Re: Pros, Priests and Zealots: The Three Faces of Linux
|
Posted by Kagehi on 2004-09-27 13:39:32
|
|
In reply to Rob Enderle
|
Having finally decided to sign in to the site so I can post comments (a fact that I find annoying, but is definitely better than the junk you got on /. you talk about), I came across this thread. Man are there a lot of posts...
Well, I am one of those, as you may have noticed, that doesn't use my name. However, a search on Kagehi will turn up someone in Japan (not me) and a scattering of posts made by me, a lot of them at www.gammon.com.au, where I have been heavilly involved with the forums for a piece of telnet client software I use. I have used Windows 3.1, which I always got entertainment from, due to the odd feature that it tended to get more and more stable as new dll version where installed, expect when it didn't, because some other older program ate the new version and replaced it with an old one. I later used 95, which was an improvement, at least once I disabled the active desktop and some of the other integrations, thus freeing up more than 50% of the resources. It was totally unusable on the machine I had at the time with them enables. I later got 98SE and am now typing on a machine that I fully expect not to reboot properly the next time I shutdown, something I have to do because creeping instability has caused it to swallow memory like a leaking bucket. Reinstalling, especially with all the needed patches over dialup, will take me 2-3 days. How do I know this? Because I installed a version recently on our other machine and that is how long it took to get the bloody thing to where it now still refuses to run one MS 98 game, which did run properly on the previous installation of the same OS. Go figure...
I will eventually install XP on mine. Why? Because the 'improved' installers don't work right under WINE in Linux, even though nearly everything once actually installed does, and I have thousands in software I can't afford to replace and are tied to MS like people in the stearage section of the Titanic. Ah, but I meantioned Linux, so maybe I am one of those Zealots..
Not quite. I only got involved with it in the last year or so and since then I installed Fedora on our other machine, since I didn't have disk space for it on mine. I don't use it. I have booted up Knoppix once or twice, but again hardly every do anything with it. I am simply tired of MS telling me I have to buy OS version blah blah, which will fix all my problems, except for the need to upgrade every bloody piece of hardware short of the mouse to run it. Why? Because along with the vaporware I don't get, the bug fixes I do get and the new flaws there comes even less control over the OS, even more things doing stuff behind my back for 'my own good' and 5000 new bugs that didn't exist in the last one. I read recently that MS itself admited that one version of its OS had 63,000 outstanding bugs. What they had time to count, but not actually fix them?
Seriously, from what I understand XP isn't even as stable as 2000 and there are still bugs in it from the days of IE 1.0 and Windows 3.1. This includes the code from some stuff from 3.1. Yeah, maybe the OS doesn't technically use it, but it is still there anyway. The only major improvements seem to be in memory management, which prevents most of the unfixed bugs from causing quite as much havoc as they used to. But the bugs themselves are still there. But I am going to buy it anyway, because unless I want to lose the investment I already may into buying stuff for it, I don't have any other real choice.
Frankly, I would have loved to be an MS advocate, but then I found out about a lot of their practices, which still continue today with being sued over now media player integration, instead of IE and in the near future integration of search functions such as found in Dashboard from Ximian and Novell already, among others, but which 'they' don't feel it necessary to integrate so much into the OS that people won't have any choice but use it. I love how a 10% difference in code between XP Home and XP Pro means a 3x increase (or something like that) in price or how that 10% is merely the deletion of tools that came with all versions prior to XP from the Home edition. It scares me to see them making the new Windows Media Edition and trying to swallow that industry as well and if they ever do start making stuff to go in cars, I am going to start riding a bicycle everyplace from now on. Though how I am going to get on it with the padding and body armor I will be wearing to defend me against the cars whose brakes fail randomly and need to be rebooted every four weeks I have no idea. lol
Yesterday I found this site, which pretty much sums up my own aggrivation and distrust of MS, their anti-"anything that isn't our standard" and general lack of interest in real innovation or quality. In fact, it has made me seriously reconsider if just reinstalling 98 isn't better than letting MS crawl even farther into my life:
http://www.euronet.nl/users/frankvw/rants/microsoft/IhateMS.html
All in all, it is disturbing the number of people who both have used MS products for years, *and* in some cases even used to work for them, I have found recently when hunting for some bit of information who now refuse to have anything to do with them. If I could, I would be one of them. You don't get zealots without one of two things:
1. A substantial reason to hate the target
2. Misinformation and intentional propaganda.
I would be inclines to place most of the Linux zealots in the former, while a lot of MS supporters are in the later. Why? Because as the guy who made the site above says in his site, "Who can possible justify saying their systems that need to be rebooted an average of once every four weeks with 30 minutes of downtime are more stable that the products of systems that are up for literally months and rarely offline for even close to that long?" His answer is simple, people that have spent years convincing them that four weeks of stability and random crashes are 'expected' and know that as long as their three ring circus convinces anyone to buy something, that company is stuck with MS forever. As one of the stuck, I couldn't agree with this assessment more.
Oh.. BTW, why the heck does this comment system eat white space between paragraphs?
|
|
Headline Feeds
