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"Missing Link" In Windows Emulation Unveiled?
ben_ writes "According to this article on inq7.net, a Philippines company called SpecOps has revealed their Project David, a middleware layer that solves the problem Wine has been working at for years and will "enable all major Microsoft Windows applications to run on the free and open source Linux OS".
Further (and more sceptical) analysis at Linux Electrons." I'm with Linux Electrons on this; as nice as it sounds, the information about David comes via Press Release which as we all know are founts of dependability *cough*.
They do a very good job of debunking it. Its Crap. Don't believe evrything you read.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Hopefully this isn't a result of the supposed 'leaked' code awhile back. If it was, and Microsoft finds out, it could set them back twice as far as they've come.
All jokes aside, BSODs are very very few and far between (certainly on the *nix scale) since 2k/XP was released. Before 2k/XP most people blammed microsoft when in reality it was buggy drivers. Now with the new driver model these instances of drivers crashing the kernel are rather rare. When a company claims to have found a "bug" which was a relativly well-known design decision they have lost most all credibility. This is either a pump-and-dump scheme, vaporware or an instance of code stealing.
Comments on the article website seem to suggest that this *may* be a re-engineer of the Win32 api based on the stolen win2k codebase.
The phillipines is not known for its strict adherence to interlectual properties laws.
Actually, would this even be illegal?
If the codebase was stolen in the US, looked at in the phillipines and a program written based on that looking, would the program be legal in the US or not?
And what about elsewhere in the world?
Official GOD FAQ.
Hello,
this announcement reminds me of waht Lindows told us back then. I mean 100% Windows compatibility and such. The linked article seems quite ridiculous to me.
I mean "while all those projects emulating windows inherit the windows specific problems like instability, out new implementation does not contain those, thus is stabler then windows".
This is just another WINE-ripoff combined with good PR. Don't believe a thing!
Philip
It's easy too make promises and say that "this is gonna revolutionize evrything" but these claims have been made before by many companies...when someone makes a claim with nothing to back it up it should be worthless until it is backed up...Microsoft has been doing this from they 1 and look at the quility of the software they provide...it would be nice to have compatibility ...i mean windows has great *nix compatibility with cygwin...we have wine thats a very nice peace of software in my opinion...thanks to them we can run key apps on a non windows platform...we shall see where this project goes but not before there is some solid backup of what they are claiming..
"David is currently 25% completed with the Systems Design Phase of development."
... high on hyperbole with little to no substance.
If this works, great. Going through there website doesn't fill me with any confidence.
Very reminiscint of Infinium Labs [www.infiniumlabs.com]
One to watch, yes; but really, don't hold your breath.
Apparently, you don't even need to install it! What will they think of next...
the entire statement is "the release will be," "the product will be," "in development."
so basically someone identified a market and said "Hey, there's money to be made in reinventing the wine wheel. let's do it!"
"You worthless post!"
-Shakespeare, 2 Gentlemen of Verona, 1. 1. 147
If this is a silver bullet app, then why does it only work on 'major' apps???
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
The story is such a joke, where do they get these reporters? They don't do the most elementary fact checking, just take whatever the one source tells them, put it in pyramid form and make sure they have a couple of money lines. It's such piss-poor work.
This thing is obviously a scam of some kind. It's not going to be an OS in a browser, they didn't correct MS design flaws while reverse-engineering the whole windows API, etc. IOW most of the article is wrong or insane. This may as well be about orgone boxes.
As a native english speaking engineer who lives and works in Japan, I'd have to say that reading the website for SpecOps reads very much like it was written by an engineer for whom English is a second language.
... it's so often the case that when you do an analysis like Linux Electrons did on the wording of their claims, you rely on the english used to be exactly what the speaker meant. And engineers / technology people are spectacularly good at misusing technical words in second languages.
And one thing I've learnt the hard way again and again here is that usually it's not worth analyzing such text in such detail when this is the case. The reason is simple
Not making any comment on the technology itself, just that it's kinda misleading to treat such a piece of text so literally.
Servlet v2.4 container in a single 161KB jar file ? Try Winstone
I am not sure that MS would want to do anything about this. They aren't going to stop Linux, maybe slow it down , but not stop it, and I think they are smart enough to know that. If David actually passes puberty without dying, it would give MS another platform to sell their products on. Secondly it would give publishers little reason to spend time porting their code to Linux when they on't need to. That in itself might play well into MS's hand. This could be a double edged sword.
In any case, vapourware announcement sometimes preceded by some years the real Microsoft products, maybe their part of emulation includes that behaviour too.
The web page says it all. The 'solution' is for "Linux" whereas wine will run on FreeBSD and all the various GNU/Linux forks.
When specopslabs gets a product that can run on BSD and GNU/Linux, then they have something. Until then, WINE works better, because at least it WORKS.
Trying to port legacy AIP's from Windows to Linux is a waste of time; especially if all you know about the API's is the external interfaces. I am sure MS's Programs use plenty of "Internal/Undocumented" features.... Since MS Based coding is moving to .NET does it not make since to support any software written in fully managed .NET code? That's where project Mono comes in. I think that when Linux runs .NET code transparently that will be when it becomes "Main Stream"...
They have time to do what noone has effectively been able to do (make complete win32 emulation possible on open platforms) but they don't have time to make a simple webpage? Their home page says under construction.
I smell bullshit.
hrrm.
True. But my 2000 and XP machines (at work) routinely have to be rebooted because they come to a crawl, or freeze. Is it the OS to blame, or the apps I am running? That is a rhetorical question - the cause of the reboot doesn't matter. This doesn't even count required reboots for software installs/patches, which are common. Just because there is no BSOD doesn't necessarily mean it is stable. Is XP more stable than Win98? Yes. Does it still have acceptable stability? Yes. Would I consider it to be a stable OS? Nope. If Windows was all I knew, I would probably say yes.
And not to be cliche, but my Linux machine at home, which I use on a daily basis, has been up for 79 days. I have had a few Xwindows crashes and freezes, but the OS is still running.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Sorry, but gimp is not even CLOSE to a replacement for photoshop. Is it a nice image editor? Sure. But there's no way it can compete with PS at this time.
That is the *one* thing that is keeping me from being Windows free at this point. I've found open source replacements for everything else I use and look forward to gimp being able to do the things I need to do in PS so I can make the switch. I'm rooting for it.
You're being needlessly pedantic, and you're probably wrong by your own definition anyhow. There's no one solid definition of "operating system", but a distro is way more than an operating system: a distro is an operating system plus an application suite -- usually a very extensive one. Probably the minimum that you'd call "operating system" is the Linux kernel booting into Busybox or similar.
Your own citation of dictionary.com on your "complete rant" disagrees with you. "The low-level software which handles the interface to peripheral hardware, schedules tasks, allocates storage, and presents a default interface to the user when no application program is running
/ The foundation software of a machine; that which schedules tasks, allocates storage, and presents a default interface to the user between applications"
Default interface to the user? Sounds like a shell to me.
So there you go -- operating system = kernel + shell. (One could argue for a bootloader as well)
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
you are wrong. Unless you are siding with Microsoft on the antitrust trial. Doesn't anyone remember that IE is *NOT* part of the operating system. Neither is office, Windows Media Player, or GDI.
Just like gtk+, glibc, bash, Mozilla, GAIM, and KDE are not part of the operating system. They are software applications and libraries built on top of the operating system (or used to build the OS with, in the case of glibc.)
An operating system is the program that determines how the software interacts with the hardware (operates.) It's really very simple to understand.
DOS stands for "disk operating system" because it is an API and drivers for reading from/writing to a disk. There were additional tools (a shell) built into COMMAND.COM, but not all of them were part of the "operating system" even though they were in the same binary file. Just because a bunch of bytes are stored in contiguous sectors on a disk does not make them the same thing.
Linux is an operating system. With or without GNOME bundled. Windows includes an operating system.
Keep in mind that I'm speaking from a mile-in-the-sky standpoint. I have no personal knowledge of ANY of what I've been talking about here, I'm just passing along info from much more knowledgeable people.
:-)
That said, are you *sure*? Everything I have read suggests that Win32 is just a personality, and that the NT kernel can easily support others. (If Microsoft weren't so concerned about maintaining their monopoly, there might be other personalities for sale already.) I don't know exactly where the dividing line is, but windows managed in the kernel seems like it would badly violate that premise. Are you, perhaps, confusing the Win32 personality with the kernel? Are you looking deeply enough?
The 'don't need a copy of Windows' part just doesn't parse to me. If they're trying to replace the kernel, that's fine, but they have to get the Win32 personality from somewhere. The only legal way to get it is from Windows. If they're actually trying to replace Win32, then it's truly vapor... WINE hasn't managed it in 10+ years, I don't think they're going to do it in two months.
Let's assume for a minute all these claims are true and they have the perfect windows emulation for linux.
This is commercial development. They aren't going to open this code and it's not going to be free.
Like most commercial vendors they will be greedy of course and price it high, instead of dirt cheap like they need it.
If they price the oem non volume (or maybe even 10 pack) at about $5-15 then this will be a big winner all around. They will sell millions(or even billions) of copies and make a great return on their invesstment, every linux pc will be preloaded with this thing. Every linux user will have a copy.
On the other hand, if they are greedy like most companies and want more than that... all the sudden linux is as expensive or more so than windows per copy (like with crossover office). Vendors are going to sell box sets, not download distros and a box set is going to cost about $60-80, again simply too expensive. If this thing is even $20 and is basically prerequisite (and it would be) then it's just as expensive as windows.
Nope, our best hope is that this company has real technology, goes bankrupt and gpl's their code with their dying breath. It will do us little good for the same reason crossover office hasn't done nearly as much as it should... crossover office alone costs nearly as much per license as windows. If you combine it will a box distro it's more than an OEM XP Pro, let alone home.
I don't see anything on SpecOpsLabs site that talks about the fact that WINE falls under the LGPL. Rather they state, "Instead of simply using the WINE project as our basis, David has incorporated into its architecture the best features of all the windows compatibility projects such as WINE, WABI, TWIN and the others. David therefore is not a reinvention of the wheel. Rather, it takes the best of breed pieces from previous attempts to simulate the Windows Subsystem, and integrate it into a single product."
To the extent that this "incorporation" consists of copying over big blocks of code from WINE, this might raise some intricate legal issues. According to WineHQ, the copyright in WINE is held by the "WINE Project Authors," who now number over 600 people. I'm not sure exactly how such a large, disparate group of developers will be able to defend their copyright if it comes to that. Perhaps they should consider transferring copyright to the FSF, or setting up some nonprofit corporate entity to hold the rights?
If we want a genuinely user-friendly word processor (as opposed to one that gives the illusion of user-friendliness by imitating MS Word---which is still a useful goal, kudos to those doing it), we should not add more complexity. We should have a simple, nice looking word processor that does the basics that most people use and does not let you do more. I know that's controversial, but I think if you let it export to formats readble by more fully-featured editors it can be acceptable. You won't need to worry about people aligning things with spaces, you just need to configure the thing (by default) not to put in more than one space, and to provide an unobtrusive explanation for this odd behavior.
I'm not talking about adding complexity, I'm talking about concealing it. I wouldn't want to use it for everything, but I know some people who would love to have an easy text editor that produced good-looking output.
Here: GOOD UI DESIGN IS TASK BASED, NOT FEATURE BASED.
There! That's the whole secret! All that cool functionality you've written in software DOES NOT LINE UP ONE-TO-ONE WITH YOUR INTERFACE. There may be awesome, supremely powerful, thoroughly cool things you can do with your back-end. If they don't line up with what the user actually wants to do with your program, TOO BAD. Bury it in a menu someplace if you really need to scratch that itch. To cure cancer in your text editor, go to the Tools menu, click Options->Advanced, bring up the Diseases pane, then check the "Cure Cancer" box. Don't put it with all the important window managing shit. If curing cancer is so awesome, it should be in its own damned tool. Your user is there to edit text, not play fucking towers of hanoi.
There's this delicate balance, see, this eternal compromise, between power and usability. You want a powerful search tool? Geeks say, "Use regular expressions!" Users say, "I just want this to work." Enlightened developers say, "This is a hard problem."
Christ, use a Mac sometime. Notice how few options are given in preference windows, and yet how useful they all are. This is because they don't correspond to features. Notice how iTunes has a glowing "Burn CD" button in a prominent position.
Make your program do things that help the user solve the problem they want to solve. Make it do them all easily, in a straightforward and non-constraining manner. Then get someone to shoot you when you're done.
Sound difficult? It is!
What is the problem here? The problem here is that the application thinks indentation is one thing and the user thinks it is another. The application thinks spaces, tabs, and explicitly aligned text are different. The user thinks it lines up, therefore it works.
The solution? Certainly not to disable indentation! You *do* need to worry about people aligning things with spaces; this is easy for a human to do, and difficult for a computer. Allow the user a sane mental model.
(Pet peeve: Editors which differentiate between tabs and spaces. FUCK THAT. Pick one spacing representation to present to the user.)
Okay, so let's solve this fucker. We have two seperate things: Spatially aligned text, and spaces. The user sees: spaces. If we want to seperate these things in the user's mind, how about some sort of visual indicator? How about this: if the user has carefully aligned two lines in a row with spaces, decide that they might want the whole paragraph aligned?
Better yet, how about a word processor which is aware of the semantics of paragraphs, and allows you to mess with them? Right-click somewhere in the paragraph, click "Indent", and poof! Like fucking magic! It's really not that hard to determine where paragraphs are. Drag them around, toss them into columns, whatever. Bundle the thing with popular STANDARD formatting layouts for essays and screenplays and shit. If you can follow the Chicago Manual of Style without breaking a sweat in a word processor, then fuck yes, bring that shit on.
See, that's a _task_. Spacing is a _feature_. What I really want is something where I don't care about formatting until I do. And once I do, it should be dead simple to change. Seperate the content from the form.
There, how's that sound?
Why confine it to Windows 9x?
It switches the processor to 386 Protected mode and installs its own set of hardware, filesystem, network, and other drivers. It replaces the int 0x21 interface with its own. Applications use Windows 9X for access to system resources (ram, files, network, etc.)
By that standard, Windows 3.1 in 386 Enhanced Mode with 32-Bit Disk Access enabled was an operating system, too, back in 1992. It did all of that too.