In terms of sales or technology? OpenServer was already considered a legacy OS in 1994, while UnixWare was to be the foundation for Novell's nextgen OS.
If you can't get that from the man page, you shouldn't be allowed near a keyboard.
I agree with your implication that the majority of people should not be allowed near Unix. However I think that's a rather unpopular opinion on Slashdot.
(The reason I mentioned it in the first place is that it was a common freshman gag to tell people to type 'rm -r *', so I think it's worth an explicit mention. It's not like one line in a man page would be the end of civilization and Unix Guru Ego as we know it.)
It wasn't just that the index was friendly, the information in the DOS Help file was presented in a very accessible manner -- something that is not done in the GNU/Linux man system.
For a very simple contrast, compare the information between HELP DEL and GNU man rm
The man rm example basically sums up everything that's wrong with GNU man pages in a microcosm:
First it tells you that 'rm' is good for removing directories, then it tells you that it isn't (unless you are a superuser)
There's no examples, except for the side case of a file starting with a hyphen, and even that's unclear (why 'rm.td'?)
There's no reference or link to the rmdir command
There's no warning about destructive behavior ('rm -r *' etc)
Of course, it tells you to lookup an info page
Now, that's just for a simple example. Imagine a newbie scratching his head while looking at the man page for complex command like grep or find. Basically the man system is only useful if you already know 95% of what the man page is trying to tell you -- and even there it falls down as a reference work because all the real information is in the info system.
I'm pointing this out because a lot of times Unix Oldtimers point new users to the man system (even on this thread), probably without realizing exactly how horrid it is on a GNU/Linux system. It is not at all accessible to newbies, and probably should just be chucked in it's current form.
Look at it this way: OS/2 was designed to be the successor to Windows. If OS/2 hadn't emulated Windows, nobody would have used OS/2 at all. In fact, according the the IBM commercials of the day and advocacy groups like "Team OS/2", the Windows Emulation feature was one of the most popular parts of OS/2.
OS/2 failure had a lot more to do with pricing and positioning than it did with Windows Emulation. The lack of native software can large be blamed on the ridiculous cost of devkits.
Besides, if someone really wants Linux to be the successor OS to Windows, they are going to have to deal with the literally trillions of dollars worth of software that is designed for Windows. We're not talking about MS Office here, but the millions of custom and vertical programs running on Windows.
You've got three options: 1) Ignore the installed base (and fail) 2) Rewrite all that software (impossible) 3) Emulate it.
Conclusion: Wine is absolutely critical to the future of Linux as a mainstream OS.
This is now the standard historical rewrite of the Microsoft Anti-trust trial one finds on Slashdot, and quite frankly it's largely bullshit. I'm not in the least a supporter of Bush, but it is bothersome to see the story of the case repeatedly spun as an overly simplistic conspiracy theory.
A couple points: 1) You neglected to mention that the appeals court knocked out several of the verdicts, and basically told the lower courts that they weren't going to let a breakup happen.
2) Clinton DOJ was begging to settle the case as well, from the very beginning. However Microsoft absolutely refused. The original judge held the case several times and the single fact that made him so angry is that Microsoft repeatedly left a very good deal on the table.
Check out this story from Wired for some real reporting, rather than conspiracies.
Literally, people were claiming that KMart would go bankrupt for about 20 years... and then they finally did! So much for that non-argument:P
Furthermore, that's 100% knee-jerk defensiveness -- especially because I made it clear that I don't think Apple is dying at all.
Most of the Unix Geeks I know have always used Apple equipment on and off over the years, so I don't see the massive market growth you are predicting from Apple capturing this oh-so-not-crucial.01% of the market (that doesn't really buy shrinkwrapped software anyway).
There's an interesting argument regarding the future of the Mac platform here.
Note that I fall purely on the pro-Mac side -- I would love to see Apple return the Mac platform to a competitive position in the general purpose personal computing market. Just that over the last 5 years Apple's shown 0 interest in doing so and instead has time and time again gone back to soak their installed base. Sorry, that I'm not excited as the rest of you about Apple making big revenue selling iPods, RIAA Tunes, and other consumer do-dads, but it's hardly trolling.
Well, if you read between the lines, Apple is expecting that it's growth will come from new business -- iTunes/iPod/"Digital Lifestyle", which is a very different story than "Macintosh is exciting".
So, while nobody is arguing that "Apple is dying", you could still make the argument that "the traditional Macintosh Platform is dying, and Apple knows it".
Which isn't the greatest news for us Macintosh Fanboys, although the new crop of Apple Inc. Fanboys and Steve Jobs Fanboys might be happy.
Novell did NOT buy WPCorp to get the WordPerfect office suite. They bought WPCorp to get *GroupWise* -- which Novell still owns.
This isn't really true. The CEO of Novell at the time made it very clear that they wanted to compete head-to-head with Microsoft in the client realm using WordPerfect and DR-DOS. There was a few versions of WordPerfect with very blatent Novell branding.
Only later when it was clear that was a loser strategy did Novell say "Well, for the $kajillon we paid for WordPerfect, at least we got GroupWise" (which honestly wasn't a very good client anyway).
The sad thing about all of this that Novell was so worried about office suites and email that they forgot about their core market of small server systems. They let UNIXWare just kinda disappear, got focused on enterprise directories, missed out on the Internet Boom, and Windows NT just took over most of Novell's market.
Most virus chuckers run with SYSTEM level access so that they can intercept file calls. Which basically means they can do whatever they want. Many people would probably prefer that such a low-level component was written by the OS vendor (presumably correctly), rather than a 3rd party.
As an example, some anti-virus programs even run their GUI control panels as SYSTEM, which means a local user can exploit them to gain access to the machine.
You know, "PC Magazine" was aimed at home and small business users -- the classic Lotus/dBase/BASIC "Power User" crowd -- while IBM was selling OS/2 to "enterprise" IT Manager types.
PCMag also mostly ignored Windows NT and SCO UNIX as well, barely covered Novell past login script tricks, and I don't think they ever mentioned "hobbyist" OSes like Yggdrasil, Slackware, or 386BSD.
When IBM repositioned OS/2 for the home market with "Warp", PC Mag did give it quite a bit of coverage -- of course the OS/2 advocates hated that as well because the articles couldn't avoid pointing out the obvious (no apps, install problems, etc).
Not that any of this matters because today's Ziff-Davis is about 3 owners removed from those days.
Re:You just do less with a Mac
on
Mac v. Microsoft TCO
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
You're right! There's no version of HotBar for the Mac.
This is sort of a joke, but it gets right to the point of Apple's historic TCO advantage.
If a user does happen to find and install a dodgy piece of software on Mac (at least with the classic OS) even the dummy users can figure out how to open Extention Manager and disable it. There's also tasks such as connecting to servers or network printers that are much easier for Mac End Users to accomplish.
No Help Desk Call -> Lower TCO.
So, it's not really that Macs break less often, but that user's can and do perform Self Support. (and often have to, because the IT Dept is semi-hostile to Macs.)
It's also one of the big reason that low-level techs (DOS/Novell guys) fought against Macs back in the day -- they knew if the things caught on, it would eliminate much of their jobs.
No, I would call you a committed professional user. If I were you I wouldn't group myself with the "I would use Linux but Quake 3 came out 2 weeks late" crowd who infests places like slashdot -- maybe you have the same goals of World Domination(tm), but you aren't the same purchasing demographic.
For Linux to achive something like the Mac ISV market, they need a lot more users who are willing to buy Linux software even when it's more expensive, late, and perhaps even not as good as the Windows version.
I actually submitted that before I finished my thought and didn't bother to fix it.
Yes, there's tons of enterprise or academic Linux users that are willing to pay for software. However, that's a very distinct group of people from the Home User crowd.
In the latter group, there's a small minority that's willing to buy commercial Linux software - people like yourself. RedHat's a good example, because they dropped their Retail version and basically told those people they didn't want their money.
I'm not suggesting that it will be impossible to hack consumer electronics -- But when you have 100 competing models, it will be more difficult to find the Pirate ROMs, etc necessary to do things like you see with the XBox.
Besides, only a minuscule number of users actually do the things you are talking about.
The thing that worries people is that these "terminal systems" will contain the same basic hardware as a PC -- x86 or PPC CPUs, hard drives, etc. One can easily see the situation in 10 years where most hard drives ship to television or cable companies and only a small fraction go into general-purpose computers.
This means that DRM technology will be built into the core components that make up PCs. It is extremely unlikely that PCs will ever ship where MP3s don't play, Linux doesn't boot, etc -- but the tech will be there.
What's more likely is that PC technology will become of an extention of home entertainment tech and will advance at a slower pace.
The big problem with Gopher was that the clients didn't provide an easy means to bookmark locations or enter URLs.
Thus, at the U of MN, every trip into "gopherspace" started at the University home location and required to you to dig down 100 levels to get what you were looking for. And there was some pretty cool stuff there -- you could get into parts of The Well BBS, Wired, The the EFF, download Apple software, etc.
But I think 99% of the students never got past the jokes page that was at the root level of the hierarchy.
Yeah but the reasoning was entirely different back in the 1980s -- When people said "32-bit" software, they really meant protected-mode kernels, security subsystems, and all of the "overhead" of things like UNIX.
So-called, "16-bit" software was old-fashioned DOS stuff that bit-banged directly on the hardware. Fast, but zero safety net.
In fact, protected mode 32-bit software was just as fast or faster than protected mode 16-bit software (like OS/2).
Now that everyone runs a "modern" OS, the perf difference between 32-bit and 64-bit software is mainly due to cache and bandwidth issues, not because the software is fundamentally different.
> The Macintosh appealed to everyone who had the cash really
In 1984, my friend got a Mac 128 and I got a Apple//c.
At that time I was still really into BASIC programming and playing pirated games -- and while the Mac was really amazing, it didn't have many games and had zero programming languages. I certainly thought I got the better computer at the time.
Microsoft people have a tendancy to overstate the truth. Keep in mind that NT was originally advertised as "OS/2 3.0", so they probably wanted to make it very clear that the base operating system was all new code (which I agree it was).
The LanMan SMB networking is right out of Lan Manager for DOS
I don't think you could run a domain controller on LanMan for DOS. The Resource Kit claimed it was based on OS/2 LanMan.
Another point I forgot is that the bootloader would occassionally throw an "!OS2" error or something.... Hmm.
there is no OS/2 in NT
Unless you were on the development team, I don't think you are in a position to state this.
Not true. The "LanMan" SMB Networking is right out of OS/2. This was even bragged about in the early NT documentation because it meant NT could slide-in to your SMB network seamlessly. For a long time, OS/2 and NT domain controllers were interchangable.
There's also the HPFS filesystem code in NT3, and NTFS, which is admittedly based on HPFS. It's also highly doubtful there's 0 OS/2 code in the "OS/2 Subsystem".
if there was, IBM would have a claim on Windows NT
Microsoft and IBM had a "divorce" agreement - as reported in the press, this allowed them to share co-developed products -- which I think included DOS 5, Windows 3.0, and OS/2 1.3.
Slashdot Mirror
In terms of sales or technology? OpenServer was already considered a legacy OS in 1994, while UnixWare was to be the foundation for Novell's nextgen OS.
If you can't get that from the man page, you shouldn't be allowed near a keyboard.
I agree with your implication that the majority of people should not be allowed near Unix. However I think that's a rather unpopular opinion on Slashdot.
(The reason I mentioned it in the first place is that it was a common freshman gag to tell people to type 'rm -r *', so I think it's worth an explicit mention. It's not like one line in a man page would be the end of civilization and Unix Guru Ego as we know it.)
For a very simple contrast, compare the information between HELP DEL and GNU man rm
The man rm example basically sums up everything that's wrong with GNU man pages in a microcosm:
Now, that's just for a simple example. Imagine a newbie scratching his head while looking at the man page for complex command like grep or find. Basically the man system is only useful if you already know 95% of what the man page is trying to tell you -- and even there it falls down as a reference work because all the real information is in the info system.
I'm pointing this out because a lot of times Unix Oldtimers point new users to the man system (even on this thread), probably without realizing exactly how horrid it is on a GNU/Linux system. It is not at all accessible to newbies, and probably should just be chucked in it's current form.
Look at it this way: OS/2 was designed to be the successor to Windows. If OS/2 hadn't emulated Windows, nobody would have used OS/2 at all. In fact, according the the IBM commercials of the day and advocacy groups like "Team OS/2", the Windows Emulation feature was one of the most popular parts of OS/2.
OS/2 failure had a lot more to do with pricing and positioning than it did with Windows Emulation. The lack of native software can large be blamed on the ridiculous cost of devkits.
Besides, if someone really wants Linux to be the successor OS to Windows, they are going to have to deal with the literally trillions of dollars worth of software that is designed for Windows. We're not talking about MS Office here, but the millions of custom and vertical programs running on Windows.
You've got three options:
1) Ignore the installed base (and fail)
2) Rewrite all that software (impossible)
3) Emulate it.
Conclusion: Wine is absolutely critical to the future of Linux as a mainstream OS.
This is now the standard historical rewrite of the Microsoft Anti-trust trial one finds on Slashdot, and quite frankly it's largely bullshit. I'm not in the least a supporter of Bush, but it is bothersome to see the story of the case repeatedly spun as an overly simplistic conspiracy theory.
A couple points:
1) You neglected to mention that the appeals court knocked out several of the verdicts, and basically told the lower courts that they weren't going to let a breakup happen.
2) Clinton DOJ was begging to settle the case as well, from the very beginning. However Microsoft absolutely refused. The original judge held the case several times and the single fact that made him so angry is that Microsoft repeatedly left a very good deal on the table.
Check out this story from Wired for some real reporting, rather than conspiracies.
Literally, people were claiming that KMart would go bankrupt for about 20 years ... and then they finally did! So much for that non-argument :P
.01% of the market (that doesn't really buy shrinkwrapped software anyway).
Furthermore, that's 100% knee-jerk defensiveness -- especially because I made it clear that I don't think Apple is dying at all.
Most of the Unix Geeks I know have always used Apple equipment on and off over the years, so I don't see the massive market growth you are predicting from Apple capturing this oh-so-not-crucial
There's an interesting argument regarding the future of the Mac platform here.
Note that I fall purely on the pro-Mac side -- I would love to see Apple return the Mac platform to a competitive position in the general purpose personal computing market. Just that over the last 5 years Apple's shown 0 interest in doing so and instead has time and time again gone back to soak their installed base. Sorry, that I'm not excited as the rest of you about Apple making big revenue selling iPods, RIAA Tunes, and other consumer do-dads, but it's hardly trolling.
Well, if you read between the lines, Apple is expecting that it's growth will come from new business -- iTunes/iPod/"Digital Lifestyle", which is a very different story than "Macintosh is exciting".
So, while nobody is arguing that "Apple is dying", you could still make the argument that "the traditional Macintosh Platform is dying, and Apple knows it".
Which isn't the greatest news for us Macintosh Fanboys, although the new crop of Apple Inc. Fanboys and Steve Jobs Fanboys might be happy.
Novell did NOT buy WPCorp to get the WordPerfect office suite. They bought WPCorp to get *GroupWise* -- which Novell still owns.
This isn't really true. The CEO of Novell at the time made it very clear that they wanted to compete head-to-head with Microsoft in the client realm using WordPerfect and DR-DOS. There was a few versions of WordPerfect with very blatent Novell branding.
Only later when it was clear that was a loser strategy did Novell say "Well, for the $kajillon we paid for WordPerfect, at least we got GroupWise" (which honestly wasn't a very good client anyway).
The sad thing about all of this that Novell was so worried about office suites and email that they forgot about their core market of small server systems. They let UNIXWare just kinda disappear, got focused on enterprise directories, missed out on the Internet Boom, and Windows NT just took over most of Novell's market.
Most virus chuckers run with SYSTEM level access so that they can intercept file calls. Which basically means they can do whatever they want. Many people would probably prefer that such a low-level component was written by the OS vendor (presumably correctly), rather than a 3rd party.
As an example, some anti-virus programs even run their GUI control panels as SYSTEM, which means a local user can exploit them to gain access to the machine.
(Also, BSD firewalling might be in userspace.)
You know, "PC Magazine" was aimed at home and small business users -- the classic Lotus/dBase/BASIC "Power User" crowd -- while IBM was selling OS/2 to "enterprise" IT Manager types.
PCMag also mostly ignored Windows NT and SCO UNIX as well, barely covered Novell past login script tricks, and I don't think they ever mentioned "hobbyist" OSes like Yggdrasil, Slackware, or 386BSD.
When IBM repositioned OS/2 for the home market with "Warp", PC Mag did give it quite a bit of coverage -- of course the OS/2 advocates hated that as well because the articles couldn't avoid pointing out the obvious (no apps, install problems, etc).
Not that any of this matters because today's Ziff-Davis is about 3 owners removed from those days.
You're right! There's no version of HotBar for the Mac.
This is sort of a joke, but it gets right to the point of Apple's historic TCO advantage.
If a user does happen to find and install a dodgy piece of software on Mac (at least with the classic OS) even the dummy users can figure out how to open Extention Manager and disable it. There's also tasks such as connecting to servers or network printers that are much easier for Mac End Users to accomplish.
No Help Desk Call -> Lower TCO.
So, it's not really that Macs break less often, but that user's can and do perform Self Support. (and often have to, because the IT Dept is semi-hostile to Macs.)
It's also one of the big reason that low-level techs (DOS/Novell guys) fought against Macs back in the day -- they knew if the things caught on, it would eliminate much of their jobs.
No, I would call you a committed professional user. If I were you I wouldn't group myself with the "I would use Linux but Quake 3 came out 2 weeks late" crowd who infests places like slashdot -- maybe you have the same goals of World Domination(tm), but you aren't the same purchasing demographic.
For Linux to achive something like the Mac ISV market, they need a lot more users who are willing to buy Linux software even when it's more expensive, late, and perhaps even not as good as the Windows version.
I actually submitted that before I finished my thought and didn't bother to fix it.
Yes, there's tons of enterprise or academic Linux users that are willing to pay for software. However, that's a very distinct group of people from the Home User crowd.
In the latter group, there's a small minority that's willing to buy commercial Linux software - people like yourself. RedHat's a good example, because they dropped their Retail version and basically told those people they didn't want their money.
> because somebody expresses an opinion that it's automatically the opinion of all linux users
No, but you can assume what the majority position is. And yours is in a tiny minority.
Another good example is Tivo.
I'm not suggesting that it will be impossible to hack consumer electronics -- But when you have 100 competing models, it will be more difficult to find the Pirate ROMs, etc necessary to do things like you see with the XBox.
Besides, only a minuscule number of users actually do the things you are talking about.
The thing that worries people is that these "terminal systems" will contain the same basic hardware as a PC -- x86 or PPC CPUs, hard drives, etc. One can easily see the situation in 10 years where most hard drives ship to television or cable companies and only a small fraction go into general-purpose computers.
This means that DRM technology will be built into the core components that make up PCs. It is extremely unlikely that PCs will ever ship where MP3s don't play, Linux doesn't boot, etc -- but the tech will be there.
What's more likely is that PC technology will become of an extention of home entertainment tech and will advance at a slower pace.
The big problem with Gopher was that the clients didn't provide an easy means to bookmark locations or enter URLs.
Thus, at the U of MN, every trip into "gopherspace" started at the University home location and required to you to dig down 100 levels to get what you were looking for. And there was some pretty cool stuff there -- you could get into parts of The Well BBS, Wired, The the EFF, download Apple software, etc.
But I think 99% of the students never got past the jokes page that was at the root level of the hierarchy.
You can do DRM in a conventional BIOS (see IBM systems now shipping)
You can have a DRM-free EFI implementation (see Itanium systems now shipping)
DRM and EFI aren't directly related at all -- although they will both become mainstream at about the same point in time.
Yeah but the reasoning was entirely different back in the 1980s -- When people said "32-bit" software, they really meant protected-mode kernels, security subsystems, and all of the "overhead" of things like UNIX.
So-called, "16-bit" software was old-fashioned DOS stuff that bit-banged directly on the hardware. Fast, but zero safety net.
In fact, protected mode 32-bit software was just as fast or faster than protected mode 16-bit software (like OS/2).
Now that everyone runs a "modern" OS, the perf difference between 32-bit and 64-bit software is mainly due to cache and bandwidth issues, not because the software is fundamentally different.
There were Quadrophonic 8-Tracks. Basically the same thing.
Actually, I'm suggesting that, if your story is true, you were probably talking to someone in product marketing rather than development.
But I've had enough faulty arugments from you. Good day.
You might be right, but petulantly stomping your feet doesn't make for a very convicing argument.
> The Macintosh appealed to everyone who had the cash really
//c.
In 1984, my friend got a Mac 128 and I got a Apple
At that time I was still really into BASIC programming and playing pirated games -- and while the Mac was really amazing, it didn't have many games and had zero programming languages. I certainly thought I got the better computer at the time.
Microsoft people have a tendancy to overstate the truth. Keep in mind that NT was originally advertised as "OS/2 3.0", so they probably wanted to make it very clear that the base operating system was all new code (which I agree it was).
.... Hmm.
The LanMan SMB networking is right out of Lan Manager for DOS
I don't think you could run a domain controller on LanMan for DOS. The Resource Kit claimed it was based on OS/2 LanMan.
Another point I forgot is that the bootloader would occassionally throw an "!OS2" error or something
there is no OS/2 in NT
Unless you were on the development team, I don't think you are in a position to state this.
There is NO OS/2 code in Windows NT
Not true. The "LanMan" SMB Networking is right out of OS/2. This was even bragged about in the early NT documentation because it meant NT could slide-in to your SMB network seamlessly. For a long time, OS/2 and NT domain controllers were interchangable.
There's also the HPFS filesystem code in NT3, and NTFS, which is admittedly based on HPFS. It's also highly doubtful there's 0 OS/2 code in the "OS/2 Subsystem".
if there was, IBM would have a claim on Windows NT
Microsoft and IBM had a "divorce" agreement - as reported in the press, this allowed them to share co-developed products -- which I think included DOS 5, Windows 3.0, and OS/2 1.3.