Presumably if the fans finance (at least partially) a new series of "Enterprise", those same fans will also get a cut of the profits when it's sold to TV stations, sold on DVD and results in additional merchandise sales?
Does someone *really* want to try to convince me that maintaining a Windows PC is easier than maintaining a Linux one?
One month ago, I rebuilt two PCs for my sister and her kids on Windows 2000. I showed them how to update and run virus checkers, spyware checkers, defrag and cleaning utilities. Each time they run one of these tools, they call me on the phone first and I talk them through what to do.
However, one month later, both PCs are totally screwed - mainly because the kids play a lot of online games and sit in chatrooms. Both PCs are infested with "XXX Popups" and now cannot connect to the Internet.
Sure, I run Windows 2000 at home and it runs smoothly without any real problems, provided I take the time to check the PCs on a regular basis.
However, the time I spend on Windows 2000 maintenance is probably more than what I spend on my Linux PCs, after I've done all the security updates, scans, etc.
The fact is that clever Microsoft marketing has convinced Joe Average that Windows is quick and easy to maintain when the reality is that most of the Joe Averages have to rely on friends, relatives, the local PC store and re-installation CDs to keep their PCs working.
Let's be under no illusion - using Linux requires a degree of PC knowledge and a steep learning curve but Windows is no different by the time you have to start running virus checkers, spyware checkers and applying virtually constant updates.
If Windows does kill Linux, then it will be as the result of clever Microsoft marketing, not because of drivers.
1. Rick Berman and Brannon Braga are stopped from having any involvement in Star Trek. Sure, Gene Roddenberry had his faults but at least he kept the shows as cohesive as possible and kept stupid paradoxes (like "Enterprise") from appearing.
2. They get some decent writers. Far too much of Trek in the past few years has been about moralising rather than just telling a good story. I definitely vote for Michael J Straczynski doing some of the writing for the shows.
3. They stop dicking about with the movies. Stop doing Trek movies "for the masses", keep them within the Roddenberry guidelines and for the fans. For example, I do not want to see our favourite bald captain spending 15 years or so following the Prime Directive only to tear around the surface of a planet like a lunatic in a sand buggy (as in "Nemesis")! Definitely not in Picard's character...
4. Go forward rather than back. Why wasn't Enterprise just set after Voyager rather than before TOS? Prequels always introduce plot discrepancies which are going to be picked up by a fan-base as involved as Trek fans are. This seemed the ultimate stupidity with "Enterprise", IMHO.
5. Look at entertaining the fans first, then worry about the money-making. If the fans like it, they'll by the merchandise and go to the conventions.
I'm a middle-aged geek who's followed the shows since childhood - TNG was great, DS9 was good, Voyager had about half-a-season's worth of good episodes, Enterprise was rubbish. Now I've about given up on Trek completely and won't be coming back until I feel I am being entertained rather than just ripped off by Paramount for as much money as possible.
Believe me, I dislike Microsoft as much as the next guy but as a resident in the EU, I definitely don't want this!
Sure, come down hard on Microsoft for monopolistic practices, lack of security or bundling in Windows Media Player but please don't force me, as a government, from not being able to make a free choice...
Give me the facts, tell me how good OSS is and how crooked Microsoft are and let me decide which products I do and do not want to buy or support.
a more efficient system of production that doesn't result in us having 10 times as many chicken farmers as we actually need.
This seems like an oxymoron.
If you have more people producing chickens than you actually need, the prices of chickens drop, the profits of each chicken producer fall and some of them go out of business or find more profitable things to do. Therefore production drops, prices go up until a balance is reached between price, production and public demand. Isn't this just self-balancing anyway?
I do accept that government farm subsidies (to NOT produce as much as you are capable of) make no sense and throw the whole thing out of balance but otherwise supply & demand find their own equilibrium.
we already have people standing outside of starbucks complaining about fair trade coffee and the likes?
Yes, but we also have thousands of people going into Starbucks every day to buy their over-priced coffee without giving a moment's thought to the coffee growers in Brazil/Africa/etc.
It's one thing caring but it's only effective when the majority care...
if you don't like microsoft products, don't buy them.
Sure, Microsoft want to sell Windows and Office to Joe Sixpack through computer stores but this is not their greatest concern - a great proportion of the public at large run MS products from borrowed MSDN CDs anyway.
It's the computer vendors selling the stuff per-installed and the corporates with the licensing deals that fill the Microsoft coffers...
If Joe Sixpack stops buying pre-installed Windows PCs and complains to his boss that he's not prepared to use Windows at work (and gets listened to!) then we can make a change. But MS is so entrenched in these areas that it's more likely security and cost issues will drive MS out of the marketplace, not direct public action...
actively campaign at your uni/govn't agency/corp. to make a switch to free/oss stuff. bitch, whine, kick, scream, hand out flyers about 'microsoft's bad business practices'
Joe Sixpack doesn't give a damn about this, I'm sorry to say. He just cares about surfing the Internet, playing his games, editing his photos and taking his PC round to a relation to get it fixed if it goes wrong.
Maybe if all us anti-Microsoft tech-heads stopped repairing all our friends and relatives Windows PCs, things would eventually grind to a halt for Joe Sixpack & his Windows:-)
the way most corp's deal with a falling bottom line is to fire the people making the least
Ain't that the truth! One Joe Sixpack boycotts a product and another Joe Sixpack loses his job due to falling profits - yet MR Fat Cat CEO still gets his bonus!
I'm all for direct positive action but the reality is most people just don't give a damn, I'm sorry to say.
The problem is that "we the people" are fickle and vote for a political party based on our own greed (tax-cuts, etc) rather than on long-term policies that might limit corporate power.
Sorry, but the OSS community does not need people like you.
Using OSS software is about exercising a choice, whether it's using Firefox in Windows or trashing your hard drive and going completely with Linux/BSD/etc.
Educating and informing the commercial software users about OSS and letting them decide is the right thing to do, name-calling and abuse is the wrong thing to do and makes you no better than Microsoft & their predatory tactics.
True, but the question is: how much choice do we really have?
Software is probably the exception to the rule where each and everyone of us does have the choice of OSS, created "for the people, by the people" - okay, maybe OSS isn't always suitable for a particular task but that's another argument...
Take the food industry. I enjoy a hamburger occasionally but refuse to spend any money in McDonald's, KFC, Burger King, etc. because of what I know their combined power is doing to the agriculture industry world-wide. But this means I buy fresh meat in a local supermarket who, in turn, wield their own corporate power over the meat producing industry. The fact that there's competition in the different supermarket chains means price-cutting and probably the livestock farmers of the world suffering as a result.
I guess if I was to completely avoid any hypocrisy, I would rear my own livestock and kill it myself for food...
I think it's just about choosing the lesser of two evils - personally, I take the viewpoint that the more pervasive a corporation is with advertising in the media, the lest likely it is they manufacture a good product (because a good product would sell itself by word of mouth only).
Consequently, the more I see something advertised, the more I try to avoid buying it...
We are going to get ruled more and more by corporations, rather than governments.
You make it sound like this is inevitable. The inherent weakness of any corporation is the need for money & profit - it's we, the cattle-like consumers, that have the power to rally together and simply boycott the products from corporations that don't act in a fashion we deem acceptable.
Unfortunately, those of us in the "Western World" tend to just sit here and consume whatever is dealt by them without reaction or complaint.
I'm no Communist, I'm all for Capitalism provided that we use our spending power as consumers to only let those who trade fairly to receive our money.
We've only ourselves to blame if corporations get too powerful, it's that straightforward.
At an even more base level, just like I have no intention of eating three meals a day, seven days a week at McDonald's, there is just no way I am letting a single, convicted monopolist corporation pervade every aspect of my computing & entertainment experience, it's that simple.
Imagine it... booting up my Microsoft Windows PC, surfing in Internet Explorer, playing my music in Windows Media Player that I've downloaded from MSN Music, collecting my email in Hotmail and chatting to all my buddies in MSN Messenger. Then when I get bored I go fire up my X-Box...
Sorry, but it's simply unhealthy and dangerous being that dependent on one single corporation, especially one who's one and only aim is to rip as much money as they can out of me.
Actively looking for a little diversity in life may be harder & more difficult than just sitting there having things handed to me on a plate, but at least I can have the illusion of feeling like a free-willed human being.
1. Linus Torvalds released the Linux kernel in 1991 because "he was unsatisfied with the operating systems of the time" (as I think the quote goes from "Just For Fun").
2. He wrote the Linux kernel on a 386 PC - yeah, i guess he could have been using SCO UNIX on it but I seem to recall he was using MS-DOS a bit also.
3. Richard Stallman started GNU during the 1980s, emacs, gcc, etc were already in widespread usage and being handed out as free source code.
Therefore, the catalyst that sparked off Linux doesn't appear to have been Windows 3.0 anyway.
Sure, with more OS/2 users, there may not have been so many people developing for Linux but it would still be here.
I'd love to ditch Windows 2000 fully and as someone who does a lot of retrogaming, MAME is great on Linux, there's a whole heap of emulators and DOSBox takes care of running a lot of old DOS/Windows games in Linux.
However, as an experienced Gentoo Linux user, I have not yet found a way of running "native" Unreal Tournament 2004 at any reliable speed on my ATI Radeon cards - it's fine playing alone but network it and the FPS drops so its virtually unusable.
From chat on the Gentoo forums, it looks as though it's simply because even using OpenGL in Linux, UT2004 is optimised for Windows and DirectX and that's it.
I view most games companies as scum-sucking bottom-feeders anyway who are just not prepared to innovate or take any risks where money is involved. To expect them to develop specifically for a (unfortunately) minority OS like Linux is unrealistic, not to mention the graphics card manufacturers writing properly optimised drivers for Linux.
It's a real shame but it won't happen any time soon - I'd love to be proved wrong!
People seem to forget far too easily that long before the likes of Billy G. decided you could make money selling software, a whole heap of university Stallman-types were giving the stuff away freely to anyone who wanted it.
Yes, folks, the capitalistic commercial software industry is nothing more than an offshoot of the free software movement!
It strikes me that one of the major barriers to Open Source software being rolled out into business enterprises is the fact that there's nobody to provide an indemnity against software patent legal cases against OSS - just look at how Microsoft have promised to protect their customers if and when it comes to patent issues with their software. (Sure, the reality will probably be a whole lot different but MS have made the promise which no doubt counts for a lot in the eyes of their customers.)
The delaying of EU software patents surely means that, at least in Europe, OSS gets a fair "crack of the whip" again and gets to compete on an equal footing with commercial software and without the customer fears of patent litigations. This can only be a good thing because hopefully in a few years time, when the subject of EU software patents rises again, OSS will be far more prevalent in commercial enterprises and, even better, government and educational networks.
And no, this isn't just a "ditch Windows, install Linux" rant either - even if this means Firefox competes better with IE on the Windows desktop, or OpenOffice.org with MS Office, then that can only be a good thing for all concerned because OSS then gets evaluated for it's suitability for specific tasks, not because of the risk of legal issues in using it.
UNIX was never designed to be secure because when it was designed 30-odd years ago, there was no public Internet full stop.
However, as time has gone on, the architecture of UNIX and UNIX-like systems has changed to compensate for the insecurity of the Internet - this is why most daemons on a UNIX system can now be run as non-root users and/or over layers like SSL to tighten things up considerably.
Sure, it takes time and a heap of knowledge to get a UNIX system as secure as possible but when you run open protocols over the Internet, any exploits get fixed pretty quickly and there's absolutely no chance of an email attachment trashing a system, for example, because someone has found an exploit in a closed proprietary protocol or API that just about everyone uses.
In the same vein, this UNIX-bashing, based on the UNIX that was 30 years ago, is also getting old.
With all respect, Windows is sold as an easy operating system to use and maintain which is simply not the case.
Sure, my 12-year-old niece can download and play MP3s in XP, do her homework in MSOffice, install software, etc. But does she update her virus checker, scan her system for spyware, apply regular software updates, etc. etc? Of course not...
I don't doubt your Windows system has been trouble free but you've had to spend a lot of time and effort keeping it that way.
Linux currently has the advantage that it's not targetted for spyware, worms and viruses and in reality, it probably never will be simply because it's very difficult (if not impossible) to find the same version of a single component that runs on most of the Linux machines that connect to the Internet. How can you exploit a vulnerability if only a very small number of people have that vulnerability on their systems?
I'm not denying that Linux can be exploited through buffer overflow attacks on daemons and I probably spend as much time as you applying updates, configuring firewalls and trawling system logs on my Linux systems.
But let's dispel this fantasy that any OS is "easy" - the real problem is that so many Joe Sickpacks have believed the MS hype of "easy Windows" which is why there is now such a huge population of poorly protected PCs out there to spread all manner of unwanted programs.
I always tell people "use the right tool for the job" so they shouldn't feel dirty if they maintain a Windows box (or dual boot) to play games, etc.
Linux now occupies about 80% of my computing time but I am also the first guy all my friends and relatives asks to fix their Windows PCs when something goes wrong with them.
Sure, I point them in the direction of OSS Windows apps like Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, GIMP, etc. but if they feel they are productive using Windows, then who am I to tell them otherwise?
Remember that OSS does not have huge advertising budgets and getting the word out about killer OSS apps is a case of word-of-mouth on places like/. However, only a few people here are zealots - most of us don't like the fact that when the next Windows virus hits, we all suffer through slow Internet connections and people turning up on our doorsteps with broken PCs.
The Linux fanboys on Slashdot and just about any other OSS coder believes that Linux will overate MS and become the next Windows.
There are as many MS zealots as there are Linux ones. Just look in any corporate IT department, mine included, and find a bunch of MCSEs who refuse to deploy Open Source software for certain functions where it quite clearly outperforms MS products - purely because those same people are too afraid to learn something new.
Remember that a lot of Linux people, myself included, migrated from Windows by choice and can happily make rational comparisons between Windows and Linux. Most Windows people never touch Linux yet feel qualified to form opinions based on FUD and rumour rather than from personal experience.
Believe me, I'd love to fully ditch Windows tomorrow because I hate using the products of a convicted monopolist - but the fact is, for the 20% of my computing time when I play games and use some specific Windows apps, I still use Windows 2000.
For me personally, Linux is the way forward but I am not going to "cut my nose off to spite my face".
Maybe it's just because their copy-protection scheme are getting better.
For products like XP that are sold through computer stores to the general public, this may be the case. But MSDN CDs have very little in the way protection on them and everyone I know who runs MS products at home just copies those from work.
I always find it amusing asking my peers and colleagues if they would still use MS products if they were forced to pay the going prices for them and not get them for free.
The analogy to MS being the "drug pusher" is perfect - most people now have their "MS addiction", from this point on, as DRM and copy protection become more widespread, the addicted users are going to have to start paying for the products.
It's going to be interesting to see what the take up of Open Source will be over the next few years as MS starts clamping down on copying.
And I'm still not sure about Linux (or other free os) defeating Windows.
Sorry, but where did you get this idea from? I don't recall Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman or any of the other Open Source people ever talk about defeating Windows...
Linux is an alternative and a good one at that. It exists despite Windows and it's getting better and better as time goes on - that's all that matters...
Slashdot Mirror
Presumably if the fans finance (at least partially) a new series of "Enterprise", those same fans will also get a cut of the profits when it's sold to TV stations, sold on DVD and results in additional merchandise sales?
Yeah, right...
One month ago, I rebuilt two PCs for my sister and her kids on Windows 2000. I showed them how to update and run virus checkers, spyware checkers, defrag and cleaning utilities. Each time they run one of these tools, they call me on the phone first and I talk them through what to do.
However, one month later, both PCs are totally screwed - mainly because the kids play a lot of online games and sit in chatrooms. Both PCs are infested with "XXX Popups" and now cannot connect to the Internet.
Sure, I run Windows 2000 at home and it runs smoothly without any real problems, provided I take the time to check the PCs on a regular basis. However, the time I spend on Windows 2000 maintenance is probably more than what I spend on my Linux PCs, after I've done all the security updates, scans, etc.
The fact is that clever Microsoft marketing has convinced Joe Average that Windows is quick and easy to maintain when the reality is that most of the Joe Averages have to rely on friends, relatives, the local PC store and re-installation CDs to keep their PCs working.
Let's be under no illusion - using Linux requires a degree of PC knowledge and a steep learning curve but Windows is no different by the time you have to start running virus checkers, spyware checkers and applying virtually constant updates.
If Windows does kill Linux, then it will be as the result of clever Microsoft marketing, not because of drivers.
2. They get some decent writers. Far too much of Trek in the past few years has been about moralising rather than just telling a good story. I definitely vote for Michael J Straczynski doing some of the writing for the shows.
3. They stop dicking about with the movies. Stop doing Trek movies "for the masses", keep them within the Roddenberry guidelines and for the fans. For example, I do not want to see our favourite bald captain spending 15 years or so following the Prime Directive only to tear around the surface of a planet like a lunatic in a sand buggy (as in "Nemesis")! Definitely not in Picard's character...
4. Go forward rather than back. Why wasn't Enterprise just set after Voyager rather than before TOS? Prequels always introduce plot discrepancies which are going to be picked up by a fan-base as involved as Trek fans are. This seemed the ultimate stupidity with "Enterprise", IMHO.
5. Look at entertaining the fans first, then worry about the money-making. If the fans like it, they'll by the merchandise and go to the conventions.
I'm a middle-aged geek who's followed the shows since childhood - TNG was great, DS9 was good, Voyager had about half-a-season's worth of good episodes, Enterprise was rubbish. Now I've about given up on Trek completely and won't be coming back until I feel I am being entertained rather than just ripped off by Paramount for as much money as possible.
Sure, come down hard on Microsoft for monopolistic practices, lack of security or bundling in Windows Media Player but please don't force me, as a government, from not being able to make a free choice...
Give me the facts, tell me how good OSS is and how crooked Microsoft are and let me decide which products I do and do not want to buy or support.
This seems like an oxymoron.
If you have more people producing chickens than you actually need, the prices of chickens drop, the profits of each chicken producer fall and some of them go out of business or find more profitable things to do. Therefore production drops, prices go up until a balance is reached between price, production and public demand. Isn't this just self-balancing anyway?
I do accept that government farm subsidies (to NOT produce as much as you are capable of) make no sense and throw the whole thing out of balance but otherwise supply & demand find their own equilibrium.
Yes, but we also have thousands of people going into Starbucks every day to buy their over-priced coffee without giving a moment's thought to the coffee growers in Brazil/Africa/etc.
It's one thing caring but it's only effective when the majority care...
if you don't like microsoft products, don't buy them.
Sure, Microsoft want to sell Windows and Office to Joe Sixpack through computer stores but this is not their greatest concern - a great proportion of the public at large run MS products from borrowed MSDN CDs anyway.
It's the computer vendors selling the stuff per-installed and the corporates with the licensing deals that fill the Microsoft coffers...
If Joe Sixpack stops buying pre-installed Windows PCs and complains to his boss that he's not prepared to use Windows at work (and gets listened to!) then we can make a change. But MS is so entrenched in these areas that it's more likely security and cost issues will drive MS out of the marketplace, not direct public action...
actively campaign at your uni/govn't agency/corp. to make a switch to free/oss stuff. bitch, whine, kick, scream, hand out flyers about 'microsoft's bad business practices'
Joe Sixpack doesn't give a damn about this, I'm sorry to say. He just cares about surfing the Internet, playing his games, editing his photos and taking his PC round to a relation to get it fixed if it goes wrong.
Maybe if all us anti-Microsoft tech-heads stopped repairing all our friends and relatives Windows PCs, things would eventually grind to a halt for Joe Sixpack & his Windows :-)
the way most corp's deal with a falling bottom line is to fire the people making the least
Ain't that the truth! One Joe Sixpack boycotts a product and another Joe Sixpack loses his job due to falling profits - yet MR Fat Cat CEO still gets his bonus!
I'm all for direct positive action but the reality is most people just don't give a damn, I'm sorry to say.
But who votes the government in?
The problem is that "we the people" are fickle and vote for a political party based on our own greed (tax-cuts, etc) rather than on long-term policies that might limit corporate power.
We're all still responsible for all this...
Blue Screen of Deathstar?
Using OSS software is about exercising a choice, whether it's using Firefox in Windows or trashing your hard drive and going completely with Linux/BSD/etc.
Educating and informing the commercial software users about OSS and letting them decide is the right thing to do, name-calling and abuse is the wrong thing to do and makes you no better than Microsoft & their predatory tactics.
Software is probably the exception to the rule where each and everyone of us does have the choice of OSS, created "for the people, by the people" - okay, maybe OSS isn't always suitable for a particular task but that's another argument...
Take the food industry. I enjoy a hamburger occasionally but refuse to spend any money in McDonald's, KFC, Burger King, etc. because of what I know their combined power is doing to the agriculture industry world-wide. But this means I buy fresh meat in a local supermarket who, in turn, wield their own corporate power over the meat producing industry. The fact that there's competition in the different supermarket chains means price-cutting and probably the livestock farmers of the world suffering as a result.
I guess if I was to completely avoid any hypocrisy, I would rear my own livestock and kill it myself for food...
I think it's just about choosing the lesser of two evils - personally, I take the viewpoint that the more pervasive a corporation is with advertising in the media, the lest likely it is they manufacture a good product (because a good product would sell itself by word of mouth only).
Consequently, the more I see something advertised, the more I try to avoid buying it...
You make it sound like this is inevitable. The inherent weakness of any corporation is the need for money & profit - it's we, the cattle-like consumers, that have the power to rally together and simply boycott the products from corporations that don't act in a fashion we deem acceptable.
Unfortunately, those of us in the "Western World" tend to just sit here and consume whatever is dealt by them without reaction or complaint.
I'm no Communist, I'm all for Capitalism provided that we use our spending power as consumers to only let those who trade fairly to receive our money.
We've only ourselves to blame if corporations get too powerful, it's that straightforward.
Imagine it... booting up my Microsoft Windows PC, surfing in Internet Explorer, playing my music in Windows Media Player that I've downloaded from MSN Music, collecting my email in Hotmail and chatting to all my buddies in MSN Messenger. Then when I get bored I go fire up my X-Box...
Sorry, but it's simply unhealthy and dangerous being that dependent on one single corporation, especially one who's one and only aim is to rip as much money as they can out of me.
Actively looking for a little diversity in life may be harder & more difficult than just sitting there having things handed to me on a plate, but at least I can have the illusion of feeling like a free-willed human being.
I'm sticking with Google, end of story...
2. He wrote the Linux kernel on a 386 PC - yeah, i guess he could have been using SCO UNIX on it but I seem to recall he was using MS-DOS a bit also.
3. Richard Stallman started GNU during the 1980s, emacs, gcc, etc were already in widespread usage and being handed out as free source code.
Therefore, the catalyst that sparked off Linux doesn't appear to have been Windows 3.0 anyway.
Sure, with more OS/2 users, there may not have been so many people developing for Linux but it would still be here.
However, as an experienced Gentoo Linux user, I have not yet found a way of running "native" Unreal Tournament 2004 at any reliable speed on my ATI Radeon cards - it's fine playing alone but network it and the FPS drops so its virtually unusable.
From chat on the Gentoo forums, it looks as though it's simply because even using OpenGL in Linux, UT2004 is optimised for Windows and DirectX and that's it.
I view most games companies as scum-sucking bottom-feeders anyway who are just not prepared to innovate or take any risks where money is involved. To expect them to develop specifically for a (unfortunately) minority OS like Linux is unrealistic, not to mention the graphics card manufacturers writing properly optimised drivers for Linux.
It's a real shame but it won't happen any time soon - I'd love to be proved wrong!
People seem to forget far too easily that long before the likes of Billy G. decided you could make money selling software, a whole heap of university Stallman-types were giving the stuff away freely to anyone who wanted it.
Yes, folks, the capitalistic commercial software industry is nothing more than an offshoot of the free software movement!
The delaying of EU software patents surely means that, at least in Europe, OSS gets a fair "crack of the whip" again and gets to compete on an equal footing with commercial software and without the customer fears of patent litigations. This can only be a good thing because hopefully in a few years time, when the subject of EU software patents rises again, OSS will be far more prevalent in commercial enterprises and, even better, government and educational networks.
And no, this isn't just a "ditch Windows, install Linux" rant either - even if this means Firefox competes better with IE on the Windows desktop, or OpenOffice.org with MS Office, then that can only be a good thing for all concerned because OSS then gets evaluated for it's suitability for specific tasks, not because of the risk of legal issues in using it.
However, as time has gone on, the architecture of UNIX and UNIX-like systems has changed to compensate for the insecurity of the Internet - this is why most daemons on a UNIX system can now be run as non-root users and/or over layers like SSL to tighten things up considerably.
Sure, it takes time and a heap of knowledge to get a UNIX system as secure as possible but when you run open protocols over the Internet, any exploits get fixed pretty quickly and there's absolutely no chance of an email attachment trashing a system, for example, because someone has found an exploit in a closed proprietary protocol or API that just about everyone uses.
In the same vein, this UNIX-bashing, based on the UNIX that was 30 years ago, is also getting old.
Sure, my 12-year-old niece can download and play MP3s in XP, do her homework in MSOffice, install software, etc. But does she update her virus checker, scan her system for spyware, apply regular software updates, etc. etc? Of course not...
I don't doubt your Windows system has been trouble free but you've had to spend a lot of time and effort keeping it that way.
Linux currently has the advantage that it's not targetted for spyware, worms and viruses and in reality, it probably never will be simply because it's very difficult (if not impossible) to find the same version of a single component that runs on most of the Linux machines that connect to the Internet. How can you exploit a vulnerability if only a very small number of people have that vulnerability on their systems?
I'm not denying that Linux can be exploited through buffer overflow attacks on daemons and I probably spend as much time as you applying updates, configuring firewalls and trawling system logs on my Linux systems.
But let's dispel this fantasy that any OS is "easy" - the real problem is that so many Joe Sickpacks have believed the MS hype of "easy Windows" which is why there is now such a huge population of poorly protected PCs out there to spread all manner of unwanted programs.
I hope someone can get this killer app to run under Wine...
Wow! Steve Ballmer's coming on a little strong this afternoon, ain't he?
Linux now occupies about 80% of my computing time but I am also the first guy all my friends and relatives asks to fix their Windows PCs when something goes wrong with them.
Sure, I point them in the direction of OSS Windows apps like Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, GIMP, etc. but if they feel they are productive using Windows, then who am I to tell them otherwise?
Remember that OSS does not have huge advertising budgets and getting the word out about killer OSS apps is a case of word-of-mouth on places like /. However, only a few people here are zealots - most of us don't like the fact that when the next Windows virus hits, we all suffer through slow Internet connections and people turning up on our doorsteps with broken PCs.
There are as many MS zealots as there are Linux ones. Just look in any corporate IT department, mine included, and find a bunch of MCSEs who refuse to deploy Open Source software for certain functions where it quite clearly outperforms MS products - purely because those same people are too afraid to learn something new.
Remember that a lot of Linux people, myself included, migrated from Windows by choice and can happily make rational comparisons between Windows and Linux. Most Windows people never touch Linux yet feel qualified to form opinions based on FUD and rumour rather than from personal experience.
Believe me, I'd love to fully ditch Windows tomorrow because I hate using the products of a convicted monopolist - but the fact is, for the 20% of my computing time when I play games and use some specific Windows apps, I still use Windows 2000.
For me personally, Linux is the way forward but I am not going to "cut my nose off to spite my face".
For products like XP that are sold through computer stores to the general public, this may be the case. But MSDN CDs have very little in the way protection on them and everyone I know who runs MS products at home just copies those from work.
I always find it amusing asking my peers and colleagues if they would still use MS products if they were forced to pay the going prices for them and not get them for free.
The analogy to MS being the "drug pusher" is perfect - most people now have their "MS addiction", from this point on, as DRM and copy protection become more widespread, the addicted users are going to have to start paying for the products.
It's going to be interesting to see what the take up of Open Source will be over the next few years as MS starts clamping down on copying.
...that apart from the occasional piece of MS-branded hardware, like mice or keyboards, none of their profits came from my hard-earned cash.
Sorry, but where did you get this idea from? I don't recall Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman or any of the other Open Source people ever talk about defeating Windows...
Linux is an alternative and a good one at that. It exists despite Windows and it's getting better and better as time goes on - that's all that matters...