In other words, there isn't a single reason to upgrade to Longhorn.
1.).NET? Available for XP. 2.) Avalon? Available for XP. 3.) Indigo? Available for XP.
And now...
4.) WinFS? Available for XP.
Apparently, the only thing Longhorn will offer over Windows XP is a Direct3D interface that requires you to upgrade your computer in order to run it.
Perhaps Longhorn always should have been just a collection of technologies released for existing versions of Windows rather than a whole upgrade. Because I don't see many people upgrading with all of Longhorn's technologies being made available for Windows XP anyway.
The problem is that the "choice" people will come running at you with torches. These loud, obnoxious people have taken over the OSS movement and insisted that everything should be forked, there should be multiple versions of the same functionality, and there should be no standards so that everybody can choose various ones.
You're right about Cocoa/Carbon apps, but OS X has various layers. Darwin, Aqua, the BSD layer, and so on. The BSD layer is there, as are the beloved UNIX directories like "/etc." They are hidden in the Finder, but a simple "ls/" in Terminal will show you that all the UNIX stuff really is there.
You can code command-line UNIX apps on OS X if you want to. Most of the command tools are from OpenBSD. While the Apple APIs are far removed from the gritty UNIX world, that world is still there and happily supported. OS X even ships with Apache, Perl, etc.
And yet, despite the instability of Windows systems, developing for them was relatively stable compared to the UNIX world. Sure, your app might crash, but at least you'll be able to develop it in a month and maintain it for years to come. Look at, say, Photoshop. Photoshop is still a Win32 app and never needed a rewrite as Windows went through all its incarnations--even surviving an entire kernel change.
You can even run Windows applications from the 98-era--which used a completely differnet kernel based on DOS--on XP. It's all about the stable API.
Now they're trying hard to replace it with.NET. Good luck with that! Photoshop is never going to be rewritten in "managed code."
Every year, I've been posting that the OSS world needs one sane, unified development API for its desktops. I sometimes get modded down, sometimes get angry replies...but nobody ever actually refutes what I'm saying, because they know I'm right.
I think with the recent spat of articles, people are beginning to see that desktop Linux is never going to make a dent on Microsoft's marketshare. Not with the way things are currently going.
MS have steadily - through 95, 98, and on and on in the rolecall of fucked up apologies for operating systems - made it more and more fucked.
No.
95 and 98 were based on MS-DOS, so that terminal you were running was a shell to MS-DOS itself.
Windows NT, 2000, and beyond are based on the NT codebase which isn't centered on DOS. So, surprise, the terminal suddenly isn't a fully functioning MS-DOS, because there is no MS-DOS in the system. I recall that using MS-DOS as the foundation for Windows was a criticism at the time. Apparently, some want it back.
Photoshop was coded to the MacIntosh user interface, not X-windows, and functions on OSX as a side-effect of the excellent backwards-compatibility that Apple slavishly built into their kernel-swap.
No, it functions because of Carbon, the procedural API of OS X. Carbon does share similarities with the old Mac toolbox.
Perhaps this is what he was saying, but the way he says it implies OS X happily runs old OS 9 binaries due to some "slavishly" added binary compatibility cruft. It doesn't--the apps need a recompile and some code tweaking to become "Carbonized," and suddenly they're OS X apps through and through.
why are we obsessed with firefox being too perfect!
Because a lot of people use Firefox just to stick it to Microsoft in their minds. The more rational of us use it and other alternatives simply because we see them as the technically superior browsers.
The reason you see it in OSS more often than, say, the commercial world, is that people who piss off clients usually get fired. That sort of accountability to the consumer--mostly because consumers eventually affect the bottom-line--doesn't exist in the OSS world. We have to rely on trust and goodwill, and often people don't feel the need to follow any social rules because they're not being employed by anyone.
Like any development model, OSS has its good points and its bad points, and that is certainly a bad one.
This is about the core code reviewers, not the coders. The core guys have to know the codebase inside out. From what this guy is saying in his blog, four of them are AWOL and the others are ineffective. I have been wondering what's taking so long for the 1.1 release. Now I know...and I know not to expect 2.0 this year.:(
In all seriousness, this is a bad time for Firefox to be going through this considering IE7 is scheduled for release later this year according to Gates, and you know that's going to get a lot of press. Do you want the news articles saying, "Firefox, which started out strong but had a string of vulnerabilities and developer burnout as the year began"?
Along with Gnome's optimization bounty, your call for money reminds me that "volunteer effort" isn't always the perfect motivation it's cracked up to be in OSS. Eventually, plain old capitalism sometimes gets the job done better. At the least, it's a damn good kickstart.
Everything should be examined on a case-by-case basis. You shouldn't be fired because you support a different political party (though it's probably still legal if you are fired for that), but you can be fired for badmouthing the boss publicly.
Why are there so many people these days online who think everything is leading to something else? "Oh no, this happened, it's only a matter of time until so-and-so." Um, no. Not everything is some downward spiral to something else. There are boundaries that are defined by the law on a situational basis. You know how there are different levels of murder? Not everything is black-and-white, and just because someone isn't allowed to say whatever the hell they want doesn't mean your rights are getting "eroded away." Get real!
These rules are common sense to you and me. But apparently to some, this story belongs in the Your Rights Online category. Sorry, but I don't have the "right" to bitch about my company publicly and then expect to keep working there. Sigh.
You didn't refute anything I said. In fact, all you did was offer supporting evidence.
You can't blame them. There are no well stablished standards on widgets, strings and so on.
I can perfectly well blame them. There should be established standards for widgets and strings. It doesn't matter if they're "different organizations;" that doesn't mean each one should reinvent the wheel and fill up my memory when part of the point of a desktop GUI is to provide a standard interface with standard APIs that take care of it all. Seriously, what does it have to do with anything that they're different organizations? Why even have toolkits if apps are just going to write their own internal ones anyway?
They should choose a toolkit and stick with it. They should choose a desktop environment and stick with it. They should choose a standard set of widgets and stick with it. Or else these apps, and Linux desktops in general, will forever be fragmented projects wasting effort and energy working on interoperability with each other instead of standardizing on one toolset so we can get our work done (and not lose 200MB of memory in the process as each app and toolkit fires up and loads its own reinvented object infrastructures into my RAM).
What this app also needs is a major interface redesign.
I had the joy of being able to use Pages from iWork all day yesterday. After using that app which has something like five toolbar buttons total, seeing this cluttered interface of tiny, tiny toolbar buttons all jammed into two rows with everything and the kitchen sink right there staring back at you makes my eyes hurt.
I mean, it looks almost exactly like Microsoft Office. Even a lot of the toolbar icons are incredibly similar and function the same way. This is just an Office clone, not a new, innovative OSS office suite. Businesses don't mind paying for Office and won't see a reason to switch if they can just get the real thing that runs faster, integrates better, and opens/reads their files.
It's called "reinventing the wheel." All these big OSS projects feel the need to rewrite everything for themselves. Running GNOME but prefer a KDE app? Okay, so now you have both GNOME libraries and KDE libraries in memory. Then you fire up Mozilla--now there's another ~50MB of reinvented widgets and libraries. Mozilla even has its own string class! Now, you also decide to fire up OpenOffice, which ALSO does its own thing with widgets and classes.
So you have four versions of widgets, strings, and so on all loaded into memory when they all should be using one set provided by the desktop environment. Why this sort of bloat is considered "okay" in the community is above me, especially when this sort of thing would be completely BASHED if it were from Microsoft.
What encouraging P2P piracy means is that those cheaper alternatives will just get pirated too, so they have to raise prices to compensate--thereby not being so "cheap" anymore.
It's because so much gets pointlessly reinvented. Take a look at Mozilla sometime. So many wheels are reinvented in that code just for the sake of easy portability. The code is horrible. Take a look at that layout code sometime and attempt to decipher it. And Mozilla is supposed to be a golden child of OSS development!
Also, there is less structure and discipline because it's not a corporate environment with lead programmer, project leaders, and so on overseeing things like performance and code size. Instead, it's a volunteer effort that takes code from all over the place rather than from the small pool of gifted programmers you hired solely for your project.
Everything has advantages and disadvantages, and OSS has its disadvantages like any other model.
Slashdot Mirror
How would this lock it up since WinFS is just a system service running in the background that works on NTFS drives?
WinFS uses NTFS.
In other words, there isn't a single reason to upgrade to Longhorn.
.NET? Available for XP.
1.)
2.) Avalon? Available for XP.
3.) Indigo? Available for XP.
And now...
4.) WinFS? Available for XP.
Apparently, the only thing Longhorn will offer over Windows XP is a Direct3D interface that requires you to upgrade your computer in order to run it.
Perhaps Longhorn always should have been just a collection of technologies released for existing versions of Windows rather than a whole upgrade. Because I don't see many people upgrading with all of Longhorn's technologies being made available for Windows XP anyway.
The problem is that the "choice" people will come running at you with torches. These loud, obnoxious people have taken over the OSS movement and insisted that everything should be forked, there should be multiple versions of the same functionality, and there should be no standards so that everybody can choose various ones.
It's holding back a lot of progress.
You're right about Cocoa/Carbon apps, but OS X has various layers. Darwin, Aqua, the BSD layer, and so on. The BSD layer is there, as are the beloved UNIX directories like "/etc." They are hidden in the Finder, but a simple "ls /" in Terminal will show you that all the UNIX stuff really is there.
You can code command-line UNIX apps on OS X if you want to. Most of the command tools are from OpenBSD. While the Apple APIs are far removed from the gritty UNIX world, that world is still there and happily supported. OS X even ships with Apache, Perl, etc.
And yet, despite the instability of Windows systems, developing for them was relatively stable compared to the UNIX world. Sure, your app might crash, but at least you'll be able to develop it in a month and maintain it for years to come. Look at, say, Photoshop. Photoshop is still a Win32 app and never needed a rewrite as Windows went through all its incarnations--even surviving an entire kernel change.
.NET. Good luck with that! Photoshop is never going to be rewritten in "managed code."
You can even run Windows applications from the 98-era--which used a completely differnet kernel based on DOS--on XP. It's all about the stable API.
Now they're trying hard to replace it with
Every year, I've been posting that the OSS world needs one sane, unified development API for its desktops. I sometimes get modded down, sometimes get angry replies...but nobody ever actually refutes what I'm saying, because they know I'm right.
I think with the recent spat of articles, people are beginning to see that desktop Linux is never going to make a dent on Microsoft's marketshare. Not with the way things are currently going.
His reference of the kernel makes it seem he is implying actual binary/API compatibility.
Carbon apps are full-on OS X applications. The API shares similarities with the old pre-OS X APIs, but you still have to change things and recompile.
Carbon is the procedural API, and Cocoa is the object-oriented API. Apple lets you choose.
MS have steadily - through 95, 98, and on and on in the rolecall of fucked up apologies for operating systems - made it more and more fucked.
No.
95 and 98 were based on MS-DOS, so that terminal you were running was a shell to MS-DOS itself.
Windows NT, 2000, and beyond are based on the NT codebase which isn't centered on DOS. So, surprise, the terminal suddenly isn't a fully functioning MS-DOS, because there is no MS-DOS in the system. I recall that using MS-DOS as the foundation for Windows was a criticism at the time. Apparently, some want it back.
Opera's engine is versatile enough that it's used internally for Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 and Adobe GoLive CS, among others.
Those apps have apparently decided not to use Gecko.
Photoshop was coded to the MacIntosh user interface, not X-windows, and functions on OSX as a side-effect of the excellent backwards-compatibility that Apple slavishly built into their kernel-swap.
No, it functions because of Carbon, the procedural API of OS X. Carbon does share similarities with the old Mac toolbox.
Perhaps this is what he was saying, but the way he says it implies OS X happily runs old OS 9 binaries due to some "slavishly" added binary compatibility cruft. It doesn't--the apps need a recompile and some code tweaking to become "Carbonized," and suddenly they're OS X apps through and through.
why are we obsessed with firefox being too perfect!
Because a lot of people use Firefox just to stick it to Microsoft in their minds. The more rational of us use it and other alternatives simply because we see them as the technically superior browsers.
The reason you see it in OSS more often than, say, the commercial world, is that people who piss off clients usually get fired. That sort of accountability to the consumer--mostly because consumers eventually affect the bottom-line--doesn't exist in the OSS world. We have to rely on trust and goodwill, and often people don't feel the need to follow any social rules because they're not being employed by anyone.
Like any development model, OSS has its good points and its bad points, and that is certainly a bad one.
This is about the core code reviewers, not the coders. The core guys have to know the codebase inside out. From what this guy is saying in his blog, four of them are AWOL and the others are ineffective. I have been wondering what's taking so long for the 1.1 release. Now I know...and I know not to expect 2.0 this year. :(
In all seriousness, this is a bad time for Firefox to be going through this considering IE7 is scheduled for release later this year according to Gates, and you know that's going to get a lot of press. Do you want the news articles saying, "Firefox, which started out strong but had a string of vulnerabilities and developer burnout as the year began"?
Along with Gnome's optimization bounty, your call for money reminds me that "volunteer effort" isn't always the perfect motivation it's cracked up to be in OSS. Eventually, plain old capitalism sometimes gets the job done better. At the least, it's a damn good kickstart.
Everything should be examined on a case-by-case basis. You shouldn't be fired because you support a different political party (though it's probably still legal if you are fired for that), but you can be fired for badmouthing the boss publicly.
Why are there so many people these days online who think everything is leading to something else? "Oh no, this happened, it's only a matter of time until so-and-so." Um, no. Not everything is some downward spiral to something else. There are boundaries that are defined by the law on a situational basis. You know how there are different levels of murder? Not everything is black-and-white, and just because someone isn't allowed to say whatever the hell they want doesn't mean your rights are getting "eroded away." Get real!
These rules are common sense to you and me. But apparently to some, this story belongs in the Your Rights Online category. Sorry, but I don't have the "right" to bitch about my company publicly and then expect to keep working there. Sigh.
Every year number of users grows for more than double.
I love when people just throw out random statistics with no sources. Everyone is a walking usage study chart on Slashdot.
You didn't refute anything I said. In fact, all you did was offer supporting evidence.
You can't blame them. There are no well stablished standards on widgets, strings and so on.
I can perfectly well blame them. There should be established standards for widgets and strings. It doesn't matter if they're "different organizations;" that doesn't mean each one should reinvent the wheel and fill up my memory when part of the point of a desktop GUI is to provide a standard interface with standard APIs that take care of it all. Seriously, what does it have to do with anything that they're different organizations? Why even have toolkits if apps are just going to write their own internal ones anyway?
They should choose a toolkit and stick with it. They should choose a desktop environment and stick with it. They should choose a standard set of widgets and stick with it. Or else these apps, and Linux desktops in general, will forever be fragmented projects wasting effort and energy working on interoperability with each other instead of standardizing on one toolset so we can get our work done (and not lose 200MB of memory in the process as each app and toolkit fires up and loads its own reinvented object infrastructures into my RAM).
What this app also needs is a major interface redesign.
I had the joy of being able to use Pages from iWork all day yesterday. After using that app which has something like five toolbar buttons total, seeing this cluttered interface of tiny, tiny toolbar buttons all jammed into two rows with everything and the kitchen sink right there staring back at you makes my eyes hurt.
I mean, it looks almost exactly like Microsoft Office. Even a lot of the toolbar icons are incredibly similar and function the same way. This is just an Office clone, not a new, innovative OSS office suite. Businesses don't mind paying for Office and won't see a reason to switch if they can just get the real thing that runs faster, integrates better, and opens/reads their files.
In my opinion, OpenOffice.org is the most important software suite in the OSS movement.
Wow, I would have figured Linux.
It's called "reinventing the wheel." All these big OSS projects feel the need to rewrite everything for themselves. Running GNOME but prefer a KDE app? Okay, so now you have both GNOME libraries and KDE libraries in memory. Then you fire up Mozilla--now there's another ~50MB of reinvented widgets and libraries. Mozilla even has its own string class! Now, you also decide to fire up OpenOffice, which ALSO does its own thing with widgets and classes.
So you have four versions of widgets, strings, and so on all loaded into memory when they all should be using one set provided by the desktop environment. Why this sort of bloat is considered "okay" in the community is above me, especially when this sort of thing would be completely BASHED if it were from Microsoft.
What encouraging P2P piracy means is that those cheaper alternatives will just get pirated too, so they have to raise prices to compensate--thereby not being so "cheap" anymore.
It's because so much gets pointlessly reinvented. Take a look at Mozilla sometime. So many wheels are reinvented in that code just for the sake of easy portability. The code is horrible. Take a look at that layout code sometime and attempt to decipher it. And Mozilla is supposed to be a golden child of OSS development!
Also, there is less structure and discipline because it's not a corporate environment with lead programmer, project leaders, and so on overseeing things like performance and code size. Instead, it's a volunteer effort that takes code from all over the place rather than from the small pool of gifted programmers you hired solely for your project.
Everything has advantages and disadvantages, and OSS has its disadvantages like any other model.
Basic visual cues are "eye candy," the favorite intellectual fallback weapon to describe anything that makes you feel less elite for using it.
This isn't 1987 anymore. My CPU can handle drawing pleasing visual effects so that after 13 hours of programming, my eyes aren't fatigued.