IT Job creations... IT job losses?

[Keith Mastin]

> On Sat, 01 Nov 2003 20:43:00 -0500
> CLIFFORD ILKAY <clifford_ilkay-biY6FKoJMRdBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org> uttered:
>
>> >So who is the average user who is not so average and what apps does
>> >he need that requires M$ ?
>>
>> I have a client who uses some very sophisticated (and expensive ~
>> $80,000/seat) CAD/CAM software that has little chance of ever running
>> on Windows. Though he would love to run Linux, it would be crazy for
>> him to do that because it would effectively kill his business. Yes,
>> Linux is great and can leap over tall buildings and all that but, the
>> biggest disservice we can do to Linux is to claim that it is suitable
>> for all situations and users.

Best you can do for buddy is give him some protection and backup or
mirroring ability, from the sounds of it. I run into this from time to
time.

> ...but the biggest sevice we can do to Linux (or BSD, or Eros ;-)) is to
> break the monopoly, the stranglehold, that MS has on the desktop market,
> and thereby give developers a reason to port and/or code versions of
> said software for OS's other than Windows. That's why I am convinced
> more and more every day that there is an activist component to being an
> OSS advocate, or even just as a user. Linux users have shunned the
> political debate far too much, I think, believing that they are somehow
> above it, and this is wrong.

Why is it wrong? M$ has a huge market share on the desktop, yes. Why does
that irritate you? Why are you not going after Mac for building bigger,
faster and better proprietary computers that you can't customize without
killing the warranty? Is that also not monopolistic?

I fix a lot of broken windoh$ boxes. Let me tell ya something... those
users... M$ is the best they are capable of using, and even that's a
stretch. I've seen them decide they didn't need an Administrator account
on Win2k, so they deleted it. Let me ask you this: do you really want
those people trying to run a computer that's outfitted with anything but
windoh$?

And the windoh$ coders you referred to. Sharpen your pencil, you have just
been duley elected by proxy to port VB to *nix so they too can play with
the rest of us. :)

> We obviously cannot rely on the DOJ in the US to enforce it's own
> convictions of MS on illegal market manipulation, we cannot sit idly by
> and watch MS dodge this, if we expect *nix in general to become what I
> believe it is supposed to have been all along, the dominant model for
> computing everywhere, more advanced, more secure, more stable, and, dare
> I say it, more politically and economically egalitarian.

I'm not convinced that everyone shares your views about what linux is
*supposed to be*. I sure don't. Dominant models genrally suck for anything
they weren't designed to do. Volkswagen made a great car with the beetle,
but it was thought to be useless for moving a house.

> Linux *can be* "suitable for all situations and users", but it's not
> going to happen overnight, and it's not going to happen without users
> taking an active and participatory role in the politcal discourse that
> so far has allowed MS to quietly carry on it's monopolistic game.

Ah, you want to push it. What makes linux so great? Yes, it's a good
little OS for a lot of things, makes for great inexpensive general
servers, but no match against other OSes for some things. We don't yet
have a RDBMS that can do live realtime backups without a ton of
specialized and expensive hardware and proprietary software, and this is
no small issue.

I really don't care about X or and of the DE's. As far as I'm concerned X
is a lost cause and should be thrown back to the drawing board the same
way that a lot of the M$ underbelly is trife.  IMHO a whole new graphical
user interface architecture needs to be rethunk so we can scrap X
altogether. Now just imagine the headaches of the deployment and
distribution.

Joe, remember that linux is just a baby. It hasn't been around forever
line some the Unices or M$. It's come a long way and so far is a great
backend support system for running servers, but at the end of a day, it's
just another OS to chose from.

-- 
Keith
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