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The Ideas Behind Longhorn
An anonymous reader writes: "Fortune magazine is carrying an interesting article on the new and improved Bill Gates, as well as some details on Longhorn: 'Because Gates' geeks are completely overhauling the operating system, they'll also have to redesign most of the company's other software products and services to take full advantage, including the MSN online service, its server applications, and especially Microsoft Office, the productivity suite that accounts for nearly a third of the company's sales and profits. If this enormous undertaking succeeds, it will make computers more personal than ever. Equipped with Longhorn, your PC will keep track of how you work, whom you talk to, what sites you look at, how you make documents and whom you share them with, which data on the network are yours--making all those things easier.'"
...discussion about this on the Register.
--Kylus
Idiot-proof something, and Life will build a better Idiot.
the old DR releases of BeOS also had a db as a filesystem. They left it for a more 'normal' fs since it bacame rather slow as things grew. Should be interesting to osee if ms can pull that one of
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
"What's wrong with taking everyone's good ideas and implementing them into one product?"
Because that would require a public domain, and recent copyright laws have destroyed the public domain. It's a great idea, but let the protectionists reap what they sow. They can have infinite copyright, or innovation, but not both.
There's an quite interesting article on the Register where the old BeOS developers who implemented the BeOS relational db/fs talks about their thoughts of the MS db/fs.
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
Even the DMCA has provisions allowing reverse-engineering for interoperability purposes. The problem is that this is what legislators and lawyers like to call a "phantom exception" or a "bait exception."
DeCSS is an excellent example of the problem. DeCSS is required to decrypt DVD's so they can be watched on Linux. Of course, once the data's unencrypted, it's also possible to DivX it and put it on the internet.
Of course DeCSS's primary purpose is interoperability - this is the oldest story in open source operating systems; we have to reverse engineer proprietary systems that vendors have designed in order to keep us out (because they don't want to worry about competition). But the architects of both Europe's and America's IP-protectionism laws knew that when faced with the dilemma of deciding what a program's "significant use" was, the courts could easily be made to err on the side of "caution." Besides, how many private citizens can even afford the first round of the fight?
Hence, no free DVD players (and none at all on Linux), and programmers all over the world in jail, in court, or living in fear. Many of them in Europe. So please, if this issue concerns you, don't rest on your laurels, no matter which side of the pond you're on.
Write a letter or make a phone call to your elected representatives now. What we all need is to have the DMCA (and its European equivalents, if any) repealed, and the members of government who created these laws properly investigated for corruption.
We're on the road to Tycho.
Um... for the last few years just about any program for windows installs itself into the
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try." -Homer Simpson
Functional command line "help":
apropos <keyword>
man <topic>
Centralized service/sofware manager:
chkconfig
/etc/init.d/* <start|stop|restart>