chuck> ... No kidding? And, of course if you just want to fix one
chuck> problem in one program, you can go to the correct source
chuck> subdirectory, type `Make install <program-name>'---since
chuck> Microsoft already follows the best attributes of the
chuck> open-source model. But we already knew that, since, Microsoft
chuck> does that, and of course more widely than generally
chuck> realized...
I cringe every time I see or hear a progressive -- who would never dream of eating factory-farmed meat, miss a WTO protest, or back away from supporting the liberation of women, people of color, and so on -- blithely using Microsoft products, which has seemed to me a major no-no since well before Judge Jackson's ruling.
Microsoft is *easier* (for some values of easy, anyway) to use than almost everything else (owing almost entirely to its ubiquity on new machines), but, geez, being a vegan, antiglobalization, antiracist, antisexist protester is *way* harder than learning to use Linux (or one of the BSDs). Those of us who've done both can attest to that. (And it's getting easier to use all the time; the latest Gnome desktop for Linux is rapidly approaching peopel--who-only-email-and-surf stage very rapidly.)
It's simply one of the nastiest companies around -- growing positively Orwellian of late, from a heavy reliance on prison labor to the very recent, totally evil 'turn in people who request a quote for new computers delivered without an MS operating system' gambit -- and the degree to which progressive activists are reliant on its shitty software is bewildering and sad.
Best, Kendall Clark
PS-for-Chuck -- There's a new Linux distribution that's using the BSD-style port tree for system configuration and management; just another feather in the cap of the BSD crowd, the core of which seems to have a perpetual chip on its shoulder at what it takes to be the undeserving (relative) popularity of Linux -- which it has always considered, often in open, brittle hostility, to be as technically inferior to, say, FreeBSD as Windows is to Linux.