Why Doesn't Microsoft Have A Cult Religion?

rs232 writes "'Apple has one. So does the Java community, Oracle, IBM, and Google. Lord knows anyone who uses Linux or free and open source software is dedicated to spreading the gospel of St. Linus Torvalds and St. Richard Stallman. But does anyone really worship the Gods of Redmond?' While many Microsoft employees are pumped to work there, article author Michael Singer explores why even enthusiastic Microsoft-watchers acknowledge that customers and product developers are unenthusiastic about the software giant. He theorizes that it comes down to passion: Microsoft lost that a long time ago, he says, and so passionate people gravitate to other projects and products."

Comments

Re:Life Under the Dominant Cult.

[bill_mcgonigle]

Can you name any fully-featured file systems for Unix that provide transparent compression? How 'bout any Unix that provides transactional file system behavior? Alternate streams/extended attributes that can be read and written as files?

You're looking for ZFS. It's in OpenSolaris, BSD 7.x, and Mac OS X 10.5. Linux has a FUSE port, but until the kernel devs get over their 'rampant layering violation' buggywhip-thought Linux doesn't/won't really have it.

How many versions of Unix have case insensitive file systems? (Personally, I feel that case sensitive file systems should be considered a dated practice.)

All I know about is HFS+, on linux and Mac OS X and ext3ci from fellow Slashdotter Bill Herrin, but that's because I haven't looked to hard. JFS has it too, I think.

Reiser4 provides what I think is a much better model for how to handle that sort of thing.

Agreed, Reiser4 is awesome from this regard. I'm not sure if ZFS is that advanced or not, especially in the realm of semantics.

But the others are things that I wish that Linux had. And that's just looking at the file system.

Would it be too rude for me to say, "look harder"? At a minimum I'm glad you posted the question here before giving up. Have fun!