dangerous for whom? those people who also believe his nonsense? i feel this is a monumental milestone, and i'll take this opportunity to comment on some of the things gates said.
quote:
Gates said that during other points in Microsoft's history there had been technologies that people said were going to kill the company.
"OS/2 for about six years was that. And it wasn't a joke; it was all of IBM that was 10 times the size of Microsoft putting all their energy, their leverage on ISVs, bundling it with their systems, everything they could do to beat Windows, and we as a company had to learn new things, do new things to respond to that competition," he said.
But Linux is an "unusual kind of competition because in a way it's out there and very pervasive.
VERY good. this will show people linux is to be taken seriously. if gates acknowledges it as a real thing, people will become aware of its existence, and will consider it seriously too.
quote:
In a way, there's more incompatible versions of Linux than there are of all other operating systems put together. That is, as people do innovations on top of Linux, they don't all get tested together and they're not all consistent with each other," Gates told the MVPs.
gets right in there, doesn't he? this is all done for the audience. does he believe this? he sounds like he is commenting on linux three or four years ago. in a way what he says is true, but he misses many fundamental benefits of allowing anybody at all to modify the code. he seems not to understand that by having the code totally open, only the very best versions of any piece of code will survive, because every single person will have the opportunity to acquire and possibly improve on any piece of code. GPL software works exactly opposite to the 'lowest common denominator' method that gates has obviously grown up with.
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As a result, there are things that the free model is never going to do well, whether it is testing or support or innovations where a risk has to be taken across all the boundaries of the different modules.
i addressed this above. i suspect that this might all be for the benefit of the sheeple. maybe he believes it himself, but it's a pack of lies, as i show above, and the only issue is how many people will be taken in by it.
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That kind of testing, that uniformity, is done well by commercial software companies.
is it? give examples. prove that that's correct. you can't, can you?
quote:
As an example,
oh here we go...
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Gates cited the development of the Tablet PC, where there had to be a handwriting group, an Office group and a user interface group, all coordinated into one step.
wait. that's it? how is that showing me that companies do better bug testing and development than the open source community? it doesn't. fixes and patches come faster from the open source community than from companies, software is more stable than from companies et cetera. again, this is all hogwash designed to dazzle the sheeple.
quote:
"It's almost like a 747 where, yes, it's easy to do a wing, it's easy to do a tail, but to produce a wing and a tail that work together under all conditions, that's tough, and that's the position we're in," he said.
he's a moron. it's nothing like a 747! of course, idiots will not see through this total lack of facts and will be taken in, since that's the market he is aiming for.
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Linux today is basically Unix,
linux was written from scratch and has been revised many times since. it is in no way unix although it is source-code-compatible with many unix applications because it uses the same directory structure and GUI.
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what Unix has always been, Gates said, adding that Microsoft has been competing with Unix for a long time.
how? unix has never been a commercial product! he doesn't know what he is talking about!
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One of the things Microsoft has done in response to that was to build a Unix compatibility layer, in its Services for Unix product. "It's really quite amazing because it actually emulates different flavors of Unix, and it's getting richer and richer," he said.
you mean you are as a result of people's amazing ability to dig deeper into their pockets every year for a product they could get for free elsewhere.
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As people move off proprietary Unix systems and onto X86 hardware, they must decide whether to run Windows or Linux.
yes, they must, or maybe they'll choose Free/Open/NetBSD, as many ISPs do, or Sun Solaris, or any of a number of other x86 compatible OSs, including OS/2.
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Microsoft shows those customers what its value proposition is, such as the rich layers and support Windows has, like Active Directory, and management.
this sentence says literally nothing. read it again. i defy you to find any content.
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The real comparison is between Linux with WebSphere and Windows: compare the price, compare the architectural coherence, the richness of the development tools and/or performance, Gates said. "That will be a very dramatic contrast;
yes it will.
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our price is still way lower than what you're going to have to do with those others.
for the first time here, an actual lie. and he was doing so well. nice that he dressed it up in a nice yanky style colloquialism to get you onside so you believe him.
quote:
"So it's great.
wait. you convinced yourself, but i have yet to hear anything with any substance, how is it 'great'? in fact *what* is 'great'?
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There's always been people who thought the Macintosh would take over, that Netscape would take over.
'take over'? it's not about taking over, it's about being better and giving people an honest choice. if you can't compate with that, then fuck you, eat our dust. i won't lose any sleep if you fail to evolve fast enough just like IBM failed to do in the eighties.
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Network computers, remember all those ads and those poor customers who bought those things?
what are you talking about? linux is free. it runs on the same architecture that people already have kicking about. how will they be left with a white elephant simply by using linux? there is literally no loss to be risked by simply trying linux out.
quote:
So we take it seriously. I'm not trying to make light of it. I never made light of OS/2," Gates said.
"or at least never when i thought anybody might have been listening"
i can't be arsed going on. read the article, or save yourself some time and don't.
nice to see it's being taken seriously, even if it is a one sided war. i'm off to get more popcorn, this should be a good show...
