Re: ANN: The unix Pestilence

From: Xah Lee (xah_at_xahlee.org)
Date: 05/19/03

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    Date: 19 May 2003 13:47:30 -0700

    my hatred for hedonistic irresponsible programers is deep. However,
    among unix advocates, their hatred for Microsoft is comparable to mime
    of unix, and if not greater.

    i believe that much hatred of MS is unwarranted, and much of it is
    fashionable lip service too. (termed "me too" in newsgroup locution)

    i like to present some essays on this issue, because hatred based on
    wrong info is ultimately harmful to all.

    -------------------

    Date: Sat, 23 Feb 2002 08:20:17 -0800
    From: xah@xahlee.org (Xah Lee)
    Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
    Subject: Microsoft hatred [was: How I lost my faith]
    Message-ID: <7fe97cc4.0202230820.19933d2@posting.google.com>

    Dear Erik Naggum,

    you wrote
    > Open Source is in my view an overreaction to the evils of Microsoft and
    > it has some "stopping power" towards the progress of those bad people,
    > but I seriously doubt that it has lasting value in its own right.

    It is well known that you are an avid hater of Microsoft, from their
    technologies to their leader to their business practices. I have now
    and then seen your impassioned expression of this hatred, scattered
    among your comp.lang.lisp posts.

    Personally, i have an inherent distrust towards big organizations.
    This applies to Microsoft. Since perhaps 1995, MS has become more and
    more large, and as well becoming a hate target especially among unix
    communities. Of MS hatred there are two aspects: those who think MS
    products are utterly incompetent, and those who think MS business
    practice are the most evil.

    I have always been an Apple Macintosh user. I have used a few MS
    products such as MS Word word processor on the Mac since about 1990,
    and Mac version of MS Internet Explorer web browser and Outlook
    Express email program when they became available around 1997 or so
    free of charge. My experiences has been that MS software on the Mac
    are pretty good, if not usually better than competitors. In fact,
    before the MS-hatred era of late 1990s, i recall that i was found of
    MS Word and would say it was the software that never crashed, with the
    richest (useful) features. I have not used MS Windows much until 1999,
    so i cannot judge from my own experience whether people's complains
    about MS's product's poor quality. By the time i used MS Windows daily
    in 1999, it was MS Windows NT, and i have moved into industrial
    programing field now called IT. At the time Apple's OS is around
    version 8. Although Windows is not as aesthetic or intuitive as my
    beloved Mac OS, but on the whole i think Windows NT beats the *** out
    of Mac OS by far. Mac OS crashed daily if a info-collecting tech-head
    like myself are careful, hourly if not, and among quite a few of other
    reasons.

    As the MS hatred is rolling like a snowball, i started to pay
    attention. On one hand, i never cared for Microsoft. Their sole
    impression on me before 1998 was that MS Word is good software, and i
    hate Windows just because i'm a dedicated Apple fan just because Apple
    had made many revolutionary innovations in both software and hardware
    and MS was Apple's market enemy. Although i think the unix crowd are
    tech morons of the world, but when it comes to political issues, i'm
    inclined to side with their freedom loving and paranoia propensities.
    I'm ashamed to admit, that i started to visit unix moron's mecca the
    slashdot.org around 1999, and have read quite a lot of their MS hatred
    verbiage, from drivel of sopho-morons to Eric Raymond's OpenSource
    Jihad to Richard Stallman's Free Software Foundation. Perhaps due to
    their propaganda, at times i shudder at the mind-numbing MS
    juggernaut, and have felt ready to join their cause and kill
    Microsoft.

    Since 1999, my behavior have in fact been mildly anti-Microsoft. I
    would, for example, mention FreeSoftware or OpenSource in meetings,
    avoid using MS products myself and convert all my MS Word files i have
    on my Mac to some standard format such as plain text, and also use the
    Free Software Foundation's GNU Public License for my own software
    dabblings. Still, i was never a MS hater. Some people i know are MS
    haters, but i'm just a mild FreeSoftware proponent and was never sure
    i should be a MS hater. I could have investigated the issue, by
    studying the various lawsuits, check out MS history, exam and verify
    MS hater's essays, but life is short and i have other interests so i
    did not undertook such activities and never decided whether MS should
    be hated. I just disliked big organizations, and thus Microsoft.

    Since 1999 i entered the field of industrial programing known as Info
    Technology. In particular, i'm a web application programer on the unix
    platform. My daily office machines are PC running Windows (NT and
    followings) and remote unix servers. I find NT quite usable and almost
    never crashed at least as a desktop machine. I don't know much about
    any MS-bred technologies, but i knew quite a lot about unix. My
    attitude towards unixes is that it is the MOST incompetent thing in
    the computing world. I am an outright unix HATER. I have becoming
    increasingly nosy about unix MS-hater's claims technology-wise as most
    readily found from slashdot.org, from User Interface design to
    protocol embrace & extend to innovation to power & flexibility to
    security considerations. In the past few years, i started to pay mild
    attention to the question of wether from a technical or technological
    point of view MS should be hated.

    Even i don't know much Microsoft technologies except using their OS,
    but in my personal judgment system among all things considered, i
    think that if MS has done damage to society then unix has done hundred
    times more. I believe that Microsoft Windows technologies is on the
    whole FAR superior to unixes both as a PC and server, all things
    considered. (this includes the fact that unix is more stable then
    Windows NT, today.) Comparing to the other major desktop Operating
    System the Mac OS (where unixes are so incompetent it is out of the
    question), with intact conscience i think that MS's OS since about
    1997 has left my beloved Mac OS in dust. If Windows 98 is poor
    quality, then Mac OS of that year is crap.

    (i plan to have book-length material on the reasons, but here for now
    i can only briefly state my beliefs in a conclusive manner.)

    The above is my beliefs on product or technological quality aspect of
    Microsoft-hatred. I have much interest in technology than politics or
    business, thus my know-how of social oriented issues pales in
    comparison. I have never examined the accusations of MS's evil
    business practices, other than news hearsay. To this day, i know
    little of what is true or false regarding MS's business practices.
    Although i have never undertook an interest of a topic, but as a
    philosopher i have gathered opinions regarding a topic from great
    variety of sources and experiences, and can form a personal judgment.
    And from my observations of computing industry, and my little
    knowledge of economics, all things and experiences lead me to believe
    that there is little to no reason to hate MS for their business
    practice either. Sometimes last year i read Thomas Sowell's Basic
    Economics. Although he never talked about software in the book, but
    that book made a major impression on my views of MS-hating issues.

    Around 1994 i read the book _Steve Jobs and the NeXT big thing_ by
    historian Randall E. Stross, and i was highly positively impressed by
    him. I have then learned that he also wrote a book in 1997 on MS: _The
    Microsoft Way : The Real Story of How the Company Outsmarts Its
    Competition_. Although i have not read the book, but from amazon.com
    reviews it indicated that he simply think that the success of MS is
    due to being smart.

    There are various lawsuits against the MS giant in the last few years,
    from Sun Microsystem's Java lawsuit, to United States vs Microsoft
    anti-trust lawsuit, to last month's AOL suit for Netscape browser. As
    you know, Sun is a unix vendor, with its own greedy grip on Java. I
    frankly don't buy any bull*** from the Sun Micro commercial turd. MS
    may be devious with their own "standard"-breaking java, but no more
    hanky-panky than Sun's Universal Java sham in the first fucking place.
    Any commercial organizations do devious things for their own interest.
    As to United State's claim that MS screwed innovation by bundling
    browser, that itself is a fantastic fucking idea. Integrating browser
    into OS is an innovation, and amid so great many claims that MS does
    not innovate, i can think of quite a few cases where MS has in fact
    been innovative or responsible for technological lead from my personal
    computing experiences. (Microsoft Word accounts for great many
    innovations in word processing along.) And, who needs the government
    to meddle with industry? (as i have learned in Thomas's Sowell's book,
    anti-trust cases are invariably all the same.) Lastly is the AOL's
    bandwagon-hopping lawsuit in the name of fantastically incompetent
    Netscape the-loser-browser. *** America On-Line.

    I'm often ignorant when it comes to economics practicality, such as
    stock market or personal finance. Since about 1999, i started to
    become a stock holder, thus started to learn a bit of its nature. On
    this process, one thing came to my attention is that Microsoft is a
    public owned company. Public owned companies are directed by the
    people who owns its stock, and any joe can purchase it. That means, if
    Microsoft is an evil empire, then public shares a great blame. From
    this aspect, i don't see any sense of Microsoft-hatred either. Blame
    the public, such as your boss and neighbors and wife and friends and
    community, or, blame the fantastic greed-oriented system called
    capitalism that made USA so prosperous far beyond the moral-oriented
    communist/socialist nations or sovereignly ruled kingdoms & queendoms.

    Dear Nagg'm, among all i've seen, i think you are the most vehement
    Microsoft hater by far. From your various rants i've gathered that you
    think MS products are the most poor quality, their business practice
    the most unethical, and Bill Gates one of the greatest criminal of
    mankind. Though, i don't think i have came across a cogent detail of
    why. Your rants tends to be mythically incendiary, and defensive in
    nature when risen the challenge. I would really like to see you give a
    plain account of why Microsoft is worthy of hatred.

    Please put aside tones and grudges, and propound for the good of
    humanity.

    (
    here is a relevant essay i've written regarding Mac OS X, unix, and
    Windows.
    http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/20020105_macosx_rant.txt
    )

     Xah
     xah@xahlee.org
     http://xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/more.html

    > Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
    > Subject: Re: How I lost my faith (very long)
    > From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net>
    > Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2002 11:55:19 GMT

    ----------------------

    the above article and three subsequent essays on Microsoft hatred is
    archived at
    http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/gnur.html

    again, feedback welcome.

    thanks.

     Xah
     xah@xahlee.org
     http://xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/more.html

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