I put a DVD into the drive, click 'Open Drive', wait about one minute for the scan to complete, click 'Make backup', Click 'Ok', Wait between 10 and 60 minutes for the drive door to open, replace the DVD with a DVD+R, close the door, wait about 20 minutes for the drive door to re-open, and then pull out a freshly minted backup.
It's pretty neat. Didn't require a man page, an apt get, or a kernal recompile.
I'm not going to argue your lone example regarding handwriting recognition (a rather narrow field).
Indeed, but if and when it does take off you can be sure of three things:
Microsoft will have had a large part in said upbringing.
The open source community will be working their asses off on one hand to replicate the functionality.
And on the other hand they'll be pointing out that MS didn't invent the technology and has once again made a bundle by stealing or buying someone elses idea.
Then they should use the backups, perhaps. If they're stupid enough not to have those on Windows are they going to suddenly become smart enough to get with the program when they install Linux?
They so know that if they were to open up the CLR of their.net Technology, and like, allow people to write their own CLR languages, their stock would plummet.
Um, people can write their own CLR languages. Quite a few have. Hell, they even let Borland play.
Ya know what's annoying? Having to type in a bunch of random crap at the end of a message because slashdot does now seem to like having a low number of characters per line.
Like how easy the migration from 95 to NT4 was? That was fun... That was fun... 3.1 to 95? That was loads of fun, too.
I can't speak on that. I was never quite dumb enough to install any of Microsofts DOS based windows shells. But NT4 to 2000 was pretty simple. 2000 to XP, also quite simple. Of course the article did mention that Munchen runs those operating systems, so they would have to go through that pain in some cases. Instead they'll go through the Linux install pain. And before you have the normal slashdot kneejerk reaction to that comment stop and ask yourself this question: Is installing any operating system fun?
Do us all a favor and leave your nationalist bigotry out of the discussion.
Good thing you missed the 'final solution' comment:P
I'm not sure if you know this, but most sales that involve a guy with a suit have a lot of play in the price. So yes, they can sell the same software to different parties at different prices. And you can bet your ass the number the salesman is shooting for is the maximum price the market (segment) is willing to pay without switching to a competetor. This is not some sleazy practice microsoft invented to screw the open source advocates, it's simply how sales are done.
If anything you should be encouraged that Linux actually FORCED Microsoft to do this. It shows that the monopoly is effectively broken and that you can point your attentions to something more important (and maybe even more productive) than knee jerk "M$" bashing.
I wonder how the cost of open-source can be so much higher than overpriced windows. I agree that they will save money over the long run, though.
Well, first off, I'm not sure if you know this but if I were to buy 14,000 licenses to Windows XP professional I'm not going to be paying that sticker price that scares you so much when you stroll past the endcap at best buy.
Also, an upgrade to an operating system is usually less painful than a new install. In general applications and settings will be maintained. The folks in Redmond do a decent job with this. So what you have now is 14,000 boxes which are probably a hodge-podge of every imaginable type of component you can think of. Well, that assumes they are anything like big american agencies. Who knows, maybe the zee germans are as systematic und otterly as they're potrayed and the boxes are all the same, but I doubt it. So every system gets some tender loving care. And even though the software was free the price of that TLC is not going to be. Since it's a new install there are applications to install. More TLC. Users who don't know how to use them YET and pay for that initially with less productivity and/or training costs. Applications will not exist for linux. The choice there comes down hiring coders (which is going to have to be done eventually, really, because I dont think you're going to have luck with finding out-of-the-box open source apps for a lot of the obscure verty apps they likely use) or using emulation. And retail for the electronic distro version of VMWare costs the exact same thing as (surprise surprise) windows XP. And when Heidi Schwanke, whose machine could barely keep up with the memory requirements of windows + her applications is now running linux, plus a virtual machine running linux she's going to be sunk. But she needs to run the final solution application NOW. But the programmers are not going to be finished with that for six months. Well, guess it's time to throw hardware at the problem. Oh, and since you're dealing with programmers on that six month think it really means 9 months and twice the estimated cost.
I would also have to think that the city could form a partnership with SuSe. It would be beneficial for the both of them. Maybe they could put up SuSe billboards throughout the city in exchange for discounted software.
Looky, I don't know how it works in the fatherland, but over here, haliburten excepted, governments are not encouraged (understatement, replace with "allowed by law") to partner up with companies. For purchases over a certain amount there is usually a bidding process to attempt to find the least expensive solution. Also, I'm curious as to why you're so keen to see windows eradicated. The only practical upshot I could see for you is that it would force microsoft to develop applications for linux. Other than that, what's it matter to you?
They also really need to do more studies like the one mentioned in the article. Since Linux can consistently undersell Microsoft, all they need to do is concentrate on studies.
I tend to think the studies could do them more harm than good. At first glance the kneejerk reaction to linux seems to be "holy shit, it's free! great!". But it's the studies that bring folks down to earth and inform them that although the software is free the support, service, and most importantly, TIME are not.
Once they improve ease-of-use and ease-of-learning issues and prove that is in fact is easy to use in the studies, Linux will be the OS of choice for the general public.
Ah, the things that programmers HATE to do, for the most part. Documentation. Polish. Also the thing that software companies hire hoards of folks to ensure that they ARE done. Testers, Technical writers, etc. When you write your next open source opus are YOU going to fund a usability conference? Nah, you'll release and wait for the people to complain about it. In addition to the complaints will be "cool f
No one because they're easy too busy trying to convince the world that the microsoft way is crap or working to re-implement it. And not doing much of a job at either.
By most of us you mean those of you who don't use a Mac.
How about this: "Most of us don't use a Mac".
iPhoto does all of that well, without mangling the filesystem.
Kudos to the iPhoto development team, but WinFS has very little to do with photos, it's a bit broader than that.
Other than photos/mp3's I am hard pressed to find an example that a good background indexing system with a fully featured 'contains text' search feature doesn't already handle.
Yes, but have you found a good background indexing system that doesn't bleed your CPU during inopportune times? And the point is that it will also index those mp3's and do as good a job on the photos as it can.
And to be honst I don't really want my filesystem to become fubared because they want to accomidate what should be handled in a userspace app for photos/mp3s.
I can somewhat understand that. But the first thing to keep in mind is that WinFS is not actually a replacement for NTFS. It sits above it acting as a relational dbms while the actual files live on the backing store. Of course I think for a lot of small bits (like contacts) the entire thing may very well live within WinFS.
Oh, and the applications that play and view photos are still (and will still be) userland apps. It's just that the OS vendor supplies them in this case, but there is going to be nothing at all to stop 3rd party applications from taking advantage of the existing schema for certain media types. In fact the version of visual studio that will ship with longhorn will be able to read an existing schema and generate a set of classes for easily accessing said schema. If I come up with a great schema for organzing widgits another developer can come along and generate code that can be used to easily access and manipulate my data in a relational manner. I can't wait until things like the contact manager, calander, and email bits of outlook are under the system.
My mother is an idiot. She can't ever seem to group like media together in the same directory and doesn't really understand the whole heirarchal directory tree thing. Her scripting skills are also sub-par and I don't think she's going to be whipping up file re-naming utilities any time in this incarnation.
I seem to think she, in the world, could benifit from something like this. Of course your retort will probably be agreement that she's an idiot and encouragement for her to educate herself better to rise above the ranks of mass-market end user lowest common denominator mickysoft dumbfuckoid. And I'll even pass it along to her the next time she has me try to find some photo of my daughter that she has hopelessly buried in a 20 directory deep quagmire. She'll roll her eyes and disregard the comment.
But hey, no one needs this M$ bullshit that they probably jobs stole out of Steve Jobs garbage can, anyway. Keep telling yourself that and (not) acting on it and maybe 2005 (and 2006 and 2007 and...) can also be the year of "Linux on the Desktop."
Everyone is quite fixated on photos. Probably because the guy used that as an example, but the plan for WinFS is to index everything. Photos were probably the worse example the guy could have used as they are the one case where the user would have to manually enter a load of data. Other items like music (ID3 tags), word processing documents, spreadsheets, databases, contact lists, appointments, etc will likely add their own metadata based on content and be easily searchable with a unified tool. That will be nice.
Oh, and even when it comes to the photo's there still may be some use. Doing something as simple as entering a description for an entire batch of downloaded pictures could be helpful.
"Day at the beach with Mary and Spot"
"New York City With Mary"
"Spot's first day home from the puppy farm"
"New York City for widgit presentation"
You could then do broad searches for pictures of Mary, Spot, and New York, coming up with images from multiple 'directories'. Still not a killer application, but more useful than what most of us probably have in place now.
Apparently you have no idea what backwards compatibility is.
Apparently you have no reading comprehension. My point was that you don't need backwards compatibility if you still have a playstation 1 hooked up to the television. Make sense? If an application written with version 1.0 the framework does not work with version 1.1 you can run it against the 1.0 framework. It's not backward compatibility, it's side-by-side execution. With that said, I have never had a problem running a 1.0 application under the 1.1 framework, so not really sure if the original poster was talking out of his ass.
You were probably running a virtual machine that was too old for one of the two apps. Java is 100% backwards compatible. Not so much so the other way.
Dunno, seems like one of them would not run on a newer implementation of the runtime. Perhaps it was just a buggy implementation.
name a SDK that works without Visual Studio besides.NET that is both supported and available for free download?
Um, the platform SDK, which pretty much has everything?
Should we classify this as 'False Anology' or 'Appeal to Emotion'? I never was good at the taxonomy of logical fallacies, but I can smell shit from a fair distance.
If you give someone a app written in 1.0 to someone with a 1.1 runtime you run into the issue of it not running due to changes from 1.0 to 1.1. Backwards compatibility means that you would still be able to run the 1.0 compiled app on a 1.1 runtime.
No shit. The point is that when you can run the app in any sandbox you want it doesn't make a whole lot of difference.
.NET is not 100% backwards compatible. Java is.
Hrm, I seem to remember having quite a few problems getting Tomcat and Forte both running with the same VM back when I had the misfortune of working with Java.
They have done this in the past with other products and its perfectly within thier domain to do so. You have to understand that Microsoft is a company that makes money selling products. Visual Studio is a product. If SharpDevelop cuts into their profits they WILL kill it with this approach. They did not get where they are today by always playing nice.
Ok, what SDK being used by 10's of thousands of people have MS stopped offering for download replaced with a product that leaves a developer no recourse other than to send them money?
And they DID get where they are by playing nice with developers.
And you are not addressing that the next version of.NET will make 1.1 incompatible. They will also require you purchase a new copy of Visual Studio.
Again, side by side execution will work *IF* the newer version breaks the old one. In addition, how is one forced to purchase the lastest visual studio when both the 1.0 and 1.1 (and 1.x) compilers are free (as in don't cost money)? Quite a few people are using an open source IDE with the free compiler. And it would not really surprise me if we were to see the open source compiler able to take advantage of the mono compiler at some point in time (if it does not already).
The.Net 1.1 runtime is not backwards compatible (it won't properly run all.Net 1.0 apps), even though it was only a minor version increment. They also changed many interfaces, so you couldn't always recompile on 1.1 without code changes.
They don't have to be backward compatible. Period. Side by side deployment of the 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2 framework just "works" and if a program it targetted at a specific version of the framework that's what it will use. If you can be bothered go do a little research on how "DLL Hell" was addressed with the.net framework.
In a nutshell the 1.1 framework should not even be running 1.0 apps. They should be running on 1.0, and there is no magic you have to do to have application A use one version of the framework and applications A, B, and C use another.
Plus WinForms is already being dropped in the near future. Anything you develop today with a GUI in.Net will be considered legacy very soon. All new development is supposed to switch to a whole new API (Avalon?). Java did something similar with AWT and Swing, but they still support both. Microsoft's marking the WinForms API deprecated within a couple of years (by the time Longhorn's released).
In another thread talking about the threat of longhorn I'm quite sure you'd be calling it vapor and mentioning how it wont see the light of day for at least another half decade. BUT REGARDLESS, the applications you develop today are still going to work right next to the XAML apps that will be created. It's simply not an issue as different versions of the framework will continue to work side by side.
Your post really borders on FUD making it sound like the code you write today simply wont execute tommorow, and really that's just not the case.
No one. All we really need is air, food, and water. But there are a lot of reasons to WANT these things.
I have a whiz-bang phone and about the best thing about it has to be the outlook integration. Contact list, Task list, Calander, and Inbox. I used all of these items extensively on the desktop so it's nice to always have access to this information when on the road. Appointment reminders, birthday notifications, task reminders. When I meet folks I don't have to resort to writing information down on scraps of paper and losing them. Nor do I have to go home and enter the information into a second location. I plug the phone into the cradle and there ya go. When I get an email with directions to a client site I don't have to bother with printing it out. I can just browse my inbox from the phone or add a contact. Using the mapping software I have installed on my phone is also helpful when the directions are not. I find a lot of other uses. Notetaking during calls is big for me. They dont get taken on scraps of paper and eaten by the washer machine, they end up on my PC, where they have a chance to be useful. Also handy for airport parking. Nothing like getting back after a week and looking over the sea of cars and wondering where the scrap of paper you wrote the location on has run off to. A PDA does a good deal of this, but the problem is why carry both? More often than not when I was doing the PDA/Cell combo I'd forget the PDA at home.
Most people don't have to. If you company has a copy of it running on your work machine you're actually allowed to run a copy on your home machine, legally.
And if your company does not have office MS Word can be had for as little as 49 bucks (OEM Works Suite 2003 includes Word XP)
I just don't want to be part of that cossy word in which choice is completely taken away from the consumer.
Neither do I, and if anything in the operating system impeded the installation of 3rd party utilities then said operating system would find its way off of my hard drive.
If your freedom of choice as a costumer is valued in as much as a little inconveninece to run an installation program, then your freedom has no value at all.
I'm not terribly sure how you equate my appreciation of the bundling of 3rd party applications as an infringement upon my choice as a consumer. It did not limit my choice of browsers. Given the choice of the pre-installed software and software that actually meets my need I will not only install but PAY for replacement software. I did just that in the case of Opera.
When it comes to applications or utilities where my needs are more modest I'm generally not willing to pay. Some good examples are media playing and word processing. I used the bundled applications. Sure, you could attempt to make the point that this somehowe cuts the revenues of the makers of media players and word processing software, but in their absence as bundled products only two things would happen: I'd download a competent free product and be irritated that basic crap like that didn't come out of the box and think about an alternate OS.
One that DID come with those things.
And I'm willing to bet that since my option at that point would likely be a free operating system (whose initials are Linux) that you'd have no problem at all with it. Even though it also could be claimed to cut the revenues of software companies.
Slashdot Mirror
I put a DVD into the drive, click 'Open Drive', wait about one minute for the scan to complete, click 'Make backup', Click 'Ok', Wait between 10 and 60 minutes for the drive door to open, replace the DVD with a DVD+R, close the door, wait about 20 minutes for the drive door to re-open, and then pull out a freshly minted backup.
It's pretty neat. Didn't require a man page, an apt get, or a kernal recompile.
Of course I could certainly have visited this site Some directions I found on bunring DVDs under Linux.
Indeed, but if and when it does take off you can be sure of three things:
Whoops, I was having an MS Zealot knee jerk moment.
Then they should use the backups, perhaps. If they're stupid enough not to have those on Windows are they going to suddenly become smart enough to get with the program when they install Linux?
They so know that if they were to open up the CLR of their .net Technology, and like, allow people to write their own CLR languages, their stock would plummet.
Um, people can write their own CLR languages. Quite a few have. Hell, they even let Borland play.
Perl
Python
FORTRA
More FORTRAN
SmallTalk alike (SmallScript)
Mondrian
Pascal
Scheme
Mercury
Eiffel
Oberon
Cobol
Ya know what's annoying? Having to type in a bunch of random crap at the end of a message because slashdot does now seem to like having a low number of characters per line.
Like how easy the migration from 95 to NT4 was? That was fun... That was fun... 3.1 to 95? That was loads of fun, too.
:P
I can't speak on that. I was never quite dumb enough to install any of Microsofts DOS based windows shells. But NT4 to 2000 was pretty simple. 2000 to XP, also quite simple. Of course the article did mention that Munchen runs those operating systems, so they would have to go through that pain in some cases. Instead they'll go through the Linux install pain. And before you have the normal slashdot kneejerk reaction to that comment stop and ask yourself this question: Is installing any operating system fun?
Do us all a favor and leave your nationalist bigotry out of the discussion.
Good thing you missed the 'final solution' comment
Microsoft, once it discovered it was being undercut by a more efficient producer, deliberately dumped goods below marginal cost into a market.
Are you somehow privy to Microsoft's actual cost for the product to be able to state as plain fact that they were "dumping below marginal cost"?
I'm not sure if you know this, but most sales that involve a guy with a suit have a lot of play in the price. So yes, they can sell the same software to different parties at different prices. And you can bet your ass the number the salesman is shooting for is the maximum price the market (segment) is willing to pay without switching to a competetor. This is not some sleazy practice microsoft invented to screw the open source advocates, it's simply how sales are done.
If anything you should be encouraged that Linux actually FORCED Microsoft to do this. It shows that the monopoly is effectively broken and that you can point your attentions to something more important (and maybe even more productive) than knee jerk "M$" bashing.
I wonder how the cost of open-source can be so much higher than overpriced windows. I agree that they will save money over the long run, though.
Well, first off, I'm not sure if you know this but if I were to buy 14,000 licenses to Windows XP professional I'm not going to be paying that sticker price that scares you so much when you stroll past the endcap at best buy.
Also, an upgrade to an operating system is usually less painful than a new install. In general applications and settings will be maintained. The folks in Redmond do a decent job with this. So what you have now is 14,000 boxes which are probably a hodge-podge of every imaginable type of component you can think of. Well, that assumes they are anything like big american agencies. Who knows, maybe the zee germans are as systematic und otterly as they're potrayed and the boxes are all the same, but I doubt it. So every system gets some tender loving care. And even though the software was free the price of that TLC is not going to be. Since it's a new install there are applications to install. More TLC. Users who don't know how to use them YET and pay for that initially with less productivity and/or training costs. Applications will not exist for linux. The choice there comes down hiring coders (which is going to have to be done eventually, really, because I dont think you're going to have luck with finding out-of-the-box open source apps for a lot of the obscure verty apps they likely use) or using emulation. And retail for the electronic distro version of VMWare costs the exact same thing as (surprise surprise) windows XP. And when Heidi Schwanke, whose machine could barely keep up with the memory requirements of windows + her applications is now running linux, plus a virtual machine running linux she's going to be sunk. But she needs to run the final solution application NOW. But the programmers are not going to be finished with that for six months. Well, guess it's time to throw hardware at the problem. Oh, and since you're dealing with programmers on that six month think it really means 9 months and twice the estimated cost.
I would also have to think that the city could form a partnership with SuSe. It would be beneficial for the both of them. Maybe they could put up SuSe billboards throughout the city in exchange for discounted software.
Looky, I don't know how it works in the fatherland, but over here, haliburten excepted, governments are not encouraged (understatement, replace with "allowed by law") to partner up with companies. For purchases over a certain amount there is usually a bidding process to attempt to find the least expensive solution. Also, I'm curious as to why you're so keen to see windows eradicated. The only practical upshot I could see for you is that it would force microsoft to develop applications for linux. Other than that, what's it matter to you?
They also really need to do more studies like the one mentioned in the article. Since Linux can consistently undersell Microsoft, all they need to do is concentrate on studies.
I tend to think the studies could do them more harm than good. At first glance the kneejerk reaction to linux seems to be "holy shit, it's free! great!". But it's the studies that bring folks down to earth and inform them that although the software is free the support, service, and most importantly, TIME are not.
Once they improve ease-of-use and ease-of-learning issues and prove that is in fact is easy to use in the studies, Linux will be the OS of choice for the general public.
Ah, the things that programmers HATE to do, for the most part. Documentation. Polish. Also the thing that software companies hire hoards of folks to ensure that they ARE done. Testers, Technical writers, etc. When you write your next open source opus are YOU going to fund a usability conference? Nah, you'll release and wait for the people to complain about it. In addition to the complaints will be "cool f
No one because they're easy too busy trying to convince the world that the microsoft way is crap or working to re-implement it. And not doing much of a job at either.
By most of us you mean those of you who don't use a Mac.
How about this: "Most of us don't use a Mac".
iPhoto does all of that well, without mangling the filesystem.
Kudos to the iPhoto development team, but WinFS has very little to do with photos, it's a bit broader than that.
Other than photos/mp3's I am hard pressed to find an example that a good background indexing system with a fully featured 'contains text' search feature doesn't already handle.
Yes, but have you found a good background indexing system that doesn't bleed your CPU during inopportune times? And the point is that it will also index those mp3's and do as good a job on the photos as it can.
And to be honst I don't really want my filesystem to become fubared because they want to accomidate what should be handled in a userspace app for photos/mp3s.
I can somewhat understand that. But the first thing to keep in mind is that WinFS is not actually a replacement for NTFS. It sits above it acting as a relational dbms while the actual files live on the backing store. Of course I think for a lot of small bits (like contacts) the entire thing may very well live within WinFS. Oh, and the applications that play and view photos are still (and will still be) userland apps. It's just that the OS vendor supplies them in this case, but there is going to be nothing at all to stop 3rd party applications from taking advantage of the existing schema for certain media types. In fact the version of visual studio that will ship with longhorn will be able to read an existing schema and generate a set of classes for easily accessing said schema. If I come up with a great schema for organzing widgits another developer can come along and generate code that can be used to easily access and manipulate my data in a relational manner. I can't wait until things like the contact manager, calander, and email bits of outlook are under the system.
My mother is an idiot. She can't ever seem to group like media together in the same directory and doesn't really understand the whole heirarchal directory tree thing. Her scripting skills are also sub-par and I don't think she's going to be whipping up file re-naming utilities any time in this incarnation.
...) can also be the year of "Linux on the Desktop."
I seem to think she, in the world, could benifit from something like this. Of course your retort will probably be agreement that she's an idiot and encouragement for her to educate herself better to rise above the ranks of mass-market end user lowest common denominator mickysoft dumbfuckoid. And I'll even pass it along to her the next time she has me try to find some photo of my daughter that she has hopelessly buried in a 20 directory deep quagmire. She'll roll her eyes and disregard the comment.
But hey, no one needs this M$ bullshit that they probably jobs stole out of Steve Jobs garbage can, anyway. Keep telling yourself that and (not) acting on it and maybe 2005 (and 2006 and 2007 and
Everyone is quite fixated on photos. Probably because the guy used that as an example, but the plan for WinFS is to index everything. Photos were probably the worse example the guy could have used as they are the one case where the user would have to manually enter a load of data. Other items like music (ID3 tags), word processing documents, spreadsheets, databases, contact lists, appointments, etc will likely add their own metadata based on content and be easily searchable with a unified tool. That will be nice.
Oh, and even when it comes to the photo's there still may be some use. Doing something as simple as entering a description for an entire batch of downloaded pictures could be helpful.
"Day at the beach with Mary and Spot"
"New York City With Mary"
"Spot's first day home from the puppy farm"
"New York City for widgit presentation"
You could then do broad searches for pictures of Mary, Spot, and New York, coming up with images from multiple 'directories'. Still not a killer application, but more useful than what most of us probably have in place now.
Apparently you have no idea what backwards compatibility is.
.NET that is both supported and available for free download?
Apparently you have no reading comprehension. My point was that you don't need backwards compatibility if you still have a playstation 1 hooked up to the television. Make sense? If an application written with version 1.0 the framework does not work with version 1.1 you can run it against the 1.0 framework. It's not backward compatibility, it's side-by-side execution. With that said, I have never had a problem running a 1.0 application under the 1.1 framework, so not really sure if the original poster was talking out of his ass.
You were probably running a virtual machine that was too old for one of the two apps. Java is 100% backwards compatible. Not so much so the other way.
Dunno, seems like one of them would not run on a newer implementation of the runtime. Perhaps it was just a buggy implementation. name a SDK that works without Visual Studio besides
Um, the platform SDK, which pretty much has everything?
It's not a false analogy, just an extreme comparison.
No, it's still a false analogy. You spend a lot more copy building up the appeal to emotion this time, though.
Bzzzt. Still availible and programs written with it will still run. They discontinued development, that's all.
Should we classify this as 'False Anology' or 'Appeal to Emotion'? I never was good at the taxonomy of logical fallacies, but I can smell shit from a fair distance.
If you give someone a app written in 1.0 to someone with a 1.1 runtime you run into the issue of it not running due to changes from 1.0 to 1.1. Backwards compatibility means that you would still be able to run the 1.0 compiled app on a 1.1 runtime.
.NET is not 100% backwards compatible. Java is.
No shit. The point is that when you can run the app in any sandbox you want it doesn't make a whole lot of difference.
Hrm, I seem to remember having quite a few problems getting Tomcat and Forte both running with the same VM back when I had the misfortune of working with Java.
They have done this in the past with other products and its perfectly within thier domain to do so. You have to understand that Microsoft is a company that makes money selling products. Visual Studio is a product. If SharpDevelop cuts into their profits they WILL kill it with this approach. They did not get where they are today by always playing nice.
Ok, what SDK being used by 10's of thousands of people have MS stopped offering for download replaced with a product that leaves a developer no recourse other than to send them money?
And they DID get where they are by playing nice with developers.
And you are not addressing that the next version of .NET will make 1.1 incompatible. They will also require you purchase a new copy of Visual Studio.
Again, side by side execution will work *IF* the newer version breaks the old one. In addition, how is one forced to purchase the lastest visual studio when both the 1.0 and 1.1 (and 1.x) compilers are free (as in don't cost money)? Quite a few people are using an open source IDE with the free compiler. And it would not really surprise me if we were to see the open source compiler able to take advantage of the mono compiler at some point in time (if it does not already).
The .Net 1.1 runtime is not backwards compatible (it won't properly run all .Net 1.0 apps), even though it was only a minor version increment. They also changed many interfaces, so you couldn't always recompile on 1.1 without code changes.
.net framework.
.Net will be considered legacy very soon. All new development is supposed to switch to a whole new API (Avalon?). Java did something similar with AWT and Swing, but they still support both. Microsoft's marking the WinForms API deprecated within a couple of years (by the time Longhorn's released).
They don't have to be backward compatible. Period. Side by side deployment of the 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2 framework just "works" and if a program it targetted at a specific version of the framework that's what it will use. If you can be bothered go do a little research on how "DLL Hell" was addressed with the
In a nutshell the 1.1 framework should not even be running 1.0 apps. They should be running on 1.0, and there is no magic you have to do to have application A use one version of the framework and applications A, B, and C use another.
Plus WinForms is already being dropped in the near future. Anything you develop today with a GUI in
In another thread talking about the threat of longhorn I'm quite sure you'd be calling it vapor and mentioning how it wont see the light of day for at least another half decade. BUT REGARDLESS, the applications you develop today are still going to work right next to the XAML apps that will be created. It's simply not an issue as different versions of the framework will continue to work side by side.
Your post really borders on FUD making it sound like the code you write today simply wont execute tommorow, and really that's just not the case.
Who needs all that nonsense?
No one. All we really need is air, food, and water. But there are a lot of reasons to WANT these things.
I have a whiz-bang phone and about the best thing about it has to be the outlook integration. Contact list, Task list, Calander, and Inbox. I used all of these items extensively on the desktop so it's nice to always have access to this information when on the road. Appointment reminders, birthday notifications, task reminders. When I meet folks I don't have to resort to writing information down on scraps of paper and losing them. Nor do I have to go home and enter the information into a second location. I plug the phone into the cradle and there ya go. When I get an email with directions to a client site I don't have to bother with printing it out. I can just browse my inbox from the phone or add a contact. Using the mapping software I have installed on my phone is also helpful when the directions are not. I find a lot of other uses. Notetaking during calls is big for me. They dont get taken on scraps of paper and eaten by the washer machine, they end up on my PC, where they have a chance to be useful. Also handy for airport parking. Nothing like getting back after a week and looking over the sea of cars and wondering where the scrap of paper you wrote the location on has run off to. A PDA does a good deal of this, but the problem is why carry both? More often than not when I was doing the PDA/Cell combo I'd forget the PDA at home.
And that windows version?
Most people don't have to. If you company has a copy of it running on your work machine you're actually allowed to run a copy on your home machine, legally.
And if your company does not have office MS Word can be had for as little as 49 bucks (OEM Works Suite 2003 includes Word XP)
Scandisk? Fat drive? Eish, and what version of windows are you using?
I just don't want to be part of that cossy word in which choice is completely taken away from the consumer.
Neither do I, and if anything in the operating system impeded the installation of 3rd party utilities then said operating system would find its way off of my hard drive.
If your freedom of choice as a costumer is valued in as much as a little inconveninece to run an installation program, then your freedom has no value at all.
I'm not terribly sure how you equate my appreciation of the bundling of 3rd party applications as an infringement upon my choice as a consumer. It did not limit my choice of browsers. Given the choice of the pre-installed software and software that actually meets my need I will not only install but PAY for replacement software. I did just that in the case of Opera.
When it comes to applications or utilities where my needs are more modest I'm generally not willing to pay. Some good examples are media playing and word processing. I used the bundled applications. Sure, you could attempt to make the point that this somehowe cuts the revenues of the makers of media players and word processing software, but in their absence as bundled products only two things would happen: I'd download a competent free product and be irritated that basic crap like that didn't come out of the box and think about an alternate OS.
One that DID come with those things.
And I'm willing to bet that since my option at that point would likely be a free operating system (whose initials are Linux) that you'd have no problem at all with it. Even though it also could be claimed to cut the revenues of software companies.