Best quotes: HUMORIX WORLD HEADQUARTERS -- Two Humorix unpaid interns were injured earlier today as the result of mass panic induced by an unexpected attack of the dreaded Slashdot Effect.
The two injured interns are actually specially bred chickens trained to peck the reboot button on our two Windows PCs when the screen turns blue
... and.... Preliminary calculations show that the damage caused by the Great Slashdot Effect Attack of November 2002 will likely total several dozen dollars. :)
Waterloo Maple brand symbolic math software should integrate and differentiate fine on Virtual PC. And don't Windows's biggest security problems spring from the "integration" of Internet Explorer into the shell? Or by "integration" do you just mean "rootless" that supports the clipboard and drag?
Hmm, sorry, don't really understand the first sentance there. I'm not talking about apps integrating with Windows, I'm talking about the host environment ie in your case MacOS, in my case Linux. Integration means a lot of things. Yep, rootless windows and clipboard integration are a good start, but also stuff like seamless transitions of files between host drives and virtual drives (in Wine if you linux drive is encrypted for instance, windows apps will take advantage of that), menu/desktop integration (so you can have evolution associate MS Office docs) and so on and so forth.
As AC pointed out, the full retail version of Virtual PC includes a copy of OEM Windows XP Professional. And if that's too expensive, buy the version that includes DOS and install Mandrake and Crossover Office. It should run enough apps to ease the transition from Windows applications to Mac and Java applications.
What about all the apps that there are no equivalents for? It isn't simply a case of making the transition easy, in many cases there simply is no equivalent for a piece of software (that is good enough, that has feature X etc) on anything other than Windows. I have IE6 here on Linux because it runs the adobe svg plugin with host scripting integration - no other browser supports that, not even Mozilla:(
Business apps usually are custom written so of course there aren't any ports available either. And if you have to buy Windows just to use your favourite apps, then MS still has you - in the ideal world you would be able to use your favourite apps regardless of what APIs they were written to, regardless of what OS you're on.
No, virtual PC doesn't count, it's slow, doesn't integrate very well with the host environment, and of course you still need Windows. That last point is the killer - why should you have to pay for a copy Windows just so you can run your old apps slowly with virtually no integration? And of course you have to pay for Virtual PC too. You might as well use Windows. Rules it out for business use as well of course.
I believe some distros, Lindows for instance, will offer to transfer your personal data when you stick in the CD before installation. I know one of them will copy across personal documents, email (settings and mail itself), bookmarks and so on.
This could be made a lot slicker however, for instance copying across chat program settings, proxy configuration and so on. I was going to suggest Wine integration, so your Windows apps appear in the Linux menus, but thinking about it Windows normally has so much garbage on it I wouldn't want that, and anyway Wine works better when apps are installed into it.
Nice idea from Apple, although methinks the real problem isn't transferring background pictures, the real problem for them is applications. Most windows users have 1 or 2 oddball apps that they simply MUST have, on top of all the usual suspects. I've met people who won't consider anything that doesn't run one particular brand of scrabble game for instance, and most Windows users often have hobbies or even jobs based around such things as well. When Apple figure out how to get Windows apps working on MacOS (don't think it'll happen myself) then this will be more than just a gimmick.
OK, is Slashdot now poting a story every time somebody installs Linux? This is getting ridiculous. We understand that more people are using Linux now. This stopped being news several years ago.
This isn't somebody. This is over 100,000 machines with 10,000 switched already. I don't recall ever hearing about such a large OS conversion ever. This is news.
Good article. I hope they succeed, though I expect they'll have to put some elbow grease in to fix problems. I wonder if they'd be willing to help with my project? Easy software installation is a big deal on Linux at the moment..... anyway
Microsoft regards such talk as too dramatic and distracting. It is software, after all, not war, company officials said. It is far more productive in their view to talk about the technical aspects of Windows vs. Linux.
LOL! Good one. Unfortunately Microsoft you made it war a long, long time ago, by killing anything that stood in your way. The computer industry has been in their grip for years, we've seen some of the largest abuses of the free market in history, we've seen the law bought, then bought again and now they tell people not to be emotional?
"There's been too much theology and not enough economic analysis in the debate so far," said Bradford L. Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, who oversees the company's global lobbying tea
This is rich coming from the company that described the GPL as "unamerican". I guess they're scared people might realise there's more to computers than the opcodes they run?
"Consider that there's a lot more to the total cost and value of a product than the initial offering somebody might give you," Smith said. For instance, it is often expensive to find support services for free software, whereas such help comes bundled with the purchase of Windows. And companies like Microsoft have a vested interest in updating their products; that's not necessarily so with free software.
You can pay as much as you like Linux tech support. I paid nothing for mine, and #linuxhelp came through every single time. You can buy it if you like, and it'll be of much higher quality than Microsofts - have you ever actually tried to get through to them on the phone when it matters?
"Somebody might give you a free puppy this afternoon," Smith said, "but you're going to have to go buy dog food in the morning."
When you use analogies, you should be careful that they can't be turned around on you. In Microsofts case, they'll sell you a puppy, then kill it when it gets old and force you to buy a new one. And you still have to buy dog food.
The software has become so popular that it has been downloaded more than 55,000 times from www.linex.org by people outside Extremadura.
Good for them. I hope they succeed, and let the community know if they need anything.
If this were true then why would Microsoft have fake pictures of a fake OS removed from multiple websites?
Good question, one I can only speculate on. Presumably because if people see them they may assume they're genuine and go around talking about them, with the end result that people have different expectations as to what it should be like.
Customer A: "Hey, where's that groovy horny clock thing that I saw a year or two ago gone? Bring back my clock Microsoft"
Come on people, wake up! Since when do MS leak betas that last a year? I remember the same thing happening with Windows XP, a truckload of faked screenshots, some obvious, some not. The XML Control Panel was a beauty.
A few things that are clearly out of whack here - some of the screenshots have inconsistent antialiasing of text for one, which often happens when screenshots are photoshopped. The artwork is hilarious, some of the title bars have gradients but the minimize/close/restore boxes don't, making them stick out like a sore thumb.
Why are the hard disk sizes measured in KB when everything else in Windows is megabytes? Why does some of the text overlap the borders of the containing window (an api impossibility). The last screenshot is just taking the piss totally, this version of Windows won't install on that version of DOS? That's not even trying to be real.
Look, guys, if you want screenshots of cool new features that you know are genuine, look at the stuff the Linux teams post - if they're real you can get them soon, if they're faked they always tell you. This kind of slobbering over crude mockups gives Microsoft a bad name.
Actually, yeah, CodeWeavers now sell CrossOver Office Server allowing you to pay for 1 license of Office and "run" it on as many computers as you like. How? By exporting them via X of course - dunno how long it'll take for Microsoft to patch that legal loophole but versions up to 2000 at least are good to go.
SuSE do an excellent Live CD. It can be downloaded from their FTP site and has pretty bootup screens, latest KDE with custom artwork, Mozilla, OpenOffice etc.
Some other stuff it does well - it'll store swap, config and home directory on files in the first windows harddisk with enough space it can find. That means you can in fact use it as your primary OS if you're happy with not being able to add new software and slow bootup times. You can reconfigure, write docs and so on, and it'll all be saved to disk.
You think that's bad, just try reporting bugs for Internet Explorer!
Not only do they not have any public bug database, but they don't even have ANYWHERE to report bugs to (at least on the sites i've seen) - not even an email address. I eventually sent a report to the "web team", surprise surprise, no response.
Bugzilla rocks. It's one of the best things about the project.
Deregulation doesn't mean no laws concerning behaviour and legal requirements, it means that there are no regulatory barriers that favor one company over any other
Right - the problem being that some things naturally are hard to create level playing fields for. Trains are a good example, the rail network in this country is a mess has been caused largely by privatization. The problem is ensuring competition - do people choose which train to catch based on price? Or how nice the trains are? Or what they think of the company?
No, they choose the train that will get them there when they want, the quickest. Always. The only time this doesn't apply is when you've got very long distance travel so the savings might be worth it, but on those lines there only tends to be one company, so you're stuffed anyway.
Water, another good one. Companies are supposed to compete for "franchises" - but they last 20 years! And who chooses which companies get the franchise? Not the customers.
Proper regulation doesn't mean favouring one company over another, it means enforcing standards and rules upon those companies. The problem is of course that sometimes you have double standards, big corps exploit weakenesses in international law to get the upper hand. News Corps BSkyB digital TV is a good example of this. In the UK there used to be a digital terrrestrial broadcaster (ONdigital/ITV Digital). They faced a lot of problems, some of which were caused by themselves, but one issue that didn't help was that they were strictly regulated and Sky, who broadcast out of Luxembourg, were not. So for instance ONdigital had to meet targets for subtitling, they had to do regional and sub-regional broadcasts (33 mpeg encoders for 1 channel), and they had to pay the government money for the priviledge of existing too. Sky had none of those worries, so in theory this was bad regulation, but if all the companies had been under its juristiction it would have improved TV for all of us, instead of giving Sky the upper hand.
The answer is, like most things, that economics requires a balance.
I've always thought it would be obvious that too much regulation is as bad as too little, and that the sweet spot is somewhere in between, yet I constantly see people spouting opinions about how "government kills efficiency", "the private sector is more innovative", and "privatization will benefit us all". I've even seen sites like that Free State thing a while back that implied that no regulation of the market at all was utopia!
I think that's nuts, nobody, not even the US operates "pure" capitalism, because pure capitalism is a recipe for self-destruction: it puts the benefit of the self above all else. Because we live in groups, we have to bracket and control the free market to serve us, not to rule us. Equally though, too much control can constrict the economy.
This is all obvious, yet New Labour is privatizing everything it possibly can, it's even attempting to get business involved in the NHS! George Monbiot covers this issue superbly - the worlds leaders have a love affair with business, and it's hurting us all. They need to get a balance back.
Not exactly. Wine is capable of using Windows DLLs if the Wine builtin ones aren't up to scratch, but you can run it without any copy of Windows at all. The apps currently don't work as well though. One day, hopefully wine won't need this crutch anymore...... it's certainly not a critical piece of the architecture though.
Face it, people... you DO NOT NEED ANY Microsoft programs anymore. Unless you are a hard core gamer, you don't even need Windows.
I need it. My project at work involves web design, and it HAS to be able to work well in IE. Because even version 6 has its own quirks and peculiar interpretations of the specs, I can't just write to standards and hope it'll work (though I usually write for Moz first, then hack it to work in IE), so I have to be able to run it. Without Wine I wouldn't be able to use Linux at work at all, so I'd be even more reliant on proprietary software.
And of course, you're forgetting, sometimes/often commercial software kicks the ass of the open equivalent. The interactive query interface for my web app only works in IE. Why? Because Mozilla screwed up when it came to proper plugin embedding APIs. Adobe did support Mozilla once, then they scrapped the API they'd previously been advocating and kicked Adobe in the shins at the same time. They still have no good plugin interface, yet IE has had a massively powerful system for ActiveX controls to integrate with IE for years, and it's totally stable.
I love Mozilla and use it as my main browser, have done for years, but this time around they screwed up and IE does it much better than they do. Considering that most of my users will be on IE, I'm not about to drop the interactive query feature either - it's something Mozilla users will have to do without.
If running Microsoft Office on Linux is such a requirement, why is there no effort to run Mac OS X applications on Linux?
A few reasons:
Why bother? Linux has equivalents for pretty much every OS X app in existence. Whether they are better or not is really a matter of opinion of course, but one of the driving forces behind Wine is lots of custom business apps that are written for Windows and there are no equivalents anywhere else for them. This doesn't apply to the Mac.
It'd be very, very hard. OS X isn't as complex or featureful at the API level as Windows from what I've seen, but even so replicating APIs is insanely difficult. Don't let the open code of Darwin fool you, for most of the APIs that "Mac" native apps use, as opposed to ports of Linux apps, the implementations are closed. Being based on FreeBSD would only make it every so slightly easier. It'd require a complete reimplementation of Quartz for one, and then Aqua - that'd especially cause problems as Apple would sue for infringing their look and feel. This case would be indefencible, you can't legally protect a look and feel, but they'd do it anyway (they have before), and who would fight the m?
It'd be slow - you'd have to do VMware style CPU emulation as well. Wine is in theory as fast as Windows, because it's just remapping function calls, something that would happen under windows too. The moment you throw CPU emulation in, performance would die. Add into that all the performance issues OS X had, and the insane amounts of optimization they had to do (think quartz extreme) in the early days as well, and you have unusably slow apps.
Because Microsoft don't own the underlying OS they are restricted in the number of changes they can make to Office X to break emulator compatability, unlike with WINE
Myth - Microsoft cannot make any API changes that will break wine, as those same changes would break all the other Windows apps too. The most they can do is add new APIs. Note that I think you can run apps written for Windows 1.0 on XP: that's how good they are at preserving compatability.
I realise this wouldn't give us Visio and possibly not Access, but I would take this option up long before running a heavyweight WINE install on my box, plus we would get the nice Mac plugins which ae generally every bit as good as their Windows versions.
???? Wine is about 7mb? It's far from heavyweight, this is just FUD. Oh yeah, one other myth - IE starts fast because it's well written by the way. Compared to Mozilla on Linux, and IE6 under Wine on Linux, Moz has the advantage (in theory) yet IE still starts faster.
Not sure what you're thinking of when you say "nice mac plugins" - there are more plugins available for Windows, and plugins integrate with the web page so "nice" doesn't really enter into it. Considering that I'm buying CrossOver purely so I can run the Adobe SVG plugin in IE (no other browser supports host scripting merge, which I need), this point irks especially.
Nothing prevents Microsoft from doing the same thing with the Office 11 EULA.
Actually, the law stops them. It'd be pretty cool if they did put such a clause in the EULA actually, because then CodeWeavers could sue them, win, and have more funds to develop Wine with.
They've tried very hard to do this kind of thing before, but it would be blatantly illegal product tying - they've put in similar clauses then taken them back out again in the past.
Well worth it to me. IMNSHO, Codeweavers is a company well deserving of my money and support.
Most definately, I've just been playing with 1.3.1 beta and it's fantastic. At work, my last Windows dependancy was IE6, which works great in CrossOver. Not only that, but I can get informal tech support on the mailing lists too (sshhh). Jeremy White, the guy who runs CodeWeavers, is a top guy - a brilliant mix of hacker and business man. He does in fact contrbute patches to Wine himself and has very high standards when it comes to software freedom. Think of them as the RedHat of Wine.
Wine has a big perception problem, because people download a development Wine release, or even Wine CVS (i'm guilty of this), finding that nothing works and assuming Wine sucks. No - you'd be surprised at just how much works when you have a proper distro like CrossOver. I have trillian sitting on my desktop now for instance, it's by no means perfect (in fact it suffers from a few serious bugs still) but it runs, runs stable and is very close to running perfectly despite not being a supported app.
1.3.1 is out soon, like in a few days. I'll be the first in line with my wallet.
I can imagine that by changing the software to make calls to the newest APIs, there's a smaller chance that these have already been made available to Linux users through Wine/CrossOver, and thus users would find their Office 11 not working on this SuSE version.
Short answer: no.
Long answer: probably no. There is basically no way that they can stop Office from running on Wine. They can't stop it legally, that would be a major violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, and they'd be convicted almost instantly. They can introduce new APIs that aren't in Windows already yes, but then everybody would have to upgrade Windows in order to install Office - unless that upgrade was free, that's not going to happen quickly. If the upgrade was free, then Wine would probably be good enough to have the upgrade installed on top of it, I installed IE6 today and it worked great.
Even if there was no upgrade for these new APIs, Microsoft still lose, because Wine can easily have new APIs added. The simpler the APIs, the easier they are to add.
The only possible thing they could do is to add such a large amount of code, such complex features into Windows that the Wine team get seriously behind, and then make Office require those features. Which is in fact what they appear to be doing with the SQL Server based filing system idea - if Office 11 was to require that, then CrossOver would be seriously screwed as it'd be an absolute nightmare to replicate. It could be done though, DirectX and RPC are nightmares to replicate too, but it's happening none the less. Anyway, this is just idle speculation, you don't just "add" support for that kind of thing to Office overnight, even if they threw resources at it, it'd take years.
Wine has caught up with Microsoft. There are only a few issues remaining with Office itself, for instance online help doesn't work right yet. Some more polish, and Office will run perfectly under Wine. At that point it's simply a pissing match, who can throw resources at the Windows APIs faster? Maybe at the moment the answer is Gates, but Linux development scales far far better than Windows development does by Microsofts own admission, so basically Gates is screwed - we've won.
Mark my words, in a few years we're going to take it for granted that we can download and use Windows apps just as easily as people actually using Windows, just as we take it for granted that we can run servers that stay up permenantly, and that installing Linux is easier than Windows today.
Well, when I decided that I too wanted a l33t desktop I did some research. It only took a few weeks to get up to speed on what was going on, but if you don't want to do that then fair enough, so here's a rundown.
Why are there so many distros? Because Linux is a free market, and people have wildly varying tastes in operating systems it turns out. The domination of Windows kind of disguised that fact for a while, but like any other market you care to name, there is competition for customers, and competition is good. It keeps the distros (at least the commercial ones) on their toes.
So which is right for you? When I first looked around, there were basically two types of distro, one of the Big 3 (redhat, suse, mandrake) and then all the rest (debian/slackware/etc).
I looked at RedHat, went eurgh GNOME1.4 and looked at SuSE, which was shipping KDE2.2 - so I went for SuSE. I did look at Mandrake, but SuSE had a much stronger european presence plus their website sold me much better than the Mandrake site did.
The big 3 are all very strong distros, you should definately start with them. I went for SuSE back then, but today I spent the day installing Linux on my work machine (corporate desktop invasion is starting already, i'm by no means the first in our dept:) and it was RedHat 8, because I'm now a GNOME user, and Psyche does kick ass. SuSE is still very good however, as is Mandrake.
Since then there are of course a couple more types of distros on the scene: source based (ie gentoo) and the "XP Clones", like Xandros, Lycoris, Lindows. The last type might be of interest if you're looking for the gentlest learning curve possible, but be warned, they aren't really targetted at Slashdot readers as such. You'll find that they feel less like Linux. If you like Windows but dislike Microsoft they might be worth looking at though....
Ctrl+scroll wheel should size text a la IE. I know this was an open bug for a while. Has this been fixed? In my build of Mozilla (which is the original 1.0, I think) it hasn't... although I do appreciate the ability to resize text even when the web developer specifies a point size (something which IE can't currently do.)
Actually, it does:) For some reason it's not on by default though. Go to Preferences, Advanced, Mouse Wheel, then choose Ctrl key modifier from the drop down list and set it to alter the size of text. You can control quite a bit from this panel actually.
Secondly, I don't know about this Google toolbar replacement thing. Google is pretty much my sole search engine, though I wouldn't mind having dictionary and translate buttons. I'm not convinced that Phoenix's replacement can compare (Mozilla's couldn't.)
Hmm, I haven't used the Google bar much, but in Mozilla from where I type this now I can hit Ctrl-L "mozilla vs ie" down enter and it'll search. That's remarkably few keypresses, and no mouse movements. If I then wanted to do an image search on it instead, I'd just type "Im" (link typeahead) and hit enter. For keyboard users such as myself, I can't really imagine what could be faster.
And honestly, to be a little evil, I'd like to see a "Windows XP IE clone." I mean, something I could throw at my mother and say, "This is the new version of Internet Explorer!" and she would really believe it. If I'm going to get on the evangelism bandwagon with web browsers again (and I've been off that bandwagon since I stopped being a die-hard Netscape fan in 1998), I want to get people to switch. Obviously, they want something that looks similar to IE. (Keep in mind that IE on XP looks radically different from IE on previous versions of Windows.) I'd welcome a theme like that as well.
Yeah, IE for XP does look pretty nice. But, a few things:
A true evangelist wouldn't try and trick their own mothers! *gasp* Instead they'd point out that it's a different product, with different strengths. If you're trying to make it exactly like IE, why bother using it in the first place?
There is indeed an IE theme, but I don't like it much. Default (non-XP) IE is butt ugly. I prefer Orbit, which is very nice indeed.
When on XP Mozilla will adopt the XP style widgets, ie so the buttons/tabs/etc look the same as in IE6. No, this doesn't extend to icons, I guess somebody could make an XP-style theme pretty easily by adapting classic though.
Third, a "snappier" UI does not necessarily mean a better UI. A faster UI I can appreciate, but honestly, Mozilla felt clunky to me in more ways than one. I hope Phoenix strives to eliminate this.
Well, I know UI is very much personal, but I think you'd need to be a little more precise for the Mozilla/Pheonix team to address your concerns - I find IE to be pretty clunky myself, there are god knows how many buttons, especially as every-app-and-its-dog installs a new one.
These results have absolutely jack all to do with the "quality" of OS X - they were comparing servers not desktops, so stuff like the GUI is not at all relevant.
A lot of those components that have had "amazing progress" are also irrelevant: if we ignore the fact that every OS supports OpenGL, can create 2D images, and KDE had PDF creation built in before OS X was even released we're still left with the last section, and easy to implement Cocoa and Carbon APIs. which is BS, only Apple can implement them as they are OS X only APIs. Sure, maybe you could build something like Wine, but that's hardly easy to implement is it? Easy to implement would mean international standards and open source reference implementations, Cocoa is sort of there, but most OS X apps of note use Carbon.
Why the hell can people get free karma by drooling over MacOS? Stop with the crack pipes mods!
2) Moshe is not smart enough to boot Mac OS X into command line
I thought the point of the XServe was that you didn't need the command line? Why would being "smart" have anything to do with it anyway, the stuff in that tutorial you linked to is not at all obvious, and Apple has conditioned everybody to think that everything is always obvious on a Mac.
If you don't need a GUI, then why bother with an XServe. And if you do, then why do you want to boot it into the command line?
Maybe to you a 10% performance difference is not much, but for large sites, performance is often the deciding factor. The faster you can serve your customers, the happier they'll be.
Slashdot Mirror
Best quotes: HUMORIX WORLD HEADQUARTERS -- Two Humorix unpaid interns were injured earlier today as the result of mass panic induced by an unexpected attack of the dreaded Slashdot Effect.
The two injured interns are actually specially bred chickens trained to peck the reboot button on our two Windows PCs when the screen turns blue
Hmm, sorry, don't really understand the first sentance there. I'm not talking about apps integrating with Windows, I'm talking about the host environment ie in your case MacOS, in my case Linux. Integration means a lot of things. Yep, rootless windows and clipboard integration are a good start, but also stuff like seamless transitions of files between host drives and virtual drives (in Wine if you linux drive is encrypted for instance, windows apps will take advantage of that), menu/desktop integration (so you can have evolution associate MS Office docs) and so on and so forth.
As AC pointed out, the full retail version of Virtual PC includes a copy of OEM Windows XP Professional. And if that's too expensive, buy the version that includes DOS and install Mandrake and Crossover Office. It should run enough apps to ease the transition from Windows applications to Mac and Java applications.
What about all the apps that there are no equivalents for? It isn't simply a case of making the transition easy, in many cases there simply is no equivalent for a piece of software (that is good enough, that has feature X etc) on anything other than Windows. I have IE6 here on Linux because it runs the adobe svg plugin with host scripting integration - no other browser supports that, not even Mozilla :(
Business apps usually are custom written so of course there aren't any ports available either. And if you have to buy Windows just to use your favourite apps, then MS still has you - in the ideal world you would be able to use your favourite apps regardless of what APIs they were written to, regardless of what OS you're on.
No, virtual PC doesn't count, it's slow, doesn't integrate very well with the host environment, and of course you still need Windows. That last point is the killer - why should you have to pay for a copy Windows just so you can run your old apps slowly with virtually no integration? And of course you have to pay for Virtual PC too. You might as well use Windows. Rules it out for business use as well of course.
This could be made a lot slicker however, for instance copying across chat program settings, proxy configuration and so on. I was going to suggest Wine integration, so your Windows apps appear in the Linux menus, but thinking about it Windows normally has so much garbage on it I wouldn't want that, and anyway Wine works better when apps are installed into it.
Nice idea from Apple, although methinks the real problem isn't transferring background pictures, the real problem for them is applications. Most windows users have 1 or 2 oddball apps that they simply MUST have, on top of all the usual suspects. I've met people who won't consider anything that doesn't run one particular brand of scrabble game for instance, and most Windows users often have hobbies or even jobs based around such things as well. When Apple figure out how to get Windows apps working on MacOS (don't think it'll happen myself) then this will be more than just a gimmick.
This isn't somebody. This is over 100,000 machines with 10,000 switched already. I don't recall ever hearing about such a large OS conversion ever. This is news.
LOL! Good one. Unfortunately Microsoft you made it war a long, long time ago, by killing anything that stood in your way. The computer industry has been in their grip for years, we've seen some of the largest abuses of the free market in history, we've seen the law bought, then bought again and now they tell people not to be emotional?
"There's been too much theology and not enough economic analysis in the debate so far," said Bradford L. Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, who oversees the company's global lobbying tea
This is rich coming from the company that described the GPL as "unamerican". I guess they're scared people might realise there's more to computers than the opcodes they run?
"Consider that there's a lot more to the total cost and value of a product than the initial offering somebody might give you," Smith said. For instance, it is often expensive to find support services for free software, whereas such help comes bundled with the purchase of Windows. And companies like Microsoft have a vested interest in updating their products; that's not necessarily so with free software.
You can pay as much as you like Linux tech support. I paid nothing for mine, and #linuxhelp came through every single time. You can buy it if you like, and it'll be of much higher quality than Microsofts - have you ever actually tried to get through to them on the phone when it matters?
"Somebody might give you a free puppy this afternoon," Smith said, "but you're going to have to go buy dog food in the morning."
When you use analogies, you should be careful that they can't be turned around on you. In Microsofts case, they'll sell you a puppy, then kill it when it gets old and force you to buy a new one. And you still have to buy dog food.
The software has become so popular that it has been downloaded more than 55,000 times from www.linex.org by people outside Extremadura.
Good for them. I hope they succeed, and let the community know if they need anything.
Good question, one I can only speculate on. Presumably because if people see them they may assume they're genuine and go around talking about them, with the end result that people have different expectations as to what it should be like.
Customer A: "Hey, where's that groovy horny clock thing that I saw a year or two ago gone? Bring back my clock Microsoft"
Microsoft: "Er, what clock?"
A few things that are clearly out of whack here - some of the screenshots have inconsistent antialiasing of text for one, which often happens when screenshots are photoshopped. The artwork is hilarious, some of the title bars have gradients but the minimize/close/restore boxes don't, making them stick out like a sore thumb.
Why are the hard disk sizes measured in KB when everything else in Windows is megabytes? Why does some of the text overlap the borders of the containing window (an api impossibility). The last screenshot is just taking the piss totally, this version of Windows won't install on that version of DOS? That's not even trying to be real.
Look, guys, if you want screenshots of cool new features that you know are genuine, look at the stuff the Linux teams post - if they're real you can get them soon, if they're faked they always tell you. This kind of slobbering over crude mockups gives Microsoft a bad name.
Actually, yeah, CodeWeavers now sell CrossOver Office Server allowing you to pay for 1 license of Office and "run" it on as many computers as you like. How? By exporting them via X of course - dunno how long it'll take for Microsoft to patch that legal loophole but versions up to 2000 at least are good to go.
Some other stuff it does well - it'll store swap, config and home directory on files in the first windows harddisk with enough space it can find. That means you can in fact use it as your primary OS if you're happy with not being able to add new software and slow bootup times. You can reconfigure, write docs and so on, and it'll all be saved to disk.
Not only do they not have any public bug database, but they don't even have ANYWHERE to report bugs to (at least on the sites i've seen) - not even an email address. I eventually sent a report to the "web team", surprise surprise, no response.
Bugzilla rocks. It's one of the best things about the project.
Reproducibility: always
Steps to reproduce:
1) Submit story to slashdot
2) Set topic wrong
3) Watch as editors post it anyway
Actual results: story is posted in the wrong section
Expected results: story is posted twice, then an editor should apologise
---------- Comment by Hemos, 10:05pm
Dupe of bug #133340985732
---------- Comment by CmdrTaco, 10:08pm
Marking WONTFIX
---------- Comment by CowboyNeal, 10:09pm
VERIFIED
Right - the problem being that some things naturally are hard to create level playing fields for. Trains are a good example, the rail network in this country is a mess has been caused largely by privatization. The problem is ensuring competition - do people choose which train to catch based on price? Or how nice the trains are? Or what they think of the company?
No, they choose the train that will get them there when they want, the quickest. Always. The only time this doesn't apply is when you've got very long distance travel so the savings might be worth it, but on those lines there only tends to be one company, so you're stuffed anyway.
Water, another good one. Companies are supposed to compete for "franchises" - but they last 20 years! And who chooses which companies get the franchise? Not the customers.
Proper regulation doesn't mean favouring one company over another, it means enforcing standards and rules upon those companies. The problem is of course that sometimes you have double standards, big corps exploit weakenesses in international law to get the upper hand. News Corps BSkyB digital TV is a good example of this. In the UK there used to be a digital terrrestrial broadcaster (ONdigital/ITV Digital). They faced a lot of problems, some of which were caused by themselves, but one issue that didn't help was that they were strictly regulated and Sky, who broadcast out of Luxembourg, were not. So for instance ONdigital had to meet targets for subtitling, they had to do regional and sub-regional broadcasts (33 mpeg encoders for 1 channel), and they had to pay the government money for the priviledge of existing too. Sky had none of those worries, so in theory this was bad regulation, but if all the companies had been under its juristiction it would have improved TV for all of us, instead of giving Sky the upper hand.
I've always thought it would be obvious that too much regulation is as bad as too little, and that the sweet spot is somewhere in between, yet I constantly see people spouting opinions about how "government kills efficiency", "the private sector is more innovative", and "privatization will benefit us all". I've even seen sites like that Free State thing a while back that implied that no regulation of the market at all was utopia!
I think that's nuts, nobody, not even the US operates "pure" capitalism, because pure capitalism is a recipe for self-destruction: it puts the benefit of the self above all else. Because we live in groups, we have to bracket and control the free market to serve us, not to rule us. Equally though, too much control can constrict the economy.
This is all obvious, yet New Labour is privatizing everything it possibly can, it's even attempting to get business involved in the NHS! George Monbiot covers this issue superbly - the worlds leaders have a love affair with business, and it's hurting us all. They need to get a balance back.
Not exactly. Wine is capable of using Windows DLLs if the Wine builtin ones aren't up to scratch, but you can run it without any copy of Windows at all. The apps currently don't work as well though. One day, hopefully wine won't need this crutch anymore...... it's certainly not a critical piece of the architecture though.
I need it. My project at work involves web design, and it HAS to be able to work well in IE. Because even version 6 has its own quirks and peculiar interpretations of the specs, I can't just write to standards and hope it'll work (though I usually write for Moz first, then hack it to work in IE), so I have to be able to run it. Without Wine I wouldn't be able to use Linux at work at all, so I'd be even more reliant on proprietary software.
And of course, you're forgetting, sometimes/often commercial software kicks the ass of the open equivalent. The interactive query interface for my web app only works in IE. Why? Because Mozilla screwed up when it came to proper plugin embedding APIs. Adobe did support Mozilla once, then they scrapped the API they'd previously been advocating and kicked Adobe in the shins at the same time. They still have no good plugin interface, yet IE has had a massively powerful system for ActiveX controls to integrate with IE for years, and it's totally stable.
I love Mozilla and use it as my main browser, have done for years, but this time around they screwed up and IE does it much better than they do. Considering that most of my users will be on IE, I'm not about to drop the interactive query feature either - it's something Mozilla users will have to do without.
A few reasons:
Because Microsoft don't own the underlying OS they are restricted in the number of changes they can make to Office X to break emulator compatability, unlike with WINE
Myth - Microsoft cannot make any API changes that will break wine, as those same changes would break all the other Windows apps too. The most they can do is add new APIs. Note that I think you can run apps written for Windows 1.0 on XP: that's how good they are at preserving compatability.
I realise this wouldn't give us Visio and possibly not Access, but I would take this option up long before running a heavyweight WINE install on my box, plus we would get the nice Mac plugins which ae generally every bit as good as their Windows versions.
???? Wine is about 7mb? It's far from heavyweight, this is just FUD. Oh yeah, one other myth - IE starts fast because it's well written by the way. Compared to Mozilla on Linux, and IE6 under Wine on Linux, Moz has the advantage (in theory) yet IE still starts faster.
Not sure what you're thinking of when you say "nice mac plugins" - there are more plugins available for Windows, and plugins integrate with the web page so "nice" doesn't really enter into it. Considering that I'm buying CrossOver purely so I can run the Adobe SVG plugin in IE (no other browser supports host scripting merge, which I need), this point irks especially.
Actually, the law stops them. It'd be pretty cool if they did put such a clause in the EULA actually, because then CodeWeavers could sue them, win, and have more funds to develop Wine with.
They've tried very hard to do this kind of thing before, but it would be blatantly illegal product tying - they've put in similar clauses then taken them back out again in the past.
Most definately, I've just been playing with 1.3.1 beta and it's fantastic. At work, my last Windows dependancy was IE6, which works great in CrossOver. Not only that, but I can get informal tech support on the mailing lists too (sshhh). Jeremy White, the guy who runs CodeWeavers, is a top guy - a brilliant mix of hacker and business man. He does in fact contrbute patches to Wine himself and has very high standards when it comes to software freedom. Think of them as the RedHat of Wine.
Wine has a big perception problem, because people download a development Wine release, or even Wine CVS (i'm guilty of this), finding that nothing works and assuming Wine sucks. No - you'd be surprised at just how much works when you have a proper distro like CrossOver. I have trillian sitting on my desktop now for instance, it's by no means perfect (in fact it suffers from a few serious bugs still) but it runs, runs stable and is very close to running perfectly despite not being a supported app.
1.3.1 is out soon, like in a few days. I'll be the first in line with my wallet.
Short answer: no.
Long answer: probably no. There is basically no way that they can stop Office from running on Wine. They can't stop it legally, that would be a major violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, and they'd be convicted almost instantly. They can introduce new APIs that aren't in Windows already yes, but then everybody would have to upgrade Windows in order to install Office - unless that upgrade was free, that's not going to happen quickly. If the upgrade was free, then Wine would probably be good enough to have the upgrade installed on top of it, I installed IE6 today and it worked great.
Even if there was no upgrade for these new APIs, Microsoft still lose, because Wine can easily have new APIs added. The simpler the APIs, the easier they are to add.
The only possible thing they could do is to add such a large amount of code, such complex features into Windows that the Wine team get seriously behind, and then make Office require those features. Which is in fact what they appear to be doing with the SQL Server based filing system idea - if Office 11 was to require that, then CrossOver would be seriously screwed as it'd be an absolute nightmare to replicate. It could be done though, DirectX and RPC are nightmares to replicate too, but it's happening none the less. Anyway, this is just idle speculation, you don't just "add" support for that kind of thing to Office overnight, even if they threw resources at it, it'd take years.
Wine has caught up with Microsoft. There are only a few issues remaining with Office itself, for instance online help doesn't work right yet. Some more polish, and Office will run perfectly under Wine. At that point it's simply a pissing match, who can throw resources at the Windows APIs faster? Maybe at the moment the answer is Gates, but Linux development scales far far better than Windows development does by Microsofts own admission, so basically Gates is screwed - we've won.
Mark my words, in a few years we're going to take it for granted that we can download and use Windows apps just as easily as people actually using Windows, just as we take it for granted that we can run servers that stay up permenantly, and that installing Linux is easier than Windows today.
Why are there so many distros? Because Linux is a free market, and people have wildly varying tastes in operating systems it turns out. The domination of Windows kind of disguised that fact for a while, but like any other market you care to name, there is competition for customers, and competition is good. It keeps the distros (at least the commercial ones) on their toes.
So which is right for you? When I first looked around, there were basically two types of distro, one of the Big 3 (redhat, suse, mandrake) and then all the rest (debian/slackware/etc).
I looked at RedHat, went eurgh GNOME1.4 and looked at SuSE, which was shipping KDE2.2 - so I went for SuSE. I did look at Mandrake, but SuSE had a much stronger european presence plus their website sold me much better than the Mandrake site did.
The big 3 are all very strong distros, you should definately start with them. I went for SuSE back then, but today I spent the day installing Linux on my work machine (corporate desktop invasion is starting already, i'm by no means the first in our dept :) and it was RedHat 8, because I'm now a GNOME user, and Psyche does kick ass. SuSE is still very good however, as is Mandrake.
Since then there are of course a couple more types of distros on the scene: source based (ie gentoo) and the "XP Clones", like Xandros, Lycoris, Lindows. The last type might be of interest if you're looking for the gentlest learning curve possible, but be warned, they aren't really targetted at Slashdot readers as such. You'll find that they feel less like Linux. If you like Windows but dislike Microsoft they might be worth looking at though....
Actually, it does :) For some reason it's not on by default though. Go to Preferences, Advanced, Mouse Wheel, then choose Ctrl key modifier from the drop down list and set it to alter the size of text. You can control quite a bit from this panel actually.
Secondly, I don't know about this Google toolbar replacement thing. Google is pretty much my sole search engine, though I wouldn't mind having dictionary and translate buttons. I'm not convinced that Phoenix's replacement can compare (Mozilla's couldn't.)
Hmm, I haven't used the Google bar much, but in Mozilla from where I type this now I can hit Ctrl-L "mozilla vs ie" down enter and it'll search. That's remarkably few keypresses, and no mouse movements. If I then wanted to do an image search on it instead, I'd just type "Im" (link typeahead) and hit enter. For keyboard users such as myself, I can't really imagine what could be faster.
And honestly, to be a little evil, I'd like to see a "Windows XP IE clone." I mean, something I could throw at my mother and say, "This is the new version of Internet Explorer!" and she would really believe it. If I'm going to get on the evangelism bandwagon with web browsers again (and I've been off that bandwagon since I stopped being a die-hard Netscape fan in 1998), I want to get people to switch. Obviously, they want something that looks similar to IE. (Keep in mind that IE on XP looks radically different from IE on previous versions of Windows.) I'd welcome a theme like that as well.
Yeah, IE for XP does look pretty nice. But, a few things:
- A true evangelist wouldn't try and trick their own mothers! *gasp* Instead they'd point out that it's a different product, with different strengths. If you're trying to make it exactly like IE, why bother using it in the first place?
- There is indeed an IE theme, but I don't like it much. Default (non-XP) IE is butt ugly. I prefer Orbit, which is very nice indeed.
- When on XP Mozilla will adopt the XP style widgets, ie so the buttons/tabs/etc look the same as in IE6. No, this doesn't extend to icons, I guess somebody could make an XP-style theme pretty easily by adapting classic though.
Third, a "snappier" UI does not necessarily mean a better UI. A faster UI I can appreciate, but honestly, Mozilla felt clunky to me in more ways than one. I hope Phoenix strives to eliminate this.Well, I know UI is very much personal, but I think you'd need to be a little more precise for the Mozilla/Pheonix team to address your concerns - I find IE to be pretty clunky myself, there are god knows how many buttons, especially as every-app-and-its-dog installs a new one.
These results have absolutely jack all to do with the "quality" of OS X - they were comparing servers not desktops, so stuff like the GUI is not at all relevant.
A lot of those components that have had "amazing progress" are also irrelevant: if we ignore the fact that every OS supports OpenGL, can create 2D images, and KDE had PDF creation built in before OS X was even released we're still left with the last section, and easy to implement Cocoa and Carbon APIs. which is BS, only Apple can implement them as they are OS X only APIs. Sure, maybe you could build something like Wine, but that's hardly easy to implement is it? Easy to implement would mean international standards and open source reference implementations, Cocoa is sort of there, but most OS X apps of note use Carbon.
Why the hell can people get free karma by drooling over MacOS? Stop with the crack pipes mods!
I thought the point of the XServe was that you didn't need the command line? Why would being "smart" have anything to do with it anyway, the stuff in that tutorial you linked to is not at all obvious, and Apple has conditioned everybody to think that everything is always obvious on a Mac.
If you don't need a GUI, then why bother with an XServe. And if you do, then why do you want to boot it into the command line?
Maybe to you a 10% performance difference is not much, but for large sites, performance is often the deciding factor. The faster you can serve your customers, the happier they'll be.