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Virtues of Monoculture, Or Why Microsoft Wins
blackbearnh writes to ask, "Why does Microsoft win the development environment war so often, when we all know it's a lifetime lock-in to Windows? Perhaps it's because the open source community offers too much choice." From the post: "Microsoft offers the certainty of no choices. Choice isn't always good, and the open source community sometimes offers far too many ways to skin the same cat, choices that are born more out of pride, ego, or stubbornness than a genuine need for two different paths. I won't point fingers, everyone knows examples... The reality is that there are good, practical reasons that drive people into the arms of the Redmond tool set, and we need to accept that as a fact and learn from it, rather than shake our fists and curse the darkness."
The only definite point I got from that article was "sometimes too much choice is bad". I don't think you can really seriously argue with that statement, but on the other hand it'd not all that helpful either.
I also love Kubuntu and use it on all my machines at home... However I develop for Windows at work. Developing application in Windows can be as easy as VB. As far as I have seen there is nothing on this (OSS) side of the fence that comes close to it for ease of use, with (reasonably) good debugging. From there it's a skip and a jump into C# and beyond.
As a (bad) example of how far UIs have to go, I use Visual Studio 2005 at work and I use Matlab for my postgrad work. Both professional, closed-source products. The Matlab debugging facilities pale in comparison to Visual Studio's power. Makes life so much easier. I find Matlab a bit archaic, but KOctave seems even worse. I guess Matlab only has to do better than Octave on Linux systems.
Of course my argument is omitting things like Eclipse... but I have only used it a few times and found it too slow (slower than VS.Net!!) and user unfriendly.
Couldn't stand the weather
> Does the open source community do anything to change it's fractured ways since the last time this was mentioned?
.desktop standard for menu items, actions etc. Both use the freedesktop.org icon naming system, and mimetype system, and so on.
Take a look at freedesktop.org.
* Sharing of sound system - both Gnome and KDE 4 will work with gstreamer
* Joining of messaging system. It was dcop (kde) and corba (Gnome). Now both will use DBus
* Common themes that make kde and gnome apps look the same.
Plus lots of 'small' points. Both follow the
No, it does not. Well only sort-of.. The "standard GUI layer" of Windows is limited to the plain widgets we all know from Windows 95. The ones Notepad and WordPad still use. Ugly menu's and big bevel toolbar buttons. If you look closer you'll see Notepad, Windows Explorer, Visual Studio, Office all use different menu's and toolbar handles. They're all custom widgets, not standard.
Most advanced widgets for Windows are part of a commercial widget toolkit you've chosen. This can be MFC, ComCtl, VLC (Borland), Windows Forms (.Net), WPF (.Net3), Qt, and I'm missing others (e.g. remember those big sized OK-buttons a big green check icon inside).
All those different frameworks do have something in common. Windows provides central settings for fonts and color schemes. This makes them all look the same. That's something Linux should really improve.
his license and that license (really meaning, these liabilities and those liabilities.)You have two good options for Linux:
The best way to accelerate a windows server is by 9.81 m/s2
Very true. This is a very informative Google TechTalk called The Paradox of Choice - Why More Is Less [warning 1 hour] that describes this issue. It's not intuitive, but is logical. It is very hard for people to make a choice, so hard, that often people will avoid making a decision when doing nothing is actually more costly than making a bad choice. This talk is back up by results of some interesting experiments.
"Follow me" the wise man said, but he walked behind.