Who to fight

Story: I'm Ready To Pick a FightTotal Replies: 18
Author Content
cyber_rigger

May 25, 2005
7:00 PM EDT
Microsoft isn't the one installing Windows on your new computer. It is the computer SUPPLIERS. It is DELL, HP, GATEWAY, etc..

DELL, HP, GATEWAY, etc are the culprits. They continue to maintain Microsoft's desktop monopoly. I don't care if they sell a gazillion Linux servers. Microsoft is not a monopoly there.

It is DELL, HP, GATEWAY, etc that do NOT offer consumers a choice.

I suggest boycotting these companies that do not offer consumers a non-Microsoft choice.

Linux machines are selling well elsewhere i.e. walmart.com outpost.com, etc.

thanks for listening

Don't get mad at Microsoft. Get mad at the suppliers that don't offer you a choice. Don't do business with them.
dinotrac

May 26, 2005
9:08 AM EDT
>Don't get mad at Microsoft. >Get mad at the suppliers that don't offer you a choice. >Don't do business with them.

Well, right on two out of three, anyway -- one out of three depending on your predilections.

It makes no sense to get mad at the vendors. It's not personal to them, it's all business. That's the way we need to look at it, too.

Don't do business with them is the right answer.

If you're so inclined, you can even drop a note the next time you buy competing hardware, letting them know that you really wanted to buy x, but bought y instead because it offered Linux support and that outweighed any advantages x might have.

But don't get mad. It'll just raise your stress levels and shorten your life.
PaulFerris

May 26, 2005
9:19 AM EDT
But don't get mad. It'll just raise your stress levels and shorten your life.

This part of the comment really hacked me off! Who are you to tell me not to get angry? !? Huh?
dinotrac

May 26, 2005
10:59 AM EDT
Ferris, you just never quit, do you?

You just up a roly-polty little head of steam and then just HACK PEOPLE OFF!!!

You blurry-eyed bitheads, oblivious to the pungent smell of mildew accumulating in your dank little hacker havens, care not one whit for the feelings of others.

NO! NOT YOU!!!!

You see a couple of people having a perfectly civilized conversation and YOU JUST WANT TO DESTROY WHAT LITTLE BIT OF DECENCY REMAINS IN THIS WORLD.

YOU'RE JUST LUCKY I'M SO #%@$!!! HARD TO ANGER!!!!







tuxchick

May 26, 2005
6:03 PM EDT
Now now, my little peasants, remember that how you express yourself is just as important as what you say. If you wish to be heard then you must use "I" messages so you don't sound like you are attacking your listener, like:

"I am really hacked off by your idiotic, unfocused ramblings." "You really piss I off." "If I were a carpenter, and you were a lady, would you marry me anyway, would you have my baby."

See? You can honestly express yourself, and still maintain civilized discourse.
PaulFerris

May 26, 2005
6:48 PM EDT
See? You can honestly express yourself, and still maintain civilized discourse.

You really pulled that one off -- the quote above in the same talkback as a song qoute that idolizes procreation.

You self-contradictory hackers are all alike.

You crouch in the dust of your debating booths, nothing but the sound of new-age folk music and the glow from the lava lamps to guide your way. You come onto this message board and act all smarmy in your heavy handed way, interupt a perfectly sane discourse between the 'trac'd one and myself, and then pretend all the while that you're giving us advice on how best for each of us to get attention.

But I'm on to you now. I see through the wall of pretend honesty and suggestions of spawning processes (say this sentense it like Sylvester the Cat, it's a lot funnier that way). Just remember -- no one uses the I noun like we do, er, something like that -- remember it I tell you!

One day soon (this part is mandatory, sorry) you and your kind will find yourselves debating simple things like whether to use KDE or GNOME. You won't be able to finish the next cookbook because you won't be able to decide. Then (THEN!) we'll see the damage from your contradictory nature.

;) FeriCyde
dinotrac

May 26, 2005
7:19 PM EDT
Ferris --

You pitiful little troll...

Admit it...

You're just hacked off because Tuxchick was able to be more clever than you even when using a lame 60s semi-folk-song reference.
salparadise

May 26, 2005
10:58 PM EDT
"There must be some way out of here," said the user to the geek, "There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief. Billy Gates, he drinks my wine, Apple dig my earth, None of them along the line know what any of it is worth."

"No reason to get excited," the geek, he kindly spoke, "There are many here among us who feel Linux is but a joke. But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate, So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late."

PaulFerris

May 27, 2005
1:18 AM EDT
salparadise: that's awesome -- Hendrix.

Tuxchick: You know what I said was a compliment.

Dinotrac: As usual, you're just replying to demean my stature. I am not a "little" troll -- got it?

I'm just a troll, and I'd rather not be... resisting the urge to paraphrase no-doubt. Done.
tuxchick

May 27, 2005
2:24 AM EDT
No one heard me cry not even the chair
dinotrac

May 27, 2005
2:57 AM EDT
Paulie -

So sorry. Big troll.

Tuxchick --

As Yoda might say, "So impressed by you I am, I cried."
dinotrac

May 27, 2005
2:58 AM EDT
Paulie -

I almost forgot...

Did you know that we acquired a new (stray) dog last fall. A chihuahua. Weighs 7 pounds.

Big chihuahua.
helios

May 27, 2005
4:19 AM EDT
'scuse me, while I kiss the sky.

helios
tuxchick

May 27, 2005
8:51 AM EDT
Getting back to the original topic (sorry, but I have an actual on-topic thought) -- Back when the DoJ first started going after M$ (boy howdy, them DoJ pitbulls sure taught Gates and Ballmer a lesson) (yeah right) the blindingly obvious avenue of investigation was (and still is) collusion between M$ and hardware vendors. Not just PC sellers, but everything- printers, scanners, expansion cards, the works. Not for even a nanosecond do I believe that hardware manufacturers are cannily waiting for that magic level of demand that would make it worthwhile for them to support Linux- that's just code for "we don't want to piss off Microsoft."

They don't even need to write the drivers- just supplying specs and test units to the existing giant horde of Linux driver developers would do the job. But the reluctance of so many of them to do so is quite obviously ph34r of the Evil Empire. Criminy, they act like Linux users want to abuse their virgin daughters or something.
alc

May 27, 2005
10:37 AM EDT
"Criminy, they act like Linux users want to abuse their virgin daughters or something."

Given the choice between their daughters being abused by crazed linux users and losing MS money,I have to wonder which choice they'd make.So far,it doesn't look good for the daughters.
PaulFerris

May 27, 2005
11:11 AM EDT
tuxchick: on the mark. Microsoft could make life similarly difficult for them, just as they do ISVs -- change an API call just to break a driver and maybe a whole series of printers suddenly doesn't work as good as it used to. This is a terrifying thought -- users won't know the difference between a bad printer and a bad printer driver -- it's all the same to them.

I'm reminded of a reversal of this from ancient experience (1996, to be exact) when NT 4.0 started shipping and clueless salesmen (yes PM, I'm talking about you) were selling NT into Unix manufacturing shops that needed honest to goodness vector plotting. Guess what? NT 4.0 by default had no ability to talk to anything but raster devices.

Do you think the end-user of the services understood?

You could buy say, and HP pen plotter (or ink-jet which emulated pen plotting) and hook it up, but if your software didn't know Windows printing you were screwed (Read: it was lame, because printing a roll-sized, 36 inch wide CAD drawing via raster means about 40-120 meg of traffic to the device, versus say, 120k of vector pen plotter commands, which transfers and provides just as pretty of a picture). Guess what -- I was supporting as a systems engineer, HP's CAD system, which rocked.

Usually.

In this case, it sucked -- because the printer drivers for Windows NT 4.0 were raster only. This was before a 3rd party stepped in and wrote a set of drivers to fix the problem.

Do you think the customer understood any of this?

No. It was my fault (they of course had the trial for this judgement sans myself). I was able to get the plotter to work, after 3 days of hair-pulling -- in a broken sense. Slow as molasis in January, plotting only to the center of the page regardless of how the check-boxes were picked. Top it all off with the fact that the SMB traffic on their network was aweful and you have a recipe for disaster.

Oh, and NT 4.0 was as stable as a tea-cup in an earthquake.

End-users don't understand Microsofts tricks -- things either work or they're junk. Microsoft can make them junk simply by changing an API in a DLL to their whims.

Don't think they would do this? Go and study some trial data from say, 1995, and look for yourself. It won't take long to draw the conclusions, because they've provided ample historical data to support this.

Contrast all of this cloak and dagger BS with the ability to simply look into the source code any time you want. It's going to be somewhat tricky, but I think it's not beyond the realm of possibility that we can still see some open-ness in the hardware sector, long term.

After all, the rest of the Linux-using world will eventually need to buy hardware.

helios

May 28, 2005
3:39 AM EDT
they act like Linux users want to abuse their virgin daughters or something.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

helios
AnonymousCoward

May 29, 2005
7:43 PM EDT
alc: a lot depends upon the daughters' definition of "good".
peragrin

May 30, 2005
2:50 AM EDT
That is MSFT's position now. They are actually vulnerable to companies that are willing to saw fsck off MSFT. take http://www.pchdtv.com/hd_3000_right_down.html they can give you windows drivers but don't expect support, or for them to even work right.

As more and more companies realize that there is a way out of the mess, licensing issues, and prices of MSFT certified they will take it. Slowly at first.

Longhorn is doomed to die. to many features have been removed for nothing. it is going to be windows XP SE while windows XP will turn into XP.b with half of the back ported features of xp SE.

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