[ Deliberate top posting (;-)]


Stumbling around the web, I've found that I've been preempted in summarising Microsoft.


http://www.hevanet.com/peace/microsoft.htm

... I think gives a fair history and appraisal of Microsoft's OS products and practices. It is backed up by various news articles and other articles.

Included is (amongst many details) a very plausible explanation as to why perfectly good systems will or will not crash (hard coded resource limits).

Also, amongst the various (likely deliberate) 'feature' problems detrimental to the paying users, I had never realised that there's now been 12 years of litigation against Microsoft for various bad practices.


Interesting stuff fundamental to a large percentage of our IT infrastructure.

Consider and judge for yourselves.

Regards,
Martin



Martin wrote:
[...]

(However, windoze introduces enough randomness and inconsistency to
confound everyone.)

Despite all the anti-MicroSloth hype, I've never had any real issues with
Windoze.  [...]

The 'MicroSloth' stuff works well enough initially if you are happy to work in exactly the way expected of you. However, try to do something slightly different to their 'way of working' and you soon hit time consuming or expensive problems.

(Warning: Rant mode on!)
The early days were good for their hard sell tactics driving down the cost of software. However, [...] There is a good argument that they have slowed the advancement of computer science to the detriment of all due to their ferocious marketing and everyones' resultant miss-directed efforts.

And I'm losing about 20% of my internet bandwidth due to MS Blaster pings (92 bytes long), and then the CPU time and log file space to drop them. (That's a lot of blasts per minute (:-((

(Rant off.)

The various OSes have their place. However, dubious monopolistic practices have severely skewed the overall picture.

[...]

I spent some good time configuring/securing a recent Windoze installation. Ofcourse, I was forced into using multiple third party software to try to patch over various glaring deficiencies. There is also the problem still of incompatible doc file formats/versions between on site and other companies off site... Users just hit 'save' or 'send', they have no concern about propriatory non-backwards compatible formats...

Linux is expensive in other ways, but in my opinion it is far more elegant and robust a solution that is _useable_.