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Microsoft Rep To Keynote Unix Conference
An anonymous reader writes "According to ZDNET Microsoft is going to be keynoting the Australian Unix and Open Systems Users Group conference. From the article: '"Don't be put off by Chris' Microsoft badge -- he is actually a long time Unix hacker," the user group said today in a statement updating users on presentations at the conference ... Green, Microsoft's local Unix Interoperability and High Performance Computing specialist, will update the conference on his company's "Unix and open source-related activities, including their efforts to provide a POSIX environment in Windows, and to integrate Windows and Unix systems."'"
Experience thus far indicates that whatever the Unix guy might have been before he walked into Redmond, when he comes out, he's just a marketing shill whose purpose is to say nothing of any substance with as many words as possible.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Personally I think memory allocation and time-sharing of CPUs is getting a bit mature; and it's the development philosophies of GNU/* software thats fundementally different. I'm not at all surprised that Unix & Microsoft are aligned.
Support reiserFS and ext2 / ext3 file systems in windows!
Thank you.
Would that be the same POSIX that they thought TSCO Group had IP lciense to when in fact Novel was the actual IP owener? I think MS should get their IP story straight before showing up at Unix conferences..
Fred Grott(aka shareme) http://mobilebytes.wordpress.com
Yeah, Like Microsoft would ever offer anything POSIX compliant (coughSFUcough), like Linux does across the whole system (coughpthreadscough).
It's funny they say that because I went to Microsoft career talks at my university (York University in Toronto) and every time a (different guy) came in and the first thing they said was:
..."
"... I was unix hacker for a long time before I decided Microsoft's the way to go
Just as a benchmark, consider that back in the mid-70's there was no shortage of sub-MIPS machines with less than 128kB that could reliably support dozens of running processes and handfuls of interactive users.
16k TRS-80s and others of its ilk were, understandably, not up to multitasking, but they were very useful for single-tasking. Thanks for the handy BASIC, Bill, it was your last useful contribution.
It seemed like a no-brainer to assume that once the machines had faster processors and more memory that proper multi-user, multitasking OSes would become commonplace on them. Boy was I wrong.
---Fast forward---
1983: Here comes the PC-XT with 128k and a 10MB hard drive. We were solidly into PDP-8 territory. Multitasking was doable. The hardware was missing a supervisor mode, but that was a minor obstacle. The new 286 chips had already (mostly) addressed that issue. MS-DOS was the crater in the runway.
1986: 286's were as powerful as a PDP-11. The hardware still lacked a proper supervisor mode, but decent multitasking had reached the desktop. Unfortunately, most people were stuck with DOS. MS was selling Xenix on 286 because the market demanded it, but they had no intention of standing behind it.
1987: MS told the world that the next PC OS would be OS/2. With IBM, they developed a real operating system! They sold Xenix to SCO.
1990: 386's were here with their fully functioning real/protected modes. They were as powerful as a VAX. MS fucked the world by dropping OS/2 and started touting the multitasking abilities of Windows 3.0. Three years late and it was a major disappointment. It could barely manage a background print job, never mind the comms program I wanted it to run.
Dell was selling Unix on boxes identical to our Windows boxes. I could run jobs as multiple users... concurrently. Ahhhhhh! The DOS comms program actually ran better under an emulator (VPix anyone?) than it did on Windows. I hung a half dozen dumb terminals off a 386 and had a multiuser system running apps against a SQL database. This was a real business computer. WinDOS was a toy.
1993: MS released NT. There was no multiuser support, but at least it could multitask (between reboots). Congratulations guys, welcome to 1975. It's too bad that it would still be another seven years before they thought that non-powerusers should be blessed with this innovation. And even then, they floundered. Millenium Edition? Kill it already; it's fucking DOS.
IMO, XP is their first decent standalone OS, but you need to spend big money on it if you plan to have concurrent users. Licensing is a bitch. Security issues abound. Networking is fine, as long as the network is all Windows.
So that's the OS story, as I remember it. They wasted decades trying to rig the market and convince customers that when they release a twenty year old feature, it's an innovation. They're still getting away with it, but the end-game is near. People are moving away from this dinosaur lest they be squished when it falls.
remote apps still exist, they are still usefull. including a well done ssh and X11 implementations (preferably based on xfree86 and openssh) would make life soo much easier....
im not talking about full sessions (remote terminal/vnc/nx etc) but apps that blend in with your desktop and those running from other machines. X11 is the already used standard for this.
its like windows is hostile to X11 or something. on a mac (yes, 10.4 on a g4) i can watch a movie in firefox over X11 over ssh and forget its even remote, hell, i can even run blender like that.
but on windows ssh + X11 are hacked on 3rd party kludges...how long will MS pretend ssh doesnt exist? single sign on with ssh and X11 and SMB is like from a windows PDC/KDC only (for you konfused KDE freaks, thats key distribution server, as in kerberos) and still looks like a hack easily ruined by the next upgrade (new to smb, so maybe its my ignorance)
those two would make windows play so much better in a unix network. of course, it would also mean that windows is just playing along, and NOT the needed master so MS would probably not see "value" in it...
I recall a story I heard from someone years back, when MS spoke at a conference of UNIX geeks. A man stood up and criticized MS's POSIX subsystem for Windows NT 4.0, stating that a feature in Korn shell wasn't compatible with true Korn shell. The conversation went something like this:
UNIX geek: Feature X in your korn shell implementation isn't true to the korn shell spec. Wnen do you plan to fix that?
MS guy: We're certain it's copmatible with the standard. Are you sure you don't have it wrong?
UNIX geek: Yes, I'm sure. It's broken.
MS guy: And who are you?
UNIX geek: I'm David Korn.
May or may not be true, but it was an amusing story, nonetheless.
Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggy" until you can find a rock.
No, it was a necessary feature thrown in to allow the government to avoid having to throw away all their software once the operating systems they originally developed on were no longer optimal. Games of "catch the moving API" can be fun and profitable for operating system vendors, but they're not so great for third party developers and users
.net, qt, gtk, xlib, perl, python, php, java, etc etc etc. So where exactly am I locked in, again?
1.) That's funny -- when Microsoft does this, it's called "vendor lock-in".
2.) Microsoft is notorious for backwards compatibility in their APIs. Probably a bit too much, actually.
3.) Microsoft's XENIX was still going strong back then.
4.) Microsoft wasn't a 300lbs gorilla back then, they were the IBM underdogs just over their honeymoon period.
The idea behind having a portable interface was to allow customers to choose different operating systems based on price, features, and performance.
s/different operating systems/UNIX/
The POSIX spec is based off of, and therefore highly prejudice towards UNIX. And since there weren't but a few major versions of UNIX, there wasn't really much choice involved. You picked your OS, and then got locked in via server hardware and maintenance contracts.
Obviously that's not the kind of market that a vendor can siphon tens of billions of dollars of profit from, however - I'm sure Microsoft much prefers the current situation where customers can choose different operating systems based on price, features, performance, and having to rewrite or replace all their unique applications.
Microsoft's monopoly appears to be dwindling, either due to the rise of opponents like Linux, or per the natural cycle of life and death.
What API CAN'T you write for on Windows? We have the shitty POSIX subsystem, SFU, cygwin, win32,
So this is why most open source apps are exact copies of their Windows counterparts(The UI especially)?
Since when? I use both OS software and Windows, and few of the OS software are exact copies of Windows anything. KDE, for example, is definitely not Explorer. It's not only more stable and far more configurable, it's just plain different. QtParted compared to Partition Magic? QtParted is way better and faster and has a simpler interface. Parition Magic is painfully slow by comaprison. There is no resemblance between K3b and any other cd-burning software I've seen on Windows, and I've had Roxio, NTI, Nero and a couple of others over the years. OpenOffice.org compared to MS Office? They're similar only to the point that they're both office suites; MS Office bears just a smuch resemblance to Corel's office suite. Xmms and Winamp? Again, they're similar because they do the same thing; there's as much resemblance between them as there is between all multimedia players. Well, with the possible exception of Xine, the GUI of which bears little resemblance to anything I've ever seen on Windows. The Gimp compared to Photoshop? I've heard that the Gimp's UI does bear a resemblance to the older versions of PS, but there's certainly little resemblance between them now; I've used both. And how do you compare OS software that there is no counterpart for on Windows except ports? Fluxbox the windows manager is one of these. Before Blackbox was ported to Windows, there was absolutely nothing like it on Windows at all. And what about Vim? And other text editors that bear no resemblance to Notepad or Wordpad whatsoever?
Firefox crashing? Yeah, it does that occasionally. Not even half as much as IE. Again, I've both; I used IE for years and it usually crashed about 3 times on a good day, not to mention all those "page cannot be found" but could easily be found by Opera or any othe browser. Now I'd rather break my finger than use IE. Not to mention that you can turn off software installation in both Mozilla & FF and this helps protect your Windows from spyware and viruses. And both can block popups without needing tird-party software. You can't do either with IE. Give me Firefox or Mozilla any day.
I don't know what universe you're in, but in this one, most OS software are not copies of Windows anything, let alone "exact" copies. If you're going to glorify MS against OSS you should come up with some facts instead of easily-refuted lies like that.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
Microsoft is finally going to be POSIX compliant. This means it will be eaiser to port unix apps to the MS platform. This is a good thing guys, and heres why:
When you are considering deploying Linux in your business, you first need to make sure your entire toolchain is platform independent. You move all your stuff to open source apps which historically have spotty support on windows, and then just swap out the o/s. Better POSIX support means this proces is eaiser (it also means more options for win32 admins as well, so it's good all around).
Merlin