Slashdot Mirror
Is Linux At the End of Its Life Cycle?
Glyn Moody writes "That's what Nikolai Pryanishnikov, president of Microsoft Russia, seems to think. Quoted in the context of continuing questions about Russia's plans to create its own national operating system based on GNU/Linux, Pryanishnikov said [via Google Translate]: 'We must bear in mind that Linux is not a Russian OS and, moreover, is at the end of its life cycle.' An off-the-cuff comment, or something more?"
"We must bear in mind that Linux is not a Russian OS and, moreover, is at the end of its life cycle."
could also be:
"We must bear in mind that Linux is not a Russian OS and, moreover, is deprecated"
"We must bear in mind that Linux is not a Russian OS and, moreover, is obsolete"
"We must bear in mind that Linux is not a Russian OS and, moreover, is old fashioned"
Does anyone have the exact translation for what the guy really meant or just a Google translation.
Also, of course it's off-the-cuff. A Microsoft guy saying nothing more than "Linux is [i]x[/i]" with nothing more to back up the statement or shed more light on it.
This is news?
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
...Steve Ballmer said that (paraphrasing) Linux is what all our competitors use
This was in response to a question by their stockholders about the possibility of breaking the company up
http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/11/ballmer-and-gates-heres-why-were.html
It's pretty brazen of you to imply that Windows is less secure than Linux. Put a desktop distro on linux and connect it to the internet, give it Window's marketshare and watch hackers make swiss cheese of it.
LOL. Where do all these 'there is no difference in security between operating system' trolls come from?
Wasn't Ubuntu pulled from OS cracking contests recently because it was too hard to crack when compared to Windows and MacOS?
Did you miss the part where it says the dude is a Microsoft employee? He's a capitalist, not a socialist. Not that the facts have ever stopped you from making cracks about your imaginary version of socialism.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Sorry, but thats nonsense. It's the old argument o proportions. The Linux kernel is not as perfect as the BSD kernel :P but its by far more modular, open source (so those hackers could start right away) and witten with a different methodology in mind. Also there were no time constraints but lots of hackers and gifted coders around the globe that took their time to write something they would like. That's in sharp contrast to the thing a company has to do to pay its employees. In case you still don't believe me check the security records and forget about comparing the numbers of bugs/flaws but their actual impact/severity on the OS. Finally check out what most ISPs do. Yes, they run GNU/Linux, not even because it's cheaper and more stable, but also because its more secure.
Yes, he did literally say "end of life cycle". Most probably because in modern Russian corporate-speak expressions and terms like this are direct translations from English (in the same way 300 to 100 years ago they were borrowed from French :) ).
Paul B.
By implying that Windows has undergone a ground up rewrite wile Linux has not, you imply that you already know the answer to your own question, which means your question is not at all earnest.
One might even say he was begging the question...
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Nope, WOW was part of WIndows 95, and allowed 16-bit Windows 3.1 apps to run on the 32-bit OS. Sure, Microsoft applied the desktop shell improvements to both product lines in parallel, but the desktop shell has never really been the problem with Windows. The real backwards compatibility comes from Win32 - allowing user-mode code to use the same systems library with either kernel. Basically everything you can call the OS, from the kernel up through the implementation of the systems libraries, was different between NT and Win9x.
If you just want to argue that the new OS was backwards compatible for apps with the old one, sure - that's true. It's also why Windows won. People like thier apps.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
the sooner Autotools dies, the better.
I quite like autotools, actually. If you actually think about what you're doing when writing your configure.ac and M4 macros, it's an elegant, clean and easy to understand solution.
Unfortunately, at the moment it seems fashionable to throw all the configuration macros into a single, poorly commented file, with all the code copied and pasted from other projects with little understanding demonstrated of what it does or why it does it, with the predictable poor performance and low maintainability.
Pirate Party UK
I hear this idiocy all the time on IRC. When it happens, I ask if the person if they actually know how to use autotools. The answer is *always* no. Usually with a justification like "why would I want to learn a system that sucks?"
You gave zero reasons for bashing autotools, so I put you in this same camp. Back up your assertions or GTFO.
It is actually a handy piece of software. When used properly, most projects need just one or two macros - AC_CHECK_LIB and AC_CHECK_HEADERS and then just list out your sources and flags in a Makefile.am.
There's really very little to complain about. It does it's job, does it fairly well. The only catch is that you have to RTFM.
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
Umm.. no.
Windows NT was released in 1993, 2 years before Windows 9x. So it's not really possible for it to have been a port of 9x. In reality, the guys that wrote the 9x UI were NT guys who were on loan to the 9x team. They had intended to write the UI for NT (then code named Cairo) but 9x got higher priority due to the need to bridge the dos/nt barrier with app and driver compatibility.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
What kind of reasoning is that? Sounds like a very elite hacking contest...
If the 'elite hackers' can break into Windows and MacOS but not Ubuntu, that should tell you something.
Besides, there have been countless amount of Linux hacks and exploits.
No there haven't:
a) the number is clearly countable.
b) the number is far, far less than the number of Windows hacks and exploits.
c) the Linux exploits are generally fixed much faster: my Ubuntu machines are normally patched automatically before the exploit hits the media.
d) Windows has staggering amounts of insecure backwards compatibility crud which guarantees security holes. For example, including the current directory on the DLL search path by default... that is quite simply insane, but Microsoft won't change it in case they break WhizzbangSoft-95 and those users complain about it.
Kids these days.
Windows 95 was an updated GUI running on DOS. You must be thinking of something else.
Lessee... Windows NT 3.1 was the Windows 3.1 GUI running on a new (NT) kernel.
("New" is relative, as NT was created by a bunch of VMS coders, from which it gets message passing and other features. One could argue somewhat whimsically that Dos-based Windows up to ME was based on 1981 technology, and every Windows version since then was based on 1975 technology.)
NT 3.51 would be called a service pack today. It was pretty solid for the time.
Windows NT 4.0 was the NT 3.5 core with a GUI that looked more like Windows 95.
Windows 2000 (still my favorite Windows desktop for business use) was basically a huge service pack on NT 4.
Windows XP was a substantial update of 2000, but by no means a "ground up" rewrite.
Vista started as a "ground up" rewrite (Longhorn) but was plagued by project delays and restarts. I'm not certain, but I wouldn't be surprised at all that what actually made it to GA had a substantial amount of XP code.
Then there's discussions on thunking and code reuse and backwards compatibility...
I'm by no means an expert, but I don't think that Windows has ever had a complete bare-metal ground-up rewrite.
But if it did, it was not Windows 95.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
In the PWN2OWN competition in 2008, attackers were able to crack the OSX and Vista laptops, but no one succeeded in breaking into the Ubuntu machine. There weren't any Linux targets in 2009 or 2010 (it looks like the focus shifted more toward web browser vulnerabilities anyhow).
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.