Speaking of which, does anyone see the release of StarOffice as GPL as anything other than an attempt by Sun to kill off Microsoft's cash cow, Office?
Have you heard the rhetoric coming out of Redmond lately? It's Sun this, Sun that, Sun Sun Sun Sun Sun. Microsoft doesn't seem to have a care in the world about Mac or Linux or any other Unix or mainframes or anything, except for Sun. They just rolled out some 32 proc boxes running Windows which is a pretty naked attempt to kill off Sun's cash cow.
So, if you are Sun, and you've got money to spare, what do you do? They know that Others have just sat there and taken it while Microsoft came and "got the loot". No, if they are coming at your cash cow, the smart thing to do is go back at their cash cow, even if it's just a minor distraction to them.
So what becomes of this when Sun gets bored and stops dumping resources into StarOffice? Well, at the very least the OSS guys got a fairly decent office suite just gifted to them, and when it's finally decided if people want hosted rent-a-application, that will be out there also as open source, as opposed to pay Microsoft.
I'll be interested to see what the code looks like Star has been ported from OS/2 to Windows to Unix to Java and then back to OS/2. Apparently (like NS4.x), it has a big ugly cross-platform runtime engine. We'll see if this makes the Unix programmers out there totally sick, or if a Mozilla-like "total rewrite" is necessary, or if everyone can live with the current state of the beast. --
So the question is: When are you Unix boys going to use DCE to start reverse engineering the Exchange wire protocol? (grin - it looks like it costs $100,000 to redistribute...) --
I actually agree with that, and it's what I was getting at with the term "commodity". If they are broken up, in the long run, the OS Company does not have a sustainable business model, despite the fact they get a monopoly cut on almost every PC sold. Especially with.NET on the horizon, they will need to get into other markets fast, which will be difficult without established products.
On the other hand, the App Company needs to figure out a way to go "enterprise" and go there fast to keep the profit levels up. The "Windows DNA" COM stuff wasn't getting them there, so they are going with a pretty radical technological break. The price of this is that all of the current MS Office/VisualBasic/COM-based tech deployed by their fanbase has been declared obsolete. Too bad for those guys. --
It not like Microsoft or Corel could demand that Apache or any other of the software Linux or BSD users run support.NET
I'd bet that IBM is already working on SOAP support for Apache..NET itself might not run on Unix right away, but basic interoperability using things like SOAP and various XML schemas is not a hard problem.
(And, yes, there could be quite a bit of extend-and-embrace in MS's SOAP and XML formats. But, it's still a much better situation than today's binary RPC mechanisms like DCOM, CORBA, or the horrific MS-RPC protocols.) --
I know a popular Slashdot image is Bill Gates cowering behind his gigantic desk, quivering in terror over the Linux threat, but in reality he's got bigger worries (the Government).
If anything Linux just represents what Gates already knows -- the OS is a commodity, and in the long run somebody could out-commodity his biggest profit center. When Andreeson and McNeely stated back in 1994 that the web and Java makes Windows irrelevant, Gates knows that someday they will be right. If not Java, then Linux. If not Linux, then handholds or NCs or somehthing else will eventually get onto a large percentage of Gates' corporate and home desktops.
Meanwhile, Microsoft's attempts at getting a real foothold in the meat of corporations infrastructure haven't been going that well. Despite 10 years of COM/DCOM "integration", it hasn't really sold well in the larger sense.
So, along comes the US Government with the proposal to split the OS division off from the rest of the company. Under the current integrated COM-based system, this could be a technical disaster.
But.NET solves all of this -- it's the first Microsoft initiative that treats Windows that the commodity that it is, and it firmly moves *all* of the sexy system stuff to the "middleware" MSAppsCo layer. It's amazing leap for Microsoft if only because it does not have "Windows" written all over it. (Microsoft didn't even know if the "W" in the NGWS codename stood for "Web" or "Windows".) And furthermore, it has a real enterprise sell to it, much like Java does, except that it also has an instant foothold -- the real monopoly of MS Office.
Under.NET, the OS company can go into low effort maintance mode, making commodity profits for a commodity product. Meanwhile, the Apps company can continue with it's extend-and-embrace jihad against every other computer company. And if Linux or something gets popular on the desktop -- no problem, just port the.NET virtual machine, and let the OS Co wither and die. On the other hand, if they win the anti-trust case, no problem either - just use their Windows monopoly to force the OEMs to pre-install the.NET runtime on millions of machines and continue as usual.
Thanks for the info. Hopefully, Apple's changes will be merged back into the mainline GCC for 3.0.
Agreed about RH. It's ironic when an Open Source company gets flamed for Releasing Early and Releasing Often and otherwise doing what you'd expect from an Open Source company.
Except for the fact that defining market categories isn't just some debating game played here at Slashdot. There's real money behind these numbers.
Microsoft makes something like $4 Billion a year off of it's desktop monopoly. Companies such as RedHat and VALinux exist to serve the small server/Unix workstation market. Microsoft is aggressively expanding into the Internet server market. Both MS and VA are targetting Sun. Maybe someday RedHat wants a piece of Microsoft's desktop pie. These things are real. --
And where was IBM when the "Bug free" Windows 95 turnned out
By the time Windows 95 shipped in 1995, IBM had made the correct strategic decision put OS/2 into legacy support mode and stop pushing it to new customers.
Why? Because they spent billions of dollars pushing it in 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, and 1994, and it never caught on. One last marketing campaign (this time against a better opponent) would not have suddenly made it popular.
Apple never went on the attack. It's users might have, but the company never did. There used to be a site call the "Evangalist" that mostly bitched about how wishy-washy Apple's marketing was.
Linux is not like Apple or OS/2. It is not competing directly with Microsoft on the desktop (yet). It's used in a server capacity or by people who want a Unix workstation. And in the markets it's strong in, Linux is actually not the underdog at all.
(Apologies for the strong language -- I know that OS/2 users are sore about IBM's mismarketing, but I can't stand to see history get rewritten that they didn't market it. OS/2 was probably the most overmarketed product in PC history.) --
This is one of those flashback Slashdot threads -- if we're going to dig up "Microsoft's Linux Myth's", why not Mindcr --don't go there sista!! Next comes Halloween IX.
I'm aware that working directory and ACL solutions are out there. However, there is that matter of hurmp-Integration. I'd love to see a distribution go head-to-head with Microsoft and Novell with a real open Kerberos/AFS/LDAP/etc system all packaged up nice. Not to take the big bucks out of your wallet. --
I was at one largish operation when they switched from Compaq to Dell. The reasons mainly were (1) They could order directly from Dell and not from some reseller, (2) The computers came when they said they would, (3) Motherboard components didn't randomly change, meaning standard disk images could be used for Windows installs, and last (4) They were a little cheaper.
It turned out that the "direct" support channel worked much better than those f-up Compaq resellers. I can't say that the boxes themselves were especially better. (Although I'd rather have a 3Com NIC with a real model number than some mystery "Compaq" ethernet adapter.) --
Except for the fact that Unix UGO permissions are a beloved kludge that only works most of the time, and probably not at all in a directory-based environment. (I think this is what MS is getting at, or maybe they are talking about their built-in partially privledged "Power User" group.)
On the other hand, NT/2000 has this sexy system of Object ACLs, Registry ACLs, and File ACLs, but despite all of those NT boxes it has not been tested in the real world at all (90% of everything on a NT box runs either as Local Administrator or SYSTEM).
Apple attacked Microsoft while IBM sat around and did nothing...
That's bullshit. 99% of IBM's advertising for OS/2 touted it's multitasking and robustness (in obvious comparison to Windows), and even marketed it as (famously) "A Better Windows Than Windows".
Apple had one ad with some old men reading "C Colon Back-slash Windows" from a manual and that was a looong time ago. With a few exceptions, Apple has seen themselves as so much better that it's not worth mentioning the other guy.
Microsoft defines the market..
Microsoft defines the market for cheap internet servers? Microsoft defines the market for Unix systems? Check again and stop being so defensive.
Nice long post about the evils of managers, but according to http://www.uwsg.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel /0010.0/0069.html , using the GCC snapshot was a technical decision:
Richard Henderson -- You would be wrong then. Management asked what version of gcc would be best to support, we answered, they followed our recomendation. --
Right -- Karma was introduced as a "reputation system" to help readers seperate the good posters from the bad.
Then Karma was hidden from other users, so you couldn't see anyone's reputation even if you wanted to. If they had over 25, you could see their +1 bonus, however. You could still see your own karma to judge how your own reputation was doing.
Then pretty much anyone here longer than a couple months figured out the "formula" to get 25 karma points. Garbage at score 2 has become common, so the +1 bonus became meaningless.
Then Karma was 'kapped' at 50, so the people who have been here a long time can't use it as a relative measure anyway.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm not arguing against the Karma Kapping or Karma Hiding or Karma Bonuses -- I'm just wondering, with all of these modifications, what is the point of Karma at all these days?
Karma came in after the moderation system -- Slashdot did not always have it. My feeling was the S/N ratio was higher in the days before Karma, and people would actually post and read at the AC level. The readership has gone way up and the quality has generally gone down, but in general moderation has worked, but I don't know if anyone can honestly say that Karma has worked at all.
So since Karma been rendered largely pointless, and has been a contentious problem for some folks, why not get rid of Karma all together? If you must have a +1 bonus, do it purely on seniority (just like Mod and MetaMod privs). Just a thought.
Is it just me, or does Microsoft keep inventing the same thing over and over again trying to get it right?
Yes, but what is interesting about.NET is that it is a pretty clean break from the last 10 years of Microsoft's COM-based Windows-tied technology. It's not often that a large company junks millions of lines of code and starts over with a roughly clean slate.
It's also pretty clearly a way to hedge their bets against a government break-up. By making the underlying 'operating system' virtual, they can take the platform with the applications and keep the integration they've sold customers on. If they don't get broken up -- no problem. Just don't port the NET VM to anywhere else and get the OEMs to ship it out pre-installed on millions of machines. --
Part of the reason for SOAP are those pesky firewall administrators that refuse to allow RPC clients to work with Internet servers. Smart Firewalls that could filter SOAP are a 'solution' if only because most places won't bother implementing them.
Not that is necessary a huge problem -- we've already got a number of other protocols running on port 80, so why not another. The real issue is Microsoft's implementation -- If they muck it up as badly as they mucked up ActiveX/COM, they you might have real problems with SOAP-aware ILOVEYOU viruses and the like. On the other hand,.NET is their big enterprise play, so hopefully they will be using it to fix their security partitioning problems. --
AC - (DOSWord) had (brace yourself for this!) Menus that you could actually see to make your selections. At that same point in history, saving a file in WordPerfect meant hitting (control)(alt)(left-flipper)f8, all with no visual feedback whatsoever.... The only way that WordPerfect was better was that they offered unlimited free support to registered customers (who needed all that support. They slowly built up a cadre of stuffy-middleclass-women who were 'WordPerfect gurus' and who were severely threatened when Windows and easy-to-use alternatives to WordPerfect
The design goal of WordPerfect was to maximize the space on your 80x24 screen for text editing. Of course that mean that none of your precious real-estate was wasted with namby-pampy things like a user interface.
Compare this to excellent programs like Word 4.0 for the Mac, which was fully feature-complete, you could create a table without a PhD from Utah, and ran just great on a 1MB machine.
But, I totally agree with your sentiments about WordPerfect. "Word Processing" used to be some expert, in-demand skill. That's a bad situation unless you happened to be one of the WordPerfect F-key gurus. Nowdays, even PHBs manage to *type their own memos* , get this, *on a computer*. Microsoft Word is a big reason for that happening. --
At one time there was there was once a righteous sense of "we're changing the world" here and "we DO know what the fuck we are talking about". Slashdot was interesting because of this. But like all good things that's been so sufficiently buried by capitalism and schmaltz and a tide of intentional and unintentional garbage, it inevitably become a parody of itself. Half the time I don't know who's trolling, who's whoring, and who's just an moron. Karma, hidden sids, and that tempting "Post Anonymously" box are just all part of the bacchanalia in the decline of the slashdot/linux-jihad empire. Entertaining. but perhaps the party is winding down.
Anyway, you nailed it full on. Wish I could have said it as well as you.
(And Siggy, sorry to see you go. Effugus and the original Enoch Root passed with out a peep, somehow I don't think it will be same with you. At least let us know your maximum karma if you really are gone. Or would that destroy the legend?) --
Thanks for your reply, because at least your story shows that I'm not completely off-base on my perception of the current state of NetWare. Now days, when file+print is increasingly the least interesting part of your network, something like NetWare that requires specialized servers and clients and protocols and administrators seems more and more untenable. (Then again, my entire perception of NetWare was a 2 week stint in the late 3.1, early 4.0 days, and as NT admin during a big conversion back in 1994, and I've always thought of it as POS.)
My view on the NetWare EOL annoucement of 3.x and 4.x is that they want to weed out their own customer base and get on with life as eBusiness eProvider eWhatever (or get bought out). There's far too many people out there who have been faithfully writing checks to them for NW3 boxes for 10 years now, and there's another huge group (like you) that are on NW 4 or 5, but never managed to "leverage" NDS for anything and are wondering why they bothered in the first place. The last NetWare fan I know recently admitted that he'll switch to MAD as soon as the login scripts and a couple other things get solved. If someone like RedHat came up with a "Directory System" package that was decently integrated, there could be a big market there. --
Slashdot Mirror
When Microsoft and IBM "divorced" in the early 90s, they both got full rights to jointly developed technology - DOS, Windows, OS/2, early NT work.
So Microsoft doesn't have to pay IBM for OS/2 tech, and IBM doesn't have to pay MS for, uhh, Windows 3.0 tech.
--
Speaking of which, does anyone see the release of StarOffice as GPL as anything other than an attempt by Sun to kill off Microsoft's cash cow, Office?
Have you heard the rhetoric coming out of Redmond lately? It's Sun this, Sun that, Sun Sun Sun Sun Sun. Microsoft doesn't seem to have a care in the world about Mac or Linux or any other Unix or mainframes or anything, except for Sun. They just rolled out some 32 proc boxes running Windows which is a pretty naked attempt to kill off Sun's cash cow.
So, if you are Sun, and you've got money to spare, what do you do? They know that Others have just sat there and taken it while Microsoft came and "got the loot". No, if they are coming at your cash cow, the smart thing to do is go back at their cash cow, even if it's just a minor distraction to them.
So what becomes of this when Sun gets bored and stops dumping resources into StarOffice? Well, at the very least the OSS guys got a fairly decent office suite just gifted to them, and when it's finally decided if people want hosted rent-a-application, that will be out there also as open source, as opposed to pay Microsoft.
I'll be interested to see what the code looks like Star has been ported from OS/2 to Windows to Unix to Java and then back to OS/2. Apparently (like NS4.x), it has a big ugly cross-platform runtime engine. We'll see if this makes the Unix programmers out there totally sick, or if a Mozilla-like "total rewrite" is necessary, or if everyone can live with the current state of the beast.
--
Yeah, I was mildly aware of that when I posted.
So the question is: When are you Unix boys going to use DCE to start reverse engineering the Exchange wire protocol? (grin - it looks like it costs $100,000 to redistribute...)
--
I actually agree with that, and it's what I was getting at with the term "commodity". If they are broken up, in the long run, the OS Company does not have a sustainable business model, despite the fact they get a monopoly cut on almost every PC sold. Especially with .NET on the horizon, they will need to get into other markets fast, which will be difficult without established products.
On the other hand, the App Company needs to figure out a way to go "enterprise" and go there fast to keep the profit levels up. The "Windows DNA" COM stuff wasn't getting them there, so they are going with a pretty radical technological break. The price of this is that all of the current MS Office/VisualBasic/COM-based tech deployed by their fanbase has been declared obsolete. Too bad for those guys.
--
It not like Microsoft or Corel could demand that Apache or any other of the software Linux or BSD users run support .NET
.NET itself might not run on Unix right away, but basic interoperability using things like SOAP and various XML schemas is not a hard problem.
I'd bet that IBM is already working on SOAP support for Apache.
(And, yes, there could be quite a bit of extend-and-embrace in MS's SOAP and XML formats. But, it's still a much better situation than today's binary RPC mechanisms like DCOM, CORBA, or the horrific MS-RPC protocols.)
--
I know a popular Slashdot image is Bill Gates cowering behind his gigantic desk, quivering in terror over the Linux threat, but in reality he's got bigger worries (the Government).
.NET solves all of this -- it's the first Microsoft initiative that treats Windows that the commodity that it is, and it firmly moves *all* of the sexy system stuff to the "middleware" MSAppsCo layer. It's amazing leap for Microsoft if only because it does not have "Windows" written all over it. (Microsoft didn't even know if the "W" in the NGWS codename stood for "Web" or "Windows".) And furthermore, it has a real enterprise sell to it, much like Java does, except that it also has an instant foothold -- the real monopoly of MS Office.
.NET, the OS company can go into low effort maintance mode, making commodity profits for a commodity product. Meanwhile, the Apps company can continue with it's extend-and-embrace jihad against every other computer company. And if Linux or something gets popular on the desktop -- no problem, just port the .NET virtual machine, and let the OS Co wither and die. On the other hand, if they win the anti-trust case, no problem either - just use their Windows monopoly to force the OEMs to pre-install the .NET runtime on millions of machines and continue as usual.
If anything Linux just represents what Gates already knows -- the OS is a commodity, and in the long run somebody could out-commodity his biggest profit center. When Andreeson and McNeely stated back in 1994 that the web and Java makes Windows irrelevant, Gates knows that someday they will be right. If not Java, then Linux. If not Linux, then handholds or NCs or somehthing else will eventually get onto a large percentage of Gates' corporate and home desktops.
Meanwhile, Microsoft's attempts at getting a real foothold in the meat of corporations infrastructure haven't been going that well. Despite 10 years of COM/DCOM "integration", it hasn't really sold well in the larger sense.
So, along comes the US Government with the proposal to split the OS division off from the rest of the company. Under the current integrated COM-based system, this could be a technical disaster.
But
Under
--
Thanks for the info. Hopefully, Apple's changes will be merged back into the mainline GCC for 3.0.
Agreed about RH. It's ironic when an Open Source company gets flamed for Releasing Early and Releasing Often and otherwise doing what you'd expect from an Open Source company.
--
Except for the fact that defining market categories isn't just some debating game played here at Slashdot. There's real money behind these numbers.
Microsoft makes something like $4 Billion a year off of it's desktop monopoly. Companies such as RedHat and VALinux exist to serve the small server/Unix workstation market. Microsoft is aggressively expanding into the Internet server market. Both MS and VA are targetting Sun. Maybe someday RedHat wants a piece of Microsoft's desktop pie. These things are real.
--
Ooog, I'd forgotten that. This one is indelibly burned however:
How do ya do it?
I PS/2 it!
How do ya get it done?
..
PS/2 From IBMMMMMM!!
--
When the judge found that Linux was irrelevant in the Desktop x86 Operating System market, most people here seemed to agree.
--
And where was IBM when the "Bug free" Windows 95 turnned out
By the time Windows 95 shipped in 1995, IBM had made the correct strategic decision put OS/2 into legacy support mode and stop pushing it to new customers.
Why? Because they spent billions of dollars pushing it in 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, and 1994, and it never caught on. One last marketing campaign (this time against a better opponent) would not have suddenly made it popular.
Apple never went on the attack. It's users might have, but the company never did. There used to be a site call the "Evangalist" that mostly bitched about how wishy-washy Apple's marketing was.
Linux is not like Apple or OS/2. It is not competing directly with Microsoft on the desktop (yet). It's used in a server capacity or by people who want a Unix workstation. And in the markets it's strong in, Linux is actually not the underdog at all.
(Apologies for the strong language -- I know that OS/2 users are sore about IBM's mismarketing, but I can't stand to see history get rewritten that they didn't market it. OS/2 was probably the most overmarketed product in PC history.)
--
This is one of those flashback Slashdot threads -- if we're going to dig up "Microsoft's Linux Myth's", why not Mindcr --don't go there sista!! Next comes Halloween IX.
I'm aware that working directory and ACL solutions are out there. However, there is that matter of hurmp-Integration. I'd love to see a distribution go head-to-head with Microsoft and Novell with a real open Kerberos/AFS/LDAP/etc system all packaged up nice. Not to take the big bucks out of your wallet.
--
I was at one largish operation when they switched from Compaq to Dell. The reasons mainly were (1) They could order directly from Dell and not from some reseller, (2) The computers came when they said they would, (3) Motherboard components didn't randomly change, meaning standard disk images could be used for Windows installs, and last (4) They were a little cheaper.
It turned out that the "direct" support channel worked much better than those f-up Compaq resellers. I can't say that the boxes themselves were especially better. (Although I'd rather have a 3Com NIC with a real model number than some mystery "Compaq" ethernet adapter.)
--
Except for the fact that Unix UGO permissions are a beloved kludge that only works most of the time, and probably not at all in a directory-based environment. (I think this is what MS is getting at, or maybe they are talking about their built-in partially privledged "Power User" group.)
On the other hand, NT/2000 has this sexy system of Object ACLs, Registry ACLs, and File ACLs, but despite all of those NT boxes it has not been tested in the real world at all (90% of everything on a NT box runs either as Local Administrator or SYSTEM).
--
Come on pb, for someone who reads Slashdot as much as you, how could you miss Linux Beats Win2000 In SpecWeb 2000. Even on a 4 CPU 4 NIC box.
Mindcraft is over -- Linux won. Get on with it.
--
Apple attacked Microsoft while IBM sat around and did nothing...
That's bullshit. 99% of IBM's advertising for OS/2 touted it's multitasking and robustness (in obvious comparison to Windows), and even marketed it as (famously) "A Better Windows Than Windows".
Apple had one ad with some old men reading "C Colon Back-slash Windows" from a manual and that was a looong time ago. With a few exceptions, Apple has seen themselves as so much better that it's not worth mentioning the other guy.
Microsoft defines the market..
Microsoft defines the market for cheap internet servers? Microsoft defines the market for Unix systems? Check again and stop being so defensive.
--
So, which version of GCC is Apple using?
--
Nice long post about the evils of managers, but according to http://www.uwsg.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel /0010.0/0069.html , using the GCC snapshot was a technical decision:
Richard Henderson -- You would be wrong then. Management asked what version of gcc would be best to support, we answered, they followed our recomendation.
--
Right -- Karma was introduced as a "reputation system" to help readers seperate the good posters from the bad.
Then Karma was hidden from other users, so you couldn't see anyone's reputation even if you wanted to. If they had over 25, you could see their +1 bonus, however. You could still see your own karma to judge how your own reputation was doing.
Then pretty much anyone here longer than a couple months figured out the "formula" to get 25 karma points. Garbage at score 2 has become common, so the +1 bonus became meaningless.
Then Karma was 'kapped' at 50, so the people who have been here a long time can't use it as a relative measure anyway.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm not arguing against the Karma Kapping or Karma Hiding or Karma Bonuses -- I'm just wondering, with all of these modifications, what is the point of Karma at all these days?
Karma came in after the moderation system -- Slashdot did not always have it. My feeling was the S/N ratio was higher in the days before Karma, and people would actually post and read at the AC level. The readership has gone way up and the quality has generally gone down, but in general moderation has worked, but I don't know if anyone can honestly say that Karma has worked at all.
So since Karma been rendered largely pointless, and has been a contentious problem for some folks, why not get rid of Karma all together? If you must have a +1 bonus, do it purely on seniority (just like Mod and MetaMod privs). Just a thought.
--
Is it just me, or does Microsoft keep inventing the same thing over and over again trying to get it right?
.NET is that it is a pretty clean break from the last 10 years of Microsoft's COM-based Windows-tied technology. It's not often that a large company junks millions of lines of code and starts over with a roughly clean slate.
Yes, but what is interesting about
It's also pretty clearly a way to hedge their bets against a government break-up. By making the underlying 'operating system' virtual, they can take the platform with the applications and keep the integration they've sold customers on. If they don't get broken up -- no problem. Just don't port the NET VM to anywhere else and get the OEMs to ship it out pre-installed on millions of machines.
--
It's a feature, not a bug ...
.NET is their big enterprise play, so hopefully they will be using it to fix their security partitioning problems.
Part of the reason for SOAP are those pesky firewall administrators that refuse to allow RPC clients to work with Internet servers. Smart Firewalls that could filter SOAP are a 'solution' if only because most places won't bother implementing them.
Not that is necessary a huge problem -- we've already got a number of other protocols running on port 80, so why not another. The real issue is Microsoft's implementation -- If they muck it up as badly as they mucked up ActiveX/COM, they you might have real problems with SOAP-aware ILOVEYOU viruses and the like. On the other hand,
--
Oh, I know where you went, and why. Lurking you guys is one of the best parts of the circus here, you know.
--
AC - (DOSWord) had (brace yourself for this!) Menus that you could actually see to make your selections. At that same point in history, saving a file in WordPerfect meant hitting (control)(alt)(left-flipper)f8, all with no visual feedback whatsoever. ... The only way that WordPerfect was better was that they offered unlimited free support to registered customers (who needed all that support. They slowly built up a cadre of stuffy-middleclass-women who were 'WordPerfect gurus' and who were severely threatened when Windows and easy-to-use alternatives to WordPerfect
The design goal of WordPerfect was to maximize the space on your 80x24 screen for text editing. Of course that mean that none of your precious real-estate was wasted with namby-pampy things like a user interface.
Compare this to excellent programs like Word 4.0 for the Mac, which was fully feature-complete, you could create a table without a PhD from Utah, and ran just great on a 1MB machine.
But, I totally agree with your sentiments about WordPerfect. "Word Processing" used to be some expert, in-demand skill. That's a bad situation unless you happened to be one of the WordPerfect F-key gurus. Nowdays, even PHBs manage to *type their own memos* , get this, *on a computer*. Microsoft Word is a big reason for that happening.
--
At one time there was there was once a righteous sense of "we're changing the world" here and "we DO know what the fuck we are talking about". Slashdot was interesting because of this. But like all good things that's been so sufficiently buried by capitalism and schmaltz and a tide of intentional and unintentional garbage, it inevitably become a parody of itself. Half the time I don't know who's trolling, who's whoring, and who's just an moron. Karma, hidden sids, and that tempting "Post Anonymously" box are just all part of the bacchanalia in the decline of the slashdot/linux-jihad empire. Entertaining. but perhaps the party is winding down.
Anyway, you nailed it full on. Wish I could have said it as well as you.
(And Siggy, sorry to see you go. Effugus and the original Enoch Root passed with out a peep, somehow I don't think it will be same with you. At least let us know your maximum karma if you really are gone. Or would that destroy the legend?)
--
Thanks for your reply, because at least your story shows that I'm not completely off-base on my perception of the current state of NetWare. Now days, when file+print is increasingly the least interesting part of your network, something like NetWare that requires specialized servers and clients and protocols and administrators seems more and more untenable. (Then again, my entire perception of NetWare was a 2 week stint in the late 3.1, early 4.0 days, and as NT admin during a big conversion back in 1994, and I've always thought of it as POS.)
My view on the NetWare EOL annoucement of 3.x and 4.x is that they want to weed out their own customer base and get on with life as eBusiness eProvider eWhatever (or get bought out). There's far too many people out there who have been faithfully writing checks to them for NW3 boxes for 10 years now, and there's another huge group (like you) that are on NW 4 or 5, but never managed to "leverage" NDS for anything and are wondering why they bothered in the first place. The last NetWare fan I know recently admitted that he'll switch to MAD as soon as the login scripts and a couple other things get solved. If someone like RedHat came up with a "Directory System" package that was decently integrated, there could be a big market there.
--