bill gates=Harvard University, Drop Out

[ducks]

Net Worth: $46.5 bil down

Country of citizenship: United States
Residence: Medina, WA, United States
Industry: Software
Marital Status: married , 3 children
Harvard University, Drop Out

Gates was given honorary knighthood in March, but don't call him Sir William: the title is only good for citizens of the Commonwealth. He is staying plenty busy pressing Microsoft beyond PCs into television set-top boxes, games, cell phones. "Software is where the action is," Gates proclaimed to company researchers last August. Competition from rival open source operating system, Linux, is stalling Microsoft's growth in the server market, but desktop dominance remains intact: Windows installed in 94% of PCs being sold. Next version, Longhorn, should be ready in 2006. Microsoft, meanwhile, is pursuing online music, photos and search software. Gates is methodically diversifying his wealth: He sells 20 million shares each quarter, reinvests through Cascade Investment in nontech companies, including big stakes in Cox Communications, Canadian National Railway, Republic Services. World's biggest philanthropist also devoting $27 billion to good deeds. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation fights infectious diseases (hepatitis B, AIDS), funds vaccine development, helps high schools.

[Uncle Donnie]

I'm surprised to see you touting an article about Gates being the richest man in America, one that affirms Windows absolute dominance, only for a quick blurb about linux "stalling" Microsoft's server growth. Too bad there wasn't anything about how .NET is dominating Java. Or anything about the legal problems "stalling" the hell out of open source.

[exstatic]

Or anything about the legal problems "stalling" the hell out of open source.

The only "legal problems" are being cause by lawsuits financed by Bill Gates.

[baseline bum]

I don't think Windows is ever going to get the server market. Windows has never had the stability to be able to efficiently handle being a server. Windows will not work on anything other than processors based on the Intel 8086 architechture. Uptime is critical for a server, and Windows fails miserably here. Any windows user knows that the system can become very sluggish if it hasn't been rebooted in a couple of days or so. Another huge problem related to uptime is how bad the 2 windows filesystems, FAT and NTFS, are when an error happens. When the system is booted after an event like a crash, an imppoper shutdown, a powe loss, etc. it has to run scandisk to correct errors in the filesystem. Because of the way the filesystems are laid out scandisk must check every block of the hard drives that weren't cleanly unmounted. The time scandisk takes to finish grows with filesystem size, and it can take forever on large drives.

The old-school UNIX filesystem UFS and the Linux native ext2 suffer this problem also. However, there are a lot of filesystems called journaling filesystems (such as reiserfs, SGI's XFS, and IBM's JFS) that write a journal of all filesystem changes so that correcting a corrupted filesystem takes only a second or two, regarless of size of the filesystem. The only one I know well is reiserfs (the fs I use), which is pretty fast and efficient for reading, writing, and creating files, as well as searching because it's based on using a balanced tree structure for oganizing the filesystem.

Anyways, Windows won't run on an Itanium, UltraSparc, Sparc, G4, G5, etc, thus tying people's hands into a dying architechture (the Intel 8086).

I think it's funny that linux is only compared to windowso though. Linux is so much hype and legend because of its free roots. Honestly, linux wouldn't be my choice for running a server either. When compared to windows linux looks incredible when it comes to things like stability, security, uptime, etc, but it's definitely not at the level of BSD UNIX's in any of tose areas. FreeBSD is probably the most stable OS ever created, with uptimes recorded of more than 4 years.

As for the desktop, I can't see linux ever wrestling it away from Microsoft. At first glance you would think linux should be beating windows pants off there too given its stability and security, but there's not one linux. There's thousands of different distributions out there, and they are very different. For instance, there are so many different tools for package management (ie, easy installing and uninstalling of software). Slackware's package manager is pretty simple: a set of bash scripts and one text file per package. On the other side you have dependency checking package managers like RedHat's RPM, SuSe's YaSt, Gentoo's BSD Ports based Portage, and so on that download and install missing dependencies.

[baseline bum]

Another huge issue with linux on the desktop: which environment to use? KDE? GNOME? XfCE? fluxbox?

KDE is the most popular choice: it offers a tightly integrated set of feautures includeing things like text editors (KWrite), an web/file browers (Konqueror), an office suite (KOffice), and a million other things. It looks like Windows, and is a swiss-army knife kind of program like Windows.... which makes it the choice for a lot of people. However, KDE is really buggy in the leading distro right now, Red Hat. Also, a lot of people are using linux because they can't stand Windows, and thus KDE isn't appealing to them... so then there's GNOME... GNOME looks like MacOS, it's not anywhere near as tightly integrated as KDE (which can make it a real pain in the ass to use and configure), and it uses less system resources to run. Still, it almost seems like just a chaotic collection of stuff without the organizaion of KDE's offering.

For those that don't like either of the previous two, there's XFCE (X Cholesterol Free Environment) which uses minimal system resources while giving a decent user interface that is unlike anything seen in Windows or Mac. For the really hardcore there's window managers like fluxbox, blackbox, metacity, windowmaker, etc that only support Start-bar like menus, easy window switching, and so on but not things like point and click file browsing, icons on the desktop, etc.

There is no one consistent user interface for linux. Because linux is an OS written by computer geeks for computer geeks it's not friendly to people who only want a computer to do basic things or to do work on. Until one dominant linux distro takes over with one dominant way of doing things like package management, running a windows-like environment, etc. Windows will continue to kill everyone in the desktop market. Linux is about choice, but with choice there's responsibility too.. ie, you have to know what you're doing and be willing to spend time to make things work how you want.

[baseline bum]

double-post

[Uncle Donnie]

The only "legal problems" are being cause by lawsuits financed by Bill Gates.

Conspiracy theories aside, my intention wasn't to bash open source. But rather that there's pluses and minuses to everything, and the constant Microsoft bashing gets old.

[ducks]

in texas there is a internet cafe that has linux on there computers and not windows




has anyone played with lindows?

[ducks]

I posted the article because bill gates is a college drop out and people think you have to have a degree to make money

[Duff McCartney]

Come on Ducks how can you hate Bill Gates?

He's worth billions and when he dies...his kids are only gonna get 0.04 percent of his money, which amounts to $10 million dollars...the rest is gonna be donated to charity.

[ducks]

he is the most greedy sob alive

he choices not to fix his problems with his os
he charges way to much for office

he tells people not to pirate his stuff but gets caught overseas doing that

[scott]

I posted the article because bill gates is a college drop out and people think you have to have a degree to make money

You have to half a semi-decent grasp of English, however.

[ducks]

You have to half a semi-decent grasp of English, however.

not in everywhere in the world :spin