You know, I've always thought that fork/exec is a bit goofy too (as compared to a system call that just launches a new process, like NtCreateProcess), but there are very good reasons for it.
Essentially, it allows you to change things about the environment before running the new program. Want to redirect standard input or output? You can do that between fork and exec. Want to change the environment variables the new process runs under? You can do that between fork and exec. Want to do that in Windows, with CreateProcess? You have to pass them as parameters, which means that everyone has to pay at least a little attention to these things that you may want to do but usually won't.
fork(2) is a zero-argument function, and execve(2) has three. CreateProcess has nine in parameters, one of which is a pointer to a struct with 14 meaningful fields. Not all of the added complexity is due to the decision to make a CreateProcess call instead of a fork/exec-type call, but a lot of it is. (E.g. three fields of the struct are handles to stdin, out, and err; one argument is the environment to run in; another is the working directory the program should run in. All of these could be removed with a fork/exec interface. Many other arguments and fields may or may not be able to be removed nicely.)
I would say that the real culprits are the applications that properly use neither of the big ui toolkits, integrating with nothing, and looking / feeling out of place everywhere!
Agreed. That said, IMO in an ideal world, even the latter distinction would be unimportant from a look-and-feel point of view.
(I'm willing to forgive Firefox and OpenOffice because, at least under my setup, both look very similar to Gnome apps, to the point where I wasn't sure if they were using GTK for their widgets or not.)
For example, thanks to some laziness and lack of vision, tabbed interfaces have caught on.....
I've liked the Fluxbox idea for a while. It's too bad that more window managers don't support something like that. The Fluxbox idea's also more flexible than typical tab implementations, though Pidgin's are pretty good too.
(That said, in the absence of popular support for WM-managed tabs, I think that application-managed tabs are often better than nothing. There are also sometimes cases where tabs done at a level below the top-level window is the right way to go, though the WM/widget toolkit could still provide the tools to build them and make them consistent.)
(sorry about the long-winded, rambly spaghetti posting by the way)
Heh, no problem. I just posted one of those, though even worse.;-)
The task bar's preview has no way of showing anything but what the window has currently open via what amounts to its own built in window manager that switches between documents, just like what can already be done with top-level windows!
I haven't really used Vista and don't use IE, so I'm not sure what you're referring to exactly, but I think that some of this opacity is one of the big benefits of tabs.
I wouldn't would want alt-tab for instance to cycle through all of the tabs I have open in Firefox, and I don't want the taskbar to show separate icons for them. This is mostly because of the number -- I have far more tabs open than I do total windows, and I don't want my FF tabs to overwhelm the number of other applications. (I also hate the taskbar grouping feature and turn it off as one of the first actions on a new install or new system. If you like that, the problem is rather lessened I think.)
Having this problem is not innate to Window Manager-managed tabs, but the ideal WM would be cognizant of the issue and would at least allow some configuration of how to handle it.
(In other words, the present situation is, as you say with "the window has currently open via what amounts to its own built in window manager that switches between documents", the WM switches between windows and the application has a different WM that switches between documents. I assert that getting rid of the idea of the distinction between switching between applications and switching between documents is not a good idea, and that we should still be left with the ability to have this sort of two-level affect, just with both levels managed by the WM. If that means that "window" is replaced by "group of windows" and "document" is replaced by "tab within a group", that's fine.)
[Warning: rant ahead. I think I got too carried away with this post... I apologize for the length.]
I think this is overrated. Complaints about UI inconsistency are a symptom of a general (and completely justified) lack of confidence with Linux.
I suspect it's overstated too, but I still think there's something to it.
People aren't convinced they're savvy enough to handle Linux, so they're easily discouraged.
While I suspect this is part of the problem, it's not the whole story.
There's also just an aesthetics issue, which is something that was neglected for a long time on Linux. There have been some recent strides made in this area -- there is now XGL and Beryl and such for some pretty neat window effects, OpenOffice 2.0 was a tremendous improvement over 1.1 in this department -- but there are still some issues, and one of them is the inconsistency between especially Gnome and KDE apps.
For instance, take me. I use Windows as my primary OS. (I seem to be one of the rare breed of people who actually likes Windows.) I have Gentoo installed on this computer too, but it doesn't get much use. Why? I have no good reason to switch, because I don't find the technical arguments in favor of Linux compelling, and I'm not really a subscriber to the Free software mentality. (On the latter point, there's also the "it's not going to affect anything if I stay with Windows" issue that is such a problem with so many issues; I fully admit guilt in that area.)
I mean, what are the major technical arguments in favor of Linux? Security and reliability come to mind as ones that are commonly brought up. Well, I haven't had a problem with either of these on Windows really. I've had a virus once, and that was many years ago, from me doing something stupid (PSA: don't run warez without running it through a virus scanner first -- but I was young and stupid then), and had the whole episode been translated to Linux, would have caused almost as much of a problem then. As for reliability, about the only times I reboot are when I need to turn off the computer anyway, or if I'm installing an update. In the latter case, I can wait 'till I'm going to sleep or something, so the downtime doesn't really affect anything. I recently had to reinstall Windows after the defragger went haywire and corrupted Windows and some other things. But I've also "had" to reinstall Gentoo after Portage started going haywire too. (I could have posted a message on the Gentoo forums or something, but I didn't really want to wait for an answer so I could try out half a dozen things. I did a search for existing problems that were similar, but didn't find anything helpful.) Basically, in short, in my experience, Windows doesn't have a problem in this area. (This isn't to say that someone who is less careful about browsing the internet and stuff wouldn't benefit.)
Linux is often brought up as a great platform for development -- you get GCC, grep, Emacs and Vi, make, etc. But I too don't like this argument, because I don't like those tools. Emacs is a great editor (pretend I said "Vi" if that's your thing) and has some things that are nice for coding, but I'll take a true IDE in a second. I like having better autocompletion ("Intellisense"), a "go to definition" action (tags doesn't cut it), refactoring support, etc. So if I were to work on a personal project where I had a choice, I would use something like Eclipse for development anyway. And hey, that works on Windows too! And on Windows, you get Visual Studio (which I can get for free). And for the things that Linux does better even after that, you can replicate most of it with Cygwin/SFU. So I don't find those arguments compelling.
I have seen people be super-productive with Linux -- using the command line everywhere, set up the window manager to do exactly what they want (I know someone who configured his WM so that windows would display without the title bar or borders so that he didn't waste space on it), etc., but rising to that level would go
Hey, I didn't say that I actually expected an answer.;-)
But I think that while there isn't one, the inconsistencies between especially KDE and Gnome apps will hinder Linux's adoption. I don't think it will actually act as a blocker to adoption for almost anyone, but it will slow it, because it adds a reason to not switch.
Being that it is always necessary to make a copy of a program (at least in RAM) in order to use it, a EULA of some sort is always required.
No offense, but you're full of crap. That sort of copying is not infringing. 17 USC 117:
(a) Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy.-- Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:
(1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner...
Copying the program into ram is an essential step in the use of the program, thus that step is not infringing.
(Besides, if it were, you couldn't load the installation program into RAM in order to read the EULA.)
That's the elegance of splitting implementation from interface that's at the core of why programming works. You can have one set of tools -- or even just one set of CLI and GUI interfaces -- that will take care of that stuff behind your back.
Then if you move from Red Hat to Ubuntu you don't need to relearn how to install programs just because Red Hat uses Yum and Ubuntu uses apt-get (or Aptitude or Synaptic or whatever you want to consider it using), because what the user would do to install an application on both distros would be the same, even though what actually goes on behind the scenes would differ.
I use Windows as my primary OS. While it's not an ideal world, and there are plenty of inconsistencies (everything from quick little Java apps that someone pounded out to big guns like MS Office), on a whole, Windows is far more consistent than my Linux setup. It's like comparing night and day.
Why couldn't Gnome change their toolkit so that it produces widgets that have the look and feel of KDE's, or KDE (or maybe Trolltech) change their toolkit so it emulates Gnome?
I can thing of three reasons: 1. Developer egos 2. Other features seem more pressing, so get priority 3. It might break compatibility with stuff like themes written for one or the other
Granted, this is important to the Linux community, but when I hear Linux development, I think kernel, modules, and organization
Then you didn't read the summary very carefully: if you were able to devote a 'significant' number of resources (read: high-quality developers) to a particular app or area of the kernel
In other words, something that improves KDE, Gnome, X, etc. is a perfectly fine answer to this question.
Why are you so confidant that they will fail faster because of their choice not to support Linux?
It's quite possible that people have sat around, pounded out some numbers, and said "providing support for Linux will currently cost us more than the added business that it will bring in", and they consider the loss of your sale part of the cost of business.
Just because they lost a sale doesn't mean that they are losing out on the whole.
(Of course, this isn't in any way meant to suggest that you SHOULD buy hardware from companies that say this, that your decision is wrong, etc. Also, it seems unlikely that on popular pieces of hardware (for instance, video cards from a certain manufacturer with a 3-letter name) this tradeoff would go against Linux. I just get tired of hearing the same things over and over again when they really aren't all that correct.)
They are suggesting making the CLI unnecessary to do most tasks, something that would be a virtue, not a vice. Power users and gurus could still use it to get the added power and speed.
The fact that you suggest that if you want a GUI you should use OS X is exactly proof of their point. There's really no reason that they can't coexit, and the only issue with making them do so would be that the effort required to bring Linux up to OS X's standards would distract developers from things that you feel are more important. This is a valid concern, but it's rather a different shade of argument than the one you're apparently making.
(Once they had compared Redhat Linux 7.1 with Windows XP!).
Depending on when this comparison was done, and with what service packs and stuff for XP, this may have been a fairly reasonable comparison. If they were comparing XP sans-service packs, RedHat 7.2 would have been the most apples-to-apples comparison. Both were released in October of 2001. It's even quite possible XP was out before 7.2, which would have made 7.1 an even more reasonable choice (though 7.2 would still have been better).
Of course, if this is XP+SP2 for instance, then that's totally off-base.
Not "hi's computer". Do you ever see that mistake?
So yes, it is a bit weird (especially because it's the only such pronoun with just an 's' tacked onto the non-possessive form, and "it's" is a valid word), but not quite as weird as you portray.
..that NO existing solution would have allowed the same speed of progress, that NO other tools would have been as useful to him as BitKeeper if he'd given them a real chance, that he would NOT have improved any shortcomings in existing version control systems, that he would NOT have written as good a tool as Git without the hindsight of knowing BitKeeper, etc etc.
The first three I have evidence for: even years AFTER they decided to go to Bitkeeper, they were still true. Linus probably wouldn't have given the other tools a real chance, and he probably wouldn't have improved any of the shortcomings in the existing version control systems, because he didn't do it when he lost Bitkeeper support.
The last suggestion is much more questionable. However, Linus has also said that Git's workflow is based off of Bitkeeper's. Without the Bitkeeper experience, would he have known what he wanted? I don't know.
Was it? Linus has said that Linux is far ahead of where it would be had they not used Bitkeeper even for the few years they did.
Without BK, would Linus eventually have given up with the system he was using and written Git? Maybe, maybe not. I doubt he would have done anything else though. And if he had written Git, would it be as useful (to him at least) as he claims it is? Again, maybe or maybe not, but probably not.
Admittedly 1.4 (though I will point out that C# has the major language features introduced after then, like generics (and.Net's are better), enums (though done differently -- I'm not sure which is better), autoboxing, varargs, and syntactic sugar for loops that iterate over collections; some of these features were in C# before Java), but I did use Eclipse.
I have to hand it to the Eclipse folks, when editing Java, that's a better IDE than Visual Studio was before 2K5. The main thing I liked about Eclipse was the refactoring support; I wish the C++ editors I use would support that. 2K5 does have refactoring support, though there seem to be less options than I remember in Eclipse. The ones I used most often though are in Java.
I should also say that I haven't done all that much with C#, just made a couple programs for myself with it. I just know that I got very frustrated with some things in the Java language, and C# would have gone a long way toward helping with those frustrations.
so they give traction to _now_ meaningless projects like Mono, classpath, gcj, kaffe,...
Mono will still allow some programs written for.NET to run on other platforms, or a free platform on Windows. That's not meaningless. It will also allow people to choose the.NET languages, like C#; that too is not meaningless. (I happen to think that the C# language is notably more fun and better to program in than Java, but that's just my opinion.)
GCJ provides a compiler for Java that goes to native machine code rather than bytecode. Open-source Java doesn't do this; this project too is not meaningless. (Though there was, I'm sure, a good bit of duplicated effort.)
I'm just some grad school kid setting up a server in his apartment, but within a few months I'm gonna get a new desktop and move my current one to a server. I'm debating between FreeBSD and x86 Solaris for it.
You are (depending on how you count) between about 3 and 9 months out of date.
Re:Summary is Flamebait
on
SCO Loses
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
No. They lost because they were _wrong_.
While this is true, I think it's also fair to say that a big reason that IBM got to show that SCO was wrong was because IBM has truckloads of money.
If SCO had sued me instead, SCO wouldn't have lost because they were wrong, because I wouldn't have had the money to show that they were wrong. I would have had to find a lawyer willing to work pro bono.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, I've always thought that fork/exec is a bit goofy too (as compared to a system call that just launches a new process, like NtCreateProcess), but there are very good reasons for it.
Essentially, it allows you to change things about the environment before running the new program. Want to redirect standard input or output? You can do that between fork and exec. Want to change the environment variables the new process runs under? You can do that between fork and exec. Want to do that in Windows, with CreateProcess? You have to pass them as parameters, which means that everyone has to pay at least a little attention to these things that you may want to do but usually won't.
fork(2) is a zero-argument function, and execve(2) has three. CreateProcess has nine in parameters, one of which is a pointer to a struct with 14 meaningful fields. Not all of the added complexity is due to the decision to make a CreateProcess call instead of a fork/exec-type call, but a lot of it is. (E.g. three fields of the struct are handles to stdin, out, and err; one argument is the environment to run in; another is the working directory the program should run in. All of these could be removed with a fork/exec interface. Many other arguments and fields may or may not be able to be removed nicely.)
I would say that the real culprits are the applications that properly use neither of the big ui toolkits, integrating with nothing, and looking / feeling out of place everywhere!
....
;-)
Agreed. That said, IMO in an ideal world, even the latter distinction would be unimportant from a look-and-feel point of view.
(I'm willing to forgive Firefox and OpenOffice because, at least under my setup, both look very similar to Gnome apps, to the point where I wasn't sure if they were using GTK for their widgets or not.)
For example, thanks to some laziness and lack of vision, tabbed interfaces have caught on.
I've liked the Fluxbox idea for a while. It's too bad that more window managers don't support something like that. The Fluxbox idea's also more flexible than typical tab implementations, though Pidgin's are pretty good too.
(That said, in the absence of popular support for WM-managed tabs, I think that application-managed tabs are often better than nothing. There are also sometimes cases where tabs done at a level below the top-level window is the right way to go, though the WM/widget toolkit could still provide the tools to build them and make them consistent.)
(sorry about the long-winded, rambly spaghetti posting by the way)
Heh, no problem. I just posted one of those, though even worse.
The task bar's preview has no way of showing anything but what the window has currently open via what amounts to its own built in window manager that switches between documents, just like what can already be done with top-level windows!
I haven't really used Vista and don't use IE, so I'm not sure what you're referring to exactly, but I think that some of this opacity is one of the big benefits of tabs.
I wouldn't would want alt-tab for instance to cycle through all of the tabs I have open in Firefox, and I don't want the taskbar to show separate icons for them. This is mostly because of the number -- I have far more tabs open than I do total windows, and I don't want my FF tabs to overwhelm the number of other applications. (I also hate the taskbar grouping feature and turn it off as one of the first actions on a new install or new system. If you like that, the problem is rather lessened I think.)
Having this problem is not innate to Window Manager-managed tabs, but the ideal WM would be cognizant of the issue and would at least allow some configuration of how to handle it.
(In other words, the present situation is, as you say with "the window has currently open via what amounts to its own built in window manager that switches between documents", the WM switches between windows and the application has a different WM that switches between documents. I assert that getting rid of the idea of the distinction between switching between applications and switching between documents is not a good idea, and that we should still be left with the ability to have this sort of two-level affect, just with both levels managed by the WM. If that means that "window" is replaced by "group of windows" and "document" is replaced by "tab within a group", that's fine.)
[Warning: rant ahead. I think I got too carried away with this post... I apologize for the length.]
I think this is overrated. Complaints about UI inconsistency are a symptom of a general (and completely justified) lack of confidence with Linux.
I suspect it's overstated too, but I still think there's something to it.
People aren't convinced they're savvy enough to handle Linux, so they're easily discouraged.
While I suspect this is part of the problem, it's not the whole story.
There's also just an aesthetics issue, which is something that was neglected for a long time on Linux. There have been some recent strides made in this area -- there is now XGL and Beryl and such for some pretty neat window effects, OpenOffice 2.0 was a tremendous improvement over 1.1 in this department -- but there are still some issues, and one of them is the inconsistency between especially Gnome and KDE apps.
For instance, take me. I use Windows as my primary OS. (I seem to be one of the rare breed of people who actually likes Windows.) I have Gentoo installed on this computer too, but it doesn't get much use. Why? I have no good reason to switch, because I don't find the technical arguments in favor of Linux compelling, and I'm not really a subscriber to the Free software mentality. (On the latter point, there's also the "it's not going to affect anything if I stay with Windows" issue that is such a problem with so many issues; I fully admit guilt in that area.)
I mean, what are the major technical arguments in favor of Linux? Security and reliability come to mind as ones that are commonly brought up. Well, I haven't had a problem with either of these on Windows really. I've had a virus once, and that was many years ago, from me doing something stupid (PSA: don't run warez without running it through a virus scanner first -- but I was young and stupid then), and had the whole episode been translated to Linux, would have caused almost as much of a problem then. As for reliability, about the only times I reboot are when I need to turn off the computer anyway, or if I'm installing an update. In the latter case, I can wait 'till I'm going to sleep or something, so the downtime doesn't really affect anything. I recently had to reinstall Windows after the defragger went haywire and corrupted Windows and some other things. But I've also "had" to reinstall Gentoo after Portage started going haywire too. (I could have posted a message on the Gentoo forums or something, but I didn't really want to wait for an answer so I could try out half a dozen things. I did a search for existing problems that were similar, but didn't find anything helpful.) Basically, in short, in my experience, Windows doesn't have a problem in this area. (This isn't to say that someone who is less careful about browsing the internet and stuff wouldn't benefit.)
Linux is often brought up as a great platform for development -- you get GCC, grep, Emacs and Vi, make, etc. But I too don't like this argument, because I don't like those tools. Emacs is a great editor (pretend I said "Vi" if that's your thing) and has some things that are nice for coding, but I'll take a true IDE in a second. I like having better autocompletion ("Intellisense"), a "go to definition" action (tags doesn't cut it), refactoring support, etc. So if I were to work on a personal project where I had a choice, I would use something like Eclipse for development anyway. And hey, that works on Windows too! And on Windows, you get Visual Studio (which I can get for free). And for the things that Linux does better even after that, you can replicate most of it with Cygwin/SFU. So I don't find those arguments compelling.
I have seen people be super-productive with Linux -- using the command line everywhere, set up the window manager to do exactly what they want (I know someone who configured his WM so that windows would display without the title bar or borders so that he didn't waste space on it), etc., but rising to that level would go
Hey, I didn't say that I actually expected an answer. ;-)
But I think that while there isn't one, the inconsistencies between especially KDE and Gnome apps will hinder Linux's adoption. I don't think it will actually act as a blocker to adoption for almost anyone, but it will slow it, because it adds a reason to not switch.
No offense, but you're full of crap. That sort of copying is not infringing. 17 USC 117:
Copying the program into ram is an essential step in the use of the program, thus that step is not infringing.
(Besides, if it were, you couldn't load the installation program into RAM in order to read the EULA.)
Just because it's a hard question doesn't mean it doesn't need an answer.
What? You're saying that Windows is insecure because it provides cookie-cutter ways of doing things?
Windows's insecurity comes from some fundamental security policy decisions, such as run as admin, and some outright coding bugs like buffer overflows.
The security mechanisms Windows provides are fine, and in fact rather more expressive than anything you get on a traditional Unix-like system.
That's fine.
That's the elegance of splitting implementation from interface that's at the core of why programming works. You can have one set of tools -- or even just one set of CLI and GUI interfaces -- that will take care of that stuff behind your back.
Then if you move from Red Hat to Ubuntu you don't need to relearn how to install programs just because Red Hat uses Yum and Ubuntu uses apt-get (or Aptitude or Synaptic or whatever you want to consider it using), because what the user would do to install an application on both distros would be the same, even though what actually goes on behind the scenes would differ.
I use Windows as my primary OS. While it's not an ideal world, and there are plenty of inconsistencies (everything from quick little Java apps that someone pounded out to big guns like MS Office), on a whole, Windows is far more consistent than my Linux setup. It's like comparing night and day.
Why's that?
Why couldn't Gnome change their toolkit so that it produces widgets that have the look and feel of KDE's, or KDE (or maybe Trolltech) change their toolkit so it emulates Gnome?
I can thing of three reasons:
1. Developer egos
2. Other features seem more pressing, so get priority
3. It might break compatibility with stuff like themes written for one or the other
Granted, this is important to the Linux community, but when I hear Linux development, I think kernel, modules, and organization
Then you didn't read the summary very carefully:
if you were able to devote a 'significant' number of resources (read: high-quality developers) to a particular app or area of the kernel
In other words, something that improves KDE, Gnome, X, etc. is a perfectly fine answer to this question.
Why are you so confidant that they will fail faster because of their choice not to support Linux?
It's quite possible that people have sat around, pounded out some numbers, and said "providing support for Linux will currently cost us more than the added business that it will bring in", and they consider the loss of your sale part of the cost of business.
Just because they lost a sale doesn't mean that they are losing out on the whole.
(Of course, this isn't in any way meant to suggest that you SHOULD buy hardware from companies that say this, that your decision is wrong, etc. Also, it seems unlikely that on popular pieces of hardware (for instance, video cards from a certain manufacturer with a 3-letter name) this tradeoff would go against Linux. I just get tired of hearing the same things over and over again when they really aren't all that correct.)
None of those posts suggest burying the CLI.
They are suggesting making the CLI unnecessary to do most tasks, something that would be a virtue, not a vice. Power users and gurus could still use it to get the added power and speed.
The fact that you suggest that if you want a GUI you should use OS X is exactly proof of their point. There's really no reason that they can't coexit, and the only issue with making them do so would be that the effort required to bring Linux up to OS X's standards would distract developers from things that you feel are more important. This is a valid concern, but it's rather a different shade of argument than the one you're apparently making.
Ha, I love how the IE window that he's killing has Google open.
(Once they had compared Redhat Linux 7.1 with Windows XP!).
Depending on when this comparison was done, and with what service packs and stuff for XP, this may have been a fairly reasonable comparison. If they were comparing XP sans-service packs, RedHat 7.2 would have been the most apples-to-apples comparison. Both were released in October of 2001. It's even quite possible XP was out before 7.2, which would have made 7.1 an even more reasonable choice (though 7.2 would still have been better).
Of course, if this is XP+SP2 for instance, then that's totally off-base.
But posting it ten times?
That counts as spam my friend. One thing you are NOT doing is making me want to vote for Ron Paul.
...except the other possessive pronouns.
His computer.
Her bicycle.
Its bone.
Not "hi's computer". Do you ever see that mistake?
So yes, it is a bit weird (especially because it's the only such pronoun with just an 's' tacked onto the non-possessive form, and "it's" is a valid word), but not quite as weird as you portray.
What if it was cryptographically signed or even encrypted?
..that NO existing solution would have allowed the same speed of progress, that NO other tools would have been as useful to him as BitKeeper if he'd given them a real chance, that he would NOT have improved any shortcomings in existing version control systems, that he would NOT have written as good a tool as Git without the hindsight of knowing BitKeeper, etc etc.
The first three I have evidence for: even years AFTER they decided to go to Bitkeeper, they were still true. Linus probably wouldn't have given the other tools a real chance, and he probably wouldn't have improved any of the shortcomings in the existing version control systems, because he didn't do it when he lost Bitkeeper support.
The last suggestion is much more questionable. However, Linus has also said that Git's workflow is based off of Bitkeeper's. Without the Bitkeeper experience, would he have known what he wanted? I don't know.
It was so with BitKeeper.
Was it? Linus has said that Linux is far ahead of where it would be had they not used Bitkeeper even for the few years they did.
Without BK, would Linus eventually have given up with the system he was using and written Git? Maybe, maybe not. I doubt he would have done anything else though. And if he had written Git, would it be as useful (to him at least) as he claims it is? Again, maybe or maybe not, but probably not.
So, no, it probably wasn't so with Bitkeeper.
Admittedly 1.4 (though I will point out that C# has the major language features introduced after then, like generics (and .Net's are better), enums (though done differently -- I'm not sure which is better), autoboxing, varargs, and syntactic sugar for loops that iterate over collections; some of these features were in C# before Java), but I did use Eclipse.
I have to hand it to the Eclipse folks, when editing Java, that's a better IDE than Visual Studio was before 2K5. The main thing I liked about Eclipse was the refactoring support; I wish the C++ editors I use would support that. 2K5 does have refactoring support, though there seem to be less options than I remember in Eclipse. The ones I used most often though are in Java.
I should also say that I haven't done all that much with C#, just made a couple programs for myself with it. I just know that I got very frustrated with some things in the Java language, and C# would have gone a long way toward helping with those frustrations.
so they give traction to _now_ meaningless projects like Mono, classpath, gcj, kaffe, ...
.NET to run on other platforms, or a free platform on Windows. That's not meaningless. It will also allow people to choose the .NET languages, like C#; that too is not meaningless. (I happen to think that the C# language is notably more fun and better to program in than Java, but that's just my opinion.)
Mono will still allow some programs written for
GCJ provides a compiler for Java that goes to native machine code rather than bytecode. Open-source Java doesn't do this; this project too is not meaningless. (Though there was, I'm sure, a good bit of duplicated effort.)
I'm just some grad school kid setting up a server in his apartment, but within a few months I'm gonna get a new desktop and move my current one to a server. I'm debating between FreeBSD and x86 Solaris for it.
You are (depending on how you count) between about 3 and 9 months out of date.
No. They lost because they were _wrong_.
While this is true, I think it's also fair to say that a big reason that IBM got to show that SCO was wrong was because IBM has truckloads of money.
If SCO had sued me instead, SCO wouldn't have lost because they were wrong, because I wouldn't have had the money to show that they were wrong. I would have had to find a lawyer willing to work pro bono.