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Is Gates' retirement Linux's chance?


aioshin
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The world would be a different place, and arguably, the consumer PC industry would be very different, and nowhere as near as developed as it is now.

I doubt it would have developed any less slowly with the likes of commodore and amiga. What really made the change was IBM opening up the XT ...

As for not shopping at Mc Donalds, Starbucks and Co, that's your choice. I dont work like that, I go where there's a product. I stopped using windows, because I found a product I like more. I'd happily go to starbucks, because I like their coffee, and I dont mind a Big Mac once in a while -- though not a regular thing.

 

And companies underpricing competition? Well why the hell wouldnt they? They sell more, albeit at a slightly lower profit margin, and they make more money, that's what businesses do Gowator, make money. Businesses arent around to be philosophical and moral perfections, they exist to make a profit.

 

The problem is Mcdonalds or Starbucks don't sell at any less profit, they simply have a more efficient supply chain through bulk buying and in most cases owning the whole process which mom n pops coffe house or cafe can never compete with. On top of that they have dirty fingers and pay off local or national polititians to get their product placed where they want it. Once a company becomes big enough to buy governments then what people choose becomes largely irrelevant because the market is controlled by a single company and that company doesn't need to follow the same laws as everyone else.

 

How did the companies end up in the position to undercut competition? They had a good product and it sold well. If linux is good enough to replace windows on the desktop, it will eventually -- if Microsoft dont adapt to combat it. Major changes dont take place overnight Gowator.

Linux will only replace Microsoft when governments intervene ... and stop taking backhanders from microsoft.

It has nothing to do with which is better when one controls legislation .... was Internet explorer better than Netscape ... did people even choose to use it?

However when MS set out it didn't aim to have the internet so it adapted ... but that is not why they presently dominate the market. Starbucks started out with a single coffee house in Seattle and sold decent coffee but it wasn't until they stopped buying decent coffee and started buying the cheapest crap they could in bulk that they really expanded. With a few lucky breaks they managed to get enough to be bigger than everone else then they set about wrecking the livelyhood of any alternative coffee shops ... more or less like MS did with the IBM deal, except they actually stole someone elses work and used that instead, something they have been doing ever since.

 

What all of these have in common is either directly lying to consumers or deliberatly misleading them.

Microsioft started the FUD on linux, McDonalds has been proven to simply just lie as to their ingredients .. Starbucks just has misleading information on their website. Not a single quote from them says what type of bean they use... however analysis reveals they only use the worst kind but dress it up .... perhaps not in the same leage as MS and McDonalds over this ... who have both been found guilty of not only lying to consumers but then lying in court.

 

More efficient is not always better... take Ford .. they are a big company known to havce lied about their products and killed many people through directly hiding design flaws. However Ford are big enough to ride through this .. a small company would not be.

 

Going back the the value of a human life.... Ford have a figure, a very exact figure they use ... $200,000 ..for a product that is likely to kill people and the cost of fixing the risk $11... however its cheaper to kill people and fight costs in court than spend $11 on a car to correct a known design fault.

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Simply put, I have nothing personal against Billy Bob Gates. He's probably a nice enough guy in person. And no doubt, he has given a lot of money to his foundation, and he apparently has intentions of dedicating the rest of his life mainly to running that.

 

There is also no doubt that his company is guilty of costing everyone - businesses, institutions and private individuals - many times more billions of dollars than he will ever donate because of his lousey software and reprehensible business practices. I'm not talking about the original cost of the software - I mean the cost of security software to protect Windoze's tender ass, downtime, lost data, etc etc. Not to mention mental pain and suffering.

 

So as far as I'm concerned, while I won't go so far as to condemn Gates & Co. to burn in Hell with Hitler, he's not gonna buy his way into Heaven either. Too much bad for the good to ever offset.

 

But back to the original question posed by this thread...

Gates leaving will mean nothing to Linux or Apple. And there is and never was any 'Vista window of opportunity'. Linux cannot effectively compete on the desktop until it can 'out of the box' (using Wine, Win4Lin, VMware or similar *which must be included in the installed distro* so those making the switch from Windoze can just install their stuff and go):

 

1. Run all Windoze apps - business, games, whatever.

2. Run any custom IE plugins. Any browser would probably do, but all IE plugins *must* work.

3. Run DirectX and VBS.

 

There is so much custom business software, games and other applications that depend on these things that Linux simply cannot complete at present. Ahh, but you say Firefox wiil never run all IE plugins, and Linux will never run VBS - well, there's the rub...

Until Linux distros can promise to do the above, they'll never be serious desktop competitiors and Linux will never be found pre-installed at your local CompUSA.

I love using Linux and I'll never give it up at home. But until it can do the things listed above it's not for most ordinary users and I'll probably never be able to use it for my office desktops.

Edited by Crashdamage
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That is equally amusing! And I think Godwin was on to something. It seems based upon a logical fallacy in relating an action to a characteristic that is not derivative of that characteristic. For example, both the neighborhood child molester and I buy bread at the same grocery store. Therefore, I must also be a child molester! So goes this particular fallacy.

You obviously didn't read the entire FAQ. I posted it more as a joke, also.

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That is equally amusing! And I think Godwin was on to something. It seems based upon a logical fallacy in relating an action to a characteristic that is not derivative of that characteristic. For example, both the neighborhood child molester and I buy bread at the same grocery store. Therefore, I must also be a child molester! So goes this particular fallacy.

You obviously didn't read the entire FAQ. I posted it more as a joke, also.

Or more poignantly, just because the childmolester|axe murderer|whomever does shop at the same supermarket doesn't mean they are just a regular guy. Indeed most times someone gets caught the neighbours all seem to say "but he was just a regular guy" ....

 

History has already decided for us that Hitler was $EVIL which is why he is always a personification of evil but when he was rising to power enough people believed he wasn't .... and history and PC dictates that we must not discuss all the "good" things he did like trying to give every German citizen the means to work or banning smoking in public places.. We can say of course he wanted all germans working so he could build arms and he banned smoking because it was an external dependance but perhaps he just wanted to look like a nice guy.

 

Who knows, the reasoniong behind Bill's philanthriopy. Henry Ford was a great philanthropist who gave far more of his personal money than Bill Gates, he was also a staunch supporter of Hitler. He approved the publication in his name of "The International Jew, the World's Foremost Problem." However he left a legacy in the form of the Ford Foundation to carry on this good work... and of course he also said "History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today."

 

Perhaps it is this quote that Gates was thinking of when he donated $15 Million to the computer history museum in 2005? Of course this is eclipsed by the selfless giving of $3,000,000 to the Indian Ocean Earthquake funds which is over a $1.50 for every person who lost a home, life or means of production. I'm sure he get a plaque added to the Computer History Museum" for this strirling work , especially if he donates another $15 million!

 

He also doinates to a lot of universities and Im sure that the CS departments are very grateful having their sylabii written for them. It must save a lot of time to have their hisotry of computing module already written for them and thier alternative OS course provided by the "get the facts campaign" ...

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver/facts/default.mspx

 

not to mention all the funding for "independent" IT workgroups who make "independent" papers on how Linux is a cancer.

 

 

Gates leaving will mean nothing to Linux or Apple. And there is and never was any 'Vista window of opportunity'. Linux cannot effectively compete on the desktop until it can 'out of the box' (using Wine, Win4Lin, VMware or similar *which must be included in the installed distro* so those making the switch from Windoze can just install their stuff and go):

 

1. Run all Windoze apps - business, games, whatever.

2. Run any custom IE plugins. Any browser would probably do, but all IE plugins *must* work.

3. Run DirectX and VBS.

 

There is so much custom business software, games and other applications that depend on these things that Linux simply cannot complete at present. Ahh, but you say Firefox wiil never run all IE plugins, and Linux will never run VBS - well, there's the rub...

 

Well exactly, there is the rub.... because MS spends far more money a month than Gates donated to the Indian Ocean earthquake fund just ensuring that plug-ins don't work in other OS's and that DVD playback won't work etc. etc. and encouraging organisations to use VB code that interdepend on each other and force the customer to keep the same products upgrade after upgrade.

 

Incidentally Linux does run almost all Windows apps under emulation or on a virtual machine, just like the Mac so this is not a real stumbling point. However putting vmware in a distro by default is likely to make it expensive and most users just don't need it.

Those businesses which have huge interdependent spreadsheets are not just stuck with Windows, they are stuck with Excel .. and a team of consultants to update the spreadsheets every time they are forced to upgrade.

which can be added to

There is also no doubt that his company is guilty of costing everyone - businesses, institutions and private individuals - many times more billions of dollars than he will ever donate because of his lousey software and reprehensible business practices. I'm not talking about the original cost of the software - I mean the cost of security software to protect Windoze's tender ass, downtime, lost data, etc etc. Not to mention mental pain and suffering.

 

I think Ix sums it up well....

Integrity.

 

Whether one is rich or not is simply a life situation. Whether or not one has integrity is a quality of character. Rich and poor folk can have integrity, meaning wealth is not a factor. Like the rich politicians who decry capitalism but are hugely wealthy from its practice demonstrate a lack of integrity in their criticism, so Microsoft lacks integrity from its so-called "expansion" of technology. If they were really interested in technology, they would have developed the ideas of the companies and people they have purchased over the years. Instead, they made their purchases in order to squelch competition, even though it was a better tech idea. And what they did not squelch, they out-right stole. The company has no integrity.

 

So, I do not like them because they are not the type of organization that I support. If a linux distro were making lots of money, so what? It is the corporate integrity that I look at, and not their financial success.

 

But, in a defence of Gowater, I think he was saying that benevolent donations in and of themselves come from all sources and do not necessarily mean the giver is a wonderful person. Our world does tend to fall into that same sort of thinking, doesn't it?

Yes, that and more.... you just need to look where the donations are going, when we started saying about the cost of a life. Its hard to reconcile that and the $15M given to the computer museum and the $3M to the Tsunami victims. Giving money away just to look good may in fact benefit a few but this in itself simply provides a screen for other activity.

 

This is why the Hitler analogy is relevant. As already discussed, history has provided us with the $EVIL guy but when he was rising to power many common Germans actually found good things in much of his policies and his critics were denounced as anti-German or anti-progress etc. etc.

 

Everything Hitler did was done with the approval or at least non-disapproval of the people. Sure he had opponents but he managed to give himself a good enough image to override their cries and the more pervasive his influence became the harder it was to criticise it until people became dependent upon it.

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IE plugins? you mean ActiveX? that's the one component of Windows that causes so much pain and suffering, and you want to include it in Linux? sorry, but that's :screwy:

 

DirectX is good for games...but as it is owned by MS, it won't really become "free" as in freedom, Cedega implements it but has to license some proprietary libraries. Microsoft MIGHT opensource it...and pigs might also fly.

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aurthur said:

 

IE plugins? you mean ActiveX? that's the one component of Windows that causes so much pain and suffering, and you want to include it in Linux?

 

Yeah, IE plugins. There are probably humdreds of custom-made IE plugins that many businesses (including mine) requre to use various websites, particularly the "real-time intergrated web portal" type sites. These are becoming more common in business all the time, their popularity is just exploding. Quite a few such sites use ActiveX, but even more use VBS, so VBS is probably more critical for using Linux as a business desktop than ActiveX is.

 

Of course, IE, ActiveX and VBS all suck a large one, and of course I hate that Linux needs any such crap. But this stuff is already out there in massive numbers all over th world, so the ability to run legacy Winshaft apps out of the box, IE plugin compatibility, ActiveX and VBS will be necessary for Linux to mount a serious challenge to Windoze. It's just the way it is.

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Or more poignantly, just because the childmolester|axe murderer|whomever does shop at the same supermarket doesn't mean they are just a regular guy. Indeed most times someone gets caught the neighbours all seem to say "but he was just a regular guy" ....

 

History has already decided for us that Hitler was $EVIL which is why he is always a personification of evil but when he was rising to power enough people believed he wasn't .... and history and PC dictates that we must not discuss all the "good" things he did like trying to give every German citizen the means to work or banning smoking in public places.. We can say of course he wanted all germans working so he could build arms and he banned smoking because it was an external dependance but perhaps he just wanted to look like a nice guy.

 

...

 

This is why the Hitler analogy is relevant. As already discussed, history has provided us with the $EVIL guy but when he was rising to power many common Germans actually found good things in much of his policies and his critics were denounced as anti-German or anti-progress etc. etc.

 

Everything Hitler did was done with the approval or at least non-disapproval of the people. Sure he had opponents but he managed to give himself a good enough image to override their cries and the more pervasive his influence became the harder it was to criticise it until people became dependent upon it.

Consider this a second and final warning not to stray into the realms of politics. We don't allow politics outside of OTW for a reason, and I ask that it be respected. If it is not, then appropriate action will have to be taken.

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  • 2 weeks later...

what is all this stuff about linux has to run microsofts plugins and applications etc etc etc.........

 

the glorious thing about the open source world is that we have the chance (hackers permitting) to create new applications smaller better and more efficient, written with higher quality code, that does not break under stress.

i hate all this guff about linux has to run windows anything!!

 

go your own way, do it right (where they have gone wrong), don't immitate, Innovate!

 

ok so microsoft has the market lead now, but if the linux application developers create better, more efficient applications/plugins, then they will gradually take over, and as it becomes more efficient to use linux the people will follow.

 

IMAGINE A TIME WHEN MICROSOFT USERS SAY " WINDOWS HAS TO RUN LINUX PLUGINS OR ELSE!"

 

human beings are fickle things, people would just as quickly leave microsoft, as flocked to them in the 80's, providing the alternative was better in all areas.

 

what linux needs is independent, out of the box thinking (like its originator linus torvalds), create something new and different , BUT MAKE IT SMALLER, FASTER, BETTER AND MORE SECURE.

 

so microsoft developed direct x, active x, etc etc whoopee!

so why can't the open source world develop our own version (not of microsoft subroutines, but linux /unix sub routines), this maybe years away but don't waste valuable coding time trying to imitate that which you all despise, do it different and do it better thats the way forward.

 

LINUX HAS ALREADY COME A VERY LONG WAY IN A SHORT SPACE OF TIME, and if we keep losing the plot in our thinking, it will end up with just a linux version of microsoft.

i know lets make linux run all microsoft stuff and then what, linux with blue screens and fatal exceptions!! no thank you, i want applications written for linux by linux coders.

 

if i want to run microsoft anything i have a spare old machine here for that thank you!

 

oh and just as a by the by, Bill Gates retiring from microsoft would make absolutely no difference whatsoever

Microsoft the corp is its own entity.

and gawd bless him Bill stuck 30 billion dollars into his foundation (which has been doubled to 60 billion by another very wealthy american (who donated 30 billion dollars!!) this according to a news snippet i watched recently will double the charitable donations to 6.6 million dollars a year!

thats a lot of dollars helping the fight against malaria, hiv aids, etc etc

this is a great thing to do, and his foundation is making a huge difference to the world and for that i personally thank the man.

 

still i am reminded of the biblical story about the little old lady who had only a halfpenny, and she gave it to a poor soul who she deemed needed it more than she.

and the millionaire who gave £10,000

who gave more?

 

regards

Reb

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