I've worked with Douglas Miller while at Softway, when he and his team were developing OpenNT (later renamed Interix, and then quickly bought out by Microsoft before it could do any real damage to their market share).
OpenNT (Interix) was about porting the Unix (POSIX) environment to Windows NT. There was some heavy wizardry involved, and the OpenNT crew had to rewrite most of the NT POSIX module (with source code available compliments of Microsoft). But it worked, and you could build & run Apache/bash/sendmail/gcc/etc. on OpenNT with minimal effort. Sort of like the Cygnus thing, or the MKS toolkit, but this was no emulation, rather true POSIX compliance brought by building the necessary layers above the NT kernel.
The market was there, and OpenNT (sorry, Interix -- never got used to it) started taking off, mainly in the governmental/educational markets, people with Unix apps that they didn't want to let go off, and at the same time pushed to NT for multiple reasons.
But before Interix could really penetrate the market in any significant way, Microsoft quickly zeroed on it and swallowed it whole. Quite typical really.
Doug's background is fairly technical, and he was a Unix freak for years before moving on to the Dark Side.:)
Coming from someone with that experience and broad knowledge of the Industry, his argument cannot be readily dismissed. Even as I'm reading this thread I see some heads, colder than most, agreeing to at least to some of his points. Do not make the mistake to dismiss Doug as yet another Microsoft flack. After seeing the Unix market fragment and ultimately fail in the 90s, he knows what he's talking about.
And now we can work this into an evil money-making scheme^W^W^W^W cool game: I give you two random Web pages, you have to find a click path between the two. The shortest wins.
First example: from the/. home page to... (let's see, something really obscure...) this one. Ready, set, go!
Of course, me and my investors hope that this path is also packed full of computer-generated Web abs, since this is how we get rich^W^W make it more fun for everyone!
This article is laughable. I will debunk myself only a couple of its claims, but do yourself a favor and read the X11 chapter of the Unix-Haters Handbook. They do a much better job than I could even if I really tried.
X [is] beautiful from an engineering standpoint. It functions excellently on networks and uses shared memory to efficiently coexist with programs running on the same machine as the X server.
[...]
A specialist in California can run a program on a computer running IRIX in Japan and display it in the comfort of his own home on his Mac--complete with high quality 2D and 3D imaging--securely and even over a low bandwidth link.
Ahahahahahahah! This one is actually funny! What do you think he calls a "low bandwidth link"? I hope it's not some kind of phone line, because last time I tried to use xv (your basic image displaying program) with a modem, I almost threw the computer out the window. Try it for yourself, it's impressive... in slowness. Even with custom "compression protocols", X is a bandwidth (and memory) hog.
"Securely"??!!! You mean that the ugly hack known as MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE is considered secure? Who are we trying to fool here?
I'm sorry, X sucks. I've never seen anything quite as bloated and slow. The only reason everybody uses it is because there really isn't anything else. The only good thing about X is that it's not integrated in the OS and I can do without if I want to. Oops, wait, that's because it's running on top of Unix.
This is too cool... TP 5 is the first real compiler I used, about 10 years ago. Had to steal it at the end of my first class, just in case I would need it at home one day (I didn't have a computer to run it on, but hey). And the environment was awesome, much less confusing than TP 6 IMHO. Hell, I still use the same keyboard shortcuts in XEmacs!
Tired of C-x-s? Would rather make use of those neat (and otherwise useless) function keys at the top of your keyboard? An elegant solution to a common problem, re-bind Emacs commands to their Turbo shortcuts. With judicious of Meta and Control, you can get a lot of power at your fingertips. Plus the nostalgia factor...;)
Add this to your.emacs:
; delete is real delete, not freaking backspace (setq delete-key-deletes-forward t)
(global-set-key [f1] 'info) ; F1 is Help (global-set-key [(meta f1)] 'describe-function) (global-set-key [(control f1)] 'describe-key)
(global-set-key [f2] 'save-buffer) ; F2 is Save (global-set-key [(meta f2)] 'write-file)
(global-set-key [f3] 'find-file) ; F3 is Open (global-set-key [(meta f3)] 'split-window-vertically) (global-set-key [(control f3)] 'make-frame)
(global-set-key [f4] 'kill-buffer) ; F4 is Close (global-set-key [(meta f4)] 'delete-window) (global-set-key [(control f4)] 'delete-frame)
(global-set-key [f5] 'advertised-undo) ; F5 is Undo (global-set-key [f6] 'kill-region) ; F6 is Cut (global-set-key [f7] 'copy-region-as-kill) ; F7 is Copy (global-set-key [f8] 'yank) ; F6 is Paste
; auto-indent after return (global-set-key [(return)] 'newline-and-indent)
Mmmmh, and that was all of 10 years ago... Maybe I should say that in my resume "Been programming for ten years".
Anyways, I just downloaded the beast, and sure enough, it runs great on NT. The compile+run time is so fast, I did it three times before realizing I had to switch to user window to see the output!
Slashdot Mirror
I've worked with Douglas Miller while at Softway, when he and his team were developing OpenNT (later renamed Interix, and then quickly bought out by Microsoft before it could do any real damage to their market share).
OpenNT (Interix) was about porting the Unix (POSIX) environment to Windows NT. There was some heavy wizardry involved, and the OpenNT crew had to rewrite most of the NT POSIX module (with source code available compliments of Microsoft). But it worked, and you could build & run Apache/bash/sendmail/gcc/etc. on OpenNT with minimal effort. Sort of like the Cygnus thing, or the MKS toolkit, but this was no emulation, rather true POSIX compliance brought by building the necessary layers above the NT kernel.
The market was there, and OpenNT (sorry, Interix -- never got used to it) started taking off, mainly in the governmental/educational markets, people with Unix apps that they didn't want to let go off, and at the same time pushed to NT for multiple reasons. But before Interix could really penetrate the market in any significant way, Microsoft quickly zeroed on it and swallowed it whole. Quite typical really.
Doug's background is fairly technical, and he was a Unix freak for years before moving on to the Dark Side. :)
Coming from someone with that experience and broad knowledge of the Industry, his argument cannot be readily dismissed. Even as I'm reading this thread I see some heads, colder than most, agreeing to at least to some of his points. Do not make the mistake to dismiss Doug as yet another Microsoft flack. After seeing the Unix market fragment and ultimately fail in the 90s, he knows what he's talking about.
First example: from the /. home page to... (let's see, something really obscure...) this one. Ready, set, go!
Of course, me and my investors hope that this path is also packed full of computer-generated Web abs, since this is how we get rich^W^W make it more fun for everyone!
This article is laughable. I will debunk myself only a couple of its claims, but do yourself a favor and read the X11 chapter of the Unix-Haters Handbook . They do a much better job than I could even if I really tried.
X [is] beautiful from an engineering standpoint. It functions excellently on networks and uses shared memory to efficiently coexist with programs running on the same machine as the X server.
[...]
A specialist in California can run a program on a computer running IRIX in Japan and display it in the comfort of his own home on his Mac--complete with high quality 2D and 3D imaging--securely and even over a low bandwidth link.
Ahahahahahahah! This one is actually funny! What do you think he calls a "low bandwidth link"? I hope it's not some kind of phone line, because last time I tried to use xv (your basic image displaying program) with a modem, I almost threw the computer out the window. Try it for yourself, it's impressive... in slowness. Even with custom "compression protocols", X is a bandwidth (and memory) hog.
"Securely"??!!! You mean that the ugly hack known as MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE is considered secure? Who are we trying to fool here?
I'm sorry, X sucks. I've never seen anything quite as bloated and slow. The only reason everybody uses it is because there really isn't anything else. The only good thing about X is that it's not integrated in the OS and I can do without if I want to. Oops, wait, that's because it's running on top of Unix.
This is too cool... TP 5 is the first real compiler I used, about 10 years ago. Had to steal it at the end of my first class, just in case I would need it at home one day (I didn't have a computer to run it on, but hey). And the environment was awesome, much less confusing than TP 6 IMHO. Hell, I still use the same keyboard shortcuts in XEmacs!
Tired of C-x-s? Would rather make use of those neat (and otherwise useless) function keys at the top of your keyboard? An elegant solution to a common problem, re-bind Emacs commands to their Turbo shortcuts. With judicious of Meta and Control, you can get a lot of power at your fingertips. Plus the nostalgia factor... ;)
Add this to your .emacs:
Mmmmh, and that was all of 10 years ago... Maybe I should say that in my resume "Been programming for ten years".
Anyways, I just downloaded the beast, and sure enough, it runs great on NT. The compile+run time is so fast, I did it three times before realizing I had to switch to user window to see the output!
TP rocks...