Emlyn wrote:
>
> Has anyone noticed the similarity to vegetarianism in all this?
Rabid advocacy battles is a fundamental human thing, so the similiarity
to XY is unsurprising.
> The ms-flunkies (including me, apparently) are the meat eaters, junk food
> eaters, impure and proud.
<unrelated>
I dropped about 5 kg when I quit my SoCal junk food habit, turning a few
more into muscle mass. I doubt I can ever stomach true CR, but I'm
certainly limiting my caloric intake (CR is but an end point of a continuum),
and I'm moving away from mass-produced animal protein. Sea fish is a bit high
on PCBs, but heck, one has to eat something.</unrelated>
As to dining on scraps from Redmond's table, that's a classical scavenger
behaviour. Ulch, that meat was tainted.
> The anti-ms camp are the vegetarians; and I've noticed from this very fun
> rumble that, just like vegetarians, there is no unity in that camp.
Yes, there is: OpenSource. If I'm against MS, it doesn't mean I'm pro
Sun or pro Oracle or pro IBM.
> We've got people who'll dabble in MS products, but prefer the good stuff
> when they can get it (I'm a vegetarian, because I only eat fish).
I will use MS products if I don't have a choice. I will not do it gladly,
and I will make every effort to make this condition temporary.
> There are those who use anything as long as it's on Unix, and that's that
> (straight out vegos).
Naw, *nix is far from being perfect, but it has a tolerable payoff of
a user/support base and availability of usable software. It would have
been fun, if the Forth and/or Lisp community went supercritical, including
hardware. We do have a small revival of end user hardware design with
FPGAs, but we'll only see lots of interesting stuff if a prototyping
system will drop down to a few megabucks, and a prototyping run wouldn't
cost more than a few hundred bucks. Hence the printable circuit scene needs
close watching, despite its obvious limitations.
> And the most rabid camp, who wont learn proprietary languages, wont have
> ought to do with proprietary products, apparently, which rules out all of
> windows, much of unix, and most of anything else. Rabid open-source fanatics
As you well know, the future of proprietary Unices does not look very bright.
I see vendors slowly ceasing to support their proprietary derivates as Linux
matures (code fork between high end low end seems imminent or a fait accompli
already). If you're reading news, the trend is obvious for 1-2 years now.
It is interesting to see at which stage Intel will dare openly ignore Microsoft.
By the volume (and some would argue, also by quality), Linux is the Microsoft
of OpenSource OSses. Of course, there are variations: there's Debian, and the
rest of them. I haven't personally used *BSD, but serious people seem to like
it. The architecture and the code quality seems to be much cleaner, albeit
we're not nearly at the level of true microkernels like QNX and Fiasco.
There have been rather interesting proprietary developments in the past, but
the reason they're there (in the dustbin of history or in an embedded niche)
is that they never went OpenSource or never even had the guts of giving binaries
away for free in the time when that would have made a difference. Taos, Be and
QNX would seem to be the most obvious examples.
> amongst them (You guessed it; the vegans).
>
> I bet there are more categories; anyone?
Computer cowboys: people who design and make their own silicon, and use only
roll-your-own software, of course. Some of them are lunatic fringe, some are
rather impressive.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:56:24 MDT