In article <47f7781b@news.povray.org>, doc### [at] gmailcom says...
> Darren New wrote:
> > Doctor John wrote:
> >> Bill Gates' and Paul Allen's partnership today
> >> Don't know whether to laugh or cry
> > 
> > Think of it this way - without Microsoft, we probably wouldn't have
> > enough similarity between hardware platforms that something like Linux
> > ever got off the ground. :-)
> > 
> True dammit :-(
> 
Well, maybe true. We also might have ended up with a mil-spec system 
that is stable, required to operate in a wide range of conditions, and 
clearly documented interfaces. What we have is unstable, often doesn't 
operate even in the conditions it supposedly was designed for, and even 
the clearly documented interfaces, like modem commands, get screwed up 
by nonstandard interfaces/drivers/control mechanisms, which where 
designed to work only with specific OSes.

In other words, we started with 100 species of machines, none of them 
alike, and ended up with something that... has almost as many hacks, 
bugs, design short cuts, and stupid compromises as human DNA (and not 
because those things "worked" better than the other paths tried). If the 
military built aircraft the way Microsoft, to a large degree, and 
others, to different degrees, pushed us to produce computers, we would 
be losing billion dollar airplanes once a week, half of them in the 
first moments of flight, when some obscure set of conditions caused the 
wings to fall off.

Its a logical fallacy to presume that Microsoft was "necessary", any 
more than just about any other absurd thing that led to the modern world 
"had to" happen to get here. Even if true, the real question is, "Was 
the price paid to do so *worth* it, given other paths that may have led 
to the same thing?"

PCs imho where inevitable. Had Microsoft not shown up, someone else 
would have. Eventually, some standard would have appeared. Likely, given 
the wide us of Unix, it would have been a *nix standard. And, 
interestingly enough, Microsoft is the **only** brand name, other than 
in the embedded market, where standardizations isn't necessary as much, 
which isn't going that way "anyway". So, did we really need them to muck 
things up?

-- 
void main () {

    if version = "Vista" {
      call slow_by_half();
      call DRM_everything();
    }
    call functional_code();
  }
  else
    call crash_windows();
}

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