Then why open source Java? Sun open sourced things that rendered their company pointless. Why drop money on Open Office? Even Red Hat had the sense not to initially open source RHN.
The point is that open sourcing something makes it a commodity. Red Hat can market an open source operating system because Linux made Unix a commodity. Red Hat offers a cohesive and supported platform solution built on Linux. That's how they license it. What value does Sun offer its customers anymore?
Its funny how you keep trying to pull netgear back in to support applying you 'freetard' theory to Sun. I never said one thing about netgear meanwhile you are the one who started the whole discussion about Sun. I guess you must have realized how silly that was since you keep trying to drop the point under debate and make it about something else. You want to fight about netgear? Get the fuck back up the thread and reply to the people talking about netgear.
The problem is that you're inept and incapable of parsing complex ideas, so we run in circles.
My point is that Sun killed itself by giving away all its products in an obtuse manner, rather than just open sourcing useless technologies on the fringe of their business like any other sensible company that deal with open source.
That's separate from my initial point which is that FREETARDS DO NOT BUY THINGS. You do not market to them because they attack anyone who tries to sell things to them. Selling to an anti-commercial market is stupid. Netgear will get to learn this the hard way.
What are these links? What is your point? Red Hat has all sorts of open/free bullshit hidden deep in their site, but their marketing material says Red Hat before it says "open" or GPL or anything useless like that. It's not a selling point.
Bingo! That's why saying something like, "Their marketing is just not freetard centric like anything GNU or the FSF puts their name on" is absolutely moronic.
No, it's not. It's exactly my point. You are so goddamn dense. Red Hat is NOT MARKETING TO OPEN SOURCE ENTHUSIASTS. How much more clear can I make this? They are marketing their solution as a commercially supported professional enterprise platform. They mention Linux, but not GNU or the FSF. If you want to see freetard-centric marketing, look at this:
What's this? Oh, it seems to be marketed as an OPEN SOURCE router My OPEN router. Now find an entity that markets to this segment and profits. Good luck!
Now you've got me LOLing on the floor - all RedHat software products, ALL of them, are GNU licensed. Seems to me that you know even less about Redhat than you do about Sun.
The GPL is not a brand, it's just a license. You are an abject moron. Red Hat does not use GNU as a major advertising point. Dig around on their website and see how many levels you have to go through to find GNU or the FSF mentioned.
All your ranting says to me is that you've never been a significant commercial customer of Sun and are totally unfamiliar with the support services they provide. RHN? All commercial unix vendors have an equivalent.
So what would Sun's equivalent to RHN be? It's more than just a package manager. What does Sun offer that gives a web based interface to server management?
That's funny. The real problem with sun is that they did not 'believe' - upper management's philosophy did not trickle down fast enough to the trenches, Sun was schizo instead of fully committed and thus had a lot of difficulty convincing customers that they were honest about their intentions. Red hat "keeps it real" by being fully open - the only thing they keep locked up is their trademarks.
Red Hat has value in their commercialized platform. They have things like RHN. Besides this, they're specifically an open source consulting firm. They don't make money by giving things away. Also, they're focused on the parts of their platform that make money... while Sun wasted money on things like OpenOffice, which is basically a scourge to any organization that wastes cash on it.
What other organization has managed to squeeze money out of the free software specific community? The most profitable linux-oriented ventures are not presenting it as an open platform, but as an embedded system well hidden from the user.
Red Hat is just a completely inapplicable example of this. Their marketing is just not freetard centric like anything GNU or the FSF puts their name on. Red Hat is a company that offers enterprise services.
This netgear product is a freetard-centric router. It's marketed specifically towards people who buy things because they're "open". Red Hat's platform has value outside of being open. Netgear's product does not.
Sun blew their load and open sourced everything, even valuable things. They left almost no value in their platform. Red Hat made sure there was no supported free version of RHEL- CentOS being outside of their organization. Sun even started to give away Solaris 10. I believe their documentation was openly available, also. Red Hat makes sure to keep their documentation only usable by subscribers.
Red Hat simply has a better monetized business model. Sun died the death of a company that "truly believed" in open source while Red Hat kept it real.
Ha! Oh netgear, you just don't market to freetards. They'll aggressively attack any company that attempts to cater to them or their platform. They will not be happy until you have given everything away and are completely unprofitable, like Sun. So Broadcom won't let you gpl their drivers? That's too bad, now the FSF is going to hang you from the highest tree and make an example out of you for making those drivers available to be used by the community. Instead of reaching a difficult to market to segment, you're instead going to be attacked by the very people you sought to please.
You just don't cater to people who are looking to undermine and exploit your product, it's not worth it. Save yourself some development time and just give them an unsupported breadboard with no firmware on any chips, some rough documentation, and tell them to have fun "hacking".
What a hilarious waste of marketing money. Selling to an anti-commercial market segment...
It seems fair that something paid for by public money should be openly available to all Americans, but what about foreigners? What happens if they commies get a hold of our U.S. History textbooks? Then they will know that Christopher Columbus discovered North America while proving that the Earth was round.
Furthermore, they might also discover that America won World War I single-handedly. This is dangerous information that I am certain few other nations possess.
Symantec doesn't like that Microsoft is releasing a high quality anti-virus for free? I wonder why. How... how so very odd.
It seems like the virus protection racket on the Microsoft platform for home users might be over. That must be really scary for Symantec, not having everyone by the balls.
Every western company has to step carefully around the Chinese market. If you're working on a proprietary product, you NEVER license source over there. If a Chinese company decides to rip you off, you've got no recourse.
When you sell software in China, no matter what type, you can only sell a single seat license-- they will break your protection and run it on a hundred.
China's government protects its companies from fair business practices, anyway. Many of the malicious hacks that come from the Chinese government are purely economical- just stealing plans, prototypes, and source code from prominent western businesses.
So, good luck, guys. If these big powerful multinational companies can't get China to pay for what they do to our IP market, I'm not sure what you GPL folks can do. They will say anything they need to say to avoid respecting your license.
Since the 1960's, people have produced numerous kernels in languages other than C. Systems had virtualization, elaborate access controls and security architectures, and tons of other features. These weren't academic exercises, they were the workhorses of the computer industry. IBM alone had a highly virtualized product line, plus an entirely separate product line based on virtual machines. People were working on highly parallel systems, multicore support, verification, sandboxing, kernels in functional and managed languages, and all sorts of other "modern" things.
You're talking IBM Mainframe operating systems, then? Yes, they had very advanced architectures-- intelligent concepts like capabilties-based kernels and such. I think you're really oversimplifying this history. If anything, Unix killed off systems like this. Microsoft came in from a completely different angle-- I'm not even sure if you could consider them a driving force in the server world until very recently. Their systems are built from a simplistic base and moved towards complexity, making many architectural sacrifices to cut the cost of hardware.
I am generally talking about PC's, here- and I can't think of what these IBM systems would offer that market.
If anything, Unix eliminated these systems and stagnated internally, leaving a VMS-based system like NT in a competitive position. Systems like NT and Unix are cognitive, they interface well with people. They won in a human market, not a technical market.
As for your "multi-role" arguments, you really need to read up a bit on the history of operating systems since you obviously have no idea of the history of this.
Actually, it sounds like I am talking about small computers and you're talking MULTICS.
All that came to a halt in the 1990's. It came to a halt because Microsoft took over the industry, not with better technology, but with its illegal monopolistic practices. After Microsoft's takeover, neither academics nor companies felt there was much point in working on kernels anymore because Microsoft would not let anything succeed in the market anyway. It's going to take us another decade or so to recover from the Microsoft dark ages and for people to start working on operating system research again.
I don't think Microsoft really hurt these systems as much as the concept of personal computing in general. It wasn't a dark ages so much as servers and clusters leaving the limelight. The Microsoft brand is so weak right now that people are actually pretending that desktop Linux is usable, so I think the excuses are gone. Microsoft dominated for about a decade by providing cheap and accessible systems and commanding the PC show, but technology-cleansing and losing the server market was all Unix.
And you sound like the typical guy who was hired into Microsoft fresh out of college and has never seen anything else.
And you'd be wrong. You sound like a cranky mainframe guy.
Microsoft is talking about the security framework of IE 8 and they're absolutely correct. Bringing up IE 5 and IE 6 and IE's of times yore is completely irrelevant.
This isn't about characterizing the Microsoft enterprise as some sort of individual and IE as some sort of character in a dramatic play. This sort of analysis is irrational when talking about security.
We are talking about the current IE 8... and IE 8 is extremely secure as it is. I brought up this exact issue the other day because it is a relevant point-- how much can you safely strip from Google Chrome before its security model is irrelevant to the IE plugin model and you've created a new entry point?
If you want Google Chrome, it would be more secure to simply run Google Chrome.
Putting these two browsers together creates awkward new security situation that completely defeats features like antimalware and anti-XSS protecton where IE 8 excels.
Take your fanboy hats for a moment and try to grasp that Microsoft is bringing up a valid point: if Google doesn't maintain this frame with the same level of resources they throw at Chrome, it will simply become an attack vector that neither Microsoft nor Google will be able to cover.
In terms of total number of installed Linux kernels in the world, Linux probably already has NT beat hands down.
And that's why Red Hat is the largest company in the technology world.
er... maybe all the Linux co's combined?
No?
Oh, nevermind.
Obviously, your nonexistent fantasy operating system will come by and change everything once Linux pads the way and people start loving impractical academic systems again. Until then, I think what matters is organization and architecture, something that I've never seen come out of the academic or open source world. Platforms are more than just their system architecture, they're also platform architecture.
Talking to you is a waste of time. I am talking about a real market and you are talking about a fantasy market full of nonexistent products.
Modula-3 and CEDAR/MESA come to mind, but kernels have been written in managed languages.
And C is about as far from being "optimal" for writing a many million line kernel as any language can be.
That's completely and utterly unrealistic. If those techniques and languages produced workable products, some would exist.
The fact that you mention kernels as being millions of lines suggests that you've never seen a microkernel and have little comprehension of the NT architecture.
I hate to break it to you, tux, but academic kernels are actually behind commercial kernels in technology... and they most certainly don't beat them in practicality or performance. If they did, I'm sure someone would use them. Companies are very good at grabbing academic kernels and dropping them in, like NeXT and XNU, for instance.
I'll just leave you to your little "modern kernel" fantasy.
That claim makes absolutely no sense at all, since the Java EE approach was developed on UNIX and Linux. And once you run your servers in managed virtual machines, you don't need all the elaborate kernel-based "multi-role" support anyway. That's another reason the "multi-role" support in NT is superfluous and obsolete.
I would say the Java platform is rather separate from its host architecture.
UNIX and Linux actually offer all the "multi-role" support you could possibly imagine and want: access control, isolation, namespace manipulations, and various forms of virtualization. Among all of those, people choose virtualization because it's the least hassle and the easiest to manage.
Haha... and because the system is so limited that you have to literally customize and hack it to work properly towards any server task, so one machine could never realistically do any task in production. Oh sure, it can "multi-role", it just isn't feasible. Virtualization simply exposes it as a limited architecture.
There's nothing archaic about making a multi-role capable system, realistically systems are getting largely and some people need more work out a single machine. Virtualization is extremely inefficient in comparison, just manageable to UNIX people.
Yeah, that's because you obviously don't know anything, and neither did the people at Microsoft. Microsoft's OS developers in the 1980's and 1990's were a bunch of PC hackers plus industry wash-ups who had no idea what the state of the art in computer science actually was, and they developed a third rate OS that was obsolete from the start.
Where are all these brilliant "true" computer scientists who write "modern" kernels? Every now and then, some PhD's system gets swallowed into a commercial distribution of some sort. If this weren't just some sort of utterly retarded academic systems fanfic on your part, someone would have made something that somehow outperforms or outshines commercial systems.
Besides this, commercial systems are defined by their organization. You know nothing about the actual NT kernel architecture, and that's fine. It sounds like you have a very absurdly ivory tower perspective anyway.
I am not sure it's open source, but like WPF or WinForms, I believe you can simply call it as a documented interface. I am not sure whether or not you have to include the library. You might need to in Vista, but not in 7.
It shouldn't be any different than calling Cocoa or Winforms licensing-wise.
Why wouldn't they just call the native interface, since it's provided with Windows? It would be really awkward and slow to do that......were you joking? Now I feel silly.
I suppose a Windows "Camino" would be more of a fully integrated Gecko browser with an interface written in modern WPF that adheres to the Windows 7 UX Guide. The only browser I can think of that meets any of these criteria is K-meleon, which is at least Windows-specific.
Usability research showed that the ribbon interface cost productivity for about a month, then improved it thereafter. Anyone who was not very familiar with office before the Ribbon was more productive afterwards.
It's definitely a trade-off-- it's actually a more accessible interface, but very different.
Firefox will provide a simple means to disable it, in any case. Firefox doesn't hide that much functionality in its menus, so I wouldn't be surprised if it were used to expose contextual functionality you would usually get from selecting screen elements.
That's where Ribbon was successful was in exposing useful but rarely used functionality.
That's really clever. The Ribbon is fully available to any application that doesn't compete with Office... I would have never thought about a web browser as being within that fold, but it most certainly is. IE is not part of the office ecosystem. This is smart move towards integration and a clever way to utilize the platform. However, there likely will be some backlash from purists. Might I suggest a branch of Firefox not unlike Camino for Mac? Perhaps a Windows-centric version of the Mozilla browser would be in order to better provide for the range of needs and interests in the community.
The Office 2007 ribbon is very effective for exposing contextual functionality, but it's also capable of being a lightweight interface. I am curious to see how Firefox implements this. I wouldn't anticipate it being nearly as wide open as Office's ribbon, with much of its functionality likely hidden in the globe.
Alongside some Windows 7 integration, these features could go far towards making Firefox more of a native browser and less of a competing visual element in Windows.
The embedded market? Microsoft doesn't target nearly the same ground Linux does in that market. You're just cherry-picking situations where people use Linux because it doesn't compete in the workstation market.
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And neither was Sun. Duh.
Then why open source Java? Sun open sourced things that rendered their company pointless. Why drop money on Open Office? Even Red Hat had the sense not to initially open source RHN.
The point is that open sourcing something makes it a commodity. Red Hat can market an open source operating system because Linux made Unix a commodity. Red Hat offers a cohesive and supported platform solution built on Linux. That's how they license it. What value does Sun offer its customers anymore?
Its funny how you keep trying to pull netgear back in to support applying you 'freetard' theory to Sun. I never said one thing about netgear meanwhile you are the one who started the whole discussion about Sun. I guess you must have realized how silly that was since you keep trying to drop the point under debate and make it about something else. You want to fight about netgear? Get the fuck back up the thread and reply to the people talking about netgear.
The problem is that you're inept and incapable of parsing complex ideas, so we run in circles.
My point is that Sun killed itself by giving away all its products in an obtuse manner, rather than just open sourcing useless technologies on the fringe of their business like any other sensible company that deal with open source.
That's separate from my initial point which is that FREETARDS DO NOT BUY THINGS. You do not market to them because they attack anyone who tries to sell things to them. Selling to an anti-commercial market is stupid. Netgear will get to learn this the hard way.
What are these links? What is your point? Red Hat has all sorts of open/free bullshit hidden deep in their site, but their marketing material says Red Hat before it says "open" or GPL or anything useless like that. It's not a selling point.
That's a pretty pragmatic take on this, but I think it's going to bite them because they're marketing to an aggressive and reactive segment.
Bingo! That's why saying something like, "Their marketing is just not freetard centric like anything GNU or the FSF puts their name on" is absolutely moronic.
No, it's not. It's exactly my point. You are so goddamn dense. Red Hat is NOT MARKETING TO OPEN SOURCE ENTHUSIASTS. How much more clear can I make this? They are marketing their solution as a commercially supported professional enterprise platform. They mention Linux, but not GNU or the FSF. If you want to see freetard-centric marketing, look at this:
http://www.gnewsense.org/
Do you see a difference? Oh, all it seems to talk about is how "free" the software makes you. Try to find this on Red Hat's website.
Wait, here's another one:
http://www.myopenrouter.com/
What's this? Oh, it seems to be marketed as an OPEN SOURCE router My OPEN router. Now find an entity that markets to this segment and profits. Good luck!
Now you've got me LOLing on the floor - all RedHat software products, ALL of them, are GNU licensed. Seems to me that you know even less about Redhat than you do about Sun.
The GPL is not a brand, it's just a license. You are an abject moron. Red Hat does not use GNU as a major advertising point. Dig around on their website and see how many levels you have to go through to find GNU or the FSF mentioned.
All your ranting says to me is that you've never been a significant commercial customer of Sun and are totally unfamiliar with the support services they provide. RHN? All commercial unix vendors have an equivalent.
So what would Sun's equivalent to RHN be? It's more than just a package manager. What does Sun offer that gives a web based interface to server management?
That's funny. The real problem with sun is that they did not 'believe' - upper management's philosophy did not trickle down fast enough to the trenches, Sun was schizo instead of fully committed and thus had a lot of difficulty convincing customers that they were honest about their intentions. Red hat "keeps it real" by being fully open - the only thing they keep locked up is their trademarks.
Red Hat has value in their commercialized platform. They have things like RHN. Besides this, they're specifically an open source consulting firm. They don't make money by giving things away. Also, they're focused on the parts of their platform that make money... while Sun wasted money on things like OpenOffice, which is basically a scourge to any organization that wastes cash on it.
What other organization has managed to squeeze money out of the free software specific community? The most profitable linux-oriented ventures are not presenting it as an open platform, but as an embedded system well hidden from the user.
Red Hat is just a completely inapplicable example of this. Their marketing is just not freetard centric like anything GNU or the FSF puts their name on. Red Hat is a company that offers enterprise services.
This netgear product is a freetard-centric router. It's marketed specifically towards people who buy things because they're "open". Red Hat's platform has value outside of being open. Netgear's product does not.
Sun blew their load and open sourced everything, even valuable things. They left almost no value in their platform. Red Hat made sure there was no supported free version of RHEL- CentOS being outside of their organization. Sun even started to give away Solaris 10. I believe their documentation was openly available, also. Red Hat makes sure to keep their documentation only usable by subscribers.
Red Hat simply has a better monetized business model. Sun died the death of a company that "truly believed" in open source while Red Hat kept it real.
Red Hat markets to enterprises, not freetards. Freetards do not purchase RHEL.
Ha! Oh netgear, you just don't market to freetards. They'll aggressively attack any company that attempts to cater to them or their platform. They will not be happy until you have given everything away and are completely unprofitable, like Sun. So Broadcom won't let you gpl their drivers? That's too bad, now the FSF is going to hang you from the highest tree and make an example out of you for making those drivers available to be used by the community. Instead of reaching a difficult to market to segment, you're instead going to be attacked by the very people you sought to please.
You just don't cater to people who are looking to undermine and exploit your product, it's not worth it. Save yourself some development time and just give them an unsupported breadboard with no firmware on any chips, some rough documentation, and tell them to have fun "hacking".
What a hilarious waste of marketing money. Selling to an anti-commercial market segment...
It seems fair that something paid for by public money should be openly available to all Americans, but what about foreigners? What happens if they commies get a hold of our U.S. History textbooks? Then they will know that Christopher Columbus discovered North America while proving that the Earth was round.
Furthermore, they might also discover that America won World War I single-handedly. This is dangerous information that I am certain few other nations possess.
Symantec doesn't like that Microsoft is releasing a high quality anti-virus for free? I wonder why. How... how so very odd.
It seems like the virus protection racket on the Microsoft platform for home users might be over. That must be really scary for Symantec, not having everyone by the balls.
Every western company has to step carefully around the Chinese market. If you're working on a proprietary product, you NEVER license source over there. If a Chinese company decides to rip you off, you've got no recourse.
When you sell software in China, no matter what type, you can only sell a single seat license-- they will break your protection and run it on a hundred.
China's government protects its companies from fair business practices, anyway. Many of the malicious hacks that come from the Chinese government are purely economical- just stealing plans, prototypes, and source code from prominent western businesses.
So, good luck, guys. If these big powerful multinational companies can't get China to pay for what they do to our IP market, I'm not sure what you GPL folks can do. They will say anything they need to say to avoid respecting your license.
But which do you like?
I think I'll just go back to riding around town on my goat. He's much faster.
Since the 1960's, people have produced numerous kernels in languages other than C. Systems had virtualization, elaborate access controls and security architectures, and tons of other features. These weren't academic exercises, they were the workhorses of the computer industry. IBM alone had a highly virtualized product line, plus an entirely separate product line based on virtual machines. People were working on highly parallel systems, multicore support, verification, sandboxing, kernels in functional and managed languages, and all sorts of other "modern" things.
You're talking IBM Mainframe operating systems, then? Yes, they had very advanced architectures-- intelligent concepts like capabilties-based kernels and such. I think you're really oversimplifying this history. If anything, Unix killed off systems like this. Microsoft came in from a completely different angle-- I'm not even sure if you could consider them a driving force in the server world until very recently. Their systems are built from a simplistic base and moved towards complexity, making many architectural sacrifices to cut the cost of hardware.
I am generally talking about PC's, here- and I can't think of what these IBM systems would offer that market.
If anything, Unix eliminated these systems and stagnated internally, leaving a VMS-based system like NT in a competitive position. Systems like NT and Unix are cognitive, they interface well with people. They won in a human market, not a technical market.
As for your "multi-role" arguments, you really need to read up a bit on the history of operating systems since you obviously have no idea of the history of this.
Actually, it sounds like I am talking about small computers and you're talking MULTICS.
All that came to a halt in the 1990's. It came to a halt because Microsoft took over the industry, not with better technology, but with its illegal monopolistic practices. After Microsoft's takeover, neither academics nor companies felt there was much point in working on kernels anymore because Microsoft would not let anything succeed in the market anyway. It's going to take us another decade or so to recover from the Microsoft dark ages and for people to start working on operating system research again.
I don't think Microsoft really hurt these systems as much as the concept of personal computing in general. It wasn't a dark ages so much as servers and clusters leaving the limelight. The Microsoft brand is so weak right now that people are actually pretending that desktop Linux is usable, so I think the excuses are gone. Microsoft dominated for about a decade by providing cheap and accessible systems and commanding the PC show, but technology-cleansing and losing the server market was all Unix.
And you sound like the typical guy who was hired into Microsoft fresh out of college and has never seen anything else.
And you'd be wrong. You sound like a cranky mainframe guy.
I was hoping to just hear people talk about their favorite titles in general. No major preference.
I am not being snarky. I am literally curious to see if they ever got around to releasing good games for this console.
Microsoft is talking about the security framework of IE 8 and they're absolutely correct. Bringing up IE 5 and IE 6 and IE's of times yore is completely irrelevant.
This isn't about characterizing the Microsoft enterprise as some sort of individual and IE as some sort of character in a dramatic play. This sort of analysis is irrational when talking about security.
We are talking about the current IE 8... and IE 8 is extremely secure as it is. I brought up this exact issue the other day because it is a relevant point-- how much can you safely strip from Google Chrome before its security model is irrelevant to the IE plugin model and you've created a new entry point?
If you want Google Chrome, it would be more secure to simply run Google Chrome.
Putting these two browsers together creates awkward new security situation that completely defeats features like antimalware and anti-XSS protecton where IE 8 excels.
Take your fanboy hats for a moment and try to grasp that Microsoft is bringing up a valid point: if Google doesn't maintain this frame with the same level of resources they throw at Chrome, it will simply become an attack vector that neither Microsoft nor Google will be able to cover.
In terms of total number of installed Linux kernels in the world, Linux probably already has NT beat hands down.
And that's why Red Hat is the largest company in the technology world.
er... maybe all the Linux co's combined?
No?
Oh, nevermind.
Obviously, your nonexistent fantasy operating system will come by and change everything once Linux pads the way and people start loving impractical academic systems again. Until then, I think what matters is organization and architecture, something that I've never seen come out of the academic or open source world. Platforms are more than just their system architecture, they're also platform architecture.
Talking to you is a waste of time. I am talking about a real market and you are talking about a fantasy market full of nonexistent products.
Modula-3 and CEDAR/MESA come to mind, but kernels have been written in managed languages.
And C is about as far from being "optimal" for writing a many million line kernel as any language can be.
That's completely and utterly unrealistic. If those techniques and languages produced workable products, some would exist.
The fact that you mention kernels as being millions of lines suggests that you've never seen a microkernel and have little comprehension of the NT architecture.
I hate to break it to you, tux, but academic kernels are actually behind commercial kernels in technology... and they most certainly don't beat them in practicality or performance. If they did, I'm sure someone would use them. Companies are very good at grabbing academic kernels and dropping them in, like NeXT and XNU, for instance.
I'll just leave you to your little "modern kernel" fantasy.
That claim makes absolutely no sense at all, since the Java EE approach was developed on UNIX and Linux. And once you run your servers in managed virtual machines, you don't need all the elaborate kernel-based "multi-role" support anyway. That's another reason the "multi-role" support in NT is superfluous and obsolete.
I would say the Java platform is rather separate from its host architecture.
UNIX and Linux actually offer all the "multi-role" support you could possibly imagine and want: access control, isolation, namespace manipulations, and various forms of virtualization. Among all of those, people choose virtualization because it's the least hassle and the easiest to manage.
Haha... and because the system is so limited that you have to literally customize and hack it to work properly towards any server task, so one machine could never realistically do any task in production. Oh sure, it can "multi-role", it just isn't feasible. Virtualization simply exposes it as a limited architecture.
There's nothing archaic about making a multi-role capable system, realistically systems are getting largely and some people need more work out a single machine. Virtualization is extremely inefficient in comparison, just manageable to UNIX people.
Yeah, that's because you obviously don't know anything, and neither did the people at Microsoft. Microsoft's OS developers in the 1980's and 1990's were a bunch of PC hackers plus industry wash-ups who had no idea what the state of the art in computer science actually was, and they developed a third rate OS that was obsolete from the start.
Where are all these brilliant "true" computer scientists who write "modern" kernels? Every now and then, some PhD's system gets swallowed into a commercial distribution of some sort. If this weren't just some sort of utterly retarded academic systems fanfic on your part, someone would have made something that somehow outperforms or outshines commercial systems.
Besides this, commercial systems are defined by their organization. You know nothing about the actual NT kernel architecture, and that's fine. It sounds like you have a very absurdly ivory tower perspective anyway.
I am not sure it's open source, but like WPF or WinForms, I believe you can simply call it as a documented interface. I am not sure whether or not you have to include the library. You might need to in Vista, but not in 7.
It shouldn't be any different than calling Cocoa or Winforms licensing-wise.
Why wouldn't they just call the native interface, since it's provided with Windows? It would be really awkward and slow to do that... ...were you joking? Now I feel silly.
I suppose a Windows "Camino" would be more of a fully integrated Gecko browser with an interface written in modern WPF that adheres to the Windows 7 UX Guide. The only browser I can think of that meets any of these criteria is K-meleon, which is at least Windows-specific.
Usability research showed that the ribbon interface cost productivity for about a month, then improved it thereafter. Anyone who was not very familiar with office before the Ribbon was more productive afterwards.
It's definitely a trade-off-- it's actually a more accessible interface, but very different.
Firefox will provide a simple means to disable it, in any case. Firefox doesn't hide that much functionality in its menus, so I wouldn't be surprised if it were used to expose contextual functionality you would usually get from selecting screen elements.
That's where Ribbon was successful was in exposing useful but rarely used functionality.
That's really clever. The Ribbon is fully available to any application that doesn't compete with Office... I would have never thought about a web browser as being within that fold, but it most certainly is. IE is not part of the office ecosystem. This is smart move towards integration and a clever way to utilize the platform. However, there likely will be some backlash from purists. Might I suggest a branch of Firefox not unlike Camino for Mac? Perhaps a Windows-centric version of the Mozilla browser would be in order to better provide for the range of needs and interests in the community.
The Office 2007 ribbon is very effective for exposing contextual functionality, but it's also capable of being a lightweight interface. I am curious to see how Firefox implements this. I wouldn't anticipate it being nearly as wide open as Office's ribbon, with much of its functionality likely hidden in the globe.
Alongside some Windows 7 integration, these features could go far towards making Firefox more of a native browser and less of a competing visual element in Windows.
The embedded market? Microsoft doesn't target nearly the same ground Linux does in that market. You're just cherry-picking situations where people use Linux because it doesn't compete in the workstation market.