[ShadowAce]

Long article, but a good read

[snowrip]

How is an untouchable superpower defeated? In many cases, it foolishly engages itself in an unwinnable war and simply consumes itself.

Wrong. To lose, the superpower must allow the politicians to fight the war, bow to the idiocy of liberal political correctness, and hang the soldiers actually fighting the battle out to dry.

[ShadowAce]

[TChris]

IBGE!

[GingisK]

I often look back upon the times before there were PCs. There were all sorts of computers and operating systems. There were the "main frames", mini-computers, and the microcomputers. Ah, the Cray, TI ASC, and the like. Innovation was common and exciting. These were all different and fun. A trip to the National Computer Conference was like a trip heaven. Now every booth in the shows just shows another version of the thing in the next booth.

The PC really killed the general innovation of the computer industry, and Microsoft clogs up the development of decent, fun-loving software.

[Sergio]

I heard that Novel HQs in Salt Lake City, have switched to UNIX for all of their desktop PCs.

I’ve been a Windows user since Windows 3.0 but Windows Vista is the reason my next PC will be a Mac.

[theFIRMbss]

>As Microsoft begins waging its all out war against Linux

Yeah, you know, women
are not going to "wage war"
against those weird guys

who dress in girls' clothes.
There's little chance those weird guys
will eat away at [!]

serious numbers
of the men that women want.
Linux is like that.

Microsoft doesn't
have to "wage war" against it.
It's just fringe weirdos!

[lmailbvmbipfwedu]

ping

[TexasRepublic]

When asked by Fortune whether Microsoft would ever seek to “sue its customers for royalties, the way the record industry has,” Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer answered, “That's not a bridge we've crossed, and not a bridge I want to cross today on the phone with you.”

The only thing Gates and Ballmer lack as gangsters are the machineguns.

[cameraman]

I'd say that the article and all of the posts here are from the "geek" perspective(I consider myself to be part of the "geek" crowd). I see the whole thing as closley related to the BetaMax vs VHS argument years ago where the better product went down to its' less expensive competitor.

One of the questions I am often asked is "What is Linux?" I usually respond "It is an alternative to the Windows Operating System", to which the next question is "What's an Operating System?" The consumers who make up a large part of the computing market, don't care and simply want to push a button and have it all work. They ask me if they should buy a Mac and then ask "but will my Word work on it?" It is painfully obvious that most of the computing world is unable to differentiate an OS from an application, who makes what, or which files will be compatible with what programs, and sometimes don't know what a file is!!!

My point is that what ever option is less both in cost and time spent learning a new computing environment will be the winner. Microsoft still has control of both of these criteria.

[Golden Eagle]

So much for your supposed white knight. From today:

IBM Sees Software Producing Half of Profit by 2010

http://biz.yahoo.com/rb/070517/ibm_outlook.html?.v=2

[HAL9000]

Conceptually, this new framework has a lot in common with Apple's Cocoa frameworks in Mac OS X. The main difference is that while Apple has made no effort to offer an open specification for third party implementations of Cocoa (the way NeXT earlier opened up its predecessor under the name OpenStep), Microsoft has submitted portions of .Net technologies to the ECMA standards body.

That paragraph might give the impression that .Net is available as an open specification, while Cocoa is not. In fact, Cocoa is an updated version of OpenStep - and all of OpenStep is available in open specification, while Microsoft has submitted "portions of .Net" to a standards body. Many Cocoa applications can be ported to GnuStep, particularily since the default compiler for the Objective-C language used with Cocoa on Macs is GNU's GCC compiler - the same one used on Linux for compiling C and C++ code.

I might add that the .Net frameworks are merely a thin wrapper for the antiquated WIN32 APIs.

[Constitutionalist Conservative]

Microsoft's Unwinnable War

Quagmire!