Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Is Linux At the End of Its Life Cycle?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the don't-cycles-repeat dept.

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?"

119 of 676 comments (clear)

  1. In Soviet Russia... by Stregano · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...good OS dies first

    --
    The world is how you make it
    1. Re:In Soviet Russia... by drumcat · · Score: 5, Funny

      Linux reboots you.

    2. Re:In Soviet Russia... by CRCulver · · Score: 4, Funny

      In Soviet Russia, GNU Hurd triumphs over Linux!

    3. Re:In Soviet Russia... by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 5, Funny

      Lifecycle ENDS YOU!

      --
      "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
      Never been known to fail..."
    4. Re:In Soviet Russia... by uzyn · · Score: 2, Funny

      ... national OS makes Russians.

    5. Re:In Soviet Russia... by IICV · · Score: 3, Funny

      I was going to go for "... Microsoft EOLs Linux", myself.

    6. Re:In Soviet Russia... by spun · · Score: 3, Informative

      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
    7. Re:In Soviet Russia... by marcello_dl · · Score: 5, Funny

      FUD spreads Microsoft Russian (aka MSSR) exec.

      I think I know why MSSR is depicting Linux as a end of line OS: I hear MS has a beta of an operating system, has been in the works for a loong time (beta 1.0 came shortly after the first Mac). One of these days it will be good for release. Possibly.

      --
      ---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
    8. Re:In Soviet Russia... by bluelip · · Score: 2, Funny

      Maybe someone should let him know that his nation is beyond the end of its life-cycle.

      --

      Yep, I never spell check.
      More incorrect spellings can be found he
    9. Re:In Soviet Russia... by spun · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Trolled? Is that his excuse for being an idiot? c64_love wasn't doing this to troll anyone. He's not that clever. This was, I am quite sure, a funny joke in his mind.

      --
      - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
    10. Re:In Soviet Russia... by spun · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Why do you persist in lying about what socialism is?

      Money is the 'product of your body?!?' You crap money? Amazing. Money is a social construct, meaningless without social agreement. The ability to amass and preserve a surplus is not an individual ability, it is an emergent phenomenon enabled by the agreement of a society to honor money. Without society, money is meaningless.

      In a true socialist state, no one can force anyone to do anything, unlike a capitalist state, where those with capital control and dominate those without. If you are poor, and lack education (something capitalist overlords work to ensure, so you will be a more malleable slave) then you are a slave. Kiss masters ass or die of starvation, and master will work to ensure that any attempt by the peasants to band together to protect their interests and provide for themselves is derided as "socialism." Indeed, mutual benefit societies (A.K.A "The State") are inherently evil, and ruthless selfishness is a virtue.

      --
      - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
    11. Re:In Soviet Russia... by Tetsujin · · Score: 2, Funny

      Drago: If it dies, it dies.

      I don't hate Balboa. I pity the fool.

      --
      Bow-ties are cool.
    12. Re:In Soviet Russia... by arbitraryaardvark · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yuri: what's the difference between microsoft and russia?
      Sasha: One's a ruthless totalitarian empire bent on world domination, with millions of informers, riddled with organized crime.
      The other's a computer company.

    13. Re:In Soviet Russia... by jgardia · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Nah, I just think it is just the way they see things in Microsoft. When an OS is stable and works reliably, then it is at the end of its life cycle (like Windows XP).

    14. Re:In Soviet Russia... by Doug77 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I think the point you are missing is that life cannot be boiled down to a simple point (irony intended). People tend to simplify situations so they can easily understand them and ignore the incomprehensible number of interaction that had to happen in order for them to be productive.

    15. Re:In Soviet Russia... by mangu · · Score: 4, Funny

      Yuri: what's the difference between microsoft and russia?
      Sasha: One's a ruthless totalitarian empire bent on world domination, with millions of informers, riddled with organized crime.
      The other's a computer company.

      I knew they had privatized everything when the Soviet Union fell, but this is ridiculous!

      No way they turned Russia into a computer company!

    16. Re:In Soviet Russia... by spun · · Score: 2, Informative

      Wrong, as I explained, labor doesn't get you a portable, tradable, universal, and everlasting unit of wealth exchange, it gets you products.

      Here's capitalism: A man knocks on your door with an offer, you get to continue top breath his air and eat his food if you suck his cock.

      It is not stealing if you get something in return, and you freely accept the exchange. If you don't like what is offered by society, don't live in society. You have the choice not to play, you can live as a hermit and no one will bother you. But as long as you would like to be a part of our mutual benefit society, you will pay the membership dues.

      Without society, those Amish have no ability to trade in money. They can barter, using whatever of their perishable crop survives, directly for items from others. They have every right to keep the direct product of their labor, the food and goods they produce. If they want to use currency, they need to be part of a society. And if they want to be part of a society, they need to pay he membership dues.

      Libertarians want to be members of the club, they just don't want to have to pay to be members of the club. Which makes libertarians no good freeloading leaches.

      --
      - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
    17. Re:In Soviet Russia... by dfenstrate · · Score: 2, Interesting

      In a true socialist state, no one can force anyone to do anything, unlike a capitalist state, where those with capital control and dominate those without.

      So in a socialist state, if I actually work and produce something of value, the state won't force me to share that with an able-bodied person who chooses to sit on his ass all day?

      Do you imagine the 'true socialist state' as one where everyone is guaranteed a reasonable standard of living while not being required to produce anything of value for their fellow man?

      How long do you think a system of mandatory benefits but voluntary contribution would last?

      --
      Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
    18. Re:In Soviet Russia... by spun · · Score: 2, Insightful

      All societies force you to share the products of your labor. It is the cost of membership. You are paying for the benefit of being a part of society. Libertarians want the benefits, but they don't want to pay for it.

      If you don't pay, you don't get to be a member. If you don't like the deal offered by one society, do what you do in the free market: shop around. No one I know goes into a McDonald's, asks for a Whopper, offers to pay $0 for it, then gets incensed and starts whining about their rights being infringed when everyone laughs at them. Yet that is exactly analogous to what libertarians do. You do not like the deal society offers you, you do not want to pay, therefore, your rights are being infringed.

      Most libertarians, like Rand Paul, would argue that a store owner should have the right not to serve a black man if they don't want to. Well, our mutual benefit society doesn't want to serve freeloaders. You do NOT have the right to demand free services. You do NOT have the right to demand that other people do things your way, and whining about your rights does not disguise the fact that simply you want other people to change to suit you.

      --
      - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
    19. Re:In Soviet Russia... by Grishnakh · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Your writing makes very little sense.

      First, about the Amish: you don't need to deal with money to be required to pay money to the government for taxes. Even if you use the barter system for everything, the IRS requires you to pay taxes based on the market value of the goods and services you trade. So, for instance, if you agree with your neighbor to fix his car in exchange for him mowing your lawn for a month, you and he both are required to determine the Dollar amount this transaction is worth, and count it as income on both your tax returns, and pay taxes on it. Of course, in reality, no one does that, but the law is the law. It's easy for people working normal jobs to get away with not reporting this stuff, since they already have tons of thousands of dollars in regular W-4 income, but if someone appears to be making a good living (like with a farm), but isn't reporting any income or paying any taxes, the IRS generally takes a dim view of that. How (or if) the Amish get away with not paying taxes, I have no idea.

      Now for the rest of your argument, it makes no sense. You're talking about some kind of exchange for living in society; what exchange are you talking about? The previous poster was talking about the common criticism of Marxism which is that everyone seems to receive the same income (or at least some guaranteed minimum income), whether or not they feel like working, and that this system is unsustainable. What is your response to that charge?

      And then of course you go off on some nonsensical rant about capitalism and fellatio. Sorry, but that's not capitalism at all; capitalism is when people are able to control capital and use it to invest in industry. Of course, in the most successful capitalist societies (which I would argue are the Western European nations), there's strong governmental controls over the market to make sure that things don't get out of control, and companies aren't allowed to grow too large and become too powerful. Capitalism and free-market economies work best when the playing field is level, so to speak, companies aren't allowed to grow too large and powerful, and the rules are tilted in favor of smaller competitors rather than larger incumbents.

      The Soviet experiment showed why Marxism and planned centralized economies simply don't work, and North Korea is still trying to make it work, to no avail. China however gave up on it, and now that they have a free(r) market, they're quite successful, even though they never gave up the authoritarian government part.

    20. Re:In Soviet Russia... by Grishnakh · · Score: 3, Insightful

      What about all the other socialist services you enjoy, such as roads and highways, food inspections, parks, etc.? Should those be eliminated too? Good luck inspecting your own food before buying it. I guess you can just have your family sue the grocery store after you die of food poisoning, or maybe we'll just rely on word-of-mouth getting around and the grocery store selling tainted meat going out of business after a few hundred people die.

    21. Re:In Soviet Russia... by spun · · Score: 2, Insightful

      In a pure Capitalist state, anyone with property dominates, controls, and enslaves anyone without income producing property. Libertarians define aggression as a poor man stealing an apple from a rich man, but when the rich man offers the poor man an apple in exchange for a life of slavery, that is a fair deal.

      When your life is on the line, any deal is a fair deal. Libertarians don't want people to band together to protect themselves from oppression, they want the powerful to be free to oppress the weak. Libertarians are almost all social Darwinists who think the weak should just die to make more room for the rest of us, or at best roll over and do whatever their betters tell them to.

      The State is just the weak banding together to protect themselves from oppression by the strong. The idea that some individual should have control over natural resources, property, the means of production, while other people should do what the owners tell them, is tyranny.

      You still want a state. You just want the state to be nothing more than your hired guns, to keep the poor from taking back what you stole from them.

      --
      - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
    22. Re:In Soviet Russia... by spun · · Score: 3, Insightful

      We do want socialism in the US. Look at medicare, medicaid, the military, police, fire departments, public schools, public libraries, public roads, social security, the list of popular socialist endeavors is quite long.

      --
      - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
    23. Re:In Soviet Russia... by spun · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Regular folks emphatically do not like capitalism better. The poster boys for capitalism, Wall Street CEOs, are amongst the most loathed figures on the world scene today. And in any case, do try to compare apples to apples. People in first world European socialist democracies wouldn't trade places with Americans for anything, most of the world looks at us as ruthless barbarians who don't give a fuck about the poor. but more and more Americans are emigrating to these socialist democracies. Now, try to find me a capitalist state that went from subsistence level farming to being an industrial powerhouse in under fifty years, Like the Mondragon Cooperative did. You can't.

      --
      - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
    24. Re:In Soviet Russia... by spun · · Score: 2, Informative

      It means different things in America than in the rest of the word, where it is just another term for 'anarchist.' Here in America, it means "Individualist free market anarchist," and implies a belief in absolute property rights.

      I would wager that I know quite a bit more about libertarians and the history and philosophy of anarchism than you do, in fact, it is because I know what anarchism is that I hate libertarians. American libertarians are basically nothing more than closet fascists.

      --
      - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
    25. Re:In Soviet Russia... by Grishnakh · · Score: 2, Insightful

      That's not what the previous poster was talking about, or else he's an idiot. There is no choice to not pay taxes in any industrialized country I've ever heard of, unless you're on the dole or similar (but even then, you're still "playing" and a part of the system).

      No, you can't live as a hermit, not legally any way. Living as a hermit implies moving to some rural area and living on the land there. That's only legal if you own the land, and if you own the land, you have to pay property taxes to continue owning it. Otherwise, you're a trespasser (whether you're on someone else's private land or on government-owned land). Of course, there are homeless people who either wander around and live on city benches until they're told to move by the cops, or who live under a bridge somewhere, but these actions really aren't legal either, the cops just don't bother enforcing vagrancy laws against them since it's rather pointless.

    26. Re:In Soviet Russia... by ifiwereasculptor · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I don't know, dude. If taxation is theft, how would you call making $20000 worth of goods in a given month and being paid a $1000 salary? I think what makes people hate taxes is that those $200 come and then go, so you miss them much more than the other $18000 you don't even see. If I made $20000 a month, I wouldn't mind parting with $4000, honestly.

    27. Re:In Soviet Russia... by FoolishOwl · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The previous poster was talking about the common criticism of Marxism which is that everyone seems to receive the same income (or at least some guaranteed minimum income), whether or not they feel like working, and that this system is unsustainable. What is your response to that charge?

      I'll just offer a short answer to this question.

      The premise is that people fundamentally want to work, that most of what people do when they're not sleeping is a form of work, and people dislike their jobs because of poor conditions and their lack of real influence over the results of their labor (i.e., alienation).

      Secondarily, people respond to social norms; ever feel uncomfortable taking a break around people who are working?

      If there were some minimum income, there would doubtless be freeloaders, despite the foregoing; there are freeloaders now, but it's not that big a problem, given how productive the majority are.

    28. Re:In Soviet Russia... by somersault · · Score: 2, Insightful

      There is no choice to not pay taxes in any industrialized country I've ever heard of

      Hence his point about an exchange for living in society.

      No, you can't live as a hermit, not legally any way

      If you're truly wanting to live as a hermit, why would you care about social constructs such as laws?

      --
      which is totally what she said
    29. Re:In Soviet Russia... by Grishnakh · · Score: 2, Informative

      If you're truly wanting to live as a hermit, why would you care about social constructs such as laws?

      Because trespassing on someone else's land (as in trying to live there) will get you either shot, or arrested and thrown in jail. You can choose to not care about laws as much as you want, but the police don't care about your choice.

      It's not like there's tons of lush, fertile, unoccupied land out there that you can live on and get all your food from. If the land is the kind that you can live off of, there's either someone already there, or it's a government park (and park rangers aren't very accommodating of squatters). If the land is wide-open with no one around for hundreds of miles, then it's also barren and not a place where you can find food.

      A couple decades ago, some guy named McCandless tried to be a hermit in Alaska just for about 6 months, and he died of starvation because he couldn't find enough food to sustain himself, even though he was in a remote place where no one cared that he was staying.

    30. Re:In Soviet Russia... by poopdeville · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Look, I'm an American, and you can't fucking tell me what to do. Hypocrite.

      --
      After all, I am strangely colored.
    31. Re:In Soviet Russia... by Grishnakh · · Score: 2, Insightful

      So when you go to a restaurant, are you going to demand to inspect their kitchen and make sure that all the food they use has these nice logos on it?

      Remember, if you screw up, you (or your children) gets food poisoning and dies.

      I guess you think we should also eliminate the FAA and its aircraft inspections, and just rely on people to fly on airlines that are certified by a private foundation?

      Just because "the government" isn't doing something as well as it possibly could doesn't mean we should throw the whole thing out.

    32. Re:In Soviet Russia... by Grishnakh · · Score: 2, Informative

      This is my point exactly: the places left in the world where you are able to get lost and not be noticed are places where it is extremely difficult or impossible to survive on your own. Those places are empty precisely because they're not nice places to live: the land isn't very fertile, the weather too extreme, etc. Humans require a fair amount of land per person to grow the food they need to survive. Back in the days before agriculture, this wasn't the case, because humans just took food from the land: either wild-growing plants or wild animals. However, we overpopulated the world several thousand years ago to the point where it was impossible to enjoy a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and we had to invent agriculture to survive in our increased numbers. In the transition, humans' health got much worse, and they lost a full foot of height due to the much poorer nutrition that an agricultural lifestyle provides, until they figured out how to vary their diet enough to compensate. Jared Diamond wrote a whole book on this.

      If there were still nice places to live where you could live as a hunter-gatherer, people would be moving there. The places that are empty are places where no sane person would want to move to. Some of them are actually quite beautiful in their wild state (like Alaska), but even then they are not very habitable (very cold and not suitable for agriculture). Sure, Ray Mears might be able to do it, but he's an exception. Plus, it would only take a handful of people like him in one area to completely exhaust its resources: there's only so many huntable wild animals to go around.

  2. And Windows is? by gman003 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The same criticisms can be applied to Windows. Definitely not a Russian OS, and it's definitely starting to slip.

    1. Re:And Windows is? by windcask · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I have an earnest question:

      What percentage of the original Linux codebase remains in place today as it was in 1991?

      And what percentage of Windows 95 (a ground-up rewrite, from what I understand) remains now?

    2. Re:And Windows is? by Bert64 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Windows retains a lot of very insecure backwards compatibility cruft (eg lanman hash types to cite just one example)... Linux is far better in that regard..

      It was NT which was the ground up rewrite, but although NT provided a new kernel they bolted a lot of the existing legacy cruft on top of it, many of the security holes in windows are a result of weaknesses in (or as a direct result of) this cruft rather than the core NT kernel.

      --
      http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
    3. Re:And Windows is? by geekoid · · Score: 2, Interesting

      slip how? it's sold 100's of millions of copies, and is in support, and 7 is pretty good.

      I'm not defending MS, just saying I don't see anywhere any indication that it is slipping.

      --
      The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
    4. Re:And Windows is? by Samantha+Wright · · Score: 2, Informative

      Exactly. It's slipping in the same way Linux is.

      --
      Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
    5. Re:And Windows is? by commodore64_love · · Score: 2, Interesting

      >>>And what percentage of Windows 95 (a ground-up rewrite, from what I understand) remains now?

      None. Because Windows 7 is part of the new NT line (3.1, 4.x, 5.x, 6.x) while Win95/98/m.e. were part of the old MS-DOS line that microsoft terminated.

      The real question is: What percentage of the original NT 3.1 still remains, and the answer is probably "a lot" due to the need for backwards-compatibility with old apps (like Office 1995/97, or IE 5/6), as demanded by business customers. Don't know what % though... maybe 25%?

      --
      "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
    6. Re:And Windows is? by 0123456 · · Score: 4, Informative

      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?

    7. Re:And Windows is? by cforciea · · Score: 4, Funny

      Then they discarded 95/98

      That's a funny way of describing the Windows ME production process, but after a couple of seconds thought, I think it is accurate.

    8. Re:And Windows is? by spun · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
    9. Re:And Windows is? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    10. Re:And Windows is? by UnknowingFool · · Score: 5, Interesting

      By your logic, marketshare % == hacking attempts %. You do realize that many servers run Linux right? According to Forrester Research 48% of businesses surveyed used OSS. If Linux represents even half of that then at least 24% of businesses use Linux. That would mean 24% of all exploits would have to be targetting Linux. Funny I don't see 24% of botnets being written for Linux. The vast, vast majority are written for Windows.

      Also hackers do it for the glory or for money. If they are after money, then they would target financial institutions. Also they attack the weakest point. So far hackers target customers of these institution who use Windows, not the servers themselves that use Linux or Unix or whatever. Maybe because Linux servers are harder to compromise than Windows desktops?

      --
      Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
    11. Re:And Windows is? by Lord+Byron+II · · Score: 2, Informative

      That's the same old argument that has been variously applied to Linux, BSD, and Macs. At least in the Linux world, it doesn't hold water, since the code is subject to so many more eyes. And in the case of an exploitable bug, a patch is usually available within a few hours, not weeks, as on a "patch Tuesday" system.

      Additionally, Linux (via distributions) updates all of the software on a system from one location. Windows is getting there (Windows Update), but still has a way to go (Flash, Reader, and Java updates). As a result, Linux application bugs get fixed just as fast as kernel bugs. In the Windows world, even if your Windows install is up to date, your version of Office, Internet Explorer, or TurboTax might still have a critical bug.

    12. Re:And Windows is? by XxtraLarGe · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.
    13. Re:And Windows is? by lgw · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.
    14. Re:And Windows is? by not+already+in+use · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

      Comparing linux on the server to linux on the desktop, in terms of security, is comparing apples to oranges.

      --
      Similes are like metaphors
    15. Re:And Windows is? by not+already+in+use · · Score: 2, Informative

      By your logic, linux on the server is as easily exploitable as linux on the desktop. Last time I checked, server-side linux isn't running a web browser with Java and flash plug-ins, OpenOffice, or many of the other desktop-centric things that make it more open to attack.
      The common theme in the replies here is that linux on the server side is secure. No shit. Go read my original response and you'll notice I made it a point to say "Desktop."

      --
      Similes are like metaphors
    16. Re:And Windows is? by ThatMegathronDude · · Score: 3, Insightful

      No, let's

    17. Re:And Windows is? by man_of_mr_e · · Score: 5, Informative

      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
    18. Re:And Windows is? by nomadic · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Like they were going to be a sideshow compared to centralized computing by now?

    19. Re:And Windows is? by 0123456 · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    20. Re:And Windows is? by roc97007 · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.
    21. Re:And Windows is? by RocketRabbit · · Score: 2, Informative

      Linux gets attacked and compromised a lot.

      Attacked a lot? Sure. compromised a lot? No. Barely ever. The only common Linux attacks are just scripts that check the system for default passwords. There are other attacks but they are extremely rare.

      I mean, it happens, but it is so damn rare to come across an infected Linux (or any Unix or Unix-like OS) machine that you might as well also claim that women give birth to sextuplets "a lot" as well.

    22. Re:And Windows is? by khellendros1984 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.
    23. Re:And Windows is? by RocketRabbit · · Score: 2, Informative

      Telnet is also included in ever version of Windows. The telnet client is not a security risk if used properly, and there are devices out there that do not speak SSH.

      Sure, running a telnet server could be a security risk. But if you are using it on an intranet, maybe not.

      NFS was not "highly insecure" although there have been vulnerabilities in certain implementations.

      One key difference between Unix and Unix-like systems, and Windows, is that Windows attracts hordes of clueless morons who use the computer like an expensive typewriter, and do not know about security, nor do they wish to know. If their machine is compromised they bring the machine to the computer man. Linux and Unix users tend to be a bit more savvy.

    24. Re:And Windows is? by HermMunster · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It stands for (or stood for) Windows on Windows.

      --
      You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
    25. Re:And Windows is? by icebraining · · Score: 2, Informative

      Ubuntu, by default, has one open port, for Avahi.
      Windows 7 has seven, including Netbios, RPC and SSDP.

      A decent distro should have none, but I would still trust more Ubuntu than Windows 7, with its 700% more open ports, including the famously secure netbios /sarcasm.

      --
      Dilbert RSS feed
    26. Re:And Windows is? by Blakey+Rat · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Old legends never die. They just get repeated over and over until people treat them like fact...

      Windows used DOS as a bootloader; once Windows was booted, if there were no DOS TSRs or 16-bit drivers it needed for compatibility purposes, it killed-off DOS entirely. Which is... something about 99% of systems from about 1998 on. (Windows 95 systems usually still had DOS CD drivers.)

      Think about the alternative if they hadn't implemented it that way: nobody can run Windows 95 without buying brand new hardware with 32-bit drivers. They wouldn't have sold a single copy.

      I mean, I guess if you see "ran on top of" meaning "bootloader", then your statement is technically correct, although really misleading. Not that you'd care about that, since you're only here to bash Microsoft.

      --
      Comment of the year
    27. Re:And Windows is? by nschubach · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I got a call this week from a recruiter...

      I asked where he got my information and why he was calling me. I had not used any of those services for over 8 years. He told me that a company was looking for a VB coder and I replied, "I don't do that anymore," to which he replied, "I know! Nobody does. That's why I dug back this far in our history to find someone with experience."

      --
      Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
    28. Re:And Windows is? by commodore64_love · · Score: 2, Interesting

      >>>Nerds certainly dont fuck up

      Don't they? Einstein was one of the smartest men who ever lived, and his writings are filled with tons of mis-spellings..... not because he was dumb but just because he wrote so quickly that he made mistakes. Ditto a friend of mine who has a Ph.D. in engineering science... he has a nasty habit or writing words without the "silent e" at the end. "writ" instead of "write"

      So I flubbed and said 512K instead of 512M. BFD.

      You know what I meant - NT 6.1 aka Seven runs in half a gigabyte comfortably where NT 6.0 Vista did not (even though it was supposed to). And now I think I'll go try Puppy Linux as I have an old 64K laptop I don't want to throw away.

      Oops, I mean 64M.

      --
      "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
    29. Re:And Windows is? by the_womble · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Firstly, even if you are right, I will worry about that when it is a imminent threat. In the meantime I think I have a good few years of not worrying about security.

      Secondly, MS has a pretty poor security track record even where it is not dominant - e.g. server software, so it is not unreasonable to assume that someone else could do better.

      Thirdly, even if Linux was the dominant desktop OS, we would have a choice of distros and would not suffer from an easily targeted monoculture.

      Just three flaws in your reasoning,

    30. Re:And Windows is? by the_womble · · Score: 2, Funny

      LOL. Where do all these 'there is no difference in security between operating system' trolls come from?

      Microsoft Russia.

  3. Wadka. by AnonymousClown · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "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

    1. Re:Wadka. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      That's FUDka.

  4. Right on time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  5. Nonstory, sorry by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    This just in, WIndows person says non-windows product will fail! Gets frontpage on slashdot!

    1. Re:Nonstory, sorry by md65536 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yeah, but ms only does this when they already have a competing product that has already proven itself vastly more successful.
      http://idle.slashdot.org/story/10/09/11/1920205/Microsoft-Holds-iPhone-Funeral-Event
      http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/09/22/1416246/Xbox-Head-Proclaims-Blu-ray-Dead

      It's not like they're trying to create popular doubt in superior products or anything.

    2. Re:Nonstory, sorry by Random+BedHead+Ed · · Score: 2, Funny

      No, he's absolutely correct: Linux is scheduled for EOL in 2011, and even now Linus is only patching critical security bugs (we'll still probably see at least a few of those every Linux Patch Tuesday until EOL, and frankly I'll be happy to see my last LPT). And look, there hasn't been a major update since Linux SP4 in 2006, and he stopped active development of Linux's integrated web browser, Firefox, years ago, so it's not like we weren't warned. I'm not sure what everyone here is complaining about - sure, this Microsoft Russia guy is itching for us to switch to Windows now that Linux is going away, but most of us upgraded to PostLinux 7 Business Premium Edition well over a year ago. This is a non-story.

  6. It's Hindsight by jgagnon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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 /facepalm oil to prevent chafing.
    1. Re:It's Hindsight by CRCulver · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The use of Dash as the default shell over Bash, the growing preference for cmake over GNU Make, and the speedy progress of Clang against GCC mean that the GNU toolchain is not invulnerable. Even if they still have a few years on the competition in most areas, I think GNU needs to start thinking now about how to maintain its relevance in the long term.

    2. Re:It's Hindsight by marcansoft · · Score: 2, Informative

      cmake is built on OS tools, including GNU make in the case of Linux. What you're thinking of is the use of cmake over GNU autotools. And we're all happy for it.

      The GNU Compiler Collection isn't going anywhere (though competition from LLVM is good and welcome), but the sooner Autotools dies, the better.

    3. Re:It's Hindsight by Bert64 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It doesn't have to...
      GNU is not about dominance, it is about ensuring software freedom. GNU was a plan to replace proprietary tools with open equivalents, the fact that these open equivalents are now being replaced with superior open equivalents is irrelevant.

      I doubt RMS's primary goal is that everyone use GNU software, rather that everyone should use open source software regardless of who wrote it or where it came from, providing its users have the freedoms granted by the GPL (or a great level, eg BSD).

      --
      http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
    4. Re:It's Hindsight by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      1. cmake sucks ass

      Is it any worse than autoboardwithrustynails + autobagofbrokenglass + autofountainofacid?

    5. Re:It's Hindsight by kwabbles · · Score: 2, Funny

      You tenderfoots and your DASHES and CLANGS... you unwittingly believe that your new tools are so sexy and shiny, giggling and chuckling with your hippo dancing jokes. These tools are an abomination and a sacrilege. REPENT! The filthy whores of Babylon such is Apple may give you honey, they may give you mead now - but in the end you will be left in sorrow, pennyless. She will take your GNU purity and defile it and you will rend your clothes and mourn when you realize the extent of your filth.

      REPENT!

      --
      Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
    6. Re:It's Hindsight by slapout · · Score: 4, Funny

      I thought RMS's primary goal was to ensure that everyone called it GNU/Linux :-)

      --
      Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
    7. Re:It's Hindsight by PeterBrett · · Score: 3, Informative

      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
    8. Re:It's Hindsight by graveyhead · · Score: 3, Informative

      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;
    9. Re:It's Hindsight by marcansoft · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Quite honestly, I don't have much experience with autotools. There are two reasons: what little I've seen looks, at first glance, as a nightmare, and, as a user, the experience is horrible. Specifically, autotools is slow . These days I spend more time ./configuring than I do actually compiling, especially with distcc (./configure not being parallelizable). Even worse, sometimes I need to rebuild all of the scripts due to some patch, and that adds even more time to an already ridiculously inefficient process. I mean, seriously, why do I need to check for a C compiler, determine the maximum length of commandline arguments, and figure out if I have 20 system headers and 30 libc functions every time I want to compile a package?

      Meanwhile, CMake is a hell of a lot faster, uses a more modern language, and can integrate better with other build environments. I've used CMake for a couple of projects and, although the language does have its quirks, it's mostly been smooth sailing. Where I don't use/need CMake, I use simple Makefiles.

      So no, I'm not in a position of familiarity with both systems to be able to do a detailed objective comparison as a developer, but as a user I can clearly say CMake is much superior (at least the way it is used by actual projects), and as a developer I can at least say CMake is nice. Several large projects have migrated from autotools to CMake, and I bet they had a good reason.

      Meanwhile, most small projects using autotools only appear to be using them because "it's what everyone else uses" and don't really understand them. Maybe autotools is great if you're an autotools guru, but it's still slow, and most people aren't going to invest the time to properly learn a system based on arcane tools. As far as I'm concerned, it's the CVS of build systems - sure, it kind of works works, but honestly, I'd rather either use a modern DVCS or stick with tarballs and patches (bare Makefiles).

    10. Re:It's Hindsight by Tetsujin · · Score: 2, Informative

      The use of Dash as the default shell over Bash

      That's just a matter of choosing the right tool for the job.

      Bash is (as POSIX shells go) very full-featured with a bunch of enhancements (nonstandard extensions) for use in scripting and various niceties for interactive use. It's one of several shells these days that are commonly accepted as good choices for login shells.

      However, quite a lot of shell scripts on a typical system don't need or use bash extensions. (And Debian policy is that shell scripts that are interpreted with /bin/sh should not use any non-POSIX extensions) A shell that's not so rich in features, but rather written with the goal of providing a quick and compact implementation of the standard is a better choice for these shell scripts. If switching /bin/sh to point at dash produces a noticeable improvement in boot-time, that justifies dash's existence on the system. Interactive command history (via readline), tab completion, associative arrays, built in regex, and so on justify bash.

      --
      Bow-ties are cool.
    11. Re:It's Hindsight by ciggieposeur · · Score: 2, Informative

      Here's what is good about autotools: 'make dist', ./configure --enable-XXX, and easy integration with debhelper and rpmbuild.

      I've got a small ~60kloc project out there that I started out using a simple makefile and C code, and then later migrated to gettext and autotools. I really wish in hindsight that I had just started with GNU Hello World and gettext from the get-go and then built out my project. As it was, I spent days re-factoring strings for gettext and more days getting my configure.ac and Makefile.am doing what they should have done rather than what I wanted them to do.

      But now I've got a build system that works very cleanly on Linux, OS X, FreeBSD, Cygwin, and Win32 (using the mingw32 cross compiler), and can also be used with dpkg-buildpackage to make .debs. All with the same configure.ac and Makefile.am, and automatically compiling the right things when a header is changed. I have conditionals for three different user interfaces and two optional supporting libraries. All told it was a LOT easier than make by itself or even boost.build.

  7. How One Might Interpret That by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:How One Might Interpret That by nine-times · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Yeah, I really don't know what this guy meant, but it's worth noting that being at the end of a life cycle generally also means you're at the beginning. That's why it's called a "life cycle" and not a "life timeline". The end of the cycle is when you start over.

      So to me, if you say that a piece of software is "at the end of its life cycle", I read that as, "This software is complete. Time to start working on the next version."

    2. Re:How One Might Interpret That by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Your interpretation of "life cycle" is entirely reasonable, but it's not what MBA types mean when they use the phrase. Business schools teach all kinds of subtle warping of the language (any language: English, Russian, whatever.) The bizspeak meaning of "at the end of its life cycle" is "this is Old And Busted and we can't make any money off it -- check out our New Hotness!"

      --
      The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
  8. Cool Story, Bro by rakuen · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  9. President of Microsoft Russia by stagg · · Score: 5, Funny

    Well, the president of Microsoft Russia should be a reliable, trustworthy source for this kind of analysis, right? Right?

  10. what will it be called? by digitalsushi · · Score: 4, Funny

    PinkOS.

    --
    slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
  11. Google Translate by kwabbles · · Score: 5, Informative

    "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.
    1. Re:Google Translate by TurtleBay · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I have to second this. My girlfriend is trilingual and is a professional translator. She jokes with her coworkers at how bad online automated translations are. Take a look at funnytranslator.com. After 30 online translations the phrase: "We must bear in mind that Linux is not a Russian OS and, moreover, is at the end of its life cycle." becomes: "The Linux Caozuojitong what life in Russia, you know."

    2. Re:Google Translate by windcask · · Score: 5, Funny

      He could also be saying "We must bear in mind that Linux is not a Russian OS, and moreover, is the ass of a living bicycle."

      or

      "Die, capitalist pig."

    3. Re:Google Translate by sheehaje · · Score: 4, Funny

      "This is news?"

      It has the words Linux, Microsoft, and Russia in it. News? This to Slashdot is like the Ark of the Covenant is to religion.

    4. Re:Google Translate by LifesABeach · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.

    5. Re:Google Translate by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I have no trouble believing that the translation is accurate, because it sounds exactly like the kind of thing you'd expect an English-speaking Microsoft exec to say. Bizspeak is a universal language: MBAs around the world spout the same meaningless crap no matter what language it sounds like they're speaking.

      --
      The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
    6. Re:Google Translate by MBGMorden · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yes, but OS X is based largely on the same paradigms. Windows? It's command line structure has been around for nearly 30 years now. It's basic GUI concepts have been around about 20, and it's whole interface (a taskbar with a menu button on the left, open applications in the middle, and a clock + resident apps on the right) has been around for 15 years now.

      When you really get down to the nitty gritty, desktop OS's have just be doing slow evolution over time - and that's not really a bad thing. The systems we have - whichever you happen to prefer - actually work pretty well for most modern computing tasks.

      Either way though - the comment is absurd. While the "Year of Linux on the Desktop" might be a bit of a pipe dream, it's undeniable that Linux has continued to get better and better over the years, and there's plenty of life left in the product. As a matter of fact, I'd say that so long as we use desktops, the desktop versions of MacOS, Windows, AND Linux have a nearly unlimited amount of life left. And in the mobile space? Linux (via Android) is actually kicking Microsoft's arrogant little ass. To that extent, it may very well be more accurate to say that Windows is a lot closer to end of life than Linux.

      --
      "People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
    7. Re:Google Translate by David+Chappell · · Score: 2, Informative

      Google translated that sentence perfectly. He actually used the phrase "life cycle". The rest of the translation has minor errors and obfuscations, but overall is not too bad. Automatic translators do much better when translating formal writing since the grammar is more regular.

      Since you asked, here is a human translation which you can compare to the Google translation:

      "Microsoft Corporation defends technological neutrality and is of the opinion that the choice of OS should be predicated solely on the characteristics of the OS itself, on bang-for-the-buck, on the actual real-world problems to be solved, on security, and not on ideological considerations."

      From our point of view, the most effective way to develop the country's innovation economy is not to create an equivalent of an existing OS, the cost of which would be enormous in time and resources, but to start with the most widely OS, which has been tested by the Russian special services, in order to create our own applications and solutions, while at the same time investing resources in Russian scientific projects which have a future. One should remember that Linux is not a Russian OS, and moreover it is at the end of its life cycle.

      (You will note that he is contradicting himself: To use Linux is to create a new OS (at great trouble and expense). But we should not use it because it is at the end of its life cycle.

    8. Re:Google Translate by Shompol · · Score: 2, Interesting

      As a native Russian speaker, I must report that to my astonishment, the translation is very precise and professional. More than that, the quote is actually EASIER to read and comprehend in English. Many of the words are actually borrowed from English, which is common in computer technical jargon.
      The speech was obviously prepared in advance. It sounds almost like the original of the speech was written in English, possibly at Microsoft headquarters in US, then translated to Russian. Another explanation would be that the speech writers read too many translated documents and learned to think in similar patterns. I am just speculating, but honestly, who needs to know Russian with translations like this? :)

    9. Re:Google Translate by RzUpAnmsCwrds · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Take a look at funnytranslator.com. After 30 online translations the phrase: "We must bear in mind that Linux is not a Russian OS and, moreover, is at the end of its life cycle." becomes: "The Linux Caozuojitong what life in Russia, you know.

      Your girlfriend should know better than to evaluate a translation system based on a series of repeated translations.

      Translation, whether it is done by a human or a machine, always involves trade-offs. One of the most important trade-offs is between fluency and faithfulness. Fluency refers to how well the translation matches the conventions (syntactic and stylistic) of the destination language, whereas faithfulness refers to how precisely the translation matches the meaning of the original text. Because languages have idioms, and because often there are words in the source language that simply do not have a counterpart in the destination language, it is often necessary to simplify or modify the meaning to create a translation that is not awkward.

      There is a constant balancing act - change too much and you end up with a translation that is misleading, change too little and you end up with a translation that's awkward and hard to understand. But the bottom line is that in ANY non-trivial translation, information is lost in the process. If you did the same experiment with human translators - and did it in a real sense, with different translators for each step in the cycle, you would end up with text that is perfectly readable but had very little in common with the source text.

      I'm not saying that the translation in the article is 100% faithful to the original Russian. It's not. No real translation is. If the precise nature of the words is important, it's necessary to examine the implications of the Russian. You can't do that with a simple translation.

  12. Just Days After.... by Ynot_82 · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...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

    Divesting something only means creating a harder time competing for all relevant parties . The operating systems that are popular on clients also tend to be popular on servers. They're all based around Linux technology. We happen to build our server business on Windows technology. It creates dis-synergy in fact to split our server and enterprise business from our client business.

  13. Oh come on by Jethro · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  14. EVEN AS LINUX BEGAN... by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 4, Funny

    We knew that fools would Russian, to try and Finnish it off.

    --
    "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
    Never been known to fail..."
    1. Re:EVEN AS LINUX BEGAN... by masmullin · · Score: 5, Funny

      but I... cant... help... falling in love with gnu!

    2. Re:EVEN AS LINUX BEGAN... by Mordok-DestroyerOfWo · · Score: 3, Funny

      There's Norway that would happen!

      --
      "Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
    3. Re:EVEN AS LINUX BEGAN... by Kjella · · Score: 2, Funny

      Hmm, bestiality or zealotry, tough choice. At least one of them don't intentionally eat their toe jam...

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  15. Russian OS? by gregthebunny · · Score: 2, Informative

    Linux is not a Russian OS

    Neither is Windows! I don't see the relevance of that statement.

  16. Russian OS.. by Bert64 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!
  17. No. by Solar+Granulation · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  18. Re:Flame Bait by $RANDOMLUSER · · Score: 3, Insightful

    All open source projects evolve to the point where the current developers want to throw away all the code and start again.

    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
  19. Linux NT by perpenso · · Score: 4, Funny

    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. :-)

  20. Re:wow by hazydave · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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
  21. Bollocks by TheRealGrogan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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 :-)

    1. Re:Bollocks by Un+pobre+guey · · Score: 3, Insightful

      There's also the infatuation people have with wealth and power. Microsoft infuses everything with vast hype and very expensive, flashy, and overwhelming marketing, and most people are hopelessly dazzled by it. Bill Gates is or was Forbes' richest man for years, and people fall into an emotional transference trap by concluding that this makes him some kind of a wise sage who can do no wrong, and the magic is generalized to everything he touches. It is superstition and tribalism deep within our subconscious pulled back out with the most powerful force known to man: money.

      It is sad, it is pathetic, it is moronic, it is self-destructive, but it is.

  22. Russians learned that technique from Comrade Lenin by ElmoGonzo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This guy is the "president of Microsoft Russia". Does anyone think that he's going to say anything positive about Linux?

  23. As a native Russian speaker... by PaulBu · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  24. So what will we be running in 20 years time? by petes_PoV · · Score: 2, Interesting
    If we've now got to the point where Linux (and windows, too by the look of it) are really just in maintenance mode: with all the features pretty much in place and mere "tick-over" releases to fix a few bugs and support new hardware - where do we go from here?

    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
  25. Re:Flame Bait by Kjella · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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
  26. Re:might be true for both Linux and Windows. by jedidiah · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Linux already scales to such systems.

    Linux is already being used in such systems.

    Being more of a "server OS", it has been exposed to those sorts of features for a rather long time.

    When people act excited over "the cloud", I think about 20+ year old Unix deployments and wonder what took everyone else so long to catch up.

    --
    A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
  27. Re:How to test if a OS is dead. by Joey+Vegetables · · Score: 2, Insightful

    In many respects Linux is a 40 year old design, and surely it is not without its warts. Yet, its success in the form of Android speaks to its unrivaled flexibility and adaptability. True, many things that didn't really work well as files ended up modeled as streams instead (think of streaming a video rather than downloading it). Others ended up relying on OOP and/or relational models. Still others required concurrent and/or massively parallel processing or storage models. Linux and the free software ecosystem have adapted beautifully to all of these. Perfect they are not, but what's out there that's better? Windows is popular on the desktop, but we're rapidly approaching the day when your phone can do everything your desktop can, and better. Microsoft has known and feared this day for many years, decades even, and it's only a matter of time before they are forced to either change or become irrelevant. Apple has niches in various markets that probably won't disappear anytime soon, and the Oracle/Google/IBM showdown may well cause changes in various parts of the software and infrastructure landscape. But my prediction is that Linux will remain well-used and well-loved for at least as long as I expect to be around (I'm 43 now). It's more than reached the critical mass of users, developers, and other interested parties that will be needed to ensure its continuing health, vitality and usefulness. To beat it, something new would have to come along that was not only at least as good as Linux, but also at least as open and at least as popular. There are other players that are arguably better and more open than Linux, and certainly those that are more popular in certain niches, but to beat it in all three areas seems far beyond the reach of anything I can see on the horizon.

    --

    Nonaggression works!
  28. why bother? by t2t10 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.