From: John K Clark (jonkc@att.net)
Date: Fri Nov 15 2002 - 11:34:41 MST
"Charles Hixson" <charleshixsn@earthlink.net>
> Yes. I believe that Mr. Gates has been a net detriment to the computer
> community.
That is the politically correct view and it is also utter nonsense, I admire
Bill Gates Obviously if you were starting from scratch lots of people
could make a more stable, more elegant, system than Windows, but
Microsoft didn't have that luxury. Everything they made had to be
compatible with everything they made before, and they had to do it
during a time when computer hardware became thousands of times
more powerful. This imposes a severe burden, but a burden the
most popular operating system in the world MUST bear. If the
Many Worlds Interpretation is correct, I predict that on nearly all
those worlds people are complaining that the most popular operating
system is an ugly mess, a inelegant hodgepodge of kludges. Such is
the fate of things that are not designed all at once but evolve and
grow, things like English with it's weird spelling, or biological
organisms for that matter.
It's in the nature of things that standards are resistant to change, but
that's OK because that is exactly the way a standards should be. The lack of
popularity of the Linux or Apple or Next or Bee or whatever operating system
is not an example of market failure because in the context of the real world
they are in fact inferior system. If everything else was equal they would be
better than Windows but everything else is not equal. These systems have
small technical advantages but that is countered by enormous practical
disadvantages, most will not operate on the type of computer that people
have and none will run billions of dollars worth of popular software that
took millions of man years to write. It's perfectly valid to take such
things into account when deciding what system is really superior.
When a standard is set it's just not worth going to a new one unless
you get an astronomical improvement. The market has decided, at least
so far, that Linux is not a huge advance of that type. Maybe the market
is wrong but it sure as hell has a better chance of being correct than
Charles Hixson does.
John K Clark jonkc@att.net
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