Smart as you seem to be it shouldn't be a problem for you to find some place on the internet (btw Ballmer invented it) where people actually believe the BS you are spreading - there's always OTW at gentoo.

I don't think MS bought Xenix unless they later sold it to SCO because SCO Xenix existed long after MS Xenix went by the way side.

Xenix was a derivation of Unix not the other way around by the way.

Funny comment about MS "creating" anything. I can't think of a single idea they "created" - they simply took the ideas of others and ran with them. Next they'll be telling us that Firefox violates MS patents on IE because IE now has tabbed browsing. What MS is good at "creating" is hostile environments for people with less money than they have.

old6598

wikipedia is your friend

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix

Microsoft did not create anything. One could say they tried to clone it... who knows

If you like windows and all that stuff it's OK, but don't be blind.

Try Linux and get a taste of freedom

Microsoft can ki$$ my a$$ and Steve Baldmer can ki$$ a little deeper...

Actually while the anarchist - hippy Stallman was busy smoking pot in his hippy comune during the late 70s and early 80s and while trovalds the little Finnish communist boy was busy writing BASIC programs with his commodore 64 (I bet he really wrote all of linux in BASIC, anyways, but pretended to do in C, since C was cool..) Ballmer with his friend Billy GOAT was busy writing UNIX and Windows. So it is all his, so pay up....

As someone who runs a small hosting and web development business, I have to say this is all much ado about nothing.

If Microsoft discovered these breaches in their IP, they should have come forward and filed lawsuits right away. But they've create a precedent where they have identified violations of their IP and now their sitting on them. As someone else has pointed out (the "latches" rule), Microsoft will have no standing in a court of law because they're waiting.

As a business owner, I've selected Linux (and Unix-style operating systems in general) because it outperforms Windows in many respects. I don't use Windows unless I have to. Then I use versions of Windows that are extremely outdated and actually aren't supported anymore. If I need a newer version of Windows, I try to find another solution. If there isn't one, then I just don't do it. I have identified Windows as an unacceptable security risk. Not just because I dislike Microsoft, but because I am intimately familiar with how Windows is constructed, and it's worse than you think. Plus, I refuse to pay money for Windows when I can get a better OS for next to nothing.

I agree that this is all a ploy from Microsoft to delay the inevitable. The tragedy is that if Microsoft spent as much money on R&D as they do on their lawyers and their marketing, they would actually have a top-notch product. Plus, there are some fairly easy changes they can make to Windows that would make it a much more secure platform. It might mean forcing software developers to change the way they construct Windows programs, but this is one instance where they could use their "monopoly" strength for good (their own good and the good of their users). They forced developers to "do it right" when they introduced Windows 3.0. Many Windows 2.x programs broke because Microsoft no longer permitted developers to break Windows programming conventions. Microsoft had a minor PR problem with that decision, but Windows 3.0 put Microsoft over the top in terms of a GUI environment. But they keep nursing the same broken architecture and it's only going to get worse as long as they do that. Plus, there are things they could do to ease the transition in the form of abstraction layers. But they choose not to do these things.

I've often thought about the issue of Windows systems being subject to attacks and viruses much more often than any other platform. This is another reason why Windows is an unacceptable security risk; not only are Windows systems attacked more often, but that they are often very vulnerable to these attacks. Right now, I'm in the mids of a project with a fairly large client. They in turn are doing a large project with a very large, very well known client. In fact, chances are you use their products everyday if you are in the United States. This client I'm working for truly lives the Microsoft lifestyle. Their entire data center is Windows-based. So when I told them I was developing a system that was based on Linux, they just about had a heart-attack. The truth of the matter is, once we're done getting the systems set up and everything is running, we will probably never have any interaction with their IT group again.

So am I worried that Microsoft has an eye to pursuing legal action against Linux? Not at all. Linux is too good to go away, and Microsoft has become too big for it's own good. They're becoming like IBM was in the '80s and the '90s. They are now having a hard time keeping out of their own way. They don't really have anything against Linux in a legal sense, and nothing will come of these idol threats.

Yeah and then Torvalds posted the "BASIC" code online so that everyone could contribute to his project, linux.

It's a conspiracy, all the linux devs are BASIC programmers fooling everyone else telling them it's actually written in C. Then those who dare to look at the open source code are either brainwashed to hold the secret or killed.

Crazy man, if anyones getting high it's you. I bet you're blazing up and posting all of this nonsense just for laughs.

Actually I thought this before, but I don't think even Ballmer would take it this far. Ballmer would maybe make a few posts to get inside the head of what, according to him, is a commie linux user. Beyond that would just be a waste of time for even Ballmer.

I could be mistaken of course, Ballmer could just be a crazy old, obsessive man like old6598.

What is the point of posting things like this? What a waste of everyone's time.....I just wasted 8 seconds of my life reading your post because I thought you might have a constructive opinion!

IBM has 300,000 employees, net profit of 9 billion dollars (2006) and big Iron "Dinosaur" mainframes with VM operating systems that can host hundreds of "linux images" at the same time. It would take Microsoft and the whole open source community decades to produce such top notch Operating Systems and Computers.

IBM is still way ahead of everyone else...

Yes, Bill Gates wrote Unix... right. Do you, in ANY post, actually have evidence to support your rants? To me you sound like some right-wing nut job like McCarthy.

And yet IBM sells a huge variety of Linux products and services. (See http://www-1.ibm.com/partnerworld/pw..._products.html) They have also shown their commitment to Open Source (http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource)

I will say I've always liked IBM hardware. It was almost impossible to kill the original IBM PC and PC/XT. However after having worked on System 34/36, AIX, OS/2 and OS/400 I'm of the strong opinion that they should leave writing operating systems to other people. (Oddly enough DOS was from M$ and for its day wasn't a bad OS for a PC.)

This weekend I'm again going to have to babysit my AS/400 full system backup because the morons at IBM couldn't figure out how to leave TCP/IP running or do a proper remote console on a full system save. UNIX on the other hand allowed me to do full backups via modem before TCP/IP and via network since TCP/IP.

It was amusing to see how great and big IBM is. That post sort of missed the point that IBM used to be BIGGER and they basically shot themselves in the foot by trying to retake the PC market by force with the PS/2's MCA being incompatible with ISA cards. Compaq and others exploited that big time by coming up with EISA. Not saying MCA wasn't a superior bus but IBM should have learned from its own history. They essentially got huge in the computer industry because they original made mainframes that were compatible with their old tabulating machines whereas all the other computer players didn't.

M$ trying to retake market share by forcing the unfaithful back to Windoze by threatening Linux will likely suffer a similar fate. If it works to any degree it will leave such a bad taste in peoples mouths that they'll go to UNIX instead.

UNIX has been going away any day now since 1970...

IBM is not about PCs. That was always a sidelight.

You missed the two best operating systems ever to be written, VM and MVS. I agree, those other OS you mentioned are not necessarily the hot ticket, but they are much more recent creations and based on trying to be compatible more or less with other OS that IBM didn't design.

What they did design, and got exactly right, is MVS and VM. And don't forget DB2, which is also an IBM creation.

The world runs on MVS (Z/OS is the latest incarnation) and has been running on it since the 1960s. Every bank, insurance company, brokerage, trading company, utility, every major business runs IBM's MVS operating system. So does NASA; the most commonly used I/O spooling subsytem is a descendent of HASP (Houston Automatic Spooling Processor).

VM has been providing true virtualization since the 1970s, good enough and fast enough to host MVS images used in production in the types of business I mentioned above.

These are absolutely outstanding general purpose, high-throughput, high performance operating systems with unmatched reliability and robustness and an extremely disciplined migration strategy. Programs written for the last 40-50 years are basically object-code compatible today. IBM also sports probably the best documentation of any software company. It's coherent across hundreds (thousands?) of products.

The compilers and all of the software end-to-end are so much better quality than anything else and such a pleasure to work on that nothing else comes close (and indeed is quite aggravating to deal with.) If you haven't had a chance to work with these OS and toolchains you're missing one of the more pleasant experiences in computing.

Can someone PLEASE show this bloke the door?

Don't forget to bang his head on the frame on the way out, like Al Bundy used to do with Kelly's boyfriends.