Slashdot Mirror
Business Week Online Laughs at Win2K
ethereal writes, "Business Week Online has a really
humorous article about how we're all going to end up
running Win2K. There's a small pro-Linux wrap-up at the
bottom, however. " The surprising thing about this article
is that it was written by
Sam Jaffe, who is a stock market writer, not a tech guy.
I had one nit-pick with the story (that I'm sure many of
you will pick up on), but it was minor. This was such a
blatant Linux plug that I almost (but not quite) felt sorry
for Microsoft after reading it.
I want to know what will happen when the Win2K embedded in your Xerox copier crashes...Will it just start printing out blue sheets of paper?
To me it has not yet been proven that a uniform look and feel is a good thing. This is just an assumption so far. There are tradeoffs associated with the 'standardization' that is uniform look and feel just as there are tradeoffs with any other standardization. The primary type of tradeoff in standardizations is flexibility vs. uniformity related. Since GUIs are inherently 'artsy', and the best tend to be games with no look and feel standards at all, I think a strong case can be made that a standardized look and feel is not better than 'a multitude of window managers, apps, etc, but no coherent look and feel'.
"Linux is also a favorite among techies because its so-called source code is open to anyone and everyone"
So-called? wtf?!
i think that "customer's features" are (at least now) conflicting with "our" features thus implementing them means poluting system.
i'm not against "linux for dummies" or "linux for exWindozers" but i think that better solution is to leave BE, MacOS or whatever to "windozers" and linux, FreeBSD, ULTRIX, Solaris or whatever to "techies".
i prefer set of optimised tools rather than one universal tool (for everything but not doing anything good).
hany
I was arguing for efficiency over shallow learning curve WITHIN the context of GUIs, not againt GUIs altogether. GUIs do indeed have their place. Shallowish GUIs even have their place. My point is that a standard GUI environment will tend to fix that shallow vs. efficiency tradeoff point at some level in at least mindset if not in technical restrictions. Incidently my wife, her co-workers, and the secretary here at our company all agree that they would rather have WordPerfect 5.1 back than the Office behemoth that is shoved down their throats now. They would of course prefer a best of both worlds, like maybe a current WordPerfect, but Word it the dictated 'standard' they are restricted to.
By the way, would you rather submit a paper you wrote to be formatted to the WordPerfect, FrameMaker, or LaTeX expert or would you rather have the lazy Word drone who couldnt go up a curve do it. There is a place for quality document PEOPLE in most organizations, and I would rather they have the best tools possible.
I end up formatting them myself since all I have access to are Word drones. Wasted engineer time.
There are probably other factors involved, such as what exactly is being served.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
You are correct. There is at least one Linux discussion group in the Public Folders at MS. As well, a number of employees run Linux on their own time, prefer to use emacs or vi to Visual Studio's IDE, and generally aren't as brainwashed as most people assume them to be. At least, that's been my experience, but I also work mainly with devs rather than program managers or any of the other people who generally get heavy into the MS mentality.
Neither Microsoft nor BillG can regulate what MS employees do on their own time. As long as the code is not done with or on MS property (thus making it MS code), everything is nice an legal.
-- MS Employee posting as an AC to keep my anonymity.
There are very few applications where a different GUI style is justified by increased efficiency. Take Truespace. The totally different style is neccessary becuase of the difference between a 3D modeler and a Office app. But often, the time saved by having to click less does not justify the time spent learning the application. Plus most programs let you edit the interface to suit you. You can make macro in HotDog pro and then assign them to a icon. Then complex operations can be done with the click of a button. Also you can move elements around, make links to oft used options, etc. Elements like that really make the whole arguement against standardization kind of fall apart.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
You are joking, right?
Interface stability is consistent look and feel. With a consistent look and feel, interfaces are stable across multiple applications, not just within one application. This is the point you are missing.
GNU getopt gives you this unified look and feel by giving you one way to get at a command's options regardless of what the command does. More than that, the standard "FSF style" gives you a consistent way to find out what options are available: foo --help.
If you do away with this (my example of five different getopt libraries, and each program randomly chooses one) then your desktop experience starts to crumble. Every new program you install might use any of these getopt methods, or it might use none of them, and you need to learn yet another way of saying "foo --switch *.txt". Somewhere around the 20th program that thinks your time is less valuable than the programmer's time, you'll feel a little bit resentful of all this waste.
No matter how efficient one hundred different customized interfaces to one hundred different commands might be individually, they will never be as efficient collectively as one hundred commands that use getopt. And similarly, if you only use one GUI program, it's entirely possible that you will find its nonstandard interface is much more useful. But people who use one GUI program often use more than one, and that's where the benefits of consistency add up.
Taken in isolation, inconsistency may be good. But most of us don't have the luxury of using only one program over the course of our lifetimes. If you do, good for you; but I sincerely hope I'm never forced to waste my time learning your software, instead of using it.
Was your hardware on the HCL? Where did you get RC1? It has not even been released to the public yet...
I'm sorry but I can't take anyone seriously who says "sucks balls". I guess it kinda sucks to be grown up. There was a time that would have been funny to me.
And some of us understood you the first time. Of course, some of us aren't 14 and home for the summer on mummy and daddy's computer ...
Good to see another NH user out there. MH kicks ass (ooooohhh, that sounded mature, didn't it:) But is does.
Try MH. MH is very, very nice and blows elm, pine, and close to anything else into the weeds.
Brendan
Bars Emptied, Insurance Collected, Wars Fought, AIX Wrangled
There _IS_ an official GNU version of hello. It's in version 1.3 now IIRC. Check it at the FSF's website.
I guess sarcasm isn't in your vocabulary.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
so there is a way to make windows stable...joy. unfortunately for MS, there are those of us who don't like their entire systems crashing in the first place. Give me a stable Unix anyday...ext2 works well enough for me, and the kernel is stable enough that I really don't see a need for a fs that recovers quickly.
MY Unix server is running on a 486, and I plan to upgrade to 2.4
Save the children; quit overparenting!
I've seen some (dare I say many) Win9x boxen where you don't even have to mess around with them - just constant use for a few months is simply enough to make them go mad, and all you can do is just blow everything away and reinstall fresh.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Yawn. You screwed up server. Don't blame your incompetence on MS. I get 10K hits a day on my IIS 4.0 box, and I haven't rebooted it since the day it went live (in January some time). Get a clue, please.
My typical Linux screen has Netscape, Kdevelop, Licq, X11amp, and about 12 "Konsoles" open. The GUI allows me to see several CLI's at the same time, and size them to whatever size I want them to be. I can work at the console if I need to (for example, on Linux boxes that are hard-core servers), but I find it annoying and limiting, even with 6 virtual consoles, and I eventually start my laptop into X-windows and ssh into the server if I need to work there for a prolonged period of time.
Just because you are running X doesn't mean that you can't (and aren't) using the power of the cli.
COBRA, OLE,COM etc kick ass over fvwm and xterms any day. Nowhere in linux (except the forthcoming KOM) can you take a picture from one program, embed it into another, or take a spreadsheet and embed it into a document, while still retaining the features of the spreadsheet program. I do WORK with computers. But some people like your self seem to think that work only means clicking away at your CLI making programs or editing the files in the /etc directory! It is incredibly arrogent that you think that yours is the only kind of work people do. Try doing 3D modeling in your precious little xterms. Try editing avis, make documents that have embeded spreadsheets, etc. Sorry but Linux HAS to atleast catch up with windows in the GUI department. It has to get OLE, Object based programming, context sensitive actions, and a easy to learn interface. There are different ways of doing things, but in each catagory you can usually compare two things. Even if they do things differently, one is better or worse than the other. CLI will always be better for somethings. (I find my self typing cd .. in explorer) but a good GUI has to be totally integrated, easy to learn, and consitant. Windows,OLE, COM, and COBRA are technologys that are far ahead of fwvm and even KDE in that regard.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I think a high line count is a strong negative factor when evaluating software. Every line is a potential bug. The more lines you have, the more bugs you have.
It amuses me that Microsoft constantly touts how many lines of code their software has, as if that were somehow a feature, or a positive thing. To me, it's just a measure of how unlreliable the software is likely to be.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Ok, so Linux has more programmers working with it. But does it have 30 million lines of code? Hah!
Let that be a clarion call to developers everywhere to make Linux the most feature-rich OS around...
...features that customers want, not just what we want.
----
----
"Oh, bother," said Pooh, as he hid Piglet's mangled corpse.
99.9%, aka 999/1000 sounds like a nice ratio, until you consider that (as every programmer worth his salty snacks knows) the /real/ problems occur in the boundary conditions. You know, that eventuallity that you didn't plan or lay code for? Like trapping certain nasty but rare exceptions?
/me/ when I hit one of those boundary conditions? Do I get to sleep that night? That *week*?
Now this really _is_ nit-picking, but what eventuallities does this 99.9% cover? Successive pings? I don't really care about the ordinary stuff that users do. What happens to
Now, the Journalling-NTFS will help... Maybe... I'd feel better about it if MS had a better history of writing good file system standards and disaster recovery code. Do I really trust MS to rollback dirty writes?
The answer is typically 'No'.
It's funny that KDE didn't exist until recently. I guess I was using something else two and a half years ago when I first started using KDE. Silly me. Also, their description of a journalling file system (not journal filing system) wasn't all that great, but the guy writes stock market articles, so what can you expect.
-matt
ok yes he got alot right which he should be comended for !
why although was it not made clear the pressures that M$ is under.
windows is becomeing the expensive part of a sub $500 machine
win2000 interface has serious drawbacks
the vunerbility because people discovering the bugs dont tell or fix them
my thoughts ^
john jones
a poor student @ bournemouth uni in the UK (a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)
Although there were a few humorous spots, I'd say the tone of the article was more cynical than sarcastic. A well-earned cynicism I think we'd all agree ... after all, isn't every MicroSoft program the "most important program ever written" about six months before it's released, according to their own opinion? ;-) (BTW, what other company in the world could get away with making statements like that about their own product?)
I think what they meant was that since IE is component based, you can re-use its different COM objects. At one place I used to work, we had used IE's COm objects to have an application diplay some HTML in a window. Pretty cool.
By contrast, netscape is a big monolithic application.
but because it was incoherent. This is writing? I could hardly glean a point from this rambling babble, although it was more or less inocuous and mildly entertaining. It reads worse than some of the anti-windows rants on usenet, which (sometimes) are funny.
support gun control: take guns from cops
Apple? You don't mean the company that's making a comeback in a big way, do you? Hmm.
Please.
-- Too lazy to get a lower UID.
Since when does NT take 100MB of RAM? I have W2K Beta 3 running right now on a 128MB computer. No swap file activity with AOL, 4 IE windows, and Visual Studio 6 open.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Yeah, the one that coasted for a longtime before their big comeback.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
This is one of the very essenses of the Open Source movement. Do you think that when Linus finishes work on a kernel revision he just lays back and says "Ok, that's good enough, let's stop work on Linux."? No, he keeps working on it. No matter how many bugs removed, no matter how many new features added, he keeps working on it. He's striving, just like other software authors, for something better. Constantly working on it because it may be "good enough", but it will never be perfect. Why do you think that emacs is up to version 20? Yes, it's fun, a good way to get famous, but it's also this undeniable urge to keep on hacking. I'll admit that the article was good, and did better than most. But the day that someone does not "nitpick" something will be the day that the human spirit, and Open Source, die.
Well if you don't use windows it's kind of hard to use IE now isn't it. I think he was refering to that fact that Win98 has IE wrapped tightly around its bloated little heart(-Boot Magazine, Win98 Preview) and the fact that a lot of program require IE before they even install.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
It is, declares one Microsoft executive, "the most important program ever written."
..................................@ @
yes, it is quite humorous. unfortunately, it wasn't meant to be that way...
i dont display scores, and my threshhold is -1. post accordingly.
Discuss
Let's try that with an Apple coffee maker.
Power on coffee maker.
[3 min boot up]
Drag icon of filter basket to trash.
[Warning, another program is using the basket. The basket can not be ejected at this time.]
{Stupid,&%^*#&.}
Restart coffee maker and hold down brew switch to force eject the basket.
Load with hard to find Apple JavaBeans.
Double click brew icon.
[Decaf or regular?]
[Sorry, error type 10 in Burner, Restart.]
Restart coffee maker, drag carafe to AppleScript brew folder.
[Carafe autofills with water, and java complier starts. This is Apple's version and takes all day for one pot.]
Make mental note to upgrade coffee maker to QuickBrew 4.0, choose startup carafe, and to turn off Appliance Linking.
Have you ever installed Windows 9x from scratch? It's not that easy to get started. With most current Linux distros, it's at least as easy to install. Partition, assign into the FS tree, start the install. It's easy.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Are you kidding? Games are the single area of consumer computing where performace is most crucial. Gamers aren't going to bother with $500 machines. They want SBLive's and TNT2 and a processor that can keep up the the TNT2's rendering. The lowend market is more suitable for light applications use. For the basics, Linux is already suitable.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
When I read this article yesterday, I was surprised to learn that Linux hadn't had a widely-accepted GUI until six months ago, when KDE and GNOME were born (I suppose that as far as some writers are concerned, nothing exists until it's been hyped in the media).
I'm sure Mr. Jaffe will receive hundreds of polite emails like the one I sent with a short background on X, window managers, etc.
My quandary is, where do these trade writers keep getting these silly notions about Linux not having a GUI? Is the MS FUD that pervasive?
slashdot broke my sig
I don't think you caught what the previous poster meant by X. X refers to some generic task, not the X window system in particular.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
You get visted by the Butt Fairy ...
Slashdotted already.
That's 1,000 angry and unhappy customers, not 10,000. 0.1% of 1,000,000 is definitely NOT 10,000... :)
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
You do realize that Be interfaces with standard keyboards. Thus if you keyboard is not standard (It takes advantage of undocumented stuff in they standard) then it will not work without an operating system that reproduces the undoumented features. Linux does, Windows does, however BeOS is clean and keeps things that aren't from being used on a BeOS system.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
" Its greatest advantage is that it has tens of thousands of programmers throughout the world who can adjust and improve it in their free time. Poor Microsoft, by contrast, can afford only 4,000 programmers to work on the code for Windows 2000. "
I gotta say I like that... Linux programmers outnumber (and outcode?) windows 2k programmers. That's gotta sting.
--
Oh please. Many novices don't even know they can do things like object imbedding. For an ubersuite, it's not even useful as all the components are part of the same deliverable anyways.
The Windows consumer mentality makes object reuse technologies much less valuable than they could be otherwise.
For the most part, it's a marketing bulletpoint more than anything else.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Though I think we /. readers may find it amusing, I do not think the article was intended to be a humorous satire, but real speculation about the future of w2k... Just because we like the linux part does not mean that is the only part we interpret as serious when it seems pretty clear that the entire article had the same tone to it..
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
That was poor form I suppose. The paper(s) I am talking about are technical white papers and published papers. They tend to be 5000-15000 words with mathematical formulas, figures, etc. I therefore prefer LaTeX.
Word may have been a poor target on my part due to my relatively low exposure. I just wanted to leverage my wife, friends, etc as backup on the argument. They use Word and Excel. They like Excel. So I used Word.
Yes Linux is sure more faster and more flexibler and more stabler!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
When he says that one of the reasons that IE has become popular is because it's embeddeble (SP) ..
Uh...huh huh...I'm sure the fact that it's shipped by default with almost every computer over the past couple years has nothing to do with it...
That seems like an odd reason for its success. The fact that they bundle it with every personal computer sold in the world seems like a more likely one.
D
----
Exactly! Why should we care if Windows is the dominant OS? We can still use Linux or BSD. What is the point in even trying to get desktop acceptance? If people want to use Windows, fine, let them, it doesn't have anything to do with us.
If they want to use Linux, that's good too. And if they want to use Linux but have it look like windows, they can write the necessary bits. Some do, some have. But it's nothing to get excited about.
I can't really decide whether this article was meant to be funny or not, but it certainly managed to be so... 30 million lines of code being "embeddable" is a laugh :)
-- K
No, in fact we are nearer of 99.99% of stability. Here at the OECD we have a BSOD every 10K hits with our IIS4.0/SP4 server !
NT is definitely the fastest server : It crashes (at least) 7 times more faster than Linux.
- Dodge this, bill ! -
I'm half kidding. But edlin is not too bad as a batch file editor. It can be used as sort of a crude version of sed. Actually, edlin should be loved by real hard core Unix fans because it is a kissin' cousin to ed and ex. Come on now, Linux heads. Drop to the command line and type ex. Or ed. Do you have the balls?
Everyone who owns a computer less than a year or two old has Internet Explorer on it, and most of those people probably use it. That's what I was saying.
I don't doubt that many programs embed Internet Explorer - I had an application where I did myself, and it is remarkably easy to do. But I don't think the bulk of users browse the web with HomeSite, Notes or Quicken.
D
----
Compared to what? NTFS is slower than FAT for obvious and provable reasons (just as running through a SQL DBMS is often slower than using TEXT files for inserting records...though it is amazing how many people are astounded by this). NTFS doesn't have "performance problems", it is a simple reality that it is slower than the "straight to the disk" FAT.
..this is the /. - here everybody wins several cookies! Just look at your cookies.txt: sexual orientation, visa number, religion, etc. it's all there! God bless you Rob.
um
isn't NTFS just HPFS with some extra fiddleybits in it?
whee -Me
Strange... I had 7.
1) sooner or later, you'll likely be using it when you boot up
2) Windows 2000
3) Linux has quickly gained a foothold in the server OS market
4) Linux has grown quickly, mostly at the expense of other Unix operating systems
5) it's a far cry from the feature-rich Windows 2000
6) Just six months ago it had no widely accepted graphical user interface
7) If Linux can make changes like that
I guess I shouldn't be too rough, though...
not everyone can have a clue.
I fear, however, that this article was NOT intended as humour...
Yeah but until BeOS can communicate with most keyboards, it isn't worth a damn.
I just thought you weighted the other point more. You actually are backing an argument I still give thought to. The standardized interface across applications is nice in theory but it will never be failsafe. Somebody will always deviate, whether from preference, ignorance, need, or beligerence. Therefore, it is sort of a fallen house of cards from the standpoint of leveraging the standardized interface as a software layer. However, as a convention I fully back such things when the tradeoffs as I evaluate them justify it. For example, all my standalone executables do have -h, --help, and -? as help arguments.
In summary I think such guidelines are best left as conventions, not standards. So moving back up to the GUI level I submit that conventions are an acceptable thing, but standards should be avoided.
The is admittedly a fine line in the Linux world where everything is optional anyway, but the mentality of it is what is significant in the long run. I could go on about the ramifications with embedded systems, alternative user IO, etc but this slashdot article is about to scroll off so this probably wont be read anyway.
Yes, I think most of us know (though apparently someone didn't) that NTFS is a journalling filesystem.
If you use a nice distro (like, oh, Debian), you might not have such a hard time setting up a PPP dialin account (pppconfig is pretty damn easy - simple Q/A setup).
Unix (and by proxy, Linux) wasn't designed for "non-computer users". It's getting more user friendly (tho I'm not sure I like all the baggage that brings), but as it is now, Linux assumes you, the user, actually have something called a CLUE.
Journalling filesystems are being developed for Linux (journalling extensions for ext2, reiserfs, and ext3). As one other person said tho, I'm not sure I'd trust a Microsoft product to take care of dirty writes like that.
Just picking products off the NT HCL doesn't guarantee jack. Do you have an MCSE? Or do you just believe everything you read?
I'm glad your NT server (server? what are you serving? how much? what kind of load?) is so stable. As for some of the rest of us, we'll let you dink around with NT 5^H^H^H^HWindows 2000 and we'll be happy with our Linux installs.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
So? BMC doesn't have any problem 'reusing' Netscrape on Solaris? ORB's aren't the only way to reuse components.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Disclaimer: my company is a "Microsoft Partner".
I've had a chance to work with the latest Beta (Beta 3, I think), and it's quite stable. Our W2K team believes it's a release candidate, so 4Q '99 is easily believable.[1]
Present strategy is (I believe) to eke out at least one more major release on the W95-W98 base, then start herding consumers toward a "personal" version of W2K, after which there will once again be "only one Windows". But it will come in at least 5 and maybe more "sizes", from personal to SOHO to enterprise. It may be a bit confusing, but certainly no MORE confusing than the present situation.
[1] None of this should be taken to mean that I love W2K. I "like" it only in that it's a clear improvement over NT4.
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Good point -- it is nice not to crash in the first place. But there are certainly enterprise-level and other mission-critical functions that will require a JFS safety-net. We shouldn't lose sight of that. Crashes aren't all due to the OS, remember (ever have a backhoe twenty miles away take down your WAN?). And even if Linux is only X% as likely to crash as NT -- that's no comfort to the IS director for whom one crash, at the wrong time, could be professional suicide.
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
It is quite obvious that you never used the new WordPerfect Office 2000. If you tried to spread Microsoft FUD, be a little bit smarter. Recently Yahoo Corel Discussion Group was invaded by agents from the Evil Empire. The Jedi has returned, and Microsoft is getting mightily scared (40% of its profit).
As I understand it, the major difficult in porting Corel Draw into Linux is true font implementation. With regard to office suite (remember this is our subject here), Corel is hiring a large number of programs to work on the WINE project.
The main difference between MSO2K and WPO2K is that the former tried to squeeze too many things into the suite (so as to justify the high price), causing it highly wasteful and unstable. On constrast, WPO2K installation is very "neat". This gives you a confidence of stability.
If you want to spread FUD, make sure you at least know something about the product(s). To me, this is a vaporFUD, and it only makes you look Microsoftish.
it's fast compared to just about anything, according to what i remember reading. i don't remember what i was reading, though :(
Well I have to use both at work, and there are several notable things that MS could and should fix with their OS in order to make it hold a candle to Linux and Solaris, the two major unices that I use. My major gripe with NT and other Windows OSes for that matter, is a phenomenon I call ' OS Rot '. Windows is the only OS I've ever used that has a tendency to become more unstable the more you try to tweak it. Granted you can screw up any OS in a big way if you do the wrong thing, but here's an example similar to the 'Router as Serial Mouse' problem. I can't ever upgrade the NT machine I have at work because it just simply refuses to work. After installing and uninstalling various service packs and option packs, the damn thing BSOD's every weekend without fail, and every time I reboot I have to reinstall the display drivers. This is not making my job easier.
Needless to say, every problem I've ever had with Solaris or Linux is due to me goofing something up, .
The Windows Rot phenomenon is what really burns me about Microsoft. It IS possible to build an OS that doesn't do that, yet they don't.
Also, just put in my 2 cents on the 'average joe won't use Linux' opinion: I just installed Caldera OpenLinux 2.2 on my formerly Win98 machine, and it was painless and fast. Up and running and on the net in about an hour. Everything was there, and it all worked. It absolutely rivals Win98 or NT for setup ease ( I mean, click-click-click you're there). Don't be too sure that Linux can't make better headway into the desktop area, if this is the wave of the future. Now, all I need is Baldur's Gate for Linux and I'll never even think about Windows again.
WordPerfect Office for Java is something I believe Corel could/will never forget. But you learn from mistakes. Indeed, this is the best way to learn, and that's why the new WordPerfect Office is so good. Corel is a very different company now. One of the constants in the everychanging world is that things are changing. Remember, five, or even three years ago, Microsoft was a very likable company. Now Microsoft-bashing has become a very popular national past time.
Try reformatting the drive first. W2K is to unlike NT4 to work as un upgrade. And W2K does "fucking boot" as you so eleqoently put it. You just have to set it up right.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
If only we could recompile Windows kernels for ourselves. Then we could enable only those options we need!
Anyone use a VISCA VCR w/ their 'puter?
I wonder if the compile would work though.
I have three computers I've owned for fewer than two years and none of them has Internet Explorer on it.
I don't care about look and feel so much as functionality. Personally I could give a rats ass about Gnome's "official emailer" Balsa, because it doesn't do anything worthwile and crashes a lot trying to do even that. :P /bin or /usr/bin.. umm) . Also, chmodding/chowning manually is annoying and by comparison toggling little boxes is super easy. (some people just don't understand what chmod 666 does, and some will think it satanic.. :P)
Thank you, I'll suffer through a crappy looking toolkit or a text based program like Pine or Mutt rather than lose the features I need to get things done.
GUIs are about empowering the user to get things done quickly without typing a lot. Moving files around within deeply structured directories is a lot easier with a file managing program, because you get a quick idea what else is in directories and can see the directory tree structure (eg. does this go in
I for one have a few favorite apps that have to be GUI.
1) FTP -- right now gftp is the most functional and stable.
2) E-Mail -- I think this goes to Mahogany
3) Web browser -- Lynx is useful, but not always useful. Hard to navigate art sites with it, hehe. Mozilla is looking nice, but is taking its sweet time.
4) Compression utility -- guiTAR is pretty nice
5) File manager -- kfm is less prone to crashes, but neither kfm or gmc can associate mime types and file types as easily as windows explorer. I think I prefer gmc's interface, but I don't like how Gnome apps don't like to play very well with window managers other than Enlightenment. I for one dislike how hard it is to configure E, and prefer Window Maker's elegant simplicity.
It didnt work. My 486 just gave me a stiff neck.
Back under the bed it went!
violust@icelab.net
Ha ha! Edlin! Ha ha!
We can laugh at it because we have vi! It rocks!
It probably means that .1% of the code is violently unstable. And at 30 million lines of code, that comes out to be a mear 30000 lines of code, and is probably something like the start menu and the My Computer icon.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
Well, I know this might have annoyed a few of you:
"Of course, the Unix version that has gained so much attention lately is Linux."
Linux isn't a version of Unix, it's a Unix flavor. It was written from scratch, and not based on the BSD kernel.
Anyways, it's still a pretty interesting article. We recently received Windows2000-Nt-server at work for testing, and I don't really like it.. It takes up 600 megs of HD space, and on a P2 333/64megs, it's very slow. (although I'll let the benefit of the doubt that it might be badly configured)
I'm also curious about the price, but hey, corporate people just love paying too much money, they feel more secure.
For your info I am a college student, and it seemed like the proper term at the time. Possibly if you guys stopped breathing ASCII air once in a week, you would laugh. Just my thoughts. I still rest my case that Windows is pathetic, said correctly or not.
...the comments like:
"Well, I installed Linux without ANY TROUBLE and it has currently been up for 8 years STRAIGHT. Windows on the other hand crashes every SECOND I try to use it AND it killed my mother."
It gets really old and you end up sounding like an idiot.
If that comment was true, why the heck are you installing Windows anyway.
Oh, I forgot, you are forced to use it at work/school etc.
Uh huh.
Eight Xterms and FVWM sounds pretty darn Luddite to me.
----
----
"Oh, bother," said Pooh, as he hid Piglet's mangled corpse.
Metaphors are neat. You can "prove" about anything using metaphors. Maybe that's why they're so useful in politics.
If some people are happy just playing MP3s and surfing the web, I'm happy for them.
If some people are happy with a powerful stable server OS for their website, I'm happy for them.
But I need different things from my system than that. Some of those things are already available in Windows, and I'd like to see them in Linux.
Those features will come to Linux inspite of all those who think it's just fine already, because, frankly, those of us who are programmers understand the technology better, and will endeavor to include it in Linux, even if many end users aren't interested (yet).
----
----
"Oh, bother," said Pooh, as he hid Piglet's mangled corpse.
"Another key feature of Windows 2000 will be its "embeddability." That means it'll be possible to embed it into other programs or hardware. Already, Xerox has signed on with Microsoft to create Windows 2000 copiers that will have the OS built in and will operate seamlessly with a Windows 2000-run network"
(I already posted this to the defcon list, but thought it'd be good here, too)
Oh, yeah, that's what I want, W2K appliances. Like, say, coffee machines.
7:30AM:
[Try to take out used coffee grounds from yesterday]
"Alert! User has requested to open basket which is currently in use. Continuing this action will cease all programs using this basket! Continue? {Y/N}"
[grumble, wipe sleep from eyes, press No by mistake]
[Remove grounds, take two]
"(Windows repeats itself, this time you hit the right button)"
[Add coffee grounds, reinsert basket]
"Warning! Cannot autorun this coffee. Please remove from basket and try again {OK/Cancel}"
[*whang!*]
"Warning! There is no water in the carafe. Please insert MS Water v.H-20 build 4535 into Carafe {OK/Cancel}"
[grumble. take carafe out]
"Alert! User has requested to open drive which is currently in use. Continuing this action will cease all programs using this drive! Continue? {Y/N}"
[hit Y.]
"Another program has requested a drive that is unavailable. Coffee production is halted"
[fill carafe, ignoring Windows, begin to fill reservoir]
"Warning! Any malicious water you pour into the reservoir may be contaminated and could possibly kill you. Continue with this action? {Y/N}"
[hit Y, HARD]
[Replace carafe under basket, hit "Start"]
"Sorry, but the carafe was previously removed, cannot fulfill request at this time"
[It's now 8:30AM, late for work, and now coffee. Leave anyway, grabbing some easily portable java on the way to work...]
[While at work, the home coffee machine power-cycles randomly and finds that both the basket and the carafe are actually inserted properly, and begins making coffee. It's cold by the time you get home... Try to remove it to place into a Linux microwave to warm it up]
"Warning! Any coffee reheated by non-Microsoft compliant appliances may not be the same. Loading webpage for MicroSoft CoffeeHot! countertop appliance..."
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
True story: (read this Bill!)
I used the windows uninstall utility to uninstall a demo I'd stuck on the HDD some time ago.
"Are you sure you want to remove program X?"
yes
"Removing wheelmouse driver........"
Basts!
You guys just don't get it do you?
>I too almost feel sorry for Microsoft, they are
>like a little child who keeps trying to get it
>right, but never totally does.
If they "got it right" the first time, there would be no need for upgrades! It is not profitable to make a perfect product.
They can make a product that purports to do the job. They sell it. They make an upgraded product that is only a *little* better than the previous one; they say it's vastly improved and offers better performance. True, but only a little. They sell it. They, then, make an upgraded product that is only a *little* better than the previous one; they say it's vastly improved and offers better performance. True, but only a little. They sell it. They, then, make another upgraded product that is only a *little* better than the previous one; they say it's vastly improved and offers better performance. True, but only a little. They sell it.
Get the picture? Their revenue stream *DEPENDS* on upgrades. They must convince folks to upgrade - that's why they try to put more junk into the OS - to convince folks to upgrade.
I think of Linux like this: A technician who is as easily at home at the keyboard as he is in the hardware. He has his well stocked toolbox ready to go. He can grab a pair of needlenose pliers, a hardened phillips or an allen wrench if he needs it - the right tool for the job. He's also affordabe.
I think of Windows like this: A guy who walks around with all kinds of tools protruding from his body - permanantly. Sometimes, he can't get his hands in the case because of all the junk attached to it. He has a pair of pliers welded to his hand that doubles as a hammer and a screwdriver. None of his tools is especially designed to do the job right but seems to be barely "good enough". He frequently looses his balance due to his overweight condition, falls over and leaves telltale impressions in the concrete wherever he goes. This guy is very expensive.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
He mentions that most people won't buy it until after Y2K. That would be a mistake, last I heard 95 and 98 were not Y2K compliant, and that NT was only fully compliant with SP5, which I have heard is fairly unstable.
Also, just a quick question. Isn't W2k supposed to be the OS that you buy once and pay for the rest of you life. By that I mean, isn't it set up that you need to get a new license every year in order to use it? Funny how no one ever mentions that.
As for a Windows computer working on a server with 32 processors. Do I even need to touch that? I am kind of curious where they are going to find an x86 machine that can do that.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
NTFS and HPFS were written by a team (composed mostly of) Microsoft programmer Lee Fisher. He wrote HPFS for OS/2 when Microsoft did it, then NTFS as an improvement (and quite an improvement) for NT.
No no no, time scale doesn't work here. He's talking about an arbitrary set of states, chosen by microsoft for testing purposes, like "on" or "off" or "upsidedown". But since he says %99.9 of computer situations, it means he must have tested every possible set of situations a computer could be in, like, "underwater, on jupiter while the sun is exploding."
But wait, I guess that wouldn't be a "computing" situation. So what does he mean by that? Well, why would you want to use a computer in microsoft? Hmm, that's a tough one. Let's say 50% of computing situations at MS involve solitaire. Well, I've never had a problem playing solitaire, so that's 50% covered. Another ~50% would be devoted to consuming idle cycles while the coders, go to the washroom, eat lunch, spin in their chairs, etc. If there's one thing windows does extremely well, it's consume idle cycles, so that's ~100% covered. So the final 0.01% must be the rare time someone actually tries to code, or compile a kernel, or open a menu, or do WORK.
There, that's all cleared up now.
Michael Gentili
- He's just some guy, you know?
Articles like this one shouldn't surprise anybody. It's fashionable at the moment to bash Microsoft. But fashion is a fickle mistress. By this time next year it'll be considered passe' and everybody will have forgotten all about Linux (except the hackers who will still be having good fun with it.)
As far as mainstream attention, the fact that it's currently so trendy to be out there singing the glories of Linux is actually a serious threat. It will soon be uncool and kinda dorky to advocate Linux. Like wearing tshirts with the sleeves ripped out or peppering your vocabulary with 'cyber.' Only the socially crippled will admit in public that they actually use Linux.
The sub $500 dollar computer market is a great place for Linux. When you can knock off $50-100? of a $300-500 machine you can gain a competitive advantage. Include a bi-monthly (yearly) upgrade CD with GOOD instructions and you can get some serious customer loyalty.
I expect W2K to be the same as the others, nice, sterile, and simple, until it starts to do really strange things without rhyme or reason until you shoot it.
+&x
I don't know about that, I think a fast G3 running OS X Server is a formidable setup. That hardware may not be cheap, or the software fully featured yet, but at least we know both of those factors will improve before W2K even ships! Apparently the author can only see hype, and all else he is blind to.
And if that doesn't work as an ideal solution, you can always keep the hardware and install a variety of OSS OSes on it.
Boo!
Edlin is and always has been a piece of crap compared to ed, let alone ex.
I've used ed for fifteen years. I've written a couple of versions of ed. Nope, edlin is no ed. Anyone who says otherwise has never used one or the other, or is trolling.
-- Alastair
You have two assumptions here that I contest. The first is the notion of what an average 'Linux' user is, and what average 'Linux' user Linux (and environments) should be optimized for.
The second assumption (not technically an assumption since you phased it as a question, but still a rhetorical assumption) is that a uniform look and feel is best for your assumed average user. This assumption actually has some evidence for it, but there is also evidence against it.
the most recent iteration of its NT operating system is crash-proof in 99.9% of computing situations
I don't get how you measure 99.9% stability of "computer situaations"? (I hope this doesn't mean one out of every 999 instructions crash the machine...)
Hmmm. This suggests that one out of a thousand users will have Win2k crash, doesn't it? So if they sell a million copies, that's 10,000 angry and unhappy customers who will experience the blue screen o' death... Great.
W
-------------------
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
why although was it not made clear the pressures that M$ is under.
/. but it's true. Brand names are held in high esteem by Americans.
I think he did make it clear what pressures they are under. Linux is not yet a legitimate threat to their desktop market. Linux, and Unix in general, is and has been for some time, a threat to the server market. Win2K is meant to be a converging point for Microsoft's desktop (Win98) and server (WinNT) offerings.
There is no way that an average Win98 user will consider Linux. The advantages just aren't there.
Win2K may offer more of a threat to Linux than NT does, but don't forget, this article compares the Linux of today with the Win2K of next year. Linux may be wildly transformed in a lot of areas by then.
Tangent: this is where the incremental nature of Linux can hurt it's ability to get mind share. Win2K will be announced with a lot of fanfare and hooplah. All the changes of 2+ years will be ejaculated into the community at once, where all the Linux changes will be released slowly. It's a tortoise and the hare situation
windows is becomeing the expensive part of a sub $500 machine
Games. People who own $500 computers like to play games. Almost everybody likes to play games. Linux has less games than the MacOS. Not a valid desktop competitor. Cost is not as much an issue as you think, and MS has a lot of room to lower their prices.
win2000 interface has serious drawbacks
If you are talking about the GUI, I think Gnome and KDE have a long way to go. For real user interface, check out MacOS or BeOS.
the vunerbility because people discovering the bugs dont tell or fix them
This is a double edged sword. Rephrase: Who do you want to fix bugs in your OS? Some unknown USENET poster, or one of the 4000 fine professional programmers at Microsoft.
This is a real advantage that Linux has over WinANYTHING, but it will be difficult to convince most people that this is the case. MS is a trusted company. Sounds ridiculous on
Also, just thought some fellow /.'ers would get a kick out of this.. Apparently, they had more than a few Linux Users out there...
One of the projects, I think it was Project Pyramid, when you installed the drivers for it, if the copier crashed, it would eat your operating system as well.. strangely enough, this only happened on Microsoft products.
Why, you may ask? The driver developers decided to thread the driver through the Operating system.
please clarify for me: is W2K or is W2K not on the NT kernel? if it's still on the 9x kernel then you're right, but if it's on the NT kernel, that's a pretty damn big difference.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
True story:
I installed Slackware 4.0 and it magically didn't install a printer. It magically didn't install a GUI. It magically came up to a Bash prompt and happily waited for me to type something.
When I typed XF86Setup, it prompted me for about thirty items of information. Voila! I had a GUI.
Then I started digging around and found the printer setup script (text-based).
YMMV. In my experience, a lot of this is "automated" to such a degree in RHat installs that the quickest way to get it working is to rip it all out and install Slackware.
But I'm not trying to advocate one distribution over another. Just adding to the horror stories in progress, 'round this virtual campfire or whatever.
"Among the many brilliant ideas that have sustained Microsoft is vaporware. That's when you stifle an opponent's new-product release by leaking news that you're about to release a similar product that's even better. Maybe you never release it, or do so only years later. What's important is that you've killed the buzz
about your competitor's product."
Wow! Now the same tactics that got IBM into their big anti-trust lawsuit has become a stroke of genius for M$? Who needs to concern themselves with understanding computing history when they can get all the info they need in a M$ press release. Don't people have to have any brain cells at all to be a journalist and influence millions with their smartly worded drivel? Yup, maybe the DOJ needs to call this guy as a witless.. err.. witness.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
"MY NT server has benn running for almost a year and a half now and I plan to upgrade to wk2."
Ummm... consitently? NO reboots at all?
Lemme guess... it's not connected to a network... and you don't do anything with it but run screensavers.. right?
Have fun with wk2... Please post your horror stories for out enjoyment.
I have vi too. On a bunch of the OS/2 machines I use here at work. It's far better for quick and dirty edit jobs. Especially when I'm telnetted into the OS/2 machine from the Windows 95 machine on my desktop. (a few months ago an exchange engineer from Switzerland was using the main OS/2 machine I do builds on, because he needed a workstation and that was the one the boss told him to use. So I continued to edit scripts and makefiles and do builds, out of telnet sessions from my Win95 machine. Moved things in and out of that box across the network by working through the NFS mounts from the Solaris server, and across Novell to my Win95 box. Didn't physically touch the machine for about a week.
A lot of this stuff I learned by futzing around with Linux and networking at home. It's a great cheap way of learning a lot of diverse networking skills. Right now my slackware box is probably still ripping that music CD (even with CDParanoia music CDs from the library can take a long time to rip). When I get home I'll drag the WAV files over to my Win98 machine to burn the tunes I want onto a fresh CD blank.
I wouldn't give up my Win98 box, my NT box, or my Slackware box. I suppose if I had to choose betweent them, I'd say the hell with it and blow the dust out of my correcting selectric. A lot of this stuff is a serious distraction to the creative process. Try a typewriter sometime, and you'll find there's an eerie satisfying immediacy to ink directly onto paper.
Acooring to your philosophy you would never have learned to drive a car had you been brought up with horses and cart. Silly steering wheel.
You example is more of interface instability than of consistent look and feel as it applies to interface design. Once grep has its interface stabilized and standardized it should not change in a way that is incompatible with older interface revisions.
Using getopt for ALL applications is more analogous to the GUI standardization argument. You get to this point later with your command line vs. environment variable example. In this case some applications may be more appropriately controlled by environment variable, input files, or some other state initialization method.
As a side note I use a library that unifies command line input, environment variables, and input files for my state initialization so that my programs can be controlled be any of these. I find getopt quite limited. I treat interface libraries/environments/whatever as tools to possibly choose from for a task, not as standards to comply with. If I wrote grep and did not have the aforementioned library at the time I may very well have chosen getopt, but not because of some standard. It is simple and concise and good for the job. After my selection I would not change the interface later, therefore you perl script would not have to resemble autoconfig.
This brings me to autoconfig itself (this is starting to feel like that show Connections), which I think it a necessary type of evil to bridge a lack of standards that I am glad do not truly exist. Standards at any particular level have a tendency to stifle innovation at that level. I do not think OSes are at a level yet where we want to stifle their interfaces with a standard.
"Hello, World!" May not be the most functional program ever written, but it is definitely the most portable and most widely ported. It may be the single most popular program considering the number of times it has been re-implemented from scratch by different programmers.
I'd venture to guess the almost every programmer has written hello world apps in more programming languages than any other program.
But, now that I start thinking about it, we really need an I18N version of hello_world and we need a manpage to hello_world. Better yet, we need sgml docs for it that can be converted to html, info, tex, and manpage.
I'm concerned about the license that hello world is distributed under, though. I'd hate to think that someone could take the free hello world, enhance it, and start selling it. Worse, yet... Imagine if some commercial company included "Hello, world" in their commercial software, and didn't redistribute the changes. I think hello world needs to be GPL'd to protect it.
Then we need a hello world daemon that when queried, responds with a "Hello, world" - hmm, could be a modified ping.
root@my_dumb_whitebox #> hello_world gatekeeper
gatekeeper responds "Hello, World!"
and... of course we need a hello_world gui so that we can welcome all of the non-unix gurus to linux. Please everyone, let's avoid the silly toolkit wars. I think it's good for linux to have both a khello and a ghello, and using corba, they should both be able to communicate "Hello, World" with each other.
and then we could have hello_world broadcasts from servers, and all clients on the network would respond with a storm of "Hello, World!" responses (no, wait, we already have that.. it's called Netware)
Sometimes I think slashdot readers are like Pittsburgh football fans -- it doesn't matter whether they win or lose, they complain afterwards.
So an article written by stock market analyst with presumably no technical background comes close to being a reasonable interpretation of the truth. Factually not entirely correct, but the difference between the truth and his version of the story is only wide enough to cram a couple of 14 year old script kiddies in.
In a non-technical article, a non-technical writer managed to adequately and intelligently discuss both Windows2000 and Linux, without bowing to almost any FUD. There was no "Windows is so easy to use" or "The command line is scary." There was no "Linux is so hard to install" or "There are no applications for Linux." He managed to avoid the most oft-repeated, mind numbing FUDs, and you still complain.
I just don't get it. Be happy that for once, someone without any techincal credentials almost got it right. That means we're starting to win a couple of battles.
Andrew Gardner
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog, its too dark to read.
Numbers, anyway
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
What always amuses me is companies will garantee 99.9% uptime which sounds good, till you think about it. there are 86400 seconds in a day. 0.1% of that is 86.4seconds. So you figure, if your box takes less than 86.4 seconds to reboot after a crash (my machine at work takes about a minute), then the computer can crash once a day and still meet the 99.9% uptime requirement. Even NT can do that.
-matt
The article did not mention the availability of WordPerfect 8, and the soon-to-be-available WordPerfect Office 2000. I have used both (Windows versions), and the latter just blew Microsoft Office 20000 away (more feature, more stable, and less bloated--and cheaper).
After Corel ports its WordPerfect Office 2000 and Corel Draw 9 to Linux, many Windows will be able to move to the Linux OS with a very smooth transition.
Yes if we want to compete with M$ we will have to adapt.
However, I submit that we do NOT want to compete with M$. WE are our own customers. If Linux becomes burdened with meeting needs WE ourselves dont really want then what is the point? Linux/OpenSource puts the fun back into computing/programming and trying to be a M$ competetor is the fastest way to to kill that. Now for those who LIKE to take on M$-like features or want such things themselves, fine, go for it. But I am not going to become involved in projects whose goal is to provide '..features that customers want, not just what we want'.
We are not in M$'s arena unless we go there ourselves. OS/2 was. This is a different scenario in which we cannot lose unless we corrupt Linux ourselves.
I meant to say
...numbers anyone?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
I'd like to point out that a Journaling filesystem is a high priority on NT for the same reason that parachutes and fire extinguishers were high priorities on the Hindenburg. If the primary cause of system crashes is a backhoe taking out the power, quickly recovering from crashes isn't a primary development priority. On a system that crashes in the presence of large flowers or brightly colored wallpaper, rapid crash recovery is a big time development priority. On Linux, JFS is primarily for bragging rights, isn't it? We're focused on not crashing in the first place. Rob
I think Microsoft would do good to ensure the final product actually fucking BOOTS before they release it.
End of experiment. Back to NT 4.
- A.P. (Win2K sucks _hard_.)
--
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Your assumption is that
lower the time needed to master new apps
is a given. Not always true. Often, but not always, it is the case that there is a tradeoff between learning curve and advanced usage. Some tricks mitigate this somewhat (accelerator keys) but it is still there at a more fundamental level.
Now you do throw in a qualifier that justifies your position somewhat, the GUI environment you are using, since my position is really that using a GUI environment with a predefined look and feel (skins/themes dont fundamentally change look and feel, at least not at the level I am talking about) is itself the significant design decision point.
Again I hold up the better games in our world as an example. The best interfaces almost never use a standardized GUI environment. Efficient use requires going up a learning curve, but is almost always worth it. Save some fixed number of hours in learning or increase the efficiency of use?
So why does M$, Apple, and every other major vendor like the shallow learning curve over the more efficient use? It is easier to sell. Demos go better. Initial impressions are better. Linux and such should not have to make that concession. If it does have to make that concession I'll take my vi and g++ and move on to the next OS.
Ok, then he should be consistent:
"It may be the largest consumer-market
computer program ever written, with 30 million lines of code"
should be:
"It may be the largest consumer-market computer program ever written, with 30 million lines of so-called 'code'."
Hehe, I just think if one doesn't know what code is he/she shouldn't be reading that article--it will mean nothing.
Correct me if I am wrong... but wasn't Windows 2000 once called NT 5.0. I remember reading an article when Microsoft changed the name of the OS that said the name change would probably make people forget the numerous delays from NT 5.0. I didn't believe it at the time, but it seems that the article was correct. A simple name change can easily make the general public forget that the product has already missed numerous production dates. Well, just thought I'd at my two cents.
>Ed Muth, group product manager for Windows 2000, claims that the most recent iteration of
.1% of computing situations would be ...... booting?
>its NT operating system is crash-proof in 99.9% of computing situations.
And that
Yes, this article wasn't intended to be funny. They are serious, right down to the many little errors like the "Journal Filing System" which helps to "reassemble a program after the system crashes", etc.
It was interesting in that it talks matter-of-factly about the problems with NT/Win2K but suggests we will all probably be using it anyway. I'm not as confident...
Geeky modern art T-shirts
No way dude, there was a sarcastic tone right from the start. Albeit a subtle one. Note the qualifiers after every prognostication.
"......end up using Windows 2000 -- or a competitor that by necessity will have been heavily influenced by it."
and here all this time i thought there was such a thing. jeez, do i feel silly (and have i been wasting a lot of time with this whole CS degree). why do some many writers put quotes around terms that are even very technical like "operating system" or "source code". i think the average reader can figure it out from the context.
if it wasn't "so-called source code", it must just be computer elves then. i heard if you leave a 486 under your pillow, they will leave you a new p3.
I think the statement
time saved by having to click less does not justify the time spent learning the application
is almost always FALSE. However, that is not quite the whole point anyway, although I will for the moment follow through on it. Macros, accelerators, shortcuts only minimize the impact. It is a mindset thing. If you accept the standard you are stuck in the mindset. In this shallow example, what about mouse chording. No windows influenced app has support for that in their operation customization support. Not that it is hard...it is just a midset thing.
HOWEVER, the main point is more fundamental than this. If you buy into a GUI standard you are buying alot more than just buttons mechanics, drag and drop mechanics, etc. You are buying the whole metaphor which in the case of office suites is not optimally suited for more embedded formats. In other domains, such as field electronics and even software development environments themselves the metaphor is already abysmally suited for the task. Following Microsoft's lead in the matter, which is what you are doing, will take us down the road of forcing square pegs into round holes with a screwdriver.
wtf?? the newest NTFS is not (last i heard) journaling...its just a 36-bit fs (4 bytes and a nibble :P~) But other than that and a few more security patches and file attributes, its no more a journaling FS than ntfs for nt4 is.
"There is no spoon" - Neo, The Matrix
The article mentions "tens of thousands of programmers" working on Linux, which seems a bit high, even for an OS (high as in "how does one programmer out of 10,000 not duplicate effort & step on other peoples' feet?") - does the author include people working on stuff that technically isn't Linux itself, such as applications like MSQL?
I haven't spent any significant time using W2K betas, our local copy took several minutes to display the start menu after clicking the Start button, but what do they mean by feature-rich? It seems that a good Linux distro comes with far more tools and Applications out of the box than any version of Windows I have ever seen.
Are they talking about these wizards that can "automatically configure XYZ" for you then fail or crash during the auto-configuration because your system is slightly non-standard?"
True story: I've used a serial mouse, and just bought a PS/2 mouse. When I booted Windows, Windows detected that I had new hardware, and automatically removed the video driver for me! It took about six reboots to get the system right.
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
> "... great OS for servers with a limited number
> of processors, usually less than 16"
Much ado about Nitting.
Great OS for servers? *cough cough* That's highly debatable as anyone knows. Adequate - well OK.
Less than 16? Well, that's true, as 4 16 is a true statement. Less than 4 is more accurate. I've heard rumours of 4+ proc Wintel servers roaming the woods in the Pacific Northwest, but I've never seen much evidence apart from a few footprints and a bad fuzzy video. But 16? I'd sooner believe Sasquatch wanders onto the Redmond campus for high tea with Bill on Thursday afternoons. Call me a cynic.
-MWR-
I agree. It can be funny, but then, that's what comedians are for, not people seriously interested in discussing the relative merits of computer operating systems.
When I was a college kid, I knew way more than I do now. Part of growing up is discovering what you don't know, and how to deal with it.
There are a lot of kids these days advocating Linux, because it works so well for what they know of as the things computers are used for.
It seems that Microsoft has not beaten the public into submission enough with its Office 2000 product, and wishes to inflict more punishment with Win2000. It is undeniably true that the majority of businesses and individuals will upgrade to Win2000. It will be widely successful in the sense that it will make money. However Microsoft has not really done anything substantially different from previous approaches. Sure they have improved some features and Microsoft keeps approaching a more stable and satisfactory level for us /. readers. But as the article points out, they attempt this, and definitely have the potential to be substantially better than their NT OS, but do not achieve true stability on a wider server scale. I too almost feel sorry for Microsoft, they are like a little child who keeps trying to get it right, but never totally does. My feelings of sadness quickly leave when I think of the Micro$oft billions.
So by this quote I can assume that since the 'situtation' on a computer is in reality changing constantly, I can be assured that for every 1000 seconds I am running a Win2K machine it will be in a crashable state for 1 of them? Of course we should be realistic and scale this down to instruction cycles instead of seconds, it is a Microsoft product after all...
Sounds like something out of Monty Python...
"Sons of a silly person! I taunt your so-called source code, you animal-food-throat-whoppers!"
Your point being?
Actually, this was the first nitpick that I found... the no-GUI bit hit me later. Think how many beta apps linux has at any given time -- ncftp3 comes immediately to mind, GNOME for a good long time (and KDE), Mozilla, the unstable kernel tree, 0.xx versions of countless CLI and GUI apps. I've got more betas in Linux on my box than I can count at any given time, and for the most part, they run just as reliably as stable versions of Linux apps.
;p).
That's not to mention the fact that the Debian unstable tree is currently running on our server (ringworld.org), and having very few problems, chugging along rather nicely with shell, web, and e-mail services.
The only way I've managed to do serious damage to my data (i.e. I just wiped my hard drive clean) was with an overheated processor that liked to lock up and/or reboot at random (not that I couldn't have made it go nasty...). I don't think my friend (and fellow ringworld.org sysadmin) could say that about his NT4 server at home (on which at one time he was having to reinstall the OS every week).
Keep your eyes on the prize (not necessarily on the competition). A GUI doesn't have to share any look and feel with M$ - there's other ways of doing everything (trust me, I'm an American living in Germany
--Kevin Bullock
"How many fingers do you see?"
"Four."
"You're focusing too much on the problem."
...
"Now how many do you see?"
"Eight! I see eight!"
(approximate paraphrase from Patch Adams, a.k.a. my post-appropriate signature)
Lets take the file manager example. What if somebody came up with a metaphor/model for a file manager GUI that was somehow mtually exclusive with the 'standard' look and feel (at least the spirit of the look and feel) that was better (at least for some class of users)? This is a bit blatant and contrived I admit, but it bring up a point that is even worse.
Linux is not Windows. Linux users are not Windows users. What is the difference? The mind set. The canvas that is the OS and environment. Standards, and in this case GUI standards in particular, restrict the canvas and promote a mindset. I dont like the Windows mindset. I dont particularly like the desktop metaphor either.
They pay $7.50 per hour
So dictor for life, Now who owns a journaling filesystem? I was called a troll a week or 2 ago for mentioning that linux is a bitch to setup ppp and hard for non computer users who are make a huge part of the small to medium size bussiness market and I said that NT might be better and I was nailed. Well NTFS is a journaling filesystem for fast recovery so system crashes are not an issue assuming you didnt read the ms hcl. IF you read the hcl then NT is uncrashable.
MY NT server has benn running for almost a year and a half now and I plan to upgrade to wk2.
Everyone knows Win2k is going to suck, ask any beta tester. I still can't believe he says Apple has not server OS. They already shipped OS X Server which puts NT in its place, and its only version 1.0 (albeit somewhat incomplete but fully awesome!). Apple will release the full OS X consumer which will eventually replace OS X Server is going to smoke anything. The good thing is, Linux and OS X will both benefit from eachother. Thank Apple for its open source initiative. Final word : Windows sucks balls
Here's a cool one. When Internet Explorer 5 came out for win98, you couldn't use Microsofts Windows Update unless you upgraded to it. Then after you did, if you neaded to reinstall win98, your computer would not work anymore because of conflicting files from IE 4 and IE 5. Real neat. I love these features.
Please help! I'm stuck inside my virtual reality headset!
Glass half empty / glass half full ... obviously, we see things a little differently, but I don't understand what would prevent you from using fvwm and 8 xterms, no matter what else was available ...
One of my favorite things about my Linux system is the Gimp; it's a very high-class program and it's pretty and graphical. I'm sure there are a lot of people who might like the Free OS philosophy (not to mention better stability etc) but who don't realize how good some of the graphics programs are.
a) As someone else pointed out, the claim that w2k will be a better server needs some substantiation and context. Which will be a better server given cheap commodity components and other than high-end RAM configs? An open question, but consider that right now a 4 year old computer -- say a 486 with 32 megs of RAM -- can happily run X86 Linux in most of its splendor (barring Pentium-optimized distribs), but how fast does a 486/32 seem under Windows 98?
b) Open source and cheaper are more than what the little people like. I don't know much about coding, require frequent help from my housemates to do certain trivial things on my own machine, and am unlikely in the forseeable future to be contributing much code to the kernel;) -- all that said, the fact that other people can and will extend and improve the operating system, and that the result will be on CheapBytes a couple weeks after (or ready for ftp that evening) is a huge plus! Much better than occasional, expensive, grudging, un-satisfying "service packs" for Windows. If I were running a business, I know which model of development I'd prefer.
A cheaper OS is more than just mildly good too. There are a lot of snide comments about corporate blindness and inertia on Slashdot, and I've even been the source of several -- but that's mostly with bigger businesses, as Middle Management Cancer sets in, and even then companies occasionally make smart decisions. But if a company has thousands of desktops seats served by a substantial data center, they could be saving a huge amount in licenses with Linux. Of course, that's not the only cost, far from it, but companies really like to see lower tangible costs, and service / maintenance costs often get lumped into "Oh, well, we'll spend money on IT people anyhow."
Just some thoughts --
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
It seems to me that Mr. Jaffe did a pretty darn good job with this article. He's not a technical writer, yet it seems that he has kept himself fairly well informed about the state of the OS market. (Is "market" the right word for a system containing a free product? Hurm. Might "situation" be better?)
He talked about Windows 2000 in ways that would make sense to businessmen, and I bet they wouldn't like what he said. Similarly, he talked about Linux in comprehensible terms, and he painted quite a pretty picture of it. While errors and misinformation are not good, in this case, he made Linux look *better* because of it -- he wasn't saying "There is no GUI," but rather "Look how quickly they made a GUI!"
This article is exactly the sort of thing Linux needs if it is to gain credibility in the business world. System administrators need opinions like Jaffe's as ammunition to fire at the managment of their corporations in order to convince them that Linux is a workable responce to their needs.
I'll be pretty disappointed if his next column is about how he was brutally flamed for one minor error in an otherwise sterling article.
It states the obvious facts (that win 2K WILL, whether we like it or not, be used on a great many computers in the near future). However, after mentioning the positive aspects of it, it starts to display its disadvantages and even takes the occassional jab at the operating system. I like the Sysadmin quote.
And the take on Linux wasn't the usual FUD. The article pretty much sticks to the facts, that Linux is growing and is slowly becoming the only major competitor to Microsoft's server market, but that it still lacks in features by comparison. The author also doesn't make the usual claim that linux will eventually be overcome, and even presents a few good reasons why.
I also like the "Poor Microsoft" comment. If that doesn't say something about the efficiency of the company when with all their money and power, Linux is still creeping up on them and investors, whom the article seems aimed toward, should be careful to notice.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
like NT4 still does; edlin, the most smashingly important text editor ever written!
Actually it's nice to see consumers wising up to Microsoft® tactics and not just blindly falling for their brand of mass hypnosis.
Chuck
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Uhh... No.
The reason why Allaire (HomeSite), Lotus (Notes Client), Intuit (Quicken) and NUMEROUS other companies (many of whom don't have much fondness for Microsoft) used IE, and IE became pervasive was because it is pathetically easy to reuse IE as a COM object.
Granted, as others here are sure to point out, this probably wasn't intended to be a humorous piece. Any article which contains It is, declares one Microsoft executive, "the most important program ever written." can get a laugh out of me, however. Microsoft: we're nothing if not overweening.
(first submission!)
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
:)
hany
I want to differentiate what "we" want at home, versus what "we" want at work. The customers I spoke of are people like us, in offices, with IT managers.
My point is that alot of people here on
For example OLE (and now COM) has been a staple of the Windows universe for years. People using Linux at home might not think this is important technology. But it is very important. Now with CORBA, and the KDE and Gnome projects, a Linux alternative object model is emerging.
But there's alot of work to do yet...
----
----
"Oh, bother," said Pooh, as he hid Piglet's mangled corpse.
consider this (and don't be very pedantic, i'm alredy 17 hours at work :)
$ echo "hello world!"
hello world!
$ editor hello.source
./hello.app ...
{ this is some very cool application because it have a lot of lines }
include io.lib
include window.lib
include dictionary
initialize.io
initialize.windows
initialize.dictionary
initialize.hello_string
window.setio
io.attach_window
io.print.hello_string
io.close
windows.close
dictionary.close
hello_string.close
$ make realy_complicated_build
$
core dumped. going BSOD
hany
hmmmm....if you leave an intel 486 under your pillow, you get a new p3?? what about amd 486's? If the same holds true, I'll have a k7 tomorrow morning :)
Save the children; quit overparenting!
I wonder if the compile would work though
what's the problem? with few (read 1000+US$) to buy some super-cool-windows-kernel-compiled-personal-editio n and with few (read 1GB+) bytes on HD and few (read month+) free hours i'm sure you can get custom build super-windows-3000 kernel.
:)
p.s.: count some inflation numbers while those US$, GB and hours are meant for todays situation
hany
But if [Windoze 2000] slips, the product's reputation will begin to suffer...
Huh? Reputation?
It may be the largest consumer-market computer program ever written, with 30 million lines of code.
When will the baby actually be delivered?
That's a BIG baby.
vaporware. That's when you stifle an opponent's new-product release by leaking news that you're about to release a similar product that's even better. Maybe you never release it, or do so only years later.
By no means is Windows 2000 vaporware.
Contradiction what? News to me.
It was a nice effort.
Linux has grown quickly, mostly at the expense of other Unix operating systems
:)
...do I win the cookie? Do I? Do I?