Re: tlug: Can you believe this?

["Scott M. Stone" <sstone@example.com>]

On Thu, 16 Dec 1999 shimpei@example.com wrote:

> You(Scott M. Stone) wrote:
> > > I doubt that MS will ever make a big Linux play, at least not as long
> > > as the OS and the app divisions are a single company.  MS's whole
> > > culture is antithetical to the Unix philosophy.  I doubt they could
> > > make a good Unix product, even starting with an existing Linux distro
> > > (say, buy SuSE).  Their play on Linux would be on the app side,
> > > porting IE and Office to Linux.
> > 
> > But that would be Good Things (IE and Office for Linux).... wouldn't they?
> 
> No. Absolutely, positively, emphatically, no.
> 
> Have you tried Office lately? Every single component of it sucks. And

yes, but I use office 95.  did they make it worse?

> I think I'm qualified to comment on this; I use the damned thing every
> day. (You might be able to get me to start a rant on this topic if you
> provoke me enough at Nomikai, but I suspect people wouldn't want to
> hear it.) As for IE, I might have considered saying it might be a good
> thing *if* they could get it to be more stable than Netscape 4.x and
> *if* they get it out of the door months before Mozilla does and *if*

mozilla barely works and NS4 isn't much better.  We need some kind of good
browser for Linux, and if NS keeps foundering like this, IE will be it,
for all platforms.  I don't like it, but I put functionality above all
other considerations, including OS bigotry :)

> Linux with Microsoftware piled thick on top is going to look, feel and
> act like just another Microsoftware, except that Microsoft is going to
> treat you as a second-class citizen for refusing to use their

well, personally I'd love to run Lotus Notes and Office on a linux box
(and Visio, too) so that I wouldn't have to have an NT4 box on my desk
next to my TL box, but.. I think that advocating a lack of functionality
is bad.  The more ports, the better.  I don't like "linux for the masses",
but most of us geeks need to use Office at some point during the day as
well.

> kernel. Almost all the vaunted advantages of using a free operating
> system is gone when you depend on such a large piece of proprietary
> software--think about all the problems you have with Linux
> Netscape 4.x that you can't fix even if you are the hottest programmer
> on Earth because you can't get the source code; you really want that
> situation to happen with all the software you depend on? What's the
> point of that?
> 

it would still be an improvement over the current situation, which is to
stop using my Linux box and go use my NT4 box to get done what I need to
do.  Besides, even the hottest programmers on earth still haven't fixed
the fscking NFS in the kernel yet, but that's a topic for another
thread...

--------------------------
Scott M. Stone, CCNA <sstone@example.com>
UNIX Systems and Network Engineer
Taos - The SysAdmin Company 

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