Uh, what about the BSD's? Solaris? IRIX? AIX? HPUX? Don't say Linux doesn't have competition. You can see Linux as an alternative, but there are also alternatives to Linux:-)
Exactly, and even inside Linux there is competition: SuSE, Mandrake, debian, etc.
It's like it should be: Competition in a leveled playing-field, that means every player is compatible (= using the same APIs) as the others.
I don't like your optimism? I thought I was being nice and honest, but obviously you know better.
Maybe I was a bit harsh, my apologies.
A North American company trying to break through a market in Japan cannot do well, and MS did not really expect their launch numbers there to be very high.
Did they also expect retailors to cancel orders in the first days after release?
Of course Microsoft will say that numbers will be above "expectations", as always. However, most MS-products lately (Win2K, WinME, WinXP, OfficeXP) had a rather dissapointing start.
As for the hardware drivers question, the only reason there is no large community writing drivers for Windows is because of course there is no reason for it.
You really think that anybody would write drivers for Windows in their free time? Why? What's the point?
Linux offers a lot compared to Windows, especially for programmers: Openness, freedom, etc.
The only thing Windows offers is great app-support, if that goes away (and you could run the same apps on Linux), why should any programmer write drivers for it?
I don't think most developers are very excited about writing drivers - they're programs with very narrow purpose that are obseleted on a whim by the hardware manufacturer with a minor product revision. As Linux gains support, hardware companies will try to ensure to make both Windows and Linux drivers inhouse, and I hope to see independent need for driver writing go away. Linux community has more exciting and better applications to create.
Considering the quality of many drivers written by the vendor, I think that it would be the best if vendors would do open-source drivers which could then be reviewed and fixed by the community.
Don't forget that the main reason behind.NET is that it will save Microsoft even if it is forced to be divided into separate smaller companies, because it is making Microsoft Office software more dependent on the Microsoft Windows and on it's servers and softwares for Internet, i.e, it is serving as a 'glue' for all MS softwares.
This simply won't work. Application service providers simply don't work for the masses. NOBODY likes the concept, even die-hard Microsoft fans are rather sceptical about it.
What's the point in sending all your data around the world constantly anyway? Who will pay for the bandwidth? What's the added value? Why should anybody upgrade Office if everybody uses Office 97 anyway?
.NET will just be the next Win32API and Microsoft hopes that all Windows users will upgrade to Windows.NET.
Do you think a company this large, with this vast amount of money, would be stupid or good?
Stupidity is directly proportional to company-size.
See for yourself., it's just a cartoon, but it's closwer to reality than most people think.
No, you don't. You are much more comfortable in believing that.NET is a grand masterplan invented by the evil geniuses at Microsoft to take over the world.
Reality is that Microsoft is just an ordinary company that makes a lot of mistakes and screws up a lot. Probably even more than other companies. Of course they make tons of cash because IBM gave them the x86-OS monopoly. But *anybody* no matter how incompetent can make tons of cash with that.
Some things that might change your mind:
- Windows was not an evil plot to take over everything. Windows was already abandoned after v2.0 and Microsoft's strategy was to go with OS/2. However a Microsoft employee played with it in his free time and laid the foundation for Windows 3.0 which was picked up after relations to IBM went worse and OS/2 was delayed and delayed. So Windows was essentially an accident, if that employee wouldn't have played with it, OS/2 and IBM would probably dominate today! (which would be much worse BTW, because it's hardware and software)
Most Microsoft projects were big failures: Windows/Mips, Windows/PowerPC, Windows/Alpha, "Homer" Project, Modular Windows, "Otto" Projekt, MMOSA (Set-Top-boxes Operating System), WebTV, Blackbird/Internet Studio (1995),
proprietary MSN which should replace the Internet, COOl (C++ Object Orientated Language),
PenWindows, Microsoft Bob.
In 12 Months we can also add "XBox" to the list. Just look at Japanese sales which were so low that retailors cancelled orders IN THE FIRST WEEK of the launch!!
And I'm also very excited to see the European launch where the XBox will cost nearly twice as much as the PS2.
(And unlike those other projects, XBox is very visible and will scratch Microsoft's reputation of being invincible.)
but I think that as you point out, reality does not include Windows being killed off "in a few years."
What's the point in running Windows if you can get all the apps on another platform, too? I don't think PC-makers would sacrifice 20% (and increasing) share of their revenue to go directly to Microsoft if there was an other OS that could run all the apps reliably.
And most people will use whatever comes on the PC. (as long as it runs their apps)
Nor do I understand why it necessarily has to die?
Did I say that? I said that it would die, not that it's necessary. I personally wouldn't care if Windows lifes forever if I could run all apps on Linux. But on a leveled playing-field, Windows simply doesn't have much of a chance. On a leveled playing-field Windows will die, not because I want it to, but because of basic market forces. It's not like there is a big community around Windows that writes drivers. If the hardware-maker doesn't do a driver, there will be no driver. Microsoft couldn't write all the drivers, even if they wanted to.
Just look at server and embedded system markets. On those, almost all apps are available on Linux, therefore Windows starts to fade, because there is no added value for the money. Of course a lot of companies use Windows on servers because they are used to it, but show me any startup-company that uses Windows on servers.
Companies grow and shrink, come and go. Without startups, a platform is doomed to fail.
The same is happening on embedded systems. Even in the PDA-sector (which is a tiny part of embedded) where WinCE should be strong, all new PDA-designs are Linux-based. Show me any company that has *started* to produce PDAs in the last 2 years that uses WinCE - there are none.
In non-PDA embedded areas, WinCE's situation is even worse.
XML, SOAP, DHTML etc. are not core parts. (And XML allows binary sections which means that you can put *everything* no matter how incompatible into an XML, BTW)
The important thing is the API which will be incompatible to everything else. If it isn't it would be very bad for Microsoft.
I suspect that.NET is incompatible to everything else, but projects like Mono could endanger this incompatibility and become big problems for Microsoft.
Linux can only win. Worst case is that everything stays as incompatible as it is now, best case is that.NET becomes multi-platform which would kill Windows in a few years.
The reality will probably be something in between: Compatibility will be better than current Wine/Win32 compatibility, but not 100% - yet Linux could make big inroads also on desktops if Windows-compatibility is good enough.
The way I see it is that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer fell victim to a big delusion: That Windows could survive on a leveled playing-field.
Next, let's discuss Microsoft realizing that.NET is a "stupid idea." Microsoft doesn't care about setting up a scapegoat because they're 100% sure it will work, and they're probably right. The whole company has been restructured to work with.NET and it is not going away. Latest copy of Windows in development is Windows.NET, latest set of development tools is Visual Studio.NET, latest certification is MCSD.NET. Getting a trend here yet?
Yeah, I know with the Linux-hype over, some people feel very "objective" when they treat Microsoft's marketing schemes like the word of god.
However:
.NET is essentially just the next incompatible-to-everything-but-itself Win32API with some Java-ideas and pseudo-language-independence thrown in.
Will it become the standard on Windows? Sure, just like the Win32API - just like any api Microsoft pushes.
Will it harm or endange other operating systems? No. Worst case is that everything stays the same and Linux can't run Windows-programs. Best-case is that Mono allows Windows-compatibility which would benefit Linux greatly.
.NET is nothing new, it's just the next API Microsoft *HAS* to push, otherwise nobody upgrades. And it could be Microsoft's biggest mistake if it runs on Linux.
BTW, I've read about an experiment where they did something similar with humans. The effect was that the volunteer (it was only a single human tested) fell asleep after a few days and just nothing could wake him up.
For a human to reach this state, you would have to never sleep for something like 60 years. I would want the acutal study results to really judge what they concluded.
Rats easily survive falls of 2 meters which is about 40 times their own height.
According to your logic, humans should easily survive falls of 60 to 80 meters. (~20 stories)
Since I'm replying to this at 1:30 am, that means I'm going to be living for a while now...
Babies sleep 12 hours or longer per day while old people sleep 6 hours or less per day.
If you do the study this way (asking people at different ages how long they sleep, then look at mortality) you get obvious result that long sleep = early death. People who died at age 2 slept probably more than 12 hours/day.
If you look at it the other way and ask for the rest life expectancy you would get exactly the opposite result: People sleeping longer have statistically a longer rest life expectancy (because they are younger, but this study ignores age, so we can ignore it, too)
Um... At that time, neither Red Hat nor Debian was shipping KDE due to licensing conflicts. KDE was under GPL. It depended on QT, which was not licensed in a compatible manner, which isn't allowed by the GPL.
Did you read my post? Obviously not, because it's exactly what I said.
It's pretty obvious that the licence holders (the KDE-authors) had nothing against linking it with Qt, so many distributions shipped Qt and KDE and were not sued for it by the KDE-team. This whole licensing-thing is none of RedHat's business anyway.
Note that this situation was not resolved by Red Hat bending to their users requests, but by Trolltech's licensing QT under the GPL.
Yeah, Trolltech realized that using the GPL instead of QPL would change nada except taking an argument away from the KDE-haters.
No, I did not want to say that this is a marketing-plot, I said a lot more people are going to try it because it's a.0 release (which is a marketing-thing).
Of course I know that it's binary incompatible with KDE2, but that's irrelevant for somebody who tries KDE for the first time. (And KDE 3.0 will get *A LOT* of first-time triers, a lot more than a KDE 2.x would get.)
you can't really say redhat hates kde (why would they ship it then?)
Don't you remember the times when RedHat refused to ship the opensource-but-not-GPL (the HORROR) Qt, but did ship the then closed-source and commercial Netscape?
RedHat simply had to ship KDE because it is wanted by the users.
Kcontrol is not, by any stretch of the imagination, all settings. There are settings tweakable in rc files without a UI for the setting. It doesn't handle things like filesharing, remote access, that are outside the scope of KDE. MacOS X has these in the control panel, all organised for you.
On SuSE, everything can be found in kcontrol as YaST2 is integrated in it.
As a summary, we can agree that MacOSX has some advantages, but KDE/Linux also has some. For people who like those, it's not "copletely totally absurd" to run it instead of MacOSX.
Re:How completely totally absurd.
on
Linux on the iMac G4
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Simple:
Multiple Desktop support:
KDE/Linux [x] MacOSX [ ] WinXP [~] (with tools)
Browser windows respawn and restore everything like it was on logout:
Konqueror [x] Mozilla [ ] IE [ ]
MMB pastes selection:
KDE/Linux [x] MacOSX [ ] WinXP [ ]
You can have menubar-applets like mixer and syscontrol:
KDE/Linux [x] MacOSX [ ] WinXP [ ]
You can have multiple menubars:
KDE/Linux [x] MacOSX [ ] WinXP [x]
You can have (gasp) a real taskbar than also supports grouping:
KDE/Linux [x] MacOSX [ ] WinXP [x]
MMB opens link in new window:
Konqueror[x] Mozilla [x] IE [ ]
You can have a fast filebrowser in the menubar:
KDE/Linux [x] MacOSX [ ] WinXP [ ]
You can have ALL settings/controls organized in a tree-like structure:
If nothing else, the aqua interface is far more pleasant for the eye than KDE or Gnome.
Matter of taste.
Not only that, but OS X boasts actual design decisions that differ from what Microsoft has chosen to do.
Irrelevant. (It's wrong anyway, I frequently try to paste with the middle mouse button in Windows just to notice that nothing happens. I also miss my 16 desktops and Konqueror)
Unfortunately, KDE and Gnome are not in a position to make such a claim.
See above.
So the only relevant pro-MacOSX point you made is 100% subjective (pleasant for the eye...)
Yes, it would be handy for those uses... but since the iMac already has a very well-developped flavor of *nix, pre-installed, the question stands. Why bother?
It's not about *nix, it's about KDE.
MacOSX does not support multiple desktops, multiple mouse buttons (no that pseudo support does not count, I want to push windows back with the MMB, I want new browser windows to open on MMB, I want to paste with the MMB), menubar applets or respawning browser windows, does it?
haha yes, go figure.. some people actually want/need real apps. no, open source just dosn't cut it sometimes.
OSS apps *are* real apps.
GIMP have all the colour matching etc of photoshop ? you tell your boss that.
Only a minority of computer users are graphic artists and only a minority of graphic artists really need color matching. (Actually I do some graphics for websites - Gimp is perfect for this.)
BTW, does really every Mac-user shell out several hundred bucks for Photoshop? I don't think so.
1) Adobe applications
2) Microsoft office
3) iMovie, iPhoto, etc.
So it's all about the apps?
Well, all MacOS9 apps run fine in MOL.
But OK, if you really need one of those (I don't) then MacOSX is probably better fitted, not because of MacOSX' great advantages but because of the apps that happen to support MacOSX.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly, and even inside Linux there is competition: SuSE, Mandrake, debian, etc.
It's like it should be: Competition in a leveled playing-field, that means every player is compatible (= using the same APIs) as the others.
Maybe I was a bit harsh, my apologies.
A North American company trying to break through a market in Japan cannot do well, and MS did not really expect their launch numbers there to be very high.
Did they also expect retailors to cancel orders in the first days after release?
Of course Microsoft will say that numbers will be above "expectations", as always. However, most MS-products lately (Win2K, WinME, WinXP, OfficeXP) had a rather dissapointing start.
As for the hardware drivers question, the only reason there is no large community writing drivers for Windows is because of course there is no reason for it.
You really think that anybody would write drivers for Windows in their free time? Why? What's the point?
Linux offers a lot compared to Windows, especially for programmers: Openness, freedom, etc.
The only thing Windows offers is great app-support, if that goes away (and you could run the same apps on Linux), why should any programmer write drivers for it?
I don't think most developers are very excited about writing drivers - they're programs with very narrow purpose that are obseleted on a whim by the hardware manufacturer with a minor product revision. As Linux gains support, hardware companies will try to ensure to make both Windows and Linux drivers inhouse, and I hope to see independent need for driver writing go away. Linux community has more exciting and better applications to create.
Considering the quality of many drivers written by the vendor, I think that it would be the best if vendors would do open-source drivers which could then be reviewed and fixed by the community.
This simply won't work. Application service providers simply don't work for the masses. NOBODY likes the concept, even die-hard Microsoft fans are rather sceptical about it.
What's the point in sending all your data around the world constantly anyway? Who will pay for the bandwidth? What's the added value? Why should anybody upgrade Office if everybody uses Office 97 anyway?
Do you think a company this large, with this vast amount of money, would be stupid or good?
Stupidity is directly proportional to company-size.
See for yourself., it's just a cartoon, but it's closwer to reality than most people think.
No, you don't. You are much more comfortable in believing that .NET is a grand masterplan invented by the evil geniuses at Microsoft to take over the world.
Reality is that Microsoft is just an ordinary company that makes a lot of mistakes and screws up a lot. Probably even more than other companies. Of course they make tons of cash because IBM gave them the x86-OS monopoly. But *anybody* no matter how incompetent can make tons of cash with that.
Some things that might change your mind:
- Windows was not an evil plot to take over everything. Windows was already abandoned after v2.0 and Microsoft's strategy was to go with OS/2. However a Microsoft employee played with it in his free time and laid the foundation for Windows 3.0 which was picked up after relations to IBM went worse and OS/2 was delayed and delayed. So Windows was essentially an accident, if that employee wouldn't have played with it, OS/2 and IBM would probably dominate today! (which would be much worse BTW, because it's hardware and software)
Most Microsoft projects were big failures: Windows/Mips, Windows/PowerPC, Windows/Alpha, "Homer" Project, Modular Windows, "Otto" Projekt, MMOSA (Set-Top-boxes Operating System), WebTV, Blackbird/Internet Studio (1995), proprietary MSN which should replace the Internet, COOl (C++ Object Orientated Language), PenWindows, Microsoft Bob.
In 12 Months we can also add "XBox" to the list. Just look at Japanese sales which were so low that retailors cancelled orders IN THE FIRST WEEK of the launch!!
And I'm also very excited to see the European launch where the XBox will cost nearly twice as much as the PS2.
(And unlike those other projects, XBox is very visible and will scratch Microsoft's reputation of being invincible.)
but I think that as you point out, reality does not include Windows being killed off "in a few years."
What's the point in running Windows if you can get all the apps on another platform, too? I don't think PC-makers would sacrifice 20% (and increasing) share of their revenue to go directly to Microsoft if there was an other OS that could run all the apps reliably.
And most people will use whatever comes on the PC. (as long as it runs their apps)
Nor do I understand why it necessarily has to die?
Did I say that? I said that it would die, not that it's necessary. I personally wouldn't care if Windows lifes forever if I could run all apps on Linux. But on a leveled playing-field, Windows simply doesn't have much of a chance. On a leveled playing-field Windows will die, not because I want it to, but because of basic market forces. It's not like there is a big community around Windows that writes drivers. If the hardware-maker doesn't do a driver, there will be no driver. Microsoft couldn't write all the drivers, even if they wanted to.
Just look at server and embedded system markets. On those, almost all apps are available on Linux, therefore Windows starts to fade, because there is no added value for the money. Of course a lot of companies use Windows on servers because they are used to it, but show me any startup-company that uses Windows on servers.
Companies grow and shrink, come and go. Without startups, a platform is doomed to fail.
The same is happening on embedded systems. Even in the PDA-sector (which is a tiny part of embedded) where WinCE should be strong, all new PDA-designs are Linux-based. Show me any company that has *started* to produce PDAs in the last 2 years that uses WinCE - there are none.
In non-PDA embedded areas, WinCE's situation is even worse.
The important thing is the API which will be incompatible to everything else. If it isn't it would be very bad for Microsoft.
I suspect that .NET is incompatible to everything else, but projects like Mono could endanger this incompatibility and become big problems for Microsoft.
Linux can only win. Worst case is that everything stays as incompatible as it is now, best case is that .NET becomes multi-platform which would kill Windows in a few years.
The reality will probably be something in between: Compatibility will be better than current Wine/Win32 compatibility, but not 100% - yet Linux could make big inroads also on desktops if Windows-compatibility is good enough.
The way I see it is that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer fell victim to a big delusion: That Windows could survive on a leveled playing-field.
Yeah, I know with the Linux-hype over, some people feel very "objective" when they treat Microsoft's marketing schemes like the word of god.
However:
Will it become the standard on Windows? Sure, just like the Win32API - just like any api Microsoft pushes.
Will it harm or endange other operating systems? No. Worst case is that everything stays the same and Linux can't run Windows-programs. Best-case is that Mono allows Windows-compatibility which would benefit Linux greatly.
But maybe others turn insane, who knows...
Rats easily survive falls of 2 meters which is about 40 times their own height.
According to your logic, humans should easily survive falls of 60 to 80 meters. (~20 stories)
Babies sleep 12 hours or longer per day while old people sleep 6 hours or less per day.
If you do the study this way (asking people at different ages how long they sleep, then look at mortality) you get obvious result that long sleep = early death. People who died at age 2 slept probably more than 12 hours/day.
If you look at it the other way and ask for the rest life expectancy you would get exactly the opposite result: People sleeping longer have statistically a longer rest life expectancy (because they are younger, but this study ignores age, so we can ignore it, too)
Strange, what do they mean by that? Wouldn't "less than 4.5 hours" enough as last time I checked 3.5 is less than 4.5?
Exactly. People who die young sleep longer per night.
Q.E.D.
AFAIR RedHat was shipping KDE before the change of Qt's license, so obviously the license-issues weren't that important for RedHat anyway.
Oh yeah, I remember quite well when debian was the only distro not shipping KDE....
Did you read my post? Obviously not, because it's exactly what I said.
It's pretty obvious that the licence holders (the KDE-authors) had nothing against linking it with Qt, so many distributions shipped Qt and KDE and were not sued for it by the KDE-team. This whole licensing-thing is none of RedHat's business anyway.
Note that this situation was not resolved by Red Hat bending to their users requests, but by Trolltech's licensing QT under the GPL.
Yeah, Trolltech realized that using the GPL instead of QPL would change nada except taking an argument away from the KDE-haters.
Nevertheless, the rest of RedHat doesn't give it very much support (just like you said):
Red Hat probably doesn't provide packages through other channels because they aren't going to support them.
Of course I know that it's binary incompatible with KDE2, but that's irrelevant for somebody who tries KDE for the first time. (And KDE 3.0 will get *A LOT* of first-time triers, a lot more than a KDE 2.x would get.)
Don't you remember the times when RedHat refused to ship the opensource-but-not-GPL (the HORROR) Qt, but did ship the then closed-source and commercial Netscape?
RedHat simply had to ship KDE because it is wanted by the users.
But obviously Bob Young is still using Gnome.
(Yes, it's RedHat's fault that there are no RH-packages, not KDE's. All other distros are also doing their packages on their own.)
I know a lot of people who were scared away from KDE2.0's unstability and bugs.
It's a marketing-thing. People tend to only try out .0 releases, so a 3.0 release that is in reality a 2.3 is the best thing that can happen to KDE :-)
The second-best feature of KDE 3.0 is the configuration of animated pics, BTW ;-)
So?
Is it "completely totally absurd" if your preferences don't coincide with Apple's?
On SuSE, everything can be found in kcontrol as YaST2 is integrated in it.
As a summary, we can agree that MacOSX has some advantages, but KDE/Linux also has some. For people who like those, it's not "copletely totally absurd" to run it instead of MacOSX.
Multiple Desktop support:
KDE/Linux [x] MacOSX [ ] WinXP [~] (with tools)
Browser windows respawn and restore everything like it was on logout:
Konqueror [x] Mozilla [ ] IE [ ]
MMB pastes selection:
KDE/Linux [x] MacOSX [ ] WinXP [ ]
You can have menubar-applets like mixer and syscontrol:
KDE/Linux [x] MacOSX [ ] WinXP [ ]
You can have multiple menubars:
KDE/Linux [x] MacOSX [ ] WinXP [x]
You can have (gasp) a real taskbar than also supports grouping:
KDE/Linux [x] MacOSX [ ] WinXP [x]
MMB opens link in new window:
Konqueror[x] Mozilla [x] IE [ ]
You can have a fast filebrowser in the menubar:
KDE/Linux [x] MacOSX [ ] WinXP [ ]
You can have ALL settings/controls organized in a tree-like structure:
KControl [x] MacOSX [ ] WinXP [ ]
What was your point again?
Matter of taste.
Not only that, but OS X boasts actual design decisions that differ from what Microsoft has chosen to do.
Irrelevant. (It's wrong anyway, I frequently try to paste with the middle mouse button in Windows just to notice that nothing happens. I also miss my 16 desktops and Konqueror)
Unfortunately, KDE and Gnome are not in a position to make such a claim.
See above.
So the only relevant pro-MacOSX point you made is 100% subjective (pleasant for the eye...)
Wow.
It's not about *nix, it's about KDE.
MacOSX does not support multiple desktops, multiple mouse buttons (no that pseudo support does not count, I want to push windows back with the MMB, I want new browser windows to open on MMB, I want to paste with the MMB), menubar applets or respawning browser windows, does it?
OSS apps *are* real apps.
GIMP have all the colour matching etc of photoshop ? you tell your boss that.
Only a minority of computer users are graphic artists and only a minority of graphic artists really need color matching. (Actually I do some graphics for websites - Gimp is perfect for this.)
BTW, does really every Mac-user shell out several hundred bucks for Photoshop? I don't think so.
I can.
1) Adobe applications 2) Microsoft office 3) iMovie, iPhoto, etc.
So it's all about the apps?
Well, all MacOS9 apps run fine in MOL.
But OK, if you really need one of those (I don't) then MacOSX is probably better fitted, not because of MacOSX' great advantages but because of the apps that happen to support MacOSX.