Those are the wrong reasons and the wrong conclusions. As a consumer, superiority is a combination of pricing, coverage and equipment in the areas where you use your phone. That is it, and will vary by person and even over time for the same person.
As a carrier, CDMA is way better for the simple reason tnat it is upgradeable using the same frequencies and is forwards and backwards compatible. You don't need expensive new spectrum nor do you need to supply new handsets. GSM/TDMA was a good design for its time, but lacks forward and backwards compatibility which means carriers had to buy new frequencies, or repurpose portions of existing frequency.
If you want the technical details, there is an excellent read on how TDMA/GSM and CDMA work, as well as the politics behind it at Stephen DenBeste's site.
Also don't forget the "marketing" lock-in. I had a friend many years taking Microsoft exams. One of the questions was how much memory Win95 needed to run (this was just after Win95 had been released). The answer they expected you to give was 4MB, which is what Microsoft marketing preached at the time. Of course everyone knew that in the real world you needed double that amount. Everyone taking the test had to give the marketing answer.
What I found outrageous is that they disconnected customers. Even though they knew there was a payment issue. Surely the first thing to do would have been to put all disconnections, late fees etc on hold until after you know what the situation is.
They didn't include the cost of alienating customers or destroying their own brand image in the post mortem. But then again it would be a breath of fresh air to find a utility company that shows compassion or cares about its own image.
It looks like LCDs are finally coming down in price for people who want big screens. I run two CRTs (marvellously productive for coding). One is 21" at 1600x1200 (and would be higher resolution if the monitor could do decent refresh rates) and a 19" at 1280x1024 (which I really wanted at 1600x1200).
Together they cost $800 (that is now - cost me way more back I when I got them). You can match those resolutions at $1000 for a 20" 1600x1200 and $600 for a 19" 1280x1024.
Other than the Apple/Sony/Sun widescreen panels for $3k, I haven't seen larger resolution panels. It would also take quite some time to recoup the extra money spent on the panels from the energy savings, especially if the host is configured to turn screens off after periods of inactivity.
I had forgotten about the people who use images as backgrounds. The fun ones are those who make the background image 640 or a similar number of pixels wide, but have the text free flowing. On a wider browser window the image repeats and often looks terrible and makes the text flowing over the top of it unreadable.
You can move an application display around by using xmove. It has to be pointed at X servers. I already use TightVNC as my X server but it does the whole session as one big rectangular window to the VNC client. I want the individual apps to be displayed by VNC without the single big rectangle.
In theory I could do it by having an X server present on every client and using xmove, but I really don't want to have to install X everywhere, and it doesn't solve bandwidth issues like VNC does.
I really did look everywhere. Admittedly I didn't drop down every combobox to see all the settings (only the ones that seemed likely). Thanks for pointing it out:-)
I can also confirm that both Mozilla and Thunderbird to play nice with IMAP (ie if another client on another marks the message for deletion they pick it up). The expunge behaviour is seriously annoying. The messages for mailing lists I am on get delivered to other folders. Having to manually expunge is highly annoying. I do like the OE behaviour (expunge when leaving folder) since once I look at another folder I don't need to keep track of what was going on in the folder I am leaving.
I would personally escort the idiots who have splash pages to their own corner of hell. Numerous times I go to sites and get a blank page. It turns out they decide that there is *no* way I can possibly experience their site without having both Javascript and Flash turned on. You see they use the Javascript to run the Flash. (I have a proxy that kills nosey javascripts). Feel free to do that in the depths of your site where Flash may be appropriate but preventing entry to the very front page is idiotic.
The other thing I detest is sites that decide how many pixels everything should be. I run Mozilla maximized to 1600x1200 on a 21" monitor. Numerous sites think I can read text a few pixels high. I can't. I turned on the Mozilla preference that lets me enforce the minimum point size.
Even the Google Answers site linked to screws it up. Their horizontal ad bar at the top gets vertically truncated since they decided to allocate a fixed number of pixels to it. Other sites have borders around the article as a fixed length and so I get articles abruptly terminating and have to drag the mouse on the text to see what is below the end of the arbitrary bottom border.
As everyone else says in these comments, stop trying to control stuff to pixels and instead specify the big picture for the layout. If you have to ask the question about what the best viewed size is, then your design is badly broken.
Thanks, that worked for me. However I can't see how to expunge a folder. I couldn't even get it to be expunged on exiting Evolution. (In OE I have it set to expunge whenever I change folders).
I couldn't find anything comparable in Thunderbird or Mozilla.
(Still waiting for when the VNC variants will do seamless/local window manager windows so I could leave an Evolution session running on the Linux server and display it anywhere as though it was a local app).
One thing I like about Outlook Express is that you can mark emails for deletion. The mails are shown with a line through them (strike through). This is useful for how I keep my place in my emails. For example if 10 emails come in, they are all in bold until I read them. Then as I delete some, they are marked for deletion but I can see where my place is in those 10.
For some reason, Mozilla/Thunderbird do not appear to offer any way of doing the same thing. All my email is on an IMAP server which has specific flags for doing this. It really bugs me that an email disappears when I delete it! (I do however understand there are people who feel the other way round).
It bugs me enough that I stick to Outlook Express. (Evolution doesn't offer it either.)
Why has nobody managed (or tried) to take the last step?
The first problem is that anyone trying to do a web app has to support Internet Explorer if they want to reach a reasonable number of users. Macromedia is trying to do the rich web client thing with flex. I basically compiles the UI to Flash but still communicates with the server. There is a good demo and presentation on that site. However be prepared to fall off your chair laughing when you find out how much it costs.
Contrary to Microsoft's, UNIX and POSIX APIs have been very stable
That isn't exactly true. Posix only has about a 1000 apis. It doesn't cover things like a GUI, rich access control and security, printing (not job submission but actual page composition), databases. There have been random UNIX centric APIs that have covered all those such as Xlib, XT, Motif, Gtk, Qt, KDE, Kerberos, DCE etc. However they too have evolved over time just like Microsoft APIs have.
I will certainly agree that UNIX centric APIs are usually (but not always) better designed.
For even more fun, you can run a C++ program under a JIT. Although it sounds absurd, HP's Dynamo got around 20% performance improvement on binaries compiled on -O2 and even more on those compiled with -O4!
If you are on Verizon Wireless, the largest US carrier with around 35m subscribers you can see further examples of stupidity. They have a fantastic infrastructure and you can do data at 150kbps (max, typical is 70-115kps, I always have 115). They will be rolling out EVDO later this year which maxes at 3MBPS, typical speed of 500kbps.
On their phones they chose to do Brew which is a binary based environment. You compile up your C/C++ apps against the API and they will run on any Brew phone (in theory). However Qualcomm, the purveyor of Brew, decided they didn't want just anyone to write Brew apps. You have to get a dev kit from them (with a license that makes Microsoft look like good guys), you have to have the app certified, and you have to have it approved by the carrier. Finally it gets distributed by the carrier for a fee to subscribers - the carrier gets 10%, Qualcomm gets 10% and the developer gets 80%. You cannot make free applications for this platform - it costs around $6000 a year just to have an app and they can only be distributed by the carrier.
And of course binaries are not portable between phones even if that is the intention as there are enough phone specific differences and quirks.
So as a customer you can download apps really quickly (just a few seconds), but you get to pay $3 to $5 per month to subscribe to each app, or you can buy them outright for $8 to $10 each. Most do not have free previews, and those that do are largely terrible. I assume the rest are just as bad as their descriptions are useless. The games are also tied to your phone. If you get a new phone you cannot transfer them, you have to buy them all again.
It is a shame to see so much potential wasted just because the carrier and their technology provider decided to erect barriers and impose such ridiculous costs when they have such a lead in network infrastructure.
Colin Fahey has an excellent page about J2ME vs Brew and how restrictive all the carriers are.
Just to give you an idea, here are some of the items showing up when I browse. Note that none of them have a free preview so you have no idea what they actually do without paying.
NASCAR.COM: Provide real time information about NASCAR news, schedules, standings, races.... $10.49 per month.
Around the world in 80 days: Based on Jackie Chan movie... $2.49 monthly subscription, $5.99 unlimited use.
Pink Panther Freeze Tag: The Pink Panther and friends are loose in this exciting game. Can you handle the pressure and tag them all? $1.99 monthly, $4.99 unlimited use.
YAMAHA Ringtones: An application that allows browsing, managing and downloading of ringtones. $1.99 1 use, $6.99 6 uses. (No clue as to where the ringtones come from, if you can supply your own etc)
Just how much exactly is Microsoft afraid of Linux? How much marketshare does Microsoft percieve Linux to take?
You should remember just how Microsoft took over.
They very rarely drop backwards compatibility - the old VisiCalc binary runs even today
They realised the value is making their suite of operating systems and applications appear like they had almost everything in common, even if under the hood they didn't. For example look at how little shared code there was in the office suite or how the desktop and server operating systems were fundamentally different
They entered all markets. This created a circle where if you had Windows on the desktop, you were more inclined to run it on the server, the notebook and the palmtop.
They created tight linkages between Microsoft software on different machines for example in authentication schemes, web browsers and servers, file system protocols, networking (uPnP) etc
Where their platform was not number one, they gave the development tools away for free
They have always done a really good job on developer information (MSDN)
They offer very little choice. For example look at how many different authentication schemes you can actually run on a Microsoft network, there is exactly one web server, one web browser, one gui environment, one distributed component system, two office suites, one developer environment, one device driver model (now), one way of doing i18n...
All of those practices appeal to managers ("it is easier to manage Windows servers and palmtops if you already manage Windows desktops"), developers ("write once, run anywhere") and users ("if you know how to use win95, you can use WinXP"). (As geeks we all know there is devil in the details but those statements are largely true in the big picture)
Linux on the desktop is becoming the threat because that means it becomes credible to have Linux everywhere (servers, palmtops) (ie the same reasons why Windows spread like a virus:-)
The Linux companies are slowly doing some of the same things, but at a far slower rate, and IMHO far more stupidly (ahem RedHat, take a bow). But Microsoft never makes the mistake of underestimating their competitors, and these actions are consistent with them learning what lead to their own success and ensuring the same doors won't be wide open for Linux.
I started on Linux during the kernel 0.11 to 0.12 transition. It didn't have networking. It didn't have a lot of stuff. For example there was no 'ps' command which was implemented by various hacks months after 0.12 was released.
Even the multi-tasking was simple. Instead of seperate address spaces like you have now (imagine having seperate pages in a book, only viewing one at a time, and a task switch changes the page), everything was all in one big address space with 64MB of address range per process. The kernel just had to flip a few pointers to point at the current task, and that meant task switching was really fast (the page is never flipped, you just look at a different portion of it).
You had to boot the kernel off a floppy and only the Minix filesystem was available. (And no he didn't take the Minix code since that used micro-kernel servers to implement the filesystem and sucked.)
Shared libraries were a dream yet to happen.
But you could use gcc to compile the kernel, there was a C library available that took a really long time to compile.
Everybody just pitched in and contributed bug fixes, enhancements and ported various utilities across to Linux. In fact that happened at such a great speed that the next kernel version was 0.95.
And a common machine of the time was a 33MHz 386 with 4MB of RAM and 100MB hard disk. My 2 year old video card has a 500MHz processor and 128MB of RAM!
You are confusing several things. Swap is not RAM and is not addressed in the same. Nor is swap "mapped" above RAM with 4GB limits or anything else like that.
You also completely missed my point as to why I do it. tmpfs comes out of memory and swap. Having the various filesystems I mentioned coming out of them is a LOT faster than straight forward disk. Much of the stuff I compile has huge source and build trees. I also run UML a lot, and it uses tmpfs files as "memory".
I have 5GB of swap. I have/var/tmp and/tmp as well as the RPM build (on Redhat) (/var/tmp/portage on Gentoo) as tmpfs. That basically means those filesystems are backed by memory and swap. Compilation speeds are significantly improved and as real RAM fills up, less used tmpfs stuff ends up in swap.
The swap is on 2 x 2GB partitions and 1 x 1GB partition. Normally all drives except the first one are powered down.
I really wish they would look into other ways of fitting people in planes. I would love it if they could do it Japanese capsule hotel style (as long as each one is at least 6'5" long so I fit:-)
That way each person would only annoy themselves. Or perhaps they need an assholes and non-asshole section like the smoking/non-smoking sections of yore.
The OP said they think svn is overkill for what they want. Personally I think of svn as CVS II, and expect many people to migrate eventually (probably about the same speed as migration from Apache 1 to Apache 2).
The CVSTrac features are really nice, especially if you want to show a PHB what is going on, ro have them actually participate. For example, see the timeline feature. Having all your CVS checkins, wiki and bug tracker items combined is really nice.
I would recommend using CVS and CVSTrac. They both work fine under Windows (as servers). CVSTrac also gives you the benefit of browsing the code from the web, a bug tracker and a Wiki.
Microsoft has spent over a decade essentially supporting only ONE processor architecture, x86
In the decade before that they also supported 68k based Macs and used pcode (and compiled to it) for a lot of the Office code.
Windows NT was available for 5 platforms: PowerPC, Intel 860, Intel x86, MIPS and Alpha. (NT was originally developed on the Intel 860 before moving to x86).
A decade ago Microsoft was definitely a multi-hardware platform company. They even participated in the ACE initiative, which would have made a RISC chip the "standard" processor. Intel finally responded with performance improvements making all that RISC stuff moot.
I did find this excellent page on the history of Win32 and compiler/toolkit releases.
Technically you are right, but there is a lot more important detail that is relevant. See this article all about the history and evolution of GSM, CDMA and what is called 3G. And Qualcomm who is the major player in CDMA standards and implementation is very much a US company (with worldwide offices).
Especially note upgrade paths and what the original designs allowed for.
GSM was the very best propeller-driven fighter money could buy, but CDMA was a jet engine
I have only tried it with a Windows host. It opened a window and then immediately closed. Due to that I could never figure out what the issue is. At some point I will get around to trying it on Linux.
Actually I think it is the Microsoft competition, now retailing at $129. I believe the majority of VMWare workstation sales are on Windows.
Microsoft will be coming out with Virtual Server soon.
VMWare did do one smart thing. They donated free licenses to many open source projects (such as Samba). That ensured that those talented developers didn't contribute their time to the open source projects due to having something that works for them.
You forgot Qemu. It is fast, open source and doing really well. As a bonus as well as dealing with an entire virtual machine, it can also do individual Linux processes (on a Linux host). That way a PPC Linux user can run i386 Linux binaries (including Wine).
Slashdot Mirror
Those are the wrong reasons and the wrong conclusions. As a consumer, superiority is a combination of pricing, coverage and equipment in the areas where you use your phone. That is it, and will vary by person and even over time for the same person.
As a carrier, CDMA is way better for the simple reason tnat it is upgradeable using the same frequencies and is forwards and backwards compatible. You don't need expensive new spectrum nor do you need to supply new handsets. GSM/TDMA was a good design for its time, but lacks forward and backwards compatibility which means carriers had to buy new frequencies, or repurpose portions of existing frequency.
If you want the technical details, there is an excellent read on how TDMA/GSM and CDMA work, as well as the politics behind it at Stephen DenBeste's site.
Also don't forget the "marketing" lock-in. I had a friend many years taking Microsoft exams. One of the questions was how much memory Win95 needed to run (this was just after Win95 had been released). The answer they expected you to give was 4MB, which is what Microsoft marketing preached at the time. Of course everyone knew that in the real world you needed double that amount. Everyone taking the test had to give the marketing answer.
What I found outrageous is that they disconnected customers. Even though they knew there was a payment issue. Surely the first thing to do would have been to put all disconnections, late fees etc on hold until after you know what the situation is.
They didn't include the cost of alienating customers or destroying their own brand image in the post mortem. But then again it would be a breath of fresh air to find a utility company that shows compassion or cares about its own image.
It looks like LCDs are finally coming down in price for people who want big screens. I run two CRTs (marvellously productive for coding). One is 21" at 1600x1200 (and would be higher resolution if the monitor could do decent refresh rates) and a 19" at 1280x1024 (which I really wanted at 1600x1200).
Together they cost $800 (that is now - cost me way more back I when I got them). You can match those resolutions at $1000 for a 20" 1600x1200 and $600 for a 19" 1280x1024.
Other than the Apple/Sony/Sun widescreen panels for $3k, I haven't seen larger resolution panels. It would also take quite some time to recoup the extra money spent on the panels from the energy savings, especially if the host is configured to turn screens off after periods of inactivity.
I had forgotten about the people who use images as backgrounds. The fun ones are those who make the background image 640 or a similar number of pixels wide, but have the text free flowing. On a wider browser window the image repeats and often looks terrible and makes the text flowing over the top of it unreadable.
You can move an application display around by using xmove. It has to be pointed at X servers. I already use TightVNC as my X server but it does the whole session as one big rectangular window to the VNC client. I want the individual apps to be displayed by VNC without the single big rectangle.
In theory I could do it by having an X server present on every client and using xmove, but I really don't want to have to install X everywhere, and it doesn't solve bandwidth issues like VNC does.
I really did look everywhere. Admittedly I didn't drop down every combobox to see all the settings (only the ones that seemed likely). Thanks for pointing it out :-)
I can also confirm that both Mozilla and Thunderbird to play nice with IMAP (ie if another client on another marks the message for deletion they pick it up). The expunge behaviour is seriously annoying. The messages for mailing lists I am on get delivered to other folders. Having to manually expunge is highly annoying. I do like the OE behaviour (expunge when leaving folder) since once I look at another folder I don't need to keep track of what was going on in the folder I am leaving.
I would personally escort the idiots who have splash pages to their own corner of hell. Numerous times I go to sites and get a blank page. It turns out they decide that there is *no* way I can possibly experience their site without having both Javascript and Flash turned on. You see they use the Javascript to run the Flash. (I have a proxy that kills nosey javascripts). Feel free to do that in the depths of your site where Flash may be appropriate but preventing entry to the very front page is idiotic.
The other thing I detest is sites that decide how many pixels everything should be. I run Mozilla maximized to 1600x1200 on a 21" monitor. Numerous sites think I can read text a few pixels high. I can't. I turned on the Mozilla preference that lets me enforce the minimum point size.
Even the Google Answers site linked to screws it up. Their horizontal ad bar at the top gets vertically truncated since they decided to allocate a fixed number of pixels to it. Other sites have borders around the article as a fixed length and so I get articles abruptly terminating and have to drag the mouse on the text to see what is below the end of the arbitrary bottom border.
As everyone else says in these comments, stop trying to control stuff to pixels and instead specify the big picture for the layout. If you have to ask the question about what the best viewed size is, then your design is badly broken.
Thanks, that worked for me. However I can't see how to expunge a folder. I couldn't even get it to be expunged on exiting Evolution. (In OE I have it set to expunge whenever I change folders).
I couldn't find anything comparable in Thunderbird or Mozilla.
(Still waiting for when the VNC variants will do seamless/local window manager windows so I could leave an Evolution session running on the Linux server and display it anywhere as though it was a local app).
One thing I like about Outlook Express is that you can mark emails for deletion. The mails are shown with a line through them (strike through). This is useful for how I keep my place in my emails. For example if 10 emails come in, they are all in bold until I read them. Then as I delete some, they are marked for deletion but I can see where my place is in those 10.
For some reason, Mozilla/Thunderbird do not appear to offer any way of doing the same thing. All my email is on an IMAP server which has specific flags for doing this. It really bugs me that an email disappears when I delete it! (I do however understand there are people who feel the other way round).
It bugs me enough that I stick to Outlook Express. (Evolution doesn't offer it either.)
The first problem is that anyone trying to do a web app has to support Internet Explorer if they want to reach a reasonable number of users. Macromedia is trying to do the rich web client thing with flex. I basically compiles the UI to Flash but still communicates with the server. There is a good demo and presentation on that site. However be prepared to fall off your chair laughing when you find out how much it costs.
That isn't exactly true. Posix only has about a 1000 apis. It doesn't cover things like a GUI, rich access control and security, printing (not job submission but actual page composition), databases. There have been random UNIX centric APIs that have covered all those such as Xlib, XT, Motif, Gtk, Qt, KDE, Kerberos, DCE etc. However they too have evolved over time just like Microsoft APIs have.
I will certainly agree that UNIX centric APIs are usually (but not always) better designed.
For even more fun, you can run a C++ program under a JIT. Although it sounds absurd, HP's Dynamo got around 20% performance improvement on binaries compiled on -O2 and even more on those compiled with -O4!
If you are on Verizon Wireless, the largest US carrier with around 35m subscribers you can see further examples of stupidity. They have a fantastic infrastructure and you can do data at 150kbps (max, typical is 70-115kps, I always have 115). They will be rolling out EVDO later this year which maxes at 3MBPS, typical speed of 500kbps.
On their phones they chose to do Brew which is a binary based environment. You compile up your C/C++ apps against the API and they will run on any Brew phone (in theory). However Qualcomm, the purveyor of Brew, decided they didn't want just anyone to write Brew apps. You have to get a dev kit from them (with a license that makes Microsoft look like good guys), you have to have the app certified, and you have to have it approved by the carrier. Finally it gets distributed by the carrier for a fee to subscribers - the carrier gets 10%, Qualcomm gets 10% and the developer gets 80%. You cannot make free applications for this platform - it costs around $6000 a year just to have an app and they can only be distributed by the carrier.
And of course binaries are not portable between phones even if that is the intention as there are enough phone specific differences and quirks.
So as a customer you can download apps really quickly (just a few seconds), but you get to pay $3 to $5 per month to subscribe to each app, or you can buy them outright for $8 to $10 each. Most do not have free previews, and those that do are largely terrible. I assume the rest are just as bad as their descriptions are useless. The games are also tied to your phone. If you get a new phone you cannot transfer them, you have to buy them all again.
It is a shame to see so much potential wasted just because the carrier and their technology provider decided to erect barriers and impose such ridiculous costs when they have such a lead in network infrastructure.
Colin Fahey has an excellent page about J2ME vs Brew and how restrictive all the carriers are.
Just to give you an idea, here are some of the items showing up when I browse. Note that none of them have a free preview so you have no idea what they actually do without paying.
Maybe the games aren't just "furtive" enough?
You should remember just how Microsoft took over.
All of those practices appeal to managers ("it is easier to manage Windows servers and palmtops if you already manage Windows desktops"), developers ("write once, run anywhere") and users ("if you know how to use win95, you can use WinXP"). (As geeks we all know there is devil in the details but those statements are largely true in the big picture)
Linux on the desktop is becoming the threat because that means it becomes credible to have Linux everywhere (servers, palmtops) (ie the same reasons why Windows spread like a virus :-)
The Linux companies are slowly doing some of the same things, but at a far slower rate, and IMHO far more stupidly (ahem RedHat, take a bow). But Microsoft never makes the mistake of underestimating their competitors, and these actions are consistent with them learning what lead to their own success and ensuring the same doors won't be wide open for Linux.
I started on Linux during the kernel 0.11 to 0.12 transition. It didn't have networking. It didn't have a lot of stuff. For example there was no 'ps' command which was implemented by various hacks months after 0.12 was released.
Even the multi-tasking was simple. Instead of seperate address spaces like you have now (imagine having seperate pages in a book, only viewing one at a time, and a task switch changes the page), everything was all in one big address space with 64MB of address range per process. The kernel just had to flip a few pointers to point at the current task, and that meant task switching was really fast (the page is never flipped, you just look at a different portion of it).
You had to boot the kernel off a floppy and only the Minix filesystem was available. (And no he didn't take the Minix code since that used micro-kernel servers to implement the filesystem and sucked.)
Shared libraries were a dream yet to happen.
But you could use gcc to compile the kernel, there was a C library available that took a really long time to compile.
Everybody just pitched in and contributed bug fixes, enhancements and ported various utilities across to Linux. In fact that happened at such a great speed that the next kernel version was 0.95.
And a common machine of the time was a 33MHz 386 with 4MB of RAM and 100MB hard disk. My 2 year old video card has a 500MHz processor and 128MB of RAM!
You are confusing several things. Swap is not RAM and is not addressed in the same. Nor is swap "mapped" above RAM with 4GB limits or anything else like that.
You also completely missed my point as to why I do it. tmpfs comes out of memory and swap. Having the various filesystems I mentioned coming out of them is a LOT faster than straight forward disk. Much of the stuff I compile has huge source and build trees. I also run UML a lot, and it uses tmpfs files as "memory".
I have 5GB of swap. I have /var/tmp and /tmp as well as the RPM build (on Redhat) (/var/tmp/portage on Gentoo) as tmpfs. That basically means those filesystems are backed by memory and swap. Compilation speeds are significantly improved and as real RAM fills up, less used tmpfs stuff ends up in swap.
The swap is on 2 x 2GB partitions and 1 x 1GB partition. Normally all drives except the first one are powered down.
I really wish they would look into other ways of fitting people in planes. I would love it if they could do it Japanese capsule hotel style (as long as each one is at least 6'5" long so I fit :-)
That way each person would only annoy themselves. Or perhaps they need an assholes and non-asshole section like the smoking/non-smoking sections of yore.
The OP said they think svn is overkill for what they want. Personally I think of svn as CVS II, and expect many people to migrate eventually (probably about the same speed as migration from Apache 1 to Apache 2).
The CVSTrac features are really nice, especially if you want to show a PHB what is going on, ro have them actually participate. For example, see the timeline feature. Having all your CVS checkins, wiki and bug tracker items combined is really nice.
I would recommend using CVS and CVSTrac. They both work fine under Windows (as servers). CVSTrac also gives you the benefit of browsing the code from the web, a bug tracker and a Wiki.
In the decade before that they also supported 68k based Macs and used pcode (and compiled to it) for a lot of the Office code.
Windows NT was available for 5 platforms: PowerPC, Intel 860, Intel x86, MIPS and Alpha. (NT was originally developed on the Intel 860 before moving to x86).
A decade ago Microsoft was definitely a multi-hardware platform company. They even participated in the ACE initiative, which would have made a RISC chip the "standard" processor. Intel finally responded with performance improvements making all that RISC stuff moot.
I did find this excellent page on the history of Win32 and compiler/toolkit releases.
Especially note upgrade paths and what the original designs allowed for.
I have only tried it with a Windows host. It opened a window and then immediately closed. Due to that I could never figure out what the issue is. At some point I will get around to trying it on Linux.
Actually I think it is the Microsoft competition, now retailing at $129. I believe the majority of VMWare workstation sales are on Windows.
Microsoft will be coming out with Virtual Server soon.
VMWare did do one smart thing. They donated free licenses to many open source projects (such as Samba). That ensured that those talented developers didn't contribute their time to the open source projects due to having something that works for them.
You forgot Qemu. It is fast, open source and doing really well. As a bonus as well as dealing with an entire virtual machine, it can also do individual Linux processes (on a Linux host). That way a PPC Linux user can run i386 Linux binaries (including Wine).