My only "claim" is that Microsoft is far from dying - in fact it continues to grow in spite of how huge it is. For evidence you can look at the annual reports. Everything else you are spouting is meaningless conjecture and attempts to change the issue: you have failed to build a strong case never mind prove that Microsoft is dying. Oh that's right, you're a zealot so I suppose that even the name of this thread is hyperbole and can be ignored, just like you.
Your handle says it all ... Bigloser..... You never built a strong case for microsoft not dying and your comments are meaningless conjecture and can and should be ignored ...... Having failed to engage in any type of rational thought I will put you on my ignore list .....
Right prt. I misprinted the date, it should read 1978, not 1985. I kind of remembered the 8 but didn't check. I was in fact referring to the still famous issue, in the word of its editor: "The public journal unveiling of UNIX was the 1978 special issue of BSTJ". The most prestigious "Bell System Technical Journal" , known as the BSTJ, had seen an incredible number of scientific and technical "firsts" in its history. It is true that articles by Kerninghan, Ritchie and Thompson had appeared in the BSTJ about 4 years earlier on their work. The voluminous 1978 special BSTJ presented the entirety of the concept for the first time, a lot of it like it still goes today. (No lan, wifi of course). The authors clearly saw things like C and the OS as meshing together as a whole with other UNIX tools, still in use today.
I keep attempting to steer this discussion to the topic of the thread, but I give up. It appears you guys are too busy slapping each other's backs on how amazing Linux is and how much all MS tech sucks. I'll leave you to that.
Agyar, Looking in the future is always hazardous. You should admit that the those Bell people of the 1970's really did. I fail to see the .NET "tool" thing as something that will still impact the world 30 years from now. You also probably never heard of IBM's Barnum & Bailey about PL/1 at the time of the S/360 release way back in 1966(?). PL/1, darling of the uni's, where are you? Fortran and Cobol, are still around though.
I never said it sucks I just said it was not cost effective ... which I suppose in the context of software expenditures is equivalent to "sucks" ...
As an undergraduate I once asked the computer science chairman why his program required PL1 as at the time it was sparsely used. His response was that it was just another language and that any modern language was appropriate for the fisrt few introductory courses. Later I learned that the department received huge grants from IBM .. they stuck with PL1 until IBM was ready to phase out their last PL1 installed bases ..... So, the mere promotion of a technology or its requirement by paid hacks does not gaurantee its longevity or popularity if there is a better alternative. If C language and pascal and C++ had never come along we might still be using PL1. The strength of open source is its cost, both in up front expenditures - zero - and ongoing risk - very low since no single entity controls it.
Can't blame you. Up till almost today, many things couldn't be done without Fortran. Practically up till the arrival of the current cluster super-machines, most scientific work run on the esoteric earlier supercomputers had to be programmed in Fortran. Fortran in most cases being the only compiler available on these architectures. No ruby. (even no python ) PS: science_trader, some guys might call us zealots.