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.

[BrainInAJar]

"Can you name any fully-featured file systems for Unix that provide transparent compression?"

ZFS on Solaris10

"How 'bout any Unix that provides transactional file system behavior?"

ZFS on Solaris10, again

"Alternate streams/extended attributes that can be read and written as files?"

Do you work for Sun or something? ZFS... it does that.

"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 of them can use FAT32, but case-sensitivity is eminently useful, and only ancient operating systems ignore case, so we keep it.

All that, plus it's open-source

Re:Life Under the Dominant Cult.

[gweihir]

Can you name any fully-featured file systems for Unix that provide transparent compression?
For writing: None, since it is a pretty bad idea with regard to performance, fragmentation and reliability. For reading, there are several. One is used by Knoppix for example. Also note that the Linux kernel is usually loaded in compressed form.

How 'bout any Unix that provides transactional file system behavior?
Again a very bad idea. If you need that, use a database, not a filesystem.

Alternate streams/extended attributes that can be read and written as files?
And again, a very bad idea. In fact extended attributes are a bad idea, since they break compatibility.

How many versions of Unix have case insensitive file systems? (Personally, I feel that case sensitive file systems should be considered a dated practice.)
So the filesystem should understand case semantics? Very, very bad idea. Especially if you allow Unicode filenames.

I think these features were though about by the Unix and Linux crowd numerous times and rejected every time because they are dangerous and break more than they fix.

Re:Microsoft Is Like America.

[kpharmer]

> It's kind of like Catholics during the Inquisition.

I think you mean "like the christians during the inquisition".

The inquisition was far from catholic-only. On the catholic side you had the initial enablement via the papal bull of 1484 and it was executed primarily via their secular lawyer and monk (first dominican then jesuit) proxies.

But as far as the protestants go:
    - luther said that witches should be burnt
    - luther believed in incubus, sucubus, witches flying at night, etc, etc, etc
    - calvin said the bible teaches us that that there are witches and that they must be slain
    - calvin said that God expressly commands that all witches and enchantresses shall be put to death
    - lutheran preachers brought the witch hunt to denmark, germany, sweden, etc
    - calvinist missionaries brought it to transylvania, scottland, england, etc
    - the catholic-protestant religious wars vastly increased the witch-burnings

So, while the catholics started the ball rolling, the protestants were equally guilty of keeping it going.