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Miguel de Icaza on Longhorn
An anonymous reader writes "In Miguel de Icaza's latest blog entry the Mono project leader discusses the threat Longhorn's new technologies and frameworks pose to Linux and open source. He also directs users to this recent USENET post about the goals of Mozilla, which is a very interesting read.
Originally seen on OSnews." Mmmm...Miguel smart. Seriously, good commentary - and ripe for discussion/flame wars.
Hey - if someone wants to make a goal for Mozilla, here is a good one:
Create a "drop-in" replacement for Internet Explorer. That is, it has the same layout and "feel" of the IE browser without all that monopoly crap.
I'd use Mozilla if I could shift+click and get a new browser window. But every time that I install it, I end up removing it because of little annoyances that happen from my IE habits. I can't expect to make others use it (I deploy many PCs) if I don't do it myself.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
The "Microsoft Network" lost out to internet because W95 shipped too late. Let's do the same with Longhorn!
It is interesting that he acknowledges Mozilla's work. XUL has the potential to supply a platform that could nullify Longhown's advantage before it hits the streets.
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
Having something similar to the Microsoft platform would encourage developers to develop cross-platform. If a usable subset is developed on mono, the restriction to that subset is the price for a cross-platform application - better than a reimplementation.
Yes, as a possible solution to a problem he himself as created. As far as I cana make out he seems to be saying (between the lines) "I have been barking up the wrong tree"
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
What do you mean 'wasting time'?
His post is all about getting something working out of the door first. The point is defining what you need to do and how to go about doing it. Someone has to mull all of this over, privately and publicly, and Miguel's one of the ones doing this.
Good for him.
(Did I troll feed? Sorry)
I'm all for Mono, software should be cross platform, and and it would be nice to see this succeed where Java unfortunately didn't.
"but in some other cases they got fairly good adoption of their products with little or no effort: just bundle it with Windows: MSN messenger, Media Player."
This argument is old and irrelavent. Every OS ships with pre-installed versions of complimentary software. Microsoft does it, Apple does, and Linux does it. If the OS blocked the user from installing other software that would be one thing, but they don't and you can install whatever you want to.
The success or failure of Linux has nothing to do with
Yes developers like
It's not mainstream like Java. I think Mono is good for Linux as a technology but I think this discussing Longhorn as if its some big threat is silly. Longhorn will have nothing over Linux, it will almost obviously be less secure than Linux, it will almost for sure have more game and driver support. The last thing I'm sure of is it will cost more.
There's no reason for me or anyone else to buy Longhorn EVER. So even if somehow Longhorn is great software, no one really cares at this point because most of the PC sales are in markets where price is everything and where Microsoft has little to no influence. In fact most people who are buying new PCs will pirate Longhorn or whatever Microsoft has out.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
Microsoft's threat to the Linux community will not be raised by Longhorn. I doubt that Microsoft's newest OS will have anything drastically new that the Linux community does not already have, or that can easily be added.
Although I don't think the OSS community should be making descisions based solely on Microsoft's heading, I don't think ignoring them is the way to go either. I do think the fact that something like mono exists makes one less argument *not* to make the switch to linux. If you support .net the Linux platform can attract developers which would otherwise be coding for and on Windows only.
Just my 2ç
It's not a clone, it's an evironment that allows portable code. That is one of the points of .NET; with a written VM, the code can run on anything. Like Java, except Microsoft isn't writing the VM's for other platforms, it's down to the users, hence Miguel.
Question to Miguel ...
.. but why are we -following- Microsoft .. there are ways we can leap ahead of Longhorn.
.. ok fine it is .. but this has to do with how Linux desktops can beat Longhorn. Icons that are in 3D (change perspective when moved and reflect lighting etc. and also change shape, position, and size according to time or other factors (for example I use certain instant messenger at weekend nights mostly).
.. and nobody's asking for photorealism.
I definitely agree we need to pay attention to Microsoft and learn from the whatever innovative or good things they are bringing to market (regardless of whether they invented it)
For example, why is everyone trying to get 2D vector icons when it's obvious 3D or even 4D (fourth dimension is time) icons are the way to go? This may sound offtopic
Realtime 3D icon rendering may not be possible for most people's graphics cards today (guess they'll have to disable that feature)..but they will be soon
-Johan
Are you talking about the upper or the lower horn?
The owls are not what they seem
> There's no reason for me or anyone else to buy Longhorn EVER
Just as there was no reason to buy Windows XP. But still, many people did it. And new computers come with Windows XP, so there is no easy way to avoid it.
Especially when the first applications are written that only run on that version of Windows. (Either XP or Longhorn.)
I thought Sun Solaris was the standard for servers? I thought Apple the standard for schools? Face it, there is no standard. The standard software is the software which comes first. Microsoft steals standards but never sets them. The browser was not invented by Microsoft, Netscape was around long before IE. Just like Google owns the search engine and AOL owns instant msging, Microsoft is not standard. We should take the good features of OSX, BEOS, Unix and Windows and make the best OS. Forget about copying Microsoft as if Microsoft innovates. Copy Apple, at least Apple actually does invent new technologies instead of just new buzzwords.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
Certainly he has boundless energy, but many people were allready pointing out that it could be the case to concentrate on getting P&P functionality with what was allready available (and hence beating MS to the market), rather than play MS at a game of catch up that you could never win (they make the rules).
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
That was quite an interesting read. While I don't totally agree with every point, the gist of the blog is right on target. I think one of the keys to Linux fighting off such threats is to get better cohesion between GNU projects, outside the Linux distro. This weekend I went to install some GNU software on my WinXP Pro laptop. I get to the download page, and ooops! I also need to install 3 other GNU projects just to get the software I want to work. Then I get to one of the other projects, and ooops! I have to install another program to get it to work. To install one app, I had to install 4 others, which meant a lot of navigation and downloading. No sweat. I am a coder; I can do this. But it did take extra time. I started wondering why these were not all packaged together, or why the installer could not simply detect they were not there and install the needed apps. This is one advantage MS has over many GNU projects and the Linux community. They are one company, and can enforce product compliance, etc. The point I am leading to is this: if the GNU community wants to beat MS in the long run they need to make sure more of their apps can easily install on MS boxes without having any knowledge of programming, IT, etc. Once you get people using this software, the switch to using this software on Linux will be much easier. Open Office is a great example of this. I know most GNU projects compile on Windows (or will with some modifications) but it has to be easier for the Windows user to get said applications.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
If Miguel thinks that Longhorn is such a threat because it will incorporate the .NET framework, will he come out an admit the truth: that spending all that time and effort on Mono was a mistake and a waste? Trying to reinvent .NET for Unix/Linux never made any sense to me, since the components in .NET that people really want aren't available on anything but Windows. Perhaps this is a shift in his POV as a result of Ximian now being part of Novell, and they are now aiming their sights at trying to dent MS's lock on desktop and market share in the server arena. But no, he sees Mono as part of the potential answer to Schlonghorn-- don't you get it Miguel? .NET was an "embrace, extend, extinguish the competition" move to do Java one better. What makes you think that sticking with Mono will work when MS might well modify the .NET framework by the time Longhorn comes out so as to make it unusable by anything but Windows? Better to start making your own framework now instead of waiting around to see what MS will do.
Always look on the briight side of life! (whistle, whistle)
Mono will fail along with .Net, the technology is good but depending on Microsoft is bad.
.Net or it dies.
.Net .Net is a good technology, that is all it is. XUL is good too, so is QT.
Unless Mono seperates itself from Microsoft completely as a stand alone replacement technology, I don't see a use for it to even exist. Mono must be better than Microsofts
Also I wouldnt give up on Java just yet, with the embedded market picking up steam Java has a bright future, brighter than
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
From Miguel's blog The sandboxed execution in .NET [1] means that you can visit any web site and run local rich applications as oppposed to web applications without fearing about your data security: spyware, trojans and what have you.
That's true...if Microsoft can get it right. But as in any complex software system, there will be bugs, and considering the scope of Microsoft's deployment base, it could be disastrous. I do not think Microsoft makes worse code than anybody else, it's simply that updating their massive install base is very difficult once bugs are found. Also, the majority of Windows desktop users make poor systems administrators, there will always be bugs and crackers that exploit them. Sad, but true.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
I'm all for Mono, software should be cross platform, and and it would be nice to see this succeed where Java unfortunately didn't.
.Net/Mono, C et al will be for the overseeable future. (Dont give me the "C is portable too" crap, just today I found differences in the behaviour of strtok between platforms, not to speak of "compile everywhere").
.Net", hopefully they will interoperate more or less seamlessly, something that there is already work in progress on in more than one place.
Its always interesting to see people dismiss java as a failure out of hand with no real arguments for it. Did it fail? Depends on your point of view. Is java cross-platform? Most certainly is! And will continue to be so to a bigger extent than
Is java a failure on the client? Well, as far as circulation goes, probably, but that has three main reasons:
1. Higher learning curve, VB will always be easier to learn.
2. Old myths die hard: yes, Java was slow and java interfaces where ugly and clunky. 5 years ago! Newsflash, Java has moved forward in great leaps since the days of Java 1.1
3. Applets are mostly useless. But: Java != Applets!
Java is a great success just about everywhere else BUT on the desktop computer though, there are millions of java-enabled handsets, there are tens of thousands of java server deployments etc etc.
But.. Hopefully in the future I wont have to choose "java or
Seperating Mono from Microsoft would be missing the point. It's supposed to run Microsoft code. .NET is supposed to be a portable architecture, providing that a VM exists for your setup. And's that what Mono is doing. Making it 'better' would be pointless and irrelevant.
I find .net the fastest platform to develop for.
The documentation in Visual Studio 2003 is far better suns java docs.
VS2003 also helps the programmer along, speeding development.
-- Agent
XUL does not have the potential to do this for one simple reason. Almost nobody runs Mozilla. Yeah, I know we all do, but in the real world, on the desktops of people doing their internet banking, their web based email and so on, nobody uses Mozilla, so people cannot ship a web based app using Mozilla tech (XUL). It would have to run on IE to have even a chance in hell of nullifying Avalon, and XUL simply does not, and will never, work on IE.
My only aim with the Java bash was that while WebStart is a great technology, how many people are implementing applications like this? One app, multiple end user platforms. I have no beef with the language, so I don't want to start a flame war :)
You're deceiving yourself if you think XUL can do it. Microsoft's new technologies WILL be out there, and they WILL succeed. If you accept that, you can be smarter about things. Let's get interoperable so we can compete - THEN we can extend into a new arena.
Miguel "gets it." The future of the web is seamless, safe perfectly integrated rapid application delivery. Imagine delivering an app via website that used native widgets and looked and felt like part of your OS, all while safely sandboxed. It's gonna happen come the Longhorn./NET heydey.
Many fanboys bitch and moan that Miguel laps up the Microsoft swill and ensures their success, but I'd argue it's the converse: Miguel knows we need to reach interoperability to have a meaningful competition in the first place. The better technology doesn't always win. Sometimes you gotta play the game via the home team's rules before the league lets you vote to change them.
From what I've seen, most linux users are always comparing linux to windows 95 and 98...most of them having bailed out of using windows around then...and they basically are fighting against the ghost of windows past. Whereas I don't see many of these people ever saying "yes, I use winddows xp / server2003 almost constantly in an attempt to understand what I'm up against here."
slashdot, news for crazed liberal socialist zealots
People arent buying typical PCs anymore from Typical OEMs like they were back then. Microsoft had a complete lock on OEMs, the American market is sold up in terms of the Desktop computer.
New devices which run Linux now actually arent so typical in nature, devices like PDAs, Cellphones, Tivos, Video Game Consoles, Small FormFactor PCs like Shuttle and Biodeq, all come with Linux not WindowsXP.
Sun's Linux Desktop is actually catching up to Microsoft in certain countries and even surpassing them. Microsoft is King only in one specific area, the USA PC gaming desktop PC.
For laptops people don't care if it runs Windows,Linux or OSX, For media centers people don't care as long as it works well with their Tivo. For their PDA they just want it to work.
The era of Microsoft is coming to an end, Microsoft knows this, most people on the inside know this. Microsoft simply cannot sell another version of Office and another version of Windows. Most people who use Microsoft office have no reason to buy a new PC. Most people who buy new PC products who arent gamers are doing so to do new things which Longhorn currently is behind Linux at doing, like running servers, or hosting a media center, more sophisticated uses which are appearing now that people have more than one computer in the house.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
Miquel's vision a few years ago was that GNOME,
Gtk and Bonobo, etc will take over Microsoft.
Now his vision is that Mono should be used for that
goal.
He wasn't right the first time.
Whe should anybody trust his vision this time?
This "analysis" is poor:
Where is "Java" in that list? Java's only big problem, at this point, is the mindset that "something is wrong with it". It's really quite good, and there is a growing ecosystem of open source stuff (see SWT and friends) growing around it.
Every major computer company besides Microsoft supports it, and a Sun JVM now ships with many (most?) new Windows PCs. Even if not, a broadband JRE download is only a couple of minutes...and ~40% of U.S. households are on broadband if I remember a recent article correctly.
There is also plenty of effort going into Free/OSS JVM development, including gcj and IKVM on Mono.
Java tends to break the MS monopoly...Mono/.Nyet tends to lock it in. Which do we really want?
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Around 10% or so run Netscape/Mozilla, still a small amount. This amount could easily rise if AOL wanted it to, but until AOL decides to do so, Mozilla won't gain much support at least not in the USA.
In other countries however this is a different story.
If AOL were to market Netscape like they do Winamp and AIM, everyone would be using it instead of IE. We use AIM and ICQ over MSN already even though MSN comes with the damn OS.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
That USENET post goes on and on about XML formats and such and I'm not saying that's irrelevant, but XML is really more of a concern for people in specialized projects. I thought that was the whole point of XML. The browser just has to follow the standards.
I think in the browser game it's the little things like pop-up blockers and being able to manage your configs across multiple desktops are what make Firefox kick ass all over IE.
These are the things that closed source has no reason to compete on. It doesn't make anybody money to prevent ads. There's no way MS is going to compete on that front, and yet it's a huge factor for most end users.
Let's just hope that never happens... Is there anything around at the moment that ONLY runs on XP?
I help blind users with access to computers, and the evil JAWS screen reader package ($1800!) comes with limitations; you can only install it on win95, 98, ME (why?), and XP home only. No win2000 of any flavour, and no XP pro. The reasons for its restrictions are not technical though; they are built in to ensure that corporate users are charged more than personal ones...
I've started teaching one of my clients some linux skills as X can now talk... the Linux revolution is here for the blind community, as it is for the rest of us!
Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
-- Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
Yes, and the Longhorn-related APIs will widely used, and more difficult to replicate, like SWF currently is.
Freenet runs fine, and Limeware is java too if I remember right, along with lots of other p2p apps
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
Also to assume Microsoft will win, is to have sold out. If you think Microsoft is going to win at everything they do, why don't you go work for them and help them.
That's the difference between being a realist and an idealist. It would be ideal if Microsoft wasn't a guarantee, but it is for now. Accept it and maybe we can do something about it.
Developing (say, mono ) to prevent platform lock-in is a hell of a lot better than trolling Slashdot and whining about how everyone else's actions are wrong.
If we are going to develop Microsofts shit to run their shit, why the hell use our shit (Linux)
I mean really, why use Linux if all we are going to do is be the poor mans Windows. Yeah our messed up versions of all the nice
Migel should just get a job for Microsoft and stop developing open source software. He has obviously sold out and theres no more excuses we can make for this guy.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
It's a big world out there if you look out the windows - there's more to computers than the receptionists PC or using a desktop PC to replace a Playstation.
The unix way is to have configuration files in known locations with sane names (generally not one of the names of the three stooges followed by a string of numbers), and to use pipes or ports. Miguel with gnome followed the windows method of weird OLE stuff, heaps of temporary files and multiple configuration files that may as well be registry entries (gnome panel is the worst offender, including the file names mentioned above). In the end once the political stuff and odd dependancies dropped out we were left with a usable set of programs that look good - whether it is because of the design or in spite of it I'll leave to someone who knows more about the aspects of gnome that just confuse me.
Insightful, yet content-free? Very Zen.
Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
-- Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
Maybe I'm on a fruitbreak or something, but why not pick up GNUstep and enhance that? That way you get some semblance of source compatibility with Mac OSX Cocoa apps. Why follow Microsoft's example? It has always ended in tears in the past.
Stick Men
I really don't know what it's going to take for GNU/Linux to move out of geekdom and on to the average desktop. What I do know is that Longhorn looks like a mighty nice piece of technology that may be a winner with anyone that can afford the machinery.
I think GNU/Linux is the best thing since sliced silicon. But the other day I was reading a magazine review of a beta (or alpha or something) of Longhorn. I was deep in thought, wondering how the OSS hackers would cope with WinFS, .NET functionality and so on. I was also cynically musing about the same old security holes that'll presumably crop up, and resting assured that my choice os OS is the correct one.
A mate rings up, having read the same review. "Hey Cammo," he shouted down the phone. "The windows flap when you move 'em!!!"
Where do I order the beta?
Cogito, ergo sig.
I don't know nor care much about whether or not going to support Avalon and XAML is a good idea if your goal is nuke Microsoft and Redmond.
However
My goal for Mono, being an active supporter and a small contributor, is not to try and kill Microsoft. My goal is not like most slashdot zealots to wipe and replace Microsoft. My goal is to provide Linux with a platform for developers that they can and will enjoy.
The point is not to compete with the Java world nor to compete with the Microsoft world. The point of Mono is to create both a self hosting platform and a platform that will be somehow compatible with Microsoft.
The point of Mono is not the be 100% compatible! It has never tried to be 100% compatible. The main point of Mono is to create a self hosting platform.
People often argue that it would be better to implement our own kickass framework. Well, Mono is just that. Agreed they are filling in the specifications which Microsoft made. But Mono is doing much more than that. And the specification is not that bad at all. Why throw a way a nice specification just because you hate the creator of it? That doesn't make any sense. And I don't hate Microsoft, nor do most Mono developers (oh by the way, Miguel is not the only developer).
Hating Microsoft is foolish and stupid. You don't have to love them (hell I don't) and you don't have to agree with their marketing point NOR technical point of view (mostly for the marketing part I for sure don't), but that doesn't mean that you also have to ignore them completely. I even dare to say that you are a fool and an idiot if you do so.
I would very much support introducing support for Avalon/XAML in Mono if Avalon/XAML is a nice technology. And yes, it looks nice to me. So if it's possible to implement that technology (using Mono or using whatever) then I think that we as an OpenSource community should do that. We should, indeed, (re)implement it, at some point in time.
Not because we can then compete with Microsoft, thats not the point, but because we want to provide developers (and in the end, users of our softwares) with the best technology, the best platform and most choices.
Our users will have the benefit of not having to get locked in that Microsoft monopoly because WE recreated a part of that Microsoft-world.
Lets not forget that we are doing this because of the love of the art of programming, not because we HATE Microsoft. Thats what those stupid newbie Linux usies think why we do it. We love the art of programming. We love to show our art and the best way to do this is by making it public. And we, OpenSource developers, think that the best way to make things public is by licensing it using for example GPL, MIT or whatever OpenSource license.
Just like a lot musicians release their compositions for free, so that students can learn using their materials. I often compare such (classical) music with software code. The author thinks that it's art, the listener mainly enjoys it. But for a lot people it's art, okay?
For software developers, our code is our art. Our users don't give a shit about that code. They want to use our code. We want to distribute our art and show our skills. THATS the main reason why OpenSource exists. NOT because we HATE Microsoft.
Regretfully most people think we are doing this because we hate Microsoft. We don't. (And I speak for a lot OpenSource developers, I am confident about that).
There was a good reason to buy Windows XP - it is great. It's by far the best version of Windows since 95, and for people that were stuck with 98, or God forbid ME, there was a clear reason to upgrade.
Free iPods - now in the UK!
Microsoft is on top of that.
LUA is supposed to take care of that. And yes, it is a bit like Unix permissioning, but it does do some cool stuff, like provide each app its own copy of local files and even mock registry hives.
Mono means they can stay in their comfort zone, but still produce software that will work for people moving to Linux. You're not likely to change the minds of all those Windows programmers who are just doing a job because they are being paid to do it, but you can at least open a path of least resistance towards portability. Go Mono!
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Off topic, but ... Are there any examples of actual projects using mono that I could try out right now? (On Linux.)
.. Anything?
Web apps, desktop apps, utilities
I am slightly tired to this Longhorn debate.
Why try to re-invent everything that Longhorn already have?
If Longhorn is so good, then use it instead of wasting time re-inventing the technologies. And if a detail don't fit, then fix it on Longhorn.
I do. I use Windows XP hours on end at work. But I use GNOME on Debian at home. And I prefer GNOME over XP. Even though I'm on a 750MHz Duron.
And, in my opinion, it doesn't matter that I'm a power user in both OS's. I work as a student tutor at the local community college, and I see people completely new to computers coming into the lab every semester.
They don't find Windows intuitive. They don't find Office intuitive ("Where is cell B5?"). They don't find MS Paint intuitive.
The easiest thing for them to use is the Internet. And that's actually easier to use under Linux than Windows, since IE is absent under Linux. People get all these windows popping up over their screen, and they have a hard time doing anything about it.
There's a lot of people around who still don't know how to use a computer well. They go to community colleges to learn. Community colleges exist to serve the needs of bussinesses, and they have a tendency to swallow market speak. So market, damnit!
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Yeah, I upgraded to XP precicely to get away from the Windcrap 95/98/ME line of OS's (which IMO are the worst x86 PC OS's ever written as far as general bugginess goes)
I see two possible options:
* Implement Avalon/XAML and ship it with Linux (with Mono).
* Come up with our own, competitive stack.
wxwidgets and python with a sandboxed execution stack using the already existing xmlrpclib.
Got Code?
At work (only place I use windows enough to want gnu software on it), I just use the cygwin setup utility. Lots of GNU software, painless install. The interface could be better, but it works well. Sorry, don't have time to dig for links.
.NET will succeed because it is better.
It looks better than java, its faster than java, is is easier to deploy than java, they really thought about the security issues (as opposed to java's sandbox which stops you doing anything).
It's so much better than CORBA its not worth comparing.
Ironicaly however, I believe
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
Miguel makes good points but is wrong to attribute MS's dominant position to Linux apps being 'late to market', for example.
At the time of Windows 95, nobody could seriously say that MAC OS was not far better - stable, superior UI etc. So, even when MS had an obviously inferior product, they still won. And now, from XP onwards, they don't have have such a bad product, so what hope is there ?
They won because of their ruthless, illegal business practices. It's time to stop with the argument "we'll win because we're better".
"If we choose to go in our own direction, there are certain strengths in open source that we should employ to get to market quickly: requirements, design guidelines, key people who could contribute, compatibility requirements and deployment platforms."
Pity that he's obviously not been watching how most programmers actually do programming. Hint: most of them wouldn't know how to create a real requirements document if their lives depending on it. And read the requirements, and then develop real test cases that verify both functionality and coverage? Don't make me laugh.
Once upon a time there used to be two groups of people creating software: the analysts/engineers and the programmers/coders. The first group did the analysis, requirements, modeling and design; the second group converted it into code and punched it in. There was a reason for that, and those people produced some serious applications. Some of those apps are still in use today.
But, sadly, with the advent of the IDE it's now possible for anyone to be a bonafide Code Monkey, and just starting PAK'ing (programming at the keyboard) like crazy.
We're doomed, people. Submit to Bill now and just get it over with and save your passion for something more productive. Like sex.
I think Avalanche or Avalaunch would be nice names. And btw a new Lindows/Windows lawsuit debate keeps /. readers focused on the necessities.
/. to /.. take the discussions to higher levels?
Curiosity: Would renaming
Java failed because Sun assumed it was good to use on the web and it simply wasnt.
.NET (and Java too) come up with good, interoperable, solid ways to make this happen, web apps will be springing up in areas that you have never imagined.
No, Java "failed" [as a web app framework] because Sun never could put together an applets platform that was fast and produced professional-looking apps.
If you really believe there has never been any demand for fully functional applications running in a browser, your vision of the demand for apps has been far too narrow over the last 10 years. There was absolutely high demand for this type of application in 1995, and even more so now. Some isolated examples are coming closer and closer to this vision already, just making use of DHTML and proprietary browser enhancements. Good examples are the newer versions of Exchange Web Access and Hotmail, which are both coming closer to fully functional web apps with every new release. Once
More importantly, there is high demand for easily deployable applications in many business environments, and it's obvious that the easiest deployment is no deployment - something which is only accomplished via a universal tool that everyone already has - i.e. The Browser. Just because you personally don't see the need for a web app, does not mean that many thousands of companies with billions of dollars to spend don't have business needs for them.
Way I see it.
The advantages to Open Source technology are.
A: Security (you know Microsoft code will be riddled with holes here).
B: Realiability
C: Peer review, I, John Q random engineer can verify it.
D: Speed, basically Windows is bloated and slow.
E: Continuity, a user of the original Unix would be able to navigate and use Linux desktop in hours, you cannot say the same thing about Microsoft software.
This leads me to the point that, great software is long lived and thus ubiquitous becuase of that.
I am firmly of the opinion that some sort of Axis, like IBM, Walmart, Red Hat, Novell and friends will take a big chunk out of Microsoft's market share.
Now is the time to do that. Longhorn is behind schedule and having core functionailty like WINFS removed apace to get it up to release date.
It is ludicrous in the extreme to think that Windows boxes obselete processors that were bleeding edge in under two years, but, it happens.
Eventually people will get tired of continuously shelling out for the same regurgiatated Windows 95 core functionality.
People want word processors, they want eye candy, they want all that stuff Microsoft does well. They don't want, security holes, having to shell out once every two years for software that's slower and doesn't really do anything different to the old software.
I think funnily even though Microsoft's principal Business opposition is US based, that Americans will be some of the last to recognise how mistreated they are under Microsoft.
It will be the likes of the Chinese, Japanese, Germans and developing nations, which will, break away from Windows with force, it's already happening and I don't think M$ understands this.
Thank god.
The market for Linux on the desktop is cost, cost, cost, because money talks.
Provide 'analagous' and seamless cloned functionality for less and Microsoft has *no* market.
People were sleeping at the wheel. In 1993-1994, Linux had the promise of becoming the best desktop system.
Miguel is fabricating some silly, alarmist, revisionist history with statements like these.
Linux was a lot of things in 1994, but one thing that is was not was a viable desktop. It was so lacking in the mindshare, number of developers, driver support and basic desktop technologies in 1994 as compared to today, that statements like this just make Miguel look like a silly idealogue.
I'm a developer and I don't like .Net. Gimme Java for JSP and Servlets, and Perl.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
This is the age old Microsoft mantra. Long before they've so much as written a line of usable code, before they've even tested the concept, they cry to world that their current vaporware will be the greatest thing to revolutionize the computing industry -- EVER!. There was NT, "The UNIX Killer" before whom the nations trembled, DCOM --- the ultimate framework that would redefine client/server computing, which more than anything made it possible to crash Windows remotely on other peoples machines. There was ActiveX --- Ooohhh --- another name for COM/DCOM/OLE/ATL which would change the web and make alive. Like DCOM, it was little more than a fancy DLL tied to the Windows registry. Lets not forget Windows DNA --- what disruptive technology was that? Then came "Next Generation Windows Services", which like DCOM was been morphed/recast by the marketing department into something more catchy. Yes, dear reader --- it truly is the lastest greatest world changing, paradigm shifting, not-to-be matched-or-conquered --- (trumpets blast) --- .NET. No really, we're serious this time, it's really going to change the world. This is going to be really good --- just wait.
So what's the reality. It's been three years since Almighty Bill declared to the world that Microsoft would make its software secure. Still waiting? Remember how the XBox was going to be the greatest gaming machine ever made --- a year before it was to be release? Well, I see playstation still has 60% of the market. I also hear that XBoxes have been know to catch the carpet on fire.
Maybe I'm too old. At the ripe old age of 33, I've smelled enough MS BS for a lifetime. The only thing I do now with this kind of news is use it to compost my wife's azaleas. I've yet to witness The Unix Killer, trustworthy computing, DCOM in my life, and somehow I doubt Longhorn will change this. I am quite happy with that "Cancer" called Linux and GPL software, that just three years ago was never going to take off. Yep, I'm shaking in my boots.
This is only half true. As the 'computer person' in the family I get all of the 'my computer...' calls. Most of these calls are related to virus activity and or crappy performance. The most common being performance issues. 9 times out of 10 this is related to LOTS of spyware. Every machine I sit at after removing all of the spyware and setting up adaware to run every so often I remove all links to internet explorer from the users desktop and start menu and replace them with Mozilla. I name the link 'Internet Explorer' and replace the icon on some machines because people do not know what to do in any other case. Once this is done I always get comments like 'The Internet is so much faster now!' and once I tell them about the new 'feature' of tabbed browsing it is a done deal. 100% of these users are STILL using Mozilla. As I am sure all of the readers here know its all about what is PRESENTED to the user. As long as MS continues to bundle IE it will be the dominate browser. If we do not want that to be the case then start removing it from user land and putting mozilla in its place.
of course failed to find an agent
Why "of course"? Some kind of conspiracy theory?
So maybe the Mozilla team should consider creating a XUL plug-in for IE then. Is that feasible, or are there technical quirks preventing that from happening?
How the hell can you discuss vector interfaces and rich clients without mentioning Flash? Macromedia have been providing a safe platform in which to embed your rich client-side applications for years.
The answer to all of this is simple: An operating system programmed in Perl, with all applications programmed in Perl. Think of the expansion of the CPAN with something like that!
Every application would be easily ported to other OSes fairly easily. And Larry Wall could rule the universe. I couldn't think of a better way to go, although I'm sure a Python user will be along shortly with one.
-Augie
.NET has now surpassed J2EE on new projects here in Scandinavia. IOW. .NET is now *more* main stream than Java.
M.
wasn't there talk recently of Sun opening up java? was that just people want them to, or was it that they were thinking about it.
.NET. Java's already there, if it were to be opened up, it wouldn't mean a brand new implementation.
If Sun opened up Java, that would mean the OSS community could "embrace and extend" Java and make it better than
I beg to differ. Windows 2000 was the first, and last, good version of Windows.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
To even clone all these technologies we'de need to tightly integrate all kinds of packages, something i dont see happening soon.
- Implement Avalon/XAML and ship it with Linux (with Mono).
- Come up with our own, competitive stack.
There is, of course, a third option. Move all your development time and efforts to supporting and using Java on Linux. Java is the technology Microsoft is trying to emulate and squash withCan you recommend a couple of sites to learn about Linux text-to-speech and/or voice recognition, especially X integration?
Given that this whole thing is all about running in a sandbox, it is entirely feasible. The only down side is that in order to get the same kind of container nature you're going to have to run a separate instance of mozilla for each XUL application you load. I don't know how much of Mozilla that will require but I assume it will be substantial. (IANAMozillaDeveloper.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I dont understand the benefit of following someone with as bad track record as MS in security? I seriously doubt that mono is going to bring us nothing but troubles if its a success. Part of me feals like Miquel is walking us into a trap because i for sure wouldnt put past MS to enforce any patent in mono if its a vital part of the linux desktop.
Why not do something new alltogheter thats better than mono? Surely MS isnt the amarter boys in town.
I will stay away from anything with a hint of mono in it of principle no matter what, just like i stay away from BSD of political reasons.
I assume many will do like me and that must be a bummer to the mono project, no matter how good it is noone will use it.
HTTP/1.1 400
You can already "embed" XUL in IE of course, by having the user download the Gecko ActiveX control and effectively embed a renderer within a renderer, but that's a cheap hack and has severe performance implications.
To be frank, I'm 100% not convinced that Avalon is going to be as world changing as Miggy predicts. I think it's especially rash to be starting internal projects even if they are "thought only" to develop a competitor.
Miguel thinks Avalon will be great, because it will let you deploy applications via the web browser that use native widgets, and be nicely integrated with .NET and so on.
But ... but ... but ... Microsoft did this years ago (minus .net). Or am I really the only one who remembers the version of Outlook implemented entirely using DHTML/HTA (which produces native widgets). I can't remember the codename, but the project was scrapped. The benefits of running Outlook inside IE just were not compelling enough to overcome the performance and other problems.
I'm not denying it'd be useful. The long term UI goals for my own packaging/installer project are that the user should be able to launch (and implicitly install) software simply by clicking on an icon embedded in a web page. As far as the user is concerned then the effects would be the same, so the real differences lie in how the developer sees things.
In the Avalon world view, the developer creates widgets on a canvas (AFAIK), ties them together with .NET code, and then .NET CAS allows you to launch it from a web browser without fear of it doing nasty things to your machine (which is a massive oversimplification, but oh well).
In fact, we can do this sort of thing today, with technologies that are either here or just around the corner. SELinux allows you to effectively sandbox native code to a fine degree, similar to .NET CAS except enforced at the kernel level and not by a VM. It's not just a set of kernel security checks - it's actually a security architecture with an exposed set of APIs which allow people to use MAC security features to a high level.
I don't know enough about .NET security to know how it compares, but SELinux policy is easily distributable in the form of text files and allows you use native code, which runs directly on the CPU without the overhead of a VM and huge set of managed APIs.
So, if you can download some native code and correctly sandbox it, you have the start of web app deployment. XAML appears to bear a superficial representation to Glade (note: NOT xul) but using a more customised and therefore human friendly schema.
I say Glade and not XUL because a Glade file is, in actuality, not an UI description at all. It's really a persisted GObject tree that libglade uses along with the GObject reflection APIs to reconstruct the GUI at runtime. I have read that XAML despite appearances is similar: it is a persisted .NET object graph.
So, I think if Miguel starts from "what user experiences does this technology allow" and work backwards, he'll find we already have the basics in production. Sure, they need to be improved and tied together, but they are there nonetheless.
Finally I think it's wrong to say that the reason desktop Linux didn't happen in 1994 was because people were "sleeping at the wheel". The fact of the matter was in 1994 Microsoft already had several thousand people working on Windows full time, whereas desktop Linux had .... none.
Really, I think a simpler explanation is just that MS had a monopoly pumping cash into their development teams, and Linux did not. Its falling behind was therefore completely inevitable until it gained enough momentum to move as fast as Microsoft do.
.....what political reasons are there that you don't use BSD?
In 1993 we did have big hopes and eyes.
I think you are confusing the promise that miggie and many others saw with the implementation we all struggled with.
From this hope came gtk,gnome,gimp,qt,kde,...
How much of a compelling reason does it take to motivate someone to download and install Moz? 40% of Net connections are broadband now. Two years from now it will be something like 60-70%. Many of us can remember when "Almost nobody runs Word." People had to pay for Word, but it gained dominance in less than a year over well-entrenched WordPerfect. Mozilla will do the same thing if there are a few major - or many minor - sites that require it for cool new stuff. People will download Moz just out of curiousity about those sites. Once they use it many won't go back.
... adjust the gain on your imagination.
And if businesses can develop rich apps for their employees that leverage it, and it's free, and it runs on a free OS just as well as on Windows
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Windows 2000 and XP are so close to one another as for there to be no substantial difference. If you don't want to use the "additional features" of Windows XP they can be turned off. Meanwhile, like each windows release before it, several small but significant enhancements have been made to usability. For instance in Windows 98 it was the ability to double-click the radio buttons in the shutdown dialog. Windows XP got the new start menu design and a lot more start menu configurability, plus some more task bar configurability. There ARE minor reasons why XP is superior to 2000 for desktop use. As for the server, XP is not intended for it, so this is a non-issue. Microsoft still sells 2k, obviously.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Just as there was no reason to buy Windows XP
This is largely true, if you were on Win2K. In fact because of the rediculous registration process I was considering going back to Win2K (and I have a legal copy of XP, but I am offended that I have to explain/excuse my way through a phone call everytime I change harddrives).
There's one pathetic reason for not doing it though: ClearType...
Fortunately I full expect Linux to overtake Microsoft before Longhorn.
Here's a question. How do we copy Microsoft and get our "working something" out the door first? Do we go back in time?
Here's another question which nobody on the "We must clone Microsoft's products at all costs" lobby has ever satisfactorily answered: how are we contributing anything to the world if our product is just a (poor, it has to be poor, because Microsoft's technologies are not lumbered with having to run on a platform that was never designed to run them) clone of something that already exists? Do we improve music by producing "free" versions of Brittney Spears and the Spice Girls? Do we contribute something new and wonderful by making a movie with the exact same plot as Terminator 3, but with even poorer acting? Do we ensure that everyone has something that caters for them by spending a lot of effort cloning the writing style of Jeffrey Archer and writing predictable thrillers, then redistributing them for free?
As long as Microsoft defines the product, Microsoft will be ahead. Icaza ignores this because Icaza likes Microsoft's technologies, they suit him, he lacks the imagination, will, and talent to produce anything better than what Microsoft produces, so he's content to spend the rest of his life in perpetual catch-up, pretending that he will in some way be able to produce something better than his mentor and rival without ever knowing ahead of time what it is that mentor and rival will be producing and so being unable to produce his clone before Microsoft's original.
The truth to the statement "The central point was that paying too much attention to Microsoft simply allows Microsoft to define the game. And when Microsoft gets to define the game, they ALWAYS win." is self-evident. You cannot both follow and lead.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
MS will win because it looks for problems it can solve for customers with its technology. MS employees are not looking at Linux and going oh look at that feature we need to counter it. Or no problem we already have done that.
Instead they look at the market and say, how can we solve someone's problem. A great example is thin media clients. Linux could have dominated this market. Linux is a robust OS that just runs. It has a low to no cost for deploying to millions of homes. The HD1000 from ROKU (http://www.rokulabs.com) is a great example of what is possible for Linux in this $100+ billion industry.
However, Linux is squandering away the opportunity. MS came in to the marketplace and said to the hardware manufacturers here is a complete solution just install. To a company that cares more about selling hardware than software the choice is clear. Pay MS and design the hardware to run MS technology (especially when you have multiple hardware vendors saying here is the base platform already designed for you). The consumer electronic companies make money by selling hardware not software. Anyone who says to them here is a complete and working system just build the hardware will get there attention.
That is why MS wins. They solve problems; they don't just invent technology for technologies sake.
Rabi Satter
Dashboard, which not too long ago got a reference on sweetcode.
> MS will start to churn out all it's products as .NET apps, meaning they *will* run unchanged on Linux. Mono is the new Wine :-)
.NET apps that will run on Linux are the ones that Microsoft will want to run on Linux. i.e. Hey look! IIS.NET beats Apache on Linux! Everyone move over to our new product, and you don't even have to change your server OS! Of course, if you do change it'll be even better... yadda yadda
Running unchanged on Linux? Yeah, sure... as long as the Mono implementation is a fully complete implementation of the Microsoft libraries... including the magic undocumented ones that Microsoft doesn't tell you about. Oh, and don't forget... don't trample any patents on the way in.
The only
/ not trolling, but being really negative.
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. --Ford Prefect
What about the deployment issues. Why would a bank use XUL for an application (forcing all thier users to download mozilla), when they can let them run native Longhorn appps from thier browser without any installation? XUL may compete fine with XMAL, but neither is especially helpful for solving the real problem.
Hey! Speak for yourself, i still use WinME without any regrets. I much rather WinME over WinXP. And no one is going to get me to change NO ONE..... :) But I am dual booting with FC1 and RH9 is on my server.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
The main reason Java failed on the desktop was that there didn't used to be a Java Web Start program. But now we have one and it works great.
Also, it used to be difficult to install the Java VM, and the Microsoft version that came with Windows was a buggy piece of crap. However, that's been solved too. Visit www.java.com in IE and click download. It's as easy as installing FlashPlayer.
Other issues: AWT was too sluggish. Well, the new Swing UI is pretty slick. There was no good Java IDE. Now, Eclipse kicks ass and is the best IDE evar IMHO.
And as for Applets being mostly useless, that's not true. If you sign your code you can do anything with an Applet that you can do with a Web Start application.
We have great success with Java on the desktop. The only snag is that we have to tell our customers to download the Java VM, but once they've done it, everything's good.
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. --Ford Prefect
How does X talking work with all the applications with their own text drawing routines? Since antialiased text is not supported by X itself (stupid!) people are drawing a lot of text to the screen as graphics, and the X server itself has no idea what that text might have been...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"There was absolutely high demand for this type of application in 1995, and even more so now."
Most individuals and businesses were just learning about what the Internet was in 1995, there was no significant demand for browser apps in those days.
There are plenty of others. For Speech synthesis, you are probably looking at Festival. For Voice recognition, you are probably best off looking at IBM Viavoice for linux. GNOME has gone a very long way with the Accessibility toolkit and will continue to push down the accessibility path - for example, take a look at Dasher for an interesting app to aid writing for impaired users. There is a lot more on GNOME Accessibility to read.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Web apps will be what ultimately kills .Net
.NET.
Web apps are only a tiny, relatively insignficant part of
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
Stop trying to follow whatever Microsoft are doing and concentrate on what you are doing well. Companys that let Microsoft lead them will forever have to follow "standards" that get churned/dumped on Microsoft's own terms... and with Microsoft's internal developers having access to far better support there will always be the prospect of hidden api calls etc. for them to take advantage of.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
XUL is rendered with Gecko. There's your "quirk". In order to embed XUL you have to embed Mozilla, by which point you might as well just be running Mozilla.
- Chris
First of all, you have to decide who you're talking about. There are server based code(ie. web development, aka think client) and client side code (ie. fat client). I develop server based code. We use Java. We use Java because our customers use so many different platforms. We've deployed on solaris, mvs, linux, windows, and many more. There is not even a remote possibility that we will be switching .NET for these types of applications in the near future. The only people who would switch their server code to .NET would be people who are currently in the VB.NET/ASP.NET world already.
.NET? Your photo editing software? I don't know, I can only speculate. A direct comparison between OSS and commercial/microsoft versions of a product reveal that in most cases the OSS version is more secure and has better features. So why, oh why, do people not use the OSS version? Simple, marketing!
The client side (desktop) is the area where all Miguels comments seem to be directed. Will your word processor of choice be written in
You see, software developers work on projects. And projects ARE NOT PRODUCTS! You can have a successful project, which may not be a successful product. And as microsoft shows, you can have an unsuccessful project, which is a successful product. Projects become successful products because of good marketing. OSS has little or no marketing, and this is the fatal flaw. If only apple could help market some OSS projects we could see just how successful they could become. Think about it, if you saw an ad for the "Sexy, New, Feature Rich, Gimp project"(note that a name change would be mandatory for this project to be marketed, project vs product). Now put this ad in Cosmopolitan magazine (this is where you see ipod ads...). Put it everywhere. Make it sexy, make consumers, that's who we're really talking about here, want it.
Many of the developers on these projects are not going to like this. Nobody wants to "sell out" their project. But if you're after the client side market(aka desktop), then you're targeting consumers, not developers.
mp3's are only for those with bad memories
The truth to the statement "The central point was that paying too much attention to Microsoft simply allows Microsoft to define the game. And when Microsoft gets to define the game, they ALWAYS win." is self-evident. You cannot both follow and lead.
That is specious reasoning; Microsoft gets to define the game regardless. No matter how much we innovate, the pain of migrating to another platform keeps companies on Windows. If we created the next killer app, Microsoft would have plenty of time to copy it before people started to migrate en masse.
The only way to ease the pain of migration is to make things work. Most companies' infrastructure is far too thick to be able to migrate to a whole new platform in one giant leap. So addressing Windows compatibility is critical before many people can even consider Linux.
That said, I agree largely that a single project can't lead and follow, but GNU/Linux is not one project. If you are arguing that resources spent copying Microsoft are wasted, then I think it is only your own time that is being wasted, since open source developers work on what they want and will never all agree to one ideology.
Dont give me the "C is portable too" crap, just today I found differences in the behaviour of strtok between platforms
Well, that's a pretty poor example. There are differences in behaviour of Java functions between platforms as well.
Although differences in behaviour between platforms can be bugs in the implementation, more commonly they are a result of insufficient documentation. In other words, the differences are usually found in situations that are incompletely or not at all documented.
Not that I'm saying that C is the most portable of them all.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
When originally I heard about Mono I was skeptical. Then I met up with Miguel had a talk to him and was optimistic. There were some posts of his that made me upbeat about Mono. Now ever since Novell bought Ximian I am really skeptical again.
.NET clone. Mono will never succeed and it will fail miserably. Nobody can compete or be compatible with Microsoft, just ask Mainsoft, Bristol, and other companies that licensed Microsoft technologies.
Mono SHOULD NOT be a Microsoft
I am amazed that people think it is in Microsoft's interest to build cross-platform application. Microsoft has said, time and time again that it is not in their interest. Microsoft has their own operating system and that is their interest. So what I wonder is why people keep thinking it would be good to run Windows Apps on Linux.
Wine, and CrossOffice are hacks until more applications are ported. When I use my OSX box, or my Linux box or even my Windows box I look for native applications, not emulation. Native apps run faster, better and are more stable.
Mono should go back and focus on doing their own thing again. Just like the Jakarta team focused on building good Open Source applications.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Built on open standards (XUL / Java / J2EE) and are in production now. Runs in almost any JVM...
:)
Heh... That last bit is implied/redundant when talking about *any* Java app more complex than "hello world"
One of Miguel's points is that we have lots of "bits"... and we sit around going "pfff... we've been able to do that for ages" to each little announcement from Microsoft.
Microsoft *will* ship Longhorn. It *will* contains all the "bits" needed to easily build distributed apps (well... easily build any apps actually). All of the "bits" will come pre-assmbled and delivered onto millions of desktops ready for eager developers to take advatage of.
And we, the open source world, will be left howling about how Microsoft doesn't innovate, and trying to convince a bored public that Linux/Mozilla etc etc did it first -- when, in fact, all we did was provide all the parts in kit-form, and then only to a handful (comparitively) of users.
Unfortunately there are several application that will only run on XP. AVID DV Express, Adobe Encore, and Adobe Premiere, just to name the software I want to use on my 2000 box, of course I do wish my C&C Red Alert would run on an OS other then 95 and 98.
Miguel's crusade to badly copy where Microsoft has gone before isn't really that productive and it has produced rather a lot of sloppy, unfinished, unpolished software that has more promise than usefulness.
I desperately want this not to be so, but it is.
Microsoft have an important ally in Miguel. It is not necessary to announce vaporware for Linux to frighten off the competition since everyone is already waiting for applications like Evolution to stop sucking so badly.
I agree that there weren't many reasons, but there was one: ClearType. That's pretty much the only thing in Windows XP that interests me, thus the primary reason why I'm still on Windows 2000.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
Am not fabricating anything.
In 1994, the desktop was not a GUI desktop, the
desktop was mostly a command-line universe both
on DOS-based systems and Linux systems.
Linux did have an advantage: multiple virtual
consoles, real multi-tasking, tcp/ip stack
bundled, nfs, file serving capabilities, and
DOSemu with compatibility with the past.
I have to say, way better than DOS + pile of
device drivers and Windows was only starting to
be used with very few applications. Windows 3.11
was out, with really few applications.
Miguel.
Yes developers like .Net, but the users don't give a damn about .Net, the CEO's don't care about it, its currently a cool developers toy, like QT.
Whoever that rules the programming language/tools rules the applications.... whoever that rules the applications rules the operating system... whoever that rules the operating system, rules the world (ok maybe not the last part ;))
.NET is a new development environment. It isn't just a language or a piece of software. It is almost a cohesive software platform that you can use to do everything. What this means is that if you program for .NET, you will likely develop skills in C# (as opposed to say C++), will program for .NET only (since it is likely incomptabile in any other OS, not counting things like Mono), and will be doing everything for a Windows-oriented OS.
.NET, it will capture even more market share. For example, why would anyone bother with Java anymore? The applications that we are talking about isn't just desktop applications. Rather, it is EVERYTHING. In particular, .NET will capture what is commonly called web services. Web services are the future of software!!! Remember when people were saying that everything, such as doing your banking, purchasing products, renewing your driver's licence, etc, will be done on the internet? Well it will become true with .NET. Java attempted to take over the web application/web services/whatever market. It didn't really succeed fully. With Microsoft's financial, marketing and engineering support, .NET will accomplish 100x what Java was supposed to do.
.NET, will you still stick with linux or will you migrate to Windows? YOU probably will stick around but most won't. Already there are quite a few websites that I have encountered which require Windows (mostly due to use of ASP, WMV files, or some version of plug-in not available/not good in Linux (eg. the linux flash plug-in for mozilla totally sucks compared to Windows. Try loading www.sportsnet.ca and see how the menus cause problems)).
;) but most people aren't little Hitlers. Most people follow the law. (In any case, Hitler did spend some time in jail so you may end up there too ;) ) If most people pirated Windows, Microsoft would lose millions on the home operating system market--but it doesn't. Most people follow the law.
.NET and Longhorn provide features that aren't available in linux, people will not bother changing. I use linux right now but I might switch based on future events. For example, if banks* provide a seemless, in
Why is Windows so popular? It's because of the applications. Now, if a huge chunk of people only program for
If this doesn't convince you, think about an example. Let's say web services take off, and that many of your activities are done thourough the web. Will you still stick with linux when MS dominates the web area? For example, if you have discount broker or banker that seemlessly integrates with the OS using
There's no reason for me or anyone else to buy Longhorn EVER. So even if somehow Longhorn is great software, no one really cares at this point because most of the PC sales are in markets where price is everything and where Microsoft has little to no influence. In fact most people who are buying new PCs will pirate Longhorn or whatever Microsoft has out.
First of all, pirating is illegal and you are liable. I don't expect someone named Hitler to follow the laws that closely
Secondly, what YOU will do is irrelevant, just like what *I* do is irrelevant. What matters is the market as a whole. If 95% of the people use Longhorn, it will dominate. It doesn't matter if you, or I, or your friend, or whomever, doesn't use it.
Lastly--and this goes to the point of my message--what drives the market are features. If
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
sorry about that, brain not working today - you know what i meant...
1995 ^H^H^H^H 2000
I liked the sentiment of your post, but I have two minor criticisms:
/. for years, wanting to contribute (but were unwilling to go back to C) will help build the next Linux desktop.
1) Mono is not the new Wine. The mono implementation of WinForms may be (at one time they talked about binding it to wine). I see the main use of Mono to be building Linux applications that only *happen* to work on windows. At first they will use GTK# and later some new better UI toolkit (Avalon# ???, XUL# ???)
2) Mono opens the doors for many more programmers to contribute to Linux, but not just unwittingly. When (if) mono become commonplace on the Linux desktop, Window programmers and Java programmers will flock to the Linux desktop. Thousands of people who have been reading
I for one welcome the change. God knows there's plenty of work.
I don't see the difficulty. If it's a good idea then do it. Isn't that the way Open Source succeeds -- always? No need to worry about what MS is doing. Wherever the good ideas come from doesn't matter. Use them all. That plan must succeed.
Windows 2000 is not a good OS for the home. My memory is sketchy since I wans't using it much (except at work) but let me see...
What version of DirectX did Windows 2000 ship with? I think it was way behind or something. Games and other multimedia apps weren't very good...
What was the cost? If I remember correctly, didn't Win2000 cost more than Win ME and Win XP?
Win2000 boots up slower than Win XP.
Win XP has better sleep mode, and other power consuming features.
And so on...
Overall, Win XP is much better than Windows 2000 for the home user... Don't know about servers though... In any case Win XP is very similar to Win 2000.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
Why would a bank use XUL for an application (forcing all thier users to download mozilla), when they can let them run native Longhorn appps from thier browser without any installation?
Mozilla has the GRE (Gecko Runtime Engine) which is all that is needed to execute XUL apps. The GRE can be loaded without the browser. Last time I check I think it was a little under 10 megs which is not too bad since 1 GRE can support multiple XUL apps.
Linux won't overtake Windows for a while (I'm talking about home market only--server is another story). Windows just provides too many features that Linux lacks. Windows is also much easier to use. For instance, how easy is it to change video card drivers (or for that matter any driver) in Linux? It is very difficult for causal users. I think 90% of the home users won't get past, say, Nvidia's 3rd instruction to modify the XFree-86 configuration file. Or how about when something goes wrong? Linux is not as foolproof. For instance, if there are problems with the filesystems, the error/fix messages generated during boot-up would give a heart attack to many users (the messages basically say something like 'you could lose all data if you proceed' :) ).
Lastly, Linux does not have enough software. This will seriously prevent adoption for a while. You can find basic software in Linux but it's always those one or two special ones that make it difficult. For instance, if you are using a particular tax software, you may not find it in linux. Or you may be able to find replacements for everything but MS Encarta (encyclopedia). Or, you find everything in linux except that digital camera software that you cherish.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
The answer to your points are historic.
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
A Microsoft clone of GNU/Linux is as bad a thing as a F/OSS clone of Windows. Clones are bad. Choices are good. Clones remove choice.
Remember the late eighties? You had Amigas, Macs, Atari STs, PC Clones with GEM, PC Clones with Windows, and those were just the "mainstream" platforms. You had choices. You could chose a computer that actually suited you. The different manufacturers did things in different ways to suit their audiences. There was more than a nod to the Mac in all of the above, but not so much you could safely argue most were clones of it. That was a good time to be in computing.
The F/OSS communities can be leaders in the industry. It doesn't have to replace one monopoly with another. It certainly doesn't have to submit to a monopoly mindset, as its leaders do today.
This is a justification for cloning Microsoft, not something that addresses the issue of Microsoft's ability to define the game. And it doesn't answer the fundamental "what's the point of creating something that isn't a choice" issue I raised in my original. I'm arguing that copying Microsoft is fundamentally damaging. The cloners are more interested in the idea that something called "GNU/Linux" will become popular and that "Microsoft" will not than producing something positive. They don't care what gets called GNU/Linux, as long as it "takes over the world". If it's a lousy, security hole ridden, irritating, poor clone of an operating system that was never any good to begin with, that's fine, as long as the name wins out.This shouldn't be a war against Microsoft. This should be a war against a lack of choices, and against proprietary software. Both are inherently undermined by the cloners.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Win2k has the same DirectX as XP.
Games run faster in 2k than XP, in my experience. Rise of Nations, for example, simply performs letter on 2k (starts faster, runs faster, shuts down faster).
XP seems to be 2k plus slowness, annoyance, and "better power management" -- but I have it running on a desktop, so I wouldn't know.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
But ... but ... but ... Microsoft did this years ago (minus .net). Or am I really the only one who remembers the version of Outlook implemented entirely using DHTML/HTA (which produces native widgets). I can't remember the codename, but the project was scrapped. The benefits of running Outlook inside IE just were not compelling enough to overcome the performance and other problems.
I believe this turned into Outlook Web Access, which is an integrated component of Exchange servers. It's also pretty damn slick.
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
I can't tell if you are saying C or Java is easier to write mail apps with. Anyways, both have issues. Writing in C makes it difficult (not impossible) to write cross platform apps. C also becomes a huge headache with large development due to its non-OOP ways. Java allows for simpler apps but suffers from poor GUI tools and APIs. Deployment of Java apps is a bit more tricky IMHO compared to a C app.
I have my own ideas on this subject. I believe that the GUI should not be confined by the language. This is where mozilla could come in by have XUL apps work with either C or Java. At that point it goes back to programmer preference on language rather than limitations that exist in both.
If we really wanted .Net functionality on Linux, we would make peace with Sun and pull Java into the OSS world.
As far as I can tell, the fact that Linux is a viable platform for running Java applications is one of the things keeping Java in the running.
So what exactly does the Linux community have to "make peace" with Sun over?
Is it the fact that the Java platform is "non-free" according to Richard Stallman? That's not something we did to Sun; some recent Slashdot articles have covered IBM's offer to help Sun open-source Java. Although talks may still be going on, Scott McNealy has said there will be no open-source Java -- at least, not one coming from Sun.
Any issues with "pulling Java into the OSS world" are Sun's issues, not the Linux community's.
Jay (=
I agree with Miguel here,in '94/early '95, at least in the UK, there was talk that if Windows95 slipped much more, OS/2 Warp might take over! That's how weak windows was (then known as Windows for workgroups 3.11 I think).
Follow Miguel, follow Microsoft... there's not any difference except in the end, one may have more of a surprised look on their face than the other. I can hear, "Oh... well.. I never saw that one coming." But in reality, I think Miguel is smart enough to FULLY comprehend what will happen... and that's what is really scary.
Miguel would say that we're all asleep... are we?? I wonder who really has their eyes closed on this one.
People always trash MS but it has some of hte best engineers and software developers around. Because of that, they always seem to take advantage. For instance, if .NET becomes popular (which it will), I can automatically see MS Office destroying everything else (not that there is much competition these days) and actually cause consumers to upgrade for sure.
.NET. It is the company that designed it after all. So they would have some advantage. If nothing, they will at least have more knowledge and expertise than others.
Also, don't forget that MS controls
As far as the IBM example is concerned... the reason IBM kind of lost is because they cared about mainframes more than PCs. Mainframes generated more profits and hence IBM didn't want to sacrifice that market for the PC market... In any case, IBM still remained in the top 5 PC manufacturers all throughout the 90's (and even now I think). So it's not as if they failed. A better example of total collapse is Apple. Apple had a huge market in the early 90's but totally fell off the planet...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
Check out Avantbrowser. It's a replacement "front end" for IE, supports tabbed browsing, popup blocker, ad blocker, script blocker, flash blocker, etc, etc, etc. Ctrl-N (or middle-mouse click, or mouse gesture, or however you want to open a new tab) works as you'd like it to (and me, too). As for wrong URLs hanging for 10-20 seconds, that's an oddity. I usually just hit Esc to stop loading the page.
Which is more painful? Going to work or gouging your eye out with a spoon? Find out!
http://www.workorspoon.com
It is simply a case of time to market.
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
He moved on from Gnome saying C coding was dead, all hail C#, thus dilating OSS approaches. Mozilla's XUL approach was allready around **before** he started MONO.
From what I read I seen things differently. Mono is just a language whereas Mozilla is a platform. If Mono and Mozilla interoperate you could get a cross platform language running an app written in XUL. Oh the possibilities...
Someone once said not to worry about people stealing your good ideas, since if you have a truly great, innovative, new idea, you'll have to work hard to get others to accept it.
This manifests itself in the world of Free and Open Source software, where the developers are human just like everyone else. You see, they'd rather stick to tried, proven, trusted solutions and mabe add a few bells and whistles rather that do anything radical.
The upshot of this is, as in all walks of life, if you do have a radical new idea, you have to do the first implementation all by yourself. It's a lot of work, technically challenging and takes a lot of time, especially for people who are already busy.
The advantages that Free and Open Source developers have is access to excellent free tools and a wealth of information. However, the next radical, new, fresh, exciting thing will come from a "crazy" lone developer with nothing but a whacko idea, and a lot of motivation. It will not come from GNOME or KDE.
Stick Men
Neither the blog entry or the Usenet post pointed to mention one critical advantage that the mentioned software has over proprietary alternatives--software freedom. This means a lot to me running a business because I have the freedom to modify the software (which is great when software programmers go away, stop developing their fork of the program, or take their fork in a direction I don't agree with). Then I can share my fork of the software with others (and I do, sometimes for a profit). If the free software community teaches people to value software freedom and not just technical features they will have learned a great reason to stick with free software when free software doesn't offer the best set of features. If all we teach others is to value features and dismiss software freedom then we will lose whatever audience we have gained when a proprietor outcompetes us.
Digital Citizen
2. Old myths die hard: yes, Java was slow and java interfaces where ugly and clunky. 5 years ago! Newsflash, Java has moved forward in great leaps since the days of Java 1.1
It's not a myth. Most Java applications I've used are slow. Even simple apps, like JEdit (a text editor) are slow. Annoyingly slow. Slow to the point that I'll just use something else.
there are millions of java-enabled handsets
Yes, and that sucks. My Blackberry is really cool, except that is slow as hell. If I'm receiving several emails, the UI practically stops. Using call waiting causes the UI to lag behind nearly 7 seconds before refreshing with the new call information. Maybe Blackberry did something wrong. Maybe not. For me, it just furthers the "myth" that Java is slow because it is just one more thing using Java that is too damn slow.
I tend to disagree here. The thing that made me switch from dos/win3.11 to linux in 93/84 wqas the desktop. Sure it was a pain in the ass to get the right hardware etc, but FVWM vs. Win 3.11 is a no contest. I was amazed at what I saw, and then spent 3 months trying to get it to run. No, it wasn't friendly, but holy cow was it an eye opener. Just remembering back kinda makes me misty eyed.
What software do you use for screen reading under X? Under what circumstances is a braile reader better?
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
I think your memory is a little different from mine. Certainly, DOS was the PC king. Almost all games came out for DOS. Lots of various bits and pieces and utilities came out for DOS. DOS was where a PC hacker got work done. DOS was where we computer-type boys and teens mucked around on.
But for the other 90% of computer users it was a different story. Windows 3.1x may not have had alot of software from the hacker's perspective, but it was a smash hit in the home-user market despite its limitations. It is Windows 3.1 that sent Amiga to its grave, battered the Mac platform, and for the first time had masses of ordinary people seriously considering buying a computer. It was cute, and although it was not very intuitive, it was simple enough to learn for the more intelligent 1/4th of the population who considered buying a PC back then. Microsoft's marketing at the time was the best it has ever been. They perfectly understood the paradyme; their "Microsoft Home" subbrand (that finally got mothers wanting computers for their children) might've sold over 10 million PCs by itself. Which is about how many people use Linux today incidently.
In 1994 the desktop was a GUI desktop -- for everyone except hackers. The GUI desktop had easily arrived circa 1992 for oridinary users. Hackers, on the other hand, didn't seriously get into the GUI thing until KDE arrived. Before then, the Unix GUI was just a glorified text and widget terminal.
Linux did do well for what it did. It was a geeks' perfect toy. Its technical features were excellent. It did expand to its full potential for what it was capable as -- as a hacker's _text-based_ Unix system.
As much as Linux had an advantage over DOS and Windows from a pure technical point of view back then, it sucked as GUI desktop system. By and large, it still does, as much as Linux users protesth. That's why hardly anyone uses it. This is the cold hard reality.
The only way Linux could have succeded on the ordinary user desktop would have been if it didn't use X-Windows, didn't have a heap of semi-broken widget sets, etc etc etc. I don't need to explain this. We all know what the problems are. If Linus had in 1994 decided to personally oversee and start from scratch a new, unified, coherent, legacy-free 'official' GUI project for Linux, then Linux would be used by over 100 million people now.
He moved on from Gnome saying C coding was dead,
He most certainly did not say C was dead, and we had an entire Slashdot discussion about how his words were twisted by the headline of the article.
Not really. Mono uses C# but must implement the .NET platform (API). Of course this can be done in a Mozilla framework......but it is a case of the cart before the horse!
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
What kind of computer are you using? Saying something is slow without specifying the hardware you are running it on, is like saying I have 500 units of cash in my pocket: what lire? euros? cents? dollars? Yes. JEdit is slower than vi. But I am using at least 5 java apps continuously. I really like the fact that I KNOW I can switch computer and still use them. So the slowdown is not a big problem given that functionality. And since we are speaking of mono, are you suggesting that will be faster?
Let's just hope that never happens... Is there anything around at the moment that ONLY runs on XP?
Several applications have gone 2000/XP only. From Cakewalk Sonar to Photoshop CS to lots more. Games haven't made the change, though I'm sure the recent ones have. Most require at least 98SE. But Google Zeitgeist shows that in the past two years, XP has eclipsed 98 in usage, so it's only a matter of time. And believe me, when Longhorn comes out, 98 WILL be completely abandoned by developers. That piece of shit bastard DOS GUI is over five years old now.
Come on, just look at the screenshots for GNUstep apps. Ah, I remember 1993. It was a very good year.
And no, leveraging the Mac community is irrelevant. Mac developers already have an eyecandy platform, its called Quartz.
Mozilla has the GRE (Gecko Runtime Engine) which is all that is needed to execute XUL apps. The GRE can be loaded without the browser. Last time I check I think it was a little under 10 megs which is not too bad since 1 GRE can support multiple XUL apps.
A one-time runtime installation was also the case with Java, flash and even the gtk. None of those framworks ever took off on the windows desktop. The best solution for deployment of thick clients is going to take advantage of the runtime already running on the client machine. Sure you can use a third party library for the widgets (if it's small enough and completly portable), but even ONE install procedure is still more than Microsoft's platform is going to require.
Well, C coding *IS* dead, or should be. Whether OSS is the future or not is debatable, but non-object oriented, non-exception handling, non-bounds checking languages with hand-rolled memory management are on the way out. They're inefficient to program in and nowadays have little to offer in terms of performance. And thanks to the unsafe block, there are ways to bypass even the smallest performance hit by removing all these safeties.
.NET initiative in a cross platform manner. There's a subtle difference, but it's an important one: de Icaza's methodology takes the newest strategy from the for-better-or-worse market leader and makes it ubiquitous, instead of trying to make a name for himself with a brand new strayegy. From a risk assessment point of view, there's a much better chance that .NET will succeed than any of the dozens of competing intiatives in the OSS community. And there's less work involved. We the power users may not want to get both feet in bed with Microsoft, but for a lot of companies out there it has proven to be a very valuable strategy. Miguel's trying to give them a means of keeping one foot on the floor, to tap the ubiquity of windows while maintaining (or in many cases, gaining) cross platform compatibility.
.NET. MS couldn't say that openly, of course.
As for XUL...i can't see why anybody who touted the life of C could also praise XUL. XML is a nice idea for encapsulating data in a hierarchical, human readable format, but it's a bad bad BAD idea for user interfaces and anything else where you want INSTANT access to data. Parsing -- or should I say compiling -- all those words into language a machine can understand wastes time. Sure, it makes sense for a handful of widgets (like a web page), but what if you have an application that loads 300-500 per form like most of the apps I deal in? Not only do you have the rendering overhead, you also have the XML parsing overhead for each of them. I'll stick with JVM and the Windows Forms frameworks.
As for "catching up" with Microsoft...de Icaza's point is that while Linux is treading water with its own kind of uniformity and platform cross compatibility, trying to make inroads into Windows apps, de Icaza's aiming to replicate the
Which I'm sure was the whole thrust behind standardizing
Hey freaks: now you're ju
"You propose that we can define the game, that we can lead, that Microsoft is perfectly willing, if necessary, to clone the efforts of the F/OSS community"
I'm not sure I agree here. Even if the OSS community develops the next "killer app", Microsoft can throw enough money and development to gain more market share. Take the word processor. Microsoft did not invent the word processor. After years of them throwing money at it, where is the market now? If they don't "define the game", why do people advertise alternatives as being compatible with Microsoft Office? They may not have had the idea, but through time, money and market share they've become the de facto standard. As long as Microsoft controls 90%+ of the market share in desktop computing, they can redefine most "games." Now, I'm not arguing that GNU/Linux needs to compete on market share with Microsoft to be useful, but we need more users to really be successful in the desktop. Like it or not, infusing money into GNU/Linux is what will improve it the most on the desktop. I could go on and on about the pros and cons of both OS's, but most readers already know them. Even without Microsoft's head start in market share, Windows has some major advantages to the beginning/inexperienced user (and believe me, there are a lot of them in business). Emulating some things are necessary if you want to see GNU/Linux increase on the desktop. After all, all of the OS's windows managers had bump from Xerox.
/I'm not saying that market share is the driving force, or even necessary for GNU/Linux overall.
Tech News, Reviews and Tutorials
I do not think you read my whole message,
because I stated that there were two options:
to implement Avalon, or to build our own.
We are in the process of specing out what
ours should be (the platform we call
"salvador").
Miguel.
But many of you have ignored the reason why .NET is going to be so popular - it is going to be so damn easy to develop applications. Literally, everything will be taken care of for you. Want to link to a database? No problem, in 20 minutes you will have a database application. Most people here will probably not want to use it, but we aren't the ones making most of the decisions. If a company sees an opportunity to hit 90% of the market (which it wants) and develop the program in half the time, then it will. There is no arguing the economics of this. .NET is a formidible beast and yes while most people here say it sucks and they hate it you don't seem to realize most people don't care. Or if they do care, they are willing to set aside their caring long enough to write a program in .NET, which will take all of a few days for a lot of apps.
http://www.rustyrazorblade.com
I beg to differ. Win 2k was the best version of Windows ever written. It's basically XP without the the pretty GUI and the obfuscated menus. I mean, you open up Search, and there's no damn dog waiting for you. That, my friend, is sublime.
XP seems to be Microsoft's attempt to counter common problems by throwing words at them. Maybe it was successful in a home environment...but I've been using Windows for fucking ever. When I want to add a VPN, I just want to add it...I don't want to be confronted with a dozen paragraph-long menus asking the details in a roundabout way. I mean, if I want to buy Pringles, I ask for Pringles. I don't say, "Do you have those fried potato snacks that are extruded into a saddle shape and sold in a sealed cylindrical carboard container?"
There are a handful of features that were exclusive to XP that are nice to have...Remote Desktop is one of them, personal firewall the other (though I'd still rather have a hardware firewall). They're not worth upgrading for...unless, like you mentioned, you're still running one of the older Windows with a 9x kernel. In which case, you should really try to find Win2k. It won't insult you...and it's a hair faster, I reckon.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Avalon is the new Windows API, and it apparently represents a major jump in UI capabilities. Part of its value proposition is in the ease of use to developers and part in the experience for end users.
In order to increase developer productivity, Avalon will rationalize and reduce the number of APIs in the Win32 stack from over 70,000 down to 8,000.
On the user experience side, Avalon will feature advanced support for 2D and 3D vector graphics as well as standard GUI widgets.Some descriptions of Avalon suggest that it is more comprehensive than just the graphics layer, and will incorporate support for paradigm-shifting "task-oriented" UIs.
http://weblogs.java.net/pub/wlg/525
George II -- Spreading Freedom and American values, one bomb at a time.
Mr. Public, it's sad that you might even take the time to post something that does little more than attempt to aggravate, but I'll bite, just to put you in your place.
As much as you'd like to believe we're a bunch of 12 year old playstation addicts who haxx0r our b0x3n, the fact is, many of us would like to see OSS be more widely adopted because it's often better quality. And that, despite your untainted quest, means you need a userbase. And a userbase doesn't just come from innovation, as time has proven with products like the BeOS. It comes from offering a great product, worth the price, that allows you to be productive.
When Longhorn era technologies start succeeding, the new switchers will look to be productive first, and that means they want the same or similar technologies available. That, sir, is competition.
The blog said this same thing. Lots of the technologies have been implemented elsewhere.
.NET.
But who all uses Java Webstart? EVERYONE is going to use
The point is to accept that Microsoft's will be the one to succeed, so we need to work off of that and not answer every single point with "it's been done in so-and-so." You could do that with anything...Microsoft is the one integrating it all into one single desktop entity. I should note that people have been wanting Linux desktops to do that forever, but people always come back with the "choice" argument. And meanwhile Windows trudges foward...
Sure enough, Microsoft has DEDICATED people reading this stuff. Access to it is just a click away. Market strategy is all about surprise. So I'm proposing a new movement. Open Source, Closed Strategy (OSCS). Seriously.
Get it overwith. You are obsessed with Microsoft. Every time you give a speech its about Microsoft, every product you seem to work on is a clone of something made by Microsoft. You are more worried about what Microsoft is doing than you are about what Linux is doing.
Hey, welcome to Slashdot and its community...
It's a big world out there if you look out the windows - there's more to computers than the receptionists PC or using a desktop PC to replace a Playstation.
You can't possibly be ignoring the 95% marketshare that Windows has on desktop PCs, can you? This is exactly why Miguel is smarter than most of you complainers--he doesn't dismiss Microsoft just because he hates them. And he's smart enough to appreciate the technology as a result.
Another example is the web. Microsoft did not invent the web browser, it merely took the innovation that was being done by Netscape, copied it, and improved upon it. It was lead, then it lead when it felt confident enough to do so. Now it's arguably being lead again - the Longhorn IE supposedly has tabs and pop-up blocking. Wonder where they got those ideas from?
Microsoft both leads and is lead. The comment I responded to implied that we shouldn't lead, basically by wording the idea negatively (if we create something original, MS will copy it - well, duh! That's what leading the industry is. You should worry if nobody's copying what you're doing, not if people are.)
I think Windows generally is a poor thing to copy, if we're going to copy. Yes, it's more user friendly than Linux, part of that is because of the not-terribly-well-thought-out copying that's going on. It's taken how long for us to have something as simple and obvious as a spacial file browser. Why? And why are we copying the faults? If user friendliness is the issue, why are we copying Microsoft when certain fruitily named companies have a much better reputation in that sphere?And why do cloners persist with the argument that to move forward in a particular direction, you must copy? Is it beyond the will of anyone to come up with a user interface that is user friendly and reflects the underlying system (in this case Unix)?
I submit it isn't, because NeXT, Apple (twice! A/UX and OS X), Be, Atheos, etc, have all come up with perfectly viable, super user-friendly, interfaces to POSIX operating systems. I'm not advocating blanket copying from these either, I just suggest that building friendly interfaces does not mean putting your imagination in a box, sailing into the middle of the ocean, and dropping the box into the sea. All it takes is thought.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Which means Linux will need to reverse engineer in support. Again.
Why? NTFS isn't changing one bit. WinFS is a layer on top of NTFS for APIs to use. The filesystem will still be intact.
When I was working in Pre-Press in 1991, I was doing it in a very nice, very usable GUI, on a Mac.
Mono is the new Wine
.NET to do certain things (like play sounds) that aren't in the framework yet. But the idea from Microsoft is to get the entire body of Windows functions into the Framework. At this point, any machine that supports the whole Framework can run .NET code without need for Windows DLLs.
Au contraire. Wine is an interpretter at heart (though it is NOT an emulator, which it's proud to tell you). It redirects commands from one API to another. That redirection layer is an unfortunate hack -- a hack that, eventually, Mono will not have to perform. It does perform it at the moment because of the number of P/Invoke calls and COM Wrappers we need in
So in other words, Mono isn't the new Wine. It's more like the new Java.
They don't want to learn new langauges or switch to a new OS
I don't know about this. I think it's more that, at the moment, there's no POINT in learning new languages or new OS. There's certainly not a lot more money in being a Linux programmer vs being a Windows programmer, and there's substantially more risk in alligning yourself with the "upstart." My company writes software for a market that is almost 100% Windows based, and none of them can or will move to Linux until all of their custom apps will run on it. Since there's no monetary incentive for us to write a Linux app, our apps do not currently run on it. It would take one of two things to break this cycle: a large investment from one of our clients to adapt our whole codebase to Linux, or an environment that makes support on Linux almost accidental while maintaining easy access to Windows functionality. Mono is the answer.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
.NET uses published standards. Heck, using the Common Language Specification, any compiler can create the intermediate code used by the .NET Runtime. Want Python.NET? Someone's already working on it.
Mono isn't a waste of time--it's a waste of time to do anything else, because nothing else has gone anywhere. Programming for QT and GTK and wxWidgets and whatever else is a waste of time. Programming for two entire desktop environments is a waste of time. For crying out loud, Linux is still at 1% of usage on Google Zeitgeist. At one point do you say, "Hmm, well these other things haven't worked...let's try this."
Sure, Java can do all that too, but slowly.
There seem to be parties out there that have a self-interest in propagating this meme. For what it is worth, you lose credibility with this statement because of the simple fact that Java is not slow. It is, in fact, quite speedy. The JVM has been tweaked so that much code that us run under it now runs as fast as (and in some cases faster than) native code. Java is currently used in enterprise level applications that handle thousands of simulataneous users. It is not only battle-tested but battle hardened.
Best of all, the VM targets Windows 2000, XP, 2003, 98, ME, and NT 4.0 (!), meaning that all apps written in .
Great, but will it run on Solaris? OS X? AS/400? Linux? I am currently working in an environment where I do my development on a Windows machine, have a Linux staging environment, and a Solaris QA and production environment. The code that I run on my local machine -- written in Java - runs without change or kludge on all three of those platforms. I have a G5 at home, and have also been able to run the code unmodified on that machine, as well.
Sure it would be great to get many applications developed on .Net to run directly on Linux and BSD but I find the contrary to be true. Getting Linux apps to run on .Net means they will have a shot at running on Windows.
Its theoretically a two way street. Evolution on Windows? Pan on Windows? Sure leveraging all of those Windows applications on a platform of your choice is an interesting thing but everyone seems to neglect leveraging Linux and BSD applications onto Windows!
This will be interesting. I'm not going to be against Miguel or Mono but I'm not going to be against Cringley either. Cringley's point is that you can't lead if you are always following. Miguel's point is that its stupid to ignore such a good piece of technology. Why do people assume one is wrong?
Actually not only is Miguel right, but I'd go a bit further and state that a second similar window of opportunity appeared just before the release of NT 4.0, when Linux could have become the back server of choice. Back then my job involved dealing with lots of back server admins, and they were toying with the idea of Linux (stable, low TCO). Linux could have won the back server market if only a few relatively minor details, such as ease of installation, had been taken care of.
However in those pre-KDE pre-GNOME days it was outright heresy to suggest that Linux was a wee bit too hard to use, even by a system administrator.
By the time Red Hat, KDE, GNOME and mandrake threw their hat in the ring, NT 4.0 was out and the window of opportunity had already closed.
I hate to break it to you, but most people find Linux even less intuitive. Cell B5? Most people have trouble getting a mousewheel to work, much less installing software or setting up a printer.
Well, I welcome you to read the AC reply to your post. He says more on the topic that I care to. As anyone who knows anything about the state of the desktop in 1994 knows:
Windows 3.11 (however much it sucked) was KING!!!
Most of your many technical advantages (nfs, file serving capabilites, multiple virutal consoles) are meaningless for the average desktop user of the time. What it needed was (1) Hardware Support and (2) Developer Tools and Platforms (Python, Java, IDEs, QT, GTK, etc)?
In 1994, Linux didn't even have a file system that allowed Joe User to shutdown his machine (with the powerbutton) without corrupting itself. You expect people to build on that?
Of course what was really needed was a realization of the power and potential of the OSS development model for core operating system technology that commericial interests could then add value to, but that of course took time.
Would never have thought to look at Emacs for speech support, but it makes perfect sense that the kitchen sink could provide a unified interface. Glad to hear that Viavoice is available on Linux. Thanks for the links.
...and found it to be less than enlightening. The first part reads as a self-serving defense against Cringely's (rather obvious, I thought) observation that *you can't play catch-up against Microsoft, because you will lose*. This painfully evident observation applies to everyone; if MS makes the rules, MS will always be at the forefront of whatever it is that it gets to define, and no one playing tag-along will ever be able to catch up with them. Miguel and his efforts are no exception to this, despite what he seems to think. He makes the mistake of assuming that he's different - just like all the other companies which thought the same thing, and were driven out of their markets (or nearly so) by Microsoft.
Cringely was right. Miguel is wrong.
The second part is based on a faulty assumption, i.e., that most Linux users care if about taking the battle to Microsoft and 'getting Linux on the desktop'. Fact is, most Linux users could give a shit one way or another, and aren't interested in seeing their OS used as a vehicle to launch a crusade against the evil empire. Never have been, never will be; this 'crusade' mentality belongs to a tiny, but very obnoxious and very loud, minority. One which I heartily wish would shut the hell up, move on to the next Big Thing(TM), and leave those of us who actually code for and use the OS for our own satisfaction the hell alone.
It's just as Cringely said. The best thing to do for Linux is to simply ignore MS altogether and continue coding what we want to code, when we want to code at, in the way we want to code it. If more than that tiny minority of us actually begin to take this crusade bullshit seriously, all we'll end up with is a second-rate Windows clone that whores itself out to whatever blithering idiots scream the loudest and whine the longest.
And in any event, what do these crusaders think they're going to accomplish, anyway? Even if they manage to drive MS out of business (not in this lifetime, pal) Bill Gates will still be one of the richest men in the world - richer than any of the crusaders, and laughing all the way to the bank. So will his cronies, and so will the smart investors. The only people who'll 'lose' the war are a bunch of average-Joe schmucks who work for Microsoft, or who invested in Microsoft and didn't manage to pull out until it was too late.
The folks who created the 'evil empire' have already made their money, and nothing the crusaders do to the company will change that fact. Those folks will always be richer than the crusaders, and will always be laughing at their trite vitriolic dialogue - no doubt while sitting on a beach in Tahiti surrounded by beautiful (if purchased) women. To them the crusaders are nothing more than sad little fools worthy of little more than contempt.
And they're right.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Good question that, since Mono or any other .NET clone will by definition suffer by trailing MS's .NET and have the problems you and others point out.
My answer to that is very simple: security.
The Microsoft is really taking a hit on security. Bottom line IT support cost hits: wasn't there mention of how worms et. al. are hurting a lot of small-medium European companies? We've all seen or heard of this sort of crisis in companies we or friends know about. And if I was running a back end Windows based system I'd be nervous....
The biggest weakness of MS .NET is that you can run it on platform you want, as along as it is Windows (to paraphrase the very old Ford joke).
Mono/[your favorite .NET clone] has the potential of running on a more secure platform, and that is of very serious interest to a lot of institutions, especially since Java is perceived to be a bit weak right now.
No, it isn't, and you don't get to pretend you've justified that claim by changing the subject, worse still when your change of subject has already been debunked.
Okay, I'll give you that. I didn't really explain myself well. Here's my thesis:
Copying Microsoft serves a valid purpose for the advancement of free software.
My reasoning? Interoperability is a big selling point for organizations looking to migrate. You could have the best Linux product in the world, but many companies need to have a clear roadmap of how to get from Windows to Linux before they can even consider it based on merit.
Why is migration important? Because the greater the marketshare we have relative to Microsoft, the more pressure they have to make a genuine effort to match the utility of Linux. As it stands now, Microsoft only needs a half-assed implementation of all our best ideas to look good on a PowerPoint. With the fear of migration issues, that's plenty to keep IT buyers firmly in the Microsoft boat. If Linux had 50% marketshare then IT buyers would give a deeper look at the merits of the product rather than what's the safe bet.
I agree that cloning Microsoft does not add much value in the long run, but you are totally ignoring the migration issue. If GNU/Linux was a fixed set of developers then I would agree with you wholeheartedly, but more marketshare means more developers and more market influence. How can you lead when no one is following?
I'm arguing that copying Microsoft is fundamentally damaging. The cloners are more interested in the idea that something called "GNU/Linux" will become popular and that "Microsoft" will not than producing something positive. They don't care what gets called GNU/Linux, as long as it "takes over the world". If it's a lousy, security hole ridden, irritating, poor clone of an operating system that was never any good to begin with, that's fine, as long as the name wins out.
This is totally false. People do not want Linux to be popular for popularity's sake. The real reason is because then anyone is free to modify it as they see fit. So what if Linux starts it's popularity with some buggy MS-like apps? The whole point is that we can then remedy the situation.
If you really want to argue that cloning MS products is 'fundamentally damaging' then you either have to argue that interoperability is less important than innovation for increasing marketshare from Windows migrants, or that marketshare itself is irrelevant.
MIguel, in his usual way, is about halfway right, I think.
.Net will Take Over The World(TM). From his perspective as a .Net implementor on Linux, he obviously sees it as the best thing since Corona beer and tacos. Those technologies will surely become very popular in the Windows world, and I'm sure that a good deal of companies that are currently within the Windows loop will make heavy use of local Web applications a la XAML.
.Net and XAML on Windows machines since the idea that Mozilla will get it together in a reasonable amount of time to get their engine to render anything in the way of the Avalon engine is probably expecting too much.
He is definitely right that MS won a lot of its marketshare by simply bundling stuff with the OS and by having enough money and time to survive mistakes that killed competitors (XBox, WinCE, Plug and Pray, Bob, J++ etc).
He is only halfway right that Longhorn and XAML, Avalon and
But, as has been the case before, it's only half the picture. The other half of the picture is that those people who see it as critical to have their web applications be compatible with the myriad different Windows OS versions, the myriad different OS types right across the board will still use Java/PHP etc for server based apps and keep the frontend in the browser. The XAML local web applications are very similar to Java Webstart in concept, but will find it only marginally more acceptable in the real world, for purely compatibility reasons.
Granted Java has been an unmitigated disaster client side, with Sun having screwed up by introducing the white elephant known as swing and thereby permanently giving client side Java the reputation of being slow, even though this is no longer true with modern CPUs. This hole will probably be filled by
And the price/performance and price/freedom of implementation benefits of Linux are truly starting to find adherents across the world in a serious manner.
In the end it will probably be that Windows will provide the better experience but that Linux will provide the lower cost and "be good enough" very much like Windows 95 was compared to its competitors.
t would take one of two things to break this cycle: a large investment from one of our clients to adapt our whole codebase to Linux, or an environment that makes support on Linux almost accidental while maintaining easy access to Windows functionality. Mono is the answer.
This is pretty much the situation at my last workplace and also my current one. If they could get a Linux port out for little or no cost then they might consider chasing those markets - otherwise, it's 100% MS here. Mono is the best hope for lowering those porting costs, since we can't/won't go Java (for many and various reasons).
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Hear, hear.
:)
People who say that Windows 2000 Professional is the best Microsoft operating system EVAR look really dumb when they realize that, hey, Windows XP Pro includes *every feature* of Windows 2000 Pro plus a hell of a lot more.
You like 2000 Pro? You're *still* better off buying XP Pro (at the same price!) and turning off the features you don't happen to like. And, hey, maybe they'll come a day when you're smacking your forehead with your palm because you turned off System Restore... after all 2000 Pro didn't have it!... and now you have to spend 20 minutes re-installing corrupted driver files. Oh look, you got a new roommate... well, now you can turn on fast user switching and you're in heaven... sure couldn't do that with Windows 2000 Pro. Etc.
There is no logical reason whatsoever to favor 2000 Pro over XP Pro. There's not one thing that 2000 Pro can do that XP Pro can't, and XP Pro can do a hell of a lot more.
Comment of the year
The comment I responded to implied that we shouldn't lead, basically by wording the idea negatively (if we create something original, MS will copy it - well, duh! That's what leading the industry is. You should worry if nobody's copying what you're doing, not if people are.)
This is just semantics. I agree that Microsoft products are better because of the many innovators that fly under the mainstream radar. My negative wording was because Microsoft will implement a feature only as well as it needs to maintain it's monopoly, which generally means only to a marketable level, not a technically robust level.
So it seems that the key here, as is the case with everything, is education.
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
Hi, I read a portion of the Lonhorn schpeel from MS and I read all of the comments from Mozilla. I am confused though. The Mozilla comments make Longhorn and it's components, file formats, etc.., seem to be this new and amazing, almost impossible to compete with technology.
Is it? I find it difficult that MS has developed several somethings that could cause problems for open source communities. After all I have read about the flaws with Windows(any version) and other MS products, I find it rather odd or almost disturbing to read the Mozilla post.
I sense fear in the post. This seems like a jog back in time to the 80's when people feared about Japan's electronic edge.
I have read on Slashdot so much about MS's buggy, inefficient, poorly patche, and bloated code. How could they suddenly become the inverse of all of that? If they have new technologies about to be released can't we expect the same problems?
Is MS releasing hidden talents and intending to show that not only do they have the money but also the brains to be the biggest sw company in the world?
I am just a little lost.
Oh, and have MS written a brand new kernel for Longhorn? Or is it mostly just modified code from NT/2000/XP?
Gonna toot my own horn:
My post on this topic
If you don't want to see the dog, turn it off.
Comment of the year
Comparing XUL with .NET is like comparing apples to house boats. XUL does not come close to matching the depth and breadth of .NET in terms of API, speed etc.
.NET for Linux either because no matter what Miguel and the rest of the Mono team might believe, the possibility that Microsoft can put a stop to Mono development does exist - either by a legal process (read patents, injunction, cease & desist....) or simply by making changes to the .NET framework.
.NET app? or would a company support Mono as a framework for their .NET app? both these scenarios are highly unlikely. There is very little incentive to use Mono either for development or for deployment.
.NET (but without an obvious link to .NET) such as a well design API, a garbage collection system, the common language runtime and running as a native app. No, Java doesn't count. And neither does QT because QT requires an expensive developer license when the application being developed is a commercial one.
.NET, MS's decision to make the framework itself free but charging just for the developer tools has helped its adoption. It might have been better if Trolltech had developed a development environement which they were selling instead of charging for using the QT framework itself.
And speaking of Mono - Mono is not really an answer to
And even if MS didn't stop development on Mono, who uses Mono anyway? Would any development team use Mono for developing a commercial
But having said that, a framework similar to Mono but which is not encumbered by an obvious and irrefutable link to any specific MS technology is absolutely needed for Linux.
We do not have a framework which runs on Linux which brings with the many advantages of
I can understand that Trolltech has to charge for QT, but this is drastically limiting its adoption. In the case of
Linux desperately needs a technology like QT to ship standard with most distributions and this coupled with an excellent configuration storage and management facility will definitely put an end to the dependency hell that is now a part of Linux.
Once such a framework is in place, the app installation tools like rpm, yast, apt-get etc could get much more advanced and include facilities similar to installshield, wise etc, which make use of scriptable interfaces to configure and manage the OS environment.
Now, before I am flamed for saying - "scriptable interfaces" with the expected comments abouts vbscript, macros and viruses, there is really no reason why a scriptable interface cannot be safely and securely implemented. Just because MS screwed up its implementation does not mean that such a system cannot be implemented well.
The scriptable interfaces on Windows (accessible via COM) allow for the creation of advanced applications such installers much more intuitively without having to go and mess around with application configuration files which may be spread around the system in different directories.
So thats my 2c.
Just curious on this one ... that's one of the reasons I'm loathe to switch to Firefox on my Linux desktop--it runs ever-so-slightly slower than Opera. Opera just responds faster to everything ... are you sure it runs slower than Firefox on your machine?
Dlugar
Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
The problem with your suggest is that Python has no sandboxed execution stack (bastion/rexec has been removed as of the 2.2 branch because it was fundementally insecure.) There is a lot of discussion about what to put into Python to replace this feature set. Personally, I favor a capabilities approach but Guide seems to disagree so we will see what happens.
Either way, only one of your two tools meets the required specs. Try again...
I agree that Miguel dismisses Win3.1 unfairly, but what the hell are you talking about WRT the Linux filesystem? Few, if any, filesystems *today* can guarantee that, journalled or not. And FAT16 sure as hell couldn't even pretend to claim that. The only time you could just hit the power button was if you were in DOS, and thats only because DOS was dumb and not doing anything. Services and multiple processes are what cause filesystem corruption.
For that matter, I dunno about hardware support... back in those days it was much simpler than it is today. Any respectable soundcard would be soundblaster-compatible, so you really only had to have 1 or 2 drivers, and video cards were all some variation of VESA or whatever... few fancy 3d-accelerators yet. Printers, I'm sure, were a bitch, though the dot-matrixes would have all worked well enough.
Furthermore, whats this about development platforms??? What were the platforms in 1994? BASIC? C++? Java was nothing then. Borland was the IDE and it was DOS-based. GUI toolkits? Ok, maybe we needed those.
Longhorn always been targetted for late 2005/early 2006. People who still refer to Longhorn as "vaporware"--even with the PDC build and endless technology demos--are buying into a mindless hatred for all things Microsoft and ignoring the real existence of the technology that will be coming out and permeating everywhere.
.NET will change things. It's why they're completely replacing Win32 with it. I have a feeling you haven't really examined the Longhorn tech all that much and have only read some marketing hype that you subsequently dismissed. Surprise, surprise, companies market their products as the greatest things ever. But Longhorn is actually a real overhaul of Windows, from the display technology to the filesystem technology to the runtime libraries and more.
Sorry, Longhorn is not vaporware, and there has never been a release date delay because there never was a release date. And, yes,
Miguel is smart in recognizing the inevitability of Longhorn...Slashdotters want to dismiss Longhorn because deep down they know it will arrive and take over.
Miguel, what do you envision as the channel for getting Windows users to adopt Avalon? A default install is pretty hard to compete with.
To take one example you cite, If I am going to be developing with Python, there's a whole lot of functionality I can use to create an app that will run on Win32 and other platforms without involving .NET at all. This is the whole point of modules like sys and os, and this is the usefulness of frameworks like Tk and wx-- you can write the app once and install it on more than one platform. Why should I pay Active State a bunch of money for Python.NET when I can get most of what I want with Python and other components I can get for free?
Always look on the briight side of life! (whistle, whistle)
What I am referring to is that drastic level of corruption that would regularly occur under ext2 that would render the system unbootable (even with a fsck)? Just from personal experience, back in the RedHat 5 and prior days, just hitting the power button to shutdown, could be guaranteed to cause serious corruption.
I regularly hit the powerbutton on my Mandrake 10 system (using both reiser and ext3) and do not render the system unbootable. I am usually just lazy to go through the shutdown procedure, or my 1 year old son does the honors for me.
Now under DOS, Windows 3.1, Win95, they had nothing like a journaling file system, but due to the relative simplicity of FAT, it was very rare that shutting down the system would render it unbootable. But there was no OS level shutdown procedure with DOS and 3.1 anyway: the power button was how you shutdown your computer.
I respect your work, Miguel, but I think that your experience may deviate from reality a bit here. You were working on Midnight Commander at the time, so obviously text-based consoles were your bread & butter at the time, but from my experience the dominant desktop was the windows gui, the second in the race was the Mac GUI, and the best desktop at the time (the state of the art) was the NeXTstep GUI, with OS/2's workplace shell not being too shabby either. At the time I had already been a NeXTstep user for a few years. I remember linux at the time being only for those brave enough for the command-line, and perhaps Windows power-users lived in the DOS shell, but to equate that with the dominant desktop of the time is a severely skewed revision of history.
But now that you've shared your recollection of that period in time, I finally understand Midnight Commander, which I always took to be someone's attempt at retro redux. Now I get it.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
Was looking around and found MyXaML which is an opensource implementation. Is this a possible product worth looking into?
Eric B
ebresie@gmail.com
Microsoft followed a development path with DOS/Windows which followed Moore's law. That is, they released software which had hardware requirements meeting the machines of the day. Thus Win3.1 could run reasonably in 4-8 megs, Win95 in 8-16 megs, WinNT in 16-32 megs... etc.
But in the early days, Linux had hardware requirements which far exceeded the capabilities of the common desktop. This was part of the great debate, and as an experimental platform it made sense to go this route. But it wouldn't have helped it to succeed as a mainstream desktop.
It wasn't until really probably the era of the Pentium II/III when desktops started coming routinely with 64 Megs of RAM that things had caught up with Linux resource needs. So I don't agree that Linux had a chance on the desktop in 1994, no moreso than OS/2 had, probably even less the case as OS/2 had numerous large scale deployments in Fortune 500 companies. Even then, factors contributed to prevent it from taking off.
Linux did have a chance right around the 1999 time frame to make signifigant strides, this mainly due to a weak spot in the market left by the delayed delivery of Windows 2000 to upgrade the slagging NT4. But since the release of Win2k, there has been no compelling technical reason to deploy Linux in either the desktop or server realm. I think Miguel is correct in that this situation is going to become even starker with the release of Longhorn. There will be a substantial gap between the capabilities of Linux and Windows.
I do have to applaud Miguel for his technical understanding of the issues, and his work on Mono and other technologies. It would be great if some day it was as enjoyable to develop on Linux as it is on Windows.
We have an excellent opportunity, think of this all windows is compliled, this will *never* change we have easy access to source which can be intrepeted and only compile / send on the fly by the host or client. OK OK I'll get to the point......
There is one thing that Microsoft *can't* do with their current platform that is stream *entire* applications so they run seemless on your own machine!!
Not an applett that allows you to subscribe to a mailing list, I'm talking about Open office, all the New Linux Games, who needs p2p??
All of your progs will run on my machine!!! No DLL hell gets transfered as needed. One thing that makes GPL better than EULA you *CANNOT* PIRATE GPL!! lets show them what you can do in an ideal community that lets you share *EVREYTHING* You have a new prog i can run it right from your box but instead of a term, download the application and stream source/binary on the fly!!
You think Bill would touch that???
I doubt it
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
I was there, and Windows 3.1 ruled the desktop absolutely. Remember, Windows 95 was originally promised for 1993. Its impending release held customers back from looking at alternatives. Any potential competitor against Microsoft vaporware should look back carefully at that history.
OS/2 had all those advantages, plus a GUI, complete with a superior version of Solitaire (the killer app of Windows 3.1). It also supported all Windows 3.1 apps. OS/2 was the superior desktop platform back then; Linux was a command-line hacker's toy.
As others have said, Windows 3.1 at that time had far more GUI applications in 1994 than Linux has now. Most important, it had Word and Excel. Did Linux even support the text-mode equivalents of WordPerfect or 1-2-3, whose users were already defecting to Word and Excel?
Maybe the folks at Novell ignored OS/2 back then, because their world view comprised DOS clients and Novell servers, even as Windows 3.11 for Workgroups was seeding that world's destruction. I'm glad you recognize that .NET will happen because Internet Explorer is fully deployed and the .NET client libraries are shipping. Please do what you can to give the Linux platform the compatibility it needs to remain a viable server platform for .NET web applications.
I can appreciate the attraction of building another .NET competitor that might beat .NET to market. But please remember these points:
Your challenge with Mono is not to defeat Microsoft, but to help Linux survive as a platform for web services.
No, though it would be a hell of a bonus if they opened the thing. Specs only, or (bonus) specs+implemetation. While they are at it, make it easy to get and use.
I understand why Sun hasn't done this. I'd also like to scream at them for 'screwing-the-pooch' and missing a much bigger opportunity.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
but I am offended that I have to explain/excuse my way through a phone call everytime I change harddrives
Pure BS. I've had to reinstall my legitimate copy of XP three times in the past 2 years. The first two times worked fine (and I was able to use the online registration, no questions asked.) Third one failed. I called the 1-800 number, and it asked me to read off (speak) my product ID. I did so, and then it responded with my registration code. Typed that in and clicked next, and I was registered yet again.
Here at work, we've used the 1-800 number a few times as well, and only once have I been transferred to an actual person. She simply asked for my product ID, and then gave me my registration code. No explanation or inquisition necessary.
If you ask me, this is how product activation/protection should work. Microsoft did it fairly right the first time around. If xx number of months/days/years has passed since the last install, the product should be allowed to be reactivated without a problem.
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
But ... but ... but ... Microsoft did this years ago (minus .net). Or am I really the only one who remembers the version of Outlook implemented entirely using DHTML/HTA (which produces native widgets). I can't remember the codename, but the project was scrapped. The benefits of running Outlook inside IE just were not compelling enough to overcome the performance and other problems.
It's called Outlook Web Access, and it's pretty damn slick.
I have Exchange 2003 installed on my home servers, so I can get access to my mail, notes, calendar, contacts, from anywhere on the internet. It works almost exactly as though I'm running Outlook 2003, only within an IE browser.
I have trouble understanding your contradictory stances. The difference in performance between C and, say, Java is unimportant, but the time to parse XML is a deal breaker? I would rather parse 10 pages of xml on startup than wait for the JVM to fire up. Of course, if you are arguing for C++ or some other compiled OO language, there is still more of a performance hit compared to a lower level language than there is in parsing a few extra lines of text. (Just to clarify my own position, I favor low level non-OO languages and despise XML...)
Boys from the City. Not yet caught by the Whirlwind of Progress. Feed soda pop to the thirsty pigs.
That must be the one and only thing that M$ have done right!
I'm inclined to agree with the grandparent and disagree with you. When I first tried Linux in 1998 I got my ass handed to me. I actually *was* still running DOS and Win3.11 (my computer was very slow), so the comparison is analogous to your own. While I agree with your list of advantages Linux had over Windows, the things which posed a problem to me far outweighed the benefits.
Thing is, if you look at these shortcomings, they are the same complaints you hear to today. Only today, we are light-years ahead of where we were, and the momentum we're gaining is accelerating our progress exponentially. All of the above points are borderline on being completely solved, and since I don't see any reason for us to stop improving we will inevitably be better than Microsoft.
Most computer users aren't Aunt Tillie, and they don't feel any particular loyalty to MS. I am confident that, when presented with a better alternative, they will switch.
All that aside, you seem to be talking about Enterprise Development Platforms (is this what the Gnome language debate is all about?), and I really have no idea what the hell any of that stuff is. All the real programs I've ever used on any platform were your standard fair C/C++ deals, and that's what I myself write. When people start talking about Java, .NET, XUL, XPCOM, DOM, XBEL, CORBA, Bonobo, Components, Platforms... my eyes glaze over. What exactly is the debate about here? Do we need a VB for Linux or something?
I see XAML mentioned over and over again. I don't know about it in detail, but I do know there is a new Java technology that may come to compete with XAML: JavaServer Faces. It is a markup-agnostic server technology to ease web development.
I know it is not the same thing as XAML - but I think it may develop into an attractive solution when the problem you need to solve is : how do I create a thin user interface that does not need deployment.
Now is the time to get all the bugs out of the configuration and installation tools, fix the man pages, sort out the XF86Config once and for all, and maybe simply set things up, where possible, by reading settings from previously installed Windoze, amongst other things. Configuration and installation tools are the weakest area of Linux, they don't seem to attract sufficient first-class developers, maybe because they seem to be boring, but that is the area which must get attention, and quickly.
And, my favourite complaint about every distro I have seen, uodates to the software must work on a dialup line with frequent interruptions. Every distro I have tried fails abysmally on this, some of the updates are very large, and if you can't get your security updates it is very serious indeed. By the time Longhorn appears, most of the world will still be on dialup, evidently all the developers and testers are on broadband and have not noticed the problem.
Fix these things and the rate of uptake of Linux will accelerate, don't fix them and it will fail, which will be a great tragedy for mankind.
One of the nice things about GNU/Linux, is that anybody can innovate with a new project. If a new file browser is innovative and well received than the idea could take off. Unfortunately, most end users, (at least non-technical office) have no idea how the file structure exists. I've known plenty of people that can't find something unless it's on their desktop. Yes, this is the same group that keeps opening up attachments from unknown emails. If we're talking about getting GNU/Linux on the desktop, more "user-friendly" is always better. The OSS community has an opportunity to really push ahead with new interfaces and applications, but the usability needs to improve first. One of the greatest strengths and weaknesses with GNU/Linux is the sheer number of choices. Even to an experienced end-user, the number of programs on a basic distribution can be overwhelming. Depending on the flavor, installing applications can be very daunting. I started playing around with distributions in early 1996, and in 8 years, the community has made great progress in the installation and usability of the platform. The more users we get, the more drivers we'll get from vendors. It's very frustrating that ATI hasn't been more helpful to the community, but the market share is so low that they don't bother too much. All and all, if the GNU/Linux community continues to improve the distributions for the desktop, it will only help. I'm not sure we want to end up with a free Windows clone, but Windows, OSX, BeOS, FreeBSD, etc.... all have features and advantages that could be used for inspiration.
I agree with most of what you say. My previous post about innovation was in response to "defining the game" by innovating. I just think a large company like Microsoft could swoop in and (control/screw up) the standards. That's not to say that I think the OSS community should stop coming up with new ideas at all.
Tech News, Reviews and Tutorials
First: looking at things from developers' perspective does not make any sense. These days the majority of PC users are not developers.
Second: MS won everything mostly due to their absolute commitment to backwards compatibility. It allowed them to survivie during Sux'95 days of BSOD and will allow them to survive the present security fever.
But that's nothing. What's important is DRM. Here is a probable scenario for the next decade: 1. DRMed Longhorn PCs become commonplace. 2. Most of the commercial content is accessible via DRMed PCs only. 3. Linux' chances to win a consumer desktop are dead once and for all.
I mean, commercial websites will not be accesible from nonDRMed Linux/Gnome/Mozilla PCs because those web sites will be happy to use DRM for: 1. blocking ad blockers 2. blocking "helpful" slashdotters from violating their copyrights.
And chances for a GPLed kernel to become compatible with that patented MS DRM stuff are zero.
Right?
Typical /. response. Just because of your own anecdotal experience, you assume those are the facts.
What, do you think I make this shit up?
Just because YOUR experience is a certain way doesn't mean it always happens like that. I have personally been asked for an explanation twice now and at my previous job, where we tested boards my boss called in and was asked also. He was actually pretty upset because I had just told him that he wouldn't be transferred to a real human (that was my experience then).
In fact, we had the guy inside our company that was in contact with MS figure out if there was anything we could do, because it's a real pain in the ass for companies that do a lot of testing on different boards/hardware etc.
MS came back and said no, nothing could be done, and we should just explain the situation every time we registered.
Linux won't overtake Windows for a while (I'm talking about home market only--server is another story).
Fair enough, I actually ment for me. In other words I expect Linux to be at a level where it makes sense for me to switch. That's all...
The real question though, is whether or not certain interests will be able to stifle the others, removing any impetus to improve. Personally, I don't think any company, no matter how large, can really do that indefinately. There will always be somebody waiting in the wings with that killer app.
Ah, the preview button, it's a love/hate relationship.
No matter how many of my rights are taken away, somehow I still don't feel safe. -Frigid Monkey
And --POOF-- Slashdot disappears in a cloud of irony.
-
Inventor of the term 'pardon my French'.
I suppose the idea of running a manual fsck would be beyond you as well.
I didn't know that running a manual fsck was so difficult! Trust me I did it many times on my pre-Reiser RedHat systems.
There really is only one solution to our current conumdrum: empirical testing. You should set up two systems, one DOS and one RedHat 5. Perform random system reboots while under normal desktop usage. Then report back to us.
I can guarantee you that this testing is mostly likely of more worth than either the time you spend mindlessly insulting people or your usual daily activities. Just post your results as a reply to this message.
I am using Firefox 0.8, and it does open a new browser window when you shift+click and a new tab if you Ctrl+click.
It also keeps Alt-D as the shortcut to the navigation bar.
I had tried switching before, but given up because of minor annoyances like changed keyboard shortcuts and less slickness than IE, but I switched to this version and haven't missed IE almost at all (I do miss the google toolbar slightly, but I think there is a project to replicate it).
If you haven't tried Mozilla/Firefox in a while, I'd suggest giving it another whirl when you have some free time.
The combination of tabbed browsing and the ability to bookmark all tabs to a folder or open all bookmarks in a folder to tabs can be a real time saver, too.
I do have one frustration that comes from my IE habits:
I really like the way they've implemented tabbed browsing, but I occassionally close the whole window when I just meant to close the open tab because of IE habits. Anyone know of a quick fix to prevent that or a way to get back my browser session after closing the browser?
Also, does anyone know if there is there a way to save a browsing session? I know you can bookmark all tabs to a folder, but I'd like to preserve the individual history threads for each tab.
I would rather parse 10 pages of xml on startup than wait for the JVM to fire up
Interesting point. Obviously, if you're starting up a lot of programs all the time like most UNIX coders, you don't want to open up a new JVM instance for each. I don't deal with piping or porting, so I didn't think about it...most of the programs I write are opened at 8:30 am and not closed until 5 pm. What you consider a program is more like a function to me...hence why you don't necessarily need OO.
In fact, I think that's the key to most of the pro-C, anti-OO sentiment. You're thinking of programs as things that start, perform a set process, and then end. I think of programs as things that start, and then do whatever the user tells them to do. To you, three separate user functions are performed by three programs called by a flow control program. To me, they're three separate functions of an object, or three functions in three separate objects, or one virtual function of an interface shared by all three -- depending on the context and the similarity of the functions and the data they operate on. Neither philosophy is more correct than the other, but OOP makes it a lot easier to make massive, consistant, ubiquitous GUI applications.
The other point is, why are we waiting for the JVM to start up before we can do anything? Shouldn't it already be loaded and shouldn't it be trivial to load our program with a new classloader or as a new thread on the current JVM? After all, that's how Tomcat and other servlet engines work. Why is there no applet engine? I mean, once the JVM or CLI becomes the operating system...like it did with PocketLinux...
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Really? I've worked at several companines that deployed their tools as web apps. If you have thousands of employees which is more cost effective: making them all download the new version of your tool and install in on their desktop (especially when they're not admins on their machines and can't install software), or upgrading the (single) version on your intranet servers, allowing most employees to suddenly have the new version without having to do anything? Just because you don't use them doesn't mean there is "no demand".
I'd rather be lucky than good.
If you're really getting hassled like that, then don't bother explaining to the low level support person. Tell them you'd like to speak with their supervisor, or someone higher up who will elevate your problem. Start a support ticket, that sort of thing, etc..
Also, the reason you provide (hardware testing) is a bit lacking. Windows XP will operate fully for 30 (or maybe 15? I don't remember right now..) days without being activated. If that's not enough time for you to perform your "testing", I would look into Microsoft's corporate licensing, or a subscription to MSDN, which would provide you with a copy of Windows XP that does not require activation.
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
Within a few years, GNUStep(*BSD, Linux) and Cocoa (Mac OS X) will make this topic moot.
If DOSemu were preinstalled with all distros and would have worked on all DOS-programs, you would be right, but at that time even installing a Linux distribution was a monumental task.
But the main point is that for some strange reason you have forgotten Windows 3.11, which was released in 1991 IIRC. Then there was Amiga and of course Apple, so yes, of course almost everybody had a GUI already, even Microsoft.
Of course DOS was still widespread, especially in the gaming market, but the market was going to GUIs and by 1994 everybody should have realized that.
In my opinion, the first viable Linux-desktop was KDE 2.0, which was released IIRC in 1999 or 2000.
Excuse me if this post is a little too pro-Microsoft, but you can't appreciate what Miguel is trying to say if your concepts of where Windows and .NET are going are flat out wrong:
... but ... but ... Microsoft did this years ago (minus .net). Or am I really the only one who remembers the version of Outlook implemented entirely using DHTML/HTA (which produces native widgets). I can't remember the codename, but the project was scrapped. The benefits of running Outlook inside IE just were not compelling enough to overcome the performance and other problems.
.NET/Avalon is. The Framework provides the fine-grained security needed for safe distributed applications, it comes will a very robust development environment, and Avalon is now fully part of the operating system, enabling it to do all the application-level things that DHTML from IE could never do.
.NET security to know how it compares, but SELinux policy is easily distributable in the form of text files and allows you use native code, which runs directly on the CPU without the overhead of a VM and huge set of managed APIs.
.NET code doesn't run under a VM, at least in the way you normally think of a VM. MSIL was designed to be never executed, and in fact, it never is; .NET code is all JITted directly to native code that simply calls into a runtime library for the rare times it needs to do something it can't JIT. Even the Framework APIs are all JITted. That's how .NET languages can achieve the same level of performance you'd have gotten by writing directly in native C. And it's security infrastructure is more flexible than SELinux, simply because of the fact that the native code came from the JIT, so that even the native code itself can be trusted in certain ways.
But
The reason there was performance problems with DHTML Outlook was because they were trying to shoehorn an application on top of a system designed to do web browsing. This is clunky at best, but when it works it does give you the holy grail of a zero-install application. The problem is that the UI through the browser was never intended for application use, and that the scripting/code interfaces were weighted in the same way. XUL suffers largely from the same problems, which is why you're not seeing widespread adoption of Mozilla as an application platform.
Now, suppose they took the same zero-install goal, and built the UI and code engine from the ground up to support it. That's exactly what
Interestingly, that's also the same reason Microsoft decided to go with XAML instead of SVG, not just because Microsoft hates standards. SVG is designed with images in mind, not interactive applications. Rather than shoehorn in SVG as a non-optimal solution, they took what they needed from it and built their own schema -- much like how the Mozilla team created XUL rather than just use HTML. Read some Longhorn blogs and you'll find the developers go into detail as to exactly why SVG alone wouldn't have cut the mustard.
I don't know enough about
NO CARRIER
(a.k.a. ClearType) is a good thing indeed for LCDs. Available on Linux.
Hmm. I think we are looking at different issues here than your comparison to computing in the eighties.
.DOC, and IE only websites, and Miquel's blog addresses the issue of this continuing to happen with .NET and Longhorn, and trying to beat them to it, and make their items work on other platforms.
I think there is a valid point to be made about people having choices, and letting the use different systems for their own different uses.
But what is being addressed right now is that people are going to want choices AND standards. People want to be able to write a document and be able to distribute it to anyone and let them edit it, whether they are using Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, BSD, or any other choice of OS/hardware combination that comes about. PDF is good for distributing a document that can't be editted, but not one that can, obviously.
People should be able to create websites/web applications that will run on any of these platforms.
That is where the idea of standards comes in, and this is what is being discussed.
Microsoft comes up with their own standard
anyhow, i shifted to avant, which was cool, but it was annoying because it couldnt do simple stuff like remember the order of the tabs when you closed / reopened it.
then on a hunch i tried out myie2(.com). it is free, like avant, and has equal development pace, but all of those 'little' things that should be in avant have actually made it into myie2. avant was missing some simple java based content filter stuff, but myie2 worked fine filtering the same content. also, i've found that myie2 uses less resources and just seems quicker overall.anyhow, its definitely worth checking out if you're among those who stick with windows (for whatever reason).
this sig was brought to you by the letter
"There's no reason for me or anyone else to buy Longhorn EVER."
Either you are promoting piracy (no reason to BUY), or you know nothing about Longhorn.
Which is it? My guess is that the extent of your Longhorn knowledge is based on whatever paranoid posts you read on Slashdot.
If you are going to be "anti" something, at least know what you are railing against. Go spend some time at:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/longhorn
Read the articles and whitepapers (not just the headlines). Learn what the Longhorn vision is really about. Read about WinFS and Avalon. WinFS isn't just a database filesystem and Avalon isn't just XUL/SVG/whatever.
Who knew that an icon was the missing embrace-and-extension? There may come to pass a modified Mozilla installer that performs this bit of magic.
and C++/CLI is developing an actual standard. Many people avoid Java because they don't like the language, and Java may never have an open standard. As much as I don't like MS, they're doing a lot right with .NET.
My main problem with MS is that I don't buy their vision. I don't want the future they're selling. They also tend to produce vastly overcomplicated solutions to problems, which sometimes makes me wonder how the company manages to continue its growth rate. What I don't want is for competitors to copy MS. I choose competing products over MS stuff because I prefer those differences. Why should I use a poor clone of something I don't like in the first place?
It's not a clone, it's an evironment that allows portable code. That is one of the points of .NET; with a written VM, the code can run on anything. Like Java, except Microsoft isn't writing the VM's for other platforms, it's down to the users, hence Miguel.
That's just like Java. MS wrote the VM for Windows, and of course didn't write the VM for other platforms. What was the result? Their version deliberately broke compatability, and Sun sued them so they couldn't call their broken implementation Java anymore. Thus J++, a language with a future (snicker).
That's exactly what is going to happen with Mono. Only this time, WHEN * MS breaks compatability with Mono there's nobody to sue since MS is the one defining the "standard".
The impact of Mono is going to be this: applications written for Mono will run on Unix and Windows (and Mac, and...). Applications written for MS's implementation will run on Windows and... Windows.
* Can anyone honestly tell me that this isn't going to happen? Is there anything where they haven't at least tried this strategy? Java, SMB, HTML, AFS...
The enemies of Democracy are
If you're really getting hassled like that, then don't bother explaining to the low level support person. Tell them you'd like to speak with their supervisor, or someone higher up who will elevate your problem. Start a support ticket, that sort of thing, etc..
;)
Not hassled enough to elevate it, but I think it's still a pain in the ass. They will give you the code after explaining...
Also, the reason you provide (hardware testing) is a bit lacking. Windows XP will operate fully for 30 (or maybe 15? I don't remember right now..) days without being activated.
Still think I'm making this shit up, uh?
We worked on boards for embedded systems. Part of the testing is the retention of BIOS settings when the battery is removed. Well, if you remove the battery, then the time is lost. Guess what happens if you accidentally allow Windows to boot through?
Combine testing certain functions under Windows with the about 20 tests or so that require the CMOS to be removed and you can see that it won't take long before the current XP installation get's screwed up (and you have to register or re-install).
I would look into Microsoft's corporate licensing, or a subscription to MSDN, which would provide you with a copy of Windows XP that does not require activation.
The corporate licensing was apparently not available to us (maybe because we were 60 people). The MSDN subscription sounds interesting and I'm curious why the guy that worked for us that investigated our options didn't find out about that.
Will there be a new website to download them from, or will they be on the Mono site, or the Novell site...?
But, since you asked, I don't think that the comment from 'squiggeslash' contains irrational hatred (assuming that's the original post you mean). In fact, I think it's dead-on, in that most linux pundits don't want choice, they want to construct their own replacement monopoly, which will suddenly become A Good Thing. I know that most of them figure that linux et al can't be a monopoly because of its alleged freeness, but the dissection of that is so lengthy that I'll just say, "Incorrect."
FOSS, as far as I am concerned, is the feminism of the IT world (ironic, no?). Most hardcore feminists claim that it's merely a desire to end centuries of patriarchal oppression and attain equality, yet are not satisfied until it patriarchal thinking is replaced by the same thing in reverse. Women, in their estimation, should be placed above men in importance in the name of their pursuit (Read Vandana Shiva's "The Impoverishment of the Environment: Women and Children Last" for an example). This is equality? How?
I see the same thing in the Slashdot world. Microsoft is bad, bad, bad, and anyone who chooses their products is degraded and called stupid. These people constantly talk about 'tricking' unsuspecting luddites into using non-Microsoft products, certain that they won't notice the difference while still offering another tick on the bedpost of the FOSS revolution! Whether they notice isn't really the point, though, is it? By sneaking something else in there, they've removed the luddite's choice. Let me guess, "They're not educated enough in the matter to make a proper choice." Doesn't matter.
Despite the nasal whine around this place, FOSS isn't the best choice for everyone in all cases, or even in many cases. Yet, anything from a proprietary source is immediately bad, despite the fact that it may do the job better than a free alternative. Having read Slashdot for what is approaching six years, I have a hard time believing that a wish to offer choice is behind any of this.
-
Inventor of the term 'pardon my French'.
Well put, but there are counterpoints.
.NET based, so we have no way of accessing them from a Linux desktop. Think banking, voting, major online shopping. This could slow Linux desktop adoption both at home and in the office.
.NET train is coming whether we like it or not. Calling yourself a leader and marching off in a different direction won't even be noticed by the majority.
The entertainment products are not a good analogy, because interoperability is not an issue there. Miguel fears a future in which critical services may become
Miguel's central point is that the
Turn it around and look at Samba. That's a case of following Microsoft's weird, often broken protocols. Painful, right? Should the energy have been put into better network file systems and print protocols? No. We need that interop greatly. Without Samba, many Linux deployments would not be possible.
Remember, Microsoft loved Samba when they were trying to catch up with Unix servers in credibility. They started hating it when they gained dominance. They correctly reasoned that when you're weak, you want to interoperate, but when you're strong you want to blaze your own trail and shut out competitors.
It really doesn't talk to applications well, unfortunately. Just because it now WORKS doesn't mean it works well! It's still better than JAWS + windows ($3000!!) though.
As others before me have said, EMACSspeak is widely considered the way to go by blind Linux users, or at least the more advanced ones.
Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
-- Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
>There's not one thing that 2000 Pro can do that XP Pro can't, and XP Pro can do a hell of a lot more.
Like crash. And run a buggy, slow network stack. And generally be a pain in the arse to enlightened computer users anywhere.
Let's face it, Windows is just for games!
Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
-- Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
Microsoft is bad, bad, bad, and anyone who chooses their products is degraded and called stupid.
As a Microsoft product user for nearly 30 years (I used their Z80 Assembler in the 70s), and having been in the IT business for over 20, I think that this is a pretty reasonable statement.
"You should set up two systems, one DOS and one RedHat 5. Perform random system reboots while under normal desktop usage. Then report back to us."
While we are at it why don't we test which one will cause more bodily damage: Jumping off of a speeding big wheel or jumping off of a speeding motorcycle? Sound stupid? So didn't your "empirical" test.
The central debate here is about how to best use F/OSS development resources (people and code). The assumption seems to be that everyone who cares about F/OSS should come together on a single strategy for dealing with Microsoft. But a monoculture within the F/OSS community is exactly what we're fighting against in Microsoft! Must we become the enemy to defeat the enemy?
Most F/OSS developers want to see GNU/Linux succeed in the sense of becoming a widespread desktop alternative. Those who bother thinking about why they want this are most likely to come up with a fundamental reason: choice.
Survival for GNU/Linux is a question of the niches it is able to successfully occupy. For the moment these niches include the desktops of F/OSS developers and Internet server farms. The problem with the general user desktop niche is first that it's not really a niche per se, but more importantly, it's completely dominated by Microsoft. GNU/Linux is like a small mammal running around near the end of the age of dinosaurs. What it has going for it is adaptibility. Rather than give up adaptibility and become just another dinosaur, GNU/Linux needs to find another way to occupy the general desktop niche.
What I'd like to suggest is that the desktop niche really needs to be bifurcated in such a way that GNU/Linux can survive there as a small mammal, without needing to become a dinosaur. That is, it needs a place on the desktop where it can run without necessarily displacing Windows. One way this could be done is though a Windows port of User Mode Linux, but that's not really going far enough in my opinion.
What is really needed is an OSS virtual machine monitor (VMM) for PCs, under control of which both Windows and GNU/Linux (and any other OS!) could run separately and equally. Vmware shows what this might look like, but with Vmware the host operating system runs along side the VMM rather than on top of it. It sort of achieves "separate" but not "equal".
The problem with current approaches to PC VMMs is that they suffer from certain architectural limitations in virtualizing the CPU. These limitations probably could have been eliminated several hardware generations ago, were it not for the unholy alliance of Microsoft and Intel. But there is some hope that that alliance could be broken, if AMD would implement virtualizability in its CPUs and/or IBM would apply carrots and sticks to Intel on behalf of GNU/Linux.
The ultimate goal is freedom to innovate from the lowest levels of software on up. This can only be truely achieved by a complete OSS platform, as access to the source is what enables the kind of innovation that does not require reinventing the wheel when something at a lower level doesn't work the way you want it to. On the other hand, some F/OSS developers may be perfectly happy developing on top of Windows or some OS-independent application platform. Indeed, there's no reason to believe that .NET isn't "good enough" for some of them.
Fair enough. You are right that most programs with which I deal are targeted single-function programs. Were my environment different there may be changes in my approach. However, I do have to disagree with your comment concerning tomcat et. al. Even with a running application server, I have noticed a remarkable lag in response time. At low loads it is not that significant, but under a heavy load I have noticed the overhead of interpreted languages such as java (or perl) can significantly reduce performance.
Boys from the City. Not yet caught by the Whirlwind of Progress. Feed soda pop to the thirsty pigs.
Those days are over. These days everything needs to be connected. When your DVD disc doesn't play on your operating system; when your bank doesn't support your browser; when your favourite games isn't compatible with your system, there is no choice. Was not GNU/Linux a clone of the same standards the proprietrary Unices were built around?
Read closely: There is no choice if there is no interoperability.
As much as you despise those in the FOSS community who clone software, they do it for a legitimate reason and so form a vital part of our strategy wresting control from Microsoft.
Get over it. Spend more time promoting projects you value than criticising projects you don't understand.
If you have a slow machine, the difference between Windows 2000 and XP is blantantly obvious.
You won't need to run any benchmarking software, as you will instinctively feel the difference. Windows 2000 will be responsive, with each key press and mouse click getting immediate feedback.
In comparison, you can learn a lot about how Windows is structured by running XP on the very same machine. Pressing the START button becomes a two-minute adventure in line drawing, area filling, and icon placement.
Being the smart guy I am, I stripped XP of every cycle-burning animation and needless graphical add-on that advanced tabs in option windows gave me, but I never, ever was able to get XP to run as quickly as 2000.
This discovery was quite a disappointment for me. When I first bought Windows 2000 to replace Windows 95, my machine became faster and more responsive. When I installed XP, I thought the same thing would happen. How wrong I was.
(For those who are interested, the "slow machine" I talk about was an overclocked 266MHz, Pentium with MMX machine with a 2GB SCSI drive, 192MB SDRAM, and an AGP video card on a FIC VIA-chipset motherboard.)
Of course, if you've bought yourself some computing powerhouse, sure, burn your cycles.
I've never used Java or .NET for anything serious, but one of the things I like about what I've heard about .NET is that you can interface managed and unmanaged code at the class / object level.
.NET I can still use C++ if I want to and even combine them to get the best of both worlds. With Java it's all or nothing. Not everyone is starting a new project from scratch... That's definitely one of the reasons Java never caught on with me...
My understanding is that to integrate Java with my 1 million lines of existing C++ code I would have to provide C wrappers (lose all the OO) for that code.
Has any progress been made in that respect or am I just behind the times w/r/t Java? I'm not really inclined to un-OO this code by providing a C wrapper and there's no way I'd ever have time to rewrite the whole thing in Java.
With
And one of the not-so-nice things about Linux is that everybody can innovate with a new project, forking the needs of the OSS community into dozens and dozens of little incomplete pieces, with massive duplicated efforts. Which dissipates a lot of energy and scatters the 'needs' of the community for a few good, complete applications.
resigned
This public emphasis on IT oriented solutions and security must be a smoke screen by MS. What makes an OS usable is excellent support for very fast basic services so that new and powerful applications can be developed. The applications that really matter are not the browser connecting you to your bank -- that will easily become a commodity. The applications that matter are the hard ones, like Avid Media Composer, or Photoshop, or Autocad, or Maya.
.NET or mono are very low value -- they can be easily outsourced or duplicated as commodities. What the OS community is neglecting is support for very high value low level applications; applications that need fast direct IO and proprietary data structures -- applications that will not tolerate managed environments. Pointers and low level access exist for a very strategic reason.
Any products based on
The idea (in the 50's, 60's, 70's, and 80's) was that as hardware gets faster, the environment will improve for the user, NOT for the programmer. Programs are supposed to get smarter as hardware increases in power. But we are using the increase in power to make the programmers job easier. This is so misguided.
The first successful "personal" platform for difficult applications was the Macintosh. In 1985 the Mac had quickdraw and a useable direct display graphics interface. X11 was saddled with the prohibitively slow client/server interface and proprietary direct graphics APIs. Consequently the Macintosh became the platform of choice for hard media applications, and it is still the only computer in most post production houses in Hollywood (I've worked in post production in LA for the last couple of years), despite the ballyhoo about linux in the renderfarm.
The Mac has practically owned the difficult media market since 1984 because it provided powerful and simple direct I/O support, so that rich high-value applications could be more easily created.
MS, DOS, and windows recieved their power from IBM. IBM choose MS DOS for their first PC, which became influential in 1985 thru 1987 -- pushing out CPM/Motorola 68000 based systems. The PC/MS DOS was selected because it was IBM, not because it was MS. At this time Apple was for the hobby desktop, IBM was for serious IT, and CPM was the serious IT oriented PC. IBM/MS DOS replaced CPM, but it did not replace the Mac. MS/PC did not become viable as a serious GUI application platform until windows 95. But from the beginning Windows had a direct useable display model and was practically superior to X11 for high performance apps. It was the LACK of security and abstraction that made Windows better.
Over the past eight years many apps have transitioned from the Mac and from proprietary Unix based display API onto Windows. Autocad moved from Unix onto windows. Avid DV works well under windows. Photoshop is excellent under windows (and [sorry] is much faster than the gimp.)
I believe that we in the OS community are loosing track of what matters. If I want to write a serious application -- a very smart application with heavy GUI interactivity -- what do I use? Should I use SDL? Why do I have to tunnel through the C/S metaphor? Why *is* there a C/S metaphor for an OS that wants to become a choice for the "desktop"? Should not something other that X be the standard GUI for a desktop system?
Where are the serious applications for Linux? Instead of Avid media composer there is Cinelerra. Instead of Photoshop there is GIMP, which is the best thing OS has produced, but (be honest) -- it does not compare in terms of feel with Photoshop. GIMP does not snap. Where is Autocad for Linux?
Why all this emphasis on low value applications? Dot NET based development might as well be outsourced. If you don't need to code an efficient pointer based data structure maybe you should look for a new job. What OS/Linux needs to do is become the platform of choice for the SMARTEST and most cutting edge of applications.
As it stands right now I cannot even simply change my
While you got moderated as a troll, but I actually agree with you. Cringley is right.
The OSS community needs to worry less about implementation MS clones and look more at innovation. For example PHP - it's a great at what it does and has had a major impact on the web.
An example that hasn't taken off yet, but is relevant to this article, is "thinlets" (www.thinlet.com). I saw this project and thought... Wow this could really mean rich GUI apps deployed by the web....
The number of Java developers continues to grow, and Java continues to evolve and improve. New projects continue to chose Java over "rival" technologies. I could rabbit on, but I'd just sound like a Java salesman.
Personally, I don't use Java but I do use it at work for specific purposes. It's not a panacea, and nothing is, however it's a very powerful and useful tool.
More and more people are looking to move away from Windows, either to the Mac or Linux and are considering Java. With the power of todays machines, performace isn't an issue.
If you're deploying a critical application, you can take the time and trouble to chose your JRE and deploy it on the clients as required.
Anyway, I'm not a serious Java developer, but I know people who are.
The pundits tend to overemphasise it's percieved disadvantages.
Stick Men
I do use them. I do not prefer them.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
What version of DirectX did Windows 2000 ship with? I think it was way behind or something. Games and other multimedia apps weren't very good...
.Net in *nix, those developers already fluent with .Net can make an easy transition... Also, IMHO ASP.Net is probably the best web environment to work in.. why, it simply works... Getting even tomcat setup is more involved that getting ASP.Net going...
It shipped with, iirc, the current version as of the rc1 release... it is also able to be upgraded to the current version, as even XP doesn't come with the current DirectX, beyond this, most games will install a newer version if needed.
What was the cost? If I remember correctly, didn't Win2000 cost more than Win ME and Win XP?
OEM Pricing for Win2K Pro is about the same as WinXP Pro.
Win2000 boots up slower than Win XP.
Win XP has better sleep mode, and other power consuming features.
Well, simply put, it was more designed for this, however, I almost never reboot, and tend to not have my computer sleep... why, because I usually have stuff running in the background, I want to stay running... blank screen is about as far as I go..
As for *most* home users, XP is probably a better choice, I don't like all the Fischer Price changes to the interface.. I liked a more simple interface... once in a while I will use litestep, when I want something more refined.
As to the original topic, I think that being at least as friendly to setup/change, and modify a system is important... ever installed linux to find that you selected the wrong mouse, or that your sound driver detected doesn't work, or any number of other things. (sorry, have to drop out of the GUI, and change these, and good luck finding examples out there searching for "linux change mouse driver" or "x11 change mouse" or anything similar...) Wanting to install a newer audio driver... oops, obscure programming library not installed... 6 hours later.. woah, yeah, sound works.. in windows, I could have watched 3 dvd's by then.
Don't get me wrong, linux is improving a *lot* in usability, and for most, it is a great environment for corporate use, on the desktop... improvements in RAD environments are needed.. by implimenting
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
What are you talking about?
Mac OS 8/9 worst ever? Unstable? My Mac OS 9.2.2 install was pretty rock solid on my rock solid hardware Pismo PowerBook AND my Twentieth Anniversary Mac and my iMac and my eMac and ALL of my client's machines.
At first, I hated OS X - even now panther presents MANY problems - like sleep and boot issues. Now I can't live without Mac OS X.
You certainly are in the minority in your opinion, I think you meant to say XP just caught up to OS 9.
And by the way, OS 8.6 is the most stable OS Apple has EVER put out with the smallest memory requirement. 8.6 can also be tweaked with appearance themes, hacks, control panels and extensions to almost mimic OSX.
OSX Theme
SmoothText
ADock
PowerWindows (menu/window transparency)
Steve's Browser (column views)
8.1 is rock solid on 68040 hardware and can be tweaked through hacks/control panels to resemble 9.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
I found this thread of troll posts in metamod and rated ech one of you.
Macs RUN EVERYTHING important and ALL popular games have almost ALWAYS been on the Mac too. There have always been a bazillion forms of solitare and minesweeper and Macs have ALWAYS been [and remain] superior in CD burning, Photoshop, and content creation.
"Windows boxes" have NEVER [and still aren't] 1/2 the cost of EQUIVALENT PCs. The people that buy bargain bin PCs for >$500 are just outright foolish and the people that buy greater than 4 year old PCs have more headaches [and should be seriously concerned about licensing issues].
Right now Macs are actually LESS than PCs. If you decked out an equivalent PC to an eMac with a 17" monitor, like graphics card, like programs, like keyboard - you would be at about a $1000 PC for the $799 eMac
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny