Very Worried at MS .net

[Frank Heckenbach]

John Peter Tapsell wrote:

> We are years and years behind MS.  It doesn't seem it, and we seem sooo
> tantatlilisingly close, but MS have the infrastructure we don't.
> More then ever we need to go back and fill in that infrastructure (/me is
> thinking of examples such SMB etc),

What kind of infrastructure do you mean? I think we have quite a
good infrastructure called the internet ("we" meaning Unix style
systems and open standards here, which is not equivalent to free
software, but a precondition for most free software development). I
don't know much about SMB because I fortunately never had to use it,
but I thought it was just a bad parody of NFS etc. What does it give
me (in terms of real features) that is not available with existing
free software?

> Our gtk widget set is still buggy, and far behind, our X server is starting to
> show its age (again, in the infrastructure.  Check X.org )

<sarcasm> Now that's quite a difference to M$ products which are
never buggy and never show their age. ;-) </sarcasm>

If you say that the "big decisions" don't depend on technical merits
but on politics, then you should not worry too much about technical
problems in free software projects, either (which will certainly be
dealt with by competent prople, I'm quite confident).

MJ Ray wrote:

> Then again, I don't even understand their interfaces and am well-known
> locally for unintentional catastrophic breakage of Windows 32 machines
> usually within minutes of "normal usage".

Isn't catastrophic breakage part of "normal usage" of windoze
machines? Or do you mean that more experienced windoze users cause
their catastrophic breakages intentionally? ;-)

> I even managed to kill a
> laptop with only alt-tab between Powerpoint and Notepad, and using the
> mouse to move the insertion point in Notepad.  Don't ask me what
> happened, because I don't understand that!

Reminds me of the old joke:
"Windows has detected that you have moved your mouse. Your
system must be restarted for this change to take effect." ;-)

Frank

-- 
Frank Heckenbach, frank at g-n-u.de
http://fjf.gnu.de/
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