Re: The threat to our national security
On Fri, Jan 23, 2004 at 05:36:33AM -0600, ABrady wrote:
>
> I still contend they aren't after money any more. They're after
> domination. Most of their products lose money. The ones that make any
> make obscene amounts to support the losers. It would mean more to the
> market if they dropped the losers than it would dropping the server.
> They won't do either because it doesn't fit their goal of owning it all.
Well, they're after domination, *because* they're after money. Rich
People Are Different -- They Have More Money (Hemingway).
You can't quite appreciate what it's like to work for the richest
company in the world until you've done it -- even though I don't have
much money. Power is my trip. My advice to all of you -- work for the
place with the most money. There's truly nothing like having gobs of
cash at your disposal -- not as a mere possibility, but as an actuality.
'Nuff said.
The struggle at Microsoft now is choosing what to monetize and what to
give away free, in particular with free web services like Messenger and
Hotmail. They'd give their left nut to get you on a $35/month
subscription like Timewarner.
> I tried linux for a few months way back (Redhat 4.2) on the only machine
> I had in the house. It was a Compaq laptop with no CD drive, no
> networking, no floppy and a hokey parallel-port SCSI emulator with a ZIP
> drive attached. It was difficult to get linux onto the machine because
> the phony SCSI "card" was so buggy. But I persisted.
It took me one month to get fonts, drivers, and eye/ear candy going.
4 months to learn how to program (and I was a C programmer in Windows --
I had read-only access to the NT code base and built bits of it -- and
believe me, Microsoft doesn't use Visual Studio to build Windows. Lots
of perl scripts, everything's command line and unixy -- xcopy deployment
-- no registry or GUI -- in fact the very opposite of the model they
sell. Funny huh.
> I think in all of that time I needed 2 programs that I couldn't find in
> linux. They were around, I just had trouble locating them. I've learned
> to be a little more persistent in seeking these things now because I've
> yet to find anything I need that wasn't available in linux already
> (YMMV).
Stuff I do on my XP partition:
* Games
* My resume
* My taxes
* The rare website I care about that just refuses to play nice
(fortunately this is extremely rare, all my online banking and 401k and
investment and things like that work great in Linux).
* Tivo-ish stuff (Creative Videoblaster, shoulda bought the Hauppauge)
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