As much as I hate conspiracy theories and Microsoft bashing, this may be an extremely clever move. As of now, mainframe and supercomputing worlds are still relatively safe from commiditization. Unlike Linux, which is still virtually ireelevant on the desktop, mainframes and supercomputers are much bigger a piece to swallow for Microsoft. By recommending Linux clusters, Microsoft may actually be trying to establish commodity hardware in the world of supercomputing. The keyword here is hardware. Once clusters become ubiquitous, Microsoft will start aggresively pushing Windows 200X Server Cluster Edition, fighting an enemy it has already much experience with.
This scenario sounds pleasing for anyone capable of troubleshooting his PC. However most people aren't. An average person, when not being able to boot his PC, would call Dell/Gateway/Compaq/whatever customer support department.
Besides, the newest trend in customer care is to provide a "recovery" CD wich would quickly revert the hard drive into it's state (or in the best case, it would "refresh the O/S installation). With this approach, unless you have a visible hardware proble, the very first advice you'd get from them would be "please reinstall from the recovery CD."
You're probably right - I don't. The fact that I developed anti-piracy software for MS-DOS that relied on direct IDE controller programming probably doesn't count.
Please show me how Linux or Windows use int 13h. Support your rants.
The OS vendors will ignore all the embedded functionality, because they have it all implemented in the code, very flexible and optimized. If someone has forgotten, the very first thing every modern PC O/S does is ignoring most of the BIOS.
So ok, what a great idea - to have a web browser and a TCP stack in the BIOS. One question though - why?!?!?! I don't care, I've got O/S for this. I can hardly imgaine myself botting the PC into the OS-less mode to browse the net. So far their only use case for this model is the OS-less BIOS upgrade. But who cares? Does it sound like toomuch work, to go to the BIOS manufacturer (or even better, to the computer vendor's) website and to download the damn thing? It's hardly more than one floppy in size!
Yet another pathetic case of a totally useless product with all kinds of "kewl" buzzwords attached...
Better still, let's not allow reviews from people who don't know Unix system calls by heart.
Even better, let's not allow all those people "who dont know about PDAs" to use PDAs at all. This way we are guaranteed to only have reviews praising things just because they have an L*word associated with them. Forget about the fact that the average shipping volume on all those Zauri and Yopis will be approx. two dozens.
That's true for the typical end-user mass-market software you're probably thinking about, e.g. office applications. But for the most part, this software is already available on Linux anyway as native applications, so there isn't any real need for WINE.
Big mistake. Being in the state of denial doesn't change things unfortunately. FWIW, Excel is the spreadsheet standard and PowerPoint is the presentation standard. If you doubt it, see how much success you'll get by sending any other format to anyone outside the friendly Linux community (and what would you send to your fellow Linux user: a Gnumeric file? A StarOffice file? An OpenOffice one? Kspread maybe? Note, I'm talking about file formats so far, not even about advanced features like macros and common scripting standard).
They will when you consider that you're already paying $200-300 for Windows. It is just "included" in the "cost."
Since when did Windows cost $200-300? Even the brand new XP Home costs $199 at most and nobody buys it at that price. OEMs pay much lower prices when bundling MS software (I'd estimate, something around $50 even though I have nothing to support this estimation) and consumers get it at a very low price as well. So, no FUD please...
..and the practical advantage of flexible CDs over regular ones are...
Before you develop a neat but useless technology, ask yourself: "why would anyone use it?" The flexible CDs are just about as practical as CueCat was. And they will hardly be as reliable as the regular CDs are. So much for one more useless technology...
To begin with, a security flaw in a bank server will not render me broke - I'm still under the FDIC umbrella.:-)
Now, I'd be equally unhappy if my bank used either MS software or Open Source stuff. I'd much rather see them using something proprietary and not available to general public, like mainframes.
However, if there is a security flaw in the bank, I'll primarily blame the bank itself, not Microsoft, Linux, or whatnot. Software will never be perfectly secure (errare humanum est) and in my opinion primary blame is always upon the implementor.
Finally, in all of the above I'm neither blaming nor advocating Microsoft. I'm just saying that they are doing exactly what they are supposed to do as a public company and to blame them in this or to ask them to radically change themselves is in my opinion childish.
This "research" is way too unrealistic. Security doesn't necessarily play along with getting an edge over competitors, which is (and will always be) a primary goal of any company. Yet the authors are so detached - they seem to want all of it short of making Microsoft opening the Windows and Office source code and handing it over to Richard Stallman.
Traditional sh is too limited in features, let alone the compatibility problems you've described. Use #!/bin/ksh - it is much more feature rich and free Un*x clones usually have pdksh readily available. You'll be amazed how many things that you did manually in sh are implemented in KSH. KSH is far from perfect but it's probably the most useful one of the entire *sh family (scsh is another story, however).
We've been using ksh/pdksh very successfully in our projects. As of now, we've got about 200+ ksh scripts and they run perfectly in Linux (Intel and AXP), DG/UX, Solaris, HP/UX and AIX. And no, we haven't hit a single pdksh incompatibility yet.
The "obvious fact of..closed source... risking getting sued" is total BS. Motif look-n-feel was never enforced and/or trademarked and there were tons of applications &/| toolkits closely
emulating it. Tk, Fvwm, LessTif to name a few
As for "complete lack of customizability" - the fact that you don't know about it doesn't mean there isn't one. Try, for example, editres - make it grab Netscape widget tree and play with it. It is *extremely* customizeable. It may not be as flashy as KDE control center and it (thanks God) lacks "themes" but these are hardly required by Motif's target audience...
As if anyone cared. Some 1K-100K for a commercially supported GUI toolkit is not that much for something like GE and such. Trust me noone has meetings with an agenda like "we have to save on Motif license otherwise we won't make it till the end of the year..."
Quo licet client-server, non licet PDA
on
Agenda, Not Hidden
·
· Score: 1
Fully agree - if you drop all that "Linux rulez" cheer and examine the situation carefully, you'll see a number of obvious reasons why Linux (in its current form) will never make it to the PDA market:
PDA OS and software have a very tight set of requirements that desktop applications don't conform to. Microsoft learned it hard way with the previous releases of CE, where it just tried to squeeze Windows into a handheld.
Windows is much more (l)user-friendly than Linux to begin with, so it has a huge headstart for the market with non computer-savvy target audience.
Write one hundred times - "X is no good for PDA!" X, being a client-server design sucks on PDA - it's just too huge and clumsy and layered to be useful. You may squeeze it here and there but it still sucks. Anything designed from scratch with PDA form factor in mind would be better.
A product may be competitive only by having a clear advantage over comparable offers. What is the advantage of V3? What exactly does it offer that would make it a more attractive choice over palm or CE based devices? SSH? You could get something similar on any of the above, but do you really use it? A warm fuzzy feeling of "Linux inside(tm)?" Good for you then... Programming? How much programming have you done on your PDA? A consumer IR port? Congratulations, you are slated just like the first poster to buy a $200 universal remote.
To summarize, it is a pity that people, developers and investors alike, prefer chasing false goals instead of trying to define areas where Linux can be competitive and trying to improve it. Of course it is much more interesting to be engaged in a permanent war between KDE and Gnome, to have 120 text editors hardly deserving attention and it is much more cool to boast a PDA that runs Apache.
It is just amazing how IBM is capable of screwing up anything OS/2
over and over again. First they blow it having a ~1yr headstart vs
Windows 95 and actually being what they promised (better Windows than
Windows, better Dos than Dos). Now they blow it again, probably
because some delirious executive dreamed of thousands of installations
of a system that is barely compatible with anything else and costs
about the same as W2k server.
Seriously, quote me on this, but I think it is just a clumsy attempt to let the system die. Even with a sizeable share in ATMs and IBM financial solutions, noone seriously expects OS/2 (or whatever they call it now) to survive a new price tag and incompatibility with anything else. I guess, IBM has just unloaded this burden without being accused of not supporting the customers.
That's it. Sorry for being hasty - gotta hurry to pay $400 for a O/S which only supports a bunch of old browsers and office suites (har har).
Let's see... Let's get a good yet questionnable idea (PDA w/ Linux), launch a wave of PR talking how great this device will be. Let's incur all kinds of delays possible promising the device soon. At some stage let's do 'goto start' and do it all over again with the new version of the device without releasing the original one.
Finally, let's make a great step towards establishing the device on the market - let's charge developers for the dev. kit (much more than what other companies charge) for the device that is based on a free system and is supposed to use free development tools (gcc et al.)
There are way too many sleazy companies trying to ride the Linux popularity wave as well as to save on the O/S royalties.
NB. This is a repost - sorry for some clumsiness of mine (not much./ experience)
When designing and developing NT, Microsoft had a wonderful chance to provide a new generation OS capable of replacing UNIX. All they needed to do in that respect was to:
Introduce a reasonably complete POSIX/XPG/BSD/Linux set of system calls
Provide most of the UNIX command line utilities including *sh/sed/awk etc.
Provide a simple no-frills X server (or better still native X support)
MAYBE provide a set of X/Xt/Motif libraries
This would have made the new system immediately positioned as an instant UNIX replacement bringing the best of both worlds (UNIX compatibility and corporate backing by Microsoft).
However, this hasn't happended. Instead only a restrictive POSIX personality was provided and none of the UNIX programs. Why did this happen? One would argue that most of the items above can be purchased separately from third-party companies. yet this is not the same as a one-package ready-to-use OS from one company.
When designing and developing NT, Microsoft had a wonderful chance to provide a new generation OS capable of replacing UNIX. All they needed to do in that respect was to:
1. introduce a reasonably complete POSIX/XPG/BSD/Linux set of system calls
2. Provide most of the UNIX command line utilities including *sh/sed/awk etc.
3. Provide a simple no-frills X server (or better still native X support)
4. MAYBE provide a set of X/Xt/Motif libraries
This would have made the new system immediately positioned as an instant UNIX replacement bringing the best of both worlds (UNIX compatibility and corporate backing by Microsoft).
However, this haven't happended. Instead only a restrictive POSIX personality was provided and none of the UNIX programs. Why did this happen?
One would argue that most of the items above can be purchased separately from third-party companies. yet this is not the same as a one-package ready-to-use OS from one company.
Slashdot Mirror
As much as I hate conspiracy theories and Microsoft bashing, this may be an extremely clever move. As of now, mainframe and supercomputing worlds are still relatively safe from commiditization. Unlike Linux, which is still virtually ireelevant on the desktop, mainframes and supercomputers are much bigger a piece to swallow for Microsoft. By recommending Linux clusters, Microsoft may actually be trying to establish commodity hardware in the world of supercomputing. The keyword here is hardware. Once clusters become ubiquitous, Microsoft will start aggresively pushing Windows 200X Server Cluster Edition, fighting an enemy it has already much experience with.
Besides, the newest trend in customer care is to provide a "recovery" CD wich would quickly revert the hard drive into it's state (or in the best case, it would "refresh the O/S installation). With this approach, unless you have a visible hardware proble, the very first advice you'd get from them would be "please reinstall from the recovery CD."
Please show me how Linux or Windows use int 13h. Support your rants.
The OS vendors will ignore all the embedded functionality, because they have it all implemented in the code, very flexible and optimized. If someone has forgotten, the very first thing every modern PC O/S does is ignoring most of the BIOS.
So ok, what a great idea - to have a web browser and a TCP stack in the BIOS. One question though - why?!?!?! I don't care, I've got O/S for this. I can hardly imgaine myself botting the PC into the OS-less mode to browse the net. So far their only use case for this model is the OS-less BIOS upgrade. But who cares? Does it sound like toomuch work, to go to the BIOS manufacturer (or even better, to the computer vendor's) website and to download the damn thing? It's hardly more than one floppy in size!
Yet another pathetic case of a totally useless product with all kinds of "kewl" buzzwords attached...
Even better, let's not allow all those people "who dont know about PDAs" to use PDAs at all. This way we are guaranteed to only have reviews praising things just because they have an L*word associated with them. Forget about the fact that the average shipping volume on all those Zauri and Yopis will be approx. two dozens.
Big mistake. Being in the state of denial doesn't change things unfortunately. FWIW, Excel is the spreadsheet standard and PowerPoint is the presentation standard. If you doubt it, see how much success you'll get by sending any other format to anyone outside the friendly Linux community (and what would you send to your fellow Linux user: a Gnumeric file? A StarOffice file? An OpenOffice one? Kspread maybe? Note, I'm talking about file formats so far, not even about advanced features like macros and common scripting standard).
Since when did Windows cost $200-300? Even the brand new XP Home costs $199 at most and nobody buys it at that price. OEMs pay much lower prices when bundling MS software (I'd estimate, something around $50 even though I have nothing to support this estimation) and consumers get it at a very low price as well. So, no FUD please...
Before you develop a neat but useless technology, ask yourself: "why would anyone use it?" The flexible CDs are just about as practical as CueCat was. And they will hardly be as reliable as the regular CDs are. So much for one more useless technology...
Now, I'd be equally unhappy if my bank used either MS software or Open Source stuff. I'd much rather see them using something proprietary and not available to general public, like mainframes.
However, if there is a security flaw in the bank, I'll primarily blame the bank itself, not Microsoft, Linux, or whatnot. Software will never be perfectly secure (errare humanum est) and in my opinion primary blame is always upon the implementor.
Finally, in all of the above I'm neither blaming nor advocating Microsoft. I'm just saying that they are doing exactly what they are supposed to do as a public company and to blame them in this or to ask them to radically change themselves is in my opinion childish.
This "research" is way too unrealistic. Security doesn't necessarily play along with getting an edge over competitors, which is (and will always be) a primary goal of any company. Yet the authors are so detached - they seem to want all of it short of making Microsoft opening the Windows and Office source code and handing it over to Richard Stallman.
We've been using ksh/pdksh very successfully in our projects. As of now, we've got about 200+ ksh scripts and they run perfectly in Linux (Intel and AXP), DG/UX, Solaris, HP/UX and AIX. And no, we haven't hit a single pdksh incompatibility yet.
Well, how about Argentina and the UK for starters.
As for "complete lack of customizability" - the fact that you don't know about it doesn't mean there isn't one. Try, for example, editres - make it grab Netscape widget tree and play with it. It is *extremely* customizeable. It may not be as flashy as KDE control center and it (thanks God) lacks "themes" but these are hardly required by Motif's target audience...
As if anyone cared. Some 1K-100K for a commercially supported GUI toolkit is not that much for something like GE and such. Trust me noone has meetings with an agenda like "we have to save on Motif license otherwise we won't make it till the end of the year..."
- PDA OS and software have a very tight set of requirements that desktop applications don't conform to. Microsoft learned it hard way with the previous releases of CE, where it just tried to squeeze Windows into a handheld.
- Windows is much more (l)user-friendly than Linux to begin with, so it has a huge headstart for the market with non computer-savvy target audience.
- Write one hundred times - "X is no good for PDA!" X, being a client-server design sucks on PDA - it's just too huge and clumsy and layered to be useful. You may squeeze it here and there but it still sucks. Anything designed from scratch with PDA form factor in mind would be better.
- A product may be competitive only by having a clear advantage over comparable offers. What is the advantage of V3? What exactly does it offer that would make it a more attractive choice over palm or CE based devices? SSH? You could get something similar on any of the above, but do you really use it? A warm fuzzy feeling of "Linux inside(tm)?" Good for you then... Programming? How much programming have you done on your PDA? A consumer IR port? Congratulations, you are slated just like the first poster to buy a $200 universal remote.
To summarize, it is a pity that people, developers and investors alike, prefer chasing false goals instead of trying to define areas where Linux can be competitive and trying to improve it. Of course it is much more interesting to be engaged in a permanent war between KDE and Gnome, to have 120 text editors hardly deserving attention and it is much more cool to boast a PDA that runs Apache.Seriously, quote me on this, but I think it is just a clumsy attempt to let the system die. Even with a sizeable share in ATMs and IBM financial solutions, noone seriously expects OS/2 (or whatever they call it now) to survive a new price tag and incompatibility with anything else. I guess, IBM has just unloaded this burden without being accused of not supporting the customers.
That's it. Sorry for being hasty - gotta hurry to pay $400 for a O/S which only supports a bunch of old browsers and office suites (har har).
Let's see... Let's get a good yet questionnable idea (PDA w/ Linux), launch a wave of PR talking how great this device will be. Let's incur all kinds of delays possible promising the device soon. At some stage let's do 'goto start' and do it all over again with the new version of the device without releasing the original one.
Finally, let's make a great step towards establishing the device on the market - let's charge developers for the dev. kit (much more than what other companies charge) for the device that is based on a free system and is supposed to use free development tools (gcc et al.)
There are way too many sleazy companies trying to ride the Linux popularity wave as well as to save on the O/S royalties.
- Introduce a reasonably complete POSIX/XPG/BSD/Linux set of system calls
- Provide most of the UNIX command line utilities including *sh/sed/awk etc.
- Provide a simple no-frills X server (or better still native X support)
- MAYBE provide a set of X/Xt/Motif libraries
This would have made the new system immediately positioned as an instant UNIX replacement bringing the best of both worlds (UNIX compatibility and corporate backing by Microsoft).However, this hasn't happended. Instead only a restrictive POSIX personality was provided and none of the UNIX programs. Why did this happen? One would argue that most of the items above can be purchased separately from third-party companies. yet this is not the same as a one-package ready-to-use OS from one company.
When designing and developing NT, Microsoft had a wonderful chance to provide a new generation OS capable of replacing UNIX. All they needed to do in that respect was to: 1. introduce a reasonably complete POSIX/XPG/BSD/Linux set of system calls 2. Provide most of the UNIX command line utilities including *sh/sed/awk etc. 3. Provide a simple no-frills X server (or better still native X support) 4. MAYBE provide a set of X/Xt/Motif libraries This would have made the new system immediately positioned as an instant UNIX replacement bringing the best of both worlds (UNIX compatibility and corporate backing by Microsoft). However, this haven't happended. Instead only a restrictive POSIX personality was provided and none of the UNIX programs. Why did this happen? One would argue that most of the items above can be purchased separately from third-party companies. yet this is not the same as a one-package ready-to-use OS from one company.