Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Office On OSX, *BSD, *nix?
aliya writes: "Microsoft has announced Office and IE5.5 for Mac OS X in mid-2001. Given that OS X is based on BSD, what are the ramifications for those trying to get these apps on unix? Seems like a generic OS X-to-unix API translation would be a lot easier than Win32 API-to-unix. Not that I'm a big fan of the MS Office monopoly or the broken IE5 implementations, but it seems like this is going to have major ramifications for any application ported to Mac OS X." Of course, Microsoft promised products before which have mysteriously failed to appear, but still...interesting.
Well, physicists as a whole are known more for their skill at physics than their abilities of self-expression. Add to this the fact that the conference probably covered plenty of cutting edge research, where people were struggling with issues they barely understood, and it's not surprising there were plenty of poor sentences.
A more interesting comparison would be between, say, physicists at a party (hard to find, I know), versus others at a party.
BSD 4.4 is neither FreeBSD nor OpenBSD (nor NetBSD for that matter). However, it was the last official release of BSD by Berkeley, and is the code that today's BSD's are based upon (with quite a few twists and turns along the way).
For a excellent, if a bit dry, history of BSD check out: Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution
For a more narrative, though less inclusive, story of BSD try: BSD Unix: Power to the people, from the code
But this would also apply if your eyes stop because the author uses a different dialect to your own, or if your eyes pause momentarily because the author uses a different register of formality to what you expected. It doesn't neccessarily mean the author should change their writing style.
It's wrong in standard American and standard British English. I believe it's valid in Black American Vernacular; it's certainly valid in some British dialects. Who are we to force an arbitrary dialect down the throat of a speaker who uses another one? Obviously it's no good if people just choose phrases from lots of dialects *because* they are different to Standard (American|British). But if [adult native] speakers use constructs which "feel" valid to them, there's little validity in correcting them just because Standard (American|English) is different. To a linguist,
a construct is valid if it is "attested", i.e. if it gets used by native speakers who don't consider it erroneous.
Of course, completely different rules apply if writing formal language or deliberately attempting to speak in Standard (American|English).
An interesting aside: some linguists did a study of grammar as used by physicists at conferences, and compared it to Black American Vernacular, as spoken on the streets of many American cities. They found that the BAV speakers were using grammar which was far more regular and consistent than what the conference physicists used.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
feature which the existing RFCs don't cover, I'm required to go through a lengthy process of getting what I'm doing "approved"
by a bureaucratic process.
Use existing RFCs if they're there; otherwise, create a new one, but leave it OPEN so other people can interact with your products.
---
END OF LINE
> 1. It's a huge resource and memory HOG.
You don't use Outlook do you?
When you MINIMIZE it, it unloads most of itself, and takes about 1 meg of memory.
Sure Outlook has its faults, but I haven't noticed it sucking up resources and memory like you claim.
In view of your evidently limited, in particular US-centric knowledge of grammar, you have made a poor decision.
Why...why do so many people insist on mismatching plural verbs with singular nouns?
Probably because by doing so, they are speaking proper English within the dialect of their culture, and hence there is no "mismatch" at all. This is indeed ungrammatical in the US dialect, but not in the dialects of English spoken in most places in the world, including the UK, Australia, New Zealand and in Africa.
In these dialects, nouns denoting collectives, such as corporations, sports teams, committees, nations, rock bands, what have you, are paired with plural verbs, even if the nouns themselves exhibit a singular form. Thus they will say things like:
These sentences are ungrammatical in North America, where the verb would have to be singular ("has"). But they are grammatically correct almost everywhere else English is spoken.
The differences between "American" and "British" English are really not that extensive -- the pronunciation and spelling are famously different, and there are some idiosyncratic (albeit entertaining) differences in the vocabulary, such as in expressions for toilets or women's underwear. But there are very, very few genuine differences in the grammar. This one -- the number agreement of collective-denoting nouns -- is one of those very few differences, and by far the most noticeable.
I, too, have many pet peeves about language -- I recently complained on Slashdot about people writing "loose" when they mean "lose". But what I find much worse are people who make an overbearing post about something while getting the facts embarassingly wrong. The post to which I'm replying was an example of just that.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
No serious spreadsheet user would choose Gnumeric over Excel (unless they had a very tiny budget). Gnumeric is far more buggy, has far fewer features, and is slower than Excel. The advantages are that it runs under unix and is free. Perhaps in a couple years Gnumeric will be close to where Excel is now, if the development team works very hard on it.
This is not to say that Excel is all that great. It is just the best general spreadsheet out there because Microsoft eliminated most of its competition in spreadsheets through its bundling practices. This is quite unfortunate. The loss of competition has left Excel stagnant (but still far, far ahead of Gnumeric).
Well, it doesn't matter how much you like IE over Netscape on Windows. He is saying the Unix versions of IE that have been out really suck. And he's right. I have also tried the Solaris port, out of curiosity, and it really does blow chunks. Painfully slow, and even flakier than Netscape. So no matter how nice IE is for Windows, the Unix versions they've released thus far are really pathetic.
I've just ported a small (10000 lines) application from MFC to Qt, and I must say that anything that's made for m$ windoze is hard to port to any other system. MFC may be called "high" level by the m$ bunch, but it's so involuted that, if you don't have MFC in the target system, it would be almost easier to redo the whole GUI from scratch in a typical application.
Get excited.
KOffice and GNOME Office are coming.
As far as Excel being "the best spreadsheet app of its type", have you really used Gnumeric? You probably should try it. I mean the latest versions, too- maybe if you're up to it, you can research Bonobo and/or KParts while you're at it, and get *really* excited. Or not.
the government sometimes dictates free speech takes place over the majority view. i want that to continue.
the government mandates that someone bigger or stronger than you faces grave consequences for killing you and stealing what you own. it hasn't always been that way -- in the animal world, you would have a much shorter life than you have in our modern, western society.
when the government fails, it's because people like you turned their back on it and let the system run rampant.
like it or not, there is a place for government done well, and it screws up sometimes.
many companies develop kick ass standards and let others license it. they make great profits off this, and the consumer benefits as well.
by the way, as much as i hate correcting you monkeys, the RFC process is not monitored by a beauracracy. there would be no IRC, mail, ftp, http, etc. w/o the the RFC process. All of these protocols help different computer systems interoperate.
many standards processes are not monitored by a bureaucracy, and do quite well. products throughout your home, on the desk in front of you, in your car and on the road are proof.
you say it will lead to ruin, i'm a commie, etc. the truth is, you are an unthinking name-caller like the first poster. sometimes government makes mistakes, sometimes industry makes mistakes. the truth is, i'm not pleased with the size of our government, nor with many of it's decisions. but there are many functions it provides on a daily basis that keeps us safe, and from being ripped off by companies like microsoft.
imagine gasoline companies and auto manufacturers colluding to make engines fail early by adding contaminants to fuel. the only way to stop such a thing is through government regulation and monitoring. you think the free market will "protect" us from such a thing -- some gas company will come clean, some car manufacturer will do the right thing. history has shown you to be pitifully wrong.
example: car companies secretly buying all public transporation in los angeles and destroying it to sell more vehicles (GM did this, and was fined $1).
there are countless examples of the medical industry falsifying records to make medicine seem more effective or less dangerous. do you want your loved ones taking that medicine? (presuming you love or care about anyone).
if you still don't think the government has the right and duty to take from the privileged (in some cases) and give to the public, if your point of view is that it is always wrong, go study the phrase "riparian rights". if you still don't understand, your brain is defective.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Although Microsoft's site isn't very clear (there are a lot of conflicting stories on different pages), IE 5 has been released for HP/UX and Solaris.
<P>
I might add that it didn't work at all. Outlook Express did work, though.
This was a couple years back, I heard that Microsoft had released IE4 for Unix. I was very curious to see what kind of application Microsoft could make for Unix (and surprised that they'd even try!) so I went to the Unix lab at my university, downloaded it, and tried it out. I ended up running it on a remote machine and displaying on the one I was sitting at (running on ultrasparc, displaying on an old sparc).
Anyway, to sum up, IE4 actually crashed the sparcstation I was sitting at! Not even the one it was running on! It crashed the machine is was merely displaying on! I could not believe it. Prior to that, a crash in Solaris was utterly unheard of to me, but somehow Microsoft managed to find a way to crash it. Froze the machine solid and I had to cycle the power.
Microsoft never ceases to amaze me.
Well, yes and no. It wouldn't mean the other *BSD folks were close, but I think it might mean they were closer. Then again, I know this sounds linuxcentric (Don't bother me, I just bought the obsd 2.7 CD, and the 2.6 tee shirt) but I think it would be more likely to show up on linux.
Mind you, being closer doesn't mean you'll get there at all. However, since doing things on MacOSX should be at least a little more unixish (I really just don't know the architecture there, so feel free to correct me) and that will give the team that does the port some experience on that platform. It's just more likely that they'll hire someone or buy some company with some unix skills anyway, if that experience is needed.
One of the things Microsoft does is hire people and pay them well just so they don't go to some other company and develop good competition -- A plan that has worked for many, many companies for an extremely long time. I suspect that when two groups of neanderthals were out on the plains slaughtering whatever big meaty shaggy quadrupeds they ate, they'd all be offering the beast hunters some extra giblets to come over to their hunting party.
So Microsoft will be sitting here with these people with unix experience, and it's not like Windows CE is exactly cornering the embedded systems market or anything, so they're obviously not going to be able to kill linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, or anything else, really, right now. Since everyone they deal with seems to get the short end of the stick (their own faults, really) then I'm sure some people have seen the light and are looking for alternatives.
Anyway, I digress, that's a different rant. The point is, Microsoft has got to realize at this point that they can't go off on a unix-killing rampage or they'll get split more than two ways just to make sure their reach is a little shorter. So they might even think about doing a linux port if they could get a secure enough system. PCs don't really nodelock, so I'm not sure how they'd be sure that people weren't warezing office. Even if they couldn't secure it, the thought of crushing some competition and becoming heroes to a subset of the unix population would likely appeal.
Does this mean I think Microsoft is going to port Office (or even a subset) to unix? Nope. Does it mean I think there's hope? Well, yes. Just a glimmer, but what the hell, it's less pressure than hoping for world peace.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The only reason that Microsoft is doing because of Apple. They put money into Apple because Apple sells. That's all I gotta say.
............ no.
That they are planning to use full fledged Carbon for IE 5.5. And Carbon has nothing to do with BSD - those are Mac OS 8.x, 9 compartible APIs with potential of somewhat better use of the things which Mac OS X offer such as mutlthreading, preemptive multitasking and so on. And as for the support of traditional Mac APIs microsof have had it for years. Of course you could port Carbon support to other UNICES easily, but that is not up to MSFT it is up to Apple, and I doubt they will do it, though if they would it could be fun - not only MSFT but all Apple apps will run.
If Microsoft ports to OS X, it doesn't mean that a port to other BSD operating systems (and to some degree Linux) would be easier than coming straight from OS 7-9 versions or Windows, but it isn't going to help much, because the hardest part of the port, the GUI, isn't going to transfer. OS X uses a GUI system that I don't know the exact name of (is Aqua the name of the GUI, or is Aqua the API, over which the GUI runs?). It's about as far away from X as you can get (Anti-aliasing? Of course, it's automatic. Alpha channels? That too.)
Regarding the suggestion Microsoft will be porting to the Carbon APIs, I just don't see that as likely. Microsoft actually supports Macintosh really well. They wouldn't be taking a year to port to carbon. The next version they deliver will probably be built for carbon as well. Remember, the Macintosh version of IE 5 is the only standards compliant browser around that supports Java (ruling out Opera).
I really like what I've seen of OS X. If only I didn't have to buy the hardware from Apple, I might consider going to a Mac for my next machine. I wonder when we're going to get SMP G3+'s from IBM running Linux or BeOS.
They put money into Apple because Apple sells.
Apple has always made MSFT more money than any other platform. Less piracy (unless you count people like me ripping the French Microsoft Word because they wouldn't sell it to me when I had a Mac) for example.
But, the point is, they could port it. And, if they are broken up, they probably will once someone gags Bill G.
[usual caveats about owning MSFT and RHAT]
Will in Seattle
...no languages in which 2 positives make a negative.
Yeah, yeah...
This is absolutely correct.
/. awhile back) could have figured out what is going on. This should not be an "Ask Slashdot" because you don't have to "Ask Slashdot" to get the answer, because anyone proficient with a search engine could figure it out in five minutes.
Ports of programs with graphical interfaces to Mac OS X will be dependent on Apple's closed source APIs. This means BSD users are no closer than they would have been before OS X saw the light of day to getting these apps.
The fact that this Ask Slashdot was posted shows great ignorance on the part of nik. Anyone who has bothered to visit Apple's Mac OS X website or read any of the technical articles on it (i.e. the Ars Technica article linked from
In brief: GTK, Tcl/Tk, Qt and the other cross-platform graphics libraries will be made avaliable to Mac OS X. OSS movement people can write software for these and make it compile on Mac OS X and any other UNIX. But it won't be reciprocal for Apple's graphics libraries. Not until Apple open-sources them, or releases binaries (unlikely as hell) can software that relies on these libs be cross-platform, unless they are reverse-engineered, or cloned, or something (still pretty unlikely, but possible, think WINE).
I kinda find pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis easier to spell than a lot of other words considering it's pretty much just a big compound word. Oh well.
>Most ActiveX controls (in fact, all of them but >one) are not IE, and most of them do not depend >on it, unless the author specifically wishes it >to be so. (This is no 'worse' then a Linux
>package that "depends on" (your phrase) glibc,
>for example.)
in all honesty, i know nothing about programming on MS products, except for the two and a half years i spent writing ODBC/C++ clients for NT. That was years ago, and COM/DCOM/active-x were just starting up.
our web based apps, written by the IT dept., *require* IE to work. I've tried them under Netscape and they do not work. They sent out an email saying everyone must use IE if they want to access the system from home, or participate in the upcoming work-at-home projects. As you say, they must have written them purposefully to break under netscape.
Since I have not written any code for MS for nearly three years, I actually don't know or care how they did it...hate to say that, but it's the truth. I simply don't want to use or write code for microsoft...anything.
>Did you actually read what I wrote?
Yes, I did. I'm not sure why you made this comment, there are a couple MS/Linux types at work (not MS-haters, not MS-lovers) who looked at the pages and said "...they broke netscape by using active-x..." other than that, I can't say.
so, i guess MS standards are not really effective or something, i'm not really qualified to judge in this case, except for the reasons i've mentioned (exchange is closed, active-x can be written to break netscape).
thanks for not cursing me or calling me a commie.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
wait...are you really saying that :
>He was advocating that the government step in and
>*mandate* that all standards that are used be
>open.
and...
>the poster was advocating that intermachine
>protocols be open and standardized.
...are the same thing? you can't be. that would be a grotesque distortion. a variety of standards are already legislated, and compliance monitored.
I don't want to go that far, what I'd like to see is the threat of legislation force MS to participate more fully and earlier with other companies like they did with DHCP and ODBC, as opposed to what they did with SOAP, writing it internally and dumping it on the standards committee at the last minute so they could claim innovation.
but if the software companies don't enter into meaningful standards, early and inclusive, on the issues of intermachine communication and open peer-peer/client-server applications, then a legal solution would be fully acceptable to me.
as i've said elsewhere, your example of firewire is an open standard. IEEE has codified it and published the results. apple makes money licensing it -- although many people consider the fee too high. MS should (for example) license the exchange protocol in a fair and inclusive way.
you (AND OTHERS OF YOUR ILK) keep implying i am somehow trying to impose a bureauracy on the s/w industry. this is a false assertion someone made early on. it just isn't true, and reading my responses and the various other comments shows i never made that jump. that "velocinews" guy did it when he was calling me names, which lead to other people calling me a commie. just unfair and wrong, that's all.
>You can't have it both ways. Either the
>government mandates open standards or companies
>are free to have closed standards. Which is it?
actually, legally and historically, you can have it both ways. Example : some companies, based on their size, are exempted from certain city, county and federal regulations (race, gender, inspections) while others are not.
in our last few exchanges, i have tried to explain to you where you have distorted my words, and also where you have made misstatements, yet you never admit an error.
you seem to have real problems admitting your mistakes.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
How can it get used in any applications other than your own if you don't let other people use it?
---
END OF LINE
The goal is not Microsoft on more platforms, it's the elimination of closed, proprietary protocols like exchange and active-x controls.
MSHAFT's strategy is to develop as many closed protocols as possible, and foist them on their corporate customers, hoping it will lock up the home market.
Imagine your company decides to let you work at home. If you use non-ms products at home, you night not be able to get your email or access the company web pages. You're screwed.
My main concern is the way they develop closed protocols and make workplaces "Microsoft Only" -- if the exchange server has Microserfs administering it, no mail client will work except outlook.
If the company does webpages with active-x, no browser works except IE.
The situation sucks. The only hope is that I keep seeing more ads on the job boards for Linux developers and admins.
I'm a firm believer that legislation should be enacted to force all inter-machine communication protocols to be open and documented.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Till "mid 2001" Mozilla and StarOffice will kick the crap out of m$ and nobody will care about IE and Oriffice. Till "mid 2001" KOffice, Konqueror, Gnome-office, Gnumeric, Abiword, [k|g]* will be as feature-full as their m$ conterparts and less buggy and more stable. Who will need m$ products in the next mellenium ?
PS: and as we know m$, "mid 2001" == "around 2002"
+++ATH0
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
Very few common Mac OS X apps will be easily portable to the greater UNIX world unless most of the OS X libraries (i.e. everything under cocoa) are ported as well. GnuStep, in its current state, would not be a big help, because it only deals with the older OpenStep stuff. If someone decided to write directly to the Darwin level of things, then porting wouldn't be too problematic, but it is in fact very unlikely that this would happen, because the high level framework of Mac OS X is excellent. I would consider Mac OS X apps to be portable unless...
a) you rewrite everything from scratch; but that defeats the purpose of a port.
b) Apple open-sources the rest of their OS (not just the kernel), which is highly unlikely right now.
"broken IE5 implementations" Netscape on Linux is extraordinarily buggy. It crashes and halts on a daily basis. Just about any page with Flash or Java in one form or another might crash it. Sure, you can turn off those two things - but why should you have to? Why don't they fix the browser? IE5 on the other hand is fast, featureful and pretty. At the end of the day, I want a tool that does the job, I don't care who wrote it.
>You never called me poopy-pants, but you
>repeatedly say things like "people of your ilk,"
>"people like you," "no reasonable person," "no
>thinking person," etc, implying that I am a
>member of a group of unreasonable, unthinking,
>and uninformed people. The fact that in this case
>I'm making a similar argument to a certain
>group of people does not mean I share all of
>their views. And the fact that I disagree with
>you does not make me stupid, uninformed, twisted,
>or evil.
oops, there you go again. i never made the assertion you were twisted, stupid or evil, nor did I ever say you share all the views of some group.
however, i do beleive you tend not to think when you post, that you are uninformed about several subjects, and when you post you say unreasonable things. Additionally, several other posters in the thread are like you, in that they exhibit the same behavior.
the opinions you espouse are ones that tend to be held by a vociferous herd that, in all honesty, fails to take in the facts. there's nothing wrong with being ignorant, but to maintain the opinion once certain facts have been revealed to you is a mark of someone who has some maturing to do.
ignorance is not a bad thing, as long as you learn. unfortunately, you seem to have problems admitting when you are wrong, even when faced with evidence to the contrary.
Your comments on the FCC, Microsoft "standardizing hardware" and FTP being a closed standard were completely false. Yet you fail to admit you were ignorant of the facts and admit it. To cover your ignorance, and the fact that I point it out, you start claiming "ad hom, ad hom". It's not ad hom, if you and other continue to exhibit herd ignorance.
You also keep saying I advocate the government "regulating standards" or "overseeing standards". Once again, you (and the herd like you) tend to hear the word "legislation" and inject "regulation" and "oversight". This is simply not the case -- some types of legislation are merely advisory, and have nothing to do with bureaucracy or the creation of a government standards body.
Try to relax for a minute -- I never said those words! That "velocinews" guy, a couple others, and you created a number of falsehoods and ascribed it to me.
That, binarybits, is the mark of an unthinking herd. And you are a member -- you and your kind.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
After having read the article thoroughly, I have some thoughts;
... and a new mail client and PIM ..."
..."
..."
:)
;) Gimme a break, I'm a cynic :)
1. "contain
This should be interesting. I would like to see if Microsoft has taking any hints from Open Source efforts in these areas, largely from Evolution and the KDE PIM environments. They've used a lot of MS ideas, and maybe turnabout is fair play, eh?
2. "PowerPoint 2001 will incorporate a new tri-pane interface
Wow. I mean, honestly, that really isn't much "innovation", does it? A user can do that with any GLADE-type GNOME/GTK+ program. I think. Anyways, I don't understand how in the anti-trust trial, Microsoft has kept bringing up its right to "innovate" when this is the sort of evidence available. How much "innovation" has gone into any recent MS products? And I don't mean things that were implemented somewhere else first.
3. "However, Office 2001 will not feature support for synchronizing data with Microsoft's Pocket PC
This is pretty lousy programming. Assuming good file and database backends, this should be a trivial thing. Why would and upper management let the press get ahold of something like this? It'll make great publicity for the Palm platform, though
Dave
P.S.: Yeah, I know that I used '"innovate"' too much
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Just from a raw word-count, it appears that about two-thirds of your post is spent calling me names. I don't care too much about being called names but I think it says something about your ability to discuss issues in mature manner. The fact that I disagree with you does not make me stupid, ignorant, uninformed, in the pay of corporations, or evil. This is what we call an ad hominim attack and is universally recognized to be a debating fallacy.
You say you want to force open standards. The means you want to make it *illegal* to write any code that uses a closed protocol. How far do you want that to go? If I write an application that I just use in-house, will the government break down my door and tell me to publish a spec? How about if I give it away for free on the internet? Will the Feds force me to take down my FTP server until I publish specs? How about if it's shareware? Or if I'm a small startup, will it force me to stop selling my product until I've documented every protocol my products uses?
Clearly it would be ridiculous to require every standard to be open. Publishing a spec (and sticking to it) costs time and money. Forcing every trivial app that does networking to do so would impose millions of dollars in unneeded costs. Filling out the necessary paperwork to prove that you've got an open standard would be even worse.
So assuming that you don't really want every standard to be forced open, then what criteria will you use? If history is any guide, such a law would be used to harrass competitors and keep out new entrants, just as the FDA does not for pharmacueticals. There would be an increasingly complex bureaucracy that you'd have to go through to prove that your protocol was sufficiently open. Eventually, getting this approval would consume much of the resources of small startups, to the point where many of them would be unable to compete. Don't believe me? Look at the pharmacuetical industry, which is dominated by a handful of big firms and spends most of its resources getting FDA approval for its products.
Your attempt to equate standards exclusively with the government is absurd. The computer industry is full of standards that were created with no help from the government-- Unix, FireWire, USB, SCSI, IDE, ADB, etc. All of these are open or semi-open. And if you don't think open standards can exist in a free market, how do you explain the success of TCP/IP and the failure of more closed networking protocols? Yes, TCP/IP was created by the government, but no one was forced to use it.
The fact is that in the long run the free market encourages open standards and common protocols. No government intervention is necessary. Corporations who refuse to abide by the standards process lose respect in the eyes of geeks, who take their business elsewhere. This largely explains the success of companies like IBM and Sun who are freindly to open systems. Microsoft has been losing market share in the server space precisely because sysadmins like open standards and will go out of their way to avoid products that don't have them.
And please cut the condescending "I'm smarter than you are" crap. You have an opinion. You think your opinion is right. Fine, so tell us why your opinion is right. Use arguments and persuasion, not insults. "If you weren't such an ignoramous you'd understand" is not an argument, and it won't convince anyone older than 12 years old.
you're forgetting that Full Java1.2(1.3 when released) is part of cocoa. so there is actually 5 API that you can use to write code for X. Isn't Java available on other unix platform?
>Actually, your post is hideously contrived in
>many areas, but I'll limit myself to the
You have no idea... (I am agreeing, just in case).
>You claim that a longer lifespan in western
>society, as opposed to a shorter lifespan in a
>strictly laissez faire "animal" society is
>restricted strictly to medicinal benefits.
First, There is nothing more "animal" in laissez faire society than in a structured society. Bees are no less animals than bears, wolves or humans.
Second, I did not mean lifespan difference is strictly because of medicinal benefits. That is only accurate if your only other factor is government, which makes no qualitative difference.
>What you fail to recognize is that the
>government protects both individuals and groups,
>through the rule of law, to prevent them from
>competing in what our society considers
>inapproporiate ways.
What you fail to see is that social animals obey their unwritten laws before any governments, and it is the nature of the social animal what defines the appropiate or inappropiate way to compete. Government is only tolerated if it facilitates that without undue overhead.
What your baboons are doing is no different from a modern coup d'etat. The very arguments that make a government legitimate are used as a justification for coup d'etats, including the "authority to take from the priviledged and give to the unpriviledged" which you have cited before.
As a sidenote, governments have the right and duty of protecting themselves from coup d'etats, but that is not their function (as your use of the baboon example would suggest).
>Your second point is that "Nature considers some
>unworthy". Ah, yes. You're one of those "Kill
>the 'tards" people, aren't you?
No. On the "objective side", judgement of what is 'tard is not for us to make; intelligence has no evolutionary value in many environments, for example, not to mention we don't know what it is or how to analyze it precisely.
I was stating a fact, not an opinion. Notice that the subject was "Nature", not I. It is my opinion that that is a fact, but it doesn't mean I consider it "moral". Nature doesn't have morals to share, it doesn't care.
On the "subjective side", I'm a myopic unambitious weakling with no sense of economics and a lack of social skills; success would be very unlikely for me. I'm no "winner" that looks down on the weak, I'm weak myself.
You're still missing the main point here: People do not live longer because of government; more people live. It is a quantitive, not a qualitative difference. You missed a valid point pursuing an invalid one.
>Perhaps if you grew up with a brain damaged
>brother or sister, you might have more
>compassion, but your inability to project your
Is that the only reason for compassion? I had my share of close victims who have suffered unduly. That doesn't change how the world works, we become irrelevant unless we know the world we want to change and understand why.
Is compassion the only "reason" that validates your argument? What makes different in that case the argument for government from "wishful thinking"? If only the world were compassionate, everything would work wonderfully!
You already know you are right, you only have to find why. What's the point of thinking it through in that case?
An animalist? Maybe I am. I don't know. Is that supposed to be "bad"?
>I'm cheering for the first baboon with the guts
>to take a swing at you, and I hope the rest join
>in bravely.
How utterly compassionate of you. I'm glad you can project your existence into those who are uncapable of seeing what you see!
(Now here is where I lose my moral ground!)
Bodrius
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
Until the makers of Office, namely Microsoft, decide to support any efforts to port their software to OS's other than Windows and the MacOS, it doesn't really mean anything for anyone except home users. I just don't see any big companies deciding to hack a MacOS X version of Office 2000 so that their developers who are on *nix workstations can use it. At the other end of the spectrum, we might see Office apps on our home linux boxes, but haven't we already found ways to live without Microsoft? This just doesn't seem like big news to me.
There used to be someone around /. who would point out abuses of our good friend, cat. In his memory, I would like to point out that cat msg | mail -s "sub" $addr would be better written as mail -s "sub" $addr < msg. Please, cat is doing his best to fulfill all your catenation needs; there's no reason to burden him further.
Here is a quick run down of OS X: Aqua: Advanced HI . Puts anything else out there to shame. Carbon: Mac OS - 10% of the troublesome API's. Apple to a hard look at the Mac OS and discovered that about 10% of the API's were holding them back and causing 95% of the problems. They axed these 10% , and companies like Adobe were able with 1 developer carbonize photoshop in three weeks. Cocoa: High level API's, Apple wants developers to write to these because it will mean the least amount of work in taking advantage of many advantages of the OS such as multithreading. These API's are clean, and Apples development tools kick ass for OS X! Mach Kernel/BSD/POSIX: As is the ruff definition of a micro kernel architecture. You have a micro kernel sitting below a monolithic kernel. Mach is the Micro Kernel, and FreeBSD is the monolithic kernel in this case. Apple has said there point of reference in the BSD world is FreeBSD. That is why at WWDC FreeBSD group announced a port to the PowerPC. Apple doesn't have the desire or the time to invest in official POSIX compliance certification. They have said that if your POSIX compliant app doesn't compile on there system . Let them know about it. What does this mean for the portability of OS X apps such as MS Office? If they write to COCOA as MS will probably do. It will not be very portable. MS has said that the first release will just be a carbon app, but the later ones will be rewritten to take advantage of COCOA.
Cheers,
WFE
===========
I use windows, openbsd, and linux.
I would like to use office on windows, and linux.
I'm just not sure how much I would pay...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If and when MS breaks up, the application portion of the company would be foolish to only keep making Windows Applications. Branching out and creating more solutions for other markets like Linux/Unix, Mac, and BSD would be very lucritive. But then that whole monopoly thing might be brought back up again...might have to split that company up too...
There is going to be nothing left of Microsoft eventually...all the money they will be making will be used to fight off the courts...
You might even see more open source products heading our way from Microsoft, just think, you'll be able to code Outlook just the way your "ILOVEYOU" virus wants...
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
Comrades! lend me your ears!
Whereas, Microsoft, a Corporation of that great State of Washington has been found guilty of violating the Sherman Antitrust Act;
And furthermore, such actions have harmed to a great extent both the population of these Great States and the global community;
It is hereby ordered:
The Microsoft Corporation shall participate fully in a Intermachine Communications Standards commitee for a period not less than ten years;
Any and all protocols used for intermachine communication shall be fully disclosed, documented and approved of by the committee before implementation;
The standards committee shall be composed of not less than twelve persons or corporate leaders from the fields of software or electronics.
A steering committee shall choose the initial membership. The steering committee shall be composed of William Gates III (Microsoft Incorporated), Richard M. Stallman (The Free Software Foundation), Robert Malda (SlashDot.org), Steven Jobs (Apple, Inc), Robert Young (RedHat Linux) and Scott McNealy (Sun Microsystems).
Each member of the steering commitee may nominate two individuals or corporations to serve on the initial committee. After a service of two years, committee members may assign their seat to an alternate, with approval of a majority of the remainder of the board. If a majority cannot be made after three rounds of nomination, the replacement shall be selected by a simple majority of the board.
At the end of the ten year period the Microsoft Corporation may remove its prescense from the organization, and the organization may be disbanded according to the wishes of the remaining members.
This board shall have one mandate : preserving for the future that all internetworking machines be able to seamlessly communicate through industry standard protocols. The very foundation of the internetworking community was built by industry leaders agreeing on protocols and sharing enough information such that disparate machines and software could intercommunicate.
It is the sole intent of this law to restore that spirit of teamwork back into an industry that has fallen to the mere pursuit of greed at the expense of the communicating community.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Where has this been announced? The "from scratch" part as well as the "Cocoa" part.
By the way, Cocoa is a programing interface accessible from both Objective-C++ and Java (through a bridge), as well as other languages such as Perl or Python via third party utilities.
Why do you call "morons" people who abbreviate the word "Micro$oft" in the most readable way? And what about you? Your own abbreviation stinks. If you had written "This oming from a moron who an't even abbreviate Mirosoft in a mature fashion?" we would understand that your keyboard was missing the 'c' key. But it seems that either you can't type or you can't uderstand irony. Who do you call a moron...
Here is what Microsoft has to say. Notice they don't actually mention OS X at all, but I'm sure it's an implied thing... While porting Office to a Posix/Unix style OS is a lot of work, porting the GUI to X/Windows will surely be a bigger task, should they try to do it.
:)
What's actually scarier... Follow the link on the bottom of that press release to this.
Word 2001 introduces the Data Merge Manager, a feature available first for the Mac that simplifies and consolidates into a single window the entire process of using data to conduct mass communications via e-mail or letter. Tight integration with the new e-mail and personal information manager makes it easy to merge contacts from the Address Book into a bulk mailing.
Eeeek! Is it me, or does it sound like Microsoft is giving every Mac user who buys Office some mass spam software?
-- Kevin
I tried using IE 5 for Solaris and it is _extremely_ slow, when compared to netscape. The first time I tried running it, it took about 4 minutes to startup on a Sun Ultra 5 (333 Mhz Ultra Sparc IIprocessor, 128MB RAM), and was painfully slow to run.
Arun
>But Microsoft themselves said they were going to use Cocoa, Wowa! Where did you read that? I've been following this issue pretty closely and haven't been able to find a single reliable reference indicating that *any* major software will get rewritten in Cocoa. Please cite source. thanks
Development to OS X, particularly in the case of an office suite or a web browser, rely on more than the core of the OS!
These app's will leverage the advanced PDF based abilities of the Quartz display layer to do things well (even M$ developers know to put the best face on their product!).
If Apple opened these elements, even in a general way, life would be good for those of us who would like to see the efforts Apple has made benefit the OSS community. I doubt that will happen.
Apple will advance things, but our benefit will still be at their hands!
Which, means running Win98 under a Mac would be/is *DOG* slow. (VirtualPC does pretty well, but its nothing like having a real PC.)
So Why does Microsoft port? There are several reasons. Microsoft would like an Office monopoly to go along with its desktop OS monopoly, People aren't likely to buy VirtualPC just to run Win98/Office if there are other alternative out there(Adobe solutions, etc...), and when/if the company breaks in two the other will need revenue, and it helps provide a defense against the DOJ.
------ 24.5% slashdot pure
I like some of the Office apps. Only for what they are, mind you, but back in medieval times when you had to know 500 key commands to use Word Perfect or Lotus, I had Works and it was great. My mom could type 100wpm+ after years of practice, but I sat down and was writing my own book reports in about five minutes.
I know this costs me on the linux geek cool scale (just when I was feeling good about explaining to the IBM employees how to install SuSE on a 770...), but I can't tell you how happy I when I first got X up and installed StarOffice. I don't know any of the Tex/Latex stuff, so it was great to be able to work with something fairly familiar.
We have WP9(Corel2000) for linux, but I still have some residual resentment against the wall of key commands they used in their early days. I haven't tried applix yet...
Anyway, I'd like to see them port MS Office to Unix. I've seen all the complaints about bloat and monopolies, etc... but Excel really is the best spreadsheet app of its type, and Word is just so easy to pick up at the basic Cut/Paste/Bold/Italic level... Maybe they could port the basic parts of each app (including Visio!), cutting the size in half, and then replace the VB macros with C scripting.
That would, I think, be a great compromise. Especially if there were some way to uninstall Outlook.
-jpowers
-jpowers
The Mac uses a Motorola processor, which is not compatible with the x86. Sure, one can try to get the Office apps to work on *NIXs like Linux PPC but it will never happen to the Intel based *NIXs.
I'm not missing the point at all -- I understand the loss of control. I think what hacker-types have a hard time believing is that most people *don't care* about losing control when it comes to some things. Hence the term "trade off".
-Stu
i am soo glad to hear of hopes for these applications.
I've waited for the day when i could use MSIE and MS Office in linux!!! no...wait...that's one of the fucking reasons i switched!!!
Doesn't it seem odd to anyone that a shit ton of people are heralding the arrival to linux of the apps/os they originally were trying to get away from??
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Are you saying that M$ has been the only company ever to do this? If so, you need to take a long, serious look at computer history. Dozens of companies have done and are still doing similar or identical things.
Me, I'd rather see laws passed requiring that any protocols used by any product under consideration for purchase by the government be fully open and held by standards organizations. And I'd like to see the government start abiding by it's multiple-source and source code requirement policies. You can't argue that policies governing the government itself are in any way socialistic.
--
There is no sin except stupidity -- Oscar Wilde
Considering that OS X is only going to be realeased for PPC, VMWare which is a virtualization program for x86 machines wouldn't work. There is the possibility of using existing Linux/BSD binaries for the PPC platform on OS X, and things such as X have already been ported, but OS X is going to be a consumer app, not a Unix clone. BTW, by the text about Unicode circles, are you talking about Larry Wall's section in Open Sources?
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
could you port the software which provides that compatability?
>>in the animal world, you would have a much
>>shorter life than you have in our modern,
>>western society.
>Points for medicine, not government. A strong >individual could live as long without government >as with government, assuming he can get the >medical benefits (by force, if necessary). A
>smart one probably as long, if he can make others
>dependent on him (as a medic, for example).
>A weaker individual without saleable talents or >the social skills to market them would die, >Nature considers him/her not worthy. I think >that's your point, but you
>didn't make it, I have to guess.
Actually, your post is hideously contrived in many areas, but I'll limit myself to the inaccuracies above for the sake of brevity.
You claim that a longer lifespan in western society, as opposed to a shorter lifespan in a strictly laissez faire "animal" society is restricted strictly to medicinal benefits.
You then go on to give an example of a "smart person" living as long (or longer) regardless of government.
What you fail to recognize is that the government protects both individuals and groups, through the rule of law, to prevent them from competing in what our society considers inapproporiate ways.
Example: A group of disgruntled programmers drug and hypnotize an Air Force pilot such that he napalms Bill Gate's island mansion.
There is no "medicinal" influence here. It's just a matter of doing things within the law. In the animal kingdom, ganging together and removing a strong/unfair leader from power is a social victory. (Babboons occasionally do this when a troop leader is monopolizing power).
Your second point is that "Nature considers some unworthy". Ah, yes. You're one of those "Kill the 'tards" people, aren't you?
Perhaps if you grew up with a brain damaged brother or sister, you might have more compassion, but your inability to project your existence into that of the less fortunate counts strongly against any such expression of compassion. Truly an animalist.
I'm cheering for the first baboon with the guts to take a swing at you, and I hope the rest join in bravely.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
More apt than Coacoa seems Carbon, since there's already MS Office for the old MacOS. It'd be easier and cheaper to simply develop for this, than to muck with Objective-C and Coacoa.
send flames > /dev/null
Only 'flamers' flame!
Too lazy ? Too dumb ?
What kind of shit is that. They are niether lazy nor dumb. Currently, it simply makes no economical sense to do that.
Just because one company extended a standard in an attempt to screw the competition does not mean that we should make it illegal to extend standards period.
The ability of individuals and corporations to innovate (I used that word for ironic effect here) is very fundamental to developing new and exciting technology.
Find other ways to curb abuse of this ability but government regulation of technology is not the answer. Don't take away the right to develop products any way you please just because some people are able to abuse that right. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water.
Mmmm.. Donuts
As it has ben mentioned before, Cocoa is just the next version of the OpenStep libraries of which GNUStep is an implementation. Development on the GNUStep libraries is slowly plodding along, they could use our help. When they are finished, Mac OS X Cocoa apps should be only a recompile away, if you can convince the Author to go through the effort.
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
Why...why do so many people insist on mismatching plural verbs with singular nouns? It's right in the heart of this article:
My friends, no matter how many people work at Microsoft, there is only one company (for now). Microsoft is an "it". Not a "they". Don't follow the herd. Just because the staff on Slashdot can't seem to figure this out doesn't mean that everyone has to do it.
Since virtually all of the communication through this site is written, doesn't it make sense to make the most of the language?
I thought so...
=h=
>the government sometimes dictates free speech
>takes place over the majority view. i want that
>to continue.
That's part of being a democracy indeed, as opposed to fascism et al, but that's a self-limitation of the government, which ends up representing and imposing majority views.
Great if you want it to continue, but remember that any organized imposition of a majority requires a de facto government. Protection of minority opinion is not inherent to government, not even to good government, it's a compromise of government based on limits that were imposed on it with the invention of modern democracy, so that "the government of the people wouldn't run rampant". (Maybe I'm preaching the obvious, but you would be surprised how whole countries take "democracy" literally).
My point is that government is needed to protect minority opinion only because to systematically attack minorities government is necessary. It is therefore not the best argument for government.
>in the animal world, you would have a much
>shorter life than you have in our modern,
>western society.
Points for medicine, not government. A strong individual could live as long without government as with government, assuming he can get the medical benefits (by force, if necessary). A smart one probably as long, if he can make others dependent on him (as a medic, for example).
A weaker individual without saleable talents or the social skills to market them would die, Nature considers him/her not worthy. I think that's your point, but you didn't make it, I have to guess.
>when the government fails, it's because people
>like you turned their back on it and let the
>system run rampant.
When government fails, the system did not "run rampant". It dissolves because of structural defects. If the government runs rampant it doesn't fail: it is very successful. It's goals may or may not become different from their citizens, but that's another matter.
When the government fails SOMEONE is because they didn't make sure the government defended their interests, that is true. Or because other people with other interests were more successful. Government will always fail a lot of people.
Government obeys the citizens that make their interests known and press for them.
Citizens do that in direct proportion to the benefits they reap from defending their interests.
Corporate entities defend their interests earnestly because they can benefit greatly, and obviously. Individual citizens do not, unless the interests are very, very important for them.
Therefore, corporate entities are at advantage within the government because they are citizens who defend their interests. Government helps corporations because they are citizens (lots of them, and with unified interests to boot), and helping citizens is their job.
That is not failure of the government, if there is conflict between corporate interest and individual interest, it's failure of the individuals on two grounds:
- Not defending their individual interests in the government
- Fighting constantly with themselves because their corporate interests (job, stocks, organizations, etc) are at conflict with their personal interests.
Both are problems of not taking responsabilities, not of a lack or excess of government. Precisely what the poster you replied to was criticizing.
Now, the examples you use of wrong corporate behavior are all criminal acts (fraud, to be specific). Since no one argued for dissolution of law enforcement, they are irrelevant.
I don't know that anyone argued that free markets protect from fraud. Not even that fraud is not an effective business strategy in the free market (I happen to think that in the end it backfires), which still would not make it legal. Fraud was simply not dealt with here that I know.
And invoking history to invalidate "free markets" doesn't work, because there has never been a significant "free market" as we know it or may come to know it in the future. Scale is a BIG difference.
>by the way, as much as i hate correcting you
>monkeys,
>if you still don't understand, your brain is
>defective.
I think you lost the moral ground here.
>you are an unthinking name-caller
I assume that would make you a "thinking name-caller", then?
Now, all the "communist" crap was way out of line, but this seems worse to me (mainly because the "anti-communist" didn't pretend argumentative superiority, but you do).
Bodrius
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
I think you're overreacting. There are virtually no good absolute positions to take in the real world. You can say that killing is always wrong, but how do you work in military actions, self defense, suicide, etc? Similarly while it's _generally_ good for people to be able to do as they like without crossing the path of an external controlling agency, this does not mean that it is always good.
Our model in the states is basically to set up the ground rules so that a system of checks and balances prevents anyone from being able to assert unassailable power over the other players. It's worked remarkably well, and isn't quite as reliant as earlier attempts were on nigh-omniscient machiavellian people to keep everything running smoothly.
If MS is just another company in the industry they only have to worry about the same laws that their competitors deal with. When they are no longer akin to their competitors though, things no longer work well. You can keep lizards as pets. You cannot keep Godzilla as a pet, it just won't work. (particularly when he picks up a bus and throws it back down)
Remember, we're trying to develop a society that is good for everyone - this is not going to be something that can be reduced to a single universal law, so we shouldn't sweat that.
Anyway, we change the rules for MS, giving them three choices:
1)follow the rules for monopolies
2)willingly stop being a monopoly, become a normal company again and play by the normal rules
3)keep it up and we'll ensure that you do 1 or 2.
So I don't think that non-monopolys should need to open their protocols. But if it helps to keep things working in a situation which left unchecked would fail, then monopolies should have to. (as the situation warrants)
Can't compare apples and oranges my friend.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
For one thing, Office itself is closed source. That goes without saying. But the other thing to consider is that while the kernel and BSD layer of MacOSX and MacOSX server is open source, the GUI is not. Office is a GUI app and will be made for the Mac OS X gui. It would be just as hard to port to X on BSD and co. as from Windows to X.
Incidentally, I believe that the original Office runs in the "Blue Box" (Mac OS VM) on Mac OS X server. OS X client has "aqua" I am not sure if this is the same thing, but basically the idea was for Mac Apps to either run unmodified or be easily ported to the new system.
In these projects, you usually have to be a fairly accomplished programmer to do much, because most of the easy work has been done. I do say most because there's certainly easy tasks that don't get done because someone else is paying attention to them, but the big projects tend to be, well, big.
I don't really code. I script in perl, and I can do some pretty clever stuff, but I mostly restrict myself to text processing. Every now and then I'll do something cute with it. I can understand program flow and so on, I've done non-blocking IO, etc etc, but I just don't feel qualified to start jumping into multithreaded C++ applications.
Anyway, all that said, I'd rather be able to just get a tool that does what I need it to without a learning curve, and especially without having to write code. I may be lazy, but I do work I know how to do, I get these pieces of paper I give to someone who increments a counter in a computer, and then I can get little green pieces of paper to give to people to do work I don't want to do, or don't know how to do. I don't want to write my own office suite.
Then again, Word doesn't do everything I want it to do, which is why I have Pagemaker. Now, Pagemaker for Solaris exists, or used to, IIRC. I'd like to have THAT on linux, with support for XFree acceleration extensions. THAT would be a slick piece of software to have around. It'd be nice to see them do two versions, too; One that would let you do large documents, and one that wouldn't, with different pricing scales. I bet they could make a mint on that, especially if they had some sort of dvi input plug-in or something. Come on, Adobe, leverage all that free software.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
In either case, I love Office. I don't know why most slashdoters have to continually shoot down EVERYTHING MS creates. Office on the Mac is extremely stable, and I think lately MS has catered to Mac users far more than in the past. Given a choice between StarOffice and MS Office I'd choose MS Office any day (a far more professional program).
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
What are you talking about? Every single review of IE5.5 on the Mac I've read raved about it - especially about it's standards compliance. In some areas it is even more standard compliant than Mozilla (I believe some CSS2 issues)
It's easy to talk tough about MS, but that is just FUD.
> Well, it's *probable* that Apple has quite a bit of Cocoa ported to win32,
> since that may have been their original plan. Obviously, they've shied
> away from the win32/x86 crowd at the moment, at least for a full product,
> probably because of lack of engineering hours to spend on the project, but
> who knows what else that $150 million deal with Microsoft included.
Next had an OpenStep platform available *for*sale* which would run on WinNT, at the time that Apple bought them. Unless my memory is playing tricks on me, Next had ported the BSD/Mach version to HP/UX, Solaris and WinNT by that time.
If I am right in gathering that Cocoa is largely warmed-over OpenStep, then there's not much guessing to do - Cocoa on WinNT can, and perhaps will, be readily done. It also seems clear to me that if Apple had any business sense, they would release a Cocoa implementation on Linux - for a price - in order to drive volume adoption of the API. Have they learned from the closed-platform disaster which was the Mac? Do they understand why Windows first eclipsed MacOS, and why Linux is so hot now?
Mike Greaves
-- Mike Greaves
Netscape isn't a COM container, and IE (on Win32) is. That's how IE is able to host your IT department's ActiveX controls, and Netscape isn't. Your IT department must have developed their application on the understanding that by requiring ActiveX it would only function under IE on Win32.
-- "I believe the human being and the fish can coexist peacefully." - George W. Bush, 29 September 2000
You could always run VMWare under BOCS..
No...OS X is [supposedly] being ported to x86, that was what I was wondering about, and yeah I was talking about Larry Wall's article...
-sempiternity
0100100000100000011010010111000010000001100001001
I hate to think that this _didn't_ occur to anyone when Apple ANNOUNCED this, right? You know, back when they mentioned integrating a UNIX-DERIVATIVE into their mainstream, desktop-ruling, dumb-people-can-use-this product, remember that??!!
I hate to say it, but the people here are just a teensy, little bit focused on linux sometimes. The BSD's are really something, and anyone who doesn't recognize by now the fact that there's room out there for _lots_ of OS's which each suit a different segment of the population, then you've forgotten that we used to be a people that did things any way we liked until TV came along and taught us all how to imitate each other so well...
Now, is it DEFINITELY going to happen? Of course not. Even if Linus was _sure_ that this or that module would be available in time for a certain kernel release, we'd still have to take that with a little grain of salt, now wouldn't we? But it seems likely now, and how can we know today what tomorrow brings us, eh?
Check my Go-related blog for beginners: DGD
It could be don, IF (real big if) there were some sort of Aqua to, ohh, lets say Motif ( I got to say it, being the motifzone webmaster, it's in my contract ;) ) translation.
But that would rely on Apple opening up the Aqua toolkit.
Doubt that will happen, though.
"Even Prophets don't know everything"
I use IE5 on my Sun (*cough* for compatibility testing), and it's fine. Much faster then nutscrape 4.72 anyway. And it doesn't crash.
I think an office port should be pretty easy, they've obviously got the display stuff done.
>The previous poster was not simply advocating
>standards.
this is true, the poster was advocating that intermachine protocols be standardized.
>He was advocating that the government
>step in and *mandate* that all standards that are
>used be open.
wrong. the poster was advocating that intermachine protocols be open and standardized.
for example, what was firewire is now an IEEE standard, that can be licensed for a reasonable cost and used by anyone.
microsoft, as far as i know, is not licensing the exchange protocol to anyone, and there are free and open solutions that provide similar functionality.
in other words, microsoft is using a proprietary protocol to maintain their monopoly. when you support this type of behavior, giving corporations the ability to mandate what OS people use at home via a closed protocol, you are treading pretty heavily on civil liberties, whether you intend to or not.
and before you say it, i know the rallying cry of you and your ilk -- "Don't like it? Go get another job".
well, binarybits, as much as you and your pals want to write me off as a kook, a commie, or whatever, the fact is I have several years invested with my customers, and i enjoy serving them.
i don't see why that relationship has to be destroyed by microsoft's desire to control the software we use. the company i work for wants to keep the employees happy, but the fact is, in this division, we have a microsoft nazi who want microsoft everywhere. he runs the exchange server.
in another division, where i know a few people, the admin is totally different. he lets people use whatever mail client they want -- he keeps pop3/smtp open.
the company lets divisions handle things the way they think best. should i leave the company? should i change divisions? why should i? all i want is for the company to give people some freedom and choice.
there are a variety of laws on the books regulating when and how a employer can listen in on their own phone systems, let you refuse to allow MS to be forced to adhere to standards.
i think it's wrong to make me get another job so i can have a bit more freedom in my workplace. i also think a company that gives it's employees a bit of freedom and choice has happier employees and more production. in the long run, it's better for the company, the employee and the customer.
so, before you complain that i should get another job, you might want to consider that i'd like my workplace to be better, and i'd like to keep working here, for my customer base, with a bit more freedom.
>In other words, he wanted to *ban*
>closed standards.
wrong. the effect, to some extent, would be to *ban* closed intermachine protocols. but calling it a *banning* is a stretch. that's like calling calling FDA inspections of food products *the banning of kangaroo meat in hamburger*
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
...uses active-x, and the authors wrote it in such a way that it ONLY works with IE.
so, i question the qualities of your "Microsoft Standard".
If something uses active-x, and it only works with Microsoft products, it's not much of a "standard".
If one entity writes the "standard", and publishes it after the fact so everyone else gets to play catch up on a moving target, that's not much of a "standard" either.
so, i was aware of what you mentioned, it just doesn't really have much of a "standard" flavor to it.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
The day I can get IE for Linux is the day I finally dump windows.
C'mon, netscape is crap and you all know it.
Search first, ask questions later.
1) If they're writing them in Python, Perl, C, C++, (oh, and POSIX is not a language), they still need to use the Carbon or Cocoa APIs (or hooks to the APIs).
2) Cocoa and Carbon do NOT run on top of the BSD kernel, they run on top of Aqua, the GUI
3) As Cocoa and Carbon are not OpenSource, and Apple has no reason to port them, they will not get ported
4) Eh, not sure what hardware drivers you're talking about, but Aqua, the GUI, is NOT OpenSource, meaning the drivers for the graphics hardware won't be...meaning only Apple can port them.
One Microsoft Way
My plan is to pimp before they realize I'm a jackass. Hit 'em hard and fast.
Given that IE5.5 on the Mac-not-OS/X is much more standards-compliant than IE on Windows, I would hope that they port that to Carbon rather than re-porting the other. I would also guess that this would be the cheapest way of achieving their end.
It wouldn't surprise me of Office followed the same path, but Office Mac-vs-Win is not so much a camp divided as IE. The implication is that a port of Office to *BSD, Linux, BeOS, Hurd or practically anything else that runs X would be relatively simple (much of the toughest ripping out of misfeatures has already been done for the Mac port).
It would be hilarious if UnixOffice were notably more stable than Office2000 under Windows2000, and the world wound up generally using Office and Mozilla on Linux...
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Mischief is wrong and should be punished. That's the reason there are laws that prohibit certain behaviour, including fraud. I'm not arguing against that - please don't pretend I am.
I'm arguing against people who believe companies should be forced to open their protocols, artists should be forced to give away their products for free, etc. I'm arguing against people who believe the government should be able to dictate at what price you sell your goods. This is not laissez-faire capitalism in the same sense of the word that you use it.
And don't get me wrong. I'm very much a socialist. I grew up in a socialist country and strongly believe in a lot of its principles. It's just that when I see people ready to take from the rich "because no one deserves to have as much as they do" that I fear.
Btw, the same principles that make it illegal for companies to wreak "mischief" are what prevent the majority from saying to the minority "we are more than you are and since we say so you must open up your protocols".
Mmmm.. Donuts
To most geeks the programming interface is the user interface and the user interface is just for weenies.
The hole in the *nix browser market is closing at last. I'm posting this from Mozilla 16 and it is excellent (after NS4.7 at least). Not so far away now I think. As for using an MS product, if they play nicely then there's no reason not to. My (and probably many others) hatred is based on bitter and sometimes expensive experience. Or to put it another way I'm exercising my choice as a consumer not to buy a product that doesn't work properly.
- You have put YOUR data in THEIR propietary file format. They have proven (witness the recent flap over their use of the patent for ASF to suppress 3rd party apps) that they intend to defend these file formats. It's only a matter of time before all their file formats are closed using DMCA and/or UCITA (both of which they supported big-time) and/or the patent office.
- You have invited their electronic self-help software onto your machine. Remeber, they hired one of the hacks that wrote UCITA. They intend to use this. If they haven't written it in yet, they will soon.
By combining closed, proprietary file formats with the ability to turn off the apps at will, you have given them ownership of your data.Stallman may be extreme, but he has a definite point when he decries the use on non-free apps on free OSes. I'm not simon pure in this regard, but the more I see big business in action, the more I think that free (as in speech) software and open file formats and protocols are the only responsible way to go.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
I bet there isn't much demand for it, so you can't really blame MS too much for not putting too much effort into bug fixing it.
IE5.5 on Mac is pretty good by all accounts, though, which was my original point.
Carbon is the technology layer that allows applications to run on PowerPC systems that utilise Mac OS 8.1 to Mac OS X. Carbon is a re-write of the Macintosh Toolkit that eliminates out-of-date API's and adds a hardware abstraction layer. "Classic" Mac OS (Arial numerals) must use the CarbonLib extension to run Carbonised application.
Cocoa is the name for the NeXT/OpenStep API's with a few updates. Cocoa is a portable API set and already exists for Win32, Solaris, OpenStep, and Mac OS X. It's not clear whether Apple will release the API set for any other OS except Mac OS X, but the user agreement for the development releases consistently mention obtaining licenses for the API.
Quartz is the imaging model for Max OS X. It replaces QuickDraw. It is synonymous with Windows GDI and DirectDraw. It is a hybrid of QuickDraw and Display PostScript with a few new additions and a lot of updates.
Aqua is just the name of Apple's new interface. It is synonymous with "Platinum Appearance" for Mac OS 8-9.
Apple's technical documents are as user-friendly as their operating systems. Most power-users can read their documents and get an understanding of Apple technology.
Apple Tech Info Library
1st, there's sort of a contradiction in your post - you want companies to be unregulated and free to practice vendor lock-in with unpublished API's that competing vendors don't have access to, and then claim that people in the market have 'freely chosen' to use the product, as if it were on a level playing field w/o hidden tie-ins and tight integration (a plus, granted) that other application developers don't have access to! Msft may have won the desktop DOS OS market by various legal means (knighted by IBM, or chosen as 'best OS' by expert microcomputer users) but to use THAT legal monopoly to leverage OTHER products to monopoly status by changing unpublished API's and being a general ass to potential competitors is clearly NOT legal!
Anyway, with the price of Word® hitting $280 / user we just may be forced to bite the bullet and retrain people on something else that doesn't have a hook set in their jaws for the vendor to yank on when then need more fish!
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
(I don't have the karma to burn but I'm going to go ahead and voice an unpopular opinion anyway. I'm sick and tired of people on slashdot who fail to wake up and _think_ before they jump on the latest bandwagon touting the "cool" line)
You want to dictate how people do things. You had your chance in the former Soviet Union and the enter Eastern Bloc. You failed miserably. The reason communism failed miserably is that when the government decides to actively intervene in all aspects of society, it takes away the motivation of individuals to excel - why would I try to develop a kick-ass product and corner the market if the government is going to come and take that away?
In the absence of a motivation to excel, the motivation to produce and contribute to society, technology and advancement in general disappears.
This might seem like a great idea in a short-term myopic view, but history has taught us that in the long run this will only lead to ruin.
And please don't pretend there is a difference. You want protocols to use existing RFCs. So every time I want to add a new feature which the existing RFCs don't cover, I'm required to go through a lengthy process of getting what I'm doing "approved" by a bureaucratic process. The result? Stagnation. (Of course if I go ahead without waiting for the approval, you're gonna scream "embrace and extend").
Mmmm.. Donuts
That's not not what I ment. If M$ was to release their Office to MacOS X, you know for dang sure they wont compile it for Linux (you wouldn't feed your head to a lion, no would you?). When C/C++/Fortran/Pascal/Wippobingbong is compiled, it's turned into instructions that the processor can use and thus if the processor is different, it wont understand the code.
Unmask thyself, thou Anonymous Fuck!
This post is well thought out and accurate. Therefore, it cannot reflect the opinions of the SlashDot moderators.
the world would be a much better place! Seriously, if MS does this thing with Cocoa (AKA OpenStep) it's just a simple "make; make install" because we have GNUstep! However, I doubt that they'll be using Cocoa. It just works too well for MS to use it....
Are you sure they'll use Cocoa? I would think they'd use Carbon since they already have Office et al with that API. If you have proof of their writing it in Cocoa please let me know.
You'll find that the "*nix community" isn't going to be the only bunch of people using Linux in the near future. There are plenty of businesses who'd love to dump NT if they still get to run Office.
And btw, do yourself a favor and download and use icab instead of IE.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Hmm - works like a champ here on a SPARCstation 20 running solaris 2.5.1 - except they didn't release any 5.0.1 patches or anything? Grr - won't fix the security holes on other platforms, I guess. Here is the link that works about it.
If anybody has a copy of Rhapsody for Intel to give away, drop me an email.
Emacs isn't a mail client.
/.
As for Outlook's quality, I really prefer Eudora. Under windows, that is.
Mmmmm... finally getting sleepy. GNite,
-jpowers
-jpowers
Does anybody remember IE4 for Solaris and HPUX? (Slogan: "Microsoft brings the internet to Unix!")
:)
MS essentially ported the entire Windows API, and had IE4 running under emulation. On an Ultra 2 it would consume a full 2/3 of the system resources, and then proceed to leak memory from there.
If they don't do better than that this time, I say don't bother trying to make it work under BSD
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Years? Can't be years. IE5 hasn't been around for years. And anyways, that's IE5, not IE5.5, you mention. The article says IE5.5, right?
Anyways, in my opinion, any version of IE newer than 3 is better than any or all versions of Netscape. Not to start wars or anything, but Microsoft has a browser that does more, faster, and better. And anyways, at least IE knows how to deal with CSS, as opposed to Netscape...
Chris 'coldacid' Charabaruk Meldstar Entertainment
Could it be that Microsoft is up to their old tricks again? You know, the embrace, extend, extinguish business model?
When they ported Office to MacOS, they either did a really sloppy job of porting it or they made sure it had far inferior performance compared to the native (Intel) version. Considering who we are dealing with, I leave that choice to the reader. Whatever the case, the Macs started crashing and not performing well.
A large aircraft company in the midwest was almost totally a Mac shop. However, when these problems started appearing, they switched over to Intel running (you guessed it) Win95.
Personally, I don't want Office or Exploiter for Linux/*BSD/Unix. I think we're too familiar with Microsoft's business model, to believe that they would do something like that for the good of the community. They would use it to discredit *nix on the desktop. ("I don't know why these boxes crash like this. I'll bet it would run better under Windows...")
Anybody remember the IE beta for Unix? It grabbed something like 45MB of memory just to open up.
--Storm
try pegasus mail. it is very good. very powerful with built in finger and other stuff, folders as files, uuencode, excellent attachment support, preview the attachment code with out running, multi user. very good for windows crap
The coffee god lives!
AFAIK it is wrong that OSX is based on BSD. From my understanding it's based on the Mach kernel, which is a different beast, in much the same way as the NeXt Step OS was. I'm no expert in these matters though so if I'm wrong please be gentle :)
I don't know if anyone has noticed, but there are ports of numerous MS products to Solaris, including IE. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I have worked a bit with Solaris and find it very BSD-ish. It seems to be a tangle, consisting of the "best"(read: what Sun thinks is the best) of BSD and the "best" of sysv.
In any case, I would have to say that the Sun ports are a far cry closer to having the applications run on BSD-ish systems. This will never happen, however, as long as MS holds their anti-open-source attitudes. Notice there are no ports of any MS applications to Solaris 8. Perhaps they are afraid the underlying syscalls will be tampered with, revealing (very vaguely) their code, and how it works.
In the various and sundry replies to my post, which called for a government mandate that all intercommunication standards be open and documented, I have been called a communist and have read several distortions of the original statement.
I have been told "If you don't like it there, get another job". When one admin of one division allows any client to work wih the exchange server, and another admin of another division (mine) decides to close out all non-MS clients, why should I be the one to "get another job"? Why should I have to transfer? By company policy, admins are allowed to run their servers as they see fit. Yet I am no longer allowed to use my mail client of choice? To me, this sounds much more like communism than anything I have written. "Don't like our shoes? Go barefoot." That's not freedom.
This "communist" has worked for this division for 7 years, cultivating relationships with the customer, insuring quality and satisfaction at every cycle of the process -- and my record shows it. I am often requested by name when things go awry, since I never "drop the ball". So that makes me a "communist"?
Somehow, a number of posters have insisted that my post demands the creation of some kind of Orwellian "Ministry of Protocols". Ridiculous. My post says nothing of the sort, it simply states that the protocols be open and documented -- my interpretation of "open" is that a variety of entities can attend, without undue discrimination. For example, there's no reason to let Lars Ulrich in, but Sun representatives should nt be disallowed.
One poster brought up the subject of firewire, as a standard created without government intervention. Note that the companies involved did not need coercion by the government -- they wanted to spread it's use. Firewire is now an IEEE standard, anyone can get it, and must be licensed for use.
Microsoft used standards when it suited them -- ODBC and DHCP let them get on the desktop in most corporations -- but now that they control the market, they refuse to let anyone license exchange.
Another poster states COM/Active-X are open standards. I'm glad someone brought this up. Increasingly, companies like Microsoft and Sun pervert the standards process by inviting one or two NDA participants, creating and stabilizing everything, then releasing the "standard" after they have a huge head start. I really question this kind of "standard" -- while everyone tries to implement version 1.0, you're already debugged and running it, and working on version 2.0. This moving target, with a small group of NDA participants, is hardly an "open, documented standard". Add on to that the widespread use of Active-X controls that work with no browser except Netscape, and you have something, but it's not really a "standard".
I think there are real threats to our civil liberties in the making here, folks. When a company makes a change that essentially forces the employees to use Microsoft products at home, and the best your peers and management can say is "Go Get Another Job", there is something deeply wrong with the way the software industry is working and the way Management is thinking.
Corporations once had the right to listen in on your phone calls, on company property, without any regulations or hinderence. They cannot do that anymore, by law. This is a case where corporate america had to take a loss of power for the sake of individual rights.
All I'm asking is that solutions be found to insure companies cannot be in the position to force the use of Microsoft products or services at home. I proposed a solution that makes sense to me. If you have a better solution, that doesn't involve my changing jobs or putting me in a deathcamp for being some kind of "communist", I'd like to hear it.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
I don't know about a WINE equivalent, but there is Basilisk, a Mac emulator. It requires an image of a real ROM, but I understand it's quite good.
So every time I want to add a new feature which the existing RFCs don't cover
Certainly people who innovate should be allowed to collect the fruits of their labor - but there's a fine line between innovation to improve something and using a dominant position to lock out competitors. The question boils down to (to me) did Msft make proprietary changes to the open Kerberos standard to improve it (I'd love to hear exactly what those changes made better for the consumer) OR were those proprietary changes made to make other vendor's open std Kerberos products incompatible in an attempt for FORCE the consumer to switch to an all Msft shop? If the private altered standard adds no value for the consumer, but locks out competitors, Msft has a serious problem. If it does add value but, opps sorry, has the side effect of locking out competitors they can probably get away with it.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
soviet union, china, nazi germany
Funny, these are all governments
Ya, those of us who don't favor complete degegulation (probably includes legalizing drugs, gambling and prostitution, peddling bleached meat and autos with known defects as well) are branded with a govt political label, while the open standards which the Internet was built on and laid out in the RFC's were largely govt sponsered and came from defense dept projects!!
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Office will use the higher-level API's extensively, because this is a Macintosh application, and it therefore needs to make use of Mac GUI routines, Apple Events, aqua, etc. I don't think it's possible to make an "all darwin" app for the Mac that follows the rules for the same reason you can't (easily) make a Linux GUI app without making calls to X.
The upshot is that porting Office to Mac OS X will do little if any good in efforts to port Office to other unices. The fact that it has a similar core does you no good if your code makes most of its calls to higher-level API's that are not supported on other platforms. You'd have to implement Carbon and Aqua on top of Darwin before you'd have any chance of running Office on it.
"Microsoft has announced Office and IE5.5 for Mac OS X in mid-2001. Given that OS X is based on BSD, what are the ramifications for those trying to get these apps on unix? Seems like a generic OS X-to-unix API translation would be a lot easier than Win32 API-to-unix.
Nope, I belive Microsoft has stated that they'll be using Cocoa, Appls objective-c/c API. Quite natural really, as Office is a very large applictaion, and with all those specialised MS APIs and dialogs it uses, it would never work with Aqua.
Also, MacOS X programming, at least graphicaly, will be very different from the other systems, and as Office uses a GUI, I can't see how they could easily make a X windows/Aqua lib that works the same way. MS will not port to Linux, no way, at least not yet.
Maybe time for a command-line version of Office! =P
No, thats even more unlikely than Apple using a *NIX system on Macs...
-Knut S.
The OSX ports of Office will be using Cocoa, Apple's evolution of the OpenStep API's. This is still not a "pure" BSD API, so things still wouldn't be that easy to port.
On the plus side, GNUstep mioght make things easier to port. It depends on how much Cocoa Microsoft uses. But there is the potential.
I started using IE 5 for DP4 of OS X and I had to, within a day, download OmniWeb cuz the Carbonized version IE 5 sucked so badly (crashed, didn't display what the HTML really was, etc) it was almost unusable. Granted this is a Developer Preview, but isn't the point of releasing some of the applications in the works so you could see if they'd work well? MS obviously didn't do all their homework on IE5. I'd hate to see a crash-prone version of the Office Suite for Mac. That's a recipe for disaster.
So there I was. Naked. In a refrigerator. With a potroast on my knees. Smokin a cigar. That's when it got REALLY weird.
let's try something..
rocked my party... forget some of the comments here - they're posted by the slashdot elite
Close. OS X doesn't have three user interfaces, but three programmign interfaces (APIs). There is BSD, Carbon, and Cocoa. BSD is what it sounds like; Carbon is a port of a cleaned up version of the current Mac OS toolbox (the API Mac OS uses); and Cocoa, is simply the next version of the OpenStep API, which is object oriented, and quite sophisticated. Carbon allows pretty easy porting of current Mac OS applications to Mac OS X. The Carbon API also exists on the traditional Mac OS, so you can produce a binary for Mac OS 8 - 9 and Mac OS X with a compiler flag, and making changes to have it run on System 7 shouldn't be too hard either. It's for these reasons many Mac OS X developers coming from previous Mac development will use Carbon. You're getting Carbon confused with Classic. Classic is an appliation which runs on Mac OS X which runs a copy of Mac OS 9 in emulation for the purpose of running non-ported prorgams. Carbon isn't as a nice of an API as Cocoa is, but it does take advantage of all of the advantages Mac OS X has over it's predecessors. When MS says they'll have Office 2001 on OS X, they're most likely to use Carbon, for the above reasons. What does this mean in the context of getting MS apps on Unix in general? Not much. Carbon and Cocoa are portable APIs, and do not require Unix at all. ARDI is trying to implement Carbon on top of Linux/X and Windows toward the end of portable programs. Apple themselves has an older version of the Cocoa API available on Windows, as a part of WebObjects development. My point? Mac OS X doesn't use X, but it's own Display PDF window server. But that doesn't matter at all. It all depends on whether or not the API is implemented on the target platform. If an app was written in Cocoa for Mac OS X, there's a good chance, sometime in the future, they could very easily be ported to Linux and other Unices via GNUstep, an implementation of the OpenStep/YellowBox/Cocoa API, which is coming along slowly, but very surely. Porting an app from Mac OS X/Cocoa to Linux/GNUstep shouldn't be that hard, as it's a high-level API. The companies writting these apps simply need an ecomical incentive to do so.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
hmmm...
Ignoring for the moment the strong evidence that this will not actually make a Linux port any easier, I don't believe anyone switched to Linux to get away from OFFICE. We switched to Linux mostly to get away from WINDOWS. Office, while bloated, is pretty darn useful software. Windows, while bloated, is pretty and darned useless.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
why'm i doing this?
The different processors really aren't that much of a problem unless office/IE is written in assembly (which I doubt). As long as the OS and libraries are the same, C and C++ code usually compiles with no problems on alternate processors. Pretty much any Linux software runs equally well on both my P2 and my SPARC. Hackers with Macs know the same is true with PowerPCs and even 68K's.
The problem is that OSX has an API layer that is closed and non-BSD. Classic and Carbon have a whole lot more to do with the old MacOS than with Darwin. Cocoa is a great deal more UNIX-like, but then again, M$ isn't using cocoa. The display interface is different, too (Quartz is a long, long way from X).
Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
Andy Grove: "Not Much."
*nix, it's not just for servers anymore...
...
Got Warez?
OS X has two main APIs.
Coccoa, which is the revised OpenStep API with a few new tricks.
Carbon, which is the OS 7,8,9, etc API minus the cruft, which allows software makers to create native OS X apps with only minor modification (Photoshop was ported within two weeks). It is not an emulator.
Classic, a OS 9 Virtual Machine is used for running Classic MacOS apps.
Microsoft would port to either Carbon or Coccoa. They wouldn't even touch the BSD innards. Now a simple trip to http://www.apple.com/macosx/ could have answered this question in about 30 seconds. Next time Slashdot should use some care, not just post anything that includes "Office, ported and BSD or Linux" in the same message.
How many secretaries do you think are going to be given shiny new G3s and G4s to run OS X just to use MS Office?
I hate to hurt your ego, but many executive secretaries sadly have better computers than you or I do (I don't know what kind of computer you have, but I know of *many* secretaries who have G4's simply because their boss does). Hell, at one company here in the Silicon Valley, I saw a receptionist using her $5k Sun workstation and complaining that she wished she could have a Windoze PC!!! I almost smacked her on the spot, but decided to just explain to her the value of what she had and how to do what she didn't know how to do in the different OS.
Actually, lots of office users really do appreciate the helpers. Power users eventually turn them off, but they're quite good for newbies.
And FINDFAST is good as long as you schedule it at the right times.
Welcome to the world you live in: Office rules the world, and even the MS-breakup isn't going to change that fact. If you want Linux to remain a hacker's OS, then no problems... if you want it to be a mainstream OS, it's going to need Office.
-Stu
Debugging browser....
-- http://thegirlorthecar.com funny dating game for guys
> single user
You're misinformed.
Okay for people who have trouble with basic comprehension or just happened to be reading that while they were tired or distracted..
A.) they're to lazy
B.) they're to dumb
C.) they don't want to
Now it's seem to me your argument falls into C. Of course it could sort of fall into A and B also the way you worded it. If it was well coded, even as well coded as an average opensource project, then they should be able to easily port it to other systems. You must agree that any mindshare gained on competing systems is worth at least this minimum amount of work to compile it for another system. So either they just are to lazy to make that small effort or they are such bad programmers that it'd take a lot of work to port over.. or the upper management is to stupid to see the benefit of gaining mindshare within the camp of prehaps the greatest competitor they've had for years.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Surely it can't be as broken as Netscape 4 for UNIX/X.
> However, there is about a snowballs' chance in
... one of Cocoa's strengths is the rapid development drag-and-drop UI stuff. If you're building a UI wrapper for Windows code, starting fresh in Cocoa is not going to take a whole lot more time than Carbonizing.
> hell that Microsoft is porting Office to the Cocoa
> API's, the native MacOS X API.
Carbon is just as native as Cocoa, but, actually, Office 2001 for Mac OS X will be Cocoa. An MS engineer talked about this publically a month or two ago. Originally, they were going to release a Carbon version for Mac OS 8-X in late 2000, but then revised their plans and decided to do a Classic version for Mac OS 8-9 this fall, and then release a Cocoa version for Mac OS X in mid-2001.
It makes sense when you realize that only the Office UI is truly Mac-specific
This also will probably result in some Mac users buying Office 2001 (Classic) this fall and then buying it again (Cocoa) six or eight months later. A very Microsoftian bonus.
As far as running Office 2001 (Cocoa) on another Unix, perhaps a PowerPC BSD with a complete GNUstep (I don't know what the status of that is) could run it. It wouldn't look the same (no Aqua) but perhaps it could be made to work.
Apple may release Cocoa API's for other Unix variants at some point, as well. They've been trying to make XML configuration files and application packages a standard, so who knows?
I don't think you've got the relationship between carbon, aqua, and apps quite right. Carbon is a comprehensive set of API's designed to ease the transition for existing Mac apps. Carbon apps are fully buzzword-compliant and get all the benefits of the modern OS internals-- preemptive multitasking, modern memory management, SMP thread support, etc.
Aqua is just Apple's name for the look and feel of its GUI. It is not an API. Apps don't write to Aqua. They write to Carbon, and then Carbon causes your app to look Aqua-ish.
Carbon is also not the only available API. There are three major API's. (4 if you count Java) Carbon is one of them. The second is Classic, which is pretty much the existing Mac OS running inside protected memory. It will allow execution of existing Mac OS binaries. The third API is Coacoa, which is the brand new, NeXT derived, object oriented API designed for new apps. It is built around ObjC and is said to allow rapid development and highly abstract code.
So no one ports anything to Aqua. They port to Carbon and Coacoa. Aqua is just how they look when they've done this.
My main concern is the way they develop closed protocols and make workplaces "Microsoft Only" -- if the exchange server has Microserfs administering it, no mail client will work except outlook.
:) I have personally witnessed that exchange indeed works quite well as IMAP server for a large user group (at $COMPANY, I think they had some 50k accounts or something), but sucks at performance. Anyways, it works.
Not quite. Exchange does support IMAP (dont know about POP3), but of course there are better mail servers around
nc
I will not buy this software, it is scratched
People don't seem to realize that Internet Explorer already exists for UNIX. Well, Solaris only, but it does work under X Windows.
See it here.
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
The Darwin kernel that OS X uses has been ported to X86. Apple has never started that they would port OS X itself to x86. It's a possibility, but I doubt it.
MacOS X has three user interfaces
If Apple does their job right, there will be only one user interface. Users will be unable to tell which API each app is working. What there will be is 3 API's, meaning developers will see three different interfaces. But the user shouldn't have to know anything about them.
one of which is Carbon and provides legacy compatibility for all the thousands of MacOS apps out there now.
Not so. Off-the-shelf Mac software that exists now will not run in Carbon. You are thinking of Classic, which is the compatibility box. Carbon is a stripped down subset of the current Mac OS API's that provide a gentle migration path to the new OS. But it does require rewriting some code and it does require a recompile.
This is the API MS is using; their code won't take advantage of any of the two newer APIs in the OS.
If they are using Carbon for this realease (and odds are they are) then it will have access to new OS features. This was the whole point of Carbon-- to strip out those functions that prevented apps being reentrant, multi-threadable, memory-protected, etc. Apple is planning on providing API's to access most if not all new OS features through Carbon.
There is only one other API (not counting Java), and that's Coacoa. Coacoa is a Next-derived, object-oriented API designed for new apps.
ehhh..you have a -10 karma, what's to lose?
I support end users with Outlook. It is a resource *PIG*. It is *VARY* buggy. It is nightmare to troubleshoot, must of the time I have to resort to waxing the HKey_Current_User\Software\Microsoft\Office\x.0\Ou tlook or deleteing and redoing the profile. It has alot of features but none seem to work quite right or %100 percent of the time. The wost thing is the line between local and server side configuration, there is none.
First, the disclaimer... I'm not a very strong programmer (PERL w/ some ANSI C and Pascal, no Mac API experience). I did go to WWDC though.
Now, here is what I understand to be true (much of it has been said here and there already).
First, Aqua (the Interface) is totally Apple propriatary. It won't get opened and it's completely different from X. Anything coded for Aqua won't port anywhere else.
Second, There are basically 4 ways to code a program for OS-X.
--Classic (old Apple APIs running in emulation)
--Carbon (new APIs, similar to Classic APIs but supported in OS8.x, 9.x, and OS-X). Benefit: Same binary for both OSes and access to OS-X features like Protected memory.
--Cocoa (Native API set for OS-X. Full access to all OS-X core functionality, the prefered way to program new applications)
--BSD (Code written for BSD (freeBSD) can be compiled to run from the command line. BSD code has no supported interface APIs so X Applications will not compile)
Now... What will Microsoft do? Well, they have already bundled a developmental release of IE 5 in OSX DP4 and it's a Carbon App. No Unix code at all. The conversion from Classic APIs to Carbon APIs reportedly took 2 weeks to finish. Odds are that MS will make all Mac products Carbon compliant for the forseeable future because it allows the Mac group to develop in a familiar API and it allows them to release the same application to both Classic OS 8-9.x and OSX at the same time with no (or very little) modification. This means absolutely not help to the Unix community.
Even when Apple cans the existing OS line, MS will be able to keep coding in Carbon.
Even when MS eventually starts moving to Cocoa (if they ever do), it's still an Apple API from start to finish so it won't translate to any other platform. Programming for Aqua is completely different from other interfaces (I don't know of any other Display PDF interfaces... not to mention it's Apple's implimentation of a Display PDF interface).
Sorry... This isn't any good for anyone except us Mac users.
This is most likely correct. To get a product to market in a timely manner, Microsoft will merely 'carbonate' their app, which is to say that they will remove all calls to deprecated MacOS API's, and use the slimmed down API set known as carbon, which plays nice with OS X.
:-) With Cocoa available on Win32, MacOS X, and GNUStep providing API compatibility on other *nix systems, we would have a truly excellent cross-platform development toolkit. Of course, another strike against this idea is that Microsoft is not likely to want to port Office to Obj-C, and while that isn't the only language that Apple supports, it's a major player.
Microsoft has already produced a Carbon version of IE5 for MacOS X DP4, so that product should actually be quite useable when OS X ships. As for Office, especially from Microsoft, that's probably a fairly, well, huge, codebase.
In any case, what this all means is that *BSD folks are still out in the cold as far as an Office suite from Microsoft. Not that most of them would mind, probably.
However, there is about a snowballs' chance in hell that Microsoft is porting Office to the Cocoa API's, the native MacOS X API. If that were the case, *BSD users would be closer to having a suite, but that would still require a port of parts of CoreFoundation that aren't OpenSource, although a lot of it is. GNUStep might be able to fill in the blanks where CF isn't available.
Why would Microsoft do this? Well, it's *probable* that Apple has quite a bit of Cocoa ported to win32, since that may have been their original plan. Obviously, they've shied away from the win32/x86 crowd at the moment, at least for a full product, probably because of lack of engineering hours to spend on the project, but who knows what else that $150 million deal with Microsoft included.
Of course, the latter part is likely all pipe dream, but it's a nice dream, isn't it?
Contrary to information provided here, Microsoft developers have already announced that Office 2001 will be rewritten from scratch for OS X using the Cocoa APIs (aka Objective C), not merely Cabonizing the OS 8/9 version.
MS won't be happy about making a version of office which will fall into the hands of linux and BSD *nix types.
Yes, they want everyone to use their software, but on their terms
and as much as us independent, liberty-for-all linux-types want linux to be mainstream, how many of us are ready for MS on linux?
MS won't let office run on OS X in a way that can be easily stolen. Expect it to rely on BLUEBOX (classic os 9) or on new OS X quartz/carbon.
However, there are MS official versions of IE5 and office.
look at www.mainsoft.com They have exclusive licensing with MS... They ported the win32 api to unix and have made native versions of IE and office. So, it IS possible, just not cost effective. (mainsoft doesn't do free software yet.)
i wish i was a girl, so i could have a lesbian relationship with natalie portman.
i like german girls. and nannies.
OK. Why on earth would they rewrite Office to use Cocoa when they already have code to carbonize? Cocoa is mainly for new apps and rewrites.
You've got a point. But Microsoft themselves said they were going to use Cocoa, and while I don't tend to trust Microsoft on anything major I think this one's probably true.
Heck, it probably is a ploy to make users upgrade their computers, I won't argue that one.
Anyway, for an office suite, Carbon would do just fine. This is not to mention that there are millions of pre G3 Macs in that won't run a Cocoa version (no G3, no OS X, no Cocoa), but will run a Carbon version (which can run on any Mac OS back to 8.1).
Not strictly true. It's well-known that OSX DP4 runs on quite a few pre-G3 Macs (though if it's NuBus-based you're definitely out of luck). Further, it's quite possible that Apple may back-port OSX to the earlier machines (this is already true of Darwin, and it's stupid of Apple not to take advantage of that). Once you've got a basic OS going, porting it to different motherboards with the same architecture isn't that difficult. Writing the software from the ground up with that support, however, can be a very taxing task. The "G3 only" requiirement has been generally agreed to be just a trick by Apple to get the OS out more quickly, with backporting to follow in the spare time between OSX GM and January 2001.
How many secretaries do you think are going to be given shiny new G3s and G4s to run OS X just to use MS Office?
Not many, though be sure to consider that Office is a major app in the workforce, and this sort of thing has happened before. However, there's a greater chance of them being given iMacs (or the rumored "iBoxes") as an upgrade, and these can also run OSX.
Microsoft is porting things to Mac OS X, sure - but they'll be porting to the "Carbon" interfaces - the same old Mac style API's - with only a few twists.
Even if they did port this all to "Aqua", it still a completely different windowing environment, and wouldn't mean squat for any of the other other *bsd environments.
Apparently, people don't seem to understand that MacOSX is not a UNIX from the developer sense. A modern MacOSX developer is sure to use the Cocoa API so that their apps appear to be like the other apps that MacOS X users will be used to. As such, their application still won't be portable to UNIX. I mean technically, it should be simple to port apps between BeOS and Linux, since they both use a POSIX base. However, a significant amount of code in a productivity app is user interface code that is tied to the UI system. Since MacOS X uses a different windowing system, even if the Office people use the BSD API for the port, it would still be hard to port to Linux/BSD/X.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I must apologize for my errant misspelling of a monopolistic company. It appears that I was in err, and that I should have used my old favourite 'Monkeysoft' in place of the ever popular Micro$oft.
Again I apologize and withdraw any post I have made to the offense of anyone...
-sempiternity
P.S. Why would I want to use HTML in my posts? Isn't that as banal as using the abbreviation M$? Apparently not...
0100100000100000011010010111000010000001100001001
Well, having used the hell out of the IE 5.0 version for the Macintosh, it seems they went out of their way to feel like Mozilla/NS 6. If they can actually create a version of a browser and mail client that can beat the stability of the (mostly weak) *nix browser market, then I think there's a decent chance I'd walk away from Mozilla...
Then, on the flip side, it's doubtful they'd do the work for a port, even if it was minimal. The *nix community is notorious for MS Hatred, and it's not likely that anyone in the community would want to actually USE an MS product...
-Dusty Hodges
That's so true. So very very true.
This does nothing for the chances of seeing Office on other *nixes because the chances are they will simply be using the Carbon API's for MacOS X, basically the same old Mac API. So unless somebody comes up with the WINE equivalent of the Mac API, we won't see Office for *nix.
--------- Beware the dragon, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.
For something to run on MacOS X doesn't necessarily make it BSD compatible. My guess is it will be a Carbonised application, which for those of you who haven't been following Apple closely means a regular MacOS application without the calls to system functions that weren't re-entrant and stuff.
www.mackido.com probably has a good explaination of what the Carbon environment is. I'm just too tired to look it up for you.
Just look at M$'s website sometime and you'll see that IE5 exists for both Solaris and HP-UX already. I dunno about you but usually when I want to compile most Unix apps they'll compile on anything that has gcc ported to it and isn't a totally dead platform. If Microsoft isn't porting IE to FreeBSD, Linux, and other Unix-based OS's it's because A.) they're to lazy B.) they are to dumb C.) they don't want to. I'm all for M$ products being ported over to give opensource apps some competition (though I'd never use any none opensourced apps if opensourced counterparts existed) but it seems to me Microsoft isn't going to be doing that for quite some time. I'll let you decide which of the above reasons is holding them back.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
. . . and then Carbon causes your app to look Aqua-ish
I think the work we are looking for is "aquatic"
This post is well thought out and accurate. Therefore, it cannot reflect the opinions of the SlashDot moderators.
Alot of people (okay, maybe not _alot_) use IE 5 for hp-ux and solaris. But in order to get it running, you have to also download most of the already ported Win32 API as well.
This evidence kind of implies that it really wouldn't be hard at all to port IE or Office or most other microsoft code to BSD or even Linux, but its not about easy porting. I imagine, since IE is going to the new microsoft applications company, that we will see a version of it for Linux very soon after the operating systems division's stock drops below $30. Why beat a dead horse, as they say.. But then again, none of this is really gnu.
Dave
--------
--------
WWGD? (What Would Goku Do?)
First, OSX!=Carbon: MS will use the part of OSX that acts like the old MacOS, not the new APIs. From the evidence that they'll just use Cocoa, not the new Carbon APIs. This means that it wouldn't really be a port to the BSD part of OSX at all.
Second, OSX is not just another BSD. It is a whole bunch of MacOS stuff, like the Carbon and Cocoa APIs and the GUI based on Aqua (the UI) and Quartz that is built around a BSD heart, Darwin. The MS software uses these APIs and the Aqua GUI, so it would be difficult to port to a BSD system without these. One that used X, for instance.
Maybe somebody could work on a project similar to WINE that would port these APIs to non-OSX Unix systems. But in the meantime, since this isn't avalible, it probably would be about the same as porting MacOS 7-9 to Unix.
it's green.
Methinks you still need source code to port a program from one OS to the other.
Sure, this would simplify writing an emulator for OSX, because it's got some BSD blood in it, but that's not a port, that's just a glorified emulator.
Besides which, what's wrong with the (open, no less) tools provided already?
Well, of course he gets his life by following you and telling you to get a life... :)
Of course, some people may think I'm you disguised, answering your own posts, but you know I ain't you. Keep up with the good work, dude!
funnier than Mr. 575's haiku's anyway... (hey 575, how 'bout writing a haiku in response to osm's stories? heh heh heh)
the real at&t mix
MS Office is proof that mediocre programmers led by downright moronic (software-wise) businessmen churn out very, very bad programs. Simple productivity apps should not take up half a gig and leave their little "helpers" running in the background, sucking up system resources. Do we really need a findfast daemon?
Abiword and GnuMeric handle office files, and the two of them downloaded in just a few minutes on my 56K. They have almost all the functionality of their M$ counterparts, and they blaze even on my old 486s. StarOffice and Applix are pretty cool too, but proprietary. And if you really crave very poorly done ports of windows apps that weren't that good in the first place, there's Corel.
I could care less if Office gets ported to BSD or Linux. It would be very sad if after all the hard work millions of people have put into the open-source Unices, most of the users became dependant on proprietary software. Wasn't avoiding dependancy on closed software the impetus for the free software movement in the first place?
Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
Andy Grove: "Not Much."
"Undocumented systems are like the New York subway without a map."
[pause]
"You just don't go there!"
This is a joke, right?
be well;
JC.
--
"Don't declare a revolution unless you are prepared to be guillotined." - Anon.
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
Wow, I just finished reading this story, and It's seriously the biggest turd I've ever laid eyes on. If you're going to troll, make it funny or shut up. By the way, love the way you reply to comments with more of your sharp wit.
You think you're so rich...But there's one thing you can't buy....A dinosaur
Seems encouraging, doesn't it?
Don't get your hopes up.
The OS X MS Office ports are written such that OS X basically emulates the OS 9 operating environment for them. There is not an ounce of Unix code in these ports.
MacOS X has three user interfaces, one of which is Carbon and provides legacy compatibility for all the thousands of MacOS apps out there now. This is the API MS is using; their code won't take advantage of any of the two newer APIs in the OS.
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Doesn't the portability of such a program depend alot more on the GUI toolkit used? I mean, the level of back-end API that an office program would need is pretty trivial (and mostly provided by ANSI-C anyway). It's the front-end that counts. AFAIK, OSX uses its own GUI stuff, not X11 or gtk.
------
People are always saying how Netscape on Linux is oh so horrible and you can't do a damn thing with it. I was just wondering, what distribution, platform, etc do you use?
I run Netscape constantly, version 4.7. I haven't found another GUI IMAP mail client to my liking. (Pine/mutt are fine, but I like pretty GUIs sometimes.) I sometimes leave Netscape up for days at a time. I compile all of KDE2 frequently, so I shut down X for that, at least once a week, sometimes twice. I have Mandrake 7.0 currently on my Athlon 550 computer. I have Java shut off and my preferences.js non-writable to preserve some of my personal preferences Netscape enjoys deleting when it can. If I see that a ridiculous plugin loading, I quickly stop, go back and never return to the site. I do that mostly because I find them quite annoying. Javascript is still left on.
There are some complaints I have with it, but nothing to the point of "Netscape on Linux is extraordinarily buggy." So, what are you people running? I see so many people bitching about Netscape, I feel left out. Please, clue me in. With all the terrible things we've seen IE capable of doing, you'd think it would be on the Slashdot crowd's list of things worse than death.
Problems
(1) OS X APIs (Carbon, <sp>Coca</sp> etc) are not Open source / known to officaly be proted to other OSs.
(2) only the kernel and most of the CLI of OS X is OpenSource, the GUI is prety much 100% Apple only.
[theory 1]
(1) MS will probably use Carbon which is a pre OS X compatablity layer think of it as a WINE type program for going between OS X and Mac OS 7-9.
(2) Carbon is not currently portable off OS X (no implementations for linux etc) and it is not anything like Open source or even free(beer) software. and it doesn't look like it's going to be.
distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes!!!
I don't know about Mozilla, but IE5 works right.
And then, under Nutscrape Constipator, my site is unreadable because it just doesn't know what to do with my stylesheets. Don't believe me? Check out blaklight.tekscode.com with IE5 and NS. Tell me which looks better.
Chris 'coldacid' Charabaruk Meldstar Entertainment
MacOS X isn't just BSD, its a whole application layer on top of a new set of standard Mac APIs. BSD apps run on MacOS X just like they do on BSD, in a command line interface in a text window.
...the impression that OS X was compatible with linux/bsd binaries, wouldn't then the VM Ware binary work on the OS X?
If VM Ware is able to work on OS X Mac's why is M$ porting their pitances to Aqua anything of note? All it would really take is VM Ware, virtually running Win98, and people can use their m$ office crap...
If I'm wrong, please mark this: -1 (stupid)
I just finished reading a text about UNICODE Circles, so please bear with me.
-sempiternity
0100100000100000011010010111000010000001100001001