The point is, he's not getting all worked up about ridiculous things like what people wear...
You may be blindly following a herd of sheep who believe (but don`t know why) that wearing a suit and tie makes you respectable... And your therefore willing to sacrifice comfort, practicality and money to conform to that ridiculous expectation.
RMS on the other hand will wear what he finds comfortable, because he isn't willing to sacrifice anything for a ridiculous social meme.
Yes, lazy is the point... He's spending his time and effort on things that do matter ie his talk, and doing the bare minimum on things that don't matter (ie clothes).
Suits and ties are uncomfortable... The shoes that go with them are uncomfortable and bad for your feet Such clothes are overpriced and a horrendous waste of money
Not only that, but dressing in a suit and tie strongly suggests you need to try and use your appearance to give some credibility to what your saying because it can't stand on it's own.
How you dress usually has no effect on your ability to complete a task, and as such you should be evaluated based on that. Obviously there are some tasks where what you wear actually has an impact, like diving.
As for "impoliteness" and "disrespect" there is nothing impolite or disrespectful about wearing a tshirt and shorts, not unless the tshirt sports an insulting slogan anyway. The idea that you need to wear particular clothes to show respect is completely contrived and totally ridiculous. It is purely down to conditioning and sheep-like herd behavior... People don't know *why* its supposed to be polite to wear a suit, they just think that it is because thats what they've been told. It's a meme that does more harm than good.
In a Stallman world the GPL wouldn't be required, you could release your code into the public domain and people wouldn't rip it off and sell you back proprietary versions of it.
It also serves as a great disguise for someone wishing to commit a crime, especially in today's world of CCTV everywhere. A man in a balaclava would get arrested immediately, but muslims can walk around equally hidden and cry foul if anyone says anything.
Flash i would imagine, since it's their proprietary technology. On the plus side, it would mean linux users can use photoshop on a level playing field to windows/mac users, eliminating a major reason for some people to stick to windows.
Well, buying Novell would give them a product to directly compete with Redhat and Ubuntu, which wouldn't be terribly anti competitive unless they bought them for the purposes of burying their product lines, which would just drive former customers to Redhat.
Fixing the issues becomes even cheaper still if you have the capability to upgrade parts of the OS but not the whole, and strip out things you don't need... To give an example, there is a company that runs a radius server for authentication of various things including custom written apps, dialup users etc... The radius server is heavily modified such that a standard implementation couldn't be a drop in replacement. This server runs on a very old linux system, using a 1.x kernel and on hardware which is archaic by todays standards. The server has one setuid binary (sudo), 2 network listening services (radius, sshd) and 1 other background daemon (cron)... The version of SSH has been updated many times, as has crond, and the radiusd is pretty much custom.
If that were the case, microsoft could save a lot of money and effort by distributing a mozilla or webkit based browser, just like Apple do... They could even have redistributed Netscape back in the days, and supplied their own bookmarks etc.
What compelled them to push their own browser, was all the talk of cross platform browser-based apps. Sure they didn't take off, but companies like Netscape and Sun were pushing hard for them. Had they taken off, windows would have been reduced to an expensive and buggy driver-layer between hardware and browser, and people would have migrated in droves to a cheaper driver layer (eg linux) running the same browser. Customers not being dependent on them is microsoft's biggest fear, and would severely reduce their profits and force them to reorganise.
There are even some companies with legacy systems tied to Amiga hardware... Using the proprietary Zorro bus. When these machines die, there are no replacements, not even any compatible replacements.
The companies who originally chose these systems, the Amiga based devices, and the customer records database you talked about, made a huge mistake in selecting proprietary technology, and are now paying the price. You'd think enough time has passed for the industry to mature, but people are still choosing proprietary tools with no thought for the risks in the future.
Luckily proprietary hardware is all but dead, and hopefully software will go the same way.
And no vendor lockin, meaning MS have to compete on a level playing field with everyone else... As Bill Gates himself said, removing people's reliance on proprietary microsoft systems would be business suicide, microsoft would suffer greatly but everyone else would benefit.
The move from dos caused problems for gamers (many games required all the base memory they could get, and didnt work with windows running) and the move to nt-based windows caused further problems... Also, wine seems to perform fairly well, and ibm managed very good windows 3.x compatibility with os/2... Surely with the source code microsoft could manage a very good wine-like system, and what slight performance hit it might cause would be offset by faster hardware.
Ofcourse they will never do this, because it would mean a clean break from their legacy cruft, and a lot of people only stick with windows because they need old applications which are tied to it.
If you have the source code you can port it... But if you have the source, you could also port it to something other than windows too.
However most of these apps people are stuck with are proprietary and closed source, which locks the customers into whatever system they're tied to. People really need to learn from their mistakes, and not get stuck with proprietary lock in again...
That assumes you still have, or can obtain 98 licenses to install on your VM... If all you have are OEM licenses, you can't move them off the machines they came with, and when those machines physically fail due to old age your stuck.
Backwards compatibility is about the only thing keeping microsoft alive right now... Companies are stuck with a lot of old legacy apps that run on nothing else, and the cost of replacing those apps is prohibitive so they stick with windows... If they were forced to update everything anyway, then the migration costs that discourage people from migrating to something like linux would also apply to whatever microsoft were putting out. Making the savings from moving away from microsoft even higher, as well as a strong desire to not be stuck having to migrate from a deprecated proprietary product again.
Or you could take the cynical view that... NT5 (2000) failed to appeal to consumers because for most people 98se was sufficient and performed better, so they created an intentionally nobbled ME for the sole intention of making XP more appealing to consumers.
As to the NT kernel, yes the base design was very good, and you are right that the lumbering clunky userland on top of it is what brings it down, a need to maintain compatibility with all the cruft built up around dos based windows, and the fact that the NT kernel was designed and written by experienced OS developers, while the dos based windows was cobbled together by people not experienced enough, and then hacked to add more functionality as needed instead of having an extensible design up front.
It's not just the userland tho, microsoft have included a lot of cruft into the NT kernel itself, such that it's not at all the clean microkernel architecture it was intended to be... Some of the lead developers quit over the decision to put video drivers into the kernel for NT4 for instance, and a good proportion of windows crashes can be attributed to bad video drivers.
They at least can count... If you assume MX to be 6, and MX2004 to be 7 then it all fits, i'm sure the internal version numbers are visible in an about box or something.
Most people cant or wont make a choice to download something else... Some are lazy, some don't even realise anything else exists. Leave it too long, and so many websites will be locked into proprietary ie-only extensions that you lose the ability to choose completely. Plus, you saw what happened, without competition ie never got updated so the entire web stagnated for years (and is still doing so)
Microsoft weren't interested in driving users to their services, they didn't really have any services to speak of in those days. They were concerned that browser based applications would quickly become the next big thing, thus making the underlying os irrelevant. If this were to happen, linux would take over _VERY_ fast due to cost, and microsoft would be in dire trouble. They push their services now, and use whatever methods they can because they've come to realise that they can't stop their os becoming irrelevant, all they can do is delay it, and use that delay time and their current position to force themselves into other markets before it's too late.
Well, these companies know that their customers aren't using anything other than IE, because they can't be... What they don't realise is why, and that if you took away this forcing effect a lot of them would stop using it.
Bundling IE hurts end users... Because IE is designed to not follow standards, and encourage web developers also to not follow standards, thus creating sites which require IE... This takes away the end user's freedom to choose their own browser (and by extension, choose the os and hardware to run it on), which for those of us who believe in freedom is one of the worst ways you can hurt someone. That's why people support firefox and opera, because they represent choice. The more actively used browsers there are out there, the smaller the risk of sites being designed for just one.
Out of curiosity, what other word processors have you used, how long have you spent using them and what were you (trying) to do with them? As someone who used wordperfect 5 through 8 for years back when it was the app of choice, both wordworth and final writer on the amiga, msword from 95-2007, staroffice 5.2 and versions of openoffice since... I would have to say msword is one of the worst by far. It has far more stability problems, seems to lose/corrupt your work far more often, and has a far quirkier and less intuitive interface (on windows, i havent used the mac version extensively enough to comment).
As for cross references and tables of contents, i have seen many word documents where the table of contents (even after updating it) is completely wrong, and cross references point to completely the wrong place... openoffice's table of contents feature isn't brilliant either for that matter, latex seems to be very good at creating cross linked documents. For that matter, when you create a PDF from word your table of contents is just flat (no links), from openoffice the toc entries are clickable links but latex also seems to create a proper index that shows up in the sidebar of your pdf reader (instead of the page thumbnails).
Try to open some of those files your saving today, 10 or 20 years from now... Then try saying there's no benefit to ODF...
Or try writing a script to make some simple changes to the file, or even just to read arbitrary data out...
Or save the same file in both formats, and see how much space each one occupies...
ODF isn't anti microsoft, microsoft are anti odf. Why? because they are the only organization in the whole world who stand to lose from having an open documented file format.
Online apps are not always suitable (i do a lot of work on the train for instance, and some companies don`t want their files leaving their building).
That said, i do send someone an ODF file and point them towards google docs (which support the format fine), if they want an offline reader openoffice is just one choice of many.
It's not the application that's important, it's the file format. I wouldn't care what program people use, so long as the files they`re making are in standard formats, and microsoft is about the only player in town who don`t support ODF out of the box.
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Or perhaps people would be more successful if they didn't waste so much money on expensive clothes...
The point is, he's not getting all worked up about ridiculous things like what people wear...
You may be blindly following a herd of sheep who believe (but don`t know why) that wearing a suit and tie makes you respectable... And your therefore willing to sacrifice comfort, practicality and money to conform to that ridiculous expectation.
RMS on the other hand will wear what he finds comfortable, because he isn't willing to sacrifice anything for a ridiculous social meme.
Yes, lazy is the point...
He's spending his time and effort on things that do matter ie his talk, and doing the bare minimum on things that don't matter (ie clothes).
Suits and ties are uncomfortable...
The shoes that go with them are uncomfortable and bad for your feet
Such clothes are overpriced and a horrendous waste of money
Not only that, but dressing in a suit and tie strongly suggests you need to try and use your appearance to give some credibility to what your saying because it can't stand on it's own.
How you dress usually has no effect on your ability to complete a task, and as such you should be evaluated based on that. Obviously there are some tasks where what you wear actually has an impact, like diving.
As for "impoliteness" and "disrespect" there is nothing impolite or disrespectful about wearing a tshirt and shorts, not unless the tshirt sports an insulting slogan anyway. The idea that you need to wear particular clothes to show respect is completely contrived and totally ridiculous. It is purely down to conditioning and sheep-like herd behavior... People don't know *why* its supposed to be polite to wear a suit, they just think that it is because thats what they've been told. It's a meme that does more harm than good.
In a Stallman world the GPL wouldn't be required, you could release your code into the public domain and people wouldn't rip it off and sell you back proprietary versions of it.
It also serves as a great disguise for someone wishing to commit a crime, especially in today's world of CCTV everywhere.
A man in a balaclava would get arrested immediately, but muslims can walk around equally hidden and cry foul if anyone says anything.
Flash i would imagine, since it's their proprietary technology.
On the plus side, it would mean linux users can use photoshop on a level playing field to windows/mac users, eliminating a major reason for some people to stick to windows.
Well, buying Novell would give them a product to directly compete with Redhat and Ubuntu, which wouldn't be terribly anti competitive unless they bought them for the purposes of burying their product lines, which would just drive former customers to Redhat.
Fixing the issues becomes even cheaper still if you have the capability to upgrade parts of the OS but not the whole, and strip out things you don't need...
To give an example, there is a company that runs a radius server for authentication of various things including custom written apps, dialup users etc... The radius server is heavily modified such that a standard implementation couldn't be a drop in replacement.
This server runs on a very old linux system, using a 1.x kernel and on hardware which is archaic by todays standards.
The server has one setuid binary (sudo), 2 network listening services (radius, sshd) and 1 other background daemon (cron)... The version of SSH has been updated many times, as has crond, and the radiusd is pretty much custom.
If that were the case, microsoft could save a lot of money and effort by distributing a mozilla or webkit based browser, just like Apple do...
They could even have redistributed Netscape back in the days, and supplied their own bookmarks etc.
What compelled them to push their own browser, was all the talk of cross platform browser-based apps. Sure they didn't take off, but companies like Netscape and Sun were pushing hard for them. Had they taken off, windows would have been reduced to an expensive and buggy driver-layer between hardware and browser, and people would have migrated in droves to a cheaper driver layer (eg linux) running the same browser.
Customers not being dependent on them is microsoft's biggest fear, and would severely reduce their profits and force them to reorganise.
There are even some companies with legacy systems tied to Amiga hardware... Using the proprietary Zorro bus. When these machines die, there are no replacements, not even any compatible replacements.
The companies who originally chose these systems, the Amiga based devices, and the customer records database you talked about, made a huge mistake in selecting proprietary technology, and are now paying the price. You'd think enough time has passed for the industry to mature, but people are still choosing proprietary tools with no thought for the risks in the future.
Luckily proprietary hardware is all but dead, and hopefully software will go the same way.
And no vendor lockin, meaning MS have to compete on a level playing field with everyone else...
As Bill Gates himself said, removing people's reliance on proprietary microsoft systems would be business suicide, microsoft would suffer greatly but everyone else would benefit.
The move from dos caused problems for gamers (many games required all the base memory they could get, and didnt work with windows running) and the move to nt-based windows caused further problems...
Also, wine seems to perform fairly well, and ibm managed very good windows 3.x compatibility with os/2... Surely with the source code microsoft could manage a very good wine-like system, and what slight performance hit it might cause would be offset by faster hardware.
Ofcourse they will never do this, because it would mean a clean break from their legacy cruft, and a lot of people only stick with windows because they need old applications which are tied to it.
If you have the source code you can port it... But if you have the source, you could also port it to something other than windows too.
However most of these apps people are stuck with are proprietary and closed source, which locks the customers into whatever system they're tied to.
People really need to learn from their mistakes, and not get stuck with proprietary lock in again...
That assumes you still have, or can obtain 98 licenses to install on your VM...
If all you have are OEM licenses, you can't move them off the machines they came with, and when those machines physically fail due to old age your stuck.
Backwards compatibility is about the only thing keeping microsoft alive right now... Companies are stuck with a lot of old legacy apps that run on nothing else, and the cost of replacing those apps is prohibitive so they stick with windows...
If they were forced to update everything anyway, then the migration costs that discourage people from migrating to something like linux would also apply to whatever microsoft were putting out. Making the savings from moving away from microsoft even higher, as well as a strong desire to not be stuck having to migrate from a deprecated proprietary product again.
ME didn't remove the dos stuff, it just hid it from the user... You could still drop out of windows and get to a dos prompt if you wanted to.
Or you could take the cynical view that...
NT5 (2000) failed to appeal to consumers because for most people 98se was sufficient and performed better, so they created an intentionally nobbled ME for the sole intention of making XP more appealing to consumers.
As to the NT kernel, yes the base design was very good, and you are right that the lumbering clunky userland on top of it is what brings it down, a need to maintain compatibility with all the cruft built up around dos based windows, and the fact that the NT kernel was designed and written by experienced OS developers, while the dos based windows was cobbled together by people not experienced enough, and then hacked to add more functionality as needed instead of having an extensible design up front.
It's not just the userland tho, microsoft have included a lot of cruft into the NT kernel itself, such that it's not at all the clean microkernel architecture it was intended to be... Some of the lead developers quit over the decision to put video drivers into the kernel for NT4 for instance, and a good proportion of windows crashes can be attributed to bad video drivers.
They at least can count...
If you assume MX to be 6, and MX2004 to be 7 then it all fits, i'm sure the internal version numbers are visible in an about box or something.
Most people cant or wont make a choice to download something else...
Some are lazy, some don't even realise anything else exists. Leave it too long, and so many websites will be locked into proprietary ie-only extensions that you lose the ability to choose completely.
Plus, you saw what happened, without competition ie never got updated so the entire web stagnated for years (and is still doing so)
Microsoft weren't interested in driving users to their services, they didn't really have any services to speak of in those days.
They were concerned that browser based applications would quickly become the next big thing, thus making the underlying os irrelevant. If this were to happen, linux would take over _VERY_ fast due to cost, and microsoft would be in dire trouble.
They push their services now, and use whatever methods they can because they've come to realise that they can't stop their os becoming irrelevant, all they can do is delay it, and use that delay time and their current position to force themselves into other markets before it's too late.
Well, these companies know that their customers aren't using anything other than IE, because they can't be... What they don't realise is why, and that if you took away this forcing effect a lot of them would stop using it.
Bundling IE hurts end users...
Because IE is designed to not follow standards, and encourage web developers also to not follow standards, thus creating sites which require IE... This takes away the end user's freedom to choose their own browser (and by extension, choose the os and hardware to run it on), which for those of us who believe in freedom is one of the worst ways you can hurt someone.
That's why people support firefox and opera, because they represent choice. The more actively used browsers there are out there, the smaller the risk of sites being designed for just one.
Out of curiosity, what other word processors have you used, how long have you spent using them and what were you (trying) to do with them?
As someone who used wordperfect 5 through 8 for years back when it was the app of choice, both wordworth and final writer on the amiga, msword from 95-2007, staroffice 5.2 and versions of openoffice since... I would have to say msword is one of the worst by far. It has far more stability problems, seems to lose/corrupt your work far more often, and has a far quirkier and less intuitive interface (on windows, i havent used the mac version extensively enough to comment).
As for cross references and tables of contents, i have seen many word documents where the table of contents (even after updating it) is completely wrong, and cross references point to completely the wrong place... openoffice's table of contents feature isn't brilliant either for that matter, latex seems to be very good at creating cross linked documents.
For that matter, when you create a PDF from word your table of contents is just flat (no links), from openoffice the toc entries are clickable links but latex also seems to create a proper index that shows up in the sidebar of your pdf reader (instead of the page thumbnails).
Try to open some of those files your saving today, 10 or 20 years from now...
Then try saying there's no benefit to ODF...
Or try writing a script to make some simple changes to the file, or even just to read arbitrary data out...
Or save the same file in both formats, and see how much space each one occupies...
ODF isn't anti microsoft, microsoft are anti odf. Why? because they are the only organization in the whole world who stand to lose from having an open documented file format.
Online apps are not always suitable (i do a lot of work on the train for instance, and some companies don`t want their files leaving their building).
That said, i do send someone an ODF file and point them towards google docs (which support the format fine), if they want an offline reader openoffice is just one choice of many.
It's not the application that's important, it's the file format. I wouldn't care what program people use, so long as the files they`re making are in standard formats, and microsoft is about the only player in town who don`t support ODF out of the box.