Gee, Bing looks, well, rather familiar...

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@ Avarice:
My claim that Windows 7 was influenced by OS X is based on another post I saw on this site. As for everything else you just said, I feel no need to argue with it as it only affirms what I said.

"Software is like sex. It's best when it's free."
- Linus Torvalds

But seriously, if you want to pay $700 for a piece of software rather than get an application that is just as good for free, be my guest. It's still stupid, though. People can do good things without getting paid to do it. Haven't you ever heard of these things called charities?

Of course Linux was never meant to be a consumer desktop OS for the masses. Linux is a kernel... duh.


huh? You seem to be under the misinformed view that Linux is a single OS that competes towards windows. When it is in fact a kernel used by many operating systems, some of them are meant to compete with windows and some are not.



No, it is free because it uses the software as a service bussiness model instead of the obsolete software as a product bussiness model that Microsoft uses.



No, it makes it BS. It makes it awful. It makes it non-customizable. It adds lock-in. It is expensive on the long run.


Most ubuntu users don't program.


Bing is still a MS product so it should drop and die and leave the rest of the world alone.

Even if ubuntu was a fad. It is not the only competitor windows has. And it wouldn't make Microsoft any less of the piece of bull that it is . That awful company that has ruined computing thanks for removing competition in the Operating system market (and no competition means that we users are screwed up as well). No OS for desktop really is worth what MS charges you for windows. Also, if you are ret*d and like windows go ahead. But MS still stinks for ruining everything. I do not use windows in neither of the two laptops I purchased last year , yet I am FORCED to pay a windows license. That is stupid and anti-consumer. Anyone who does not agree that such situation stinks and that MS should be bashed and punished for the rest of its life for it should really shut up for being so stupid... Why the HELL do I have to give $$$ to MS for software I AM NOT GOING TO USE?

And they do ruin everything they touch. They just recently ruined non-ipod Mp3 players by making up a whole new "standard" that sucks even more than ipods and their itunes... Those players have become windows media player-only and are un-interoperable with anything else. The times in which you could just drag and drop mp3 files to your player are over all thanks to Microsoft.

Microsoft should drop dead, really.


BS, this is the same old stunt that misinformed people keep throwing out... Sure people can do good stuff for free, specially in cases when they are simultaneously users and developers of the software. For major open source software, people do get paid for it. A major proof that open source and quality are not only non-mutually exclusive but actually completely compatible is the firefox web browser for its outstanding quality.. As that BS word 'bloat' which geeks use when they really can't find any real complaint about something is the only attack you see towards it. It is fully customizable. Standard-following, fast. Good quality and already mainstream. Not to mention Chromium which is another open source browser that is also incredibly fast. The many open source operating systems like Ubuntu which are already friendly and succesful with mainstream users are also a good example of quality. The open source aspect of it means there is a lot of people doing maintenaince.

well, who cares? It is not bloated nor slow NOW. And if it does, thanks to open source someone will fix it or ultimately make a derivative OS that isn't.


You seem to ignore the fact that C# started as a windows-only Java clone called Visual J++, it was later that they renamed it to C# and added it to .Net. But it is still mostly a Java clone plus a bunch features for moron programmers that care about masturbatory features such as operator overloading and a faux functional programming that does not quite work as well as true functional languages but allows faux coders to call them-selves mathmagicians due to them using C#... Oh well, there ARE major differences between C# and Java... C# is locked into MS-only platforms and is much slower than Java.




--
Oh and ubuntu's license is not the GPL. Ubuntu brings a lot of proprietary stuff and drivers. Please do not confuse ubuntu (A gnome-based Operating system that uses the Linux kernel) with Linux (a kernel that is used by many different operating systems and devices)

Well, for one, I am not the one who started just another Microsoft-bashing topic just to get some love from the many Linux-loving geeks that lurk on here. You don't want to search on Bing? Fine. Use Google. Use Yahoo. Hell, use AOL's search engine (it still exists)! Enough! My ship sails in the morning!

I wonder what's for dinner?

.

Really? I didn't actually know that...

But programming languages are hardly my specialty, I can't do much else but some very basic C.
_________________________
#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
printf("I fail.");
return(0);

}

________________________

Or something...

I just spent an evening cursing the abomination that is Windows Server 2008 R2 (AKA Windows 7 Server). I have in the past struggled with XP and Vista as well. To me, it is Windows that is limited. Anything you try to do screws up the whole system (in Vista even trying to right-click froze up the system) and it is impossible to get anything productive done in the miserably counter-intuitive, convoluted excuse for a user interface.

The only problem I've had in Ubuntu lately is some fussiness in dealing with embedded Youtube videos, and that's easily circumvented by just going straight to Youtube. Besides that, the problem is in the proprietary plugin, something over which Canonical has no control.

Remember,
Mac is for people who don't want to know how their computer works.
Linux is for people who want to know how their computer works.
DOS is for people who want to know why their computer doesn't work.
And Windows is for people who don't want to know why their computer doesn't work.

Windows is a useless mess. It persists because of inertia, vendor lock-in, and monopolistic practices. On its own merits, it is nearly impossible for Windows to be taken seriously.

Did you know General Electric has been trying for years to ditch Microsoft? They would be using OpenOffice if not for the fact that the obfuscated proprietary file formats prevented some of their Excel files from opening properly. Of course, this was back in the 2.x days of OOo... I bet the files would all open if they gave it another shot. And when MS comes asking them for more money, you can bet they will give OOo another try. The only reason they keep Windows around at all is because they've been locked in by some legacy programs that only run on Windows (or DOS, some of them). They're dead set against ever migrating to Vista or 7. When MS cuts support for XP, they'll start investigating cheaper (and better) alternatives.

*spills milk*

I remember my old laptop, before it broke of course, ran on Ubuntu, I liked it much more than Windows. Using it was a lesson in computer skills, it took me ages to set my internet connection up on Ubuntu, I got the job done of course, after two days of typing in IP adresses, DNS etc. I loved the experience, setting it up was easy, but getting it running the way I wanted wasn't. It was always reliable, never froze and never crashed. Now I have Windows Vista and I honestly don't like it. It is laggy, it freezes, things shut down. But I don't own this laptop yet, I will soon, and I'm considering Linux again.

Even though that was rather... different to my previous posts it's what I feel, I knew little about Microsofts business practices before looking them up for myself, and they really are a... shall we say "sleazy" company. I still don't think they deserve ALL the criticism they get, but they do deserve a reasonable amount. They only have one competitor, and that's Apple. Linux is free so I didn't count that. I suppose that makes them as good as a monopoly.

I was under the impression that Ubuntu was only meant to be an introducation to Linux, Linux for people who haven't used it before and want to start anyway.

Which begs the question "why do you use it?"

You know little about software. While I was a kid software was still free, including source. What you paid for was service.

So no, open source is not a fad, its a re-awakening.

Closed source is the fad.

Alright. Closed source is the fad. The many years of software costing something and being close sourced was a fad all along. I'm pretty sure that game companies like Rockstar could have put Grand Theft Auto IV out under a GNU license instead of selling it, effectively shooting themselves in the foot and taking away all of the potential profits.

You probably don't play PC games, not that Ubuntu gives you much of a choice, even with WINE. Wonderful open-source games out there, seeing as they always get canceled instead of finished. How sad.

Talk about a company whose 1st major product to the world was reversed engineered Apple II OS.

I think you'll find Linux IS a competitor... I don't recall seeing Mac/Apple servers anywhere... The majority are Linux based and are far more stable than Windows based versions.

I don't think calling a free OS a non-worthy competitor. This site is free to join .... Does that mean this is not worthy?

You misunderstand me. I mean one competitor who charges money for their services, they can't kill a free OS because it's not an actual business competitor, people work on it because they want to, not for money. Linux is free, what Microsoft and Apple make isn't.

That's why Windows and commercial programs are better. Money is a big motivator when it comes to these things.

Could we please stop pushing the BS that open source and being promoted by money are mutually exclusive?

firefox is a bussiness. Linux is a bussiness. Ubuntu is a bussiness. People do get paid to program those things. Perhaps that's the reason they are major successes over proprietary apps. Commercial and open source are not mutually exclusive and more often than not open source is most likely the way any new software endeavor must go if they want some profit. Giants like Red Hat , Novell , Oracle, IBM and even MS profit with open source products.

(a) Windows is a useless pile of excrement
(b) Open source and commercial are not mutually exclusive- Red Hat is in the Fortune 500, they make money by selling support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is fully open-source. In fact, they do more than they are required by the GPL in terms of how easily available the source code is.
(c) The entire Internet runs on open-source. You don't like open source, get off the internet. There is very little proprietary software that can really be trusted in mission-critical circumstances, where you need things to actually work. Open source projects like Apache, SQL, PHP, Mozilla, gcc, etc ad infinitum are used everywhere because they are by far the best tools available for the job.

If you think commercial software drives better coding, consider the case of a fault tree analysis program used by every aerospace company in the world to determine safety standards for jet engines. My father recently uncovered a bug in this program which caused it to screw up boolean operations on the OR gates, producing completely idiotic output. The people who design the jet engines that power in every airplane in the sky today use this program, and they can't fix the bug because the program is proprietary. Furthermore, since the source is closed, it's harder than it needs to be to even find and isolate the bug. Who knows what other flaws are hidden in this program and others like it? With no possibility of independent auditing and verification of the algorithms being used, you're taking a tremendous leap of faith anytime you use proprietary software for something important. It's one thing to have proprietary games- if your game fails, it's not the end of the world. But for any serious work, it really is important to use open systems and open standards.