"(In order to use.NET you have to run Win2K servers)"
Bzzzzt! Wrong answer.
But we have some lovely parting gifts for you at the receptionists desk.
.Net is many things, but one major aspect of it is cross-platform interoperability through SOAP and other mechanisms.
It really amazes me the number of people who are so blinded by their hatred for Microsoft that they are unwilling or rather unable to admit when the company has a really good idea.
They would have encouraged Cowpland to stay on as CEO and just let the company lay like a floundering tuna.
I doubt Microsoft cares too much about WordPerfect, it hasn't been a very popular product since before Windows.
Honestly, I don't see what Microsoft see's in Corel. Why would you bail out a company you intended to crush when they were doing such a good job at imploding by themselves?
The only thing I see is the CorelDraw and other creative apps.
Huh? Microsoft's support is fantastic and it's roughly the same price as what RedHat has to offer.
But yes, a corporation generally spends more and expects greater support for software. A support contract for say Oracle might be $150,000/year and for that you get 24 hour access to an engineer.
Actually Oracle does it in a rather interesting way, since they have offices world wide, if you call at 2am midwest time you may very well be connected to someone in the United Kingdom.
The issue is far more complicated than what either of you make it out to be.
These benchmarks: What exactly are they measuring? No information is given about the hardware other than it is a 50 Mhz system.
My suspicion is it's a Sparc 10 with an SM50 processor card?
If so, the benchmarks aren't measuring 64-bit optimizations that exist in either Solaris or Linux. Perhaps on the UltraSparc 10 this other person has, Solaris does run better.
The benchmarks do clearly show that disk access is faster under Solaris than Linux. This is a very important aspect of total system performance.
What about dual-processor performance? It's relatively easy to add an extra SM50 processor to that Sparcstation 10. How does Linux fare compared to Solaris in that capacity?
I also read the comments on why linux is faster than Solaris. I wouldn't be too sure of that either, over the years the Linux kernel has become more and more complex and has adapted a lot of the same overhead that exists in commercial OS to solve the same problems.
Over time, who is to say that they won't look the same just Linux taking the long road to get to the same point?
Re:Not really true these days...
on
KBasic
·
· Score: 2
Visual BASIC suffers from much the same problem as Java. For certain tasks they both are very well purposed, but they are not general purpose languages.
They've both been targetted towards RAD for database applications. As such they are good for retrieving data munching on it for a bit and then displaying it to the user to do something with.
However neither is going to be used to write a new Operating System with.
Part of the whole concept of.NET is to leverage the strengths of the different languages together.
Not really true these days...
on
KBasic
·
· Score: 3
BASIC has evolved well beyond what it first was. It has taken on aspects of other languages.
At the time Dijkstra wrote his observation BASIC didn't support user defined functions, used line numbers, and a whole lot of other ancient problems.
Visual BASIC today competes successfully against Java and has 2-3 times as many developers using it in complex projects well over 20 lines of code.
Actually when NT 4.0 was first released back in 1996, the company I was at was deploying it to 486 computers.
What we had was a PS/2 Model 77 with a 486DX2/66. They currently ran OS/2 Warp on 16 Megs of RAM and a 200 meg HD(with Apps on network), but we were upgrading to 32M and a 1 Gig HD(with Apps local).
They actually ran OK. Not great, but OK. The SCSI harddrives certainly helped.
Most companies when they first migrated to NT4 did so on computers with 32M of RAM, usually P133 machines.
But yes, if you look at the computers you can buy today and how cheap they are, it doesn't make sense to try to run something that old and slow.
But back in '96/'97 computers were cheaper, but sitll not real cheap. A new P133 desktop with 32M of Ram, 1 gig drive, 15" monitor was around $2500. So there was a move to economize on what you had versus buying new.
I don't agree at all. You make it sound like iOpener built their equipment to be of any interest to geeks.
They built them to be of interest to people who basically wanted a better WebTV, i.e. something which came with a high resolution screen and would work with a wider variety of internet sites.
That segment of society isn't at all interested in making it run something else, they just want easy to use.
The reason why these became appealing to geeks was only because nobody else has been selling a reasonably priced small computer with a LCD display like this. It's the only one available, therefore people want to find out how to make it work for them.
Was it iOpener's fault that they hadn't realized the appeal to other people? Perhaps.
But I don't think that makes their business plan invalid. If this is true, then WebTV's business plan is bad as well despite 4 million+ users.
Now maybe they should have realized the opportunities they would have to sell this hardware outside the framework of their ISP service.
For instance, if they had formulated a contract, sort of like the internet appliance from Compaq whereby the cost of hardware is $500, but if you sign up for 3 years of their internet service you get a $400 rebate, they would have been in a better position and we'd likely have seen fewer complaints.
In all fairness, Microsoft has never sued anyone for stealing the "look and feel" of their software. That hasn't stopped others from suing them over that issue, however.
I don't think Microsoft agrees with that concept considering the number of times they've taken the look and feel of a competitors product.
What Bill Gates was irate about was not that someone had made a piece of software that operated similarly to his, but that someone had actually taken exactly what he had created and gave it away.
Accuse Gates of what you will, but at least be accurate.
AtariBASIC was bad, as was Northstar BASIC you mention, actually I want to call it Zbasic which might be what the.COM file was called on my floppy.
I was most familiar with MS-BASIC version 5.21 which came bundled with my father's Morrow MD-2 back in 1982. Similar versions also shipped with the Osborne and Kaypro as I recall.
Now if you are thinking of Microsoft BASIC as being similar to that which shipped with the Apple as Applesoft, or the one in the Commodore PET, I can understand your comments.
I have never seen a SOL-20, or this extended cassette BASIC, but you are in luck... The manual is online:
http://www.thebattles.net/sol20/extcassbasic.pdf
Looking it over it really seems to be very close to the Microsoft BASIC I remember. String and file handling isn't as advanced as I recall, but the ability to work with matrices is rather nice.
I don't see exactly what you mean by multi-line user-defined functions, all that is implemented was GOSUB which was available in MS-BASIC 5.21.
Certainly impressive for 1977, but I think I'd be hard pressed to backup the statement that it took 10 years for Microsoft to get that far, and ten times as much memory doing it.
MS-BASIC 5.21 ran on a machine with 64K of RAM. 57K was available after loading CP/M 2.2, and one had about 35K after loading up MS-BASIC, 39K free if you didn't load the Random access file support.
But by 1982 floppy drives were common place, which allowed for techniques such as random access files, so it's understandable it used a few more K.
I think you are thinking of QuickBASIC as being 10 years later and 10 times the memory. But there were many generations of MS-BASIC between 1977 and QuickBASIC.
Kevin Reichard posts a number of links to polls on various ZDNet, MSNBC, CNN websites encouraging readers of linuxtoday to go out and stuff the ballot box.
Then on one of the polls their is a movement by some other group of Windows users to go out and stuff the ballot box in return.
And Linux Today accuses Microsoft of cheating?
I don't get it.
Maybe if it'd been a fair and realistic poll, but the Linuxtoday editors pretty much destroyed that when they decided to encourage stuffing the ballot box.
They sad thing is Kevin Reichard probably doesn't even realize the harm he is doing to the Linux community by encouraging online poll stuffing.
I suspect Kevin used to be a member of Team OS/2.:(
Reading the article, they also don't appear to be talking about things you might use every day, but more researc software. Stuff like distributed computing, etc.
Actualy most of the report is pretty much fluff regurgitated from Raymond's writings.:(
If you asked RMS to help you with a panel on Open Source he'd go off on a tirade about how he doesn't support Open Source; he supports Free Software.
Actually if he was involved, I suspect most of the other panelists would eventually go out into the hallway and start beating their heads against the concrete walls hoping that it would just all go away.
So? Put a clause in your licenses that says if the software you created is used commercially they need to come talk to you.
Personally if I write a piece of software, and I want to give it away to others, I'll use the BSD license. If someone else takes it and goes off and does something new with it without releasing the source?
So what... If their changes are that signifigant well maybe they deserve to profit from it. If they are not, then someone can just modify my existing source with similar changes and release it for free.
Why get so bent out of shape? They can't take away what I've already given away for free.
Slashdot Mirror
"(In order to use .NET you have to run Win2K servers)"
Bzzzzt! Wrong answer.
But we have some lovely parting gifts for you at the receptionists desk.
.Net is many things, but one major aspect of it is cross-platform interoperability through SOAP and other mechanisms.
It really amazes me the number of people who are so blinded by their hatred for Microsoft that they are unwilling or rather unable to admit when the company has a really good idea.
They would have encouraged Cowpland to stay on as CEO and just let the company lay like a floundering tuna.
I doubt Microsoft cares too much about WordPerfect, it hasn't been a very popular product since before Windows.
Honestly, I don't see what Microsoft see's in Corel. Why would you bail out a company you intended to crush when they were doing such a good job at imploding by themselves?
The only thing I see is the CorelDraw and other creative apps.
Huh? Microsoft's support is fantastic and it's roughly the same price as what RedHat has to offer.
But yes, a corporation generally spends more and expects greater support for software. A support contract for say Oracle might be $150,000/year and for that you get 24 hour access to an engineer.
Actually Oracle does it in a rather interesting way, since they have offices world wide, if you call at 2am midwest time you may very well be connected to someone in the United Kingdom.
What you meant to say was "Where would GNU/Linux be without GCC and GNU Libc?"
The issue is far more complicated than what either of you make it out to be.
These benchmarks: What exactly are they measuring? No information is given about the hardware other than it is a 50 Mhz system.
My suspicion is it's a Sparc 10 with an SM50 processor card?
If so, the benchmarks aren't measuring 64-bit optimizations that exist in either Solaris or Linux. Perhaps on the UltraSparc 10 this other person has, Solaris does run better.
The benchmarks do clearly show that disk access is faster under Solaris than Linux. This is a very important aspect of total system performance.
What about dual-processor performance? It's relatively easy to add an extra SM50 processor to that Sparcstation 10. How does Linux fare compared to Solaris in that capacity?
I also read the comments on why linux is faster than Solaris. I wouldn't be too sure of that either, over the years the Linux kernel has become more and more complex and has adapted a lot of the same overhead that exists in commercial OS to solve the same problems.
Over time, who is to say that they won't look the same just Linux taking the long road to get to the same point?
Visual BASIC suffers from much the same problem as Java. For certain tasks they both are very well purposed, but they are not general purpose languages.
.NET is to leverage the strengths of the different languages together.
They've both been targetted towards RAD for database applications. As such they are good for retrieving data munching on it for a bit and then displaying it to the user to do something with.
However neither is going to be used to write a new Operating System with.
Part of the whole concept of
BASIC has evolved well beyond what it first was. It has taken on aspects of other languages.
At the time Dijkstra wrote his observation BASIC didn't support user defined functions, used line numbers, and a whole lot of other ancient problems.
Visual BASIC today competes successfully against Java and has 2-3 times as many developers using it in complex projects well over 20 lines of code.
I just took a look at ebay, and someone is apparently willing to pay at least $380.66 for Windows.
Someone selling Windows 1.0 on Ebay
And it's been out on the www.sysinternals.com website for about 3-4 years...
The Linux driver is nothing new, and Microsoft didn't sue the sysinternals guys over this.
Methinks the Linux authors did something else besides reverse engineer a solution.
Huh? The Appeals court is one of the checks and balances.
What positive traits can we say about Chris DiBona's insight:
- It brings in ad hits to slashdot.org
Otherwise is reeks of technical ineptitude, an unfortunately uncommon trait amongst slashdot editors.
Actually when NT 4.0 was first released back in 1996, the company I was at was deploying it to 486 computers.
What we had was a PS/2 Model 77 with a 486DX2/66. They currently ran OS/2 Warp on 16 Megs of RAM and a 200 meg HD(with Apps on network), but we were upgrading to 32M and a 1 Gig HD(with Apps local).
They actually ran OK. Not great, but OK. The SCSI harddrives certainly helped.
Most companies when they first migrated to NT4 did so on computers with 32M of RAM, usually P133 machines.
But yes, if you look at the computers you can buy today and how cheap they are, it doesn't make sense to try to run something that old and slow.
But back in '96/'97 computers were cheaper, but sitll not real cheap. A new P133 desktop with 32M of Ram, 1 gig drive, 15" monitor was around $2500. So there was a move to economize on what you had versus buying new.
I refuse to be a part of this nonsense.
That "failed" conversion to Windows 2000 seems to be working pretty well for them.
I don't agree at all. You make it sound like iOpener built their equipment to be of any interest to geeks.
They built them to be of interest to people who basically wanted a better WebTV, i.e. something which came with a high resolution screen and would work with a wider variety of internet sites.
That segment of society isn't at all interested in making it run something else, they just want easy to use.
The reason why these became appealing to geeks was only because nobody else has been selling a reasonably priced small computer with a LCD display like this. It's the only one available, therefore people want to find out how to make it work for them.
Was it iOpener's fault that they hadn't realized the appeal to other people? Perhaps.
But I don't think that makes their business plan invalid. If this is true, then WebTV's business plan is bad as well despite 4 million+ users.
Now maybe they should have realized the opportunities they would have to sell this hardware outside the framework of their ISP service.
For instance, if they had formulated a contract, sort of like the internet appliance from Compaq whereby the cost of hardware is $500, but if you sign up for 3 years of their internet service you get a $400 rebate, they would have been in a better position and we'd likely have seen fewer complaints.
In all fairness, Microsoft has never sued anyone for stealing the "look and feel" of their software. That hasn't stopped others from suing them over that issue, however.
I don't think Microsoft agrees with that concept considering the number of times they've taken the look and feel of a competitors product.
What Bill Gates was irate about was not that someone had made a piece of software that operated similarly to his, but that someone had actually taken exactly what he had created and gave it away.
Accuse Gates of what you will, but at least be accurate.
AtariBASIC was bad, as was Northstar BASIC you mention, actually I want to call it Zbasic which might be what the .COM file was called on my floppy.
f
I was most familiar with MS-BASIC version 5.21 which came bundled with my father's Morrow MD-2 back in 1982. Similar versions also shipped with the Osborne and Kaypro as I recall.
Now if you are thinking of Microsoft BASIC as being similar to that which shipped with the Apple as Applesoft, or the one in the Commodore PET, I can understand your comments.
I have never seen a SOL-20, or this extended cassette BASIC, but you are in luck... The manual is online:
http://www.thebattles.net/sol20/extcassbasic.pd
Looking it over it really seems to be very close to the Microsoft BASIC I remember. String and file handling isn't as advanced as I recall, but the ability to work with matrices is rather nice.
I don't see exactly what you mean by multi-line user-defined functions, all that is implemented was GOSUB which was available in MS-BASIC 5.21.
Certainly impressive for 1977, but I think I'd be hard pressed to backup the statement that it took 10 years for Microsoft to get that far, and ten times as much memory doing it.
MS-BASIC 5.21 ran on a machine with 64K of RAM. 57K was available after loading CP/M 2.2, and one had about 35K after loading up MS-BASIC, 39K free if you didn't load the Random access file support.
But by 1982 floppy drives were common place, which allowed for techniques such as random access files, so it's understandable it used a few more K.
I think you are thinking of QuickBASIC as being 10 years later and 10 times the memory. But there were many generations of MS-BASIC between 1977 and QuickBASIC.
Don't know much about the content of this kiru5hin site, but...
The front web page sure looks good, a lot nicer than the dated slashdot.org look.
Kevin Reichard posts a number of links to polls on various ZDNet, MSNBC, CNN websites encouraging readers of linuxtoday to go out and stuff the ballot box.
:(
Then on one of the polls their is a movement by some other group of Windows users to go out and stuff the ballot box in return.
And Linux Today accuses Microsoft of cheating?
I don't get it.
Maybe if it'd been a fair and realistic poll, but the Linuxtoday editors pretty much destroyed that when they decided to encourage stuffing the ballot box.
They sad thing is Kevin Reichard probably doesn't even realize the harm he is doing to the Linux community by encouraging online poll stuffing.
I suspect Kevin used to be a member of Team OS/2.
Reading the article, they also don't appear to be talking about things you might use every day, but more researc software. Stuff like distributed computing, etc.
:(
Actualy most of the report is pretty much fluff regurgitated from Raymond's writings.
If you asked RMS to help you with a panel on Open Source he'd go off on a tirade about how he doesn't support Open Source; he supports Free Software.
Actually if he was involved, I suspect most of the other panelists would eventually go out into the hallway and start beating their heads against the concrete walls hoping that it would just all go away.
So? Put a clause in your licenses that says if the software you created is used commercially they need to come talk to you.
Personally if I write a piece of software, and I want to give it away to others, I'll use the BSD license. If someone else takes it and goes off and does something new with it without releasing the source?
So what... If their changes are that signifigant well maybe they deserve to profit from it. If they are not, then someone can just modify my existing source with similar changes and release it for free.
Why get so bent out of shape? They can't take away what I've already given away for free.
I think the GPL is about bitterness.
Light up the GNU Signal!
Get Richard Stallman on the GNU Phone!
He's sure to want to write an article demanding that Sun beg forgiveness for their misdeads.
"Thanks Uncle FCC. "
It wasn't the FCC who forced this decision to be made...
Your choice... $1500, or an UltraSparc 5 :)