I hate Rush Limbaugh. In my opinion, he's a short-sighted, racist, naive fool whose vision of the world is best delivered in the form of Yoko Onno yelling loudly after being disqualified from an elementary school spelling bee. But, despite all of his faults, the guy isn't stupid.
I opened up Valleywag to read the latest gossip (read: who got fired today from Yahoo!), and found an article about Rush Limbaugh imploring Jobs to release a set of bugfixes for his Mac. Naturally, I expected to read an article about Rush being pissed that his right-click doesn't work. Instead, I read a very sane request for fixes on a Mac VPN client (oh piss off you elitest pricks, it's a damn VPN client) and well-documented problems with Time Machine. Very impressive. Very reasonable, and a bit of a shock to my otherwise infernal impression of the man.
My problem with positing at Rush Limbaugh's intelligence is bias. I wasn't willing to look beyond my own despise at the man, and frankly was reinforced by an overall popular sentiment for such a despise. Rush is far from moderate, and has certainly made some enemies out there. Still though, none of these things had to do with Rush's intelligence. Maybe you could take a jab at his reasoning skills for his analysis, but opinions are far from often intellectually-branded. It's more likely that you're going to be angry at your best friend for something stupid, rather than some well-deduced kernel of truth.
This sort of critical review is necessary, I think, in the case of Microsoft. I spend a lot of my time during the day studying and messing around at my school's Computer Science club. During the long hours I spend either getting my ass kicked in TopCoder, playing Smash Brothers, or joining in a 10 man, 1 girl conversation about sexual positions, I hear a lot of Microsoft bashing. Frankly, it's fashionable: in every tech circle I've run around, the Slashdot sort of disdain for the "closed-source evil behemoth of the shadowy north" is the lingua franca. You don't like my version of Linux because it's too user friendly? Wah! I hate you! Wait, we both hate Microsoft. Let's put aside our differences and sack Redmond together.
And while such a pillaging trip might be very profitable (Nintendo has their American headquarters in Redmond also, and there's a great Caimjumper restaurant downtown), its reasons are pretty damn faulty. Look, it's just retarded to come at Microsoft and deride their success by calling them a bunch of dumb, terrible programmers who're evil by conception. This is stupid. This is bullshit.
I'd like to review the charges I often hear levied on the corporation one by one, because all of them are some of the dumbest things I've ever heard.
- FACT: Microsoft is Evil because they're Closed-Source.
I guess all corporations that respect the importance of trade secrets are evil. I can't wait to travel to the fairytale land where stockholders appreciate having proprietary knowledge given out willey-nilley, personal property rights are inconsequential, and everything magically works. Just because a corporation doesn't want to give out the code it spent millions on, doesn't mean that the firm in question is the spawn of Satan. This is about protecting themselves from competitors that otherwise would turn into this large behemoth of "closed source" code. What incentive would I have to give you my homework for class, if all I knew you'd do with it was use it as your homework then go about life? - FACT: Bill Gates and Melinda Gates are evil people.
Don't hate the player, kids. Bill's easily one of the most brilliant business men of all time, and he and his wife have donated millions to various charities around the world. The Mercury News recently had an article asking to describe who was funding the majority of worldwide AIDS research. Guess which firm donated more money to AIDS research than all of the R.E.D. movement combined? The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Man, you guys are evil, wanting to keep people healthy and stuff. Evil, vicious people. - FACT: Microsoft is evil because it's a monopoly, and keeps people inside it.
Let's leave the economics to the people that study it. Being a monopoly has nothing to do with ethics: it simply has to do with the positive analysis on how you gather revenue. Yes, there is a clear oligopoly in the operating system market, and Microsoft is sitting atop the fattest amount of the gold. This doesn't make them evil though, nor do their attempts to raise prices on an inelastically-demanded product stink of evil. This simply happens because, well, all firms operate like this. We maximize marginal revenue where possible, and with a product with few close substitutes, we have an opportunity to reasonably raise prices over a new feature set. Welcome to the real world.
If we're really going to hose someone down for this, let's go target Apple. The average Macbook Pro is well above the CPI of all non-Mac PCs. Now, why does this happen? Simple: Apple has a clear monopoly over Apple Computers. They have to maximize marginal revenue by searching for a price in a certain way. Their way is to simply raise each unit's price by a certain amount. Simple. At least my soon-to-be-purchased Dell with the same specs doesn't cost as much as a Mac Pro. Still, I can't blame Apple. It's what they're supposed to do.
It's what any company would do. I guess then that every company is evil. - Open Source Products Are Better than Clunky, Not Working Microsoft Products
I like open source: I really do. I like the ability to tamper, screw around with, break, and tear apart my software. What I don't like is when FSF nuts decide to make this a Jihad-style war against Microsoft (coughcough where's the attacking Google's highly-protected search algorithm guys) because they're a closed-source company. Worse, I hate them calling Microsoft's software comparatively "buggy" or "beta-ware". And Ubuntu, running on a perpetually-unstable build of Debian, isn't buggy also?
Let's look at this from a non-techie user's perspective. On Windows Vista, I can actually use the broadcom wireless card (you remember that one: the brand of chipset that almost 2/3 of the world uses) natively without any problems. On Linux, I have to pray to God that either the buggy-as-hell bcmw4 driver works, or wrap it through ndiswrapper. God help me if I try to connect to an access point using WAP; if WPA supplicant does its usual song and dance, and my card for some reason isn't supported, I'm screwed. For a Windows machine, all I need to do is have my drivers and an OS later than XP SP1. Wow, that's some intense "working" you've got there open source.
Or, I can really throw down the gauntlet and talk of gaming. The die-hard Linux fanboys I know say that just because Wine supports Pixel Shader 2.0, it can play any game just as well as a PC. Well, that might be true if that game is Jedi Academy, but considering that only 10 games top WINE's platinum support list at any time, I doubt you'll be able to play PC games as they were meant ot be played. Even Counter-Strike: Source, the game widely known on Wine to be working fine and a poster child of current gaming support, still acts up a lot with sound and texture issues. Worst of all, you have to play the game in directx-8 mode, meaning you're gimping yourself both in the quality of visuals and the performance. It's an admirable attempt, but Linux will never usurp Windows in gaming potential if the present is any indication of things to come.
Again, nothing against open source. But frankly, most open source projects are the work of hobbyists who're contributing their free time. If it's your job, there's a greater level of incentive and specialization (the product of corporations' revenue, and economies of scale in the long run) that allows you and your team to produce high quality code. This also isn't to preclude any corporation from producing open source projects: quite the contrary, really. But I loathe how people use it as a vehicle for their wild diatribe against Microsoft, and just slander the hell out of the company with little more than false promises.
As a wise man said, best 'check yo'self fo' you wreckity wreck yo' self.
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