So why don't you go and jam on some of those Krell musical instruments like you did back in -9283342948295 NQ? I dug that crazy rhythm man! (Note: For people too old to get the joke, the alien race in the classic 50s sci-fi film, Forbidden Planet, are called the Krell)
I'm annoying? That must mean you're one of my regular readers. Oh... thank you! I have real followers now! I think I'm going to cry for joy!!! You like me! You REALLY like me!!!
What the hell is this world coming to? Professional gaming? You've GOT to be kidding me. It used to be that at one point in time, the things that were professional implied some kind of useful skill. Things like, oh... being a doctor, a scientist, an engineer. Those sorts of things. Then the term got extended a bit to recreational activities, but they still needed useful skills. Things like, oh... chess and various REAL sports (I exclude golf) which required mental and physical accumen. But now we have "professional gaming"? And this likely applies to first person shooters and MMORPGs... So let's see... what skills do these games entail?
FPS: The ability to click fast and move a mouse on a surface or worse, utilize a joypad controller. Other than excelling in clerical work thanks to the mouse skills, how is this useful?
MMORPG: This is like "professional breathing competitions". Only lamer. The only things that MMORPGs seem to encourage are greed and isolation. REALLY useful there. I suppose if you're a eTrade jockey it just makes you feel better or something.
God, I hate what the world has become. I had so much hope that people would get smarter and that technology would augment that increase in intelligence to the point where we would eventually become the perfect hybrids of humans and machines. Instead, the majority of the populace are a bunch of preening idiots worried about how "phat" they are. I think we'd be better off if the majority of the less mentally equipped would just fade away.
...why the Segway isn't on there. Wasn't the Segway supposed to the the "IT" that everyone was talking about? Hehehe.. I remember that when some rumours were leaked about what "IT" was, and the word transporter showed up, people started thinking transporter technology like on Star Trek. That WOULD have truly made it to this list, had it been the case. But it wasn't. However, considering how poorly the average American eats, and how fat those people are getting, I see a future industry for Segway. Imagine the day when Americans believe it's their right to enjoy the culinary delights of KFC, McDonalds, Burger King and the like and weigh 5000 pounds and have tons of health problems. To deny them the pleasures of these great dining experiences would rank up there with communism and gun control. So, Segway could then introduce the surgical leg replacements as most limbs would be unsuitable to move the typical American fatass. So people will voluntarily have their legs removed and replaced with industrial strength Segway devices so that they can easily maneuver their way into the next fast food joint down the street.;P
Coming Zune from Microsoft? In soviet Russia Zune comes on YOU!? Which is better, Zune or sex with a mare? I've got a hot Zune down my pants with pictures of Natalie Portman, naked and petrified? I kid, I kid...
I think that you'll find the market breakdown between Zune and the iPod will fall along the same lines that you see in the PC vs. Mac world. The people who want the "stylish and beautiful" device will still buy iPods. The people who want the utilitarian device with more features than sense, will buy the Zune. The wireless functionality of the Zune is a perfect example. To paraphrase Jobs, who WANT that sort of thing when you can just swap your [insert music player here] with a friend for a few minutes to listen to the songs on each other's players to see if you want to buy the tracks? (Funny how 80s Walkman technology, the 1/8" headphone plug, is perfectly compatible with nearly every music player out there. Don't expect that to last much longer... it keeps the goons from making more money through artifical restrictions.) The ridiculous filesharing that deletes itself thanks to DRM is just another component bound to cause more negative user experiences than positive ones. But, the fact is that Zune will likely break even or tank. I don't see it becoming the defacto standard as iPod has. Hell, I own a Rio Karma (they RULE BTW...) and I can attest to the fact that EVERY digital music player or service you want is made for the iPod. The FM transmitter I bought along with it's cigarette lighter adapter has a funny extra plug on it that is specifically for the iPod and totally useless on my Karma. Again... the problem of not using or establishing any kind of REAL drafted standard.
IF there were an actual standard, then the Zune and the iPod would be able to actually compete on their merits rather than artifically limiting each other. I'd say a reasonable standard would look like this:
1. A standard interface for purchasing/downloading music within the player itself rather than through a PC. This would happen via WiFi or a NIC or even a cell phone data link 2. Standard bluetooth for sending the audio data to a bluetooth headphone, or in-dash blue tooth enabled car stereos. This would eliminate the interference that you experience on the road while other people blast Howard Stern with their Sirius sets 3. A standard hardware interface for a dock that all players would utilize regardless of shape or size 4. Standard power jacks that are multipurpose for car, house or even USB power 5. A standard underlying base OS that could have extras layered on top of it to extend functionality and support for additional features in software and extended hardware features as well 6. Interaction with other bluetooth devices so that you could also use them as data drives, or even personal answering machines for cell phones (screw voice mail...)
Just a few ideas which I'm sure the "elite" here will rip apart. My point is that Zune is not going to be able to easily usurp the lead that Apple has at the moment. The only way they will is if Apple rests on their laurels and doesn't provide the next "high".
I don't doubt it. This sis exactly the entre MS needs to start up the FUD machine about the demise of Java. Don't get me wrong, as a user, I hate Java because EVERY Java app I've used has been slow and very unrealiable, so I'm not a pro-Java person. I'm aware that a lot of programmers like Java, and it likely has something to do with the time they've invested in it and the features of programming in it that non-coders are not aware of. But, you can bet that some CEOs, and management drones who have had crappy experiences with Java will buy into anything that basically says, "Java sucks". So if MS or others use this as a way to claim that the open sourcing of Java signifies the failure/end of the product, you better believe those folks will ignorantly cheer "Hear hear" and then tell their staff they're moving to.Net because it's a "Java killer". I, personally, wouldn't go that far. I'd rather see something else take the place of Java and I definitely don't want it to be.Net. But, I'm a rare kind of person in that I might not be a Java coder, but I understand that Java itself doesn't totally suck. It's mostly the people who lazily code crappy apps using shortcuts and flawed logic models.
Ya weirdo.;P Just kidding, I like BSD too. I should have said Windows users who try Linux. Linux users who move to BSD are more like "graduates". As I'm not really a coder (but I'm trying) I haven't had to deal with that design issue. And I think that was the point I was really trying to make in this thread. I'm not a developer, but Linux enables to me to do things that I would HAVE to be a developer to do in Windows. This doesn't mean that Windows is "superior" because of complexity. It means that Windows has failed to address the advanced needs of non-coders in a way that Linux has completely covered well.
Heh. It's the Unix mindset: brevity. Unfortunately it comes off as "terseness" to people who aren't into Unix. What the poster above was trying to point out was the ease of supporting many different file systems out of the box. Windows is completely capable of this as the filesystems are "pluggable" in the NT based Windows variants. But only a few people have actually done it and mostly in commercial only software. MS hasn't bothered to have build int support for much more than the basic file systems that a typical Windows user would be interested in: FAT*, NTFS, CDFS (which includes iso9660 for standard data CD-ROMs and can be augmented with udf for CD-RW and DVD). Windows NT4 was the last version of Windows to support HPFS (OS/2's file system). From my perspective, the main reason for the artifical limitations here is again, purely business reasons. MS had the HPFS support mainly so that organizations who used OS/2 would have a relatively easy way to migrate to Windows NT. However, since the OS/2 usage was fairly small and most people who were going to move had already moved by the time Win2k was released, they didn't have much reason to keep the support in. FAT and NTFS are obviously the defacto MS filesystems. It's completely possible for someone to write support for *nix filesystems like ext2/3, reiserfs (but I hear that might be murder...;P), ufs, minix, etc... as a pluggable filesystem for Windows. The reason it hasn't happened is that developing for the OS at that level is expensive and not well support (nor encouraged). The command and list of filesystems that the previous poster put up, simply show the flexibility that is already in Linux that is not in Windows. This is something that most Windows users would argue doesn't do much for them. But, for us Linux users, it's really nice to know that we can plug just about any data storage device into our boxes and grab the data.
I would add that, "out of the box", Windows is also lacking in the concept of the loopback filesystem. That's VERY handy and SHOULD be a default portion of Windows however, with the frooty goodness of the GUI added. The loopback filesystem is basically just a file of whatever size you define that gets mounted as another drive. So, for example, you could have C:\diskimage\mystash.img. If Windows had loopback filesystem support, you would be able to right click on the file and select "Mount as drive...". You would be prompted to select a drive letter, with the default being the next free letter up. After selecing it, it you would see a new drive icon in your "My Computer" window. You would then treat this drive just like any other. And "Eject" it once you've got your data on it the way you want it. You could then zip it up and send it to someone else to mount in the same way. Or you could use it to test something that you might want to dispose of later. If MS had better support for the standard filesystems outside of the Windows world, you could even exchange the data complete with the proper filesystem layout and perms preserved, just as you intend. Some would argue that a ZIP file is better, but that's assuming you have a free drive to expand the zip file to. Sometimes you just don't want to mix things into C:\. I've also used loopbacks to build floppy images that I could exchange with others. It's a very useful tool and sadly missing from the Windows tool set unless you add some commercial products with limited support for it.
Yes. I'm aware that they've "freed" the old technology. But, I'm too enamoured of the better performance from Xen to switch back to VMWare for the server end of things. I am currently testing the hardware virtualization support of Xen on my dual core AMD64. Once I get Windows XP to run in it, I'll see if it suits my needs. If not, I might check out the free beer offerings from VMWare. But, if Xen is just as good with Windows as it is with Linux as "guest" OSes, I would expect to see better performance from Xen. Xen is basically free VMWare ESX including the live migration features.:)
See my JE on doing it that I wrote when I first did it. I'm hoping to have a bit better of a write up at some point in time. The only problem I ran into that I was able to resolve in a crude way for now was DVD encryption. Even though I was exporting the DVD device and it gets treated as a local device on the importing system, the decryption needs to be performed once on the system doing the exporting. For now, I have xine open the DVD locally for about 10-15 seconds. This has worked for nearly every movie I;m trying to play. I plan to change this later to see if I can just have something that performs the decryption, but doesn't actually need to play the disc as I have now. Still, it's quite a geeky rush to show your friends that the movie they're watching on the monitor is coming from the unplugged wireless laptop your holding in your hands.;P Enjoy...
Oh I have since my job puts me there sometimes. However, I think we're talking about two different things. You're speaking of lower level kernel architecture differences. That's nice and all, but it doesn't address the userspace issues. My one example is Linux's network block device support (NBD) that allows you to export an actual block device (hard drive, cdrom, dvd, etc...) over the network to another device so the other device thinks the remote device is local. This is NOT file sharing. It's more like device sharing and it's been in the kernel since sometime in the 2.4 series as far as I can tell. I recently ran into a situation here at home where I moved my Linux based media center down to the basement and only routed a DVI cable and a USB cable to a USB hub up through the wall behind my LCD wide screen monitor. I knew that this move would put the DVD drive in the basement, so that would have been a little inconvenient. I originally planned to just get a USB DVD drive and put it on a shelf under the monitor and plug it int the hub. However, I can't afford to buy one right now.
At the same time I happened to be investigating NBD for my home server virtualization project to provide SAN-like services for the entire house. I was going to centralize storage in my one big box and then export logical volume slices from the large pool of disks. Then it occurred to me that this might solve my DVD dilemma as I keep a laptop next to the couch in th e living room all the time with a largely disused DVD drive. I tried it, and it worked. Over WiFi no less. No jerkiness, no problems. You can't do this in Windows unless you're a coder and have a really good understanding of the OS itself. ie, you work for MS. I was able to do it with a simple kernel recompile and some Bash scripting.
Windows has it's place, but it's not for people like me.
Yeah... the Linux crowd is only interested in the stuff that matters. You know... like home media centers that aren't limited or restricted artifically. Or, cool stuff like dark nets between family and friends that no one can control or snoop on. Business apps are pretty boring, which is why you don't see many of them. Especially for small business. I'm not saying they're not needed. I'm just supporting what you said. There will be small business apps eventually *if* the need arises. So far it hasn't, so there aren't. And that's largely due to the fact that there aren't many small business owners who are also programmers working on Linux distros. It just ain't that glamorous or interesting.
Your assessment is farily realistic. Being an ex-Windows user who moved to Linux in 97, I have to say the only reasons I moved were the things that I could do in Linux that you can't do in Windows. There are a ton of things like that. But, it's pretty much an even split. For all those things, I'm sure you can find things that Windows can do that Linux can't. The only thing is the reason Linux can't do them is typically artifical restrictions and not really technical limitations of Linux. Which is an important point to clear up and keep at the forefront. Many people who complain about Linux "sucking" tend to do so because if they tried it, they typically ran into a restriction that was imposed artifically by a hardware vendor or some sort of copy protection mechanism. The "problems" in Linux are not due to design issues of technical failures at all. The fact that I can't join Vongo, for example, has nothing to do with Linux distros not being capable of handling streaming video over broadband. It has to do with the fact that Vongo decided to base their service around Windows Media Player with DRM. A completely artifical restrction made in the name of business.
The fact that I can't play games like Max Payne unless I want to shell out for Cedega (which does work quite well for the games it supports officially) has nothing to do with Linux "not being up to par with Windows" where games are concerned. It has to do with the copy protection that the publisher chose which it is a crime to reverse engineer. Once again, an artificial restriction made for business reasons. I had a laptop from work at one point that I had to install Windows drivers in an NDIS Wrapper to get WiFi support for Linux with. Again, not a limitation of Linux at all, and quite a clevelr solution, I might add... The problem was that for business reasons, Broadcom had decided that they didn't want to release any specs for their WiFi chip. Seeing a theme here?
In my case, Linux won enough for me to ditch EVERY Windows box I owned and run only Linux. If I need access to something in Windows (which is typically due to DRM issues), then I use virtualization. It's also been a lot cheaper for me since I can now have EVERY piece of software I want and I don't have to worry about licensing it for each machine I've got. The NLE video suite Cinelerra, is a perfect example. I *could* buy multiple copies of Premiere for the six machines I have here at home to do video editing. Or... I could just install as many copies of Cinelerra as I want on all 18 of my systems and use it's clustering features to have a nice little free renderfarm. But, my needs are a bit more advanced than most Windows users which is why I still think that having Windows around for the normal user is just fine. And, no that's not an elitist statement. I'm just saying that there aren't many people who have 18 systems at home, like to do video work and need/want a render farm.
I won't really go into what Linux offers over Windows unless pressed, because most of us here know the truth about what Linux can do that Windows can't.:)
Well... I like to be extremely hyperbolic in my statements as it gets a rise out of people. And Slashdot is admittedly a little too boring these days. No more massive flamewars, or death threats going around. So yeah, host-based virtualization is here to stay for a couple more years. But, I speak of hypervisor because I'm already using it with Xen. I ditched VMWare for QEMU because of cost concerns. (Remember when you're dealing with me, you're dealing with a guy who does this stuff at home) I could no longer afford VMWare and QEMU, while not anywhere near as good performance wise, still did the trick for me to have access to Windows as needed. ie. Almost never. But, when I found Xen, I moved all my home servers to it because you can do some damn incredible things with it even if you don't have hardware virtualization support. I have an old P II era Celeron 400 with 384 megs of RAM running three VMs and doing everything it did before + more. It handles DHCP, Internal DNS, External DNS, DBMail for the IMAP portion of things, Postfix for SMTP (Internal and External instances), NTP, NFS, etc... So, that's more what I'm talking about.
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So why don't you go and jam on some of those Krell musical instruments like you did back in -9283342948295 NQ? I dug that crazy rhythm man! (Note: For people too old to get the joke, the alien race in the classic 50s sci-fi film, Forbidden Planet, are called the Krell)
Then things must just be a laugh a minute over in the middle east... Badump-ching!
Or... I'm just "funnin" ya'll.
Ewww... is that D&D crap? That's for nerds. Go back to whatever little smelly grotto or crevice you crawled out of.
I'm annoying? That must mean you're one of my regular readers. Oh... thank you! I have real followers now! I think I'm going to cry for joy!!! You like me! You REALLY like me!!!
Best. Response. EVAR. Thanks for the insight! ;P
More importantly, it's just not funny... (say this like Paul Harvey): Good day!
Oh... misread that. I thought it was best evar. ;/
What the hell is this world coming to? Professional gaming? You've GOT to be kidding me. It used to be that at one point in time, the things that were professional implied some kind of useful skill. Things like, oh... being a doctor, a scientist, an engineer. Those sorts of things. Then the term got extended a bit to recreational activities, but they still needed useful skills. Things like, oh... chess and various REAL sports (I exclude golf) which required mental and physical accumen. But now we have "professional gaming"? And this likely applies to first person shooters and MMORPGs... So let's see... what skills do these games entail?
FPS: The ability to click fast and move a mouse on a surface or worse, utilize a joypad controller. Other than excelling in clerical work thanks to the mouse skills, how is this useful?
MMORPG: This is like "professional breathing competitions". Only lamer. The only things that MMORPGs seem to encourage are greed and isolation. REALLY useful there. I suppose if you're a eTrade jockey it just makes you feel better or something.
God, I hate what the world has become. I had so much hope that people would get smarter and that technology would augment that increase in intelligence to the point where we would eventually become the perfect hybrids of humans and machines. Instead, the majority of the populace are a bunch of preening idiots worried about how "phat" they are. I think we'd be better off if the majority of the less mentally equipped would just fade away.
...why the Segway isn't on there. Wasn't the Segway supposed to the the "IT" that everyone was talking about? Hehehe.. I remember that when some rumours were leaked about what "IT" was, and the word transporter showed up, people started thinking transporter technology like on Star Trek. That WOULD have truly made it to this list, had it been the case. But it wasn't. However, considering how poorly the average American eats, and how fat those people are getting, I see a future industry for Segway. Imagine the day when Americans believe it's their right to enjoy the culinary delights of KFC, McDonalds, Burger King and the like and weigh 5000 pounds and have tons of health problems. To deny them the pleasures of these great dining experiences would rank up there with communism and gun control. So, Segway could then introduce the surgical leg replacements as most limbs would be unsuitable to move the typical American fatass. So people will voluntarily have their legs removed and replaced with industrial strength Segway devices so that they can easily maneuver their way into the next fast food joint down the street. ;P
Coming Zune from Microsoft? In soviet Russia Zune comes on YOU!? Which is better, Zune or sex with a mare? I've got a hot Zune down my pants with pictures of Natalie Portman, naked and petrified? I kid, I kid...
I think that you'll find the market breakdown between Zune and the iPod will fall along the same lines that you see in the PC vs. Mac world. The people who want the "stylish and beautiful" device will still buy iPods. The people who want the utilitarian device with more features than sense, will buy the Zune. The wireless functionality of the Zune is a perfect example. To paraphrase Jobs, who WANT that sort of thing when you can just swap your [insert music player here] with a friend for a few minutes to listen to the songs on each other's players to see if you want to buy the tracks? (Funny how 80s Walkman technology, the 1/8" headphone plug, is perfectly compatible with nearly every music player out there. Don't expect that to last much longer... it keeps the goons from making more money through artifical restrictions.) The ridiculous filesharing that deletes itself thanks to DRM is just another component bound to cause more negative user experiences than positive ones. But, the fact is that Zune will likely break even or tank. I don't see it becoming the defacto standard as iPod has. Hell, I own a Rio Karma (they RULE BTW...) and I can attest to the fact that EVERY digital music player or service you want is made for the iPod. The FM transmitter I bought along with it's cigarette lighter adapter has a funny extra plug on it that is specifically for the iPod and totally useless on my Karma. Again... the problem of not using or establishing any kind of REAL drafted standard.
IF there were an actual standard, then the Zune and the iPod would be able to actually compete on their merits rather than artifically limiting each other. I'd say a reasonable standard would look like this:
1. A standard interface for purchasing/downloading music within the player itself rather than through a PC. This would happen via WiFi or a NIC or even a cell phone data link
2. Standard bluetooth for sending the audio data to a bluetooth headphone, or in-dash blue tooth enabled car stereos. This would eliminate the interference that you experience on the road while other people blast Howard Stern with their Sirius sets
3. A standard hardware interface for a dock that all players would utilize regardless of shape or size
4. Standard power jacks that are multipurpose for car, house or even USB power
5. A standard underlying base OS that could have extras layered on top of it to extend functionality and support for additional features in software and extended hardware features as well
6. Interaction with other bluetooth devices so that you could also use them as data drives, or even personal answering machines for cell phones (screw voice mail...)
Just a few ideas which I'm sure the "elite" here will rip apart. My point is that Zune is not going to be able to easily usurp the lead that Apple has at the moment. The only way they will is if Apple rests on their laurels and doesn't provide the next "high".
I don't doubt it. This sis exactly the entre MS needs to start up the FUD machine about the demise of Java. Don't get me wrong, as a user, I hate Java because EVERY Java app I've used has been slow and very unrealiable, so I'm not a pro-Java person. I'm aware that a lot of programmers like Java, and it likely has something to do with the time they've invested in it and the features of programming in it that non-coders are not aware of. But, you can bet that some CEOs, and management drones who have had crappy experiences with Java will buy into anything that basically says, "Java sucks". So if MS or others use this as a way to claim that the open sourcing of Java signifies the failure/end of the product, you better believe those folks will ignorantly cheer "Hear hear" and then tell their staff they're moving to .Net because it's a "Java killer". I, personally, wouldn't go that far. I'd rather see something else take the place of Java and I definitely don't want it to be .Net. But, I'm a rare kind of person in that I might not be a Java coder, but I understand that Java itself doesn't totally suck. It's mostly the people who lazily code crappy apps using shortcuts and flawed logic models.
It would have been so much easier if you just wrote: "Yeah... what he said". Heh.
Ya weirdo. ;P Just kidding, I like BSD too. I should have said Windows users who try Linux. Linux users who move to BSD are more like "graduates". As I'm not really a coder (but I'm trying) I haven't had to deal with that design issue. And I think that was the point I was really trying to make in this thread. I'm not a developer, but Linux enables to me to do things that I would HAVE to be a developer to do in Windows. This doesn't mean that Windows is "superior" because of complexity. It means that Windows has failed to address the advanced needs of non-coders in a way that Linux has completely covered well.
Heh. It's the Unix mindset: brevity. Unfortunately it comes off as "terseness" to people who aren't into Unix. What the poster above was trying to point out was the ease of supporting many different file systems out of the box. Windows is completely capable of this as the filesystems are "pluggable" in the NT based Windows variants. But only a few people have actually done it and mostly in commercial only software. MS hasn't bothered to have build int support for much more than the basic file systems that a typical Windows user would be interested in: FAT*, NTFS, CDFS (which includes iso9660 for standard data CD-ROMs and can be augmented with udf for CD-RW and DVD). Windows NT4 was the last version of Windows to support HPFS (OS/2's file system). From my perspective, the main reason for the artifical limitations here is again, purely business reasons. MS had the HPFS support mainly so that organizations who used OS/2 would have a relatively easy way to migrate to Windows NT. However, since the OS/2 usage was fairly small and most people who were going to move had already moved by the time Win2k was released, they didn't have much reason to keep the support in. FAT and NTFS are obviously the defacto MS filesystems. It's completely possible for someone to write support for *nix filesystems like ext2/3, reiserfs (but I hear that might be murder...;P), ufs, minix, etc... as a pluggable filesystem for Windows. The reason it hasn't happened is that developing for the OS at that level is expensive and not well support (nor encouraged). The command and list of filesystems that the previous poster put up, simply show the flexibility that is already in Linux that is not in Windows. This is something that most Windows users would argue doesn't do much for them. But, for us Linux users, it's really nice to know that we can plug just about any data storage device into our boxes and grab the data.
I would add that, "out of the box", Windows is also lacking in the concept of the loopback filesystem. That's VERY handy and SHOULD be a default portion of Windows however, with the frooty goodness of the GUI added. The loopback filesystem is basically just a file of whatever size you define that gets mounted as another drive. So, for example, you could have C:\diskimage\mystash.img. If Windows had loopback filesystem support, you would be able to right click on the file and select "Mount as drive...". You would be prompted to select a drive letter, with the default being the next free letter up. After selecing it, it you would see a new drive icon in your "My Computer" window. You would then treat this drive just like any other. And "Eject" it once you've got your data on it the way you want it. You could then zip it up and send it to someone else to mount in the same way. Or you could use it to test something that you might want to dispose of later. If MS had better support for the standard filesystems outside of the Windows world, you could even exchange the data complete with the proper filesystem layout and perms preserved, just as you intend. Some would argue that a ZIP file is better, but that's assuming you have a free drive to expand the zip file to. Sometimes you just don't want to mix things into C:\. I've also used loopbacks to build floppy images that I could exchange with others. It's a very useful tool and sadly missing from the Windows tool set unless you add some commercial products with limited support for it.
Yes. I'm aware that they've "freed" the old technology. But, I'm too enamoured of the better performance from Xen to switch back to VMWare for the server end of things. I am currently testing the hardware virtualization support of Xen on my dual core AMD64. Once I get Windows XP to run in it, I'll see if it suits my needs. If not, I might check out the free beer offerings from VMWare. But, if Xen is just as good with Windows as it is with Linux as "guest" OSes, I would expect to see better performance from Xen. Xen is basically free VMWare ESX including the live migration features. :)
See my JE on doing it that I wrote when I first did it. I'm hoping to have a bit better of a write up at some point in time. The only problem I ran into that I was able to resolve in a crude way for now was DVD encryption. Even though I was exporting the DVD device and it gets treated as a local device on the importing system, the decryption needs to be performed once on the system doing the exporting. For now, I have xine open the DVD locally for about 10-15 seconds. This has worked for nearly every movie I;m trying to play. I plan to change this later to see if I can just have something that performs the decryption, but doesn't actually need to play the disc as I have now. Still, it's quite a geeky rush to show your friends that the movie they're watching on the monitor is coming from the unplugged wireless laptop your holding in your hands. ;P Enjoy...
Oh I have since my job puts me there sometimes. However, I think we're talking about two different things. You're speaking of lower level kernel architecture differences. That's nice and all, but it doesn't address the userspace issues. My one example is Linux's network block device support (NBD) that allows you to export an actual block device (hard drive, cdrom, dvd, etc...) over the network to another device so the other device thinks the remote device is local. This is NOT file sharing. It's more like device sharing and it's been in the kernel since sometime in the 2.4 series as far as I can tell. I recently ran into a situation here at home where I moved my Linux based media center down to the basement and only routed a DVI cable and a USB cable to a USB hub up through the wall behind my LCD wide screen monitor. I knew that this move would put the DVD drive in the basement, so that would have been a little inconvenient. I originally planned to just get a USB DVD drive and put it on a shelf under the monitor and plug it int the hub. However, I can't afford to buy one right now.
At the same time I happened to be investigating NBD for my home server virtualization project to provide SAN-like services for the entire house. I was going to centralize storage in my one big box and then export logical volume slices from the large pool of disks. Then it occurred to me that this might solve my DVD dilemma as I keep a laptop next to the couch in th e living room all the time with a largely disused DVD drive. I tried it, and it worked. Over WiFi no less. No jerkiness, no problems. You can't do this in Windows unless you're a coder and have a really good understanding of the OS itself. ie, you work for MS. I was able to do it with a simple kernel recompile and some Bash scripting.
Windows has it's place, but it's not for people like me.
Yeah... the Linux crowd is only interested in the stuff that matters. You know... like home media centers that aren't limited or restricted artifically. Or, cool stuff like dark nets between family and friends that no one can control or snoop on. Business apps are pretty boring, which is why you don't see many of them. Especially for small business. I'm not saying they're not needed. I'm just supporting what you said. There will be small business apps eventually *if* the need arises. So far it hasn't, so there aren't. And that's largely due to the fact that there aren't many small business owners who are also programmers working on Linux distros. It just ain't that glamorous or interesting.
Your assessment is farily realistic. Being an ex-Windows user who moved to Linux in 97, I have to say the only reasons I moved were the things that I could do in Linux that you can't do in Windows. There are a ton of things like that. But, it's pretty much an even split. For all those things, I'm sure you can find things that Windows can do that Linux can't. The only thing is the reason Linux can't do them is typically artifical restrictions and not really technical limitations of Linux. Which is an important point to clear up and keep at the forefront. Many people who complain about Linux "sucking" tend to do so because if they tried it, they typically ran into a restriction that was imposed artifically by a hardware vendor or some sort of copy protection mechanism. The "problems" in Linux are not due to design issues of technical failures at all. The fact that I can't join Vongo, for example, has nothing to do with Linux distros not being capable of handling streaming video over broadband. It has to do with the fact that Vongo decided to base their service around Windows Media Player with DRM. A completely artifical restrction made in the name of business.
:)
The fact that I can't play games like Max Payne unless I want to shell out for Cedega (which does work quite well for the games it supports officially) has nothing to do with Linux "not being up to par with Windows" where games are concerned. It has to do with the copy protection that the publisher chose which it is a crime to reverse engineer. Once again, an artificial restriction made for business reasons. I had a laptop from work at one point that I had to install Windows drivers in an NDIS Wrapper to get WiFi support for Linux with. Again, not a limitation of Linux at all, and quite a clevelr solution, I might add... The problem was that for business reasons, Broadcom had decided that they didn't want to release any specs for their WiFi chip. Seeing a theme here?
In my case, Linux won enough for me to ditch EVERY Windows box I owned and run only Linux. If I need access to something in Windows (which is typically due to DRM issues), then I use virtualization. It's also been a lot cheaper for me since I can now have EVERY piece of software I want and I don't have to worry about licensing it for each machine I've got. The NLE video suite Cinelerra, is a perfect example. I *could* buy multiple copies of Premiere for the six machines I have here at home to do video editing. Or... I could just install as many copies of Cinelerra as I want on all 18 of my systems and use it's clustering features to have a nice little free renderfarm. But, my needs are a bit more advanced than most Windows users which is why I still think that having Windows around for the normal user is just fine. And, no that's not an elitist statement. I'm just saying that there aren't many people who have 18 systems at home, like to do video work and need/want a render farm.
I won't really go into what Linux offers over Windows unless pressed, because most of us here know the truth about what Linux can do that Windows can't.
Not sure about Scorpiotarians, but I'm an avowed Vagitarian. ;P
Well... I like to be extremely hyperbolic in my statements as it gets a rise out of people. And Slashdot is admittedly a little too boring these days. No more massive flamewars, or death threats going around. So yeah, host-based virtualization is here to stay for a couple more years. But, I speak of hypervisor because I'm already using it with Xen. I ditched VMWare for QEMU because of cost concerns. (Remember when you're dealing with me, you're dealing with a guy who does this stuff at home) I could no longer afford VMWare and QEMU, while not anywhere near as good performance wise, still did the trick for me to have access to Windows as needed. ie. Almost never. But, when I found Xen, I moved all my home servers to it because you can do some damn incredible things with it even if you don't have hardware virtualization support. I have an old P II era Celeron 400 with 384 megs of RAM running three VMs and doing everything it did before + more. It handles DHCP, Internal DNS, External DNS, DBMail for the IMAP portion of things, Postfix for SMTP (Internal and External instances), NTP, NFS, etc... So, that's more what I'm talking about.
...for them to release an affordable hypervisor based virtualization package. Host based virtualization is as dead as BSD.
We stand for the right to liberate womenfolk of their bras. Li-BRA-tarian.
What do Carrots have to do with solar power? Are you taking about the 100% efficiency of photosynthesis? Tell me more...