I think you mean the "Linux Standard Base" (LSB), which has nothing to do with POSIX. There *is* a standard System V packaging format, used by Solaris (which I'm posting from) and it isn't so great either, though I think there are some changes that are being made concerning it.
Real scientists are atheists by design, atheists by rote testing, and agnostic in practice.... Is Sir Isaac Newton enough of a real scientist for you? Also, Einstein wasn't an atheist, though he wasn't of traditional theology. The discoverer of the universal background radiation (a proof of the big bang theory) was an Orthodox Jew, and a Nobel prize winner. I have the feeling that you're just as closed-minded against religion as the religions you claim to be incompatible with being a scientist.
Write me a competent word processor that fits on a floppy disk. That'd be a hoot. CP/M and early PC versions of Wordstar would fit on a single floppy. That task has been done dozens of times before PC-XT-compatibles introduced people to the hard drive. (Which was a good thing, because floppy drives have awful access times too.)
The Kidall's theory goes out the window when you consider IBM already had a license agreement for CPM
Interesting post, I never meant to claim they didn't offer CP/M, but it simply wasn't posistitioned to be the OS of choice on that platform. What the Kidall affair did was not keep IBM from offering CP/M on the PC - CP/M-86 was one of the options IBM would sell you, along with the UCSD p-system. (The latter had portable bytecode! It was a loss though because it was implemented for Pascal.;-) )
The thing was that IBM sold PC-DOS at a fraction of the price that they sold CP/M-86 or the UCSD p-system for the IBM PC. Also, I do suspect that they had the intention of CP/M compatability - PC-DOS is similar, both in interface and API, to CP/M - and the 8088 was a chip designed for portability with the venerable 8080.
and was already making better x86 based machines than the PC (like the DisplayWrite which had a faster CPU, more memory potential and CPM) but instead of using a well engineered machine to take on what they considered "toy computer". Their intent was to put Apple and Tandy out of the computer business and then regain their market on the "real computers". That's neither here nor there, the fact is that they chose the 8088 not simply because they could play the "now you should upgrade to a mainframe" card, but for reasons that had everything to do with people being able to run existing (but limited) common business applications such as Wordstar and Ashton-Tate's dBase II. (Not to be confused with IBM's mainframe and now linux database program with a similar name.) It would have been interesting I admit if they chose the 68000 or a 8086 at least. Perhaps they would have picked Unix as their OS for the 68K, it was commonly offered on that chip - though I don't know if the workstation market was out there in 1981, and of course the 68K didn't have an MMU though the next generation of 68K chips did. (I vaguely recall that Sun made their own MMU for the plain 68K, but I may be wrong on that, I didn't really enter the Unix world until '91.)
IBM picked the x86 for the original IBM PC because they wanted something better than an Apple ]{ and TRS-80 but not too much better
They probably picked the 8088, rather than the alternative 16 bit processor at the time, the somewhat better Motorolla 68000 used in (expensive) workstations at the time, because of it being very close to the 8 bit 8080/Z-80 chip - which was powering CP/M boxes that were the business software standard. That's why their first choice in operating system vendor was Digital Research, the makers of CP/M. If you're a whippersnapper, you may not remember CP/M, but it was the original platform of Wordstar, dBase II, and a number of other popular business software programs at the time. (Even MS's own MBASIC had its latest version running on CP/M.) Because of the 8088's similarity in instruction set with the 8080 and PC-DOS's similarity to CP/M, these applications were quickly ported (at first complete with the 8080 and Z-80's 8 bit limitations!) to the PC.
When Digital Research failed to follow through with IBM (Gary Kidall's famous plane flight). IBM then went to the biggest microcomputer software vendor, Microsoft, with a proposition depending upon if they had an operating system soon available for them. They lied and said that not only they had one, they had one already made to keep others from making offers, bought it for less than $20,000 from a local hobbiest hardware maker, and sold it to IBM; much in the same way that they secured a monopoly in BASIC for the Altair by claiming they already had BASIC written for it. (Of course, this is far from the worst of their business practices.)
...I'm not certain whether that's a Gnome thing or an Ubuntu thing. Thank God for the online community... it's certainly less hassle to put up with Gnome than to install an alternative. Of course, it's more of a hassle to have GNUstep on Ubuntu than GNOME. That's because Ubuntu is basically a snap-shot of Debian unstable with the latest GNOME desktop installed by default. The equivalent is the live GNUstep CD, http://livecd.gnustep.org/ to have GNUstep by default. Or use Debian, on which both are equally hard: "aptitude install gnustep" or "aptitude install gnome-desktop".
Does this mean that year 2007 will be the YEAR OF LINUX DESKTOP? I kid, i kid! =) RTFA! The article was about a laptop, not a desktop, so this means 2007 will be the Year of the Linux Laptop!;-)
Because I was using APT. The be-all-and-end-all for software installation, remember?
Oh, is VLC back in the main repo? Sweet. Yes, at least its in etch. Hmm, looking at this, it's in all the current versions of Debian:
http://packages.debian.org/stable/graphics/vlc/
Mine comes from the VLC repository. On the VLC front page, click "Debian Linux" under installs, and follow the directions. About as painful as, say, fetching.NET or MFC libraries for the first time on Windows. Yep. I think the people who find Linux the most unfriendly are Windows power-users. The reason? They know all the ins and outs of the Windows way of doing things, so when things work differently in Linux, it's unexpected.
Uh, okay. Now try running a few older games, which tend to do more complicated things than simple spreadsheet apps. You can forget about most DOS games... Yep, that's why dosbox is often used for Windows NT operating systems also... What was it about Linux's DOS compatability being inferior again? (Of course, this argument is besides the point of desktop readiness.;-) )
I don't think the amount of alleged pain it takes to run a program such as dosbox from a menu in Linux is much worse than running a dos-shell window.
There's the one-time "pain" of setting up a mount point for DOSBox, but that's about it. From the perspective of people who need it - gamers and businesses - it's really not worth screeching about, especially considering that DOSBox offers vastly better compatibility than Microsoft's NTVDM. The mythical average user who just wants to run his apps doesn't give a shit about compatibility with 15-year old DOS junk. The mythical average user only wants to surf the web, which Linux can do quite well and with a lot more safety and less maintainence than Windows. Maybe he might want to run Microsoft Word as well, he can run Open Office or if that's not good enough Crossover Office (which will run MS Office perfectly under emulation - there's that "emulation" word again) is available for cheap. Of course, some people want to be able to run their favorite games, that remains a problem, but only for a subset of users. Actually, my favorite game right now is Enigma; which is lots of fun and is multiplatform. I never was into the first person shooter genera enough to care that some programs of that sort aren't available for Linux yet.
In case you didn't know, Windows XP and Vista use an emulator for DOS programs too.
Every environment is an "emulator" within an operating system. So what? The point for a user is that he/she can run a program and it works. In OS X, Power binaries are emulated at a deep level, but it's transparent to the user.
From a user's perspective, Linux doesn't run DOS apps if it doesn't run DOS apps without special rigamorole, whatever it is.
I don't think the amount of alleged pain it takes to run a program such as dosbox from a menu in Linux is much worse than running a dos-shell window. Any more than it being harder to run Firefox rather than Internet Explorer. As for OS X, reflect that there are actually more Linux installations than OS X, as nice an OS as I'm sure it is.
That's like saying I can run any Mac application on the PC I want, as long as I have a Mac emulator. Who cares? Can I download that program in Linux, and run it like any other application, unmodified?. No. In case you didn't know, Windows XP and Vista use an emulator for DOS programs too. In fact, the emulator has enough problems that dosbox, an emulator for both Linux and Windows, is better for some applications than Microsoft's own emulation of DOS in WinNT derived OSs. Also, dosbox and dosemu have almost no effect on the emulated program's performance and near-100% compatibility. This includes programs like DOOM that use 32 bit extentions, or BBS software that access serial port hardware through a FOSSIL. Linux has had DOS emulation for years, actually. It's too bad that when MS was introducing Windows 3.x and 9x, more people didn't know that Linux would let them keep their DOS apps too.
I can confirm that a major British bank uses nothing older than WinNT on the desktops for the back office
For that reason many banks had stuck with OS/2. It's too bad that IBM wasn't able to make up its mind what OS it would support and market. (Though I prefer *nix, but if you want an MS-DOS successor OS/2 was meant to be that and filled that role admirably.)
DOS apps are easy to support, dosbox and dosemu on Linux actually emulate DOS better than WindowsNT-based systems such as Windows XP. (Of course, you *can* use dosbox on Windows.) The cruft comes from older versions of Windows.
Classic slashdot. High on rhetoric, irrational arguments, and missing the point.
I wrote back with an answer to each of his claims, as such the argument was framed in accordance to the claims he made for Windows being the "standard" and for it being the "source of commodity computing", since he didn't make the point that you're making, I didn't reply with that in mind, which I'll do now. I'm pointing out that it's possible to target real standards, such as POSIX and other standard APIs, and reach many computers too, especially with new ways to use the web catching on that blur the application and web boundry. (I pointed out that technically web pages and other internet services, served by *nix operating systems, also reach millions.) There's also Java which achieves this too, but I'm not a big fan of Swing (nor a big enemy so lets not get into *that* argument:-) ) so I didn't go there.
POSIX defines just the bare operating system services. If your're building a user-friendly GUI application that can be used by a layman, try using base POSIX services. So easy isnt it?
Sorry, I forgot to mention that Mac OS X and Cygwin also support X11, another way of talking to many different kinds of hardware.
No, the "commodity platform" was a function of IBM making their PC out of off-the-shelf parts and picking Microsoft to make an OS (MS-DOS) after the CEO of Digital Research (CP/M), their first choice (since it was a multi-platform business operating system de-facto standard at the time), didn't arrive at a meeting; legend has it while piloting his private airplane.
Again missing the point. A non-technical user can go sit in any of the world's internet cafes, and be productive enough to send an email, print out documents, hear music, without a MS in computer science.
I guess Microsoft should get credit for what Apple (well, more like Xerox PARC - but Apple was the first to bring it to consumer hardware) invented. Unix, which uses a windowing system that's older than Windows, I guess is only imitating Microsoft.;-) No, the reason why Microsoft suceeded was not through innovation, it was through being able to be included on every PC, while having contracts with OEMs that basically made it artificially more costly to include anything else. They didn't make PC clones possible, like both you and the grandparent post claim, nor did they make them easy to use. (At the time of Windows 3 and 95, there were popular alternatives to GUIs on the PC, such as OS/2 and Desqview/X, that very well could have provided a GUI were it not for MS's strong-arm tactics.)
The parent got modded up, somehow. I think/. mods must be swinging in the other direction just to be "fair and ballanced."
They created a platform that commoditized the underlying computer and jump-started a PC revolution. An independent developer can reach a market of half a billion desktops with a single binary. How neat is that?
A developer can also reach many, many operating systems and hardware, including Mac OS X (and even Windows if you add cygwin), by writing POSIX compatable software, with one set of source code. (And even binaries to some extent - many Unixes have binary compatability with negligable overhead, especially with Linux.) I find that much more exciting than Microsoft's monopoly-won success. Why? Because POSIX is a *standard*, even one mandated by the government for purchasing (hence WinNT comes with a horribly crippled POSIX mode from MS included - this can be remedied though by third party products such as the open-source Cygwin). Because of these standards, your software *can* reach a lot of people - internet servers, which are accessed by a billion both users and non-users of Windows.
What Microsoft did with PC hardware is similiar to what open source does with essential digital infrastructure: it commoditizes them by becoming the one standard reference implementation.
No, it was a function of IBM making their PC out of off-the-shelf parts and picking Microsoft to make an OS (MS-DOS) after the CEO of Digital Research (CP/M), their first choice (since it was a multi-platform business operating system de-facto standard at the time), didn't arrive at a meeting; legend has it while piloting his private airplane.
Microsoft told IBM that they had an operating system ready for the 8088, so not to worry. They actually didn't, they bought one from a local business for a few tens of thousands of dollars, then a few years later sued them out of existence for trying to ad multitasking when Microsoft had other plans for MS-DOS at the time.
Plus open source, though I'm a big fan of it, is not the creator of the standard reference of the internet. That would be Unix, and at one time also TOPS-20. Though I guess Berkeley Unix (BSD), back when it was mostly encumbered, could be counted as open source although you couldn't look at their source unless you had a source license from AT&T for the encumbered bits.
So far your batting average is pretty poor, but that doesn't surprise me; someone crediting the IBM-PC commodizing hardware to Microsoft could only be refering to statements made by Windows marketing (I hear so often this claim that I think it comes from MS or their journalist lap-dogs and is not independently arived at.)
Re:Why linux sucks on desktops....
on
Fedora Core 6 Review
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· Score: 5, Informative
1. Fonts. Linux weenies delude themselves that fonts under Xorg are just fine nowadays. BZZT. Compared to XP with cleartype the quality of font rendering in Xorg is laughable. Importing the XP fonts into a Linux system makes no difference, because they just do not look as good.
That's because the freetype library cannot use patented algorithms that are used by Windows and Macs. Recompile your freetype library with the patented stuff enabled and you can get it to look identical. Incidentally, I don't find the usual auto-hinting that is in most distros all that bad - so that's what I use nowadays. The Deja fonts now included with many distros are excellent actually, I like them better than MS core fonts.
2. Klunky UI's. Both Gnome and KDE are horrible in terms of wasting screen space. Also the UI's just don#t look as clean and polished as XP. I see rough edges on widgets, and various other things that makes UI's look cheap.
That problem is because you are using environments that imitate Windows, if you want something that doesn't use much screen space by default the *box wms such as fluxbox (I don't use 'em, but you might like them) use much less screen space than Windows and Mac, and actually look pretty nice. Another you might want to look at is fvwm-crystal, that's the coolest theme I've seen for fvwm - and it doesn't at all look like plain fvwm, transparency and decent performance at the same time!
If they ever get resolved then things might be different.
I have the feeling that nothing will satisfy you except for bug-compatible Windows emulation, and even then you'd find something to critique.
Anyone know why they stuck with making 2.4 series kernel default over 2.6?
It's more stable, and uses less memory. Slackware however has been 2.6 ready since 9.1. Now they provide not one but two 2.6 kernels, one 2.6.17.x in/extra and one bleeding-edge 2.6.18 kernel in/testing, if that's what you prefer. (I wish however that Slackware still came on four disks (with two installation ones) rather than 6, I guess that'd be impossible if it provided less kernels. 8-) Of course, a lot of people complained when it went past one installation disk, thanks to KDE and (then-included) GNOME getting more bloated.)
FVWM with Nautilus? When I use nautilus in another environment (window manager, whatever), it always starts slower than it does in Gnome (I know, I know, preload gnome-stuff and all that, but if you have to do that, what's the point?
fvwm-crystal doesn't require or neccesarily need nautilus. You can use rox-filer to generate desktop icons if you'd like just fine - and in fact the author reccomends that. If you can do without desktop icons altogeather, you can run it without rox-filer or Nautilus, or run one or both of them as just file managers if you prefer. (My favorite file manager is/bin/bash;-) ) fvwm-crystal appears to be a Unix-philosphy window manager, much like plain fvwm, in that it is very modular and you can choose from a number of different programs to do several tasks.
Debian & Redhat/Fedora always have the kludge piled on & needing the extra loads of patches...
i wont tell you my favorite distro, but it is supported and does not get the problems these high profile distros get...
Most of the patches distros make are of third party programs, which are used by *every* distro. So unless you have special security features in your OS, like OpenBSD and certain security-driven Linux operating systems, you are likely to need the patch too - and the only reason why the security breach hasn't been anounced in your "low profile" distro is because its security team is not doing its job as thoroughly, not that the bug in GNU-Foo isn't there too.
What's the current state of something like Debian's apt system and repositories for BSD? Is there a system for single command installation of applications and all the libs on which they depend? Does it work 99.9% of the time like Debian's repositories?
FreeBSD has ports, a system where the original code is downloaded from the original website, patches applied, dependencies downloaded the same way, and everything is installed all with one command. It also has pkg_add -r, a way to install binary packages and their dependencies. More people use ports though because its more bleeding-edge and customizable in spite of the greater installation time. The amount of software is similar too, over 14,000 ports are available according to freshports.org
Is anybody else noticing how many aricles are being tagged "troll"? Won't make for a very good indexing mechanism is every third article has the same keyword...
Yes. There should be a "-troll" or something similar where people can vote for inappropriate or redundant tags they want to see removed.
Why would I want to hire someone who can't even complete a college degree?
That's right, why would you want to hire Jamie Zawinski (Lucid (XEmacs) Netscape and Mozilla chief programmer) or Paul Allen (say what you want about MSFT, started by two college dropouts (Gates also didn't finish), Paul Allen could squeaze a BASIC interpreter into limited ROM space).
I have a friend who's an excellent programmer who didn't finish college - his parents didn't have the money and he made more money writing shareware programs. Now the software company he started was sold to a fortune 500 company for a half a million dollars and he's researching AI.
Seriously though, OOP is *not* a new idea. Alan Kay, inventor of Smalltalk, wrote an article about OOP in the 80s entitled "back to the future", because amongst people who knew about such things, OOP was not a revolutionary idea even then. What's new is its popularity.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you mean the "Linux Standard Base" (LSB), which has nothing to do with POSIX. There *is* a standard System V packaging format, used by Solaris (which I'm posting from) and it isn't so great either, though I think there are some changes that are being made concerning it.
Interesting post, I never meant to claim they didn't offer CP/M, but it simply wasn't posistitioned to be the OS of choice on that platform. What the Kidall affair did was not keep IBM from offering CP/M on the PC - CP/M-86 was one of the options IBM would sell you, along with the UCSD p-system. (The latter had portable bytecode! It was a loss though because it was implemented for Pascal. ;-) )
The thing was that IBM sold PC-DOS at a fraction of the price that they sold CP/M-86 or the UCSD p-system for the IBM PC. Also, I do suspect that they had the intention of CP/M compatability - PC-DOS is similar, both in interface and API, to CP/M - and the 8088 was a chip designed for portability with the venerable 8080.
and was already making better x86 based machines than the PC (like the DisplayWrite which had a faster CPU, more memory potential and CPM) but instead of using a well engineered machine to take on what they considered "toy computer". Their intent was to put Apple and Tandy out of the computer business and then regain their market on the "real computers". That's neither here nor there, the fact is that they chose the 8088 not simply because they could play the "now you should upgrade to a mainframe" card, but for reasons that had everything to do with people being able to run existing (but limited) common business applications such as Wordstar and Ashton-Tate's dBase II. (Not to be confused with IBM's mainframe and now linux database program with a similar name.) It would have been interesting I admit if they chose the 68000 or a 8086 at least. Perhaps they would have picked Unix as their OS for the 68K, it was commonly offered on that chip - though I don't know if the workstation market was out there in 1981, and of course the 68K didn't have an MMU though the next generation of 68K chips did. (I vaguely recall that Sun made their own MMU for the plain 68K, but I may be wrong on that, I didn't really enter the Unix world until '91.)They probably picked the 8088, rather than the alternative 16 bit processor at the time, the somewhat better Motorolla 68000 used in (expensive) workstations at the time, because of it being very close to the 8 bit 8080/Z-80 chip - which was powering CP/M boxes that were the business software standard. That's why their first choice in operating system vendor was Digital Research, the makers of CP/M. If you're a whippersnapper, you may not remember CP/M, but it was the original platform of Wordstar, dBase II, and a number of other popular business software programs at the time. (Even MS's own MBASIC had its latest version running on CP/M.) Because of the 8088's similarity in instruction set with the 8080 and PC-DOS's similarity to CP/M, these applications were quickly ported (at first complete with the 8080 and Z-80's 8 bit limitations!) to the PC.
When Digital Research failed to follow through with IBM (Gary Kidall's famous plane flight). IBM then went to the biggest microcomputer software vendor, Microsoft, with a proposition depending upon if they had an operating system soon available for them. They lied and said that not only they had one, they had one already made to keep others from making offers, bought it for less than $20,000 from a local hobbiest hardware maker, and sold it to IBM; much in the same way that they secured a monopoly in BASIC for the Altair by claiming they already had BASIC written for it. (Of course, this is far from the worst of their business practices.)
...I'm not certain whether that's a Gnome thing or an Ubuntu thing. Thank God for the online community...it's certainly less hassle to put up with Gnome than to install an alternative. Of course, it's more of a hassle to have GNUstep on Ubuntu than GNOME. That's because Ubuntu is basically a snap-shot of Debian unstable with the latest GNOME desktop installed by default. The equivalent is the live GNUstep CD, http://livecd.gnustep.org/ to have GNUstep by default. Or use Debian, on which both are equally hard: "aptitude install gnustep" or "aptitude install gnome-desktop".
I kid, i kid! =) RTFA! The article was about a laptop, not a desktop, so this means 2007 will be the Year of the Linux Laptop!
Oh, is VLC back in the main repo? Sweet. Yes, at least its in etch. Hmm, looking at this, it's in all the current versions of Debian: http://packages.debian.org/stable/graphics/vlc/ Mine comes from the VLC repository. On the VLC front page, click "Debian Linux" under installs, and follow the directions. About as painful as, say, fetching
But that is the point. If the program runs, it runs. The user doesn't have to know or care about the inner workings of the machine.
binfmt-support might be usable. I know it lets me run lisp portable bytecode as if it were executables.In case you didn't know, Windows XP and Vista use an emulator for DOS programs too.
Every environment is an "emulator" within an operating system. So what? The point for a user is that he/she can run a program and it works. In OS X, Power binaries are emulated at a deep level, but it's transparent to the user.
From a user's perspective, Linux doesn't run DOS apps if it doesn't run DOS apps without special rigamorole, whatever it is.
I don't think the amount of alleged pain it takes to run a program such as dosbox from a menu in Linux is much worse than running a dos-shell window. Any more than it being harder to run Firefox rather than Internet Explorer. As for OS X, reflect that there are actually more Linux installations than OS X, as nice an OS as I'm sure it is.DOS apps are easy to support, dosbox and dosemu on Linux actually emulate DOS better than WindowsNT-based systems such as Windows XP. (Of course, you *can* use dosbox on Windows.) The cruft comes from older versions of Windows.
Microsoft told IBM that they had an operating system ready for the 8088, so not to worry. They actually didn't, they bought one from a local business for a few tens of thousands of dollars, then a few years later sued them out of existence for trying to ad multitasking when Microsoft had other plans for MS-DOS at the time.
Plus open source, though I'm a big fan of it, is not the creator of the standard reference of the internet. That would be Unix, and at one time also TOPS-20. Though I guess Berkeley Unix (BSD), back when it was mostly encumbered, could be counted as open source although you couldn't look at their source unless you had a source license from AT&T for the encumbered bits.
So far your batting average is pretty poor, but that doesn't surprise me; someone crediting the IBM-PC commodizing hardware to Microsoft could only be refering to statements made by Windows marketing (I hear so often this claim that I think it comes from MS or their journalist lap-dogs and is not independently arived at.)
It's more stable, and uses less memory. Slackware however has been 2.6 ready since 9.1. Now they provide not one but two 2.6 kernels, one 2.6.17.x in
I have a friend who's an excellent programmer who didn't finish college - his parents didn't have the money and he made more money writing shareware programs. Now the software company he started was sold to a fortune 500 company for a half a million dollars and he's researching AI.