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Metcalfe claims Linux Can't Beat Win2000
Bruce Inglish writes "InfoWorld Pundit (and
inventor of Ethernet) Bob Metcalfe
just posted his 99/6/19 column entitled: "Linux's
'60s technology, open-sores ideology won't beat W2K, but what will?"
in which he predicts that "Linux will fizzle against Windows" and compares
the Open Source community to communism and the Back-to-the-Earth Movement.
"
Finally, somebody I agree with. Linux is from the same era (or is it error?) of bell-bottom pants, hippie music, and woodstock. Once very popular and very cool (or hip, whatever.)
And yes, all of that has come back to be popular again. But wait, it's not back to stay?!? Sorry brother, just another one of those fads...
Not really looking forward to next year, I hear the *80's* are coming back next...
This article reads like it's supposed to be a joke or something. Nearing 23/6 availability? Our linux servers have 60+ day uptimes (hardware upgrades!) and they're 24/7.
File this one under author on glue or editor picking through the joke bin in the morning.
First, he was a running back for the Browns, then a wide receiver for Atlanta. Now a foul-mouthed poo-pooer of Linux.
What next?
I know I am preaching to the choire, but, this is just getting on my nerves. Software is too damn hard for any one corporation to support, so the only choice is peer review, where there is no penalty for correcting problems--thanx guy, i'll just copywrite your code change, and make all kinds of money that I wouln't share with you. Linux is capitalism, windows is Despotism!
then Metcalfe should make this bet:
"NT will be the first OS to run a server with
IPv6 services running 24x7 at Foo load level
continually for Bar days, in a non-testing
environment."
And he should put more at stake than eating
a piece of paper.
A brilliant man, degrading himself by publishing rants. There's lots things about Linux that are just plain unloveable, but he misses all of them.
Is he suffering the beginning stages of Alzheimer's Disease?
Too many meds? I'm told the combination of designer personality drugs like Prozac and Luvox and OTC cough medications such as dextromethorphan produce blackouts and fits of uncontrollable rage.
How 'bout it Bob, check your meds lately?
Anyone remember the IDC report he took that from?
The numbers were, if I remember correctly, 17% AND 17% Linux, making Unix + Linux 34%... Anyway, it was at least not under any circumstances as little as 17% combined.
And I guess he didn't see the recent reports that estimated that Linux shipments would grow faster than that of any other OS's, with 25% annual growth for at least the next four years.
Although Bob's credentials are impressive, I can not be swayed by his argument based on his 'expert opinion.' Many individuals in the business community, have been quick to dismiss the process of peer-review as communism when applied to the production of goods and services. To suggest that many people are capible of providing goods and services without a closed hierachically structured society [ie a business] is an antithesis to all that they live for. Given the historical failure of the Russian form of communism, all future movements that resemble a mobilization of the 'proletariat' inevitably are compared with a failed political regime, implying that the new focus will also die.
However, history does show one group of Communists to have survived for nearly 2000 years. The institution which runs the majority body of this group, is still one of the most powerful and influential bodies on the world stage, and its leader, the Pope, rules not through force of arms or cashflow, but through MINDSHARE.
The reason Christianity beat out the other popular intellectual systems of the day, was that it filled a need that people had. After a century of the most destructive civil wars that were not matched until the 20th century in Europe, people needed a savior, and were looking for freedom from the cares of the everyday world.
Now while Linux is not a religious movement, the rules of MindShare apply equally well. People have needs that are not being fullfilled, and they are looking for a savior, in the face of years of unproductive civil war (Microsoft's Ascendsion). What this new group has rediscovered is an old doctrine of Sharing, that alturistic behavior ultimately is more self-rewarding than destruction of other people.
Anyone familiar with the period of Late Antiquity can tell you that most Christian groups died horrible deaths, and only the strong survived. Likewise, the old establishment, (business & the Roman Empire) also embraced and extended Christianity making it the primary force in European political and business afairs until the modern era.
Bob has failed to look at history and not just current events, just because a totalitarian state failed to make a secular religion work doesn't mean that it can't. If Linux is a religion, then the Free Software Movement is that radical fringe of brethern from whom the future will draw up the ranks of the Saints of the Digital Age.
DONT FEED THE TROLL
... hits
;)
You can be sure that what he wants
and mail.
DONT FEED THE TROLL
CC
From insisting reporters preface Linux with Gnu everytime he does a conference or he will leave to his rallying against and attempts to destroy anything not FSF (even other free software), I can really see how people would compare RMS with Communism. Anything not FSF and GNU-sponsored is evil (no matter if it is free or commercial), and everyone *must* agree with my ideology. And since in many minds RMS *is* free software, that hurts us all.
NANOG is a good source for Metcalfe humor ...
i storical/9903/msg00084.html
http://answerpointe.cctec.com/maillists/nanog/h
He's writing about Windows 2000 that is not based on DOS.
If I saw this at slashdot as an article (and had moderation rights) I would give it a -1 Troll rating.
Gee, I've been hearing about how NT was going to kill UNIX for about seven years now.
I also remember being told that OS/2 was going to do the same thing.
Maybe when it comes to running major data centers, reliability is still an issue. Just a thought.
-jcr
He calls Linux "senile". Me thinks he is
the senile one. Java to beat Linux?
Ok yeah whatever.
People living in glass houses should
not throw stones.
Try to realize that he's writing about Windows 2000, not DOS or Win95.
The link seems to be dead already, yet infoworld is not down. Maybe someone came to their senses?
He says that Linux is based on old tech, but
the W2K has Drive Letters like my Atari 400 did.
At one point, this guy was inventive I guess,
but now he's old, doesn't want to mess with things, and wants to settle in the W2k problem.
Quite right. Linux has finally dragged UNIX kicking and screaming into the 1980s :)
But KDE is a genuinely good thing. I'm sure the incredible similarity to Windows is purely coincidental.
PS. Why has nobody ever based an X-server round ther Mac GUI? I thought that was supposed to be the greatest. (Beware of Mac flamers!!!)
*cough* hypocracy *cough*... just a little food for thought...
Just curious, how may MS bait setters like this one are trolling slashdot these days?
I have no problem with the guy expressing a point of view that is different from mine, but the article has no technical merit whatsoever, therefore it has no place on slashdot.
We can only do him good if we all go read his article!!
If taco and the others had a vote, I would definately be one to back excluding non-technical AND badly written editorials like these from slashdot ( the best darn news site on the web : ))
This is exactly the kind of thing I expect from somebody who created a network that begins to fall over with 60% utilisation!!, i bet he thinks 23/6 is rock solid ;)..
;)
he seems to be able to remember the 60's, and perhaps that is where he belongs, this is the 90's dick so get with it
Don't stop MS's momentum, guide it! They have certainly sped things up: without them, much of today's computing infrastructure would not exist or would be much more expensive.
Admittedly they've released *lots* of junk, and forced adherence to many poor standards and protocols, but if there is a driving force, use it!
ac.
Just wait and see. Microsoft's proprietary links
between the end-user applications and NT will
limit Linux' impact and make it possible for NT
to infiltrate even the most anti-MS IS folks'
networks (like mine).
Mark
Bob's right about a lot of things, but in this case he's showing senility.
30 years ago was 1969.
Parc began in 1970.
Did X Window system exist?
GUI anything?
TCP/IP?
Ethernet?
Is Linux written in Algol, Fortran, or Cobol?
This was when a great many sites, if not most, were using vacuum tube computers with drum memory, 80 column cards for job and data entry.
magnetic core memory.
OS development was in its infancy.
Multi-user systems?
Dynamic run-time job scheduling?
If he had said 20 years, though, then we would be in the same boat.
The UI is a poor 80's architecture.
Also, Linux is a 70's style design.
There really are very few architectures around
today that aren't 70's or 80's. BeOS is an
example of a 90's rethink of a 70's architecture
(UNIX) combined with a definite direction (MMedia). The threading ideas just weren't
practical when UNIX was young, and its
conswquent lack of ability to easily deal with
them (and the difficulty Micro$hite had with
implementing them) show the age of the
architecture.
Basically, dont look to Win2K to take over -- worry about WinCE (p.s. not where and what it
is now, more where it will be).
>>Actually, christianity got big by getting the support of the political elite, which used violence to force people into accepting christianity as the only true religion.
Well, I would beg to differ, as would many scholars studing Constantine's reign. By the date of Constantine's ascendion, nearly a majorit of Gaul was Christian, Egypt and Syria had communities that were the majority, and the Church controled North Africa in general. Helena Constantine's mother was a Christian.
The Lesson to be learned here is that Christianity grew in the face of opposition without the help of the Military (establishment, etc). Linux can too. Linux can remain a viable alternative to whatever corporate operating systems are out there as long as people believe in it and contribute code. The establishment can fight Linux, but it will not win.
Don't get me wrong, I'm pro-pagan. It is not inevitable, but the social dynamics are the same.
Anyone watch this show?
It is interesting to remember that Billy was once the little guy fighting against the Corporate giant, IBM. And Steve Jobs was quite the hippy.
Now the tables have turned and the rules have changed. Microsoft is the new IBM, and the replacements for young Bill Gates play by a different set of rules. We don't want to be millionaires by beating them at their own game. We mearly want to stop the game, and have good software that everyone can use. The Software Rental model that MS has in place will die.
The only way to truely own software is when you get the source.
Basically,
Windows Sucks (we know that)
Unix sucks (in its hayday, it was renowned
for its instability and, like windows, it
is the fault of a design which takes decades
and billions of dollars to get working)
Linux sucks (hey, its still UNIX)
The closest I've seen to a good architecture
was the kind of persistent, capability based
architectures that Tymeshare were developing
for IBM mainframes in the late 70's. Java's
idea of write once, run anywhere is good, but
alas Java won't deliver. We still have a long
way to go, and the fact that microsoft is
trying to say that its already there is their
problem.
ARPANET dates back to the 1960s, and was not developed on UNIX. The BSD work undertaken by the CSRG at UC Berkeley did, however, include the porting of the ARPANET protocols to BSD UNIX in the 1980s. This work was supported by a grant from DARPA, which was interested in, among other things, the feasibility of running the ARPANET protocols on small systems.
I see two likelyhoods:
In this case he used immaturity and creative misspellings to emulate the "windoze" epithet so as to give away his purpose only to those who can see it
In this case he was trying to give the "Windows Majority" every bit of the bad name that sarcasm and immaturity has done for Linux.
I dont get it. How does working as a team, for no economic reward make you a communist. communism is political.
So when i was 5, and my brother and I worked together to build a block tower, where we communists?
What about when my mom and I baked a cake together? Is my mom a communist too?
Damn, I guess he's right. He did invent ethernet after all. What am I going to tell my parents? All these years we were communists and we didnt even know it! hot damn!
- End Racism, Kill everyone.
*The Onion
Can you please give the main article a score of -1.
Not an AN, forgot my passwd...
Actually, MS has announced that the win2k code is no longer going to be based on the nt4 code, as planned, but on the 95/98 code. So, ya, it's still based on dos.
-The quest for truth died with the birth of the net. Now we have all the truth we could ever want. The new quest is how to make sense of all this damned truth cluttering my terminal. - Alex.
Microsoft (www.hotmail.com), Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) and Walnut CDROM all agree.
Yeah, I know, flamebait in response to flamebait.
But what do you expect posting such a worthless piece of c**&p as this?
Please moderate me down to -10000 and confirm my belief that
Old Bob slams linux while not making a single comparison between the two OS's. Other than, linux is based on old tech, then conceeding that WNT2000 is based on Vax/VMS tech.
Old folks like old Bob need to make a loud smelly fart once in a while to make sure we remember they are still alive....
Hmm..This is quite cynical. I have no reason to see why Bob Metcalfe should even comment about linux and windows unless that is a plug for Microsoft. Iam yet to see a decent ethernet product from 3com in the last 5 years and that is one reason why I switched completely my gigabit network to Intel/Bay Networks. Maybe, Uncle Bob wants attention, afterall, he did invented ethernet *cough* 20 something years ago...
All we can hope for is that BeOS
makes it multiuser and gets a optimized tcp/ip.
Then you have a great server os with some sweet looking fast gui !!!
Have you ever used DOS? I've used more OS then I care to admit, everything from MacOS to OS/2 to SunOS, to Linux. But of all of these I found DOS the most confusing because just when you get a program that give you a little bit of freedom and flexibility, DOS steps in and limits it once again.
Ohh, come on! Communism is bad. Or have you been asleep for the last 10 years? And thank goodness I'm not in the U.K. I'm a free citizen. Not a subject.
First, there is no Joe User/Joe citizen.
I deal with people who don't know how to use computers well on a daily basis. Some people don't know *at all* how to use computers.
You cannot sit someone down at a windows machine and expect them to get *anything* done anymore than you can with a unix machine. I lent someone a windows computer, and came to their house to show them the ropes. After 2 hours, she could load and save word docs, and start and shutdown the computer. She is not stupid, but there's nothing more intutive about windows.
Think about it:
First, who's got wallpaper on their desk?
no one.
Now, what about windows that disappear when you close them?
no again.
And windows of any sort on your desktop?
nope
What about windows that obscure what's behind them, rather than reveal it.
That doesn't make sense.
Typing commands ins't really any better.
mv == move, which doesn't really move anything anywhere, just changes some data in a table.
Etc.
Looking for an "intuitive," or simple way to talk to a computer is dumb. Looking for a way that works for you isn't. My dad likes the keyboard commands of Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS. He's had to use the windows one because he needs it's features. So he became less efficient. Then, he got NatuallySpeaking. So, he became more efficient again. As for myself, I suspect I'd still be faster in EMACS than NaturallySpeaking.
What's important is what works for a given person.
If people like an interface like windows, that's fine. Given the thousands of linux developers out there, we can probably give people that *without* losing the stability of Linux.
Each of us can also decide for him/herself what interface they want. I know people who like straight CLIs, people who like straight GUIs, and those, like myself, who like a little of both. Linux can do this, because anyone can help. Already, it's come far from the early days. Why should it stop now?
-Dave Turner
Bye Bye Unix .. ..
Here comes BeOS
Serious question.
Who is better qualified to comment on Linux versus NT, Nicholas Petreley or Bob Metcalfe?
Two different columnists, two different oppinions who's right????
There's no place for commercial software. It's only hurtful, and if you would actually READ RMS's essays, maybe you would have a fucking clue why, rather than just spouting off unsupported statements. www.gnu.org
And, as for "idealists getting out of hand," let's remember that the Free Software movement was started by idealists. Stallman is an idealist, but a practical idealist. He knows that we can't just live on the love we all feel towards each other. That's why you can make money from free software. Like Red Hat labs does. Like he did fot years. Like Cygnus does.
-Dave Turner
Actually, PDP-8 begat CP/M begat CP/M 86 which begat DOS,which begat Win3.1.
Here it gets fuzzy.
Windows for Workgroups which begat WIN95 and at the about same time VMS begat part of WFW and NT.
Dunno what you mean by 'shortcuts' but any programs I install automatically appear in my window manager menus. For *all* my windowmanagers. Are you using a broken distribution or something?
Daniel
You're thinking about the proposed _consumer_ OS, not the wks/svr setup.
You are on crack. I've put Computer newbies in front of Linux and seen them just go. Properly installed Linux itself needs little human administration.The OS is not important to most people as long as everything works..... which is something that Doesn't Happen in the windows world. that's why Linux is becoming more popular... it works. its fast and its cheap I don't know but a couple of people that can fix their Windows box when it breaks.... I also don't know many linux boxen that have things just go wrong for no known reason.
I don't care if you like BeOS or not, but I think it has great potential.
The OpenGL support isn't finished. The new release (4.5) sort of has hardware OpenGL, but only for 3Dfx cards via translation to Glide instructions (kind of the reverse of the Glide wrappers that 3Dfx has been fighting). R5 is supposed to have real hardware OpenGL.
At any rate, for anyone with supported hardware and $69 to spare, BeOS is a really neat dual-boot addition to your machine. Whether it eventually attracts a lot of great apps is anyone's guess, but I'd sure rather have BeOS be the OS for the masses than Windows.
As an Installshield user, please don't encourage them port Installshield to Linux. From my experience with other installation tools (Wise and InstallerVise), I can say that Installshield is the worst of the three. Star Office installation is pretty nice too. Maybe they should get into the installation tool market for Linux.
I have to agree with this, recently both my parents purchased computers, now I get phone calls asking how to "shutdown the computer.", etc. It baffles new users to think of start -> shutdown. But that is an easy one to learn once you start.
Ever tried to axplain to a person with no DOS, *NIX expierence about files, directories and the difference between the two? Its not easy, they see the whole computer as one not as seperate storage spaces (directories) and alot have no idea about how the file saved in Word (Wordperfect) relates to an actual file on the hard drive. This is what windows brings us.
Also new users are nervous when they get in front of a computer, couple this with the "blue screen of death" and other assorted cryptic windows errors and you get a very nervous person. Now its your job to explain that "windows does that....blah...." (I know linux apps may crash but I have never had one take the system with it
In the words of my father after learning of the "blue screen of death" --> "...they should fix that...". You see my father comes from a place where if things are inherently broken and you paid for them you expect the company to fix it post haste and without a charge (are you listening microsoft?)
Are we agreed?
Linux not Unix? You're joking, right?
Having read this article, I just can't help feeling completely and utterly disgusted.
First, this analogy with the Soviet Union and communism. If Torvalds is Lenin, and Stallman is Marx (perhaps Stalin would be more appropriate), we all know what's going to happen to Romanoff! And what's that got to do with technology, anyway? Weren't Soviets the first to launch a satellite and send a man into outer space? (Never mind their Ministry of Defense's computers, E2K included.)
Second, what is this revolutionary new technology in Windows, and what are these fundamentally new ways of, say, memory management, or context switching, that Windows can do, and UNIX systems cannot? BTW, Linux was written totally from scratch and isn't based on any code from the 60's. Other systems, like Free/Open/NetBSD are, being based on the original BSD code, which has been around for ages, but that only makes them more, not less, stable.
Yes, Windows is still predominant in the server world, but many sysadmins have already realised the high costs of maintaining NT, and are switching to UNIX. On the desktop, Linux is constantly improving, and not without the help of a number of multi-billion dollar corporations, including Corel whose WordPerfect and the upcoming Office 2000 is not much different from the infamous MS Office. Of course, Microsoft are also "improving" their bloated code, by trying to bloat it even more with these great "new features" (and new bugs) which are supposed to make life so much easier for your average Joe Schmoe.
What the hell is so good about Windows 2000 anyway? It's but a cross between NT and 98, which both suck in their own subtle ways. Considering it's going to be even bigger, how can it be more stable? No person in their right mind can believe that.
So long, Microsoft, and thanks for all the bugs,
--
John Wilson
john_wilson100@excite.com
Installing linux is hard. But using it sure isn't. That is if you set it up correctly. I did the test here at my place :) The girl nextdoor hadn't worked on a computer yet. When I showed her your beloved windows 98 she shivered. Then I showed her gnome with only a panel (with 2 or three icons on it), and a few folders on the desktop. :o)
She succesfully browsed the web and searched the info she was looking for and completed some script for university. Without any prior knowledge, and very, very little advice from me. On the *unbelievable hard to use* linux
But I'm not so sure if open source is more like capitalism that with marxism (I'm talking "real" marxism here, not stalinist "marxism"). There's nothing inherent in marxist economic theory that precludes the existence of a free market and companies. It's only the ownership of the resources that by definition would have to be controlled by the people (under socialism that would be by the working class, but a communist community, by Marx definition, is the phase after socialism, when everyone is part of the working classes, and thus there is no distinction anymore, nor any economic classes).
As long as you are comparing open source to marxism with a planned economy, then I agree fully with you, but when you add marxism with a free market, then the difference isn't really that big. The remaining issue at that point is the ownership of the resources: under capitalism the companies are owned by a relatively small elite, while a precondition for marxism with a free market would be that the companies would be collectively owned by the people, or the communes.
I hear this spouted a lot. Certainly Unix has a number of warts, but it works and works better (and even more elegantly) than any other 'mainstream' operating system. Things like the Unix Haters Handbook and snide remarks about 25-year-old operating systems are what's technically called 'destructive criticism' unless you have a blueprint for a better system.
(I'm personally interested in the Hurd and possibly BeOS and the new OS that the Unix guy is making -- Inferno or whatever it is -- as replacements for Unix..eventually..but I'm not too well informed about the latter two.. )
Daniel
Exactly...
That's the first thing I thought of when they showed the IBM guys singing the "corporate song". Back then they fought to change the status quoe, their idea was to create a new type of computer that the average joe could afford... "A computer in every home" was a joke to IBM and HP... Now most people I know are looking at a computer in every bedroom. Now Gates and Jobs are putting profit before progress... what ever happened to free upgrades? Microsoft is going to charge for bug fixes now (Windows98 SE??). At what point do we end up paying for the bugs???
Meanwhile, Linus and the rest of the open "sores" group are starting out at the same place Gates and Jobs did with one exception... somewhere along the line it went from a cause to a corporation... Linux will never be a corporate establishment... but already groups like ISPs, Web Design Houses and other internet related companies use it quite extensively.
Overall there's one thing that I'm sure of... We have no reason to even think that linux will ever put MS out of business... it's just not designed that way... and also Gates won't make the same mistake that IBM, HP, Xerox etc... He's to smart... he won't loose that much market share without a fight!
As for win2K vs linux...
I run them both... win2k has much more software support, but linux is alot less of a resource hog... Whoever thought of making the menus fade in and out on an NT operating system should be shot... I wonder if win2000 server does the same thing??? I mean that'd be totally unnecessary (kinda like putting a $200 graphics card in a compaq rack mount server where you intend to monitor everything with a 14" monochrome monitor.)
It's a wacky little world isn't it...
Joshua Maurer
Peramus@psu.edu
Not for one moment I though Metcalfe takes his own article seriously. It is so obvious, his target audience are the PHBs, the joe-5-packs, but not the computer professionals; hard to imagine that professionals would take THIS article seriously. And lets not forget Metcalfe's past theatrics in Infoworld. Do you remember the 'supernova explosion' article in which he predicted that the Internet would collapse 3 years ago and nothing happened. This article, like many others, is for amusing the ignorant. Just another rope-dancer!
Well let's see....
e-mail - remote pine on Solaris via telnet
www - netscape v4.51 on Linux/Solaris
programming - tcl/tk, perl & PROLOG on Linux
bitmap graphics - GIMP on Linux
info management - Ghostview, ps2pdf & acroread on Linux
file management - bash shell, mkisofs & cdrecord on Linux
The only reason to boot into anything else is CorelDRAW for 2D vector graphics. As of fall/winter 1999 hopefully that too will be in Linux
So mr. Metcalf, for me Linux does the job just dandy fine. I've even gotten _so_ used to using Linux and fixing my own problems that I really don't care anymore whether Microsoft rules the world or not. All I know is that as it stands now I'll never have to go back to mediocre software again.
Where macromedia to port their software well then I suppose I'd have to start thinking differently about the Garden of Eden...
bercovic@swi.psy.uva.nl
Comon, I dare you to name a few Linux-only inventions of significant value.
Everything in the Linux kernel is a ripoff.
The point Metcalfe is trying to make is, other
companies, like Be, NeXT, Taligent, Sun, Apple,
even Microsoft, are atleast trying to do something different.
Linux is a very simplistic, naive, conservative implementation of Unix. It's a monolithic kernel, it doesn't have the concept of a Yellow box like Mac OS X, it doesn't have asynchronous or streaming drivers like Win2k, it doesn't have a radical filesystem like Be, it doesn't have a great threading architecture like Solaris or Be, it's not distributed like Plan 9. It doesn't have formal verification, it doesn't have a virtual machine.
Basically, ZERO Innovation, written by a bunch of part-time hobbyists copying 30 year old designs with a few stolen ideas like sendfile()
Let's look at what commercial vendors have been doing:
o parallel pipeline window systems (years before X/Precision Insight)
o virtual machine / o-o architecture (Yellow Box, Java, NeXT, Taligent)
o microkernel (NT, NeXT, Be)
o fully threaded OS (Be)
o component architecture (NT/COM)
o distributed components built in (DCOM/MTS)
o directory service (Novell, NT)
o plug and play architecture (Win95/98, and Win2k)
o relational file system (Be)
o postscript based WYSIWYG display system (Display Postscript on the NeXT and Sun NeWS)
The list just goes on. I haven't seen *anything* that can be considered a true innovation in Linux unless you consider being DIFFICULT TO ADMIN an innovation.
Oh yes, eventually the open-source programmers will steal the best ideas from the other platforms, and after 2 years, get a bug-free implementation, and claim it as their own (while denigrating MS and Apple), but the fact remains, Metcalfe is basically right.
I mean, look at Apache, it's not even multithreaded. Or GCC, it's based on 10 year old ideas about CPUs and global analysis on the C language. Or Emacs, an application that makes Office 2000 look slim, but delivers 1/100th of the functionality.
The Linux community seems to be held together mby a mutual hallucination that you can hack together a clone of 30 year old tech, call it innovative, and have a bunch of teenagers worship a pile of shit that is good for web servers, but useless as a desktop.
I've been running Windows2000B3 on my PC for 3 weeks now and it still hasn't crashed.
People that don't get irony and sarcasm make themselves look silly.
People that launch vitriolic personal attacks on critics to attempt to silence them make themselves look silly, and bemuse and entertain the said critic.
Kneejerk reactions to criticism are teasingly funny... because they are proof of lesser reasoning ability, and inability to objectively take criticism. They win the argument for the opponent, and in a supremely ironical way, because they don't see it.
Slashdot discussion forums are a nest of low informed ranting. As a highly skilled and experienced C/C++ developer, I was interested in contributing open source, but find the linux community so full of uninformed nincompoops that it has lost all attraction.
cheers!
The point is that the average windows user DOES NOT setup his/her printer himself/herself. Why? :) :) ... :) Then trouble begins. :) They probably never heard of KDE or GNOME or other tools included with f.e. SuSE (YaST).
1. They don't dare to cause they might screw up.
2. Hell, they won't even find where to attach it to
3. Even you should know that installing hardware in windows even with all it's plug*and*pray and other gimmicks, gives conflicts ALL THE TIME.
I *know* because I get a lot of newbies and windows people who consider themself advanced users at my place. The newbies haven't tried anything yet, which is actually easier for me, since they haven't damaged anything yet
The *advanced* win users usually fucked their entire WinPC up. That goes from deleting vital dlls to the install program itself overwriting and replacing stuff it shouldn't have replaced, or IRQ conflict, DirectX that won't install,
Just try to uninstall something. Windows will tell you something which comes down to: "This dll is not used anymore (I think but I'm not sure)" So what do you do with that??! Most users just delete it
My point is that most windows users don't administer their pc themself. So it's really a silly, to keep hammering on the fact that linux is difficult to administer. Average users surf the web, do some wordprocessing in Word or calculate taxes or stock profit in Excel.
The ones that do it themselves have the knowledge to use windows too. They just don't like editing textfiles, and think nothing has changed in 5 years for linux
Well, nothing stops you from writing the Greatest
Operating System of All Time. However, compatibility with existing software is an issue.
That's why I feel that if Linus back in 1991
had decided to write The Ulimate OS(tm) it wouldn't have got off the ground.
Does W2K also have that giant gaping security hole in it's version of IIS that allows me to take down any NT based machine on the web in 2 seconds or so?
I have to disagree - MAU's are a pain in the ass. Every sight that I visit that has token ring I immediately rip it out. If you need that kind of redundancy, use FDDI - or if you consider that "too old" bite the bullet and get ATM (You're in for a serious ride then).
Ethernet is the only current technology that you "simply plug in".
Now if only VG-AnyLAN had been successful...
Metcafe said there would be a catastropic failure
of the Net due to exponentially increasing traffic
in 1996 (or maybe its 95 or 97) in InfoWorld.
He literally ate his words when the prediction
failed.
He occasionally takes contrarian views because
the "pundit industry" doesn't think deeply
enough about what is happening and mainly parrots
majority view.
Hmmm. I kind of like that sinister "find" command...
Anyway, it took me about 15 sec to locate the built-in find file in gnome... I had to move some windows out of the way. Never bothered looking for it before. I expect that your average win* user would have found it as fast...
BTW, does your average newby work well at a DOS prompt? HAHAHAHAHAHA
Rubbish. UNIX has never been stagnant, and I for one prefer CDE to KDE (even if Motif could do with a face-lift). It's a pity the OSF's fees are so high, and are structured the way they are.
LINUX is 30 years old technology?
So IPV6 is old technology?
That comparison of emacs to Word was pretty bizarre, but I give him bonus points for being willing to point out that NT and Linux are examples of hopelessly obsolete technology, but with the Freedows project making no visible progress, we don't seem to have any real alternatives.
Stallman's EMACS was brilliant in the 1970s, but today we demand more, specifically Microsoft Word
EMACS and Word are vastly different beasts. How many of you fire up MS Word to write a programming assignment...sheesh! WordPerfect/Star Office for linux exist and are more on par with word. Is he suggesting that if linux gets MS WORD it will be a viable operating system???
W2K . . . will overpower Linux.
Did i sleep through linux's take-over of the world? W2k will overpower linux?? Is it not the other way around. Linux has gained alot of ground against win32, but windows is still in the lead, right?
Let's hope there's something coming soon that's better than both Linux and W2K. What would that be? Java or what? Let's be looking.
Since when was java an operating system. This man seems to have done very little research in to linux and the computing industry in general. He spoke a conference near my school and talked about his experiences. He was quite interesting, but when he praised the Macintosh as the operating system of the future I knew something was wrong.
-Coward of the Anonymous VarietyThis is simply untrue. There are easy-to-use interfaces for unix now.
Admittedly, it often depends on a competent admin to set them up; but I give my users wdm, gnome, and qvwm and they have no trouble at all.
Some of the X stuff can be arcane but it is up to red hat & app vendors etc to make it work correctly "out of the box" w.r.t. internet connections, printing, etc.
Saying that joe average can't figure out Unix is like saying that Joe Average doesn't understand Win32 and OLE.
Mark
This is definitly not a joke. Microsoft will eventually prevail. This is why.
They have enough financial resources to buy Linux (though noone really ownes it, they will buy the customers). They will not be able to buy everyone. The people that know what an operating system is really supposed to be will never accept Windows as a true operating system.
As people get to be more educated, Microsoft will be scared enough to make it's smartest decision ever - produce a quality operating system. At this time, the majority of the Linux users will go back to Windows 2040. But until then, Linux will survive. (I actually think that it will survive even longer through some of the die-hards. I have seen web sites that prove that there are still people wanting to go back to some of the old computers of the 80's - non PC compatable and 8 bit. If These have survived this long, Linux will definitly survive longer)
I've not been at all impressed with InstallShield, and don't much care for RPMs either. The FreeBSD ports tree is actually the best installation scheme I've used (I've heard Debian GNU/Linux uses something similar).
That scored a 1?? generous
I spent some of my youth doing engineering code development on NOS2 machines, and plotting on NOS1. now that is painful. especially since I was already used to VMS.
I agree with Metcalf for the most part. the CLI interface for unix is user-hostile, especially when compared to VMS. X-Windows is still clunky, and I found Xt and Motif development very painful. I'd like to see OpenBSD's kernel, Linux's admin services, and OS/2's GUI put together...
If Windows has a problem, just buy and install
First Aid.
Duh. until Linux has First Aid it won't be
acceptable.
> There's a key point that Bob Metacalfe, and many
> others are missing here: age is not a relevant
> metric when measuring usefulness.
Maybe not. How old is Bob?
---
(All my useful points have already been made, so I'm reduced to one remaining cheapshot)
He mentions what others have, NT has a great deal of the market. But, I think one point is really being overlooked. What actually is the server market?
:-)
Until the advent of point-and-click, networks needed network administrators, and a machine, to do the job. Along came MS and made it easy. They may have taken over part of the market, but even more so, they opened up a great new market for the technologicaly-challenged.
When you come down to mission-critical operations how many actually run NT? I would assume that a company needing a computer to do a mission-critical job would hire reliable people who can get the job done that do not need a system that makes it easier. So, although you can make it easier, certain systems give you better, and possibly more reliable, control.
Has anyone done a survey in that area?
I wish MS all the luck in selling there system. They truly did open up thr PC market. It was only them that got me to use a computer, which then got me around to come to Linux. Besides, having VMware just start _another_ instance of Linux would be relatively boring.
What Metcalf is missing is that most software that will be available for Linux won't be free or open source. Not all Linux projects are going to be developed for free, quite the opposite. The real advantage that Linux has over Windows is that developers for Linux are working and competing on a level playing field, when you try to encroach on MS territory, you can't even see all of the field. Another minor advantage is that Linux is cheaper, and Windows 3.1+PC was cheaper than a Mac or an Amiga or an Atari ST, even if in comparison it was absolute crap, but it was cheaper.
It's silly to think that Linux will just dry up and die, it's too available to do that over night. It will be in use to at least 2020 if for no other reason than people enjoy tinkering, even if it is used purely as a hobby. Linux may not wipe out Windows, but Windows isn't going to wipe out Linux either.
This is just a very obvious attempt to raise readership by being "outrageous" and "controversial". Why not just write a column: "Linus Trovalds Impregnates Alien!!".
what are you people thinking, if i have a problem with linux, i get online, check irc, or freshmeat, or some webpage and have my answer and solution in minutes....with windows your stuck for hours trying to figure out what's wrong and you'll end up spending money on software that doesnt fix your problem...but hey it'll give you nice animated icons, so yeah i guess your correct, until linux can do that, it pretty much sucks huh.......
Metcalfe does appear to be out of touch, and he is.
We should not be so quick to judge before we see his side, however error laden is it.
His rhetoric sounds alot like many older computer users I've run into. They have a perception in their head that the current way is the best, and the new way(the revised older way) is too clunky and difficult to learn. Most of them speak from experience of using a UNIX flavor, or VMS etc. Others are just repeating what Bill tells them to say. "Oh WOW Microsoft is cool! Easy to use! I can run my business on it!"
I don't think Metcalfe is being paid, he's just spouting off based on HIS experiences, and informaton. It's what pundits do. Sit back and predict sometimes not basing their statements on current information.
But there are some valid concerns in his reference to the Free Source movement as utopian balderdash. Let me make it clear that I know the Linux movement is not a 'bunch o' hippes', but there is alot of the same hopes and rhetoric. This is a kind of revolution, but one where we are the more active and practical people. Ignoring these Troll boys who trash talk Linux is a good idea. We should also try to appeal to the average user or the business man. Linux is much more than hobby software, but it needs to appeal to people who DON'T want to get their hands dirty. That's one thing the protest generation didn't do until the early 70's. Appeal to Middle America. Change didn't happen when just because young kids went out with a message. Change happened when surburban parent saw their kids coming back from Vietnam FUBAR. A change with Linux might happen when the merits of Linux are brought to the majority of M$ users, Middle America. (and M$ users around the world!)
Linux needs to convey that it's:
- cheaper than Microsoft products
- more flexible (modules instead of whole package, runs on multiple machines)
- faster bugs fixes (community of programmers not a company)
Now I'm going to shout off like a pundit. I'm going to say things that may or may not be true. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Linux does not have:
- easy customer support
- support for the bells and whistles of most M$ products.
- simple, easy to learn features
These are the complaints I get from my supervisors, friends and family when I mention that Linux should be something to examine.
IMHO, the Linux community needs to overcome these hurdles in order to break through and become 'the people's OS' for lack of a better term.
Okay, maybe that does make me sound like a Marxist revolutionary, but didn't even Thomas Jefferson say that a Revolution every once and a while was a Good Thing(tm)?
thats whay i meant, that you can make money from free software. tsk. No need to say bad words.
assuming a couple of things:
Most users are not capable of administering thier machine.
Most users have a "geek" friend that helps when there is a problem.
Wouldn't it be a lot easier to telnet to the machine to install software, add a printer, etc. rather than physically have to be there? Ever remotely installed a printer in windows?
I agree that many elements of the OSS movement, esp. the GNU GPL, share elements of communism. It is those same shared elements that will lead proponents of the OSS movement, like those of communism, to accept a lot of force and coercion in the name of advancing their movement.
This is what informs a lot of the MS hatred here, I think, as well as the insistence that the government punish MS for perceived crimes. Communists are never satisfied with the choice for individuals to live communally, with common property, etc... instead, it must be forced on everyone. Similarly, it is not enough for OSS proponents that people be allowed to choose an operating system or software methodology for themselves -- they MUST use the OSS model, and force can legitimately be used to compel them to do so.
-AG
Metcalfe's article makes no sense; he claims Linux is 60's
technology--and then admits that Windows is 60's technology as well
(VMS in particular).
Yet he provides no argument as to why the 60's
technology Windows is based on should be any better than the 60's
technology Linux is based on. Linux incorporates significant
improvements over the original 60's Unix. Linux is in fact based
on System-V, as is Solaris for one thing. It also incorporates the
BSD innovations for another.
Let's remember that the last time Unix squared off against VMS, VMS lost.
I'd be more impressed with Metcalfe if he had put some of his
intelligence into providing reasons for his opinions. As it stands,
there's little substance
in his article--only a series of sarcastic insults. Too bad.
~
Yes, Mr Metcalfe is clearly a McCarthyite fascist!
Dear me, and you lot wonder why most of us think you're fanatics.
One of the things that attracts me about
some of the linux and open source development
projects (Berlin for example) is the thought
that is put into them. The problem is that
such projects take time to mature, and things
like KDE will produce deliverables sooner.
(One thing that has been suggested for KDE,
which is missing in most desktop environments
is a backend runtime -- which can allow -so-
much to be done. The potential for this is
in Java, but is most likely never going to
see the light of day -- sonething that market
pressures tend to do, getting you to second
best quickly whilst almost completely ruling
out any chance of anything better.)
That IS happening. The thing about vastly new
technology is that it takes a long time to mature.
One needs only to look at some of the projects
around (e.g. for UI's the Berlin project, and
to a lesser degree the UDE project -- both have
effectively started anew with UI considerations)
I agree, he seems to have a rather large ego. I don't think he's ever used Linux. He's probably never used Windows 2000, considering it hasn't come out yet. It will probably be like the last 3 versions. Crashes... It not likely that Windows will grow much either, especially when the world is forced to pay MS $90 every couple of months. Linux is based on Unix, but is diffrent, because it is being molded by the users and not corporations. The old Unixes were too expensive for users to own. Very little development could take place in the open. Linux has changed that.
Wow, two examples: Redhat and Cygnus.
Unfortunately, neither is making any money.
Since when do we decide technology on what the average user 'wants', his a pig anyway.
I can't believe people are still trying to play the Red Scare card these days. The idea of giving away software for free and building software in a world-wide collective effort is so threatening to the Old Guard Capitalists, that they have to conjure up the spirits of Marx and Lenin? How does this guy think the Internet became what it is today anyway?
If this is the tatic M$ and others are going to use to try an suppress Linux and other open source software, I don't think we have too much to worry about. Most kids today don't even know who Marx and Lenin are anyways, and don't have to grow up with the looming threat of WWIII over their heads. This guy is definately showing his age, and people his age aren't going to be around for much longer.
Opera and BeZilla(Mozilla) are right around the corner!!
I agree totally.
I never thought I'd say this but...
Moderation pleasssee! : )
The reason Linux will not overtake M$ in marketshare is because people like dumb things.
People like SUV's (stupid looking, bloated, energy guzzling vehicles, with no performance/handling capacity) "OOO but it has such nice cupholders and buttwarmers and OOOO, I feel safe." is why people like them.
That's what people want on thier computers, cute useless things, and feeling safe.
About personal computing: it's not about networking. Personal computing has been and always will be about the computer itself and the software it runs, not about network protocols and user administration. The "power" of the operating system is 100% wasted if the computer is not usable, useful, and fun for normal people. The powerful aspects of Linux are entirely invisible to a non-technical user unless he/she is using software that speaks THEIR language.
Linux will never be a great home product as long as people are asked to use a command line to accomplish basic tasks.
Metcalfe... heh, what the hell does he know? He's had his fifteen minutes. He's just afraid his Microsloth stock will be worthless in the future.
Remember that we are the revolution driving the future of computing.
He writes that non-GPL'ed free software is OK. However, every time he opens up his pie-hole he is ranting about how anything non-GPL is evil. He's losing what few friends he has left by continuing on his "only I am right and you suck" crusade. No wonder Linus, ESR, and the rest of the Linux heirarchy want very little to do with him.
Don't forget that once "Herd" or whatever it's called is finally developed, Linux will be history as far as the FSF is concerned. At least that will rid the Linux community of all the commie-pinko-leftist-whiners that follow this joker.
Uhm, hello? You're talking like Billy boy is all for choice. I challenge you to go into any Circuit City or Computer City, or 99.99 percent of all computer stores and find something OTHER than M$ Windows available. Go ahead and ask them if they'll preload Linux or BeOS for you. You'll get nothing but a blank stare. Bill has manuevered his company to the purposefull act of removing choice from users. We aren't after "unsuspecting M$ users", we're here to liberate trapped M$ users by showing them there's another way. If you're a Windows lover, more power to you. But stop whining about all your Windows buddies suddenly using Linux. Bill has had years to cement himself into our culture. We have to expend just that extra bit of energy to dislodge him and show users that yes, there really is a choice, and even (gasp) better choices than Microsoft.
So....according to you linux is as easy as Windows, right? Obviously there must be some massive conspiracy that forces people to use windows.
Do you even know a regular user (someone who has never used a command prompt in his/her entire life) and who uses linux? There are millions like that who use windows - just walk into a Best Buy or compUSA and look around. Is it even possible to use linux without using the command prompt? (and I don't mean theoretically, I mean in Real Life).
You can sit on your chair and pontificate all you want about how linux is so easy - but it doesn't make any difference. I know programmers and even tech support people who have given up on linux after trying to change the resolution or trying to setup the dial up networking.
Do you actually know anybody (like a real live person) who doesn't know shit about computers and uses linux? Don't give hypothetical examples, I'm talking about real people.
It takes a certain kind of technologist, not the least the inventor of Ethernet, to look at an exponential trend like Linux and scoff.
;-)
The references to Communism are specious at best.
Linux and the Open Source revolution are a phenomena particular to the internet and not stale socialist dogma.
Linux reminds me of the Elightenment and the birth of Science. The open sharing of ideas which gave birth to the modern world we all live in. Scientists could afford to do this because their capital costs for experiments were minimal.
Open Source is to Software Engineering what the Scientific Method was to the Enlightenment.
(or something like that
The marginal cost to reproduce and incrementally improve software is so low that software ideas don't have to die.
Next we'll hear....
Linux Tovalds: "If I have seen farther it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants"
jim burnes
Right....and "printtool" is such an obviously intuitive command it must leap out at the newbie user right away. I can just picture it.
Newbie user: "Hmm...how can I add my printer now to this linux machine?"
Newbie user: "Of course! I must type in printtool and it will do that for me. How could I miss that? Doh!"
Voice over - "Linux...so easy, even our commands are obvious. Do not fiddle around with the colorful buttons on windows. They are for stupid people. Install linux today, it comes with Obvious Commands(TM) !"
Not inexperienced, they are just blinded. It reminds me of the old Os/2 crowd.
" is better than windows! It will crush Microsoft!"
Actually, I can't picture an average family going out and buying a linux PC. (By average I mean they know as much about PCs/OSes as they do about NRM spectrometry - nothing). Just imagine if they ran into one of the posters here and he went on a rampage about how emacs was better than windows....
(btw, that was a joke, I hope nobody replies back saying emacs IS better than windows).
Chill out, we won (lean mean programmers)
I think you're missing the point - it's the % of people who find something difficult that matters. Obviously you can't have every single user find ultimate happiness with a product.
Windows is more easy to use than linux - otherwise people would be installing linux more than windows. It's that simple.
I seriously doubt you've talked to average users who have tried to install linux. I've seen even programmers and technical users stumble and give up. On the other hand, grandmas and clerks use windows and Mac. There's a bell curve of users, obviously, so don't write back giving one or 2 examples as proof. It doesn't mean anything. Look at the larger body of consumers.
So why don't you install linux on the PCs of you friends and relatives?
:)
I will go out on a limb and guess that they will have tons more questions that they did with windows.
You blather about "choice" vs. "force". Ever think how similar Microsoft marketing tactics are to how drug dealers work?
Drug dealer: "Here you go, man, try a little of this. It's on me." (knowing full well you'll probably be hooked and will soon be back for more..."
MS: "Well, it's only version 5.0. You should see what comes out after we rename it to 2000!"
It's been this way for 10-15 years. People are finally starting to get wise to it, and some are moving away from it, because they finally get it, that the joke ultimately is on them, the buyer of Microsoft products.
It's a well known fact that Linux developers hang out on Slashdot. It's another well known fact that Linux developers themselves are full of spite when talking about other operating systems. You only have to read the kernel mailing list. Face it, the Linux community is not a pinnacle of tolerance and mutual respect.
I love BeOS but let's not be antagonistic. Unix will be around for many years to come. BeOS might displace Unix from the engineering workstation market in the next few years, but it doesn't have the security needed for a server OS (not designed for that purpose). BeOS _could_ be the basis for a great server OS, as it has a great file system and better SMP support than older OSes. Be has stated that the system was designed with the capability to eventually implement a Unix-style multiuser security model. Until this is done, it can't touch Unix in many respects.
Well, I shared an office with Bob briefly in the
late 70's, as a grad student at MIT. Bob had
already made his millions co-inventing Ethernet.
He was on board as some sort of "fellow," and MIT
was scratching for space, so they threw him in
with me for a while. He's a real nice
guy, real down-to-earth, not at all the asshole
that some titans of our industry turn out to be.
True, Bob has made some pretty bad predictions
in the past. However, at least he had the
decency and the sense of humor to eat his last
prediction, as he said he would.
He's gonna have to eat this one, too, I'm afraid.
Isn't it "pooh-poohed"?
Just being pedantic.
BeOS is a great single user desktop OS, although it is clearly still under construction. BeOS now has tolerable support of current hardware, and should have complete hardware OpenGL within the next year. I'm not sure if BeOS will attract a large enough "critical mass" to get more great applications and to convince hardware manufacturers to write their own BeOS drivers. If they can get past that hurdle, I think they will be around to stay, but BeOS will cut into Windows share, not Unix.
Technologically, Be could possibly make a "BeOS Server" by implementing multiuser capabilities (they claim that BeOS was designed so that this would be possible). The multiprocessor support and advanced file system would be great features for a server OS. I get the feeling, however, that this isn't a priority for Be.
You are basically 100% correct. This is why Linux needs to draw inspirations from other operating systems. "Linux world domination" is synonymous to "technical stagnation".
And you know what else? Computers are based on electricity a two hundred year old technology. etc....
PS: Post I am responding to is too long.
Metcalfe's article is unnecessarily inflammatory and insulting to the open source community. Moreover, Metcalfe does not present any solid facts or well-reasoned arguments to back up his assertions. Therefore, this article is a useless piece of fluff and should be calmly dismissed as such. It certainly gives me no reason to respect the writer.
One point worth considering, though, is what it would mean if Microsoft "crushed" Linux. Does this mean that the MS Police would come to your house and confiscate your Linux disks? No. It just means that windows would remain the dominant operating system. This is unappealing to those who dislike having to work with unstable, buggy software, or who despise Microsoft's unsavory business practices and want to see the company punished, but it wouldn't be the end of the world. The open source community would still be free to continue producing and exchanging high-quality software.
--- Brian
Look about two hundred posts back to see the beginning of this thread.
Wow, Bob Metcalfe is a hardcore Troll! That column is designed to attract some heavy duty flames! Even the title of the column is designed to piss a lot of people off.
i totally agree. apparently, someone in the linux community must have pissed him off. i haven't read an article with this much garbage since my buddy left one of his copies of people magazine at my house.
the article has a grand total of ZERO facts. all it succeeds in doing is attacking linux as a person, by calling it communistic, then changing the slant to calling linux tree-huggers. sounds more like old joe mccarthy than real news. and this guy invented ethernet? he must have taken a few serious blows to the head since then.
a little bit of advice for this moron: when writing an article, state one thesis. then back the thesis with fact after fact, in a concise manner. now, is that too hard?
as for linux losing, linux CAN'T lose. real linux users could care less about market share, or numbers. we just want a quality operating system with quality software, that's why we use it. this isn't a game, a competition to see who has the most users. i like it because it's the best possible tool for the job i use it for. my wife and kid agree. my wife is sick of win 95/98 crashing and doesn't have that problem with linux. for what she needs it for, it's the best possible tool.
QNX proves that you really can build a clean microkernel architecture that's efficient and is true to its design principles. It's a real shame that those guys haven't open-sourced it. Maybe someday when they're forced out of business...
Open Source naysayers also ignore the open source amazing success stories. They rant on how open source will fall on it face when it has already been hugely successfull.
Remember Madonna's one glove? Michael's one glove? Reagan? All that cocaine? The Amiga? MS-DOS? The Reliant-K? The 8088? The Michelin ads with the Michelin man instead of the babies? Eddie Murphy on SNL?
Oh! Boy! Bring 'em back!
an they're not any less effective for their age
The comparison shouldn't be between
EMACS and Word...
Word is default shipping IN windows,
If your going to compare EMACS,
compare it to...what does Windows have?
Well, there's Notepad.
Hmm... EMACS vs Notepad.
macros, external control from other programs,
spell checking, text or gui, understands formatting for different languages, programmable menus, etc. vs a gui, cut and paste, and maybe a search/replace option.
Wanna compare Word to something?
Word vs LaTex, Lyx, Wordperfect, KDEOffice,
need I say more?
Linux beats dos. Windows beats enl/gnome. If you're arguing, you're stupid and wrong.
He probably thinks he is credible since he invented ethernet.. Hmmm.. but as a transport medium ethernet SUCKS!! Barely better than aloha... Sorry just ranting on somebody credibility... But since he thinks unoptimized bloatware is good(Windows 2k) I guess that parrallels his own creation ethernet....
Efficeient Not-Effiecient
---------- --------------
ATM Ethernet
LINUX WINDOWS 2k,95,nt,etc...
Just some amusing parrallels I came up with while dinking around with some atm switches..
Linux ain't that slim you know. You canslim windows down by deleting unneeded stuff (like linux). Don't compare Default Windows with
slimmed down Linux.
Don't compare default Linux to Default Windows either. You don't get the development tools, etc. with the default windows. Let's count off here:
WinNT4sp4: ~250MB (can be trimmed to ~120)
Visual Studio: ~337MB (default install)
MSDN Help: ~1500GB (for the Vis Studio help)
Office 97: ~150MB (Default Install)
Total: ~2237MB
Linux-Mandrake Distribution Default Workstation Install: ~450MB (C/++, Perl, Python, etc. compilers, GIMP, KDE, nearly every How-To in existance, Version control software, etc...)
Word Perfect 8.0: ~50MB (IIRC)
Total: ~500MB
Anybody out there been using linux long enough to say what a minimum-reasonable development system install-size might be?
Here's a relative ranking of my experiences with the various current MS flavors (9+ years) and my experience with Linux (8+ months). With the exception of the Difficult rating on installation for Linux (Slackware) all other Linux ratings are based upon various Red Hat-based distros (currently Mandrake 5.3 as 6.0 is buggy).
Comparative Response time KDE vs. WinNT:
KDE/Linux system (P150MMX w/80MB RAM) not noticably slower than WinNT system (PII400 2/256MB RAM).
Ease of Use Comparison:
Linux:
OS Installation: Difficult - Easy
Configuration: Moderate
Day-to-day Use: Easy
Development Use: Easy
Application Help: Moderate
App Installation: Easy
Win9x:
OS Installation: Moderate
Configuration: Easy
Day-to-Day Use: Easy
Development Use: Fairly Easy
Application Help: Fairly Easy
App Installation: Easy
WinNT:
OS Installation: Difficult to Moderate
Configuration: Easy
Day-to-Day Use: Easy
Development Use: Fairly Easy
Application Help: Fairly Easy
App Installation: Easy
Maximum Uptime: (Theoretical/Personal)
Win95: ~45days / ~72hrs
Win98: Unknown / ~36hrs
WinNT: Unlimited / ~36hrs
Linux: Unlimited / ~6 weeks (between power outage and moving the system across town)
Crash Frequency: Annoyance/Catastrophic
Win95: Often / twice in 3+ years
Win98: Very Often / Once in 2 months
WinNT: Very Often / Once in 5 months
Linux: Seldom / Not Yet
Translation: MS COULD have spent the time needed to make a stable, robust kernel that can handle errors, but instead they decided to let even a moderate system error bring down the whole box 'for safety'.
The Clue: When the system goes down like Windows (of any store-bought version) crashes, it often corrupts that big, monolithic registry file, rendering the entire system either completely inoperable, or increasingly flakey. Mind you, NT is BETTER about this than the 9x flavors, but it's still not what I'd consider 'stable'.
Let's not forget that VMS-pushing DEC supported Ultrix only because it was forced to by the market. Ken Olsen hated UNIX with a passion.
Sound familiar?
I guess VMS is coming back from the grave to get back at UNIX...
To quote Bob Metcalf, "Every year I bring a dozen students from MIT to my four storey house and tell them I made millions by out-marketing the ethernet competitors 12-hours a day, 7 days a week for years. Marketing bought this house, not better technology. They don't like to hear that."
Ten years ago Ethernet was not cheap. I cost as much as Token Ring and more than ArcNet. It was 3Com's relentless marketing that won the war, then Moore's law lowered the price.
Linux is only free if your time has no value.
(Jamie Zawinsky / Mozilla founding member)
My experience is that Linux is quite unreliable. I view Linux as a backlash against Microsoft, no more and no less. I don't think it will be very successful in the long run.
(Ken Thompson / Father of UNIX)
Linux - It's just a notch above Luddism.
(Bob Metcalfe / Inventor of Ethernet)
If you know any other great quotes, please post them here!
The very fact of the matter is that those "Windows Lusers", as you call them, consist of the majority of computer users everywhere.
/etc with obscure flags and crappy man pages.
You cannot expect 95% of all computer users to live comfortably with Linux or ANY Unix OS, for that matter.
Most people just aren't technically adept to handle dozens of text-based configuration files under
Wake up. There is NO point it trying make Linux the defacto desktop standard. Nothing Linux does today, better than Windoze, really makes much of a difference to Joe User.
A lot of discussion about operating systems misses a fundamental point. Ever notice that users who do not develop software themselves tend to prefer MS Windows, whereas developers tend to hate it? The users don't know or care about the technical quality of an OS--they just want their applications to run. That is why MS is so huge. But the developers want a quality development environment. These are two separate concerns.
The technical quality of Linux is not the main issue. The main issue is that it essentially makes the user platform a quasi-public standard rather than a proprietary standard. Imagine if some company had a proprietary lock on protocols such as html, http, TCP/IP, ASCII, or for that matter, television signals! Something as fundamental as a platform for software applications needs to be public, or the continued development of civilization could be in jeapordy.
If you think that has anything to do with communism, then you have a very poor understanding of economics. Unlike cars and food, software can be copied virtually for free. If people are willing to develop an OS for their own intellectual satisfaction, then give it away for free, I'd say it's rather stupid to continue to pay for another OS, especially one of inferior quality. Wouldn't you? If you disagree, you are not a capitalist, you are a fool. Can I sell you some air?
I like this one better:
Linux is 30-year-old technology. It's just a notch above Luddism.
(Bob Metcalfe / Inventor of Ethernet)
The standard desktop system in at LEAST one center is a Windows95 based PC with standard applications like MS Office and Netscape. Sure, you can use Linux or Solaris or whatever on the PC but it really isn't supported when you call the help desk .
Windows is new technology - hence NT. ~;-)
However, with W2K I have learned that the codebase is in fact 2,000 years old! Wow.
Now, what will HAL have to say since he thinks the new milennium starts in 2001 (hence the movie and book title) when all the world, including Microsoft knows it starts in 2000!!!
A Nony Mouse ~;-)
Linus torvalds will have everyone believe that people developing source outside of company normally produce better products cause they are passionate about the work and not because they want to get paid.
This actually based on a Marxist belief, one I share as well. To have a product that is part of you stolen away and sold causes alienation, thus after a few incidents you distance yourself from work emotionally. Side projects that are truly yours are where many people can truly find happiness, for it is for themselves and no one else. Sure, as with opensource, others may join, but if they do not it needn't matter. Happiness is a very personal thing. We are what we make.
IMHO - windows is good. I love IE, but I choose linux because it inspires knowledge. Knowledge of past standards, other protocols, etc. Creation is the root of linux/unix. If you know any programming language you can create wonderful things.
Linux is magnificant like all unix's. Maybe Windows will be that way someday.I agree. Can't we have a moderation system for articles? This one would DEFINITELY qualify as flamebait...
Linux is much closer to being Anarcho-Syndicalist than it is to Communism or Capitalism. What's Anarcho-Syndicalism? Look here: http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/1931/
It is sometimes refered to as Libertarian Socialism, which is not the contradiction that it sounds like. It is simply individuals working together volutarily for collective benifit.
Open Source = Communism? He smoked
the wrong pot.
How do you "set up" linux right so a new user can add a printer without reaming through mountains of docs? well I'm an average new user and I found my printer (Epson 1520 ) in printool in about 2 minutes. Maybe things were alot worse before, maybe they could be better now, but I think it's safe to say they'll be better in the near future. People have helped me with things I didn't know how to do, and I knew to ask because when I first heard about Linux as an alternative to Windows, I also heard that support was available from other users 24hrs. a day worldwide. I can personally testify to that as I have been helped by people on other continents and even though I am new I have been able to help someone from the other side of the world install an X windows update. I was in contact with him within about an hour of his message hitting the news server. We took a wrong turn or two because he had trouble understanding the English-only instructions and my English-only interpretations but we got it done. Linux and the internet culture really are new, not old. If you were to ask me, I'd say the old crusty obstacle is really not Linux but Bob Metcalffe and people like him who fear change. Sorry to be all rah-rah Linux, but that's how I feel.
Be Inc says its software opengl is about ..
30% faster (in 4.5)and that easy to check with their
Opengl Teapot. About the Media Hype.
Check out some beos demos about there realtime music mixing and some other demos
its very impressive what beos can do.
and still have a simple and powerful gui.
If we'd followed the Micro$oft way of dictatorship, like the Christian way of forcing people to believe what the church thinks, we'd had to admit that the earth is flat and scientists lives weren't guaranteed to end naturally. In Holland they'd hunted innocent women to blame them of being a witch, tortured and killed them, in the name of God for the Christians and Europe. Now that's not really a nice thing to do, is it....
That's a keeper.
I don't think you can really call the Microsoft software distribution model a perfect example of capitalism- it is enabled by the ip laws that effectively subsidize their business.
I would say that Red Hat's model is a perfect example of capitalism- they take something that is free, package it, market and sell it.
As for GPL or Linux being communistic: I am a libertarian; I am oppossed to IP law and any other government subsidies of business or individuals. Linux and the GPL are subversive to IP law.
Property law is a recognition of some level of individual soverignty, a good thing. IP law is tyrannical- it aims to make scarce that that is by its nature abundant. It is a conspiracy between the govenrment and the producers of IP material. It is only capitalistic if you consider it capitalistic to burn down your competitor's factory. It is socialistic in that it is considered to benefit society by advancing art and science.
Capitalism is what happens in the absence of socialism and tyranny- under those systems, business should be considered an extension of gevernment.
One of the reasons I use Linux is that I can be more productive in Linux for less money- I don't have to shell out hundreds of dollars or commit a crime to get the standard-issue c compiler or word processor. The capital is free.
Maybe Linus and the other contributors are communists.. so what? Linux is a cultural phenom as much as it is a kernal. It's like an artistic genre- and artists are often at odds with the contemporary political situation.
Maybe rms is a communist; (I have no idea what political vies he has (with the obvious exception)) if so, he's still my ally (indeed, he is my hero) because he advocates freedom and opposes IP law and thus advances my cause.
Chris@toybag.com
Communism is Fascism in the name of Socialism.
Anarchism is Libertairian Socialism. It is socialism by choice, not by force. Everyone is free to contribute to OSS, but no one is forced to, and improvements in OSS benifit everyone.
So if RMS is like Bakunin, who does that make Linus?
Also new users are nervous when they get in front of a computer, couple this with the "blue screen of death" and other assorted cryptic windows errors and you get a very nervous person.
That reminds me of the first time a Windows program crashed on me. It said "Illegal Operation blah blah" and I thought I broke the law. (Note: I was only ~10 years old)
Yes, windoze sucks. Yes, Linux has it's problems. But, then again, what version of it is out? Oh, yeah. 2.2.xx. Ever try using MS Windows 1.x? Now there's an OS that truely was a pile of crap. I've been using Linux since the 1.x.xx days and it was very hard to use. While I'll admit that Linux has quite a ways to go (like a mountain's worth) the progress that it has made goes beyond remarkable into extraordinary.
I really get frustrated with biased, slanderous writers. What is "Open Sores"? It really doesn't bother me in the least the Metcalfe doesn't like linux or that he doesn't think it will succeed. But is he reduced to name calling to make his point? If Open Source is so bad that he has to call names at it, then why are companies now opting to adopt it to one extent or another. Even Microsoft!
30-year old technology. Now there's a stigma to stick on an OS. But why is it 30-year old technology? Well, according to the article, because it's a form of Unix and apparently it has something to do with EMACS. Well, I can get an EMACS editor for NT but that doesn't make it 30-year old technology.
If Unix, a 30-year old technology, has been around for so long, what makes him think Linux will go away so quickly?
Oh, and I guess I'm now a communist. I really can't think of any like the free flow of information that is quite so un-communist.
I believe everyone has a right to the expression of opinion. However, if you want to convert people to your opinion, you probably should use slandering name-calling. Intelligent people just don't respond all that well to it.
I think I can answer for him. I'm that live, real person you're saying doesn't exist. I bought a PC, my first, March '98. I did not know shit about computers of any type. Once upon a time, I owned a Mac Plus. Didn't use it for much after I graduated. After hearing about Linux on NPR, I installed it (with fear and trembling) May '98, . O yeah I had some problems! However, once I re-upgraded my video card (the card my pc came with was supported, the voodoo rush upgrade I selected when the first card's ram proved to be flaky was not supported) and I finally got some SVGA going, I began to quickly resolve the outstanding difficulties. I now know shit about computers, sorta. Linux is still not a perfect fit for users like me, like video is slow even with a good card, but your argument that ordinary untrained people can't ever use Linux and be happy and productive is just not true. If I owned a PC with completely supported hardware to begin with. I think I would have no scars at all from my initial encounter. As it was, those scars represent something good too, I had to go beyond what I knew and was comfortable with to get things done. I am now much more knowledgeable about the Linux filesystem and commands than i would otherwise be, which makes it easier for me to improve my GUI environment, install software I want from the Net, and deal with the little things that go wrong in there. Like stale lock files that result from Netscape crashes. Ok average users should not have to deal with hand culling lock files, but that seems to be a collision of a secure, miltiuser architecture with something complex and flakey like a browser --it's not really Linux's fault. We'll see how well W2K, and Mac OSX deal with this issue. I have seen Linux distributions come a long, long way in a short year in terms of end-user friendliness, and I am confident that the pace is accelerating. Linux isn't as easy for dummies to use at first as Windows, but give that Windows installation 6-8 months to frag itself to hell and back, and Linux begins to look like a breeze to use! Oh yeah, that massive conspiracy is on trial right now, and legal remedies aside --which I expect will fail from timidity-- no one can now deny the existence of that plan and it's frequent reliance on criminal conduct.
And who cares about your opinion...?
That may be, and I'd admit that Bob Metcalf has certainly made enough stupid predictions in his time. But I'd still be reluctant to dismiss him totally. You may not believe so, but they don't give PhD's (which Metcalf holds) away to complete idiots just every day.
Metcalfe has run a pig farm for years now. Perhaps everything looks like farming to him now. One of his two analogies is that OS'es are like farms: it makes more sense to have a few relatively large farms rather than many relatively small farms.
:).
By analogy, it makes sense to have relatively few big software companies making OS'es rather than relatively many software companies making OS'es.
This is a crock because 1) an ear of corn is an ear of corn no matter who grows it, whereas different OS'es are very different 2) I can eat beets if I don't want corn, whereas I must have an OS.
The communism analogy is just weird and doesn't pull any weight either.
More importantly though, we are entering an era where the quality of our lives depends on computers. Many--hopefully most--of us are not willing to entrust this to a single corporation, especially as corporations are amoral by nature.
But we don't have the wisdom acquired from years of slopping the hogs, either
Install, use, whatever. You're missing the larger point - ease of use is a major factor. And yes, it's a subjective factor, and there's a bell curve of users with varying responses.
I've heard people say they found windows easier than the mac, but overall, the general consensus is that the mac is far more easier for most people. Similarly, at the present moment, if you look at user experience, linux still has rough spots.
From my own experience at watching linux users, I've concluded that it still needs quite a bit to make it easier to use. For instance, even if linux were preinstalled and handed to a total novice, he/she would find it quite useless. This is because novice users do not know what mouse buttons do, how to move/close windows, what icons are, what the concept of cut 'n paste is.
You may laugh at them, but the reality is that this is not built into our genes, and we all learn it at some point. With the Mac, a total newbie learns quickly because the UI is delightfully well designed. With windows, it's klunky, but if you placed a total newbie in a closed room with a PC, eventually he/she'd figure out to click on help, navigate thru it, and be productive sooner or later. I can't imagine that with linux (and I'm sure someone will reply fervently claiming it's possible. Right...)
I've been using linux for a while, but the UI is still a pain, esp. since most parts are disparately designed and pretty much every app. has its own UI and paradigm.
To make it short - the mac is easier than windows. Windows is easier than linux. linux is easier than DOS and MVS. Maybe things will change, but this is how it is for most users, and that's the general perception.
I had a lot of respect for Metcalfe before he wrote this article. It's over, baby.
I'm sure Bob cares.
The fact that you dug around into filesystems and are hanging out on /. precludes you from the ordinary user category.
:)
I was referring to non-geek types who would not go through all that trouble. It's a good thing you did, but admittedly few people would do so.
I think linux has improved vastly in a very short time, but at the present time, it still appeals to technical types. Like you. And me. And everyone reading this.
The internet/ARPANET was initially invented way before unix. However, much of it was developed and improved on unix.
The WWW was invented by Tim Berners-Lee on a NEXTSTEP workstation.
GUI was invented by Douglas Engelbart in 1968. Not sure what OS, but he was working at SRI. He also holds the patent for the first mouse.
Microsoft BASIC is pretty much the only thing I can think of that they innovated (first PC language product?). They did pioneer some of the first PC products. But it went downhill from there in terms of innovation.
Well, most of my friends want to learn, so they just borrow my CD.
For my family, the same reason they still don't have Windows 98. It took them so long to learn one system that I'm not about to mess with it.
If they were getting their first computer, well, I'd probably get them an iMac. But I would definitely give them Linux before Windows.
Hint: it's not the poster's mind set.
You say RMS is not extreme, then look at the facts: the GPL allows everyone to benefit from from free software: it even allows a company to get a software and sell it, it also allows a company (as long as they do not distribute) to use other peoples software plus make modifications without revealing the source. Now that is definitely business friendly, to the extreme I may say. But companies having discovered free software, they want more... Much like me going to store, get everything free of charge, and then complain that the store owners are communists because they will not help me to transport the staff to my house. After all, what good is free software if it will not help me cook the food, and also help me wash the dishes. RMS is not an extremist, people who want to abduct programs to non-free are the extremist.
The Anonymous Coward often innovates. Don't deprecate him.
Instead, encourage and motivate him. However, it's theoretically impossible (and meaningless) to renovate him.
On the other hand, it's possible (and quite entertaining) to agitate him. Or frustrate, implicate, irritate, or denigrate him. However, one thing you cannot do is placate him.
It's certainly easy to impersonate him. Perhaps even subjugate him. But you cannot illuminate him, for he is not instantiated.
He may be unsophisticated or uneducated, but unlike a python, he is certainly not reticulated. However, the Anonymous Coward is generally dedicated.
Is he motivated? Yes. Is he manipulated? Maybe. At the sight of a flame, he is certainly horripilated.
He is easily impersonated, but sometimes, at the end, his name is annotated.
Lucius Lucanius.
-- Bob Metcalfe, 1999.
He may be wrong there, but that was not the point of his article. His other quotes can be immediately verified:
"Linux is 30-year-old technology."
"The Open Source Movement reminds me of communism."
"The Open Sorce Movement asks us to ignore three decades of innovation. It's just a notch above Luddism."
All true.
Without idealistic concepts GNU will not have existed; neither would Linux. Nobody is against you making money, simply, I find it insulting if you ask me to work for free, and if I refuse to call me immoral. It is apparent, it must be, that I cannot even begin to explain to you that making money for you is not my objective in life. I do not plan writing software that you will turn proprietary; I plan writing software for those willing to share. This we call trade. It is true, I do not care if the free community provides handouts to business, and you call me idealist! I understand your logic completely. Guess what, businesses do not care if I make money either! for the same reasons, you must call them idealists.
Articles like Metcalfe's are very useful, but require careful interpretation before their essential message can be discerned. For the benefit of those that didn't get far enough through the article to do it justice through unaccountably finding themselves rolling on the floor in hysterics, here is a precis:
Effectively, Metcalfe writes: "I am clueless."
The page makes some good points... but none of you care. If Linus himself said Win2K was better, you would ignore him. Why? I don't know... all I know is that I like Windows. I like Linux/Unix. Which is more productive for me? Windows. Which is easier to use for 99.9% of all humans, Windows. What makes a good OS? Speed? Nope. Hardware will take care of that. Applications? Maybe... Windows wins that one. No.. it's ease of use. The goal of technology is for it to be transparent... so easy to use, you don't even think of it. The telephone, TV, and car have all become transparent. Unix has not. Neither has Windows, but it's getting closer. So stop lashing out... because all the OS's we have today will go the way of the Dodo when the computer because completely transparent.
the BeOS was originaly intended to drop the baggage of software and hardware. But because of lack of support the BeBox was dropped and had to be ported to existing hardware, specifically mac/powerPC architecture. I would love to see an os that drops inherent support for existing software and hardware to be the fastest and most stable OS to ever exist, but no companies are willing to support that because it won't make money initially. I belive open source is the only way to make an OS like that become a reality. Linux is the closest OS right now that comes close to dropping the baggage of software dependancy while keeping it open to all independant developers. Vi and Emacs are not a part of the OS they exist there because they are compatible and people are too lazy to recreate a text editor when what exists works fine. All we need is someone to get push processor technology forward without worrying about software, just make the fastest chip first and let the ultimate OS support it. But then when has anything been perfect?
:)
P.S. for those of you worried about standards... that and the cost of developing and upgrading would be the biggest problem. The computing Eutopia has been presented, I'm not about to figure out how to impliment it
"Just because Mr. Metcalf invented the ethernet doesn't mean he can read the future."
damn straight! metcalfe's the guy who predicted the COLLAPSE OF THE INTERNET (capitalized because that's the way he would've said it) around 1996, iirc.
He seems proud of that quote. That explains a lot to me about his article.
I have windows2000 beta 3 and it slowed my 64 meg machine to a crawl. I pressed crtl + alt + delete and I looked at the taskmanager and it said that w2000 took 108 megs of ram. I was confused so I looked at the memory section and over 375 threads WERE ACTIVE and over 2,200 handles were also active at the time. IT Laughed and shook my head at disbelief and formated my partition and put NT 4 back on. NT 4 is mroe powerfull and it has things like uh diskadministrator that IS NOT EVEN INCLUDED IN w2000. I COULD ONLY DEFRAG THE DISK AND USE SCANDISK ONLY IN W2000 SERVER ONLY! NO DISK ADMIN, NO user manager for domains, no server manager. Nothing. What a piece of crap and all these features removed took 100 megs of ram to boot and 375 threads. hahahah
What a joke.
I will go bizerk if everyone switches to NT. I just read an article in Informationweek that menioned the NT brainwash craze in corporate america. People are actual running NT in mission critcal situations and just hire an army of engineers to go to one system crash after another all day long with the most critcal systems being clustered with dcom/com apps and mcses sitting there wating for a crash and hitting a reset button while they lay back and read magazines all day and demand 60,000 a year.
I guess the thought of 1 unix server for 10,000 and no expensive mcse or expensive clustering srvers seem unpractical because Bill never gave it its blessing.
Screw Microsoft and all those SStupid NT brainwashed zombies.
I will never use NT again.
That is the biggest load of garbage i've ever heard. Linux isn't any harder to use than windows. In some respects it's easier. Linux is just different than windows just as a mac is.
I just had a mental image of trying to write code using MS Word!!! The horror!!! Just imagine... Smartquotes! Autocorrect!! Variable-Width fonts galore!!!
Not that you can't turn all these things off, in theory, but boy would it not be worth the effort.
A Linux box that stays up for ages and doesn't
require reboots for the smallest software upgrade
requires zealots to babysit it. A real thinker,
aren't you. Tell the Mexican school system that
the cost of OS licenses doesn't matter. Of course,
a genius like yourself has $millions to throw
around on NT licenses.
F U C K O F F !
(spoken like a true Linux zealot)
When Metcalfe said that overcaffeinated programmers would no longer change the world alone, didn't he forget about Marc somethinerother starting this whole Internet craze (almost) singlehandedly by creating Mosaic? I remember the Internet before the Web, and it wasn't pretty, what with the Unix interfaces and the no graphics and all. E-mail didn't even take off until the Web did.
Slashdotted already
some people are so fucking ignorant its sad.
substrate: "The second premise: Linux is 30 year old technology and as such is senile. It's an interesting sentiment, but not correct. Linux is built up from concepts that are 30 some years old but only because technology often builds up on the past."
It is true that Linux is built up from 30 year old technology as you acknowledge. The bad thing for Linux is that there are OS's that are much closer to present technology such as the BSD's.
It didn't hurt that a generation or two of programmers were raised on Unix source, or clones of it. ( sounds like those hardware arguments!)
Now that there's convergence of cheap hardware and free software, what's a smart person to do? Call Bill?
Unix gives you control of your fate. Windows gives Bill control of it. Anyone who likes the latter deserves what they get, but it's like politics. People deserve the idiots they elect, though I DEFINITELY DON'T!!
I have a hard time believing that Bom Metcalfe would attach his name to such a subjective and poorly written article.
Emacs is a bloated hacked together pig!
vi is a svelt pleasurable fun editor.
Any program purporting itself to be a text editor that, if you install everything for it, takes just shy of 80MB (RH 6.0) is sad! That's almost a full Windows 95 installation!
I'd rather be stuck in Win95 hell for all eternity than deal with emacs for a day.
vi is *THE WAY*!!
Coming from the guy who inflicted CSMA/CD on the world, who predicted the Internet's collapse (then tried to weasel his way out of admitting he was wrong) and who's as totally, absolutely multinational-corporate-sector-only-and-forever as he is, this really doesn't come as much of a surprise.
Metcalfe does not exactly have the best record at planning for/predicting the future.
--
No matter how hard you work to make something idiotproof, someone will always come along and make a better idiot.
You wouldn't make those typos if you were using vi...
Metcalf will spend an eternity in a pit of fire and smoke. The devil will poke Metcalfs ass with a pitchfork until he screams in pain. Burn Metcalf, burn...
-z
Exactly. Windows 98 is based on DOS. Microsoft hasn't even improved its TCP/IP stack in 4 years! Probably because if they do improve.. why am I saying improve? If they fix it, a hundred different widely used applications that rely on that particular bug will stop functioning. Linux is a full-fledged 32 bit OS. Windows is not. You said it yourself. Windows runs off of DOS. And.. yes there is more. Would you trust app programers who don't have source of your OS to program mission-critical applications? You can defend this by saying that Microsoft gives descriptions about what they're API functions do, but my god. Have you seen them? They are vague, and may show you what it does but doesn't show you how it does it. Unless Windows 2000 is a _COMPLETE_ remake of the Windows operating system it will be worse than 98.
Although i find this poopy faced mongie's view lacking a lil proof, i have to say nice things about microsoft, coz they helped mechwarrior3 be released.:)As long as Mechwarrior and HeavyGear are only windows based, im sticking with it :(
GIve up my mechwarrior games?! unthinkable!
But when i want to use a puter for real tasks, ill use linux, windows just aint up to it yet.
and why the hell do people choose NT over Novell?, i just dont get it, "We want to upgrade to NT from novell",?????? upgrade?. anyhoo
The millenium starts on 2001. You can't celebrate a new millenium until it occurs, can you? No, I do not think so. And "we" did not come up with the calender. The people who did, I am sure know HOW TO COUNT!
You must have watched the tonight show lately.
"Even tho I love Tony, he's a lame fuck dumbass pr1ck.."
"Even tho I love your show, it's the stupidest thing i've ever seen.."
So basically as long as you stick "Even tho i love XYZ" that gives you the permit to trash XYZ in the folowing sentences?
I agree Linux is not ready for many, but keep in mind, the entire population, regardless of age, is getting more and more computer literate.
Your response is precisely why Bob Metcalfe is behind the times. Linux is not strictly a West-coast hippie/hacker phenom. Linux development is primarily an international phenom led by a lot of Europeans and U.S. intellectuals who have had uneasy stomachs with corporate tech America.
Consider that kids in developing countries will probably be more competent with X-windows/Unix consoles than Windows environments in the next 5 years (price being the key factor), then we can see how laughable Metcalfe's W2K really is. People helping make this happen internationally is what Linux is all about, not any *nix or OS in paticular.
The millenium starts on 2001. You can't celebrate a new millenium until it occurs, can you? No, I do not think so. And "we" did not come up with the calender. The people who did, I am sure know HOW TO COUNT!
;)
Nah. If they'd known how to count right, they would've been at least marginally aware of the concept of 0
It's 60 technologie, so dump it
Wheels are from the early Bronze age so why still use them? And what about pistons? Roman day's, DUMP!!!
Jet Propulsion, developped in greece a long time before christ's birth, stop using it!
wings? Age of the dinosaurus
Get it? Neophilia does not means your right.
Do you live in the developing world?
Tell SE Asia, S.America, Russia, E.Europe and good portions of the rest of the world they must buy U.S. user-licenses. Novell? Go to the Ukraine, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Australia and tell those people about PC costs. Whoa! That's a funny one.
The rest of the world's public schools will hobble their legacy systems together and actually teach their kids something about programming and networking while Americans will slavishly spend millions on software licenses and their kids learn how to use MS office and browsers. Of course a few will fall through the cracks and actually learn something.
If you wanna be really picky, the calendar was stuffed by Pope Gregory anyway and the *real* millennium was sometime in the mid nineties...
Who dug up this jive ass turkey?
for an undermined extremely long period of time.... :)
Not true. Commercial Unices are. Inferno is. Free BSDs aren't.
I have to agree, average users on any OS (especially windows because of the false sense of security of them advertising ease of use), is dangerous, they click like crazy (not understanding what lag is on a computer), they drag and drop accidently moving folders around, their are like so many possible mistakes, its scary to think about it when you leave them alone with a computer....
It's not a matter of economy, it is a matter of lifestyle. Compare how well the 25% poorest of the US live, to how well the 25% poorest of the Holland (or many northern European countries).
Holland doesn't need guns and death penalty to scare the poorest.
Installing linux is simple. Administering it is a hassle.
Linuxconf??? Hahaha.
But there is nothing in Linux that prevents it to be as administrable as Windows for all eternity. Linuxconf was a first step. There will be others. For instance, the "Window Maker Preference Utilities" made me switch to WindowMaker, when I was tired to edit fvwm2.conf. It is clearly on a par with equivalent Windows tools. So is part of KDE.
In contrast, the opaque registry mess alone does prevent Windows to be as administrable as Linux, only a redesign could clean that. (generate the registry as a cache from text files, and modify all the applications to use this).
Excuse me, dick, I AM joe citizen ( high school dropout, WORK for a living....), and I use UNIX just fine. I had to get off my intellectual ass and do a little reading, but don't think for a minute that there is any computer-oriented task of importance to me that I cannot accomplish right here on my trusty linux box. Windows don't live at my house.
HA! I use vi on a daily basis...I'd rather use vi than a word processor!
vi is your friend. Emacs is no one's friend.
There is no greater truth.
Emacs was written in LISP
That is most probably why it was written so fast.:
A non-imperative language that would be a natural choice for writing text editors..
There is another big reason Token ring lost out...it sucked...it was easy to bring down the network.
For those that don't know token ring works (simply) by passing a "token" around and the computer that has the token can speak/is paid attention to. If you don't have the token you're effective muted.
Many times whilst I was in college we have a box lock up and the network was hosed...it had the token. There's no privision for timeouts or token expiration. Unless it's been improved which I doubt.
I'd consider this a bigger reason why it failed.
Anyway...just thought you might like to know.
Mark my words, by the time Win2000 get's released, Linux will have completely faded into the background. Linux was dragged into the limelight against it's own will, and it obviously wasn't prepared for all the press coverage it got.
Maybe just a silly question of mine, but I've never fully understood the concept of 'Linux is a good development platform'. If I develop something for Linux, yes, I use Linux. But, as you suggest, many many people use Windows for a large number of different applications, so I develop many things for Windows. And when it comes to develop Windows soft, I use Windows as the development platform. Apart from embedded systems etc., isn't it always the best idea to develop on the same platform as the one that will be used to run the software?
Ease of use ranks higher than stability, they just have to accept that.
Point taken. By "nest of" I meant the majority of posters, but not all of course.
:)
The majority of posters are definitely net kooks with no sense of humour, at least in the regular sense. i.e. they take Linux vs MS, and themselves all too seriously.
The only thing that they find funny are things like "did they model Jar Jar Binks personality on Office Assistant?" hurk hurk hurk
But they miss the point completely, which is to LIGHTEN UP, and LISTEN TO CRITICISM, DO NOT ABREACT TO IT.
As a software developer myself, if I nutted every critic of my software, I would never hear the feedback that is essential to improving usability and functionality of my projects, in fact it would be criminally irresponsible of me to not listen to criticism, as much as I did not want to hear it.
Its not under corporate control (yet).
It can be run and modified by individuals.
That is is strength and weakness.
Wow, an MS employee that doesn't use MS products? What are the odds on that? We can all see right through you.
The trouble is the GNU crowd don't want it to be voluntary. They'd like to make everyone to rely on their software, as a way of forcing them to submit to the GPL. They believe there should only be `free' (in their twisted definition of the word) software.
If you like things that don't take a lot of brain power to learn, why not switch to Windows?
I'd rather use better tools
Last time I checked, the Netherlands still had a lower rate of unemployment than the USA, despite the latter's unsustainable `bubble economy' and massive trade deficits. Crime and imprisonment rates are also much lower in the Netherlands than in the USA (bearing in mind that the American economy solves part of its unemployment problem by imprisoning people who use illegal drugs).
More to the point, the quality of life of the average Dutchman is considerably better than that of the average American. Of course, there are more rich elites in private fortresses in America, and they live very well.
Agreed, linux and unix in general are not easy to configure. Nor is unix easy to get along with initially. Yet these are things that should be expected from an OS that has developed over several decades.
Once you have aquired your first pair of 'unix legs'.. and the chaos of commands and configurations becomes more familiar, you are not limited to the narrow vision of one particular developer or vendor. This is one of the things that makes linux such an excellent operating system.. its variety.
Yes, there is no easy way to go about configuring your linux box from the first time users perspective. It does take effort.. as does all learning.. but in the end it does pay off... in a way that learning NT persay, does not.
128 megs and it runs smoothly?
why would you want an OS that NEEDS 128 meg.
Im sure it can't be justified.
Developers are getting damn lazy these days, when you had only 16K of memory you had to be damn conscious of utilising all you could, now looks like we are all lazy bastards and cant be bothered.
I don't want to beat a dead horse, but the concept of the GNU GPL is very close to communism. The central theme of communism is community ownership of property/the means of production, and the aim of the GPL is to force community ownership of software and the means to create it (the source code).
Microsoft-style software distribution is a perfect example of capitalism, in that the software sources are owned by the capitalists (the owners of the software companies), while binaries are distributed for a fee to consumers (users), and the workers (developers, testers, managers, etc.) are paid wages/salaries for producing the software.
He did invent Ethernet and he has always been one of those one-size-fits-all (dare I say) fanatics about it.
...
Problems with bandwidth to home? Ethernet to the home.
Problems with networking at work? Ethernet, not that nasty Token Ring!
Problems with that Ethernet at work not performing as well as Token Ring? Faster Ethernet!
Problems with that faster Ethernet really not doing much better at all than the 16Mb Token that you replaced? Switched Ethernet!
Cell phone connectivity not what you want? What we need is cellular Ethernet!
Switched, 100Mb Ethernet not cutting it (and you are about to be fired for replacing all of that Token)? Gigabit Ethernet!
ATM? No, Ethernet!
155Mb Token Ring? No, Ethernet!
Etc., etc.
I, for one, am a little tired of hearing people like him spout off about stuff they have not been current enough with to have had a reasonable opinion on in twenty years. This reminds me way to much of my time at GM, when I was dealing with legions, I mean thousands upon thousands of old, fat, white guys who thought that the coolest thing (and the thing that the kids would just flip over) would be a 1992 equivalent of a '66 Eldo. These were people who were delighted to get a Park Avenue as a bonus and thought that it was "classy." These were Yanni-loving, spreadsheet-worshipping, soul-dead parasites who though that Glen Miller was a little too "hip" for them. They used words like "wacky" in sentences, and saw no irony. Bob Metcalfe reminds me of sitting in design meetings with people who looked like country club republicans discussing how to get the "inner city rap sensibilities" into design, giving the design tweaks even more leeway to present things that could not be manufactured properly, leading to stuff getting manufactured poorly to keep the style. And the managers got bonuses, and the smart people left, and the shareholders continued their slow burn.
Wow, wow, wow. He is really of a type that American industry has been better off getting rid of, and I wish that he would just shut up. He hasn't had anything useful to say in years, and too many like-minded managers read his stuff, see the credentials, and bring it up in the next meeting. With me. Forcing me to take time from my busy day to "un-bob" them.
I can't wait to speak to marketing later this week
And, no, for the culturally impared, I am not slamming people who are a)old, b)fat, c)white, or d)guys. I am a bitter old redneck. I am talking about the product of a coddling corporate culture, second rate state schools in areas outside of the "Old South," the effects of the aggressive middle-class homogenization of culture and mores that makes people afraid to have feelings or (even worse) express any feelings in public, and the entrenched lack of any perceptiveness to style that lies like an asbestos fire blanket over almost all of this country except the South (and the weirdos on the left coast)(and the Texans, but they make Islamic terrorists look stable, so I am not sure if we want to hold them up as an example of anything other than the world's largest open-air loonie bin).
This is why I went back to Georgia, basically -- I wanted irrational and sometimes downright strange managers that were occasionally hung over, not corporate weasels like Bob. And I can eat grits at my desk here (in fact, the data center has instant grits by the coffee).
The solutions depend on who you ask. Some marxist factions want the design by comittee approach (basically elected officials choosing which projects to go with). Some want to nurture non-monetary incentives, such as using awards, giving extra vacation time or shorter work hours (but do you really want your highest producing people to take more time off?), giving persons who innovate high ranking positions etc. etc. to make people want to innovate even though it doesn't pay off in hard cash.
You'd still have to convince someone it's worth it later on, to get capital to realize the idea. Under market based marxism, this could very well be in the form of getting companies to invest in your idea, just as in a capitalist setting.
In my opinion, this would be the most workable solution. It also requires the least change of mindset for most people, and utilize a proven method for maximizing profit (the free market), just under a different political system, and with different ownership of the companies.
It would also be concievable to have "venture capital funds" just like today, run by people with an economic background, where the goal is to maximize "profit" (allthough profit for a community can come indirectly through higher employment rates or benefits from the product delievered, not only by direct earnings from the company, as under capitalism).
But actually this problem was one of the reasons that Marx himself warned that development under communism would likely be slower than under capitalism. This is also one of the reasons he warned that communism according to him can't succeed in any country until capitalism is well developed in that country, because introducing communism in an underdeveloped country would only make everone poor rather than give everyone a reasonable degree of wealth.
The Soviet Union and most of the other "socialist" states demonstrated that very well: many of them started out with good intentions, but after it became clear that they were too poor to be able to provide wealth for everyone, abuse of power became frequent.
In this regard, the open source movement has actually in many ways been able to do community based development a lot better than Marx thought possible. But unfortunately the two aren't directly comparable, since Marx dealt mostly with "scarcity economics", that is, the economics of goods and resources that are limited, and that will under certain circumstances be scarce.
While the access to enough developers can compare to acess to a large enough workforce, there is no direct equivalent to scarcity of goods.
But I do believe that researching the open source movement would be very worthwhile for marxist econimists and researchers, though, since it demonstrate many mechanisms that has been largely "untested" on a large scale in a real world setting until now (especially development of ideas and products not driven by traditional capitalisms "holy quest" for more money).
Metcalfe's article makes no sense; he claims Linux is 60's technology--and then admits that Windows is 60's technology as well (VMS in particular). Yet he provides no argument as to why the 60's technology Windows is based on should be any better than the 60's technology Linux is based on.
In fact Linux incorporates significant improvements over the original 60's Unix. Linux is in fact based on System-V, as is Solaris for one thing. It also incorporates the BSD innovations for another. Let's remember that the last time Unix squared off against VMS, VMS lost.
I'd be more impressed with Metcalfe if he had put some of his intelligence into providing reasons for his opinions. As it stands, there's little substance in his article--only a series of sarcastic insults.
Too bad.
Folks should treat writers like Dr Metcalf like
:-)
they do other folks who post/write flame-bait -
ignore him.
For myself, I cancelled my Info World subscription
a year ago. And I've quit speaking to their
reporters.
If enough folks were to do this, they would
collapse. Or maybe start putting their tabloid
reporting on supermarket checkout shelves, where
this form of "journalism" belongs!
- John
Mr Metcalfe would probably be the first to admit the original ethernet technology he developed is past it. The problem I have with his view is the notion that new technology is inherently superior to `evolved' technology (meaning old technology which has been regularly updated). This second category would include 10Mb, 100Mb and 1Gb ethernet.
Oddly, this mindset actually ought to favour Linux over Windows or UNIX. Linux is, after all, a relatively new OS (even if it acts like UNIX), where as Windows and UNIX (BSD or System V) represent the evolution of systems which date back 20 and 30 years, respectively (though only one of those original systems was, shall we say, sound).
In terms of administration, UNIX (or Linux) has strengths and weaknesses, as does Windows.
UNIX's greatest strengths are its fairly-standard filesystem layout, and the fact that configuration information is almost always managed via text files which are easily processed with its superb console tools. These make the system very easy for seasoned professionals to manage efficiently, but do nothing for the average user (who simply finds it arcane and unfriendly).
Windows (NT or DOS-based) has fairly easy-to-use GUI tools for managing the system, but the lack of a solid console environment (even on a local machine) makes complex administration tasks tedious, difficult or impossible.
There are other issues which have to do with the roots of the operating systems in question. UNIX originated as a time-sharing system, and remains excellent for multi-user systems. For single-user systems, its necessary complexities can make it very difficult for novices to use effectively. Some people even use the root account for day-to-day work! Such use goes against the design of the system, hence it is very easy for a novice to destroy data or make the system unusable.
Windows, on the other hand, has always been a single-user system, designed in such a way that the single user has complete control, but with safety valves and an easy-to-use help system. As a result, it's easier for novices to handle simple administrative tasks (installing a new application, for example). In a multi-user setting beyond simple file-sharing, however, Windows is essentially useless.
At the end of the day, I think UNIX is a much more competent server platform, and a superior development platform (especially the FREENIXes), but Windows (NT) is a very good client for things like web-browsing and general office work. These are the things the average user uses a PC for, and Windows is probably a better choice for most of them. For technical users/developers and server administrators (a much smaller group of users), the situation is reversed.
The main failure of the self proclaimed "communist" and "socialist" states the world has seen so far has been that rather than getting rid of class divisions etc., they have increased them, and enforced an extreme top-down command chain, instead of bottom-up, that is the foundation of marxist political theory.
But I agree with your conclusion: He doesn't understand what went wrong in the states he see as communist (probably because he mixes them up with "proper" marxist theory on communism, and compare the ideals of that, with the result of the flawed implementations of socialism).
Sure, there are elements of the open source movement that are close to the marxist ideals of communism, but the movement has hardly anything in common with the self proclaimed "socialist" states.
If anything, commercial, closed source, software development is what is closest to stalinist economy:
So, open source may seem like marxism, but then closed source seems like stalinism... If those are the ones I get to choose from, I'd prefer marxism any day...
to beat the next one.
Yeah, I'm that guy.
Ethernet stinks anyway. The only reason it is so popular is that it is cheap and plentiful.
I'm getting sick and tired of all these so-called industry pundits sitting on their little soapbox spouting the biggest amount of bullshit ever to be found in the universe. This article was one of the same breed, the same age-old cliche's wrapped up together in a poorly written article. "Unix is old so it must be crap", yeah sure, computers are old too, lets ditch them, they're worthless anyway. "Stallman is a communist". Oh fuck off. The same old cliche repeated over and over again. Can't they come up with something new. The moron talks about Linux as if the only useful application is emacs. What rock has he been under since he invented Ethernet? Must be a whole pile with his "windows will rule the earth" nonsense. All these articles have one thing in common, and that's that they are not written to be analytic pieces discussing something, but piles of crap written solely to get more hits. The crappier the article, the more people will become outraged and run from slashdot to the site, thus gaining a nice amount of hits for the publisher. I don't understand why anyone would want their name above such poorly written articles. It only makes them look like idiots. So the guy founded 3com. The only thing that teaches me is that the founder of 3com is a brainless idiot that's out of touch with reality. I don't understand whats the fun of producing crappy articles to get people pissed. Reminds me of throwing garbage of the top of an apartment building and laughing at the crowd below. Something for little kids, but not reasonably intelligent people. *sigh*
Why do I think Linux won't kill Windows? Two reasons. The Open Source Movement's ideology is utopian balderdash. You mean that you like your dependence on upgrades which don't fix bugs? Are you sure that Microsoft's products are secure? Sheesh, we already have holes in Win95, Win98, and NT 4! You have to pull patches to lock 'em down and be secure on the net, and yet still not be able to be fast enough to keep up with the continous hits on the Internet. Server software it isn't. It wasn't designed to be server software. I doubt Win2K will be server software. Besides, Linux and the Open Source Initiative is not just theory, it is fact. Alot of security patches go out for Linux and it's utility programs. Linux had a fix for the Pentium FOOF bug within a week, and that's not with Intel's help. Microsoft brushed it off, saying that it's products are for single users only!
And Linux is 30-year-old technology. Relibable 30 year old technology that's secure, and recoded, reapplied, and rewritten for current hardware. Also, many components such as GTK, GIMP, and IMlib are new software and toolkits, not 30 year old technology.
A Soviet Linux lies ahead, with successive five-year plans every three. Nope, we haven't had any shootings yet...
OK, communism is too harsh on Linux. Lenin too harsh on Torvalds. It's actually Socialism, not communism (which the two get so mixed up it's suprizing you even mention it). Socialism, by Karl Marx, dictates that everyone, not the government(that's Communism), owns everything. Marx also states that it will be a slow progression into Socialism. Communism got screwed up by Lenin et al trying to speed things up. Guess what Russia got into now?
If North America actually went back to the earth, close to 250 million people would die of starvation before you could say agribusiness. When they bring organic fruit to market, you pay extra for small apples with open sores -- the Open Sores Movement. Negative. My local Giant supermarket chain carries organic, "Back to earth" style apples. They're the same size and with no open sores, no defects, no bugs as the ones treated with chemicals. They taste the same too. Try one. They're in the next same-size pile over. Brought in from local farmers. And do some better research next time.
Stallman's EMACS was brilliant in the 1970s, but today we demand more, specifically Microsoft Word, which can't be written over a weekend, no matter how much Coke you drink. Multinational corporations are themselves technology invented to get big things done, things that sustain us in the complicated modern world. I find alot of users tripping over Word myself here in college, and I suggest to them more control in the form of Corel WordPerfect. Don't you know? WordPerfect been ported all over the place. Macs, Win3.1, Win9x/NT, Solaris, Linux, insert your favorite operating system here.... There's also alot of other good programs out there similar to Word.
The Open Sores Movement asks us to ignore three decades of innovation. Three decades of security enhancements, TCP/IP implementations (remember, Unix had the first implementation!), web servers (NCSA httpd), ftp servers, and more. Even e-mail was origionally on Unix. And before the Internet, before the first router, there was UUCP. These are innovations.
NT, now approaching 23x6 availability, is already overpowering Linux. Linux is 24/7. Virtually no maintance needed once properly set up. I have computer labs here that require me to reboot every few days just because NT's about to die. Every few weeks we have to put down a new image on a few NT computers. 23 hours/day, 6 days per week? No, we can't have that in a 24/7, we never close computer lab. It's on all the time or it's dead.
Let's hope there's something coming soon that's better than both Linux and W2K. What would that be? Java or what? Let's be looking. I'm looking, but all I see is a penguin giving me source code and saying "BBBBWWWWAAAAPPPPP!!!!"
Bob Metcalfe, you forget your computing history. Back to the university library with you.
---
Spammed? Click here for free slack on how to fight it!
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
No, that's what some installers do on MacOS, and I hate hate hate it, too. It is intensely annoying because I tend to have my menus set up in a particular way, for a reason, and don't wish to have them disrupted.
Linux is going to have to deal with people like me, because _I_ am the sort who actually goes and uses linux, gets it working, plays with shell scripts etc. Taking my control of my linux installation out of my hands leaves me with no reason to even bother with it anymore...
This is what really ticks me off: that people can decide to target the whole essential concept that I and other techs I know are _desperate_ for. I'm sorry- open source is not negotiable, that's why I release occasional code under GPL and not, say, a BSD license or public domain. ;) However, what a lot of people are overlooking is this: WE OWN IT!
We are _constantly_ harassed by manifestations of proprietary software, of closedness. _This_ CD-Rom simply thrown away because you can't get it to connect to anything but a Sony MB, _that_ monitor gathering dust because it requires a funky cable to even work, _this_ new compression software upgrade featuring a wonderful new format that causes the previous version to download the whole file and silently delete it on failure to expand it, _that_ web browser rewriting global image file mappings every time it runs. I could go on and on, and I could start to make stuff up, and I'll bet you proprietary software will equal or surpass the most horrible things I can even imagine. After all, it's becoming legal for them to bear no responsibility for anything, and it might even become illegal for you to even _try_ to find out what this stuff is surreptitiously doing- so _what_ is stopping closedware from becoming even more insanely manipulative, destructive and inadequate? Not 'quality': guess what? When people don't have a choice, it's more profitable to turn the screws on them. A free market only exists when people can _legitimately_ jump to something else, when nothing can hold them hostage. The very nature of data makes it a damned good hostage, and all the better when it's proprietary and you're not allowed to deconstruct your _own_ data, only to edit and view it- and the next logical step after reverse engineering is made illegal is to make the reverse engineering of data formats illegal.
Well, there's an element of truth in a lot of the whining against Linux. It is still awkward, maybe even more awkward than Windows is, there is little chance of making a lot of profit in it, and its mama dresses it funny
We _OWN_ it. I don't care if it seems clunky, or if it doesn't seem like a classic money-spinner business opportunity. Some of us consider computers and the worldwide networking and connectivity now available to people as _important_ things: things of tangible value in and of themselves regardless of whether the interface is slick or clunky or takes a few days or weeks to master. The problem is this: the power is being centralized in very much the wrong hands- in some ways proprietary software, particularly Microsoft, is similar to the Soviet Union at its most repressive, because the power is all centralized with people you can't vote out or protest to. You're a total peon, a helpless peasant who has to endure whatever the ruling power feels like decreeing, because you have no say in what goes on, and in a very large number of cases you have no recourse, no really feasible alternative, and sometimes you can't even opt out. People are forced to use Windows for pragmatic reasons every day. It's normal to be forced to use Windows for some purpose for which only Windows software is available. Microsoft has put a great deal of effort into, and waged dedicated war towards, ensuring that these non-choices are everywhere- that you can either be a Luddite with a ballpoint pen and legal pad, or you can run Windows: your choice, such as it is.
This all leverages off proprietary software.
By contrast, the less ornate Linux may have functional superiority over Windows in many ways, but the really serious difference is the property issue- you _own_ Linux. If you run software, typically you _own_ that as well, which extends to your being free to alter or change it in any way. It doesn't matter if _you_ personally can't code to save your life- if someone makes the new compression program work so that stuff you compress cannot be opened without the recipient purchasing new software themselves, like an 'upgrade virus', then you are free to encourage somebody who _can_ code to revise the program, fix the 'bug' and then fork development to route the course of software development around the developer who is trying to hold people's workflow and data hostage with an uncooperative format. This would happen so naturally, that it is a profound disincentive for open source developers to prey on their customers- and none of it requires that customers all be programmers- it only requires that there be one other programmer out there somewhere who believes people should get to own their own data and not be treated like peasants.
This runs a hell of a lot deeper than ease of use, my friends- it frankly doesn't matter if linux is ten thousand times harder to use than Windows, _it_ still is the best place to stand if you care about rights to own data and software- if you give a damn about owning any of those bits on the HD, if you bridle at the notion that you're only borrowing it on sufferance from the higher authority which is so good as to permit you to rent bits of cyberspace, arrangements of electrons to store ideas or records or accounts- oop! but mustn't forget, they're not actually _your_ electrons, that arrangement of bits _belongs_ to Microsoft bucko, and you're only borrowing it. If your idea has to be TAKEN AWAY from you by error or as punishment that's just too bad- shoulda written it with a ballpoint if you're so anal as to think that you OWN any of it. Right?
Linux is _the_ ideal high ground to take a stand against this- and what's really at stake is new meanings for the word 'property'. The central irony is that Linux is incessantly portrayed as communist and freedom-eroding, when in fact it is proprietary software itself that functions like known examples of historical Communism. It's proprietary software when you purchase a program and it only works a certain way and parts of it are broken and you can't fix them. It's proprietary software when you try to upgrade or change software and your data does not communicate properly and you're not allowed to pry into the inner workings of your own data to fix the problem- that's not your place to do so. It's proprietary software that behaves like Communism- but customers, users are the poor bastard peasantry, and the programmers end up as the Politburo, able to twist the knive any way they please, entirely insulated from any concern for the consequences of their actions- with regard to big corporations, there is an additional level of similarity, in that expansionism comes before everything, specifically before any concern with the peasantry, and this is never questioned for a moment. When was the last time Microsoft said, 'Gee, maybe the world might be a better place if we only controlled 3/4 of the users and other vendors got to go around serving the people whom for whatever reason don't like our flavor of computing- ya think?'.
When people are backed against the wall, they can get noisy and desperate. To a large extent this is precisely what is happening with Linux. If you really care about ownership of your 'virtual property', data, software, OS, then you have no ground to give- you can do things like run MacOS but the _same_ issues constantly arise, until you feel that there's no hiding place anywhere, no way to coexist with this incredible movement taking power out of your hands and turning every computer-hosted property of yours over to central authorities of one sort or another, your rights withering and ebbing away, new laws springing up to punish you if you're fool enough to try and take that power back by reverse-engineering some of those cyber-toys that are Not Yours.
Then you go with Linux, and hang onto it as a life raft, not so much because it's that phenomenally more refined or more effective than the commercial sector (though with a bit of enthusiastic work, often it becomes a personalized Linux that pleases you), but because you OWN it, and it cannot be taken away from you. It seems a reasonable tradeoff that programmers can't earn so much at it- they can't hold you hostage either, seems fair. You have a hard time understanding what 'right' the programmer classes have to jerk people around for a boost in the ol' profitability. You've done the equivalent of homesteading a cabin off in the boonies, with your own farm and flintlock musket, and you know that when you were given the choice of 'live free or die' you picked 'live free' even if it meant a bit of hard times. Doesn't seem so bad, since the peasantry have kinds of trouble that you don't ever tolerate anymore. It feels a little bit like the ol' Revolutionary War, where those proprietary software Redcoats were busting into your 'house' any time they wanted, charging taxes on your household stuff, taking no responsibility for damages, stealing information out of your house without asking you: and now you don't endure any of that, you just won't stand it, you feel about ready to write some kind of Declaration of Independence...
And then, in a horrible trainwreck of mingling metaphors, the proprietary software Politburo looks down on you and your Colonial flintlock muskets and "Don't Tread On Me" patriotism, from their wealthy dachas and unchallenged power and Soviet-style expansionism and complete unconcern for the peasantry they're bleeding dry...
And calls _you_ a Communist.
1) He's writing about Win2000, which is not based on DOS, not win95, which is.
2) Linux did not write the entire thing from scratch. He adapted Minix, which was itself a mini-copy of AT&T's UNIX.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You say that RMS is a communist. Do you have evidence for this? I don't recall him stating this himself. If he were indeed communist, the GPL would not allow businesses to sell GPL'd code. It does.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Every single thing he said in his rebutal was factually correct. Even the Fuckwit part. The definition fits you.
www.fuckwit.tm has detailed information on what exactly a fuckwit is and even includes some examples.
--- polarbear
This is the same guy who has said, for each of the last three years, that the Internet will collapse by the end of the year and that the only solution is to charge per-minute fees for Internet access.
.000 here. I suspect his annual "the fall of Linux" speech will start to acquire the same patina as his annual "the collapse of the Internet" speech, for the same reason -- Bob simply does not understand how an anarchic network of developers can keep something like the Internet or Linux going. Bob is the classic Cathedral guy in Eric S. Raymond's "Cathedral and Bazarre". The operations of a bazarre frighten him. Ethernet has a classic simplicity reflective of Bob's highly ordered personality. When he sees the Internet or Linux, he sees chaos, and cannot see why it does not collapse under its own weight.
So far he's batting
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
It's not just Linux that Bob 'doesn't get'. It's the Internet as a whole. Linux is just the latest Internet phenomenon to be the target of Bob's bile.
Bob doesn't like the Internet because it is anarchic, has no central point of control, and seemingly develops every which way without any rhyme or reason. This offends his sensibilities. Ethernet had a classic sensibility which reflects Bob's psyche. The Internet doesn't. Every year he predicts that the Internet will collapse under its own weight by the end of the year. Every year he is proven wrong. But that does not stop him from predicting, every year, that only per-minute charges will save the Internet from collapse.
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Posted by Jæger:
What the hell is he playing at? What's Windows based on? DOS. What's DOS based on? CP/M (or whatever the hell it was). How old is CP/M? Pretty damn old. Besides, Linux is only 8 years old, and it's so very convenient that he forgot to mention that Linus wrote the entire thing from scratch. I think that Microsoft probably just sent him a nice big fat check to bash Linux around (gotta have that FUD). Of course, when the UNIX operating systems have taken over the world, little Bobby here'll probably praise Linux and predict that he knew Microsoft would fail. I think he's probably trying to be purposely inflammatory...Internet 'pundit' isn't really appropriate, I think...something more like Internet 'village idiot' would fit him so much better. The eyes are open, the mouth moves, but Mr. Brain has long since departed, hasn't it, Bob?
Posted by OGL:
Yes, a Java VM would help tremendously. As for the web browser, I would say it's on par with the KDE browser except that the Be browser doesn't crash all the time. Of course, it still gets annoying when you have a site that uses javascript or java, but for the most part browsing the web is OK.
What's annoying about Be is, when you boot it up and take a look at it, you realize just how tremendously hyped it is. Basically Be, Inc. is a corporation and corporations will tell you anything to get your money. Wow, so it has threads. Wow, so it has a really slow software-only OpenGL implementation. But come on, a "Media OS?" The idea of such a thing is laughable. What you're left with is an operating system with no software, and which has no hack value whatsoever.
The only thing that saves it is their use of gnu tools, but I'm kind of annoyed at the way they did that too...it's like Microsoft integrating the gnu sh utils into their main OS...those programs were made so that people could enjoy a completely *free* system, using them on proprietary junk is just treading water.
That's just my two cents about Be. I just installed it a little while ago, so if you have any (constructive) insight I'd love to hear about it.
-W.W.
Posted by OGL:
:P.
>I'd sure rather have BeOS be the OS for the masses than Windows.
If every windows machine were magically replaced with BeOS, and Be had the corresponding hardware and software support, I really would not shed one tear.
The hardware OpenGL support is a good start, but in reality it's just one hardware driver out of many that BeOS needs badly. Good OpenGL support won't make it a "Media OS," unless you want to start calling IRIX a media OS
But still, comparing BeOS to Windows, at least from a purely technical standpoint, is no contest...Be wins hands down.
-W.W.
Posted by Ungrounded Lightning Rod:
> Correct me if I'm mistaken here, but it seems to me that most of the innovations in the computer industry in the last 30 years
> took place on UNIX machines. The Internet, the WWW, the GUI, the mouse, the workstation, the list goes on and on. I don't
> think Microsoft could continue to "innovate" unless there was a UNIX (or even an Apple) to steal from
Some of that got done on Unix, but a lot of it was done on other OSes and then ported to Unix. One of the big advantages of Unix was its ability to absorb nearly any valuable innovation and weld it together with all the stuff it already had, creating a more powerful system than whichever from-scratch newbie had the useful feature that was being cloned.
And the thing that made Unix able to do this was its nearly open-source model. Though the core code WAS quasi-proprietary, Bell Labs' had leaked it big-time - shipping source to universities around the world. Up to about when the System V rewrite (IMHO mainly a move to thrash the code base so the ownership would no longer be vulnerable to legal attack) the common model for porting was:
- Port your bootleg source to the new platform.
- Call up Bell Labs and buy a license. (Terms were reasonable and they held no grudge.)
- Sell your product, with Unix on it.
This same relatively free availability of source made it easy to add or port anything you needed into the kernel - and created a large community of authors and porters.
Which makes it funny to see Linux folk calling Microsoft "The Borg". Oughta call 'em "Borg, the new generation." B-)
(Does that make Linux "Borg, the Gnu Generation?")
Disclaimer: This is all speculation, flame me if you want.
It just seems, that after reading this article, that directly combats one of infoworld's editors, it would be somewhat hard for this to get published.
Of course, I don't work for or track infoworld. But it does seem like ZDNet and Infoworld know what to put up to rake in those banner ads. I don't have either of these sites bookmarked but I end up reading at least one article on their sites everyday courtesy of slashdot....
I think to myself, "hmm. this might be something different". But no, it's some clueless idiot with a new name claiming that he knows something that the rest of the world doesn't. I don't give a damn if he invented ethernet or not, when does an EE and former CEO become a credible journalist? Now, I'm not going to claim that slashdot should change anything, but I cannot understnad why anyone would even waste their time reading this dribble. (including myself, I clicked the link too)
All we're doing is filling some advertisers' back pocket and reading something we've heard 500 times before... "Linux will never make it". Well let em think that. In fact, tell them that, because they're just going to accuse you of radical thinking if you don't. These people do not respond to logical argument, and therefore, their argument should not be considered logical either.
Don't waste your time reading this crap. Click reload on slashdot a few times and donate your bandwidth to filling Rob's back pocket instead. Keep using and developing linux, and the numbers will speak for themselves. Devote your energy to supporting development mailing lists or contacting hardware makers to petition driver support.
I guess it just amazes me that this utter troll-dom more than likely just designed to generate ad revenue, and link to a petreley article, again, to generate ad revenue, is wasting people's time when they could just spend 20 minutes in Jesse Berst's section on ZDNet and read the same stuff.
-Erik-
up to now, the word "troll" was used for usenet articles and comment systems like this one. infoworld, however, should be awarded a medal for making the word apply to articles in (online) magazines.
/. which yields you a 5-digit number of hits quickly, which again pleases your ad people.
it's really getting obvious by now. write some crap about Linux, get a) praise and more ad money from M$ and b) the link posted on
rob, I request you don't link to those troll articles anymore. doing so just creates more of them.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Some of the best ideas are timeless. Another post cited cars and guns. You find something that works and you stick with it until there is something better. The age of an idea has nothing to do with it's validity. All that matters is whether it works. Linux corrects the Windows mistake. When Windows 2000 comes out it'll take 2000 flushes before it goes around the bowl and down the hole.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
...check this guy's user info. He's an anti-Linux troll. Don't get too worked up, folks; save your energy for another day.
--
Get your fresh, hot kernels right here!
Boy, have you hit the nail on the head. I hadn't really thought about it much, but this makes perfect sense, as far as why I've seen an increase lately in bitter anti-Linux trolls.
These guys feel threatened, because their friends are now using something they know nothing about.
When everyone was using Windows, they felt safe; now, there's some uncertainty, so they lash out at The Penguin.
--
Get your fresh, hot kernels right here!
I think the thing missed is rate at which Linux has improved. In 91' Microsoft has a foot hold in the computer reveloution. Linux had a couple thousand lines of code that no one wanted. Years would go by befour small amounts of people started to notice Linux. When Windows95 came out Linux was starting to shape up. ( this is when I came in ). Linux, even with its poor driver support still managed to be installable on most PC's. In the past 4 years Linux has made leaps and bounds. The user base has gone from thousands to millions. More programmers started to take notice of Linux, and liked it over windows. Hardware manufactures are now helping to develope drivers for Linux. The worlds best Game company has ported Doom, doom2, Quake, Quake2. Now we are getting Quake3 in a box with Linux stamped on the system requirements.
I myself do not know of a time when the user base of Linux has gotten smaller. I think It is unfair for anyone to say that Linux is a fad. We are living in a exciting time of Linux history. There are things on the horizion to get very excited about right now. X-windows 4.0, Better support for highend hardware, Common desktop enviroments, and increasing stablity. I don't want to forget the attention of companys like Oracle, IBM, Compaq, and DELL.
The developers that contribute to all the Linux projects should be given a round of applause. You have done great work and I thank you.
The reason I don't think Linux will be dead anytime soon is: There will allways be people that want to be able to control every part of there computer ( or soon device ). For these people a MS GUI does give the power to control. Also the idea of clear text. Meaning that you can read and edit any config file. Or set up powerful scripts to configure and maintain the system. Things people in redmond don't understand why you would want to. But its the fact that they don't understand the user can do anything concept that will defeat them.
As for the communist remark. It would seem to me that a communist operating system might do things like track your documents with id numbers that they would not want you to know about. Or enable features that put you at risk then be told that they are on by default for your own good. A communist Operating system might even tell you the lie that you need the newest version inorder to be productive. Or Keep secrets from their public to maintain the illusion that the OS is safe from your competitors or criminals.
My opion is that this guy is wronge. Linux will not die. As long as anyone can download it for free it will never die.
Personnaly..... Between you and me.... I think he's pissed they did not put him in the movie "Pirates of white bread vally."
Last one in jail is a fascist.
I agree. I think the other guy was comparing Dictatorship and Democracy. These things are different from Communism and Capitalism.
I do disagree that the means of production is the source code. The means of production is the computer and a compiler. The source code is the blueprint, the design. The difference between traditional production and software production is that many people have access to the means of production. In traditional production very few own/have access to the machinery and plants to produce items.
In the industrial age there were limited means of production. The people that controled those means became powerful in both capitalistic and communistic countries. As the computer age continues almost everybody has access to the means of production. This is why the community idea is able to produce a viable product in the computer age.
There are many differences between the community of open source software and communism, but some of the same basic principles are similar.
?
Voluntary Socialism. That sounds a little better. I was going to mention socialism in my earlier post, but it's been many years since I've studied this stuff and didn't want to say something that was wrong.
Yet I still don't think that is right. OSS projects are accomplished through a community of people. And it is often volunteer work. But we aren't trying to run a country here or do many of the other things that governments have to do. We are just working together on a common goal. Much like a community working together to to build a shelter, or fixing a community building up, or sand bagging a broken levee. Sure they could have just raised the money and had Moe's construction do the work for them. But why, when they can do it themselves for less money and better quality? Yet these people aren't accused of being communists or socialists. Why? Because they aren't. Doing these things for the community have little to do with how the community is governed.
?
Look at you people! Someone writes an article stating some painfully obvious things about Linux (all you need to do is read the comments from many /. readers to confirm many of his comments) and many of you start running around like red ants attacking him any way you can.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Which kernel developer is that? The guy I'm thinking of doesn't seem to have any code in the kernel tree... as far as grep can tell.
/usr/src/linux/CREDITS:
N: Eric S. Raymond
E: esr@thyrsus.com
W: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/
D: terminfo master file maintainer
D: Editor: Installation HOWTO, Distributions HOWTO, XFree86 HOWTO
D: Author: fetchmail, Emacs VC mode, Emacs GUD mode
S: 6 Karen Drive
S: Malvern, Pennsylvania 19355
S: USA
Cool! This sounds great! Where do I download the kernel code?
You sure do a lot of considering. Have you considered _using_ BeOS? BeOS isn't "internet aware?" You "assume" the web browser isn't "up to snuff" with Netscape's? You're not a BeOS expert like you probably don't study quantum mechanics on the toilet.
What a detailed and eloquent response. Unfortunately I still don't understand what you're problem with BeOS is. You claim BeOS lacks sufficient technology to be of any use to you, but you've never used it? And to defend the point you never had, you just shout "moron" and run away?
I think you'll have to do better than that.
Okay, maybe I missed the memo, but when did linux become solely about world domination and success. I think it happened the minute the media started look at it. I think the concept of "We're writing this operating system because it is interesting and useful to us" doesn't make good press.
So linux was around long before anyone had the thought "I'll install linux instead of DOS/Windows/OS2/BeOS" and its continued success has nothing to do with people thinking that.
I agree with you wholeheartedly. Also, someone should tell Mr. Metcalfe that Win9x and NT have slowly and surreptitiously been borrowing ideas from UNIX for many years. Why? Because the guys who developed UNIX put a lot of careful thought into it, especially to making it simple and powerful. Oh, and there's that TCP/IP thing too... :)
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Why are you screwing with Xi's X server? I tried it a ways back (v2.1) and it hung just about every time I switched away from a running X session. I've heard the same problem with more recent versions. Before you give up, try XFree86 and see how it works fot you. Oh, and have you tried the latest pcmcia-cs release? I think 3.0.12 is current as of now, so if you're not using the latest version, try it. If you get the same problem, try to trace it down as best you can, and report it as a bug. That's part of what Linux is all about - tracing down the problems so we can eliminate them.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
I know it was used as an ASIC-type deal in a few Intel-made devices (similar to how Intel's i960 RISC chip has oft been used). Hoever, I don't know of any actual consumer computer systems that used it as the CPU.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
I wouldn't wish sendmail.cf and the bat-book on my worst enemy.
--
Yeah, that's him. So maybe this prediction is a really good thing. If it's half as accurate as his collapse of the internet prediction then maybe it means that Linux will be the dominant OS within a few years.
-----
Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
Yep, that's him. Check out http://computer.org/internet/v1n3/ea ts9702.htm
-----
Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
I've not read Metcalfe before( and won't ever /. effect which will provide
again if this article is indicative of his
writing ) but it seems pretty obvious that this
is a man who feels threatened by Linux and a
software model that he just doesn't understand.
This article is completely barren of any
organized argument and is simply a knee-jerk bile dump. Let
it go folks. Don't fill his Inbox with flames or
even mail intended to gently "inform" him about
Linux. He is either beyond help or hoping to
produce an email
him with more troll material.
So what's so bad about an architecture that hasn't undergone serious revision (even if that were true, which it isn't)? One could argue (as I do) that that attests to its fundamental strength. It has certainly evolved over time: witness networking, VM, real time capability, and the many other things that have changed without doing fundamental violence to the underlying system. That strikes me as a system that was fundamentally rearchitected.
"...with Windows 2000, stability appears to be a non-issue." Huh? Windows 2000 isn't even GA yet; there is to be at least one more public beta, so it's hard to make any claims about its stability. What I've seen thus far is less than encouraging. A co-worker's machine (2000B2) crashed hard when his disk filled up and he tried to add more swap space (or something of the sort -- a relatively routine kind of thing, whatever it was). It took multiple OS reloads, none of which worked (apparently some registry issue, although no one ever figured it out), and eventually he had to wipe his disk and reinstall from scratch.
GUI-based OS: that's fine for desktops (until something goes wrong with the GUI, or if you don't like it). For servers, it's insane to be wasting resources making the console look pretty.
Third party proprietary drivers: there are several issues here. One is that that's one of the best arguments in favor of open sourcing the kernel, including everything running with elevated processor privilege (and a tacit admission that open source software IS more reliable, at least in that context). Also, a buggy driver doesn't necessarily crash the entire system; the Linux kernel is able to take an oops in a driver but keep running in many cases. This may also finally force a move toward lower-privilege device drivers.
"How long it will take Unix to catch up I don't know." I don't either, but maybe it won't be quite so long as you think.
As for IPC, certainly the open source community hasn't coalesced around a single standard as the MS community has (although the latter "standard" seems to change radically from release to release -- DDE gave way to OLE which gave way to COM/ActiveX which who knows what that will become). Gnome and KDE represent two approaches, and there seems to be a move toward rapprochement between the two camps.
XF86 crashes on you? I've had very few crashes indeed, and I can't remember any within the past year. Certainly I can't speak for you, but I'm not aware of other reports of flakiness. Perhaps you're using a poorly supported card?
"If Linux succeeds, perhaps in 20 years we'll see an uprising against Linux vendors." Linus is well aware of this, which is why he's trying to keep a handle on kernel bloat and cruft. Linux isn't the be-all and end-all of operating systems, and isn't intended to be. It's intended to be a better alternative (for suitable definitions of "better" for various purposes) to what's out there.
So how does the group and user stuff weigh down Unix? Because file and directory operations (not I/O itself) check permissions?
This sort of stuff is very useful even on a single-user machine, actually; it allows partitioning of privileges according to need. For example, there's no good reason for normal users to run as root routinely; even very experienced Unix (in the generic sense) use root privilege as little as possible. Why? It's too easy to screw something up, or for a rogue program to nail you.
You have a home network? Do you want your kids to have different privileges on the system from you, or to not have access to certain files? That's another way that multi-user is useful at home.
I'd be very surprised if Linux ran out of disk space on you and left you with an irrecoverable machine (requiring a disk wipe to recover). I won't say that it's impossible, but I would be extremely surprised. Remember, I'm not talking about losing the work that didn't fit, but a major system crash that essentially required an installation from scratch (and like someone else reported, this trashed his NT4 partition on the same drive).
This stuff about drivers overwriting memory that they shouldn't is exactly what the OS should handle *before* the attempted write. The driver should take what amounts to a seg fault if it tries to do that, and the Linux kernel can recover from a seg fault (it's when the recovery routine fails, or the fault occurs in certain critical code, that Linux panics).
The irony here is that one of the early knocks against Linux was that it's a monolithic kernel, while NT was supposed to be microkernel-based. In a real microkernel architecture, filesystems and drivers are usually implemented in user space; the kernel only manages processes, VM (at most) and the like. While Linux doesn't really fit the normal definition of a microkernel, since its filesystems and drivers run in ring 0 (and because Linus and Andy Tanenbaum say so!), it's interesting that almost everything except the boot device and filesystem can be modular (and even those can effectively be modules with an initrd), and that Linux can recover from many device and filesystem faults. In contrast, NT, where everything is supposed to be pluggable, seems prone to all sorts of device-oriented weirdness.
Having been a consultant who also provided user instruction, let me assure you, you can't throw Joe citizen at a Windows machine and expect success either.
Big surprise, people have to LEARN how to use a computer and it's OS. Any technology they haven't used before for that matter. Just think, how many VCRs have that blinking 12:00 on their display.
No matter how simple Bill Gates thinks Windows is, people will still try to talk into the mouse.
Windows is more easy to use than linux - otherwise people would be installing linux more than windows. It's that simple.
Almost nobody installs Windows. That is done by the OEM for them. The reason: Windows is a pain to install. That's also why OEM's have standard configs.
Users also tend to find Windows and Mac configuration difficult. That's why most ISPs just send a CDROM that does everything for the user. In spite of that, they still have to answer MANY questions from new users. That's why the iMac comes pre-installed for a particular ISP.
I know many intelligent people who have Windows, and they all need to ask me something from time to time, and have needed help setting things up. (Sounds like the Linux situation, yes?).
Word processing, a comparison:
Windows: click start, go to applications, click WordPerfect. Write your document. Save your document (use menu functions and file selector). Optionally, Print it (File->Print).
Linux: click start (fvwm95), go to applications, click WordPerfect. Write your document. Save your document (use menu functions and file selector). Optionally, Print it (File->Print).
In either case, if that doesn't work, call a friend who actually knows how the 'infernal thing' works.
I've heard people say they found windows easier than the mac, but overall, the general consensus is that the mac is far more easier for most people.
But Wintel is killing Apple in market share! If ease of use was really the primary criterion, the situation would be reversed.
I can't imagine that with linux (and I'm sure someone will reply fervently claiming it's possible. Right...)
If everything is pre-installed for the user, it is about the same as Windows. In fact, it can be made to look almost exactly like Windows if the user has some Windows experience.
For instance, even if linux were preinstalled and handed to a total novice, he/she would find it quite useless.
I've seen the same thing with Windows. All of those concepts you mention are needed in Windows as well.
An important thing to keep in mind, The UI for Linux is improving steadily, and offers several different styles. The user can choose the one that most suits them. The Windows UI hasn't really gotten any better since '95.
(aside)
That was my first experience in working with MS-DOS, and I wasn't surprised to see undocumented "features" (like serial drivers which swallowed carriage returns whole) which caused me no end of grief. I really DO come by my anti-Microsoft bigotry honestly!
>I just want software that works, and does cool stuff.
h tml
h tml#Saturday
You won't get that from Microsoft. Check out what Jerry Pournelle has to say about Front Page 2000 and Front Page 98 on his web site. We told him so, but he didn't want to listen...
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/currentview.
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/currentview.
Except none of this keeps me from playing 3D accelerated games on Linux (BFRIS,Quake 2/3,bzflag) or playing major strategy games on Linux (CivCTP, soon Myth II), or having a nice DnD filemangler that can interoperate thusly with diversely developed applications (including my WindowManager), or using my vidcap card, or using my flatbed scanner, or ripping CD's from a nice gui frontend while playing my previously ripped CD's with a nice gui frontend.
Quite simply, while you're whining about Linux not being there, some of us are just using Linux as many of our Windows counterparts do.
An 'office knockoff' should be sufficient for the spreadsheet crowd as that's all msoffice itself really is: 10 year old recycled applications technology. Vendorlock is the only real issue there.
For the grannies, a Mac would be better as would any genuinely top-to-bottom-no-muss-no-fuss solution. Except, the grannies aren't having the Mac foist upon them.
Instead, they get a random collection of spare parts with an OS that can sometimes cope shoved down their throats.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It's like watching a former sports champion flounder around and get beat by some kids.
Actually, the coaxial version of ethernet was pretty much only Metcalfe's baby. He also founded 3Com.
-Stu
Odd fellow.
--
Actually, he's right. You are correct that the Unix implementation of TCP/IP was at Berkeley, but this was actually the first implementation of TCP/IP, and was comissioned by DARPA.
Prior to that, the ARPAnet used a protocol called NCP (network control protocol).
I don't really like writing flames, but that article was just sad. Even attempting to debunk it would be a waste of time. We don't need this sort of trash, just pull the article please admin, and give us something interesting to talk about.
--
A key difference between Linux/Open Source/Free software and the movements Metcalfe compares it to is: we don't need to fight anyone. If businesses stop using OSS as the fight-MS catchphrase of the day, and if mainstream people don't switch, that isn't going to stop Linux. If Red Hat's IPO flops, and the company folds, so what? There will still be thousands of world-class programmers willing to put their time into the project -- some because it's an ideological belief, but some because hey, it's fun to hack.
The thing is, Linux can't be beaten. It may not become the mainstream OS, but it will keep becoming better and better. In fact, it's very likely that within several years it will exceed all other choices on all fronts - whether it's successful in the market or not. And at that point, even if the current OSS fad fizzles, the market won't be able to ignore us.
--
--
Below is a letter I just sent to Mr. Metcalfe. I didn't mention how I personally know his "ultimate boss", the CEO and president of IDG, Kelly Conlin. :)
p metcalfe.xml) was written to try and get a reaction from readers. I am sure that you have done that. After the article being reported on Slashdot.org, I'm sure that you have gotten a _lot_ of reactions, too, ranging in length and "quality".
To: metcalfe@idg.net
CC: letters@infoworld.com
Mr. Metcalfe:
I can only assume your latest article (http://www.infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/990621o
Let's put aside any beliefs I may have on the future of Linux for the moment (for the record, I give it more credit than you, but less than some "fanatics"). You still have glaring errors in your article, which, sadly, are indicative of poor journalism.
First of all, it is true that some members of the Linux community disagree on how to pronounce Linux, since it was a name given to the product by someone other than Linus Torvalds himself. However, make no mistake that Linus pronounces the first syllable of _his name_ with a strong e ("leenus"), but pronounces _Linux_ with a soft i ("lihnucks"). Perhaps a minor error in your article, but something that is blatantly wrong.
Secondly, you misunderstand EMACS. I am not a user of EMACS myself, as I am not accustomed to it and it does not currently fit my needs. However, many programmers find that they are much more productive using EMACS than they could be using a tool such as Microsoft's Visual Studio. EMACS' real strength is as a highly customizable and programmable development environment. It is not nearly as suited to word processing as you seem to imply that it should be, although some users do choose at their own discretion to use it for those purposes. How often have you seen Microsoft Word used work on the development of an operating system or other large C/C++ project?
Lastly, you article clearly is intended to be incilliatory, instead of journalism. You use unnecessary derogatory terms such as the "Open Sores Movement" and "a notch above Luddism". You imply that open source software, such as EMACS, is normally written in a weekend with a lot of caffeine; the truth couldn't be more different. This is not the type of journalism I would expect from a magazine like InfoWorld, even for as a personal commentary in the magazine.
We appreciate the many contributions you have made over the years via 3COM and Ethernet. However, this latest article accomplishes nothing productive.
--
Bob Bell | Compaq Computer Corp.
Software Engineer | 110 Spit Brook Rd - ZKO3-3U/22
TruCluster Group | Nashua, NH 03062-2698
(E-Mail omitted) | (Phone omitted)
(The views expressed are my own, and do not necessary reflect those of my employer)
I've always enjoyed Metcalfe's columns. He's bright, intelligent, and sees things from a different perspective than most of the other media shills.
I don't necessarily agree with him, and over the last year I think the pay-as-you-go internet columns have been quite boring.
So it's nice to see him being a little bit controversial in a different topic.
But I have to agree. The 60's back-to-earth communist movement doesn't appeal to me. I just want software that works, and does cool stuff.
This weekend I installed Windows 2000 Server Beta-3 on one of my home machines.
And let me just sum up my experience with this beta:
Linux does not have a chance.
W2K incorporates everything that every Unix zealot has ever complained about, along with everything that every Microsoft admin has complained about. It's frankly just seriously cool.
And not just because of the smoke and mirrors(i.e. Gnome and Enlightenment), but because of the technical details.
By this time next year Linux will have the same position in the media as OS/2 has now. Good luck to you in finding new jobs!
Just try to make sense of sendmail.cf without an O'Reilly book, or a trip to the psycho ward at the local hospital.
Besides... sendmail is also a commercial product... www.sendmail.com which has many improvements over the OSS version.
I'm having trouble believing that this article is real. It strikes me as odd that they would print an article so unprofessionally written.
It is, however, partially right on one of its points: the bit about ignoring 30 years of innovation. Not in terms of under-the-hood stuff, mind you; Linux is reasonably up-to-date with that (and with some of the latest things, like XFS and the others, it will be up-to-date in even more).
But it lags sorely behind in interface. The default command-line does ignore 30 years, and to be honest I have difficulty believing that any operating system still carries such an archaism. X ignores 15 years, and is marginally better (I'll admit that I'm impressed with what the Gnome and KDE projects are actually managing to do with it) but it falls into more than a few traps (which can be expected; even at the time of X's invention superior GUI's, such as NeWS, were available, but were scoffed at for some reason). More powerful interfaces have been around for years. I'll be among the first to check Berlin out (once it's in a usable state) for this very reason.
But hey, I'm a Mac and Linux user; I'd been spoiled by usable interfaces for years before switching to Linux. And if I do anything more I'll head off into a flamebait rant (which I honestly don't intend to do), so I'll shut up about it here.
Regardless, the article is for the most part just unprofessional FUD, and not something to be taken particularly seriously.
This can't be a real article. Why?
1) It's unlike InfoWorld to print such an unprofessionally-written, poorly-researched piece.
2) It doesn't seem right that the inventor of Ethernet, of all people, would tout "23/6 availability" as a good thing. This guy knows that computers can do better than that (and often do; even a properly-maintained MacOS machine can outdo NT in stability and security).
3) When it comes to "ignoring 30 years of innovation" Metcalfe may have a point where interface is concerned (I'm impressed with the strides Gnome and KDE have made in this area, but one can only do so much with such comparatively ancient technologies as X and the command-line) but he doesn't seem to get the idea that Linux is quite up-to-date in most areas, and with the recent Open-Sourcing of such things as XFS it'll be catching up in even more stuff.
4) Going back to the lack of professionalism in the article: do you really think he'd do that? One doesn't stay in his position for as long as he has by being the sort of person who'd write that.
5) Win2K doesn't have a chance. Linux, BeOS, and OSX will all stomp it flat (especially since two of them are out already, and the third, OSX, will likely be at least a year before Win2K ever sees a store shelf, knowing Microsoft's punctuality or lack thereof). What happens after that? I don't know. I hope the three can coexist harmoniously (I know it's possible) but I doubt that will happen.
Metcalfe said: OK, communism is too harsh on Linux. Lenin too harsh on Torvalds.
strredwolf said: It's actually Socialism, not communism (which the two get so mixed up it's suprizing you even mention it). Socialism, by Karl Marx, dictates that everyone, not the government (that's Communism), owns everything. Marx also states that it will be a slow progression into Socialism. Communism got screwed up by Lenin et al trying to speed things up. Guess what Russia got into now?
You have Communism and Socialism mixed up. Socialism is the transition point from capitalism to Communism. Communism is the point in Marxist ideology at which a central government is no longer needed to handle the distribution of goods and services.
-Chris Andreasen
The article we find here consists of cheap and unwarranted comparisons, ignoring relevant aspects, and plain incompetence.
Has the technology of the internal combustion engine disappeared when it aged? Are communists like open source activitists in thinking hard about ways to make money and founding companies on the resulting ideas? What do "shipments" matter if software can be copied freely? Is a programmer's editor something like a secretary's word processor? And how would java which is not an operating system possibly be better than Linux or W2K (A JVM needs an OS to run, clearly Metcalfe has trouble understanding some fundamental principles of software architecture.)
I pity this man who is grown up, respected and yet not able to write anything better than a "slashdot-kiddie" in a moment of anger.
-cjr
Bob Metcalfe sounds like one of those National Enquirer prophets: "I correctly predicted that internet stocks would collapse! That proves my track record, now I predict the demise of Linux". Substitute the collapse of internet stocks with the assasination of John Lennon and the demise of Linux with the second coming of Elvis and its virtually identical with supermarket tabloid predictions and backed up by just a valid an analysis.
His first premise: The Open Source Movement's ideology is utopian balderdash. Alright, maybe Richard Stallman is a bit over the top with some of his talk, but he's not the entire Open Source movement. There are other advocates, such as Bruce Perens, who have done work in getting existing companies such as Netscape or Apple to at least test the Open Source waters. Then he goes on to take a Linux Torvalds' quote out of context as proof that the Open Source community is a band of raving pinko commies. Oh, scratch that, it was just hyperbole. However, if Open Source succeeds a quarter billion people will die or some other such drivel. Oh, and the only means of writing a document under Linux is with EMACS doncha know! I guess Applix, Word Perfect etc. are just communist propoganda and don't really exist.
The second premise: Linux is 30 year old technology and as such is senile. It's an interesting sentiment, but not correct. Linux is built up from concepts that are 30 some years old but only because technology often builds up on the past. Pre-emptive multitasking and protected memory are just good ideas, no reason to throw them out. In the mean time the kernel guru's have added in multi threading, multi processor support as well as support for late nineties hardware. On top of that there are a number of decent GUI overlays that can make normal day to day stuff just as easy as it is under NT (as well as some of the more complext administrative tasks as well). NT is no different in that regards, its really built up from thirty year old technology and doesn't really offer any new features. Linux performs well now. If Microsoft gets its act together maybe NT will work well tomorrow. Maybe. If given the choice between shipping something that doesn't works but people will buy or shipping something that works as advertised a little bit late guess which one will win?
In a way this is the biggest evidence that Linux (as well as other operating systems) is relevant. If Microsoft was truly indominatible they could delay their operating system release until it actually worked and not worry about releasing expensive (to the consumer) bug fix patches as Windows 98 or Windows 99 etc.
Is Linux going to kill Windows? No, I don't think so. I do think that things will be a lot closer to how they were in the eighties though. Windows will have the majority, but more like a 60 or 70% majority overall. A bit more on the desktop and a bit less in the server space. Linux and other operating systems will have that 30 to 40% market share segment. It won't dominate but will ensure that applications are ported to capture that segment of the market.
Old gurus never die, their opinions just (in some cases) become obsolete or bought and paid for.
Does this make Ballmer Rasputin?
it's still there. infoworld wouldn't care, as
long as they're getting money off the hits.
yeah I agree, but it also shows a technological generation gap b/w the commentator and the current L-users.
He maybe one smart cookie but I cant help thinking that he's missing the point about open source software - it's free, high quality, there are fast updates, available on many platforms and being developed around the clock etc, etc.
It reminds me of the mainframers/mini computer users knocking the pc and all those eminantly qualified persons who missed the internet, when any student at college could see it's potential.
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
I'm tired of such so called revues comparing Linux with Other OSes. /etc folder). So saying linux is based on 20 years old ideas is true - but windows also is (win 1.0 dates from 1986). What really bugs me is the underlaying hardware on which all this software is based on:
Usually what is being compared is a linux distribution (usually a RedHat or RedHat derivative (ie uses rpm to manage packages)). The comparaison is usually done on the install then on the firts impresion, they rarelly go to real end-user testing the prodocts. IMHO one can't compare a linux distro with Just a core OS - I'de prefer something like BackOffice to be testted against.
On the isuees of W2K the product isn't out yet - Microsoft is making some noises around it so that people with the power to choose still take windows over whats available because W2K will be here real soon now. Marketing people are the one pushing windows - not techies. My point here is that comparing things not made to do the same kind of things ius useless, even if these are sold has being designed for the same purposes.
NT4.0 has many foundation of unix in its core kernel (like the infamous
the x86 architecture - this is where the nproblem lies.
none Yet.
At least that's how I've always seen it. And I believe for reasons that have been well outlined in replies to this thread, that it works.
Does voluntary socialism work? Sure. Why wouldn't it?
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
Yes, unix happened at the start of the 70s, a bit before(?) VMS: this doesn't mean the underlying principles are wrong. The fact that NT boxes don't deal well with high load is very worrying - VMS boxes do. UNIX is up against a bad VMS implementation in NT.
;) ). NT is just HUGE - it tries to be everything to everyone. UNIX realises it's not for everyone, and ends up doing what it does very well.
The problem also is that UNIX is happy with lower resources - it *can* be stripped down (well, we use it in our car radio
I don't see NT being crushed by UNIX. Then again, I don't see UNIX being crushed by NT either - as far as I'm concerned, I'm sure they'll both carry on for at least another 10 years: maybe NT might even be stable by then.
Hugo
Don't have time for composition [ sue me ): ]
- More intuitive GUI?
- More consistent APIs?
- Better tested and secure code?
- Better bundled administration tools?
- Better vendor support?
What makes Windows such a clearly "better" OS? Metacalfe gives no specifics.This article sways neither ardent windows users nor dedicated linux users into the other's camp. Other OS's are ignore, like MacOS X, *BSD and BeOS. It is merely meant to draw luckless slashdotters to Infoworld's site.
It is my belief that Microsoft has already lost their hegemony. We are seeing the company in a bloated, red giant stage. Their death knell has chimed which is why Redmond has implemented "Vision Version 2.0".
Interestingly enough, there is a country that has recently converted its agriculture to organic methods.(in order not to use proprietry technologies i.e fertilizer) The result has been that production has gone up (30% of food for cities is now produced in the cities themselves)- largely thanks to the its approach of getting people involved in production of thier own food. (The country is Cuba BTW)
Paul M
"There are no innocent bystanders
What where they doing there in the first place"
Paul M
"There are no innocent bystanders. What where they doing there in the first place"
William S Burroughs
with Anonymous Coward.
---
"Colors blind the eye
Desires wither the heart."
-- Lao Tsu, "Tao Te Ching"
with GreyFauk.
.. but we were able to figure it out, by ourselves.
I think I can safely say that most new users to linux used DOS or MacOS previously. And since we aren't generally born with the ability to operate a computer, those same users had to learn DOS or MacOS from scratch, just like everyone else.
For those who say that using a mouse is more intuitive than the command line, I disagree.
I wanted to play games on DOS, so I learned how to fiddle with autoexec.bat and config.sys to maximize my 640k and even made *gasp* bootdisks as well. This is just how I learned - and there was no GUI to help me, or man pages.
I'm sure a lot of you out there started the same way. It isn't about intelligence, it is about being curious and having the motivation to maximize the uses of what you have in front of you.
Next came win3.11, and then win95. I learned what I needed with those and then I discovered linux a couple of years ago. Starting out with slackware 1.x and a huge 'Unleashed book, my *father* and I realized our DOS and windows skills weren't really applicable
My mom has recently gotten into email and she doesn't bat an eye when going between win32 netscape and netscape on top of KDE -- I don't think she even notices the differences.
Do I think she could learn the command line? If she had an interest in it, she definetly could. Linux is for those who don't mind experimentation and are not afraid to learn. And, once they learn the basics, inquisitive minds shouldn't have much trouble figuring out the rest.
Ziffie.
---
"Colors blind the eye
Desires wither the heart."
-- Lao Tsu, "Tao Te Ching"
So what's wrong with UNIX being originated in the 1960's? Lots of great stuff came out of that decade, and like it was said before me, UNIX certainly did not stagnate. UNIX was just one more pivotal event of the late 60's, early 70's in this country. (taps his foot as he listens to Henry Mancini's orchestra play Peter Gunn)
But more important is this communism comparison. That analogy occured to me just the other day, that Linux, FreeBSD, and Open Source software is comparable to the software "industry" as communism was comparable to capitalism. I the fretted about the fate of the Open Source movement - would it meet the same fate?
I soon realized that it would not. Open Source will never meet the same fate because it is not based upon a flawed idealization of human nature as communism is. Communism failed because it hinged on the selflessness of individuals, and in that atmosphere of complete giving to the collective, the absolute absence of greediness on the part of opportunists. Given the fact that Communism never worked and the experiments (however distant from the Marxist ideal) all sooner or later went belly up, it is pretty safe to say this theoretical perspective of the human condition was indeed flawed.
Open Source, however, is actually closer to Capitalism than it is to Communism in important areas. It does not hinge on an idealistic, unrealistic selflessness, but rather the same motivations as Capitalism: people want something for themselves. What are some of the prime reasons listed that Open Source programmers code? For glory and reputation, because they enjoy it, or to scratch an itch. Because they love what they do, the quality far exceeds commercial software where Joe Programmer is a salaried employee who is irked at his boss who keeps telling him how this and that have to be, and who didn't want to work on this stupid project anyway. At best Joe Programmer is sanguine about what he does, very few are passionate about it.
In the end Open Source will become the defacto standard for the Information Age because it is compatible with Capitalism. Instead of selling closed, proprietary software in the old Industrial Age model of capitalism, smart companies will sell services and support through the free and open software from the Community. After all, is this the Information Age or isn't it? The software is so ubiquitous these days, who would want to pay for it? Or, if it isn't ubiquitous, it certainly should be for our civilization to take full advantage of the Information Age.
The longer I use FreeBSD and download all my software from the net, the more foolish it seems for people to manufacture countless CDs, manuals, boxes, and ship all that via truck to a store I have to drive to for software I want. What a wastefull expendeture of all those resources. Metcalfe can live in the past if he wants, we'll go onto the future without him or Micro$oft.
Hmm...as far as I know the Web was developed in an open source mode, after all it would be pointless to hoard sources for the only web server.
What about Beowulf clusters, PVM, MPI? All these were developed in an open source fashion and did not exist before
The number of programmers using/developing Open Source software will soon outstrip any commercial enterprise (think of China for instance, or India, do you think these people have money to buy WinNT licenses?).
So far the open source developers bought you the Web and the Internet, just wait few more years and you'll be amazed...
...richie - It is a good day to code.
There are more fundamental problems with computers for newbie users. Just the concept of files and the idea that you need to save things is bizzare. After all, when you modify a paper document with you pencil you don't have to save it in some drawer before the changes are permanent.
A newbie computer user is confused when a program says "Document modified, do you want to save?".
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Doddering old bastard Ethernet is over 20 years old but you don't see anyone bitching about that do you? He is just pissed that he isn't the on the forefront of technology anymore and is reduced to writing shitty columns....
======== In the future, everything will be artificial. ========
Not all that "micro"; file systems, networking stacks, and the device drivers atop which they reside all live in kernel-mode code (even if Microsoft says they're in the "executive" rather than in the "kernel").
If you're referring here to moving the GDI subsystem into the kernel, yes, NT 3.x had that in the Win32 subsystem process...
...but it's not the only OS/window system combination that did that; if that was sufficient to render it a microkernel, every UNIX-flavored system with an X server is a microkernel.
> How do you "set up" linux right so a new user
> can add a printer without reaming through
> mountains of docs?
Depends on your distribution - some vendors have decided to make this easy.
"printtool" works just fine here. The only trick is that the new user needs root access to do this.
-- Rick
| Newbie user: "Hmm...how can I add my printer
| now to this linux machine?"
A newbie wouldn't use the phrase "add printer". That's windows-speak. But I digress.
| Newbie user: "Of course! I must type in
| printtool and it will do that for me. How could
| I miss that? Doh!"
A newbie user with more than half a functioning neuron might consult the Redhat installation manual (*one* book, rather than the "mountain of docs" previously implied). This is provided - of course - that said newbie has missed the menu option for printtool as well as the printer icon in redhat's control panel (which another poster has already pointed out).
The problem here isn't the "newbie to computers" user - for them, Windows is effectively as hard as Linux. "arcane commands" are replaced in windows with "tiny unintelligible buttons" and "registry settings". The problem is with Windows users who say that Linux is hard because it doesn't work like Windows.
-- Rick
Problem was, Sun wanted to charge money for NeWS. X was free and had the source code (at the time you got it for a $100 charge for the tape). X won.
I'll let everybody draw their own conclusions about what this predicts.
I suspect that this article is just a reflection
of the age of the author; forgive me, I too
remember the 70s/80s - albeit distantly - in the
days when PCW and BYTE had more pages of signal
than they did advertising noise, and computing
was looking forward to its future.
Before the OOPS fad, before the 4GL fad, there
were continual fads in the 80s that computing
was going to change for the better; articles
about compilers that would understand natural
languages and produce programs on demand, that
would do what we wanted without error. User
interfaces that would make everything we wanted
to do, simple and obvious.
This was the boom time of AI and GUI development
in academia, and the mindset is propagated in
hackers of a certain age, disposed to consider
whatever hardware or software they are using as
crud that will soon be surpassed by something
much much better than they could imagine.
This is, of course, a caricature, but I hope
that some of it is recognisable.
My point is: there are some people who will tar
any existing technology as crap and invariably
promise something better down the road; these
people can be classified as:
1) visionaries
2) sci-fi writers
3) marketeers
...depending upon their remit; I suspect that
Bob falls into one of the two former categories,
suffering some sort of self-loathing that nothing
has changed since his day.
I do not believe he falls into category 3
(which M$ excels at) where the remit is to
prevent adoption of some technology which
might undermine profits from some competing
technology of their own.
There is a depressing tendency, amongst these
people, to deride Linux for it's Unix heritage.
They forget that the flipside of "old" includes
"tried", "tested", and "well-understood enough
to be robustly optimised to hell and back",
all of which are also important features to
most computer users.
Or, at least, the ones who don't think that
one crash per week is acceptable.
- alec
perl -nle 'setpwent;crypt($_,$c)eq$c&&print"$u=$_"while($u,
"W2K will BEAT Linux"
Don't forget how quickly Linux has gone from being a non-entity/media joke to being something that now has to be 'beaten' by Microsoft.
Fsking amazing!
Keep Going!
**>>BELCH
ummm... McCarthy?
I seem to remember that the famous halloween documents said M$ would use its marketing machine to try to deface Linux in particular and Open Source movement in general. More specifically, the documents said M$ would first run a few articles where they'd let Linux win, but then (and this is the key): ** the closer to release of win2k the more FUD about Linux **. Notice how this article talks about win2k...
Have you guys forgotten the Halloween Documents already???
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Nice to see good writing style isn't completely dead.
Kythe
(Remove "x"'s from
Kythe
It seems to me like this guy's trolling for flames. He may be right that Linux is getting a huge amount of publicity, but it's doubtful that he's actually had experience with the OS if he can talk about it like this. I use Linux all the time - work, home, whatever. Fine, Microsoft makes products for the everyday man, but Linux is still far superior to Windows, even if it doesn't provide the ease of use. And he didn't even bother to consider that Linux has only really been mainstream for the past year or so, while NT and other MS products have had more of the market than anything else for the past half-decade.
-- K
'Mr. Metcalfe, thanks for Ethernet. Now go away.'
This prick has been pushing stupid ideas for awhile now, this is just the most recent one. He's on this jag about the death of flat-rate Internet access, when around the world it's on the RISE. He's quite wrongheaded about a great many things, and not worth listening to at this point.
Then again, while he tools around the SF bay or NYC on his yacht, I doubt he gives two dingos kidneys about my opinion, but there you go.
Yes, and my what a great economy that Holland has- boy I want to move there.
It's better to spend money like there's no tomorrow, than spend tonight like there's no money -P. J. O'Rourke
It's also the system for the mainstream computer geek. That is, the people who use a computer for computer's sake will love it. Anyone who gets a kick out of almost every editor offering programming syntax highlighting will love it. Anyone who loves to customize their GUI to fit them will love it. If you're one of those people (I am) then it does everything else you want well enough.
I guess it comes down to:
a) Full power to change things, but kind of obscure.
b) Only limited power to change things, but the tools are Really Fun To Play With! (except for RegEdit)?
Since the Windows way of configuration is pretty limited ("Is this computer a Server or Workstation?"), I'll take a). Someone just has to come up with some derived distribution with a reasonable set of features turned on/off appropriately (i.e., no network server services turned on...), for the average Don't-wanna-learn person, that can do a reasonable approximation to Windows Plug&Pray "automatic" setup for hardware, and the usual issue is blown out the window.
for those who continue to harp on Linux configuration (and Unix in general...) relying on Text files, remember that Windows "advanced" to the Registry and its binary files because win.ini and system.ini basically became too well-known. But, those were text files! And they're certainly easier to deal with than the Registry...
Sure, the Registry existed in internal form in Win3.1 (which is why you had to do some windows programming, similar to telling a daemon to rehup, to get Windows to reread your win/system.ini if you made any changes to them, or reboot). With today's computers, Microsoft's insistance that these text files took too long to load at boottime seem...trivial, since ideally this is something that isn't done very often for most people anyways, no?
Linux currently is just as equivalent and "nice" as NT/Win9x for use as a HTML browser and general office work (e-mail, "office" suites...don't like StarOffice or Applix? Then use WP).
Hey, RH5.x comes with more games than Windows does!
I guess it comes down to:
a) Full power to change things, but kind of obscure.
b) Only limited power to change things, but the tools are Really Fun To Play With! (except for RegEdit)?
Since the Windows way of configuration is pretty limited ("Is this computer a Server or Workstation?"), I'll take a). Someone just has to come up with some derived distribution with a reasonable set of features turned on/off appropriately (i.e., no network server services turned on...), for the average Don't-wanna-learn person, that can do a reasonable approximation to Windows Plug&Pray "automatic" setup for hardware, and the usual issue is blown out the window.
for those who continue to harp on Linux configuration (and Unix in general...) relying on Text files, remember that Windows "advanced" to the Registry and its binary files because win.ini and system.ini basically became too well-known. But, those were text files! And they're certainly easier to deal with than the Registry...
Sure, the Registry existed in internal form in Win3.1 (which is why you had to do some windows programming, similar to telling a daemon to rehup, to get Windows to reread your win/system.ini if you made any changes to them, or reboot). With today's computers, Microsoft's insistance that these text files took too long to load at boottime seem...trivial, since ideally this is something that isn't done very often for most people anyways, no?
Linux currently is just as equivalent and "nice" as NT/Win9x for use as a HTML browser and general office work (e-mail, "office" suites...don't like StarOffice or Applix? Then use WP).
Hey, RH5.x comes with more games than Windows does!
As far as using the Root account for day-to-day work, most people w/o a clue who set up NT end up just using the Administrator account, because a) setting up user "profiles" is not so obvious to them, and b), it's a complete PITA having to log out completely one's current non-Administrator "session" to log in as Administrator to do system stuff, since there isn't in NT an equivalent either of SUDO (for GUI or CLI) or SU anyways (but if there is, I'd like to know. I'm not an NT-Clueless, and this issue bugs me almost daily...), so there isn't much of an incentive anyways to properly use user security principles, even for a ostensibly single-user machine...
Plus, how many NT systems come set up using NTFS vs. FAT for the NT partition(s), because what is the point of security in NT if the file system isn't secure more than in FAT?
and the so-called "Linux Movement" branch thereof is in fact this:
Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, that I have seen since 1993 from the Linux Camp has yet to approach the quality of *any* commecial offerings, even crappy SCO. Not in the Application space, the kernel...nothing.
Call me a troll, tell me how I "don't get it" all you want, flick me off as an annoying Mac guy (who has been using Linux longer than *many of you, BTW) if it makes you feel better, but the truth is not *one of you* can point to a single thing that is solely OSS built and supported that does a better job, with clearer instructions as to how to get the job done (a *very* important part of the equation) than a commercial offering.
You can't. We, as I'm somewhat a part of this group as a Linux user, have yet to get over this hurdle.
What's worse is anytime anyone, from within, from the outside or in the middle, brings up this point, it's greeted with vitriol...or worse.
But never solutions. Never.
The best anyone comes up with is Apache or the Apache/PHP combo, but it doesn't meet all of the requirements.
The OSS, and specifically Linux, model is based in fact on socialists priciples, which, quite frankly have been proven to cater ultimatley to the Lowest Common Denominator, the 'just enough' concept if you will.
Ask yourselves this: if it was such a great idea in the first place, then why in hell do we have all these other Unix vendors/flavors and other OS's in the first place?
Added Value.
Does linux add value? Sure it does. You get the source. The real question is this:
When it all comes down to it, ideology aside, does it really matter?
The answer is 'no' it does not. As nice as the "Major Multinational XYZ backs Linux, ports Widgets2.3" press releases sound, the reality is Linux is more of a niche OS than MacOS is, but less so than BeOS.
It's niche is the Hacker Niche. The only reason why it's getting any play at all is that everyone pretty much hates MicroSoft, and the hacker pool is fairly young, cheap and easily manipulated by ideology. Great cheap skilled labor force for Multinationals that don't have their heads up the'r behinds.
Linux does not bring anything new to the table, which is why it will never overtake WindowsAnything in the hearts and minds of the majority.
You see, not since those heady days of the Early 80's has anyone, hardware or sofware wise come up with something earth-shattering.
Well, maybe Palm Computing, but these were ex-Apple guys. May RealNetworks-no, wait, ex-MS folks.
Be. Well...not exactly.
If you have any insight, you'll see where this is going.
What the Linux crowd needs to do is focus on changing the *way* people *use* computing and computing devices, instead of why Open Source is So Great.
Because, looking at it with *objective* eyes, it has yet to live up to the hype, the promise, or the poential I felt it had oh-so-long ago, downloading Slackware disk sets on a 2400bps Genuine HayesModem on a Mac to and xfering the files to a hacked together 386...
-K
One day, you'll learn to watch what you post...
Documentation is in fact a seriously killer app. One that Linuxdom sorely lacks, I might add...
And you are right about one thing. Back in the day, Linux offered a promise of nothing, and quite frankly, that was a strength.
These days, the 18-24 crowd fuels a fire that cannot burn. Linux cannot leave its Techie niche because it is born, breed and fed by folks that don't see the point of canning all of their bright ideas so that someone that isn't so bright can take advantage of them.
As far as I'm concerned, the darkest day in Linuxdom came when Microcr, er, MindCraft delt their hand. You can argue the 'benchmarketing' all you want, but M$ basically played an old, old game that the OSS crew wasn't ready for:
Shit, or get off the pot.
I've seen many, many Linux-Centric products with great potential, but they fall down in the Class, Style and Execution categories.
But know one wants to hear a word of it.
I've heard the following insane notions:
"GiMP is as good as, if not better than PhotoShop"
-Not if you want to print anything for the really-for real world on a really-for-real press. Sorry.
"KDE brings Linux to the Destop...it's better than Windows"
-This is highly arguable at best. Delusional is more like it. And Gnome? OK. Riiiight. You won't be killing the giant with this combo.
"Zope is a better Application server than WebObjects, and you can't beat the price."
Hooboy. Complete nonesense. But-
Zope isn't bad. It has shitty docs, a kludgy install process, and a *much* more programmer-oriented bent than the Zope boys want to admit...but it ain't even close to WebObjects.
But it's not bad.
There's the PHP/Cold Fusion thing too. Again, PHP, very powerful...if C is your bag.
Look at it this way, if no other way will 'parse' for you.
Everthing outside of the Win32 Office Suite that M$ offers has been from the start a *baaad* knock-off or fast-follower of something superior. Office is the ONLY thing MS makes that's worth having...and they know it. Look at the MSRP.
You need to aim higher, and shed the nerd/geek elitist shield and join the party, or wind up a bigger, more knarly and eccentric version of 'Team OS/2'.
Where do you want to go tomorrow? Think Better.
If any of this gets through to 1% of you guys, then the whole thing has a chance in hell. But as long as OSS SocioReligious Groupthink reigns supreme, then ass out is all y'all is gon' be.
We'll see.
-K
One day, you'll learn to watch what you post...
He brags that he created ethernet, but what most folks don't realize is that ethernet is the WORST networking technology still in wide use today. Switching (something I bet he didn't come up with) is the only thing that makes it viable anymore.
The reason people use ethernet is that it is a freely useable technology, and cheap, unlike the superior token passing technologies.
Bob is simply an old fuck. I don't know how else to put it.
support gun control: take guns from cops
At least one kernel developer has a decidedly right wing political stance ... and a website devoted to guns, militia and new world order bullshit.
Chris Wareham
Hurd is built on top of Mach, a microkernel implemented by an academic team. Unfortunately, the microkernel ethos is foundering on the fact that implementing a workable kernel is more difficult than a monolithic one, and the resulting examples perform poorly. As microkernels were supposed to improve kernel performance, this is proving a bit embaressing for the architecture's advocates. Dare I mention Mr. Tannenbaum?
NT was originally implemented as a microkernel, but performance was so poor that the clean design was broken, allowing direct access to the hardware. This happened with version 4.0, and stability went out the window. Ever wonder why Microsoft run their website on NT 3.51?
Chris Wareham
Well, you have to remember just how fast Linux is progressing. It's a much different beast than it even was a few months ago. There is far more support from game companies and 3d card vendors, there is far more multimedia support than before.
As a matter of fact, the pieces are coming together more and more for Linux on the desktop. Sure, it's not here today for a lot of uses, but who's to say that the momentum behind Linux isn't still building? I don't think we're anywhere near the point of inflection.
As far as fragmentation, I don't think users really see it as a problem. As long as something is branded Linux and will run all the neat and nifty software, users appreciate not being told what's best, and getting to decide for themselves. A lot of people coming from the Microsoft camp have exactly this problem with MS products.
Linux may not be there on the desktop today, but the Linux of today is not the Linux of tomorrow.
By your mindset, BSD and SYSV blow Linux out of the water...oh wait, they do.
Hmmm,
Well for those who know, ethernet one out over token ring for one major reason. Price. Ethernet chips are cheap, like pennys while token ring costs 10-20 dollars a chip. Big difference. Linux is cheap and it is more scalable. People are getting tired of having to buy 5-10 NT servers at god knows how much a piece to do one simple project. It comes down to dollars. Once linux takes the server market it will work its way into the desktop market. The issue is will companies like redhat and caldera destroy the market by setting up contracts with everyone and becoming the defacto standard. I don't mind redhat. I like debian better but I feel the one getting the press to the masses is redhat. If anything hurts linux it will be redhat and caldera, not win2k.
IMHO
Perhaps he evaluates the merits of ideologies based on their economic returns. If so, he might well ignore what many of us consider to be the nobler (but far less profitable) ideals of the Open Source community and bestow his much-sought-after (hehe) blessing upon M$'s methods.
And of course those would be to overwhelm its customers with advertisements for its corpulent, bug-ridden software that with each iteration practically demands that users make major hardware upgrades for the privilege of watching their new software suck down ever increasing amounts of system resources. Whew. Thereafter the aforementioned corporation dutifully promises to offer token support for its products in the form of hastily thrown together patches that only might fix the problem, and to let its customers languish in the deep hold tanks of its telephone support system.
In marked contrast, this community's ideals are to subject code and concepts to peer review, allowing the best and most secure to emerge naturally. Forget the "antiquated technology" argument--in another 30 years, when Metcalfe may well have gone the way of the dodo, we may look at companies still using the cabalistic design practices of M$ and scoff at their decrepitude.
I agree that Linux will always be a minority in the desktop and server markets, but a substantial one at that. But no matter what happens, there's no way all the dedicated programmers out there that make the software I use and enjoy are just going to shrivel up and disappear with the advent of Windows2000. Sheesh.
Live in the now, Metcalfe.
Bob Metcalfe invented ethernet (an old technology)
Linux is based on UNIX principles (an old technology)
Ethernet is pretty much an open standard -- you can find the specs for it and build your own network.
Linux is pretty much an open standard -- you can find the specs for it and build your own software.
Ethernet products are making money.
Linux is making money.
Ethernet is used the world over. You say "ARCnet" and most IT people will start giggling. You say "Token Ring" in a crowded hall of IT people and you might see a couple hands.
Of course Linux will fail.
Nothing worth doing is worth doing today.
Historically speaking, Commuism creates a scheme like Microsoft, two distinct classes. It's the rich 'people who exploited other ideas and presented them to the population' (Commuist 'Enlightened' People) and the peasents that did the real invadation and made the country to work (face it without peason class to do the agriculturual work, the enlightened people would die of startvation).
In communism, you typically end up with this class of truely rich people (think Bill Gates and 120 billion $$$), and the normal people (making 20-50 thousand $ a year).
You can't be fair.
At least Free Software (freedom not price), allows people to fix and debug software. We are only killing our selfs with secrets, ask your self this would the cold war have existed if both the USA and Russia shared military secrets and ideas. Of course not. We could have avoided both the Korean and Vietamn Wars, saving many peoples lives.
Being open and free (freedom) is the future, closed totaliran ideas die to freedom. (What happened to Loius XIV, the Absolute Monarchies of Britian or the USA?) They all went to opener policies.
The future is freedom of *.
(In case your not a geek * is a wildcard, meaning anything you want).
"As for closed source development, let's just look at the facts and say that since software companies charge for their software and (in some cases) deriving profit from the sale of that software, they are capitalists. Simple, no? They are the ones exploiting their software programmers of their labor-power, to put it in Marxian terms."
.00001%. If people can't afford software, they would just go to warez, since hotline servers are so convient and easy to use, after all in reality, Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 is a free (in price not freedom) download (it's free to download from a hotline server) and it's a quick one if you own a T1, ASDL or cable modem.
I disagree. Your looking at traditional commuism, not something like Mao or Stalin Commmuist. Both leaders exploited all the people to improve the lives of the elite class (the ones that stole ideas to impress the govermet) by exploiting the vast majority of peasents.
Isn't Gates exploiting the majority of us, by requiring us to pay him?
The main difference about exploitation of societies, is Commuist countries exploit all but the highest people (ie. Bill Gates and rich investors) unlike Captiliast societies that exploit just the lowest classes (Middle Class people in a modern captilist society live a good life, with technology, many freedoms and safe housing and enough good stuff to survive on.
Some people are involved with free software because of the money is cheap, but that is a SMALL group less
Most are involved for many other reasons, free software is better quality, you have more rigths, and if you a smart investor / company you can make big $$$ with free software.
The facts are "Freedom rules. Freedom Rocks. We love freedom, and are willing to pay for it!"
That idea caught on in the Macintosh Platform a few years ago when Microsoft Word 6.0 for Macintosh was released. This version of Microsoft Word 6.0, on hardware that was only a year old, could take up to 5 minutes to startup. (This was also true on some of the 386's I ran Word 6 on).
Anyways, people started to realize the Word wasn't the 'bomb' of all word processors, the realized that you didn't need a thing that takes 5 minutes to startup to write a quick letter.
That's when little tiny word processors became populuar (shareware), and gained quite a bit of popularity. Hell, Apple's ClarisWorks, a smaller but fairly flexablity program killed Microsoft Works on the Macintosh because it was faster and more stable.
Of course, you got to release that was a few years ago, and that the Macintosh community is much smaller and flexable. Also most Macintosh users were still creative professionals, that were thoughful resourceful people that were smart enought to choose something different then Microsoft Office for basic tasks.
AbiWord is getting their.... but it defintly needs some polish. KWord is pretty nice, but with it's wiz-bang features, I find it's going to be attractive replacement for Word for Windows and Adobe PageMaker not a smaller simple thing.
The use the right tools for the right job.
Don't be a wise ass who uses vim to write your master thesis. Their are far better tools on Linux for that.
I personally still use Adlus PageMaker 4.0 for Macintosh for all of my Desktop Publishing needs, since all newer versions just add unneccessary bloat to DTP (a DTP program is just that, no need for a intergrated editor for things like rectangles with gradients (that's what a draw programs are for), or that text bending stuff (again a drawing program).
So much said with so little substance. Its frighting to see that someone like Metcalfe can get paid to write fantasy stories for a trade magazine.
Anything that doesn't make money is communist? I guess I've given away my last perl script. I'd hate to be blackballed in a senate hearing soon. Please.
Linux the peace, love and flowers OS? Me thinks the Metcalfe has been smoking too many of the flowers. Try to sell that allusion to Dell who just made about $100,000 for the servers we bought from them, which immediately had Linux installed on them for a web farm and email servers.
You know I love a good fight, and Metcalfe obviously has his opinions that this one won't be won by Linux. But please, Bob, if your going to write about Linux's poor ideology (IYO), figure our what the ideology is first. And by my calculations that should leave you with pretty much nothing to write about. Because this isn't Apple friend. There is no one stream of thought being lead by an egomaniac. This is Linux, and there are at least 7 million ideologies here.
Communists. Hippies. Leave it to the stuffed shirts to fall back on such old fodder.
http://windows.scares.us
Arghhh - By analogy Linux vs. MS is not anything. What it is is one bunch of folks building software along one set of precepts versus another bunch of folks building software along another set of precepts. It is not like any political system or cultural reference or prejudice. It is not absolutely good or evil or moral or not. It is a method, a process by which something gets done and either other people see value in it and exploit it or they don't. Putting value judgments on any of this is just slack. Let's agree on a few things:
For some people or groups any technology is unlearnable and they like it that way.
For some people or groups getting something done in the easiest way possible is the only alternative ever selected whether that selection is optimal or not.
For some people or groups getting something done in the most elegant or effective way possible is the only alternative ever selected whether that selection adds any value or not.
The purpose of any group is to exclude someone be that the great unwashed MS-minions or the gore-dappled Linux-Myrmidons.
Any group larger than 3 people is a mob.
All technology sucks, to someone. Except for PHB's who have to be hit on the head to be reminded it's their turn to speak.
Technology is never the end of civilization - talking about the end of civilization is.
All things tend toward the mean. If your parents are brilliant then you are probably not.
I think you're quoting out of context. I believe he meant "the first Unix implementation [of TCP/IP] was done in berkeley". He was wrong in thinking that that wasn't the first TCP/IP implementation though, AFAIK.
Or maybe that should be make vmlinuz instead of "Boot Linux"?
--Joe
--
Program Intellivision!
Hmmm... sounds sorta like a certain OS that's being poo-pooed.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
While RMS may claim to not be a communist and not be anti-profit, he certainly does a tremendous job convincing people otherwise.
It's too bad that many in the world view Linux as the latest way for college kids to hold their ideological protests. Rather than marching around with "Make Love, Not War" signs, we're painted as marching around with "Boot Linux, Not Windows" signs.
And let us not forget the Nixon-esq "silent majority" of happy Windows users.
*sigh*
It's all too creepy. Fortunately, I doubt the Linux movement's leaders are going to start keeling over from drug abuse. :-) . Also, given that Linux users AREN'T just your average hippies and freaks, but rather are extremely pragmatic people trying to get things done (how come people always forget that tidbit), I think Linux has alot more chance to survive.
That bit about the Open Sores movement was fairly clever. I'm sure somebody's going to get alot of toasty flames that can be hand picked with asbestos oven mitts for next week's column: Linux: Where The Zealots Go Today.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Something tells me that his article makes alot of use of the fine art of sarcasm (see the bit about 23x6 reliability and how NT overpowers Linux for this reason). But, for sarcasm to work it needs to have a kernel of truth (pun intended) at its core.
Wake up. Smell the coffee. And everyone, let's start giving Linux the image it deserves: Not the OS for the techno-nerds, but rather the OS for people that actually need to do something, rather than watch the nifty 3-D Accelerated, alpha blended, animated hourglass cursor that comes with the latest "Plus!" pack for Windows.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
First, Open Source is not a communist movement. In fact I have always viewed it as a very customized
type of market. The exchange is quite a bit different from a typical monetary transaction but it is a market
nonetheless. In many ways, as has been shown with projects that have succeeded, it is a more efficient
market than the traditional commercial software market, at least for certain classes of problems.
The fact that people can use the software for free doesn't mean that it's communist or socialist. It's a
natural extension of realizing that there are other ways to gain benefit from labor than being a toll taker. In
a sense everyone that uses Open Source software gains in a way that could be viewed at least two ways:
benefiting from the culmination of knowledge (similar to our inheritance of science and other cumulated
knowledge) and as pre-payment from the open-source 'group' for possible future contributions. In
addition, it creates a society where anyone can use the benefits of the cumulative effort of society while
contributing when able. (Similar to what people enjoy in the Real World in most parts of the world.) This
contribution will often be a market driven transaction. (Similar to a construction company building a
park.)
Just to wear this metaphor a bit, we all like visiting Disney World, but we're sick of paying for admission
and every ride and are willing to work together to build some of those features into our neighborhoods.
In other words, the Open Source movement has similarities to scientific and other academic communities,
society in general, and commercial markets with a melding of characteristics.
Open Source is a thin but resilient framework consisting of simultaneous bartering, customization or
application to a problem for direct or indirect payments, play, academic expansion, creative and
constructive outlet, etc.
A company like Microsoft makes the implicit assumption that there are few programmers and they can
hire nearly all the good ones and make software for the rest of us. I believe that eventually a large
segment of the population will be programmers of some sort, and I firmly believe that it should be a
standard subject in secondary schools now. The result, given a few more advances in software and
hardware, would be much greater utility, control, and interaction with computers, the net, and other
people. More and more programmers will never again be satisfied with closed source. Similarly,
companies will become more wary of closed source and the support or existence of the companies that
create it.
What many of us see is how much better this hard-to-define, but friendly, comfortable, efficient,
rewarding, and fun Open Source (Free Software, etc.) society is than the old world many of us have
suffered through (for 18 years in my case).
As for Linux and Unix, you are also way off base. The beauty of the Unix design is that it is infinitely
extendable to absorb any advance in operating system design that comes out. The interfaces are lean and
clean, the best way to add extensions is generally clear, there is no required truckload of fat if not needed
(I.e. MS's requirement of a single user GUI central OS), and it is practically the definition of stable, open
interfaces. Linux/Unix of today is light-years ahead of Unix 30 years ago, or even 15 years ago when
people had to buy a TCP/IP stack from Wollongong, etc. Just because the core API and concepts have
remained stable longer than a MS marketing cycle does not cast obsolescence on the current incarnation.
The number of individuals and companies making contributions to Linux is growing at an amazing rate. It
has long ago acheived enough critical mass to propel it for the forseeable future. The value proposition,
as the marketing people would say, is very attactive.
sdw
Stephen D. Williams
Remember the visionary from Digital computer Mr Ken Olsen? His comment when the computer industry changed was that "nobody wanted a computer in their home" and DEC as a consequence lost its relevance. Anybody that ignores the Linux / open source movements is just repeating Mr Olsens folly. The world has changed PERIOD, live with it. The comparison to Communism is irrelevant as this was an economy of scarcity, we now have a model based on Plenty. This is a fundamental difference and makes any predictions based on a different set of assumptions meaningless.
Help fight continental drift.
if metcalfe were to read only one reply to his worthless piece i'd make it this one. he's probably never used linux, and his sole exposure to open source appears to be two whole conference talks. he's washed up.
As of Beta 3 *Advanced Server*, the requirements were a Pentium 133 with 64 megs of RAM (128 Recommended!) 2 GB of Hard drive space. This is what the manual/CD tell me.
I'd probably say it will run on a p100 with a lot more RAM (as evidence, I have Win98 Beta running on a p75 with 72 megs RAM at a decent clip, even though retail pads it and says it should run on a p90 or more)
Yes, you can buy your own copy of Workstation, Server and Advanced Server on Microsoft's web site, so you don't have to take my word for it. Yes, Win2K will run on your machine.
Three Step Plan:
1. Take over the world.
2. Get a lot of cookies.
3. Eat the cookies.
There are some 35 million lines of code in Win2k. Approximately 85% (Microsoft Figure: Let's go ahead and say 75%) is NEW code.
Three Step Plan:
1. Take over the world.
2. Get a lot of cookies.
3. Eat the cookies.
With 8,203,248,398,439,298,283 lines of code and counting (or whatever the actual number is). W2K is the Jabba the Hutt of Operating Systems. It will be crushed by its own weight.
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
Nope, emacs isn't better than windows. Vi, on the otherhand, IS better than windows.
Free Mac Mini. Yes, I'm
Hmm, it just so happens that my web site has (and about ALL it has) is an old scan of a DEC ad mentioning ARPA (2 dozen computers).
A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always
valuable. -- Thomas Jefferson
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
That's really funny - choice is *exactely* want we want in the face of encroaching M$ market monopolies, the very antithesis of capitalism; M$ does everything in their deep pocket/marketing power to take away consumer choice and make themselves the default standard("Windows everywhere!") The last thing I'd want personally is to have Linux (or ANYthing) enjoy the 'preloaded os default' that Win9x has among uninformed appliance computer buyers.
*I* enjoy many choices, and would love to share the wonderful experience with others who aren't computer professionals (and as a pro I'm *REALLY* resenting more and more the M$ consumers perpetual ly trying to get 'free' advice on how to deal with the problems they keep having).
M$ hatred is informed by direct personal experience with their lousy, overhyped, liability disclaimered, closed source, vendor locked in, perpetually upgrading whether you want it or not, so-called products! Good for M$, bad
for consumers, period.
Chuck
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Hi Bob,
I appretiate your arguments, especially about the fact that linux is actually a reincarnation of 30 year old technology.
However, I totally disagree to the fact that linux is a communist movement with Linux as the lennin. Linux is more about decentralised controll over the technology rather than anything else.
Democracy should, I think, be a better way of
describing the movement.
I respect microsoft and its products and I admire the amount of work
they have put into it. However the fear in people's
mind is not about the current microsoft products, its more about the
future. There is no democratic government which is
lead by a single party, because the people should always have an
option... so that the rulers always realise that they
have a responsibility towards the people. By saying that Linux would
loose to Microsoft because its like a "communist movement" is incorrect,
because all that the people are looking for is a viable alternative to
microsoft which would maintain a balance of
power in the IT world.
UNIX may be old, just like VAX/VMS is, and NT may be more popular
than Linux, but I still believe that world would move
in a manner to maintain a balance of power to a more democratic setup.
I don't think Linux would have got such a boost in
the last few months if IBM or APPLE had succeeded in their efforts of
putting thier OS to the public.
If linux does become more important tommorow (which I believe it
would) it would not be because of the developers alone,
but also due to people like you and other reporters of all magazines who
discuss linux daily. Some of them just want to focus thier anger
at a giant corporation, some of them like you and me, would try to
justify the linux movement, some of them might be big corporations who
want to support linux only becuase they disagree with microsoft.. and
still there are others who are linux fantics who would do anything to
prove that thier OS is the best.
I also happen to be an MCSE and a very-very big linux fan. I love
both products for thier own unique reasons and am watching the world to
see what they think about it.
Thanks again for the article... it did provoke some intresting thoughts.
Regards,
Royans
K2CFHE
RMS has clearly demonstrated on every single occasion that he subscribes to communist ideals if not the Communist party. I think it would be harsh to label him a Communist in the McCarthy-ism sense, but he clearly wants a world without all the sort of heirarchy the Software insdustry currently has.
(Personally, if anything, I'd be more inclined to call him a socialist, but remember, I'm a Liberal Canadian. *grin*)
-Joe
Don't even grace them by hitting them with your web browser. They just want to see how many of us they can sucker into looking at their adverts.
If we all charge over and look at their crap, they will continue posting stuff like this to get hits.
This sig is false.
However, without hard data to backup the outrageous claim that NT-2000 will kick ass, it will merely remain entertaining.
-- ----------------------------------------------
Vive le logiciel... Libre!!!
I have an IBM ThinkPad 365XD notebook, and it works just fine with Linux. No complaints at all, other than the pathetic 8-bit display (which, of course, isn't Linux' fault :-( ).
PCMCIA Ethernet and modem cards work just great with it. And, X configuration with SaX from SuSE is easy now - it used to be a real horror.
I do think Windows support is a mile wide and an inch thick - I know of darn few people who love the platform.
D
----
Home users don't want to have to call in a child prodigy with a Jolt addiction to get things done.
As opposed to the mentally underdeveloped drooling morons who masquerade as MSCEs?
Almost anyone who has little knowledge of computers has to call in someone once in a while to fix problems, no matter what the OS. If Linux is set up right to begin with (just the way vendors set up preinstalled Win98), there's no reason a Linux user can't do whatever they could do in Windows.
I mean, f'Chrissake, I've seen too many Windows lusers who can't even set up a printer not to be scornful of the attitude that "Linux is too difficult for the average user." The average user has trouble with their VTR, let alone a PC of any type, shape, shade or form.
[FLAME ON]
Hey Metcalfe, what's the problem? Did your doctor take you off your medication? Or maybe you've finally realized that nobody gives a shit anymore that you invented Ethernet (I like the "From the Ether" touch, I really do - classy), so you decide to dump the contents of your intestinal tract all over a technology that might be older, if you ignore the fact that UN*X has evolved considerably from its PDP-8 days?
Well, shit, just let me bend over here so that good ole Bill Gates and his merry band of crack whores - sorry, I mean Visual Basic programmers - can teach me what a REAL OS is like. (I guess one of the conditions for a real OS is that it be several million lines of largely untested code running a whole bunch of integrated applications to suck up all that nasty old CPU power - oh, and it has to be several years late, too.)
Maybe you get a boost to your self-esteem by pulling this kind of bullshit, but why don't you go masturbate somewhere a little more private? I know I sure don't want to see someone expose their complete and total idiocy so flagrantly.
[FLAME OFF]
So I had a bad day at work - sue me.
I've seen Red Hat 5.2 and 6.0 at both the local CompUSA and the local Best Buy. CompUSA even keeps a rack of 6.0 right in front of the registers and has a few commercial Linux apps (CodeWarrior is the only one that comes to mind) on the shelf as well.
Granted, there's still a lot more M$ software there, but we've made more progress than you seem to think.
It's kind of interesting that this post is marked up as "insightful". Fact is that Win95 uses DOS (IO.SYS) as pretty much a boot loader only. It's like judging Linux on LILO.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Your post sounds like wishful thinking. I would expect Windows 2000 to ship in the fall of 1999, and if you've been seeing a little anti-Linux FUD here and there, the explosion is really going to hit when W2000 finally ships. So, stock up on the ammo, Linux advocates.
However, if you are actually responsible for IT decisions (and not just chatting on
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
It seems this is another article that offers nothing to either side of the linux argument. Besides being vague to the point of using obtuse analogies, Metcalfe doesn't offer any reason why Linux really sucks. He is like a cow, eaitng grass, passing gas all day. (How's that for an analogy?)
Those who do not want Linux to win, will be silent. They will not help us by pointing out Linux's flaws. Those who want attention will either tout or slander Linux. These people are useless and should be ignored by all. Those who are proponents of Linux will point out flaws and nitpick, showing us where Linux needs attention, these people need to be heeded.
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
Oh, yeah! I'm gonna drop Emacs and code in Word!! On a second thought, there is WP, StarOffice, ABI and many other Word-like programs for Linux already, I'm now gonna code in WP.
Emacs is NOT a word processor.
Yeah, right. And PCs are 50 years old, since they are still built based on the Von Neumann's work. Okay, there are some trivial things such as pipelines and the like, but everything is still the same, right? Like Linux!
I found that article more destructive and insulting like anything. "Richard Stallman's Marx rants", "Disagreeing even on how to pronounce Linux" and his implication that open source software can't create "modern software".
Alejo.
I just wanted to say I agree wholeheartedly.
The real advantage of running X for me is that I can have many consoles opened (each inside its own xterm window), see more information at the same time (continually see the load, number of smtp connections, last mails I have received and the like) and see images. But I would rather be in plain text than trapped inside X with whatever Window Manager but without an xterm.
Alejo.
My first reaction is too laugh. At the beginning, I was curious - in the middle I was confused. Then I read the end, where he claims "NT, now approaching 23x6 availability, is already overpowering Linux." That got me laughing, all right.
30-year-old technology? What about all the enhancements and improvements that have been developed in the past 30 years? What about other old stuff that's still the backbone of computing, like, oh, say the 26-year-old Ethernet? Then what about the spritely youth of the 5-year old, no - 15 year old, no - 20 year old, no... How old is Windows/DOS anyhow? It's had so many facelifts I doubt even Gates remembers. I'm half convinced that the entire column was either a joke or a tentative stab to see if we were still alive...
As to the comparison of the "OSM" to communism - what does that make Microsoft? A dictator and a warlord. Hmm.
James Ojaste
I agree with the end note of the article..
what comes next? Linux is "Me Too Technology"
unix has been done to death... if you think
you have all this "vast and superior talent"
why not do something really new, rather than
hash over the same problems that has been solved
by commercial unixes.
ROTFLMAO!!
So what does this mean? Microsoft is hoping that NT eventually only be up 138 out of the total 168 hours in a week?
23x6 availability is the only correct fact in the entire article -- just do the math:
Let's see - 30 hours missing, ~2 minutes for a reboot (based on the NT server I occasionally use) - that's 900 reboots, or around 5-6 reboots an hour.
A lot of people here seem to be making a large logical fallacy by assuming that:
A: Communism = bad
B: Closed source = bad
C: Closed cource = Communism
and working from there (working backwards from the conclusion). Also, people seem to have a need to align software development models on one particular system of production. But it doesn't work out that way.
Remeber what RMS has said about Free software and why it isn't Communist- you can replicate a program infintely easier than replicating a commercial product, like, say, a car. So right there, you have to see you're dealing with an entirely different way of looking at the process of production.
There is also the question of motivation for open sourcing software- a lot of times, necessity being the mother of invention, people open source a program they've written because they need a program that does something like that (e.g., Apache). It's akin to a post-Marxist socialist world, where people build a dam not because they need something to do, want credit for building the thing, or want to charge people for the electricity produced-- they just needed a dam to be built. And everybody who can pitches in, because they'll be benefitting from it.
As for closed source development, let's just look at the facts and say that since software companies charge for their software and (in some cases) deriving profit from the sale of that software, they are capitalists. Simple, no? They are the ones exploiting their software programmers of their labor-power, to put it in Marxian terms.
I'd go on, but I think you get the point.
Zonker Harris "There is not, nor ought there be, any food more exalted on the face of god's grey earth, than that
After all, he predicted the internet would collapse under its own weight a couple of years ago. I notice that once again he's predicting its imminent failure.
The fact is, the situation is a simple "Linux vs. Windows, winner take all." Both are going to survive and prosper.
Also, I take issue with his statement that Linux is based on 60's technology and therefore bad. I would use the word "proven". I'd certainly rather be using 60's based Linux than, say, 70's based DOS, 80's based MacOS, or 90's based Win95.
What I meant, of course, was:
The fact is, the situation is *NOT* a simple "Linux vs. Windows, winner take all." Both are going to survive and prosper.
Don't confuse the method of distribution (cash money sales vs. free downloads) with the overall philosophy guiding the two software models.
Open Source is much more like capitalism than marxism -- ideas that are strong gain support based upon their inherent strength, not because XYZ supports it. If enough people have an interest in some feature (and it doesn't seem to take too many), that feature seems to get added and supported. The guiding goal is increasing functionality, just as capitalism has the goal of increasing capital. And sometimes it's the the detriment of the overall usefulness of the product (eg. lots of features vs. poor documentation).
Closed source is much more Fascist/Stalinist -- an idea is pushed by the marketing/PR propaganda mill (think of a 70-foot Stalin on the wall, and now think of an MS billboard). Attempts to question the technology/leadership/wisdom of closed source vendors and you are quickly banished/ignored. (How many times have you been kicked off of a vendor forum for complaining about bugs?). The guiding prinicipal is the glorification of the state/company. Software functionality is only added to the extent it furthers glorification of the software company, otherwise it is not added. Just as in a closed economy, capital expansion is only taken to the extent that it serves the needs of the state.
I wonder why a hardware inventor would have a negative response to an OS that supports his hardware? Maybe Bill sent him a check?
Microsoft aggravates my tourettes syndrome.
Or maybe when you said "kill UNIX," you were just exaggerating and meant "do some serious damage to UNIX." Well, buddy, wake up and take a look around you. It has.
SCO? Oh, the humanity! SGI? Well, maybe they can make some money on those new NT boxes they're selling. HP-UX and AIX? Ha, HP and IBM are now embracing NT harder than they've ever embraced their own flavors of UNIX. MacOS X Server? Stillborn. Hell, why stop at just UNIX? Novell? Nice mini-comeback lately, but oh, how the mighty have fallen. Banyan? We hardly knew ye. OS/2? Sorry, looks like half an OS just won't cut it for anything but ATMs these days. BSD? Sorry, NT, but I'll have to give Linux the credit for beating down those guys -- they shouldn't worry, though; I imagine BSD'll be what a lot of the current Linux users will flock to when they finally get sick of the hype.
Oh well, at least Sun and Linux should stay strong, but I don't think the other UNIX vendors will soon forget the bitch-slapping that NT has given them.
Cheers, :)
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Happy Win2K/RH Linux 6.0/BeOS R3 (I know, I know)/Solaris 2.6 user
OK yes bob is wrong on a couple of things
first lets see what M$ has in store for direct X
linux needs to sort out OpenGL NOW!!!!!
games are where desktop is
word processing is cool but people dont care as long as it formats it the way they like (EASY to USE)
can you say APPLE
Linux is server software same with any unix it is made to dev on
ah well bob you just lost alot of cred
Cya john
a poor student @ bournemouth uni in the UK (a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)
Not sure if it's true or not, but it certainly makes sense --- if 1% of /. readership follows a link posted by Hemos or CmdrTaco, that's approx. 10K pageviews for ya, free of charge.
=moJ
- - - - - -
swagmag.com
From a software engineering standpoint, open source is much more akin to the free market. Open source is described in terms of the "bazaar model". Monolithic corporate software, driven by marketroids and lawyers, is much more akin to the economic model of the Soviet Union. The Central Committee of Redmond decides that, for legal reasons, they need to integrate the browser into the OS as much as possible. While this is a highly dubious decision from a practical standpoint, Chairman Bill has decided, and so it is done.
Free software follows a certain communitarian ideal, but it follows the ideal of "free speech", as distinguished from "free beer".
Open source and free software are based on the free market and free speech. Closed source software is often based on monopoly and central planning that runs contrary to the needs of the user. Metcalfe has it completely backwards.
Open Source is much more like capitalism than marxism ...
Excellent point. To summarize my favorite responses to the "Open Source is Communism" chestnut:
1. It is literally untrue, and there is no figurative way to interpret it that stands up; i.e., it is a meaningless "argument".
2. Open Source means Free Software. Lack of freedom is supposed to be the biggest danger of communism; Open Source is the opposite.
3. Open Source works. Linux, sendmail, PERL, etc. are far, far more reliable than NT, Exchange, ASP, etc. Incompetence and market failure are the second biggest danger of communism; Open Source is the opposite.
4. Open Source is the marketplace of ideas. The currency is attention and respect. The positive externalities are fun, and a sense of (voluntarily) contributing to make the world nicer. Most people would say this is the opposite of communism, and the best environment that capitalism could provide.
5. Red-baiting is evil. Disparaging a person or idea as communistic does as much to degrade a dialogue as comparing someone to Hitler. Neither trick is "cute", since both try to connect someone to systems of slavery, oppression, and murder.
"Then he goes on to take a Linus Torvalds' quote out of context"
By showing his tremendous insight into the meaning and background of what Linus means when he says he's aiming for "world dominance", Mr Metcalfe is showing us to be one of the few people that believe that saying "We're going to chew them up and spit them out" by a sports coach to a team before a game actually has anything to do with the consumption of food.
Don't feed the trolls. I am assuming Mr Metcalfe is in full mental health and concluding he's not trying to specifically talk pro Windows or con Linux, he's just trying to make waves.
Have another one, Bob! Just take a cab when you're going back home.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
The whole Community ownership of property idea is because of scarce resources. Communism is attempting to address the same problems as capitalism, just in a different way.(Planned economy as opposed to market economy).
Since it costs nearly nothing to make 10, 100, or 100,000 copies of software, the capitalist/communist argument doesn't fly.(The scarce resources aren't there) Keeping source code secret does nothing but prevent the user(if they choose) from using their software tools to their fullest extent. The argument is against closed and open ideas here, not about money and resources(which is what capitalism and communism is about).
If only Linux was as good as the USSR, still we can
only hope.
Aside from that why does slashdot still post these
utterly fact and logic free rantings from
various computer pundits.
Do they have a deal with Infoworld?
Slashdot proletarians demand to know.
Open source has been around a lot longer than closed source. Thats not something your going to hear from people running around predicting the end of Open source.
The reality is Closed and Open source both work but in todays busness invironment of secrets and protecting your invenstments the vertues of open source are hard to visualise.
The best example I can come up with is when hardware venders close sorce the drivers and refuse to provide any sort of specs to anyone.
They lose site of the fact that the real investment is in the hardware and sealing it off only hurts that investment.
There are times when there is something to lose by giving out the source code and it's fair to expect companys to want to protect themselfs with closed source. Right now however busnessmen are just affrade of looking at open source.
Remeber WWIV, Cnet, VBBS, and DYM were all open source. Thies are long before the open source movement really started going and DYM predates GNU.
I rember when people were mad that Microsoft didn't provide the source code to MsDos. I supported Microsoft on that and I still do. The whole idea of open source was alive even then.
UNIX System philosophy Simply Stated
"Build on the work of others"
AT&T UNIX System V Programmer's Guide
1986
The very heart and soul of open source.... Unix... and the Internet...
In every way this is Linux....
I belive in power of commerce I also belive in open source becouse they are both proven.
I don't actually exist.
As long as we're pulling out historical analogies, I think Metcalfe sounds like Abby Hoffman: "Never trust anyone over 30". His comment about Linux's impending senility is especially ironic given the vast influence of Unix on the Windows APIs (cloning much of the standard C libraries; the very use of C itself). Also, I find it hilarious that the bottom of Metcalfe's column points out that he invented Ethernet in 1973. I guess it will soon be time to dump Ethernet too. It is getting on in years, and you know we are running out of IP addresses. And what's with these numbered ports? Ports should be objects, located by a naming service implemented in microcode, the BIOS, or at worst, the OS kernel.
You haven't installed any of the latest Distros have you? About the only piece missing is InstallShield(tm), but RPM works quite nicely (Now that they finally killed GLINT for GnoRPM).
The underlying OS is generally not all that important to Joe User. However, when something goes wrong, and they call their Brother/Father, or bring it to someone to fix it (BTW, most "Joe" users end up having SOMEONE fix their Windows machines for them) It's A LOT easier to fix/clean up Linux than WinXX. And you don't need to do it nearly as often.
-- Keith Moore
This sig is the express property of someone.
"To the Editor:
Bob Metcalfe's "Linux's '60s technology, open-sores ideology won't beat W2K, but what will?" should be relegated to the same garbage heap as the opinions of those who hold that tobacco smoking isn't hazardous to your health or that the Holocaust never really occured. He uses the same circular reasoning and knee-jerk Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt propaganda disguised as logic as any hyperconservative reactionary. Metcalfe's two main points are never really backed up in any useful way.
His assertion that "the Open Source Movement's ideology is utopian balderdash" is ostensibly backed by two flimsy metaphors. He starts by comparing Open Source Software to Communism and then the Back-to-the-Earth Movement and then making statements that attempt at debunking those two philisophical ideologies, which is intended to sabotage OSS's credibility. But where's the link between OSS and Communism, for example? Because they're both shamelessly idealistic? Are we to believe that just because Communists also had an idea that was different for the time and had a good go but failed at making it work out, OSS should fail as well? Or is it that the Open source community isn't making any money, just as Communism attempts in a different way to abolish class distinctions? Does the quality of a product come from the fact that the authors profited from it? Obviously not; the proof is in the statistics. Just browse the Web and look for Linux server uptime stats vs. those of NT.
Metcalf's other main assertion, that "Linux is 30-year-old technology," also implies fallacious reasoning. He even earlier counterdicts it himself, saying decent software "... can't be written in a weekend" How does Linux ask us to ignore "three decades of innovation?' It's not as if the Unix concept was implimented once and then abandoned, and now the Linux community is trying to emulate a product from thirty years ago. Besides, do we abandon our automobiles because they're based on 115 year-old technology? (As an aside: So many Microsoft backers use the term 'innovation' when they really should be saying "proprietary standards leveraged by an undue market share used to further eliminate competetion.") Then Metcalf goes on to demolish his own point by openly saying that "W2K is software also from the distant past -- VAX/VMS for Windows," Why the hell should we keep on reading at this point? Got me.
I'm not saying that my arguments above imply that there will be a Linux firestorm tomorrow that will put Microsoft out of business. All I'm trying to say is that an op-ed piece has to do a little more than express an opinion and pad the rest of the article out with rhetorical bunk. If this sort of vapid tripe passes as publishable material at your mag, may I offer my own services as an author? Benefit to you: rational, well thought-out opinions, that, while not always true, at least advance the public debate. Benefit to me: the opportunity to be inebriated at work and still do a better job than the last guy."
cygnus
Just raise the taxes on crack.
... don't exactly make a compelling social or technical argument, as far as I'm concerned.
I'm not sure what to say about the Red-baiting ... other than that Bob Metcalf needs to read the GNU Manifesto, then read some Karl Marx, and then compare the two. He could even ask his editor to help him understand any big words.
Hints for those who don't already know their Marx -- KM advocates centralization of property ownership via the State, RMS does not. KM advocates armed revolution, RMS advocates writing and sharing code, and "make it do or do without." Both KM and RMS are offended by Large Corporate Power, monopolistic practices, and treating workers like automatons. I guess that must be the part that makes RMS a Communist -- except if that were the definition of Communist, the Pope is a Bolshevik as well.
As for starvation, Metcalf claims
This is utterly false. "Back to the earth" agriculture is demonstrably more productive, on a per-acre basis, with less loss of soil productivity than conventional agribusiness-style agriculture. It just doesn't lend itself as well to the high-growth, high-profit corporate model.
There is an interesting parallel between free/open-source software and a more low-input/localized/sustainable agriculture, compared to the centralized, proprietary corporate model that Metcalf seems to prefer. In both cases (software and agriculture), there is almost certainly less money to be made, total, using the "crunchy granola" approach. However, that money will be made, in software, by smaller companies (perhaps even individuals) who will not have the ability to dominate the industry in the way of Microsoft or to get as rich as Bill Gates by manipulating markets. Similarly, in agriculture, the low-input methods are better for farmers, who have a chance to make a decent and secure living, but bad for the stockholders of Monstanto and Cargill (who get rich and powerful by proprietary IP such as gene patents and by market manipulation).
For documentation of the agriculture issues, a good start is Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity by Frances Moore Lappe (out of print, according to Amazon.com) and The Unsettling of America : Culture & Agriculture by Wendell Berry. Lappe deals with the global issues of agriculture, agribusiness, and world hunger, Berry focuses on the effects of agribusiness on America.
"Big Business and State Socialism are very much alike, especially Big Business." -- G. K. Chesterton
It seems to reactonary and knee-jerk ignorant at first glance. It reminds me of my dad who can't end a conversation with me without using the phrase "hippy-dippie" at least once.
Many of his points seem to espouse an ignorance of the current state of things. His overall point that "open-sores" technology is perpetually beta and full of bugs as opposed to windows (which is of course perfect) is quite far from the truth.
When Win2K comes around I will at home still use linux most of the time. I may try out W2K at work and after the second or third service pack venture into that dark hole. We will not use W2K at my office unless Microsoft give my department at WSU a site license (as they did for win95). I have allready begun investigating Linux/Be/BSD as alternatives and there are currently a few computers on my floor running those OS's.
This prediction has very little impact on me, and I doubt it will come to pass.
Many people have tried to compare the Open Source community to some existing social structures. It seems to me, though, that it is closest to that of the Bene Gesserit. They have a society where criticism is welcome, and is in fact relied on to keep the Sisterhood strong. Open Source also requires everyone who can to participate in strengthening the existing basis (the code). There's nothing else quite like it.
(This view of the Bene Gesserit is explained in most detail in "Chapterhouse: Dune".)
Oh, and they survived many thousands for years, as I am sure Linux will aswell *grin*. In fact, as long as there is no Butlerian Jihad, the Sisterhood will probably run Linux on their Mentats...
Off-topic - given Muad'dib, can I call CreateMuadDibSection to get a Muad'ddb?
'nuff said
"640K should be enough for anyone."
-- Attributed to Bill Gates, c. 1983.
"Linux would fizzle against Windows"
-- Bob Metcalfe, 1999.
I feel that this remark will come back to haunt him.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
It comes down to the degredation of thought when
using a computer.
Microsoft and Apple have created an environment that
pretty much allows someone to use a computer without
thinking. Of course they get what they think for.
In reality... If a user has never used a computer before
it's easier for them to learn Linux and much less painful
in the long run than if they have been corrupted
by Microshaft or Apple.
It's not that Linux is 'Too Hard' to learn... it's that
it's different than the pre-processed baby food pc companies
have been feeding them and calling good.
It's better. Ok.. so it's not as polished and supported.
That's changing quickly and I for one am glad to see
the slow migration away from the 'other' OS's....
I'd like to see the bsd's and such have as much interest as well.
I'll even bet that if you fed Gates some sodium
pentathol that he would admit that his OS is
a huge ball of garbage code that should be flushed.
There's the right way to do things... and then there's the
Microsoft/Apple way to do things.
Fortunately there are more right ways to do things
than wrong ways.
(I love this quote) 'A computer without Microsoft,
Gee... that's like chocholate cake without mustard.'
Friends don't let friends buy Compaq's. (Dell/Gateway... same same) You want a good computer? Build it yourself.
I'm sorry to be so blatantly off-topic, but your closing remark reminded me of a snippet of dialogue from the TV show "Newsradio."
Dave Nelson: Have you ever heard the expression "You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar?"
Bill McNeal: No. Have you ever heard the expression "Only a hillbilly sits around thinking up the best way to catch flies?"
Well, I thought it was funny...
Oh, dear. Wasn't Metcalfe the guy who predicted the collapse of the Internet? If he is, I wonder why he still has credibility with anyone. Oh, well.
The best thing to do with something like this (vague, unsupported pronouncements) is probably to ignore it. Personally, I'm very tired of loudly justifying myself and Linux. I intend to just continue doing what I do now -- getting amazing work done more quickly than any of my cohorts who use another OS that shall remain nameless...
Short story: I agree with Bob's outcome, unfortunately. Here's the email I sent him.
Discuss amongst yourselves.
Hi Bob,
I applaud the apparantly huge cajones you must have to write
such an article about Linux. I agree with you, but for slightly
different reasons. Both Windows and Linux are based on old
technology. Average people like Windows/Macs. Programmer geeks
often like Linux (I use it affectionately... I'm a programmer
geek, too). There are more average people than programmer geeks --
Linux doesn't stand a chance, unless it can re-draw itself as
user friendly. And once it does that, those Linux geeks will
leave in droves.
I actually spoke with one such geek at school this week who told
me, "I don't like GUI's." I was blown away. Many of these Linux
geeks love the Star Trek shows -- why aren't they enamored with
cool user interfaces yet? Star Trek is full of them. When was the
last time Capt. Picard said, "Computer, please bring up the
command-line display." Do these same geeks REALLY think the
future in operating systems has such an archaic interface as Linux?
These are the same people that tout X-windows, then laugh at
Windows 9x users for their "GUI over a shell." Excuse me?
I wish it wasn't like this. I hate Microsoft's tactics and
their monopoly. What we need is a new OS, built with modern
technology and programming techniques. I believe that OS is
BeOS. It's still very new, especially on the Intel platform,
but it has a bright future if Be can stay in the black long
enough to get a solid presence on store shelves. Gassee is one
of the few people I've read that really understands how Microsoft
is controlling the software/OS market, and has good ideas on
how to defeat them. Read his article on "cracks in the walls."
I've used Windows 3.0 to 2000, Linux (various distributions),
BeOS, MacOS. They all have their merits, and the popularity of
one or the other has more to do with politics and monopolies
than real benefits. However, Linux will never find a place on the
average person's desktop until and unless they rewrite most of
the OS to get away from the commandline-with-GUI-on-top approach.
No matter how nice KDE or Gnome look, they will always feel like
a kludge: the look-and-feel across applications is not standardized,
something that is necessary for a user-friendly UI. This is where
BeOS, MacOS, and even Windows excel.
But I hear the Linux zealots screaming out, "We're more stable!"
That might be true -- if you can correctly configure and install
the OS, compile the customized kernel with the latest stable
drivers, and have a good working knowledge of unix and network
security. Windows NT and 2000 are stable (when compared to
Windows 9x), without needing to know all the lower-level stuff.
BeOS, still in an early stage of it's life, is rock-solid stable. It
takes 5-10 seconds for it to boot up. It rarely requires rebooting,
even when upgrading key components on the machine. You can update
your networking settings, and restart only the network. It is POSIX
compliant, has a great bash shell. On the flip side, it doesn't
sacrifice the GUI -- integrated from the beginning; no add-on hack.
It has cool, modern features which you've no doubt read about in
most BeOS press releases. But they're not just buzzwords. The 64-bit,
journaling filesystem allows for huge file sizes and fast recovery
after power failures. The SMP (symmetric multi-processing) is indeed
pervasive, because unlike NT (and perhaps Linux?), the threading of
the applications runs deep. When you add 1, 3 or 7 more processors
to your system, your application speeds will all increase. The OS
is built upon object-oriented techniques. I haven't had a chance to
write anything for it yet, but I've seen the API's like the Media Kit,
and they make me WANT to write software for the BeOS. Much like Java's
design makes so much sense to many people, the design and API's for
BeOS are similarly ingenious.
But I'm not some marketing drone -- BeOS does have downsides. First
and foremost, it needs more hardware support on Intel. That is to
be understood, they've only had 3 releases on the Intel architecture,
and they only have about 80 programmers, not the thousands available
to Microsoft and Apple.
Second, they are positioning BeOS as an OS suited for "internet
appliances." Perhaps its just a buzzword to help their IPO. However,
if true, they need to support Java with a full port, ASAP. They also
need to get the multi-user environment in place quickly (currently
slated for their 5th or 6th release, I believe). Perhaps their network
stack in the latest 4.5 release is improved, but based on the one in
release 4, they need to spend more time on its performance.
I hope when BeOS matures a little more, they will release parts of
their OS as open source. Especially things having to do with security,
networking, and the like. Those areas are Microsoft's Achilles' heel
right now. I get, seemingly, an email every week with the latest
reported problem with Microsoft's security or networking bugs. The same
is true with alerts regarding Linux security/networking, but at least
these bugs can be found and fixed within hours.
You mentioned Java as a possibility for a new OS. I have to agree.
When I had more time, I was working on a project called JOS (jos.org).
I believe once they get a working, stable kernel available, you will
begin to see that project move along rapidly (or should I say, *rabidly*).
They are in planning hell right now; something Linux didn't have to
worry about because of the nature of its birth. The kernel is the key.
And I'm sure once they get going, they could use some help writing
some networking classes. Perhaps an ethernet card driver, Bob? (Hint, hint.)
Regards,
Thomas
--
Why are there so many Unix-using Star Trek fans?
When was the last time Picard said, "Computer, bring
Maybe Bob's just a realist. Not an optimist nor a pessimist. I don't always agree with him, but in this case I do. He and I both realize that the world is not filled with "educated technology-users." The majority of people want a
user-friendly computer that runs a lot of applications and works most of the time. Windows 2000 fits that bill, for better or worse.
-WW
--
Why are there so many Unix-using Star Trek fans?
When was the last time Picard said, "Computer, bring
It is if they can't figure out why the hell some obscure flag set in /etc keeps them from doing something.
probably for the same reason they can't find the hidden registry key in windows that is making an incorrectly installed program that illegal ops and hangs the computer start at bootup.
i really wish people would take this windows is simple shit and shove it up their asses sideways. windows is not simple. far from it.
and to the guy who said that unix is the most user UNfriendly enviroment...you have obviously NEVER used OpenVMS.
you have obviously never worked a job where you deal with "average user". an average user does not pop a disk into a floppy drive and then proceeds to follow the on-screen directions. they won't bother installing a new printer. they'll have someone do it for them.
/etc and its subdirectories. in windows, you just have to check or uncheck something. it's not too much more difficult for the knoledgeable person (the only one who would be messing with the darn settings anyway) to open a .conf file in their favorite editor and uncomment a line.
linux is obviously not the perfect enviroment for average joe user. i think that the "user friendly" factor of windows is way overstated. it's not as obvious as you think to some folks. work tech support at an isp for a week and then comment on how easy windows is for joe user.
for anyone other than joe user, saying linux is impossible is just the kneejerk reaction of a gui snob. most, if not all, of your settings are in
bottom line. joe user has a learning curve no matter if he has windoze, a mac(k) , or a unix. the only reason people are using windows today is because bill gates was a little better at the stealing game than the competition was. not because of any supposed great leaps of user-friendliness.
I really can't think of any like the free flow of information that is quite so un-communist.
actually, the free flow of information is most decidely un-capitalist!
don't think of the state capitalist countries like the former soviet union and china as communist countries. that's like calling hitler a socialist because his party was actually named the national socialist party.
He's been reading too much Dave Barry, and wants to take over his job now ;)
-----
kernel: lp0: using parport0 (polling).
kernel: lp0 off-line
kernel: lp0 out of paper
--
perl -e'$_=shift;die eval' '"$^X $0\047\$_=shift;die eval\047 \047$_\047"' at -e line 1.
His point is even weaker than you suggest. The QWERTY keyboard hasn't changed much over the years, but to compare Linux 2.2 with the original UN*X is like comparing the PIII with the 186
Why is everyone so determined to make linux into something more than it is? Linux is a powerful operating system designed from the perspective that the people using it would know what they were doing, would contribute improvements to make it better, and would use it and be happy.
Why is it now a way of life? A philosophy, hell almost a religion? Why is big business looking to linux to increase its capital? Why is my computer's operating system being compared to economic philosophy? It just runs programs.
I don't really care what metcalfe or anyone else says. I use linux because I like linux. It is stable and does everything I want it to do. There is no need for me to compare torvalds to lenin.
OS development is turning into a holy war, and for what? Since linux's inception it has been a revolutionary concept -- allowing the system administrator and other creative persons to adjust the way their computer works to fit their own needs. I like that idea. But why is it that now people are only concerned with benchmarking, uptime statistics, philosphy, capital, big business, etc?
Simply put, if you use linux you have your own reasons for doing so. You like it or you don't. If you don't like it, then you don't need to use it. But there is no reason to debate over it. It either meets your needs/wants/hopes/desires/dreams, or it doesn't.
My god people, its just an operating system. Its not a way of life. Its not some uber-enlightenment period in the history of mankind. Use it or don't. Just stop whining.
'Nuff said.
Not drinking, chasing women, or doing drugs won't make you live longer--it just seems that way.
...Mr. Metcalf may be right. Windows has just gotten too big, even for itself. And Gates won't let it leave just like that, especally because it won't. Remember those +12mil AOL users? They're all using Windows...
They actually have more than 17 million now.. surprisingly enough they use unix for their infrastructure, but don't have a *nix client.
AOL's marketing strategy revolves around people who have never used computers before in their lives. So far, its made them a lot of money.
Windows is easy. Change is hard. Windows gets shoved in their faces on a daily basis, and that's how they know it exsists. It's marketing, people, the same way AOL made it's fortune. Linux has no marketing as of now, and if we wish to save it, we're gonna need one hell of a marketing strategy by the time W2K comes out.
Save it from what? Linux is free. Its not in the business of making money. There is no threat of it being annihilated, it does not require any revenue to continue, linux is self-supporting. So what if there are more people on AOL than use linux. If they don't want linux, too bad for them -- it is their loss.
And secondly, more software needs to be avalible to the masses that's Linux-compatable in order for this thing to work.
Go out and buy a book or two on programming -- and start coding. Thats how linux started, and thats the way it should continue to be. Its what made linux better than offerings from the big businesses, and its what will allow linux to continue to be good.
Not drinking, chasing women, or doing drugs won't make you live longer--it just seems that way.
Metcalfe invented Ethernet. And then what? Maybe the guy is a genius or whatever you want to call him, but even geniuses can be wrong. After all, they're human beings just like you and me.
:)
This interview sounds like the guy is bitter at something or someone. I mean, ethernet is a PARC invention, isn't it? I seriously doubt he INVENTED it ALL BY HIMSELF. And not getting any royalties on it makes him jealous of Gates for being outsmarted on that one... I dunno.
But what I see through this article is that he's against the fact that some talented people actually *do* something without a dollar-hunger in their minds. He's against people who *want* to improve things without charging for bugfixes.
Comparing the Open source Community to Communism makes me smile. Maybe software is the only domain in which *communism* actually works, and works well. I don't see it as evil... Of course, it goes against the allmighty capitalism, but for what capitalism has done to the planet, I'd rather go with the Open Source Community summer camps.
And, for being long today, I'd like to add that all those hippie ideas Metcalfe seems to be against are at the origin of concepts such as *ecology*. Then again, the allmighty American capitalists are the biggest polluters. I find it quite a shameful analogy to BAD software you have to pay a lot for.
Bah, I'm gonna make plenty of ennemies anyway, so make it quick...
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
I thought there was yet another a month or two back.
One may wonder whether some big corporation isn't shelling out big bucks for "expert witnesses" outside the courtroom as well.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Emacs, I am sure, took longer than a weekend to write. I wonder what the author of this article wrote last weekend that can compete with Emacs?
Why must technology be new in order to be acceptable?
Old technology works.
New technology has bugs.
This will be so for a long time, so we better learn to deal with it.
What is the fascination with abandoning technology? The internal combustion engine is decades old. The basic design hasn't changed considerably from the original. Numerous other machines (like the helicopter) wouldn't have been possible without it, yet few people have suggested we abandon it even if newer technology is available to replace it.
Also, is it possible that Linux and the open-source idea are closer to democracy? If a majority of programmers prefer a certain approach, it becomes a part of the system, yet all programmers have a voice.
Just a thought.
The Cat
Bob, I'm sure you're getting a ton of flames about your column. While I certainly disagree with you, I won't call you names. At least I know that you know something about computers, unlike so many other folks in the media.
That being said, I am sorely disappointed by your column. It has absolutely zero content. If you want to bash Linux, fine, bash away. But from you, I expect a lot more. I expect specific technical issues, not vague mumblings about communism. Simply saying "Linux sucks because it's old and because some of the people who work on it have odd
political leanings" is about as weak an argument as it gets.
The argument "it's bad because it's old" is as silly as "it's better because it's new". Quite frankly, I'd rather run a company based on boring old stable and time-tested software rather than an OS which isn't even out of diapers yet, and contains bad implementations of every gee-whiz feature Bill gates could come up with to expand his empire. So your argument that "Linux is bad because UNIX is old" just amuses me.
And in the same way, your assertion that "Linux is bad because the programmers are weird" is pretty silly, as well. I don't care whether the programmers think the moon is made of green cheese. I only care how good the code is. And the two have zero to do with each other.
Finally, as for "Win2K" trouncing Linux, that one makes me laugh, but all we can do is wait and see.
I've read your piece 3 times, combing it for any small bit of fact, detail, or anything solid. I find nothing. This piece could have been written by my 14-year-old cousin. He also things that anything old is bad, and that weird people suck. C'mon, Bob. You're a computer professional and have a lot more technical knowledge. Is *this* the best you can do? Puh-lease. I see better arguments against Linux from pointy-haired bosses. At least *they* sometimes I have - or had - a lot more respect for you.
Well, take from the article what you will, but I read it as very sarcastic. His 23/6 comment was only the most obvious indication. His complaints about Linux being 60's technology seem to point to the fact that while the basis of Windows has changed a great deal over the years, Linux/Unix has eveloved but remained very stable. As for the purposeful factual errors (17% of servers being Unix and a small percentage of that being Linux - we know it's 17 and 17 making 34% according to IDC), they seem also to point out that Linux is currently in use while Win2k is still vapourware and promises at the moment...it's marketshare is 0%! Metcalfe seems to be parroting the views of a lot of the CIO/managers/general public out there have in regard to Linux and thus challenging us in the community to destroy these myth in the corporate/public culture. Think about it. How many of your project managers or MIS managers beleive exactly what Metcalfe said? Most I think.
Help destroy the myths about Linux.
Is linux perfect? No not really, it probably needs a few more years to develop (GUIs, drivers, ease of use...the same old arguements). But unlike Win2K, it can be used and updated now and at a very attractive price.
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
You have to walk before you run. Linux has gain alot of of ground in the past couple of month and everyday new things are brought out. Sure, I don't run it fully @ home, that's becuase of some of the programs i'm using, but with in the next year that linux should have enought support behind it and devolpement, that it will be able to really compete.
That's one of the reasons I start the Slashmeat Distro, to help progress the stuck current movemnet in distros. If you think about it, there is not much diffrent between distros.
I don't see a big picture of 2000 hitting the home user desktops, but I do see linux in the future replace the 9x series, becuase more and more people are starting to hear about linux, and yes it's becoming me too, but 'me too' mean more users and more support. With all the programming support going into linux, I feel that in the next 2 year that MS will need to come up with something more revolutionary to make a stand against linux, maybe something stable.
If the above doesn't make sense, to bad, i'm at work and also working while typing this up.
I ate my tag line.
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
First of all, I guess that I don't have to tell you that Linux is only the kernel. You know that. :-) As Linus says, if a function can be done in user-space, it will never be implemented in kernel-space. As I see it, the result of this is a very stable kernel. How about the kernels that Microsoft develops?
But is Linux perfect? Nope. There is much I don't like with Linux, but NT is not an option - it has too many bells and whistles that use CPU without giving me anything back. But that's not the worst...
What I rely dislike in the world of windows, is the strong locking of the data files. I mean, take a look at Word. Who owns the format your data is saved in? The users? No, they use the data formats to lock us users into an upgrade spiral that only the developers will earn on. And I'm not talking about Microsoft alone here - there are a lot of thieves in this temple. If a company can develop a good word processor that uses for example pure XML or SGML, and I can use it to exchange documents with the rest of the world, I would gladly change my operating system. I believe that proprietary data formats will be a bigger problem to us than Y2K is. Think about all users that has archived all documents in Word, and then suddenly must read data that is four or five (sw) generations old?
In Norway no governmental organization are allowed to use proprietary binary formats to archive data. Until they can prove that they have a working solution that takes care of the visual integrity of a document, without being locked to a given program (that can be outdated years before the document), they have to use paper archives in addition to computer based archives. Personally I don't believe that we will see a solution to this in the next five years. Of course, we have the standards, but nowadays most people are more engaged in the user interface than they are in the data they produce.
What I see in the Linux community is a lot of people caring about the format we use to save our data in. This gives me a stronger belief in Linux than in other operating systems.
Try THIS exceptionally devious method to starve trolls:
.) A few tens or hundreds of people doing this on a regular basis can do amazing things. . .
Go to each troll page. Click on the banner ads. Then write each webmaster why you will NEVER buy their products or services if they advertise on sites which are such obvious trolls and flamebait, and then show why the article is a troll and flamebait. Then mention how much of the type of services and/or products they advertise that you buy, or influence buying.
Trust me. After a few weeks of this, editorial tastes will be QUITE changed. As always, remain cool, calm, and collected; argue from established fact and logic, not just claiming that Linux rocks (even though it does. .
When you consider that emacs has been around 2x as long as Word, you have to wonder what this author is smoking. And he insinuated that everything in Linux is slapped together on the weekend, and that we are all addicted to caffiene. He thinks Open source is Communist or Socialist, and he's welcome to think that. He's wrong, but he's welcome to do so.
Lowmag.net
While this is a neat idea, it isn't too practical. Rob might instead just put a disclaimer, like:
While Metcalfe has said some snarky flamebait bits, mindlessley counterflaming him is counterproductive. Be pursuasive, not a thug, if you're going to write to him directly.
You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.
Hi there,
I am having trouble with your statements. If you actually are a Linux user, then why would you say that the command line ignores innovation? I mean, I understand that the graphical interface has improved things for many people, but why would an operating system have to prevent users from accessing its command line in order to be "innovative" ?
As a Mac user, I am sure you use Quick Keys alots more than the mouse-click, am I right? It may not be the case for you, but can you conceive of the fact that for a great number of people the command line is a more powerful and efficient way to get things done?
I am a GUI-lover. I LOVE my GUI. But if I want to do something, I pop open an xterm. Just like the Quick-keys, once you learn the commands, it's alot faster than clicking away.
And as far as Linux's graphical interface is concerned, I have never heard of NeWS or Berlin, so I cannot comment on that. But can you explain to me what about X is technologically inferior to say.. the Mac interface?
I love the Mac interface. In my opinion, MS could take a lesson from Apple about how to do it right. But why do you think X is not capable of achieving this? There hasn't been any significant development for X until about a year ago. And look how far we have come in a year? How far will we have evolved a year from now? I don't think X's drawbacks are technological. In fact, I think that the client/server model of X is something other GUIs, include Apple's should seriously consider.
--- Tao
Hi there,
I am having trouble with your statements. If you actually are a Linux user, then why would you say that the command line ignores innovation? I mean, I understand that the graphical interface has improved things for many people, but why would an operating system have to prevent users from accessing its command line in order to be "innovative" ?
As a Mac user, I am sure you use Quick Keys alot more than the mouse-click, am I right? The GUI becomes less of a functional tool and more a presentation tool. It may not be the case for you, but can you conceive of the fact that for a great number of people the command line is a more powerful and efficient way to get things done?
I am a GUI-lover. I LOVE my GUI. But if I want to do something, I pop open an xterm. Just like the Quick-keys, once you learn the commands, it's alot faster than clicking away.
And as far as Linux's graphical interface is concerned, I have never heard of NeWS or Berlin, so I cannot comment on that. But can you explain to me what about X is technologically inferior to say.. the Mac interface?
I love the Mac interface. In my opinion, MS could take a lesson from Apple about how to do it right. But why do you think X is not capable of achieving this? There hasn't been any significant development for X until about a year ago. And look how far we have come in a year? How far will we have evolved a year from now? I don't think X's drawbacks are technological. In fact, I think that the client/server model of X is something other GUIs, include Apple's should seriously consider.
Yes, X is still kinda clunky to use. But I think we're starting to see some significant changes. And when it's all said and done, and all the apps we want are available, and the desktop environments have stabilized.. Linux users will still be able to display applications on each others' monitors and the rest won't.
Your thoughts/comments are welcome.
--- Tao
I believe that Tandy (AKA Radio Shack) sold a unit (Tandy 2000 I think) for a VERY short period of time that used the x186... could be wong though.
I believe that Tandy (AKA Radio Shack) sold a unit (Tandy 2000 I think) for a VERY short period of time that used the x186... could be wrong though.
Ethernet was invented in 1973. It is old! It is obselete! I predict that the revenues of NIC retailers will drop dramatically as the general public decides to drop a working technology in favor of something totally new. Ethernet is as good as dead! DON'T TRUST COMPANIES THAT PEDDLE OBSELETE PRODUCTS! ABANDON ETHERNET!
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
Personally I think the man is just lonely. Why else would anyone write an article so blatent in its content to put every Linux user on his/her defensive. I don't think Bob is in charge of 3com anymore (he left a few years back I believe). As I said before, I think he just wanted to get his mailbox filled.
c:\format c:
d:\setup
Information is not Knowledge
for sticking this piece deep in the middle of 200+ responses to a REALLY stupid troll. This belongs at the top level of slashdot, and I hope you get it there.
Information is not Knowledge
...and kind of surprises me.
Does Bob actually think that Un*x and Linux have remained stagnant over the last 30 years?
I guess he just sees the huge momentum of MS as unstoppable.
Hopefully *that's* not the case!
Also, do we remember what is at the heart (or deep inside) of NT? VAX/VMS--technology even older than UNIX. Yes, it has been revamped, kernel is no longer monolithic, but instead has the whole windowing system built in. For speed, right? Just it does not make it any much speedier, really.
When looking for newer technology, it would make much more sense to look at Be, rather than W2K.
And then again, many of you are right, when saying that very often all these reviews are comparing apples with bananas and kiwis, rather than (at least) pears. Know what I mean?
It is very unrewarding to try being an oracle--unless you really see the future, there ain't much chance to be certain 'bout what one's saying. Then, would it not make sense to wait and see?
--AP
I think that the comparison between Emacs and Word was, well, silly. They're two different products, for two different purposes. The (indirect) slur against Emacs didn't help; though he didn't say it, I got the distinct impression that he was implying Emacs was hacked together in a short space of time.
Bzzzt, wrong! :-) RMS has no problem with "commercial" software at all; it's "proprietary" software that he campaigns against. An FSF text explaining the differences can be found at:
http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/categories.html
I will make a bold statement however. The author brushed on the topic some. I don't think Opensource software can create anything new.
Not true. There are many open source applications that are innovative: Apache, qmail, postfix, perl are examples of heavily used software that aren't just a copy of older stuff.
Gnome has been said to be a combination of Next, Windows, Mac, other user interfaces
Sure, just like Windows UI was inspired by the Mac, which in turn was ripped off the Xerox Star. So the Xerox Star is the only new UI ?
I agree totally - I thought the original article was a total piss-take on the whole OS comparison thing. It was remarkably incoherent in its logic. (Is 60's heritage good or bad??) So yes, it's a troll, quite a sophisticated one, but a troll nonetheless.
-- open source? sounds like the real book --
There will be a rebuttal to Bob M's column, in next edition of IW.
Janice
I agree with your post but it seems to me that there are some historical errors. One that I caught was: "...TCP/IP implementations (remember, Unix had the first implementation!)"
;)
Hummmmm, it seems to me that Unix didn't have the first implementation of TCP/IP. During the 70's it was ITS that supported the backbone of what became the Internet (since when is it called Internet???).
I don't know if this was ITS that had the first implementation of TCP/IP but this wasn't Unix (the first Unix implementation was done in berkeley I think).
Of course, if I am wrong I will be happy to know it and know the truth about TCP/IP's history
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
1. The only reason that W2k support more hardware is because they have more support from the designers. We are catching up.
2. Win95/98 is stable too, until you add a few other programs like Office. If everything is tied to the core of the operating system and one thing goes down, it all goes.
3. Check out CORBA. Take a look at KOffice.
4. X crash? Interesting... Which wm do you use? Are you sure you know which is crashing?
5. Linus has already acknowledged that someday, someone will probably think of a way to do things better that linux and start a new OS. This would be no surprise.
6. Mistakes made in W2k article: Linux is not Unix, it is Unix-like. Unix is not 30 years old, it is 30 years mature. You don't see other industries changing to the latest and greatest at v1.0. If that were true, our POTS would have been changed to packet based a long time ago, and we would all be watching digital tv.
Windows is like a young lover, wham-bam-thank you ma'am. Linux goes a little slower, fully considering constructive critisism, and gets better not just bigger.
I wonder what it is about these old legends that makes them not like Linux. I've got to think it's all the media hype. Or heck...maybe he just wants some attention.
There is a book called "Where Wizards Stay Up Late" that deals with the origins of Arpanet, it's actually kinda dry, but the history is neat. It talks about Metcalfe and the ethernet stuff. Worth a read.
Let's just see this for what it really is. How many of us read this article? 10,000? 100,000? Isn't it obvious what's going on here? The easiest way to get people to read an online article today is by bashing Linux. And of course, we fall for it. We should be content in knowing that our OS is superior. So what if he invented ethernet? I don't care if the pope comes up and tells me Linux was written by Satan himself! I would still use Linux every day, and would not use any other OS in its place.
The Linux bandwagon seems to be a great vehicle even for those who would use it for their own gains. Let them ride, but let's make sure that they get off at the right stop.
This is necessary...life, feeds on life...
I used to spew out tripe like this in high school. I called it "beating a deadline to death with a writer's block." It's really simple: 1) Attack something. 2) Come up with a real bizarre analogy or metaphor. Extend it to insane lengths. 3) Drag in a bunch of useless and/or meaningless and/or grandiose stuff. 4) Finish with a flourish. My AP English teacher was on to me though; he would mark me down for "excessive use of purple prose." I had fun, though. ;-)
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
Actually, Intel never officially released the 80186. The next cpu after the 8086 (and 8088) was the 80286. We only see 80186 in the instruction set.
And he's contrasting this to Windows 2000? Ummmm....waitaminit...W2K is just NT5.
Windows NT was originally written by a bunch of guys from DEC who wrote VMS. Hence, NT can be said to have derived much from VMS, which is well over 20 years old (here's some history). What does that mean for NT?
Clearly, that age doesn't mean a damn thing. Newer does not necessarily mean better. I'd rather have an OS that has evolved from decades of trial and error than something just out of Redmond, and I'm sure many others would as well.
I've been running Linux intermittently for several years (and exclusively for the last 6 months). I've also run windows 95/98, and NT4, and a beta of W2K when it was still NT5. NT5 is a pretty cool OS -- the relative (to win98) reliability and security of NT, and directx for games--yay.
This seems to be where everything is headed currently -- what used to be solely server/workstation operating systems are now becoming gaming platforms. NT is adopting directx6; Unix is getting XFree86 4.0 with all sorts of cool additions. This is A Good Thing (tm), which you should acknowledge even if you hate NT.
Curiously, the same reason that I used Windows is the reason I switched from Windows to Linux. Linux support for hardware used to suck. My TV card didn't work, there was no 3d acceleration (for my TNT), the games sucked. So, I used Windows and put up with the occasional reboot. Eventually, I got fed up with Windows. I hated having to run Exceed to be able to access some of the programs I needed for classes (Matlab, Maple, LaTeX, etc.). So I installed Linux and dealt with the lack of good hardware and game support.
I can get my TV card working with a 2.2 series kernel (which I still haven't gotten to work without breaking AFS, which kind of defeats the whole purpose), and now with NVidia releasing open source drivers, I don't have to worry about 3D acceleration. I really don't have a single qualm about not running Windows...the only games I play are Q/Q2/Q3 anyhow.
Simply put, I have no need for Windows. I haven't booted up Windows in months (I'm pretty sure mucking around with VMWare killed it anyhow), and if I do need it for anything (say, if I buy a digital camera and need to get the pictures off it), I can use VMWare (damn that's an impressive program).
Windows is not going to disappear any time soon. Neither will Linux. Both OSes have built up way too much steam to just roll over and die. Deal with it. Use whichever suits you best. Believe it or not, Linux is not the best OS for some (gasp! blasphemy!) -- my mom still has problems copying and pasting -- I don't think she's ready to be configuring XFree86 (which, while RedHat 5.2 has made some significant changes to make configuring XFree easier, still requires some knowledge about your computer's hardware, which most people haven't a clue about [horizontal refresh frequency? dot clock?]). If you want to use Linux, use it. But don't unnecessarily evangelize an OS that is not ready to replace Windows yet.
Better yet, use Linux conspicuously. Answer questions about Linux. Let them come to you -- don't force it down their throats. Then prove the esteemed Mr. Metcalfe wrong.
Not according to the Chiplist
Pff, I beat all of you, Im running windows 98... it's based on DOS... that's two decades ahead of your crap :P
:)... so... anyway from what I understand (and I may be completly wrong) the *internal* structure of linux is all new, just the libs are standerd, and the old shells are the same, am I wrong?
anyway, nither Windows or Linux could really be called '60's' technology. Windows was completly recreated, on the same theorys as VMS by the same people, but it didn't use the same code (I don't think)
Linux was completly reacreated by Linus, and used the GNU tools (remember GNU's not unix
I can't imagen that it woudl be to hard to stick a new interface/object libs on top, would it?
---------------
Chad Okere
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I don't know why people get so bent out of shape about saying "the millenium starts on 2001" like your better then everyone else or somthing beacuse you know that... woohooo! now you can run home and tell mom how great you are!!!
:P :)
we stupid humans will be celebrating it in 2000.
we should be able to celebrate whenever we damn well please!! afterall *wee* came up with the calender to begin with!!
if you want to get really technical, jesus was born in the year 3AD (the people who started all of this screwed up) so the millenium reall starts in in 2k+4. so there
btw, I like saying 2k+1 2k+2 for years after 2k. does anyone else think that's kind of cool? you don't end up saving any silables or letters though... oh well
---------------
Chad Okere
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Well, speaking as one of those "child prodigys" I have to say, that windows is a huge pain in the ass to fix....
infact it's imposible to fix, the only thing you can do most of the time is reinstall the OS, if things get weird.
---------------
Chad Okere
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
You know what really bothers me about GUIs? it's a pain in the ass to tell someone how to do somthing, or help them out online or over the phone. intstaid of saying "type this" you have to say, go there, click that, does it look like this?, ok then click there... type that in on the 3rd drop box... it fucking sucks
---------------
Chad Okere
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
FIRST COMMENT in slot #14.
:)
your message was obsolete before you even submitted it
+++++
+++++
The harder you look the less you see. That's what we're up against.
I found the article very disappointing -- it definately had the look of something rushed for deadline, as did the subject matter. His columns usually have a bit more thought and substance to them, even if you don't agree with his ideas or positions. Of course, I don't agree with him at all about Linux or his ideas in this article.
;-)
I have met and talked with Bob several times, and we had lunch together once. I don't know him all that well, but I do know that he is very right-wing in a lot of ways, and firmly believes in the free capitalistic market and "consumer choice among competing alternatives". He is a strong believer in school voucher programs, for example.
Bob is a pundit. He gets his kicks by running around the world hosting conferences, writing articles, and making pronouncements about the technology world. Sometimes they are right, sometimes they are wrong. It beats the heck out of sitting around the house all day in Lincolnville, Maine.
And he hates the telephone company monoplies, so he can't be all that bad.
Did anyone see Bob's talk, if he gave one? I'm wondering if he made these predictions then, or just silently to himself and now in his infoworld article.
Did Bob really invent "ethernet" as the bottom of the article indicates?
Anyway, he may be right that W2k will kill Windows, but I can't see that any of his reasons could be correct. Does he really think that Word is a replacement for EMACS? (Does W2k even ship with Word?) If W2K is successful, it may be because it's good, it may be because of marketing or business pressures or whatever. But, who can take this guy seriously when he's just trying to get a rise out of advocates by being insulting.
He doesn't even make a point except to confuse a rich pedigree with useless antiquity.
Peace.
recisely. He is comparing the fastly evolving linux to MS vaporware.
Take a good look at how much advancement there has been in linux and linux apps in the past six months or so. Where do you think we will be before W2K hits.
Yeah, '60s software technology (Linux) running on '40s hardware technology (von Neumann architecture).
How funny...
Yeah, back-to-earth people preferring open sores over an inflamed appendix, since they are treatable without surgery.
How funny...
Yeah, if you got enough with Y2K, why not get a new bug with W2K?
How funny...
Ha! And a point this man has missed: W2K is no technology at all (yet) - it is just a biiiig mess!
Is there anyone taking his words serious?
Then think a second time. Is he right? What if W2K does overtake Linux? Maybe Unix is too old. And confort yourself, albet shakingly, with an open mind.
I don't believe Unix is too old. I know even if Windows 2000 does overtake Linux, Linux will keeping churning and I will still be using it. But I think it is worth thinking twice about it.
I will make a bold statement however. The author brushed on the topic some. I don't think Opensource software can create anything new. Linux is a Unix-like OS. Windowmaker is a NextStep clone. The Gimp is a Photoshop clone. Wow. Gnome has been said to be a combination of Next, Windows, Mac, other user interfaces. At least in the comercial world they are all trying to come up with something new that will make them really rich. Opensource developers think, "Gee, I want a program just like that one only *with* the sourcecode". I fear that if Open source software became dominant, the industry would stagnant.
I think twice about this. But any innovation seems limited. Innovation usually is in the form of a way to get around a technical problem. My theory still stands untill I am proven otherwise.
--
Perhaps I could point out several comments that you made that display some bias and a bit of ignorance on your part -
"The Open Source Movement reminds me of communism. Richard Stallman's Marx rants about the evils of the profit motive and multinational corporations"
Firstly Stallman is considered a flake or an extremist by most in the open source movement, and many in the free software movement. Second, Stallman is the Free Software Foundation. Third, Eric Raymond is the Open Source movement. They are very distinct movements and quite different - as witnessed to the discord between Raymond and Stallman on fundamental philosophy (hardly a Trotsky and Lenin there as you portray it). So your argument is shown wrong straight out of the box.
"OK, communism is too harsh on Linux. Lenin too harsh on Torvalds"
Even you admit that this comparison to Communism is specious.
Engage your brain please: Central Control, a single authority, and change mandated from the top, all working for the good of the collective. Sounds like Microsoft and Bill Gates - ask almost any software engineer who has worked there, or anyone who has had to deal with bugs and the stream of unasked for "enhancements" from Redmond. Linux is much more along the lines of Adam Smith - people see a need in the marketplace (OS) and they fill it with product (code) for their own personal reasons with no need for mandated and forced decisions.
So you should admit that you were extremely in the wrong on this point as well.
"Stallman and Torvalds would have us return to the time when software was so new that one person working alone could change the world over the weekend."
It seems that you missed the facts here as well - most of Linux is done under a highly distributed but team oriented model. There are groups that provide for organizing and guiding the development efforts of things they have volunteered to take on. But it is a team environment - the lone-cowboy-hacker is a thing of myth, and is fairly far removed from Linux as it stands today. Aside from that, there are several HUNDRED people who have contributed to the kernel - hardly a single programmer approach, eh? Each one contributes in his area of specialty, and gets merged into the whole by the product manager (in this case Linus for the kernel). So you are wrong - and woefully ignorant.
Starting to see the pattern? Ignorance and misstatements (and innuendo) are looking like they are your stock-in-trade. Have you no integrity?
"If North America actually went back to the earth, close to 250 million people would die of starvation before you could say agribusiness. When they bring organic fruit to market, you pay extra for small apples with open sores -- the Open Sores Movement"
This attempted "ad hominem" scarcely deserves comment except for the obvious ignorance and sneering wrong-headed scorn that you display. But I will endeavor to show yet another flaw in your assumption: crops once planted can only be harvested once. Software, once written can be duplicated and reused essentially without cost. So the "farm" metaphor is brutally illustrative of your muddled and regrettably simplistic thinking on this matter.
"Stallman's EMACS was brilliant in the 1970s, but today we demand more, specifically Microsoft Word, which can't be written over a weekend, no matter how much Coke you drink."
Again you suffer from poor reasoning ability: comparing a programmers editor and a word processor is specious at best - and given the tone of your writing, its is deceitful. Compare apples and apples. EMACS is an editor, not a word processor, and as such its far superior to MS Word for writing and compiling code (its primary purpose when written). Likewise MS Word, bloated and inefficient as it is, is quite adequate for producing WYSIWYG documents, and for that specialized purpose is better then EMACS. But for you to make blanket statements like you did above shows that either you have no idea about the differences between a word processor and an editor, or that you deliberately chose to deceitfully post what you know to be a bogus comparison .
"Unix and the Internet turn 30 this summer. Both are senile, according to journalist Peter Salus, who like me is old enough, but not too old, to remember. The Open Sores Movement asks us to ignore three decades of innovation. It's just a notch above Luddism. At least they're not bombing Redmond. Not yet anyway."
Such innuendo and attempted smears (bombing indeed) that you tack onto this are despicable, intellectually dishonest, and devoid of any real content. If you have any intellectual integrity, you should be ashamed to put you name on such drivel. And to address your failed analogies, is Unix that old? Hmm, maybe we should throw out the automobile - after all the basic internal combustion engine is well over 100 years old. And lets toss out the Antilock Braking System while we are at it - it is as old as Unix. Age is irrelevant as long as new concepts are constantly incorporated - and Linux shows far more of this incorporation than Windows - which (Win98) is still based on a 16 bit kernel that was inadequate to begin with. And as for ignoring 3 decades of innovation, Linux has hardly ignored it - or did you not notice the addition of things such as threads (and theri APIs), multiple processor capability and scalability, machine clustering for distribute processing, cross platfrom compiling, open interfaces, drivers for audio and advanced graphics, and many other cutting edge technologies. So yet another part of your article is shown as hogwash coupled with deceitful attempts at smearing.
"W2K is software also from the distant past -- VAX/VMS for Windows. But it will overpower Linux. NT, now approaching 23x6 availability, is already overpowering Linux. NT and NetWare constitute 60 percent of server software shipments. All Unix's make up 17 percent, and Linux is a small fraction of that. When W2K gets here, goodbye Linux."
Here you perform a context switch and assume your conclusion - both terrible fallacies in argumentation. The assumption of W2K being quality and becoming the basis for systems is fallacious - many corporations are very reticent to move to NT5, simply because of the track record of Microsoft - poor stability in new releases, gaping security holes, and general unreliability until several patches have been released. Did you never have a freshman logic class to show you that fallacy of argumentation (assumed conclusion)? And as to the context switch, you claim that NT/Netware is 60% of all server shipments now. The original subject was NT - why did you all of a sunned have to drag in Netware - possibly because you knew that your comparison would look poor if you didn't change the context? And, in terms of context, you also omit the fact that as the internet pervades business, far more of those business are choosing Unix based servers (Sun, HP) as their prime connectivity component. Furthermore, you neglect the fact that the growth in Linux shipments and installations has far outstripped NT - and if the trend continues, that Linux will catch up to NT in a hurry. ON other thing in terms of missed context on your part: Most systems do not "ship" with Linux pre-loaded (but that is changing with Compaq coming into play now), but many of them end up that way. So shipments is not a reliable gauge.
Well, lets see - that just about demolishes your entire argument. So, when will we see a retraction printed? Or at least the intellectual integrity and honesty to admit your errors publicly?
"Multinational corporations are themselves technology invented to get big things done, things that sustain us in the complicated modern world"
Multinationals are playing catch up, their innovations coming from the smaller companies as they buy them up. Indeed, even Microsoft has acquired rather than created a good many of their products. And you overestimate the ability of any large monolithic corporation to survive - ask IBM - they had to change their culture or die. Your thinking smacks of 70's engineering, with central control and massive mater plans that produce things. Sorry fellow, it just doesn't work that way anymore. No matter how much spite and spleen you put into pasting lies, half truths and innuendo onto the internet with columns like this, the world will move on, and will not go back. Your brilliance in inventing Ethernet is appreciate, but now, please get out of our way - unlike you we have a world to build, and we'd rather like to see you as one of the forefathers than have to look back on you as roadkill.
Mr Metcalfe, the world has passed you by, sorry to see you go.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
...and, belive me, as time goes by, we _will_ see more and more of it. Before you flame me, hear my reasoning:
1. It shows the big boys really started to poo in their pants. Just to know this, and I get a fuzzy warm feeling inside.
2. Builds character. If you resisted the temptation to flame the poor guy, there's probably good advocate stuff in you.
3. It will probably keep Joe Average off Linux...for now. Come to think about it, do we _really_ want him to switch? OK, I guess we do. But, does it have to happen _right_now_? Let me hear those arguments again...
MST
Nobody want's to take Linux away from you. If you don't care about technical progress then by all means use it, enjoy it, but please STOP PROSELYTIZING unsuspecting Windows users. Tell Torvalds to stop sermonizing about World Domination, tell Stallman to stop disseminating his "If it ain't free, it's worthless" mantra, and most importantly, stop harassing other people for exercising their right to choose an OS you don't approve of.
There have always been free software alternatives, Linux offers nothing new in this regard either. You can also still build your own radio, monitor or car today. You HAVE a choice. Linux zealots, on the other hand, represent, as Bob put it, the last Luddites of the world. Time to get rid of them.
Cheers
Joe Rabinoff
The UNIX design model (small kernel running the show, everything else, processes, devices, etc. represented as files, real or virtual), make it the ideal system for multi-user, multitasking, networked computers.
When the Personal Computers arrived in the late 70s/early 80s, they were small. They were single-user, singletasking, standalone machines. You ran a spreadsheet. Or a word processor. Or a game. And nothing else. The single-user OSes, DOS and MacOS, were ideal for this purpose. They didn't need the complexity of the UNIX design model.
Then the PCs got big, and thanks to the Internet, they got networked. They had the power and memory resources to run multiple applications, and the GUIs to manage them. This is where the single-user OSes started to hit a wall. DOS (now known as Win9x) wasn't designed for the heavy strain that multiple applications, networks, and a myriad of devices placed on it.
UNIX, by its very nature, its underlying design, could handle this. IMHO, this is why we saw Linux explode at just this time. Linux is UNIX, and UNIX makes sense on the modern PC.
Calling UNIX "60s technology" is extremely misleading anyway, since most of what we know as the features of UNIX were developed in the BSD and SysV strains in the 1980s.
No sig.
Here's the letter I sent him.
Subject: Errors in your 'from the ether column'
First I'll say I don't agree with the tone of your piece, have you actually run some of the new Linux distributions? Second in the next to
last paragraph there is a factual error. You say "All Unixes make up 17 percent, and Linux is a small fraction of that." According to this
IDC Report Linux alone makes up 17% of the server market now. This is up from 7% last year, NT's share grew significantly slower than linux's in the same period.
Some additional things to think about might be the stories at CNN and IDC. These talk about where NT is actually used in business settings.
Perhaps articles should be moderated like comments. ;)
If this article had been posted as a comment, it would have received a -1 for flamebait. I read a lot of flammable opinions without much data to back them up.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
That's a great idea. A rating system for articles, and let everybody vote on them...
I strongly believe that trying to be clever is detrimental to your health. -- Linus Torvalds
was the motto in Australia for the TV show "Sixty Minutes".
/. to post these articles to spark debate (usually fairly rational), tho perhaps we have had a few too many of them lately . . .
Oh yeah, it worked. 60 Minutes was undisputed king of the telly for more than a decade.
I think its good for
Do you actually know anybody (like a real live person) who doesn't know shit about computers and uses linux? Don't give hypothetical examples, I'm talking about real
:) Her first contact with a computer was windows98 3 months ago...she hated it after a week...I installed linux (Mandrake 6) on her puter...she loves it :) She bugs me a LOT less now than she did during the week she used 98.
My mother
So...yes, Linux is better for the average joe than Windows, simply because it doesn't freeze and makes them loose the letter they've been typing for an hour
Vox
Pain is the gift of the gods, and I'm the one they chose as their messanger...
I'm not even sure where to begin on this one. The article was written very carefully to sell the idea that Linux is going to lose against NT 5 (or whatever the hell MS is calling it this week.) While there is every possibility that linux will lose, it will not be for the reasons he discussed. Unix is 30 years old now, but unlike some things it has grown over those years. Metcalfe says that the linux crowd would have you ignore 3 decades of innovation. What he tries to obscure is the fact that unix was the platform which many of those innovations sprung from. Ford has made the Mustang for many years, but that doesn't mean that the design has stayed static since Lee Iacocca's days. He also tries to say that NT5 will kill linux because linux won't kill it. That's an either/or proposition and in the real world things aren't usually that simple. In my humble opinion Linux's future will depend on how it grows from here. It is already a very capable server platform which is gaining market share. Metcalfe tries to make unix and linuxseem smaller by lumping together NT and netware, but that won't work. Linux is gaining market that other unix variants are losing, but it is also taking market share from NT and novell, just not as quickly. Linux's real challenge exists on the desktop. Right now the average joe does not have the patience to learn how to use Linux, but that is changing. Both KDE and Gnome are intended to make unix easier for non-technical people to use, and both are making good progress towards that goal. Metcalfe compares Emacs to MS Word. I don't really know what he was trying to say by doing that since the two applications serve different needs. He would do much better to compare Word to Wordperfect or the word processor in Star Office or Applixware, or even Abiword. Metcalfe also compares the open source movement to communism. Well I have to admit that he's partially right there. There are nuts in the movement who are out of touch with the real world. Stallman is one of them to some extent, but Torvalds is not. Linus is very pragmatic and realistic. But even if both were total psychopaths it would not be a fatal situation. The future of Linux will be largely shaped by what that companies who sell it do. It has gained enough momentum that even if Stallman and all his disciples whined to high heaven, it would not change its course. I don't think that linux in its current form will displace windows as the operating system of choice, at least not accross the board. It has a very good chance of running neck and neck with NT on the server end and it may in fact surpass it in market share. But servers are one thing, client computers are another. For linux to replace NT as a client OS it will have to be made easier for non-techies to operate. Preferably it should provide a consistent logical interface that people can get up to speed on quickly and which provides some support for system configuration. To beat windows it will have to be better than windows in that respect. If the linux community, including companies such as redhat, caldera, corel, etc., can do that, then linux will have a better shot at the desktop. He who owns the desktop owns the world. Linux has a long ways to go before it even gains a significant portion of the desktop, let alone challenges MS for dominance. A LONG ways to go. But it can get there if we do the right things and keep our eyes on the ball. We must push forward and we must do the things that lead to victory. We must do the things that will gain new users for linux and keep existing ones. Things that will lead to increased development and 3rd party support. Never put philosophy or ideology before results and real world success. I think that Metcalfe's statements can be traced back to a financial interest in Microsoft more than anything. Only someone with something at stake would paint the picture he did.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
I find you comment mildly funny. My mom has a dificult time using windows, someone in my family needs to be with her to help out. My Grandma was an accountant for NY and used some text base OS to do her work. She's got an iMac now and calls regularly for help, many mouse questions.
So what it all comes down to is that computer people in general know how to use a computer. We take things for grant like GUIs and mice and comman lines. But you give any comput to anyone and you'll see some stupid things done to them. Why do you think its so hard for soo many people to program a VCR which is a lot simpler than a computer?
Windows belongs to millions of people too, you just can't see the source. The limited developers it has is prone to major problems: going the wrong direction. Windows 95b was the last good Win9x, now Ms embed just about everything minus the kitchen sink into their OS.
Robert Metcalf has invented Ethernet, and that
has truly revolutionized the whole networking
business. Since then however he didn't make
a single contribution to anything AFAIK. He became
a columnist and every once in a while fires the
cheap shots just to attract attention to himself
(so I guess people can still remember him)
Last year Metcalf predicted the INTERNET would
come to the gridlock 'during the last year' or so.
It didn't happen, and he had to eat a crow. Now
he's doing it again.
Seems like he doesn't understand the nature of
INTERNET, and apparently he doesn't understand
the nature of the open source movement either.
Grunt. Oink, oink.
...Mr. Metcalf may be right. Windows has just gotten too big, even for itself. And Gates won't let it leave just like that, especally because it won't. Remember those +12mil AOL users? They're all using Windows...
But WHY?!! It's not fair! People work their asses off all their lives to get where Bill is (and they still don't, sadly) and they make good software that doesn't take up 110 meg and doesn't crash right before you go to save and works the way it's supposed to! But Bill always wins in the end. People don't accept change that well.
And because the majority of the people using Windows are light-weight computer users anyway (by that I mean people who just get on the internet to talk to their friends, and check e-mail). My only knowledge of Linux comes from hours of sitting in front of a computer and reading Slashdot. Even computer-knowledgable people don't understand the GPL or X or any of that other stuff.
Windows is easy. Change is hard. Windows gets shoved in their faces on a daily basis, and that's how they know it exsists. It's marketing, people, the same way AOL made it's fortune. Linux has no marketing as of now, and if we wish to save it, we're gonna need one hell of a marketing strategy by the time W2K comes out.
And secondly, more software needs to be avalible to the masses that's Linux-compatable in order for this thing to work.
Sorry if I seem like I'm just rambling on here...
-miyax
Althought UNIX is some 30 year old technology, Linux, however, is not. It may be some 30 year old concept, but Linux did _not_ start in the 70s.
Linux, if anything, is younger than Windows...
to find out what the anti-MS people are up to? :)
He does. He's become blinded by one of two things:
1) big fat cheque
2) big fat ignorance which seems to pollute much of the IT industry, particularly in the UK.
It's the old 'if it looks good, it must be good'. Microsoft give you the pink and furry cover. Unix doesn't. It bares it all.
Now I bet he's suffering from Visual Tool syndrome. That's where a given IT professional begins to believe that MS is the be-all and end-all simply because it's got the GUI which end-users can understand, therefore it becomes corporate king of the castle.
Funny, didn't the Scottish Power Group Plc go with Sun for most of their solutions? Even Scottish Telecom's Call Centres run Sun desktops. Scotland Online, an ISP co-owned by Scottish Telecom, part of the Scottish Power Group, and publishers D.C. Thomson, use Sun boxes to run their ISP operation.
I don't subscribe to the same ideology, I'm afraid, because I've seen that Linux and FreeBSD can achieve superior results with inferior hardware. And the ease of development issue will soon be buried as more and more people begin to develop better sets of visual tools using open technologies such as CORBA and Java.
At the end of the day, we as computer users demand choice. He doesn't appear to have factored consumer choice into the deal. And who's to say that an IT manager is going to go with Microsoft each time, every time?
When it comes to IP, Unix is sheer network glue. Make no mistake. This man is making an idiot of himself. Anyone who would willingly yield both his wrists to Bill, grin at him and yell 'Cuff me bayBEE' should be sectioned/committed - dependence on one vendor for your solutions is just as much of a liability as spreading too far.
Bruce M. Simpson Unix/Network Bod & Win32 Developer
What bothers Metcalf is that Linux, itself, is not listed in NASDAQ.
These are interesting times. Bill Gates is the richest man on the planet and Microsoft one of the highest-valued companies in the world, and arguably there is tangible market value behind it. But there are also all these other hi-tech and internet stocks flying high. A secretary at the place I work for owns a piece of AOL and the stock has split N times and she's delighted. Maybe there's some tangible value in AOL too, but you start going down the list and the stock valuations look increasingly fictitious. It smells to me like a giant speculative bubble (take a look at the P/E ratios of the star companies in NASDAQ sometime), but for the time being the market is sweet and people are having a grand old time.
And the thing is, the players in the internet stock frenzy are big (at least on paper) and getting bigger. Microsoft, AOL, Sun, Cisco, Amazon.com, etc. These are names that capture the attention of the people playing the market like the lottery.
Where does that leave Linux? An OS developed by a widely dispersed band of volunteers, not by a monolithic entity. An OS where the profit stream has so far been laughable by comparison with Microsoft and the rest of the merry gang ot "technology stocks".
This is what bothers Metcalf. He can't see the potential for billions of dollars' worth of profit in such a model, so he says it's communism. Perhaps it bothers him too that under the decentralized nature of Linux (so far), not so much Microsoft's dominance; but *American* dominance of the computer world would be somewhat diluted --though not destroyed, to be sure.
The thing is, the secretary in my office might agree with him. Right now Linux is not on her radar screen, bless her. But if Linux makes a credible challenge for the desktop market (a big if, to be sure); I very much suspect that she would be actively hostile towards it. You see, there is no Linux, Inc. that can give her the same delight she gets from seeing her AOL stocks zooming upwards, at least on paper. And that would not be, in a manner of speaking, the American way.
And what should worry Linux supporters (I consider myself one) is the reality that in today's world a products' worth is measured by the value of the parent company's stock; at least in the eyes of the general public and the so-called market analysts.
In this view, Microsoft (or AOL, for that matter) is good because it's big. That's a mindset that's going to be hard to break.
Microsoft will win (get this!) A YEAR AFTER the asteroid hits
What a maroon!
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
Maybe we should start adding moderation comments to the articles posted to Slashdot.
I think this one would be worthy of a "-1 Troll/Flamebait"
--
Exigo spamos et dona ferentes
This guy (like many other ZD articles) makes so many assumptions about sofware (providing very little *technical* evidence) that it's not even relevant.
His biggest mistake is Old ~= obsolete. (As many others have pointed out)
Lemme add my $0.02: In the 50's (a decade behind what this guy says linux is in), entropy coding was created. (Huffman) AFAIK, Huffman is used in modern formats such as JPEG and many other codecs.
It works well and time doesn't change that.
Old != Obsolete
Did anyone ever said, that computer need to be easy to handle? Okee, maybe there was someone. But then nobody ever said, that you can turn off your brain while using a computer.
That's why I use Linux. When Linux goes wrong, it's always YOUR fault.
I have not learned as much in two years using Win95 as in half a year using Linux!
Even if it's hard to chew, it tastes great when you get to it!
--- If OS were buildings, then the first woodpecker to come around would erase 95 % of civilization.
Bob Metcalfe's words reek of a delusional paranoid who grasps tightly onto his fast disappearing world. There is absolutely no inherent value in his prophecy -- he has been shown to look ridiculous in the past [which he cited in the article]. Vague generic doomsday prophecy which he still managed to screw...Doh! It's just attention seeking BS.
Besides what's the logic is there in all this ranting and raving about 30 year old technology...he doesn't look like a child of the post 70s himself. If there's anything looking dated in this article it's certainly not Linux. Although with a comment like the Open Sores Movement. we can see clearly how he's trying to temper the aging process. Stick and stones...reliving childhood...get over it...
This is a farce of an article...and it's equally farcical it was posted with a live link. As previous posts have already stated it is designer flamebait and produced for it's rating boosting properties only.
BLAMMO shaken not stirred
I'm going to take issue with the comment "Linux barely works on laptops". I've been using Linux (2.036) and KDE on my no-name laptop with no-name PCMCIA cards for around 6mos. Difficulty in getting Linux to work was analogous to the difficulty I had with Win98 ( I dual-boot for games). Performance is actually better with Linux and KDE. Although I do gain even more speed switching to plain ol X with afterstep. Not to say that you don't have a point though... "Proofreading is for wimps" -nme!
The author seems to believe wealth grants automatic expertise. If Torvalds is Lenin, who does that make Bob Metcalfe? George Wallace?
stop being a dumb $hit. you know as well as we do that all you have to do is click on the BIG PRINTER ICON in the CONTROL PANEL. blah.
Based on this column, I think Bob Metcalf had a bad hair day regarding Linux. Based on other columns of his, I think he's been having a bad hair day about Linux for a while. Why?
I think there is something about OSS and Linux that rubs him the wrong way. It's not that he disagrees with it. It's more like it offends him because it represents the possibility of a new way of thinking, a world he just can't fit into.
Microsoft is the most powerful company in the world, and the world is addicted to its software. If Linux succeeds, it will be because it represents something more powerful than Microsoft. What could that be? Someone once said "There's nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come." The time for an idea comes when the consciousness of the world changes in a way that supports that idea. If the consciousness of the educated computer-using public is really beginning to change, then Linux will succeed and nothing will be able to stop it. It the consciousness is "business-as-usual" except for a bunch of lunatic Commies, as Metcalf suggests, then Linux will fade out of view.
So this is the question: Is a change in consciousness emerging in the world of educated technology-users? I think there just might be, and I can see why Bob Metcalf is having an ongoing bad hair day about it.
Since when is an operating system written in the 1990's to be called 1960's tecnology? First of all the definition of technology is any tool capable of being used now. If it cannot be used, it is just vapour-ware. Secondly, Linux was started by Torvalds in 1991. People have been IMPROVING it since then. That makes it a technology that is evolving. Don't hackers all over the world constantly contribute to the developement and extension of the linux kernal?
As for the Richard Stallman's GNU project, Linux would have been stuck as a useless kernal if it had not been for this man's vision. Calling him a communist is like calling the Pope a Catholic Conspiracist. Stallman created software that, while based upon 1960's ideas, has been constantly improved or maintained. Just because it works, does not meen you adopt, extend, and monoploize. I have had enough of fudware. It is bad enough that the software and operating system I use at work is based upon Redmond, WA's worldview. Personally I would take AT&T's UNIX or even VMS over Windows crashing-halting on a daily basis. If blue screens of death, bloatware, useless addtions and extensions are the wave of the future, then let me be the first to write LINUX on my saboes and fling them into the machines!
Romanes eunt domus? People called Romanes, they go the 'ouse? It says Romans go home. No it doesn't. What's Latin fo
Precisely.
I have a radio sitting on my desk (early 1900's), I'm using a QWERTY keyboard (1920's), I'm looking a cathode ray tube monitor (1920's), and I'm setting under an electric light bulb (late 1800's). How old are you Bob?
Bob is old enough to have invented Ethernet over 25 years ago and lots of us are still using one variety or another of that "ancient" technology.
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black...
--
this guy is a moron!!!
He knows nothing about organic agriculture or modern farming practices... He puts down organic farming which has been proven to be as productive as other modern farming practices (if it is done correctly). Herbicides get into the water, poison wells, give people cancer, kill the wildlife, all while the happy little bugs build up a resistance to the chemicals. Have you ever wondered why the prices of farm products change from season to season? It is all a result of the success of the farmers for that period. Organic farmers dont have this problem as bad as other farmers. i won't babble on anymore, if you want to know anymore about this i'm sure there is a library near you, but keep in mind the folly of not incorporating "organic" or environmentally friendly farming practices into agriculture. It will only hurt you in the long run, it has happened in Asia and the South Pacific with rice farming and the results have been devastating. I am not a grass-roots, tree-hugging, pot smoking, sandal wearing hippy, but i personally don't want to ruin all our topsoil like Kenya did!!!
however, i suppose i understand why this idiot would write such a thing. he is after all a windows user.
> ERROR: IEXPLORE caused an invalid page fault in module MSCONV97.DLL at 0137:01212d19. Stack dumped:
I guess we won't see Palms being sold with Linux on them.
Yes I know some crazy guys(and gals?) ported Linux to the Palm. But I wanted Linux and not Palm OS being sold.
Will we see palm OS replaced with Windows 2000 soon. I doubt it, since I heard that the minimum requirements for Windows 2000 is 128 Megs RAM, and at least a 300 MHz processor. So I won't be able to get W2K anytime soon, since I still have a Pentium 233 MMX with only 64M RAM. But Linux still Rocks on it!!!!
Steven Rostedt
-- Nevermind
So far linux has captured an incredible amount of hype, far more hype than you would suspect a free knock-off of a 25 year-old OS to get (although most linux groupies seem to think linus invented unix), but the only task it has truly demonstrated proficiency at is as a server for internet services (mail, www, ftp, etc.).
(Before I go on, let me say I am a linux user so my criticisms don't come from being "bought by M$" - I don't use Microsoft products.)
Criticisms:
If you're waiting for linux to "arrive" on the desktop, don't hold your breath. The linux world can't even agree on a GUI toolkit. Apps, I mean "real" apps people actually want to buy, not just crappy Office knock-offs, are nearly nonexistant.
Linux is a crappy mutlimedia platform.
Linux is still nearly impossible for most inexperienced users to administer.
Linux barely works on laptops.
Linux distros are fragmenting an already fragmented unix market (common users don't know and don't care about the LSB - all they see is ten different products claiming to be linux).
So...
If you want to serve web content or run email or ftp services in a cost effective manner, linux is an incredible value. Otherwise, its the wrong tool for the job.
Unfortunately, Be needs to become more internet-aware. I know it is fully TCP/IP compliant, but it needs a Java environment, and a better browser. Actually, I am not a Be expert so I do not know specifically how deficient their browser is, but I'm assuming it isn't up to snuff with Netscape 4.x (not that that is a very high standard).
I'm seriously considering trying Be. I could care less about whether I can read the source or not.
I cannot believe you can put a newbie at a bash prompt and get him productive.
KDE? Yeah, Maybe they are productive at using Netscape, but that's about it.
Ask your newbie friends to simply find a file for you on the system. Maybe after twelve hours of looking at the monitor they'll come along the sinister "find" command. Maybe.
Almost anyone who has little knowledge of computers has to call in someone once in a while to fix problems, no matter what the OS. If Linux is set up right to begin with (just the way vendors set up preinstalled Win98), there's no reason a Linux user can't do whatever they could do in Windows.
Huh??
How do you "set up" linux right so a new user can add a printer without reaming through mountains of docs?
This is but one example of a simple task that is difficult on unix.
Everyone gives me the same line - "if linux is oncifgured correctly" - yet no one defines this configuration.
Gee, thanks mom, I feel all better now.
Windoze sucks, yes its true, but unix (ALL unix) most seriously sucks as well.
Unix is without a doubt the most hostile computing environment in use today. You simply cannot throw Joe citizen at a unix machine and expect any success. If you're ahppy with leaving unix as an enterprise serving OS, that's fine, then lets drop all this unix-as-a-windows-killer garbage.
Linux belongs to millions of people. Hence, it will always serve a million masters - hence it will most likely never be much more than it is today - a great platform for serving open standard network services.
ARRGGGH!!!
/etc keeps them from doing something.
When are people going to realize that
INSTALLING LINUX != ADMINSTERING LINUX
Installing linux is simple. Administering it is a hassle.
Linuxconf??? Hahaha.
The underlying OS is generally not all that important to Joe User.
It is if they can't figure out why the hell some obscure flag set in
However, when something goes wrong, and they call their Brother/Father
Yes, that's the general rule of adminstering unix - get someone to help you. That's the problem! Home users don't want to have to call in a child prodigy with a Jolt addiction to get things done.
Its so refreshing to hear someone on Slashdot admit the obvious - linux is an excellent server OS for people who know what they are doing. Otherwise, there are better tools.
The typical "linux r0lz!" banter in here gets very tiring - mostly it demonstrates how inexperienced the posters are.
> [How *does* one copy *.c to *.c.old in Windows?
.c.old as the extension because the command interpreter is not perfectly aware of new features such as multiple dots in the filename, but this is pretty much equivalent.
As an advanced windows user (but planning on switching to something else soon) I can tell you it's pretty easy to do this:
copy *.c *.c_old
You can't use
(BTW: I'm not advocating windows or anything. Its long filename support is far from perfect and frequently has little quirks like this. I'm just pointing out that it _is_ possible.)
The real question is why M$ and it's cronies are comparing linus to stalin (how many people did linus kill?) and comparing linux volunteers to communists. They must feel a threat and the only response they have is to start name calling and whining. Open Sores? give me a break. Well you keep whining and calling people murderers and we'll keep coding lets see who wins in the end.
War is necrophilia.
The guy is perhaps just tired of life. Maybe a very costly divorce and an urge to leave his miserable world. I can just guess.
//Pingo
--- Linux or FreeBSD, it's like blondes or brunettes. I like both. ---
I was there at the World Premiere (the real one) in Seattle, with my love beads and funky hat, grooving to the beat on top of the Space Needle.
It's so 60's it's 90's, baby! Yeah!
Will in Seattle
It's just a coincidence that this troll gets the largest number of posts I've seen in weeks.
...
Yeah, right
Will in Seattle
Will in Seattle
Face it, everyone knows W2K isn't ready for prime time. Not that Bill won't plop down some of his $90Billion to try to make it sound like the greatest thing since sliced bread.
If you don't believe me, check out the mags. There's no there there.
Will in Seattle
bought my house on MSFT hype (sold high)
Will in Seattle
Really! They're cute and fuzzy. We also have a statue of Bill Gates\\\\\\\\\\Lenin as well.
Maybe we need a penguin?
Will in Seattle
Will in Seattle
Seriously, I've been involved with these guys for years, and I don't recall any inovations. Borrowings, buyouts, beguilements - perhaps.
...
But inovation?
Please, don't make me start laughing.
Will in Seattle
yes, I know your MicroSerf ways
Will in Seattle
Geesh, and I used to proofread in my college days.
...
Maybe I should just log on with the rest of the Anonymous Cowards
Will in Seattle
Sheesh, I can get a 386 with 2MB of RAM to do that and stay up for a year.
So, W2K wants a Pentium 133 with 64MB of RAM? Based on my long experience with WinNT, that means a 266MHz with 128MB of RAM and three times the hard disk spec.
Get real.
Will in Seattle
who is a MCSP
Will in Seattle
CLIs are, linguistically speaking, a more powerful way to interact with a computer compared to user interfaces built using the menus and pointer model. Here is a reference to a CACM article that discusses the shortcomings of the WIMP (windows, menus, icons, pointers) interface.
http://www.acm.org/cacm/AUG96/antimac.htm
An excerpt:
The point-and-click interaction that most GUIs offer may be initially easier to use, but to claim this kind of interface as more 'advanced' is misleading.
FUD FUD FUD. Microsoft is out in force with their FUD about Linux/Open Source...as the infamous "Halloween" document laid out.
It's going to get worse before it gets better people. Expect to see more and more articles from people like Metcalfe claiming how great Win2000 is and how bad Linux is.
He would have been more credible if he had simply bashed Linux without bringing Win2000 into the mix...but when he did that, you could almost see a check being written to him by Microsoft!
And the way he kept saying "Open Sores"....how blatent can you get?
--- "It's not enough that I succeed...everyone else must fail."
I did not choose Linux because of any similarities to communism. I chose it because it is empowering and stable, as have many corporations who certainly are NOT communist.
It's very, very irritating to hear the usual blather about communism and how those damn Reds want everyone to be equally poor, etc. ad nauseum. I don't want Bill Gates imprisoned (although I wouldn't shed a tear if he was); I want people to use software that will best fir their needs, and I am confident that Linux has grown to fit the needs of almost anyone quite well, or at least better than Microsloth's products. I choose Open Source because I simply believe it's a better way of doing things and that black box software is dangerous in an age when computers control so many aspects of our lives.
Let us debate these matters instead of engaging in ignorant parroting.
Ok this guy seems really intelligent... He likes to use a lot of words with lots and lots of syllables but has anyone noticed the lack of research and supporting facts. He claims linux is 30 year old technology and that there's more shipments of Novell than linux but he fails not only to mention where he derives these statistics but also fails to realize that maybe people download linux... no shipping records then. If those points fail to turn your head then maybe you should realize that he compares linux to communism. I have never ever heard of such complete and utter BS. How exactly is it communism? And why does he compare it to not only communism but also eutopianism, is this man stating that a communist society is a eutopia? Maybe this man should step back and evaluate the facts before spewing words from his keyboard.
It's not winning that counts, it's making sure everyone else loses - MOD
What Mr. Metcalfe misses is the fact that it's not the platform that's new, it's the method. In the early days, substantial innovation in the field was done overnight (with gross excesses in caffeine.) Then, corporations and teams were formed to move the best programmers into management (c.f. "The Mythical Man-Month" or "The Dilbert Principle", your choice.) A revolutionary new method of software development is the concept being successfully proven here (the Bazaar,) a fact that seems to have escaped Mr. Metcalfe's attention. Analogies to farming have no relevance, since software is grown once and harvested without limit. Quality, not quantity, of software farmers is key. Analogies to Marxism and communism have little relevance to this meritocracy (another fairly new concept.) It appears that Mr. Metcalfe has been caught in the pundit trap on this one- he attempts to draw deep conclusions based on superficial or fundamentally flawed understanding. In this case he happened to be the proverbial blind man standing behind the elephant. "I'm not sure what it is, but I think it stinks!"
"There is a diminishing return on caution."
Female Prison Rape in NY
Female Prison Rape in NY
I was a newspaper editor in a prior life,
and one of the oldest ways to spark interest
in a publication's opinion section is to get
a flame war going.
Infoworld has a Linux advocate on their
back page, so Metcalfe rolls a grenade
into our tent from the bottom of the
inside-of-the-back page.
He is so hilariously off-base, and has been
so spectacularly wrong in the past with his
internet-gonna-crash-real-soon-now forecasts,
that his rant can be safely ignored.
Like many folks on Wall Street (my current
career) he is a "fade" - someone whose
trades you take the other side of, because
they are so likely to be wrong!
It's a shame you're listed as an Anonymous Coward. You sound like someone with a background in political philosophy as well as computer systems. The Linux community needs more of you.
Bob gives no substantial arguments and the column reads like a personal rant against something he doesn't understand.
He's certainly entitled to his point of view, but the fact the he starts out by validating his fortune-teller abilities by other "predictions" that he wasn't alone in doing, shows that he knows he's on shaky ground.
Linux quite possibly will not kill off Windows, but the OS is here to stay. I would love to hear Bob Metcalfes plan as to how exactly he would ever make a grassroots movement like Linux simply go away in the near future. Things like that just don't happen.
"Beware the FUDmonster my son
the jaws that bite the claws that catch"
says he:
"Let's hope there's something coming soon that's better than both Linux and W2K. What would that be? Java or what? Let's be looking."
Well I guess he wasn't at JavaOne last week, along with 20,000+ developers, now outnumbering C++ programmers. Java is *already* here. I guess he doesn't realize that Java is in his cell phone, his palmtop, in his set top, in his smart cards, in his toys, and, in the future, in his car, and the systems of airplanes he flies in and other systems and vehicles. Perhaps he doesn't know that Java is being used for superscalar multi-processor super-computer number-crunching. Java is in almost every enterprise. It is a phenomenally successful (and threatening to MS, et al) platform. Java is enabling the network-centric computing paradigm. Yeah, right, "Java or what?". How clueless is this person?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
How come, less than a decade ago, users were still expected to use an archaic command-line interface called "DOS"? Were they so much more brilliant back then? Did they just get increasingly dumber over the years (perhaps MS had something to do with this?). How come the average user was expected to read a DOS manual and figure out how to setup up initialization file and device drivers?
I really don't buy "Linux is too hard ". The only difference between Linux and DOS is that Linux is "billions and billions" of times better, stabler, more secure, etc. If people could do it THEN they can do it NOW if they HAVE to. The thing is they don't HAVE too. GUIs are coming out that are even more intuitive than Windows...and they DON'T randomly break. Yes, Linux is a bit behind in GUI, but it is catching up really fast.
I also don't buy "There's no support for Linux ". If you could grab a brother/father/friend/manual in the 80's with DOS, you can grab one of the millions of people around the world who either are currently *working on* Linux, or who run it and are knowledgable about it. How about RTF HOWTOs? Nothing in any brain-dead iconic imagery-laden aneroxic MS manual has *ever* given as much help as a FAQ or HOWTO, from *actual* people who *actually* use the methods to solve the problems. *Experienced* professional programmers and systems administrators have trouble diagnosing Windows problems...are they really all that stupid? Or is it the OS? You really can't criticize Linux for something Windows doesn't even have.
Users are not going to have trouble with Linux because it is "hard". They won't have trouble because users are brain-dead lemmings. They will have trouble because it is something they're not *familiar* with. They are not familiar with it because it is foreign, because they have been constantly adapting to MS paradigms and propaganda.
You have to get off the methadone some day.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Hi Bob:
Yet another aging technocrat, ill-equipped or too lazy to adapt to change, is taking a wild shot at Linux. And how do you make this withering declaration? Why, by clever McCarthy era slurs and school yard name-calling. It appears you have lost your edge.
It is sad that a person who was at one time technologically adept and an artful innovator has descended into name-calling and fear-mongering.
You Bob, are a cheap hack. You obviously can't write a column based on an accurate analysis of the art & technology of operating systems so you descend to the most blatant of tabloid scripting.
Perhaps it is some mental disease and we should call a doctor. Maybe it is the need for attention and the symptom of a flagging ego. Very likely it is some mental misadventure caused by an excess of alchohol or other mood-altering drug. Whatever the cause, it is a tragedy of Greek proportion.
Well, you have very likely succeeded in attracting the attention of the Linux community and will reap a whirlwind of denouncers and the attendant proportion of nut-cases. You can now proudly show the e-mail deluge to your bosses and syncopants and claim that you haven't lost your touch.
What makes your attempt so transparent is you don't site a single fact in support of your views. You are comparing an un-released beta OS (W2K) to a Unix like OS, of which you have no knowledge or experience.
As for your predictions of the past - I have one for you. I see a bright future for you in Real Estate sales or perhaps a Juicer info-mercial - nothing too technical because the lights are on but all the important people are not home.
Best regards,
Brian
Anybody have a URL or quote handy for this comment?
Click here for details. :^P
Great, what we need is one more "visioner"! Like the one (wasn't his name Gilly Bates, or something?) who said 640kB is more then enough for everyone. And a few years later said his OS requires at least 4MB to run...
Bob,
w/r/t the personalities in the Open Source movement, you know not whereof you speak. ESR and RMS are good friends, I know them both socially, I've seen them together on many occasions, and whatever sniping they may do at each other in public over the details of this or that open-source license, they get along fine in person.
Richard is, as you say, a commie; but in holding that view, he is certainly in the minority among contributors to open-source projects. I'm about as hard-line a capitalist libertarian as they come, but I use open source software, and I contribute to it because I want the quality.
I don't give away code that I could turn into the next killer app, but I do give away bug fixes amd feature additions to code that many other developers use. The motive is much like being a member of a volunteer fire department, or helping to build a park or playground in my neighborhood. It improves the world I live in: the world of software development.
As for UNIX: if, as you say, UNIX is senile, then NT is a retarded child, suffering from crippling congenital defects in its brain. It's the biggest naked emperor to hit this industry since OS/2, and where the rubber meets the road, in high-volume web sites and database servers, any sysop worth his salt knows damned well that NT doesn't offer the reliablility (and yes, securability is part of that) to stay up for months on end.
In production, at the USPS.gov website, I know that the sysops have determined empirically that to keep the site up, they have to set one machine to the task of re-booting all the NT hosts once every four hours. For security, they depend on the configuration of their router, because they know through hard-won experience that NT itself is not secureable.
All that being said, UNIX does indeed suck, and the fact that it sucks far less than NT is no excuse. If you care about such things, there is a project done at U. Penn, called the Extremely Reliable Operating System (EROS) which has the potential to not suck. Check it out at http://www.eros-os.org
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Windows2000 is vaporware and will probably not ship for another year or so. And then tack on another year before it is reasonably stable. Linux
exists now and is in a continuous improvement cycle and will be very different in 2 years.
Once again a case of "apples and oranges."
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Let's think about a piano. It's a rich and complex instrument that takes many years to master. Someone without experience on it is virtually useless. Compare this now with a wind-up music box. Obviously the music box is more convenient for beginners to use. So what? Just because there's a place for a music box doesn't mean that there isn't a place in this world for a piano. Which one is more powerful, more expressive?
Not everything should be optimized for use by complete idiots. The CLI is infinitely more powerful than any GUI I've ever seen, because it tolerates and encourages communication between programs in ways never dreamt of by their authors. The Unix command line provides the developer with a broad set of powerful but flexible features that the creative mind can use to produce a custom design uniquely crafted to the particular demands of the situation.
Go out and find someone who has been at this game for many years. Now just sit back and watch them at work. They have created out of base components their own IDE, possible with SUI or GUI components, but probably not. But I guarantee you that it will be one that suits their own tastes and aptitudes. Quietly observe them edit files, move them around, compile them, debug them, test them, etc. The entire development is integrated, like a top-of-the-line German sports car: functional, powerful, and elegant. You will be absolutely astonished at the speed and ease exhibited by the native speaker of Unix in his home territory.
As on a piano, the art and skill of a CLI virtuoso can only be seen to be believed. That is the path to mastery -- all these cobbled little GUIs are expensive toys designed to sell a flashy demo using cheap tricks, and being optimized for immediate but shallow understanding rather than enduring use, are but a dim palimpsest of real tools.
Those without creative minds and agile fingers are of course welcome to hurry up with my fries. And they'll probably use a GUI to take my order, too.
Metcalf also predicted the web would be unusable by now, which he publicly retracted recently.
If this column appeared on usenet, it would be called flamebait (or at least parts of it would). Perhaps that's a commentary on the state of conventional forms of journalism (eg. the columnist).
At any rate, most of what he said was silly and hyperbolic. Linux is 30-year old technology? Actually the oldest part of it is 8 years old, on average most of linux is 3 years old I'd estimate and its cycling all the time.
The writef obviously referred to when Ken Thompson first started working on a distinguishable OS later to be called Unix. Yes that was 1969, but what did Unix look like in 1969? It barely had worked out the concept of directories and devices. (Check out Ritchie's article on describing what using Unix was like in the first few years here.) Does that look anything like Linux or Unix today?
Unix (and Linux) will be around in 30 years (albeit in an evolved form) simply because it can run on anything! Think about all the trends in computing that Unix has outlived because it adapted. Linux is the most dynamic and adaptable Unix ever invented because it is so open.
Are we going to be using intel-based PCs with keyboards and SVGA monitors in 30 years? Something's wrong if we are. Will Windows be able to adapt? Nothing Microsoft has done in recent years has demonstrated any degree of innovation or adaptability. Will the open source community just eventually dump the linux code base? Why would it?
In 30 years, Unix will be here. Windows won't.
There's a key point that Bob Metacalfe, and many others are missing here: age is not a relevant metric when measuring usefulness.
...) but isn't a good model for Linux.
BM says that Linux is doomed, in part, because it is based on 60s technology. He assumes that the reason Linux popularity has mushroomed is because of some king of techno nostalgia trip. You could argue that preferences for particular technologies are somewhat cyclic (dumb terminal -> PC -> Network computer (etc.) ->
Linux is popular for several reasons. But the technological reason for its popularity (as always) is that it *works*, fulfilling a requirement. Ten years ago PCs weren't typically hanging off a network, and certainly no 'average' users had their home PCs hooked up to the Internet.
So far fewer people were interested in networks. Nowadays, just about everyone has some kind of network connection, just about every company has a leased line (of some sort) and everyone and his dog a Web site. So suddenly people need robust, reasonably secure, network-aware OSs. Options include NT, various flavours of Unix, and so on. What better place to start than with a free Unix-like OS? Linux has excellent networking features, and you can build a Web site arguably as good as any other with a distribution downloaded from the Web for free, or bought at minimal cost.
Web sites are just one example. Linux excels in several areas that are in demand; mostly to do with networking. It was designed from the ground up to run in a networked environment -- imagine an OS that didn't have TCP/IP support nowadays?
That's an example of something Linux is good at. It was always ready to be good at it, and now people need it to be. It's for these reasons that it's become popular.
But just because it's technically competent and has a loyal userbase, Linux isn't future proof. If it's not useful to enough people to maintain momentum, or something vastly better comes along, it'll get chucked on the scrapheap with everything else. That is what progress is all about, after all.
I don't believe that Metcalfe had any purpose in this article other than to piss off Linux users. I'm not a Linux fanatic, sometimes I frackin' hate the thing, but his comments were one step away from childish insults. Linus Torvalds smells like peepee. You want to talk about back-to-the-earth idealism? Read about Xerox PARC in the 70's. This guy was right at the center of that.
grep -ri 'should work'
Back in my Windoze days, I had First Aid and Norton CrashGuard- both of those God-awful resource hogs caused more crashes than they prevented. My uptime prior to using those programs was about 1-2 weeks (not bad for Win95), but after the install, it was like 5-6 hours. Sorry, I'm perfectly happy without loading crap like that on my Debian box.
-- All hamsters are mortal. Socrates was mortal. Socrates was a hamster.
I'd like to call the attention to the fact that the main argument for why
Open Source would not work, on Mr. Metcalfe's view is that the methodology of work on
Open Source, oftenly a single man writing all code for a program, can not compete
with teams of hundreds of programmers developing a Godzilla sized project.
In my opinion, nothing is more incorrect. That could be valid if the final
product was to be physically made, and needed, to some extension, of physical
work to get completed. It's software we are talking here, not car building
or something.
The main error of Mr. Metcalfe may lay in his gets the view that larger is better.
That doesn't remain true for software. 90% of the tasks done today os MS - Office would be done equally well on a 300 KB text editor with a spreadsheet, of concise code and needed features. What makes up for the sales of such "fat ware" is sheer marketing.
Another error is to assume that each Open Source programer has to start from
scratch. This is not true. The amount of work spent to develop the free software libraries
one is using in a project may very well surpass, and by far, the work done for
any limited team on a large corp. And as the base of Open Source programers grows,
so grows the superiority of it's libraries over customized ones.
And even if one assumes that MS-Office is better because it can recognize 200
kinds of image files, because there were 100 programers working for it to work that way,
over a year or so, on the Open Source, the part that recognizes the same 200 files is already made. Everything a mn would have to do is to implement them. Unlike 200 different
screwdrivers, the programmer doesn't have to buy and keep at home all of them. They
are free, and infinitely reproducible.
The main reason why big companies work is just that: accumulated Capital. Only a large factory could have the means, machinery and personnel to build in series a 2 ton car.
Anyone can have a $800,00 desktop machine that will allow one to write all the software he needs for life.
Pope Raymond Lama
->-
-><- no
This guy is claiming Unix and the Internet will fall because they are old technology. I guess that's also why Western Civilization will fall; it is, after all, 5000 year-old...
I think Metcalfe is just trying to be cool by voicing doom predictions that go against the current hype. Unfortunately for him, his article will be remembered as laughable when W2K (I like that name; it makes it appear as the bug it is) comes out and crashes miserably.
I've heard similar arguments in casual conversations that base their conclusions on feelings and pop analogies, but to write an article about it is less than professional and borders on sophism.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
I'm outraged by Metcalfe's article. Open source software isn't communism -- it's analogous to the dissemination of knowledge in academia. A scholar freely makes knowledge available to students and other scholars, without expectation of gain. Scholars do so because they take genuine pleasure in the advancement of knowledge in a non-commercial environment, which enables all humans to benefit.
Computer software is too important to humanity's future to remain the exclusive possession of for-profit software firms. Can you imagine what the world would be like if science had been cornered by a for-profit firm? Would you have to pay licensing fees to find out how to cure a disease?
What utter, stupid, ignorant bunk. I had a lot of respect for Metcalfe before he wrote this article. It's over, baby.
This could be the dumbest thing I have ever heard of....
Linux is not about technical superiority - it's about choice - freedom. Of course Linux isn't perfect - Linus et al keep working on it - knowing their history, they will always be working on it, improving it.
No - what we have is an movement that can't be bought, stolen or steamrolled. We have a choice - we can try something, on our own, and exercise some free will in deciding our own course.
And one more thing - technology that has been around for 30 years is there for a reason - it works. I have a radio sitting on my desk (early 1900's), I'm using a QWERTY keyboard (1920's), I'm looking a cathode ray tube monitor (1920's), and I'm setting under an electric light bulb (late 1800's). How old are you Bob?
It would appear you are a bit lacking in self-esteem. I have noticed that you have been posting callous remarks every few minutes.
The one fact you must consider is that Windows is a sheep OS. Sheep have no choice but to follow the shepard. In our case, the bullied OEM. People are tired. They want a stable operating system that can get things done. Linux properly installed does just that.
To properly install Linux, you must make sure that you install the needed software and packages. You exercise intelligence and think "Will I be compiling? Will I be using many text editors?"
Next, you tune your system. Add a new user, and check to see that your software is configured correctly. Unlike Win32, you can find all the documentation for your software because the Linux community pressures for it.
Then you go to town; do what you want on your system. It will break less as it is not Win32. Since you have all your docs you can repair what you need. Try that on Win32.
My bottom line is please stop posting for attention and realize that some of your remarks can be seen as exactly what they are. Cries for attention.
-Clump
I will state that I agree with the first half of your post. Criticism can be great. The Linux community benefits from being told where it needs to improve. Criticism can inspire and motivate programmers to work harder.
You are right. It is wrong for anyone to issue inflammatory rhetoric simply because they are offended. It takes a better "man" to accept criticism and learn/grow from it.
With such a good insight, I am surprised you fell into exactly what you were complaining about. "Slashdot discussion forums are a nest of low informed ranting"
To discredit an entire movement because of a few news site posts is completely ludicrous. Why judge an entire movement on them? I hope you can reconsider your stance as it is much less articulate than the first half of your post.
-Clump
windows 2000 being out in 2000. haha. haha ha.
Really it is all a tempest in a teapot. Fact of the matter is, windows probably will not maintain the dominance it once had and NT will probably just fade out. NT and windows are just too bad to fix. They will have to be re-written.
I wish I could remember who said it but ten years ago a pundit said that windows probably wont be the OS of choice 10 yrs from now...looks like that is partially coming true...only time will tell
Actually,
I don't understand so much about real Marxism. What is the marxist theory as to how resources are to be allocated (or rather how are powers and needs are to be evaluated); which new ideas are to be exploited etc?
Is it a volunteer system as in open-source development?
now curious
philip
Wow!
what an extra-ordinary prediction. My understanding is communism failed, not because those guys had ideals, but because they believed centralized planning was the correct way to implement them. In fact, it turned out that the decentralized market, for all its faults, was the more robust and succesful solution to providing for our standard of living.
Bob seems not to understand this at all, either he doesn't know what was wrong with communism, or he doesn't know that it is the open-source movement who are the champions of massively parallel, decentralized systems. Someone should tell him.
philip
Funny.. but I prefere Emacs over Microsoft Word to write C code. Furthermore, lisp might be very old technology, it's still much better than VB !
resilience is futile
Linux is cheap
You're thinking like a home user now. In any size of commercial operation, the cost of the OS itself is only a small fraction of the cost of keeping it going. The fact that Linux is free (particularly if your own time in setting it up is worth nothing) and NT costs some money is defrayed by the significant cost in administering either. And the cost of Administering an NT or a Netware server has been shown to be considerably less than the cost of administering a Unix server (except for in the case where there are zealouts babysitting the Unix server- of course neglecting their primary responsiblities).
Only a home user or a rank amateur looks at the retail price on the box and equates that with the cost of the system.
Wake up!
Lots of people have tried Windows 2000. The third beta release is available from Microsoft for $60. I have it running on a machine at home, on my network alongside my Linux box and my Windows 98 box.
A few tens or hundreds of people doing this on a regular basis can do amazing things. . .
Yep, a few tens or hundreds of people doing this can make all Linux advocates look like rabid nuts.
Eric Raymond isn't into right-wing politics. He's into Wicca and witchcraft and all that stuff. Neopaganism.
It is my opinion, therefore, that computer usage should be licensed and an 8 day waiting period established before a person can purchase a fully assembled PC.
Now there's the kind of openness all Linux users should be proud of!
Sysadmins of the world unite, to preserve the elitist clique!
Most of the responses seem to be quite scornful of the article. Generally, the replies fall under:
1) Linux is more stable, more powerful. This is why it will beat Win2000.
2) Anybody who thinks linux is difficult is plain wrong (normally followed by some anecdotal story or reasoning)
However, you must keep in mind that these were exactly the points made by Apple and Os/2 users. People forget the reason why an OS is successful - frequently it has very little to do with its technical merits or power, and a lot to do with PR and mind share. When something mediocre (like DOS vs. Apple) or technically weak (windows 95 vs. OS/2) product succeeds, the geeks wring their hands and tear their hair, wondering why nobody gets the point.
But market reality is that PR and ease-of-use matters more, far more, than stability and flexibility.
Ask this question of yourself - do you know a single "ordinary user" who uses linux? By ordinary user, I mean someone who has never heard the word "ethernet" or doesn't know what GUI means. Sure, all of you can feverishly state that linux is as easy as windows, but do you know a real live physical user who uses linux and falls in the above category?
Well, the target audience of w2k is the current base of 200 million windows users, and guess what - most of them care as much about OS issues as you do about the technical details of your apartment's plumbing - not a whole lot. To them, it's another product, like a sony walkman or cable TV, and that's why Win2000 will very likely be a massive success, with advertising and publicity that blows away the average user (remember win95's release?).
I use linux, and I think it has its place, but I seriously doubt it will be a household OS within the next decade.
You can convince each other all you want about how powerful linux is, but again, look around and ask yourself if you know a single ordinary user (as defined above) who uses it. And that, my friends, is the advantage windows has.
L.
Metcalf is a cornucopia of right-wing, half-baked ideas. As I understand it, he basically bought Infoworld so he would have a forum more substantial than the three martini, has-beens coctail circuit on which to air them.
Giving bozos like this a blurb on Slashdot is like trying to argue the color of air. It is, in a word, pointless. Let's spend our energy on better things.
This article does a good job at saying nothing at all and abusing the standard I expect from internet article writing. This is just a whole lot of words thrown together that sound good but mean absolutely nothing. Gee, there isn't enough info here to clasify it as FUD even.
There is absolutely no information to justify what Bob is saying. Although I respect him, I can not take what is saying as true without a reason.
Gee, Bob, if ya want to kill linux, you must do better than that!
he says that unix is a 30 year old technology.
:)
ethernet is almost as old, isn't it?
Strikes as rather ironic
I read the article...sounds like he swallod his mouse and isn't getting enough oxygene...he is really having no idea of what's going on in the world (best example: Unix makes 17% of all server-shipments - and Linux is just a small part of this. We remember Linux having this 17% alone ;-)
BTW: FIRST COMMENT!!!
Ya know, a respectable case can be made for Windows beating Linux in the future. Not that I'd agree, but you don't have to make a fool of yourself saying so.
But this is the sort of article that just makes me embarassed for the author.
It's hardly worth commenting on, but I'll reiterate two points. First of all, Unix's age ("30-year-old technology") is a strength, not a weakness. Unix has retained the solutions that have worked well through all that time. NT developers have to re-implement an awful lot from scratch, a good way to repeat history's mistakes.
Second, this is a good example of how political prejudices ("open source is communism!") can ruin someone's ability to make a competent analysis.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
I loved the insight about Linux returning us to the '80's. I might add that this time - rather than having a more expensive and better alternative to the PC/DOS configuration, now - with Linux - there is a cheaper and better alternative. Also, the 30 year old technology issue I believe is right on. The same concept can be applied to the automobile engine. Open Source for tools like OS's, programming languages, email, etc. works because these items are well understood. With Linux, Perl, etc. we have well crafted tools for software engineers based on the best practices in our field.
I want to be alone with the sandwich
As far as a killer app for the desktop is concerned, I can only see two possiblities: speech recognition and artificial intelligence (including natural language understanding). Speech recongition has arrived but is still a bit immature, and not quite what it's hyped up to be. Who wants everyone to hear the email they are dictating?! This just doesn't work in the modern-day office environment. Artificial intelligence is quite a ways off.
In short, the desktop is dead. The killer apps of the next ten years will be on the server. The Internet will be the next Big Thing. Broadband is where it's at. Rich multimedia. Great content. The ultimate in shopping convenience. Email. Where's the desktop in all this?
What does this have to do with Linux vs. Unix vs. Windows? Well, Windows is irrelevant. The next "Bill Gates" knows that the way to fame and fortune is to do just that -- to make your desktop irrelevant. Heck, some people will be using the Internet every day from their homes, and they won't even own a "computer." How many have paid money for a web browser? How many have paid for Real Player? How many have paid for Quicktime? Some, admittedly. But Real Networks knows that it can give away the client and potentially make a fortune on the server. AOL has been sending out client software for free in huge quantities. That's the successful business model of the future. Indeed, the real struggle ahead for Windows is to find a way to stay relevant.
The companies who create the killer server apps will find it very important to reach the broadest client base. So, maybe that means Windows will keep its monopoly for the forseeable future, but only as a totally boring, behind-the-scenes, enabling technology. However, if you as a company are not providing the "technology" per se -- if you are providing the "killerness" of the killer app -- then open standards serve you very well. Do you think Amazon.com cares whether you use Netscape or IE5? Or whether you are using Windows, Macintosh, Linux, JavaOS, etc.? The open standards will mean the Linux will be able to acheive whatever technology is necessary. And it will probably achieve it without Windows 2000's 50M lines of code.
Wow... I am always impressed, er... dissapointed is a better word, with the lashing out and personal attacks on anybody who even suggests that Windows will have the upper hand in the future. First off, Linux makes up less than 1% of the market. That's a fact. I am not saying that Linux doesn't deserve more... it does. I am constantly surprised at the evolution that Linux has undergone in the past few years.
I often wonder whether any of you even start to question your Linux following... whether or not you, the independant Linux user - free of the MS brain washing, have not been brain washed your selves.
Have any of you taken a look at the feature sets or possible benefits of Win2k? I have... and I am impressed. I have also talked to beta testers who are very excited about Win2k, and the new directions MS is moving in concerning reliability and size.
MS has made mistakes... we all have. But if you are going to succeed in the info tech world, you need to learn to consider all options.
Use software not because of who or who doesn't make it, but because it's the best choice for your situation.
Food for thought...
I never understood why people whine about emacs. (These days it's a lot more than just eight megabytes and constantly swapping, and don't get me started on how huge word is. :-)
With the tutorial, I was productive with it within an hour. Over time, I accumulated some power features. Do not confuse the learning curve of various packages within emacs with emacs itself.
I think anything word can do, emacs can do. And then emacs does more (and costs less).
MT
--
You were a moderator with 5 points. You should have read the moderator guidelines before you did any moderating
Your article in not just poorly written it also distorts many facts.
> The Open Source Movement reminds me of communism. Richard
> Stallman's Marx rants about the evils of the profit motive and
> multinational corporations. Linus Torvalds' Lenin laughs about world
> domination.
This is about the worst analogy you could have ever written. I believe a more
accurate one would have been:
The Open Source Movement reminds me of democracy. Richard Stallman's
Jefferson rants about the evils of the profit motive and multinational corporations.
Linus Torvalds' Washington laughs about world domination.
This argument sure make a hell of a lot more sense. Linux and the OS Movement is
all about freedom for everyone who uses computers. I believe Linux is my savior
and helped me fight back at the tyrannical grip Microsoft had on me. Continuing my
analogy, Bill Gates' George III represents everything wrong in the computer
industry. I believe the computing body as a whole has a right to stand up to this and
demand or create something better. Not only do we have a right but we have a
duty. Just as our forefathers had a duty to free the American people from the grasp
of British.
> How about the Back-to-the-Earth Movement? How about Linux as
> organic software grown in utopia by spiritualists?
I really do not know where you are getting your facts from.. I wonder if you are just
pulling this out of your ass to try to get a rise out of people. This kind of FUD
shows how out of touch you are with this topic. Linux has state of the art
technology running very competitively vs. any other unix and Microsoft WinX
platforms. I really do not know what you are trying to say when you make
comments like.
> If North America actually went back to the earth, close to 250 million
> people would die of starvation before you could say agribusiness.
These are completely idiotic and absurd. The most application that is compiled on
a windows machine and a linux machine runs about 10-15% faster on Linux plus
about 5-10 degrees cooler on the processor. If you are implying that there is no
computer business in Linux, you are very mistaken, Oracle, Sybase, DB2 and other
big database have released their products for Linux as well as variety of other
companies.
> Unix and the Internet turn 30 this summer. Both are senile, according to
> journalist Peter Salus, who like me is old enough, but not too old, to
> remember.
Again you have outdone yourself. The first line of code that is every was written
for Linux would be at least half that number. If you are trying to poke fun a POSIX
then you ar even more of an idiot. It is so important to have a standard, Linux is
not like Microsoft and redefines the standards where they see it. And do not even
start to say that Microsoft is re-designing due a more complicated and better
design. More complicated, probably, yet time and time again Microsoft has
proven itself to create very poor design with little insight in expandability and
stability (Win95, MSDN, MSsql, and just about everything else with MS in front of
it).
Jason Wieland
jwieland@nospam_ucsd.edu
As a side note: We will be be windows. I have not doubt in my mind that Linux within ten years will successfully take the majority of the market share. Why? Becuase people like me.. There is a lot of them, bout 5 million by my figures. I used to say to myself damn I wish I could help, with kernel devel, or gimp devel. But me being a below average coder I really could not lend. But in the workplace is a different story every day I shove Linux down the throat of my managers. My have convinced a handful of co-workers to use Linux in the workplace and then they went out and convinced their friends to try it. Now in my division of 60 about 10 people use Linux for development and and it is spreading in other divisions like a virus. Going from 0 to 10 in about a year is damn good. I caught the NT folks well off guard but now they have dug in the trenches and are prepared for a long war.
I don't totally agree with that guy, but I'm going to take this oppurtunity to blabber stuff that's been hanging around in my mind for while.
:)
While Unix and Linux have certainly evolved over the past 30 years, their architecture hasn't undergone fundamental revisions as has Windows. You can argue that this is cause Windows started off quite inferior, and I would agree, but lately, the technology boom in Windows has been quite incredible, while Linux has only been playing catch up.
Windows supports the most hardware, and with Windows 2000, stability appears to be a non-issue. Unix has had 30 years to create a decent GUI. Windows has had less time, and has succeeded in making a STABLE GUI based OS that has millions of developers and users.
Certainly, with in the next few years, we'll see other forms of communication like voice/speech form windows. How long it'll take Unix to catch up, I don't know.
When Linux starts getting 3rd party propreitry drivers from hardware manufactueres, you'll find how unstable the kernel can become.
Windows 2000 has a standard way of cross process communication (COM/+) and a common way to share components (COM/ActiveX). It's funny to see how many ways Unix programmers try to do the same thing. Sometimes they copy and paste code, and cross process communication is done using sockets or pipes etc..taking much longer development time, and more chance of errors in coding. True, some people think that harder is better, but I prefer to concentrate on doing the meat of the code, than doing something like communication over and over and over and over again in different projects. COM is brilliant, infact it'sso brilliant that the Mozilla team have based their object model on COM.
Windows has managed to make things simple, but not stupid (like has happened with MacOS).
I'm running Windows 2000 and Redhat 6 at home. Windows 2000 kicks ass by far when it comes to a workstation and general purpose machine. I can productively use it for many things. But with linux, X leaves a lot to be desired, and I'm always afraid to start doing anything in XFree less it crash on me.
Linux's advantage is it's open source model. It's free, and that's attractive to many people (I think free attracts more people than opensource).
Linux's disadvantages are it's lack of desktop maturity and *sometimes* annoying community who run around like religous fanatics. Now that I mention it, that's the thing that puts me off Linux the most, the hostility of the community (especially to anything Microsoft).
A couple of decades ago, Microsoft came along and charged incredibly low prices for products which cost many times more on Unix platforms. Microsoft was a small company, made up of students and people, reminicent of Linux developers today.
If Linux succeeds, perhaps in 20 years we'll see an uprising against Linux vendors.
Linus torvalds will have everyone believe that people developing source outside of company normally produce better products cause they are passionate about the work and not because they want to get paid. That's full of crock. Is Linus' work at Transmeta going to be low quality cause he's getting paid todo it? I don't buy the arguments that the above only applies to software development. When's Transmeta giving away it's products to the world anyway?
Bah, that was a messy message, but you get where I'm coming from
Windows has had scripting for a while. I think that WSH (windows scripting) was hidden somewhere in IE5..i think. You can download it from microsoft.com anyway.
WSH supports many plugin able languages. but comes with vbscript, jscript and perlscript.
You can do ANYTHING with it since you can call java or com objects from it. Very powerful indeed.
IT Laughed and shook my head at disbelief and formated my partition and put NT 4 back on. NT 4 is mroe powerfull and it has things like uh diskadministrator that IS NOT EVEN INCLUDED IN w2000. I COULD ONLY DEFRAG THE DISK AND USE SCANDISK ONLY IN W2000 SERVER ONLY! NO DISK ADMIN, NO user manager for domains, no server manager. Nothing. What a piece of crap and all these features removed took 100 megs of ram to boot and 375 threads. hahahah You idiot. First of all, Windows 2000 runs fine on my machine with 64MB (K6200) but runs smoother now i've added another 128MB. Second, Windows 2000 has MORE features. The disk administrator, user manager, server manager etc are now all in the new MMC called Computer Manager. It's in the Administrative Tools menu (check your taskbar properties and make sure you have Administrative Tools enabled. Alternatively you can get to Computer Manager by right clicking on "My Computer" and choosing "Manage". Everything is in there... User/Group manager Device Manager (much like Win9x's) Service Manager Server Manager Event Logs Disk Administrator Shares System Infomation Performance Logs and more!!! Windows 2000's features blows NT4 away. For god sakes, Windows 2000 even comes with a telnet server. The new CMD.exe even makes it worth it. And Windows 2000 profesional comes with scandisk and defrag...what are you crapping on about?
And you know what else? The user interface to the automobile hasn't changed a lot in 100 years either. Same thing goes for the gun. So what's your point?
I've been in this industry professionally now for over a decade and have been working with computers in one form or another since 1983. I cut my teeth on the old mainframe systems about the same time the 8086 based PC was hitting it big. Everyone viewed the 8086 as a toy. The mainframes were geared toward multi-user because they could handle it. They had all sorts of facilities to insure that all the users could co-exist and communicate. The OS handled all the hardware resources. That was the only way you could be sure one user couldn't easily crash the entire system. It still happened, but rarely.
The 8086 was a toy. DOS was a simple program loader, nothing more. The services it provided were not even re-entrant, for God's sake. There was no need for them to be -- there was no way 2 programs would ever call them at the same time.
Well since the days of the Pentium or even the 486 for that matter, the PC became more than a toy. While IA32 is still fairly low end, the systems are capable of handling a lot of users, serving web pages, handling mail and all the things that the big mainframes used to do. But you can still only get a toy OS for it. The underlying guts of Windows 95 are still non-reentrant and they will continue to be since MS decided to carry that kernel forward to Windows 2000 workstation edition. Even Windows NT permits way too much access to the underlying hardware. It's a toy OS too. You can't really blame Microsoft. The only OS they'd ever designed before NT was OS/2 and we all know how well that did.
I'd been wanting to run UNIX ever since I got my first PC. Unfortunately all the PC Unices were way out of my price range. UNIX is a serious OS for serious machines. UNIX, like the internal combustion engine, has stood the test of time with relatively few changes. It wouldn't surprise me if UNIX were to survive as long as the internal combustion engine has.
As a side note, the problem with Linux is not that it's not user friendly. The problem is that Windows convinces users that they know how to use a PC. It's like a 6 year old thinking that because he can drive his toy car, he can handle an automobile. If the Windows users would just keep playing with their toys, we wouldn't have a problem. When they get behind the wheel of the real thing and someone gets hurt and they start whining like our proverbial 6 year old, that's where the problem is. So UNIX doesn't have a place where you can stick your feet through. It's not supposed to.
It is my opinion, therefore, that computer usage should be licensed and an 8 day waiting period established before a person can purchase a fully assembled PC. If you want to buy it in component form and assemble it yourself, the license and waiting period could be waived as obviously you know what you're doing. After all, do you REALLY want to rub shoulders on the Internet with that schmoe who does the iMac commercials? Or (Insert industry journalist's name here)? I know I don't.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Perhaps one of the most lamentable aspects of being a Linux user and fan is the constant felt need to defend what should inarguably be a great idea (it is simply tiring). Standing in front of simplistic accusations and such apocalyptic claims is a frustrating experience, particularly when people are being simplistic on purpose: because it's easier and satisfies their own interests.
:)
I've run into the parallel between communism and Linux, and techno-hippyism and Linux, before. It's never been a very informed perspective, and one that has lazily been unapplied to other areas of life. For instance, does academia survive by the closedness or openness of information? does democracy thrive through power-oriented structures or through public-oriented structures? People who praise the M$ model would be continuing the same design in promoting the idea of a "benevolent dictator": but who wants a dictator even if they were benevolent?
The Linux community promotes a better idea (one that is neither a naive "left" nor a too-simple "right"): a middle-ground much like the concept of social democracy. A sense of social orientation and duty with a supporting sense of individuality and democratic freedom (the two are co-determinative and almost symbiotic). A concept that leverages the power of technology while making sure it belongs to the people.
I know that's a bit preachy, but it's true. That's something that M$ isn't doing: they aren't empowering people, they empower themselves and spend a lot of money convincing us that its all for the best. And for the most part, they succeed, because they appeal to people just like themselves: corporate, power-oriented individuals who make decisions daily which are better for themselves and the companies they own, and tell everyone else that their increasingly fat wallet ultimately is better for the community than if those resources were put directly into the hands of the populous.
Those kinds of editorials make me sick because they represent several things: 1) people will listen to them and agree with them because they hear key words that they know they must fear --like the word "communism". 2) the world in which we Linux people live is comprised by people like Mr. Metcalfe who are really only good at centering the stage around themselves rather than actually contributing anything useful back to the community. At the same time, we have to take it seriously and keep responding. If we don't, people will not understand. Our open-source ideology should extend to a sense of persistence in defending its value... and hopefully with enough eyes focusing here, the bugs of the dominant closed-source models will become apparent!
"Man has always been his own most vexing problem." --Reinhold Niebuhr, "The Nature and Destiny of Man"
Very good point.