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.

[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.