The same company who kept calling Apple’s Macintosh a toy until more code wranglers wrote games for DOS/Windows, then changed their story that Apple was unfriendly without enogh decent software, especially for entertainment?

Microsoft is doing all it can to do as much economic damage to those who threaten it since thanks to Vista (Windows ME II), they find themselves in a worse quandry than Apple’s Copland period. They’ve already renounced the 9x kernel because of its inherent limitations and now thanks to grafting 9x code onto its NT base, its limitations are becoming glaring (DirectX e.g.).

I personally think they’re spreading FUD and attempting to tweak current code because they truly cover *nix and the flexibility it’s demonstrated.

If they can wrangle themselves into owning SysV (the only *nix code they can legally own, btw) they will finally find code stability and flexibility they’ve constantly said Windows had and was proven time and again to fall short on.

So, MS, please stop the FUD and publicity machine and… Fix. Your. Code.

No both OSs will be here for quite a while. Due to marketing momentum, and market share, I do not see Windows being displaced in the short run. Over the long haul – who knows?

As kernels *nix systems will continue to exist, simply because they are easily extended for new hardware. The GUI shell is separate from the kernel and as new paradigms come and go so can new GUI shells.

Windows by M$’ own admission is stuck on Little Endian hardware. Even embedded XP is only available for x86 hardware while their CE offerings have wider hardware support.

When new CPU architectures become available, Linux will be there for the early hackers.

Will Linux become as mainstream as Windows? Probably not any time soon, but as M$ continues to add bloat for functionality that is not conducive to it business customers, those business customers will migrate to operating systems like Linux where they can choose how to best support their user base.

As a programmer, if I write portable code for *nix platforms, it can be easily ported onto windows, but if I first write the code for windows, there is a lot of stuff that needs to be rewritten to port into the *nix world.

Exo

Isn’t that what Steve Jobs tried to do with OS X?

As far as UNIX becoming obsolete soon, it seems that way unless somebody can redesign the kernel to be more up to date with modern hardware.

Apple’s marketing appeals to the desire to get shiny new stuff, while Microsofts is ‘you’ll lose money if you don’t choose us’. Either way it’s annoying, but at least Apple doesn’t scare you into thinking ‘nothing else will work’.

And they talk as if unix people are a rarity, which is simply a load of crap. The systems are still in broad use, so the demand for people who know how to run them is still there. There is no reason for unix heads to become rare.

As for user interface, sure, unixoid operating systems still have the text console. But so does Windows. The difference is that in Windows, once the GUI is running you can only access the command-line interface in a window, whereas under most unixoids, your can also switch to a pure text mode console that is completely independant of the GUI. (And the suite of command-line utilities blows the doors off of Windows’ offerings.)

There are several GUIs for the unixoids—at least two of which are very robust, and user friendly.

Windows’ primary appeal is to those who are already familiar with it—or don’t realise that they have a choice.

Meanwhile—as long as you chose to (rather derisively) draw attention to it—your composition sucks!

An elipsis after a period, in and of itself, is not a problem. The presence of the elipsis was the problem there. An elipsis indicates omission of something; it is not a general purpose way to end a sentence.

Apostrophes in contractions (you’re, must’ve, ’80s) also stand for omission. Leaving them out of contracted years does not make logical sense. The late ’70s can refer to the time of the American Revolution. But it usually refers to when disco spewed upon the music world. The late 70s always refers to the time in which Mount Vesuvius spewed upon Pompei. (Disco doesn’t seem so bad in that light—or dark, as the case may be.)

I’m not going to get too much into “modular” and “monolithic”, as i’m not sure where the line is to be drawn with kernels. But they are opposite terms. A kernel can’t be both—at least not in the same context (e.g. building versus running).

[I probably should have split this into two comments.]