Quite a few posts claim that this is a victory for Linux. I beg to differ.
I have used both Kde and Gnome on my Linux box at home, and at work I have a Solaris workstation on which I use Kde. I believe that
as far as the desktop market is concerned, the UI is more important than the underlying OS. So when I have Kde on a Unix machine, I don't bother much about what's under the hood. Both Solaris and Linux will work fine for basic internet, email and office apps. So if at all this is a victory, it's a victory for Gnome not Linux.
At Carnegie Mellon we use something called Andrew Unix. It runs on top of Solaris as well as Linux, and every CMU Solaris workstation has this standard (good) configuration with support for the Andrew File System (AFS) with kerberized versions of lots of things like ftp, telnet, pine etc. Linux kernel patches for the AFS are available.
I graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay this April. In IITB, faculty are actively involved in roping in industries, read multinational corporations, into research projects. In fact the dual-degree (Bachelors + Masters) program has a large degree of industry support (for example in the EE department from companies like TI, Analog Devices Intel, etc) albeit on a small scale compared to funding in American univs.
The point is that IITB needs the funds. Traditionally education in India has been subsidized by the government even at the college level. But funds are drying up, and IIRC government funding at IITB has been frozen after 1995. There has been a steep hike in fees consequent to that, and my juniors are paying much more than I did. In this situation, it's only natural that they look towards industry to finance the costs of an engineering education.
Why has it taken so long for a major *nix push towards component based technology?
Could it be because of the level of complication involved?
No, this isn't a troll. I've tried to use COM when I was trying to build an app which would embed the Macromedia Flash ActiveX control to display, well, Flash. Going through the ActiveX/COM docs itself turned me off; I figured that I'd need professional help with at least two weeks of thrashing out issues on my own to get started on COM so I gave it up.
Who is this great person? What on earth was he protesting for, or against? Why is this BullShit posted here on Slashdot? What happened to "news for nerds"? First we have CmdrTaco's propoganda and now this rant from a juvenile "ecommerce policy analyst" on stupid political crap.
American politics is not news for nerds. News for Nerds should have worldwide relevance. Slashdot is doing a very bad job. You guys out there who're running/. -- keep your stupid politics out of this. And do something about the quality of articles you post on/. for heaven's sake.
Would you really want to abandon the Earth, home of humanity for many millenia, and all of its scenic mountains, awe-inspiring oceans, and beautiful forests to go live on a God-forsaken hump of red rock?
Hey, that's how new civilizations come into being, right? If the passengers of the Mayflower had thought the same, where would America have been now? Having built a civilization almost from scratch, they seem to have done rather well. I don't see why this kind of thing shouldn't work for colonizing Mars as well.
Of course, as time progresses, the Mars-resident humans will resent the colonialism of the Earthlings, and if America's history is any indication, Mars will soon sever political ties with earth; all of Asimov's and Bradbury's inter-planetary and inter-stellar rebellion tales will be enacted out in full. Soon we shall have an independent Mars.;-)
My estimate for the time-frame for the above events is about three to five centuries. What do you think?
That aside, your point about first settlement on a God-forsaken lump of red rock is well taken: I wouldn't want to be the first one to settle there either.
Maybe this is slightly offtopic, but to get an idea of what goes on inside Intel, check out FaceIntel (former and current employees of Intel). If even one tenth of what you see on that website is true, then it's no wonder that Intel is doing badly in the marketplace.
Remember the back cover of The Dilbert Principle:"Employees are the ninth most valuable asset of the company...carbon paper came in eighth."
I don't buy Intel now. My new box is powered by an AMD K6-2. And when I save up enough $$, I'll upgrade to an Athlon. But no P-III for me, thanks.
I've been using Netscape on Linux for a long time now, and at the moment I have a new Solaris box where Netscape sucks even more than it used to on Linux since the Sun font system is worse than the truetype font server program that I used to run on Linux.
IE5 on Solaris is horribly slow in drawing all its widgets out. It does have a good font system though, but for some strange reason, the title bar and window borders do not appear at all with KDE. No other program gives me this problem. And IE doesn't render the CSS on my own page properly.
To experience the W3C's idea of a browser, I tried out Amaya on Win32; though it renders CSS correctly, it's nothing to write home about. The user interface leaves a lot to be desired. I doubt that the Unix version will be any better than the Windows one.
So I am (we all are) stuck without a good browser for the Unix platform. I almost feel like going back to the good old days of lynx.
Javascript and HTML look like an ideal solution to me. HTML gives you all the formatting power you need, and Javascript can be used to knock together indexing and searching.
If I remember correctly the Intel Developer Insight CD set has a few searchable documents; the entire CD set (a mirror of http://developer.intel.com) is in HTML and the search scripts are in Javascript. I think.
First of all let me claim that I submitted an Ask/. about the possibility of coming up with a free Windows clone about a couple of months back but it got rejected. That was ages back, and now I strongly believe that this effort isn't going anywhere, for several reasons.
The people who form the user base of Windows are not the kind of people who will go out and download or buy a "free OS". Those of you who have seen salesmen trying to explain Linux and the concept of a free OS to customers at computer shows will know what I mean.
These guys will never make it in time. The Microsoft platform is the fastest evolving platform on the planet today, and by the time this project (or any other) is out with their pre-release betas M$ will see to it that it is obsolete. How much longer do you think the FAT filesystem is going to last?
Anybody know all the legal issues involved? Microsoft's army of lawyers rivals its army of programmers.
Linux succeeded because the Unix model it was built on is not evolving any longer. That is not true of Windows. I remain skeptical.
In your preoccupation with the details, Americans seem to have lost the ability to get to the root of the problem. Lee Iacocca (the Chrysler man) said in his autobiography something to this effect: Japan produces four times (per capita) as many engineers as America does; but America produces fifteen times as many lawyers! .
I recently moved to Hyderabad, which is the chosen city for many American companies for their Indian software operations (including M$); Hyderabad is touted to be the cybercapital of India. Getting a simple dialup connection with POP3 access to work here took quite some doing. Even professional ISPs here don't understand technology issues.
The problem is not just a surface level problem of training and competence. In the Vedic age (10,000+ years ago) they had a flourishing civilization going (what the heck, they invented the zero, that's half the binary alphabet) when Europe and America had only nomadic tribes. Now civilization is passing through a phase when the tables are turned. It was the British Raj who really introduced modern technology to India. Now with the advent of computers and the internet, India has actually skipped several stages of development, jumping directly from the 19th to the 21st centuries. Technology did not get a chance to evolve here. We live entirely on imported technology. The main strength India in the IT industry has is labour; we can provide cheap labour to labour-starved western economies.
Infrastructure is definitely not our strong point. As the story says, most rural areas in India have severe power problems. And given the level of technical skills even in our cybercapital Hyderabad, I doubt if any railroad kiosk will ever be able to boot even Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
Quite a few posts claim that this is a victory for Linux. I beg to differ.
I have used both Kde and Gnome on my Linux box at home, and at work I have a Solaris workstation on which I use Kde. I believe that as far as the desktop market is concerned, the UI is more important than the underlying OS. So when I have Kde on a Unix machine, I don't bother much about what's under the hood. Both Solaris and Linux will work fine for basic internet, email and office apps. So if at all this is a victory, it's a victory for Gnome not Linux.
At Carnegie Mellon we use something called Andrew Unix. It runs on top of Solaris as well as Linux, and every CMU Solaris workstation has this standard (good) configuration with support for the Andrew File System (AFS) with kerberized versions of lots of things like ftp, telnet, pine etc. Linux kernel patches for the AFS are available.
The point is that IITB needs the funds. Traditionally education in India has been subsidized by the government even at the college level. But funds are drying up, and IIRC government funding at IITB has been frozen after 1995. There has been a steep hike in fees consequent to that, and my juniors are paying much more than I did. In this situation, it's only natural that they look towards industry to finance the costs of an engineering education.
Just my two bits.
Could it be because of the level of complication involved?
No, this isn't a troll. I've tried to use COM when I was trying to build an app which would embed the Macromedia Flash ActiveX control to display, well, Flash. Going through the ActiveX/COM docs itself turned me off; I figured that I'd need professional help with at least two weeks of thrashing out issues on my own to get started on COM so I gave it up.
American politics is not news for nerds. News for Nerds should have worldwide relevance. Slashdot is doing a very bad job. You guys out there who're running /. -- keep your stupid politics out of this. And do something about the quality of articles you post on /. for heaven's sake.
Hey, that's how new civilizations come into being, right? If the passengers of the Mayflower had thought the same, where would America have been now? Having built a civilization almost from scratch, they seem to have done rather well. I don't see why this kind of thing shouldn't work for colonizing Mars as well.
Of course, as time progresses, the Mars-resident humans will resent the colonialism of the Earthlings, and if America's history is any indication, Mars will soon sever political ties with earth; all of Asimov's and Bradbury's inter-planetary and inter-stellar rebellion tales will be enacted out in full. Soon we shall have an independent Mars. ;-)
My estimate for the time-frame for the above events is about three to five centuries. What do you think?
That aside, your point about first settlement on a God-forsaken lump of red rock is well taken: I wouldn't want to be the first one to settle there either.
Remember the back cover of The Dilbert Principle: "Employees are the ninth most valuable asset of the company...carbon paper came in eighth."
I don't buy Intel now. My new box is powered by an AMD K6-2. And when I save up enough $$, I'll upgrade to an Athlon. But no P-III for me, thanks.
IE5 on Solaris is horribly slow in drawing all its widgets out. It does have a good font system though, but for some strange reason, the title bar and window borders do not appear at all with KDE. No other program gives me this problem. And IE doesn't render the CSS on my own page properly.
To experience the W3C's idea of a browser, I tried out Amaya on Win32; though it renders CSS correctly, it's nothing to write home about. The user interface leaves a lot to be desired. I doubt that the Unix version will be any better than the Windows one.
So I am (we all are) stuck without a good browser for the Unix platform. I almost feel like going back to the good old days of lynx.
If I remember correctly the Intel Developer Insight CD set has a few searchable documents; the entire CD set (a mirror of http://developer.intel.com) is in HTML and the search scripts are in Javascript. I think.
Linux succeeded because the Unix model it was built on is not evolving any longer. That is not true of Windows. I remain skeptical.
Now that's the real problem.
The problem is not just a surface level problem of training and competence. In the Vedic age (10,000+ years ago) they had a flourishing civilization going (what the heck, they invented the zero, that's half the binary alphabet) when Europe and America had only nomadic tribes. Now civilization is passing through a phase when the tables are turned. It was the British Raj who really introduced modern technology to India. Now with the advent of computers and the internet, India has actually skipped several stages of development, jumping directly from the 19th to the 21st centuries. Technology did not get a chance to evolve here. We live entirely on imported technology. The main strength India in the IT industry has is labour; we can provide cheap labour to labour-starved western economies.
Infrastructure is definitely not our strong point. As the story says, most rural areas in India have severe power problems. And given the level of technical skills even in our cybercapital Hyderabad, I doubt if any railroad kiosk will ever be able to boot even Windows.