George Barca wrote:
High Plains Thumper wrote:
You are correct about disagreement. However, if you follow
their posts, most are less than civil, consisting of nothing
but ad hominem rants and very little toward the discussion
regarding the benefits of Linux compared to other operating
systems.
That subculture is the anti-Linux Wintrolls in this
newsgroup. They are the uninvited guests, whose sole purpose
is to undermine Linux advocacy.
I prefer to talk about Linux, Windows, Microsoft, Apple or
anything comparing them all. Life is far too short to sink to
the level where we behave like animals ripping each other
apart in order to win the battle. Pun intended.
Having perused this newsgroup for the past couple years, most of
the time when I have posted Linux advocacy, have immediately been
followed up with attacks. This is unfortunate. Of those
attacking have been Hadron, Flatfish and nyms (Gary Stewart),
Clogwog and nyms (Rick Mather), amicus_curious (Bill Weisberger),
and a few others. Those attacks have mostly been ad hominem in
nature, not of what I posted but toward the poster.
Most noticeable is when posting Linux advocacy or countering a
troll's FUD, is the immediate revengeful posting of my former
home address, former phone numbers and former ISP, false
references to homosexuality, racial slurs, false accusing others
as my supposed nymshifts, every bit of humanly possible dirt
imaginable.
Flatfish accused Roy Schestowitz of gender transformation,
referring to other advocates including myself of having
homosexual relations with other advocates, ad nauseum.
Those who post about Linux advocacy will be attacked.
For myself I am a Windows user however I have one Linux box
and one Apple box and from where I sit, they all have
advantages and disadvantages.
We all have both used and experienced Microsoft Windows and other
operating systems. This newsgroup charter does not prohibit
posting from a Windows computer, it simply states, "comparisons
of the benefits of Linux to other operating systems." However,
the trolls will attack a Windows using poster posting favourably
about Linux. They also attack posters, for example like DFS, who
accuses the poster of using Windows to support a living during
the day whilst posting using Linux at night.
What do see in the market place however is Linux and Apple
moving forward and Microsoft holding on for dear life. The
financial's don't tell the entire story. Think Enron where one
day things, from the outside, looked great and literally the
next day the company went under. Don't get me wrong, I don't
think this is going to happen to Microsoft in the near future
however I don't ignore the possibility that they are in
serious trouble.
There are I suppose good monopolies and bad ones. A good one was
Cox Industries, who made small displacement model aeroplane
engines. Mr. Cox developed a cost effective method to provide
high quality and powerful engines at less cost than the
competition. This is hence why that Cox dominated the industry
from the early 60's through early '90s. Other manufacturers
including Japanese engine manufacturers could not compete.
One saving grace with Cox was the low cost of their engines,
which benefited modellers everywhere. The suggested retail for a
.020 PeeWee or .049 Babee was around $3 to $4 US in the mid '60s.
Even into the '80s, costs were reasonable, $12 or less.
OTOH, Microsoft artificially kept prices up on their operating
system, even though development costs were well recouped.
Windows XP Home OEM retail is still around $90 US, same price as
it was when it was first distributed. When they had eliminated
the competition with their free bundling of the Office suite with
OEM's, I saw the price immediately go up considerably above the
competition's.
When there was competition, one could purchase among a number of
3rd parties. Quality was better than current Microsoft
offerings. There are still considerable annoyances with
Microsoft products. (Why can't text wrap in Micrsooft Outlook
calendar print out? Why doesn't moving the scroll bar in E-mail
list automatically scroll? And here is a gripe about Windows
Explorer. Why doesn't a search on text show at least one line of
text in the file with key text and the search criteria used when
completed? There are others, but I digress.)
I think the decline of Microsoft to be one of the best things for
competition. Prior to the domination by Windows, there were many
different computer systems and active learning. The home
computing industry provided low cost computers with at least a
BASIC interpreter, which allowed the average Joe to experience
and experiment with a programming language. There were cottage
industries springing up, providing games, business applications,
etc. There were articles on how to hardware hack, improve and
experiment with the systems. Creativity was at a high level.
When Microsoft dominated the industry, first thing I saw go was
BASIC. Now the owner was relegated to user status. Cottage
industries dried up and blew away. Dark ages of computing set in.
Now, Linux and derivatives enable bringing back the creativity
once again. All the software tools are there to experiment with.
For example, one doesn't need $5,000 US in Microsoft Windows
software to run a music home studio as Flatfish once boasted
about. OLPC with Linux gives children a chance to retry software
programming once again, that was taken away with Windows.
--
HPT
Quando omni flunkus moritati
(If all else fails, play dead)
- "Red" Green
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