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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?"
...good OS dies first
The world is how you make it
The same criticisms can be applied to Windows. Definitely not a Russian OS, and it's definitely starting to slip.
"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?"
Too much vodka?
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Right on time, they also missed the top 5 supercomputers and Google OS is about to debut... makes sense that MS would want to draw attention away from that.
This just in, WIndows person says non-windows product will fail! Gets frontpage on slashdot!
An off-the-cuff comment, nothing more.
As in looking at the world with your head stuck firmly up your ass.
The GNU tool chain isn't going anywhere. The Linux kernel isn't going anywhere. The only thing in flux to any great degree would be the packages contained in the distributions.
If you define "end of life cycle" as the middle of eternity, then sure, GNU/Linux is at the "end" with half-way to go.
Remember to maintain your supply of
Didn't China announce a similar plan - create a national OS based upon linux, in order to end their dependance upon a major American corporation for computing?
that's a threat.
I believe the actual quote was:
Soviet Russia will break dis linux
But the article cleaned it up a bit.
is at the end of its life cycle
That's not a bad thing. In a lot of the classic software development models, the "end" state of a software's life cycle was operations and maintenance (O&M). Which is to say you have no new requirements having fulfilled all the basic requirements. It's bad if you constantly need new features but sometimes it can be an indication that the software is mature or near complete. At this point the customer only ever pays you money to put it back into development or fix/improve something small.
I would agree that the 2.6 kernel series is very robust and something we will most likely use for quite sometime. But I would always shy from ever saying that an operating system has all the major features it could ever need. I mean, I know a lot of clients that are committed to some version of the 2.6 kernel in their server rooms and would only ever update if there was a necessary security flaw or performance feature that they could not live without. For a lot of them, Linux has provided all the web server or database hosting features they would ever need and the product of "Linux" is indeed in the final phase of its life cycle. The vast majority of their patches are to Apache, Postgres, etc.
My work here is dung.
I'm not one of those people who mindlessly bashes on Microsoft for being Microsoft. But what I see here is the president of a Microsoft branch saying one of their competitors is dying. Specifically a competitor for, essentially, a government contract.
In other news, water is wet.
Well, the president of Microsoft Russia should be a reliable, trustworthy source for this kind of analysis, right? Right?
That's got to be one of the funniest things I've read in some time. Seriously, does Microsoft do any drug screening?
That was a Yes or No question, wasn't it?
Death looks every man in the face. All any man can do is look back and smile. - Marcus Aurelius
That is some really stupid crap right there - if anything the OS wars is what has hit a brick wall - most users can do everything in the browser these days - so run a stripped down rock solid linux distro and they are good - As far as Linux hitting the EOL cycle WTF he is talking about? Last time I checked linux was running on all kinds of gear most people have and aren't even aware of - yes @wadka too much vodka for that dude for sure
So because someone said something that clearly means it's true. btw the world is flat.
PinkOS.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
"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
Really, this is the kind of remark best ignored rather than obsessing or getting upset over. Company execs talk nonsense all the time. I mean what do you expect him to day "Oh dear, this new OS will cut into our sales, as Linux has been doing and will continue doing for the foreseeable future"? Didn't think so.
Let him talk, just nod politely and continue compiling your kernel.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
And neither is Windows...or is it?
We knew that fools would Russian, to try and Finnish it off.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Linux is not a Russian OS
Neither is Windows! I don't see the relevance of that statement.
Windows is not a Russian OS either... I'm not aware of any OS which has been developed from scratch in Russia.
Linux at least comes with source code allowing the Russians to customise it however they wish. Windows doesn't provide that flexibility.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Linux is what? 10-15 years old? By their definition Linux should have been replaced at least 5 years ago. By saying this they get to compare their brand new shiny OS against a dull and broken old OS. The thin is, Linux still is more efficient dispute its age, because it keeps improving daily through its daily update channels, not just monthly bug fixes like some other OS's.
The quote was translated by Google Translate, so I'm certainly taking it with a grain of salt; can any Russian speakers vouch for its accuracy?
Bear in mind that this is the same translation service which, when given a dumb English joke to translate into Russian and back, yields, A guy walked into a bar and said: "Oh."
Just wondering. Maybe all OSes are at the end of their life cycle...
Linux is an example of software with a Rapid Development Lifecycle. It's created, used, feedback is received, modified, used, feedback is received, etc. Usually the process of modification is largely realised through addition of features and code, which has been the case with a lot of Linux development. Right now the Linux kernel code base is undergoing something of a revision, where the addition of code and features is less important than the improvement of existing features. If Linux were developed under a different model, such as the Waterfall development model, then this could easily be seen as a sign that its development were drawing to a close with the finalisation of features. But since Linux uses Rapid Development, all the current revisions signify is that the developers are making sure they have a solid foundation for later improvements. I don't see the Linux lifecycle ending any time soon. It may fragment in the next few years, in my view, but it's not about to die.
He must be expecting *BSD to displace Linux in the *NIX world. :-)
"We must bear in mind that Linux is not a Russian OS and, moreover, is at the end of its life cycle." Nikolai Pryanishnikov then returned his home under a nearby bridge.
oh sweet. so this guy would be like steve ballmer, except, only ever drunk on vodka.
the poor bastard, did anyone tell him that having both "Russia" and "Microsoft" in his title automatically invalidates any opinions he may have on free and open source operating systems?
well, i suppose we should just let him keep talking...
----
http://petes-brain.com/ - definitely -not- russian-microsoft approved
MORTICIAN: Bring out your dead!
MICROSOFT RUSSIA: Here's one -- nine pence.
LINUX: I'm not dead!
MORTICIAN: What?
MICROSOFT RUSSIA: Nothing -- here's your nine pence.
LINUX: I'm not dead!
MORTICIAN: Here -- he says he's not dead!
MICROSOFT RUSSIA: Yes, he is.
LINUX: I'm not!
MORTICIAN: He isn't.
MICROSOFT RUSSIA: Well, he will be soon, he's very ill.
LINUX: I'm getting better!
MICROSOFT RUSSIA: No, you're not -- you'll be stone dead in a moment. LINUX: I don't want to go in the cart!
MICROSOFT RUSSIA:: Oh, don't be such a baby.
MORTICIAN: I can't take him...
. . . etc . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Ask the KDE4 guys how's that working out for them.
Meanwhile, it's an interesting point. In the closed source world the justification for keeping ancient shit code is that "we have too much money in it to throw it away"; open source can simply outwait the creators of the ancient code, or fork.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
He probably meant that Linux is entering its "mature period" as an OS; it's stable. works on more platforms and devices than any other OS in the world, and is certainly something that has great potential to be used in new applications and devices - take Android as an example. Why would one even consider basing a new product on Linux otherwise?
...saying "We will bury you"?
All open source projects evolve to the point where the current developers want to throw away all the code and start again.
I'm expecting Linux NT, an entirely new kernel using a microkernel architecture. :-)
Linux evolves... continuously, and according to need.
Look at the original-ish versions of Linux... much closer to original UNIX.. they even failed to do simple things like play glitch-free music from a PC sound card. It was, after all, a well know fact, back in the 80s and early 90s, that UNIX simply could not do realtime, even Windows-class "soft" realtime. Every UNIX workstation with the need to play audio used a DSP with its own memory buffers.
Today, you can string together a gstreamer sequence from any shell and not just play back, but even transcode (within machine limits) in realtime. Just one example.
Anything reasonably good to Linux users will become part of Linux. That's both a blessing and a curse... it does mean that any cool new stuff -- cmake, new compilers, new languages, whatever, gradually become a part of the GNU/Linux gene pool. In this way, Linux never gets outdated. It also never directly courts end-users other than existing and traditional Linux types (programmers, power users) unless some other organization makes a concerted effort to push it there in some way (Google/Android, MeeGo, Ubuntu, etc).
On Window, things get added to drive [a] Microsoft's dominance, and [b] the acceptability to customers of an enforced (and paid) upgrade, and [c] demands of the hardware OEMs. This is actually more of a balancing act than a prioritized list; unbalance it too much (Vista, for example, tilted way too much toward "a" and away from "b") and they have problems. But in particular, the "getting paid" part makes Windows change in 3-year jumps, rather than Linux's continual progress. And it doesn't really guarantee any specific "progress" or "evolution", other than those defined by these criteria (eg, Microsoft makes driver changes all the time to force OEMs to write new drivers and thus remain under Microsoft's dominance -- this is change for certain, but not necessarily progress).
-Dave Haynie
An off-the-cuff comment, or something more?
How about wishful thinking?
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
"We must bear in mind that Linux is not a Russian OS..."
Putting aside the fact that no other major OS is "Russian either", and that Linux can be compiled and customized in Russia, this reeks of "not invented here" syndrome.
I'm proud to be Human, but I still wear silk and drink cow milk and alcohol produced by yeast.
Just because it was not invented or created by me doesn't mean it's not good.
If you only consume what you produce you end up eating shit.
Every time it seems that MS is starting to play nice and accept Linux as a reality, the old MS shows up again.
We must bear in mind that Linux is not a Russian OS and, moreover, is at the end of its life cycle."
In this statement the MS employee implies two false dichotomies. (1) Linux is not "Russian" and (2) Linux is "old" and decrepit. The statement implies that Windows is not. What the employee doesn't acknowledge is (1) Windows is not "Russian" either and (2) Linux started only 2 years (1991) after Windows NT (1989) which is the basis of Windows 7. Sure Windows has gone through many changes since MS starting developing NT but so has Linux. In fact there was word that a new Linux patch that would increase performance in multi-tasking. While Linux has not gotten the consumer uptake in PCs as MS has, it has a strong presence in servers especially HPC. According to the latest top 500 list:
Family Count Share
Linux 459 91.80%
Windows 5 1.00%
Unix 19 3.80%
BSD Based 1 0.20%
Mixed 16 3.20%
Having over 90% in HPC is certainly not "at end of its life cycle".
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Unix has been at the end of it's life cycle for about 20 years now and it's still here!
Having recently installed several more Linux boxes at work and home after being away from Linux for awhile, I am once again reminded how elegant and efficient the Linux OS really is. It was actually a fun project to install, configure, and add packages to these machines. Unlike installing a new Windows box where I need to reboot at least 3 times in order for it to pull down all the required updates, this was refreshing and reaffirmed my appreciation of the Linux OS. Linux isn't going away any time soon, sorry.
Didn't China announce a similar plan - create a national OS based upon linux, in order to end their dependance upon a major American corporation for computing?
No. It seems they created their own Linux distribution, Red Flag Linux, as their "best alternative" for when they sat down with a major American corporation to renegotiate pricing, source access, etc.
Enough said... http://www.makeyougohmm.com/20050524/1914/
After listening to Nikolai's comments, a more accurate translation turned out to be, "If 'I' use Linux, 'I' will be at the end of my 'Life-Cycle'." It's a common translation mistake.
...a certain regime was making right before its government and economy collapsed.
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Good point... if you factor in Apple's iOS (UNIX-but-not-Linux based), it's pretty bad news on smartphones if you're not *nix based. iOS is healthy, Android is kicking butt. Everyone but Nokia in the non-Unix SymbianOS world has left, and Nokia is increasingly talking about MeeGo (which is pretty much just a Linux distro) as their future. Windows Mobile has been failing for a few years, to the point where most OEMs lost much interest, and MS had to replace it with their ZunePhone, er, iClone, er, Windows Phone 7... still unsettled success. RIM isn't dead yet, but they're definitely behind, and moving to QNX, rather than Blackberry OS, on their tablets... and eventually, their phones (QNX, while not UNIX-derived, is a POSIX compliant microkernel).
So really, Microsoft is all alone, going against the greater world of UNIX-derived OSs, Their use is still increasing... hardly the sign of something that's "end of life". One would tend to think of an end-of-life product as maybe failing in some or all of its markets, even when pushed by the world's largest software company, even failing against a free OS mostly promoted by techno-hippies who have trouble coming up with beer money...
-Dave Haynie
He's just used to having to re-invent the OS every few years and have it be incompatible with the previous version. He is working for Microsoft after all. I'm sure he's only saying that because he sees Linux 95 in the near future.
Overrated Moderation: This posts sucks... because.
...GNU/Linux opens your source!
That might explain a lot of things, particularly its exploitation by Russian malware...
Ham and Eggs? Obsolete.
Denim? Gone.
iPods? At the end of their life cycle.
Fresh ground coffee? It is so over.
Intelligent remarks in public? Bah! Who ever did that to begin with?
It's dying, so please stop using it.
Turn in your DVD player, your BLuray Player, your Car stereo, your phone, your cellphone, your home automation gear, etc...
These kinds of articles are always written by those that know nothing at all about Computer or OS's in general.
DOS is still used in new products, Product that are mission critical.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Most of these Microsoft people believe their own FUD. They'll argue that the sun is the moon to discredit alternatives. One of the best that I've heard from someone I used to think highly of is that "Windows has far more security mechanisms in place than Unix"
I think that part of the driving force for the attitude among Microsoft enthusiasts is that they are scared of change. They are happy in their safe little world (safe, in terms of job security etc.) and it makes them angry that better systems exist and people are taking an interest in them.
Note that I'm an MCSE (Microsoft Certified Solitaire Engineer) but please don't hold that against me :-)
This guy is the "president of Microsoft Russia". Does anyone think that he's going to say anything positive about Linux?
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.
Ubuntu is only at Moldy Meercat, so there are 6 more years till the end of Linux.
In other exciting news -- the sun came up again this morning, and the economy still sucks.
Isn't this sort of like listening to China about the legitimacy of Taiwan?
could be the end of his Windows usage life cycle. I wasn't too thrilled about the brushed metal look aka Apple but after install ( 15min for me and) opening up Mint Menu it does look nice and polished looking.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Linux keeps changing, since it's written by people who like to change things frequently and are allowed to. If you write kernel drivers, you know that Linux driver interface changes very often, sometimes maddeningly so. The Windows driver interface, on the other hand, changes once every 8 years or so.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
Will our desktops look the same in 20 years time as they do now (and did, to a large extent 20 years ago - certainly for windows). Will we still be running x86-based hardware - albeit with solid-state mass storage instead of spinning stuff? If so, then it does sound to me like a rather boring environment for an IT enthusiast to be in. Even todays innovations: such as tablets are really just PCs sans keyboards: they still employ the same basic paradigm of applications occupying windows on a screen./
However, you never know - there could still be some development left to do. Who can say, by 2030 we might even have got up to kernel version 2.8
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Perhaps we have reached a state where the Desktop OS does pretty much everything the user wants it to do, and there is not much need to re-invent the wheel every few years.
There might be a few details where minor improvements or different styles to search or interact with the desktop are made, but most of those are (at least in the case of Linux) Bolted on top of the OS anyway.
In case of Linux, that might definitely happen sooner than with Windows, since the motivation for writing something in most cases is that there is a missing feature. If there are no missing features then nothing will get written. In contrast, proprietary software vendors will always have the priority of making money in mind, so they are more likely to retire software quicker.
In my case a "Install this OS and have a decade without having to worry about a major upgrade" would be a major plus in the decision what to install. So it would be for most people who just want to get stuff done.
Nikolai Pryanishnikov and Willie Gates have more than a couple things in common: (1) MS, (2) lack of prescience, (3) personality....
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Ask the KDE4 guys how's that working out for them.
A better question is if it was really the redesign as such or manpower that killed them. If you kill a huge migration project 80% into the project as many systems are already migrated you always leave a gigantic clusterfuck. Companies will commit resources to finish it, even if it's a depressing job with a result that might suck more than when you started. That was the case with KDE4, a ton of work had been committed on KDE4 ports of the applications, but the core wasn't working. And this is where a company and open source differ, a company would order developers to finish it for the good of the company. In most cases open source projects are entirely dependent on people wanting to do it, so the project slowed to a glacial pace. I think they knew KDE4 wasn't ready for release, but without more people they weren't ever going to get ready. So, they released anyway as the least possible evil.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
What linux they talk about? The kernel? Or some distribution? I mean there isn't exactly a revolution on kernels at hand, is there? So this is just hollow marketdroid speak. Unless someone can really point to some revolution to kernel development I cannot take this seriously, nor does anyone else.
... barely a month before the Year of the Linux Desktop begins!
More then likely he was confusing a specific distribution with Linux itself. It seems plausable that he meant "[Distro X] is near end of life, so now would be a good time to create our own Distro to replace it, managed by us." I mean, if Linux itself was out of date, then why build your own OS from it? Also, the article mentions Red Hat several times. It seems thats the distro they are using now, which again reinforces my thought that they are talking about a distribution being out of date, not all of Linux.
Why is it so hot? Where am I going? What am I doing in this handbasket?
like yowzah, she could do a blowjob, tea-bagging and rimjob all at the same time!
This is not the first time someone has called for a national/homegrown OS. And perhaps he's not quite ready to jump in and, to mix metaphors, bite the hand that feeds him so he calls out Linux. Or, alternatively, he is calling for a homegrown OS and he knows that bashing Windows will get him no where but that peeling off a few nationalistic OSS developers might get something started.
In any case, not sure this sentence fragment deserves any real attention, regardless of who is saying it, as Linux survives evolutionarily/according to, essentially, market forces. Ok, there is more than a little piled on top of that, but certainly not e.g. huge marketing campaigns and distribution deals, but you get my point. When Linux is EOL, and it will be at some point, it will be EOL.
I'd ask the Germans.
They're busy trying to create a branch for Open Office due to Sun/Oracle, but most of the documenters for the Open Source are sticking with the original suite for now.
In the end, it depends on whether or not anyone else cares. The Germans - or the Russians - are always free to dev their own stuff. If it's better, we'll migrate to that. If it's not, we won't.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
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The president of MICROSOFT RUSSIA announces that their biggest competitor is at the end of its life cycle and THIS IS NEWS?
Don't they, like, announce that in every quarterly earnings report?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Let's think about this. A future model for a computer may be very different from what we are using now. It could have dozens of cores and have to deal with local, network, and cloud storage. It may also have more than one kind of core as well. Look at the PS3 for example. You have the PPC cores, the Cell elements, and the GPU. That give you three very different types of cores in one system.
Even if you stick with the X86 ISA how about this as an system, And 8 Core system with two cores being atoms and six being an I7. At idle the i7 cores power down and the system loafs along on the atom cores. Run a game or transcode a video and all 6 of the I7s fire up.
Throw in a GPU or two and you have a very different type of system.
Or maybe it will just have 48 or 64 ARM cores.
Or maybe it will have CPLD blocks.
Will Windows or Linux scale will to those systems?
They might but one should never marry a technology it will only lead to heartache.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
If you want to create a national OS for Russia, the last thing you want is:
IANAARD (I am not a active releasing developer) but the test would be...
1) If you were to do a hypothetical clean sheet redesign of an OS on a cocktail napkin, throwing out the rule book and looking forward the next 10-20 years. How much would you retain that exists in the *nix and NT* environment today? Probably very little, there's a lot of legacy layers right back to the bios that don't really serve the purpose they once used to.
2) Is your OS highly dependant on, and still religiously adhereing to legacy design decisions that date back more than one or two decades, developers are just doing things a certain way without really thinking about the reasons why they do, and if it still has meaning?
To give an example, and risk being modded down, *NIX "Everything is a file" is cute, and worked well when almost all data anyone needed to work with was a file, but is increasingly irrelvant in todays world as meaningful data is more highly linked, semantic and nuanced. The result is you need a layer or two of abstraction to be able to deal with the fuzzy weird ultra-interlinked metadata universe that is the world wide web and teh internets - its a paradigm or two ahead of the design decisions that underpin both the *nix and NT IS-verses. If I think in UNIX I have a trouble solving a web problem, if I think in teh webs OS suddenly seems so abstract. But I'm generally a poor confused ex-noob anyway, so thats possibly subjective.
But.. it's kinda cool it's all still working well enough, and it all still evolving. Linux is alive and well in edgy new OSes like Android, so perhaps there's nothing to worry about.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
CATS decries that "All your base are belong to us!"
... and I'm at the end of my lifecycle.
Linux will likely have the majority of the smartphone market soon now that Nokia is switching to MeeGo. Since smartphones are the future, Linux's future is looking very bright.
Android - Linux
MeeGo - Linux
webOS - Linux
iOS - Not Linux
Win Phone 7 - Not Linux
BlackBerry OS - Not Linux
Ahhh Duh, this is the president of Microsoft Russia... What do you expect the poor bastard to say????
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
It isn't dead, so obviously it hasn't been killed by anything.
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all these jokes about soviet Russia are already boring, in Russia there are no jokes about US and EU, btw. About Nikolai - he is very interesting and clever man, I know him by myself, and these words are just a marketing step,or maybe you think different? (: BTW looks like yellow press, is it really /.?
Read between the lines folks.
MS-Russia is in real trouble here. Their install base is all but eroded away.
Russia (just like many other governments) are out of cash and are mandating Free (as in beer) OSS. They've been told that all schools must use FOSS:
http://news.slashdot.org/story/08/10/23/1627250/Russia-Mandates-Free-Software-For-Public-Schools
" If a school doesn't want to use the free software supplied by the government, it has to buy commercial licences using its own funds."
And since they're already GIVING it away to non-profits and NGOs just to maintain their install base:
http://politics.slashdot.org/story/10/10/17/2241228/MS-Gives-Free-Licenses-To-Oppressed-Nonprofits
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/09/13/221216/Microsoft-To-Issue-Blanket-License-To-NGOs
Plus they're loosing the battle in anti-piracy:
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/09/12/131247/Microsoft-Complaints-Help-Russian-Govt-Pursue-Political-Opposition-Groups
MS-Russia is really grasping at straws here.
The funny thing in their latest statement is self contradicting.:
"We must bear in mind that Linux is not a Russian OS and, moreover, is at the end of its life cycle."
"Linux is not a Russian OS..."
(does not have the back doors we need)..
But they are about to MAKE it a Russian OS. Just like China did with RedFlag Linux:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Flag_Linux
And "is at the end of its life cycle"?!?
Last I checked is is growing like crazy!
The funny thing is that by making their own Linux.. they are, in fact extending it's reach (and life) further.. and further retarding the install base of Windows.
Microsoft knows this.. but just can not say it aloud.
I think it was Gartner who said that MS would have to have an Open Source offering to compete with Linux by 2008. The real work going forward for MS is three fold:
1) How to harness Open Source, given their OSS rep
2) How to make money at it..
and from a closed-source perspective:
3) How to keep GPL from "tainting" your closed source products
(developers love to eat Asian food and pizza together..;)
As a Russian MD refugee friend of mine once told me regarding the government's view on how Russia sees its citizens,
"They say, 'Russia is such nice place. Who woult evah vant to leef?' "
Russia and Microsoft have so much in common.
Tweeks
I predict this comment signals that Nikolai Pryanishnikov is nearing the end of his lifecycle as a MS spokesman.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
This Belgiumming thread Israeli Ghana Senegal Togo where she couldn't Belize.
-- open source? sounds like the real book --
he's probably been nippin' on the cooking ethanol just a wee bit too much
SARAVA!
AK-47's :)
SARAVA!
Whoever modded me troll needs a reality check. Their very severe national alcohol problem is well documented. I have never seen humans consume alcohol in that manner.
SARAVA!
The Linux kernel architecture is creaky, but so is everybody else's. And it doesn't matter. The kernel's job is to shuffle bytes between devices and processes and manage memory. The Linux kernel does that pretty efficiently, people seem to be able to write good drivers for it, and that's pretty much all there's to it. It's the same with window systems: X11 gets the job done as efficiently and well as anybody, and even though there's some legacy stuff in there, there is no point in rewriting it.
And it's not like anybody else has something better. The NT kernel is full of complicated functionality that nobody actually uses. The OS X kernel is a microkernel that has been turned into a monolithic kernel and has had a BSD brain transplant. The one recent OS that really tried to shake things up a bit is Plan 9, but it crashed and burned.
Journalism 1: Write a story titled "Is xxx dead?"
Insert popular item of choice in place of 'xxx'.
Generates controversy and people keep falling for it.
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
Sputnik, Vostok, Salyut, etc.
Indeed.. even though Linus disagrees.
Then what term might Linus use to distinguish Linux systems on laptop PCs, desktop PCs, and servers (which tend to include glibc, Bash, GNU Coreutils, and other components of a GNU system) from Linux systems in appliances (which tend to include uClibc/Newlib/Bionic, BusyBox, and BusyBox instead, and generally far less GNU software)? In careful writing, I use GNU/Linux to describe the former and especially to distinguish it from the latter.
In another shocking development, it has been reported that wolves think sheep are tasty.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
That's a completely unfounded statement, as evidenced by his assertion that Linux is at the end of it's life cycle.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
Seriously a demise projection of Linux from one of it's most prominent haters that dream about it going away.
Who the Hell allowed this to be put on the front page or the RSS feed?
Mondragon Cooperative for those interested.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
About as well as it did with Enlightenment.
That said, after close to ten years E 0.17 is quite wonderful and what I'm using now. At work I still have E 0.16 which has mostly just had bugfixes (including some in the last couple of months) since 1999. You know that Win7 stuff where you get a cute preview of the entire window in the icon? I haven't changed my desktop theme since about 1997 on a series of computers and E 0.16 has had that since way back then.
Linux is not a Russian OS and is at the end f its life cycle ... unlike the Russian OS Windows Stalin ... I mean Seven! D'oh!
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)
The kernel is called linux
Agreed.
and the distribution is called whatever the hell the distributors want to call it.
So we have two classes of distributions: those similar to Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware, Gentoo, Fedora, CentOS, Mandriva, and openSUSE, which combine Linux with a GNU userland and are designed for use on PC-style hardware; and those along the lines of OpenWRT, DSLinux, Android, and other distributions designed for appliances with limited hardware, which use something lighter weight than the GNU components. If not "GNU/Linux", then what's a memorable generic term for the former to distinguish them from the latter?
+1
Yes, autotools can be difficult to work with (in fact I've never been in a place where I had to actually build an application stack and set up the macros etc., but I use a half-assed application structure loosely based on some of the concepts for my own work, and I've done the '.configure/make/make install' dance a zillion times), but IMHO autotools were the key to making open source and commercial applications and libraries that could be built pretty much seamlessly on many architectures, and as such made *ix ubiquitous.
Without autotools, we might well still be back in the days of maintaining completely separate code bases for each computer architecture out there. I'm continually impressed by the ease with which I can tweak parameters to .configure and watch as my computer builds something as big and complex as Apache, PHP, Python, Perl (with its own meta-tools), etc.!
Of course, I have to empathize with those who have little understanding of what it does or why - I'm more in that boat than not. I think that unless and until you've built a half-dozen C-based applications you're not really going to get the hang of the configuration.
I suppose at this time autotools is getting long in the tooth, and depends on somewhat ancient methods - but so much stuff has been built on top of it to make it easier to use and build (such as various IDEs), that I don't think that is so important any more. Most users are just going to depend on their IDE to do most of the work. Trying to build a replacement for autotools from scratch, that has the same breadth of capability, would be extremely difficult. This now extends to the auto update process that my OS (which at this time happens to be Ubuntu) uses to maintain itself, which is in its innards intimately connected with the results of many autotools builds.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
So, you want a specific name for a general situation and "linux distribution " is not good enough for you or are you just here to argue?
IMHO the only name that doesn't make sense is that imposed by an outsider pretending to take ownership by prefix - "other buggers efforts" can't even be excused by it being in a good cause.
Love Ubuntu 10.x - best yet
So, you want a specific name for a general situation and "linux distribution " is not good enough for you
Under the widest definition of "Linux distribution", Android counts. I was looking for a snappy way to distinguish Linux on the desktop and laptop PCs, which is commercially insignificant in the United States market, from Android and embedded deployments, which are far more successful.
president of Microsoft Russia said your stuff is dead, buy our stuff.
Ya sure -- lol
Better dead than red...hat.