"IBM's endorsement of Linux has added credibility and an illusion of support and accountability, although the reality is there is no 'center of gravity,' or central body,......"
Funny how MonkeyBoy even feels the need to spin some FUD internally.
Why is it an "illusion" of support? You pay IBM for support, IBM provides you support. Where's the illusion?
As for a center of gravity... I guess no one has told MonkeyBoy the good news about OSDL.
While I doubt they're going to find condemning evidence, I don't think it'd take much to open another antitrust case against Microsoft.
KA-CHING!
That sound you just heard was hundreds of millions of dollars of Microsoft monopoly money headed for the campaign coffers of both Bush and Kerry. Bribery has found a permanent place alongside lying, cheating, and stealing on Microsoft's standard playbook.
He's not only building relay servers that transfer mail between themselves, which there is absolutely no reason to do, (They should accept mail from X and forward to Y, not play hot potato with it. Having more than one server is fine, but they don't have anything to say to each other.) he's making them transfer mail between themselves using the mail queue instead of SMTP.
Wrong again. It's a shared mail queue on a relay only configuration. All of the mail systems we provide relay services for are connected using good old SMTP.
The benefit of the shared queue is simply to add capacity. Any node can accept messages and add them to the queue. Any node can pull messages from the queue and perform delivery on them. And when it comes time to manage the queue (delete all messages from or to a particular address or domain, that sort of thing) it only has to be done on one queue, not on a separate queue for every node in the cluster.
Re:Grudgingly going back to Sendmail.
on
Postfix 2.1 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
So much flamebait, so little time...
Why the hell are you sharing a mail queue? It's not like more than one server can send the message at a time, or receive it. And postfix supports NFS mailboxes just fine.
One server, one message? We're talking hundreds of thousands of messages per day spread out over dozens of individual mail systems. There are no local mailboxes -- this is strictly a relaying system.
I, personally, set up a 'backup MX' record to point at one of my IPs that didn't actually run a mail server, and cut my daily spam attempts by 30%.
And you probably dropped the reachability of legitimate mail too. I'm sure that works well in your little playground, but this is a real environment and we have SLA's to honor.
Grudgingly going back to Sendmail.
on
Postfix 2.1 Released
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· Score: 4, Interesting
One of my servers is a big Sparc box (running Linux, not Solaris) that performs backup MX and other relay services for about a hundred domains at a hosting center. It gets constantly pounded on all day long. Originally it ran Sendmail, and it was badly loaded down. Installing Postfix cleared up all the problems. It's just that much better.
Unfortunately, with all the extra mail traffic now due to MORE spam, MORE viruses, and all the bounces generated by the above, we have to expand again. And we have to go back to Sendmail because of one particular feature: you can have multiple Sendmail instances sharing an NFS-mounted queue. Since the new system is multiple Sparc boxes in a load-balanced cluster, we have to go back to Sendmail because Postfix doesn't support this.:(
I was one of the interviewees for Jason Scott's BBS documentary. One of the things that I think is going to be successfully communicated (otherwise I'm going to go find Jason and make him do three more DVD's) is that BBS's are not a thing of the past -- the community is alive and well, albeit changed a bit. The days of dialup are definitely over, but people are finding more and more that they need to connect with people. It's so much more satisfying (for those with an actual brain that functions, anyway) than mindlessly consuming the big corporations' attempts to move everything into CONSUME OUR CONTENT format.
It's the reason people love 'blogs, it's the reason they love IRC, and it's the reason they love sites like mine (see sig) that still follow the traditional BBS format. In some ways it's even better now, with the ability to have lots of people on at once.
Wow. The "D" developers don't know their C history if they chose that name. There was a language called BCPL, which begat a subset called B (the first letter of the name), and then its successor, C. Therefore the next successor would be called P, not D.
Laugh if you want, but replace "Einstein" with "Edison" and you'd basically be correct. Look at how famous Thomas Edison is. Schoolchildren are taught what a genius innovator he was. But if you really dig deep, and do your own research, you'll find that Edison was basically the Bill Gates of his day -- he spent most of his time ripping off other inventors' ideas and using them in more aggressive business models. Edison had a lot of patents because he knew how to play the patent system.
And then a suitable argument for doing such a drastic thing would be, "imagine if TCP/IP was patented, this is the internet you'd have"
And you can be sure that the corollary argument being made by the big pigopolist software companies will be, "Imagine if TCP/IP was patented by you, it is the Internet that you would have." (Yeah, I know, TCP/IP wouldn't have become so pervasive if it was proprietary, but that wouldn't stop sleazeball corporations from making that argument to politicians as they stuff the campaign coffers.)
Loss leaders
on
Red Hat Recap
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I think Red Hat has seriously underestimated the importance of their loss leader (the series of low-end boxed sets ending with RH9). Fedora is a step in the right direction, but it has a beta-quality feel to it that turned this long-time Red Hat user off to it.
I'm in the market for another distro right now -- something that would not have happened if there were such a thing as RHL 10. So what's it going to be? SuSE? White Box Linux? Something else? Hopefully I'll have that answer in a couple of months. It's not going to be Fedora, and I've got too many customers that aren't willing to pay the premium for RHEL.
They've shot themselves in the foot. RHL was an important loss leader that established the brand. People were familiar with RHL, so they were eager to buy RHEL. Without the low end product, where do you build your market from? People who are just getting started with Linux now, might just install SuSE since there's no RHL. And when they're ready to step up, those big bucks are going to go to Novell, not Red Hat.
It's a shame that success has blinded Red Hat to the realities of the marketplace. They are ready to pretend to be Microsoft, but reality says that RH ain't Microsoft. The users aren't locked in and they will move if they feel they're being screwed with.
This is kind of scary. We all know that Sun's relationship with Linux is somewhat schizophrenic. Over the last month or two they've been fairly reasonable (Opteron-based servers and decent Linux support) but we all know that McNealy the Big Mouth Bass still thinks that Solaris is the way to go. He still thinks Sun can "win" in the marketplace with SPARC and Solaris, beating out commodity stuff in even the small installations where SPARC and Solaris don't have an advantage.
If McNealy thinks that getting in bed with Microsoft is going to give Sun a leg up over Linux, then there are going to be some very annoying times ahead.
Presumably though you could build a Win32 app against the Wine libs. It would still be a native Linux application (not emulated), just that it would use the Win32 API, instead of GTK for example.
This was the original intention, and in fact the reason Corel put so much work into the WINE Win32 API's in the first place. They had intended to compile their entire product line against Winelib to produce "Linux native" binaries.
Unfortunately, they were unable to get WordPerfect to build in the GNU development environment. Well, actually, they phrased it as, the GNU development environment was unable to build WordPerfect, but considering the existence of megaprojects like OpenOffice.org and Mozilla that build just fine under GNU, I don't think that's true.
So anyway, they just kept on building on Windows, making sure that they didn't use any API's that WINE would barf on (or fixing those API's in WINE as they went) and when it was time to ship the "Linux Version" they just boxed up the Windows binaries along with a single-purpose version of WINE (some people started calling these "Winelets"). Needless to say, the entire Linux community scoffed this in unison.
So, I hope they're serious about a truly native version this time. If it's WINE, no good. If it's Winelib, that would be somewhat acceptable. If it's a continuation of the WP8 series, still built against Motif, it's just not going to look good next to modern Linux programs. Unfortunately, if they want to get taken seriously at all, they're going to have to go the extra mile and rebuild the front end with GTK or Qt. If they're truly smart, they'll use one of these toolkits and build a truly portable application.
The SPARC is already an open architecture processor. It's been that way for years. Sun was the big player behind it, and certainly the best known, but the SPARC design is the closest thing there is to an "open source cpu." There's even a non-Sun organization (SPARC International) they spun off to act as a steward for the standard.
SPARC processors are made by Sun, Texas Instruments, Hitachi, and others. There's a history of all the chips made on their web site.
Dunno why they're too blind to see that this would be as good an idea for Java.
It's called "Java" because Sun calls everything they do "Java" -- just like Microsoft calls everything they do ".NET" (or did, until they realized it was just really confusing, and nobody could figure out what.NET was).
This does make a lot of sense, actually. And it might actually be early enough in the game for it to work.
Right now, there is still the opportunity to attract developers to cross-platform.NET API's..NET might, in fact, actually be the fastest route there (aside from Java, which I think people ought to be using for this purpose, but let's set that aside for a moment). Perhaps if, boosted by a Novell push, developers begin writing and publishing.NET code that uses Qt libraries, there will be that many more cross-platform desktop apps available that won't be bound to Windows.Forms, Avalon, or whatever other Windows-bound API's Microsoft wants everyone to use.
It would be a double-bonus if Novell could make Mono a unified framework for writing apps that can be backended by KDE, GNOME, or Microsoft Windows without a rewrite. Let's see what happens. What's really a shame is that.NET is, on its face, a good design, but that we have to worry about Microsoft using it as a cudgel to beat back its competition.
"Rabid zealotry" is in the eye of the beholder. What looks like frothing to you may look like intelligent advocacy to someone who isn't fearful of the message being delivered.
Besides, when people dedicate so much time and energy to open source software, it's really not surprising that when faced with a corporate behemoth aiming to destroy everything they've worked so hard for, they might get a little emotional about it. It's easy to turn up your nose and write it off as fanaticism, but I'll take "built with pride" over "built for a paycheck" any day. It delivers better quality product.
I'm probably going to get modded down into the toilet for saying this, but I'd actually like to see the PC get marginalized as a gaming platform.
If consoles become the preferred way to play games by such a significant margin that PC gaming all but disappears, it's a suboptimal but effective way to remove one of the obstacles Linux faces on the desktop. "Lack of games" becomes irrelevant if nobody plays games on Windows either.
I can't believe what I'm reading here. Computers weren't easy to use until Windows 95? Hello? HELLO???!! Evidently we've all forgotten that Windows '95 == Macintosh '84 == Xerox '81 ?? Easy-to-use desktops are just one more thing that were invented elsewhere and didn't go mainstream until later because IBM and later Microsoft were keeping the drooling masses locked into inferior technology. Sheesh. There are already too many people who think that Microsoft invented the PC and even the Internet. You'd think even the lamest Slashbots would know otherwise about the GUI.
I have not been a fan of new TLDs for some time, as it seems to promote confusion.
I think that a large number of TLD's are exactly what we need. Two reasons:
1. When it was just.com.net.org, brand-happy organizations registered all three, just to make sure nobody else got them. That's a little harder to do when there are, say, thirty different TLD's. There should be 100 or more! Discourage people from registering in every possible TLD.
2. Perhaps if there are lots of different TLD's for lots of different purposes, Joe Sixpak (damn I hate that guy, not only does he buy from spammers, but he buys from even less reputable companies like Microsoft and Wal-Mart) might finally start looking things up properly instead of just assuming "The site I'm looking for is at $BRAND + '.com'"
I find this very intrusive. When I connect to a web site I don't expect a person to jump out at me and ruin the comfort of anonymity I have while browsing the web.
Some friends and I have recently started a campaign to simply harass them until they turn off this feature. Here are some nice things to say to them...
Rackspace: Hi, are you starting a new project, or looking for a new hosting company?
You:
Actually, I was just looking for the latitude and longitude of your data center so I can program the nuclear missiles.
hAHA d00d A/S/L?
Actually, I was looking for metal shelving.
Where can I buy some "Frank's Red Hot" sauce locally?
No, I was told I could find goat sex porn here.
Will you be my friend?
Rackspace is, in fact, turning into an 800-pound gorilla in their industry (by the way, Rackspace put up the money to start up RackShack, later renamed EV1.net, which bought an SCO license). You should do your hosting with small, regional hosting centers that actually care about their customers.
Ok, that's great, but I'd really like to know (and haven't been able to find out yet) is whether Ximian Desktop 2 is merely included in SUSE 9.1. It is, in fact, my desktop of choice (the integration of OOo with the rest of the environment is fabulous) and if it's part of the SUSE 9.1 standard install (i.e. without having to go to ximian.com afterwards to install it), SUSE 9.1 *will* become my new standard Linux. RH9 is getting a little long in the teeth, and you can't get Ximian Desktop for Fedora... and Fedora seems beta-quality at best, anyway.
I think Havoc is off base with the XAML comments. XAML will only be usable with the arrival of Longhorn which is in, what, 2008 now? It looks a lot like XUL, and yet where are all the XUL apps?
Why would anyone write applications that require Mozilla, when Mozilla is on fewer than 10 percent of the computers out there? That's a good way to alienate your user base.
On the other hand, how many web applications out there are "IE Only" ? We know all too well that there are a lot of webmasters and ISV's out there that follow the (flawed) logic of "Well, everyone has Windows and IE, so we'll just declare that this is a requirement." Some ISV's even require MS Office to be installed (again, because "everyone" already has it).
I think it's easy to imagine ISV's writing apps that require Longhorn and XAML a couple of years after they become available. And you can be sure that the code generated by Visual Studio will quietly encourage developers to roll out Microsoft-only apps, even if the developers don't realize they're doing it.
I certainly cannot see XAML taking over HTML anytime this century, there's simply too much investment in HTML and XAML isn't compelling enough from what I've seen to offset that.
I wish I could agree with you, but way too many Microsoft competitors have fallen into the "Microsoft couldn't possibly topple us, we just have too much market share" trap. Just ask WordPerfect, Netscape, or Novell. The Microsoft threat is real, and no one is immune from the onslaught. And now that they've bought their way into Washington DC, don't expect the government to slow them down either.
Slashdot Mirror
"IBM's endorsement of Linux has added credibility and an illusion of support and accountability, although the reality is there is no 'center of gravity,' or central body, ......"
Funny how MonkeyBoy even feels the need to spin some FUD internally.
Why is it an "illusion" of support? You pay IBM for support, IBM provides you support. Where's the illusion?
As for a center of gravity... I guess no one has told MonkeyBoy the good news about OSDL.
While I doubt they're going to find condemning evidence, I don't think it'd take much to open another antitrust case against Microsoft.
KA-CHING!
That sound you just heard was hundreds of millions of dollars of Microsoft monopoly money headed for the campaign coffers of both Bush and Kerry. Bribery has found a permanent place alongside lying, cheating, and stealing on Microsoft's standard playbook.
He's not only building relay servers that transfer mail between themselves, which there is absolutely no reason to do, (They should accept mail from X and forward to Y, not play hot potato with it. Having more than one server is fine, but they don't have anything to say to each other.) he's making them transfer mail between themselves using the mail queue instead of SMTP.
Wrong again. It's a shared mail queue on a relay only configuration. All of the mail systems we provide relay services for are connected using good old SMTP.
The benefit of the shared queue is simply to add capacity. Any node can accept messages and add them to the queue. Any node can pull messages from the queue and perform delivery on them. And when it comes time to manage the queue (delete all messages from or to a particular address or domain, that sort of thing) it only has to be done on one queue, not on a separate queue for every node in the cluster.
So much flamebait, so little time...
Why the hell are you sharing a mail queue? It's not like more than one server can send the message at a time, or receive it. And postfix supports NFS mailboxes just fine.
One server, one message? We're talking hundreds of thousands of messages per day spread out over dozens of individual mail systems. There are no local mailboxes -- this is strictly a relaying system.
I, personally, set up a 'backup MX' record to point at one of my IPs that didn't actually run a mail server, and cut my daily spam attempts by 30%.
And you probably dropped the reachability of legitimate mail too. I'm sure that works well in your little playground, but this is a real environment and we have SLA's to honor.
One of my servers is a big Sparc box (running Linux, not Solaris) that performs backup MX and other relay services for about a hundred domains at a hosting center. It gets constantly pounded on all day long. Originally it ran Sendmail, and it was badly loaded down. Installing Postfix cleared up all the problems. It's just that much better.
:(
Unfortunately, with all the extra mail traffic now due to MORE spam, MORE viruses, and all the bounces generated by the above, we have to expand again. And we have to go back to Sendmail because of one particular feature: you can have multiple Sendmail instances sharing an NFS-mounted queue. Since the new system is multiple Sparc boxes in a load-balanced cluster, we have to go back to Sendmail because Postfix doesn't support this.
I was one of the interviewees for Jason Scott's BBS documentary. One of the things that I think is going to be successfully communicated (otherwise I'm going to go find Jason and make him do three more DVD's) is that BBS's are not a thing of the past -- the community is alive and well, albeit changed a bit. The days of dialup are definitely over, but people are finding more and more that they need to connect with people. It's so much more satisfying (for those with an actual brain that functions, anyway) than mindlessly consuming the big corporations' attempts to move everything into CONSUME OUR CONTENT format.
It's the reason people love 'blogs, it's the reason they love IRC, and it's the reason they love sites like mine (see sig) that still follow the traditional BBS format. In some ways it's even better now, with the ability to have lots of people on at once.
The only question that matters:
IS IT PATENT ENCUMBERED?
All other issues are secondary.
Wow. The "D" developers don't know their C history if they chose that name. There was a language called BCPL, which begat a subset called B (the first letter of the name), and then its successor, C. Therefore the next successor would be called P, not D.
:)
Buncha wetbacks.
Laugh if you want, but replace "Einstein" with "Edison" and you'd basically be correct. Look at how famous Thomas Edison is. Schoolchildren are taught what a genius innovator he was. But if you really dig deep, and do your own research, you'll find that Edison was basically the Bill Gates of his day -- he spent most of his time ripping off other inventors' ideas and using them in more aggressive business models. Edison had a lot of patents because he knew how to play the patent system.
There's no way Jobs (or anyone at Apple) is going to respond to such a blatant PR move by a floundering company less than 1/10 its size.
Hey, this is the tech industry!
It's beleaguered company, you insensitive clod!
And then a suitable argument for doing such a drastic thing would be, "imagine if TCP/IP was patented, this is the internet you'd have"
And you can be sure that the corollary argument being made by the big pigopolist software companies will be, "Imagine if TCP/IP was patented by you, it is the Internet that you would have." (Yeah, I know, TCP/IP wouldn't have become so pervasive if it was proprietary, but that wouldn't stop sleazeball corporations from making that argument to politicians as they stuff the campaign coffers.)
I think Red Hat has seriously underestimated the importance of their loss leader (the series of low-end boxed sets ending with RH9). Fedora is a step in the right direction, but it has a beta-quality feel to it that turned this long-time Red Hat user off to it.
I'm in the market for another distro right now -- something that would not have happened if there were such a thing as RHL 10. So what's it going to be? SuSE? White Box Linux? Something else? Hopefully I'll have that answer in a couple of months. It's not going to be Fedora, and I've got too many customers that aren't willing to pay the premium for RHEL.
They've shot themselves in the foot. RHL was an important loss leader that established the brand. People were familiar with RHL, so they were eager to buy RHEL. Without the low end product, where do you build your market from? People who are just getting started with Linux now, might just install SuSE since there's no RHL. And when they're ready to step up, those big bucks are going to go to Novell, not Red Hat.
It's a shame that success has blinded Red Hat to the realities of the marketplace. They are ready to pretend to be Microsoft, but reality says that RH ain't Microsoft. The users aren't locked in and they will move if they feel they're being screwed with.
This is kind of scary. We all know that Sun's relationship with Linux is somewhat schizophrenic. Over the last month or two they've been fairly reasonable (Opteron-based servers and decent Linux support) but we all know that McNealy the Big Mouth Bass still thinks that Solaris is the way to go. He still thinks Sun can "win" in the marketplace with SPARC and Solaris, beating out commodity stuff in even the small installations where SPARC and Solaris don't have an advantage.
If McNealy thinks that getting in bed with Microsoft is going to give Sun a leg up over Linux, then there are going to be some very annoying times ahead.
Presumably though you could build a Win32 app against the Wine libs. It would still be a native Linux application (not emulated), just that it would use the Win32 API, instead of GTK for example.
This was the original intention, and in fact the reason Corel put so much work into the WINE Win32 API's in the first place. They had intended to compile their entire product line against Winelib to produce "Linux native" binaries.
Unfortunately, they were unable to get WordPerfect to build in the GNU development environment. Well, actually, they phrased it as, the GNU development environment was unable to build WordPerfect, but considering the existence of megaprojects like OpenOffice.org and Mozilla that build just fine under GNU, I don't think that's true.
So anyway, they just kept on building on Windows, making sure that they didn't use any API's that WINE would barf on (or fixing those API's in WINE as they went) and when it was time to ship the "Linux Version" they just boxed up the Windows binaries along with a single-purpose version of WINE (some people started calling these "Winelets"). Needless to say, the entire Linux community scoffed this in unison.
So, I hope they're serious about a truly native version this time. If it's WINE, no good. If it's Winelib, that would be somewhat acceptable. If it's a continuation of the WP8 series, still built against Motif, it's just not going to look good next to modern Linux programs. Unfortunately, if they want to get taken seriously at all, they're going to have to go the extra mile and rebuild the front end with GTK or Qt. If they're truly smart, they'll use one of these toolkits and build a truly portable application.
The SPARC is already an open architecture processor. It's been that way for years. Sun was the big player behind it, and certainly the best known, but the SPARC design is the closest thing there is to an "open source cpu." There's even a non-Sun organization (SPARC International) they spun off to act as a steward for the standard.
SPARC processors are made by Sun, Texas Instruments, Hitachi, and others. There's a history of all the chips made on their web site.
Dunno why they're too blind to see that this would be as good an idea for Java.
It's called "Java" because Sun calls everything they do "Java" -- just like Microsoft calls everything they do ".NET" (or did, until they realized it was just really confusing, and nobody could figure out what .NET was).
This does make a lot of sense, actually. And it might actually be early enough in the game for it to work.
.NET API's. .NET might, in fact, actually be the fastest route there (aside from Java, which I think people ought to be using for this purpose, but let's set that aside for a moment). Perhaps if, boosted by a Novell push, developers begin writing and publishing .NET code that uses Qt libraries, there will be that many more cross-platform desktop apps available that won't be bound to Windows.Forms, Avalon, or whatever other Windows-bound API's Microsoft wants everyone to use.
.NET is, on its face, a good design, but that we have to worry about Microsoft using it as a cudgel to beat back its competition.
Right now, there is still the opportunity to attract developers to cross-platform
It would be a double-bonus if Novell could make Mono a unified framework for writing apps that can be backended by KDE, GNOME, or Microsoft Windows without a rewrite. Let's see what happens. What's really a shame is that
"Rabid zealotry" is in the eye of the beholder. What looks like frothing to you may look like intelligent advocacy to someone who isn't fearful of the message being delivered.
Besides, when people dedicate so much time and energy to open source software, it's really not surprising that when faced with a corporate behemoth aiming to destroy everything they've worked so hard for, they might get a little emotional about it. It's easy to turn up your nose and write it off as fanaticism, but I'll take "built with pride" over "built for a paycheck" any day. It delivers better quality product.
I'm probably going to get modded down into the toilet for saying this, but I'd actually like to see the PC get marginalized as a gaming platform.
If consoles become the preferred way to play games by such a significant margin that PC gaming all but disappears, it's a suboptimal but effective way to remove one of the obstacles Linux faces on the desktop. "Lack of games" becomes irrelevant if nobody plays games on Windows either.
I can't believe what I'm reading here. Computers weren't easy to use until Windows 95? Hello? HELLO???!! Evidently we've all forgotten that Windows '95 == Macintosh '84 == Xerox '81 ?? Easy-to-use desktops are just one more thing that were invented elsewhere and didn't go mainstream until later because IBM and later Microsoft were keeping the drooling masses locked into inferior technology. Sheesh. There are already too many people who think that Microsoft invented the PC and even the Internet. You'd think even the lamest Slashbots would know otherwise about the GUI.
- Save as
.RTF from your favorite libre word processor - Rename the file from
.RTF to .DOC
Microsoft Word will see that theI have not been a fan of new TLDs for some time, as it seems to promote confusion.
.com .net .org, brand-happy organizations registered all three, just to make sure nobody else got them. That's a little harder to do when there are, say, thirty different TLD's. There should be 100 or more! Discourage people from registering in every possible TLD.
I think that a large number of TLD's are exactly what we need. Two reasons:
1. When it was just
2. Perhaps if there are lots of different TLD's for lots of different purposes, Joe Sixpak (damn I hate that guy, not only does he buy from spammers, but he buys from even less reputable companies like Microsoft and Wal-Mart) might finally start looking things up properly instead of just assuming "The site I'm looking for is at $BRAND + '.com'"
Some friends and I have recently started a campaign to simply harass them until they turn off this feature. Here are some nice things to say to them...
Rackspace: Hi, are you starting a new project, or looking for a new hosting company?
You:
Rackspace is, in fact, turning into an 800-pound gorilla in their industry (by the way, Rackspace put up the money to start up RackShack, later renamed EV1.net, which bought an SCO license). You should do your hosting with small, regional hosting centers that actually care about their customers.
Ok, that's great, but I'd really like to know (and haven't been able to find out yet) is whether Ximian Desktop 2 is merely included in SUSE 9.1. It is, in fact, my desktop of choice (the integration of OOo with the rest of the environment is fabulous) and if it's part of the SUSE 9.1 standard install (i.e. without having to go to ximian.com afterwards to install it), SUSE 9.1 *will* become my new standard Linux. RH9 is getting a little long in the teeth, and you can't get Ximian Desktop for Fedora ... and Fedora seems beta-quality at best, anyway.
I think Havoc is off base with the XAML comments. XAML will only be usable with the arrival of Longhorn which is in, what, 2008 now? It looks a lot like XUL, and yet where are all the XUL apps?
Why would anyone write applications that require Mozilla, when Mozilla is on fewer than 10 percent of the computers out there? That's a good way to alienate your user base.
On the other hand, how many web applications out there are "IE Only" ? We know all too well that there are a lot of webmasters and ISV's out there that follow the (flawed) logic of "Well, everyone has Windows and IE, so we'll just declare that this is a requirement." Some ISV's even require MS Office to be installed (again, because "everyone" already has it).
I think it's easy to imagine ISV's writing apps that require Longhorn and XAML a couple of years after they become available. And you can be sure that the code generated by Visual Studio will quietly encourage developers to roll out Microsoft-only apps, even if the developers don't realize they're doing it.
I certainly cannot see XAML taking over HTML anytime this century, there's simply too much investment in HTML and XAML isn't compelling enough from what I've seen to offset that.
I wish I could agree with you, but way too many Microsoft competitors have fallen into the "Microsoft couldn't possibly topple us, we just have too much market share" trap. Just ask WordPerfect, Netscape, or Novell. The Microsoft threat is real, and no one is immune from the onslaught. And now that they've bought their way into Washington DC, don't expect the government to slow them down either.