On Tuesday 21 January 2003 11:21 pm, Paolo Alexis Falcone wrote: >since they're positioning themselves as a viable, stable, secure and > trustworthy alternative to Unix...
i don't think they're worrying about unix per se. they have enough of the market (convicted monopolist, remember) that they can afford to be pretty confident of their status. i think they're just developing and working on features and, for now, they've got "stability" down for now. w2k and wxp are very much more stable than NT or any of the 95-> series ever were. i don't think they're as stable as unix (some things you still have to reboot for that you wouldn't have to reboot for in unix), but they're much better than they ever were. secure i'm sure they're working on. it'll be the work of a generation or two, but they're making progress. trustworthy is a different story altogether and one which i won't discuss since, ahh, everyone agrees on the matter in this mailing list. as it happens, i think there are two sides to "trustworthy", and for now they fail both. just as a matter of accuracy though, windows is not strictly descended from unix (even if some Dos commands look like unix commands) and windows definitely has some major advantages in ease of use over unix. i'm not saying that windows is better now, or will always be better than unix. i'm just saying that windows is definitely making great strides for now. they sat on their laurels during the w95->w98 period. now they're running scared again and are trying to catch up. it's up to the linux and free software community to keep again or at least to keep up. if windows is as stable as linux/freebsd/unix, but the feature sets are about the same, windows will still lose because of "free as in beer". tiger -- Gerald Timothy Quimpo tiger*quimpo*org gquimpo*sni-inc.com tiger*sni*ph Public Key: "gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 672F4C78" my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die. _ Philippine Linux Users Group. Web site and archives at http://plug.linux.org.ph To leave: send "unsubscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fully Searchable Archives With Friendly Web Interface at http://marc.free.net.ph To subscribe to the Linux Newbies' List: send "subscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
