I expect every major publishing house in the world has published a large number of books that infringe copyright (owing to plagiarism, for example). Does that therefore mean we should assume any book published by a major publishing house infringes copyright? Of course not. Such a notion is absurd on the face of it.
And because Microsoft is a convicted copyright infringer (see SoftImage), you can't say you didn't know the software you were using were infringing someones copyrights.
Surely that applies only to SoftImage, which was briefly owned by Microsoft? It would be crazy to say that because some guy in division X at company Y once infringed a copyright, that end users must assume all products from company Y infringe copyright, especially when division X was a quasi-independent subsidiary that was acquired and then sold off in a relatively short space of time.
Consider the example of a book publisher. If such a company were to once publish a book written by an author who had copied from someone else, would it then be reasonable to assume all other authors published by that company have copied? Of course not.
The SCO Group is nothing like the old Santa Cruz Operation (SCO), but its Linux lawsuit is very similar to the DR-DOS lawsuit against Microsoft in the 1990s. In that case, Caldera bought DR-DOS, which was a dead product, only so it could sue Microsoft for unfair competition (the case was settled, with a Microsoft payment to Caldera).
In other words, 'The SCO Group' is doing exactly what it's always done: funding its operations primarily through lawsuits rather than through selling products. Moreover, 'The SCO Group' it is exactly the same company as Caldera: all it did was change the name. It has nothing at all to do with the original SCO, except that Caldera bought the 'SCO' name when it bought the original SCO's Unix business.
The old SCO changed its name to Tarantella, and was recently acquired by Sun Microsystems.
It matters to me too. Most modern PCs are fast enough for most things, so the important factors are changing. I often fix my laptop at the lowest speed to keep the fans quiet.
SCO have already said they have no problem with Sun releasing OpenSolaris. Some have speculated that this is because Sun's agreement with USL gave it enough rights to the Unix code (much of which came from Sun to USL) to make it open anyway, whether or not SCO like it.
I hope this will lead to desktop/laptop drivers being ported. I like Sun's Unix environment, so I'd really like to be able to run Solaris as a secondary OS on my laptop.
Access to source code is sometimes useful, but you'll agree it isn't the same thing as 'open source', won't you?
All I'm saying is that businesses setting up Linux servers are interested in return on investment, not any licensing ideology. The availability of source code may allow them to generate a higher return on investment than they could with a binary-only platform, but that's true whether or not the code is 'open source', ie irrespective of the licensing ideology, which they generally don't care about.
I suspect that most corporate users of Linux don't even modify the OS source code anyway. They may write a lot of their own client/server applications, but only in special cases (eg Google) is the Linux kernel itself insufficient for their needs.
So you have switched positions. You now think it's OK for Bill Gates to call open source programmers communist but somehow it's not OK for Stallman to call Bill Gates a communist.
Nope! I think it's okay to say the ideology of people who want to abolish copyright resembles communism, because it does. Open source programmers have nothing to do with abolishing copyright, and in fact make use of copyright to protect their work.
As for calling Gates a communist, the problem is that Stallman didn't make a sound argument. Gates called people who are against copyright for music, films and software 'communists', and Stallman didn't show Gates had ever been anti-copyright, only that he had changed his position on software patents.
By the way, did you know Linus Torvalds's father was once a Communist Party activist in Finland? I know people whose parents were too, so unlike you, I don't see it as an insult, or something to get all worked up about it. They were just naïve, like a lot of people who are anti-copyright today.
I also notice you continually characterize stallman as "hysterical" which exposes your bias in this matter. The fact that stallman gets to Bill Gates and shills like you is a testament to the effectiveness of using hyperbole. Bill Gates understands the power of slandering open source people with the communist comment and so does stallman.
Nope! I characterise Stallman as hysterical because that's how he comes across to me. Bill Gates doesn't come across nearly as badly, but Linus Torvalds makes both Gates and Stallman look childish (which is probably one reason his public image is by far the best of the three). Stallman doesn't 'get to me' either, and I even agree with him on software patents (ie they're probably bad, and Gates's position is obviously hypocritical), but I much, much prefer to have calm and rational people like Linus arguing the case. Stallman's ridiculousness rubs off a little bit on everyone who opposes software patents.
I do find it interesting that rather than trying to argue your case, you've resorted to mischaracterising what I said and insulting me. That pretty well shows you know you've lost, so there's no need for me to say anything more. Game over.
I said before that, as far as I know, Microsoft executives stopped making stupid comments about Linux some time ago, when they realised how ridiculous it made them look.
The following link contains a list of anti-Linux quotations from Microsoft executives. It shows Steve Ballmer said Linux had 'characteristics of communism' on 31 July 2000, and called it 'a cancer' on 1 July 2001. As can be seen, these quotations are the oldest on the site, with the more recent ones sounding much less hysterical, and not mentioning cancer or communism. On 13 July 2004, Ballmer even said 'Linux is a good clone of UNIX'!
If you can point to recent quotes by Steve Ballmer or Bill Gates in which Linux is called ridiculous things like 'a cancer', I'll admit I'm wrong! Until then, however, I think it's you who's wrong.
Bill Gates has recently said those who oppose intellectual property rights are 'new modern-day sort of communists', but this is a valid point: a key part of communism is the elimination of property rights, both intellectual and physical.
The idea of being like communists may get you all worked up, but here in Europe, communism is just another economic theory, and what Gates said sounds reasonable. Eliminating property rights is communistic, but that doesn't mean it isn't valid in some cases! If software patents will stifle software development rather than help it, a communistic approach towards software ideas (not software itself) is a better one than the approach of private ownership of such. At the same time, the examples Gates used: music, films and software, which refer to copyright anyway, probably aren't.
One other thing is you haven't made any argument that hysterical comments about competitors are linked to success. You've simply said: (a) Microsoft executives have called Linux 'a cancer' and 'communism', and (b) Microsoft is successful, therefore (a) caused (b). Steve Ballmer is bald too, but that's not why Microsoft is successful!
If making hysterical comments is the key to success, why has Linux been so much more successful than Hurd? Richard Stallman has been ranting hysterically since the 1980s, where as Linus Torvalds is almost always calm and professional. By your logic, therefore, we should expect Hurd to be much more popular than Linux.
For an example of Stallman's rants, you can see his response to Gates's comments linked above (about intellectual property and communism). One of the first things that stands out is that even though the questioner asked Gates about 'intellectual property, copyrights and patents', Stallman claims Gates was only asked about software patents, and then 'shifted' the subject to intellectual property! This is simply false, as anyone who has read both links can see.
Stallman goes on to rant inanely about how Bill Gates is a communist, and claims Gates said anyone who thinks people should be 'free to program' is a communist! It's just silly, and once again, anyone who reads the other link can see so. In these two articles, Gates comes across as much calmer and more professional than Stallman, and much more so than he himself used to be. Perhaps he's learnt a lesson that Stallman hasn't.
On the desktop/laptop, yes, but Linux is an important server OS today: I think only MS Windows has a larger server market share than Linux. Businesses are adopting Linux/x86/amd64 servers mostly because they can do the same things Unix/Risc servers can do, but they costs a lot less. If you begin discussing the GPL with them, their eyes will probably glaze over.;-)
I'm sure you're right that they still have enough bugs to cause crashes, but you at least know there's probably been some testing and conformance to guidelines. Unfortunately, it sounds like some unscrupulous hardware vendors know how to cheat their way into getting a logo, which makes it meaningless in such cases.
It wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft actually lose money on certification itself, since the big win would be reducing system crashes and support calls. Ie the whole driver certification programme is more of an investment than an expense.
Some of us know enough about computers to debug system crashes, and pinpoint the problems so we can avoid buying hardware from vendors who write crap drivers again. For most people, however, it isn't a possibility, and the only way for the developers of an OS to be certain drivers are good is to write them themselves (like most Linux/BSD drivers). We can't have the proverbial cake and eat it too.:-(
Go ahead then! You'll only look ridiculous, but it's not my concern.:-) If Linux is good enough, it will succeed in spite of people like you, even if you do slow it down a bit.
the main reason to use Linux isn't the cost, it's the legal freedom to do pretty much whatever you want with it
This is true for only a very small number of people. For most people, software licensing ideologies mean nothing, and what matters is how well the system does the tasks they want it to do.
That's very true. Moreover, Windows NT/2000/XP crashes are almost always caused by substandard third-party drivers. I've occasionally made the mistake of not checking for the 'MS-certified' logo when buying hardware for use under Windows, and almost always regretted it. It's almost better to have no driver at all than to have only a crap driver that will degrage/destabilise/crash the system.
A certain level of human rights is necessary for criticism of, or opposition to, the state to have any effect. This level does not exist in China: if MSN offend the state, they will simply lose their right to operate in China.
Co-operating with an authoritarian regime is not something I am personally comfortable with, but it seems that many of those running businesses have no qualms about it. Moreovoer, those who refuse to do it are put at a competitive disadvantage by the current global trade regime, which leaves protection of human rights, the environment and many other things out of the equation.
How so? Windows has majority (>50%) market share, both for clients and servers (although the validity of the latter can be called into question), so if that's losing, I don't know what would be considered winning!
Maybe the future is looking bright for Linux now, but back in the 1950s, a lot of people thought the Soviet Bloc represented the future too. In the 1920s through 1950s, Soviet economic development was very impressive: investment was much higher than in the West, and industry grew at a correspondingly high rate, which is what allowed the Soviet Union to become a superpower to rival the USA.
It was only in the 1970s and 1980s that the return-on-investment problems of the planned Soviet economy really became clear. Whilst it was very efficient at developing heavy industry, especially military industry, once it had caught up in industrial terms, it began to stagnate, and was never able to match the services-orientated economies of the West. The Soviet economy actually came to have a negative return on investment, so investing more and more only made things worse, eventually leading to its collapse.
It will probably take at least 10 or 20 years before we'll know who's won the open- versus closed-source argument. Different models may even win in different sectors (eg operating systems are much likelier to succeed as open source than games).
I think there's a big difference between politics and advocating products.
What politicians are trying to do is gain a relatively larger proportion of votes than their opponents, in elections typically every few years: ie if they win, there is usually a buffer of a few years before they can be challenged again (barring things like the collapse of coalitions, or losing a vote of confidence). If you're a politician, one of the main ways of getting a good result in an election is to scare people into not voting for any of the parties that pose a threat: even if they then don't vote for your party, or a partner party, you still gain. This is complicated when voting is compulsory, as it is in some countries, but pushing voters towards less threatening parties is still a solid strategy.
If you're trying to convince people to use, for example, Linux, scaring them away from Windows will only help if Linux is actually better for their needs. If you scare them from Windows to Linux, and then they find Linux is not as good for their needs (even if this is only the default, and it could easily be customised to suit their needs), you not only don't win them over, you end up convincing them that Linux is no good, perhaps producing an advocate for Windows. There's no election cycle either, so you haven't a buffer of a few years to convince them you were right.
Microsoft executives made a lot of stupid comments about Open Source, but did they work, or did they just make Microsoft look panicked and irrational? I would say more the latter, which is why they've been moderating their tone for some time (most of the 'Get the Facts' marketing is pretty mild). If leading Linux supporters adopt the strategy that made Microsoft look ridiculous, they'll just end up looking ridiculous themselves.
Incidentally, I don't advocate any operating systems, so this is just an academic discussion for me. If you think you're right, I don't mind not having convinced you otherwise. I'll tell you, however, that over-the-top advocacy is more likely to drive me away from a product than towards it.
On the other hand, it may just be that the Risc architectures were unable to keep up with Intel because of economies of scale, and all of those who abandoned them did so because they saw Intel were catching up, and knew it was only a matter of time before they'd fall hopelessly behind.
IBM are doing alright at the very high end, but the formerly Risc middle is moving towards AMD64 (including AMD and Intel clones), and most systems vendors haven't got all of the other business IBM have to support their chip development.
For all the criticism Itanium gets (I don't like its instruction set at all), Itanium2 is very fast and very scalable, and has had quite a lot of success at the high end. In the long run, given Intel's manufacturing capabilities, it might still have been the right choice for HP.
I don't know of of any official G4 benchmarks, but IBM submitted G5 (970) results of the Spec CINT2000 test to spec.org, and compared to a contemporary (October 2004) Pentium 4, it's not very impressive.
G5: 2200MHz, 986 SPECint_base2000 => 0.448 SPECint_base2000 per cycle
P4: 3466MHz, 1701 SPECint_base2000 => 0.491 SPECint_base2000 per cycle
It looks like the G5 is both slower (ca. 9%) per cycle than the P4, and (much) slower overall. If the G4 were twice as fast per cycle as the P4, it would have to be more than twice as fast per cycle as the G5. This would mean a 1.67GHz G4 would be roughly as fast as a 3.66GHz G5. This is obviously not so, or Apple wouldn't be using 2.7GHz G5s in its most powerful desktop systems and 1.67GHz G4s only in its laptops.
I did find some unofficial SPECint2000 results suggesting a score of 187 for a 1.0GHz G4, which would be about 312 for a 1.67GHz G4. This is presumably the peak result, not the base (as above), which means it overstates the true performance. Even so, 312 is extremely poor compared to anything from Intel, and the resulting figure of only 0.187 SPECint2000 per cycle suggests the G4 is only about 38% as fast per cycle as the P4, or 42% as fast per cycle as the G5.
Some PowerPC supporters have long claimed that CPU benchmarks like SPECint are unfair to PowerPC, in comparison to Intel and AMD, but given the results of Apple's own demonstrations, such benchmarks appear to have been reasonably accurate all along.
In any case, a CPU which is more efficient per cycle is not necessarily a better design, just a different design. For example, HP PA-RISC and DEC Alpha were always very close competitors in terms of performance, but with very different designs. The PA-RISC designers had focussed on efficiency per cycle, so the resulting CPUs ran at relatively low clock speeds (and were unable to scale to higher ones). The Alpha designers, in contrast, had focussed on scalability to higher frequencies, and so Alphas always ran at much higher clock speeds than PA-RISC. Neither was a better or worse design, since each got about the same amount of processing done in the same amount of time.
Windows XP for x86 runs DOS and 16-bit Windows applications, but the versions for AMD64 and Itanium don't. I've got an AMD64 machine, and a few things are still for some reason written for 16-bit Windows (eg translation dictionaries), so they only run in the 32-bit XP, not the 64-bit one. The 64-bit XP does at least run 32-bit applications transparently, but 32-bit drivers aren't supported at all (which is not surprising).
In the tech world take a look at Bill Gates, Ballmer, McNealy, Ellison etc. They have all resorted to calling their enemies communists, cancer, evil, hippies, wimps, babies etc.
Do you think that's why their products have succeeded or failed in the market? I'd suspect that even if there is a positive correlation between zealotry and product success, it is statistically insignificant. The same is probably true of a negative correlation.
I can't really comment on your political suggestions, since I'm not intimately familiar with American politics, but be careful not to confuse causes and effects, or coincidences and causal relationships. As an example, if a particular viewpoint becomes more popular for some reason or other, it is to be expected that this will show up in different areas, such as a government reflecting such views being elected, more newspaper columnists supporting such views being published, etc.
You mean like Kruschev? The trouble is Windows is the incumbent leader, like the West was during the Cold War, so it doesn't quite fit. The challenger should be the one banging his shoe on the table and boasting that 'we will bury you!'
I think a lot of us (Windows users) are like that. Using Windows isn't an issue of ideology or zealotry, but of functionalism. Mac OS may be prettier, and Linux may offer source code, but in general, for a lot of us, these things don't matter most of the time, and Windows is the best tool for most of our computing tasks. For that reason, I'd imagine Windows has a much higher user-to-zealot ratio than Mac OS X or Linux.
Of course there are things I prefer about other systems I've used, and still use from time to time, which is why I still take an interest in them (and for a server I'd probably use BSD or Linux, rather than Windows), but as long as Windows provides enough value over the alternatives to justify the (OEM) price, I'll continue to use it. If something that looks better comes along, I'll give it a try, and switch if it really is better. In other words, I've absolutely no emotional attachment to Windows (or any other OS).
Slashdot sometimes contains interesting comments from non-zealot users of Linux, Mac OS X or whatever, and it's interesting to discuss them. Zealots just get in the way, but there seem to be a lot of them.
Why do any of these supposed problems matter? If an x86 (or amd64) CPU (a) works, and (b) is faster than the alternatives, why should anyone care that it happens to implement a fairly archaic instruction set, on top of a completely modern core? Hardly any code is written in assembly language any more, and x86/amd64 assembly is actually very easy to read, write and understand (especially compared to 'advanced' instruction sets like IA64).
Despite all of the PowerPC advocacy from Apple and Mac users, Apple's demo of OS X on a Pentium 4 has pretty well proved the point that Intel CPUs are faster. Other benchmarks, like the Spec CINT2000 test, have long shown the G5 is no match for the Pentium 4 too.
The Pentium 4 is much faster than the G5, or any other PowerPC, so what exactly do you think the 'x86 world' are 'paying for'? Moreover, why do you think Apple switched to x86, and why do you think Sun are so interested in amd64 (which is essentially x86 with 64-bit extensions and some other improvements), if these architectures are so bad? Do you really think you know so much more about CPU architectures than they do?
Slashdot Mirror
I expect every major publishing house in the world has published a large number of books that infringe copyright (owing to plagiarism, for example). Does that therefore mean we should assume any book published by a major publishing house infringes copyright? Of course not. Such a notion is absurd on the face of it.
Surely that applies only to SoftImage, which was briefly owned by Microsoft? It would be crazy to say that because some guy in division X at company Y once infringed a copyright, that end users must assume all products from company Y infringe copyright, especially when division X was a quasi-independent subsidiary that was acquired and then sold off in a relatively short space of time.
Consider the example of a book publisher. If such a company were to once publish a book written by an author who had copied from someone else, would it then be reasonable to assume all other authors published by that company have copied? Of course not.
In other words, 'The SCO Group' is doing exactly what it's always done: funding its operations primarily through lawsuits rather than through selling products. Moreover, 'The SCO Group' it is exactly the same company as Caldera: all it did was change the name. It has nothing at all to do with the original SCO, except that Caldera bought the 'SCO' name when it bought the original SCO's Unix business.
The old SCO changed its name to Tarantella, and was recently acquired by Sun Microsystems.
It matters to me too. Most modern PCs are fast enough for most things, so the important factors are changing. I often fix my laptop at the lowest speed to keep the fans quiet.
SCO have already said they have no problem with Sun releasing OpenSolaris. Some have speculated that this is because Sun's agreement with USL gave it enough rights to the Unix code (much of which came from Sun to USL) to make it open anyway, whether or not SCO like it.
I hope this will lead to desktop/laptop drivers being ported. I like Sun's Unix environment, so I'd really like to be able to run Solaris as a secondary OS on my laptop.
All I'm saying is that businesses setting up Linux servers are interested in return on investment, not any licensing ideology. The availability of source code may allow them to generate a higher return on investment than they could with a binary-only platform, but that's true whether or not the code is 'open source', ie irrespective of the licensing ideology, which they generally don't care about.
I suspect that most corporate users of Linux don't even modify the OS source code anyway. They may write a lot of their own client/server applications, but only in special cases (eg Google) is the Linux kernel itself insufficient for their needs.
Nope! I think it's okay to say the ideology of people who want to abolish copyright resembles communism, because it does. Open source programmers have nothing to do with abolishing copyright, and in fact make use of copyright to protect their work.
As for calling Gates a communist, the problem is that Stallman didn't make a sound argument. Gates called people who are against copyright for music, films and software 'communists', and Stallman didn't show Gates had ever been anti-copyright, only that he had changed his position on software patents.
By the way, did you know Linus Torvalds's father was once a Communist Party activist in Finland? I know people whose parents were too, so unlike you, I don't see it as an insult, or something to get all worked up about it. They were just naïve, like a lot of people who are anti-copyright today.
I also notice you continually characterize stallman as "hysterical" which exposes your bias in this matter. The fact that stallman gets to Bill Gates and shills like you is a testament to the effectiveness of using hyperbole. Bill Gates understands the power of slandering open source people with the communist comment and so does stallman.
Nope! I characterise Stallman as hysterical because that's how he comes across to me. Bill Gates doesn't come across nearly as badly, but Linus Torvalds makes both Gates and Stallman look childish (which is probably one reason his public image is by far the best of the three). Stallman doesn't 'get to me' either, and I even agree with him on software patents (ie they're probably bad, and Gates's position is obviously hypocritical), but I much, much prefer to have calm and rational people like Linus arguing the case. Stallman's ridiculousness rubs off a little bit on everyone who opposes software patents.
I do find it interesting that rather than trying to argue your case, you've resorted to mischaracterising what I said and insulting me. That pretty well shows you know you've lost, so there's no need for me to say anything more. Game over.
The following link contains a list of anti-Linux quotations from Microsoft executives. It shows Steve Ballmer said Linux had 'characteristics of communism' on 31 July 2000, and called it 'a cancer' on 1 July 2001. As can be seen, these quotations are the oldest on the site, with the more recent ones sounding much less hysterical, and not mentioning cancer or communism. On 13 July 2004, Ballmer even said 'Linux is a good clone of UNIX'!
If you can point to recent quotes by Steve Ballmer or Bill Gates in which Linux is called ridiculous things like 'a cancer', I'll admit I'm wrong! Until then, however, I think it's you who's wrong.
Bill Gates has recently said those who oppose intellectual property rights are 'new modern-day sort of communists', but this is a valid point: a key part of communism is the elimination of property rights, both intellectual and physical.
The idea of being like communists may get you all worked up, but here in Europe, communism is just another economic theory, and what Gates said sounds reasonable. Eliminating property rights is communistic, but that doesn't mean it isn't valid in some cases! If software patents will stifle software development rather than help it, a communistic approach towards software ideas (not software itself) is a better one than the approach of private ownership of such. At the same time, the examples Gates used: music, films and software, which refer to copyright anyway, probably aren't.
One other thing is you haven't made any argument that hysterical comments about competitors are linked to success. You've simply said: (a) Microsoft executives have called Linux 'a cancer' and 'communism', and (b) Microsoft is successful, therefore (a) caused (b). Steve Ballmer is bald too, but that's not why Microsoft is successful!
If making hysterical comments is the key to success, why has Linux been so much more successful than Hurd? Richard Stallman has been ranting hysterically since the 1980s, where as Linus Torvalds is almost always calm and professional. By your logic, therefore, we should expect Hurd to be much more popular than Linux.
For an example of Stallman's rants, you can see his response to Gates's comments linked above (about intellectual property and communism). One of the first things that stands out is that even though the questioner asked Gates about 'intellectual property, copyrights and patents', Stallman claims Gates was only asked about software patents, and then 'shifted' the subject to intellectual property! This is simply false, as anyone who has read both links can see.
Stallman goes on to rant inanely about how Bill Gates is a communist, and claims Gates said anyone who thinks people should be 'free to program' is a communist! It's just silly, and once again, anyone who reads the other link can see so. In these two articles, Gates comes across as much calmer and more professional than Stallman, and much more so than he himself used to be. Perhaps he's learnt a lesson that Stallman hasn't.
On the desktop/laptop, yes, but Linux is an important server OS today: I think only MS Windows has a larger server market share than Linux. Businesses are adopting Linux/x86/amd64 servers mostly because they can do the same things Unix/Risc servers can do, but they costs a lot less. If you begin discussing the GPL with them, their eyes will probably glaze over. ;-)
It wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft actually lose money on certification itself, since the big win would be reducing system crashes and support calls. Ie the whole driver certification programme is more of an investment than an expense.
Some of us know enough about computers to debug system crashes, and pinpoint the problems so we can avoid buying hardware from vendors who write crap drivers again. For most people, however, it isn't a possibility, and the only way for the developers of an OS to be certain drivers are good is to write them themselves (like most Linux/BSD drivers). We can't have the proverbial cake and eat it too. :-(
Go ahead then! You'll only look ridiculous, but it's not my concern. :-) If Linux is good enough, it will succeed in spite of people like you, even if you do slow it down a bit.
This is true for only a very small number of people. For most people, software licensing ideologies mean nothing, and what matters is how well the system does the tasks they want it to do.
That's very true. Moreover, Windows NT/2000/XP crashes are almost always caused by substandard third-party drivers. I've occasionally made the mistake of not checking for the 'MS-certified' logo when buying hardware for use under Windows, and almost always regretted it. It's almost better to have no driver at all than to have only a crap driver that will degrage/destabilise/crash the system.
Co-operating with an authoritarian regime is not something I am personally comfortable with, but it seems that many of those running businesses have no qualms about it. Moreovoer, those who refuse to do it are put at a competitive disadvantage by the current global trade regime, which leaves protection of human rights, the environment and many other things out of the equation.
Maybe the future is looking bright for Linux now, but back in the 1950s, a lot of people thought the Soviet Bloc represented the future too. In the 1920s through 1950s, Soviet economic development was very impressive: investment was much higher than in the West, and industry grew at a correspondingly high rate, which is what allowed the Soviet Union to become a superpower to rival the USA.
It was only in the 1970s and 1980s that the return-on-investment problems of the planned Soviet economy really became clear. Whilst it was very efficient at developing heavy industry, especially military industry, once it had caught up in industrial terms, it began to stagnate, and was never able to match the services-orientated economies of the West. The Soviet economy actually came to have a negative return on investment, so investing more and more only made things worse, eventually leading to its collapse.
It will probably take at least 10 or 20 years before we'll know who's won the open- versus closed-source argument. Different models may even win in different sectors (eg operating systems are much likelier to succeed as open source than games).
What politicians are trying to do is gain a relatively larger proportion of votes than their opponents, in elections typically every few years: ie if they win, there is usually a buffer of a few years before they can be challenged again (barring things like the collapse of coalitions, or losing a vote of confidence). If you're a politician, one of the main ways of getting a good result in an election is to scare people into not voting for any of the parties that pose a threat: even if they then don't vote for your party, or a partner party, you still gain. This is complicated when voting is compulsory, as it is in some countries, but pushing voters towards less threatening parties is still a solid strategy.
If you're trying to convince people to use, for example, Linux, scaring them away from Windows will only help if Linux is actually better for their needs. If you scare them from Windows to Linux, and then they find Linux is not as good for their needs (even if this is only the default, and it could easily be customised to suit their needs), you not only don't win them over, you end up convincing them that Linux is no good, perhaps producing an advocate for Windows. There's no election cycle either, so you haven't a buffer of a few years to convince them you were right.
Microsoft executives made a lot of stupid comments about Open Source, but did they work, or did they just make Microsoft look panicked and irrational? I would say more the latter, which is why they've been moderating their tone for some time (most of the 'Get the Facts' marketing is pretty mild). If leading Linux supporters adopt the strategy that made Microsoft look ridiculous, they'll just end up looking ridiculous themselves.
Incidentally, I don't advocate any operating systems, so this is just an academic discussion for me. If you think you're right, I don't mind not having convinced you otherwise. I'll tell you, however, that over-the-top advocacy is more likely to drive me away from a product than towards it.
IBM are doing alright at the very high end, but the formerly Risc middle is moving towards AMD64 (including AMD and Intel clones), and most systems vendors haven't got all of the other business IBM have to support their chip development.
For all the criticism Itanium gets (I don't like its instruction set at all), Itanium2 is very fast and very scalable, and has had quite a lot of success at the high end. In the long run, given Intel's manufacturing capabilities, it might still have been the right choice for HP.
G5: 2200MHz, 986 SPECint_base2000 => 0.448 SPECint_base2000 per cycle
P4: 3466MHz, 1701 SPECint_base2000 => 0.491 SPECint_base2000 per cycle
It looks like the G5 is both slower (ca. 9%) per cycle than the P4, and (much) slower overall. If the G4 were twice as fast per cycle as the P4, it would have to be more than twice as fast per cycle as the G5. This would mean a 1.67GHz G4 would be roughly as fast as a 3.66GHz G5. This is obviously not so, or Apple wouldn't be using 2.7GHz G5s in its most powerful desktop systems and 1.67GHz G4s only in its laptops.
I did find some unofficial SPECint2000 results suggesting a score of 187 for a 1.0GHz G4, which would be about 312 for a 1.67GHz G4. This is presumably the peak result, not the base (as above), which means it overstates the true performance. Even so, 312 is extremely poor compared to anything from Intel, and the resulting figure of only 0.187 SPECint2000 per cycle suggests the G4 is only about 38% as fast per cycle as the P4, or 42% as fast per cycle as the G5.
Some PowerPC supporters have long claimed that CPU benchmarks like SPECint are unfair to PowerPC, in comparison to Intel and AMD, but given the results of Apple's own demonstrations, such benchmarks appear to have been reasonably accurate all along.
In any case, a CPU which is more efficient per cycle is not necessarily a better design, just a different design. For example, HP PA-RISC and DEC Alpha were always very close competitors in terms of performance, but with very different designs. The PA-RISC designers had focussed on efficiency per cycle, so the resulting CPUs ran at relatively low clock speeds (and were unable to scale to higher ones). The Alpha designers, in contrast, had focussed on scalability to higher frequencies, and so Alphas always ran at much higher clock speeds than PA-RISC. Neither was a better or worse design, since each got about the same amount of processing done in the same amount of time.
Windows XP for x86 runs DOS and 16-bit Windows applications, but the versions for AMD64 and Itanium don't. I've got an AMD64 machine, and a few things are still for some reason written for 16-bit Windows (eg translation dictionaries), so they only run in the 32-bit XP, not the 64-bit one. The 64-bit XP does at least run 32-bit applications transparently, but 32-bit drivers aren't supported at all (which is not surprising).
Do you think that's why their products have succeeded or failed in the market? I'd suspect that even if there is a positive correlation between zealotry and product success, it is statistically insignificant. The same is probably true of a negative correlation.
I can't really comment on your political suggestions, since I'm not intimately familiar with American politics, but be careful not to confuse causes and effects, or coincidences and causal relationships. As an example, if a particular viewpoint becomes more popular for some reason or other, it is to be expected that this will show up in different areas, such as a government reflecting such views being elected, more newspaper columnists supporting such views being published, etc.
Zealots rarely know what they're talking about. If they did, they'd realise everything has good and bad points, and thus would cease to be zealots! ;)
You mean like Kruschev? The trouble is Windows is the incumbent leader, like the West was during the Cold War, so it doesn't quite fit. The challenger should be the one banging his shoe on the table and boasting that 'we will bury you!'
Of course there are things I prefer about other systems I've used, and still use from time to time, which is why I still take an interest in them (and for a server I'd probably use BSD or Linux, rather than Windows), but as long as Windows provides enough value over the alternatives to justify the (OEM) price, I'll continue to use it. If something that looks better comes along, I'll give it a try, and switch if it really is better. In other words, I've absolutely no emotional attachment to Windows (or any other OS).
Slashdot sometimes contains interesting comments from non-zealot users of Linux, Mac OS X or whatever, and it's interesting to discuss them. Zealots just get in the way, but there seem to be a lot of them.
Despite all of the PowerPC advocacy from Apple and Mac users, Apple's demo of OS X on a Pentium 4 has pretty well proved the point that Intel CPUs are faster. Other benchmarks, like the Spec CINT2000 test, have long shown the G5 is no match for the Pentium 4 too.
The Pentium 4 is much faster than the G5, or any other PowerPC, so what exactly do you think the 'x86 world' are 'paying for'? Moreover, why do you think Apple switched to x86, and why do you think Sun are so interested in amd64 (which is essentially x86 with 64-bit extensions and some other improvements), if these architectures are so bad? Do you really think you know so much more about CPU architectures than they do?