Well there is also going to be a shift in the way computers are thought of and used. For example, right now you use a computer like a tool...a very complex, very delicate tool, but a tool nonetheless. A future system that responds to facial expressions would be an entirely different way to view a computer, since your facial expressions aren't very useful for controlling something like a web browser. In that case, the computer, or at least that facet of the computer, would be invisible to the user...
The software currently in use does not involve computationally complex problems, and so the computers appear to have "plenty of computational power." This is likely to be the case for a very long time, but there are useful but complex tasks computers might do. For example, a computer that might interact with its user purely by voice -- more advanced voice and language recognition systems are likely to require significantly more cores and computational power than is currently in wide use. Even more advanced might be a system that can interpret visual data, such as facial expressions. These systems are desirable, but need a lot of work, and won't be widely deployed for a long time (decades at least).
I suppose what I wrote wasn't completely clear, but I didn't mean to say that garbage collection was slowing things down. What I meant was that the slowdowns occurred because of things like dynamic typing in Python, the requirement for all objects, even short lived local objects, to be on the heap, the increased complexity of function calls in languages where functions are objects, array bounds checking, etc. The specific project I had in mind involved high-resolution volumetric graphics, on the order of 60000 data objects that needed to be processed. We needed to balance portability with performance. Python, Haskell, Java, etc. would not have been able to meet the performance requirements; the overhead from their various features, especially the way arrays are handled, would have killed us.
C++ struck the balance we needed. We could have primitive arrays and function calls, objects on the stack, etc., and also be able to run our code on Windows, Linux, or whatever (remember, we had to distribute this to others). It was embarrassing that, under certain circumstances, we had crashes (for example, if the user hit "cancel" instead of opening a model), but the solution is not moving to another language, it is having a team that knows how to program in C++. The main problem, at least in the bugs that I saw, was that people were not familiar with pointers -- assuming, for example, that an uninitialized pointer would have NULL as its value. I trace the problem to a decision by the university to teach introductory CS courses in Python.
Lest I be accused of being a C++ fanboy, I'll say that I like the idea behind Haskell, and even more being Prolog, especially since I advocate for formal methods. I also like some of the ideas in Ada, especially the strong typing and the numeric range stuff. However, when it comes to dealing with enormous datasets and complicated algorithms that involve a lot of array operations and recursion, I lean towards a language that lets me do dangerous but fast things. Finally, there is the problem of dealing with other people, who may not know obscure languages like Haskell (sorry, but it just isn't mainstream enough for me to assume that the people in that lab would be able to use it).
0. Forgot about HTML in my last post.
1. OpenDocument already exists. What good does a second format, based on identical principles, do for the world?
2. OOXML requires the use of patented algorithms, which makes open source developers nervous, especially when a company that despises open source and has an ongoing campaign to kill the open source movement happens to be the patent holder...and happens to be pushing the format.
3. OOXML is exceedingly difficult to implement, giving Microsoft an automatic advantage over everyone else and forcing us to play catch-up (though OOo3 will have native support, IIRC).
4. This is/., and the format is Microsoft supported. What did you expect?
1. OpenDocument already exists. What good does a second format, based on identical principles, do for the world?
2. OOXML requires the use of patented algorithms, which makes open source developers nervous, especially when a company that despises open source and has an ongoing campaign to kill the open source movement happens to be the patent holder...and happens to be pushing the format.
3. OOXML is exceedingly difficult to implement, giving Microsoft an automatic advantage over everyone else and forcing us to play catch-up (though OOo3 will have native support, IIRC).
4. This is/., and the format is Microsoft supported. What did you expect?
I completely agree with Stroustrup. Too many people these days have little or no exposure to C++, and never learn how programming in the absence of garbage collection works. It is especially problematic in our research labs, where computationally complex problems must be solved with very fast code, but the people writing it get completely confused by pointers and memory management. Worse is when a proof-of-concept is distributed, with horrible bugs and completely incomprehensible code.
Zero exploits in the wild? The why does this website exist: http://www.securemac.com/ ? And why does it list trojans in the wild as recently as January 2008? Secunia lists numerous unpatched vulnerabilities for OS X as of this writing, some of which can be used for privilege escalation in a trojan horse. In fact, the only OS that comes to mind that has literally never had an exploit in the wild (or any really exploitable vulnerabilities in a real-world setup) is z/VM, IBM's mainframe OS.
Laptops, phones, and portable audio players are not Apple inventions. There is a market for Apple products, which Apple has worked extremely hard to keep separate from the rest of the computer world. The specific types of computers Apple sells is not the niche, any more than a vehicle with four wheels is the "niche" market of tractor manufacturers.
No, Apple does not want outside involvement in their products, and has not been friendly to the open source projects it draws on for some of its products. If by "give back to the community," you meant, "begrudgingly provide some code to the Konqueror team but never really get it right with OpenDarwin," I guess you would be right. They actively work against third party software syncing with the iPod, and have overly restrictive terms for developing software for the iPhone.
Apple only accepted interoperability and broad third party software because it was on the verge of bankruptcy, not because it is a company that sits on a moral high ground. Apple's strategy, originally, was to keep themselves completely separate, so that buying one Apple computer required you to change your whole infrastructure. This was and remains a failing strategy, and so they modified it so that just enough third party development was possible to keep their systems relevant, but nothing more. iPods only support those formats that Apple chooses (and many iPods cannot be reflashed, because they were designed to only be capable of running Apple's software). iPhones only support some third party development, and developers are required not to step too far from where Apple wants them to be. I cannot build a computer that runs Mac OS X on my own, and it is not likely that Apple will ever allow for this. Like I said, you can construct any number of reasons for these things, but there is no denying that Apple does not want third parties developing software for Apple's platforms.
I'm sorry, does Outlook have out of the box Kolab syncing? Exchange is a proprietary product that, right now, the KMail developers would have to reverse engineer in order to fully support. Kolab is open source, and the Outlook developers (if they were committed to interoperability) could implement support for it without an extensive and difficult effort. It is absurd to blame the KMail teach for poor Exchange support.
I cannot speak for the latest version of Outlook, but last I heard, it didn't have much in the way of out of the box x.400 support. Maybe you are thinking of some plugin?
In general, a buffer overflow in the kernel is dangerous. What is it about Apple fans who think that because there are fewer viruses written for their OS, it is not a problem if Apple releases buggy code?
This has always been a problem with Apple, and it is what cost them the market to begin with. They don't want the rest of the world involved with their OS, their hardware, or anything with an Apple logo on it. They begrudgingly accept the idea that SOME outside software is necessary for them to survive, but if they could, they would lock everyone else out of their platform. I don't have any idea why -- Apple fans I've met claim it is because no one else can get it "right" the way Apple does, and detractors claim that it is because Apple has no respect for its users or developers.
In a business sense, though, Apple isn't so bad off, as a niche company. That they created a niche to fill is an act of marketing genius, of course.
Apple has not always been "best of breed." Mac OS 1-9 were cooperative multitasking systems, which was out of date when Mac OS 1 was released. AmigaOS and BeOS were far superior, technologically speaking, to what Apple was offering at the same time. OS/2 remains one of the most robust systems ever developed, and guess what? It predates Mac OS X by a decade. From a security standpoint, Mac OS X falls short of BSD, which it is based on, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in terms of unpatched vulnerabilities, at least according to Secunia.
Google's web apps are still unreliable, insecure, and utterly useless for people who need to use their computers in places where there is limited or no Internet access. Google's IM software frequently disconnects, and worse, fails to send messages without even disconnecting. Last I checked, GMail's web interface had no support for cryptographically signed emails, with either S/MIME or OpenPGP (firegpg is not feature complete).
So where is this best-of-breed software you are talking about? I think what you meant to say was, "It is better than Microsoft," in which case I will say, "So is Fedora 8."
Actually, I have to disagree. While I find the Mac fanboys to be more obnoxious, I have certainly encountered the attitude among SOME Linux communities from South Africa that there is no valid criticism of their distro. I was at a LUG meeting, and brought up a common problem: packages break between major releases. Now, this is a problem that a lot of distros have to grapple with, and I expected to get the typical, "We are working on that" response, that I got from others. Instead, I got something to the effect of, "So? Microsoft does that too." I was shouted down when I began pointing out that my NetBSD system didn't have that problem when I upgraded from NetBSD 2 to NetBSD 3.
For the record, I am not a BSD contributor, but I am a Linux contributor. I was pointing out the problem in the hopes of sparking a bit of work on it.
Now, when I say that Mac fanboys are more obnoxious, it is because they are usually not informed on the issues that they are attacking people over. I was once told by one of them that Apple invented the mouse. When I pointed out that the mouse was invented a decade before the Apple I, 3000 miles from where Apple was founded, he didn't back off...he just shot back that Apple was the first company to attach a mouse to a desktop computer. When I pointed out that he was wrong about that too, he finally looked it up, and then promptly forgot that the whole incident ever happened. Worse than that, Apple fanboys think the world is black and white: Microsoft and Apple. They have no idea that anything else exists or has ever existed. AmigaOS, BeOS, BSD, NextSTEP, hundreds of GNU/Linux distros, zSeries, etc., etc., etc. are not even a part of the world that Apple fanboys seem to live in, with only a very small minority of users who actually know the history of computers.
It gets really bad when they try to talk about security. "Mac OS X" is the most secure system ever made, there are no remote exploits, there are no viruses, there are no bugs, and of course, just having a Mac makes you impervious to any sort of digital attack. I've heard criticisms of security companies for finding that FreeBSD has fewer unpatched security flaws than Mac OS X. The worst I heard was that email encryption and signing must not be very important, because the Mac OS X "Mail" application has no support for it. I wanted to smack the originator of that comment in the head with the largest security textbook I could find.
If I were uninformed on the situation, I would be in complete agreement with you. However, there really are stark parallels between Mac fans and people with strong feelings on the middle east. Aside from accusing anyone who says anything even remotely negative about Apple of being some kind of agent of Microsoft, they also have a distorted view of the history of Apple, what Apple has accomplished, and how Apple came to be where it is today. This is completely parallel with the way that people on both sides of the Israel/Palestinian seem to be completely unaware of key historical events that led to one development or another.
The fact that nobody has been killed in the Apple "debate" doesn't make the psychological phenomenon any different; people are still accusing each other of bias, still ignoring or not bothering to learn about the history of it all, and still religiously holding to their views on the subject. I've had Apple fans shout me down when I point out that Apple did not invent the mouse, nor did they come up with the idea of using a mouse in a desktop computer, nor the GUI, nor invent the first palmtop, etc. Likewise, when I point out that Ariel Sharon had been held responsible by the international community for the massacres at Sabra and Shatillah, and that by going to the Dome of the Rock with heavily armed guards he sparked the violence of the past few years, or if I say that it is completely out of line for militants in the Gaza strip to fire rockets at Israeli cities, I get shouted down by one side or another. History becomes irrelevant when people become that zealous, and logic becomes thoroughly warped. People start forming their own ideas, and refuse to follow any logical thought that strays from those preconceived notions of how the world works.
I would hope that they aren't. Presidential archives are full of letters sent to and from the White House, and are retained for decades. What makes email any different? These hard drives should be backed up and put in the Bush archive. As Nixon demonstrated, this level of secrecy surrounding the President's actions is dangerous, and the destruction of hard drives sets a dangerous precedent.
Really? I'm still an undergrad in college (double major, EE and CS), and I'm getting offers for internships that pay more than my parents make. IBM offered to cover the cost of grad school, if I committed to a job with them. All that, despite the current economic downturn. If money is all you care about, then going to college is obvious -- just ask the guys in my EE classes who already did work in the industry, but can't get promoted without a degree.
Beyond that, there is something to be said for a formal education. I was "self taught" in high school also, and thought that I would be able to handle any problem. I couldn't have been more wrong, and in my senior year of high school, when I began taking real CS courses, I learned things that I would never have grasped without a teacher. The sort of things I am studying now can't be "self taught," because in at least one case I am learning it directly from the researcher who made the discovery. Overall, a formal education not only provided me with new ways of thinking about my majors and related fields, but it also broadened my ability to solve problems, both in terms of scope and approach.
Going directly into trade after high school is a waste of time and of talent. Is college expensive? Unfortunately, yes. Is it worth the expense? Absolutely.
First of all, when did it become acceptable for "all software" to have bugs? The software that runs a missile control center better be bug free, especially the part that controls the firing sequence. There are certain situations where software errors are just not tolerable -- and I would say that voting machines are one of those cases. Our entire society is based on the idea that people have the right to vote on who leads them; if our ability to trust voting machines is undermined, then the foundation of our society is undermined. Plain and simple: this kind of software error is absolutely not tolerable, and this entire line of voting machines should be immediately recalled from every district that they are in use in.
If you RTFA, you will note that this error does not occur in every instance, meaning that this is not a simple off-by-one error, but something much more serious. Sequoia claims that this bug can be reproduced if the operator of the machine presses a valid button, but then an unused button. That is a "logic bomb," and is indicative of two things:
1.) Formal methods were not employed in the design of this software, and so the system was never proved to work.
2.) The product was not tested sufficiently, and the testers assumed that the machine operator would never make an error while operating the machine.
Neither of these situations leaves me with much confidence in Sequoia's ability to design a mission critical system. Sequoia needs to perform a review of its methods of design and testing before they sell any more voting machines, and the governments purchasing these machines need to start demanding that the designs be made available to the public.
In general, what Microsoft has been doing is a combination of using undocumented APIs and formats (both of which have landed them in trouble in court) and strong-arm tactics that ensure Windows remains absolutely dominant in the PC market. It isn't so surprising that their software works better on Windows than competitors' software; a programmer could just call up or shout down the hall and get an answer to an API question within Microsoft, whereas an external programmer would have to read through thousands of pages of documentation. However, the problem is that Microsoft actively works against competitors developing Windows applications, widening the inherent gap. That is an antitrust violation, although the Bush administration has shied away from prosecuting corporations, and it is unlikely that the next administration will press Microsoft any harder.
I wouldn't call the 50% market share of the iPod and iTunes to be "dominance." They are a market leader, but dominance is a bit of a stretch; certainly, they are on a different order of magnitude than Microsoft when it comes to Windows.
Apple is separated from Microsoft in that they have a small market share, and are not using these tactics to maintain their dominance. It is fair to point out that open source OSes generally favor open source software (that is, systems like Fedora only put open source programs in the repositories).
Or, you could reevaluate your needs, and if possible, not run Windows. Granted, sometimes you have no choice, but most people could get their work done with an open source OS without any trouble.
As I read the article, I found myself thinking, "Why is he using the word 'date' as a verb? That makes no sense at all! Everyone knows 'Date' is a class name, and therefore a noun!"
Slashdot Mirror
Well there is also going to be a shift in the way computers are thought of and used. For example, right now you use a computer like a tool...a very complex, very delicate tool, but a tool nonetheless. A future system that responds to facial expressions would be an entirely different way to view a computer, since your facial expressions aren't very useful for controlling something like a web browser. In that case, the computer, or at least that facet of the computer, would be invisible to the user...
The software currently in use does not involve computationally complex problems, and so the computers appear to have "plenty of computational power." This is likely to be the case for a very long time, but there are useful but complex tasks computers might do. For example, a computer that might interact with its user purely by voice -- more advanced voice and language recognition systems are likely to require significantly more cores and computational power than is currently in wide use. Even more advanced might be a system that can interpret visual data, such as facial expressions. These systems are desirable, but need a lot of work, and won't be widely deployed for a long time (decades at least).
http://www.kde.org/
C++ struck the balance we needed. We could have primitive arrays and function calls, objects on the stack, etc., and also be able to run our code on Windows, Linux, or whatever (remember, we had to distribute this to others). It was embarrassing that, under certain circumstances, we had crashes (for example, if the user hit "cancel" instead of opening a model), but the solution is not moving to another language, it is having a team that knows how to program in C++. The main problem, at least in the bugs that I saw, was that people were not familiar with pointers -- assuming, for example, that an uninitialized pointer would have NULL as its value. I trace the problem to a decision by the university to teach introductory CS courses in Python.
Lest I be accused of being a C++ fanboy, I'll say that I like the idea behind Haskell, and even more being Prolog, especially since I advocate for formal methods. I also like some of the ideas in Ada, especially the strong typing and the numeric range stuff. However, when it comes to dealing with enormous datasets and complicated algorithms that involve a lot of array operations and recursion, I lean towards a language that lets me do dangerous but fast things. Finally, there is the problem of dealing with other people, who may not know obscure languages like Haskell (sorry, but it just isn't mainstream enough for me to assume that the people in that lab would be able to use it).
0. Forgot about HTML in my last post. /., and the format is Microsoft supported. What did you expect?
1. OpenDocument already exists. What good does a second format, based on identical principles, do for the world?
2. OOXML requires the use of patented algorithms, which makes open source developers nervous, especially when a company that despises open source and has an ongoing campaign to kill the open source movement happens to be the patent holder...and happens to be pushing the format.
3. OOXML is exceedingly difficult to implement, giving Microsoft an automatic advantage over everyone else and forcing us to play catch-up (though OOo3 will have native support, IIRC).
4. This is
1. OpenDocument already exists. What good does a second format, based on identical principles, do for the world? 2. OOXML requires the use of patented algorithms, which makes open source developers nervous, especially when a company that despises open source and has an ongoing campaign to kill the open source movement happens to be the patent holder...and happens to be pushing the format. 3. OOXML is exceedingly difficult to implement, giving Microsoft an automatic advantage over everyone else and forcing us to play catch-up (though OOo3 will have native support, IIRC). 4. This is /., and the format is Microsoft supported. What did you expect?
I completely agree with Stroustrup. Too many people these days have little or no exposure to C++, and never learn how programming in the absence of garbage collection works. It is especially problematic in our research labs, where computationally complex problems must be solved with very fast code, but the people writing it get completely confused by pointers and memory management. Worse is when a proof-of-concept is distributed, with horrible bugs and completely incomprehensible code.
Uhm, Microsoft gives away the development tools for Windows Mobile smartphones for free.
Zero exploits in the wild? The why does this website exist: http://www.securemac.com/ ? And why does it list trojans in the wild as recently as January 2008? Secunia lists numerous unpatched vulnerabilities for OS X as of this writing, some of which can be used for privilege escalation in a trojan horse. In fact, the only OS that comes to mind that has literally never had an exploit in the wild (or any really exploitable vulnerabilities in a real-world setup) is z/VM, IBM's mainframe OS.
No, Apple does not want outside involvement in their products, and has not been friendly to the open source projects it draws on for some of its products. If by "give back to the community," you meant, "begrudgingly provide some code to the Konqueror team but never really get it right with OpenDarwin," I guess you would be right. They actively work against third party software syncing with the iPod, and have overly restrictive terms for developing software for the iPhone.
Apple only accepted interoperability and broad third party software because it was on the verge of bankruptcy, not because it is a company that sits on a moral high ground. Apple's strategy, originally, was to keep themselves completely separate, so that buying one Apple computer required you to change your whole infrastructure. This was and remains a failing strategy, and so they modified it so that just enough third party development was possible to keep their systems relevant, but nothing more. iPods only support those formats that Apple chooses (and many iPods cannot be reflashed, because they were designed to only be capable of running Apple's software). iPhones only support some third party development, and developers are required not to step too far from where Apple wants them to be. I cannot build a computer that runs Mac OS X on my own, and it is not likely that Apple will ever allow for this. Like I said, you can construct any number of reasons for these things, but there is no denying that Apple does not want third parties developing software for Apple's platforms.
I cannot speak for the latest version of Outlook, but last I heard, it didn't have much in the way of out of the box x.400 support. Maybe you are thinking of some plugin?
In general, a buffer overflow in the kernel is dangerous. What is it about Apple fans who think that because there are fewer viruses written for their OS, it is not a problem if Apple releases buggy code?
In a business sense, though, Apple isn't so bad off, as a niche company. That they created a niche to fill is an act of marketing genius, of course.
Google's web apps are still unreliable, insecure, and utterly useless for people who need to use their computers in places where there is limited or no Internet access. Google's IM software frequently disconnects, and worse, fails to send messages without even disconnecting. Last I checked, GMail's web interface had no support for cryptographically signed emails, with either S/MIME or OpenPGP (firegpg is not feature complete).
So where is this best-of-breed software you are talking about? I think what you meant to say was, "It is better than Microsoft," in which case I will say, "So is Fedora 8."
For the record, I am not a BSD contributor, but I am a Linux contributor. I was pointing out the problem in the hopes of sparking a bit of work on it.
Now, when I say that Mac fanboys are more obnoxious, it is because they are usually not informed on the issues that they are attacking people over. I was once told by one of them that Apple invented the mouse. When I pointed out that the mouse was invented a decade before the Apple I, 3000 miles from where Apple was founded, he didn't back off...he just shot back that Apple was the first company to attach a mouse to a desktop computer. When I pointed out that he was wrong about that too, he finally looked it up, and then promptly forgot that the whole incident ever happened. Worse than that, Apple fanboys think the world is black and white: Microsoft and Apple. They have no idea that anything else exists or has ever existed. AmigaOS, BeOS, BSD, NextSTEP, hundreds of GNU/Linux distros, zSeries, etc., etc., etc. are not even a part of the world that Apple fanboys seem to live in, with only a very small minority of users who actually know the history of computers.
It gets really bad when they try to talk about security. "Mac OS X" is the most secure system ever made, there are no remote exploits, there are no viruses, there are no bugs, and of course, just having a Mac makes you impervious to any sort of digital attack. I've heard criticisms of security companies for finding that FreeBSD has fewer unpatched security flaws than Mac OS X. The worst I heard was that email encryption and signing must not be very important, because the Mac OS X "Mail" application has no support for it. I wanted to smack the originator of that comment in the head with the largest security textbook I could find.
The fact that nobody has been killed in the Apple "debate" doesn't make the psychological phenomenon any different; people are still accusing each other of bias, still ignoring or not bothering to learn about the history of it all, and still religiously holding to their views on the subject. I've had Apple fans shout me down when I point out that Apple did not invent the mouse, nor did they come up with the idea of using a mouse in a desktop computer, nor the GUI, nor invent the first palmtop, etc. Likewise, when I point out that Ariel Sharon had been held responsible by the international community for the massacres at Sabra and Shatillah, and that by going to the Dome of the Rock with heavily armed guards he sparked the violence of the past few years, or if I say that it is completely out of line for militants in the Gaza strip to fire rockets at Israeli cities, I get shouted down by one side or another. History becomes irrelevant when people become that zealous, and logic becomes thoroughly warped. People start forming their own ideas, and refuse to follow any logical thought that strays from those preconceived notions of how the world works.
I would hope that they aren't. Presidential archives are full of letters sent to and from the White House, and are retained for decades. What makes email any different? These hard drives should be backed up and put in the Bush archive. As Nixon demonstrated, this level of secrecy surrounding the President's actions is dangerous, and the destruction of hard drives sets a dangerous precedent.
Beyond that, there is something to be said for a formal education. I was "self taught" in high school also, and thought that I would be able to handle any problem. I couldn't have been more wrong, and in my senior year of high school, when I began taking real CS courses, I learned things that I would never have grasped without a teacher. The sort of things I am studying now can't be "self taught," because in at least one case I am learning it directly from the researcher who made the discovery. Overall, a formal education not only provided me with new ways of thinking about my majors and related fields, but it also broadened my ability to solve problems, both in terms of scope and approach.
Going directly into trade after high school is a waste of time and of talent. Is college expensive? Unfortunately, yes. Is it worth the expense? Absolutely.
If you RTFA, you will note that this error does not occur in every instance, meaning that this is not a simple off-by-one error, but something much more serious. Sequoia claims that this bug can be reproduced if the operator of the machine presses a valid button, but then an unused button. That is a "logic bomb," and is indicative of two things:
1.) Formal methods were not employed in the design of this software, and so the system was never proved to work.
2.) The product was not tested sufficiently, and the testers assumed that the machine operator would never make an error while operating the machine.
Neither of these situations leaves me with much confidence in Sequoia's ability to design a mission critical system. Sequoia needs to perform a review of its methods of design and testing before they sell any more voting machines, and the governments purchasing these machines need to start demanding that the designs be made available to the public.
In general, what Microsoft has been doing is a combination of using undocumented APIs and formats (both of which have landed them in trouble in court) and strong-arm tactics that ensure Windows remains absolutely dominant in the PC market. It isn't so surprising that their software works better on Windows than competitors' software; a programmer could just call up or shout down the hall and get an answer to an API question within Microsoft, whereas an external programmer would have to read through thousands of pages of documentation. However, the problem is that Microsoft actively works against competitors developing Windows applications, widening the inherent gap. That is an antitrust violation, although the Bush administration has shied away from prosecuting corporations, and it is unlikely that the next administration will press Microsoft any harder.
I wouldn't call the 50% market share of the iPod and iTunes to be "dominance." They are a market leader, but dominance is a bit of a stretch; certainly, they are on a different order of magnitude than Microsoft when it comes to Windows.
Apple is separated from Microsoft in that they have a small market share, and are not using these tactics to maintain their dominance. It is fair to point out that open source OSes generally favor open source software (that is, systems like Fedora only put open source programs in the repositories).
Or, you could reevaluate your needs, and if possible, not run Windows. Granted, sometimes you have no choice, but most people could get their work done with an open source OS without any trouble.
FreeBSD is not Linux. (I had to do it).
As I read the article, I found myself thinking, "Why is he using the word 'date' as a verb? That makes no sense at all! Everyone knows 'Date' is a class name, and therefore a noun!"