You forgot to mention the girls.

Most distros automagically use tmpfs on /tmp these days, so tons of files in /tmp will only fill up swap. If you filled / to the brim, your partitioning scheme simply sucked, and if you filled /home you need to either buy more disks or delete some redundant fluff. There's no space wasted since / really needs some free space, and using it for pirated .avi files or whatever harms your system.

What most people want is a place where they can have everything and do anything, and not suffer any negative consequences.

Some idealists apparently aren't aware that Utopia means "nowhere".

LoL

Assuming it works like it does in the USA.

FP support in an OS? That's a stretch, especially when you could dump the lot of it and still have a functional OS (to the extent AppleDOS was an OS anyway). Had MS BASIC not been there, any number of people would have hacked together something to do floating point math in some flavor of BASIC. It wasn't exactly a hard problem.

Sure, there were some fanatic devotees of the CoCo, just as there are still some C64 devotees today, but that's not the market. The continued use of the CoCo didn't stop the PC, the Mac, or the Amiga from coming into existance as more powerful replacements.

There is simply nothing MS did that wouldn't have been done anyway and likely better had Gates not been at the right place at tghe right time with money in his pocket.

No need (for me) to save face. It's not my fault you forgot that math and arithmetic aren't the same thing.

Actually, I'm not. Understanding doesn't make you know that 6 times 5 is 30 any faster, but practice does. Apparently, a zap to the brain does too. That's all TFA is talking about. We have no idea if a zap to the brain will make you better at "word problems" AKA actual math where understanding comes into play.

You claimed that the bulk of the Apple DOS functionality was provided by MS BASIC. I refuted that.

Any OS and apps would have driven the continued demand for more computing power. Or did you not notice that the 4K TRS-80 was no longer seen as adequate even before the IBM PC was available. Or that very few people running Linux today are interested in a used '386 with 1MB of ram.

Without the hacker's end-run, modems wouldn't have existed. That is what practically everyone used to access the internet in the '90s.

Yes, the same sort of cunning any con man has. There was a big pile of luck to go with it.

Part of it seems to be the same statistical blindness that drives the lotto. They imagine they will one day be amongst the super-rich even though statistics say otherwise.

I've long noticed that ants seem to have a predilection for electricity. They crawl all over electrical conduits, enter homes at electrical outlets, etc.

Actually, no, it doesn't have to be anyone, it just always seems to be. There is no reason a group of people with a litle disposable income ech can't come togetrher for things that need doing. In fact, markets only work properly when the economic power of buyers and sellers is nearly equal. About the tine you start seeing 'producers' and 'consumers', markets fail.

Honestly, it's no better than the old Feudalism where someone gets enough money and power and calls himself King. Then he makes up a bunch of BS about how God wanted it that way. (Or about how some watery tart threw a sword at him).

Having a separate /home partition is a good idea, simply because you can reinstall the whole system, switch to a different distro or whatever, without wiping your personal stuff and having to reinstall from backup. I usually move my old home directory to /home/old first, to avoid conflicting dot files. No space wasted, and lots of time saved.

Without Microsoft, we would have comoditized PCs running DOS86 or CP/M. Then Linux would have taken over.