... looks to me like most operating systems these days are proprietary.
The first four are all *nix variants, and therefore are at most only semi-proprietary. All four are POSIX compliant if not POSIX certified (and their POSIX compliance is real, unlike NT's essentially unusable POSIX subsystem). All four vendors have moved towards embracing Linux. The latter two are not only not in the same class (they are desktop OSes, not server OSes), they are at most niche players. BeOS is struggling even to establish a viable niche. MacOS's successor will be *BSD based at its core. Apple will join the ranks of another proprietary OS vendor that has moved to be a UNIX vendor. Proprietary OSes, like the dinosaurs, are facing extinction. It remains to be seen if there will be survivors (like the crocodiles, aligators, etc).
That's a benefit for Microsoft and their "key partners.
It will be interesting to see how many of their 'key partners' Microsoft will stab in the back this time. Somehow transitions like this seem to benefit Microsoft much more than any of their partners.
Everyone must buy new apps. Everyone will want to have "64bit clean" systems.
It depends on how long it takes for people to upgrade. If its like the last time that the PC industry went through this (the transition from 286 to 386), it was both good and bad for vendors. It is hard to say at this point if this transition will be easier or harder, and if people on the desktop side will see the upgrade as compelling. On the server side, it is hard to imagine people won't, but they may be resistant to have mismatched client and server hardware. At the time of the 286->386 migration there was a lot smaller entrenched base of existing machines.
It will generate years and years of gluttony; several OS revisions and all-new-everything.
That is certainly what Microsoft would like to see happen. Time will tell if it does.
And then when it's all said-and-done nothing will have changed -- everything will look the same and performance will be back to what you'd expect.
If everything goes as Microsoft plans, this is probably true. However, if things don't go Microsoft's way, who knows. As many companies as have just spent considerable sums on Y2K related upgrades, etc., it will be interesting to see how receptive they are to paying for upgrades to W2K, let alone to upgrade desktop hardware to 64 bit.
That isn't what I said, exactly. While Microsoft is rolling in cash, it is primarily due to their control of OS preloads of Windows 98 and sales of Office. NT isn't responsible for their huge profits because it not only hasn't sold in huge quantities, it has cost them huge amounts in development and advertising. NT has failed to light a fire under the industry. It slowed, but failed to kill Novell. Novell looks resurgeant. It has failed to kill UNIX. UNIX growth continues. It has failed to slow acceptance of Linux. Linux is growing at a much faster rate than NT, despite the huge inequity of resources spent on promotion of NT versus that spent on promotion of Linux. Heck, NT has failed to even completely kill oS/2, despite IBM's best efforts at helping them out there.
Lets get some realism here....
The reality is that a lot of once large and once prosperous companies that relied on their own proprietary OSes have seen those products dry up and either ended up dead (like Prime (PrimeOS) for example), becoming a UNIX vendor (like HP (MPE), DEC (VMS), etc) or basically exiting the hardware/OS business altogether (Unisys).
Its easy to predict the status quo when a company is prosperous, but that can turn around quickly. If you had told people in 1980 that Digital Research would be a tiny, forgotten subsidiary of a company whos major product was a distribution of a free UNIX clone, they would have told you that you were insane.
Last I heard, Microsoft held approximately 14% of SCO, with Novell holding 10-11% and the younger and elder Michaels holding about 22% between them. If one of those didn't sell out, it would be difficult for Red Hat to buy more than 50% of SCO.
It looks like the 64 bit Linux is going to remain weekend hobbyist terratory while 32 bit WinNT is going to be the workplace.
Actually, 64 bit Linux will increasingly move into server space, and the real workhorse for large enterprise scale, mission critical stuff will continue to be 64 bit *nixes like Solaris, AIX, Tru64, IRIX, etc.
Actually, it is scary how much of the back end in many places is still on stuff like OS390.
So unless they start pushing AMD K7's as their premier processor (not a bad idea from the reviews of the processor), MSFT is really in some trouble
As good as the Athlon (K7) looks, it is still 32 bit and tied to a lot of x86 baggage (limited number of registers, poor generalization of registers) to be backwards compatible. In the long run MSFT must move to 64 bits, especially in the high end workstation and server markets. The RISC *nix vendors have all been there for some time now, and several of them are clearly resurgeant due to MSFT's stumbling. Linux is also benefiting from MSFT's misfortune.
Funny. Linux guys can't even BELIEVE how much money we make.
Funny, one of the reasons Microsoft says you should use their inferior products is that they are supposedly so simple that any idiot can administer or develop for them, so you can hire cheap recent grads and pay slave labor wages.
Surprise, surprise, either Microsoft isn't telling the truth or you aren't. Or maybe both (what I am leaning towards). I can tell you around here, I develop for Solaris and I make as much or more than most of the Windows (VB) developers we have. I know this because I can look up on our intranet what job title people have and I know the salary bands that match up to them.
You can tell them, and their eyes get really big, and then they usually start to drool.
Well, I decided a while back that I'd have to make at least twice as much to be subjected to developing on Windows again. That kind of frustration isn't worth it.
Oh well. I've got a royal blue '98 'Vette.
Big deal. That is a nice car. I could afford one if I wanted one (I have four cars already, one of which is a '99, and another of which is a classic muscle car which can roast any stock '98 Vette in the 1/4 mile). There are plenty of *nix developers that make that kind of money. Hell, there are plenty of mainframe COBOL programmers who make that kind of money. There is no need to prostitute oneself by working with Microsoft.
If you live in NC and you have a "Red Hat" bumper sticker, chances are I've given you the finger as I flew by your rusting out '82 Honda.
Chances are that more than a few Red Hat employees are sitting on stock or options that would allow them to buy that new Ferarri you've been drooling over.
Hahaha - A MS Developer laughing all the way to the bank
Frankly, I pity you. You sound like a shallow, arrogant, egotistical, idiot.
Sun is porting Solaris to IA64. Do you think they're doing this to extend Sparc?
No, Sun is doing it to expand market share even on non-Sparc hardware. They have had Solaris on 32-bit x86 for quite some time now, and it hasn't affected Sparc much.
Trust me, if the port is a roaring success, Sparc will be toast.
I've heard this too many times. People said similar things about the Sun 386i. People said similar things when the first Solaris x86 came out... Sparc is still alive and well.
Sun would be remiss not to hedge their bets, but I don't think they will give up on Sparc anytime soon.
Great for you, but people like my mother in law (who lives in a backwater area served by a small rural phone cooperative) show up as Unavailable or Out of Area. Now, no comments about how I should just ignore my mother-in-law, that isn't an option (it would piss off my wife). I gave up on Caller ID, because it just isn't reliable enough.
The mention of "Microsoft employees buying bulk quantities of " would tend to support the allegations that Microsoft has engaged in book buyback schemes to inflate the sales figures for Bill's books in order to influence public opinion. This isn't a new tactic of course, and it isn't unique to Microsoft, but if true it certainly isn't a good thing.
And NT does run on a 64 bit cpu (like Linux and NetBSD) but it only uses 32 bits
This is correct, NT is pretty much hard-coded for 32 bits.
(like Linux).
This is incorrect. Linux is 64 bit on Alpha. The original port to Alpha was 32 bit, but that was quickly replaced with a true 64 bit port. Linux will be 64 bit on Merced when it ships. I don't know for sure about Linux on 64 bit PPC processors or what the status of Linux on 64 bit MIPS is off the top of my head.
I recently bought a Netgear card (which I returned because of bogus Linux support.)
I have found nothing bogus about the Netgear FA310TX card under Linux. I've got two of them in my Linux boxes and they both autodetect under either Red Hat or SuSE and just work. I never even looked at the floppy or booklet that came with the cards.
640K barrier was nto Bill's fault. IBM decreed the 640K limit.
Actually, the 640K limit is a result of IBM's use of the 8088 processor (instead of the 8086). The 8088 only brings out enough address lines to address 1M of RAM. IBM then chose to reserve the upper 384K of space for I/O (video memory, etc) and ROM (BIOS and Microsoft BASICA).
So Compaq/Digital sells more Alphas running NT than Tru64?
Not according to the Digital employees and resellers I have talked to. They report selling more OpenVMS based Alphas than NT based ones, and more Tru64 based Alphas than OpenVMS ones. They also report that Digital and the resellers make considerably better margins on OpenVMS and Tru64 based machines than on NT based machines.
Whether the ABC was 100% reliable isn't the issue (especially since none of the early computers were). It worked enough to demonstrate a proof of concept. As for poor engineering, the ABC was built by a physics professor and a grad student, not by electrical engineers. The issue is that the concept of ENIAC as well as significant portions of its design philosophy were borrowed from the ABC. Enough that Univac's patents were invalidated after an extensive court battle.
There are other ways they can snag your keys, such as using tempest or backdoors like keyboard sniffers or secretly planted video cameras to get your password. If they can used 'sealed' warrants, you could be spied on for a long time and never know they are watching. They could exploit a vulnerability in most people's Windows boxes and install their own Back Orifice-like snooper on their machine.
I would think Perl is only hard to learn for people that have no programming experience,
Actually, several of the biggest Perl fans I know had no programming experience prior to Perl.
though I personally wouldn't know. When I first started getting into Perl, I already had quite a bit of C/C++ experience.
I did as well... Plus I had shell scripting, sed, awk, etc... A lot of the things that Perl borrowed from. Made learning Perl even easier, but certainly not a prerequisite.
I did a man perl, and about an hour or so later I was hacking away.
Actually, I didn't even do that at first... I had about 50 or 60 Perl scripts dropped on me to document, fix, maintain and enhance... So I went out and bought a copy of the 'camel book' and basically just dug into the code and occasionally looked up things I wasn't sure of in the book.
So much for hard to learn.
No kidding... I don't think Perl is hard to learn for anyone who isn't fixed on a certain mindset.
I am not sure that a little bit of competition at this point is really such a bad thing. While I would agree that at some point, some cooperation would be a good thing, I also think that it may not be that bad to have two projects going in two different ways. If we end up with two projects that are essentially the same, why did we bother? On the other hand, if we eventually end up with two projects that each solve the needs of different people, or the needs of the same people in different ways, that means we get more choice.
Personally I haven't run into that many problems getting Gnome and KDE to coexist. For example, on my laptop I am using SuSE, which sets up KDE by default, however, I have Gnome installed also and I can use both at the same time. I have also been doing GTK+ development on that machine without any problems.
One of the cool things about open source right now is that we have enough developers that we can afford to support two similar projects.
Personally, I think eventually we will see cooperation between at least parts of the two groups, and probably also some borrowing back and forth of code, but I don't really see any reason to rush things at this time. Once both KDE and Gnome fully integrate support for CORBA, I think that may help bridge some of the gaps between them.
This is wrong also. The correct answer is both should win. What we need to get away from is the idea that there has to be just one winner and everything else is a loser. If both KDE and Gnome develop into excellent desktop environments (and both show potential to do so), then they will both be winners. Users will be the winners if they continue to have more than one viable choice. The only losers will be those who feel they have to control everything (like Microsoft) or those who are deathly paralyzed by fear that they might have to make a decision, even if there is really no wrong choice.
You've got my condolences, I'd rather have a root canal than program in VB.
what easy to use programming languages do you have for Linux,
What language is available on Windows that isn't available on Linux other than proprietary things like VB? Personally, I think Java (especially with a tool like VisualAge for Java) is pretty easy. Personally, I don't find C w/ GTK+ very difficult.
and no, Perl is not easy to use for the beginner.
That is not a universally held opinion. I know quite a few beginners that have had no problems learning to use Perl. Perl isn't for everything, but it is a great tool for a lot things.
There are even a couple of BASIC variants out there for Linux, including VBIX (from Halcyon Software) which is a VB clone. You might check into Python or Visual TCL for easy languages on Linux also. There are numerous others out there, those are just two that I have played with a bit.
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The first four are all *nix variants, and therefore are at most only semi-proprietary. All four are POSIX compliant if not POSIX certified (and their POSIX compliance is real, unlike NT's essentially unusable POSIX subsystem). All four vendors have moved towards embracing Linux.
The latter two are not only not in the same class (they are desktop OSes, not server OSes), they are at most niche players. BeOS is struggling even to establish a viable niche. MacOS's successor will be *BSD based at its core. Apple will join the ranks of another proprietary OS vendor that has moved to be a UNIX vendor.
Proprietary OSes, like the dinosaurs, are facing extinction. It remains to be seen if there will be survivors (like the crocodiles, aligators, etc).
That's a benefit for Microsoft and their "key partners.
It will be interesting to see how many of their 'key partners' Microsoft will stab in the back this time. Somehow transitions like this seem to benefit Microsoft much more than any of their partners.
Everyone must buy new apps. Everyone will want to have "64bit clean" systems.
It depends on how long it takes for people to upgrade. If its like the last time that the PC industry went through this (the transition from 286 to 386), it was both good and bad for vendors. It is hard to say at this point if this transition will be easier or harder, and if people on the desktop side will see the upgrade as compelling. On the server side, it is hard to imagine people won't, but they may be resistant to have mismatched client and server hardware. At the time of the 286->386 migration there was a lot smaller entrenched base of existing machines.
It will generate years and years of gluttony; several OS revisions and all-new-everything.
That is certainly what Microsoft would like to see happen. Time will tell if it does.
And then when it's all said-and-done nothing will have changed -- everything will look the same and performance will be back to what you'd expect.
If everything goes as Microsoft plans, this is probably true. However, if things don't go Microsoft's way, who knows.
As many companies as have just spent considerable sums on Y2K related upgrades, etc., it will be interesting to see how receptive they are to paying for upgrades to W2K, let alone to upgrade desktop hardware to 64 bit.
Yeah, they are falling apart:
That isn't what I said, exactly. While Microsoft is rolling in cash, it is primarily due to their control of OS preloads of Windows 98 and sales of Office. NT isn't responsible for their huge profits because it not only hasn't sold in huge quantities, it has cost them huge amounts in development and advertising. NT has failed to light a fire under the industry. It slowed, but failed to kill Novell. Novell looks resurgeant. It has failed to kill UNIX. UNIX growth continues. It has failed to slow acceptance of Linux. Linux is growing at a much faster rate than NT, despite the huge inequity of resources spent on promotion of NT versus that spent on promotion of Linux. Heck, NT has failed to even completely kill oS/2, despite IBM's best efforts at helping them out there.
Lets get some realism here....
The reality is that a lot of once large and once prosperous companies that relied on their own proprietary OSes have seen those products dry up and either ended up dead (like Prime (PrimeOS) for example), becoming a UNIX vendor (like HP (MPE), DEC (VMS), etc) or basically exiting the hardware/OS business altogether (Unisys).
Its easy to predict the status quo when a company is prosperous, but that can turn around quickly. If you had told people in 1980 that Digital Research would be a tiny, forgotten subsidiary of a company whos major product was a distribution of a free UNIX clone, they would have told you that you were insane.
Last I heard, Microsoft held approximately 14% of SCO, with Novell holding 10-11% and the younger and elder Michaels holding about 22% between them. If one of those didn't sell out, it would be difficult for Red Hat to buy more than 50% of SCO.
It looks like the 64 bit Linux is going to remain weekend hobbyist terratory while 32 bit WinNT is going to be the workplace.
Actually, 64 bit Linux will increasingly move into server space, and the real workhorse for large enterprise scale, mission critical stuff will continue to be 64 bit *nixes like Solaris, AIX, Tru64, IRIX, etc.
Actually, it is scary how much of the back end in many places is still on stuff like OS390.
As long as he wants to "kill Unix", I don't think there's any other company out there who needs him.
NT is really the last 'great white hope' of proprietary operating systems. Where once there were dozens, now there is only one, and it is floundering.
So unless they start pushing AMD K7's as their premier processor (not a bad idea from the reviews of the processor), MSFT is really in some trouble
As good as the Athlon (K7) looks, it is still 32 bit and tied to a lot of x86 baggage (limited number of registers, poor generalization of registers) to be backwards compatible. In the long run MSFT must move to 64 bits, especially in the high end workstation and server markets. The RISC *nix vendors have all been there for some time now, and several of them are clearly resurgeant due to MSFT's stumbling. Linux is also benefiting from MSFT's misfortune.
What is worse is that practically every Windows app will likely require significant (if not complete) rewrite to run well in a 64 bit environment.
Funny. Linux guys can't even BELIEVE how much money we make.
Funny, one of the reasons Microsoft says you should use their inferior products is that they are supposedly so simple that any idiot can administer or develop for them, so you can hire cheap recent grads and pay slave labor wages.
Surprise, surprise, either Microsoft isn't telling the truth or you aren't. Or maybe both (what I am leaning towards).
I can tell you around here, I develop for Solaris and I make as much or more than most of the Windows (VB) developers we have. I know this because I can look up on our intranet what job title people have and I know the salary bands that match up to them.
You can tell them, and their eyes get really big, and then they usually start to drool.
Well, I decided a while back that I'd have to make at least twice as much to be subjected to developing on Windows again. That kind of frustration isn't worth it.
Oh well. I've got a royal blue '98 'Vette.
Big deal. That is a nice car. I could afford one if I wanted one (I have four cars already, one of which is a '99, and another of which is a classic muscle car which can roast any stock '98 Vette in the 1/4 mile). There are plenty of *nix developers that make that kind of money. Hell, there are plenty of mainframe COBOL programmers who make that kind of money. There is no need to prostitute oneself by working with Microsoft.
If you live in NC and you have a "Red Hat" bumper sticker, chances are I've given you the finger as I flew by your rusting out '82 Honda.
Chances are that more than a few Red Hat employees are sitting on stock or options that would allow them to buy that new Ferarri you've been drooling over.
Hahaha - A MS Developer laughing all the way to the bank
Frankly, I pity you. You sound like a shallow, arrogant, egotistical, idiot.
Sun is porting Solaris to IA64. Do you think they're doing this to extend Sparc?
No, Sun is doing it to expand market share even on non-Sparc hardware. They have had Solaris on 32-bit x86 for quite some time now, and it hasn't affected Sparc much.
Trust me, if the port is a roaring success, Sparc will be toast.
I've heard this too many times. People said similar things about the Sun 386i. People said similar things when the first Solaris x86 came out... Sparc is still alive and well.
Sun would be remiss not to hedge their bets, but I don't think they will give up on Sparc anytime soon.
Great for you, but people like my mother in law (who lives in a backwater area served by a small rural phone cooperative) show up as Unavailable or Out of Area. Now, no comments about how I should just ignore my mother-in-law, that isn't an option (it would piss off my wife). I gave up on Caller ID, because it just isn't reliable enough.
The mention of "Microsoft employees buying bulk quantities of " would tend to support the allegations that Microsoft has engaged in book buyback schemes to inflate the sales figures for Bill's books in order to influence public opinion. This isn't a new tactic of course, and it isn't unique to Microsoft, but if true it certainly isn't a good thing.
And NT does run on a 64 bit cpu (like Linux and NetBSD) but it only uses 32 bits
This is correct, NT is pretty much hard-coded for 32 bits.
(like Linux).
This is incorrect. Linux is 64 bit on Alpha. The original port to Alpha was 32 bit, but that was quickly replaced with a true 64 bit port. Linux will be 64 bit on Merced when it ships. I don't know for sure about Linux on 64 bit PPC processors or what the status of Linux on 64 bit MIPS is off the top of my head.
I recently bought a Netgear card (which I returned because of bogus Linux support.)
I have found nothing bogus about the Netgear FA310TX card under Linux. I've got two of them in my Linux boxes and they both autodetect under either Red Hat or SuSE and just work. I never even looked at the floppy or booklet that came with the cards.
The majority of the work on that was done by an old Sun engineer.
Actually it was an old DEC engineer -- the same guy who was the principal architect for VMS.
640K barrier was nto Bill's fault. IBM decreed the 640K limit.
Actually, the 640K limit is a result of IBM's use of the 8088 processor (instead of the 8086). The 8088 only brings out enough address lines to address 1M of RAM. IBM then chose to reserve the upper 384K of space for I/O (video memory, etc) and ROM (BIOS and Microsoft BASICA).
So Compaq/Digital sells more Alphas running NT than Tru64?
Not according to the Digital employees and resellers I have talked to. They report selling more OpenVMS based Alphas than NT based ones, and more Tru64 based Alphas than OpenVMS ones. They also report that Digital and the resellers make considerably better margins on OpenVMS and Tru64 based machines than on NT based machines.
and then didn't follow through to completion
Because Atanasoff was called away for the war effort and didn't return to Iowa State after the war.
Whether the ABC was 100% reliable isn't the issue (especially since none of the early computers were). It worked enough to demonstrate a proof of concept. As for poor engineering, the ABC was built by a physics professor and a grad student, not by electrical engineers. The issue is that the concept of ENIAC as well as significant portions of its design philosophy were borrowed from the ABC. Enough that Univac's patents were invalidated after an extensive court battle.
There are other ways they can snag your keys, such as using tempest or backdoors like keyboard sniffers or secretly planted video cameras to get your password. If they can used 'sealed' warrants, you could be spied on for a long time and never know they are watching. They could exploit a vulnerability in most people's Windows boxes and install their own Back Orifice-like snooper on their machine.
I would think Perl is only hard to learn for people that have no programming experience,
Actually, several of the biggest Perl fans I know had no programming experience prior to Perl.
though I personally wouldn't know. When I first started getting into Perl, I already had quite a bit of C/C++ experience.
I did as well... Plus I had shell scripting, sed, awk, etc... A lot of the things that Perl borrowed from. Made learning Perl even easier, but certainly not a prerequisite.
I did a man perl, and about an hour or so later I was hacking away.
Actually, I didn't even do that at first... I had about 50 or 60 Perl scripts dropped on me to document, fix, maintain and enhance... So I went out and bought a copy of the 'camel book' and basically just dug into the code and occasionally looked up things I wasn't sure of in the book.
So much for hard to learn.
No kidding... I don't think Perl is hard to learn for anyone who isn't fixed on a certain mindset.
I am not sure that a little bit of competition at this point is really such a bad thing. While I would agree that at some point, some cooperation would be a good thing, I also think that it may not be that bad to have two projects going in two different ways. If we end up with two projects that are essentially the same, why did we bother? On the other hand, if we eventually end up with two projects that each solve the needs of different people, or the needs of the same people in different ways, that means we get more choice.
Personally I haven't run into that many problems getting Gnome and KDE to coexist. For example, on my laptop I am using SuSE, which sets up KDE by default, however, I have Gnome installed also and I can use both at the same time. I have also been doing GTK+ development on that machine without any problems.
One of the cool things about open source right now is that we have enough developers that we can afford to support two similar projects.
Personally, I think eventually we will see cooperation between at least parts of the two groups, and probably also some borrowing back and forth of code, but I don't really see any reason to rush things at this time. Once both KDE and Gnome fully integrate support for CORBA, I think that may help bridge some of the gaps between them.
Actually neither should win.
This is wrong also. The correct answer is both should win. What we need to get away from is the idea that there has to be just one winner and everything else is a loser. If both KDE and Gnome develop into excellent desktop environments (and both show potential to do so), then they will both be winners. Users will be the winners if they continue to have more than one viable choice. The only losers will be those who feel they have to control everything (like Microsoft) or those who are deathly paralyzed by fear that they might have to make a decision, even if there is really no wrong choice.
I use VB to make my Windows applications,
You've got my condolences, I'd rather have a root canal than program in VB.
what easy to use programming languages do you have for Linux,
What language is available on Windows that isn't available on Linux other than proprietary things like VB? Personally, I think Java (especially with a tool like VisualAge for Java) is pretty easy. Personally, I don't find C w/ GTK+ very difficult.
and no, Perl is not easy to use for the beginner.
That is not a universally held opinion. I know quite a few beginners that have had no problems learning to use Perl. Perl isn't for everything, but it is a great tool for a lot things.
There are even a couple of BASIC variants out there for Linux, including VBIX (from Halcyon Software) which is a VB clone. You might check into Python or Visual TCL for easy languages on Linux also. There are numerous others out there, those are just two that I have played with a bit.
Actually the way that Microsoft operates, that should read more like "A computer on every desktop, running only Microsoft software".