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No WINE Before Its Time
Joe Barr writes "Stephen Feller has a story about WINE on NewsForge this morning ahead of next week's expected Beta release. The WINE project is 12 years old, so it's just about time." From the article: "'Wine has historically had a very frustrating history because it has been alpha software,' White said. 'This is really hard work. We're replicating the work of a billion-dollar company. The reason we're saying it's alpha is because we believe we still have fundamental changes to make on the way the internals work.' Noting that it has not always been easy to install software with Wine's alpha releases over the last decade, White said that once you got something working it has never meant it would continue to do so, or do so properly. There may have been display glitches or things not functioning properly, if a program even worked with Wine at all." OSTG is the parent company of both Slashdot and NewsForge.
Unless they rewritten wine in c++ its going to have problems emulating c++ features like objects really really bad. I am not bashing C, but rather pointing out that rewriting the language to mimick an operating system heavily built on C++ is a mistake.
Gnome 1.x learned this lesson by emulating c++ in C because the unix C purists thought it would be less bloated and more cool. It was fine until object oriented programing became a factor.
Most of it is due ot the fact that windows is complex and very proprietary with information hidden on the inner details. There are thousands of lines of code in windows based programs that simple workaround bugs. You have to actually duplicate the bug so the code works properly. Its a mess.
http://saveie6.com/
This is really hard work. We're replicating the work of a billion-dollar company.
Yes and no. It is a little simpler than this quote suggests. Wine does not need to implement every API that Microsoft produces. It needs to implement every API that desired Windows applications use. In some ways it is a quality of service problem, the marginal cost between supporting 90% of apps and 100% of apps may be too expensive. Maybe 80% to 90% is too expensive. I don't pretend to know what the optimal percentage is but it is surely not 100% or even mid to high 90%s.
In any case this is a monumental task and the Wine developers deserve an awful lot of credit and thanks.
The idea of running Wine on Intel Macs probably occurred to every WINE enthusiast roughly 300 milliseconds after Apple announced they were abandoning POWER. No doubt many people are working on it, including Codweavers. But forget about financial support from Apple.
It should require M$ to publish all of its APIs now and verify that all M$ applications are written to those published APIs. Moreover, it should require that all communications between the application development portion of M$ and the operating system portion of M$ are public domain.
Seastead this.
"Or do others feel that multibillion dollar companies get away with selling alpha software? As far as I can remember, most companies put out alpha and beta software to let users test it in production environments. I could name a few here, but we have all probably dealt with this issue."
One word: marketing. That's how you get away with selling alpha software. You market an alpha-qaulity product to look like something that works as good as it should, and if your marketing campaign successfully ropes in enough interested parties that can't analyze your codebase to see what shit your product really is, it will sell anyway due to the fact that you have convinced them to have faith in your product by other means. (Usually graphics, sound, and long lists of features.) It should also be noted that in the world of computing, marginal functionality in many cases is still enough to get work plenty of work done, but there is always room for improvement, especially in the case of the piece of alpha software I suspect you are speaking of. (Windows.)
WINE is a brilliant project. I'd like to see it move faster than it is, but one can't rush perfection. Now that WINE is bearing some real fruit - an actual beta release - perhaps support for the project will further build. I certainly hope so.
Vista? Wine has yet to make it to the NT era. All its dll-s are win98 compatible, not winXP.
Since the primary function of government is the protection of non-subsistence property rights, it is sensible to charge a use fee for those rights. Note, I said "non-subsistence" property rights. The point here is that house and tools of the trade are protected from confiscation under bankruptcy law precisely because they are subsistence assets. Where government does not exist, subsistence properties are typically defended by the occupant, whose life is sustained by those assets. Government brings precisely the property rights we associate with civilization -- assets beyond home and tools of the trade.
Given the relatively liquid nature of civilization, it makes sense to define "non-subsistence" in some dollar value of assets. Various ways of defining the dollar value are all approximately equal:
- The median price of housing a person plus the median price of capitalizing a job.
- The threshold used by the SEC for "qualified investor".
- The level of savings insured by the FDIC.
- Or, for the historically inclined: The market price of 20
arable acres in the Confederate south, a mule, a plow and a small house
on such land.
Until a citizen accumulates the subsistence net asset level, they should pay no tax and then pay tax only on the net assets they own above subsistence.Assessment should be by the owner, thereby establishing a "fair market value" for the exercise of eminent domain. Net assets only would be taxed and would be calculated by subtracting the fair market value of debts against the estate from the self-assessment of the occupant.
Other forms of taxation could be eliminated in a revenue neutral way if net assets, in excess of subsistence levels, were taxed at the risk free interest rate (approximately the interest rate on the national debt).
Indeed, given the centralization of asset ownership that has resulted from the subsidy of non-subsistence property, a subsidy inherent in civilization, it may be the failure to use this tax base is the ultimate cause of the repeated decay of civilizations from ancient times.
Seastead this.