There's always one. There are enough information providers on the net that you can always find one saying what you want to write an article about. Sorry, smells like FUD.
Just a heads up, The Subsystem for Unix Applications (formerly interix) ships on top of Vista, Server 2k8, and Windows 7. It's a bit more than just just posix.1. And (like Linux) once you get it up and running with it's utilities it's not half bad. It beats cygwin.
I found too many things that are just missing the final fit and finish in linux. They are missing "feature completeness." The example that always sticks out in my mind is NFS. V4 is now available in alpha/betaish form, but v2,v3 lacks good kerb support. Apple just put in v2/v3 kerb support... why? They know that someone out there thinks it's important. It's a small group, but it's important. That's necessary... someone needs to d the hard ugly work of cleaning up the old stuff and loving it rather than just moving on to the new cool shiny work...
You're right in that I'm flying largely by the seat of my pants. The best evidence to support my primary argument is slashdot itself. I see a lot of antitrust articles go by and it feels like it's the EU is really just making a show out of this. Initially the EU was dead on. They were doing what they needed to with the inqueries and investigations. They are also investigating every shipping product to validate that it is with in the bounds of antitrust law. Yes, I agree that Microsoft's tactics in the EU were illegal, that was never my argument. But they have been punished for it, as well as for their initial non-compliance with the EU. Once again, my opinion. The judges may justify it differently. That's my issue. Are the judges making the punishment too harsh?
As for the model of non-compatibility, this I can give hard evidence against. I would say that you were right on this 5 years ago but at this point definitely not. I work a lot with file protocols, so here's what I've seen. 1) MSNFS is now built into Vista. MS has been working hard to play with Sun these past few years. NFS is a protocol that Sun owns and has made public. MS plays in that space for compatibility. Also, the MS SMB team has been working with the samba group to hammer out specs that samba can use. That's for both SMB 1 and SMB 2. The other one I can think of is helping sun build.doc and.docx plugins for openoffice. They are still rough around the edges, but the initiative is there.
Also, with the model of breaking laws as a business practice, I would have agreed with you 4 or 5 years ago. But I think that's changed as well. MS took a multi-billion dollar beating from the EU (if you add up the fines, legal bills, etc.) and even for MS that has to hurt. They've been meeting almost every deadline that the EU has set for them as far as protocol documentation and design documents are concerned for new product releases. That's not too bad. I think they are trying to make a change.
As for my word "legislate" you are correct. I got a bit ranty there, that was a poor choice of wording. The sentiment I was trying to hit was a government body acting against MS inappropriately.
So I'll put this on the table. I'm a long time Mac user. Worked with linux from 2000 to 2004ish but lost interest due to the politics within the Linux community. For a Server, go Solaris or Windows Server. I would argue that there has been about as much desktop inovation in Linux as there was from XP to Vista. I've seen lots of good ideas fizzle out due to poor implementation or lack of backing. The issue I've seen lately (past 4 years or so) is a "too many cheifs not enough indians" problem. Everybody wants to do their own thing and can't work with anyone else to find a middle ground. Look at the increase in the number of linux distros over the past 4 years. We're up to over 200. Something's not right with that. I think that there hasn't been much technolgical development to equalize the playing field due to a lack of co-operation within the Linux developer community.
As far as OS X is concerned, there has been good development on the desktop (ok, leave time machine out of this;-)) and they have a good OS and it's gaining market share fast. 4%-7% in 2 years. Not bad. Why isn't that happening with Linux at all? I point to the above paragraph.
I will not argue with whether Microsoft's past actions were illegal or not. That was never in question. What I will argue is whether the playing field is level. To continue that anology, I think it's getting close to level, but if the other team isn't measuring up, the game still won't change. Should we really give the other team a handicap in the marketplace? I think currently, MS is offering a better desktop product thank Linux, even in Vista. That is subjective but I think it's true. And the playing field won't change until there is a viable alternative. OS X may be that. That is to be seen.
I do have one question for you. And I was really looking hard for an example. Can you give me a concrete example of a product being "artifically broken" by MS? That's something I want to clear up and understand.
Ya see, it's that last line that I'm worried about. I don't think they do. One of the big things that open source offered to me was choice. Whether it's the megacorp, the small company, or open source. Which ever I chose to use. Restricting choice in any way is a bad thing. MS has been hit with fines and other levies I would even go so far as to say breaking up the company would be ok as long as choice is not restricted.
Here's the other thing I'm scared of, tying into the first argument. A couple of my friend working in IT over in europe (one in London, one in France (can't remember his city's name:)) on two separate occasions have said "we need this not to go too much further" in reference to the EU's actions on MS. They are starting to feel like it's just the EU is turning this into a publicity stunt instead of a judicial action. That's a bad thing. Sure MS is in check, but you want to balance the field not damage the company. And if the politicians over there are indeed turning this into something more than that, then there are issues.
Lastly, and this is perhaps the most depressing part, I'm seeing more people yelling "yeah, take that MS" when someone else legislates against microsoft instead of focusing their energy on making software that is unquestionably the better choice. Slashdotters have always had a lot of know how. Use it! Let the legislators and judges put the pressure on MS if they need to, but someone needs to give the EU a decent alternative if the EU is going to decrease the MS presnce there. Waiting for the politicians and judges to take action against a company so an another product can take over is rather "Microsoftian" don't you think?
Well ok, let's be careful here. Ubuntu as a whole performs better than Vista according to the article. But it leaves out a little too much "why" for me. I don't want to say "the driver is faster" because there is a lot more in the underlying OS for all three OSs. Also, I want to see Fedora, Suse and Debian. If you do the search for "Mainstream, Intel Compatible" Linux OSs on linux.org (the first hit in google) Ubuntu doesn't even show up. How can you expect a standard gamer to even find the OS except by knowing a Linux geek. Ubuntu is still to niche to run a "real live" scenario test on. Use debian or fedora and you'll be more likely to hit what a normal user would use.
I'm gonna set myself up for flaming here, but I think Linux on the desktop missed it's window of opportunity. And it was at least three years wide to boot. Think 2001, xp just released, OS X finally coming out of beta. Both UI's were clunky and the consistency of UI for the native apps was poor. Had there been proper unification and standardization of the major linux apps as far as the UI goes I think there could have been something seriously different than what we see today. I'll give the gnome devs some credit for trying to do that (that's why Sun adopted it) but that wasn't enough. It took Vista 5 years and OS X at least 3 to come up with something uniform, attractive, and usable. (OK initial Aqua release was very "lickable":-) but not very usable due to speed issues). Now with the refined and well thought out Aqua on Leopard and the not as good as Aqua but still damn good Aero (but mostly just properly standardized) interface on Vista the linux desktop doesn't have a chance to edge in any more. And from what I can see MS is paying attention to their UI more and more (although what I've seen of Windows Mobile 6 doesn't impress me) and unless something amazing comes out of the open source community this situation isn't going to change. So, bottom line, does it matter that Apple is edging out linux on the desktop? It seems to me it was largely by and gone anyway.
Honestly, I'd find an old iBook G3 to do do this with. I backpacked a lot with mine and the hard candy, err... plastic shell is really nice in this case. Serisouly, I took mine up a mountain in my backpack which also had a couple of large rocks in it (don't ask long story) and it survived with just a couple scratches. Also, they have a very good battery life if you get a 600MHz+ cpu. And the HD is plenty big enough for a stack of pictures. And best of all, if this one does get stolen you're only out a couple hundred bucks as opposed to a couple thousand.
My experience (ok 25% mine 75% my girlfriend's with me watching:-) ) has been a good one. The controllers are a work of technological art and make games more interactive and interesting. Wii sports is silly and entertaining and meant to be played standing up:-). Twilight Princess is an awesome combination of Zelda and duckhunt. Run around with a sword slashing things to bits by swinging the remote around. Switch to the slingshot or boomerang and aim at the screen with the controller to hit stuff. Very slick. Much more fun and interactive than aiming with a controller. I can actually hit stuff now:-). All in all, I imagine we'll see our PS2, and other consoles rusting from disuse. I'm looking forward to more titles coming out and the online features filling out.
I recall last year Steve making the promise of 3.0GHz G5's by the end of the year when the G5 was first released. Did it materialize? No, not even a year and a half later. From his history, Steve doesn't like being made a fool of, and he may be feeling like that right now. IBM didn't live up to the expectations steve had asked them for. They lose. Time to switch partners. And with the rumored x86 version of OS X that I will rumor once again is still floating around, it's not to hard for this to materialize soon.
Apple's biggest point of competition with PC sellers has always been it's laptop market. If you look at prices that's where they are most comperable. So don't be surprised if we see an AL 12" with slightly better specs and $1299 price tag within 6 months. Apple has to keep on top of this market if they want to stay in the game.
Slashdot Mirror
There's always one. There are enough information providers on the net that you can always find one saying what you want to write an article about. Sorry, smells like FUD.
Just a heads up, The Subsystem for Unix Applications (formerly interix) ships on top of Vista, Server 2k8, and Windows 7. It's a bit more than just just posix.1. And (like Linux) once you get it up and running with it's utilities it's not half bad. It beats cygwin.
I found too many things that are just missing the final fit and finish in linux. They are missing "feature completeness." The example that always sticks out in my mind is NFS. V4 is now available in alpha/betaish form, but v2,v3 lacks good kerb support. Apple just put in v2/v3 kerb support... why? They know that someone out there thinks it's important. It's a small group, but it's important. That's necessary... someone needs to d the hard ugly work of cleaning up the old stuff and loving it rather than just moving on to the new cool shiny work...
You're right in that I'm flying largely by the seat of my pants. The best evidence to support my primary argument is slashdot itself. I see a lot of antitrust articles go by and it feels like it's the EU is really just making a show out of this.
.doc and .docx plugins for openoffice. They are still rough around the edges, but the initiative is there.
;-)) and they have a good OS and it's gaining market share fast. 4%-7% in 2 years. Not bad. Why isn't that happening with Linux at all? I point to the above paragraph.
Initially the EU was dead on. They were doing what they needed to with the inqueries and investigations. They are also investigating every shipping product to validate that it is with in the bounds of antitrust law. Yes, I agree that Microsoft's tactics in the EU were illegal, that was never my argument. But they have been punished for it, as well as for their initial non-compliance with the EU. Once again, my opinion. The judges may justify it differently. That's my issue. Are the judges making the punishment too harsh?
As for the model of non-compatibility, this I can give hard evidence against. I would say that you were right on this 5 years ago but at this point definitely not. I work a lot with file protocols, so here's what I've seen. 1) MSNFS is now built into Vista. MS has been working hard to play with Sun these past few years. NFS is a protocol that Sun owns and has made public. MS plays in that space for compatibility. Also, the MS SMB team has been working with the samba group to hammer out specs that samba can use. That's for both SMB 1 and SMB 2. The other one I can think of is helping sun build
Also, with the model of breaking laws as a business practice, I would have agreed with you 4 or 5 years ago. But I think that's changed as well. MS took a multi-billion dollar beating from the EU (if you add up the fines, legal bills, etc.) and even for MS that has to hurt. They've been meeting almost every deadline that the EU has set for them as far as protocol documentation and design documents are concerned for new product releases. That's not too bad. I think they are trying to make a change.
As for my word "legislate" you are correct. I got a bit ranty there, that was a poor choice of wording. The sentiment I was trying to hit was a government body acting against MS inappropriately.
So I'll put this on the table. I'm a long time Mac user. Worked with linux from 2000 to 2004ish but lost interest due to the politics within the Linux community. For a Server, go Solaris or Windows Server. I would argue that there has been about as much desktop inovation in Linux as there was from XP to Vista. I've seen lots of good ideas fizzle out due to poor implementation or lack of backing. The issue I've seen lately (past 4 years or so) is a "too many cheifs not enough indians" problem. Everybody wants to do their own thing and can't work with anyone else to find a middle ground. Look at the increase in the number of linux distros over the past 4 years. We're up to over 200. Something's not right with that. I think that there hasn't been much technolgical development to equalize the playing field due to a lack of co-operation within the Linux developer community.
As far as OS X is concerned, there has been good development on the desktop (ok, leave time machine out of this
I will not argue with whether Microsoft's past actions were illegal or not. That was never in question. What I will argue is whether the playing field is level. To continue that anology, I think it's getting close to level, but if the other team isn't measuring up, the game still won't change. Should we really give the other team a handicap in the marketplace? I think currently, MS is offering a better desktop product thank Linux, even in Vista. That is subjective but I think it's true. And the playing field won't change until there is a viable alternative. OS X may be that. That is to be seen.
I do have one question for you. And I was really looking hard for an example. Can you give me a concrete example of a product being "artifically broken" by MS? That's something I want to clear up and understand.
Here's the other thing I'm scared of, tying into the first argument. A couple of my friend working in IT over in europe (one in London, one in France (can't remember his city's name :)) on two separate occasions have said "we need this not to go too much further" in reference to the EU's actions on MS. They are starting to feel like it's just the EU is turning this into a publicity stunt instead of a judicial action. That's a bad thing. Sure MS is in check, but you want to balance the field not damage the company. And if the politicians over there are indeed turning this into something more than that, then there are issues.
Lastly, and this is perhaps the most depressing part, I'm seeing more people yelling "yeah, take that MS" when someone else legislates against microsoft instead of focusing their energy on making software that is unquestionably the better choice. Slashdotters have always had a lot of know how. Use it! Let the legislators and judges put the pressure on MS if they need to, but someone needs to give the EU a decent alternative if the EU is going to decrease the MS presnce there. Waiting for the politicians and judges to take action against a company so an another product can take over is rather "Microsoftian" don't you think?
Well ok, let's be careful here. Ubuntu as a whole performs better than Vista according to the article. But it leaves out a little too much "why" for me. I don't want to say "the driver is faster" because there is a lot more in the underlying OS for all three OSs. Also, I want to see Fedora, Suse and Debian. If you do the search for "Mainstream, Intel Compatible" Linux OSs on linux.org (the first hit in google) Ubuntu doesn't even show up. How can you expect a standard gamer to even find the OS except by knowing a Linux geek. Ubuntu is still to niche to run a "real live" scenario test on. Use debian or fedora and you'll be more likely to hit what a normal user would use.
I'm gonna set myself up for flaming here, but I think Linux on the desktop missed it's window of opportunity. And it was at least three years wide to boot. Think 2001, xp just released, OS X finally coming out of beta. Both UI's were clunky and the consistency of UI for the native apps was poor. Had there been proper unification and standardization of the major linux apps as far as the UI goes I think there could have been something seriously different than what we see today. I'll give the gnome devs some credit for trying to do that (that's why Sun adopted it) but that wasn't enough. It took Vista 5 years and OS X at least 3 to come up with something uniform, attractive, and usable. (OK initial Aqua release was very "lickable" :-) but not very usable due to speed issues). Now with the refined and well thought out Aqua on Leopard and the not as good as Aqua but still damn good Aero (but mostly just properly standardized) interface on Vista the linux desktop doesn't have a chance to edge in any more. And from what I can see MS is paying attention to their UI more and more (although what I've seen of Windows Mobile 6 doesn't impress me) and unless something amazing comes out of the open source community this situation isn't going to change. So, bottom line, does it matter that Apple is edging out linux on the desktop? It seems to me it was largely by and gone anyway.
Honestly, I'd find an old iBook G3 to do do this with. I backpacked a lot with mine and the hard candy, err... plastic shell is really nice in this case. Serisouly, I took mine up a mountain in my backpack which also had a couple of large rocks in it (don't ask long story) and it survived with just a couple scratches. Also, they have a very good battery life if you get a 600MHz+ cpu. And the HD is plenty big enough for a stack of pictures. And best of all, if this one does get stolen you're only out a couple hundred bucks as opposed to a couple thousand.
My experience (ok 25% mine 75% my girlfriend's with me watching :-) ) has been a good one. The controllers are a work of technological art and make games more interactive and interesting. Wii sports is silly and entertaining and meant to be played standing up :-). Twilight Princess is an awesome combination of Zelda and duckhunt. Run around with a sword slashing things to bits by swinging the remote around. Switch to the slingshot or boomerang and aim at the screen with the controller to hit stuff. Very slick. Much more fun and interactive than aiming with a controller. I can actually hit stuff now :-). All in all, I imagine we'll see our PS2, and other consoles rusting from disuse. I'm looking forward to more titles coming out and the online features filling out.
I recall last year Steve making the promise of 3.0GHz G5's by the end of the year when the G5 was first released. Did it materialize? No, not even a year and a half later. From his history, Steve doesn't like being made a fool of, and he may be feeling like that right now. IBM didn't live up to the expectations steve had asked them for. They lose. Time to switch partners. And with the rumored x86 version of OS X that I will rumor once again is still floating around, it's not to hard for this to materialize soon.
Apple's biggest point of competition with PC sellers has always been it's laptop market. If you look at prices that's where they are most comperable. So don't be surprised if we see an AL 12" with slightly better specs and $1299 price tag within 6 months. Apple has to keep on top of this market if they want to stay in the game.