Slashdot Mirror
Bill Gates On Linux
King-of-darkness writes "USA Today had an interview with Bill Gates on june the 30th. Gates seems to be considering Linux as a passing thru competition just like OS/2., and That Microsoft are the ones that keep pushing new technologies."
Let me assure you, lots of banks STILL use OS/2 and they will do so for the foreseable future. The fact that you don't use os/2 does not mean it is dead. It is as dead as Fortran and Cobol.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
Help fight continental drift.
There were not one, but TWO versions of this book. IF you manage to find a copy at a bookshop, you're more likely to come across the second edition, which is basically an entire rewrite that includes the Internet. Most of it was about how Microsoft software would run your refrigerator, dish washer, TV, change the pictures on your walls etc. It was kind of a description based on his own house, which is a technology showcase in its own right, in Redmond, Washington.
My journal has hot
nobody used OS/2?
I briefly worked for 'fortis' a huge international company, did insurance and investing. thousands, if not tens of thousands of OS/2 seats.
and just the other day i pulled up to a wells fargo atm, and it was out of order... OS/2 in a reboot loop....
OS/2 was a major player, if not for very long...
Gates is right though. OS/2 was huge - just not in the desktop home-user circles. Hell, my bank still uses OS/2. They're one of the largest banks in Canada, and they're an IBM shop through-and-through. They run on IBM's big iron mainframes, they use IBM's WebSphere (JSP and the whole shebang), and they use OS/2 on their desktops (with Netscape 4).
People nowadays just seem to think that nothing happened, but while it might have been as big a phenomenon as Windows, it sure isn't dead.
--Dan
If you've ever checked in at a United Airline ticket counter or one of the gates at one of thier hubs, your information was being run on Win3.1 with TCP/IP and Netbeui run off of an OS/2 backend over token ring. The advantage back then was the mainframe connectivity and protocols OS/2 provided (now they have a Linux machines to convert the protocols when needed). They are slowly (and I mean SLOWLY) moving away from this but it is still running fine and has been for over 10 years. Almost all of the smaller stations have been converted to straight TCP/IP without the OS/2.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Actually, J2EE is built using RMI-IIOP (or Internet-InterORB Protocol, or the CORBA protocol), not the original RMI-JRMP (Java Remote Message Protocol). J2EE transactions are CORBA transactions. J2EE security is CORBA security. JNDI naming is CORBA naming. That is how all of the cross-app-server compatability works (or rather, will work, in the future, hopefully, but thats an entirely different topic)
You should read the J2EE specifications, its all in there. J2EE hides all of that CORBA stuff, but its in there.
CORBA is quite alive and well, with new specifications arriving all the time, especially in the telco arena (for network management, etc, there is still lots of active work).
Sarcasm and hyperbole are the final refuges for weak minds
It wasn't even really competing with MS, because the people who used apps on os/2 ran them in windows (which was conveniently bundled with it out of the box)
I fail to see mr. Gate's analogy here.
Speak for yourself.
As great of a quote as this is to bash on Bill.. it is simply not true, but is in fact an urban legend of sorts that has been widely circulated on the internet.
Here is an interview with him clarifying the fact.
There is also a good interview in the New York Review of Books that also attempts to shed a better light on the matter.
Ok...it seems a bit silly to say "Well Windows beat out all the other OSes around" when you think about the computing scene then and the computing scene now.
Back then, we had MS already deeply entrenched because of the licensing deal with MS-DOS. Windows was an obvious upgrade. So you buy a PC with MS-DOS, perhaps Windows, or a Mac. This is what the consumers bought. Large institutions were still working on UNIX, mainframes with COBOL, etc.
Now...now you have a computer as common an appliance as a telephone and a toaster. MS is still deeply entrenched, no doubt about it. But this ignorance of "we beat other OSes before" won't last this time. Now we've got 8 year old kids beating the crap out of me with their *NIX coding, with these kids networking their house for their parents, playing with other operating systems. The kids see other alternatives to servers and OSes more suited to programming. So what if Linux isn't on the desktop yet. If it's got THIS much popularity without a pretty desktop face, just wait until it DOES get one. And do you really think...after the Internet bubble burst, companies would be blindly embracing something without a viable reason? IBM, HP going with Linux. Apple with a UNIX core...
The point is, more people are actually willing to try other OSes right now, not just the select few that could afford a $3,000 286 Leading Edge Model D.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
Get it right. IBM chopped 384K off the top. There were several other manufacturers (Victor, Zenith, Tandy) who had MS-DOS implementations with 900K usable memory.
Microsoft didn't spec the IBM PC, and IBM didn't spec MS-DOS.
Furthermore, since MS-DOS didn't provide a memory allocator, it's stupid to say that MS-DOS can't address non-contiguous memory.
I sat in a room with a few hundred people way back when and heard Bill say that OS/2 was the future. I wonder if he will be proven right once again :)
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
...is as bright as Bill says, why are he and Steve divesting a billion dollars in the past month?
Although the rest of your comment is accurate, I wanted to point out that the number of bits the processor is capable of wasn't the problem. In fact, to the external world, the 8088 processor only handled 8 bits, although internally it processed data in 16 bit chunks. The important fact was the number of address lines. There were 20, but due to the way the system was implemented, the upper four were rendered unavailable. I think someone else pointed out that there were other 8088-based systems that had 900+KB of memory available.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
Dragon Naturally Speaking by Scansoft has been winning awards since 1997. I first saw a demo of the product at the 1997 Comdex in Las Vegas and was suitably impressed. Microsoft, on the other hand, debued it's first speech recognition software in 2000 with the MiPad. And that was merely a prototype, not a working product.
Without arguing the merits of either technology, it does look like another case of MS jumping on the bandwagon long after it had gathered steam.
(Score: -1, Stupid)
Dear Cabal,
There have been numerous OS's that didn't and don't require you to have "esoteric" knowledge to install software. Should we do a little run through?:
MacOS (The original), Amiga, Atari, OS/2 for instance, right up to the morder day with Mac OSX, Linux (there are many distros and applications that require nothing more than double cklicking) right up and including my Nokia phone running Symbian.
For the record, the 8088 had an 8-bit bus, 16-bit registers, and 20-bits of address space. The 8088 is to the 8086 as the 80386SX was to the 80386DX, and few people claim that the 80386SX was a 16-bit chip, otherwise we'd be claiming that current consumer CPUs are anywhere from 64-bit to 512-bit.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
Here's another:
If he announced that the sky was blue, that would be enough of a reason for me to head to the nearest window to see what colour it had changed to...