One suspects that if I made the same argument and replaced 'China' with 'the United States' and 'Tibet' with 'Iraq' that I'd be quickly modded troll. And since you mentioned Puerto Rico -- are we repressing an independence movement in Puerto Rico at gunpoint? Are the people of Tibet free to vote in local elections and choose their own destiny as the people of Puerto Rico are? Tibet is technically an "autonomous region". What that means is obviously questionable in reference to Chinese power. Despite this, I am positive that Tibet can not vote themselves out of Chinese control, the same way that Puerto Rico or the US Virgin Islands likely cannot.
If I made the same argument about Native Americans I'd be modded down faster then you can say "gunpowder". What the hell gives one group of people the right to impose "modernization" on another group of less well armed people? This isn't the 19th century anymore. But we didn't modernize the native americans- at all. We simply kicked them off the fertile land and built in their place. In fact, one might go so far as to point out that we placed them at various points across the country with the least productive land available at the time. Tibetans did not get kicked out of Tibet. China simply builds roads, schools, and massive political prisons. I would compare them more to Rome than the United States, in this case. Whether or not you think it's right, these people are no longer serfs. Although they don't know it yet- that's a good thing. You really need to take a long hard look at what life in China is really about before you start acting like it's a nation of slaves. Pre-1959 Tibet was a nation of slaves.
China wants the olympics because it makes them a legitimate major nation in the international sphere, not an automatic enemy.
Suddenly we're giving them the olympics but making demands about Tibet.
Why Tibet?
I am serious- of all injustices in the world why has the Western world particularly adopted Tibet? No matter how you look at it, it's a rightful conquest. Do we expect France to come over and tell us to relinquish Puerto Rico? No- imperialist gains are imperialist gains. I don't see why China's dominion is evil while ours is not. Besides, Tibet was a theocratic feudal kingdom before China invaded, where most people were serfs who lived in hovels underneath lords. They revolt out of nationalistic pride, but in reality they are better off with China's modernizations.
What about the great firewall? Why do we even care? I think it has to do with American corporations wanting to profit off of the Chinese populace without hurting their marketing image in the US. "Hey, our company looks like a giant kindergarten at its headquarters, so we'd never want to support censorship!" Maybe China is protecting it political and economic goods. Thanks to the great firewall, Chinese corporations boom within their subset of the internet, PLUS they don't have to worry about their people embracing the American fascist economic policies because their websites are prettier.
We walk a fine line with China. Within China, they have total copyright freedom (something slashdot cares about)- but I think at this point they're working on modernization and keeping their citizens out of poverty instead of becoming a third world nation, exploited for its cheap labor while foreign companies get to start calling the shots in their government. China is in control of China, and I am sure they like it that way.
I've always heard the FOSS debate having something to do with the technical merits of being able to modify and view your source code for security or customization purposes. Even if it's platform-locked, this still applies to that general principle.
But there are shades of madness in the open source community- once Microsoft fulfills the realistic argument for why you need the source code, suddenly it's not about actually having the source code. No- it's about porting it to linux and refusing to maintain it for windows, nay- FREEDOM. It's about some sort of weird ideal defined by Stallman, whose primary argument seems to remain that he doesn't like that things cost money or that there's a software industry hustling and bustling out there that he's not qualified to participate in.
Suddenly it's no longer "you need the source code to make use of the product" but it's evolved into "I deleted the wifi firmware on my laptop because it wasn't free. Now I use a wire."
Since the slashdot zealot crowd has so many shades of open source mania, it doesn't matter what microsoft will do. Here is my slashdot zeitgeist by MS license-use prediction:
MS LRL: It's bad because it forces you to use code written FOR windows on windows.
Ms-RL: It's bad because it's not abstractly free in Stallman's imagination.
GPL: It's bad because it's Microsoft, and they're planning something.
BSD: They're just going to make us so we're dependent on it then they're going to sue everybody and everything will far apart. I was abused as a child and have trust issues.
MIT: The world is going to end and we need to resort to cannibalism immediately.
My personal thought about this is that the Shared Source license is a way for Microsoft to make use of open source in some applicable categories without having their code licensed under something that is controlled by an organization of wingnuts, like the FSF. Thus, they could release their code under the GPL, but then Stallman will just draft a GPLv4 that says whoever uses the license needs to release the source code to Windows if they are called "Microsoft", which is basically like what the GPLv3 did to Novell. Stallman and his nimrods will cook licenses that include bitter little addendums to address contemporary issues that put his panties in a knot, because suddenly Stallman has the say in how people use Linux.
This is the same reason that Monsanto doesn't use Earth First! to handle their marketing and to distribute their products to grociers. If Microsoft goes open source, they need to have the assurance that the license is under their terms otherwise their shareholders might get nervous that they're putting some maniac activist organization in control of their distribution rights. There's no reason to do that unless Windows is squarely defeated in the market by open source alternatives.
Could you imagine how many windows clones would show up overnight? It would be a disaster for their platform and company. They're currently in a state where they can sell their platform for large amounts of money. They won't give that up because it angers a fringe of developers whose religion is FOSS-- they'll only do it if there's no other way to make money.
I've been through the Microsoft campus before. It's a really nice workplace- and that was the old building. I even got a free can of "Windows Vista" to drink.
But seriously, whoever wrote this article must work in some sort of golden castle atop a cloud. They need to go visit a the IT department of a financial institution every once in a while to "keep it real".
I think we're all looking at this very backwards. I use linux almost exclusively in several contexts and if there's one thing I can agree with, it's that shit is always broken. On a default ubuntu install, for example, it will throw a thousand HAL and D-BUS errors just trying to boot the system. Fedora or SUSE are no different. Common tasks take an unbelievable amount of time- information is scarce and unreliable.
Running this sort of stuff in an enterprise requires you to have a cabal of "unix people" around who have an intimate almost religious knowledge of often undocumented unix inner-workings. These people write vast hideous perl scripts that are unmaintainable and largely unholy to mangle your systems into working conditions. This is the linux sysadmin way.
I stopped using Windows because it cost money and it never broke. Nothing ever needed to be done or gone wrong. It was absolutely no fun. Even the most polished linux distribution is riddled with problems that require your care and attention. It's like a little flying machine made of hopes and dreams, and a wonderful hobby.
I believe many IT folk were once DOS people who felt underappreciated when Windows got to a more working but less tuner-oriented state. Using the worst case scenario of irresponsible desktop windows use as an excuse (the 12 year old girl's windows 98 box), they legitimized the unbelievable amounts of time needed to create their "perfect" linux box, winning a place in their hearts and minds as an inspiring hobby.
Now it's huge, it's corporate, it's competitive. So is Microsoft scrambling to keep this best kept secret quiet?
No. They're focusing on linux because they can. It means they don't have to compare Windows Server as much to Solaris, which performs fantastically in HPC operations. I can think of many examples (which I can't name unfortunately since they're not public) where major banks with servers in Chicago started migrating servers to linux from Solaris and experienced miserable performance and reliability. Linux only competes with Solaris in the front end as far as this is concerned, making it a really easy target for Microsoft. Since people view linux and unix as the same thing, Microsoft can pick off the weakest but most popular unix in the flock and provide an accurate case while goose-stepping around the reliability, security, and performance of Solaris.
By aiming more effort on linux, they can focus on its obvious amateur/scizophrenic implementation design flaws and weaknesses instead of focusing on their more serious technological competition in some commercial unices.
Design by consortium yields sub-par results, so this a battle against people who believe they can run linux servers as a non-commercial operation- that is, not paying for external support. When business folk are aware that there is no "free" option, linux is no longer on the table as a free alternative. Since they have to pay for support no matter what, now they have to consider Windows side by side by technical merit. If the shop prefers Microsoft and the CTO realizes that running linux is not really free, a sale is made. That's all Microsoft needs in some cases.
Of course linux is a copy of unix. It's a sorry excuse for unix. BUT it is a clean room sorry excuse for unix. We all know that linux is too much of a wacky clusterfuck to share any code with the academic System V base.
It's obvious, just check out linux's half-assed "POSIX compliance". Any moron can compare OpenSolaris to linux and see what's wrong with this statement. Linux's DOS-user heritage is everywhere. Everything it does well, it does so in a totally not unixy way. Compare Ubuntu to Plan 9. See any similarities? No?
Linux is sort of a unix "kit car", if you follow my drift. It shares nothing in common except appearance and interface. Up top it's a Shelby Cobra, down below it be a mangled Ford Taurus.
I reckon Ubuntu is still pretty much free. Shuttleworth is a venture captalist that saw the possibility for profit and success in investing in true open source. But he did invest money to make money. Make no mistake, Canonical is out to make money- but they are doing so in a very positive and giving way when it comes to the community.
That's why I am posting from an Ubuntu subnotebook.
At this point, you need to win those people over by offering an easy experience. At first, people will treat it like Windows. After a while, people will eventually treat it like Ubuntu. Linux still has a hold over userbase from the DOS world where men were men and functionality was won through hard labor.
This probably occurs when people switch to mac as well.
But you are right- if Ubuntu ever matches Windows' functionality or market share, they will probably slow down in usability development. Like most open source (and closed source to a lesser extent) it grows through mimickery.
This is a fallacy. Everyone borrows from everyone in the computing world, it's called "standards" like in the case of TCP/IP. It's just not about creating new things- it's about maintaining better things.
Microsoft LICENSED the GUI-interface from Xerox in exchange for stock, same as Apple. In the case of Apple, they took something that was being sold for crazy amounts of money and released a similar product(Windows) that ran on dirt cheap hardware (but had better memory management).
If this is your definition of theft, then it's endemically impossible for open source to create or have created anything. Ever.
It's rare that a large corporation ever really "creates" anything too radical in computing. What has Apple invented? Mac OS X is a well implemented version of Mach with BSD Compatibility layer, running a DPS-based OPENSTEP window manager. Apple creates nothing anymore, they just implement things well.
What separate(d) Microsoft, Apple, or Be (for example) from the stodgy unix model is: A) Not using a monolithic kernel (Microsoft, Apple, BeOS) B) Not using X (") C) Not relying on consortium development (Apple pretends parts of os x are open source, but they are not community developed)
Beyond this formula, technologies are forked(in a sense) and improved to be made into commercial software systems. Most of the innovative new technologies that work their way into these industries come from start-ups. In this sense, unix-based systems remain so close, yet so far away as long as they keep maintaining ridiculously expensive and schizophrenic technologies like X.
So perhaps Bill Gates would have been better off saying that they should be able to sell their work, not their invention. There is truly no open source equivalent to things like DirectX (SDL is a sad mockery), Visual Studio, or Microsoft Office (I really wish OpenOffice compared). People buy these products because they're still top notch and useful, not because they're unaware of free alternatives.
Will someone please point me to something innovative from the open source world that isn't just a free alternative to something else?
I understand that this tragedy is hard on everyone here on slashdot, and we all cope in different ways. I can only cope by quietly celebrating the fact that OOXML is going be supported by OpenOffice, thus making it unncessary for me to have to do my homework in Windows. You are obviously coping by being whiny and self-righteous.
I just want to let you know, I AM HERE FOR YOU. We all deal with pain and loss in different ways. Everybody lost someone in the battle between Microsoft OOXML and Sun ODF- some even lost many. Friends, family, loved ones. This was a cruel and wicked war, but it is over now.
Novell is now going to have to add full OOXML support to OpenOffice.org, ODF is still only going to be used by people who forgot to switch to "MS Office 97/2000/XP" when saving in OpenOffice, and Koffice... well... nobody has ever used Koffice. I personally don't even think it exists.
In the end, amidst the smoking rubble, Sun will have to come to terms with the fact that defeating Microsoft through litigation and wacky European politics is going to have to take a second seat to actual technical merit, at least in this battle. Some team of unhappy programmers will be making OOXML work in OpenOffice, and they will be successful eventually. And life will go on.
Remember that, brave little soldier, life WILL GO ON.
This will assuredly be remembered as one of the greatest tragedies of our era. The tale of a desktop documentation format put forth by a large technology firm-- and how it became conditionally approved by an international standards body.
I am sorry, it's difficult for me to write this because I am so deeply hurt by this. How could an international standardizing body standardize a document format created by a large technology company that is not favored by those who frequent this website?
I am absolutely not looking forward to open source firms having to spend time and money implementing this format so I can read my goddamn school documents without booting Windows.
Ladi-... er... well... Gentleman, you are welcome to join my pity party.
Can you cite a specific instance of Roughly Drafted posting fabricated documents in the past, or is this just an ad hominem attack? Well, it's easy enough just to got to the root of the site, where anyone who isn't blind might find some sort of bias. But thankfully, Roughly Drafted has included a massive concentrated shrine of an almost dangerous level of Apple fanboism:
Why the fanatical hatred of Microsoft's ipod competitor? It's not like a technical magazine's negative review- it is a shrine of insane hatred. No one who hates anything this much can be considered sane- not unless the Zune actually killed his family or something.
They probably use fewer. What does that have to do with this article? It is about IBM testing Macs on their network (very useful for compatibility especially for their clients running mixed environments and possibly a sign of benefits for users of IBM solutions). It also talks about the preference for OS X over Windows by IBM employees. It's not surprising or anything, but that was the point stated, which you seem to have missed. Yes, "leaked internal information" using IBM's name as for credibility from a site that has an almost psychotic bent on being pro-mac and anti-windows. The article is just a collection of quotes from some unreferenced secret document citing people who are switching from Windows to Mac at IBM. At the end we get a screenshot of an internal website of mac users at IBM. A mac user group in a massive organization like IBM? 930 people? Out of 386,000 employees?
This whole article and presentation suggests that IBM is planning on adopting macs as their new enterprise workstation platform, but this just isn't indicated as being the case by anyone, much less IBM.
Poke around the site for a few minutes and it will be come really clear that Roughly Drafted is just some moron running a Microsoft hate blog. Chances are these "documents" are either made up or exaggerated.
Let's stick to numbers and press releases when we start talking about market share and company's official positions on operating systems, not the musings of some apple-phile.
Besides, we know that IBM quite plainly supports linux and unix. They're a top linux contributor:
Chances are much greater they'll be using linux internally more and more as time goes on, not relying on yet another proprietary OS vendor they have no influence over. They probably use about as many macs internally as microsoft does- and that's not an ironic statement.
Clever! Conform to the product with less than 1% of the market share, despite being free. Microsoft can't lose with a strategy like that.
Actually, I think Vista is flopping, but once they trim the legacy fat from Windows (the Windows 7 plan), it will remain clear why home users will want to use a media-oriented system instead of a server-oriented abomination like deskop linux. Believe it or not, home users enjoy having less confusing crap to deal with as opposed to more. See: Apple Products. You don't need GNOME or KDE in Windows because it already has a robust professionally designed desktop interface(doesn't even need a mouse!), it doesn't need a wacky set of sub-systems to extend the 1980's functionality of X11.
The only product that needs to emulate Linux is Windows Server- and it does. Windows Server is competing with Linux. Windows in general is competing with Mac OS X. Historical trends in general show that your "plan" here is a sure-fire means of failure (everything wrong with unix + the name windows) -- in reality, systems like Ubuntu are gaining market share only because they're simplified to the point of not being unix-y in the slightest.
And most of the stupid unix crap you can do with Windows Server anyway (text mode, separate home paritions, etc...) and what do users care?
It doesn't matter what the editor of ODF thinks. Slashdot has already made up its mind. OpenXML has already been added to their simple binary belief system under "bad".
Thread summary:
Microsoft bad =>Microsoft OpenXML bad. Open source good => Sun ODF good.
It doesn't matter if he points out that OpenXML as a standard will allow them to more easily standardize conversion between formats (since OpenXML not being an ISO standard will only dent its usage in the most official cases, likely prompting people to use the ODF plug-in for Office). Standardized formats in the mainstream benefit everyone. They underline the need for standards.
So the real question is, if the Linux developers can't manage it, are they as smart as you think they are? Oh come on. I don't mean to be rash but you, sir, are an idiot.
You're missing some fundamental information here that is primary to linux development.
First off:
A) Nothing important has happened in computing since the 70's, this is something unix developers have long understood.
B) If something is difficult to implement, it's probably not that important. But at least we support other stuff. And it's free as in libre. It's the best free implementation.
C) Linux is totally better than Minix, which was previously the most advanced kernel on the planet. Now Linux is.
You better check your shit before you come up on slashdot making crazy claims about linux devs being mediocre. If they were mediocre, why is linux free?
Because the underlying Linux got better real-time properties since you last looked; the "non-realtime system" is now a mixed system with some real-time capabilities when requested. I see. With the understanding that this can't replace all applications where one might need an RTOS like VxWorks, I see where the VxWorks emulation could prove very helpful in porting applications to rich embedded systems like cell phones or set top boxes.
In this case, the project must be very delicate in providing vxworks support while not stepping into any of these non-RT boundaries.
Of course, I still come from the school of thought that recommends a re-write when switching from a true RTOS to a hybrid-RTOS. The emulation approach seems a little too "soft" for most of the embedded applications I am used to.
I rescind my statement about linux requiring to work in tandem with an RTOS in order to perform realtime tasks.
Imagine you've already got the 8 megs, and you still want things to happen in realtime. Oh, and you want to actually have drivers. But Linux is not realtime, so its drivers can't be realtime. Part of what makes a system realtime is the way its drivers are written. Realtime device manufacturers are generally expected to be writing their own drivers or using specifically realtime drivers for an RTOS.
The moment anything passes through a linux kernel, it's no longer realtime. At best, it's "soft realtime" aka "realtime except for when it is not". For a realtime linux system to work, you'd have to run two kernels (linux and an RTOS) with two different processors, usually on an asynchronous multi-processor device, where linux runs on a dedicated non-realtime processor and an RTOS runs on a CPU designated for realtime.
SO either Xenomai is actually emulating linux as well as VxWorks in parallel, or VxWorks is running emulated as a soft realtime layer- because the moment anything TOUCHES that linux kernel, it's no longer realtime. It must pass directly through to Xenomai's RTOS or it's not realtime. If you wanted a realtime system PLUS all the perks of linux, you just got neither. Either this is useless or it is NOT LINUX.
At best, you now have some crappy open source RTOS that communicates with linux through a socket. How convenient! There's almost no benefit to this over simply having a unix compatibility layer or a real RTOS, and hypervised linux running in parallel with a vxworks compatibility layer. VxWorks can't touch linux without defeating the purpose of having used VxWorks at all.
Linux is not realtime. "Realtime linux" is a non-linux realtime OS with a non-realtime linux compatibility layer... emulating a REAL RTOS?... Why would you emulate a realtime system in a non-realtime system? Doesn't that defeat the purpose of a realtime OS?
Do you have any idea why people use realtime systems?
With VxWorks you pay license fees... FOR A REALTIME SYSTEM. You're also able to do a lot more with a lot less resources. In the embedded world, less is more! You save millions cutting kb's (or mb's) of ram out of hardware. And this emulation layer saves what, some programmer a week or two tops porting one POSIX-compliant VxWorks application to a semi-POSIX compliant linux device. The licensing fees don't seem so bad when you think about the extra hardware necessary to use a make-believe-realtime OS like "realtime" linux.
I've got a better idea- use a real, tried, trusted RTOS and simply use an emulated UNIX layer if you need that sort of support (most decent RTOS support this). This pairing of linux and Xenomai's RTOS just sounds awkward. Software costs are just miniscule compared with the cost of making a bulky device with hardware that outclasses its functionality.
Why would you ever need to emulate an RTOS in linux? Linux does not do what ThreadX, VxWorks, INTEGRITY, uVelocity, or any of the sort do- imagine you're an embedded device manufacturer and suddenly you need to bump your device up from 64k chip of ram to 8mb. This is completely retarded. In the embedded world, true RTOS are used for things that can never fail, lag, or be insecure in any way. Linux is generally used to fill in a cheap userland. Like on Sony TV's, the RTOS junk is handled by uVelocity, but they use linux for the OSD, etc. You DO NOT PUT LINUX in places you put VxWorks. Imagine having that ludicrous monolithic server OS in a PACE MAKER. Or a NUCLEAR MISSILE.
I could see people wanting to hypervise linux in a secure RTOS but emulate an RTOS in linux? Please tell me this is for development purposes... further still- are they completely insane?
I am southeast asian. I have been using Linux for 1 year I am using recently upgraded from Etch I am using KDE I like the letter a and x Hm, this is a serious case indeed. A and X are excellent letters.
Here's my take: considering your limited experience with linux (1 year is hardly enough for one to be confident in their desktop environment) and your not being North European, I believe you simply need to give gnome another go. If you truly enjoy KDE more, you may want to check your family tree. You may have obscure Nordic roots dating back as much as thousands of years, leading you to find KDE appealing. It could be a deep rooted recessive gene.
A) Northern European (this is true for some reason) True for me, but I'm just one user. North European? Ah-ha! I've specifically pointed out that North Europeans love KDE for some unfathomable reason. As you are a member of the nation of "Northern Europe", I can officially discount your position as Nordic Trickery.
Well you aren't fooling me; my conspiracy theory remains!
Slashdot Mirror
China wants the olympics because it makes them a legitimate major nation in the international sphere, not an automatic enemy.
Suddenly we're giving them the olympics but making demands about Tibet.
Why Tibet?
I am serious- of all injustices in the world why has the Western world particularly adopted Tibet? No matter how you look at it, it's a rightful conquest. Do we expect France to come over and tell us to relinquish Puerto Rico? No- imperialist gains are imperialist gains. I don't see why China's dominion is evil while ours is not. Besides, Tibet was a theocratic feudal kingdom before China invaded, where most people were serfs who lived in hovels underneath lords. They revolt out of nationalistic pride, but in reality they are better off with China's modernizations.
What about the great firewall? Why do we even care? I think it has to do with American corporations wanting to profit off of the Chinese populace without hurting their marketing image in the US. "Hey, our company looks like a giant kindergarten at its headquarters, so we'd never want to support censorship!" Maybe China is protecting it political and economic goods. Thanks to the great firewall, Chinese corporations boom within their subset of the internet, PLUS they don't have to worry about their people embracing the American fascist economic policies because their websites are prettier.
We walk a fine line with China. Within China, they have total copyright freedom (something slashdot cares about)- but I think at this point they're working on modernization and keeping their citizens out of poverty instead of becoming a third world nation, exploited for its cheap labor while foreign companies get to start calling the shots in their government. China is in control of China, and I am sure they like it that way.
I've always heard the FOSS debate having something to do with the technical merits of being able to modify and view your source code for security or customization purposes. Even if it's platform-locked, this still applies to that general principle.
But there are shades of madness in the open source community- once Microsoft fulfills the realistic argument for why you need the source code, suddenly it's not about actually having the source code. No- it's about porting it to linux and refusing to maintain it for windows, nay- FREEDOM. It's about some sort of weird ideal defined by Stallman, whose primary argument seems to remain that he doesn't like that things cost money or that there's a software industry hustling and bustling out there that he's not qualified to participate in.
Suddenly it's no longer "you need the source code to make use of the product" but it's evolved into "I deleted the wifi firmware on my laptop because it wasn't free. Now I use a wire."
Since the slashdot zealot crowd has so many shades of open source mania, it doesn't matter what microsoft will do. Here is my slashdot zeitgeist by MS license-use prediction:
MS LRL: It's bad because it forces you to use code written FOR windows on windows.
Ms-RL: It's bad because it's not abstractly free in Stallman's imagination.
GPL: It's bad because it's Microsoft, and they're planning something.
BSD: They're just going to make us so we're dependent on it then they're going to sue everybody and everything will far apart. I was abused as a child and have trust issues.
MIT: The world is going to end and we need to resort to cannibalism immediately.
My personal thought about this is that the Shared Source license is a way for Microsoft to make use of open source in some applicable categories without having their code licensed under something that is controlled by an organization of wingnuts, like the FSF. Thus, they could release their code under the GPL, but then Stallman will just draft a GPLv4 that says whoever uses the license needs to release the source code to Windows if they are called "Microsoft", which is basically like what the GPLv3 did to Novell. Stallman and his nimrods will cook licenses that include bitter little addendums to address contemporary issues that put his panties in a knot, because suddenly Stallman has the say in how people use Linux.
This is the same reason that Monsanto doesn't use Earth First! to handle their marketing and to distribute their products to grociers. If Microsoft goes open source, they need to have the assurance that the license is under their terms otherwise their shareholders might get nervous that they're putting some maniac activist organization in control of their distribution rights. There's no reason to do that unless Windows is squarely defeated in the market by open source alternatives.
Could you imagine how many windows clones would show up overnight? It would be a disaster for their platform and company. They're currently in a state where they can sell their platform for large amounts of money. They won't give that up because it angers a fringe of developers whose religion is FOSS-- they'll only do it if there's no other way to make money.
I've been through the Microsoft campus before. It's a really nice workplace- and that was the old building. I even got a free can of "Windows Vista" to drink.
But seriously, whoever wrote this article must work in some sort of golden castle atop a cloud. They need to go visit a the IT department of a financial institution every once in a while to "keep it real".
I think we're all looking at this very backwards. I use linux almost exclusively in several contexts and if there's one thing I can agree with, it's that shit is always broken. On a default ubuntu install, for example, it will throw a thousand HAL and D-BUS errors just trying to boot the system. Fedora or SUSE are no different. Common tasks take an unbelievable amount of time- information is scarce and unreliable.
Running this sort of stuff in an enterprise requires you to have a cabal of "unix people" around who have an intimate almost religious knowledge of often undocumented unix inner-workings. These people write vast hideous perl scripts that are unmaintainable and largely unholy to mangle your systems into working conditions. This is the linux sysadmin way.
I stopped using Windows because it cost money and it never broke. Nothing ever needed to be done or gone wrong. It was absolutely no fun. Even the most polished linux distribution is riddled with problems that require your care and attention. It's like a little flying machine made of hopes and dreams, and a wonderful hobby.
I believe many IT folk were once DOS people who felt underappreciated when Windows got to a more working but less tuner-oriented state. Using the worst case scenario of irresponsible desktop windows use as an excuse (the 12 year old girl's windows 98 box), they legitimized the unbelievable amounts of time needed to create their "perfect" linux box, winning a place in their hearts and minds as an inspiring hobby.
Now it's huge, it's corporate, it's competitive. So is Microsoft scrambling to keep this best kept secret quiet?
No. They're focusing on linux because they can. It means they don't have to compare Windows Server as much to Solaris, which performs fantastically in HPC operations. I can think of many examples (which I can't name unfortunately since they're not public) where major banks with servers in Chicago started migrating servers to linux from Solaris and experienced miserable performance and reliability. Linux only competes with Solaris in the front end as far as this is concerned, making it a really easy target for Microsoft. Since people view linux and unix as the same thing, Microsoft can pick off the weakest but most popular unix in the flock and provide an accurate case while goose-stepping around the reliability, security, and performance of Solaris.
By aiming more effort on linux, they can focus on its obvious amateur/scizophrenic implementation design flaws and weaknesses instead of focusing on their more serious technological competition in some commercial unices.
Design by consortium yields sub-par results, so this a battle against people who believe they can run linux servers as a non-commercial operation- that is, not paying for external support. When business folk are aware that there is no "free" option, linux is no longer on the table as a free alternative. Since they have to pay for support no matter what, now they have to consider Windows side by side by technical merit. If the shop prefers Microsoft and the CTO realizes that running linux is not really free, a sale is made. That's all Microsoft needs in some cases.
Of course linux is a copy of unix. It's a sorry excuse for unix. BUT it is a clean room sorry excuse for unix. We all know that linux is too much of a wacky clusterfuck to share any code with the academic System V base.
It's obvious, just check out linux's half-assed "POSIX compliance". Any moron can compare OpenSolaris to linux and see what's wrong with this statement. Linux's DOS-user heritage is everywhere. Everything it does well, it does so in a totally not unixy way. Compare Ubuntu to Plan 9. See any similarities? No?
Linux is sort of a unix "kit car", if you follow my drift. It shares nothing in common except appearance and interface. Up top it's a Shelby Cobra, down below it be a mangled Ford Taurus.
Try again, Darl McBride.
I reckon Ubuntu is still pretty much free. Shuttleworth is a venture captalist that saw the possibility for profit and success in investing in true open source. But he did invest money to make money. Make no mistake, Canonical is out to make money- but they are doing so in a very positive and giving way when it comes to the community.
That's why I am posting from an Ubuntu subnotebook.
Well, Windows has 91% of the OS market share.
At this point, you need to win those people over by offering an easy experience. At first, people will treat it like Windows. After a while, people will eventually treat it like Ubuntu. Linux still has a hold over userbase from the DOS world where men were men and functionality was won through hard labor.
This probably occurs when people switch to mac as well.
But you are right- if Ubuntu ever matches Windows' functionality or market share, they will probably slow down in usability development. Like most open source (and closed source to a lesser extent) it grows through mimickery.
This is a fallacy. Everyone borrows from everyone in the computing world, it's called "standards" like in the case of TCP/IP. It's just not about creating new things- it's about maintaining better things.
Microsoft LICENSED the GUI-interface from Xerox in exchange for stock, same as Apple. In the case of Apple, they took something that was being sold for crazy amounts of money and released a similar product(Windows) that ran on dirt cheap hardware (but had better memory management).
If this is your definition of theft, then it's endemically impossible for open source to create or have created anything. Ever.
It's rare that a large corporation ever really "creates" anything too radical in computing. What has Apple invented? Mac OS X is a well implemented version of Mach with BSD Compatibility layer, running a DPS-based OPENSTEP window manager. Apple creates nothing anymore, they just implement things well.
What separate(d) Microsoft, Apple, or Be (for example) from the stodgy unix model is:
A) Not using a monolithic kernel (Microsoft, Apple, BeOS)
B) Not using X (")
C) Not relying on consortium development (Apple pretends parts of os x are open source, but they are not community developed)
Beyond this formula, technologies are forked(in a sense) and improved to be made into commercial software systems. Most of the innovative new technologies that work their way into these industries come from start-ups. In this sense, unix-based systems remain so close, yet so far away as long as they keep maintaining ridiculously expensive and schizophrenic technologies like X.
So perhaps Bill Gates would have been better off saying that they should be able to sell their work, not their invention. There is truly no open source equivalent to things like DirectX (SDL is a sad mockery), Visual Studio, or Microsoft Office (I really wish OpenOffice compared). People buy these products because they're still top notch and useful, not because they're unaware of free alternatives.
Will someone please point me to something innovative from the open source world that isn't just a free alternative to something else?
I understand that this tragedy is hard on everyone here on slashdot, and we all cope in different ways. I can only cope by quietly celebrating the fact that OOXML is going be supported by OpenOffice, thus making it unncessary for me to have to do my homework in Windows. You are obviously coping by being whiny and self-righteous.
I just want to let you know, I AM HERE FOR YOU. We all deal with pain and loss in different ways. Everybody lost someone in the battle between Microsoft OOXML and Sun ODF- some even lost many. Friends, family, loved ones. This was a cruel and wicked war, but it is over now.
Novell is now going to have to add full OOXML support to OpenOffice.org, ODF is still only going to be used by people who forgot to switch to "MS Office 97/2000/XP" when saving in OpenOffice, and Koffice... well... nobody has ever used Koffice. I personally don't even think it exists.
In the end, amidst the smoking rubble, Sun will have to come to terms with the fact that defeating Microsoft through litigation and wacky European politics is going to have to take a second seat to actual technical merit, at least in this battle. Some team of unhappy programmers will be making OOXML work in OpenOffice, and they will be successful eventually. And life will go on.
Remember that, brave little soldier, life WILL GO ON.
This is the most awesome news I've heard in a while. I am putting this on top of my awesome list!
This will assuredly be remembered as one of the greatest tragedies of our era. The tale of a desktop documentation format put forth by a large technology firm-- and how it became conditionally approved by an international standards body.
I am sorry, it's difficult for me to write this because I am so deeply hurt by this. How could an international standardizing body standardize a document format created by a large technology company that is not favored by those who frequent this website?
I am absolutely not looking forward to open source firms having to spend time and money implementing this format so I can read my goddamn school documents without booting Windows.
Ladi-... er... well... Gentleman, you are welcome to join my pity party.
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/zoon/
Why the fanatical hatred of Microsoft's ipod competitor? It's not like a technical magazine's negative review- it is a shrine of insane hatred. No one who hates anything this much can be considered sane- not unless the Zune actually killed his family or something. They probably use fewer. What does that have to do with this article? It is about IBM testing Macs on their network (very useful for compatibility especially for their clients running mixed environments and possibly a sign of benefits for users of IBM solutions). It also talks about the preference for OS X over Windows by IBM employees. It's not surprising or anything, but that was the point stated, which you seem to have missed. Yes, "leaked internal information" using IBM's name as for credibility from a site that has an almost psychotic bent on being pro-mac and anti-windows. The article is just a collection of quotes from some unreferenced secret document citing people who are switching from Windows to Mac at IBM. At the end we get a screenshot of an internal website of mac users at IBM. A mac user group in a massive organization like IBM? 930 people? Out of 386,000 employees?
This whole article and presentation suggests that IBM is planning on adopting macs as their new enterprise workstation platform, but this just isn't indicated as being the case by anyone, much less IBM.
Poke around the site for a few minutes and it will be come really clear that Roughly Drafted is just some moron running a Microsoft hate blog. Chances are these "documents" are either made up or exaggerated.
Let's stick to numbers and press releases when we start talking about market share and company's official positions on operating systems, not the musings of some apple-phile.
Besides, we know that IBM quite plainly supports linux and unix. They're a top linux contributor:
https://www.linux-foundation.org/publications/linuxkerneldevelopment.phpChances are much greater they'll be using linux internally more and more as time goes on, not relying on yet another proprietary OS vendor they have no influence over. They probably use about as many macs internally as microsoft does- and that's not an ironic statement.
That's total BS. Once more, it is not the year of the Linux Desktop- OR portable.
It is the year of the rat:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_(zodiac)
Learn your lunar calendars, Slashdot.
Where did they get this information!?!? I don't trust them. This can't be true. They're just trying to fool us into complying with them, no doubt.
Clever! Conform to the product with less than 1% of the market share, despite being free. Microsoft can't lose with a strategy like that.
Actually, I think Vista is flopping, but once they trim the legacy fat from Windows (the Windows 7 plan), it will remain clear why home users will want to use a media-oriented system instead of a server-oriented abomination like deskop linux. Believe it or not, home users enjoy having less confusing crap to deal with as opposed to more. See: Apple Products. You don't need GNOME or KDE in Windows because it already has a robust professionally designed desktop interface(doesn't even need a mouse!), it doesn't need a wacky set of sub-systems to extend the 1980's functionality of X11.
The only product that needs to emulate Linux is Windows Server- and it does. Windows Server is competing with Linux. Windows in general is competing with Mac OS X. Historical trends in general show that your "plan" here is a sure-fire means of failure (everything wrong with unix + the name windows) -- in reality, systems like Ubuntu are gaining market share only because they're simplified to the point of not being unix-y in the slightest.
And most of the stupid unix crap you can do with Windows Server anyway (text mode, separate home paritions, etc...) and what do users care?
It doesn't matter what the editor of ODF thinks. Slashdot has already made up its mind. OpenXML has already been added to their simple binary belief system under "bad".
Thread summary:
Microsoft bad =>Microsoft OpenXML bad.
Open source good => Sun ODF good.
It doesn't matter if he points out that OpenXML as a standard will allow them to more easily standardize conversion between formats (since OpenXML not being an ISO standard will only dent its usage in the most official cases, likely prompting people to use the ODF plug-in for Office). Standardized formats in the mainstream benefit everyone. They underline the need for standards.
You're missing some fundamental information here that is primary to linux development.
First off:
A) Nothing important has happened in computing since the 70's, this is something unix developers have long understood.
B) If something is difficult to implement, it's probably not that important. But at least we support other stuff. And it's free as in libre. It's the best free implementation.
C) Linux is totally better than Minix, which was previously the most advanced kernel on the planet. Now Linux is.
You better check your shit before you come up on slashdot making crazy claims about linux devs being mediocre. If they were mediocre, why is linux free?
In this case, the project must be very delicate in providing vxworks support while not stepping into any of these non-RT boundaries.
Of course, I still come from the school of thought that recommends a re-write when switching from a true RTOS to a hybrid-RTOS. The emulation approach seems a little too "soft" for most of the embedded applications I am used to.
I rescind my statement about linux requiring to work in tandem with an RTOS in order to perform realtime tasks.
The moment anything passes through a linux kernel, it's no longer realtime. At best, it's "soft realtime" aka "realtime except for when it is not". For a realtime linux system to work, you'd have to run two kernels (linux and an RTOS) with two different processors, usually on an asynchronous multi-processor device, where linux runs on a dedicated non-realtime processor and an RTOS runs on a CPU designated for realtime.
SO either Xenomai is actually emulating linux as well as VxWorks in parallel, or VxWorks is running emulated as a soft realtime layer- because the moment anything TOUCHES that linux kernel, it's no longer realtime. It must pass directly through to Xenomai's RTOS or it's not realtime. If you wanted a realtime system PLUS all the perks of linux, you just got neither. Either this is useless or it is NOT LINUX.
At best, you now have some crappy open source RTOS that communicates with linux through a socket. How convenient! There's almost no benefit to this over simply having a unix compatibility layer or a real RTOS, and hypervised linux running in parallel with a vxworks compatibility layer. VxWorks can't touch linux without defeating the purpose of having used VxWorks at all.
Linux is not realtime. "Realtime linux" is a non-linux realtime OS with a non-realtime linux compatibility layer... emulating a REAL RTOS?... Why would you emulate a realtime system in a non-realtime system? Doesn't that defeat the purpose of a realtime OS?
Do you have any idea why people use realtime systems?
With VxWorks you pay license fees... FOR A REALTIME SYSTEM. You're also able to do a lot more with a lot less resources. In the embedded world, less is more! You save millions cutting kb's (or mb's) of ram out of hardware. And this emulation layer saves what, some programmer a week or two tops porting one POSIX-compliant VxWorks application to a semi-POSIX compliant linux device. The licensing fees don't seem so bad when you think about the extra hardware necessary to use a make-believe-realtime OS like "realtime" linux.
I've got a better idea- use a real, tried, trusted RTOS and simply use an emulated UNIX layer if you need that sort of support (most decent RTOS support this). This pairing of linux and Xenomai's RTOS just sounds awkward. Software costs are just miniscule compared with the cost of making a bulky device with hardware that outclasses its functionality.
Why would you ever need to emulate an RTOS in linux? Linux does not do what ThreadX, VxWorks, INTEGRITY, uVelocity, or any of the sort do- imagine you're an embedded device manufacturer and suddenly you need to bump your device up from 64k chip of ram to 8mb. This is completely retarded. In the embedded world, true RTOS are used for things that can never fail, lag, or be insecure in any way. Linux is generally used to fill in a cheap userland. Like on Sony TV's, the RTOS junk is handled by uVelocity, but they use linux for the OSD, etc. You DO NOT PUT LINUX in places you put VxWorks. Imagine having that ludicrous monolithic server OS in a PACE MAKER. Or a NUCLEAR MISSILE.
I could see people wanting to hypervise linux in a secure RTOS but emulate an RTOS in linux? Please tell me this is for development purposes... further still- are they completely insane?
I have been using Linux for 1 year
I am using recently upgraded from Etch
I am using KDE
I like the letter a and x Hm, this is a serious case indeed. A and X are excellent letters.
Here's my take: considering your limited experience with linux (1 year is hardly enough for one to be confident in their desktop environment) and your not being North European, I believe you simply need to give gnome another go. If you truly enjoy KDE more, you may want to check your family tree. You may have obscure Nordic roots dating back as much as thousands of years, leading you to find KDE appealing. It could be a deep rooted recessive gene.
Good luck on your journey of discovery.
Well you aren't fooling me; my conspiracy theory remains!