> VMWARE on Win32 will only be as stable as Win32 of course.
The days of 'unstable Win32' died with Win9x and ME... 2000 and XP on supported hardware is just as stable as any other OS. Linux fans who claim otherwise (usually on the basis that they saw a friend's Windows system crash) have about as much credibility as the idiots who reflexively claim all kernel panics to be 'linux bugs'.
Software is values-free. What makes free software "morally superior" is the _opinion_ of clueless advocates who need to read the Advocacy HOWTO instead of chanting FUD and BS to any criticism. These people (and I number the parent among them) never quite get that it is _they_ who contribute most to free software's "rebel image", not whether some OEM ships with systems running Linux.
And speaking of where free software fails to deliver: I have yet to see many free software projects pay much attention to attributes that the market has repeatedly wanted-- things like backward compatibility and ABI compatibility, integration and user experience (especially in UI). And fit-and-finish. When I raise these issues on message boards and IRC, I get waved away. But these are the things the market wants, and you can't wave the market away (oh you can try, and then wonder in puzzlement why people pay good money to run Windows).
> Microsoft's OpenXML would have required an Office upgrade in order to achieve interoperability.
Um, you might want to do some basic Googling before you post? Microsoft has gone on the record multiple times that DOCX/XLSX/etc (i.e, OpenXML) plugins would be released for Office 2000, 2002 and 2003 when Office 2007 shipped. (BBC's June 2005 story, Brian Jones' original blog post about DOCX and friends).
Ok, that other comment was a little too harsh. Much. Switch to. Decaf.
Re:In Sweden as well...
on
On The BBC 2.0
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
> (as they're called, sorry, not sure if their site is available in Anglosaxon)
You know, I'm American, I'm not 'Anglosaxon', and I can speak English pretty well. I know its hard to realize when you live in almost-lilywhite Sweden, but race does not correlate to language.
Or maybe you were just playing to the Euro Slashdot audience that thinks its cute to talk about le anglo saxon and their ghastly language. It'll be pretty freaking funny when these guys get the memo that more people speak English in Asia these days than the US+Europe combined.
People like you should have been around in the early days of Linux where distros were installed off of floppy disks and WMs were usually crude
I was. I started off with Slackware in '94 (although I use Debian on the server and Ubuntu on the desktop these days). And Linux's install, hardware support+detection and boot manager may have been clunky but its command line was just as usable then (because it inherited from Unix) and was never as inelegant as its desktops are today. Unix command line tools fit together and has an elegance about it. The Linux desktop doesn't.
And what's worse, the problems with the Linux desktop have nothing to do with things that can be iteratively improved upon. They are more fundamental in that Linux distros use a "shovel in everything" approach to the desktop (which creates inconsistency and inelegance) and don't care about ABI compat which keeps commercial vendors out.
I'm going to summarize my point about desktop linux this way:
After a largely lacklustre Seamonkey, Firefox became successful because it respected its users and acknowledged that they needed to feel at home in their browser (right down to Tools|Options and File|Exit for Windows users). The usability team adopted a benevolent-dictator approach when dealing with L&F and kept the core UI clean.
That's the kind of attitude a successful Linux distro will have. I know a lot of the Gnome folk have a similar attitude, but all their hard work is undone* when an average user has to go out of Gnome to do anything (in my case I had to install kdebase for Konquerer's WebDAV support because Nautilus' WebDAV crashed with my HTTPSed WebDAV provider).
* Yes I know a desktop is fundamentally different from a browser, and that Windows has the same problems -- Microsoft cannot control fit and finish of 3rd party Windows apps. But Gnome with its much smaller market share obviously has to try harder instead of cribbing "MS does it too and gets a free pass".
> Average home users were more interested back in the day.
I agree, but we've to deal with the world as it is, not as we'd like it to be. When your competition offers fit and finish you had better do the same.
The problem people like me have is people like you just keep saying Linux is hard, Linux doesn't work, Linux is bad.
It wouldn't be a problem if you saw it as constructive criticism and tried to figure out what users wanted from a desktop instead of expecting everyone to agree Linux desktops are the cats whiskers. And notice that this entire discussion has been about a linux *desktop*. I see no dissonance about waxing rhapsodic about the Linux command line or Linux as a server/network appliance (in fact, as I probably mentioned before, I use several Linux and BSD boxes at work -- by choice, because they were the best tools for the job) and and simultaneously bitching about how it sucks as a desktop.
> And what is so hard or bad about OSS distros?
The point is not about 'hard' but about why the user has to think about them at all. Most of Linux's desktop woes are fit-and-finish problems (therefore iteratively solvable, in fact we do see some progress with each distro iteration) but the rest are boneheaded design decisions that appeal to people who were weaned on Unix and X but leave others cold.
That's the reason why Apple (which is wedded to a great user experience and the bottom line, not any particular technological 'purity') chose a BSD core with their own GUI layer: there was no other way they could have provided a great user experience using freely available desktop solutions.
Your attitude of "you're too stupid to appreciate the beauty of Linux" is an almost-perfect example of one of the biggest problems with Linux -- advocates whose answer to everything is "it's a feature!" and further alienate users.
I think I ought to add a *big* benefit under the Windows' column -- absence of obnoxious advocates telling users how they're too stupid to appreciate the desktop. Come to think of it, even OSX has its wingnuts but even they're better than the samples that inhabit the Linux community.
> First off, when you have 50,000 employees even $30 per seat adds up.
And of course, deploying Linux for 50,000 employees (including the moonbats, er fine people in HR) is cost-free. heh.
> MSFT didn't get rich off of $30 per seat.
Oh yeah. I agree. I'm just pointing out that for many companies Windows is cheaper than you think. And Linux advocates who think that a 'free' OS == world domination don't help. There was a good article on digg yesterday about this.
> I like the jab at the end about "or sub-par (Linux)". Good to show you're not fighting any sort of OS holy war. Wouldn't want to see that.
Heh. So Linux desktops get a free pass from usability because it's open source? Please. Off the top of my head: Linux desktops have
case sensitivity
very flaky hardware support
visual inconsistencies (try running Gnome apps on KDE and vice-versa)
scary interface conventions for Windows users (why does Gnome have no cancel buttons? lots of users I know get scared with that)
advocates who bleat about 'idiot vendors not open sourcing their drivers' or 'choosing distro X will solve your problem!' or 'so roll your own distro' when told about these problems, further alienating users who want to use a Linux desktop to get his freaking job done.
PS. I currently run Gnome on one of my Ubuntu workstations (primarily so I can use dvd::rip's GUI). It's come a long way from Redhat 4's twm, but the thing is -- both Windows and MacOS have improved since RH4 too. Linux desktop advocates do themselves no credit when they compare Linux desktops with Win9x -- it just makes them look dishonest.
I have not yet used a Linux desktop that feels like a cohesive whole -- every one has felt like its been cobbled together by lots of different people, which is actually true given it's open source -- but why should users who care about polish have to suffer a cobbled-together desktop that Linux offers today?
The Pegasus Galaxy has existed for considerably longer than any of the series you mention. (And it's an inviting location to based an extra-galactic plot location seeing how one of our closest galactic neighbors is named Pegasus.) So how can Atlantis be ripping off the name of a spaceship if there's a galaxy named Pegasus already there?
I don't think you grasp the implications here. You're saying you're free to use a binary only copy of a tool. I'm saying I'm free to DISTRIBUTE tools like Perl even with my own tweaks if I want. This is especially important after platform changes (e.g. say when glibc goes to 2.5 or something and I have to rebuild it).
That bit about glibc breaking stuff is a classic open source problem that isn't even recognized as a problem. I can run Classic apps on OSX without recompiling anything. I can run Visicalc on Vista. No recompiling involved. "The source is available" is a lousy excuse for ABI breakage. (And don't quote me RHAT's intra-version ABI compatibility as a good example. IT guys might be okay with that (although I doubt it) -- it's completely unacceptable for end-users.)
And yes, I do know what Perl's artistic license implies. So now you're going to tell me that my enterprise is now dependent on a custom build of a hairy interpreter codebase that's done by _you_? That sounds like a good story for you to get consulting income, but I'd be a dunce if I chose that route.
Defeatists like you are horribly annoying. Oh, Linux isn't perfect so let's totally ignore all it's positive qualities in favour of the path of least resistance. Even though in the long run this just sends us down the path of servitude.
Servitude? wow. I somehow doubt you even know what that word means.
Anyway, flowery language aside, I'm not interested in your holy wars. No, really. I have other things to do and my own products to take care of. And I'll use whatever operating system/tool is most suitable for the job.
> I'm sure if you explained to your boss how you could save $100s per box by not installing Windows they might be interested.
Most Fortune 50 companies I know of (about 20 of them, admittedly not a comprehensive sample) pay $18-$30 for their per-seat Windows licenses. At those prices it's not worth subjecting users with training on an unfamiliar system, especially when the unfamiliar system is also more expensive (OSX) or sub-par (Linux).
If MSFT takes [...:-)] a dive off the sanity train you're fucked. What, you gonna distribute older copies of Monad [say a version you liked] to your clients? I don't fucking think so.
I wouldn't have to. If I know they own a product that includes Monad, I'll just give them the.ps? script. (And if they didn't, I'd find out what's acceptable and give them one of (Perl, Python, hell C).
And Microsoft's customers using Monad get free support and updates _for that version_ for seven years (and four more if they pay IIRC), thanks to MS' lifecycle policy. And since they own the software (unless the leased it) they have rights to continue using it after that.
Most people who buy, use and work with Microsoft products know the implications of using Microsoft products. If you insist on assuming everyone else is an idiot, more power to you. Meanwhile, I'll just get on with my work.
> Show me how their variations on the HTML standards are "better".
Considering that IE4 was the first browser with a decent programmable DOM, I'd say they were quite a bit better. Except <marquee> (but then Netscape did <blink>). See also XMLHTTPRequest.
> The MSFT way is just "different" but not because they want to do > something that is fundamentally better.
Actually, what MS does is what any software company should do--
a) ship products that work well together b) Give customers technological and financial incentives to buy more of your products c) Think about your customers first (my interpretation: think about your critics and reluctant customers later)
It's a very simple philosophy that actually used to be written down on old DOS manuals. Everything MS has succeeded at has followed from these: Windows worked well with DOS, their Word processors and spreadsheets etc worked well with Windows and DOS, their directory offering worked well with their server OS, etc. Microsoft calls it 'integrated innovation' nowadays -- the 'innovation' may be marketing-speak but the integration is real. It is also the opposite of the Unix philosophy, which is small replaceable tools: MS' products fit together all right, but they are rarely small and even more rarely easily replaceable.
> It's simple economics. If you can isolate your customers from your > competition you rule them all.
I'm sure MS' marketers love that, but the real reason product companies tend to develop their own rather than work with an outside technology is a combination of risk mitigation and effort: using outside products entails risk (hint: SQL Server 2005 took a risk embedding the CLR within it, Vista took a risk in trying to use the CLR for everyday objects like the shell and then decided it was a bad call) and more often, developers find 'rolling their own' to be easier to maintain (and in the case of software companies, to support) than working with someone else to integrate their software.
> If OpenOffice can run on a dozen platforms
Last I checked it (OO.o2 RC1 I think) it still ran _badly_ on several platforms I tried it on. For all the cribbing about bloat, Word/Excel etc start _fast_. OO makes my machine crawl.
And besides, for all your implications about how Microsoft products are inferior because they only support one platform: here's a clue. Real users care about only one platform-- their own. Cross-platform is nice-to-have, but some folk on Slashdot (typically academic CS types and Unix geeks) have a _very_ overblown idea about its importance.
(And this is from a guy who has at this moment a Windows box, several Linux boxes and a BSD box in his general vicinity. And yes, I do have Perl (and vim) on all of them. But I'm under no illusions that my needs are 'typical'.)
They don't have a problem making Perl available for customers who want it (Unix migrations mostly) but a large chunk of their customers (CIOs) are quite clear that they don't want their IT systems running on scripting duct written in $flavor-of-the-month language. I have personally seen this hostility-to-scripting at work; and again, it's not because CIOs don't grok Perl/Python but rather they're concerned about not having the skills required to maintain these scripts.
I should probably point out that I personally think these customers are wrong -- Perl code written to standards isn't write-only, and people who don't like Perl's syntax can use Python.
That said, Microsoft didn't get rich by lecturing their customers about best-practices but by delivering what they wanted. And from a product development standpoint, owning your own scripting language makes perfect sense.
> They purposefully [for instance] use the wrong direction on the slashes to make things incompatible.
Ironically, Powershell (ugh, I think I'll stick to Monad) accepts both \ and / as directory separator characters and uses - as the default switch indicator (/ is still accepted to make lives easier for people coming in from a DOS background)
> My problem is how blatantly incompatible they do everything.
And of course there is one true way(tm) of doing everything. Computing obviously reached its peak during the mid 80s and we should never ever do anything different because, you know, it'd upset the Unix geeks and you know how bad they can be when upset.
Or you could run cygwin on Windows. But I guess it's easier to kvetch.
Anyway -- It's their platform. Powershell is intended for admins running Exchange. Exchange's admin GUI will generate Powershell Commandlets that will let Windows admins package repetitive tasks in a non-programmy sort of way without taking away power and expressiveness from those who *want* to program. But of course, Microsoft should accept an external risk and go ahead and integrate Perl/Python/whatnot into its products because that'd make *you* happy. Who died and made you the Sultan of Brunei?
(As a side note, Microsoft internally has no trouble with Perl. The problem is that its customers (typically enterprises who buy Windows Servers) are quite clear that they want nothing to do with Perl-- primarily because of the CIO perception that Perl is write-only and that Perl code is essentially job-security for the admin that wrote it.)
I'm a software developer. I've worked for IBM. I maintain and develop several Open Source software applications. And I haven't been a Windows user since Windows 3.1.... The trick is damn simple for the most part: be so freakishly good at what you do that people will be happy to comply with your platform requests, and let them know up from you have no interest in working with Windows. So far, it's worked every time here.
You know, if your post was supposed to impress us about your professional skills, it didn't work for me. If you're really so freakishly good at what you do, you would try your hands on everything under the sun -- if not with a goal of achieving proficiency on that platform, then with the goal of figuring out what $foo platform does right so you can improve your favorite platform.
Ever wonder why Office starts so fast? Why Firefox starts faster on stock Windows systems over stock Linux systems? Why Windows users go nuts trying to use the mouse on other platforms? Ever wonder how IIS (and Tux on Redhat) beats the pants off Apache in fileserving benchmarks?
But no -- I could be wrong, but it seems to me you've merely traded in the 'Windows is good enough' PHB attitude so decried on/. for a 'Java is good enough so the OS doesn't matter' attitude. (What's more amusing is that the market says that the PHB is right and you are wrong.)
It's Venusian, not 'Veneral' (assuming you misspelt 'Venereal', which does originate from 'Venus' but is used as a synonym for 'sexual' and is not used for the planet).
Let's see $evil Corp snatch amnesty.org's domain away from them. Under the WIPO's UDRP, Amnesty owns the trademarks etc associated with amnesty.org and they have the right to defend it even if a product called Amnesty came into the market today.
The problem with your appeoach is that it makes the Internet a haven for those with money. Sure, money talks on the net, but much less than in any other medium -- which is why Amnesty, Greenpeace, DemocracyUnderground etc find it most convenient to disseminate their message online.
If we had a domain name auction system, how'd you like to bet the government of China would snap up rights to amnesty.org?
Slashdot Mirror
> VMWARE on Win32 will only be as stable as Win32 of course.
The days of 'unstable Win32' died with Win9x and ME... 2000 and XP on supported hardware is just as stable as any other OS. Linux fans who claim otherwise (usually on the basis that they saw a friend's Windows system crash) have about as much credibility as the idiots who reflexively claim all kernel panics to be 'linux bugs'.
Hmm, that's actually a good idea. I wonder if they'll try to weasel out of it by saying you can try reverse-engineering it when its copyright expires?
> free software is morally superior
Software is values-free. What makes free software "morally superior" is the _opinion_ of clueless advocates who need to read the Advocacy HOWTO instead of chanting FUD and BS to any criticism. These people (and I number the parent among them) never quite get that it is _they_ who contribute most to free software's "rebel image", not whether some OEM ships with systems running Linux.
And speaking of where free software fails to deliver: I have yet to see many free software projects pay much attention to attributes that the market has repeatedly wanted-- things like backward compatibility and ABI compatibility, integration and user experience (especially in UI). And fit-and-finish. When I raise these issues on message boards and IRC, I get waved away. But these are the things the market wants, and you can't wave the market away (oh you can try, and then wonder in puzzlement why people pay good money to run Windows).
> Why does every damn application need to implement its own spell checker?
1 /472407.aspx
Which is why Vista's new WPF display subsystem comes with a built-in systemwide spellchecker. This'll work on XP too if you install WPF on XP.
http://blogs.msdn.com/marcelolr/archive/2005/09/2
> Microsoft's OpenXML would have required an Office upgrade in order to achieve interoperability.
Um, you might want to do some basic Googling before you post? Microsoft has gone on the record multiple times that DOCX/XLSX/etc (i.e, OpenXML) plugins would be released for Office 2000, 2002 and 2003 when Office 2007 shipped. (BBC's June 2005 story, Brian Jones' original blog post about DOCX and friends).
Ok, that other comment was a little too harsh. Much. Switch to. Decaf.
> (as they're called, sorry, not sure if their site is available in Anglosaxon)
You know, I'm American, I'm not 'Anglosaxon', and I can speak English pretty well. I know its hard to realize when you live in almost-lilywhite Sweden, but race does not correlate to language.
Or maybe you were just playing to the Euro Slashdot audience that thinks its cute to talk about le anglo saxon and their ghastly language. It'll be pretty freaking funny when these guys get the memo that more people speak English in Asia these days than the US+Europe combined.
Anglosaxon, my fucking nonwhite ass.
People like you should have been around in the early days of Linux where distros were installed off of floppy disks and WMs were usually crude
::
I was. I started off with Slackware in '94 (although I use Debian on the server and Ubuntu on the desktop these days). And Linux's install, hardware support+detection and boot manager may have been clunky but its command line was just as usable then (because it inherited from Unix) and was never as inelegant as its desktops are today. Unix command line tools fit together and has an elegance about it. The Linux desktop doesn't.
And what's worse, the problems with the Linux desktop have nothing to do with things that can be iteratively improved upon. They are more fundamental in that Linux distros use a "shovel in everything" approach to the desktop (which creates inconsistency and inelegance) and don't care about ABI compat which keeps commercial vendors out.
I'm going to summarize my point about desktop linux this way:
current_desktop_linux : future_successful_desktop_ linux
seamonkey : firefox
After a largely lacklustre Seamonkey, Firefox became successful because it respected its users and acknowledged that they needed to feel at home in their browser (right down to Tools|Options and File|Exit for Windows users). The usability team adopted a benevolent-dictator approach when dealing with L&F and kept the core UI clean.
That's the kind of attitude a successful Linux distro will have. I know a lot of the Gnome folk have a similar attitude, but all their hard work is undone* when an average user has to go out of Gnome to do anything (in my case I had to install kdebase for Konquerer's WebDAV support because Nautilus' WebDAV crashed with my HTTPSed WebDAV provider).
* Yes I know a desktop is fundamentally different from a browser, and that Windows has the same problems -- Microsoft cannot control fit and finish of 3rd party Windows apps. But Gnome with its much smaller market share obviously has to try harder instead of cribbing "MS does it too and gets a free pass".
> Average home users were more interested back in the day.
I agree, but we've to deal with the world as it is, not as we'd like it to be. When your competition offers fit and finish you had better do the same.
The problem people like me have is people like you just keep saying Linux is hard, Linux doesn't work, Linux is bad.
It wouldn't be a problem if you saw it as constructive criticism and tried to figure out what users wanted from a desktop instead of expecting everyone to agree Linux desktops are the cats whiskers. And notice that this entire discussion has been about a linux *desktop*. I see no dissonance about waxing rhapsodic about the Linux command line or Linux as a server/network appliance (in fact, as I probably mentioned before, I use several Linux and BSD boxes at work -- by choice, because they were the best tools for the job) and and simultaneously bitching about how it sucks as a desktop.
> And what is so hard or bad about OSS distros?
The point is not about 'hard' but about why the user has to think about them at all. Most of Linux's desktop woes are fit-and-finish problems (therefore iteratively solvable, in fact we do see some progress with each distro iteration) but the rest are boneheaded design decisions that appeal to people who were weaned on Unix and X but leave others cold.
That's the reason why Apple (which is wedded to a great user experience and the bottom line, not any particular technological 'purity') chose a BSD core with their own GUI layer: there was no other way they could have provided a great user experience using freely available desktop solutions.
> From Windows 2000 and on, Microsoft actually put some degree of effort into security.
... sigh.
And here I was, using ACLs on my Windows NT 3.1 workstation back in '95
Your attitude of "you're too stupid to appreciate the beauty of Linux" is an almost-perfect example of one of the biggest problems with Linux -- advocates whose answer to everything is "it's a feature!" and further alienate users.
I think I ought to add a *big* benefit under the Windows' column -- absence of obnoxious advocates telling users how they're too stupid to appreciate the desktop. Come to think of it, even OSX has its wingnuts but even they're better than the samples that inhabit the Linux community.
And of course, deploying Linux for 50,000 employees (including the moonbats, er fine people in HR) is cost-free. heh.
> MSFT didn't get rich off of $30 per seat.
Oh yeah. I agree. I'm just pointing out that for many companies Windows is cheaper than you think. And Linux advocates who think that a 'free' OS == world domination don't help. There was a good article on digg yesterday about this.
> I like the jab at the end about "or sub-par (Linux)". Good to show you're not fighting any sort of OS holy war. Wouldn't want to see that.
Heh. So Linux desktops get a free pass from usability because it's open source? Please. Off the top of my head: Linux desktops have
PS. I currently run Gnome on one of my Ubuntu workstations (primarily so I can use dvd::rip's GUI). It's come a long way from Redhat 4's twm, but the thing is -- both Windows and MacOS have improved since RH4 too. Linux desktop advocates do themselves no credit when they compare Linux desktops with Win9x -- it just makes them look dishonest.
I have not yet used a Linux desktop that feels like a cohesive whole -- every one has felt like its been cobbled together by lots of different people, which is actually true given it's open source -- but why should users who care about polish have to suffer a cobbled-together desktop that Linux offers today?
> SG1/Atlantis has an entire pegasus galaxy
The Pegasus Galaxy has existed for considerably longer than any of the series you mention. (And it's an inviting location to based an extra-galactic plot location seeing how one of our closest galactic neighbors is named Pegasus.) So how can Atlantis be ripping off the name of a spaceship if there's a galaxy named Pegasus already there?
I don't think you grasp the implications here. You're saying you're free to use a binary only copy of a tool. I'm saying I'm free to DISTRIBUTE tools like Perl even with my own tweaks if I want. This is especially important after platform changes (e.g. say when glibc goes to 2.5 or something and I have to rebuild it).
That bit about glibc breaking stuff is a classic open source problem that isn't even recognized as a problem. I can run Classic apps on OSX without recompiling anything. I can run Visicalc on Vista. No recompiling involved. "The source is available" is a lousy excuse for ABI breakage. (And don't quote me RHAT's intra-version ABI compatibility as a good example. IT guys might be okay with that (although I doubt it) -- it's completely unacceptable for end-users.)
And yes, I do know what Perl's artistic license implies. So now you're going to tell me that my enterprise is now dependent on a custom build of a hairy interpreter codebase that's done by _you_? That sounds like a good story for you to get consulting income, but I'd be a dunce if I chose that route.
Defeatists like you are horribly annoying. Oh, Linux isn't perfect so let's totally ignore all it's positive qualities in favour of the path of least resistance. Even though in the long run this just sends us down the path of servitude.
Servitude? wow. I somehow doubt you even know what that word means.
Anyway, flowery language aside, I'm not interested in your holy wars. No, really. I have other things to do and my own products to take care of. And I'll use whatever operating system/tool is most suitable for the job.
> I'm sure if you explained to your boss how you could save $100s per box by not installing Windows they might be interested.
Most Fortune 50 companies I know of (about 20 of them, admittedly not a comprehensive sample) pay $18-$30 for their per-seat Windows licenses. At those prices it's not worth subjecting users with training on an unfamiliar system, especially when the unfamiliar system is also more expensive (OSX) or sub-par (Linux).
If MSFT takes [... :-)] a dive off the sanity train you're fucked.
.ps? script. (And if they didn't, I'd find out
What, you gonna distribute older copies of Monad [say a version you
liked] to your clients? I don't fucking think so.
I wouldn't have to. If I know they own a product that includes Monad,
I'll just give them the
what's acceptable and give them one of (Perl, Python, hell C).
And Microsoft's customers using Monad get free support and updates _for
that version_ for seven years (and four more if they pay IIRC), thanks
to MS' lifecycle policy. And since they own the software (unless the
leased it) they have rights to continue using it after that.
Most people who buy, use and work with Microsoft products know the
implications of using Microsoft products. If you insist on assuming
everyone else is an idiot, more power to you. Meanwhile, I'll just get
on with my work.
> Show me how their variations on the HTML standards are "better".
Considering that IE4 was the first browser with a decent programmable
DOM, I'd say they were quite a bit better. Except <marquee> (but
then Netscape did <blink>). See also XMLHTTPRequest.
> The MSFT way is just "different" but not because they want to do
> something that is fundamentally better.
Actually, what MS does is what any software company should do--
a) ship products that work well together
b) Give customers technological and financial incentives to buy more of your products
c) Think about your customers first (my interpretation: think about your critics and
reluctant customers later)
It's a very simple philosophy that actually used to be written down on
old DOS manuals. Everything MS has succeeded at has followed from
these: Windows worked well with DOS, their Word processors and
spreadsheets etc worked well with Windows and DOS, their directory
offering worked well with their server OS, etc. Microsoft calls it
'integrated innovation' nowadays -- the 'innovation' may be
marketing-speak but the integration is real. It is also the opposite of
the Unix philosophy, which is small replaceable tools: MS'
products fit together all right, but they are rarely small and even more
rarely easily replaceable.
> It's simple economics. If you can isolate your customers from your
> competition you rule them all.
I'm sure MS' marketers love that, but the real reason product companies
tend to develop their own rather than work with an outside technology is
a combination of risk mitigation and effort: using outside products
entails risk (hint: SQL Server 2005 took a risk embedding the CLR within
it, Vista took a risk in trying to use the CLR for everyday objects like
the shell and then decided it was a bad call) and more often, developers
find 'rolling their own' to be easier to maintain (and in the case of
software companies, to support) than working with someone else to
integrate their software.
> If OpenOffice can run on a dozen platforms
Last I checked it (OO.o2 RC1 I think) it still ran _badly_ on several
platforms I tried it on. For all the cribbing about bloat, Word/Excel
etc start _fast_. OO makes my machine crawl.
And besides, for all your implications about how Microsoft products are
inferior because they only support one platform: here's a clue. Real
users care about only one platform-- their own. Cross-platform is
nice-to-have, but some folk on Slashdot (typically academic CS types and
Unix geeks) have a _very_ overblown idea about its importance.
(And this is from a guy who has at this moment a Windows box, several
Linux boxes and a BSD box in his general vicinity. And yes, I do have
Perl (and vim) on all of them. But I'm under no illusions that my needs
are 'typical'.)
They don't have a problem making Perl available for customers who want it (Unix migrations mostly) but a large chunk of their customers (CIOs) are quite clear that they don't want their IT systems running on scripting duct written in $flavor-of-the-month language. I have personally seen this hostility-to-scripting at work; and again, it's not because CIOs don't grok Perl/Python but rather they're concerned about not having the skills required to maintain these scripts.
I should probably point out that I personally think these customers are wrong -- Perl code written to standards isn't write-only, and people who don't like Perl's syntax can use Python.
That said, Microsoft didn't get rich by lecturing their customers about best-practices but by delivering what they wanted. And from a product development standpoint, owning your own scripting language makes perfect sense.
> They purposefully [for instance] use the wrong direction on the slashes to make things incompatible.
Ironically, Powershell (ugh, I think I'll stick to Monad) accepts both \ and / as directory separator characters and uses - as the default switch indicator (/ is still accepted to make lives easier for people coming in from a DOS background)
> My problem is how blatantly incompatible they do everything.
And of course there is one true way(tm) of doing everything. Computing obviously reached its peak during the mid 80s and we should never ever do anything different because, you know, it'd upset the Unix geeks and you know how bad they can be when upset.
Or you could run cygwin on Windows. But I guess it's easier to kvetch.
Anyway -- It's their platform. Powershell is intended for admins running Exchange. Exchange's admin GUI will generate Powershell Commandlets that will let Windows admins package repetitive tasks in a non-programmy sort of way without taking away power and expressiveness from those who *want* to program. But of course, Microsoft should accept an external risk and go ahead and integrate Perl/Python/whatnot into its products because that'd make *you* happy. Who died and made you the Sultan of Brunei?
(As a side note, Microsoft internally has no trouble with Perl. The problem is that its customers (typically enterprises who buy Windows Servers) are quite clear that they want nothing to do with Perl-- primarily because of the CIO perception that Perl is write-only and that Perl code is essentially job-security for the admin that wrote it.)
> One nifty feature though, is that you no longer have to type the drive letter first to change to a directory on it.
/d D:\Bar
You can do that in cmd.exe too--
C:\Foo> cd
D:\Bar>
He got fired for showing off a company loading area on his blog (which is supposed to be off-limits to cameras). It had nothing to do with Macs.
I'm a software developer. I've worked for IBM. I maintain and develop several Open Source software applications. And I haven't been a Windows user since Windows 3.1. ... The trick is damn simple for the most part: be so freakishly good at what you do that people will be happy to comply with your platform requests, and let them know up from you have no interest in working with Windows. So far, it's worked every time here.
/. for a 'Java is good enough so the OS doesn't matter' attitude. (What's more amusing is that the market says that the PHB is right and you are wrong.)
You know, if your post was supposed to impress us about your professional skills, it didn't work for me. If you're really so freakishly good at what you do, you would try your hands on everything under the sun -- if not with a goal of achieving proficiency on that platform, then with the goal of figuring out what $foo platform does right so you can improve your favorite platform.
Ever wonder why Office starts so fast? Why Firefox starts faster on stock Windows systems over stock Linux systems? Why Windows users go nuts trying to use the mouse on other platforms? Ever wonder how IIS (and Tux on Redhat) beats the pants off Apache in fileserving benchmarks?
But no -- I could be wrong, but it seems to me you've merely traded in the 'Windows is good enough' PHB attitude so decried on
> but if we give in to terror the terrorist wins.
Heh heh. I prefer to think of the current spate of SFO laptop thefts as the Real World 1.0 intruding on Web 2.0.
It's Venusian, not 'Veneral' (assuming you misspelt 'Venereal', which does originate from 'Venus' but is used as a synonym for 'sexual' and is not used for the planet).
Wikipedia has a bit more on this.
And oh, is the Republican Party responsible for Global Warming now? That is such a tired cliche.
> Don't stare at the screen intently, keep your eyes out for anyone who doesn't look trustworthy
Or - just an option! - don't use your laptop in public? I mean, if what you're doing is really that important you could do it at home/office?
Let's see $evil Corp snatch amnesty.org's domain away from them. Under the WIPO's UDRP, Amnesty owns the trademarks etc associated with amnesty.org and they have the right to defend it even if a product called Amnesty came into the market today.
The problem with your appeoach is that it makes the Internet a haven for those with money. Sure, money talks on the net, but much less than in any other medium -- which is why Amnesty, Greenpeace, DemocracyUnderground etc find it most convenient to disseminate their message online.
If we had a domain name auction system, how'd you like to bet the government of China would snap up rights to amnesty.org?