Perhaps so, but it is possible to install a boot sector on the other hard drives which points to the grub on your main Linux drive. No partitioning needed, usually, just overwriting the boot sector.
Since Grub can then be configured to boot the Windows partition itself, you would end up with basically the functionality you have now
But hey, swapping SATA is always easy, I don't blame you for doing it that way. I can just be pedantic that way.
I installed the drivers through the GUI interface, but I guess it didn't update my xorg.config or something
Yes, every time I've explicitly installed an nvidia-glx-* package on Ubuntu lately, it's checked my xorg.conf and switched it over to "nvidia" if it wasn't already (and if I hadn't touched the file since it was installed). That's the Debian way, btw -- if you haven't touched a config file, it assumes you don't care about it, so it updates it automatically. If you have touched it (newer mtime than when the package was installed), it prompts you for what to do about it, doesn't try to update by itself (usually).
If your girlfriend/mom/dad/grandma/cousin's Windows computer is "slow" and it "crashes" and your response to that is to hoist another OS on them, that's great. More power to you. But you're not really solving the problem, are you?
In a sense, I am, because Linux makes it much harder to do something dangerous.
On Windows, you're always some three clicks away from a malware installation by downloading and running a program. On Linux, it's at least five or six, a few of them requiring conscious thought, not just "cancel/allow" or "yes/no", but actually requiring things like "Set which permission bits on this file? (you need to click 'executable' here.)"
On Linux, it is easy to install software from a repository -- but that's not anywhere near the security risk of downloading random executables.
So, for a user who's always going to click the default, path of least resistance, I'll put them on the system where that default, path of least resistance leads them to fewer issues.
But understand, they're actively participating in this. They're the ones who come to me for help, so I figure they'll always ask me for help, best I can do is set them up so they'll have less to ask for help about. Linux sometimes does that. (Not all the time, but sometimes.)
Seriously, probably 70-80% of the searches I do for Windows problems land me on Experts Exchange. Pay to see the solution. Not much else useful around.
Whereas probably 70-80% of the searches I do for Linux problems land me on Ubuntu Forums or the Wiki. One or two easy steps, done.
I'm thinking I may pick up a little contract work doing this kind of thing.
Basically, you give me ssh access to come in and fix stuff, do upgrades, and so on. I keep your systems up to date and stable, and you don't have to either be your own admin, or hire a full-time admin.
I'm not ready to do this yet (other stuff going on in my life), but is there a market for this kind of thing?
That comment is meant for your girlfriend, not you.
Look...
I know computers are scary...
But just put the CD in the drive......and...
follow the instructions on the screen?
If you'd been smart enough to put it in the drive in the first place, we wouldn't be having this conversation! It'd be obvious from what shows up on the screen...
Shit, I'm no car nut, but I know how to change a flat tire. I'm no accountant, but I know how much money is in my bank account, and how I'm going to spend it (and how I have been spending it, and how to check it online). When my air conditioner and coffee maker blow a circuit, I don't call an electrician, I go down, open the breaker box, and flip the switch. I'm no gun expert, but I know which end the bullets come out of!
Remember, every time you (as a Linux-knowledgeable person) says: "edit whatever.config to add SpecialFlag=3", that seems like a very, very easy step.
It is. It's also pretty easy for users to come to Linux-knowledgeable people to ask for it.
What I find is that most people's biggest problems can be solved with one or two commands, but more importantly, after those one or two commands, they're done. No more mucking about in the commandline for at least another year or two, and then they can come back to me and I'll solve their problem in another two minutes.
When I tried Linux, I couldnt even work out how to quit the text editor besides a hardware reboot.
On Windows, you know about ctrl+alt+del, ctrl+q, alt+f4, etc. Linux has similar mechanisms, in absolutely the worst case. Modern Linux, though, you'll just get something like Notepad, but it's called Gedit or Kate.
I hate the idea of stuff updating in the background. It might break something else, or simply be a step backwards.
Well, if it's not updating in the background, you won't do it, as you've just sort of said...
And generally, modern distros are very solid about this. If something updates, it won't break anything else, because they've tested it. If it does, it's just as easy to revert to a previous version and fix it.
It works now, I'm happy with the version I have now
In that case, pick an Ubuntu LTS version (Long-term Support), which they will keep working for the next five years, even as they come out with a new version every six months. You will get only security patches, which you need, but you won't actually get a wholly new version of anything. That is, you might upgrade to Firefox 2.0.7 or something, but you won't upgrade to Firefox 3.0.
I'm not letting any new stuff on my computer without being explicitly convinced that the upgrade is worth my time.
If it doesn't break anything, it's costing you no time. But if you're still convinced you don't want to upgrade, you don't have to. Linux is about choice.
(If you're worried about too much choice, just go install Ubuntu. If you're a total control freak, go build yourself a Linux From Scratch, or anything in between, but if you're new, just pretend those don't exist and use Ubuntu.)
Yet again, someone who knows Linux and doesn't know Windows making sweeping statements about Linux being easy and Windows being hard. Surprise, surprise...
I could say the same for you.
All OSes today suck in very big ways. They all lack things that should have been put in ten years ago or more. Among what we have, I find Linux is the best we've got, but really, that's not saying much.
And that's why I'm not a zealot. Just trying to be helpful here.
I go to Windows update, I click a few buttons, I'm updated.
I use a rather large pile of unusual software, so that simply doesn't work on Windows. I go to Windows update, I click a few buttons, and Windows is updated. Then I have to update Office (it's Office 2000, not supported by Windows Update). Then I have to check for updates for all of my games. I have to coax Steam to update by actually trying to play the games that are out of date. I have to check driver sites manually. I have to tell my antivirus to update itself.
And so on, and so forth. Thank God I only boot Windows once a month for a LAN party, but that's a LOT of administrative bullshit for a system that only needs to play games!
(Yes, I know, not many games for Linux. Oh well, there are enough, and I can do all my real work on Linux and not have even more administrative bullshit from Windows.
Automatix/Synaptic won't check for dependencies
That alone shows you're out of date. Automatix is completely depricated now.
Synaptic has handled dependencies for as long as I can remember, although I still don't use it, I still use the commandline.
but I have to edit 9000 text files and install shit from source because my Nvidia graphics driver isn't working, or my wireless card is incompatible with the kernel.
Again, out of date. Watch this:
apt-get install nvidia-glx-new
Done. Or maybe you need nvidia-glx or nvidia-glx-old. Regardless, done, every nvidia card I've tried this on (probably 5 or 6 systems) has worked perfectly -- if you know what you're doing, you can restart your GUI, otherwise simply reboot.
Next, the most common unsupported network card is Broadcom, except now it's supported, you just need firmware:
apt-get install bc43xx-fwcutter
Now, I don't remember the exact command, but just run "bc43xx-fwcutter" and I think it'll tell you what to do. It may or may not need you to grab a driver off Windows -- I think the latest version can attempt to just automatically download and install a driver.
Again, there's a command to make this take effect immediately, or you can simply reboot. In this case, I believe the relevant commands are listed when you type "bc43xx-fwcutter".
That was maybe three steps, and everything's solved. Probably takes me less time than punching in the validation key on Windows.
Again this is untrue, the one-stop shop only applies for Applications free or released by the distro, this doesnt really do much when you have other applications needed for a business or work.
There are still so many applications that are free, and many businesses don't need much more than that. The difference is still very significant between that and a Windows or OS X box, even with all of the various flavor-of-the-week auto-update systems bundled with the apps.
By your reponces its apparent that you do not admini a Windows enviroment (big or small) or you dont do your job well.
I'm not the GP here, but I can say that I've admined a sort of mixed environment -- Linux on the server, Windows on the desktop. The windows side was kept barely limping along, because they have so few needs -- in fact, many times I've tried to talk them into switching to Linux, using wine for the one or two applications we need.
Because we're not really willing to spend the money on a decent imaging system, or even recent versions of Windows for most of the people there.
On the Linux side, however, the servers I admin, I personally check on every now and then -- takes but a minute or two of my time, and I know all of them are updated and still doing what they're supposed to.
Installing MS Office takes less than a handful of mouse clicks.
If a handful is defined as five, then I can pretty much guarantee it takes more. Yes, I have installed it.
Are you seriously suggesting that the installation routine for Open Office is faster and easier in any meaningful way?
Installation and updates, although recent versions of Office are integrated with Windows update.
It's simple: It comes out of the box on Ubuntu (and Kubuntu), and your system will bug you when it has a new version. Then: Two clicks to upgrade your entire system, including openoffice.
As far as administration and update headaches go - are you really saying that Windows Update is not on a par with, if not better than, apt-get for system updates?
Yes. Windows Update only has Microsoft software in it. For example: Norton AntiVirus is going to have virus definitions come from Norton LiveUpdate. iTunes will get it from Apple's Software Update. Firefox will update itself. Gaim/Pidgin, as far as I know, won't auto-update at all, along with many, many other pieces of software -- Nero, I think?
For a start, apt-get doesn't give you short explanatory descriptions for each update - you just have to take it or leave it.
Maybe apt-get (on the commandline) doesn't, but the Software Update utility will tell you (in detail) what each package is, and there's definitely a way to grab a changelog, though it escapes me at the moment.
But the upside? If this feature is lacking, and we add it, we only have to add it once, and all software on the entire system will suddenly gain that ability. The changelogs are already there in a standard format, so apt/dpkg/deb theoretically supports this, the frontends just aren't great about it.
I could call this the "once and for all" advantage.
Your point about Linux updating all installed software rather than just the core system is irrelevant for any software compiled from source.
True, but with over twenty thousand packages in Feisty, I so rarely have to install software compiled from source that it becomes irrelevant.
Also, for the few cases when I want to customize a package that's already there, I can download the source package and be confident that I've got all build dependencies, and that everything will work as expected.
And then there's Gentoo. There are lots of other things wrong with Gentoo, but it is extremely easy to create a source package on Gentoo. I've done it a couple of times.
Between Linux and OS X... There are actually less than a handful of programs I've had to compile from source on any given machine, usually closer to one or two. On my OS X laptop, it was more like ten or twenty -- not compiled from source, but simply downloaded, and without a coherent auto-update, that's a lot of programs to launch and check individually -- or run over to their website -- to try and find the latest version.
unplugging and swapping around hard drive cables (it kept booting back into Windows, instead of using the Linux bootloader)
The fix for that is more painful than it should be -- involves a bit of mucking around with the grub commandline -- but if you fixed it with hard drive cables, you should be able to set your BIOS to boot from one hard drive before the other anyway. I don't remember the exact commands for that.
playing around with the video settings to get it to recognize my GeForce 7900 GT
Try to understand two things here, though: First, Ubuntu is on a 6-month release cycle. So, if you have hardware newer than that, even assuming 0 development time, it's not going to be supported at all, even by the closed ones -- because you'd have to download them.
Second, there's all kinds of ways to mess with the install CD, the easiest of which being using the other install CD -- the "Alternate" one. You use that to install a base, commandline-only Linux. Then, for you, you probably just do:
Substitute "ubuntu-desktop" for "kubuntu-desktop" if you like.
I believe the rest is automagic from there. You might have to enable a repository first.
after a bit of fiddling I decided the cost to my free time wasn't worth it.
The above steps shouldn't take you more than a few minutes of your time, maybe an hour of your computer's. The rest of the install might be problematic, as the Alternate install won't automatically repartition for you. But worst case, you could get Partition Magic... And trust me, installation is the worst problem you'll have.
Eventually I'm sure Ubuntu will fix their issue, and then the cost equation may switch back the other way.
I'd say, check the very next official release when it comes out -- probably Gusty, 7.10, next month in theory. Athough it still might not be supported, as I believe the install CD boots to an entirely proprietary-free mode. You may be able to force it to vesa/vga mode (no nv support at all) with boot options, but I don't remember what they are -- once you know, again, less than a minute of your time.
I'm not trying to argue that the situation is right or fair, I'm trying to help you out if you actually want to get this working.
Maybe I'm just more familiar with Ubuntu than with Fedora, but here:
Like how if I lose network connectivity it takes two minutes to start a terminal.
Can't help you there. Maybe weird hardware, maybe an old kernel. What happens when your desktop loses network connectivity? Does everything still work then?
Or how if I unplug the power cord with a full battery, Fedora mis-reads the battery status and pops up a helpful "Your battery power is dangerously low (99%).
Way back when I was using Gentoo, there were no decent tools -- or none I was using -- to deal with battery status, so I had to write my own scripts.
But still, this kind of behavior is all userland, and probably a combination of config files and scripts that should be really easy to deal with. Should be... But that's just me.
But hey, solve it once and it's solved forever. I still have my old Gentoo/etc from that laptop, complete with things like remapping the power button to switch me to vt1 (that's ctrl+alt+f1).
Or when the system update program helpfully reinstalls the bcom43xx kernel module and erases the ndiswrapper settings, resulting in a non-working wireless card.
On my system, I'd fire up aptitude, or apt frontend of choice, really, and wipe the bcom43xx kernel module. It would probably require a few big "let's depend on everything" packages that are used for upgrades, but that'd be it. And it never overwrites settings that I've touched myself without asking me.
But actually, the kernel module has always worked better for me, you just need to get the firmware. There's a separate program that you need to slice the firmware out, but once you do, it's got to be at least as easy as ndiswrapper -- it'll probably use the same Windows DLL. Bonus: Works flawlessly on PowerPC macs.
I admit, it's a hassle, and it really should be better. We could assign blame all day, point fingers at each other (and mostly at Broadcom), but it should be better.
But even with that cost, I still use Linux everywhere. I count problems like this as part of the cost of setting up a new system -- and it's a small part, compared to the amount of customizing I do.
For example, if you want to use Nero, you have to have not only a copy of Nero, but the specific copy that came with your drive, because it's licensed per-drive, not per-computer or per-user.
You could always download InfraRecorder, I guess, but I've seen other, similar things happen. It seems like there's always one or two like that, before they get absorbed into Windows proper (XP can burn CDs itself, though not as well).
Well, in this case, I'm sure the teacher was just doing it "by the book". I just wanted to use methods which hadn't been taught yet.
That, and I have a kneejerk reaction of trying to do best practices. "There's NO reason this data type needs to be int! Let me typecast to Object, or use Generics, or SOMETHING! *sigh* Ok, int it is, I want the grades..."
A bit like attempting to find asymptotes with spreadsheet programs and/or examining graphs from graphing calculators, and the kids who've had some extracurricular math are seething because once you know just a little calculus, it's retardedly easy to solve just by glancing at the equation.
Mostly because I remember the argument was something about explosions "heightening dramatic tension" -- and hey, the starship going "whoosh" as it goes past probably makes it feel more dramatic and epic, or hearing the engines humming when the ship is viewed from a vacuum...
But I always thought it better to get as close as you can to reality, and build all of your art on top of that foundation.
And I love Firefly for proving that, so beautifully. There are all kinds of moments in space, with all kinds of moods -- humor, fun, tension, sadness... And it was done because we know this ship, we know these characters, and we care about what's really happening, not just what went "boom".
But it doesn't mean there's no sound happening when we look at space. There's the music... And the music is just beautiful.
My favorite scenes... can I even count them? First that comes to mind is in the pilot, having almost entirely visual cues and dialog from the radio helmets showing the robbery taking place. No hiss when they blow the hatch, but you see the air rush out. And then, that scene in which Jayne says "Let's moon them." Here, we have this Western theme music running, with a bit of a wry attitude to it, as the ship turns around, lights up its ass like a firefly, and launches away at high speed.
I sort of always seem to remember that scene as having the generic doppler effect sound of a Star Trek ship wooshing off into warp, but it doesn't. It creates most of the same experience, but without the sound effects.
And like all other forms of art, restriction forces creativity (necessity is the mother of invention)... Like Picasso's Blue Period, maybe. There's just something that feels right, not even consciously, about it being silent. It makes the few sounds that there are that much more powerful, too.
Serenity was a bit closer to the cliches, but still... so perfectly done, it's amazing. The sequence from the title screen -- after we're introduced to the operative -- is now one of my favorite scenes in any movie, for the sheer cinematic genius of it... How much we got to see without any cutting back and forth at all, going through the ship, being introduced to it and the crew, and then... just flowing right into the movie.
It's exactly the kind of thing that they'd do. I've heard rumors that the scripts of Trek shows actually included TECHNO -- as in, you'd have a line that said, literally, "Well can't you [TECHNO] to get through their shields?" "We can't, because of [TECHNO]."
Then they'd get whoever their scientific eggheads were -- probably pseudoscientific marketers, but whatever -- to come up with some good sounding TECHNO to fill in the script.
Think about it...
"Space fleets of the future outfit their crews with [TECHNO]. These use [TECHNO] to produce the sounds, which, as everyone knows, does something good (insert more [TECHNO] here)."
You just described Geordi's Visor. (Or is that VISOR? Never can remember.)
There was an episode in which we got to see what it would look like.
Re:MS locks developers into Win; MS extends too mu
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Cross-Platform Microsoft
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I do a lot of pseudo-developing myself...
But I'm at least consistant, and I think you've got a strawman here. Has anyone on Slashdot complained about anything going cross-platform?
It's not that we don't want silverlight to be cross-platform. It's that we're looking at it from every possible angle, trying to figure out why MS would be giving us something like this, because every time they've appeared to give us something in the past, it eventually led to us being screwed over.
It's that we're afraid that Linux and OS X will adopt it, we'll have Silverlight all over the place, maybe Silverlight on my cell phone powered by Mono... and then MS will move from the Embrace phase into Extend and Exterminate. They'll start adding features that aren't in the spec, people will start using them, and before long, you'll see half the Silverlight apps are only meant for Windows/IE with actual.NET, and Linux/Firefox/Mono people will be struggling to catch up.
They've done it before.
When someone kicks you in the balls enough, you get scared of them. It's only natural.
The only other contenders I see are Java, Flash, Silverlight, and native desktop apps.
The other things you listed are wholly irrelevant, being server-side technologies. Perl, PHP, Tomcat,.NET, Java, Python, Ruby, Lisp, whatever you want -- it's all on the server side, and none of it matters. As long as it speaks HTTP and delivers HTML or XML, browsers will talk to it, either with normal HTTP/HTML, or with that plus AJAX.
Which means I can easily move from Perl to PHP to Tomcat to Erlang to Brainfuck if I feel like it, all on the server side. I can even write parts of a site in one language and parts in another.
Silverlight is more dangerous, and also has more promise.
The promise is, it's built on.NET, which is meant to be a generic runtime environment, so theoretically, you can actually write the parts that go in the browser in ANY sufficiently high-level language. Oh, and it'll have nice, Flash-like graphics, so we won't really need plugins anymore, except maybe the occasional PDF.
(More languages doesn't excite me as much because I'm learning to love JavaScript. It's Lisp, but it looks like C... But Silverlight will be much, much faster to execute. Javascript implementations are pathetically slow.)
I don't know much about the Windows filesystem API, but I know that the UNIX/POSIX API is not rich enough, by itself, to support the kind of filesystem I'd like to write -- or at least, the kind I think should be written. What I'd love to see is a solid transaction API on top of it, instead of all this laziness of calling sync or fsync whenever we need to make sure one thing hits the disk before another, or to implement a pseudo-transaction via tempfiles which can be "rolled back" by deleting said tempfiles.
An API like this would let us do things like... oh... atime updates on flash media, without destroying the media. Or actually delay full transactions, not even allocate the disk space, until memory pressure forces a write -- so people don't need tmpfs or ramdisks for temporary files anymore, as there's a good chance the file will never hit the disk.
But I've got a lot of ideas like this, and right now, I'm sticking to the ones that can get me work.
(A simple example: I think an entire OS could be created without... I think it's called memory segmentation. All programs, even untrusted ones, could share the same address space, technically, yet the system would be secure. If you're interested, we can go off on a tangent about that, but it's not relevant to this discussion, I think -- this discussion is about the security of existing real OSes.)
Hmmm, doesn't Linux bootup & install from a ramdisk in part, initially?
First, this part is optional for the vast majority of most setups, at least at boot.
And second, it's not a ramdisk anymore. It all revolves around tmpfs.
tmpfs is a virtual memory filesystm. Basically, it expands or contracts in the same way that your filesystem cache would -- it essentially is a filesystem cache, only without the filesystem -- whereas Linux ramdisks actually emulate a physical disk, to some extent, in that they're a fixed size, and need another filesystem on top of them, which is hugely inefficient.
The initrd (initial ramdisk) system -- like I said, optional -- has been replaced with initramfs, which takes an optionally gzipped CPIO archive (loaded in by the bootloader) and unpacks it into a tmpfs filesystem, and uses that as its root filesystem for the first few seconds (or milliseconds) of boot. After it's done with whatever has to happen there -- which includes things like scripts running to set up RAID and such, and maybe even networking if you want to run off a network -- it switches to the real root filesystem, and drops the ramfs.
This gives it much more flexibility than (I think) Windows has, because you can do almost anything in that initial ramfs environment before you access the root filesystem. A very simple example: You could put your kernel, bootloader, and initramfs image on a USB stick and boot from that, then take it out -- enter a passphrase, which is then used to gain access to the hard disk. The ENTIRE hard disk can then be encrypted, and they have to physically get a hold of your USB key and your password in order to crack it. Or, they would have to take your USB key, modify the files on it, and give it back to you without you noticing.
Another example is boot CDs -- you want to keep your boot CD image as small as possible, so the ENTIRE thing, except for the kernel and the bootloader, can be compressed. The kernel and the bootloader are, altogether, less than five megabytes, probably around one or two.
Unionfs is a sort of copy-on-write filesystem, that's used for the install, and for LiveCDs. I'm not sure Windows has anything like it.
Basically, Unionfs takes two filesystems -- one read-only (or it accesses it read-only), one read-write. You then mount those two as the third "union" filesystem. Any reads from that filesystem that aren't satisfied by the read-write filesystem are passed on to the read-only filesysetm.
On a boot CD, this means that any file you don't change is simply read off the CD, and need not consume RAM. However, any file you write to, or even delete, causes some data to be saved in the tmpfs (ram filesystem).
This means that if you have enough RAM, you can, quite literally, do anything to a running boot CD you can do to a live system, short of rebooting. Ubuntu Linux now installs from this environment, but you can, in fact, try it out before installing, or even while it's installing. If you're running low on RAM, you can create swap space -- in fact, if you're doing an install, it will start using swap space as soon as you create it, and I think it will also detect any swap that was already on your system and use that. This is somewhat equivalent to the pagefile on Windows.
A useful example: The livecd I tried most recently did not support wireless cards out of the box. So, when trying to use wireless on a powerbook, I could boot off the CD, plug it in physically, download and install the packages I needed (through the package manager, no less), and pull the firmware out of the OS X partition that was already there. Then I could unplug and walk around, and have wireless internet on a laptop -- AS ITS OS WAS INSTALLED.
Also - Go to SuperSpeed.com, & look up SuperDisk (there should still be some material for uses of Ramdisks that make them practical for things listed there, with graphs/charts/tests etc.).
Everyone who isn't a Microsoft fanboi needs to ask themselves WHY Microsoft wouldn't handle such project itself, with its own people, if it saw the need for such on Linux.
Duh? Because its own people cost money.
Doing Mono this way means they can get all kinds of people from Mono to do the work for them, and then they can play the IP card and kill the project when they don't need it anymore. Right now, they need Silverlight to be cross-platform, so that people have no reason to choose it over Flash.
This is the Embrace period.
Once it becomes THE way to get web content, and YouTube runs on Silverlight, and Flash is dead -- then they can start adding features to the Windows version of Silverlight, and stop helping Mono.
That will be Extend.
Basically, get everyone preferring the MS platform, because they're seen as the innovator, because they're adding more features -- mainly because they can copy any feature from Mono, but not the other way around.
Then, they can play the patent card whenever they want -- hell, they may already have these patents -- and basically make the Mono version of Silverlight illegal. Linux people will hate it, and everyone else will go "C'est la vie" and just use Windows when they want to look at a Silverlight page, because who knows if it'll work right in the insanely-limited legal version of Mono.
That would be Extinguish.
The GPL cannot possibly do this, by the way. It's entirely possible to avoid using any GPL'd code, and no one can play the "GPL card" later.
What I really hope is that there's sufficient competition now for us to be able to force them to stay in "embrace" mode.
Look at the Web. Microsoft killed it around IE5 or IE6, with most websites "Viewed Best in Internet Explorer (at exactly such and such a resolution)", or "This site requires Internet Explorer 6." They'd basically killed Netscape, and were reaping the rewards.
And Netscape came back from the grave as Firefox, and forced them to wake up after years of pure stagnation and move back into "embrace" mode, with IE7.
I don't mind "embrace" mode. It's warm, it's fuzzy, and it involves Microsoft actually getting things done. By the time they move to extend, it's still ok for awhile, because we can keep pace with them -- that's what happened with XMLHttpRequest, I think. And if they try to extinguish, the worst that happens is, we fork entirely.
They've learned their lesson -- embrace more, so nobody can possibly cut you off with a more attractive platform. But we've learned ours -- make a platform that's attractive enough that even if you fork, you take some 5-10% of the market with you, which is still a few million people -- and make it a noisy enough few million that Microsoft's customers (not consumers, customers, businesses and developers and such) start embracing FOR microsoft, and demanding that MS play nice.
They've done it before. They've killed projects like this, or severely crippled them, probably intentionally, before.
However...
I'm not sure if there's significant chunks of the official Silverlight actually running on Mono. I was under the impression that it was actually a re-implementation. Which means that if MS really kills Silverlight, we can start shipping Mono plus Mono's own Silverlight with/for Firefox. It's kind of like Mono itself -- Mono, at this point, could be severely hurt by Microsoft's dominance, but not actually killed in its own right.
It's like Java. Microsoft killed Java with their JVM, but only as a potential platform of choice for Windows and the Web. We still have Sun's JVM, and we can still use it for portable apps, or just for enterprise apps on the server. I hate Java for everything but its portability, bytecode nature, and garbage collection (which is a lot to like, actually) -- but Java is living proof that the most Microsoft can do to an open source project, even one they embrace/extend/extinguish, is severely hurt it. They can't kill it.
HTML is another example. Microsoft has, in fact, set the Web back years. They did, in fact, try to kill Netscape. And Netscape has come back as Firefox to haunt them, and even that tiny amount of competition has forced them to move back to "embrace" mode.
Even if their intent is to extend/extinguish, I am really hopeful that we can always fork or force them to embrace.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps so, but it is possible to install a boot sector on the other hard drives which points to the grub on your main Linux drive. No partitioning needed, usually, just overwriting the boot sector.
Since Grub can then be configured to boot the Windows partition itself, you would end up with basically the functionality you have now
But hey, swapping SATA is always easy, I don't blame you for doing it that way. I can just be pedantic that way.
Yes, every time I've explicitly installed an nvidia-glx-* package on Ubuntu lately, it's checked my xorg.conf and switched it over to "nvidia" if it wasn't already (and if I hadn't touched the file since it was installed). That's the Debian way, btw -- if you haven't touched a config file, it assumes you don't care about it, so it updates it automatically. If you have touched it (newer mtime than when the package was installed), it prompts you for what to do about it, doesn't try to update by itself (usually).
In a sense, I am, because Linux makes it much harder to do something dangerous.
On Windows, you're always some three clicks away from a malware installation by downloading and running a program. On Linux, it's at least five or six, a few of them requiring conscious thought, not just "cancel/allow" or "yes/no", but actually requiring things like "Set which permission bits on this file? (you need to click 'executable' here.)"
On Linux, it is easy to install software from a repository -- but that's not anywhere near the security risk of downloading random executables.
So, for a user who's always going to click the default, path of least resistance, I'll put them on the system where that default, path of least resistance leads them to fewer issues.
I actually do try to teach them...
But understand, they're actively participating in this. They're the ones who come to me for help, so I figure they'll always ask me for help, best I can do is set them up so they'll have less to ask for help about. Linux sometimes does that. (Not all the time, but sometimes.)
I'll take easy to find free support any day.
Seriously, probably 70-80% of the searches I do for Windows problems land me on Experts Exchange. Pay to see the solution. Not much else useful around.
Whereas probably 70-80% of the searches I do for Linux problems land me on Ubuntu Forums or the Wiki. One or two easy steps, done.
I'm thinking I may pick up a little contract work doing this kind of thing.
Basically, you give me ssh access to come in and fix stuff, do upgrades, and so on. I keep your systems up to date and stable, and you don't have to either be your own admin, or hire a full-time admin.
I'm not ready to do this yet (other stuff going on in my life), but is there a market for this kind of thing?
That comment is meant for your girlfriend, not you.
...and...
Look...
I know computers are scary...
But just put the CD in the drive...
follow the instructions on the screen?
If you'd been smart enough to put it in the drive in the first place, we wouldn't be having this conversation! It'd be obvious from what shows up on the screen...
Shit, I'm no car nut, but I know how to change a flat tire. I'm no accountant, but I know how much money is in my bank account, and how I'm going to spend it (and how I have been spending it, and how to check it online). When my air conditioner and coffee maker blow a circuit, I don't call an electrician, I go down, open the breaker box, and flip the switch. I'm no gun expert, but I know which end the bullets come out of!
It is. It's also pretty easy for users to come to Linux-knowledgeable people to ask for it.
What I find is that most people's biggest problems can be solved with one or two commands, but more importantly, after those one or two commands, they're done. No more mucking about in the commandline for at least another year or two, and then they can come back to me and I'll solve their problem in another two minutes.
On Windows, you know about ctrl+alt+del, ctrl+q, alt+f4, etc. Linux has similar mechanisms, in absolutely the worst case. Modern Linux, though, you'll just get something like Notepad, but it's called Gedit or Kate.
Well, if it's not updating in the background, you won't do it, as you've just sort of said...
And generally, modern distros are very solid about this. If something updates, it won't break anything else, because they've tested it. If it does, it's just as easy to revert to a previous version and fix it.
In that case, pick an Ubuntu LTS version (Long-term Support), which they will keep working for the next five years, even as they come out with a new version every six months. You will get only security patches, which you need, but you won't actually get a wholly new version of anything. That is, you might upgrade to Firefox 2.0.7 or something, but you won't upgrade to Firefox 3.0.
If it doesn't break anything, it's costing you no time. But if you're still convinced you don't want to upgrade, you don't have to. Linux is about choice.
(If you're worried about too much choice, just go install Ubuntu. If you're a total control freak, go build yourself a Linux From Scratch, or anything in between, but if you're new, just pretend those don't exist and use Ubuntu.)
I could say the same for you.
All OSes today suck in very big ways. They all lack things that should have been put in ten years ago or more. Among what we have, I find Linux is the best we've got, but really, that's not saying much.
And that's why I'm not a zealot. Just trying to be helpful here.
I use a rather large pile of unusual software, so that simply doesn't work on Windows. I go to Windows update, I click a few buttons, and Windows is updated. Then I have to update Office (it's Office 2000, not supported by Windows Update). Then I have to check for updates for all of my games. I have to coax Steam to update by actually trying to play the games that are out of date. I have to check driver sites manually. I have to tell my antivirus to update itself.
And so on, and so forth. Thank God I only boot Windows once a month for a LAN party, but that's a LOT of administrative bullshit for a system that only needs to play games!
(Yes, I know, not many games for Linux. Oh well, there are enough, and I can do all my real work on Linux and not have even more administrative bullshit from Windows.
That alone shows you're out of date. Automatix is completely depricated now.
Synaptic has handled dependencies for as long as I can remember, although I still don't use it, I still use the commandline.
Again, out of date. Watch this:
apt-get install nvidia-glx-new
Done. Or maybe you need nvidia-glx or nvidia-glx-old. Regardless, done, every nvidia card I've tried this on (probably 5 or 6 systems) has worked perfectly -- if you know what you're doing, you can restart your GUI, otherwise simply reboot.
Next, the most common unsupported network card is Broadcom, except now it's supported, you just need firmware:
apt-get install bc43xx-fwcutter
Now, I don't remember the exact command, but just run "bc43xx-fwcutter" and I think it'll tell you what to do. It may or may not need you to grab a driver off Windows -- I think the latest version can attempt to just automatically download and install a driver.
Again, there's a command to make this take effect immediately, or you can simply reboot. In this case, I believe the relevant commands are listed when you type "bc43xx-fwcutter".
That was maybe three steps, and everything's solved. Probably takes me less time than punching in the validation key on Windows.
There are still so many applications that are free, and many businesses don't need much more than that. The difference is still very significant between that and a Windows or OS X box, even with all of the various flavor-of-the-week auto-update systems bundled with the apps.
I'm not the GP here, but I can say that I've admined a sort of mixed environment -- Linux on the server, Windows on the desktop. The windows side was kept barely limping along, because they have so few needs -- in fact, many times I've tried to talk them into switching to Linux, using wine for the one or two applications we need.
Because we're not really willing to spend the money on a decent imaging system, or even recent versions of Windows for most of the people there.
On the Linux side, however, the servers I admin, I personally check on every now and then -- takes but a minute or two of my time, and I know all of them are updated and still doing what they're supposed to.
If a handful is defined as five, then I can pretty much guarantee it takes more. Yes, I have installed it.
Installation and updates, although recent versions of Office are integrated with Windows update.
It's simple: It comes out of the box on Ubuntu (and Kubuntu), and your system will bug you when it has a new version. Then: Two clicks to upgrade your entire system, including openoffice.
Yes. Windows Update only has Microsoft software in it. For example: Norton AntiVirus is going to have virus definitions come from Norton LiveUpdate. iTunes will get it from Apple's Software Update. Firefox will update itself. Gaim/Pidgin, as far as I know, won't auto-update at all, along with many, many other pieces of software -- Nero, I think?
Maybe apt-get (on the commandline) doesn't, but the Software Update utility will tell you (in detail) what each package is, and there's definitely a way to grab a changelog, though it escapes me at the moment.
But the upside? If this feature is lacking, and we add it, we only have to add it once, and all software on the entire system will suddenly gain that ability. The changelogs are already there in a standard format, so apt/dpkg/deb theoretically supports this, the frontends just aren't great about it.
I could call this the "once and for all" advantage.
True, but with over twenty thousand packages in Feisty, I so rarely have to install software compiled from source that it becomes irrelevant.
Also, for the few cases when I want to customize a package that's already there, I can download the source package and be confident that I've got all build dependencies, and that everything will work as expected.
And then there's Gentoo. There are lots of other things wrong with Gentoo, but it is extremely easy to create a source package on Gentoo. I've done it a couple of times.
Between Linux and OS X... There are actually less than a handful of programs I've had to compile from source on any given machine, usually closer to one or two. On my OS X laptop, it was more like ten or twenty -- not compiled from source, but simply downloaded, and without a coherent auto-update, that's a lot of programs to launch and check individually -- or run over to their website -- to try and find the latest version.
And yes, I've been an admin.
The fix for that is more painful than it should be -- involves a bit of mucking around with the grub commandline -- but if you fixed it with hard drive cables, you should be able to set your BIOS to boot from one hard drive before the other anyway. I don't remember the exact commands for that.
sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx-new
Try to understand two things here, though: First, Ubuntu is on a 6-month release cycle. So, if you have hardware newer than that, even assuming 0 development time, it's not going to be supported at all, even by the closed ones -- because you'd have to download them.
Second, there's all kinds of ways to mess with the install CD, the easiest of which being using the other install CD -- the "Alternate" one. You use that to install a base, commandline-only Linux. Then, for you, you probably just do:
sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx-new ubuntu-desktop
Substitute "ubuntu-desktop" for "kubuntu-desktop" if you like.
I believe the rest is automagic from there. You might have to enable a repository first.
The above steps shouldn't take you more than a few minutes of your time, maybe an hour of your computer's. The rest of the install might be problematic, as the Alternate install won't automatically repartition for you. But worst case, you could get Partition Magic... And trust me, installation is the worst problem you'll have.
I'd say, check the very next official release when it comes out -- probably Gusty, 7.10, next month in theory. Athough it still might not be supported, as I believe the install CD boots to an entirely proprietary-free mode. You may be able to force it to vesa/vga mode (no nv support at all) with boot options, but I don't remember what they are -- once you know, again, less than a minute of your time.
I'm not trying to argue that the situation is right or fair, I'm trying to help you out if you actually want to get this working.
Maybe I'm just more familiar with Ubuntu than with Fedora, but here:
Can't help you there. Maybe weird hardware, maybe an old kernel. What happens when your desktop loses network connectivity? Does everything still work then?
Way back when I was using Gentoo, there were no decent tools -- or none I was using -- to deal with battery status, so I had to write my own scripts.
But still, this kind of behavior is all userland, and probably a combination of config files and scripts that should be really easy to deal with. Should be... But that's just me.
But hey, solve it once and it's solved forever. I still have my old Gentoo /etc from that laptop, complete with things like remapping the power button to switch me to vt1 (that's ctrl+alt+f1).
On my system, I'd fire up aptitude, or apt frontend of choice, really, and wipe the bcom43xx kernel module. It would probably require a few big "let's depend on everything" packages that are used for upgrades, but that'd be it. And it never overwrites settings that I've touched myself without asking me.
But actually, the kernel module has always worked better for me, you just need to get the firmware. There's a separate program that you need to slice the firmware out, but once you do, it's got to be at least as easy as ndiswrapper -- it'll probably use the same Windows DLL. Bonus: Works flawlessly on PowerPC macs.
I admit, it's a hassle, and it really should be better. We could assign blame all day, point fingers at each other (and mostly at Broadcom), but it should be better.
But even with that cost, I still use Linux everywhere. I count problems like this as part of the cost of setting up a new system -- and it's a small part, compared to the amount of customizing I do.
For example, if you want to use Nero, you have to have not only a copy of Nero, but the specific copy that came with your drive, because it's licensed per-drive, not per-computer or per-user.
You could always download InfraRecorder, I guess, but I've seen other, similar things happen. It seems like there's always one or two like that, before they get absorbed into Windows proper (XP can burn CDs itself, though not as well).
Well, in this case, I'm sure the teacher was just doing it "by the book". I just wanted to use methods which hadn't been taught yet.
That, and I have a kneejerk reaction of trying to do best practices. "There's NO reason this data type needs to be int! Let me typecast to Object, or use Generics, or SOMETHING! *sigh* Ok, int it is, I want the grades..."
A bit like attempting to find asymptotes with spreadsheet programs and/or examining graphs from graphing calculators, and the kids who've had some extracurricular math are seething because once you know just a little calculus, it's retardedly easy to solve just by glancing at the equation.
I loved Firefly for that.
Mostly because I remember the argument was something about explosions "heightening dramatic tension" -- and hey, the starship going "whoosh" as it goes past probably makes it feel more dramatic and epic, or hearing the engines humming when the ship is viewed from a vacuum...
But I always thought it better to get as close as you can to reality, and build all of your art on top of that foundation.
And I love Firefly for proving that, so beautifully. There are all kinds of moments in space, with all kinds of moods -- humor, fun, tension, sadness... And it was done because we know this ship, we know these characters, and we care about what's really happening, not just what went "boom".
But it doesn't mean there's no sound happening when we look at space. There's the music... And the music is just beautiful.
My favorite scenes... can I even count them? First that comes to mind is in the pilot, having almost entirely visual cues and dialog from the radio helmets showing the robbery taking place. No hiss when they blow the hatch, but you see the air rush out. And then, that scene in which Jayne says "Let's moon them." Here, we have this Western theme music running, with a bit of a wry attitude to it, as the ship turns around, lights up its ass like a firefly, and launches away at high speed.
I sort of always seem to remember that scene as having the generic doppler effect sound of a Star Trek ship wooshing off into warp, but it doesn't. It creates most of the same experience, but without the sound effects.
And like all other forms of art, restriction forces creativity (necessity is the mother of invention)... Like Picasso's Blue Period, maybe. There's just something that feels right, not even consciously, about it being silent. It makes the few sounds that there are that much more powerful, too.
Serenity was a bit closer to the cliches, but still... so perfectly done, it's amazing. The sequence from the title screen -- after we're introduced to the operative -- is now one of my favorite scenes in any movie, for the sheer cinematic genius of it... How much we got to see without any cutting back and forth at all, going through the ship, being introduced to it and the crew, and then... just flowing right into the movie.
Your technobabble sounds exactly right for Trek.
It's exactly the kind of thing that they'd do. I've heard rumors that the scripts of Trek shows actually included TECHNO -- as in, you'd have a line that said, literally, "Well can't you [TECHNO] to get through their shields?" "We can't, because of [TECHNO]."
Then they'd get whoever their scientific eggheads were -- probably pseudoscientific marketers, but whatever -- to come up with some good sounding TECHNO to fill in the script.
Think about it...
"Space fleets of the future outfit their crews with [TECHNO]. These use [TECHNO] to produce the sounds, which, as everyone knows, does something good (insert more [TECHNO] here)."
You just described Geordi's Visor. (Or is that VISOR? Never can remember.)
There was an episode in which we got to see what it would look like.
I do a lot of pseudo-developing myself...
.NET, and Linux/Firefox/Mono people will be struggling to catch up.
But I'm at least consistant, and I think you've got a strawman here. Has anyone on Slashdot complained about anything going cross-platform?
It's not that we don't want silverlight to be cross-platform. It's that we're looking at it from every possible angle, trying to figure out why MS would be giving us something like this, because every time they've appeared to give us something in the past, it eventually led to us being screwed over.
It's that we're afraid that Linux and OS X will adopt it, we'll have Silverlight all over the place, maybe Silverlight on my cell phone powered by Mono... and then MS will move from the Embrace phase into Extend and Exterminate. They'll start adding features that aren't in the spec, people will start using them, and before long, you'll see half the Silverlight apps are only meant for Windows/IE with actual
They've done it before.
When someone kicks you in the balls enough, you get scared of them. It's only natural.
What, pray tell, is AJAX losing ground to?
.NET, Java, Python, Ruby, Lisp, whatever you want -- it's all on the server side, and none of it matters. As long as it speaks HTTP and delivers HTML or XML, browsers will talk to it, either with normal HTTP/HTML, or with that plus AJAX.
.NET, which is meant to be a generic runtime environment, so theoretically, you can actually write the parts that go in the browser in ANY sufficiently high-level language. Oh, and it'll have nice, Flash-like graphics, so we won't really need plugins anymore, except maybe the occasional PDF.
The only other contenders I see are Java, Flash, Silverlight, and native desktop apps.
The other things you listed are wholly irrelevant, being server-side technologies. Perl, PHP, Tomcat,
Which means I can easily move from Perl to PHP to Tomcat to Erlang to Brainfuck if I feel like it, all on the server side. I can even write parts of a site in one language and parts in another.
Silverlight is more dangerous, and also has more promise.
The promise is, it's built on
(More languages doesn't excite me as much because I'm learning to love JavaScript. It's Lisp, but it looks like C... But Silverlight will be much, much faster to execute. Javascript implementations are pathetically slow.)
I don't know much about the Windows filesystem API, but I know that the UNIX/POSIX API is not rich enough, by itself, to support the kind of filesystem I'd like to write -- or at least, the kind I think should be written. What I'd love to see is a solid transaction API on top of it, instead of all this laziness of calling sync or fsync whenever we need to make sure one thing hits the disk before another, or to implement a pseudo-transaction via tempfiles which can be "rolled back" by deleting said tempfiles.
An API like this would let us do things like... oh... atime updates on flash media, without destroying the media. Or actually delay full transactions, not even allocate the disk space, until memory pressure forces a write -- so people don't need tmpfs or ramdisks for temporary files anymore, as there's a good chance the file will never hit the disk.
But I've got a lot of ideas like this, and right now, I'm sticking to the ones that can get me work.
(A simple example: I think an entire OS could be created without... I think it's called memory segmentation. All programs, even untrusted ones, could share the same address space, technically, yet the system would be secure. If you're interested, we can go off on a tangent about that, but it's not relevant to this discussion, I think -- this discussion is about the security of existing real OSes.)
First, this part is optional for the vast majority of most setups, at least at boot.
And second, it's not a ramdisk anymore. It all revolves around tmpfs.
tmpfs is a virtual memory filesystm. Basically, it expands or contracts in the same way that your filesystem cache would -- it essentially is a filesystem cache, only without the filesystem -- whereas Linux ramdisks actually emulate a physical disk, to some extent, in that they're a fixed size, and need another filesystem on top of them, which is hugely inefficient.
The initrd (initial ramdisk) system -- like I said, optional -- has been replaced with initramfs, which takes an optionally gzipped CPIO archive (loaded in by the bootloader) and unpacks it into a tmpfs filesystem, and uses that as its root filesystem for the first few seconds (or milliseconds) of boot. After it's done with whatever has to happen there -- which includes things like scripts running to set up RAID and such, and maybe even networking if you want to run off a network -- it switches to the real root filesystem, and drops the ramfs.
This gives it much more flexibility than (I think) Windows has, because you can do almost anything in that initial ramfs environment before you access the root filesystem. A very simple example: You could put your kernel, bootloader, and initramfs image on a USB stick and boot from that, then take it out -- enter a passphrase, which is then used to gain access to the hard disk. The ENTIRE hard disk can then be encrypted, and they have to physically get a hold of your USB key and your password in order to crack it. Or, they would have to take your USB key, modify the files on it, and give it back to you without you noticing.
Another example is boot CDs -- you want to keep your boot CD image as small as possible, so the ENTIRE thing, except for the kernel and the bootloader, can be compressed. The kernel and the bootloader are, altogether, less than five megabytes, probably around one or two.
Unionfs is a sort of copy-on-write filesystem, that's used for the install, and for LiveCDs. I'm not sure Windows has anything like it.
Basically, Unionfs takes two filesystems -- one read-only (or it accesses it read-only), one read-write. You then mount those two as the third "union" filesystem. Any reads from that filesystem that aren't satisfied by the read-write filesystem are passed on to the read-only filesysetm.
On a boot CD, this means that any file you don't change is simply read off the CD, and need not consume RAM. However, any file you write to, or even delete, causes some data to be saved in the tmpfs (ram filesystem).
This means that if you have enough RAM, you can, quite literally, do anything to a running boot CD you can do to a live system, short of rebooting. Ubuntu Linux now installs from this environment, but you can, in fact, try it out before installing, or even while it's installing. If you're running low on RAM, you can create swap space -- in fact, if you're doing an install, it will start using swap space as soon as you create it, and I think it will also detect any swap that was already on your system and use that. This is somewhat equivalent to the pagefile on Windows.
A useful example: The livecd I tried most recently did not support wireless cards out of the box. So, when trying to use wireless on a powerbook, I could boot off the CD, plug it in physically, download and install the packages I needed (through the package manager, no less), and pull the firmware out of the OS X partition that was already there. Then I could unplug and walk around, and have wireless internet on a laptop -- AS ITS OS WAS INSTALLED.
Duh? Because its own people cost money.
Doing Mono this way means they can get all kinds of people from Mono to do the work for them, and then they can play the IP card and kill the project when they don't need it anymore. Right now, they need Silverlight to be cross-platform, so that people have no reason to choose it over Flash.
This is the Embrace period.
Once it becomes THE way to get web content, and YouTube runs on Silverlight, and Flash is dead -- then they can start adding features to the Windows version of Silverlight, and stop helping Mono.
That will be Extend.
Basically, get everyone preferring the MS platform, because they're seen as the innovator, because they're adding more features -- mainly because they can copy any feature from Mono, but not the other way around.
Then, they can play the patent card whenever they want -- hell, they may already have these patents -- and basically make the Mono version of Silverlight illegal. Linux people will hate it, and everyone else will go "C'est la vie" and just use Windows when they want to look at a Silverlight page, because who knows if it'll work right in the insanely-limited legal version of Mono.
That would be Extinguish.
The GPL cannot possibly do this, by the way. It's entirely possible to avoid using any GPL'd code, and no one can play the "GPL card" later.
What I really hope is that there's sufficient competition now for us to be able to force them to stay in "embrace" mode.
Look at the Web. Microsoft killed it around IE5 or IE6, with most websites "Viewed Best in Internet Explorer (at exactly such and such a resolution)", or "This site requires Internet Explorer 6." They'd basically killed Netscape, and were reaping the rewards.
And Netscape came back from the grave as Firefox, and forced them to wake up after years of pure stagnation and move back into "embrace" mode, with IE7.
I don't mind "embrace" mode. It's warm, it's fuzzy, and it involves Microsoft actually getting things done. By the time they move to extend, it's still ok for awhile, because we can keep pace with them -- that's what happened with XMLHttpRequest, I think. And if they try to extinguish, the worst that happens is, we fork entirely.
They've learned their lesson -- embrace more, so nobody can possibly cut you off with a more attractive platform. But we've learned ours -- make a platform that's attractive enough that even if you fork, you take some 5-10% of the market with you, which is still a few million people -- and make it a noisy enough few million that Microsoft's customers (not consumers, customers, businesses and developers and such) start embracing FOR microsoft, and demanding that MS play nice.
They've done it before. They've killed projects like this, or severely crippled them, probably intentionally, before.
However...
I'm not sure if there's significant chunks of the official Silverlight actually running on Mono. I was under the impression that it was actually a re-implementation. Which means that if MS really kills Silverlight, we can start shipping Mono plus Mono's own Silverlight with/for Firefox. It's kind of like Mono itself -- Mono, at this point, could be severely hurt by Microsoft's dominance, but not actually killed in its own right.
It's like Java. Microsoft killed Java with their JVM, but only as a potential platform of choice for Windows and the Web. We still have Sun's JVM, and we can still use it for portable apps, or just for enterprise apps on the server. I hate Java for everything but its portability, bytecode nature, and garbage collection (which is a lot to like, actually) -- but Java is living proof that the most Microsoft can do to an open source project, even one they embrace/extend/extinguish, is severely hurt it. They can't kill it.
HTML is another example. Microsoft has, in fact, set the Web back years. They did, in fact, try to kill Netscape. And Netscape has come back as Firefox to haunt them, and even that tiny amount of competition has forced them to move back to "embrace" mode.
Even if their intent is to extend/extinguish, I am really hopeful that we can always fork or force them to embrace.