Date: Fri, 26 Jun 1998 09:13:16 -0700 (PDT) From: Tim Gerchmez <fewtch@serv.net> To: simon mendoza <simon_v_mendoza@yahoo.com> Cc: freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG, Rick Hamell <hcg@teleport.com> Subject: Re: How important is "the OS?" Message-ID: <XFMail.980626090857.fewtch@serv.net> In-Reply-To: <19980625160001.28158.rocketmail@send1b.yahoomail.com>
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On 25-Jun-98 simon mendoza wrote: > A few questions to enhaced Tim's discussion: > > 1) have you all read Victor Orwell's "1994"? I read it a long time ago (BTW, I believe it was called '1984' - so what's one decade anyway ;-) Terrifying book. Thankfully, we're nowhere near that state - in fact, the breakdown of 'communism' in the early 90's practically guaranteed us another 30-50 years of avoiding anything resembling the society in the book '1984.' If you start to comment on MS and the book 1984, I don't think the two are even close to related. 1984 involved the world in general, not the world of computing, and although MS is slowly getting into more markets (and computing is getting more popular), they are still basically focused on computers. I don't think MS wants to take over the world - they just want to take over computers (and there's still a lot more to the world than that). Let's not make too much of MS and give them more power than they actually have. That only encourages them to try to gather more power. > 2) Don't you think that the greek theory of "Brutus happiness"(I'm > happy because I fish and eat, the rest I don't care) is against > democracy?(the greeks stated the fundaments of democracy later > developed by the romans) I won't speculate on that one. > 3) Why shouldn't I think that it is "unnatural" to be tied up with > something (be it in the form of an OS or a brand of detergent) and > for get about the "freedom of choice" that prevails in this ever > changing world? In fact, it's very natural. People WANT standards, they want to buy a computer with an OS on it and have it work out of the box, and have every computer store carry software that will work on their PC. That's one reason why MS has managed to gather so much power in the computing world. They have encouraged standardization (their OWN standards, of course, but standards nonetheless). That is what people want, and rightly so. What's wrong about it is that all the standards are tied to one company, and are not open standards, but closed standards. That tends to eliminate competition and encourages monopoly. The world NEEDS a standard OS... but it should be an OS that isn't tied to one company that pulls all the puppet strings. Unfortunately, although efforts have been made in the area of creating such an OS, none have been successful as of yet. > 4) What if it's not UNIX, but GNUOS, BEOS or SARDos, the one that > breaks the MS monopoly? Wouldn't bother me a bit. Anything that breaks the 'monopoly' (I put it in quotes because I don't think it's a true monopoly yet, although it's headed in that direction) and offers people more choice is a good thing. If the world standardized on BeOS, I would probably wipe my hard drive and install BeOS (or keep a dual boot system). *I* want standards too, and I want to be able to find a lot of software for the OS I use the most. > and to end this set of questions.. > 5) did you know that the Roman empire was so successful that ruled the > known world (at that time) but once it dismantled itself was never to > revive? Yes. I can practically guarantee you in 50 years nobody will remember Windows, except as a nostalgic thing of the past. ---------------------------------- E-Mail: Tim Gerchmez <fewtch@serv.net> Date: 26-Jun-98 Time: 08:53:13 This message was sent by XFMail ---------------------------------- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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