uses a Mac and almost never uses Windows himself. This also applies to Ballmer and all other top-level executives working for MS. If there's an page where the interviewer asked him about that, I'd love to have a link to it. It seems most never dare. So you see, I'm not really all that excited about an interview with Gates; most of the interviewers seem too well-trained to ask anything interesting.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome."
Man, if there were EVER an article that Slashdotters weren't going to RTFA...
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/WinHistoryIntro.m spx
I wonder how many of you did use those first versions of Windows. From 3.1 on, it was quite common but before 3.1...
--Use ant to make
This is the third time I've seen this post in as many months. Do you keep it in a textfile on your PC?
After using GNU/Linux for three years, it was kind of a relieve to return back to Windows. I still use tools like emacs, gimp, gcc, latex, etc. But Windows is very stable now, and it supports all the hardware you can throw at it. Now I don't have to sit for days at end trying to get my TV tuner, printer, etc. to work.
The cause of, and solution to, all of lifes problems!
"it was considered nothing more than a slow operating environment that had arrived late to the party, well behind the industry leaders" what's changed?
I was using windows/386 well before 1995. (Though I am a bit embarrased to say it)
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
I always thought MS biggest coup was not producing a graphical interface(others were doing far better ones at the time) but convincing companies like lotus to port there applications to it.
I bet the discussion did not go like "if you port lotus 1-2-3 to our new graphical interface and help make it popular, in a few years time we will use our position to write a competing app and wipe you off the mat."
I bet the head of lotus wished he had negotiated a non-compete clause.
Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies
IMO Microsoft made computing cheap (as in $) well before Linux was a twinkle in Linus' eye. And MS still makes computing cheap relative to all other commercial offerings.
SUN and Apple had the world by the tail in those days (mid 80's), but they never worked to commoditize themselves (despite what they tell you its a good thing). Rather SUN, with its hubris laden leadership thought they were so great that only universities and large conglomerates were entitled use their software and hardware; a fact reflected in their price list. And look were its gotten them... McNeally - "I could've been a contender!"
An argument could even be made that Microsoft with its relatively low priced OS is what made the business model that created Linux. The only way to compete with cheap (as in $) is free (as in beer).
Another operating system will have supplanted it.
Perhaps something open like Linux, but not necessarily Linux. I think Plan 9 has some potential:
http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/
I like Plan 9's idea of having one protocol, P9, for communicating in the network. Very simple.
Or better yet, most of us won't have to worry about operating systems at all (for the desktop), because many things become more standarized, drivers contain metadata detailing the device's operation rather needing to deal with every operating system's quirks and specific interface, and applications work seamlessly across platforms - perhaps by having a minimal universal API, perhaps by taking the JAVA idea on step further and making the OS the VM.
Please remember, my ideas are more to reach a goal than for being realistic or pragmatic, I'm not an expert in all these areas....
With 20 years and 95% market share they had the time, money and resources to create the most advanced operating system ever. Instead, all they ever produced was "good enough" - never on the leading edge, never innovative.
What good have they done? They made the PC a commodity, accessible to all but the most poor. Gone are the days of $7000 proprietary machines that didn't operate with other different computers. These are all good things but they came as a result of market share and fate rather than purposeful design and innovation.
I look back at the last 20 years of Windows and say - what a waste. What a colossal monument to greed and complacency.
So Windows is twenty. Really, it's ten. It was the release of Windows 95 that brought the dismal tide over the levees and submerged us all. By coincidence or not, Apple just announced its best shipments since the days of the crazy Dr Gil Amelio, not far off the same time. Maybe that tells us something about the future, too.
What lies in the future, apparently, is keeping your data in the "cloud" - on giant servers somewhere - and being able to plug into it via a usb fob or similar device which carries your identity and the system settings just the way you like them. Fine, I'm up for that, though if I had really important data I doubt I'd entrust it to the tender care of megacorp inc.
It's rather unfortunate that the Microsofties use "rich" the whole time to describe things. It's pretty rich being told you have to impoverish yourself in order to enjoy a rich user experience that's usually on a par with a nasty hamburger.
Likely by the time Vista comes out folks will be so sick and tired of hearing about it that they'll be desperate for any other news. As for the "interview" with Mr Gates. Hmmn, stilted. Are these things ever done live, or is the interview cut and pasted from questions emailed over and droided answers emailed back? It is, after all, the Borg we're dealing with here.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
Is reading an interview with him considered an honor today, or what?? Not that there would already be plenty of other interviews where he can spread FUD.
Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
Just look at what Apple is doing now. No guesswork there.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
"It took twenty years, but we got the security right this time...honest"
Unlike most here on slashdot I'm quite happy with Windows, I think it works great, provides a myriad of features and is fast and stable. So heres to another 20 years of Windows
plz shut the hell up
Windows User:lol i'm gonna post the same thing over and over again to make linux look stupid lol i am so witty makeing myself look like a idiot and makeing all windows users look like unimaginative dumb asses
Dual-Booter:plz shut the hell up
More lies about:
1. security;
2. efficiency;
3. non-draconian DRM;
4. interoperability;
5. openness;
6. standards compliance;
7. release dates;
I hope in 5 or 6 years time the Windows anniversary will be about "the year MS lost its monopoly".
Disclosure: I'm stupid
Without Ads
"...well behind the industry leaders, Apple and Xerox PARC." PARC was certainly a leader in research, but not an industry leader. You couldn't buy their stuff at the time. And the Mac was a slow seller with almost no software. DOS was king, and IBM was still on top. I have a 20 year old issue of Byte that reviews all the window managers (GEM, TopView, Desqview, etc) that were shipping, and it mentions the soon-to-arrive Microsoft Windows. My Windows 1.0 SDK has a "hello world" example with several pages of C code. I remember thinking "this will never work"...
Place nail here >+
Everything to configure X is in xorg.conf. If X won't run, 90% of the time all you have to do is fix xorg.conf. X'll probably tell you exactly what's wrong, too. Everything in most linux distros is like this. I believe this practice coincides with the Unix Philosophy.
If Windows won't load, 90% of the time your safest choice is a clean install. It won't tell you what the problem is. Usually it won't even tell you there's a problem. It'll just die. Theres usually no way to fix it from a command prompt, and "Safe Mode" is a joke. I believe this practice coincides with the totalitarianism. (There's no problem. Use your computer as usual. Anyone who says their computer is not booting is a political dissident, and an enemy of the people!)
People who don't want to know what's going on can use Windows. People who don't want to know what's going on shouldn't actively participate in a democratic government, though. To paraphrase a political party I have the little sympathy for: "The personal [computer] is the political."
(I do of course realize that you can be very much interested in one field of interest (say, politics), while simply regarding another field from a more utilitarian perspective (say, computers). I would prefer if people took less for granted, though.)
Okay, I come off as a total loon here, so AC I go =]
Interesting, because this month is also the 20th anniversary for another OS and mouse-driven GUI - Amiga OS 1.0. The Commodore Amiga 1000 first shipped in October, 1985. It's truly a shame it did not become more mainstream, because the Amiga's GUI completely blew Windows away.
It took Microsoft at least another decade to offer a gui as smooth and responsive as the Amiga's, with the release of Windows 95. Yep, 10 years before they had a mouse pointer that properly followed the physical mouse like the Amiga's, instead of the herky-jerky mouse movement Window's users had to put up with.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
First, windows is getting better, but it sure seems like a slow grind.
More importantly, there is another thing that is not changing. The Wall Street Journal has an article today that confirms its previous reports of Google in talks with Time-Warner about giving them money to prop up AOL.
Nothing has changed. Every time a potential challenger to MS pops up, the challenger kills itself off through its own hubris. Once again, the folks at MS sit in Redmond and laugh all the way to the bank while Google is throwing its money away. Intense focus on small incremental changes for MS has turned them into a money making machine.
where would be linux and the open source movement if microsoft/windows hasn't ever existed?
Would it be linux at all?. I think linux mainly exist and evolves because of its continuous competition against windows.
I used to get really exited about Windows. Betas of Windows 98 and NT 4 at home, Systernals tools, things like TweakUI, an NT 4 era MCSE, caring about the differences between Windows 95 OSR2 and OSR1, etc.
...what? A crap web browser, an IM that only does MSN (Linux does AOL, ICQ, Yahoo, and Jabber, aka Google), a crap mail client (compared to Evolution - check hotwayd if you need to check Hotmail), OpenOffice 2 (yeah, I think OO 1 was crap too) a good firewall out of the box, no spyware hassles, and the ability to install and upgrade my apps/hardware without rebooting for every single one, over and over again. Sure, you could install all this stuff in Windows, but you have to find it and pay for it and reboot and reboot and reboot. If Linux fucks up, all the config files are documented and I can fix it. There's even useful shit like strace in the OS. If Windows fucks up, most of the registry isn't documented and Systernals tools are expensive as hell.
I kinda stopped being interested shortly after Windows 2000. What happened? Well nothing. Before Windows 2000, you had Windows 98, which was unstable, and Windows NT 4, which was a bastard to use (in particular, it had no Plug and Play support).
Then there was Windows 2000, and it was more stable and still easy to use.
Windows XP could hav been a Windows 2000 service pack. A better themable UI, a minor IE update, some utilities to do things like registry snapshots that were useful, but always available as cheap third party tools. No big deal. XP SP 2 was the same, except the firewall was so bad you still needed a third party firewall. And yeah, spyware got more popular in the last few years, so you need antispyware tools now too.
There have been no significant improvements since Windows 2000. Meanwhile, about 1998, I saw a screenshot of Enlightenment. I wanted Enlightenment. Linux came with the bargain. Linux was tweakable to my hearts content. And also really difficult. And I'd use it for a little while,. then mess it up or find something I couldn't do, then go back to Windows.
The thing is, Linux seemed to be improving. Things that seemed to buy me about Linux were bugging other people too. I went from Red Hat 5.2 to Mandrake, which had a nicer GUI, KDE. Then Red Hat 6 came out, and it had KDE plus a simpler GUI installer. Woo. And tools to notice new hardware and configure it. And I started learning about Linux, cause it was nice and tweakable and interesting.
After a while, I'd want to do something in Linux I couldn't do in Windows. First it was pull down sequences of files using wget. In Windows you'd need to fetch and install some trialware crap to do that, and Linux came with the tool. Then it was use Evolution. Then I found smssend, which was cool as hell. Meanwhile, Gnome got quite decent, so I switched to that. These days, Windows has
Meanwhile, I and my Linux buddies had finished Grand Theft Auto on the PS2 while most of my remaining Windows using mates were waiting for it to be released.
"...was considered nothing more than a slow operating environment that had arrived late to the party, well behind the industry leaders" - how times change?
I'd much rather read Wikipedia's History of Windows[Wikipedia] entry instead.
When Windows first shipped, 20 years ago this month, it was considered nothing more than a slow operating environment that had arrived late to the party, well behind the industry leaders, Apple and Xerox PARC. Today, not much has changed.
What's changed is that, as the article says, 95% of computers run Windows. It may not be the fastest. (But then again, I'm writing this in Konqueror on a Gnome desktop, and... well, it seems to me that Windows XP on my gaming machine does boot faster, and renders a lot faster. Maybe because it doesn't render and antialias everything in software.) It may not be _the_ one that discovered the wheel. Etc. But a lot of people like it anyway. It's an achievent they can be proud of.
In a sense, the old wisecrack "Saying that Windows is better because more people use it, is like saying that McDonalds is the best restaurant" actually applies there. For a lot of people, McDonalds _is_ the better choice, or they would go eat somewhere else.
Choosing a restaurant isn't just a matter of who has the best cuisine and the rarest wines, but a compromise that also includes stuff like:
- price (self-explaining)
- time (maybe I just want to pick my hamburger and be on my way, not wait an hour while the chef prepares a complicated 5-star meal)
- accessibility and/or personal effort involved (if the 5 star restaurant is in the next town, and the McDonalds is right around the corner, you can guess where I'll eat. Doubly so if I have to drive home first and get a suit and tie for the 5 star restaurant.)
- familiarity (I already know what a cheeseburger and a Cola taste like. Maybe I don't have the time or inclination right now to figure out wth 'escargot provencal avec champignons' or 'canard a l'orange' even mean, or which of them I might even like, and if I want a Chateauneuf Sauvignon or a Valadilene Pinot Gris with either.)
- personal taste (maybe I actually _like_ a chickenburger, or not wearing a tie while I eat it.)
- social perception/acceptability (if I were a teenager taking my punk gang to a restaurant, chances are some snotty Chez Lex establishment would just make them uncomfortable)
Etc.
Yes, McDonalds didn't invent hamburgers or Cola, they're latecomers, etc. But people choose to go eat there anyway. Go figure.
Well, the same applies to OS's. If you factor in the whole mile-long list of reasons, and not just take one aspect out of context, for a lot of people Windows actually is the best choice. So, well, I'd say MS has reason enough to celebrate there.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This is the third time I've seen this post in as many months. Do you keep it in a textfile on your PC?
.doc
More likely a
bullshit
I wish I had mod point to mod you all down to hell.
"The challenge with Win XP was to give users new ways to use their systems, while retaining the features they had learned to appreciate from previous versions," says Chris Jones, corporate vice president of Windows Core Operating Systems Development.
"A lot of the value proposition of XP was, it's basically the same, with a new look, a new set of experiences around photos and music, and some new scenarios," Jones says. "But it had the new engine in it, and so it was just way, way more reliable."
Aside from virus and bug issues, Windows is not customizable enough right out of the box. Every copy looks the same with the same blue theme and it is getting tiresome. It should also update/protect itself automatically from outside attacks.
Windows did make computing cheaper and easier to access for the average human.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
100% of the people who ask me for support are switched to Linux within months.
Really? Both of them?
Better suit up with a privoxy condom before attempting the linked site. You'll finish reading it feeling very dirty and ad contaminated.
So maybe it isn't as relevant to the rest of the world, but it's also the 9th aniversary of KDE's founding today. I doubt whether Matthias Ettrich planned it so, but three cheers for the windows that are free for the masses!
If anyone has 589Kb of disk space on a server that's not stuck on stupid 384kbit DSL upload limit, I have a VMWare image I created of Windows 1.01 on top of Dos 3.3. Works pretty nicely, except that VMWare can't emulate a serial mouse (and Win 1.01 predates PS/2).
Any offers? I'll email it out to anyone that's prepared to post a link to it here...!
We spend way too much time bashing Microsoft and Windows. For all of their flaws (and I'll admit, there are quite a few), Microsoft has done a lot to advance personal computing. The combination of Microsoft's operating system and Intel's chips have consistantly driven down the price of PC hardware to a point where many people that once could never think about affording a computer can now own one relatively easily.
Don't get me wrong. I love (and use) Linux. I think Macs are great. I understand Windows ain't perfect. But can we, just this once, look at one way that it has actually advanced and spread computing?
It doesn't count if you're the only one who asks you for support.
I see a lot of that and it's a total crock of shit. Can you tell me how price fixing and other anti-competitive practices did this? That's all Microsoft has ever done. Microsoft has given you the upgrade train with all of it's intentional wastes in hardware, software and document retention. While obsoleting your computer every two or three years, they also make sure no one can sell you a new one that does not put money in their pocket.
Standardization, competition and improvements in production by hardware makers have lead to low priced hardware. Microsoft's work against standardization and competition has done nothing but make things expensive. Winmodems, for example, are cheap because a single chip is cheap but they are ultimately more expensive than they have to be because no two are the same and they all require expensive software to work and performance is poor. Imagine that industry had stuck with scsi and had slowly moved to firewire instead. We'd all have cheap but higher quality hardare then the absolute garbage IDE and USB junk we have now. DMA would not be so painful if Intel was not doggedly supporting Microsoft's legacy crap. Other chipmakers got abound Intel's DMA DOSyness but were slammed out of market share by vendor manipulations. The paradoxical result of Microsoft's anti-competitive bend is a kind of "standardization" around the worst kinds of hardware paractices. The designed result of their anti-standards bend is the destruction of excellent hardware which works with "competing" software.
Microsoft's current business model goes away when PC's reach the $250 level. At that point, there's not enough money to pay for their junk and manufacturers will have to seek lower cost alternatives. A low end computer from Dell or any of the other makers still costs around $800. That's about the same as it's been for the last 10 years of Microsoft monopoly. They can't keep their 80% profit margin with less to work with.
Do yourself a favor. Buy a real commodity computer - a used one and put free software on it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
(AP) Associated Press Hordes of rabid, self-described "elite open-source programmers" unable to properly keep their Windows-based PC's free of spyware, viruses. Experts attribute this to the fact that they spend all day downloading random .iso files from Russian serial/crack sites hoping to find a new Linux build that they haven't installed/reformated over on their ancient Pentium Pro machine.
(no karma whoring, either)
You have a good point, but "there" is used when talking about a location and "their" is used when talking about a group of things (usually people.)
Given that this has been posted about 500 times in the last month, you'd think someone would get around to fixing that ">1%" thing...
Don't you hate meta-sigs?
An employee suggested to me that we install Windows XP on a few machines here as an evaluation. I was skeptical at first but he explained the benefits of using Windows XP instead of a (arguably) harder to use Linux distro. I decided to let him install it on 5 machines to see how the employees got on. Besides, our IT manager had been using Windows at home and he hadn't reported any problems - why not try it on our employees?
Once he'd got the employees up and running with Windows we let them try it out. It all seemed fine to start with: The Windows systems were a pretty good replacement for some of the Linux boxen we'd used before and the employees could still do their work as normal.
Alas it did not stay that way. After a few days, I had lost count of the number of complaints received from our employees. Users could not do things they could before (like use bash scripting). The final straw came when one employee lost several hours work when MS Office suddenly froze up, destroying the 70 page document he had been working on.
Needless to say, Redmont, having been stagnant for half a decade, offered no support whatsoever. I dismissed the employee and made him remove the Windows systems before he left.
If the past is any indication then what lies ahead is well, more lies from Redmond.
well behind the industry leaders, Apple and Xerox PARC
Oh, righhhht, I remember everyone talking about the GUI-centric operating system that Xerox was delivering to consumers - making it an industry leader. How many were sold again? It must have been something like... seven? Maybe twelve?
In reality, Xerox wasn't an industry leader in this area. Xerox just rushed out some unmarketable stuff after Apple showed them that the Xerox research center was in fact filled with great ideas.
I'm sure Microsoft surpassed Xerox in GUI-centric OS sales within a couple of days.
Or about as long as the Serenity poll has been up.
"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose" - Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, Le Figaro, 1849.
s e_Karr
Quaint, isn't it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Baptiste_Alphon
I live on a street that bears his name, so I'm favored by the stars and granted authority to tell you to stfuplzokthx.
A présent, éloignez-vous avant que je ne me moque de vous une seconde fois!
When Windows first shipped, 20 years ago this month, it was considered nothing more than a slow operating environment that had arrived late to the party.. and not much has changed since then, methinks.
But my question is; how will they celebrate this? Corporate sing-alongs and collective suicide?
Defining Statistics and Social Research
The operating system behind the e-commerce everyone uses is Windows? Wow. That IS quite a target.
Just goes to show....
You build a better mouse trap.... and some stinking Harvard MBA dropout will steal it, make a bad copy and sell it for a lot less!!
those articles are so unreadable thanks to ramming adverts down your throat. 15 percent article, 85 percent garbage.
Amazing how something can be modded up so high without any factual basis or citations. If Gates and Ballmer use Macs at all (which I doubt, and have never seen any evidence for) then it's most likely in order to 'know thine enemy', as well as to steal useful UI ideas.
We "Old Timers" remember when Bill Gates was nothing but a smelly little geek salesman peddling someone else's stuff like a BASIC on paper tape and an operating system he's conned someone out of. Now my daughter's high school computer classes are being taught from books that state if it weren't for Gates we wouldn't have PCs at all and that he alone is responsible for everything that's in them and what's running on them. She and her friends think I'm a heretic and a delusional old man when I explain the true history and explain how we had other desktop machines that ran just alright before Micro Soft became one word. I knew legions of secretaries and book keepers that ran everything from command line as well as any UNIX/Linux admin today. They just learned how and did it. I wrote a lot of business programs on CP/M and Radio Shack Models I and II in BASIC, FORTRAN, and Z80 ASM. I never used an OS that had a Gates touch until I had to use a XENIX box.
if this was "widely known" I think I'd have known about it.
This is one of those celebrations that starts with raising a glass and ends when one passes out holding the empty, tear-stained bottle.
Ade_
/
Big Bubbles (no troubles) - what sucks, who sucks and you suck
I would NOT describe Windows as open.
I still remember Bill Gates whiny little letter in Byte magazine. He's the richest man in the world by far and Microsoft is the least innovative, most reactive corporation on the planet.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Everything to configure X is in xorg.conf. If X won't run, 90% of the time all you have to do is fix xorg.conf. X'll probably tell you exactly what's wrong, too.
My experiences indicate the opposite. If you are lucky, the X error output helps you. In fact, clean error messages are one of the features to be implemented in the next X versions (see the bug lists, annotations, milestones...)
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
GNU/Linux is user friendly, it is not idiot friendly or stupid friendly, maybe you need to spend a little time learning to use a computer from a GNU/Linux point of view, i think you been sitting in front of a MS Windows machine for so long it has turned your brain in to mush...
games such as quake is not only reason people use computers, some people actually use an office suite to do actual work...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Well, read that entire article. Microsoft does have a very interesting History. I need to say that the information it provides on the history of the earlier versions of Windows is very noteworthy. Personally I have OS/2 Warp and I liked it. But I was a kid at the time these things came out... I never knew anything of other OS's until ohhh 1999 when I first used Linux. I still always come back to using Windows because...well... I can play games on it, Work uses it, and its much easier to work with. I don't like having to program to get my OS to work right. Hehe. But I enjoyed the article. I am looking forward to Vista too as soon as that comes out (late, right?)
-- Josh
"Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me!" - Pete Conrad
Do not mark parent as redundant, mark parent as insightful!!!!!!
Not only does Microsoft have a complete monopoly in the market, it is also the slowest in the market!!!!
Indeed, since Microsoft has a monopoly on the market, it is also the fastest on the market!!!!
Do not mark parent as insightful, mark parent as undernourished!!!!
Feed the world, allow cannibalism of Floridians.
Feed Florida, allow cannibalism of the rest of the world!!!!
Free Microsoft, allow it to participate in an open market!!!!
No, it's the Chinese and Taiwanese who did that, by producing zillions of cheap motherboards, CD drives and video cards. And (mostly) AMD and Intel, by producing CPU's that anyone can afford. And countless other companies that produce commodity hardware. And researchers, who made this all possible by figuring out how to put yet more transistors on a silicon wafer or more bits on a harddisk platter.
If you give MS credit for cheap computing, you implicitly assume that software to use that hardware is a bottleneck. I think it's the other way round. Hardware developments drive the industry forward, and software eagerly waits to consume that newly created computing power.
I used to give MS credit for introducing the masses to things like DOS and the GUI. But in hindsight, I think their monolopy play to suck as much $$ as possible from licenses, has done more damage than good. Suppose the Free/Open Source software 'revolution' that we see today, had started around Win3.1/95 times. Imagine what today's computing landscape would like in that case.
No need to love or hate MS for any of this. It's just a (big) player in a quickly changing world.Support and test http://reactos.org/.
Parent tells mods that it's not redundant twice, which is clearly redundant.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Windows wasn't an operating system 20 years ago, it was only a DOSShell, it turned into an operating system in 1995 (not really an operating system but it got bigger, but still a layer on top of DOS)
Quarterdeck's Desqview was vastly superior at that time. There's even a wikipedia entry for it! I rest my case.
Desqview got a look in only because of Quarterdeck's QEMM. Does anyone even remember that ? The good old days of really needing an expanded memory manager - never to be confused with an extended memory manager ? And that some of the key programs during that period worked with expanded memory and some worked with extended memory? And how the way you loaded your drivers and then your programs *mattered*?
Goddam you young 'uns have it easy.
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
Okay, so 3.0 required a 386.
20 years and never a satisfied customer!
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
"Now, it's the operating system used on nearly 95 percent of all the desktops and notebooks sold worldwide"
And still not on a single real computer or server.
It's also the 20th anniversary of GeOS on the Commodore 64.
At the risk of going slightly off topic ...
Any formatted document is a mixture of content and markup. Getting the thing to do what you want it to do is entirely dependent on getting the markup right. Everybody I know who moved from WP to MSWord missed the ability to directly manipulate the markup. With reveal codes you always had an answer to the question "why has it done that?"
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
The power of open source hardware.
Ahh, 20th anniversary of Windows. May be a good reason to pull out the Ballmer musical again (Dance Monkey Boy and Developers cut together to an outstanding acoustic drama).
Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
I tried to RTFA, but I got depressed. There is no mystery as to how or why Microsoft became so ubiquitous - it represented the best balance of usability / functionality / cost to businesses and home users in the time before the internet. By the time the internet had hit, there was so much human momentum behind it that the microsoft of today was inevitable. We shouldn't blame Microsoft for becoming Microsoft, we should blame human nature. We wanted a single platform and we wanted it for as little money as possible.
The problem we're facing today is that there are two many people pushing single platform solutions. You can't blame them for that, you stand a better chance of repeat purchases if your software doesn't play well with others and the cost of migration is greater than the cost of an upgrade, but in the long run its not good for anyone, because it creates Micorsofts.
We need to educate people in the benefits of hetrogentity - don't buy software that only works for a single platform. Don't buy computers that will only work with similar computers. Don't buy into product that only has a single line of support - and never buy a product that has no support (I include offshore telephone support in that) and top of the list must be: don't buy software that generates files that can only be read by a single application.
Anytime you buy/use a product that adopts and enhances a standard protocol and doesn't tell the rest of the world how they are doing it, you buy into the next Microsoft.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
More tripe about MS windows. Yes, as the article says it was nothing more than a slow operating environment that had arrived late to the party, well behind the industry leaders, Apple and Xerox PARC. Windows still has a lot of growing up to do, you can't even connected to the net without it getting owned in less than 4 minutes. The only thing that's changed is that Bill is now such a powerful politician that he can walk all over the EU courts with impunity.
I hope you do realize that there's a difference between "spyware", "virus" and "worm". Hint: "spyware" is usually installed with the user's unknowing "consent". E.g., I can assure you that all the buggers who got Claria/Gator on their computer, didn't get it via ActiveX, but got it buried in some other piece of software's installer (e.g., even DivX helpfully offered a variant with Gator) and usually barely mentioned on page 27 of a 50 page EULA.
/home/joe for example. If he installs that cutesy toolbar as non-root, that's all I need to steal (and if I'm malicious: destroy) all his data.
So if I offered some spyware as some super-duper Mozilla toolbar instead of an IE toolbar... how would the Unix architecture prevent Joe Clueless from installing it? No, seriously.
Even if my hypothetical malware needed root access to really do the dirty deed, want to bet that a simple "You need administrator (root) rights to install this software" would get 90% of the Joe Clueless population to dutifully su and try again? What advice have you given Joe? "Only run as root when you install stuff", maybe? Well, he'll do just that: run as root to install my stuff.
Would that make Joe suspicious? Chances are, it won't. But if I really were worried about that, I'd wrap it neatly in something that looks legit enough in its need to be installed as root. E.g., as a driver. "Our patented InternetAccelerator (TM) drivers use special compression to double your internet's speed!" Watch a batch of Joes rush to install it. "Or EvidenceEliminator (TM) drivers act as a low level gateway, ensuring that none of your porn surfing habits are even written on the hard drive at all!" Watch another batch of Joes install it. And if I'm really evil, I'll pack it as an Anti-Virus/Anti-Spyware/Firewall package, and say it needs to be installed as a driver to scan everything as it's transferred through the network, before it even reaches your hard drive. Yep, watch another batch of Joes install it.
And if that doesn't get Joe, maybe I'll target a weaker link. E.g., his wife, Jane Clueless, with some cutesy screensaver or puzzle game. Or maybe his kid, little Timmy Clueless, with some Counter-Strike wall-hack. I'll just tell Timmy that it needs that to hide itself from the HL executable, so PunkBuster doesn't catch it. (And it's even truth in advertising. It'll be a rootkit that hides itself all right, that he installs there.) Chances are one of the three, I don't even care which, will be less savvy enough to actually do it.
That is, if Joe even bothers about not running as root. Chances are at some point he'll decide it's too big of a hassle to keep su-ing back and forth, and just run as root anyway.
But do I even need root access to rape Joe's privacy? Nope. I don't give a damn about his executables, which are just what was on the distro CD anyway. Any data I'd want to steal is in Joe's own files, in
Etc.
Basically, please. Unix design and architecture mean jack squat when you have a far weaker link to attack: the untrained users. For that architecture to keep anyone safe, their own knowledge would already need to be a lot less weak a link. I.e., they'd need to be at a clue level, where, well, then they'd have no problem keeping their Windows machine clean too.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Because Microsoft has Macs, that means that Gates and Ballmer use and prefer Macs?! Wow, that's quite a leap of logic you've got there!
Look, I'm as much of a hater of Microsoft's stuidity at times as anyone else, but going from "Macs at Microsoft" to "Microsoft execs prefer Mac" is just insane. Didn't you even read the Slashdot story about the Mac@Microsoft pictures? The guy was apparently fired for publishing pictures from an area he wasn't supposed to take pictures of, much less publish for the entire world to see!
You even linked to a page which explains the whole thing:
See the parts in bold? They explain that:But hey, I'm all for a nice silly theory every now and then. I mean, what's the point in boring theories about the Mac purchase, such as Microsoft actually working on Mac apps, and wanting to keep an eye on the competition. No, easy answers are never right! So it must be Gates and Ballmer that ordered them for themselves since they prefer Mac OS over Windows!
Clever signature text goes here.
True. I remember using a toolset called PC Tools where you had a multitasking DOS-environment too. This toolset was indeed much lighter to run on an x86 than Windows was. But you didn't have those fancy screensavers.
--Use ant to make
looking at microsoft's timeline, there hasn't been such a large gap between windows operating system versions since 3.1 - 95.
i think that's somewhat important to point out since the rest of their timeline is full of significant updates, and lately microsoft has given fewer and less useful updates than they used to. it was actually worth buying win95 over 3.1, and it was actually worth getting win2000 over those.
as bad as it may seem, microsoft is slipping in the innovation department, an area at which they never really excelled in the first place.
"When Windows first shipped, 20 years ago this month, it was considered nothing more than a slow operating environment that had arrived late to the party, well behind the industry leaders..."
And how is that any different from today? Lets see, XP == slow operating enviornment. Vista == Arriving years after its competition with less features. Yeah, great job Micro$oft, keep up the good work.
.... It's the 20th anniversary of the the blue screen of death?
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
How to win a war? Make sure double clicking on the icon works at any cost.
"We got in my little Toyota pickup that I had at the time, we drove it to Egghead, and we literally bought one of every multimedia application in the store," Cole says. "Picture a small-size Toyota pickup and the back of it is heaped with boxes of applications, games, all kinds of crazy multimedia stuff. We brought them all back, literally backed the truck up to the building, and we handed them out to all the employees and said, 'We've got to get these things tested.'"
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Just check it out for yourself at http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1870342,00.as p
Gotta find a system with 512 KB RAM and DOS 3.1 somewhere...
Sig erased via substitution of an identical one.
In Redmond, the windows are all frosted so you can't see inside, and closed but unlocked.
Windows 1.0 to XP: Screenshots
Microsoft KNEW is couldn't compete on quality against DR-DOS, (and later against Xerox and Apple,) so it locked the OEMs into some illegal, unfair, anti-competitive deals.
Since the OEMs, mom-n-pop operations by this time, didn't want to assume responsability for anything other that slapping together some boards in a mass produced chassis and sliding the resulting mess into a beige case, they were unconcerned about YOUR rights as consumers.
M$ users (NOT their customers, who are the hundreds of mom-n-pop box stuffers and a fistfull of Michael Dells,) have been getting it in the shorts for over twenty five years.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Not needed to do it... just to enhance it.
What a great piece of revisionist history, depicting early versions of Windows as major technological advancements in the industry. As I remember it, Microsoft was furiously trying to play catch up with other industry leaders of the time, while concentrating on acquiring a stranglehold of the PC market with its MS-DOS operating system. Windows was pure crap and barely functional -- certainly not up to par to other contemporaries, such as the Apple Lisa and Macintosh, and other GUI environments like VisiOn and DesQView -- until version 3.0 came along. And even that one was still behind with the times, but was finally a serious contender.
Bill Gates betting the company on Windows 1.0? Puhleez! It was a half-assed attempt just to be able to say "me too!" in the market place and steal the thunder being built up by Apple, while still focusing on DOS, which they view as their main cash-cow.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
Oriented towards a metafile approach for interactive interfaces... hmm, isn't that what XAML is? Does anyone know enough about GDDM?
Something Witty Goes Here
>> Do not reward the monipoly.
So apt...
Brilliant! Though, you mistyped "money". Har, Har, Har!
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
You clearly don't know much about Linux. It originated in the Unix world, of which it is a version. Unix held great sway in the academic world at the time. Stallman, Torvalds and most of those involved in its early development were academics who decided to write themselves a free version of Unix. They had probably never used Windows back then and I doubt if they have much since.
You may find it hard to believe, but there are those of us who do not find Windows an inspiration.
Who needs Windows and Gates ?
"When Windows first shipped, 20 years ago this month, it was considered nothing more than a slow operating environment that had arrived late to the party, well behind the industry leaders, Apple ..."
So what has changed in the last 20 years, as we wait for Vista?
No, that's just stupid.
...
;).
price (self-explaining)
I agree. Upgrading and downloading Linux is free.
time
Ok, so you can get your shitty burger and fries faster than you could get your smoked salmon - how does this relate to operating systems? My Linux starts up, shuts down, and requires just as little (if not less) maintenance than a Windows "burger". What's your point? It's not like you have to use Gentoo
accessibility and/or personal effort involved (if the 5 star restaurant is in the next town, and the McDonalds is right around the corner, you can guess where I'll eat. Doubly so if I have to drive home first and get a suit and tie for the 5 star restaurant.)
Again, what's your point? My Linux is not in the next town - it's right in front of me. I have never worn a suit and tie specifically for the purposes of using Linux....what's your point?
familiarity
When I was a kid my family went on some vacations in Europe and all I would eat was Mc-Freaking-Donald's. Imagine going to Paris or Budapest and eating only those awful pieces of shit they pretend are burgers. Eventually I matured and decided to try something authentic - something of quality. Thanks to a little maturity and some willingness to try something new I now eat a healthier, more varied, and more delicious assortment of food. The same applies for my transition to Linux. I'm much better off now that I switched. I've used Linux exclusively for at least 4 years. Now I'm more familiar with Linux.
The point is that McDonald's is pretty popular because people are unaware that better alternatives are out there, or are too scared to try something new. Does this mean that McDonald's is "good", or that its users---err---patrons are just timid and uninformed?
social perception/acceptability (if I were a teenager taking my punk gang to a restaurant, chances are some snotty Chez Lex establishment would just make them uncomfortable)
Uh huh. What's your freaking point? First of all, I'm not a punk gang, I'm a computer user. When I use my computer I don't think "Gee, what operating system would a group of uninformed kids like to use?". Second of all, Linux is far from "snotty" - in fact its subculture makes it perhaps the "coolest" OS to use.
So basically your post gives several reasons why uninformed and lazy people eat at McDonald's. You have not persuaded me to eat at McDonald's because I know it's shit. Your points have little to no bearing on the OS market. Moreover, throughout your post you keep referring to the "alternative" as 5-star and basically imply that the food you get at McDo's is, in a word, worse. Why not eat the best? What's your freaking point?
The article doesn't quite say that, although the sentiment is similar. It says "It's the operating system used on nearly 95 percent of all the desktops and notebooks sold worldwide, relegating other OSs to niche players". Now, while this may relegate other OSs to that status (debatable) the very interesting part is that TFA does not even attempt to give a source for this figure. If it were true, 19 out of every 20 desktops or laptops would be running some Windows variant. Personal experience suggests otherwise. Does anybody have an authoritative source for the true percentage?
Burns: We're building a casino!
McAllister: Arrr. Give me 5 minutes.
well behind the industry leaders, Apple and Xerox PARC
At that time, everyone who was anyone was running that Xerox PARC. Xerox PARC was on every desktop.
Oh you could write a script "in an hour" that would "pwon" most Linux users? Please do describe your exact aprpoach so we can all laugh at your utter lack of technical and security understanding.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It was a superb architecture - an advanced interrupt driven, custom active chipsets, multiple bus hardware that could be used by a its preemptive multitasking OS which could really be used. Very high quality compilers, among many other things available. Was linear addressing memory, multitasking and running with the large networked systems while others still trying to figure out how to fit things into memory, rebooting between applications, or to load multiple network stacks at the same time.
i cal_user_interface#Amiga_Intuition
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_graph
Twenty years have already gone by - hard to believe it's been in beta that long already. Anyone know when we will see a release candidate?
You are in a maze of little twisting passages, all different.
As if. Random sampling seems to put the number at around 80% and falling over time.
Help us build a better map!
Choke on your gold motherfucking pig CHOKE !!!
Bring back my good old Amiga you scumbags !
You Windows pricks and your lame "multitasking"...
FUCK YOU 20 TIMES BILL YOU GREEDY ASSHOLE !!!
According to most Google results, Windows 1.0 was released in November 1985. It's not yet 20 years old.
From the little I know, MS hires, or attempts to hire, the best of the lot.
If the best people out there cannot innovate and consistently produce highly buggy code, why do other companies supposedly innovate more and produce less buggy code?
Does there exist an analysis tying SLOC produced by MS v/s number of bugs comparing those to that produced by other companies and by OSS developers?
I thought it was interesting that when asked about Steve Jobs and the apple team's famous rip off of the GUI idea from Xerox, and how Microsoft in turn stole the idea from Apple, Gates says that there is some element of truth to the story, but seems to imply that Apple borrowed the idea from Microsoft instead. I would love to see Gates vs. Jobs on celebrity boxing.
games such as quake is not only reason people use computers, some people actually use an office suite to do actual work... Quake's the only reason I use a computer but since I can play it on Linux I am happy!
- widely attributed to John Ruskin, seen on the wall of every Baskin Robbins shop. Applied to IT in many places, most notably here.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
The Web Security Mailing List is a good place to go if you're curious about the threats that XSS (Cross Site Scripting) and AJAX can bring.
The Web Security Mailing List
To Subscribe send an email to websecurity-subscribe@webappsec.org
...from French to German to English to Korean to English:
"When it was an identical thing, more it sees general principles, with the fact that it takes it changed together c."
well to think of what has been suffocated by monopoly is saddening. But some of it was due to crappy decisions from businessfolks too...i mean, commodore people was no saints...jesus christ did they fuck themselves over businesswise. many more like that.. beos steps towards "internet appliances" long before most people had cheap broadband at home. Well, i sincerely hope microsoft dies, and like the totalitarian regimes of yesterday, i hope humanity will learn.
It's really not interesting to most of us to decide who invented what. That PC Mag article was boring. I would like to know if Microsoft is evil or not. Or more evil, less evil equally evil to Apple, Google or Sun. There is a better question: what in MS Office is worth $400 to $500 when you have Open Office for free. The true answer is nothing. The practical answer is complete compatibility with MS Office. But on the other hand, I was amused on my new laptop (Windows) that IE now announces its ability to block Javascript popups with a popup. I know it's a kind of crude way to claim credit for what Mozilla forced Microsoft to do, but somehow that gave me a feeling of hope. Maybe the silent majority isn't totally lazy, disinterested, cowed by technology and wowed by big corporations.
Windows is picking up in the sever space, especially on the enterprise market where support is a BIG issue.
What is slashdotters pick on this? Why doesnt Unix or Linuxers trying to attack this platform??
--http://messagingtalk.org/ - The Microsoft Exchange resource portal.
Windows 1.0 was released in 1983. Windows 2.0 was released in 1987. Did it take them 4 years to find out how to do region operations (union, intersection etc)??? amazing, considering the region algorithms where discovered in the 70s.
(region operations like union and intersection are the basis of 2D window systems, by the way: they allow a window to draw behind another window. A region is a list of rectangles.)
"including an interview with Mr. Bill Gates himself."
Who gives a shit what self-serving crap this asshole has to say?
Shut the fuck up, Bill, you've said far too much already.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
... their favorite abandonwarez sites and download Windows 1.0 onto the nearest floppy disk, only to realize they can't find one and give up.
Certain functions, such as commands, may change too
Finally! del wil be dir and vice versa
there are other things added to Windows for free because it's good for developers to have those features deployed
How about the source code for free (as in beer and speech)
I still have my original four 5 1/4" floppies of Windows 1.01 that I purchased the first week Windows was released. I still have two 5 1/2" drives at home, but I haven't tried installing Windows 1 for about 5 years now. Anyone want to guess how much these floppies would be worth?
The first usable version of windows was 3.1 which shipped in 1993.
This was pretty much the MicroSoft story until the mid-1990s. You did not want to get versions 1X or 2X until the alpha-testers, i.e. the stupid customers, found the bugs. After the mid-1990s MicroSoft internal testing improved a lot.
The joke's been made, and it was too obvious to be funny the first time.
your analogy of MS to McDonalds is missing some key points, chiefly that McDonalds 'food' is *bad for your health* --high in fat and sugar, low in nutritional value, and created by very questionable methods, designed for profit first, and health last (Did you know that each McDonalds hamburger contains parts of 20 different cows? What part of the chicken does a Chicken McNugget come from?) Read the book 'Fast Food Nation,' and you will learn some things that make your stomach turn. your argument is basically saying that people choose McDonalds for it's Lowest Common Denominator appeal, to the long-term detriment of their health--now, *that's* the key analogy of MS to McDonalds!
" it was considered nothing more than a slow operating environment that had arrived late to the party, well behind the industry leaders,"
and still is today!!
""VISTA" an acronym for the top five Windows problems: Viruses, Intrusions, Spyware, Trojans and Adware.-- Jim Lee Jr"
""Veritable Incentive to Switch To Another operating system".-- Brian O' Connell."
"When Windows first shipped, 20 years ago this month, it was considered nothing more than a slow operating environment that had arrived late to the party, well behind the industry leaders, Apple and Xerox PARC.
well at leat MS has been consistent for the lat 20 years.
" whoever wrote this article needs to whipe the c#m off ther face and get a life"
I think they had to edit this out:
Ozzie futher recalled "Another reason that helped convinced me was how Ballmer so eloquently stated that 'using their interface was better than getting hit in the face with a chair'."
[/joke]
You seem to have a deep-seated hostility towards analogies. He was explaining reasons for restaurant choice. The reasons people have for choosing windows may not map directly onto that, but he was just pointing out that "That's like saying mcdonalds is the best restaurant" is sensitive to what your definition of a 'good restaurant' even _means_.
We've secretly replaced Slashdot with new Folgers Crystals - let's see if it notices.
"When Windows first shipped, 20 years ago this month, it was considered nothing more than a slow operating environment that had arrived late to the party, well behind the industry leaders, Apple and Xerox PARC"
Behind the industry leaders, Apple and Xerox PARC? Apple has not have a significient market share since back in the days of the Apple IIC. Even then the PC clones were available and dominated the business sector. 10 Years ago when Win95 arrived, most PC users were already using MS-DOS and Windows 3.0/3.1. I sold software and 95% of the retail/business market were running DOS based applicaitons. We sold more software for the Amiga than Apple/Mac.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
I bought a Zenith 286 computer in 1989 and it had both DOS and Windows 2.0 on it. Shortly afterwards, I went into a computer store the saleman and technician both told me how they hated Windows and that I should just use DOS instead. That was the typical attitude of most computer users back then. I actually used DOS programs most of the time on the computer while not bothering to start it up in Windows. Windows ran on top of DOS back then. The only reason that I didn't totally get rid of Windows was that my computer came with a Windows version of Excel and I needed to be able to boot it up into Windows 2.0 before I could use Excel. It wasn't until Windows 3.0 came out a few years later that Windows became so popular. The new Windows 3.0 user interface looked like a Mac with and all pretty icons scattered across the screen. Everyone was impressed at the "Mac like" look and feel. Windows 2.0 did not look like that. One difference between Windows and a Mac was that in Windows you had to double click where on a Mac you could single click. I believe that may possibly have been done to get around copyright restrictions.
About 5 years ago I switched to using various versions of Linux instead ever since then. Installing and properly configuring Linux took a while but, I have been happy with it ever since. Linux was far more stable than Windows ME and is not vulnerable to viruses and most adware like all versions of Windows. So I am a happy Linux user now.
But when an OS has a 95% marketshare, centralized package managment for all software simple isn't feasable. I think the point of the parent (with which I agree) is that if Linux had the same market conditions as Windows, the malware situation would not be much different.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
The best way to help people who compalain about spyware, etc. is to delete the IE icon from their desktops and put Firefox there instead. That won't stop all infection, but it will make Windows much safer.
The big advantage of Firefox is that people won't need much technical support (it's just a browser!), unlike OO.org or Linux, which are sufficiently different from their MS equivalents to confuse people. Also, users will thank you once they see that they're not being attacked by popups. Plus, Firefox is a nice, simple introduction to free software that doesn't involve giving up Windows.
"If you discount the trees, the rocks, and the animals this forest is a pretty good field."
It does not work that way.
Open Source Sushi
The thing that aggravates me most about Microsoft is their overwhelming desire to keep a monopoly. I respect the monopoly for what it is -- a product of a successful company in a healthy, capitalistic environment. When a company reaches a monopoly, you have the power to do something your predecessors never dreamed about, just like uniting the world under one government, you have the capability and the resources to unite huge amounts of work and resources into a goal. What really irks me about Microsoft isn't its monopoly, but what it's doing. Microsoft hates the open-source movement like a plague -- you have people delivering talks that try and publically reprimand a United States state for using an open standard. Not only that, but Microsoft has almost nothing in the sense of variety. Sure, I wouldn't mind if my neighbors around me used Microsoft Word, but maybe I don't like Microsoft Word, maybe power users like me would want something a bit more powerful, less user-friendly, and less glossy. Maybe some of us would like to have a terminal emulator that does something other than eat up most of our system resources, and neglect all the features that made the original underlying shell famous. Microsoft does none of this (with the exception of Monad, which is a recent wake-up call, one thinks). Microsoft doesen't use its monopolistic position to create a ``golden age'' under their rule, but rather, a big-brother type scenario where the market is dependant on your products. Some may think that this is the only way to go, but look at Apple. Apple supports open software with an open palm. Darwin, the framework behind the current Mac OS, is released under an open license. Apple has used the KHTML codebase in its development of Safari, and then contributed to the codebase itself (albeit very late). If Apple were to become the next monopoly and keep its current business stances, I wouldn't give a damn about it being a monopoly. In fact, a prime example of this would be Google. Google is quick and rising, and has a firm fief on the search engine market. Google search is constantly breaking its bounds, and finding new innovations to explore, implementing a ``golden age'' all on its own (even though I am a bit worried about its ventures out of the search market, or anything related). Who would have thought that twenty years ago, a dark ominous cloud dressed up nice in a pink fluffy cirrus look, would steal the horizon and spread like a plague.
Just to let you know about me as a user: I run GNU/Linux Debian, do the majority of my work in GNU/Emacs and a few other things in a screen session in my terminal emulator, and do the majority of my documents in LaTeX, and the rest in AbiWord. I run ratpoison as my WM. If Microsoft were able to implement these in any sort of usable fashion, I wouldn't mind giving up my Linux, still years of hard lessons have taught me that this isn't happening any time soon, so i'll get comfortable with my apt-get.
To be free or not to be free: that is the question.
What would he have to say that would have any resemblence to reality? I mean, can anyone outside of other MSFT execs believe anything he says? I think the facts show that he can't be trusted IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
where did they get 95% of all computers run windows? oh well it fits well cause u always want to throw ur computer out the window when it is running windows
(yes i know i suck at spelling fell free to correct my grammar and/or spellin i dont care, im still not going to change
:sniff: It's...beautiful...
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
Anyone else who thinks my original post is flamebait should also feel free to share with us this magical one-hour script which would bring all Linux (nay UNIX itself) users to their knees.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
> Who uses the word "methinks"?
I do.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.