Windows 98 wasn't multi-user (neither was Mac OS 9) but Windows 2000 + and and OS X are. That being said what most people mean when they say windows isn't a multi-user system is:
Windows is desinged to runs a few applications whereas Linux/Unix is designed to run lots of applications (it has to do with low level locking). That isn't to say windows can't run lots of applications it just doesn't work as well as it should. That's why in the Unix world you get a bigger machine and run more stuff on it where as in the windows world you buy a machine for each application.
The other thing people are often talking about is that Windows doesn't do a verfy good job of seperating applications from the OS. If you're computer is the same as mine you'll have noticed that IE can crash the WHOLE copmuter. An operating system is supposed to stop that from happening but since IE is intergrated with the OS it can kill it. On linux everything is alot more seperated. So while X crashs sometimes which on a single user machine looks like the OS has crashed (and it may as well have) on a multi-user system X crashing only affects one user or one service (a big one sure) but it doesn't take down all 100 users or all 20 service.
On a home computer with a couple of users it doesn't matter that much if a single user causes the machine to crash but it does when they're are 50+ users getting paid by the hour.
So while Windows can have multiple users people often says that it isn't a multi-user system. This is similar to the argument that Linux is an enterprise OS because it can't run well on 64 CPUs. To a home user or a small company it makes no difference but as you scale up it becomes more obvious.
Some of your Bad points for Subvresion don't sound quite right:
*Quite hard to share repositories
The repositories can be read using any WebDAV complient software. If your talking about on the web the articles says you can use viewcvs as a web interface. If you want poeple to connect to the server then it should be setup by default as it's client server.
*No distributed development
If your talking about multiple servers like bitkeeper then I can't help you *I know nothing* but if your talking about client server then there's a misunderstanding as it's been designed to be client server.
I may have misunderstood what you were saying but the comments were a bit vague.
The bigest difference is that LDAP is locked down and is a standard (apart from the fact that it's a different type of database - not relational)
Eg. If you use the posix schema you can use it and pam for authenication.
There are also standard for Samba, Email contacts etc.
Sure you can do it all yourself but if you want to get two different product you download to just work eg Netscape LDAP server and linux PAM to work you need standards
Software regulation is not only necessary and a benefit but already being done!
I work for a medical company have they've alreaday started to regulate the software. Basically what we have to do is comply with a numbere of ISO standard deaaling with software validation.
The long and soft of this is: a) If at all possible you buy validated software so you don't have to do it youself. b) If you have to validated it you end up with alot of documentation basically saying it does what it's supposed to. c) To make any changes you have to revalidate everytyhing again.
phpMyAdmin is great for when your managing a server remotely or on a server with a webserver but if you don't have a webserver it's alot of work to install a webserver then php then libphpmysql then phpMyAdmin just to admin a database. Also web interfaces just aren't the same as a interactive interface. All that being said I'll keep using phpMyAdmin most of the time but it's nice to know that I don't need one if I have an app that just needs MySQL.
It isn't but you can get around that with javascript the best RTF widget that i've seen is HTMLArea3 which now works with Mozilla and IE. Check it out. The butons look the same as wordpad or word so most people can figure them our fairly easily.
Apart from raytracing the only other experiance I've had with grids is compiling using distcc. Apple has also brought out xcode which does the same thing. Basically think of anything that takes a long time and can be done in parallel.
For compiling it make allot of sense. It means that instead of taking 1 hour and 1 minutes to compile it only takes 10 minutes. Add up how many times you compile the product and it adds up to alot of time that can be spent testing or debuging instead of waiting for the program to compile.
As for not many problems that can be solved using grids well how many things do you know of in this day and age that take longer than an hour to complete or require more than 3 computer(web server, web service, database) to run? If you don't know many/any they you won't really need grid computing either. It's not for you just like most people don't need a real time OS either but if you do then you don't have much choice.
I don't know what no one has really talked about using both. If you want linux on the client use rdesktop to connect to a windows box with terminal services for the software you can't use on Linux or try CrossOver Office the other alternative is to have Windows on the client and use WinAxe or another X server to conenct to Linux. If you don't like thoes ideas you can also use Open Source Windows software
Google is a search engine. Why would they provide contnent!?!? They promoted their own services and made people more aware at the same time.
If you have a look through the past images they do a special one every couple of weeks.
as for getting an academic to write a page for google how does that make sence for google they're trying to show how good their search engine. If it was yahoo it would make sence as they are a portal. Should google have to ask to use it's own search engine?!?!? As for who was at the top it changed halfway through. If you don't want you page in google you can useway remove it:-)
It was actually a PR thing. At the end of the contract there will actually be 3/5 (can't remmember) games released about 1 every 2 or 3 years (The other games were a rpg kind game and a management game) the aim was to make the Amry see more "hip and cool" to teens and youth.
It's been a while since I ready the article but for $2 million I think it's a great deal and will achive it's goals alot better than adds on TV.
The way they deal with it is fairly balanced. That is to say all the views.
Eg. According to the Indians the Kashmir is.... the Pakis on the other hand think.
The idea behind this is that it gives the user more information and means that people that have strong views are less like to react.
The same thing happens in slashdot. If you see a comment that you don't agree with you feel like you have to respond if there is another reponce already that almost the same as yours then you're less like to respond even if they aren't as strongly worded as you'd like.
As for being bias everything is bias the thing you have to try and figure out is in which way is it bias. If I were to write about "Jaffna Jungles in Shri lanka" it would be completly unbias because I don't know anything about it. If I went over there and lived there for a couple of years and then wrote about it I know I would be bias even if I tried not to be but I would know what I was writing about.
Anyway they're going we'll so far and they can always change the system if it's not working.
The following are cross platform and most of them are on Mac, Windows and Linux: *QT *GTK *Open Office Widgets *XUL
Windows: *Windows 16 bit. *Windows 32 bit *Windows XP
Mac OS X: *Carbon *Aqua *Quartz
As you can see EVERY OS has multiple widgets for various reasons. The thing is Linux programers like choice and tend to write code in lots of different languages using lits of different widgets and libraries.
All that being said I would like more more intergration but that's happening and will happen over time.
The only statement I don't understand is "server-side widget-drawing and window management code" apart fron the whole X server/client thing I'm think X already does this. If it doesn't you can always use the X-VNC proxy which means everything is doesn on the server.
Most of it has to do with the algorithms. For example I can write a really optimized bubble search but if you write an un optimized quick sort it will still be faster than my optimized bubble search. That being said any newbie programmer can do a bubble search but you have to know what you're doing to do a quick/merge sort.
So while 2.4 wasn't using the best solutions it was better than nothing. It's always better to have bad working code than great code that doesn't work. Hurd is a great example. It may be batter but it doesn't work (well enough for me anyway) yet so who cares.
IDE is another example. If I remember correctly 2.2 didn't have DMA support but it worked adding DMA makes it much faster but it would have made it more unstable if they added it at the beginning.
The last thing that you have to remember is that lots of the changes were taking advantage of features in the newer hardware. If you ran the same test on 486 you wouldn't get the same results as you'd have different bottlenecks. In another 10 years we'll get the same thing again. The might make it so that the bus to the memory is as faster as the level 2 cache on the CPU. If they do that they'll have to make big changes to the OS to get rid of the new bottle necks and you'd increase the speed by another 50% or maybe even 100%
I saw a few comments about MMORG's but not as many as I expected. When I was still at UNI I was a big everquest player (my girlfreind at the time got me interested) and I was impresed at how many couples[1] played. While it's ok to play by yourself the whole point is to play as a group. That's why the have guilds etc. But playing as a couple means you can have a healer/wizard and a tank. Most MMORG are mainly chatting anyway so they are fairly social.
A standard game in everquest is like the following:
Run to some location fighting on the way then sit and fight monsters at a single location for 2 hours:-) Most of the time you a sitting down and healing or using the automatic attack features. Every couple of hours you have a big boss and everyone comes in to help kill it and then you run back to town and finish the quest.
The other advantage is you don't have to be chatting to each other all the timeas you make other friends all over the world. My Brother new people from about 10 different countries and it was really interesting seeing what limes they logged on (or when they were logged on;-) )
Apart from chatting and making new friends you also have made memories together. Eg. Remmember when we spent 3 hours camping the "Red Stripped Gnome" and then when he spawned some one tried to steal the kill but we all backed off and it killed him. By the way did we every finish that quest?
Just realise you may never see her again if she gets really into the game.
I only bought the textbooks for the first semester of Uni after that I never bought any again unless I thought I would use it as a refference book. I know at my Uni the Library had at least 5 copies of each book I had and even if they were out the public library had another cople of copies.
You are legally allowed to photocopy "parts" of any book and since most of the time you either write summary notes or just use a section of the book (pages 110-115,127 and 130-140) it's easy and leagal to get the information.
We were able to download all the slides that they used in the leactures and only one of two leactures reffered to the textbook more than "for additional reading see ???"
As for getting the latest version why bother you can alway get the old version and just relise that there may be some changes.
Here's a summary of my Uni text book budget: *First Semester ~ $450 on text books. *Every other semester ~ $50.
The kernal is always forking and remerging. There are at least 3 or 4 major braches that I know of (The AC branch and the uC branch) that have patches that aren't in the "Linus" branch but everyone calls the "Linus" branch the "Offical Kernal".
As for a kernal that is realtime, low latency and responcive I think that is what everyone wants? As for scaling up and scaling down they aren't exclusive but they have different problems. Often fix the problems for one while give minor improvements to the other that aren't needed but are nice to have Eg:
Low latency is a requirement for embeded devices but not required for the desktop or servers. But it's REALLY nice to have on the desktop:-)
What's really weird is in Australia Wendys is and Icecream shop. I went to America last year and saw all these Wendys shops out by themselves with at least a foot of snow all around them. I thought everone in the drivethough was crazy till I found out the truth.
I few years ago I would have agreed with you but I don't any more. I now think that you can go one way but not the other:
*OO: C++ -> Java/C# -> Pascal -> VB.
*Procedural: Assembly -> C -> Pascal -> VB.
This means that if you understood C++ 100% you'd know about 90% of VB but if you knew 100% of VB you'd only know 40% of C++.
But apart from the minor differences the big difference is using the libraries. I wouldn't expect someone to be able to go from the Java libraries to the STL because they work differently or any one of the 1000 of other libraries.
When people make comments about people with high degrees knowing more or being smarting I think I live in a different world.
Tafe: Practical. Bachelor: General overall knowledge in a specific field. Masters: Detailed knowledge in a specilised field. Phd: Research knowledge in a single topic/idea.
Having a higher education doesn't mean you know more or are smarter it just confirms that you had the potental.
If you don't agree with me then why do they have Honarary Docterates?
Also at each level you become more specialised which is great if that area is needed but it isn't transferable to another "universe of discourse".
I guess I have a somewhat jaded view since my Grandfather wrote the coricumem for a University and all my uncles and Aunties on my Fathers side have multiple letters after their names and they are all screwed up and see schrinks at least once a month.
Summing up: *The smater you are the higher you can get in the educational game.[1] *Being higher in the educational game doesn't MAKE you smarter.[1]
[1] For thoes of you who did logic at Uni this is also known as "The Fallacy of the Consequent" http://www.fallacyfiles.org/commcond.html
After the invested 50 million into Novell I'd be fairly sure that they'd end up using Ximian desktop on Suse. Think of what it's like now, add 2.6 kernal, add better Open Office, add Java with Gnome support, add D-BUS and HAL, then add the advances in X that should happen over the next 12 months as the fork refactors the code and you have a fairly good desktop from what I can see.
On top of that they are moving everything to webportals (or to be more correct and you have portals or portals) and everything should be fairly easy.
It shoulds like they want stuff that's easy to port to be ported and then convert the rest into a web application. Sounds like a good idea to me.
You can download a trial version so it's not hard to find out but for those of you that can't be bothered here's a summary:
*Preconfigured. *Tweak for supported products. *Tested for supported software.
Here's a quick example:
Wine worked fine with notepad. Tried to do some more advanced stuff but to get most of it working I had to tweak and go to google and then find out that some of it didn't work or didn't work well enough or that I had to install it on windows copy it accross and then copy a ew dlls as well.
Crossover office: Put the Office CD in and used the office installed. Everything just worked. For on of the programs there was an error but Crossover Office warned you beforehand. Also they have a server edition for thin clients.
They also support som stuff that wine can't support due to licensing and NDA (mainly some installers).
The big deal about automated music is that it can be random but set the mood. If you have the same music and repeat it again and again it gets repedative.
The random music isn't really good as just background music (you may as well get someone to write you music it will be MUCH better) but for dynamic music.
Here's a first person death match example: *You have 3 people all coming together - action music. *Walking nowhere ne anyone else - boring music. *Only a few kills till someone wins - faster music.
Movies are a great example and there aresome single player games that do this will because they a scripted. Multiplayer games can't have script music so getting a dynamic music engine is a great product.
OSS = Open Sound System (I think) not open source software:-)
OSS was fine for playing music but you couldn't do things like fade from one song to the next so you'd get a "hss" or "pop" between songs if you had a cheap sound card.
From what I've read Linux had a fairly bad SCSI implimentation in 2.4 that was a mess. I rememmber reading in one of the articles that they wanted to just dump the mess but for the fact the people have SCSI devices:-)
If I remmember they rewrote the entire subsystem for 2.6
Slashdot Mirror
Windows 98 wasn't multi-user (neither was Mac OS 9) but Windows 2000 + and and OS X are. That being said what most people mean when they say windows isn't a multi-user system is:
Windows is desinged to runs a few applications whereas Linux/Unix is designed to run lots of applications (it has to do with low level locking). That isn't to say windows can't run lots of applications it just doesn't work as well as it should. That's why in the Unix world you get a bigger machine and run more stuff on it where as in the windows world you buy a machine for each application.
The other thing people are often talking about is that Windows doesn't do a verfy good job of seperating applications from the OS. If you're computer is the same as mine you'll have noticed that IE can crash the WHOLE copmuter. An operating system is supposed to stop that from happening but since IE is intergrated with the OS it can kill it. On linux everything is alot more seperated. So while X crashs sometimes which on a single user machine looks like the OS has crashed (and it may as well have) on a multi-user system X crashing only affects one user or one service (a big one sure) but it doesn't take down all 100 users or all 20 service.
On a home computer with a couple of users it doesn't matter that much if a single user causes the machine to crash but it does when they're are 50+ users getting paid by the hour.
So while Windows can have multiple users people often says that it isn't a multi-user system. This is similar to the argument that Linux is an enterprise OS because it can't run well on 64 CPUs. To a home user or a small company it makes no difference but as you scale up it becomes more obvious.
Some of your Bad points for Subvresion don't sound quite right:
*Quite hard to share repositories
The repositories can be read using any WebDAV complient software. If your talking about on the web the articles says you can use viewcvs as a web interface. If you want poeple to connect to the server then it should be setup by default as it's client server.
*No distributed development
If your talking about multiple servers like bitkeeper then I can't help you *I know nothing* but if your talking about client server then there's a misunderstanding as it's been designed to be client server.
I may have misunderstood what you were saying but the comments were a bit vague.
The bigest difference is that LDAP is locked down and is a standard (apart from the fact that it's a different type of database - not relational)
Eg. If you use the posix schema you can use it and pam for authenication.
There are also standard for Samba, Email contacts etc.
Sure you can do it all yourself but if you want to get two different product you download to just work eg Netscape LDAP server and linux PAM to work you need standards
Software regulation is not only necessary and a benefit but already being done!
I work for a medical company have they've alreaday started to regulate the software. Basically what we have to do is comply with a numbere of ISO standard deaaling with software validation.
The long and soft of this is:
a) If at all possible you buy validated software so you don't have to do it youself.
b) If you have to validated it you end up with alot of documentation basically saying it does what it's supposed to.
c) To make any changes you have to revalidate everytyhing again.
phpMyAdmin is great for when your managing a server remotely or on a server with a webserver but if you don't have a webserver it's alot of work to install a webserver then php then libphpmysql then phpMyAdmin just to admin a database. Also web interfaces just aren't the same as a interactive interface. All that being said I'll keep using phpMyAdmin most of the time but it's nice to know that I don't need one if I have an app that just needs MySQL.
It isn't but you can get around that with javascript the best RTF widget that i've seen is HTMLArea3 which now works with Mozilla and IE. Check it out. The butons look the same as wordpad or word so most people can figure them our fairly easily.
Apart from raytracing the only other experiance I've had with grids is compiling using distcc. Apple has also brought out xcode which does the same thing. Basically think of anything that takes a long time and can be done in parallel. For compiling it make allot of sense. It means that instead of taking 1 hour and 1 minutes to compile it only takes 10 minutes. Add up how many times you compile the product and it adds up to alot of time that can be spent testing or debuging instead of waiting for the program to compile.
As for not many problems that can be solved using grids well how many things do you know of in this day and age that take longer than an hour to complete or require more than 3 computer(web server, web service, database) to run? If you don't know many/any they you won't really need grid computing either. It's not for you just like most people don't need a real time OS either but if you do then you don't have much choice.
I don't know what no one has really talked about using both. If you want linux on the client use rdesktop to connect to a windows box with terminal services for the software you can't use on Linux or try CrossOver Office the other alternative is to have Windows on the client and use WinAxe or another X server to conenct to Linux. If you don't like thoes ideas you can also use Open Source Windows software
Google is a search engine. Why would they provide contnent!?!? They promoted their own services and made people more aware at the same time.
:-)
If you have a look through the past images they do a special one every couple of weeks.
as for getting an academic to write a page for google how does that make sence for google they're trying to show how good their search engine. If it was yahoo it would make sence as they are a portal. Should google have to ask to use it's own search engine?!?!? As for who was at the top it changed halfway through. If you don't want you page in google you can useway remove it
It was actually a PR thing. At the end of the contract there will actually be 3/5 (can't remmember) games released about 1 every 2 or 3 years (The other games were a rpg kind game and a management game) the aim was to make the Amry see more "hip and cool" to teens and youth.
It's been a while since I ready the article but for $2 million I think it's a great deal and will achive it's goals alot better than adds on TV.
The way they deal with it is fairly balanced. That is to say all the views.
.... the Pakis on the other hand think.
Eg.
According to the Indians the Kashmir is
The idea behind this is that it gives the user more information and means that people that have strong views are less like to react.
The same thing happens in slashdot. If you see a comment that you don't agree with you feel like you have to respond if there is another reponce already that almost the same as yours then you're less like to respond even if they aren't as strongly worded as you'd like.
As for being bias everything is bias the thing you have to try and figure out is in which way is it bias. If I were to write about "Jaffna Jungles in Shri lanka" it would be completly unbias because I don't know anything about it. If I went over there and lived there for a couple of years and then wrote about it I know I would be bias even if I tried not to be but I would know what I was writing about.
Anyway they're going we'll so far and they can always change the system if it's not working.
I wouldn't be supprised if the Uni had a local copy although I would expect it to be read only...
Every operating system I know is the same.
The following are cross platform and most of them are on Mac, Windows and Linux:
*QT
*GTK
*Open Office Widgets
*XUL
Windows:
*Windows 16 bit.
*Windows 32 bit
*Windows XP
Mac OS X:
*Carbon
*Aqua
*Quartz
As you can see EVERY OS has multiple widgets for various reasons. The thing is Linux programers like choice and tend to write code in lots of different languages using lits of different widgets and libraries.
All that being said I would like more more intergration but that's happening and will happen over time.
The only statement I don't understand is "server-side widget-drawing and window management code" apart fron the whole X server/client thing I'm think X already does this. If it doesn't you can always use the X-VNC proxy which means everything is doesn on the server.
Most of it has to do with the algorithms. For example I can write a really optimized bubble search but if you write an un optimized quick sort it will still be faster than my optimized bubble search. That being said any newbie programmer can do a bubble search but you have to know what you're doing to do a quick/merge sort.
So while 2.4 wasn't using the best solutions it was better than nothing. It's always better to have bad working code than great code that doesn't work. Hurd is a great example. It may be batter but it doesn't work (well enough for me anyway) yet so who cares.
IDE is another example. If I remember correctly 2.2 didn't have DMA support but it worked adding DMA makes it much faster but it would have made it more unstable if they added it at the beginning.
The last thing that you have to remember is that lots of the changes were taking advantage of features in the newer hardware. If you ran the same test on 486 you wouldn't get the same results as you'd have different bottlenecks. In another 10 years we'll get the same thing again. The might make it so that the bus to the memory is as faster as the level 2 cache on the CPU. If they do that they'll have to make big changes to the OS to get rid of the new bottle necks and you'd increase the speed by another 50% or maybe even 100%
Anyway that's enough ranting.
I saw a few comments about MMORG's but not as many as I expected. When I was still at UNI I was a big everquest player (my girlfreind at the time got me interested) and I was impresed at how many couples[1] played. While it's ok to play by yourself the whole point is to play as a group. That's why the have guilds etc. But playing as a couple means you can have a healer/wizard and a tank. Most MMORG are mainly chatting anyway so they are fairly social.
:-) Most of the time you a sitting down and healing or using the automatic attack features. Every couple of hours you have a big boss and everyone comes in to help kill it and then you run back to town and finish the quest.
;-) )
A standard game in everquest is like the following:
Run to some location fighting on the way then sit and fight monsters at a single location for 2 hours
The other advantage is you don't have to be chatting to each other all the timeas you make other friends all over the world. My Brother new people from about 10 different countries and it was really interesting seeing what limes they logged on (or when they were logged on
Apart from chatting and making new friends you also have made memories together. Eg. Remmember when we spent 3 hours camping the "Red Stripped Gnome" and then when he spawned some one tried to steal the kill but we all backed off and it killed him. By the way did we every finish that quest?
Just realise you may never see her again if she gets really into the game.
I only bought the textbooks for the first semester of Uni after that I never bought any again unless I thought I would use it as a refference book. I know at my Uni the Library had at least 5 copies of each book I had and even if they were out the public library had another cople of copies.
You are legally allowed to photocopy "parts" of any book and since most of the time you either write summary notes or just use a section of the book (pages 110-115,127 and 130-140) it's easy and leagal to get the information.
We were able to download all the slides that they used in the leactures and only one of two leactures reffered to the textbook more than "for additional reading see ???"
As for getting the latest version why bother you can alway get the old version and just relise that there may be some changes.
Here's a summary of my Uni text book budget:
*First Semester ~ $450 on text books.
*Every other semester ~ $50.
The kernal is always forking and remerging. There are at least 3 or 4 major braches that I know of (The AC branch and the uC branch) that have patches that aren't in the "Linus" branch but everyone calls the "Linus" branch the "Offical Kernal".
:-)
As for a kernal that is realtime, low latency and responcive I think that is what everyone wants? As for scaling up and scaling down they aren't exclusive but they have different problems. Often fix the problems for one while give minor improvements to the other that aren't needed but are nice to have Eg:
Low latency is a requirement for embeded devices but not required for the desktop or servers. But it's REALLY nice to have on the desktop
What's really weird is in Australia Wendys is and Icecream shop. I went to America last year and saw all these Wendys shops out by themselves with at least a foot of snow all around them. I thought everone in the drivethough was crazy till I found out the truth.
You should read another one of his articles Mainly the bit about pointers.
I few years ago I would have agreed with you but I don't any more. I now think that you can go one way but not the other:
*OO: C++ -> Java/C# -> Pascal -> VB.
*Procedural: Assembly -> C -> Pascal -> VB.
This means that if you understood C++ 100% you'd know about 90% of VB but if you knew 100% of VB you'd only know 40% of C++.
But apart from the minor differences the big difference is using the libraries. I wouldn't expect someone to be able to go from the Java libraries to the STL because they work differently or any one of the 1000 of other libraries.
What is it about people and degrees?
When people make comments about people with high degrees knowing more or being smarting I think I live in a different world.
Tafe: Practical.
Bachelor: General overall knowledge in a specific field.
Masters: Detailed knowledge in a specilised field.
Phd: Research knowledge in a single topic/idea.
Having a higher education doesn't mean you know more or are smarter it just confirms that you had the potental.
If you don't agree with me then why do they have Honarary Docterates?
Also at each level you become more specialised which is great if that area is needed but it isn't transferable to another "universe of discourse".
I guess I have a somewhat jaded view since my Grandfather wrote the coricumem for a University and all my uncles and Aunties on my Fathers side have multiple letters after their names and they are all screwed up and see schrinks at least once a month.
Summing up:
*The smater you are the higher you can get in the educational game.[1]
*Being higher in the educational game doesn't MAKE you smarter.[1]
[1] For thoes of you who did logic at Uni this is also known as "The Fallacy of the Consequent" http://www.fallacyfiles.org/commcond.html
After the invested 50 million into Novell I'd be fairly sure that they'd end up using Ximian desktop on Suse. Think of what it's like now, add 2.6 kernal, add better Open Office, add Java with Gnome support, add D-BUS and HAL, then add the advances in X that should happen over the next 12 months as the fork refactors the code and you have a fairly good desktop from what I can see.
On top of that they are moving everything to webportals (or to be more correct and you have portals or portals) and everything should be fairly easy.
It shoulds like they want stuff that's easy to port to be ported and then convert the rest into a web application. Sounds like a good idea to me.
You can download a trial version so it's not hard to find out but for those of you that can't be bothered here's a summary:
*Preconfigured.
*Tweak for supported products.
*Tested for supported software.
Here's a quick example:
Wine worked fine with notepad. Tried to do some more advanced stuff but to get most of it working I had to tweak and go to google and then find out that some of it didn't work or didn't work well enough or that I had to install it on windows copy it accross and then copy a ew dlls as well.
Crossover office: Put the Office CD in and used the office installed. Everything just worked. For on of the programs there was an error but Crossover Office warned you beforehand. Also they have a server edition for thin clients.
They also support som stuff that wine can't support due to licensing and NDA (mainly some installers).
The big deal about automated music is that it can be random but set the mood. If you have the same music and repeat it again and again it gets repedative.
The random music isn't really good as just background music (you may as well get someone to write you music it will be MUCH better) but for dynamic music.
Here's a first person death match example:
*You have 3 people all coming together - action music.
*Walking nowhere ne anyone else - boring music.
*Only a few kills till someone wins - faster music.
Movies are a great example and there aresome single player games that do this will because they a scripted. Multiplayer games can't have script music so getting a dynamic music engine is a great product.
OSS = Open Sound System (I think) not open source software :-)
OSS was fine for playing music but you couldn't do things like fade from one song to the next so you'd get a "hss" or "pop" between songs if you had a cheap sound card.
From what I've read Linux had a fairly bad SCSI implimentation in 2.4 that was a mess. I rememmber reading in one of the articles that they wanted to just dump the mess but for the fact the people have SCSI devices :-)
If I remmember they rewrote the entire subsystem for 2.6