Why Doesn't Microsoft Have A Cult Religion? 535
rs232 writes "'Apple has one. So does the Java community, Oracle, IBM, and Google. Lord knows anyone who uses Linux or free and open source software is dedicated to spreading the gospel of St. Linus Torvalds and St. Richard Stallman. But does anyone really worship the Gods of Redmond?' While many Microsoft employees are pumped to work there, article author Michael Singer explores why even enthusiastic Microsoft-watchers acknowledge that customers and product developers are unenthusiastic about the software giant. He theorizes that it comes down to passion: Microsoft lost that a long time ago, he says, and so passionate people gravitate to other projects and products."
You must be new here (Score:3, Informative)
almost right (Score:1, Informative)
Three words. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Life Under the Dominant Cult. (Score:2, Informative)
Really? Does it support writing?
I can't think of a less mainstream idea. Thanks, you made my day.
I bet if you carried out a survey of users you would find that case insensitivity is *exactly* mainstream.
For added evidence, I point you to OS X, which despite having some of its roots in Unix, still keeps case insensitivity by defeault.
Re:Life Under the Dominant Cult. (Score:3, Informative)
Solaris.
Mac OS X.
MCSEs (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Life Under the Dominant Cult. (Score:5, Informative)
ZFS on Solaris10
"How 'bout any Unix that provides transactional file system behavior?"
ZFS on Solaris10, again
"Alternate streams/extended attributes that can be read and written as files?"
Do you work for Sun or something? ZFS... it does that.
"How many versions of Unix have case insensitive file systems? (Personally, I feel that case sensitive file systems should be considered a dated practice.)"
All of them can use FAT32, but case-sensitivity is eminently useful, and only ancient operating systems ignore case, so we keep it.
All that, plus it's open-source
Re:They do have one... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Life Under the Dominant Cult. (Score:3, Informative)
Mac OS X.
You can use case-sensitive HFS+ too.
Re:Life Under the Dominant Cult. (Score:5, Informative)
For writing: None, since it is a pretty bad idea with regard to performance, fragmentation and reliability. For reading, there are several. One is used by Knoppix for example. Also note that the Linux kernel is usually loaded in compressed form.
How 'bout any Unix that provides transactional file system behavior?
Again a very bad idea. If you need that, use a database, not a filesystem.
Alternate streams/extended attributes that can be read and written as files?
And again, a very bad idea. In fact extended attributes are a bad idea, since they break compatibility.
How many versions of Unix have case insensitive file systems? (Personally, I feel that case sensitive file systems should be considered a dated practice.)
So the filesystem should understand case semantics? Very, very bad idea. Especially if you allow Unicode filenames.
I think these features were though about by the Unix and Linux crowd numerous times and rejected every time because they are dangerous and break more than they fix.
Re:Microsoft Is Like America. (Score:5, Informative)
I think you mean "like the christians during the inquisition".
The inquisition was far from catholic-only. On the catholic side you had the initial enablement via the papal bull of 1484 and it was executed primarily via their secular lawyer and monk (first dominican then jesuit) proxies.
But as far as the protestants go:
- luther said that witches should be burnt
- luther believed in incubus, sucubus, witches flying at night, etc, etc, etc
- calvin said the bible teaches us that that there are witches and that they must be slain
- calvin said that God expressly commands that all witches and enchantresses shall be put to death
- lutheran preachers brought the witch hunt to denmark, germany, sweden, etc
- calvinist missionaries brought it to transylvania, scottland, england, etc
- the catholic-protestant religious wars vastly increased the witch-burnings
So, while the catholics started the ball rolling, the protestants were equally guilty of keeping it going.
Re:Microsoft Is Like America. (Score:1, Informative)
Re:They Suck. (Score:4, Informative)
On the other hand, Bill Gates didn't eat Sunday dinner on the Hare Krishna's dime when he was young so he obviously didn't learn the techniques for mindfucking his employees like Jobs did.
Yup, linux user here. Not crazy about either of them.
Re:Slashdot is Microsoft's cult (Score:3, Informative)
know your enemy?
>everything they do or say is subjected to unending speculation here, albeit negative.
they've fucked over so many of their partners. they've broken so many laws. and the us government does nothing. should people who can see that they are doing evil ignore them? that'll make the problem go away! hey that might work!
>Outside of Slashdot I dont know a soul who really gives a rats ass what MS do
my brother knows nothing about computers. what he does know is that every 3-4 weeks he was calling me to get rid of viruses on his system. i can install firefox, avg, thunderbird and remove as much ms junk as possible but some will inevitably get through as it's the os that is vulnerable especially to socially engineered attacks (it's also not easy downloading 50 million patches on dialup, teaching that porn.jpg.exe in an email should not be opened etc.). i finally convinced him to get a mac and all now is happiness and light. after a couple of months him and his kids are using it more than they ever used the windows pc. he loves it so much he's now trying to convince his friends to switch from ms. he really gives a rats ass enough to try and convince them! i love seeing people switch, it's seeing them realise computers can work without driving them crazy.
>and would never in a million years even consider discussing MS in the sort of emotive language used here.
pick an industry. they all have whipping posts. it's just that ms is such a good one as they really really deserve it