BillW50 wrote:
"Jeff" wrote in message ...
Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2005 13:15:35 -0500

This is begining to sound like an arguement based soley on
which company you hate more, IBM or Microsoft. You each seem to
be stating facts and then coloring them to suit your own
arguements. I personally dont care who screwed who in the
origins of the OS world, I only wish that there was some form
of real competition for MS and their huge market share to cause
some real inovation, choice and fair pricing.


What do you mean Jeff? There are tons of choices out there. Like
Mac, BeOS, UNIX, Linux, XWindows, FreeDOS, GEOS, GEM, OS/2, DEC,
etc. How many more choices would you like?



In all fairness, BeOS is dead, XWindows is not an operating system but a
GUI used mostly in *nix environments, GEOS, GEM and OS/2 are
effectively dead, DEC had a flavor of Unix but I'm not sure whether that
exists anymore. In current OS's, there's Windows, MacOS (FreeBSD Unix
based) and all the various incarnations of Linux but that's about it for
the consumer desktop as far as I know.

I still use Win2K on most of my machines, though I did put a recent
version of Ubuntu Linux on one of my laptops to play with and I was
shocked at how far it's come in the last few years. It still has a few
rough edges but it's shaping up to be a very usable operating system and
definitly something I'm interested in seeing after a couple more years
of polish. If someone can come up with a solid unified configuration
panel, settle on a standard sound driver interface and get the Windows
emulator rock solid so it supports everything MS might have some real
competition. Of course I don't really see it as a fight anyway, nothing
is forcing me to use any operating system in particular, so I just use
those which are most appropriate for what I'm doing with each particular
computer I'm doing it on. Usually the choice comes down to what
applications I need to run and what specific hardware is best supported.