I don't think Microsoft will ever say they don't have a chance to compete with Linux on the desktop market, because it can be very hard to reverse market share regardless of the quality of the products.
Microsoft is realizing that Linux and all Unix environments keep becoming more popular in the Server environment. They are trying to stop people from complete migrations away by allowing interoperability, to perhaps keep people using some MS products.
They are also trying to stop the development of certain products for which Microsoft has little competition.
I don't think Microsoft will ever, ever bow down to Linux. But I wouldn't be shocked to see something like Exchange Server run on top of Linux.
I think this is the most ridiculous sentiment that people keep passing around.
Clearly it is a visual upgrade from XP, and people liken the visual style to something Apple would design. And I don't care for most of Vista, but Vista is a huge upgrade, the least of which is the visual style. 99% of what has changed between XP and Vista has nothing to do with Tiger, nor copies Tiger in any way.
Perhaps you should look into what major changes are there rather than look at one desktop screenshot and judge an OS simply by it's visual style.
I don't want to start a flame-fest, but I know Ubuntu has become the default distro for so many as the place to start. Many love it, and I'm not here to start a war, but please understand it certainly isn't the only distro out there. In my opinion it is far from the best one either.
My only advice is to look around at least towards the major ones and understand which one is right for you.
Linux played catch-up not only in market share, but in features for a long time. While we can all agree that Linux generally beats down Windows in reliability and is generally a much better server solution, we're talking about the desktop here. On the desktop, Windows has been much easier to pick up and just work out of the box doing everything a person wants it to do.
While the author of the article feels Linux hasn't grown, I believe it has. It is not only fully on par with Windows, but I feel considerably more feature-rich, easier to install (for some distros), easier to maintain, has better performance, and has gained in two major areas.
1 - Windows app compatibility 2 - Gaming
Linux is very much a viable and reasonable desktop alternative to pretty much anyone on the planet today, where as that hasn't always been the case.
If that isn't significant growth, I'm not sure what is.
And let us not forget the strides that are being made in desktop search (programs like Beagle) and the 3D Desktop like Compwiz. Linux is beginning to innovate, and the big boys are trying to follow suit.
One could make the arguement that Microsoft saw this coming way back in the mid 90's. IE was released in 95. but who knows how long it was developed?
And I'm not sure when ActiveX came around, but if Microsoft had this grand plan for web-based apps 11-plus years ago, I'd have to believe they'd have jumped all over it and put some out.
In reality, Google has web-based apps, and Microsoft appears to just now be entering this arena.
Actually, it isn't required since you can run it on a Mac. And with the Novell/MS partnership, don't be surprised to see Red Hat with IE someday in the future.
My point is that IE is free software, and it was never created as some scheme to make sure everyone was completely dependent on Windows, nor a means for Microsoft to create an online OS. Both of these points have been thrown at me, which is funny because they really contradict each other.
My point is that MS asserts dominance in markets where there is no financial gain. They don't profit from IE development, save for the fact that later it ended up becoming integrated with their OS. But when IE 1 was developed in 1995, I don't believe that was part of the plan.
I know that MS doesn't really support IE on the Mac anymore, and why should they? Mac users are quite happy with Safari. My point is that they offered it in the first place. By offering it as a cross-platform free application, it makes it pretty hard to suggest that it is a tool to force the world to be dependent on Windows.
I believe that IE was developed because Microsoft had an interest in making their OS internet ready for the future. They gave it away as free software, and now they don't want to back down from their position of prominence.
I remember the days of fighting to get a page to render the same in both Netscape and IE. It really wasn't as bad as today, where CSS and DHTML are far more common, but Microsoft respects the standards of neither. You'll note I also mentioned that I had a beef with MS introducing browser-specific tags to begin with. Even before we got into DHTML, JS and the like, there were HTML standards, to which Microsoft felt that could extend and change into proprietary tags instead.
And despite IE's dominance and IE7's popularity, they have been lagging behind in features for quite some time. They borrowed tabbed browsing, integrated RSS feeds, etc. from better browsers. Their only innovation was anti-phishing, which Firefox admittedly copied, but pulls off better.
Running IE on a Mac isn't tying Mac users to the Windows platform. Windows isn't required for IE. And it has been available on the Mac since 1995, that's 11 years ago.
11 years ago Microsoft wasn't thinking about an online operating system. Hell, by all rumors and accounts they didn't start working on one until last year.
Less evil? What is that? Is that a man who only hits his wife 5 days a week, instead of 7? They have shifted in what they do. They don't have to actualy go out and steal, like some streetkid. They can just make a deal with you like the real Don Corleone. That does not make them less evil, or good businessman. It makes them more evil.
They have begun to support Open Source, even if just barely. They decided of their own volition to make filters to allow Office 2k7 to save in ODF, etc. And Bill Gates personally went for a guy who didn't believe in charity to starting one of the largest charity organizations in the world. Between his personal contributions, fundraising, and the Buffet donation, it probably is the largest in the world right now.
Maybe you missed Bill Gates being named Time's Man of the Year, but yes, Microsoft is less evil today that what it used to be. I'm trying to be objective about the whole thing, rather than suggest that they are evil "just because".
No they don't. The price they ask is for the whole package and includes OE. See it as advertisement if you like, but a company like Microsoft did become what they are by doing something for free. It might be free for you as an individual, but Microsoft does not think about intividuals. it thinks about the large numbers.
They give IE away for free to Mac users as well, and IE wasn't always bundled with the OS. However, it has always been free software.
If Microsoft never bothered with IE, then people wouldn't be dumping Microsoft software for an alternative, it would just be an area that they aren't into.
However, Microsoft needs to be everywhere just to establish their presence.
They became a giant by stealing other people's ideas, establishing a status quo of mediocrity, and squashed innovation.
It is frustrating knowing that better products exist that will never get a chance because of their hegemony.
However, I do really like certain Microsoft products. I think Defender is a great idea, perhaps a few years late in the game. MS Office is a great product. Their development tools are good.
And Microsoft has become considerably less evil in recent years, but they have no regards for standards and make life unduly difficult for a great deal of people. Sometimes it doesn't even serve a financial purpose.
Look at their history with Sun and Java. Microsoft clearly has no respect for other's rights or licenses. And they want the internet to be something proprietary that they control, again even if it costs them money, and they don't gain anything from it. They just want to control things. By pushing for browser-specific tags, and refusing to conform to web standards, every webmaster on the planet is put out to design around both standards and Microsoft.
Does Microsoft make money of IE? No. They give it away for free, while throwing butt-loads of money developing it. So why continue to spend money fucking the entire internet over? Because they are bullies who like to remain the king of every hill they can find, even if it means forcing customers into inferior products.
Feargus Urqhart is running Obsidian these days, and there is plenty of bad blood between him and Interplay. There is no way he is going to touch this. From what I understand, Obsidian made their bid for the Fallout 3 rights, but got outbid. And they did buy some licenses (I think Icewind Dale) from Interplay during the firesale, but they'll never work for Interplay again after the Fallout 3 (Van Buren) and Baldur's Gate 3 (Jefferson) fiascos.
They tweaked the rules to make all the attributes more important, added combat/lightsaber styles, more Force powers, Prestige Classes, etc. So from a pure mechanics standpoint they really improved the game.
They added Influence, and allowed you to alter the members of your party. My wife played Dark Side, and I watched her pry Atton's secrets from him, and use them to twist him to the Dark Side. It was a great moment. Truly that was an improvement over the original.
All of the characters had depth, including T3. T3 and the Wookie were empty, cardboard cutout characters in the original.
The dialog was better all around. The romances weren't nearly as cheesy as the original.
The main character perhaps didn't have the same bad-ass factor that people enjoyed from the original, but I found his backstory to be more interesting. The backstory of Revan is that he is a bad-ass. End of story. In KOTOR:2 there was just much more depth.
If Obsidian didn't have to ship the game 3 months early, I'm sure they would have been less bugs, and if LucasArts didn't axe the original ending, people would see the game very differently.
Obsidian really needs to the do the third installment, so they can finish what they started.
No, someone needs to convince LucasArts not to ship a game 3 months early and then completely cut off the ending.
KOTOR:2 was superior to KOTOR:1 in all regards, save for the fact that it was unfinished.
Bioware made Baldur's Gate, and then the Obsidian crew (when they were Black Isle) made a FAR SUPERIOR game using the same engine called Planescape: Torment.
Their NWN:2 shines head and shoulders over NWN. Obsidian has arguably the most talented staff around.
They need a publisher who will support them. Obsidian didn't have that when they did KOTOR:2.
I've already seen laser keyboards that spread over a flat surface for PDAs. I wonder how they sense where you are typing, but now that I think about it, I would like to have a silent keyboard. I just wonder how difficult it is to type when you can't get a physical feel for the keyboard.
However, we do know from past experiences that Newt Gingrich doesn't believe in Free Speech. He spearheaded and passed the Telecommunications Decency Act of 1994 if you recall, which made it a federal crime punishable by prison and a $200,000 fine to transmit anything offensive over an electronic medium.
When interviewed he openly stated that he knew it was unconstitutional, and that he didn't believe in free speech.
The law was stricken, not for being unconstitutional, but for being unenforcible.
Wasn't there initially a patent on the double-click?
I'm beginning to think that we need to seriously rethink the patent process on the whole.
There is a world of difference in lifting an entire screenplay, design document, or chunk of source code, and using the same small idea. We shouldn't allow patents on small, trivial concepts. But people have patents on trivial things.
I have no doubt whatsoever that various distros infringe on some small patents. And I also have no doubt that Microsoft stole countless ideas from innovators before them.
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I don't think Microsoft will ever say they don't have a chance to compete with Linux on the desktop market, because it can be very hard to reverse market share regardless of the quality of the products.
Microsoft is realizing that Linux and all Unix environments keep becoming more popular in the Server environment. They are trying to stop people from complete migrations away by allowing interoperability, to perhaps keep people using some MS products.
They are also trying to stop the development of certain products for which Microsoft has little competition.
I don't think Microsoft will ever, ever bow down to Linux. But I wouldn't be shocked to see something like Exchange Server run on top of Linux.
I think this is the most ridiculous sentiment that people keep passing around.
Clearly it is a visual upgrade from XP, and people liken the visual style to something Apple would design. And I don't care for most of Vista, but Vista is a huge upgrade, the least of which is the visual style. 99% of what has changed between XP and Vista has nothing to do with Tiger, nor copies Tiger in any way.
Perhaps you should look into what major changes are there rather than look at one desktop screenshot and judge an OS simply by it's visual style.
I don't want to start a flame-fest, but I know Ubuntu has become the default distro for so many as the place to start. Many love it, and I'm not here to start a war, but please understand it certainly isn't the only distro out there. In my opinion it is far from the best one either.
My only advice is to look around at least towards the major ones and understand which one is right for you.
Linux played catch-up not only in market share, but in features for a long time. While we can all agree that Linux generally beats down Windows in reliability and is generally a much better server solution, we're talking about the desktop here. On the desktop, Windows has been much easier to pick up and just work out of the box doing everything a person wants it to do.
While the author of the article feels Linux hasn't grown, I believe it has. It is not only fully on par with Windows, but I feel considerably more feature-rich, easier to install (for some distros), easier to maintain, has better performance, and has gained in two major areas.
1 - Windows app compatibility
2 - Gaming
Linux is very much a viable and reasonable desktop alternative to pretty much anyone on the planet today, where as that hasn't always been the case.
If that isn't significant growth, I'm not sure what is.
And let us not forget the strides that are being made in desktop search (programs like Beagle) and the 3D Desktop like Compwiz. Linux is beginning to innovate, and the big boys are trying to follow suit.
Part of this agreement involves Novell paying Microsoft not to sue them.
It makes the Linux world look guilty of stealing from Microsoft.
And the second Novell gave Microsoft money, Novell ceased development on products that would compete with Microsoft.
Do you think that Novell isn't forever compromised by this deal?
Which one?
Again instead of posting anything with substance, you give vague slams.
You might as well post AC.
No I don't. I lived it.
If you have an actual retort with facts, please respond.
If you are going to make vague statements with no facts, then don't bother.
One could make the arguement that Microsoft saw this coming way back in the mid 90's. IE was released in 95. but who knows how long it was developed?
And I'm not sure when ActiveX came around, but if Microsoft had this grand plan for web-based apps 11-plus years ago, I'd have to believe they'd have jumped all over it and put some out.
In reality, Google has web-based apps, and Microsoft appears to just now be entering this arena.
Actually, it isn't required since you can run it on a Mac. And with the Novell/MS partnership, don't be surprised to see Red Hat with IE someday in the future.
You're diverging from the point.
My point is that IE is free software, and it was never created as some scheme to make sure everyone was completely dependent on Windows, nor a means for Microsoft to create an online OS. Both of these points have been thrown at me, which is funny because they really contradict each other.
My point is that MS asserts dominance in markets where there is no financial gain. They don't profit from IE development, save for the fact that later it ended up becoming integrated with their OS. But when IE 1 was developed in 1995, I don't believe that was part of the plan.
I know that MS doesn't really support IE on the Mac anymore, and why should they? Mac users are quite happy with Safari. My point is that they offered it in the first place. By offering it as a cross-platform free application, it makes it pretty hard to suggest that it is a tool to force the world to be dependent on Windows.
I believe that IE was developed because Microsoft had an interest in making their OS internet ready for the future. They gave it away as free software, and now they don't want to back down from their position of prominence.
I remember the days of fighting to get a page to render the same in both Netscape and IE. It really wasn't as bad as today, where CSS and DHTML are far more common, but Microsoft respects the standards of neither. You'll note I also mentioned that I had a beef with MS introducing browser-specific tags to begin with. Even before we got into DHTML, JS and the like, there were HTML standards, to which Microsoft felt that could extend and change into proprietary tags instead.
And despite IE's dominance and IE7's popularity, they have been lagging behind in features for quite some time. They borrowed tabbed browsing, integrated RSS feeds, etc. from better browsers. Their only innovation was anti-phishing, which Firefox admittedly copied, but pulls off better.
Running IE on a Mac isn't tying Mac users to the Windows platform. Windows isn't required for IE. And it has been available on the Mac since 1995, that's 11 years ago.
11 years ago Microsoft wasn't thinking about an online operating system. Hell, by all rumors and accounts they didn't start working on one until last year.
Less evil? What is that? Is that a man who only hits his wife 5 days a week, instead of 7? They have shifted in what they do. They don't have to actualy go out and steal, like some streetkid. They can just make a deal with you like the real Don Corleone. That does not make them less evil, or good businessman. It makes them more evil.
They have begun to support Open Source, even if just barely. They decided of their own volition to make filters to allow Office 2k7 to save in ODF, etc. And Bill Gates personally went for a guy who didn't believe in charity to starting one of the largest charity organizations in the world. Between his personal contributions, fundraising, and the Buffet donation, it probably is the largest in the world right now.
Maybe you missed Bill Gates being named Time's Man of the Year, but yes, Microsoft is less evil today that what it used to be. I'm trying to be objective about the whole thing, rather than suggest that they are evil "just because".
No they don't. The price they ask is for the whole package and includes OE. See it as advertisement if you like, but a company like Microsoft did become what they are by doing something for free. It might be free for you as an individual, but Microsoft does not think about intividuals. it thinks about the large numbers.
They give IE away for free to Mac users as well, and IE wasn't always bundled with the OS. However, it has always been free software.
But why enter the arena in the first place?
If Microsoft never bothered with IE, then people wouldn't be dumping Microsoft software for an alternative, it would just be an area that they aren't into.
However, Microsoft needs to be everywhere just to establish their presence.
They became a giant by stealing other people's ideas, establishing a status quo of mediocrity, and squashed innovation.
It is frustrating knowing that better products exist that will never get a chance because of their hegemony.
However, I do really like certain Microsoft products. I think Defender is a great idea, perhaps a few years late in the game. MS Office is a great product. Their development tools are good.
And Microsoft has become considerably less evil in recent years, but they have no regards for standards and make life unduly difficult for a great deal of people. Sometimes it doesn't even serve a financial purpose.
Look at their history with Sun and Java. Microsoft clearly has no respect for other's rights or licenses. And they want the internet to be something proprietary that they control, again even if it costs them money, and they don't gain anything from it. They just want to control things. By pushing for browser-specific tags, and refusing to conform to web standards, every webmaster on the planet is put out to design around both standards and Microsoft.
Does Microsoft make money of IE? No. They give it away for free, while throwing butt-loads of money developing it. So why continue to spend money fucking the entire internet over? Because they are bullies who like to remain the king of every hill they can find, even if it means forcing customers into inferior products.
That's why.
The PC version was just as good, and AvP:2 was also quite good.
Feargus Urqhart is running Obsidian these days, and there is plenty of bad blood between him and Interplay. There is no way he is going to touch this. From what I understand, Obsidian made their bid for the Fallout 3 rights, but got outbid. And they did buy some licenses (I think Icewind Dale) from Interplay during the firesale, but they'll never work for Interplay again after the Fallout 3 (Van Buren) and Baldur's Gate 3 (Jefferson) fiascos.
Funny. I know plenty of people that have played the game to completion with not a single problem.
They tweaked the rules to make all the attributes more important, added combat/lightsaber styles, more Force powers, Prestige Classes, etc. So from a pure mechanics standpoint they really improved the game.
They added Influence, and allowed you to alter the members of your party. My wife played Dark Side, and I watched her pry Atton's secrets from him, and use them to twist him to the Dark Side. It was a great moment. Truly that was an improvement over the original.
All of the characters had depth, including T3. T3 and the Wookie were empty, cardboard cutout characters in the original.
The dialog was better all around. The romances weren't nearly as cheesy as the original.
The main character perhaps didn't have the same bad-ass factor that people enjoyed from the original, but I found his backstory to be more interesting. The backstory of Revan is that he is a bad-ass. End of story. In KOTOR:2 there was just much more depth.
If Obsidian didn't have to ship the game 3 months early, I'm sure they would have been less bugs, and if LucasArts didn't axe the original ending, people would see the game very differently.
Obsidian really needs to the do the third installment, so they can finish what they started.
No, someone needs to convince LucasArts not to ship a game 3 months early and then completely cut off the ending.
KOTOR:2 was superior to KOTOR:1 in all regards, save for the fact that it was unfinished.
Bioware made Baldur's Gate, and then the Obsidian crew (when they were Black Isle) made a FAR SUPERIOR game using the same engine called Planescape: Torment.
Their NWN:2 shines head and shoulders over NWN. Obsidian has arguably the most talented staff around.
They need a publisher who will support them. Obsidian didn't have that when they did KOTOR:2.
I've already seen laser keyboards that spread over a flat surface for PDAs. I wonder how they sense where you are typing, but now that I think about it, I would like to have a silent keyboard. I just wonder how difficult it is to type when you can't get a physical feel for the keyboard.
However, we do know from past experiences that Newt Gingrich doesn't believe in Free Speech. He spearheaded and passed the Telecommunications Decency Act of 1994 if you recall, which made it a federal crime punishable by prison and a $200,000 fine to transmit anything offensive over an electronic medium.
When interviewed he openly stated that he knew it was unconstitutional, and that he didn't believe in free speech.
The law was stricken, not for being unconstitutional, but for being unenforcible.
Again, copying the source code outright should be protected against.
Taking the concept of how something is done, improving it, and doing it yourself from scratch is another story.
I'm sure someone is going to mod you troll, but that doesn't take away from the veracity of your post.
Wasn't there initially a patent on the double-click?
I'm beginning to think that we need to seriously rethink the patent process on the whole.
There is a world of difference in lifting an entire screenplay, design document, or chunk of source code, and using the same small idea. We shouldn't allow patents on small, trivial concepts. But people have patents on trivial things.
I have no doubt whatsoever that various distros infringe on some small patents. And I also have no doubt that Microsoft stole countless ideas from innovators before them.
Everyone refers to the Scarlet Letter all the time as well, but that doesn't make it a good book.