On Wednesday 14 March 2007 04:03:33 pm Randall R Schulz wrote: > On Wednesday 14 March 2007 14:56, Doug McGarrett wrote: > > ... > > > > I really don't have anything useful to the list to add, but perhaps > > useful to Novell and the developers: I agree 100% with the previous > > writer. If Linux is ever to have a significant proportion of the > > market, it must be at least as big as the Mac market to survive, and > > it _must be user-friendly_ or it will be as dead as CPM and DOS. > > I hear this again and again, but it's absurd. There is far more to > computing that home and office desktops. > > CPM and DOS were never used to run large e-commerce and other Internet > services.
That's because Al Gore hadn't invented e-commerce yet. > Linux will not die for the simple reason that it is absolutely essential > to the likes of Google, Amazon and many, many others. Exactly. Even if it were to stumble and "fail" on the desktop, it will continue to thrive in the server room. Keep in mind - even the many Windows weenies I know have a linux server or two (or a hundred) in their cold rooms. > > I don't really have any idea (nor do I care) what it would take to make > Linux displace Windows or give it a comparable share of users to Mac OS > X. Aren't Linux and Macintosh about equivalent in market share? I seem to remember reading that somewhere. > I don't need anything from Linux that it does not already have in > order to make it invaluable to me in my day-to-day work. Nor does the > continued existence of Windows really harm me. It sometimes makes my > work a little harder, but it's just one among many sources of such > challenges. > > We probably should not want any one operating system, be it proprietary, > open-source or a hybrid, to displace all others. Monopolies and > monocultures have bad consequences by their inherent nature. Bingo! Yeah, it makes things a little easier for lazy programmers, but the end result is lack of innovation and being force-fed something we may not want. > > You claim that Linux's continued existence is contingent upon it > satisfying the needs of non-technical users of computers. That's not > true, nor will Windows disappear any time soon, and that's true > regardless of how brilliantly Linux advances. > > Because Windows will continue to be a predominant OS for a very long > time, I think computing professionals should pressure Windows to get > its technological act together (especially regarding security). And > institutional and government users, not to mention law-enforcement > agencies, should be pressuring (or litigating) Microsoft to do business > in a more honorable fashion. > > Were it not for all those easily compromised Windows boxes out there, > the security and privacy landscape today would be a lot more benign. > Then we could all just choose the platform that suits us and / or our > customers best and let legitimate market forces play their role in > driving the advancement of information technology. Heh - I had to laugh today. While dealing with various comprimises to our Windows 2003 workstations in the cold room, I went to login. I was told the password (currently: p14yp0k3r) to one workstation but it turns out - at least they changed the administrator name from "Administrator" to "supremebeing". Those server guys have one odd sense of humor. -- kai Free Compean and Ramos http://www.grassfire.org/142/petition.asp http://www.perfectreign.com/?q=node/46 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
