It is probably not as much what you said, but how you said it. You shouldn't get moderated down for saying something that is an unpopular opinion, but you should get moderated down for saying it in a way that would fit into flamebait or trolling. If you have been moderated down unfairly, one would hope that the moderator who did so got slapped when it came time for meta moderation. Also, you would probably find that you would be less likely to get moderated down if you were posting from a real account instead of as Anonymous Coward.
I rarely ever agree with Zico, but at least his posts are generally mostly civil and not personal attacks.
I didn't even know one single person who had until somebody gave me a copy of Corel Linux last week (it comes with WP8; don't even get me started -- can you say "No shadow passwords?" I knew you could). I tend to doubt your "lot of people" statement, although some evidence could sway me.
Without conducting a scientific poll of Slashdot users, it would be difficult (even then it would be difficult) to get any solid evidence one way or the other. I do know that I live out in the middle of nowhere, and the local CompUSA and Best Buy stores carry WordPerfect 8 and a number of other Linux titles on the shelf. If they weren't selling, they wouldn't be there. I know that most of the people in the local Linux user group read Slashdot, and several of them have purchased WordPerfect 8 for Linux and/or several other commercial titles for Linux.
Hey, no offense to you personally, but who said anything about idealism? The conventional wisdom behind Linux users not buying software (Linux or otherwise) has nothing to do with idealism, and all to do with cheapness.
I don't think there are that many more cheapskates in the Linux world than there are in the Windows world. A lot (close to, if not most) of the people I know in the Windows world just pirate everything. I could very easily have just pirated WordPerfect 8 for Windows, but I didn't.
I could easily afford to buy Windows and commercial software if I wanted to, I make decent money. The 'conventional wisdom' that Linux users are all broke college students is a load of crap as far as I can tell. I use Linux because I like it, and it works well for what I want to do. I don't use Windows because I don't like it, and it doesn't work well. The fact that Linux is less expensive than Windows is just a pleasant bonus. For that matter, if I wanted to, I could just pirate Windows and every commercial title around (I've got access to the CDs here at work, and I have a CD burner). Windows just doesn't interest me. Its not just a matter of cheapness when it comes to software, since if you are willing to pirate (which most people are), then everything is free as in 'free beer'.
Unless they have backtracked from WordPerfect 8, I can definitely say you are incorrect. WordPerfect 8 is a native Linux executable. I can't think of any reason why they wouldn't do the same thing for WordPerfect 2000.
I don't know what usability you are talking about, but I haven't seen anything useful that Word 97 at least can do that WordPerfect 8 can't. And some of the things that I do just plain work a lot better in WordPerfect 8. Table editing, for example, has always driven me batty in MS-Word, WordPerfect isn't totally perfect there either, but better than MS-Word. Multicolumn layouts, maddening in MS-Word (no matter how I try to drag them around, they never space out the way I want), also better in WordPerfect. Multilevel bulleted lists, absoluetely horrific in MS-Word, works the way I would expect things to work in WordPerfect. I actually often do mulicolumn layouts with multilevel bulleted lists. I'd go insane if I had to do that with MS-Word, but I can get WordPerfect to do what I want without a lot of problem.
For my money, even if I had to use Windows at home, I'd pick WordPerfect over MS-Word, and I personally hated WordPerfect prior to WordPerfect 6. I've used both 6 and 8 and been quite happy with them.
Actually Corel Draw is a vector based drawing package, and Photoshop is for manipulating bitmap images. Not really comparable at all, as they are for totally different purposes.
Gimp is probably the closest competitor to Photoshop on Linux. Gimp is pretty good, and fairly comparable overall to Photoshop, and getting better all the time. From what I've read the two areas that Photoshop still has over Gimp are mainly in printing support and support for color seperations. If you aren't doing high end work, especially if you are doing mainly work for web images, Gimp is probably already good enough for what you need to do.
That is a load of crap. A lot of Slashdot readers buy Linux software. I'm sure a lot of people out there have bought WordPerfect 8 for Linux for example. While a lot of us believe in open source and free software, we are not all totally idealistic about it.
Actually, that would be better worded as "The Microsoft world didn't see a true 32 bit OS until NT came out".
There were a lot of true 32 bit OSes out before NT, even on the x86 (SCO UNIX, Microport UNIX, Interactive UNIX, etc). On non-x86 processors there were dozens, dating back to at least the mid 70's. Since you mention DEC specifically, an example would be VMS. For that matter, they had Ultrix (which started as a thinly disguised 4.3BSD port) out in the mid 80's.
I'm actually sure you already knew that, but some of the people out there who know nothing but Microsoft might not.
Here is a question though: Is it like other Pascal orriented toolkits I've used that are clunky to use from C/C++ because of the differences between calling conventions and data types? I mean things like converting from C style null terminated strings to Pascal delimited length strings is an inconvenience. It would be a lot better if they have already wrapped things in a layer to make things like that more transparent, although that adds in some extra overhead.
Re:Killing Unix is like killing computers:
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The End of Unix?
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It's pretty surprising you are running into so much new AS/400 stuff out there, it could just be a fluke or something -- maybe you are getting those assignments because you've heard of AS/400's or something.:-)
As I said, I live in the AS/400's back yard, and I'm seeing the opposite happen. Most of the AS/400 shops are hedging their bet by implementing other platforms (AIX/RS6k, other *nix or Wintel) beside the AS/400 for other purposes. Only the most hardcore AS/400 people are putting stuff like web servers, groupware and email on AS/400's. However, few are making that serious of moves toward abandoning the AS/400 for the stuff that it is doing today, so the AS/400 really isn't losing ground too quickly either. It's kinda like where Netware seems to be these days. It isn't making many new converts, but I don't see anyone actually ripping it out either. Most of the people who were talking about it have backed off or at least slowed down their timetables to do so.
I know back home its some backyard ISP who would not even attempt to divulge in something that is not M$.
Around here all of the 'backyard' (read as small independent start ups) ISP's use Linux and/or *BSD as their primary platforms. M$'s stuff is just too expensive, both in licenses, and also in the expensive hardware it takes to host a significant number of users. The more well heeled ISP's usually run Linux and/or *BSD, often in conjunction with Commercial *nixes.
Re:Killing Unix is like killing computers:
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You're right that the AS/400 is primarily a nitch product. However, IBM is trying to change that, and AS/400s running more 'normal' tasks like web servers and Lotus Domino are appearing more and more. It's market is expanding.
It's market should be expanding, but I don't see that happening very much, and I live in an area that is about as condusive to the AS/400 as there is (the plant where they are built is only about 200 miles from here, and there are a lot of stodgy insurance and financial companies around). Mostly the newer features they are adding to the AS/400 are just slowing down the defection rate in existing AS/400 shops.
Still, most shops get into the AS/400 because of some line of business application that only runs there, or they're a true blue IBM customer.
Bingo. Usually it is something like an accounting system, and often the AS/400 is used only for a single purpose. A lot of the true-Blue IBM shops (tons of those around here) use AS/400's, but there shops often have IBM mainframes as their main back end system, and often RS/6000's in the middle tier as well.
The other tasks are largely an afterthought.
Yea, and mainly only in smaller shops where they don't have the financial means to support multiple platforms, but they want to add stuff like email, groupware, etc.
I don't think even IBM would consider the 400 a head-to-head competitor to Sun and DECpaq -- that's why they have the RS/6000s.
Well, I think that a few people on the AS/400 team at IBM think that the AS/400 is a direct competitor to Sun, Compaq, etc. Most of the other IBMers I've met have a bit more realistic viewpoint of where the AS/400 is, and where it is going.
Re:Killing Unix is like killing computers:
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I would basically agree with most of your assessment that traditional micro OSes (including NT) were designed with a pretty limited vision of their place.
The AS/400 is probably about the only proprietary OS mini that hasn't died off, and I think that is partially because it comes from IBM, but also because it never really tried to compete directly with the other minis (despite IBM's intentions). It basically found its own whole seperate niche. While the AS/400 may be bigger and more profitable than Sun, of course Sun is only one of many UNIX midrange vendors. They are nowhere near 1/2 of that market, as there is still HP/UX, AIX, Compaq Tru64, SGI Irix, etc. At any rate, while the AS/400 is probably going to continue along as it has been for the forseeable future, I don't see it as suddenly starting to increase its market share or start to move outside its current niche markets.
Compaq probably makes more on VMS than they'd like, but it is obviously a legacy system that is getting slowly replaced. They aren't pushing it to new customers and their customers have mostly targeted other platforms as their future directions. I'd classify VMS as one of the 'lifeless zombies'. It is dead, but that doesn't stop it from shuffling about a bit.
You are right that UNIX hasn't won the midrange wars yet, but a lot of the competitors have dropped out, leaving NT/W2K as the last 'great white hope' of the proprietary OS.
Most of the cheap low end cars that are sold over here which get the high MPG don't offer any of the ABS or other refinements of the last 20 years. Why? Because they are cheap, low end cars that the auto makers don't want to put the good stuff into, precisely because they aren't that profitable.
The micro cars aren't just in competition for safety against old big cars of 20 years ago anyway, they also have to compete against the mid size and larger cars of today and against the road monster SUVs. No amount of ABS brakes or airbags are going to negate the fact that if a car like a Metro gets hit by a 6000 pound SUV (let alone a semi trailer rig) doing 65 miles an hour, the Metro is going to look like it was a tin can crushed by a 200lb man's shoe.
Your argument still does nothing against the fact that the high MPG cars are dangerously underpowered either. My wife used to have a Ford Festiva with a dinky littly 1.2L four cylinder engine and a 5-speed manual transmission. On a short freeway onramp, no matter how hard you pounded the thing through the gears there was no way you could get it up much above 45 MPH to merge into traffic. Dangerous, and scary as hell when you have 18-wheelers bearing down in your rear view mirror. It is my opinion that any car that can't get up to 65 by the end of one of those ramps without being a major ordeal is dangerously underpowered and should be banned.
You also completely ignore the fact that most people don't want something like a Metro because they are just too small and uncomfortable for most people here in the US. Automakers don't really have to engage in that much of a FUD campaign to sell people on larger cars. That is what people want, and has been since before there really were any small cars. The American love affair with the big car dates back to the 1930s when there was no such thing as an econobox (the Model T was dead by then) or SUVs either.
Re:Killing Unix is like killing computers:
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Observe: MS-DOS was, IIRC, originally intended to be a 'simple' Unix-like OS for the PC
Actually, MS-DOS was originally intended to be a clone of CP/M targetted for the 8086/8088 instead of the 8080/Z80. About the only UNIX-like feature it included was starting at 2.0, it incorporated heirarchial subdirectories (unlike CP/M which had a flat file structure), the original 1.0 and 1.1 versions of MS-DOS used a flat file system like CP/M.
CP/M, in turn was originally intended to be a simplified subset clone of RSTS/11, a DEC minicomputer OS for the PDP-11 family, except targeted to the 8080/Z80 based microcomputers of the early hobbiest computer era. RSTS and RSX were the DEC predecessors to VMS. VMS, as we know was primarily architected for many years by the same person who went to Microsoft to design the NT kernel. All of the MS-hype aside, NT is largely a reinvention of Micro-VMS with the Windows GUI and the MS-DOS command interpreter grafted on, and without a lot of the stability and scalability that made a lot of people like VMS (I wasn't one of them mind you). Yes, for the inevitable Microsoft apologists, that is an oversimplified view.
Yes, each of these took a little different take on Unix, and tried to re-invent the wheel: but the influence of Unix cannot be safely ignored.
UNIX only influenced those other products by being a competitor that they were trying to respond to. Notice that virtually all of the proprietary minicomputer OSes are dead or at least lifeless zombies, despite all of the years of predictions of the doom of UNIX (for mostly the same reasons people predict the demise of Linux). NT/W2K is, in my opinion, the last great hurrah for proprietary OSes. UNIX on the other hand has been much more equipped to change with the times and adapt to new and different purposes. The fundamental difference is that it is built with a different philosophy, one that small is beautiful, and that simple tools which do one thing, and do it well and can be put together to solve more complex problems is a better way to do things than the huge, integrated, monolithic monsters that the proprietary OS world puts out.
I really had an interesting talk with one of my professors a couple of days ago and pretty much found that all the major universities are using Windows type development models for their CS programs.
That isn't even close to true. In fact it is a pretty silly statement given that it would be virtually impossible to get all of the major universities to agree on anything let alone something that specific.
I think you would further find that even in universities that have adopted MS-centric curriculum that it is not pervasive throughout their entire CS program. Any university which would purport to offer a well balanced and rounded background for their students would be ill serviced by making their program so focussed on a single company's technology. That is the sort of thing that lower end institutions such as trade schools and community colleges do, not major universities.
Given how cool these things are, I'm not too surprised that supply is tight. I wonder how many other hardware hackers out there are buying them versus the number of people buying them for the intended use.
As I said before, unfortunately, I don't have a local Circuit City (I live in a small town of about 300k people out in the boondocks). The nearest ones to me are 250-300 miles away, so you can bet I would call first and have them hold one for me before I'd make that kind of a drive! It would majorly suck to drive 5 or 6 hours for nothing, especially with the horribly ridiculous gas prices recently.
Do you have a reference to the article you mention? I'd be curious as to which model and year Ferrari and Vette they are using in their comparisons and what the actual performance specs on the electric car you mention are. Most of the Ferrari's I've seen have been published with numbers in the 13-14 second range, which is not bad for a production car, especially one that is intended more for road racing than drag racing, but not really that impressive when you consider it is the same ballpark that a $20k Firebird Formula V8 is. 99% of the cars on the road are absolutely horrible 1/4 mile performers (look at the number of minivans, SUVs and econoboxes on the roads), that doesn't make a Ferrari or Vette outstanding 1/4 mile performers.
If they wanted to pick a car for example that was a reasonable comparison based on price, they might have picked the Dodge Viper, for example. It will toast either the current C6 Vette (which is a much less expensive car) or a Ferrari (which is a lot more expensive) in either the 1/8 or 1/4 mile. I'm not really a huge Viper fan personally (for that kind of money, I'd build a Cobra kit car with a 502 Chevy box motor and have money left over), but it is hard to argue with the numbers in this case.
5.0? Big? Big doesn't start until over 7 liters. And all but the last generation RX7's weren't really that impressive performers for drag racing (no torque at low RPMs). And those didn't compare that favorably in price/performance (they were priced in the range of Vettes). Also the rotary has always had durability problems and its fuel consumption per liter displacement is pretty attrocious.
There is a reason the rotary engine never took off, even after the Wankel patents expired. Even Mazda has given up on it.
The motor industry is extremely interested in all forms of fuel economy
The motor industry is less interested in economy than they are in performance, or building the biggest SUV they can. Why? There is a lot more profit in building vehicles like that than there is in building the low-end cars that get good fuel economy.
high MPG sells cars
You must be from Europe. Almost nobody thinks that way in the US. The only people in the US who buy the high MPG cars like the Geo Metro are people who are just too poor to buy a decent car. All of those cars are tiny, uncomfortable, dangerously underpowered rolling deathtraps.
You apparently are picking purposely bad internal combustion cars at the 1/4 mile. Neither a Vette, nor a Ferarri (and you don't specify year or model either) are particularly stellar performers in 1/4 mile and even less so in 1/8 mile drag racing. Both of these cars are more orriented for handling and road racing, especially the Ferarri. Line the specially built electric vehicle up against a internal combustion vehicle that is built for drag racing, and the story will likely be significantly different. Let alone that the electric car probably costs several times as much to build.
I sure wish that CompUSA or Best Buy carried these things. I may just have to drive about 250 to the nearest Circuit City to get one. I've even got a 340M 2.5" hard drive sitting around idle (ripped out of a laptop to replace it with a bigger drive), so all I'd need would be the cable and to make a mounting bracket...
While I agree that it is highly unlikely that Microsoft will ever port MS-Office to Linux, porting from Windows to UNIX or Linux isn't as hard as you think.
Three commercial companies make products for just that purpose, two of which include source code licensed from Microsoft (Bristol's Wind/U and (Microsoft's choice for porting IE to HP/UX and Solaris) Mainsoft's MainWin). The other is Twin from Willows (funded by Ray Noorda (former CEO of Novell and also the money guy behind Caldera)). The Wine project also has winelib, which is what Corel is using for their Windows->Linux ports. It is my understanding that it isn't quite as refined as the commercial products yet, but is now progressing more rapidly now that Corel is contributing back their enhancements and fixes.
These porting products provide most if not all of the services and API's you are talking about, and as for IE integration, I would believe Microsoft doing an IE port for Linux way before I would believe they'd do an MS-Office port, especially since they have already done ports of IE to Solaris and HP/UX.
The reason that Microsoft won't do a Linux port of Office is because it would hurt Windows sales more than it would build sales of Office. It would also be an admission of defeat that Microsoft's pride would never allow them to make, even if it were monetarily advantageous in the long run. Training support costs wouldn't be that big of a deal to them, they barely support their own products now (a lot of the support they push off to the hardware vendors), so what would the difference be? They train people to support MS-Office on MacOS, so adding one other OS wouldn't be that much more of a stretch.
Microsoft XENIX was sold to SCO way before Windows or OS/2 were in development. SCO sold XENIX (which was a UNIX V7 variant) for a long time, then they grafted major parts of XENIX into their SVR2 UNIX port which was SCO UNIX. SCO OpenDesktop and OpenServer still contain a lot of cruft for backwards compatibility with old XENIX apps. SCO UnixWare on the otherhand is based on SVR4, and is a lot cleaner (albiet still wouldn't be my first choice).
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It is probably not as much what you said, but how you said it. You shouldn't get moderated down for saying something that is an unpopular opinion, but you should get moderated down for saying it in a way that would fit into flamebait or trolling. If you have been moderated down unfairly, one would hope that the moderator who did so got slapped when it came time for meta moderation. Also, you would probably find that you would be less likely to get moderated down if you were posting from a real account instead of as Anonymous Coward.
I rarely ever agree with Zico, but at least his posts are generally mostly civil and not personal attacks.
Evidence of this, please?
Evidence to the contrary please?
Did you buy it?
Yes, as a matter of fact, I did.
I didn't even know one single person who had until somebody gave me a copy of Corel Linux last week (it comes with WP8; don't even get me started -- can you say "No shadow passwords?" I knew you could). I tend to doubt your "lot of people" statement, although some evidence could sway me.
Without conducting a scientific poll of Slashdot users, it would be difficult (even then it would be difficult) to get any solid evidence one way or the other. I do know that I live out in the middle of nowhere, and the local CompUSA and Best Buy stores carry WordPerfect 8 and a number of other Linux titles on the shelf. If they weren't selling, they wouldn't be there. I know that most of the people in the local Linux user group read Slashdot, and several of them have purchased WordPerfect 8 for Linux and/or several other commercial titles for Linux.
Hey, no offense to you personally, but who said anything about idealism? The conventional wisdom behind Linux users not buying software (Linux or otherwise) has nothing to do with idealism, and all to do with cheapness.
I don't think there are that many more cheapskates in the Linux world than there are in the Windows world. A lot (close to, if not most) of the people I know in the Windows world just pirate everything. I could very easily have just pirated WordPerfect 8 for Windows, but I didn't.
I could easily afford to buy Windows and commercial software if I wanted to, I make decent money. The 'conventional wisdom' that Linux users are all broke college students is a load of crap as far as I can tell. I use Linux because I like it, and it works well for what I want to do. I don't use Windows because I don't like it, and it doesn't work well. The fact that Linux is less expensive than Windows is just a pleasant bonus. For that matter, if I wanted to, I could just pirate Windows and every commercial title around (I've got access to the CDs here at work, and I have a CD burner). Windows just doesn't interest me. Its not just a matter of cheapness when it comes to software, since if you are willing to pirate (which most people are), then everything is free as in 'free beer'.
Unless they have backtracked from WordPerfect 8, I can definitely say you are incorrect. WordPerfect 8 is a native Linux executable. I can't think of any reason why they wouldn't do the same thing for WordPerfect 2000.
I don't know what usability you are talking about, but I haven't seen anything useful that Word 97 at least can do that WordPerfect 8 can't. And some of the things that I do just plain work a lot better in WordPerfect 8. Table editing, for example, has always driven me batty in MS-Word, WordPerfect isn't totally perfect there either, but better than MS-Word. Multicolumn layouts, maddening in MS-Word (no matter how I try to drag them around, they never space out the way I want), also better in WordPerfect. Multilevel bulleted lists, absoluetely horrific in MS-Word, works the way I would expect things to work in WordPerfect. I actually often do mulicolumn layouts with multilevel bulleted lists. I'd go insane if I had to do that with MS-Word, but I can get WordPerfect to do what I want without a lot of problem.
For my money, even if I had to use Windows at home, I'd pick WordPerfect over MS-Word, and I personally hated WordPerfect prior to WordPerfect 6. I've used both 6 and 8 and been quite happy with them.
Actually Corel Draw is a vector based drawing package, and Photoshop is for manipulating bitmap images. Not really comparable at all, as they are for totally different purposes.
Gimp is probably the closest competitor to Photoshop on Linux. Gimp is pretty good, and fairly comparable overall to Photoshop, and getting better all the time. From what I've read the two areas that Photoshop still has over Gimp are mainly in printing support and support for color seperations. If you aren't doing high end work, especially if you are doing mainly work for web images, Gimp is probably already good enough for what you need to do.
And neither will any other Slashdot readers.
That is a load of crap. A lot of Slashdot readers buy Linux software. I'm sure a lot of people out there have bought WordPerfect 8 for Linux for example. While a lot of us believe in open source and free software, we are not all totally idealistic about it.
We didn't see a true 32 bit OS until NT came out.
Actually, that would be better worded as "The Microsoft world didn't see a true 32 bit OS until NT came out".
There were a lot of true 32 bit OSes out before NT, even on the x86 (SCO UNIX, Microport UNIX, Interactive UNIX, etc). On non-x86 processors there were dozens, dating back to at least the mid 70's. Since you mention DEC specifically, an example would be VMS. For that matter, they had Ultrix (which started as a thinly disguised 4.3BSD port) out in the mid 80's.
I'm actually sure you already knew that, but some of the people out there who know nothing but Microsoft might not.
Here is a question though: Is it like other Pascal orriented toolkits I've used that are clunky to use from C/C++ because of the differences between calling conventions and data types? I mean things like converting from C style null terminated strings to Pascal delimited length strings is an inconvenience. It would be a lot better if they have already wrapped things in a layer to make things like that more transparent, although that adds in some extra overhead.
It's pretty surprising you are running into so much new AS/400 stuff out there, it could just be a fluke or something -- maybe you are getting those assignments because you've heard of AS/400's or something. :-)
As I said, I live in the AS/400's back yard, and I'm seeing the opposite happen. Most of the AS/400 shops are hedging their bet by implementing other platforms (AIX/RS6k, other *nix or Wintel) beside the AS/400 for other purposes. Only the most hardcore AS/400 people are putting stuff like web servers, groupware and email on AS/400's. However, few are making that serious of moves toward abandoning the AS/400 for the stuff that it is doing today, so the AS/400 really isn't losing ground too quickly either. It's kinda like where Netware seems to be these days. It isn't making many new converts, but I don't see anyone actually ripping it out either. Most of the people who were talking about it have backed off or at least slowed down their timetables to do so.
I know back home its some backyard ISP who would not even attempt to divulge in something that is not M$.
Around here all of the 'backyard' (read as small independent start ups) ISP's use Linux and/or *BSD as their primary platforms. M$'s stuff is just too expensive, both in licenses, and also in the expensive hardware it takes to host a significant number of users. The more well heeled ISP's usually run Linux and/or *BSD, often in conjunction with Commercial *nixes.
You're right that the AS/400 is primarily a nitch product. However, IBM is trying to change that, and AS/400s running more 'normal' tasks like web servers and Lotus Domino are appearing more and more. It's market is expanding.
It's market should be expanding, but I don't see that happening very much, and I live in an area that is about as condusive to the AS/400 as there is (the plant where they are built is only about 200 miles from here, and there are a lot of stodgy insurance and financial companies around). Mostly the newer features they are adding to the AS/400 are just slowing down the defection rate in existing AS/400 shops.
Still, most shops get into the AS/400 because of some line of business application that only runs there, or they're a true blue IBM customer.
Bingo. Usually it is something like an accounting system, and often the AS/400 is used only for a single purpose. A lot of the true-Blue IBM shops (tons of those around here) use AS/400's, but there shops often have IBM mainframes as their main back end system, and often RS/6000's in the middle tier as well.
The other tasks are largely an afterthought.
Yea, and mainly only in smaller shops where they don't have the financial means to support multiple platforms, but they want to add stuff like email, groupware, etc.
I don't think even IBM would consider the 400 a head-to-head competitor to Sun and DECpaq -- that's why they have the RS/6000s.
Well, I think that a few people on the AS/400 team at IBM think that the AS/400 is a direct competitor to Sun, Compaq, etc. Most of the other IBMers I've met have a bit more realistic viewpoint of where the AS/400 is, and where it is going.
I would basically agree with most of your assessment that traditional micro OSes (including NT) were designed with a pretty limited vision of their place.
The AS/400 is probably about the only proprietary OS mini that hasn't died off, and I think that is partially because it comes from IBM, but also because it never really tried to compete directly with the other minis (despite IBM's intentions). It basically found its own whole seperate niche. While the AS/400 may be bigger and more profitable than Sun, of course Sun is only one of many UNIX midrange vendors. They are nowhere near 1/2 of that market, as there is still HP/UX, AIX, Compaq Tru64, SGI Irix, etc. At any rate, while the AS/400 is probably going to continue along as it has been for the forseeable future, I don't see it as suddenly starting to increase its market share or start to move outside its current niche markets.
Compaq probably makes more on VMS than they'd like, but it is obviously a legacy system that is getting slowly replaced. They aren't pushing it to new customers and their customers have mostly targeted other platforms as their future directions. I'd classify VMS as one of the 'lifeless zombies'. It is dead, but that doesn't stop it from shuffling about a bit.
You are right that UNIX hasn't won the midrange wars yet, but a lot of the competitors have dropped out, leaving NT/W2K as the last 'great white hope' of the proprietary OS.
Most of the cheap low end cars that are sold over here which get the high MPG don't offer any of the ABS or other refinements of the last 20 years. Why? Because they are cheap, low end cars that the auto makers don't want to put the good stuff into, precisely because they aren't that profitable.
The micro cars aren't just in competition for safety against old big cars of 20 years ago anyway, they also have to compete against the mid size and larger cars of today and against the road monster SUVs. No amount of ABS brakes or airbags are going to negate the fact that if a car like a Metro gets hit by a 6000 pound SUV (let alone a semi trailer rig) doing 65 miles an hour, the Metro is going to look like it was a tin can crushed by a 200lb man's shoe.
Your argument still does nothing against the fact that the high MPG cars are dangerously underpowered either. My wife used to have a Ford Festiva with a dinky littly 1.2L four cylinder engine and a 5-speed manual transmission. On a short freeway onramp, no matter how hard you pounded the thing through the gears there was no way you could get it up much above 45 MPH to merge into traffic. Dangerous, and scary as hell when you have 18-wheelers bearing down in your rear view mirror. It is my opinion that any car that can't get up to 65 by the end of one of those ramps without being a major ordeal is dangerously underpowered and should be banned.
You also completely ignore the fact that most people don't want something like a Metro because they are just too small and uncomfortable for most people here in the US. Automakers don't really have to engage in that much of a FUD campaign to sell people on larger cars. That is what people want, and has been since before there really were any small cars. The American love affair with the big car dates back to the 1930s when there was no such thing as an econobox (the Model T was dead by then) or SUVs either.
Observe: MS-DOS was, IIRC, originally intended to be a 'simple' Unix-like OS for the PC
Actually, MS-DOS was originally intended to be a clone of CP/M targetted for the 8086/8088 instead of the 8080/Z80. About the only UNIX-like feature it included was starting at 2.0, it incorporated heirarchial subdirectories (unlike CP/M which had a flat file structure), the original 1.0 and 1.1 versions of MS-DOS used a flat file system like CP/M.
CP/M, in turn was originally intended to be a simplified subset clone of RSTS/11, a DEC minicomputer OS for the PDP-11 family, except targeted to the 8080/Z80 based microcomputers of the early hobbiest computer era. RSTS and RSX were the DEC predecessors to VMS. VMS, as we know was primarily architected for many years by the same person who went to Microsoft to design the NT kernel. All of the MS-hype aside, NT is largely a reinvention of Micro-VMS with the Windows GUI and the MS-DOS command interpreter grafted on, and without a lot of the stability and scalability that made a lot of people like VMS (I wasn't one of them mind you). Yes, for the inevitable Microsoft apologists, that is an oversimplified view.
Yes, each of these took a little different take on Unix, and tried to re-invent the wheel: but the influence of Unix cannot be safely ignored.
UNIX only influenced those other products by being a competitor that they were trying to respond to. Notice that virtually all of the proprietary minicomputer OSes are dead or at least lifeless zombies, despite all of the years of predictions of the doom of UNIX (for mostly the same reasons people predict the demise of Linux). NT/W2K is, in my opinion, the last great hurrah for proprietary OSes. UNIX on the other hand has been much more equipped to change with the times and adapt to new and different purposes. The fundamental difference is that it is built with a different philosophy, one that small is beautiful, and that simple tools which do one thing, and do it well and can be put together to solve more complex problems is a better way to do things than the huge, integrated, monolithic monsters that the proprietary OS world puts out.
I really had an interesting talk with one of my professors a couple of days ago and pretty much found that all the major universities are using Windows type development models for their CS programs.
That isn't even close to true. In fact it is a pretty silly statement given that it would be virtually impossible to get all of the major universities to agree on anything let alone something that specific.
I think you would further find that even in universities that have adopted MS-centric curriculum that it is not pervasive throughout their entire CS program. Any university which would purport to offer a well balanced and rounded background for their students would be ill serviced by making their program so focussed on a single company's technology. That is the sort of thing that lower end institutions such as trade schools and community colleges do, not major universities.
No, it was already past 408 years ago:
3-14-1592
Given how cool these things are, I'm not too surprised that supply is tight. I wonder how many other hardware hackers out there are buying them versus the number of people buying them for the intended use.
As I said before, unfortunately, I don't have a local Circuit City (I live in a small town of about 300k people out in the boondocks). The nearest ones to me are 250-300 miles away, so you can bet I would call first and have them hold one for me before I'd make that kind of a drive! It would majorly suck to drive 5 or 6 hours for nothing, especially with the horribly ridiculous gas prices recently.
If you are talking Linux you may be able to override the BIOS limitation by using something like "mem=131072k" as an append parameter in LILO.
I don't know for sure if this will work with the Iopener, but it does for one of my old PC's which also has a 64M BIOS limit.
O.K., "Even Mazda U.S. has given up on it.". The article you reference mentions that those cars will be built only for sale in Japan.
Do you have a reference to the article you mention? I'd be curious as to which model and year Ferrari and Vette they are using in their comparisons and what the actual performance specs on the electric car you mention are. Most of the Ferrari's I've seen have been published with numbers in the 13-14 second range, which is not bad for a production car, especially one that is intended more for road racing than drag racing, but not really that impressive when you consider it is the same ballpark that a $20k Firebird Formula V8 is. 99% of the cars on the road are absolutely horrible 1/4 mile performers (look at the number of minivans, SUVs and econoboxes on the roads), that doesn't make a Ferrari or Vette outstanding 1/4 mile performers.
If they wanted to pick a car for example that was a reasonable comparison based on price, they might have picked the Dodge Viper, for example. It will toast either the current C6 Vette (which is a much less expensive car) or a Ferrari (which is a lot more expensive) in either the 1/8 or 1/4 mile. I'm not really a huge Viper fan personally (for that kind of money, I'd build a Cobra kit car with a 502 Chevy box motor and have money left over), but it is hard to argue with the numbers in this case.
5.0? Big? Big doesn't start until over 7 liters. And all but the last generation RX7's weren't really that impressive performers for drag racing (no torque at low RPMs). And those didn't compare that favorably in price/performance (they were priced in the range of Vettes). Also the rotary has always had durability problems and its fuel consumption per liter displacement is pretty attrocious.
There is a reason the rotary engine never took off, even after the Wankel patents expired. Even Mazda has given up on it.
The motor industry is extremely interested in all forms of fuel economy
The motor industry is less interested in economy than they are in performance, or building the biggest SUV they can. Why? There is a lot more profit in building vehicles like that than there is in building the low-end cars that get good fuel economy.
high MPG sells cars
You must be from Europe. Almost nobody thinks that way in the US. The only people in the US who buy the high MPG cars like the Geo Metro are people who are just too poor to buy a decent car. All of those cars are tiny, uncomfortable, dangerously underpowered rolling deathtraps.
You apparently are picking purposely bad internal combustion cars at the 1/4 mile. Neither a Vette, nor a Ferarri (and you don't specify year or model either) are particularly stellar performers in 1/4 mile and even less so in 1/8 mile drag racing. Both of these cars are more orriented for handling and road racing, especially the Ferarri. Line the specially built electric vehicle up against a internal combustion vehicle that is built for drag racing, and the story will likely be significantly different. Let alone that the electric car probably costs several times as much to build.
I sure wish that CompUSA or Best Buy carried these things. I may just have to drive about 250 to the nearest Circuit City to get one. I've even got a 340M 2.5" hard drive sitting around idle (ripped out of a laptop to replace it with a bigger drive), so all I'd need would be the cable and to make a mounting bracket...
While I agree that it is highly unlikely that Microsoft will ever port MS-Office to Linux, porting from Windows to UNIX or Linux isn't as hard as you think.
Three commercial companies make products for just that purpose, two of which include source code licensed from Microsoft (Bristol's Wind/U and (Microsoft's choice for porting IE to HP/UX and Solaris) Mainsoft's MainWin). The other is Twin from Willows (funded by Ray Noorda (former CEO of Novell and also the money guy behind Caldera)). The Wine project also has winelib, which is what Corel is using for their Windows->Linux ports. It is my understanding that it isn't quite as refined as the commercial products yet, but is now progressing more rapidly now that Corel is contributing back their enhancements and fixes.
These porting products provide most if not all of the services and API's you are talking about, and as for IE integration, I would believe Microsoft doing an IE port for Linux way before I would believe they'd do an MS-Office port, especially since they have already done ports of IE to Solaris and HP/UX.
The reason that Microsoft won't do a Linux port of Office is because it would hurt Windows sales more than it would build sales of Office. It would also be an admission of defeat that Microsoft's pride would never allow them to make, even if it were monetarily advantageous in the long run. Training support costs wouldn't be that big of a deal to them, they barely support their own products now (a lot of the support they push off to the hardware vendors), so what would the difference be? They train people to support MS-Office on MacOS, so adding one other OS wouldn't be that much more of a stretch.
Microsoft XENIX was sold to SCO way before Windows or OS/2 were in development. SCO sold XENIX (which was a UNIX V7 variant) for a long time, then they grafted major parts of XENIX into their SVR2 UNIX port which was SCO UNIX. SCO OpenDesktop and OpenServer still contain a lot of cruft for backwards compatibility with old XENIX apps. SCO UnixWare on the otherhand is based on SVR4, and is a lot cleaner (albiet still wouldn't be my first choice).