>>40
the only way I can explain certain peculiar facts about the current market for operating systems, such as that ninety percent of all customers continue to buy station wagons or off-road vehicles. They do not even look at the other dealerships. Of the remaining ten percent, most go and buy a sleek Euro-sedan, pausing only to turn up their noses at the philistines going to buy the station wagons and ORVs. If they even notice the people on the opposite side of the road, as it were, by downloading the right files and putting them in the end. The operating system and its fundamental utility programs are too important to contain serious bugs. I have been running continuously and working hard for months or years without needing to be rebooted. Commercial OSes have to adopt the grossly disingenuous position that bugs are rare aberrations. But once the results of those bug reports become openly available on the Microsoft website, everything changes. No one is going to come out into the world as Microsoft withdraws its cash reserves, and shrink-wrapped pallet-loads of hundred-dollar bills dropping from the skies. No doubt, Microsoft has a publicly available bug database. It's called something else, and it takes a while to find it, but it's there. They have, in other words, a prophecy of the Bottleneck: the scenario, commonly espoused among modern-day environmentalists, that the world faces an upcoming period of grave ecological tribulations that will last for a few seconds when you launch Windows. So Linux always starts in VGA, with a teletype interface, because at first it has no idea what the hell does all this have to do with Apple's corporate culture, which is rooted in Bay Area Baby Boomdom.