> I'll say one thing for Bill Gates: his approach to setup makes
> amateurs like Linux look *really* amateurish. Why the hell don't
> they just copy Windows? It's not like they have to work it out
> for themselves - Bill's already done it for them.

LL> Errrrr.... why copy a badly designed, overbloated,
LL> virus-ridden, insecure piece of crud "operating system" like
LL> Windows ? Doesn't make a great deal of sene from this end.....

 I don't mean copy the code, which would be illegal under copyright;
I mean copy the ideas, the layout, and the methods... the way that
Gates copied Apple's icons. The *hard* part of any product is the
original idea. Once you have the idea, the rest is just going through
the mechanics of *doing* it. This is where Microsoft fails.

 They started in the wrong place with DOS (which was given to Gates
anyway) and Bill has done brilliantly since, being smart enough to
tell the bad from the good ideas that he stole, guided by a philosophy
he may not even be aware that he follows: to make the PC *easy* for
the user, hiding a complexity *he* controls, under a pretty interface
that runs as automatically as possible.

 *This* is why Windows stuffs up. His code is basically as good as it
gets, but in making it easy to use, he leaves holes that bastards
drive straight through.

 Linux, on the other hand, has a philosophy still trapped back in the
80s before Windows, when PCs were the domain of enthusiasts and
hackers. What makes me scream with frustration, is that efforts to put
this right like X11, Gnome and KDE strat from scratch with their own
GUI and losr the plot when all they have to do is copy Windows. The
whole thing exists, they don't have to *invent* anything, Gates has
perfected the basic Windows system over 20 years... all they have to
do is dump DOS and its bastard child NT, and adapt the beautiful
Windows concept to the correct Linux platform.

 Of course, being Uniwankers they can't do that. They have to do it
their *own* way, stuff it up, make it hard, and the text editor rules
okay.

Regards,
Bob
 

 

--- BQWK Alpha 0.5