Re: What if Panasonic Televisions were free? Like Linux is free.
From: The Ghost In The Machine (ewill_at_sirius.athghost7038suus.net)
Date: 11/06/04
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Date: Sat, 06 Nov 2004 01:00:57 GMT
In comp.os.linux.advocacy, TAB
<trentallenblack@yahoo.com>
wrote
on 5 Nov 2004 14:01:33 -0800
<250669b5.0411051401.2a8a225@posting.google.com>:
> Does Bill Gates pay you to trash this group? You have many posts,
> using flawed logic in each case.
Erm, who are you referring to? This looks like q-ball but you
didn't supply a postheader. I agree that his logic is quite flawed,
though.
>
>> Yet, Linux is free every day of the year and people are still willing
>>to pay money for Windows.
>
> Most did not have a choice. Microsoft contracts required a hardware
> seller, that wanted to sell Microsoft, to pay for a copy of the
> Microsoft OS for EVERY machine that went out the door, whether the
> customer wanted Microsoft or not. Microsoft then goes out and
> destroys the competition with scummy tactics a Mafia boss would be
> proud of.
Yeah, that was fairly clever -- in a stupid sort of way. Now, of course,
we're trying to get out from under the suffocating blanket of such tactics.
Bleargh.
There was also that nice little error message in the beta that got
taken out of the finished product, scaring everyone from non-MSDOS.
And the AARD code. I forget what that was for.
I think the real killer, though, was that, if the reseller sold
any box with any other (or no OS) installed, it invalidated the
contract and the reseller had to pay street price for the OS on
all other boxes, instead of the contract price, which was cheaper.
However, I'd have to look -- though AIUI it was one of the things
called out on the original DoJ complaint.
Guess what most resellers didn't do? :-)
>
> Do you remember Netscape?
> Some of the old DOS competitors?
> Do you think Windows was innovation from Microsoft?
Windows was an innovation of sorts. It's a strange beastie, though;
originally it was supposed to be part of OS/2, but it branched out
on its own and (somehow) convinced everyone, as of Win3.1, that it
was an excellent environment. (I suspect IBM was furious at the time,
and may be thinking revenge now, or at least smirking in satisfaction
while recouping their $1B investment in record time.)
And maybe Windows was, for a time. Unfortunately it went downhill once
Win95 came out. Horizontal scrollbars for file listings on
nonresizable requesters? Ye gods.
Of course it gets even weirder now. One can think of it this way:
Win3.0 was a girl sitting on its parent's shoulders (DOS, OS/2). Cute,
young, and interesting. Her parents divorced shortly afterwards,
or maybe before -- I forget.
Win3.1 got very popular in middle school, edging out, among others,
Desqview/X.
Win95 is a young girl with lots of extra makeup, but still requires
her parent's support for many things. Still fairly cute, and now
very popular.
Win98 has even more makeup. SE2 added a strategically-placed mole.
WinNT is a woman with very similar (but not identical) makeup to
her Win95 sister. However, she's independently minded, and
a brunette to Win98's blondeness, though she still can wear her
mom's (DOS) clothes.
Win2k is a mature woman -- NT grown up, basically.
WinXP is a redhead, and a bottle blonde. Don't look too closely;
your skin will crawl, too. (The woman's skin crawls out, to be
replaced -- and occasionally she has surgery, and invisibly so.
Her suitor, of course, has no clue what's going on, because she
never takes off the makeup.) And now of course she has a dog,
courtesy of BOB. [*]
And she has lots of supporting equipment; she gets flu shots, for
instance, on a very regular basis. Even then, she catches
bugs in her teeth. Or was it somewhere else?
I could go on but I think you catch my drift... :-) On a more
technical level, such things as WinInet are being replaced by
WinHTTP, and RDO was replaced by ADO; OLE was replaced by ActiveX;
drivers seem to change protocols every release, but the
application programs never notice. Hence my metaphor.
(I'd be curious to see if a Linux 1.2-era module would still compile
under 2.6. But it's a largely moot point anyway; modules are
rarely removed from the actual kernel code.)
> What about the VBASIC SDK look and feel.
ObYuck: Yuck.
> Do you know why Sun sued Microsoft over Java?
Was that the suit because of Microsoft's, erm, interesting modifications? :-)
Fortunately, J++ became a laughingstock; it never got past 1.1.4.
(Or was it 1.1.7?)
>
>>Windows is wanted,demanded and used because it is a quality program
>>with professional programs and universal support.
>
> I am still looking for the QUALITY in the software. Support is
> Terrible. Support consists of RE-INSTALL THE SOFTWARE.
Or restore a system image generated from things like Norton Ghost or 'dd'.
How many other operating systems does one know about that suffer so
from a condition usually described as "bitrot"? Ye gods.
>
>>Linux is a pile of hacked together, half done junk that is put on the
>>market while still riddled with bugs.
>
> What you do think Windows is? It is code upon code of junk upon junk.
> It was not designed from the ground up. A ground up effort would be
> the BE OS, which was a fast, smooth OS. Windows has been tested on
> more components so seems smoother. But go and work Tech Support, and
> any time Windows has a problem, which is often, the only thing you can
> do is RE-INSTALL. I have had to re-install my system over 4 times a
> year. Microsoft is the BUG KINGS. They have so many. Remember Word
> 3.0? Released so riddled with bugs, like not being able to SAVE a
> document, that they had the fastest rewrite in history. Was still
> buggy, but livable.
>
> I think that since the Chinese are starting to use Linux, the world is
> going to change.
Hmmm...how many TABs on this newsgroup? You sound like a moderate Linvocate.
Perhaps I need to check the headers of that other TAB... :-)
I'll admit BeOS looked attractive once upon a box; I was a little
sorry to see it hit the old bankruptcy curve and slide off the face
of the earth. I'm hoping it'll come back as freeware at some point,
much like AmigaOS.
(I should have bought the box, if only for a keepsake.)
FreeBSD looks mildly interesting. I've not tried it since 4.6, though.
I don't remember Word3 but I do remember hearing about the 95->97 fiasco.
Haven't had to deal with doc conversions of that sort. (Personally,
I prefer HTML or XML, written using good old vi, viewed using a
handy browser to check for typos and such. However, oowriter
looks workable, except that it doesn't generate style sheets -- but
then I've yet to see a word processor generate style sheets.)
* * *
[*] I have no idea what Linux might look like in this analogy! :-)
However, in Linux, the protocols do not change as much;
fork() is still fork() [there was the vfork() issue some time
back, but that was resolved in '96 or thereabouts].
-- #191, ewill3@earthlink.net It's still legal to go .sigless.
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