I distinctly remember Microsoft announcing it would be microkernel based back when microkernels were the future and announcing a microkernel-based OS seemed fashionable. NT would be able to present an OS/2 personality to OS/2 programs and a POSIX personality for POSIX-compliant programs and future versions could have additional personalities (the shipping product was allegedly capable of doing it but with limitations so severe it was never really allowed to).
In the end, the product they shipped had little resemblance to what was touted before and it is now apparent most of the "trophy-features" that were dropped before shipment were seemingly there to prevent people from considering alternatives (like Unixes or IBM's flavour of OS/2) during NT's development.
This pattern was repeated over and over again on every Microsoft OS launch.
"Microsoft make lots of very good products, it's not fair to bag them on -everything-"
"sql server is a great product, and is certainly better then everything else in the opensource world aside from postgresql"
While I agree SQL Server is their best product, I don't quite agree it's better than anything open-source. There are a lot of other options besides PostgreSQL (which is great and I love it) that are as good as SQL Server that have the added bonus of not being limited to Windows and what Windows can run on (Niagara is an amazing CPU).
Having said that, I usually joke with my friends who work for the Evil Empire (or, as we put it, "the other side of the Force") that the three best products Microsoft ever made are the Natural Keyboards, the mice and SQL Server, in that order.
Comparing the MBA an the Eee is, to say the least, unfair. One is an exercise on how little and inexpensive you can make a comlhted wighojf crjppling it completely. The MBA is a full featured notebook that runs pretty much anything a desktop Mac runs. It may lack an ethernet port, buf Apple considers wired networks legacy tech (at my home it mostly is and in most of my clients it's only for the desktops). Even my printer has 802.11. For those who need cabled ethernet, there is a USB thingie.
As for the optical drive, the external USB one seems more than adequate.
I first experienced Vista on a very reasonable box. It didn't feel any better than the OSX 10.3 I was running on my trusty iMac. It was, to be sincere, it was quite unimpressive. It sure was glitzier than XP or the Gnome that's my main work environment, but it was not glitzier in any meaningful respect than OSX. The. Time passed, I continued to use Linux, Feisty came, I started to get used to Compiz and then, the last time I used Vista, it felt so primitive I would be ashamed if that's all the product I had to offer.
To top that off, it was slow as hell. The last notebook I bought ran Vista for about 15 minutes, just enough to make sure there was no "I don't want this crap. Give my money back" button before installin Ubuntu.
"Lisp and Scheme I'll lump in "parenthesis hell." I've never seen the allure of list processing languages - they drive me nuts"
It's obvious that, although you may have achieved a passing grade, you didn't learn the real lessons being taught.
"As abusive as it sounds, languages like COBOL (banking/finance) or Ada (government/military) or even FORTRAN (mech-E) will get you a job faster than Haskell"
A lot of your points could be explained by you entering a CS career with the "get you a job" priority. First you learn what you can do well, then you get the job.
Compsci is as much capable of turning Joe Sixpack into a programmer as any amount of swimming classes are capable of turning him into a fish.
"The OS/2 API is emphatically NOT the Windows API"
Never said it was, but denying Microsoft wrote a huge part of the OS/2 API is like denying gravity. There is a lot of Microsoft code under OS/2's hood. Lots of it probably written in hand-tuned 386 assembly (those parts could have been rewritten after the split because I have used OS/2 under PowerPC).
As for the WPS, I stand corrected. I never really used it for long and found it somewhat confusing, to be sincere. It never struck me as something very interesting or particularly powerful.
Never used 4OS2 too. Will look it up - I am a curious person.
And, about Embellish, maybe you can advocate for the missing features to the GIMP team. Those lads can do quite impressive things with pixels and I doubt they wouldn't be able to duplicate any fancy imaging tricks.
BTW, your sig says you are a mainframe guy. I am entertaining the idea of playing with Hercules, but never got around it. Have you used it?
Come on. Even Vista is more responsive than that 8086.
Not because Vista is fast, of course, but because that 8MHz 8086 was pretty much of a dog all by itself. The IBM PC architecture that lives in most computers today (even Macs, sadly) is so horrible in so many ways it's hard to describe without wanting to puke. They are a couple times faster today because they use processors a million times faster and a million times more memory. My wristwatch probably has more than 640K.
I loved my Apple II. I loved my Macintosh LC III, I loved my RS/6000s. I loved my SPARCstations. I loved my PA-RISC machines. I tolerated my PCs.
"The implicit assumption that open sourcing is magically different from on-selling in general. In all cases it is necessary to review the terms of the constituent licenses to determine what's possible and what's not. IBM would've been foolish not to get very liberal licenses for anything in OS/2."
Selling a contract is very different from changing the license it's under. The contract remains the same but the parts change.
The original OS/2 code is under some proprietary license and the copyright holder of a big chunk of it is Microsoft.
IBM could re-write the code only to find the code in violation of some Microsoft patent. While IBM and its direct customers are shielded by cross-licensing deals between MS and IBM, the GPL-ed code would still be poisonous.
And, quite frankly, doing all that for a dead OS is too much to ask. OS/2 is even deader than BSD.;-)
If you need to run some OS/2 software, you probably can tweak Wine (or write an OS/2 compatibility layer for Wine)
If you need WPS, go re-implement it. I am sure IBM won't sue you. It can't be that hard if you use a modern language and you can build upon all the goodness Gnome or KDE already have.
I for one would like a Lisa-like stationery system more than WPS.
"The median (average calculated by lining up values in order from lowest to highest and taking the one at the halfway point) IQ is 100 as a matter of definition."
Which, IIRC, in a Gaussian distribution, is the same as the average for the given population.
This is not an effect of the "or later" part. It's an effect of the copyright holder always being able to license the code under whatever license it feels adequate.
"I don't see anyone lining up to switch to a non-free alternative from Digium"
Don't underestimate the power of the one-stop-shop. Most people really don't care whether their solution is or not proprietary - they only care how much it costs and how well it works.
I don't know TrixBox, but if the proprietary solution they are considering costs significantly less to maintain than the alternatives, I see their users flocking to it.
One of the key selling points of FOSS is the misinterpretation of the "free" part.
"all religion is necessarily evil because it fosters a culture in which a faith-based life is an acceptable lifestyle, which in turn leaves a society with no means of resaonably extirpating the extremists, who are truly dangerous. In other words, if moderate faith is acceptable, it is implicit that extreme faith must also be acceptable."
I think that preventing anti-social behaviour, whether or not it is religious in nature, is what laws are for. And, for the case where religions aspire to create laws, that's what the separation of state and religion is for.
I can start by mentioning Tokamak-style fusion. It's hot, requires more energy than it produces (as of now) but seems capable of, given the right economic incentive, to produce as much helium as we can pump deuterium in it. Research about it is also receiving obscene amounts of money.
There are also other approaches, such as inertial electrostatic confinement designs, which have been used for decades as neutron sources. While true that those neutron sources produce ridiculously small quantities of helium, please keep in mind they have been designed to produce neutrons more than anything else. The Bussard (Polywell) design is a fresh take on that and a quite promising, if unproven, one.
You could also imagine muon-catalyzed fusion as another possible approach, but I doubt it would be practical.
As they presently stand, none of them could produce helium in industrial scale. Remember that none of these approaches is tailored to the specific purpose we are discussing - they are either neutron sources or power-plant wannabes.
An economy is a powerful force and you seem blinded by a strange belief I said something on the lines that it can solve any problem. Don't forget we are discussing a solution to the depletion of our helium sources. If none of these approaches solves the problem, other solution will doubtlessly emerge.
Even if it's as simple as finding another gas to use instead of helium.
Markets are powerful tools to find solutions to problems, but not necessarily the solutions we expect. And, quite often, they cheat by redefining the problem.
Before you blast me, you should do a little reading. May be hard at first, but once you get the hang of it, you will see it's pretty easy. Most children can do it quite well with about 3 years of training.
There are plenty ways to fuse hydrogen into helium, many of them very old. Most of the research now is focused on fusing heavy hydrogen isotopes without spending more energy than you can get from the fusion reaction, which is damn hard to do. But fortunately, for our little exercise, it is not required: if the price of helium gets high enough, the technology that exists today will be scaled to industrial production as soon as it becomes economically feasible.
And if you offered a billion-trillion dollars for immortality, most clever people (being libertarians is not a requirement) would simply say you don't have the money.
Oh yes. Solaris has no civilized package manager. That's a problem and that's a good reason for me not to run Solaris on my notebook.
But, If I had so much need for ZFS (and ZFS feature set goes well beyond performance), I suppose I wouldn't be on a notebook built for compactness and low energy consumption. I think the roles where ZFS is a must and Solaris is excluded in favor of Linux are a pretty narrow niche. I, personally, can't think of one.
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"QNX is probably one of the oldest microkernels and they're still around."
There probably is some x86 box in some factory that still runs the first version and never crashed since it was first booted under it.
I leaned C under QNX. It sure felt just like any other Unix of that time (late 80s).
"They already have Singularity"
Everybody knows singularities suck.
And, BTW, why the hell would it be the compiler's job to handle IPC? Shouldn't it the job of whatever is behind the OS API?
I distinctly remember Microsoft announcing it would be microkernel based back when microkernels were the future and announcing a microkernel-based OS seemed fashionable. NT would be able to present an OS/2 personality to OS/2 programs and a POSIX personality for POSIX-compliant programs and future versions could have additional personalities (the shipping product was allegedly capable of doing it but with limitations so severe it was never really allowed to).
In the end, the product they shipped had little resemblance to what was touted before and it is now apparent most of the "trophy-features" that were dropped before shipment were seemingly there to prevent people from considering alternatives (like Unixes or IBM's flavour of OS/2) during NT's development.
This pattern was repeated over and over again on every Microsoft OS launch.
"Microsoft make lots of very good products, it's not fair to bag them on -everything-"
"sql server is a great product, and is certainly better then everything else in the opensource world aside from postgresql"
While I agree SQL Server is their best product, I don't quite agree it's better than anything open-source. There are a lot of other options besides PostgreSQL (which is great and I love it) that are as good as SQL Server that have the added bonus of not being limited to Windows and what Windows can run on (Niagara is an amazing CPU).
Having said that, I usually joke with my friends who work for the Evil Empire (or, as we put it, "the other side of the Force") that the three best products Microsoft ever made are the Natural Keyboards, the mice and SQL Server, in that order.
"The real important question: Is microsoft any less of a monopoly due to any of these remedy's?"
It's not illegal to be a monopoly. What's illegal is to leverage one monopoly to create another. The remedies are aimed at that.
Actually, I was typing that on my iPod Touch, but you pretty well got the idea.
Any keyboard smaller than the one on my trusty IBM Z-50 is too small for me.
Comparing the MBA an the Eee is, to say the least, unfair. One is an exercise on how little and inexpensive you can make a comlhted wighojf crjppling it completely. The MBA is a full featured notebook that runs pretty much anything a desktop Mac runs. It may lack an ethernet port, buf Apple considers wired networks legacy tech (at my home it mostly is and in most of my clients it's only for the desktops). Even my printer has 802.11. For those who need cabled ethernet, there is a USB thingie. As for the optical drive, the external USB one seems more than adequate.
I first experienced Vista on a very reasonable box. It didn't feel any better than the OSX 10.3 I was running on my trusty iMac. It was, to be sincere, it was quite unimpressive. It sure was glitzier than XP or the Gnome that's my main work environment, but it was not glitzier in any meaningful respect than OSX. The. Time passed, I continued to use Linux, Feisty came, I started to get used to Compiz and then, the last time I used Vista, it felt so primitive I would be ashamed if that's all the product I had to offer.
To top that off, it was slow as hell. The last notebook I bought ran Vista for about 15 minutes, just enough to make sure there was no "I don't want this crap. Give my money back" button before installin Ubuntu.
"Lisp and Scheme I'll lump in "parenthesis hell." I've never seen the allure of list processing languages - they drive me nuts"
It's obvious that, although you may have achieved a passing grade, you didn't learn the real lessons being taught.
"As abusive as it sounds, languages like COBOL (banking/finance) or Ada (government/military) or even FORTRAN (mech-E) will get you a job faster than Haskell"
A lot of your points could be explained by you entering a CS career with the "get you a job" priority. First you learn what you can do well, then you get the job.
Compsci is as much capable of turning Joe Sixpack into a programmer as any amount of swimming classes are capable of turning him into a fish.
"The OS/2 API is emphatically NOT the Windows API"
Never said it was, but denying Microsoft wrote a huge part of the OS/2 API is like denying gravity. There is a lot of Microsoft code under OS/2's hood. Lots of it probably written in hand-tuned 386 assembly (those parts could have been rewritten after the split because I have used OS/2 under PowerPC).
As for the WPS, I stand corrected. I never really used it for long and found it somewhat confusing, to be sincere. It never struck me as something very interesting or particularly powerful.
Never used 4OS2 too. Will look it up - I am a curious person.
And, about Embellish, maybe you can advocate for the missing features to the GIMP team. Those lads can do quite impressive things with pixels and I doubt they wouldn't be able to duplicate any fancy imaging tricks.
BTW, your sig says you are a mainframe guy. I am entertaining the idea of playing with Hercules, but never got around it. Have you used it?
'cause ME and Vista never happened? ;-)
Come on. Even Vista is more responsive than that 8086.
Not because Vista is fast, of course, but because that 8MHz 8086 was pretty much of a dog all by itself. The IBM PC architecture that lives in most computers today (even Macs, sadly) is so horrible in so many ways it's hard to describe without wanting to puke. They are a couple times faster today because they use processors a million times faster and a million times more memory. My wristwatch probably has more than 640K.
I loved my Apple II. I loved my Macintosh LC III, I loved my RS/6000s. I loved my SPARCstations. I loved my PA-RISC machines. I tolerated my PCs.
"itll probably end up being a minor change, Vista SP2 with new name?"
And, most important, with a price tag.
"The implicit assumption that open sourcing is magically different from on-selling in general. In all cases it is necessary to review the terms of the constituent licenses to determine what's possible and what's not. IBM would've been foolish not to get very liberal licenses for anything in OS/2."
;-)
Selling a contract is very different from changing the license it's under. The contract remains the same but the parts change.
The original OS/2 code is under some proprietary license and the copyright holder of a big chunk of it is Microsoft.
IBM could re-write the code only to find the code in violation of some Microsoft patent. While IBM and its direct customers are shielded by cross-licensing deals between MS and IBM, the GPL-ed code would still be poisonous.
And, quite frankly, doing all that for a dead OS is too much to ask. OS/2 is even deader than BSD.
If you need to run some OS/2 software, you probably can tweak Wine (or write an OS/2 compatibility layer for Wine)
If you need WPS, go re-implement it. I am sure IBM won't sue you. It can't be that hard if you use a modern language and you can build upon all the goodness Gnome or KDE already have.
I for one would like a Lisa-like stationery system more than WPS.
What's in OS/2 that you need so much?
You can fork MySQL all you want, but only MySQL AB has the right to re-license it as they please.
"The median (average calculated by lining up values in order from lowest to highest and taking the one at the halfway point) IQ is 100 as a matter of definition."
Which, IIRC, in a Gaussian distribution, is the same as the average for the given population.
This is not an effect of the "or later" part. It's an effect of the copyright holder always being able to license the code under whatever license it feels adequate.
"I don't see anyone lining up to switch to a non-free alternative from Digium"
Don't underestimate the power of the one-stop-shop. Most people really don't care whether their solution is or not proprietary - they only care how much it costs and how well it works.
I don't know TrixBox, but if the proprietary solution they are considering costs significantly less to maintain than the alternatives, I see their users flocking to it.
One of the key selling points of FOSS is the misinterpretation of the "free" part.
"Not a great many, but some certainly do."
It's a huge tragedy that exactly half of mankind have average-and-below IQs.
On the bright side, you still got what you paid for: SCO will never come after you.
"all religion is necessarily evil because it fosters a culture in which a faith-based life is an acceptable lifestyle, which in turn leaves a society with no means of resaonably extirpating the extremists, who are truly dangerous. In other words, if moderate faith is acceptable, it is implicit that extreme faith must also be acceptable."
I think that preventing anti-social behaviour, whether or not it is religious in nature, is what laws are for. And, for the case where religions aspire to create laws, that's what the separation of state and religion is for.
"Your Junk is soo small, you need a telescope to find it"
"Asteroid Yurdick" would work a lot better with this one.
I can start by mentioning Tokamak-style fusion. It's hot, requires more energy than it produces (as of now) but seems capable of, given the right economic incentive, to produce as much helium as we can pump deuterium in it. Research about it is also receiving obscene amounts of money.
There are also other approaches, such as inertial electrostatic confinement designs, which have been used for decades as neutron sources. While true that those neutron sources produce ridiculously small quantities of helium, please keep in mind they have been designed to produce neutrons more than anything else. The Bussard (Polywell) design is a fresh take on that and a quite promising, if unproven, one.
You could also imagine muon-catalyzed fusion as another possible approach, but I doubt it would be practical.
As they presently stand, none of them could produce helium in industrial scale. Remember that none of these approaches is tailored to the specific purpose we are discussing - they are either neutron sources or power-plant wannabes.
An economy is a powerful force and you seem blinded by a strange belief I said something on the lines that it can solve any problem. Don't forget we are discussing a solution to the depletion of our helium sources. If none of these approaches solves the problem, other solution will doubtlessly emerge.
Even if it's as simple as finding another gas to use instead of helium.
Markets are powerful tools to find solutions to problems, but not necessarily the solutions we expect. And, quite often, they cheat by redefining the problem.
Before you blast me, you should do a little reading. May be hard at first, but once you get the hang of it, you will see it's pretty easy. Most children can do it quite well with about 3 years of training.
There are plenty ways to fuse hydrogen into helium, many of them very old. Most of the research now is focused on fusing heavy hydrogen isotopes without spending more energy than you can get from the fusion reaction, which is damn hard to do. But fortunately, for our little exercise, it is not required: if the price of helium gets high enough, the technology that exists today will be scaled to industrial production as soon as it becomes economically feasible.
And if you offered a billion-trillion dollars for immortality, most clever people (being libertarians is not a requirement) would simply say you don't have the money.
Oh yes. Solaris has no civilized package manager. That's a problem and that's a good reason for me not to run Solaris on my notebook.
But, If I had so much need for ZFS (and ZFS feature set goes well beyond performance), I suppose I wouldn't be on a notebook built for compactness and low energy consumption. I think the roles where ZFS is a must and Solaris is excluded in favor of Linux are a pretty narrow niche. I, personally, can't think of one.
And, BTW, what is a "miss-lead"?