Whatever. I give up. Do whatever the fuck you guys want and you can mod me as a troll but that does not change that what I said has truth to it.
You can all keep your heads in the sand like MSFT keeps it's stranglehold on the X86 desktop while my favourite platform (OS X) erodes marketshare of both Linux and windows.
You just don't get "regular users" or corporate and closed source developers.
I hope those "high minded" ideals and diverse (and incompatible) linux distros give you comfort as linux fades into obscurity with no ported commercial apps like Photoshop.
Are you sure that you are a distro maintainer? Please tell us which one it is so we can avoid it.
I don't think you understand what the main problem with the linux desktop is. Freedesktop will not fix the problem. The issue is commercial "closed source" software availability. Open source software is nice and all but it is severely lacking in usability and UI design. Developer do not usually make good UI designers.
LSB would provide binary compatibility for desktop apps which closed source developers could package and release on CD's for profit.
Linux will not succeed on the desktop as long as the distros effectively shut out closed source developers. A platform must have diversity in order to be successful. You should support both open and closed source developers.
Exactly. The F/OSS movement is being held back by rhetoric and personalities.
People like the grandparent poster and RMS chase people away from linux. They are not interested in the success of the platform. Their only concern seems to be maintaining the status quo and their status within the movement.
It's funny how linux advocates so often accuse mac users of be elitist snobs.
Are you serious or are you just trolling? If everyone had a defeatist attitude like you, nothing would ever get done or standardized. Standards "can" come about through grass roots adoption. You are using past failures as an excuse to not trying.
Why do you have such a big problem with commercial software? Why do you have a problem with "open standards"? Open Source software without open standards offers little utility for the average end user.
You either work for MSFT and want linux to fail or you are an elitist geeky snob who wants to keep linux usage to the elite. Perhaps you are afraid that if it goes mainstream, you will not be seen as "cool" by the linux community.
I'm not questioning the intellectual prowess of the developers at MSFT. I am questioning the intellect of the middle management and their ability to determine and cut scope. Scope must be determined fairly early in the process or you end up with waterfall development.
I'm questioning the organisational structure and it's effectiveness. I have no doubt that there are many extremely bright software engineers at MSFT but that does not mean much of anything if the team leaders are not doing their jobs effectively. If the process you guys are using to develop software is broken, all that intellect goes to waste.
Is it too much to ask for you guys to get something out the door?
If smaller companies like Be Inc. and Apple can do it, so can you. Again, it's not a question of how intelligent your developers are but rather whether or not your process is working. Apple has their shit together organisationally which is why they are able to ship software.
I'm not just talking out of my ass, some of your former colleagues that joined google from the NT group had lost faith in MSFT's ability to "ship" software.
You need a new CEO and new middle management. They are holding you back.
How the fuck is this offtopic? Would you have modded some moslem reference offtopic? What about Hindu scriptures? No, of course not. It's PC to slag on the bible these days but if you did the same to some other religion, your would be labelled a racist.
I have news for you boys and girls. Genesis is also in the Hebrew scriptures so I could just label you all of you as a bunch of inbred goose stepping anti-Semitic NAZIS.
Grow the fuck up and move out of your mother's basements already for crying out loud.
That is all well and good but I'm not interested in what some people are thing WinFS's purpose is in their minds. I really honestly don't care.
I care about what it will provide to the user in terms of functionality and what it will provide windows developer such as myself. When you guys ship something concrete, then I will take more interest.
All that "what we want to accomplish" is as meaningless and superfluous to me as vapourware is.
Given that you work at MSFT, I am perhaps not surprised that you don't know what Spotlight is. You have to maintain your distance to avoid patent infringement entanglements.
If you are curious about one of the main developers of Spotlight, Dominic Giampaolo. Check out his website: http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/
There is an interesting PDF of a book written by him there concerning filesystem design. You might find it of interest as it was written around the time he was with Be Inc working on the BFS.
I'm having a hard time understanding what is taking the WinFS development team so long considering that NTFS has rich support of metadata, support for alternate streams and indexing services. Do you guys really have to "reinvent" the wheel? Can't you just optimise the indexing engine, expose the API for indexing metadata/writing to alternate streams and call that WinFS?
As a developer who is not a "fanboy" of MSFT, I'm quite frankly sick of the vapourware which MSFT has been promising since the cairo project. Enough is enough. Either refactor and get it out the door or admit you have nothing and give up.
I'm sorry, but this "much more" sounds like FUD and vapourware to me. From what I've seen, all of the functionality promised by WinFS can be accomplished with today's technology.
MSFT seems like they have trouble with defining scope of their projects. They could use some better analysts to define clearly defined functional requirements, better project mangers, a better QA process (testable requirement and regression testing) and systems analysts/lead developers with a firm grasp of the realities of scope creep and the KISS principle.
Yeah, I'm well aware of all that given that I'm a windows software developer but what you described is what Spotlight offers. It does not just allow for fast searching of files and file contents but also email, calendar items etc.... All of this is accomplished without need of a heavy database server.
I'm waiting for someone to explain how WinFS is better. I'm not interested in implementation differences but rather concrete advantages. Of course, we are comparing Spotlight which is shipping soon with WinFS which is vapourware.
You did not clear anything up at all. You sound like a fanboy. How can you say that WinFS is greater than what spotlight is if you don't even know what WinFS is?
Your post contained absolutely zero information about what WinFS is.
From what I've read about Spotlight and WinFS is that they are very similar despite what fanboys like you and spin doctors within MSFT would say.
From what I can gather, WinFS will run on top of NTFS and make use of the facilities within the indexing service to build a database containing metadata and full text indexes of text strings in documents.
This also basically what Spotlight is (besides being an API and running on top of HFS+ instead of NTFS). What is the purpose of a database if not to store information about something? How else would you get information out of the database other than through a query?
I really hate MS fanboys who try to make WinFS being something other than what it is (Windows Future Storage).
Apple is shipping their technology while the MSFT technology is vaporware. Deal with it.
I will lobby the next federal government (Conservatives) to strike down your proposed tariff on legal music downloads. Be very careful. Consumers such myself are capable of using the internet and local television stations to organise a boycott of all music purchases.
Your greed and short-sightedness could be your industry's undoing. We Canadians are doing just fine without the hockey league and we could do just fine without purchasing any music whatsoever.
Think before you act or you could spell your own economic doom. Individuals such as myself are respecting copyrights. This proposed tariff is a slap in the face and tantamount to legalised racketeering.
Yeah, that's exactly what has been in OS X for ages. Burnable folders is something different. You don't have to insert a CD first and they can be dispersed throughout the file system.
"Now, as most music-software-inclined people know, ACID is basically Garageband, except it came out many many years earlier (and has at this point evolved far past where Garageband is today). ACID, of course, has also been available on the platform that the overwhelming majority of computer users use (Windows), whereas Garageband has and is not. So really, what's with the straight-from-the-marketing-department talk?"
Yeah computer users. I wonder what proportion of successful musicians use mac versus windows directly in their work. I also wonder what percentage of the those computer users actually bought their copy of ACID.
I'm not talking about some shitty "independent" artist but someone who is good enough to consistently produce good shit with mass appeal.
Obviously, neither Garageband or ACID are used by serious artists except perhaps as a scratch pad for playing with ideas.
If you had RTFA, you would have known that NIN used ProTools to do the original recording and Trent ported it to Garageband for his mac user fans.
Nice troll coward. How about backing up what you say with an account?
Windows 2000 was released in 2000 and XP was released in 2001. Nice try asswipe. I was a beta tester for XP Pro and I'm a windows developer with an MSDN Universal subscription through work.
Like I said, 10.3.1 through 10.3.9 are all "free". We've had free Service packs for 10.3 since Panther was released October 24,2003. Now we are going to get Tiger on April 29,2005 which is about a year and a half later.
Like I said, nice troll. Jaguar was released August 23, 2002 and they continued releasing "free" service packs up until just before Panther was released.
http://home.comcast.net/~jsflowers/macosx.html
How much does a copy of XP PRO set someone back if they want to upgrade from Windows 95? The price of two OS X updates (10.3 & Tiger) plus some extra ($299 USD). For the price of upgrading from Windows 2000 Pro to XP Pro would be the same as buying a 5 licence pack of Tiger from Apple at $199.00 USD. Upgrading from Mac OS 9 to Tiger only costs 129 USD.
Enjoy throwing your money away as each service pack of windows is slower than the previous one and each "paid" upgrade is slower still. Conversely, each service pack and paid upgrade of OS X is "faster" than it's predecessor. Who's the fool here? I will gladly pay money for a software upgrade that extends the life and usefulness of my hardware.
Because they prefer to use Open Source compilers whereas other manufacturers use proprietary compilers like the Intel Compiler. Unfortunately, GCC is not very well optimized on the PPC and for some reason, the project refuses to incorporate PPC a lot of PPC specific optimizations despite the fact that it already contains a lot more X86 specific ones.
I suppose they could create artificial benchmarks using the IBM PPC Compiler but what would be the point? Almost none of the code compiled on the mac would have been compiled with the IBM compiler.
If you really want to see the raw speed of programs running on OS X using the IBM Compiler, look at the Cluster projects on the Top 500 list.
WTF do you think those 10.3.x things were? They are service packs. Every two weeks? Do tell?
Let's see, there were eight free service packs for 10.2 and there will apparently be a 9th service pack coming out of 10.3 before Tiger ships.
Are you a little bitter because MSFT slow in coming out with Longhorn and dropping features?
When did MSFT give a free upgrade from Windows 95 (4.0) to Windows 98 (4.1)? What about from Windows 98 to Windows 98SE or from Windows 98 to Windows ME?
Was there a free upgrade from Windows 2000Pro (5.0) to XP (5.1)?
Yeah, you are forgetting the Customs Import Tax and Tariffs which "protect" your home grown computer industry from imports. Talk to your Member of Parliment.
Emil. Place yourself in Apple's shoes for a money. I know that your post was a troll given that you mentioned the RIAA but make the effort to participate in this intellectual expercise.
Now say that you are the CEO of a company and one of your employees was leaking trade secrets to a blogger. Now what if that leaked information could give your competitors an unfair advantage and allow them to get out a cheap knock off to the market before you could. What would you do? Would you not want to find out who was leaking the information?
Say that your company had sunk in millions of dollars in R&D money into the leaked product. Be honest for once in your life and think with your head. It's time to take off your dyed shirt and rose coloured glasses. The 60's are over.
Are MP3 players essential? Are they a general purpose tool?
MSFT's monopoly is built on trying to keep people off a platform (PC's) which it neither invented/designed or manufactures.
They are a convicted monopolist which tried to control the OEM's and prevent other proprietary software from entering into the marketplace on the X86 platform.
Really? Guess what? Most of the mac users posting here on/. are recent switchers who did not consider getting a mac until OS X came out.
I think you will find that most of us suggest keeping OS X because it offers the largest selection of software for the mac platform and it offers the best hardware support.
The only possible reason for using linux or FreeBSD on a mac mini might be for a cheap PPC development platform for PPC related server software.
Only an ideological fool would run linux on a "new" mac as a desktop system.
The sane thing to do would be to dual boot between OS X and another OS like linux if need be.
Slashdot Mirror
You can all keep your heads in the sand like MSFT keeps it's stranglehold on the X86 desktop while my favourite platform (OS X) erodes marketshare of both Linux and windows.
You just don't get "regular users" or corporate and closed source developers.
I hope those "high minded" ideals and diverse (and incompatible) linux distros give you comfort as linux fades into obscurity with no ported commercial apps like Photoshop.
Are you sure that you are a distro maintainer? Please tell us which one it is so we can avoid it.
I don't think you understand what the main problem with the linux desktop is. Freedesktop will not fix the problem. The issue is commercial "closed source" software availability. Open source software is nice and all but it is severely lacking in usability and UI design. Developer do not usually make good UI designers.
LSB would provide binary compatibility for desktop apps which closed source developers could package and release on CD's for profit.
Linux will not succeed on the desktop as long as the distros effectively shut out closed source developers. A platform must have diversity in order to be successful. You should support both open and closed source developers.
People like the grandparent poster and RMS chase people away from linux. They are not interested in the success of the platform. Their only concern seems to be maintaining the status quo and their status within the movement.
It's funny how linux advocates so often accuse mac users of be elitist snobs.
Why do you have such a big problem with commercial software? Why do you have a problem with "open standards"? Open Source software without open standards offers little utility for the average end user.
You either work for MSFT and want linux to fail or you are an elitist geeky snob who wants to keep linux usage to the elite. Perhaps you are afraid that if it goes mainstream, you will not be seen as "cool" by the linux community.
I'm questioning the organisational structure and it's effectiveness. I have no doubt that there are many extremely bright software engineers at MSFT but that does not mean much of anything if the team leaders are not doing their jobs effectively. If the process you guys are using to develop software is broken, all that intellect goes to waste.
Is it too much to ask for you guys to get something out the door?
If smaller companies like Be Inc. and Apple can do it, so can you. Again, it's not a question of how intelligent your developers are but rather whether or not your process is working. Apple has their shit together organisationally which is why they are able to ship software.
I'm not just talking out of my ass, some of your former colleagues that joined google from the NT group had lost faith in MSFT's ability to "ship" software.
You need a new CEO and new middle management. They are holding you back.
I've often had to consider whether implementing the "perfect" solution "on paper" was worth the increase in scope.
More often than not, the "not perfect" solution turns out to be the best choice in the end and tends to far more scalable.
I'm not convinced that a relational database built on SQL technology is very scalable or efficient.
Ultimately, you want to design a system that is extensible for future and unforeseen needs.
Fuck, I'm starting to hate slashbot more and more each day.
Grow the fuck up mods. Can't handle the truth eh Nazis?
I have news for you boys and girls. Genesis is also in the Hebrew scriptures so I could just label you all of you as a bunch of inbred goose stepping anti-Semitic NAZIS.
Grow the fuck up and move out of your mother's basements already for crying out loud.
I care about what it will provide to the user in terms of functionality and what it will provide windows developer such as myself. When you guys ship something concrete, then I will take more interest.
All that "what we want to accomplish" is as meaningless and superfluous to me as vapourware is.
Given that you work at MSFT, I am perhaps not surprised that you don't know what Spotlight is. You have to maintain your distance to avoid patent infringement entanglements.
If you are curious about one of the main developers of Spotlight, Dominic Giampaolo. Check out his website:
http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/
There is an interesting PDF of a book written by him there concerning filesystem design. You might find it of interest as it was written around the time he was with Be Inc working on the BFS.
I'm having a hard time understanding what is taking the WinFS development team so long considering that NTFS has rich support of metadata, support for alternate streams and indexing services. Do you guys really have to "reinvent" the wheel? Can't you just optimise the indexing engine, expose the API for indexing metadata/writing to alternate streams and call that WinFS?
As a developer who is not a "fanboy" of MSFT, I'm quite frankly sick of the vapourware which MSFT has been promising since the cairo project. Enough is enough. Either refactor and get it out the door or admit you have nothing and give up.
I'm sorry, but this "much more" sounds like FUD and vapourware to me. From what I've seen, all of the functionality promised by WinFS can be accomplished with today's technology.
MSFT seems like they have trouble with defining scope of their projects. They could use some better analysts to define clearly defined functional requirements, better project mangers, a better QA process (testable requirement and regression testing) and systems analysts/lead developers with a firm grasp of the realities of scope creep and the KISS principle.
I'm waiting for someone to explain how WinFS is better. I'm not interested in implementation differences but rather concrete advantages. Of course, we are comparing Spotlight which is shipping soon with WinFS which is vapourware.
Your post contained absolutely zero information about what WinFS is.
From what I've read about Spotlight and WinFS is that they are very similar despite what fanboys like you and spin doctors within MSFT would say.
From what I can gather, WinFS will run on top of NTFS and make use of the facilities within the indexing service to build a database containing metadata and full text indexes of text strings in documents.
This also basically what Spotlight is (besides being an API and running on top of HFS+ instead of NTFS). What is the purpose of a database if not to store information about something? How else would you get information out of the database other than through a query?
I really hate MS fanboys who try to make WinFS being something other than what it is (Windows Future Storage).
Apple is shipping their technology while the MSFT technology is vaporware. Deal with it.
Your greed and short-sightedness could be your industry's undoing. We Canadians are doing just fine without the hockey league and we could do just fine without purchasing any music whatsoever.
Think before you act or you could spell your own economic doom. Individuals such as myself are respecting copyrights. This proposed tariff is a slap in the face and tantamount to legalised racketeering.
Yeah, that's exactly what has been in OS X for ages. Burnable folders is something different. You don't have to insert a CD first and they can be dispersed throughout the file system.
Yeah computer users. I wonder what proportion of successful musicians use mac versus windows directly in their work. I also wonder what percentage of the those computer users actually bought their copy of ACID.
I'm not talking about some shitty "independent" artist but someone who is good enough to consistently produce good shit with mass appeal.
Obviously, neither Garageband or ACID are used by serious artists except perhaps as a scratch pad for playing with ideas.
If you had RTFA, you would have known that NIN used ProTools to do the original recording and Trent ported it to Garageband for his mac user fans.
Or you could have bought iLife 05.
Windows 2000 was released in 2000 and XP was released in 2001. Nice try asswipe. I was a beta tester for XP Pro and I'm a windows developer with an MSDN Universal subscription through work.
Like I said, 10.3.1 through 10.3.9 are all "free". We've had free Service packs for 10.3 since Panther was released October 24,2003. Now we are going to get Tiger on April 29,2005 which is about a year and a half later.
Like I said, nice troll. Jaguar was released August 23, 2002 and they continued releasing "free" service packs up until just before Panther was released.
http://home.comcast.net/~jsflowers/macosx.html
How much does a copy of XP PRO set someone back if they want to upgrade from Windows 95? The price of two OS X updates (10.3 & Tiger) plus some extra ($299 USD). For the price of upgrading from Windows 2000 Pro to XP Pro would be the same as buying a 5 licence pack of Tiger from Apple at $199.00 USD. Upgrading from Mac OS 9 to Tiger only costs 129 USD.
Enjoy throwing your money away as each service pack of windows is slower than the previous one and each "paid" upgrade is slower still. Conversely, each service pack and paid upgrade of OS X is "faster" than it's predecessor. Who's the fool here? I will gladly pay money for a software upgrade that extends the life and usefulness of my hardware.
I suppose they could create artificial benchmarks using the IBM PPC Compiler but what would be the point? Almost none of the code compiled on the mac would have been compiled with the IBM compiler.
If you really want to see the raw speed of programs running on OS X using the IBM Compiler, look at the Cluster projects on the Top 500 list.
Let's see, there were eight free service packs for 10.2 and there will apparently be a 9th service pack coming out of 10.3 before Tiger ships.
Are you a little bitter because MSFT slow in coming out with Longhorn and dropping features?
When did MSFT give a free upgrade from Windows 95 (4.0) to Windows 98 (4.1)? What about from Windows 98 to Windows 98SE or from Windows 98 to Windows ME?
Was there a free upgrade from Windows 2000Pro (5.0) to XP (5.1)?
Yeah, you are forgetting the Customs Import Tax and Tariffs which "protect" your home grown computer industry from imports. Talk to your Member of Parliment.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/64bit/
Now say that you are the CEO of a company and one of your employees was leaking trade secrets to a blogger. Now what if that leaked information could give your competitors an unfair advantage and allow them to get out a cheap knock off to the market before you could. What would you do? Would you not want to find out who was leaking the information?
Say that your company had sunk in millions of dollars in R&D money into the leaked product. Be honest for once in your life and think with your head. It's time to take off your dyed shirt and rose coloured glasses. The 60's are over.
MSFT's monopoly is built on trying to keep people off a platform (PC's) which it neither invented/designed or manufactures.
They are a convicted monopolist which tried to control the OEM's and prevent other proprietary software from entering into the marketplace on the X86 platform.
I think you will find that most of us suggest keeping OS X because it offers the largest selection of software for the mac platform and it offers the best hardware support.
The only possible reason for using linux or FreeBSD on a mac mini might be for a cheap PPC development platform for PPC related server software.
Only an ideological fool would run linux on a "new" mac as a desktop system.
The sane thing to do would be to dual boot between OS X and another OS like linux if need be.
1. Do you work for Dell? ./?
2. Would you personally actually buy and use those cheap Dells you are whoring on