Maybe instead of focusing all of your energy on bashing microsoft, you could
instead focus on something more constructive like looking at the features
Vista, IE7, .NET, and Office has that open source products do not have, and
Nkay..
Vista has DRM, a shiny new theme, a new graphics processor which eats
80% of the CPU without doing anything, DRM, a £200 price tag, and an
awful lot of marketing. Oh, and desktop search.
All of these are in some sort of Linux (apart from DRM, which I'm sure you could put in if you really
wanted it.) This is because Vista is a pile of overmarketed, poorly
managed, barely-changed crap. Look at the difference between Ubuntu
Dapper and Debian Potato/Woody, and then at the difference between
Vista and XP, and you'll see you're talking rubbish (I'm being nice
with the language here.)
IE7 is merely an attempt to catch up with Firefox, as is blatantly
obvious from the GUI design (did someone say, six months ago, "this
looks too much like FF, let's sod it up"?), new features etc etc.. most
of which appear to focus on ineffectually patching security holes which
didn't even exist in Phoenix.
.NET is implemented, as much as is important, in Mono, and the rest is being done now.
Office... well, admittedly it has a superior featureset, but there's
still the matter of a mere £300 and a hundred megs more than OOo2.
Here, I will go the FSF way and say that yes, openness, ODF and freedom
is more important than a few features which, if they are not in OOo2,
or planned, it appears nobody wants/uses anyway. Perhaps if you filed a
bug report (you know, actually helping) asking for these features they
might be implemented? You could even implement them yourself; you
certainly are not permitted to do that with Microsoft's bugware.
do the things that need doing to add them as features requests at the right
project. For example, automatically adding route weights based upon interface
speeds as mentioned in a previous post today.
Why don't you do that? Are you too lazy? Has it occurred to you that the GNOME developers are not psychic?
Because while you're in your little hole preaching about how amazingly rubbish
[3] Microsoft's products are (and, of course, the obligatory "Microsoft are
SOOOO evil" .. make sure you get that SOOOO bit right, just like Vicky
Polard - sounds much more amusing), they're busy finalising their next
generation of products to blow OSS out of it's way for desktop (and possibly
even server) users. oops.
While you're in your little hole preaching about non-existent
improvements of Microsoft's software over open-source equivalents,
Microsoft are readying their DRM, their
backwards-compatibility-destroying software, their massive hardware
requirements, draconian license agreements and their ludicrous pricing.
Vista has now been delayed to January - Linux has all of the features
promised by Vista in 2004, six months before Vista won't have most of
them. As for servers, yeah, right... (make sure you get that yeah right bit right, just like Vicky Pollard - sounds much more sarcastic.)
I believe shoehorns can be useful in extracting one's head from one's arse. Or perhaps a little reality-awakening, hmm?
