Re: Why complicated directory structure in Linux


Matt Giwer wrote:
mydejamail@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Dave Uhring wrote:

If you cannot even perform such a simple subtraction perhaps you ought to
continue to use that Microsfot shitware you used to post your question.

I installed Linux around 93/94 played with it for a few weeks and
uninstalled it.

My first shot at it was Slackware 3.0 in pure text mode and after a stupid
think on my part ...

It was only in 98 that I installed a Redhat 5.2 server

... first got started seriously with RH 5.2 but as a stable home computer
system against windows. Great minds and all.

and even then I never saw much of it because it just performed its job
of serving files without any hassle except with power failures.

If Microsoft is shitware why is Bill Gates the worlds richest man and
in a position to donate more to charity than the combined earnings of
all the pure Linux/Open Source companies?

It is a matter of the business model. Remember first that his father was an
indulgent billionare who bankrolled him. It was an aggressive "who do you trust"
playing off of the IBM connection. Not condemning the strategy.

And when he arrived on the scene a Unix OS cost $10,000 (ten thousand) at a
minimum. I once worked for Softech and they charged $5000 just for a Pascal
compiler in addition to a piece of the action for anything written using their
compiler. Unix had a similar deal for the C compiler.

Not that this was a bad model as there were so few users and the developers and
improvers had to be paid. But when the first million PCs were around that price
model collapsed. (And with Softech is was layed off.)

He simply had a product that served many companies and people when Unix
didn't and Linux didn't exist. Is it a crime for him to have taken
advantage of the opportunity that he saw?

As I was around back when I switched from the Atari 800 to the *** PC AFTER it
was cloned and not a grossly overpriced IBM product I remember it well. There
were serious objections to the PC itself in those days in regard to the chip it
was based on but it remained the best game in town.

There were not problems with Gates in the beginning. He kept meeting the
customer demand with improvements. But there were problems from about DOS 5 when
he started charging $10,000 plus monthly payments to get the documentation on
the internal calls of DOS. NO ONE like me could afford that even though I had
bought the same thing from Atari for $200 years before.

Then came Windows and it was a kludge not a wrapper on DOS. And over the years
to whatever it popular now that kludge non-wrapper has come to pretend to be an
OS in itself and excluded direct DOS style access. Sort of like a DOS window
runs in a chroot.

And then on top of it all Gates betrayed his customers with Digital Rights
Management. Not that the idea is wrong but in doing so he took away
functionality from his loyal customers.

Not to make it worse he also let his OS be extremely vulnerable to outside
attack. Let is the operative word BECAUSE he let vendors change libraries. He
let them be changed at the expense of other vendors whose products would stop
working.

There is a huge list of similar problems which turned people against Gates. I
presume you have your own pet peeveS. Everyone does.

The one that got me to linux was the regular disk crashes where I had to
reinstall and lost everything I had saved if not on backup some place. I can't
believe I was once expert in downloading all programs I used like Qedit in only
one day before getting back on line. I have NEVER had a similar bad experience
with linux.

...

But why should enshrining this concept in a license result in the
coming together of a lot of people who share such a dislike for
Microsoft's financial success? I am sure Microsoft wouldn't engender so
much hatred if they were not so financial successful.

The issue has NEVER been his success. The issue has been the *** product.
The product went downhill as time went on.
...

There is a story about a country which faced a political crisis and
some illiterate guy off the street was picked to be leader. He stood
before a crowd reading a speech and someone in the crowd yelled out
that the paper he was reading from was upside down.

Then the new leader retorted, 'What difference does it make if a
document is held upside down so long as you can read it?'. The whole
crowd cheered.

That is the reality those who consider themselves more knowledgeable
and insightful face in this world. The media know it, the marketeers
know it and so do the politicians, and they all exploit for what its
worth. You might call it cynical but that is the world we live in.


Perhaps Bill Gates should donate a lot of his charity money to the
development of open source software and Linux and that would make a lot
of the likes of you happier.

Who gives a rat's ass what it is called. All the folks from a century ago like
Rockefeller and Carnegi who did the same thing have clauses to hire direct
descendents if they cannot find gainful employment.

I do not have a dog in this fight. I know exactly why I switched and it was the
disk crashes. The same computer, same disk and I had no problem keeping it
running without turning off for a month or two and never had the triennial disk
crashes of Windows.

--
Bush has announced himself as a Christian Zionist.
That means he is a traitor to America.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 3693
nizkor http://www.giwersworld.org/nizkook/nizkook.phtml
antisemitism http://www.giwersworld.org/antisem/ a1

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