VisualBasic.NET is really just C# with different syntax -- they're bringing the mountain to Mohammed on this one, and breaking lots of stuff in it's stead. You'll never see an oldstyle version of VB that's anywhere near compatible, but someone implements the CLR and C# (and the other non-standard bits like WinForms and ADO.NET), they are mighty close to having a version of VB for Unix.
Competition between Sun and Microsoft may be a good thing for Sun or for Microsoft, or for the occasional consumer, but only tangentially are there any benefits to the consumer.
And that's what troubles me about Mono. One side you have a Microsoft with thousands of internal developers and a staggering array of products. One the other you have the Sun Java camp which includes most of the Unix world as well as hundreds of third party middleware companies and a significant open source community.
In the middle we have Mono, which probably won't have very good interoperability with.NET but will provide it's own set of features. This will attract it's own base of Linux-friendly developers, perhaps people that have been largely neutral or negative to Java's philosophy.
Now, I suppose it's the natural order of things for the Unix userbase to fragment and fight civil wars. But, when you have two gigantic semis, one labeled "Sun" and the other labeled "Microsoft" and they start barrelling towards each other in a game of enterprise chicken, I wouldn't want to be in the VW Bug with the stuffed penguin hanging in the back window that happens to be caught between them.
Yes, but significant portions of the.NET platform are implemented as native Windows components and are not part of the standards submission. (Meaning the standards are already embraced and extended.) That does leave Mono significantly vulnerable at least from a compatibility aspect.
+ The "Open Source Community" for the most part has been working to build a better Unix system, not to take out Microsoft.
+ Linux's popularity has little to do with the anti-trust trial. In the last 5 years, Linux OSes have undergone massive improvement, and standard PC hardware has far better performance than it used to. Meanwhile, proprietary UNIX hardware has seen less relative improvement.
+ Since Linux is free, companies will probably not go back to paying commercial UNIX companies thousands of dollars per Unit for software when they can equipt there machines for the price of a burned CD.
(Microsoft wouldn't be in the competitive position in server space they are now if wasn't for the UNIX companies, including Novell, shooting themselves in the foot. With massive growth in the Internet server market over the last several years, it's still debatable whether Linux is growing with the incumbant platform, UNIX, or is growing at the expensive of the challenger, Microsoft.)
+ I agree that when Microsoft dove into a previously internal OSS licencing flamewar, that they are now playing by the OSS community's rules.
It would be nice if they *really* played by the Unix community rules, such as abolishing seat licences for filesharing. Until MS starts cutting prices, they obviously don't see Linux as a substantial competitive threat to their core market of workgroup serving.
Just to make you happy, I punched in through terminal server (well, I'm supposed to be working..), and verified that DMA is enabled according to the device mangler.
I'll concur -- My PII-400/100 with 40Mbit SCSI is far more responsive and lighter on the CPU than my work PIII-733/133 with ATA-66. Both have 256MB, W2K (which should be enabling the ATA magic just fine)
Both machines are plenty fast for what I need, it's just a perceptual smoothness that's present on the SCSI machine and absent on the IDE one. I know the benchmarks make it look about equal, but if you've got the dough, SCSI is a worthwhile upgrade in my book, over say an incrementally faster CPU.
One thing I learned the hard way was to never install a theme unless it was specifically advertised as compatible with whichever release of Moz I was using.
Because the API has been changing and themes.org has been down, most theme developers seem to be on hold. Probably a smart move considering the current hectic release schedule -- when 1.0 ships and the API is stable, I'd expect an explosion of themes.
You don't think.NET has "contingency plan" written all over it?
(I agree that Gates/Ballmer would rather see their company sued into the ground than to to turn into IBM. Matter of princpal. Of course Gates/Ballmer might not be around there forever.)
Re:All extremists may fuck off now. Thank you.
on
USENIX Reports
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· Score: 1
We have this nice western word that gets used to describe the Unix situation: Balkanization.
The modern zealot kiddies have picked up where the old lumbering commercial UNIX firms have left off, turning minor technical or philosophical differences into a religious civil war.
The fact is that that nearly all Unix systems are 95% identical from a user interface point of view, and that while there is no single OS "UNIX" anymore, the fate and popularity of various Unix OSes are intimately linked together, against proprietary minicomputer systems in the old days, and against proprietary personal computer system now.
Yet, we have major divisions over twiddly little details such as the thread implementation or the init scripts. This ripples outward until you have the jihad kiddies essentially committing fraticide against each other, and the Unix platform as a whole. Not to mention the OSS licencing issues which have always been more of a debating point (with Microsoft now taking the stand) than anything more than normal due course to developers.
This entire attitude comes from the false idea that platform growth is zero sum game. Every X user is one less Y user, etc,etc. (You can be sure that Bill Gates doesn't see the computer market this way!) Therefore, if you can't convert Windows users to your Unix, it pays to wage a civil war against other Unix users.
This wouldn't be so much of a problem if there was zealous advocacy of and interest in the growth of the Unix platform as a whole, because the technical and cutural issues would be seen in context. Until people start looking at the big picture, the ongoing fraternal flamewars will continue to hurt the platform.
Please. Stop posting this bullshit. If you actually believe it take a look at http://www.xs4all.nl/~ppk/js/version5.html .
Opera has a lot of nice user-oriented features, including the debatable use of MDI. If that's enough to make you want to use it, fine. But don't fall back on some bogus standards argument.
Agreed - the worst threat to internal networks are the users that imagine themselves to be 'power users' and therefore outside or above IT jursidiction. These are the guys who download the "shareware of the day", get e-mail updates about dubious Windows-optimization tips (just delete this reg key and computer go fast!), load up their machine with game demos and weird multimedia crap, send out viruses (real or "good times"), run out of disk because they installed an unused Linux partition, read "PC Magazine" religously, and so on.
Generally, if someone can't figure out the difference between a "home" computer and a "work" computer they aren't power users, they're wannabes, and that's dangerous.
any and all unofficial screen savers must be extinguished -
"Install this screen saver" has been one of the most prevalant way (next to Outlook viruses and 'greeting cards') to trojan Windows systems. Unofficial screensavers should be forbidden.
WinNT/2K does HLT the CPU. Win9x/ME doesn't (maybe because the CPU is unpredictably in 16-bit modes?)
On the other hand, APM/ACPI is more likely to work on any given machine under Win9x. NT 4 can't even power-save the monitor, which is something a DOS TSR could do.
Yeah, but Microsoft may or may not be using it. It sounds like they didn't rewrite all of their Unix Hotmail software but instead used their Internix UNIX API emulator product to keep the administrative stuff going
Lets see, on the MacOS you've got a hidden case-sensitive 4 character code to store file type. On Windows, you've got a partially hidden case-insensitive 3 character code.
Even so, for our complaining friend - what's the Mac file type for a AVI file? Something like "nAVI", if I recall correctly, with no means of publishing codec information to the shell. Quicktime files have the exact same problem (except it's something like MooV).
Now the Mac has a "creator" code, but that solves a different problem. I think we can do significantly better either OS in this department.
Re:Videogame revenue is far less than movie revenu
on
Review: Tomb Raider
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· Score: 1
The video game industry first surpassed Hollywood box office revenues in the early 1980s (not Pong, but close).
Of course, Hollywood then was far less profitable than today, and there wasn't much of a video rental market to speak of, but still impressive for the day.
If MS really wanted to take over the world, they'd do to MP3 what they did to AVI.
That is, they'd use the same file extension to represent dozens of codecs, many of which were proprietary.
This really wasn't a conspiricy -- it's more an outgrowth of the totally retarded File Extension == File Type idea that Windows is based on. Decent metadata display could easily solve this. Not to mention that most Windows users have the default setting of file extentions turned off in Explorer anyway.
I've noticed the same, and it's too bad because WMP sounds like shit at low bit rates (like talk radio stuff). Real started doing audio, and they really had that down, at least.
Absolutely -- During the big recession of the early-90s (well, it was big in CA), the layoffs were primarily driven by BIG corporations such as AT&T (laid-off 100,000 people IIRC), IBM, and the defence contractors.
These were the "safe" big company jobs that Joe Morgage punched the clock at until unexpectedly getting the boot, repalced by an army of contractors and outsourcers. The resulting decentralization in labor talent and total decimation of company loyalty was one of thing primary motivating factors which lead to the "dot-com economy".
Note that in the midrange and high-end markets, "subscription" software is very common. It's called "maintenance" and often costs up to 40% of the original purchase price, per year.
Would Microsoft be more interested in bug fixes if they derived a significant portion of revenue from maintenance? Hell, yes, which is why a move to a subscription model is not necessarily a bad thing.
As it is, MS has a unique business model which depends on creating enough features to sell upgrades. As Bill Gates said (falsely) "Nobody ever pays for a bug fix" -- which means that the bugfixes don't get implemented until the next major "features" release.
I don't think MS business practices are particularlly "hidden" -- You pay money for Product version X. End of Transaction. The next transaction doesn't start until you buy version X+1, and there is no incentive for MS to give you anything until then.
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VisualBasic.NET is really just C# with different syntax -- they're bringing the mountain to Mohammed on this one, and breaking lots of stuff in it's stead. You'll never see an oldstyle version of VB that's anywhere near compatible, but someone implements the CLR and C# (and the other non-standard bits like WinForms and ADO.NET), they are mighty close to having a version of VB for Unix.
First of all, excellent post.
.NET but will provide it's own set of features. This will attract it's own base of Linux-friendly developers, perhaps people that have been largely neutral or negative to Java's philosophy.
Competition between Sun and Microsoft may be a good thing for Sun or for Microsoft, or for the occasional consumer, but only tangentially are there any benefits to the consumer.
And that's what troubles me about Mono. One side you have a Microsoft with thousands of internal developers and a staggering array of products. One the other you have the Sun Java camp which includes most of the Unix world as well as hundreds of third party middleware companies and a significant open source community.
In the middle we have Mono, which probably won't have very good interoperability with
Now, I suppose it's the natural order of things for the Unix userbase to fragment and fight civil wars. But, when you have two gigantic semis, one labeled "Sun" and the other labeled "Microsoft" and they start barrelling towards each other in a game of enterprise chicken, I wouldn't want to be in the VW Bug with the stuffed penguin hanging in the back window that happens to be caught between them.
Yes, but significant portions of the .NET platform are implemented as native Windows components and are not part of the standards submission. (Meaning the standards are already embraced and extended.) That does leave Mono significantly vulnerable at least from a compatibility aspect.
I think all of you guys need to reverse the polarity of your joke sensors.
Solution: invent RPC over HTTP protocols. Problem solved!
+ The "Open Source Community" for the most part has been working to build a better Unix system, not to take out Microsoft.
+ Linux's popularity has little to do with the anti-trust trial. In the last 5 years, Linux OSes have undergone massive improvement, and standard PC hardware has far better performance than it used to. Meanwhile, proprietary UNIX hardware has seen less relative improvement.
+ Since Linux is free, companies will probably not go back to paying commercial UNIX companies thousands of dollars per Unit for software when they can equipt there machines for the price of a burned CD.
(Microsoft wouldn't be in the competitive position in server space they are now if wasn't for the UNIX companies, including Novell, shooting themselves in the foot. With massive growth in the Internet server market over the last several years, it's still debatable whether Linux is growing with the incumbant platform, UNIX, or is growing at the expensive of the challenger, Microsoft.)
+ I agree that when Microsoft dove into a previously internal OSS licencing flamewar, that they are now playing by the OSS community's rules.
It would be nice if they *really* played by the Unix community rules, such as abolishing seat licences for filesharing. Until MS starts cutting prices, they obviously don't see Linux as a substantial competitive threat to their core market of workgroup serving.
Just to make you happy, I punched in through terminal server (well, I'm supposed to be working..), and verified that DMA is enabled according to the device mangler.
I'll concur -- My PII-400/100 with 40Mbit SCSI is far more responsive and lighter on the CPU than my work PIII-733/133 with ATA-66. Both have 256MB, W2K (which should be enabling the ATA magic just fine)
Both machines are plenty fast for what I need, it's just a perceptual smoothness that's present on the SCSI machine and absent on the IDE one. I know the benchmarks make it look about equal, but if you've got the dough, SCSI is a worthwhile upgrade in my book, over say an incrementally faster CPU.
I doubt being able to use the same hard drive standard between 2030 and 2056
Considering that 2001 adapters are register-compatible with those from 1984, I wouldn't be shocked if you could.
One thing I learned the hard way was to never install a theme unless it was specifically advertised as compatible with whichever release of Moz I was using.
Because the API has been changing and themes.org has been down, most theme developers seem to be on hold. Probably a smart move considering the current hectic release schedule -- when 1.0 ships and the API is stable, I'd expect an explosion of themes.
You don't think .NET has "contingency plan" written all over it?
(I agree that Gates/Ballmer would rather see their company sued into the ground than to to turn into IBM. Matter of princpal. Of course Gates/Ballmer might not be around there forever.)
We have this nice western word that gets used to describe the Unix situation: Balkanization.
The modern zealot kiddies have picked up where the old lumbering commercial UNIX firms have left off, turning minor technical or philosophical differences into a religious civil war.
The fact is that that nearly all Unix systems are 95% identical from a user interface point of view, and that while there is no single OS "UNIX" anymore, the fate and popularity of various Unix OSes are intimately linked together, against proprietary minicomputer systems in the old days, and against proprietary personal computer system now.
Yet, we have major divisions over twiddly little details such as the thread implementation or the init scripts. This ripples outward until you have the jihad kiddies essentially committing fraticide against each other, and the Unix platform as a whole. Not to mention the OSS licencing issues which have always been more of a debating point (with Microsoft now taking the stand) than anything more than normal due course to developers.
This entire attitude comes from the false idea that platform growth is zero sum game. Every X user is one less Y user, etc,etc. (You can be sure that Bill Gates doesn't see the computer market this way!) Therefore, if you can't convert Windows users to your Unix, it pays to wage a civil war against other Unix users.
This wouldn't be so much of a problem if there was zealous advocacy of and interest in the growth of the Unix platform as a whole, because the technical and cutural issues would be seen in context. Until people start looking at the big picture, the ongoing fraternal flamewars will continue to hurt the platform.
Opera is completely standards compliant.
Please. Stop posting this bullshit. If you actually believe it take a look at http://www.xs4all.nl/~ppk/js/version5.html .
Opera has a lot of nice user-oriented features, including the debatable use of MDI. If that's enough to make you want to use it, fine. But don't fall back on some bogus standards argument.
Agreed - the worst threat to internal networks are the users that imagine themselves to be 'power users' and therefore outside or above IT jursidiction. These are the guys who download the "shareware of the day", get e-mail updates about dubious Windows-optimization tips (just delete this reg key and computer go fast!), load up their machine with game demos and weird multimedia crap, send out viruses (real or "good times"), run out of disk because they installed an unused Linux partition, read "PC Magazine" religously, and so on.
Generally, if someone can't figure out the difference between a "home" computer and a "work" computer they aren't power users, they're wannabes, and that's dangerous.
any and all unofficial screen savers must be extinguished -
"Install this screen saver" has been one of the most prevalant way (next to Outlook viruses and 'greeting cards') to trojan Windows systems. Unofficial screensavers should be forbidden.
WinNT/2K does HLT the CPU. Win9x/ME doesn't (maybe because the CPU is unpredictably in 16-bit modes?)
On the other hand, APM/ACPI is more likely to work on any given machine under Win9x. NT 4 can't even power-save the monitor, which is something a DOS TSR could do.
Yeah, but Microsoft may or may not be using it. It sounds like they didn't rewrite all of their Unix Hotmail software but instead used their Internix UNIX API emulator product to keep the administrative stuff going
The MS paper describing the migration is here.
Lets see, on the MacOS you've got a hidden case-sensitive 4 character code to store file type. On Windows, you've got a partially hidden case-insensitive 3 character code.
Even so, for our complaining friend - what's the Mac file type for a AVI file? Something like "nAVI", if I recall correctly, with no means of publishing codec information to the shell. Quicktime files have the exact same problem (except it's something like MooV).
Now the Mac has a "creator" code, but that solves a different problem. I think we can do significantly better either OS in this department.
The video game industry first surpassed Hollywood box office revenues in the early 1980s (not Pong, but close).
Of course, Hollywood then was far less profitable than today, and there wasn't much of a video rental market to speak of, but still impressive for the day.
If MS really wanted to take over the world, they'd do to MP3 what they did to AVI.
That is, they'd use the same file extension to represent dozens of codecs, many of which were proprietary.
This really wasn't a conspiricy -- it's more an outgrowth of the totally retarded File Extension == File Type idea that Windows is based on. Decent metadata display could easily solve this. Not to mention that most Windows users have the default setting of file extentions turned off in Explorer anyway.
I've noticed the same, and it's too bad because WMP sounds like shit at low bit rates (like talk radio stuff). Real started doing audio, and they really had that down, at least.
Absolutely -- During the big recession of the early-90s (well, it was big in CA), the layoffs were primarily driven by BIG corporations such as AT&T (laid-off 100,000 people IIRC), IBM, and the defence contractors.
These were the "safe" big company jobs that Joe Morgage punched the clock at until unexpectedly getting the boot, repalced by an army of contractors and outsourcers. The resulting decentralization in labor talent and total decimation of company loyalty was one of thing primary motivating factors which lead to the "dot-com economy".
Note that in the midrange and high-end markets, "subscription" software is very common. It's called "maintenance" and often costs up to 40% of the original purchase price, per year.
Would Microsoft be more interested in bug fixes if they derived a significant portion of revenue from maintenance? Hell, yes, which is why a move to a subscription model is not necessarily a bad thing.
As it is, MS has a unique business model which depends on creating enough features to sell upgrades. As Bill Gates said (falsely) "Nobody ever pays for a bug fix" -- which means that the bugfixes don't get implemented until the next major "features" release.
I don't think MS business practices are particularlly "hidden" -- You pay money for Product version X. End of Transaction. The next transaction doesn't start until you buy version X+1, and there is no incentive for MS to give you anything until then.
There is DOS code in Windows 2000 -- find "1981" d:\winnt\system32\command.com
Although, this is a legacy applicaiton that is distributed with Win2000, and the core parts of the OS are by no means derived from DOS.
I think you could make a substantial argument that Windows 2000 is derived from OS/2 1.0 (1987), which is almost as old as DOS, tho.
1) you are quibbling over the word "live" when we are saying the same thing
2) you are quibbling over the word "disabled" when we are saying the same thing.