Please wait...
Like I said before ... if Microsoft hasn't gained a foothold outside of the desktop space by now, they're not going to ... and if Linux hasn't gained a foothold inside the desktop space by now, it's not going to either. So with the slippery-slope gone, and Windows finally out of beta (although they curiously named the 1.0 production release "Windows 7") ... bearing the friction of using a superior but unadopted Linux OS on the desktop simply doesn't make as much sense as it used to.
Also, now that Netscape has won the browser war, the desktop doesn't matter quite as much anymore either. It's too bad Netscape didn't survive to enjoy their victory.
The truth is, these days the biggest existential threats to the universe are Facebook and Amazon. Microsoft has largely been neutralized. (Karl Vreski can take it from here.)
Does anyone actually *use* FreeDOS? I thought it existed only as a placeholder for manufacturers to sell computers without an operating system pre-installed, but they have to put something on the disk to get around Microsoft's "any computer sold without an operating system automatically counts as piracy of Windows" schtick.
For a long time, some form of DOS was needed to at least flash a BIOS or the like, but now that everything seems to support USB, and people building motherboards today account for this, I think it's far less useful than it used to be.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/microsoft-engineer-installs-google-chrome-durin g-presentation-after-edge-freezes-518291.shtml
or
http://tinyurl.com/yangwolh
We’ve seen lots of blunders on stage, and still happen occasionally, but this must be the best of all.
How soon they forget:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKy9fV_zX_o
Well, at least they correctly demonstrated that the only legitimate purpose of Internet Edge-plorer is to download a real web browser.
Remember the good old days when you had to use FTP to download Netscape?
I think we can see something interesting here.
Microsoft bundled its browser with the OS, effectively killing Netscape.
In those days, people didn't seem to grasp enough about computers to even realize they had a choice in browsers... they were content to use the one on the OS, even if it was a pile of shit.
Today, people are savvy enough to not only recognize a shitty browser, but to also download and install a browser they prefer in its place.
Even though you'd think, "Well, it's just a browser, any of these ought to do," there's enough of a difference that people still care enough to install their own.
Frankly, we've come a ways from the computer illiterate person just getting into computers. It's part of our lives now, like it or not.
And those who never really got it about computers, or for whatever reason didn't embrace them, are probably kinda lost, and getting more lost as time moves forward.
Microsoft bashing observation for today:
People like to bash non-Microsoft office suites like LibreOffice because they occasionally don't have full fidelity opening Microsoft Office documents.
You know what's even worse at opening Microsoft Office documents? Microsoft Office 365. Anything other than the simplest of documents, it's like there was a middle step where someone tried to edit it in emacs first.
Also ... Sharepoint 365 is even worse than regular Sharepoint. I didn't even think that was possible.