Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion

How Windows 8 hopes to change everything - and likely not for the better.

<< < (5/6) > >>

Carol Haynes:
The irony is I do sell MS products - but I can see LibreOffice becoming a favourite for my clients! Can't help feeling sheeple power will start to become effective as all these subscriptions start costing more than the electric bill!

Renegade:
The irony is I do sell MS products - but I can see LibreOffice becoming a favourite for my clients! Can't help feeling sheeple power will start to become effective as all these subscriptions start costing more than the electric bill!
-Carol Haynes (October 18, 2012, 09:26 AM)
--- End quote ---

As an MS partner, I've never sold an MS product. I can perfectly understand why someone would, but it's just one road that I've never wanted to go down.

As a developer for MS platforms, I'm willing to abandon it now because MS is simply too much like Apple and Google, i.e. too evil.

Evil on the desktop was one thing back when I didn't really care much about anything... But evil on the Internet now is an entirely different thing. (Yeah, IE and all that, but really... the whole IE thing is small potatoes compared to what is going on now.) Just my own take there and not really any measure of anything.

However, I'm stuck in that MS spider-web, and not fully able to extricate myself from it very easily. I'm simply stuck, and have no real options at the moment. I really hope that LibreOffice does very well, because that would really help me out of my predicament.

worstje:
Win8 is just the latest take on the Active Desktop concept that Microsoft introduced after they missed the internet boat with regards to their Microsoft Network. AOL had something going in those days in the way of being the access portal of the internet (and still has some vestiges remain of that), and Microsoft wanted it. So IE, and that crazy channels feature, it all became a part of Windows. In the EU, they got their arses wiped because they cut out the competition.

Now they're doing it again. I truly hope the EU is on the ball with this one, and won't spend 5+ years coming up with an ineffective 'N' solution. It needs to be a hard 'keep the PC free for consumers; they own the thing!'

Alas. It's dark skies on that horizon.

mahesh2k:
If you like playing with tarrot cards, you will love Windows 8. It's just that you'll have to play with tarrot all the time.

40hz:
Then again, Apple is *nix, but they just wrapped it all in a UI layer. That's what began bothering me about Ubuntu, which seems to be nudging towards Apple-Lite. "Look, it's *nix with a new UI layer and let's start (*currently* optional!) charging for it, and market it as its own OS, and hiding its Linux Roots."
-TaoPhoenix (October 17, 2012, 12:44 PM)
--- End quote ---

Minor technical point which I'll make before somebody else does: OSX is loosely based on the Mach kernal as originally developed by Carnegie Mellon University. Mach traces its roots back to Unix and BSD - not Linux - although certain ideas found in the elusive (and perpetually "soon to be released") GNU Hurd also figured into the mishmash of operating system concepts that ultimately became OSX.

Apple eventually settled on the XNU kernal (developed by NeXT) which was a hybrid based on the Carnegie Mellon Mach 2.4 kernal, elements of BSD 4.3, and some code contributed by the FreeBSD project. Supposedly Apple broke with company tradition and went outside for code when its own development efforts for a "new" OS hit serious setbacks.

Once they had XNU, Apple did some additional core code work, developed a pretty wrapper for the customers, and the rest is history.

This is mostly of interest to technology history buffs. Wikipedia has a pretty good article about it if anybody is that interested.

Suffice to say Linux is a completely different beast, having little in common with OSX and vice-versa. The kernal incorporated into OSX also has zero code in common with the Linux kernal as maintained by Linus Torvalds & Co.
 8) :Thmbsup:

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page