Damn man… I hope my younger brother will never catch you making such discussions…
I don’t really know about BeOS… but be sure that Win is one of the worst OS of pc history… too bad it’s also the most common… so anyone who cares about “commercial standards” is somehow compelled to install Win 
The secret is in the money, as always.
Linux is free.
Windows is not.
“But… I got win for free with my PC”
or
“But… the fact that I have to pay for win suggests me that Win is better”
Yes, and it’s Santa who brings gift under the xmas tree.
There are known linux machines said to work non-stop for years while accomplishing several professional server tasks… while sometime my Win98 was used to crash even when doing nothing at all
Microsoft intention is “noble” somehow… but it hides very bad commercial speculations.
“Technology for everyone” seems to be Bill’s slogan…“and everyone’s money to me” might I add.
Allowing technology to be available to everyone is a great democratic deal.
What Bill is doing, instead, it looks like having more to do with its own bank account than with “humankind wellbeing” or “technology improving” or “cyberpunk democracy”… Actually the only thing that Bill managed to spread to a popular level is the false consciousness that you NEED tech support to correctly use a PC.
Guess what? Most Microsoft-certified people is nothing more than “tech assistance”… so I guess that a stable OS is not what Microsoft is after if they care about their billionaire business.
Microsoft is also well-known to release their OS with minimum if NO debug at all… you know, we’re talking about money… and if you have a real OS that will keep you satisfied for years, hey… it means you’re not buying anymore… not clicking on support pages anymore, not buying goddamn “PC for everyone” books… and Bill (and his bank account) might be greatly sad about it.
Code optimization is something even more subtle and vicious.
They simply don’t do it… this means that your machine is doing TONS of operations that simply are NOT NEEDED.
Why? Any coder from Renoise Developement Team could tell you that better than I could…
If the coding language you use is distant from the “machine language” then the resulting exe will be larger. The more you get near to human-like language and the more you’re using pre-built function that are distant from optimization (example: 10+10+10+10+10+10+10… is 7 operation… 10x7 is 1 operation your computer will do… if math is not an opinion, what program will run faster?)
Obviously our friend Bill has pushed this kind of approach instead of a more “pro” one… all in all it’s faster to put Visual basic in the hands of a newby and tell him “Go, you’re a coder now” …than training real coders.
So applications are growing larger and larger.
It’s commerce, bros… and we’re fresh meat.
If you want to know what is possible to do on a machine with a well-optimized code you should definitely get into the DemoScene (if you still out of it) and get some 4Kb intro… or 64Kb intro… and then spend the rest of your life looking at your Outlook Express, wondering what in the world has happened for such a difference to take place right on your goddamn desktop…
