Maybe it's electronic music which wasn't made with instruments at all, so the only point of performing it "live" would be to run the same synthesizer-and-sequencer program over bigger speakers. Funny enough that this type of music brings the largest audiences when done right. Jean Michelle Jarre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Michel_Jarre has had concerts with over a million people multiple times. He does throw in some nice light shows though.
No it is not just the Window Manager. Run Blackbox under XFree86 on OS/2 and compare to running Blackbox under Linux. OS/2 still felt much more responsive and running Gnome on OS/2 was way more pleasant. Even today running Ubuntu, Linux still feels clunky. Launch Firefox and the mouse starts hesitating. The UI just gets clunky. Of course my hardware is 6 years old so I notice it much more. OS/2 runs most scripting languages as well including most *nix shells. Scheduling a task is as simple as right clicking on a program object, going to the schedule tab and entering when and how often you want the task to run. Something that anyone can do without needing to know cron or at.
Sorry about not getting into the usability of the WPS (which Richard covered very well). I was just trying to show that the development of OS/2 does continue even without IBMs help and without access to the source code. One of the problems with OS/2 back in the day was that it was somewhat ugly, crappy icons and crappy default layout and these screen shots show how far the OS/2 look has come. And about the Windows 3.1 way of starting programs, the box for Windows 2.1 advertised loudly how it had the new look and feel of OS/2. OS/2 1.x looked much like Windows 3.x but came first and did allow things like having folders in Program Manager.
Unluckily you pretty well need a higher fixpak level then 12 nowadays as FP13+ introduced high memory support (up to 3GBs memory instead of 1/2 a GB) which is quite important for things like Firefox otherwise they run out of memory way to quick. Nice to hear about Xen getting more support for OS/2 and of course virtual box supports running OS/2 fine.
I have a Byte magazine around here somewhere with a short article about MS finally getting OS/2 NT ver 3 to boot (text mode only) on some risc chip which I can't remember right now. NT definitely did start out as a rewrite of OS/2 though the idea that was that it would be portable and capable of running lots of different sytems. With the success of Win 3.1 NT got redone as Windows NT. The VMS part came from having lots of ex VMS developers working on NT. I also have another Byte article talking about MS getting the 32 bit Presentation Manager running on NT so if OS/2 had won the operating system war we'd probably have MS OS/2 XP and OS/2 Vista now.
All of the significant features of OS/2 have already been duplicated in Linux.
a) Workplace Shell. Workplace shell was cool, but Linux already has two object oriented desktops in KDE and Gnome that both do more than WPS did, and without the aweful MS lock that sank the whole desktop. I wouldn't say that either KDE or Gnome does more then the WPS did. Small examples include customizing the desktop or mouse useage.
b) Graphics layer. OS/2 had an early version of Windows GDI, while Linux has several ways to use a graphics surface. Cairo comes to mind, but there are others. And, Linux has a good implementation of hardware accelerated OpenGL to go with. Actually it is the other way around, Windows followed the OS/2 GDI. And Cairo has been added to the desktop lately, nice transparent png icons and other eye candy is based on Cairo. See http://svn.netlabs.org/wps-wizard
c) OS Core. Yeah, OS/2 was a pioneering in threading, but Linux threading has gotten pretty good as of late. And a lot of OS/2's other features - such as a driver architecture, DLLs, and so on, are all there in the OS. OS/2 supported multiple file systems, but so does Linux, and Linux has better file systems than HPFS. Pretty well true though most people now adays use JFS with OS/2
d) Other devices. Long a liability for Linux, Linux now supports a fairly broad array of devices in its own right - from custom monitor specifications to USB storage to graphics, sound, and networking cards. OS/2 still supports a wide range of devices, USB storage (sometimes need to add a partition table as IBM followed the standard instead of doing it the MS way). Sound drivers are based on Alsa so support is about the same. Network cards were the last thing to drop OS/2 support and now there is a Windows wrapper so if Windows supports a network card so does OS/2
c) Finally, I have to have the obligatory quote - Linux does the right thing with CTRL-ALT-DEL. OS/2 does not. Most people now use a process manager (CAD-POPUP) that comes up when pushing C-A-D.
You can purchase Ecomstation here, http://www.ecomstation.com/ which includes the last version of OS/2 released by IBM. At that to install on and take advantage of modern hardware you pretty well have to go this route.
I can mount HPFS drives under Win2k using pinball.sys from 3.51. Unluckily it is broken if your partitions are over 4 GB (maybe 2 GB?). I can also run OS/2 v1.x text mode binaries under 2k even cmd.exe. NT did start as a rewrite of OS/2 and the first version that booted up was OS/2 NT ver 3. One thing MS did get in the divorce was rights to use version 3 and up which is why OS/2 4.5 is actually ver 2.45 eg F:\usr\bin>uname -a OS/2 amad.localdomain 2 2.45 i386
Actually up till a year or so ago OS/2 would install on any decent hardware that Linux would install on. Now you are limited to ATI video cards if you want to use an up to date one. OS/2 supports most all hard drives, lots of sound cards, networking is getting trickier but there is now a wrapper to use Windows drivers. USB support isn't to bad though as usual IBM followed the standards and MS didn't so often a thumbdrive has to be reformatted and have a partition table added. Also once again it you need quality hardware. Also of course you need the newest version especially if you want to take full advantage of that new quad core cpu. There is a live CD here, http://www.ecomstation.com/democd/ if you want to try it.
IBM rewrote the 16 bit API in the PPC version . The Adobe stuff could be ripped out. OS/2 supports TTF quite fine now, especially using Freetype. Most people have replaced Lanman with Samba.The Presentation Manager could be a problem though. Best would be if they could find the PowerPC code and release that though that to is a dream.
VMware doesn't emulate a 386 good enough to run OS/2. OS/2 used things that no one else used like part of the OS running in ring 2. Virtual Box will run OS/2, so will Virtual PC but not VMware
Where would the major flaws be? OS/2 installed without any services running. Networking used straight NETBEUI so was unroutable and now a days simplest to use Samba. The stack is ported from AIX and is considered very solid and the current browser is Firefox which is also considered secure. Of course the client was single user so if you had access to the machine you could do damage but I have yet to hear of an ATM being hacked little well any other system running OS/2.
Sounds like the IT department had it pretty locked down. Out of the box icons stayed where ever you put them (as long as you did a proper shutdown). The desktop background could be changed by simply opening up the solid colour palette and dragging which ever colour you wanted to the desktop. Same with folders, at that the desktop was just another folder and all folders could have different backgound colours or even different wallpaper. And of course shitty apps can be written for any OS
Yea the old store bought OS/2 won't install on a hard drive over 4 GBs without updating the disk driver. If you'd like to try it go here, http://www.ecomstation.com/democd/
Actually having the OS/2 scheduler as an option would be great for Linux on the desktop. The OS/2 scheduler (in client mode) is great for giving the user the feeling of responsiveness without starving background tasks. The foreground application gets a priority boost and an IO boost giving a great feel.
No but they could open source the parts that they do clearly own. They've done exactly the opposite. They rewrote JFS for OS/2 then forked it with a GPL version for Linux. Our JFS is still closed source though the Linux fork is getting ported back. The IP stack is ported from AIX and based no BSD code, I'd imagine they could open that up. When they open sourced Object Rexx there was no OS/2 code included. Rumour has it that when Sun open sourced Staroffice IBM asked them to rip out all the OS/2 code. Luckily the code was left making it much easier to port OpenOffice. I'm sure there are more examples.
While OS/2 is old it still feels better then Linux or Windows. Anyways the Workplace Shell (WPS) is still ahead of any other operating shell I have used. And it is supposedly IBMs IP. Some years ago there was a rumour that IBM was going to open source the WPS. Shame it didn't happen. With things like Cairo getting integrated into the WPS it is still quite nice and Cairo allows the eye candy that people nowadays seem to demand. Current screen shots of the WPS are available here, http://svn.netlabs.org/wps-wizard and here http://svn.netlabs.org/wps-wizard/wiki/WpsWizardScreenshots. Of course this just shows how it looks, not how it functions.
No, everyone stops buying their stuff and they'll just use it to prove that piracy is that bad and they should get paid by the government. Pretty soon everything you buy that is even remotely connected with content will have a levy that goes straight to the *AAs. And they will get very creative about what is connected to content. I don't want to have a levy on my eyeglasses or my bathroom mirror.
A couple of examples that come to mind that have benefited society quite a bit including large amounts of money saved and created are weather satellites and communications satellites. Even knowing these are possible no private company yet has created a rocket that could get these up there and at the time no private company believed these would pay of anywhere near how they have payed of.
America did not have any defense treaty with Kuwait at the time of the gulf war and Saddam was nice enough to call on the American ambassador to ask how America would feel if he invaded Kuwait. The American ambassador (April Gaspie) said America had no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts.
Your example is more like a man walks up to on the sidewalk and with a gun in his hand asks you to pay your share of the sidewalk that you are using. I guess it is a potential use of violence to get you to pay your share but its not like you had to be on the sidewalk. I guess you could call it stealing to have to pay for what you're using but that is the way the world works.
1. Privileges, an ordinary user can't mess up the entire system. Unless the user is *really* stupid, they are not root and therefore do not have Write privileges on system-critical files. So even if you ran "rm -rf/" as a normal user, you would only lose the files you had access to and not break the system. So you figure it is better to only lose your home directory containing everything you care about, email, pictures, personal documents, all your settings like bookmarks etc. As long as the rest of the system, which is easy as hell to reinstall, is not compromised? As a desktop user I severely disagree, I'd rather lose everything but ~ and if I'm stupid enough to run malware that malware will have the necessary permissions to delete everything I care about. And about opensource being better because people can look at it and find vulnerabilities. Have you ever looked at the Mozilla code? Lots of people have and yet regularly there are new exploits found, some that have been there since the browser was called Mozilla. I monitor a few open source applications mailing lists and often when a security vulnerability is found, it has been there a long time. How many more are lurking in that mess of C++ code?
Actually July and August were just renamed. July was Quintilis before being renamed in honour of Julius and August was Sextilis. The year used to start in March (Spring) so the month numbers were correct at one time.
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Mozilla 1.7.13 is old now, you should think about upgrading to Seamonkey.
Maybe it's electronic music which wasn't made with instruments at all, so the only point of performing it "live" would be to run the same synthesizer-and-sequencer program over bigger speakers.
Funny enough that this type of music brings the largest audiences when done right. Jean Michelle Jarre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Michel_Jarre has had concerts with over a million people multiple times. He does throw in some nice light shows though.
No it is not just the Window Manager. Run Blackbox under XFree86 on OS/2 and compare to running Blackbox under Linux. OS/2 still felt much more responsive and running Gnome on OS/2 was way more pleasant.
Even today running Ubuntu, Linux still feels clunky. Launch Firefox and the mouse starts hesitating. The UI just gets clunky.
Of course my hardware is 6 years old so I notice it much more.
OS/2 runs most scripting languages as well including most *nix shells.
Scheduling a task is as simple as right clicking on a program object, going to the schedule tab and entering when and how often you want the task to run. Something that anyone can do without needing to know cron or at.
Sorry about not getting into the usability of the WPS (which Richard covered very well). I was just trying to show that the development of OS/2 does continue even without IBMs help and without access to the source code.
One of the problems with OS/2 back in the day was that it was somewhat ugly, crappy icons and crappy default layout and these screen shots show how far the OS/2 look has come.
And about the Windows 3.1 way of starting programs, the box for Windows 2.1 advertised loudly how it had the new look and feel of OS/2. OS/2 1.x looked much like Windows 3.x but came first and did allow things like having folders in Program Manager.
Unluckily you pretty well need a higher fixpak level then 12 nowadays as FP13+ introduced high memory support (up to 3GBs memory instead of 1/2 a GB) which is quite important for things like Firefox otherwise they run out of memory way to quick.
Nice to hear about Xen getting more support for OS/2 and of course virtual box supports running OS/2 fine.
I have a Byte magazine around here somewhere with a short article about MS finally getting OS/2 NT ver 3 to boot (text mode only) on some risc chip which I can't remember right now. NT definitely did start out as a rewrite of OS/2 though the idea that was that it would be portable and capable of running lots of different sytems. With the success of Win 3.1 NT got redone as Windows NT.
The VMS part came from having lots of ex VMS developers working on NT.
I also have another Byte article talking about MS getting the 32 bit Presentation Manager running on NT so if OS/2 had won the operating system war we'd probably have MS OS/2 XP and OS/2 Vista now.
You can purchase Ecomstation here, http://www.ecomstation.com/ which includes the last version of OS/2 released by IBM. At that to install on and take advantage of modern hardware you pretty well have to go this route.
You can get a live CD here, http://www.ecomstation.com/democd/ Unluckily you can't do all that much with it.
I can mount HPFS drives under Win2k using pinball.sys from 3.51. Unluckily it is broken if your partitions are over 4 GB (maybe 2 GB?).
I can also run OS/2 v1.x text mode binaries under 2k even cmd.exe.
NT did start as a rewrite of OS/2 and the first version that booted up was OS/2 NT ver 3.
One thing MS did get in the divorce was rights to use version 3 and up which is why OS/2 4.5 is actually ver 2.45 eg
F:\usr\bin>uname -a
OS/2 amad.localdomain 2 2.45 i386
Actually up till a year or so ago OS/2 would install on any decent hardware that Linux would install on. Now you are limited to ATI video cards if you want to use an up to date one. OS/2 supports most all hard drives, lots of sound cards, networking is getting trickier but there is now a wrapper to use Windows drivers. USB support isn't to bad though as usual IBM followed the standards and MS didn't so often a thumbdrive has to be reformatted and have a partition table added. Also once again it you need quality hardware.
Also of course you need the newest version especially if you want to take full advantage of that new quad core cpu.
There is a live CD here, http://www.ecomstation.com/democd/ if you want to try it.
IBM rewrote the 16 bit API in the PPC version . The Adobe stuff could be ripped out. OS/2 supports TTF quite fine now, especially using Freetype. Most people have replaced Lanman with Samba.The Presentation Manager could be a problem though.
Best would be if they could find the PowerPC code and release that though that to is a dream.
VMware doesn't emulate a 386 good enough to run OS/2. OS/2 used things that no one else used like part of the OS running in ring 2.
Virtual Box will run OS/2, so will Virtual PC but not VMware
Where would the major flaws be? OS/2 installed without any services running. Networking used straight NETBEUI so was unroutable and now a days simplest to use Samba. The stack is ported from AIX and is considered very solid and the current browser is Firefox which is also considered secure.
Of course the client was single user so if you had access to the machine you could do damage but I have yet to hear of an ATM being hacked little well any other system running OS/2.
Sounds like the IT department had it pretty locked down. Out of the box icons stayed where ever you put them (as long as you did a proper shutdown). The desktop background could be changed by simply opening up the solid colour palette and dragging which ever colour you wanted to the desktop. Same with folders, at that the desktop was just another folder and all folders could have different backgound colours or even different wallpaper.
And of course shitty apps can be written for any OS
Yea the old store bought OS/2 won't install on a hard drive over 4 GBs without updating the disk driver. If you'd like to try it go here, http://www.ecomstation.com/democd/
Actually having the OS/2 scheduler as an option would be great for Linux on the desktop. The OS/2 scheduler (in client mode) is great for giving the user the feeling of responsiveness without starving background tasks.
The foreground application gets a priority boost and an IO boost giving a great feel.
No but they could open source the parts that they do clearly own. They've done exactly the opposite. They rewrote JFS for OS/2 then forked it with a GPL version for Linux. Our JFS is still closed source though the Linux fork is getting ported back. The IP stack is ported from AIX and based no BSD code, I'd imagine they could open that up.
When they open sourced Object Rexx there was no OS/2 code included. Rumour has it that when Sun open sourced Staroffice IBM asked them to rip out all the OS/2 code. Luckily the code was left making it much easier to port OpenOffice. I'm sure there are more examples.
While OS/2 is old it still feels better then Linux or Windows.
Anyways the Workplace Shell (WPS) is still ahead of any other operating shell I have used. And it is supposedly IBMs IP. Some years ago there was a rumour that IBM was going to open source the WPS. Shame it didn't happen.
With things like Cairo getting integrated into the WPS it is still quite nice and Cairo allows the eye candy that people nowadays seem to demand.
Current screen shots of the WPS are available here, http://svn.netlabs.org/wps-wizard and here http://svn.netlabs.org/wps-wizard/wiki/WpsWizardScreenshots.
Of course this just shows how it looks, not how it functions.
No, everyone stops buying their stuff and they'll just use it to prove that piracy is that bad and they should get paid by the government. Pretty soon everything you buy that is even remotely connected with content will have a levy that goes straight to the *AAs. And they will get very creative about what is connected to content. I don't want to have a levy on my eyeglasses or my bathroom mirror.
A couple of examples that come to mind that have benefited society quite a bit including large amounts of money saved and created are weather satellites and communications satellites.
Even knowing these are possible no private company yet has created a rocket that could get these up there and at the time no private company believed these would pay of anywhere near how they have payed of.
America did not have any defense treaty with Kuwait at the time of the gulf war and Saddam was nice enough to call on the American ambassador to ask how America would feel if he invaded Kuwait. The American ambassador (April Gaspie) said America had no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts.
Your example is more like a man walks up to on the sidewalk and with a gun in his hand asks you to pay your share of the sidewalk that you are using. I guess it is a potential use of violence to get you to pay your share but its not like you had to be on the sidewalk.
I guess you could call it stealing to have to pay for what you're using but that is the way the world works.
As a desktop user I severely disagree, I'd rather lose everything but ~ and if I'm stupid enough to run malware that malware will have the necessary permissions to delete everything I care about.
And about opensource being better because people can look at it and find vulnerabilities. Have you ever looked at the Mozilla code? Lots of people have and yet regularly there are new exploits found, some that have been there since the browser was called Mozilla.
I monitor a few open source applications mailing lists and often when a security vulnerability is found, it has been there a long time. How many more are lurking in that mess of C++ code?
Actually July and August were just renamed. July was Quintilis before being renamed in honour of Julius and August was Sextilis. The year used to start in March (Spring) so the month numbers were correct at one time.