Piestar

Looks like the FSF are at it again.

http://windows7sins.org/

Guys, here’s a hint:

Spend your time making your products not suck rather than slander the competition.  Nobody is going to use your crap OS if there is something better out there, even if it – shock horror! – costs money.

Also, apparently they sent letters (if it works for the EU) to the Fortune 500 companies telling them of the ethics of using closed source software.  Once they are done killing sealife, animals and children with oil slicks, forced labour and chemical pollution I am positive that they will join the cause against the immoral Microsoft.

Either make software that doesn’t suck, isn’t at best a shoddy carbon copy of the competition and make something decent, or shut up and go do something more productive instead.

46 comments

So I was bored at lunchtime and thought I’d have a go at making one of those shoutbox things – makes a nice change from the usual e-commerce stuff.

Anyway here it is for the interested!

Also was this good ranty comment by Ted, which I think deserves a notice as it nails several points so I am going to repost it here as it deserves to be seen!

There’s no such thing as a fair comparison between Windows and Linux from the FOSS crowd. No fact shall remain untwisted, no semantic loophole left unused.

When it comes to features; Windows only has a browser, media player and simple utilities. Linux has Office suites, mail servers, web servers, IDEs and DVDs worth of applications.

However, when it’s bug count, Windows suddenly also includes Office, Exchange, Visual Studio, two instances of SQL Server, IIS and Photoshop. Linux is just a kernel.

Add a feature to Linux? Best feature ever, can’t live without it.
Add a feature to Windows? Bloat! Copied from Apple! Anti-trust!

Any feature not in Windows? Why isn’t this feature in?
Any feature not in Linux? You didn’t need it anyway!

Windows Aero? Resource hungry, useless eye-candy.
Compiz? Absolute must-have! Spinning cubes!

(For those that say Compiz/Ruby was first or is better, Google “Vista wobbly windows WinHec 2003″. Note how the windows don’t tear when moved, unlike Compiz!)

Benchmarks from established and trusted sources, with reproducible methodology that show Windows is better – shills, FUD, lies, MS paid for results, corrupt.
Benchmark from random blog with questionable (if any) methodology showing Linux is better – holy gospel truth.

Windows bluescreens several times a day.
Kernel panics do not exist.

Any Windows-only program = unoriginal, buggy, useless rubbish.
Linux programs – Original, innovative, not in fact, clones of successful Windows apps.

Copying interface changes from Windows apps into the OSS clones is OK, even though they’re much maligned in the Windows version… I’m looking at you, OpenOffice. If they’re so crap, why clone them?

It’s OK to infringe copyrights of music and films, but don’t dare violate the GPL. It’s copyright, you know.

The double standards exhibited are staggering.

3 comments

Like a red rag to a bull, claiming a Microsoft OS release is not going to be an abject failure on Slashdot is just asking for trouble.  I am currently reading the following thread and it just seems to consist pretty much entirely of uninformed* sniping.  In fact I am half way down and nobody has yet said anything good about Windows 7.

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/08/17/2151224/XP-Users-Are-Willing-To-Give-Windows-7-a-Chance

It’s ironic (like rain on your wedding day) that the Linux community, who cry MS FUD on average one out of five freetard rants are the ones that ladle it out like it’s candy.  They just plain make up shit and repeat fully debunked mistruths simply to make themselves feel tingly about Microsoft’s failure and imminent demise.  Look at some of the gems that people are saying:

“Poor DOS support for games”
- Do I even need to justify this with an answer?

“but requiring hardware produced in 2010s.” and “1GHz/512ram/pata hdd i have 22 seconds from ntldr to busy cursor gone. windows 7 doesn’t even install on that”
- Windows 7 would install and run fine on that.  This guy clearly mislabelled his ‘Windows Vista’ talking points, either that or he knows nothing.

“Windows 7 is a Service Pack to Windows Vista” and “I heard even 1G of RAM is not enough”
- Looks like he got his facts from Mr Vista Talking Points.  And tada!  they are now facts, repeat as necessary.

“I tried the RTM on Friday. No Remote Server Administration Tools. Google turns up a blog on technet with a dead link to RSAT beta. There were sundry other disappointments and annoyances, but lack of RSAT was the deal-breaker: less than an hour after it began, my Windows 7 experience ended.”
- First link on Google didn’t find my downloads!  Windows 7 Sucks! Google yourself “windows 7 rsat”.  I know how incredibly hard it is to scroll down to click the 3rd link rather than the first.

This sort of thing continues ad-nauseum.  The freetards look for something (anything) to bash Windows 7 with and then make outlandish claims about how crap it’s going to be, how nobody will use it.

Not that any of this is vaguely relevant to my point.  My point is this – to quote Sun Tzu:

If you know the enemy
and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a
hundred battles.  If you know yourself but not the enemy,
for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.
If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will
succumb in every battle.

They don’t know their enemy.  They don’t even know themselves.  They just like talking shit as it makes them look knowledgeable, but give it a year and Linux usage will be even lower than it is now.  Truth, reality and facts are discarded if they do not present the reality they want to believe.  Facts are found and created to enforce the conclusions they want to come to.  The truth is pretty much irrelevant to the whole debate.  They had all decided Windows 7 sucked when they first heard about it.  Now they are just looking for proof.

Ubuntu ‘Moronic Mongoose’ will then be released a few years from now, featuing the same crappy cruft, problems, and cargo cult usability ripped from Windows 7 and OSX, it’ll be hailed as near perfect, revolutionary and anyone that doesn’t use it will be called a moron and an idiot, Microsoft’s doom will be foretold once again and then this whole idiotic cycle will restart.

And all of the camaraderie and tales of imminent success will continue against the backdrop of sliding support from users, manufacturers and developers (which obviously will be attributed to FUD) who have had enough of the lies and propaganda.

Could the last freetard please turn out the light?  Thanks.

* On the internet, everyone is a sysadmin and a kung-fu expert.  Fact.

13 comments

I’ve noticed a rising trend of right wing North Americans to use the UK as an example of why gun control is a bad idea – how we have been ‘disarmed’ and are ‘defenceless’.  Not to mention the claims that our rights are being stripped away because we don’t have guns.

Here’s a quick newsflash for you:

NOBODY HERE WANTS GUNS!  SHUT UP ALREADY!

I seriously doubt even 1% of the population want the legalisation and distribution of firearms in this country.  I am glad we don’t have guns, and the only time I have ever seen a (working) gun is on a policeman, and even then that is incredibly uncommon.  Sure, we have knife crime, but who doesn’t, and the only reason you hear about it is because the right wing press loves to jump on anything to make the current government look bad.  Not that the current government needs any help as their legislative agenda is focused entirely on what the tabloids were slamming them for last year rather than dealing with actual issues that concern people.  But I digress.

Yes, our civil liberties are being gradually removed by an over-zealous legislature, but guns have nothing to do with that and North America has seen it’s fair share too – can you say ‘free speech zones’ or Bush taking a metaphorical dump on the Bill of Rights?  Yet there has been no revolts.

Not that I think banning guns over there would be a good idea, it’s a cultural thing, and they are awash with them anyway so it just wouldn’t work, but we’ve never had a culture of gun ownership here, nobody wants them and nobody for a second thinks it would make us safer, so stop using the UK as a talking point.  Thanks.

“A Well Regulated Militia”

While I am on the subject, what gun control North Americans do have is incredibly bizarre.  The focus seems to be on banning ‘Assault Weapons’ and heavy rifles (such as the Barrett 50 cal).  I don’t know for sure but I am pretty certain that you’re not allowed to own anything like an M249 or heaven forbid an M203.  It makes no sense.

For one ‘A Well Regulated Militia’ requires more than a bunch of rednecks with Glocks.  What I took away from reading this part of the constitution is that the right to bear arms is to keep the government in check in terms of powers, yet the guns being banned tend to be exclusively of the type that are required in a ‘Well Regulated Militia’.

If I was writing the gun control laws in the USA I would do exactly the opposite of the current approach – just ban anything under 2 foot.  Simple and to the point.  You’re not exactly going to get mugged by someone carrying a concealed M16, and I really can’t see anyone doing a drive by with a Barrett, yet the gun crimes and deaths in America seem to be centered around short-stock, small calibre weapons, with the government having a fetish for banning the ‘big guns’ that are pretty much useless for your regular criminal.

And yes, I realise that banning short guns wouldn’t work as you are awash with them already, but that’s the point – despite what some nutjobs say the UK is not awash with illegal firearms and pretty much nobody wants this to change.  So until you’ve overthrown at least one corrupt government thanks to the right to have guns, shut up.

10 comments

So I’ve been asked to do some Windows criticism – but I am too lazy for that at the moment so I dug up one of my earlier pieces instead.  Written in early 2006, so it’s a bit old and slightly out of context, but lots of it still holds true.  The basic gist is that programs should *not* have control over their installation – it’s the OS’s job, yet Windows lets programs do whatever they please, even to the point of installing rootkits and modifying other programs.  Program installation should be done by the OS based upon a config file provided by the program, giving the user ultimate choice in all decisions.  Nothing should be allowed to autostart without the users express permission.

Windows Sucks

It’s a universally held opinion by most PC users on the planet that ‘Windows Sucks’. Most couldn’t back this assertion up with concrete evidence though and most anti-Windows comments are actually blatantly wrong or refer to problems long fixed.

Windows, from a usability point of view, has also come a long way. When you get over the rabid Microsoft hating fervor gripping most people you’ll come to realize that (although I don’t know why they got a 8 year old to design the theme) its actually a very well thought out GUI and if looked at from a objective usability based point of view, you can see the time and effort that has gone in to trying to make it as easy to use as possible. Its certainly miles ahead of the Open Source competition.

But Windows does suck, and the reason is the software. For the uninitiated Windows software installs via an executable file (setup.exe usually) that places the main program files in the directory program files and then places a shortcut, or a folder of shortcuts in documents and settings->all users->start menu. The installing software has complete access to all areas of the hard drive – there are absolutely no limitations on what it can access and where it can put things. The software also generally saves settings in the Windows Registry (a centralized point of failure) via Windows APIs.

Of course sometimes programs do what they want. If some software wants to install itself in the root of c: (an incredibly bad place to put it) – its allowed. The fact of the matter though is that programs can install themselves anywhere they want, add as many icons as they want to any place they want – and even delete anything that they want.

The problem with this is that programs think they are much more important than they actually are. Quicktime, which isn’t even the worst, and which 99% of people only have to use very occasionally watch a QuickTime file, installs a system tray stub (for settings and fast launch) a Quick-launch icon and an icon in your start menu. Not only that it also runs an updater in the background that’ll alert you when new versions of the software come out. Its bundled with iTunes also (you don’t get a choice in the matter you’ve got to download both) which also gives it a quick-launch icon. I now have 3 icons taking up room on my start bar, some more on the desktop, a constantly running process (quick-launch and auto-update) and a mp3 player when all I needed was the ability to play QuickTime files.

If just one program does this it is not so bad but even things which don’t even need an icon do it. Acrobat for example puts shortcuts everywhere, features a quick-launch and auto-updater (which I will go into in a minute) yet the only time Acrobat files are actually used is either integrated into the browser (so no launch button is required) or if you open a PDF (double clicking on it opens it in acrobat). Yet icons are everywhere.

The auto-update mentioned in the previous paragraph is a classic example of the bloatware PC’s face. Yahoo! Toolbar for Internet Explorer now automatically adds itself to the ‘Critical Updates for Download’ box beside the ‘Security Update for Acrobat’. You can’t remove it either, you have to remove the Acrobat update (which removes Yahoo) then re-add the Acrobat Update. The fact I have to go out of my way to separate junkware from valid security downloads is disgusting.

Yahoo Messenger also now has a nice feature whereby the ‘Load this program automatically on startup’ button is grayed out unless you log in with a valid Yahoo account. So if someone installs Yahoo Messenger on your computer you can’t actually stop it starting whenever you log in to Windows unless you sign up with yahoo, sign in, and then disable it. This wasn’t a feature in earlier versions either. Skype goes one step further and simply doesn’t give you the option of not starting automatically – If it *does* give you the option I couldn’t find it!

Unfortunately every single bit of irrelevant software nowadays has its own autoupdater, quicklaunch, system tray and start menu icons if it actually needs it or not. Now add RealPlayer (which is one of the worst for it), AIM, MSN, Skype, the usual collection of toolbars foisted on you, the half dozen more pointless icons added by your scanner, printer, OEM and mouse and you’ve got a slow booting computer with irrelevant icons repeated all over the place (and no room to view running programs) all popping up alerts, news, updates and generally getting in your way. You have to manually delete several dozen or so icons and then try to figure out where the ‘stop annoying me all the time’ button is buried on each one. It is generally buried fairly well too.

To add the icing on the cake the uninstall process is also handled by the software – Windows has pretty much nothing to do with it. If the installer wants to leave icons everywhere, it does. If it wants to remove key system files or leave software running in the background and not tell you about it, it can. It can even just not work entirely leaving you no decent way of getting rid of it. Installing things in Windows is generally a permanent move.

Most people don’t even realise that it’s not meant to be like this – they just think that it’s the way it is and just learn to live with it. I have no idea why software installers are given 100% free reign over your PC, but they are. It’s as big a problem as spyware and it’s the main, large IT companies that are responsible. Sun has even recently declared a public partnership with Google – probably to try and install Google Toolbar whenever you install OpenOffice or Java as MSN’s toolbar (foisted on you by MSN Messenger) and Yahoo’s toolbar (Critical Update by Acrobat Reader) may not empower your browser quite enough on their own. It is misbehaving software (and installers) that are responsible for 99% of the unstable, unbootable and otherwise slow to the point of unusable Windows computers.

Windows without any untrustworthy 3rd party software is as stable as it realistically needs to be ‘Windows crashes a lot’ is no longer a valid insult – in fact it’s a lie. The last time I saw a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) was when I took a modem out without shutting down the PC first (you cannot really blame Windows for that). You will generally only see a BSOD in the event of hardware failure (not Windows fault), because of a bad device driver, (not Windows fault) or because a 3rd party piece of software has screwed the OS (partially Windows fault).

If the software install was not such a treacherous process, if programs didn’t have complete reign over your PC and you could actually uninstall software without worrying about your PC actually starting next time you turn it on Windows might have a chance of being a decent OS. Until then it sucks.

14 comments

So Thomas B failed, Lunduke failed (and has apparently taken his ball and gone home), so I am throwing this wide open to all you Linux fans out there.  Here it is:

Find me three examples of constructive criticism of Linux on a public, semi mainstream Linux forum that…

1. Isn’t a flamewar
2. That the answers are not all largely YouDontNeedThat ™ and
3. The developers of the software actually read.

Linux sucks.  All your showcase apps such – Gimp, Cinerella, OpenOffice, etc suck, Your WM’s are bad copies of the commerical offerings, your API’s and interfaces are so slow and convoluted it’s quicker to run Firefox under Wine that it is natively and apart from everything crashing a bit less and hibernate/sleep allegedly working on some peoples computers nothing has changed in over a decade.

Linux has < 1% of the marketshare and is dropping.  In fact it’s marketshare is within the statistical margin of error – the reason companies don’t rush to support you is because it’s simply not economical – not some large conspiracy.  Why is this – it’s certainly not because of the popularly claimed reason ‘poor marketing’, as its pretty much impossible to go anywhere on the net without meeting evangelical freetards.  Yet people, despite knowing about it – and even trying it! – are failing to use it in droves.

It simply isn’t good enough, and has too many problems.  I, as a professional software developer, don’t use it.  And the big problem, the #1 reason Linux sucks is this:

You don’t want to know why I don’t use it.

I could spend hours going into the specific reasons that it doesn’t fill my needs, problems I have, even giving examples and ideas on how to improve things, better approaches etc.  But it would be pointless – I’d just be called a MS shill.

My first real foray into Linux was when I was running an Internet Cafe, and had heard so much about how fantastic it was, years ahead, stable, etc – you all know the talking points.  This was around 2006 iirc.  So I set up a test box to see how it fared.  Not very well was the answer – not only did I hate it, my customers did too.  So since I’d heard so much about community contributions I wrote up a long article on what I felt the limiting factors for both me and my customers were.  I was willing to even learn C at that point and help contribute.

And rather than do what a professional software development team would do and take these suggestions on board – which included classics such as ‘What about a bootsplash, verbose mode is scaring the customers’, I had idiot newbies such as the aforementioned Thomas B ‘debunking’ me.  I was called an idiot for wanting double clickable .deb files (don’t you know apt-get install is easier?).

Linux zealots are on an ideological crusade, and the few that aren’t idiots spend little to no effort reining in the freetards – and it is impossible to argue with idiots, as they drag you down to their level then beat you with experience.  Since they are promoting the concept of free software they don’t really care if it’s better or not – quality is judged by the release license, not the code.  As a result criticism of Linux is seen as criticism of the Ideology – and attacked.  It’d be like advocating grilled steaks on a vegan forum, which is fine – I am vegetarian myself – but they seem to think that everyone else should care about their bizarre concept of ‘software ethics’ as much as them, when most people don’t care – they just want the tastiest food, and the best OS.

So the situation is this:

You’ve got distro’s that release the software, and due to package management, are the intermediary between the users and the developers.  Since the distro’s largely just package up and send on other peoples work they generally don’t even have any form of feedback method outside bugzilla.  Add to this the fact that the community is actively hostile to anyone who happens to disagree with them and you have a real recipe for stagnation.

The reason Linux sucks is because the developers are shielded from any criticism by the fan(boys|base) and by the time that they do hear from someone they regularly have become so pissed off and disappointed with the whole experience that they just declare ‘it sucks’ and are rarely constructive.  Personally I am in that state half the time.

The other problem with the community is that they are largely all of the same opinion (Linux rocks, Micro$oft sucks, viva la Stallman!) not because they are right, but because everyone that disagrees with them has left.  It’s a monoculture which simply isn’t healthy as nobody is willing to accept having their ideas challenged.

After all how on earth can you ever expect to improve anything if you kick out all the people who think it can be improved?

If I am wrong, then surely the above challenge should be a piece of cake, five minutes, just pop over to any large distro’s forum.  So go ahead, what are you waiting for, prove me wrong!

Addendum:

I was just having a look through Wikipedia and found this really interesting article on Groupthink.  Especially this bit:

To make groupthink testable, Irving Janis devised eight symptoms indicative of groupthink (1977).

1. Illusions of invulnerability creating excessive optimism and encouraging risk taking.
2. Rationalising warnings that might challenge the group’s assumptions.
3. Unquestioned belief in the morality of the group, causing members to ignore the consequences of their actions.
4. Stereotyping those who are opposed to the group as weak, evil, biased, spiteful, disfigured, impotent, or stupid.
5. Direct pressure to conform placed on any member who questions the group, couched in terms of “disloyalty”.
6. Self censorship of ideas that deviate from the apparent group consensus.
7. Illusions of unanimity among group members, silence is viewed as agreement.
8. Mindguards — self-appointed members who shield the group from dissenting information.

Groupthink, resulting from the symptoms listed above, results in defective decision making. That is, consensus-driven decisions are the result of the following practices of groupthinking^[5]

1. Incomplete survey of alternatives
2. Incomplete survey of objectives
3. Failure to examine risks of preferred choice
4. Failure to reevaluate previously rejected alternatives
5. Poor information search
6. Selection bias in collecting information
7. Failure to work out contingency plans.

Sounds like the Linux community to a tee, doesn’t it?

16 comments

A bit late to the game with this one, but I have been meaning to write about this for a while now.  You may already know about it – the whole XPilot iPhone debacle.  If you’re not aware (and can’t be bothered reading the slashdot thread) some programmers, who were fans of the game XPilot back in the day, decided to release a version for the iPhone.  Now the game was GPL’d by the original creators, but when they found out they gave this great quote:

After it hit the App store, one of the original developers of XPilot told us he feels adamantly that we’re betraying the spirit of the GPL by charging for it.”

Firstly, it’s very hard to ‘betray the spirit’ of a license.  That’s why you have a license in the first place.  If it’s written by anyone even half competent they will check for loopholes and problems.  Hence the GPLv3 in response to TiVo.

What actually happened though is the original developers GPL’d it after listening to the hippy ‘power of the community’ love fest with no real understanding of the implications.  Which is this:

It gives freedom to the software, not the developer.  It is the software that is free.  You develop software, fine.  Release it under the GPL, fine.  But you no longer own it.  You have no more rights than anyone else to it.  By releasing under the GPL you explicitly relinquish all of your control over it.  You have freed it like you would free a bird from a cage – it is yours no longer.

It is amazing how so many people fail to understand this.  The whole ‘you can sell it’ thing is a red herring as piracy is legally enshrined in the license – everyone else can sell it too as proven by this.  There is nothing stopping me recompiling it and putting it on the app store for $0.50, or even for free.

What the XPilot creators actually wanted was one of the Creative Commons licenses (maybe NC-3) as that would appear to be what they think the ‘spirit’ of the GPL is.

The amusing thing in all of this is not only do normal users not bother to read their license agreements (EULA), but apparently neither do the developers of the software either.

1 comment

So, I am not sure if I should feel honoured or not (I am tentatively going for ‘not’) about the request to debate this Lunduke fellow on his show.  Did I ‘diss’ him?  It feels like we are incredibly uncool rappers or something.  Not that I’ve watched it – I hadn’t heard of the guy before that point – but I have no real idea what he wants to debate.

The strange thing is reading his blog I can’t see any point that our opinions diverge significantly, such as:

his post on ‘freedom’, my post on ‘freedom’ – I say that the FOSS license excludes small developers, he says he’s a small developer that tried (and failed) at open sourcing.

My main gripe with Linux, which the commenter FBM gets, is that the community is largely a bunch of argumentative newbies who are intent on a almost religious level of promotion and who refuse to hear a bad word about their OS.

Anyway, I’ll go on your show provided you can answer the following:

1. Where do we actually diverge in opinion.  You say you want to debate, but what about?

2. Find me three examples of constructive criticism of Linux on a public, semi mainstream Linux forum that a: isn’t a flamewar and b: that the answers are not all largely YouDontNeedThat ™ and c: the developers of the software actually read.

Since I’ve never yet seen someone complete 2. I reckon I am safe. 

4 comments

Normally I wouldn’t give the time to such people, but if he’s intent on spewing his copypasta everywhere then so be it.  So here we go!

Hello again everybody. First of all, you people are the noobish fanboys who I ranted about on my blog. It is you people who need to get a life!

Now the thing to remember is that he is probably, at most, fifteen.  He was saying in one post how he had to beg his parents for $30 for wifi in a hotel they were staying in.  Not that there is anything wrong with being young, no, but the fact is most of the people he’s calling ‘noobs’ have been using (and programming computers) for longer than he’s been alive.  Computers are not simple and despite his laughable claim that it only takes two weeks for someone to become an expert programmer, it takes years of study to truly come to a point where you can call yourself competent.

I agree with you people that a lot of Linux users can be immature, but this site is the HOME OF IMMATURE NOOBS. We need to get lives eh? At least us “freetards” don’t spend all day attacking an operating system that’s much better than Winblows made by Microshit.

You’ll notice I don’t refer to Linux as Linsux, Shitux, or even the new and improved Shitsux.  You are a fanboy.  You claim you’re not but you drank the kool-aid, took the red pill, or whatever it is you do to become a penguin worshipper.  You keep claiming that Windows sucks, that Linux is years ahead, that Linux is ‘so much better’, but utterly fail to even make one cogent point that backs up this assertion.

You also talked about ‘Solaris Linux’.  That one phrase alone declares you unable to make any comment about operating systems as the spectacular lack of knowlege to think that Solaris runs on the Linux kernel basically says you have no idea of the heritage of Unix.

Also almost every single tech site is overrun be freetards bashing MS and promoting Linux even when it is massively inappropriate for the task.  The whole Linux Hater thing is a response to the non-stop idiocy of the freetard community.  For every one anti-Linux post I can find you 100 anti MS posts, and no doubt I can find them faster.  In fact name me one popular tech site that isn’t infested with freetards and I’ll give you a cookie.

You hypocrites make me so fucking angry!

Us “freetards” aren’t giving our money to companies that don’t give a fuck about their customers, like Microsoft and Adobe and more!

I don’t think you understand how this capitalism thing works.  Here’s a quick reminder:

Someone makes and sells a product that does a task.  If the product does this task well the company will be successful.  If it doesn’t do it well they will be less successful.  The whole basis of this is an exchange of something that you want (a decent OS) for something that they want (Money).  If they ‘didn’t give a fuck about their customers’ then their customers would be less likely to give them money, thus they would do badly.  It is in their, and their shareholders, interests to ‘give a fuck’ as otherwise they will fail as a company.  As they should.

Then you have ‘Open Source’, who truly don’t give a shit about their customers, and who’s main reply to criticism is ‘Fuck off, it’s free’.  The capitalist evolutionary trait of survival of the fittest simply doesn’t apply, the evolutionary force of competing products doesn’t apply.  There is no incentive for anyone to do anything new and innovative as a: all the truly competent people have full time jobs as b: they won’t get anything out of it.  You may dislike what LH and myself say, but i’ve yet to see you actually coherently argue against any point apart from ‘wahh, they are being big meanies’.  And you end up with pieces of shit such as Gimp, Gnome, a massive reliance on CLI’s for everything and a failure to gain any marketshare whatsoever.  Windows 7 beat Linux marketshare months ago – is this because everyone installing a beta MS OS is an idiot, or because it’s simply better than Linux?

Actually, this is getting so fucking annoying, this constant bashing of an OS that is years ahead of Windows! Microsoft is finally making something good, because we all know that every operating since Windows 95 hasn’t had a new feature added.

Again with your failure to know anything about history.  Windows 98 was the ‘end of the line’ in terms of the 9x kernel, Windows 2000 built on top of NT, a true multitasking protected-memory kernel.  It’s be like running Gnome on top of BSD instead of Linux (but moreso) and claiming that this wasn’t anything new.  There have been hundreds of improvements made to Windows since 95, but you’re too much of a deluded newbie fanboy hater to understand.

Plus pretty much everything that makes Linux Linux is nicked from either the Unix world or Windows.  It’s a Unix rip-off system on a Windows rip-off GUI.  It’s so far from original it’s not funny.  And apart from the idiocy that is package management (I’ll get into this in a new post sometime) I can’t think of a single thing that can’t be traced back to someone else’s work.

Microsoft, I used to like, I used to defend. But they have gotten so fucking stupid, I just had to switch. They didn’t care about me, or any of their other customers. At least in the “freetard community,” we’re actually paid attention to.

You’re not paid attention to.  You just feel you’re part of some community, which is fine, but the needs of the tiny freetard section is largely ignored by Microsoft as what you want isn’t in their best interests and isn’t worth the time to implement anyhow.

A challenge:

If you truly feel you are being paid attention to then try this:  Go to a semi-official Linux forum and try giving constructive criticism, that is honest feedback.  Not I love Linux poetry, not anti Microsoft rants, but honest criticism.  If you need any tips just read LH or my blog – try this post, it’s quite inspirational.  If you can do this without creating an angry flamewar then maybe I am wrong, but I seriously doubt it.

The whole reason for this blog existing is that Linux sucks, yet idiots like you* spend you’re whole lives bashing MS and making outlandish claims while failing to actually contribute anything – except acting like a boat anchor to progress – to this great cause.

* I’ve realised that the people who promote Linux the most are the ones that know the least.  They have fervor, but lack understanding.  You get some idiot who only found out that CLI’s existed 6 months ago arguing with veterans of 20+ years about how typing apt-get install foobar** is actually more intuitive that just downloading an installer.  Put down your ‘RMS talking points’ cards and shut up.

** Which moron decided to call a sound app foobar anyway.  It’s like creating a domain name called ‘example.com’ or ‘localhost’.  Retards.

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