Return of the ’70s Weirdos

"If it wasn't for UNIX, there would be no internet."

The Internet was around almost a decade before the first line of UNIX code was written and it didn't turn into what we have now until the first *WINDOWS* browser client was released.


"The current age of computing exists despite Microsoft, not because of it."

Microsoft Servers are now outshipping Linux by almost 3 to 1 (Odd since Linux is free.) and UNIX by 10 to 1. Or to put it another way Microsoft Servers are outselling all other competition combined 2 to 1. The Web runs on Microsoft Windows Server.

http://www.gulfnews.com/BUSINESS/Technology/10193779.html


"On the other hand, if there were no Microsoft, there would be no one pissed off enough to write Linux :)"

Linux was initially released in 1992, the same year as Windows 3.1. Linux has less than 2% market share on the desktop (Odd since Linux is free.). Even combined with Apple they still make up barely 6% of the total market.

Pissed off people will write anything - look at your own foolish comment as an example. The fact is nobody seems pissed off enough to use it...now that is proof.

"If it wasn't for Microsoft we would still be in the stone ages"

If it wasn't for UNIX, there would be no internet. If it wasn't for Linux, there would be no Google.

Proof: Google is an application that runs on an OS. Google's application is a competitor to Microsoft. Microsoft must crush Google. Microsoft cannot affect Google because they do not run their servers on Windows; they run them on Linux.

Google was followed by YouTube, et al. The current age of computing exists despite Microsoft, not because of it.

So, thank Linus, Alan Cox, Sergei, Larry, and all the others who dumped the Microsoft model and made your life better.

On the other hand, if there were no Microsoft, there would be no one pissed off enough to write Linux :)

The only thing cuter would be a reunion of neocons in 20 years, on top of a pile of smoking rubble.

paul allen is one smart ape

Funny. I don't see either picture showing any spirit. Maybe the spirit of a box of rocks.

Let's face it. Bill Gates & Co. have persued and conquered the American Dream. More power to them. Oh well, sucks to be you wishing you were them!

Ken = Microsoft Troll

Seriously- how can you make this crap up and continue to live with yourself? Microsoft has bought or stolen every "innovation" they have ever had from Unix/Linux, Sun, Xerox, Apple, Borland, Adobe, and a whole alphabet soup of other companies and people. Vista is a blatant rip-off of OS-X and Gnome, and doesn't work close to as well as either of them.

I recently made the mistake of upgrading my company to Exchange 2007. What a piece of crap that is. Funny though- almost everything practical you have to do in it requires the use of the COMMAND LINE- what an innovation that is! It's a good thing I have so much command line experience running Linux, although most Linux scripts I run aren't nearly as buggy as Microsoft's.

Linux has been around for over 15 years, yet they literally can't give it away.

Bashing the Microsoft IDEs just doesn't make any sense. Love them or hate them they are those most developer intune platform company in the world.

Silverlight has been around for less than 18 months. The early adopters besides the 2008 Olympics are the NBA, MLB, HSN, the Emmys & Entertainment Tonight and the WWe.

iPhone rejected Flash, they needed innovation so they collaborated with Silverlight. Nokia likewise is rolling out smartphones and other Symbian OS devices that are running Silverlight out of the box.

As with .Net, Linux developers have jumped in head first to get their hands on this innovative technology with the MONO-like Moonlight project and Microsoft will be helping them along.

By the end of this summer the number of Silverlight enabled PCs and handhelds will rival the install-base of Flash - if not surpassing it. You can hate all you want but that is innovation. I expect Flash to be open-sourced by 2010 and AIR probably three years later after being bought by a startup with deep pockets and still failing to take hold. The first apps you will see from that open-sourcing will be Flash/Air to Silverlight converters.

So don't forget what we have talked about back here in 2008. ;-}

Have a great week!

I was the software manager for an early home called the "Compucolor". We had an intergrated floppy, VLSI crt controller we got TI to make for us when Apple had some TTL they put together in a garage. Who could have thought?

Anyway, we bought Bill Gates BASIC from him. I read his code, he was a great programmer, MUCH better quality than others. But when we became a customer, he met Dr. Whitten, who had just gotten his PH.D from Harvard in math, out software leader. Long story short, he took the money we had just given him as a customer and gave it to our employee to come to work for him...

SOB

There's too many 'geeks' who remember what the frontier of computers and OS systems (Amiga anybody?) and even pre-www... when we had local guys running BBS out of their basements.

Don't try to BS us. Microsoft wasn't the second coming that you proclaim it was. They ripped off EVERYBODY on their way to market domination. They had more ruthless business acumen. That's all.

To: ken

You are wrong in so many ways it is impressive how you could amass such a collection of misinformation in one place.

Dev tools: Borland's Turbo C, Pascal etc. were rulers of dev tools for ages before Microsoft had anything beyond simple command-line tools. The reason they were able to "steal the thunder" when it came to Windows dev tools was that until they abruptly withdrew from the collaboration, they were telling everyone that OS/2 was the future and the true successor to DOS.

APIs: Windows API was a joke compared to the power provided by X11 for years prior to the first usable Windows, i.e. 3.11 - heck you could make better-looking programs in DOS using Turbo Pascal plus Turbo Tools. Most "innovation" in Windows came from their participation in OSF during the development of MOTIF. But feel free to think point and click is the same as programming.

That "Web 2.0" was pioneered by Microsoft is also a joke (it was pioneered by sites like MySpace). That they insisted on creating a Windows-only Active/X control instead of implementing XmlHTTPRequest is just another NIH-ism from them. Have you forgotten that Microsoft tried to "reinvent" Compuserve with their first attempt at making something called MSN back when everyone else were using the "real" Web?

And Silverlight shows - again - that Microsoft is the eternal follower, makling the "second implementation" of whatever some other company has innovated.

@ken
1. The Windows API brought DLL hell to the masses. Most technologies available in the recent Microsoft OSes were available thousands of years ago in *nix OSes. I mean, a "modern" network stack, filesystem, etc.
2. In the 90s, Microsoft tried to ruin what we today know as the Internet with their "Microsoft Network" initiative, and failed. And today, Internet Explorer's implementation of technologies like HTML, CSS, etc are intentionally broken, to break compatibility with other browsers (i.e: making pages look bad when not using IE).
3. Windows is built on the top of stolen ideas: Xerox PARC's GUI, 86-DOS Operating System, etc. They even steal small ideas like the location bar stuff seen in the common dialogs in GNOME that mysteriously appeared afterwards in Vista.
4. Silverlight is the result of another yet bruteforced reverse engineering effort to replace a existing, working and effective technology like Adobe Flash. The only problem with it is : nobody is using it. Most Microsoft sites are still using Flash, why should we use Silverlight then?

If it wasn't for Microsoft we would still be in the stone ages. The development tools alone pushed the limits of what developers were able to do far beyond anything yet on the market. The Windows API made building software for the masses possible. Something *nix crowd still can't do.

If you want to give them credit where credit is due then thank them for making "Web 2.0" possible a decade early, who knows where we would be if Microsoft hadn't created what is now called AJAX back in 1998. The XMLHTTP object was as big a catalyst for Web 2.0 as TCP/IP & Mosaic were over a decade earlier.

Now with Silverlight you will see a shift to a new platform once again spearheaded by Microsoft. Over the last 12 months they have blown anything Flash ever did out of the water and AIR is already a lame duck second option that will only be adopted by zealots.

The entire world will be on Silverlight as it is the *ONLY* platform that will be streaming the 2008 Olympics live on the web. Once again Microsoft has pushed the envelope and created a new platform that will connect the world.

Your welcome.