Re: Bill Gates vs. General Motors

Lubow wrote:
On Jul 6, 3:26 pm, BuffetHater <BuffettHa...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jul 6, 1:45 pm, Olneyb...@xxxxxxxxx (Trailer Trash) wrote:



For all of us who feel only the deepest love and affection for the way
computers have enhanced our lives, read on.
At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the
computer industry with the auto industry and stated, "If GM had kept up
with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving
$25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon." In response to Bill's
comments, General Motors issued a press release stating:
If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving
cars with the following characteristics (and I just love this part):
1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash........ Twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to
buy a new car.
3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You
would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows,
shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could
continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.
4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause
your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would
have to reinstall the engine.
5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable,
five times as fast and twice as easy to drive - but would run on only
five percent of the roads.
6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all
be replaced by a single "This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation"
warning light. 7. The airbag system would ask "Are you sure?" before deploying.
Ola Amigo !!!!
That is some very, very, funny chit. hahahaha.

RHT is the stock of the future. From what i remember (this is Mikey
as in drive Bluhhhh nutzer/more obsessive or am
i wrong?) u have a software or computer background. . . do u fool
around
with the linux type o/s ? What is ur opine?


I took Red Hat training in Durham in 1999. When I got home, the first
thing I did was sell my Red Hat stock. It turned out to be a good
idea (got in when it went IPO) but for the wrong reason. My logic was
that the food in Durham was beyond gross. The food was not only
horrible but unhealthy. Cheese over everything (no wonder
cardiologists call that neck of the woods, "heart attack alley"). Why
would a kid from the software hotbeds of the world like Stanford,
Berkeley or MIT want to live in Durham with its crummy if not deadly
food?

Ten years later and the world is a little different. Linux has its
niche as the backbone of the network infrastructure, if not the entire
internet. The software is secure and compared to any MSFT product, it
is relatively bug and error free. We installed an early version of
Red Hat (version 4) for a customer in the mid 1990s. His system
crashed only once in the 13 or 14 years it has been running. That
occurred when his son pulled out the mouse and keyboard to play a
vidgame on his laptop.

Linux still suffers from a lack industrial strength applications. For
example, Intuit still has not rolled out a low cost Linux version of
Quickbooks, although it does support a Postgresql (that's a database
engine that many Linux systems use) in its $2000+ version. One of my
students worked for Intuit and told me the development is done in
Linux, FWIW. It should be mentioned that the Wine software product
can run many MSFT apps on Linux.

The primary thing that irritates me is that despite IBM's and HPQ's
billion dollar Linux initiatives, they fail to get the message out. I
really expected a Superbowl commercial from either IBM or HPQ
extolling the virtues of Linux. Without significant advertising from
the heavy hitters, my job becomes that much more difficult because,
effectively, we are selling a product that few understand or
understand what it does.

As for RHT, our company was a charter Certified Vendor. That means we
took Red Hat training in Durham and had to pass a very difficult Red
Hat engineering exam. It was quite a feather in our cap, but hardly
anyone cared. We gave up our RHT affiliation six years ago and now we
concentrate on the Gentoo distribution. We like Gentoo because it's
the best Linux distro out there, bar none. Every free software
application is easily installed onto Gentoo. If anyone works with Red
Hat, that person would likely experience something called "dependency
hell" when installing software. I won't go into the details, but
installing software on Red Hat can consume a day or two of
frustration. That does not exist in Gentoo.

Interesting.

I have dabbled in Linux from time to time (some people in my company run a SUSE distro on their laptops, and the company provides a build of the our corporate load on it) but my laptop is my life -- when you travel a lot, you don't have the luxury of carrying one machine for the corporate build and another for all the other apps you might use for personal financial management or whatever --- and my experience quickly is that anything not-corporate-build I try to load on SUSE requires alternative libraries to be loaded that simply won't load.

So, I end up saying "screw it" and staying in Windows Hell. Definitely a "devil you know" situation.

JG


Gentoo is difficult to install, but once it's running, it just runs
forever. If a customer insists on Red Hat, we supply Centos, a no-
cost product, which is exactly the same software as Red Hat Enterprise
sans Red Hat support.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Bill Gates vs. General Motors
    ... computer industry with the auto industry and stated, ... buy a new car. ... with the linux type o/s? ... took Red Hat training in Durham and had to pass a very difficult Red ...
    (misc.invest.stocks)
  • Re: Bill Gates vs. General Motors
    ... computer industry with the auto industry and stated, ... buy a new car. ... with the linux type o/s? ... I took Red Hat training in Durham in 1999. ...
    (misc.invest.stocks)
  • Re: Bill Gates vs. General Motors
    ... computer industry with the auto industry and stated, ... Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. ... with the linux type o/s? ... took Red Hat training in Durham and had to pass a very difficult Red ...
    (misc.invest.stocks)
  • Re: Bill Gates vs. General Motors
    ... computer industry with the auto industry and stated, ... Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. ... with the linux type o/s? ... I took Red Hat training in Durham in 1999. ...
    (misc.invest.stocks)
  • Re: Bill Gates vs. General Motors
    ... computer industry with the auto industry and stated, ... with the linux type o/s? ... took Red Hat training in Durham and had to pass a very difficult Red ... concentrate on the Gentoo distribution. ...
    (misc.invest.stocks)