Seriously, I am a frustrated GNU Hurd zealot, not an IBM OS/2 zealot. My brother loved OS/2, I only found it interesting. But sure it is much better technology than MS-WNT.
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IBM and MS started a collaboration called OS/2, then later decided to part ways.
Actually MS stabbed IBM in the back by breaking the agreement (MS-W16 never to get 32 bits or a DOS virtual machine, OS/2 forever) without warning by launching MS-W3.1. This effectively killed OS/2 and made going from OS/2 3.0 NT to MS-WNT a no-brainer for MS.
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MS wasn't entirely enthusiastic about development at IBM speed
You mean IBM quality, not speed. OS/2 development speed wasn't so bad; in fact, they decided to go for a command-line only, i286 version initially in order to ship early.
The real problem is that MS wanted to push forward the stupid MS Win16 API inherited from MS Windows 1.0 for the IBM-PC/XT, and IBM knew it was garbage. Also MS realised it could get more money by selling a product without any interoperability or standardisation, while IBM would have made it interoperable, documented and stable -- as they still do with the current IBM OS/2.
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It's kind of ironic istn't it that CMOS PCs will eventually need the same plumbing as the TCMs they were supposed to replace.
Actually there is more to the PC than being CMOS, like a popular, well-understood architecture that can run GNU/Linux -- AFAIK GNU/Linux S/390 still need VM and proprietary drivers to run. Not to mention being able to have control on your own instead of relying always on IT. OTOH, I am an advocate of POSIX hosts and X terminals, so this actually goes against the PC.
Also, remember not all PCs run inefficient x86 or IPF processors. PowerPCs and ARMs won't need cooling anytime soon, probably never.
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corporations who sold weapons of mass destruction materials to saddam back in the 80's, when he was obviously using them in warfare
Good point, bad example. At the time this was official government policy in all the World, including US, Europe, Soviet Union and Latin America, as a means to counter the spread of Islamic revolution from Iran.
BTW the only weapons of mass destruction Saddam Hussein did use in warfare was gas, and he can hardly be blamed for it as Iran did too. In fact, the well-known gas bombing of Kurd villages seem to have been done by mistake by Iran during a big battle, not as genocide by Iraq.
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Microsoft owning the OEM channel and therefore maintaining profits because nobody else could sell their products directly into the channel. Profits keep flowing to Redmond
MS has not had a real profit since 1.995, as Bill Parish has shown.
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Novell, the networking pioneer, has suffered greatly from Microsoft's deep inroads into networking.
When you say networking, you mean LAN. When he says it, he means Internet. MS has beaten Novell in the LAN, but is beaten by free software in the Net.
Novell was a, not the, LAN pioneer, but not networking pioneer. ARPANet and other networking existed much before Novell.
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The biggest thing at Microsoft is DOT NET, not DOT PC.
.Net is still PC-centric. Despite Rotor and mono, it is still MS-centric, and that means PC-centric. See, this is the guy behing Rotor, and even him sees it..Net is still built around proprietarisation -- AKA decommoditisation -- either by non-documentation a la AD Kerberos or by patents & copyrights.
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Web services (XML, RDF, SOAP, WDDI) is all the rage in Redmond.
XML is text markup, instrumental as it is to the human interface called Web. SOAP and WDDI are higly contentious, and IMNSHO are the wrong answer to the wrong question. They are mostly pigbacking on HTTP to bypass some inconveniences in RPCs, CORBA, distributed computing -- the problem is that mostly this are inherent issues, and bypassing them will only make things worse in the long run.
See, you talk about Web services. The problem is, the Web is just a human interface. Services are data and communications: we need databases with shared, agreed-upon relational schemas, and standard protocols. The human interface is orthogonal to that. Forcing protocols, formats and a mindset honed on Web onto services is bound to failure IMNSHO.
And even if all these protocols and formats eventually succeed, MS will still decommoditise them, and effectively isolate itself from free software, until it gets critical mass to eventually make MS irrelevant.
So yes, MS (and others) is paying attention to the Net. But it is getting it wrong.
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MS was a founding member of the W3C XML Working Group in 1997.
Which was basically created to dumb down the much older, more capable SGML. So what?
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They invented the MAPI protocol several years ago.
Invented? Come on, MAPI is just a interface. You cannot invent an interface, any more than you invent a book. You craft, write, create it, but not invent -- no matter what the USNA patents system seems to think. And MAPI was not an unanimity, having (arguably better) competitors that would have given us a more open, level playing field.
Anyway, what has MAPI to do with all this? It is just a mail API. Never contributed to make MS less closed.
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They run an ISP (MSN) and the largest Internet mail service (Hotmail).
The ISP has repeatedly fallen short of its goals, and I still remember they trying to make it bigger than the Net when it was just another online service. Still has a bad taste in the mouth from those times. Hotmail was bought outside, and is still closed: no IMAP, no POP, vulnerabilities, all that. So what?
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They make the most popular web browser
Which they bought elsewhere, and the effectively stole from its vendor.
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You can publish Office documents to the web (ActiveX required to view, unfortunately)
See?
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Office 11 will have XML document formats for all its programs.
The quality and usefullness of MS Office 11 XML DTDs or schemas remain to be seen. If History is any good as a guide...
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people on this forum have expressed fears that MS could almost own the Internet
...because this would kill it, or at least its openness.
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the only part of the Internet they don't have their hands in is the routers and cables.
Not surprisingly, this is the part where failure would be most painful to users and companies alike. But for the rest, only the client they have in their hands, and even there they have free software as a potential competitor. All the rest is still up to grabs.
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they're now selling game consoles (XBox)
A lousy one, on which they are loosing loads of money they robbed from retirement plans and such thru creative accounting...
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they've been trying to get their software into cars since at least 1998.
With resounding failure, as the BMW series 7 issues make patently clear.
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the open source movement (or for that matter, Apple) has been able to live and thrive on the niche markets and margins of the software/hardware industries
Niche is a relative concept. One can argue that computing is too big to be defined monolithically, and that desktop computing for Apple or Internet servers for free software are hardly niches.
But Apple, thriving? They are hardly living, but surviving.
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I'm not talking about whether BSD-licensed code can be relicensed as GPL, I'm talking about whether code under the Watcom license can be relicensed under BSDL.
Can't, because the Watcom license carries restrictions that aren't present in BSDL. Remember, "relicensing" isn't relicensing in fact, it is just adding restrictions. You can't remove a license and replace with another.
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You claimed that the advertising clause prevents the latter, but I just don't see how that can be so.
Sorry, I just misread you. The effect is the same, but not from that cause.
390 is a number. It can designate a class of machines, the S/390, which is virtualisable hardware. And it designates its main OS, OS/390, that can run on virtual machines. These are managed by another OS, the VM/OS.
>> IBM's recent growth in the mid-range server market...
>I wouldn't call it recent.:-)
He never said S/390 or OS/390 were recent, even if the monikers really are. He said that their success in middle-range is recent, which is true due to only recently S/390 machines prices being brought down enough from their former big-iron heights.
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If I go to a conference about Open Source, I'm looking for useful information about Open Source. No-one representing Microsoft's corporate policy can possibly have anything to say that qualifies
While I agree with you, I do think they should be allowed, and even invited. Only that their participation should be clearly labelled Contrarian View, just to prevent confusion.
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Another project forming is Apollo. It's unrelated to this year's releases, but shows a significant amount of dedication from AOL into Gecko's future, both the current codebase, and what is tentatively known as Gecko 2.0.
You are kidding, right? The book is ridiculous, espousing a naïve Scientificism that had already been discredited some twenty to thirty years before in CS Lewis' Space Trilogy, especially the first and the final ones, Out of the Silent Planet and That Hideous Strength. The only reason the movie looks better is being amazingly beautiful and not saying much.
A result of this (at least in the late 90's) was and increase in MBA's along with a large decline in the number of math, science, and engineering graduates.
You are kidding, right?
The US has been a place were educational levels were relatively low. It was not so when education was not mandatory, then US churches did a better job on literacy then their European equivalents. But since mandatory education became the norm, the average European and Far Eastern school is much better the their US equivalents. Granted, Ivy League universities and the schools leading up to them are top-notch, but today they are just mostly forming well-educated crooks because the supreme value for US people is money.
That the space program gave average education in the US a boost is a myth. Only some good schools were needed to that. What really gave some improvement was the Cold War comparisions with what was reported (but not necessarily in truth) of the USSR schooling standards, and racial integration. Now the US compares itself to no one, thinks it is better because it houses MS & Intel to mention only two of the biggest pigopolies in the World, and racial integration has taken an ugly turn with quotas perverting the goals of education.
Anyway the Sputnik was a crisis. You can't use a crisis to drive a nation over so many decades. To do that you need shared belief in virtues and values, and good ones at that. Only God can give you that, and He doesn't just because you want a challenge to be the first. He makes you want either Himself or at least Truth or Salvation, or something the like.
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The big beef I have with software developers is often that functionality is REMOVED for no good reason.
The big beef I have is when good funcionality is broken. Like styles & stylesheets that worked in MS Word before version 6, but were substituted by styles & templates that are simply too painful now.
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I don't know if the Watcom license allows relicensing as BSDL
Relicensing actually means adding restrictions. So one can take the modified BSD license and relicense it under the GNU GPL, but the same is not true for the original BSD license.
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I can't imagine how the advertising clause would prevent it.
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Most of the push for 64 but chips is because 32 bits doensn't allow for enough memory.
Not only. I do not care so much for 64 bits in my desktop, for example, but appreciate being able to use a more efficient RISC processor. It helps that when I need 64 bits the migration path will be straightforward.
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No OS that I'm aware of supports this very well
Precisely. Why use an ugly hack instead of the real thing?
Such as gcc, for example? There is more than one company making good money for many years now selling and supporting it.
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there once was a time when compilers bragged about how many lines of code they could compile per second, as a significant selling point.
On which platform? Watcom may be fast, but it cannot compile for embedded platforms, nor for big iron. Now what is easier, to speed up gcc or go generalise Watcom?
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How the heck do you know that gcc is probably better written?
See how many years it has been in existence, with so many front-ends, on so many platforms, targetting so many others, maintained and improved by so many people. Watcom could not even be released as was.
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Does the prospect of compiling Doom from source, perhaps 20 years from now, begin to sound interesting?
No. Much better if Doom is made standards-compliant. BTW it probably is already, or would not be available in so many platforms.
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dismissing something you haven't seen
Why is so much reporting and reviewing done if you think everyone is supposed to see and touch before reflecting?
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presuming that you know how history will judge
You seem to from the whatever is, is good school. I am for the common good.
Yes, always under copyleft so it remains always free.
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So GPL is about getting advantages over other people, right?
It is about denying some people, namely hoarders, unfair advantages over users and authors.
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you have not tested it and dislike it out of blue
I dislike first the licensing, and second the me-too, obsoleteness.
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they plan to port it to Linux and FreeBSD.
Where we have quite good compilers that could use additional developers and testers instead of duplication of effort. BTW, will they port it to PowerPC as well? That is what I use.
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You omitted the word commercially.They said "no longer commerciably viable". It narrows nonviability area, isn't it?
Yes. But then why it is not commercially viable? Would it not be because users refuse to pay for it? There are quite some people willing to pay for gcc, there are even companies set around selling and supporting it.
gcc has a pretty obfuscated architecture compared to other compilers
With obfuscated you mean modular, flexible, powerful, well-structured and documented, right?
Or just because you cannot grasp something, then it is obfuscated?
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many of the architectural limitations in GCC
Would you care to refer to some, or you just mean it is not yet as fast to compile MS-W32 games as you wished?
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it is portable, which is not always the best thing to do amongst compilers.
Why not? Why optimise to one platform only, and then see all the work down the drain? No platform is eternal, and sure enought RMS learned his lesson when he had to migrate from ITS to POSIX.
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Do you plan on holding that over BSD's head forever and ever and ever?
Should not I? Unmodified BSD licensing is incompatible with GNU GPL, and actually impractical for commercial software that needs to be advertised. I have nothing against fixed BSD licenses, other than being open to hoarding. I know some authors prefer it like that, but I lament it.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. There is still a Microsoft bigot here.
Seriously, I am a frustrated GNU Hurd zealot, not an IBM OS/2 zealot. My brother loved OS/2, I only found it interesting. But sure it is much better technology than MS-WNT.
Actually MS stabbed IBM in the back by breaking the agreement (MS-W16 never to get 32 bits or a DOS virtual machine, OS/2 forever) without warning by launching MS-W3.1. This effectively killed OS/2 and made going from OS/2 3.0 NT to MS-WNT a no-brainer for MS.
You mean IBM quality, not speed. OS/2 development speed wasn't so bad; in fact, they decided to go for a command-line only, i286 version initially in order to ship early.
The real problem is that MS wanted to push forward the stupid MS Win16 API inherited from MS Windows 1.0 for the IBM-PC/XT, and IBM knew it was garbage. Also MS realised it could get more money by selling a product without any interoperability or standardisation, while IBM would have made it interoperable, documented and stable -- as they still do with the current IBM OS/2.
Actually there is more to the PC than being CMOS, like a popular, well-understood architecture that can run GNU/Linux -- AFAIK GNU/Linux S/390 still need VM and proprietary drivers to run. Not to mention being able to have control on your own instead of relying always on IT. OTOH, I am an advocate of POSIX hosts and X terminals, so this actually goes against the PC.
Also, remember not all PCs run inefficient x86 or IPF processors. PowerPCs and ARMs won't need cooling anytime soon, probably never.
Good point, bad example. At the time this was official government policy in all the World, including US, Europe, Soviet Union and Latin America, as a means to counter the spread of Islamic revolution from Iran.
BTW the only weapons of mass destruction Saddam Hussein did use in warfare was gas, and he can hardly be blamed for it as Iran did too. In fact, the well-known gas bombing of Kurd villages seem to have been done by mistake by Iran during a big battle, not as genocide by Iraq.
I still think he should be deposed.
MS has not had a real profit since 1.995, as Bill Parish has shown.
When you say networking, you mean LAN. When he says it, he means Internet. MS has beaten Novell in the LAN, but is beaten by free software in the Net.
Novell was a, not the, LAN pioneer, but not networking pioneer. ARPANet and other networking existed much before Novell.
.Net is still PC-centric. Despite Rotor and mono, it is still MS-centric, and that means PC-centric. See, this is the guy behing Rotor, and even him sees it. .Net is still built around proprietarisation -- AKA decommoditisation -- either by non-documentation a la AD Kerberos or by patents & copyrights.
XML is text markup, instrumental as it is to the human interface called Web. SOAP and WDDI are higly contentious, and IMNSHO are the wrong answer to the wrong question. They are mostly pigbacking on HTTP to bypass some inconveniences in RPCs, CORBA, distributed computing -- the problem is that mostly this are inherent issues, and bypassing them will only make things worse in the long run.
See, you talk about Web services. The problem is, the Web is just a human interface. Services are data and communications: we need databases with shared, agreed-upon relational schemas, and standard protocols. The human interface is orthogonal to that. Forcing protocols, formats and a mindset honed on Web onto services is bound to failure IMNSHO.
And even if all these protocols and formats eventually succeed, MS will still decommoditise them, and effectively isolate itself from free software, until it gets critical mass to eventually make MS irrelevant.
So yes, MS (and others) is paying attention to the Net. But it is getting it wrong.
Which was basically created to dumb down the much older, more capable SGML. So what?
Invented? Come on, MAPI is just a interface. You cannot invent an interface, any more than you invent a book. You craft, write, create it, but not invent -- no matter what the USNA patents system seems to think. And MAPI was not an unanimity, having (arguably better) competitors that would have given us a more open, level playing field.
Anyway, what has MAPI to do with all this? It is just a mail API. Never contributed to make MS less closed.
The ISP has repeatedly fallen short of its goals, and I still remember they trying to make it bigger than the Net when it was just another online service. Still has a bad taste in the mouth from those times. Hotmail was bought outside, and is still closed: no IMAP, no POP, vulnerabilities, all that. So what?
Which they bought elsewhere, and the effectively stole from its vendor.
See?
The quality and usefullness of MS Office 11 XML DTDs or schemas remain to be seen. If History is any good as a guide...
...because this would kill it, or at least its openness.
Not surprisingly, this is the part where failure would be most painful to users and companies alike. But for the rest, only the client they have in their hands, and even there they have free software as a potential competitor. All the rest is still up to grabs.
A lousy one, on which they are loosing loads of money they robbed from retirement plans and such thru creative accounting...
With resounding failure, as the BMW series 7 issues make patently clear.
Niche is a relative concept. One can argue that computing is too big to be defined monolithically, and that desktop computing for Apple or Internet servers for free software are hardly niches.
But Apple, thriving? They are hardly living, but surviving.
Can't, because the Watcom license carries restrictions that aren't present in BSDL. Remember, "relicensing" isn't relicensing in fact, it is just adding restrictions. You can't remove a license and replace with another.
Sorry, I just misread you. The effect is the same, but not from that cause.
390 is a number. It can designate a class of machines, the S/390, which is virtualisable hardware. And it designates its main OS, OS/390, that can run on virtual machines. These are managed by another OS, the VM/OS.
He never said S/390 or OS/390 were recent, even if the monikers really are. He said that their success in middle-range is recent, which is true due to only recently S/390 machines prices being brought down enough from their former big-iron heights.
While I agree with you, I do think they should be allowed, and even invited. Only that their participation should be clearly labelled Contrarian View, just to prevent confusion.
From the article:
Any references?
You are kidding, right? The book is ridiculous, espousing a naïve Scientificism that had already been discredited some twenty to thirty years before in CS Lewis' Space Trilogy, especially the first and the final ones, Out of the Silent Planet and That Hideous Strength. The only reason the movie looks better is being amazingly beautiful and not saying much.
You are kidding, right?
The US has been a place were educational levels were relatively low. It was not so when education was not mandatory, then US churches did a better job on literacy then their European equivalents. But since mandatory education became the norm, the average European and Far Eastern school is much better the their US equivalents. Granted, Ivy League universities and the schools leading up to them are top-notch, but today they are just mostly forming well-educated crooks because the supreme value for US people is money.
That the space program gave average education in the US a boost is a myth. Only some good schools were needed to that. What really gave some improvement was the Cold War comparisions with what was reported (but not necessarily in truth) of the USSR schooling standards, and racial integration. Now the US compares itself to no one, thinks it is better because it houses MS & Intel to mention only two of the biggest pigopolies in the World, and racial integration has taken an ugly turn with quotas perverting the goals of education.
Anyway the Sputnik was a crisis. You can't use a crisis to drive a nation over so many decades. To do that you need shared belief in virtues and values, and good ones at that. Only God can give you that, and He doesn't just because you want a challenge to be the first. He makes you want either Himself or at least Truth or Salvation, or something the like.
The big beef I have is when good funcionality is broken. Like styles & stylesheets that worked in MS Word before version 6, but were substituted by styles & templates that are simply too painful now.
Relicensing actually means adding restrictions. So one can take the modified BSD license and relicense it under the GNU GPL, but the same is not true for the original BSD license.
The FSF enlightens ye!
Yes, but code licensed under it is still floating around.
References?
Not only. I do not care so much for 64 bits in my desktop, for example, but appreciate being able to use a more efficient RISC processor. It helps that when I need 64 bits the migration path will be straightforward.
Precisely. Why use an ugly hack instead of the real thing?
Such as gcc, for example? There is more than one company making good money for many years now selling and supporting it.
On which platform? Watcom may be fast, but it cannot compile for embedded platforms, nor for big iron. Now what is easier, to speed up gcc or go generalise Watcom?
See how many years it has been in existence, with so many front-ends, on so many platforms, targetting so many others, maintained and improved by so many people. Watcom could not even be released as was.
No. Much better if Doom is made standards-compliant. BTW it probably is already, or would not be available in so many platforms.
Why is so much reporting and reviewing done if you think everyone is supposed to see and touch before reflecting?
You seem to from the whatever is, is good school. I am for the common good.
Not everyone is a coder.
Yes, always under copyleft so it remains always free.
It is about denying some people, namely hoarders, unfair advantages over users and authors.
I dislike first the licensing, and second the me-too, obsoleteness.
Where we have quite good compilers that could use additional developers and testers instead of duplication of effort. BTW, will they port it to PowerPC as well? That is what I use.
Yes. But then why it is not commercially viable? Would it not be because users refuse to pay for it? There are quite some people willing to pay for gcc, there are even companies set around selling and supporting it.
Yet many still use the unmodified rather than the fixed BSD license. Some do not even have a choice, because forked before the clause was removed.
Not so. Yet the world would be a nicer place as I see it. Feel free to differ.
That is just your over-sensitiveness.
With obfuscated you mean modular, flexible, powerful, well-structured and documented, right?
Or just because you cannot grasp something, then it is obfuscated?
Would you care to refer to some, or you just mean it is not yet as fast to compile MS-W32 games as you wished?
Why not? Why optimise to one platform only, and then see all the work down the drain? No platform is eternal, and sure enought RMS learned his lesson when he had to migrate from ITS to POSIX.
Is that good? I would not say so.
Anyway, IDEs and porting Unix, or rather POSIX *not* UNIX, applications are orthogonal.
Should not I? Unmodified BSD licensing is incompatible with GNU GPL, and actually impractical for commercial software that needs to be advertised. I have nothing against fixed BSD licenses, other than being open to hoarding. I know some authors prefer it like that, but I lament it.