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EComStation 2.0 GA To Be Released May 14
martiniturbide writes "After a long delay, eComStation 2.0 GA will finally become reality. It will be released in time to be presented at the Warpstock Europe 2010 event which will be held in Trier, Germany, from May 14 to 16. We consider eComStation 2.0 to be the biggest overhaul of OS/2 so far. Together with a team of both hired and volunteer developers, we have extended the functionality, removed limitations, updated hardware support as far as possible, and resolved close to 1000 issues that had been reported since the release of eComStation 1.2R. The new eComStation 2.0 GA is the result of several years of combined efforts and investments."
I'll be able to format floppies again without slowing down the rest of my work.
Perhaps this is the real story behind IBM's alleged relaunch of OS2?
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
... give it a lamer name?
Be seeing you...
Short answer, no.
Long answer, nooooooooooooooooooooo.
I am sorry if it seems overly shallow, but looking at the (awful) Flash demo, the UI design hasn't been upgraded at all from the last time I ran OS/2. I was hoping they had someone spend some time getting rid of the Win 3.1 look and feel, or are they hoping for some upswelling of nostalgia for the old look and feel?
I should be open-mindedly welcoming the return of an old friend, and looking at the functionality available, but I am afraid I can't look past the awful look and feel of the UI long enough to find out. It just looked terrible - at least as long as the terrible flash demo ran before the whole thing seized up on me and I gave up.
I *loved* OS/2 when I used it, it was superior to Win 3.1, allowed me to run DOS programs (like my BBS software) in the background while I ran something else in the foreground, etc etc. It had an amazing future - until IBM dropped the ball and completely failed to promote it. I would far rather than modern OS design had drawn more from OS/2 as a heritage than from MS Windows, but its a tad late now.
Now, I am sure there is a market for this - all those POS software packages that look like DOS and are still used all over in small stores, ATM applications that are similarly primitive etc - but I can't see it having much appeal beyond the legacy support type environment.
Now, if the arrival of eCommstation heralds the return of BBSing, I might be inclined to buy it. I loved the old BBS days prior to the availability of the Intertubes, but I don't think anything is going to bring that back :(
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
OS/2 is still used quite extensively in Australia by banking institutions, who claim it is still more reliable than the Windows equivalents. Much of the critical banking infrastructure reliant on OS/2 has since been ported to Linux (Mostly running atop RHEL.) The combination of high stability. the very configurable and flexible workplace shell with REXX IPC, at a time when the NT kernel was still being sorted ensured rapid uptake and penetration in some vertical markets. Like the AmigaOS it was very economical of system resources and had a very consistent UI. There are still lessons in the Workplace Shell (OS/2) and Intuition (Amiga) for both KDE and GNOME. Window managers with some of the WS features for Linux http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_Shell and related http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS7822082064.html
Yes, the supermarket. Many of them still run it on their cash registers.
A lot of ATM machines run OS/2 as well, and I wish more still did. The day Bank of America replaced their ATM machines I heard the familiar Windows "Ding!" as my card popped back out. A part of me died that day, but it was replaced with a love for .NET, so oh well... :)
Wrong. Short answer, yes. Long answer, definitely yes.
There are still a lot of large companies out there using OS/2 installs who are attempting to replace aging hardware without having to have all their specialized software ported to something else. One such company is a Fortune 50-ish (it's in the 50-55 range) company that has a massive OS/2 install to this very day.
Do you have any idea how many specialized pieces of equipment out there are controlled by OS/2? Or the MASSIVE cost involved in having the software ported to Windows or Linux? Or the large amounts of time testing the stuff because it cant EVER fail while running? I, on the other hand, have some idea about that sort of thing... there are lots of such setups.
People dont hear about those types of setups, or even know about them, because they aren't desktop clients where some 9-5'er is running Word or whatever on it. They are systems that sit quietly in the background and run entire production lines, run automated machinery, run power plants, run transit systems, run elevators and so on.
In addition, there are new companies that are using OS/2 for specialized apps or as servers that have gotten fed up with Windows, and find the various fragmented releases of Linux to be too daunting. I know... I install eCS boxes at a few of them. And, they couldnt be happier. I install em... come every few months to clean em (of dust and stuff) and otherwise no one ever touches them. They never had that type of a positive experience on their Windows server/app server boxes.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
That's not a market. It's an installed base. There may be a handful of people out there interested in buying new OS/2. No more.
Nope... it still has all the functionality of OS/2 2.x, 3.x, Warp, etc... it just adds more functionality, as well as support for newer hardware, more apps, etc.
As for the WPS, though it has changed somewhat, the core is still the same. That was the beauty of it's design. You could either subclass or even superclass any WPS class to add functionality without changing the core WPS code at all.
That includes transparencies, additional controls, additional status bars, different window/folder styles, added sort criteria or a plethora of other features; such as the "multimedia" folders where one could create music playlists that never break when you move around the actual media files and read ID3 info, added play/pause/stop/FF/REW/etc control buttons and sliders, etc... all to a standard folder class.
So... the WPS books are still quite relevant.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
That's true, but there are only a handful of people out there interested in buying new Windows.
It's the installed base that forces the issue.
Well, one decently large site I run for a client runs on Warp Server for e-Business. It runs on an ancient box (10 years old) with a whoppingly fast set of 550MHz CPUs (Quad XEON 3's) and 4GB of RAM. It runs at an average of 3% CPU utilization. The site was originally hosted on a Windows Server 2003 box 4 or 5 years ago when traffic was one tenth of what it currently is. The Win2003 box was 4 times more powerful - and either bogged down or crashed repeatedly due to load.
When I do the final video transcoding for Star Trek New Voyages: Phase 2, it's generally done on an OS/2 box using mEncoder or FFMPEG... even on a much slower box than the one Windows machine here, those apps run far better, and even faster than the equivalent Windows versions (ie: it seems Linux ports run much much better on OS/2 than on Windows) and unlike on the Windows box, where the desktop becomes near unusable, OS/2's WPS is still snappy (even though the OS/2 box has 1/4 the CPU power). When I start using a "bunch" of threads on the Windows box (a "whopping" four) to do the transcodes, Windows slows to a crawl. Simple web pages in Firefox take 10 times as long to load. Windows takes forever to launch apps. The apps become unresponsive... all while the transcoder is set to normal priority. No such problems on OS/2. Windows XP and Windows Vista do not alleviate these problems - I dont know about Windows 7 as I have not tried it on that... but that still indicates that OS/2 seems to have a far better thread scheduler (coupled with the possibility that Linux ports simply run a lot better on OS/2).
So... as the site I host keeps gaining popularity, I could either get a FEW big 8 way state of the art system each running Windows Server 2008 to serve the web requests for it (and a bunch more IP addresses)... or I can simply keep running the website on ONE ancient Netfinity 7000 M10 and Warp Server for e-Business.
I've got a few clients who were tired of their Windows Server boxes... those boxes were replaced with eComStation, and run custom server side web based apps. For four years now. You have no idea how thrilled they are that they never have to call me because of a problem. And they only see me once every 3 months to clean the boxes out (ie: remove dust, clean fans, etc).
They dont care what such things are running. The only thing they care about is that they dont need to call me to fix some new issue that has arisen (server infected, machine restarted on it's own because MS forced an update even though automatic updates is disabled, some idiotic WGA error and limited functionality because some new WGA update was broken, machine is running horrendously slow for some reason, and on and on - those are actual problems the clients had with their previous installation and their previous support team).
Which do you think gets my market share?
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
No, it's not (just) an installed base. It's a market - as in those who are tired of Windows and the need to get a ton of hardware to throw at a task to handle it well, who then switch to something better. That market grows the installed base of whatever their alternative choice is (whether MacOSX, Linux, or eComStation).
It would be an installed base if they were running OS/2 and decided to keep running OS/2.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
There may be a market, but it's most definitely a dying market.
The vibrant Linux community, with all of its options, daunting, while the OS/2 community which died like a decade ago before BeOS was even around, looks better? If your shit needs OS/2 to run, that is what we call obsolete. Port it to Linux. If that's too daunting, find a vendor that sells stuff made some time in the last ten or 15 years.
Ummm... what version of Linux do you select to run a bunch of specialized hardware? What GUI? What development toolkit(s)? Who will write the drivers necessary? What happens if the current OS/2 apps are simply WPS extensions for which Linux has absolutely NO equivalent? Or even simply just true OS/2 GUI apps?
On top of that, the OS/2 API hasnt really changed. No need to select one of... how many? APIs/toolkits used by the various Linux implentations/dev tools.
Gotta remember, porting a Linux app to OS/2 is "pretty easy" (Apache, PHP, MySQL, VLC, KMP, mPlayer/mEncoder, FFMPEG, Squid, Rsycn, ISC Bind, Scribus, Quassel, Postgres, GutenPrint, CUPS, Ghostscript, cURL, Python, Subversion, GCC, Cmake, GNU Core Utils, bzip, wGet, Perl, OpenLDAP, STunnel, Tar, VirtualBox - and those are only a FEW of the ports maintained by ONE OR TWO people - and a small list of the total Linux to OS/2 ports (GUI and non-GUI).
Porting an OS/2 GUI app to Linux? If it's a true OS/2 app that utilizes the WPS, it's near impossible to totally impossible. Most of these older specialized apps for the types of systems I was discussing fit that category.
I'd call that daunting. Wouldn't you?
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
Dude, most of the java code I've run into isn't even future proof to the next subversion of java. It's seriously a significantly larger headache for us than going from Office 2000->2003->2010 or XP->Win7.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Do you think any/many of them actually want a new version of Windows? Short answer: no. In fact, every new release is a gamble for Microsoft. If they change things too much, users might as well switch to Mac OS X, or Linux, for all their retained knowledge will be worth.
After all, I am strangely colored.
And most of those people don't care what OS comes on their new computer as long as they can figure out how to get to google and play farmville.
How many people out there are explicitly buying windows 7? Hardly anyone.
Thats exactly my point. IBM Hardware and your golden but anything short like a different atapi cdrom and you had to edit the config file on the floppy install and you better hope your good at remembering hardware addresses, IRQ's, DMA, etc... I did try and boot on a regular PC directly, but it's a Corei7 and figured that would be a bit much. tried anyway and it failed there too. I just don't feel like trying to get OS/2 working if it's that much trouble. Yes, I'm sure it wouldn't be that hard, and I do know how to get most things working, I just don't think the end result is going to be worth it...
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
There are people who use what works, and there are people who hawk tech for the sake of it. I don't bitch that my house is 100s of years old, or that the trees at the back of my garden are decades old, or that some of my furniture was built in Empire Asia, or that the workhorse car is a decade old, or that my landline telephone is 15 years old, or that my mouse is 8 years old, or that some of the medications in my cabinet were formulated half a century ago or that the general coverage receiver on my desk was built in the '80s... you know why?
They're all good shit which does the job and lasts.
And I couldn't give a fuck if you want to sell me some second rate mass market junk which will be shinier on the surface but be built to last a tenth as long and not do the actual job nearly as well.
BTW, have you actually tried to develop hardware for the Linux kernel? Something driven on OS/2 15 years ago works on OS/2 today. But Linux has this perpetual habit of changing the API with the excuse that someone will be available to update and recompile driver source. So, unless you're planning to hire some guy to maintain all custom hardware drivers, a Linux install will be quickly behind the state of the art in features and security.
You have clearly never seen a Java app then. I have moved a very large LOB app through Java from 1999 through 2006, no major issues. This means that either you have done something very odd, or your competence level simply isn't what it should be.
My angle? Are you SERIOUSLY claiming that it is MORE DIFFICULT to port a LOB app written in Java from one OS to another than it is to port one that is written in C or C++ or CICS/Cobol or Delphi or something like that? Really?