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What Will Happen in IT in 2007?
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet's Paul Murphy has set out his IT predictions for 2007. Featured among the completely predictable, OpenSolaris overtaking Linux is apparently inevitable within one year. From the article: 'By the end of the year the OpenSolaris community will be widely recognized as larger and more active than the Linux community.' Is 2007 the year of the OpenSolaris desktop? Other 'inevitables' include Microsoft's success with Vista, the continuing phase-out of Itanium, and the Cell processor powering most of the world's super-computers."
every competing OS developer community except Microsoft's will have copied the key ideas including its organisational structure
Does that mean that he wants Linus to get hit by a bus? Cause that's what I'm reading!
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
2. ???
3. Profit!
Ex MacOSX guys won't fuel Vista - Dell, HP, et al will. People won't even know that there's any alternative, that's why Microsoft will be making their billions. Bullshit that OpenSolaris will overtake Linux anytime soon, let alone within the next year. The open source zealots will never go for it, and a lot of people have too much invested in Linux. And how will the Cell processor totally dominate the next top computing list when it's not even worth a mention in the current top computing list?
He then goes on to reiterate much of what's been said every year but never come true, that is the parts that actually made sense. I'm surprised that he didn't say "2007 is the year for the Open Solaris desktop".
What a waste of time.
"'By the end of the year the OpenSolaris community will be widely recognized as larger and more active than the Linux community.' Is 2007 the year of the OpenSolaris desktop?"
I could replace the word OpenSolaris with Linux. Or Mac OS X. Or BeOS. Or Amiga.
Face it, Windows is the defacto standard and will be for many, many years. Until businesses change (from running Windows) every other operating system ever created will be second fiddle to the Microsoft monopoly. You know what? Who cares? Do you think Porsche executives stay up late at night thinking "Jesus Christ, Ford has really got us by the balls. How the fuck are we going to compete againt the new Escort?"
I don't care about Microsoft and what they're doing. If it wasn't for their stranglehold on the computing industry, they'd be 10 years behind the technological curve. Natch. They ARE 10 years behind the curve. They just (currently) have the money right NOW to stay relevant.
It'll change. Maybe not now, but soon.
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
What I don't get is that Microsoft made Exchange clients for DOS, Win31, and Mac (There was even a rare Outlook 97 for Windows 3.1!) Why hasn't any of that been successfully reverse engineered and cloned?
Hmmm, I have been using Linux desktop since Sep 2004.
At this time my work machine, home machine, my kids' desktop and school notebooks are all Linux (pclinuxos 0.92)
I assume you don't use Linux as your desktop, have not even tried one in the last couple years, hence the total crap comment.
The reality is, Linux desktop is as functional and user friendly as the Windows desktop for most mainstream applications.
As an added bonus, you're virtually immune to virus, adware, data corruption, system hangs, etc.
You also have realtime access to many high quality applications.
And should you need to run the occasional Windows apps - wine works for many of them.
Somebody find this guy a cluestick and beat him with it.
How many trite phrases can you fit in one blog post? "structural convergence" "Web 2" "SOA" "Googlemania" "YouTube"
OK, Here's my set of predictions.
Don't like my list? You do better.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
DRM does not really matter to corporate. You shouldn't be watching movies or listening to music at work anyway. It's probably a selling point.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
my predictions apple will buy google and the us army, and turn all into iPeople.
Actually, since Google is involved... that woudl be giPeople.
An anonymous reader writes
ZDNet's Paul Murphy
Anybody else have the feeling that the submitter is actually Paul Murphy?
Seems like Zonk has broken into the New Years champagne a bit early, and the standard for front-page stories went from infinitesimal to nil.
Get real - Linux tracing capabilities are like primitive caveman tools compared to DTrace. Just because something wasn't developed by the "Linux community" (whatever the hell that means) doesn't mean it is worthless. ZFS is a major evolutionary step forward for file systems. Again, just because it wasn't born and raised as a sourceforge project doesn't mean it must be crap. Take off the blinders, zealot. Great technology knows no religion, it can come from anywhere. Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, et al, are not staffed by idiots (well, at least not in the engineering ranks). Just because they work for "the man" doesn't make their contributions to the field of software any less relevant or useful. Judge the tools by their merits, ignore the religion.
Whether or not OpenSolaris "takes over" in 2007 remains to be seen, but to dismiss the contributions of Sun's engineers (or Microsoft's for that matter) is to ignore history and to ignore some truly innovative contributions to the field.
Which apps specifically are you referring to that will not run in either OS X or Linux?
;)
The only hiccup I've run into running Linux or OS X (on non-mac hardware no less) is getting wifi working. A few internet searches later (other computer obviously) and voilà, they work.
In OS X you can run parallels but 99% of the Windows apps I use are available for OS X (for example, Office, Photoshop, Flash Studio, Quickbooks, Firefox, etc). Linux is a different story. That being said I have great luck running wine with photoshop and quickbooks. I've never tried flash but it's not needed. Open Office is a more than adequate replacement for MS Office. I don't use the extra 95% of tools available in those products anyway.
I like windows actually. I however love OS X. Linux is great as well. I cut my teeth using Linux in '95 while in college trying to get on doing Oracle DB development on HP-UX. I needed to be able to get around the shell and learn csh. Programming dot clocks to get your "new" video card to start X windows was an interesting learning experience. I'm forever amazed at the new distributions. Ubuntu (sp?), Fedora, etc. Ah the good old days of Slackware disk packages downloaded over ftp at the local Uni!
Tru64, Solaris (SunOS), hell even DR/MS-DOS in the days. Oh yeah Integer Basic on Apple ][ was great! Mac OS was pretty nice too, I was a bit sad to see OS 9 die. My first Mac with OS 9 & X dual boot made me see why so many people were into pre-OS X. 10.0 & 10.1 sucked IMO. However, 10.2 made my system exponentially faster, 10.3 sped it up even more, 10.4 was not such a drastic improvement, leading me to believe the OS is more mature now. I'd like to see that from an OS from Redmond. Windows gets massively larger per OS update. Granted Linux has as well. It however, includes almost 100% of what you need for an operational system. Windows just includes notepad
Ciao
Specifically Nevada build 54 and Nexenta alpha 5. They have some interesting technologies (specificaly ZFS, which is interesting, and Zones, which is a bit lower overhead than virtualization, but not as flexible (everything still goes through the Solaris kernel)). Nexenta I honestly thought was a cool concept, and executed quite well, Debian package management and GNU software that is clearly better than some of the Sun basic utilities (and much less Java inclined...), offering the benefits that Solaris does have to offer...
Anyway, from my working with it, I know the OpenSolaris is certainly full of themselves, and some denial, but I don't think they can live up to their own expectations. For example, any complaint or bug frequently got met with 'at least you aren't running linux!'. They trashed on lack of documentation in linux while I struggled to find some documentation on their stuff that seemed unwritten. They'd pick up a decade-old howto and say 'this is how linux requires you do it, versus our not-yet released way, see how crappy linux is'. When people talked about how woefully (understandably) incomplete their ACPI and suspend support was, they pointed at linux and said 'linux acpi support hardly works at all, so don't expect too much' despite the reality of 3 out of 3 generic motherboards I've tried worked splendidly with linux acpi. My laptop despite being one of their officially tested still doesn't have clock modulation and their acpi parser barfs on the DSDT that nothing else (not even intel's compiler) even warns on. People discussing panics/hangs are met with 'at least it doesn't crash as much as linux', despite evidence to the contrary. They are used to a closed, proprietary world of a select set of hardware and the open world if they make any headway in is going to give them quite the wake up call. They talk about how much better their driver support is, despite the glaring lack of drivers. Largely their efforts in expanding that involve porting drivers from the BSD projects.
Anyway, their current implementation does admittedly seem adequate for most server type activities if the hardware is supported. I could see a lot of hardware vendors happy about a system with a stable binary interface for drivers that doesn't require rebuilds for every uname -r, but hardware vendors face the market realities and put up with the pain if they want to play in the server space. I understand the hassle, but linux making a PITA for hardware vendors have given us a lot more driver source than we could have hoped for. For the market, probably the single best card they have is ZFS. They have done a good job of consolidating volume management, software raid, filesystem, stuff like snapshots, and paranoia of checksumming everywhere into a single implementation. In doing so they have done things more efficiently (such as RAID format on disk leveraging filesystem layer knowledge for better performance), and trustworthy (a controller failing to report data corruption is detected at a higher level). ZFS is impressive, and that was/is the one thing that makes me really want the rest of the platform to be usable for me day to day.
DTrace is much hyped, and very useful in the hands of good developers and good administrators, but I don't see administrators at large making use of it enough to deliver on the hopes Sun sets up for it.
Zoning is a nice logical extension from simple chrooting which is more comprehensive, and more efficient than the other extreme of virtualization, theoretically. However, with virtualization being ubiquitous and most of the market accepting the ever-reducing overhead for the flexibility, I don't know if Zones are going to excite anyone that much. The BrandZ extension of the metaphor gives it some flexibility, but again their Linux profile still doesn't run linux things just right, and a linux vm with the linux kernel already will do so today.
So you have a platform that probably won't need to be as successful as linux had to be in order for hardware ve
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
What? XML gets way too much "respect" by all the wrong people.
XML was designed for one thing, blind data interchange. That's it. Not config files, not GUI descriptions, not anything to do with databases. Get over it. Everything else is hype created by idiots that make money selling ads in magazines and on web sites.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
As a solaris guy from way back I say.... not!
Solaris is great, but if you want a FREE unix BSD is your ticket. Hell I even run it on some older Sparc 5 boxes in the basement... Faster and easier than solaris because of it being 100% open.
As for everything else.... nope... IT in 2007 will look 100% like IT in 2006. XP on the desktop in every competent Corperation, not much changes anywhere else.
Change = expense.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
DRM _will_ start to matter to corporate the first time a software vendor shuts down a mission-critical business application due to some sort of misunderstanding over payment terms.
Actually, since Google is involved... that woudl be giPeople.
Drafting GI's? Nothing ever changes does it.
At least we'll be able to do a spotlight search on Google Earth for WMD's.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
The only hiccup I've run into running Linux or OS X (on non-mac hardware no less) is getting wifi working. A few internet searches later (other computer obviously) and voilà, they work.
Yah, because you can't download a driver for an ethernet adaptor without its drivers. Otherwise, we're resorted to floppies, CDs, USB fobs, or some combinations of each!
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
Linux has no good filesystems. You are stuck trying to pick which pig has the nicest lipstick on. And the two nicest made up pigs are both from corporations giving up their unixes and opening their filesystems up. If not for IBM and SGI, linux still would have no usable filesystems at all.
And linux has nothing that in any way comes anywhere even close to dtrace. I know its pretty standard for gnubies to not know anything besides linux, and speak of linux's greatness out of ignorance, but go read up on dtrace before spewing bullshit.
Everything about linux is a half dozen not quite good enough "solutions" that are miles behind solaris's offerings. From filesystems to virtualization, from threads to system administration tools, solaris blows linux away on every front.
You are right about one thing though. Linux will go its own way all right. As always, failing to learn anything from the vastly superior operating systems it pathetically fails to copy.
Vista will make billions. XP would continue to make billions if Vista were never created. Considering how little new features Vista introduces, its development has been a complete waste. Nobody will shell out the money to "upgrade" to it. They'll only spend money that would otherwise have been spent on XP. I don't know the business term to describe this, but if a new product only cannibalizes sales of an existing product and doesn't bring in new sales, whatever money was spent developing it was completely wasted.
Outlook not so good.
2. A Windows security hole will be discovered.
3. Internet use will increase.
4. Zune will not overtake the iPod.
5. The prices of hard drives and DRAM will continue to fall.
6. The circulation of print newspapers will continue to decline.
7. Interest groups will raise a stink over violence in video games.
8. A major technology company will introduce a new form of DRM...which will fail miserably.
9. The next version of Mac OS X will be visually and technically superior to Windows Vista.
10. Duke Nukem Forever will not be released.
I know I'm going out on a limb here, but trust me. I'm a science fiction writer. I can see the future!
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Two of Paul's more interesting predictions were placed on Who's Wrong.
Interesting site for viewing predictions from folks.
Crackpot.
/. within last month. I just felt obliged to comment.
1) Billions off vista? Yeah, right. Public beta is expected to start at the end of January, turnaround to the market isn't THAT fast (remember NT4 SP3? Remember W2000 SP4? Remember Windows XP SP1?)
2) Itanium?
3) Except for the fact that SUPERcomputers are not specced, ordered and build overnight, more like 18-24 month timeframe for rollout and then some for full capacity if we are talking about serious ones. Also CELL is not the answer, ask Cray.
4) Assuming that ___OPEN!!! IT'S OPEN NOW___ Solaris actually manages to get any exposure at all this is absolutely unlikely to happen in an envorement that is supercharged with egos and religious evangelists/fanatics that spend their lives defending their indentation style or plan source control system migration for 18 months ahead.
Of course we could be had - last three paragraphs hives off a hint that this could be a very ultrasubtle attempt at humor. In a failed way of sense.
In short - most stupid article seen on
Ugh. A couple of other predictions for 2007:
/. unabated.
1. Entertainment writers will spend the last week of 2007 wracking their brains for meaningless, top-ten-list, fluff pieces in order to receive their next paychecks.
2. The apparent MS astroturfing campaign will continue on
3. Apologists for the upcoming Vista horrorshow will continue to denounce MS critics as zealots.
4. A new branch of mathematics (VERIZONMATH) will dominate industry calculations, leading to much hijinx, and ultimately, total economic collapse.
5. Richard Stallman will learn to levitate, leading to much hijinx, and ultimately, total economic collapse.
Ehhhh...my onboard Intel Pro 10/100 (e100 on Linux, for many years) doesn't work without Dell's drivers on XP SP2. I think it finally works on Vista, some four years and a major OS version after the PC was made. On a newer computer, the XP installer doesn't work if I run my SATA drives in AHCI mode (surprise, runs fine on recent Linux kernels). If you look at default compatibility with modern hardware, Linux is way ahead of Windows. Linux fails on a tiny subset of just-released hardware that require their own drivers, and hardware where the vendor has threatened legal action (ie: Broadcom wireless adapters, until recently).
LOAD "SIG",8,1
By the end of the year the OpenSolaris community will be widely recognized as larger and more active than the Linux community.
To quote Lewis Black: "where can one find a drug that would make one so delusional." The Linux community, I'm sorry to inform him, is much larger and more active than he apparently understands. That's because it encompasses tens of thousands of products and technologies well beyond the server and desktop markets, which aren't even the biggest market so far as Linux usage is concerned.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
It isn't Outlook that needs to be beat, it is Exchange. The client is the easy part (relatively speaking).
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Sun is going to have an impact on anything? Huh? Sun is imploding. Anybody want to buy their Fremont campus? It's empty.
What else is he expecting, a comeback of SGI?
This ZDNet guy is an idiot in search of an audience. Move along, there's nothing to see here other than some pathetic dude trying to keep his ad-clicks up.
I didn't have to read more than OpenSolaris. Overtaking Linux? Yeah right. Even if it does happen it sure has heck won't be in 12 months time.
Culture in America was officially declared dead on December 8, 1980. The actual time of death is unknown.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
What Linux already has is mindshare. It is a "good enough" Microsoft alternative that works now. Sure, DTrace is good. Great, even. But most people wouldn't know how to take advantage of it. Most people putting together a mail server or web server simply don't need it. And as for ZFS... well that just seems like overkill for most situations. I'm sure it is awesome if you really need it, but when ext3/ufs are perfectly adequate for 95% of use cases, who cares?
Anyone who thinks OpenSolaris is going to be the next Linux because it has a few cool tools needs to realize that brands don't make it on technical merits alone. It is much more complicated than that.
Personally, I don't know ANYONE who is running OpenSolaris as a production server. To suggest that it will overtake Linux in 2007 is just ridiculous. Maybe it will someday, I can't see that far ahead, but I would bet a lot of money that it won't happen in 2007.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
They're numbers we assign to years, a measure of time. For more info on this little-known phenomenom see Wikipedia's Year entry.
Software patents delenda est.
Paul Murphy has no idea what is is talking about.
/MOD article +1 Flamebait
Ever tried reverse engineering the MAPI "protocol"? It's all serialized COM objects being shunted across the network. The client and the server are tied, making any attempts at reverese engineering an exercise in feature-chasing frustration.
There are still plenty of businesses that use alternative servers like Lotus Notes. (Though only God knows why.) That should tell the market that an alternative communications stack should be viable in the corporate market. All you need is an email server and client with features that are competitive with Outlook/Exchange, and an operating system that doesn't automatically sell the customer on using a "unified software provider" for all their OS, Email, and Office needs.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Yep. Ever hear of NFS? NIS?
In what way were Sun NFS and NIS big open source successes? I mean, apart from the fact that NFS and NIS absolutely suck as technologies, Sun released their source long after other people had created their own, independent implementations.
Complete system probes are something completely new in the world of computing,
Yes, and that statement in itself makes them suspect. The UNIX philosophy has always been to provide minimal "good enough" solutions for clearly defined needs, not complete, all encompassing solutions to anticipated problems.
Linux' "multiple excellent file systems" are nothing special--the best of them work acceptably, but that's it.
Yes, and that is exactly what a UNIX file system should be: "nothing special". If it's any more than that, it's suspect. And that's why everybody is actually running ext3 without ACLs or extended attributes on Linux, even though there are far more advanced file systems already available.
ZFS will transform small-storage computing in a few years.
Maybe. If it does, then (and only then) will Linux incorporate a minimal set of features to provide just those aspects of ZFS that have turned out to be useful in practice. And, most likely, the actual Linux implementation of those features will end up being completely differently from the ZFS implementation, and much simpler.
As a comparison, would it matter if an Electiricity supplier shuts down mains power due to some misunderstanding over payment terms?
Methinks you completely miss the idea of why Exchange is so popular. If all it did was email then it would never have become a dominant player. It is precisely because it offers a unified provider that it has become popular. The server integrates tightly with voice communications as well as forms of instant messaging. In addition to this there is the identity management integration, teleconferencing, remote assistance, the list really goes on and on.
The desktop OS created Microsoft but all the services provided under one roof are what solidified it in the corporate world. In large organizations they like to exercise strict control and if something goes wrong they want a single person to go to fix the problem.
Most everyone in the world realizes the shortsightedness of this philosophy but it is indeed the reality. The only way to compete with Microsoft is to first become compatible, then expand your feature-set beyond what Microsoft can provide. It is a steep challenge to say the least despite problems with the software that MS produces it is mostly functional otherwise it would never have been accepted. Convergence is the future, it is why SIP is the dominant protocol and why TCP/IP overtook IPX/SPX. The medium that can do the most will win despite IPX/SPX being superior TCP/IP still won so keep that in mind. Of course Novell can squander pretty much anything so that might not be the best example.
From what I've seen of Lotus Notes it's a huge pain in the ass and doesn't even come close to offering the same features as Exchange. Much like DB/2 against SQL 2005 or Oracle.
I think in short a small tools philosophy has proven to work well but it goes against how we think in the real world. We don't setup millions of tiny warehouses for everything we need to store, we setup large facilities where all the resources can be centralized, managed, and monitored. We're like ants that way. It's risky and causes problems; a single bomb and we're screwed.
With that said maybe this year we can devote to changing the way people think about their tools. My leatherman sure it handy with all the tools it has in it but sometimes you just need a proper screw driver to get the job done. Perhaps there is a place for both, granted I use my leatherman for 90% of the tasks I perform that require a tool.
You're missing the point of what DRM in Vista is for.
It will always be possible to watch Lord.Of.The.Rings.DVDRIP.xvid.avi on a Windows machine, Vista or XP since there are open source applications that let you watch it which Windows can't refuse to run.
The difference between XP and Vista is that BlueRay and HDDVD disks will (initially) only play on Vista, since XP is not regarded as secure enough to have software players run on it. But sooner or later, one of the open source media players will learn to play the new disks on any OS.
The DRM is there to let you play content, albeit with draconian restrictions, which you would not be able to play at all if the OS didn't support it.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
BURN THE HERETIC!
As have I.
Nevertheless, these may be the most long-shot predictions I've seen yet. Servers/Users embracing Vista? Not likely. Open-Solaris being kick-ass? Hmm. Never tried it, but I gotta admit that the different *nix flavors are like that - ice cream with nuance.Don't matter to me 'cept that NetBSD is the hardest initial lockdown.
Everyone should have to be subjected to 'Babes in Toyland' at least once. How else do you learn?
"Look, Smithers! I'm Davy Crockett!"
Could happen, if Solaris was already massively better than Linux. I don't think that will happen.
/proc was ripped off wholesale from Plan 9. If ZFS is ultimately such a great idea, most of its advantages will be absorbed into Linux, so eventually you'll have OpenSolaris, which implements ZFS perfectly and may have slightly better-looking code, and Linux, which does almost everything you need from ZFS, but also has binary blobs from nVidia and ATI, can run in usermode, has suspend to disk, runs on an iPod, and does many other things that Solaris will still be catching up with.
The simple reason is: Worse is better.
Why do you think absolutely everyone on Linux was using Mozilla? It was the main Gecko program, and your other options kind of sucked. Mozilla got the job done, and everyone was developing for it -- you were guaranteed to have new and interesting stuff (Flash, Java, RSS, tabbed browsing, etc) on Mozilla, either before it was anywhere else, or within a month of it being implemented elsewhere.
Of course, some things never made it into Mozilla -- for instance, Amaya is both a web browser and a WYSIWYG editor, and you can jump into any webpage and edit, and save the new version somewhere -- there may even be a mechanism for re-uploading it. But there must not be that much demand for such features -- after all, most of us either use Notepad (or vim), or we use some nicely-done AJAX WYSIWYG.
You could point to Firefox, but remember: Firefox was originally named "Pheonix", because it rose from the ashes of Mozilla. Had Firefox been written from scratch, it would never have gotten where it is today -- old Mozilla bugs and all.
That is what will happen with Linux and OpenSolaris.
Linux is already much, much more popular than BSD or OpenSolaris -- or, for that matter, Plan 9. So, we take the best ideas from other OSes, so long as we can reasonably implement them, and we also toy with new things of our own. If I remember right,
The only way this picture changes is if Solaris is so ridiculously better than Linux that the few people hacking on it now are enough for it to surpass Linux -- keep in mind, there will be plenty more people hacking on Linux at the same time. This has happened in the past, on a smaller scale, but I just don't think Solaris is better enough -- remember, evangelizing won't work. You won't get me to hack on Solaris till it runs on my Powerbook, at least -- and you need people like me to make it run on that Powerbook. You need it to already be almost as good as Linux, if not significantly better -- and not just in a few areas I don't care about -- in order to get me to hack on it.
If you really want to replace Linux, come up with something that's both better enough that it takes half the time to write it in FooOS than in Linux, and can run a Linux kernel alongside it (do something tricky with UML, or something like what Apple did with Mach/Darwin), so that I can load up my nVidia driver and play Quake 4, and still hack around with something cool like, say, a new cluster filesystem. You have to do it right, though -- I should be able to load my Linux kernel, nVidia driver, and Quake4 binary (and maps) from my own FooOS cluster filesystem.
If you can do that, and provide compelling enough development tools to sway the Linux kernel devs, then we might actually lose the Linux kernel -- slowly -- and replace it with something better. Unless you can do that, Linux will remain the best we've got, now and forever.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
My grandmother is ~80 years old and uses Debian stable. It fits her needs - or better - she fits the computer's needs.
She needs her PC for
In a way my granny is a lot more platform-independent than I am. She doesn't care if it's called C: or
About a year with Windows XP led to a bigger amount of "family support cases", now it's the second year with Debian and it just runs - but ok, she doesn't have to dist-upgrade on her own, just the updates. But she wouldn't install a new version of Windows on her own either.
But you'll never know if your granny likes it until she tries it for herself.
You know stuff about HPC. That's cool.
I've been reading some of your older posts. You seem like a smart guy. Even about non-tech stuff like http://www.mosesmi.org/ (who could use a new webmaster, btw).
I still disagree with you about GPGPU and HPC. For HPC interconnect is king and you can't get any better than being on the same die. Yes, compiler complexity bites, and it will get worse before it gets better. Naturally the ideal is an absurdly large address space of shared memory, but the reality is that no real processor can even CRC 2^40 bits of address space in real time. The rest of it can and should be abstracted at a level above the CPU.
We're programming down to the bare metal right now because that's how you get the answers in something close to real time with the available equipment. From an analyst point of view some of this stuff (granularity, interconnects, task sequencing) can and should be done by the OS or the compiler, and that's how it's going to work out in the long run.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
In any case, comparison with a utility company is not exactly right here, it would imply renting the software - this rarely happens. A better comparison would be with a paper book that contains a chip that monitors how often you read the book, where, and how, and won't tell you what else it monitors and sends back home. And this chip can incinerate the book if it receives a radio signal from the publisher, or if it itself thinks that you are trying to copy the book. In reality you may be just reading under the sunlight. The book costs $500 (or $5,000, or more) and is essential in your business. Would you buy it? Or maybe you'd prefer a book without the chip, the one that is yours for as long as you want (since that's what was promised when you paid the money for it.) Software is very much like a book - you get use rights only, but those use rights ought to be irrevocable, unless you breach the terms of the contract and the judge (if you so choose) agrees that you are the guilty party. You can't allow a dumb machine to be your judge, jury and the executioner; you can't allow your rights to be terminated on mere suspicion of wrongdoing - and that's what the DRM is about, to deny you your rights automatically, based on arbitrary set of rules that you aren't even allowed to know.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
DRM does not really matter to corporate.
You've got to be kidding. Ever heard of Intellectual Property?
We're moving to Office 2007/SharePoint because of DRM.
(Not that I think it will work like the brochure says...)
The opposite of progress is congress
I'm sorry, but the reality is that Linux pales in comparison to Windows with regards to user friendliness.
:)
--Okay, I'm a little grumpy this morning (it's early), so sorry folks...
How is using Wine simpler than just using windows?
--Because it's a lot easier and cheaper to spend a few minute setting up wine than buying and installing windows onto another partition to run a couple old windows programs that somebody wants me to use.
Why bother emulating it when it comes standard on most pre-built systems that the majority of computer illiterate will be purchasing?
--Because my system isn't pre-built, and I'm not computer illiterate.
Its pointless for those kinds of people. Don't get me wrong, I would love to see ANY OS properly compete with Windows, but I don't see it happening. What will the computer illiterates do with their computer?
--The same as they're doing today. Not much. The "choice" of OS and GUI have no bearing on someone who doesn't care. They managed (when they were forced to) with DOS, they'll be in the same boat with any future OS.
I'm willing to bet its gaming, word processing (possibly some other apps that come in Office), surfing and chatting, and playing media.
--I'm willing to bet it's probably not even that. True computer phobics will go to familiar programs, have other people set up things and show them how to activate them. As long as someone is there to help and show them how to do the handful of things they need, they'll use any OS. I'd hazard a guess that Linux's myriad of configuration options might offer such people a better experience. Instead of trying to force people into MS's view of user interaction, Linux will work as configured, and won't scare them with "your subscription is about to expire!", "your anti-virus is out of date!", etc.
Yeah its wonderful that Linux is a very secure OS, but its too bad it doesnt play any games.
--You mean games, as in the popular ones that lots of people buy that are typically ported to Linux? Or do you mean the kind of games MS plays with their users?
Games for Windows, no matter how much I despise it, will bring make it even more simple for those who want to game on a PC but have trouble setting up in the current PC gaming world. Windows is on top and it is folly to think its up top without a reason.
--It's folly to base your opinion on one aspect of anything. You're obviously a gamer, and some of your choice games aren't made for Linux. Personally, I'm not into running on the gaming treadmill. I'd like to know a game is good before I spend my cash on it. A key to this decision is to see that gamers like it enough to request a Linux version.
--As you can see, this is all subjective. MS Windows works for you, Linux works for me. Blanket statements either way are useless. However, my choice is a lot cheaper to implement...leaving me with more money for games.
Microsoft has just released their much anticipated hands-free cordless mouse. Warning, it may hurt a little at first.
You hear a lot of people saying this and I just don't think it's true. I've recently acquired a laptop for my mother (that's a good swap - stop it!) and she has never used a computer of any sort. Well, Windows is the obvious choice as it's so intuitive and user friendly says I. This is a myth that is cleverly enforced by the whole Windows GUI "Style Guide" meaning that most Windows apps have a similar "look and feel". If you've used Windows before it is indeed intuitive and user friendly. For the new user, however, it simply isn't!
Why is it then that Windows "power users" (for want of a better term) used to use the short-cut keys to accomplish most tasks rather than using the mouse - this was of course back in the day when every command available to the mouse had an associated key, or set of keys, to perform the same function from the keyboard.
With a command line, you just need to know what command to issue whereas with a Windows interface you need to know the command (ie which button to click, which box to tick) but you also need to know where to go to issue the command.
When trying to show my mum how to use the PC she is making notes. Does she have to draw each stupid window with some means of signifying which bit she has to click on? It obviously doesn't help that she's scared of the thing, like most people of her generation - a teacher at school when "computers" first arrived used to teach us kids how it all worked, and he spent most of the lesson telling us to stop pressing buttons and trying things. He offered a similar course to the other teachers and he found it hard to get them to even touch the computers at all!
I, personally, hate windows. It frustrates me enormously that I can't just issue a command to achieve what I want. Many of the more esoteric, and therefore useful, features of windows are hidden away down through a myriad of different pull down menus, select item, advanced button, select from multiple tabs, another advanced button, more damn tabs, more buttons - it's a nightmare! Aaaaaarrrggghhhh!
But I still got her a windows machine! Perhaps that says it all!
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
Well if you were to give my Grandmother a Windows disc she would just be as baffled by it. I assume the same would happen if you gave her a Mac. For people who have never used any operating system it would be just as difficult for them to understand any OS you could give them.
The problem isn't just whether linux is a user friendly OS. the apps must also be user friendly and better than the best Windows apps in order to convince people to drop Windows. That is why I think it is more important to work on replacing their apps with Windows apps that are better and also run on linux. It's very unrealistic to get most people to switch OS but apps are easier. Games...ok that is a big problem but you should still be able to get your work done no matter what OS-that's a realistic but challenging goal.
Firefox Power http://firefoxpower.blogspot.com/
Needless to remind that many predicted similar demise of Linux after release of OpenDarwin.
Say *what*?
I had a NeXT, I use Mac OS X daily, and even I didn't bother installing OpenDarwin. FreeBSD is far superior to Darwin in every respect but the ability to run OSX on top of it.
I don't recall anyone predicting that OpenDarwin would replace Linux. Where was this happening?