Doesn't matter WHERE, you're going to get dumped on by some company- there's non-tech sector companies where I just will not do business with unless there's no other options. Tom Thumb (a division of Safeway down in Texas) is one such company. Someone managed to steal my checkbook and went on a 5k shopping spree with forged checks. Some of them landed in a Tom Thumb 10 miles away from my then apartment for $400 total. I presented affadavits to the effect that these were not my checks and had proof thereof sent to them and several other locations- they insisted (and I suspect that they still do) that I wrote those checks and will not accept a check from me because they will not pull me from their bad check database.
Doesn't that qualify as jerking me around? There's others, but you get the idea. Most small businesses usually operate on the up and up, but as you get bigger and bigger, the company gets further and further removed from the customer and keeps insisting on "the customer being first" but doing everything they can to save those dollars for absoulte maximum return on their investment- including things that put the customer and/or employees (which is worse- because they're going to put your customer in that same place because they're looking out for #1...) dead last.
Small flaws in the polymer coating or in the recordable layer (be they polymers (in the case of CD-R's) or sputtered metal films (in the case of CD-RW's)) will cause bit errors. How do they compensate for/know about the errors? Error correction placed into the stream written out to the disk. It'd be little to no different with holographic storage.
Really now... Do you know anything of the dynamics of SmallTalk?
It's a late binding language, meaning that all operations on methods, etc. are determined at runtime. Better get more muscle to push the app.
It's, generally speaking, an interpreted language- you're running on a VM, not unlike a JVM in almost all cases of a SmallTalk runtime environment. Better get even more muscle to push that app.
It's garbage collected, meaning it's going to do evil things to you when you're trying to do something time critical and it decides to do garbage collection (which you don't have control over- nor does the paradigm of SmallTalk allow for that.). Better hope garbage collection can be handled in another thread and you've a SMP machine to use for your app.
For some things, SmallTalk is great. For things like word processors, etc. it's a blessing.
For many systems tasks such as UI's (Not app UI, something more like X (Unix) or GDI (Windows) or OSes, it's a poor fit. There's other good fits and bad fits- and making SmallTalk change to fit the ill-fitting things better, you lose much of the benefits that the language brought to the table and you might as well have been doing the thing in C/C++/ObjectPascal/ADA95/etc.
As for truly reusable classes, SmallTalk doesn't make it magically so. It requires skill, even in SmallTalk to do that.
That would probably be Java then because it's object model is largely SmallTalk's and the syntax, etc. is C-ish.
Strictly speaking, there's not going to be one ideal language.
FORTH
ADA (95, not 83...)
SmallTalk
Java
C
C++
Object Pascal
Oberon
Modula2/Modula3
Each of the above mentioned solve problems. Some do a better job of dealing with solving a given problem than do others. Each of the above can be used for doing much of anything in computer science. But to use Java for an OS, well, there's raftloads in that list that would be better suited. SmallTalk is good for high-level stuff; but to try and make a game in either SmallTalk or Java would be either great or painful depending on the game (Quake III or UT in Java? Nice try, but no cigar...)
The problem is people trying to find that magic bullet that will let them do anything with peak efficiency (as it is hard to try to remember past 2 languages, let alone something like 17 of them...)- there is none. There never really will be one (because there's always some better way of expressing oneself for a given set of "expressing oneself"- math, for example doesn't do good for expressing a novel, but it does do pretty good at expressing many Physics concepts.)
It's not as simple as that. You can have partially overlapped polygons amongst other things. Totally occluded polys can be culled without overdraw- partially occluded ones need some sort of clipping/culling done in one way or another to render right (Or you end up with gaps in the objects, etc.). Usually what is applied is a "painter's algorithm" which determines which order in space the polys are and paints them in order on the screen. That translates into overdraw. Some engines strive to minimize overdraw (such as Quake III) and others (such as Serious Sam) don't, letting the card deal with the problem. This is why you see such a disparity with Serious Sam logging such high scores for the Kyro II and the Kyro weighing in as a mid-range card- Croteam's apparently not concerning themselves as much about partially occluded polys and as such the Kyro's not rendering all the excess, non-visible info to the display memory like the GeForce and Radeon do.
Jury's still out on this design, but it looks promising to say the least. There's several developers trying to sweet-talk STMicroelectronics or Imagination out of register info to make Linux drivers right now because of the potential of the cards.
I've been noticing over the years a slow, steady decline in the quality of the Journalistic Endeavor. Slipshod reporting, etc. is not solely in the New Media's baliwick. This is not to tar the entire profession, but merely to point out that there's been raftloads of BS printed online and off that's not been thought out, researched, etc.
Once you know about the nature of the copy "scrambling" signal, you can usually scrub it out (because it HAD to be largely undetectable to begin with to be usable in this sort of context...)- and there seems to be a large number of Macrovision strippers on the market.
What makes you think that anything that would be largely inaudible to the human ear would be any different?
In the examples you gave, the applications do all of that work for the user. It's not the "filesystem" that does it. Ever looked at the memory management setup on any PDA? They all have the distinction of files that are copied on or off the machine. The apps don't make that distinction unless they have to.
Just because Linux is being used doesn't just magically prevent that- all the Linux PDA's I've seen so far have a mix of apps, some of them the traditional ones, some of them not. The ones that are the traditional way of things on a PDA don't have the distinction of "files". The ones that are a little more sophisticated tend to work as their paradigm allows for files or not. Some do, some don't. I'm sure that the concept of MP3's does bring in some semblence of files, etc.
There's multiple pieces to a Linux distribution, but Linux is nothing more than a Kernel to run other applications on. As a Kernel, it's not much different in size to something like PalmOS or EPOC. If you don't realize that there'd be "PDA" type apps instead of server or desktop apps running on the PDA, you're more clueless than most.
Bluntly speaking, they don't happen to be that well known. If someone doesn't know about a given restaurant, they're not going to be a patron of it now are they? Same goes for any other business.
"$103M. That's One Hundred Three Million Dollars. "A million here, a million there; pretty soon, you're talking real money." Fiddling small change, uh huh."
Compared to the trillion or so that they spend each year 103 mil is chump-change. Compared to our measly incomes, on the other hand, it's something.
8-bit color translates into a maximum of 256 possible colors at any one time. That will give you a playable game, but it's not going to look very photorealistic. Doing twisted things to exceed that on a display will make the hardware or software doing that convoluted and will negate any possible advantages to working with one byte pixels.
Furthermore, 8-bit color doesn't mix like 32-bit color. You have to go through the motions of doing a color mix on each of the RGBA values on the palette entries and then re-map the resultant color to a (hopefully) matching color in the palette. It's actually SLOWER to do it that way. The only reason why we did 8-bit color in the first place was that it was cheaper back then to do it that way- not because it was superior in any way to anything else.
There's this little ABI that Microsoft published, called Win32- it was to this that he was referring to, not the DirectX ABI, that largely works only on the Win95/98/Me platform line.
Applications written to the Win32 layer are supposed to work- no matter what. It's this ABI that Office 95/98/2k were written- and they install the same set of binaries for all Windows platforms out right now. This means that applications written to the Win32 ABI should work fine on Win95/98/Me as well as WinNT/2k/XP- no matter what (It's what MS has been saying all this time...).
You know what? They DON'T. Especially if you're dealing with the GDI layer- that's toast (even though it's all part of the ABI...). There's bizarre behaviors that you've got to find out for yourself (because they're not even documented in the MSDN CD sets or anywhere else...) that cause a nightmare for supporting things like document imaging, etc. on Windows platforms. I know I did that for approximately 3 years at a previous job where I wrote OCXes, then ActiveX components to allow VB and other development platforms do document imaging on Windows more easily.
RedHat seems to be making money (Just so very close to turning an actual profit per share... If they weren't making money on it, they'd not be in that position). Others seem to make money off of it- IBM, for example.
You just can't make money the way Corel attempted to do it.
They screwed up bigtime. Rather than making solid apps for Linux, they attempted to embrace and extend it- tried to offer an "end-to-end" solution in a position where they weren't ready to provide it. (And on reflection, I don't think they could have ever really pulled it off- it'd take a company with the resources of IBM or HP to pull it off if at all.)
They wasted time and money on NetWinder (which is an amazing piece of hardware) by designing it and then going nowhere with it. Dumb move.
They wasted time and money doing a Linux distribution on their own when they could have partnered with another distribution vendor and worked together. It's now been revealed why they wasted that energy- they wanted total control of it all.
They spent time and money that could have been spent making cross-platform versions or slightly differing, but functionality complete of their applications (a' la WordPerfect 8 for Unix) doing WINE upgrades so that they could be lazy and migrate the Windows versions over. While the benefits to WINE have been immense, the results on their apps have been lackluster. The applications require quite a bit more muscle than other contemporary comparable applications under Linux.
Do you really think they've got a solid grasp on things as they are? They've been grasping at straws for years now, since they lost their focus on things and started buying up WordPerfect, etc. I mean, look at all the other spectacular failed business decisions (that were debatable at best) such as that all-Java version of their office suite (when Java really wasn't ready for that sort of thing!). They've not a clue. Apparently haven't had one for a while from the looks of things from this end.
TransCore's got this nifty little application that manages access control and billing for parking and airport ground transportation management. System was redesigned from the ground up to run on nearly any server platform, nearly any embedded platform.
As long as ACE/TAO supports it and the components have a TCP/IP connection to the other devices it'll largely compile and run. I know- I designed the beast.
There's two piece parts to the embedded portions system, a transaction processing engine and a transaction generation/lane hardware control engine. The transaction engine can reside on any server that has local or network ODBC/CLI access. The lane control portion has to control several digital I/O points and one RFID device that detects TransCore's vehicular transponder tag.
The NT units at one of the current installations at the DFW International Airport are capricious beasts and periodically need restarting (about once every two or so weeks...). Resource leaks. Not with the app as best as we can tell- Purify told us that we had a clean bill of health, but an internal function in NT was leaking like a sieve. The Linux version is on an embedded machine out at the lanes there at DFW. It hasn't needed a reboot yet. Using Embedded NT would have added about $250-500 per lane to the cost of the embedded hardware version of the system. With Linux, I saved $2500 per lane over the older, centralized design. With Embedded NT, it would have been more like $500-1000 per lane cost savings combined with needing to spend much, much more time writing the device drivers for the embedded I/O on the single board computer we used.
Adapting to any situation's good- insisting on using truly unsuitable tools to do a job ends up being a cobbled up work at best and a botch job in most cases.
NT doesn't really HAVE a Journaling filesystem...
on
Linux Is Going Down
·
· Score: 2
Well, not in the sense of something like XFS or JFS.
I thought that W2K was robust and that they had the financial resources to be able to manage their own DNS. Says a lot for a company that's running their own ISP and claims that W2K's better than UNIX, don't you think?
It's a content control law. It allows the content providers the ability to control all aspects of the content, taking away your fair-use rights.
No more making copies of stuff to play in the car, keeping your originals safe at home- something you can do by law otherwise.
No more taping of shows to watch at a later time.
No more copying of pieces of the content for use within other things. You can't take a snippet or even a still from a movie to show in a review or a research paper- unless you've got permission from the content provider first.
No more control over the content that you produce- they're insisting on every recording device have anti-copy systems in place such that you can't copy even your own content that you've got rights to by law. No way to duplicate it either since the DMCA takes away all rights in that regard.
All of these things are rights that have been taken away by the DMCA and copy protection systems.
Stealing I've no problem with- unless it's something they're stealing from me...
I think you're going to find that most of them were taken in the center of metripolitan areas.
What's present all over those areas?
Concrete and Asphalt.
These absorb heat and slowly, but slowly release it.
Measured temperatures are on the average 3-7 degrees colder on the outskirts of the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex when compared with the inner cities or the measuring points at DFW International Airport, Love Field, or Meecham.
While I'm not saying they're wrong, I'm asking that they and everyone else happen to have more accurate data points before making statements.
Well, we know of the rumors. Yes, they're rumors- but Bill and Co's not stupid. Careless, sloppy, and arrogant they are- stupid they are not (consider that they've basically hoodwinked the world's populace into buying their barely functional eye-candy apps...).
However, having said this, while MacOS X happens to have Mach/BSD, the programming API's all Apple's doing and abstracts away most of the underlying OS. Succinctly put, in order for this to make fruit for MS on the Linux front, they'd need to license and make a version of the MacOS X layer for Linux or make GNUStep fill in the holes between it and the MacOS X developer API. Not likely to happen unless MS is desperate and hurting BADLY.
Since the app's a native MacOS X app, it's possible that GNUStep's a stepping stone for making an IE port (because MacOS X's developer API's are NeXTStep derivatives...) but I don't think it'll happen or that anyone will want it if it does happen- like someone said, MS has little care for standards except their own.
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Doesn't matter WHERE, you're going to get dumped on by some company- there's non-tech sector companies where I just will not do business with unless there's no other options. Tom Thumb (a division of Safeway down in Texas) is one such company. Someone managed to steal my checkbook and went on a 5k shopping spree with forged checks. Some of them landed in a Tom Thumb 10 miles away from my then apartment for $400 total. I presented affadavits to the effect that these were not my checks and had proof thereof sent to them and several other locations- they insisted (and I suspect that they still do) that I wrote those checks and will not accept a check from me because they will not pull me from their bad check database.
Doesn't that qualify as jerking me around? There's others, but you get the idea. Most small businesses usually operate on the up and up, but as you get bigger and bigger, the company gets further and further removed from the customer and keeps insisting on "the customer being first" but doing everything they can to save those dollars for absoulte maximum return on their investment- including things that put the customer and/or employees (which is worse- because they're going to put your customer in that same place because they're looking out for #1...) dead last.
Small flaws in the polymer coating or in the recordable layer (be they polymers (in the case of CD-R's) or sputtered metal films (in the case of CD-RW's)) will cause bit errors. How do they compensate for/know about the errors? Error correction placed into the stream written out to the disk. It'd be little to no different with holographic storage.
Really now... Do you know anything of the dynamics of SmallTalk?
It's a late binding language, meaning that all operations on methods, etc. are determined at runtime. Better get more muscle to push the app.
It's, generally speaking, an interpreted language- you're running on a VM, not unlike a JVM in almost all cases of a SmallTalk runtime environment. Better get even more muscle to push that app.
It's garbage collected, meaning it's going to do evil things to you when you're trying to do something time critical and it decides to do garbage collection (which you don't have control over- nor does the paradigm of SmallTalk allow for that.). Better hope garbage collection can be handled in another thread and you've a SMP machine to use for your app.
For some things, SmallTalk is great. For things like word processors, etc. it's a blessing.
For many systems tasks such as UI's (Not app UI, something more like X (Unix) or GDI (Windows) or OSes, it's a poor fit. There's other good fits and bad fits- and making SmallTalk change to fit the ill-fitting things better, you lose much of the benefits that the language brought to the table and you might as well have been doing the thing in C/C++/ObjectPascal/ADA95/etc.
As for truly reusable classes, SmallTalk doesn't make it magically so. It requires skill, even in SmallTalk to do that.
That would probably be Java then because it's object model is largely SmallTalk's and the syntax, etc. is C-ish. Strictly speaking, there's not going to be one ideal language. FORTH ADA (95, not 83...) SmallTalk Java C C++ Object Pascal Oberon Modula2/Modula3 Each of the above mentioned solve problems. Some do a better job of dealing with solving a given problem than do others. Each of the above can be used for doing much of anything in computer science. But to use Java for an OS, well, there's raftloads in that list that would be better suited. SmallTalk is good for high-level stuff; but to try and make a game in either SmallTalk or Java would be either great or painful depending on the game (Quake III or UT in Java? Nice try, but no cigar...) The problem is people trying to find that magic bullet that will let them do anything with peak efficiency (as it is hard to try to remember past 2 languages, let alone something like 17 of them...)- there is none. There never really will be one (because there's always some better way of expressing oneself for a given set of "expressing oneself"- math, for example doesn't do good for expressing a novel, but it does do pretty good at expressing many Physics concepts.)
It's not as simple as that. You can have partially overlapped polygons amongst other things. Totally occluded polys can be culled without overdraw- partially occluded ones need some sort of clipping/culling done in one way or another to render right (Or you end up with gaps in the objects, etc.). Usually what is applied is a "painter's algorithm" which determines which order in space the polys are and paints them in order on the screen. That translates into overdraw. Some engines strive to minimize overdraw (such as Quake III) and others (such as Serious Sam) don't, letting the card deal with the problem. This is why you see such a disparity with Serious Sam logging such high scores for the Kyro II and the Kyro weighing in as a mid-range card- Croteam's apparently not concerning themselves as much about partially occluded polys and as such the Kyro's not rendering all the excess, non-visible info to the display memory like the GeForce and Radeon do.
Jury's still out on this design, but it looks promising to say the least. There's several developers trying to sweet-talk STMicroelectronics or Imagination out of register info to make Linux drivers right now because of the potential of the cards.
I've been noticing over the years a slow, steady decline in the quality of the Journalistic Endeavor. Slipshod reporting, etc. is not solely in the New Media's baliwick. This is not to tar the entire profession, but merely to point out that there's been raftloads of BS printed online and off that's not been thought out, researched, etc.
Once you know about the nature of the copy "scrambling" signal, you can usually scrub it out (because it HAD to be largely undetectable to begin with to be usable in this sort of context...)- and there seems to be a large number of Macrovision strippers on the market.
What makes you think that anything that would be largely inaudible to the human ear would be any different?
In the examples you gave, the applications do all of that work for the user. It's not the "filesystem" that does it. Ever looked at the memory management setup on any PDA? They all have the distinction of files that are copied on or off the machine. The apps don't make that distinction unless they have to.
Just because Linux is being used doesn't just magically prevent that- all the Linux PDA's I've seen so far have a mix of apps, some of them the traditional ones, some of them not. The ones that are the traditional way of things on a PDA don't have the distinction of "files". The ones that are a little more sophisticated tend to work as their paradigm allows for files or not. Some do, some don't. I'm sure that the concept of MP3's does bring in some semblence of files, etc.
There's multiple pieces to a Linux distribution, but Linux is nothing more than a Kernel to run other applications on. As a Kernel, it's not much different in size to something like PalmOS or EPOC. If you don't realize that there'd be "PDA" type apps instead of server or desktop apps running on the PDA, you're more clueless than most.
Bluntly speaking, they don't happen to be that well known. If someone doesn't know about a given restaurant, they're not going to be a patron of it now are they? Same goes for any other business.
"$103M. That's One Hundred Three Million Dollars. "A million here, a million there; pretty soon, you're talking real money." Fiddling small change, uh huh."
Compared to the trillion or so that they spend each year 103 mil is chump-change. Compared to our measly incomes, on the other hand, it's something.
It may be that he has no option.
Let's look at this, shall we?
8-bit color translates into a maximum of 256 possible colors at any one time. That will give you a playable game, but it's not going to look very photorealistic. Doing twisted things to exceed that on a display will make the hardware or software doing that convoluted and will negate any possible advantages to working with one byte pixels.
Furthermore, 8-bit color doesn't mix like 32-bit color. You have to go through the motions of doing a color mix on each of the RGBA values on the palette entries and then re-map the resultant color to a (hopefully) matching color in the palette. It's actually SLOWER to do it that way. The only reason why we did 8-bit color in the first place was that it was cheaper back then to do it that way- not because it was superior in any way to anything else.
There's this little ABI that Microsoft published, called Win32- it was to this that he was referring to, not the DirectX ABI, that largely works only on the Win95/98/Me platform line.
Applications written to the Win32 layer are supposed to work- no matter what. It's this ABI that Office 95/98/2k were written- and they install the same set of binaries for all Windows platforms out right now. This means that applications written to the Win32 ABI should work fine on Win95/98/Me as well as WinNT/2k/XP- no matter what (It's what MS has been saying all this time...).
You know what? They DON'T. Especially if you're dealing with the GDI layer- that's toast (even though it's all part of the ABI...). There's bizarre behaviors that you've got to find out for yourself (because they're not even documented in the MSDN CD sets or anywhere else...) that cause a nightmare for supporting things like document imaging, etc. on Windows platforms. I know I did that for approximately 3 years at a previous job where I wrote OCXes, then ActiveX components to allow VB and other development platforms do document imaging on Windows more easily.
Oh, that's because everyone doesn't know about the better water (and it's NOT the one they're paying for...)- if they did, they'd be using it instead.
Insightful? Not really.
RedHat seems to be making money (Just so very close to turning an actual profit per share... If they weren't making money on it, they'd not be in that position). Others seem to make money off of it- IBM, for example.
You just can't make money the way Corel attempted to do it.
They screwed up bigtime. Rather than making solid apps for Linux, they attempted to embrace and extend it- tried to offer an "end-to-end" solution in a position where they weren't ready to provide it. (And on reflection, I don't think they could have ever really pulled it off- it'd take a company with the resources of IBM or HP to pull it off if at all.)
They wasted time and money on NetWinder (which is an amazing piece of hardware) by designing it and then going nowhere with it. Dumb move.
They wasted time and money doing a Linux distribution on their own when they could have partnered with another distribution vendor and worked together. It's now been revealed why they wasted that energy- they wanted total control of it all.
They spent time and money that could have been spent making cross-platform versions or slightly differing, but functionality complete of their applications (a' la WordPerfect 8 for Unix) doing WINE upgrades so that they could be lazy and migrate the Windows versions over. While the benefits to WINE have been immense, the results on their apps have been lackluster. The applications require quite a bit more muscle than other contemporary comparable applications under Linux.
Do you really think they've got a solid grasp on things as they are? They've been grasping at straws for years now, since they lost their focus on things and started buying up WordPerfect, etc. I mean, look at all the other spectacular failed business decisions (that were debatable at best) such as that all-Java version of their office suite (when Java really wasn't ready for that sort of thing!). They've not a clue. Apparently haven't had one for a while from the looks of things from this end.
Some things don't adapt well at all.
NT in an embedded context is one such thing.
TransCore's got this nifty little application that manages access control and billing for parking and airport ground transportation management. System was redesigned from the ground up to run on nearly any server platform, nearly any embedded platform.
As long as ACE/TAO supports it and the components have a TCP/IP connection to the other devices it'll largely compile and run. I know- I designed the beast.
There's two piece parts to the embedded portions system, a transaction processing engine and a transaction generation/lane hardware control engine. The transaction engine can reside on any server that has local or network ODBC/CLI access. The lane control portion has to control several digital I/O points and one RFID device that detects TransCore's vehicular transponder tag.
The NT units at one of the current installations at the DFW International Airport are capricious beasts and periodically need restarting (about once every two or so weeks...). Resource leaks. Not with the app as best as we can tell- Purify told us that we had a clean bill of health, but an internal function in NT was leaking like a sieve. The Linux version is on an embedded machine out at the lanes there at DFW. It hasn't needed a reboot yet. Using Embedded NT would have added about $250-500 per lane to the cost of the embedded hardware version of the system. With Linux, I saved $2500 per lane over the older, centralized design. With Embedded NT, it would have been more like $500-1000 per lane cost savings combined with needing to spend much, much more time writing the device drivers for the embedded I/O on the single board computer we used.
Adapting to any situation's good- insisting on using truly unsuitable tools to do a job ends up being a cobbled up work at best and a botch job in most cases.
Well, not in the sense of something like XFS or JFS.
I thought that W2K was robust and that they had the financial resources to be able to manage their own DNS. Says a lot for a company that's running their own ISP and claims that W2K's better than UNIX, don't you think?
...Controlling stealing I've no problem with- unless they steal something from me to achieve it...
It's a content control law. It allows the content providers the ability to control all aspects of the content, taking away your fair-use rights.
No more making copies of stuff to play in the car, keeping your originals safe at home- something you can do by law otherwise.
No more taping of shows to watch at a later time.
No more copying of pieces of the content for use within other things. You can't take a snippet or even a still from a movie to show in a review or a research paper- unless you've got permission from the content provider first.
No more control over the content that you produce- they're insisting on every recording device have anti-copy systems in place such that you can't copy even your own content that you've got rights to by law. No way to duplicate it either since the DMCA takes away all rights in that regard.
All of these things are rights that have been taken away by the DMCA and copy protection systems.
Stealing I've no problem with- unless it's something they're stealing from me...
...need to get with it and get that PPC support out the door.. :-)
I think you're going to find that most of them were taken in the center of metripolitan areas.
What's present all over those areas?
Concrete and Asphalt.
These absorb heat and slowly, but slowly release it.
Measured temperatures are on the average 3-7 degrees colder on the outskirts of the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex when compared with the inner cities or the measuring points at DFW International Airport, Love Field, or Meecham.
While I'm not saying they're wrong, I'm asking that they and everyone else happen to have more accurate data points before making statements.
Well, we know of the rumors. Yes, they're rumors- but Bill and Co's not stupid. Careless, sloppy, and arrogant they are- stupid they are not (consider that they've basically hoodwinked the world's populace into buying their barely functional eye-candy apps...).
However, having said this, while MacOS X happens to have Mach/BSD, the programming API's all Apple's doing and abstracts away most of the underlying OS. Succinctly put, in order for this to make fruit for MS on the Linux front, they'd need to license and make a version of the MacOS X layer for Linux or make GNUStep fill in the holes between it and the MacOS X developer API. Not likely to happen unless MS is desperate and hurting BADLY.
Since the app's a native MacOS X app, it's possible that GNUStep's a stepping stone for making an IE port (because MacOS X's developer API's are NeXTStep derivatives...) but I don't think it'll happen or that anyone will want it if it does happen- like someone said, MS has little care for standards except their own.