If ReactOS is almost a Windows clone, but a sub-par one, this begs the question of why do we need ReactOS anyway? Well, to find the answer I went straight to the source reactos.org, but apparently they haven't figured out the answer yet either.
Honestly, can anyone tell me what advantages that ReactOS has over something like Linux+Wine? I've heard several reasons before, but they don't seem to stand up to an honest analysis, such as:
Application Compatibility - Wine can never offer as much compatibility as ReactOS. Since ReactOS actually shares Wine's code base, it is highly unlikely that ReactOS will have significantly better compatibility than Wine.
Speed - Wine, since it is an emulator, can never be as fast as ReactOS, a dedicated OS. This is usually advanced without any sort of benchmarks or other proof to back it up. First, Wine Is Not an Emulator, it is just an implementation of the win32 api. There is no technical reason why Wine couldn't be as fast as other "native" Linux APIs, such as QT or Gtk+. Furthermore, there have long been reports of Windows programs running faster on Wine than native Windows.
Driver Compatibility - ReactOS can use native Windows drivers. Projects like NdisWrapper have shown that it is possible to use Windows drivers on Linux too, if enough people are interested. Of course, Linux already has drivers available for a great deal of hardware. There is also the huge issue of using binary drivers in an open source kernel. It still hasn't been settled whether or not this is ultimately a good or bad thing. However, it is generally accepted that open source drivers are much better than binary, and ReactOS would provide absolutely no motivation for hardware vendors to ever open their drivers, or even to target ReactOS as a platform.
User Interface Familiarity - Windows users would feel right at home, with virtually no learning curve. This ignores the fact that anyone who has been through Win 3.1 -> Win 9x -> Win XP -> Vista will know that Window's interface is anything but consistent, things move around and change quite a bit between major releases. Also, if one desired you could rework something like KDE to be VERY similar to Windows, I believe that there are already distro's who try to do this (such as Linspire). There are still differences, but not really significantly more than between Win 98 & XP.
Don't get me wrong, I think ReactOS is a pretty cool project, and it would be kind of neat to have an open source Windows clone, however as I said I can't really find much practical reason for it beyond the coolness factor. It seems like one would be better off just integrating Wine into Linux better. Please feel free to enlighten me.;)
Where I need transparency, I simply must use GIF, which limits the ways in which I can use it. This is because IE6 (still by far the most popular browser) doesn't properly display transparent PNGs.
I thought that IE6 displayed PNG binary transparency just fine, it is only PNG alpha transparency that IE6 has a problem with. Since GIF only does binary transparency, I have not idea why you'd want to use GIF over PNG for any case other than animation (which PNG does not support). Perhaps you can enlighten me?
Thought I'd challenge a few of your points about why you'd choose ReactOS over Linux+Wine.
Drivers. How well does WINE load that WinXP dll/ocx driver for your WiFi card? Display driver? etc.
Wine doesn't load your Windows drivers, but maybe Linux can. Have you heard of projects like NdisWrapper? Of course, running binary drivers in ReactOS will also have the same issues as running binary drivers in Linux, see the continuing debate on this topic.
Performance. Compatibility layer on top of another OS is never going to be as fast.
Do you have any proof of this? Just saying it doesn't make it so. There have long been reports of programs running faster in Wine than on actual Windows. My understanding is that Wine is just an API, such as QT or GTK, and there's really no technical reason that it should perform slower than other APIs.
Interface. Everything is in the same place. If you know how to use Windows, running apps, and changing settings in ReactOS is very, very similar. No matter how similar KDE may look to Windows, it doesn't work anything like it.
An some would say that that's a good thing! However, this is a valid point, although it is useful to point out that MS changes the interface between major versions of Windows. Just because you know how XP works doesn't mean that you won't be lost on Vista.
Filesystems. Most systems may have FAT32 compatibility, but if you start using it for heavy tasks, the limitations and incompatibilities really come to the surface.
I have no idea what you are saying here, Linux has far broader filesystem support than ReactOS. Currently ReactOS only supports FAT32, while Linux can run NTFS with read/write support (check out NTFS-3G.
Ever been stopped on the way out the door at Costco? You're basically proving to the door lackey that you're not stealing anything. Since when is proving you didn't steal anything between the check stand and the door become part of the game?
When you signed your membership agreement specifically allowing them to do that. You're right about stores like Wal-Mart and Fry's which don't require a membership, but Costco was a bad example.
wouldn't it be easier to simply send along some tapes of a type appropriate to the format/type that the scientific institution uses?
There are basically two reasons one would choose to use HDDs over tapes: compatibility and price.
Compatibility: Sure, one scientific institution may have standardized on a specific type of tape, but what about all the rest? Pretty much everyone in the world can read a standard HDD formated with a well known filesystem.
Price: what is the cost of HDDs vs. tapes per gigabyte? What is the cost of the hardware to read them? What are the actual differences in shipping costs between the two?
susceptible to data loss when it gets bounced too hard by FedEx/UPS/DHL/Whatever.
Hard drives are shipped all the time, how do you think they get to stores in the first place? Besides, if the price difference is great enough, and damage is infrequent, perhaps you can afford to re-send damaged HDDs when necessary, and still come out ahead of tape.
wouldn't require some poor IT schmuck to disassemble a server or wait forver for USB to transfer all of it
They have removable trays for disks. Or you could use something external like firewire. Or you could do what has been suggested elsewhere, and just ship a standard configuration of PC loaded with drives, so that you just have to plug it into your network to get at the data.
We have been sending two DVDs, with about 6-8 GB data, around every month for updates. Now we are trying rsync, which in our view has been more convenient.
The article and the GP is about sending large amounts of data, as in terabytes. In this discussion, 8 GB is tiny, and is easily downloaded much faster than even express mail. Besides, rsync won't really help if all your data is unique (such as astronomical data). Rsync really helps when very little of your data set changes between updates, such as backups.
Because in order to play it on your computer, you must make a copy, whereas the library lends you the copy, depriving them of their sole copy, and they lose if you do not return it.
If I borrow a CD or DVD from the library and play it on my computer, I am also making a copy on my computer.
The theory, that I've heard, is that if you don't have a license from the software publisher then it would be copyright violation to load the software onto a hard drive or into a computer's memory.
No. In the US copying a computer program to your computer for the purposes of running it is explicitly allowed by copyright law, as is the right to make backups. See Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 117.
(a) Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy.-- Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:
(1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or
(2) that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful.
Ex: ATi and nVidia cannot open source their drivers because of legal issues with patents and trademarks held by [if I remember correctly] SGI and possibly several others, whose technologies allow the drivers to work.
Just thought I'd point out that patents don't necessarily prevent open source implementations, this depends entirely on the way the patent is licensed (and the license which ATi & nVidia acquired the patent rights may very well prevent open source implementations). Heck, the whole point of a patent is that you're supposed to tell the whole world exactly how you did it, and how they could duplicate it (once the patent terms expire), this can be compatible with open source licenses. I have no idea how trademarks supposedly affect open-sourcing code. If their drivers contain code copyrighted by others, then this could be a problem, however copyrights are relatively easy to get around by rewriting those specific parts. However, trade secrets are probably the aspect of intellectual property law that most applies here, there are likely clever bits in the drivers which aren't patented, and which the respective companies don't want to disclose.
This is actually insightful, IMO, for most of the country (outside of ca) incandescent lights are probably a wash six months of the year due to heating.
It's not insightful, it's silly (I think the GP was going for the funny mod). Electrical resistance heating is about the worst you can do for efficiency. Even in the winter, you would be far better off using lower energy bulbs and letting your furnace or heat pump heat your building. Making matters even worse, lightbulbs usually aren't placed correctly for heating purposes (who wants to heat their ceiling?).
Ironically, it's that loose control over the PC that's allowed it to gain the nasty reputation for the Wild West that is has now and that Apple capitalizes on with its newer commercials.
(not that we've made heat-seeking missiles in ages)
AIM-9s and later versions are still in production and active use. I know that there are other infrared tracking missiles, but that was the first one that came to mind.
"What sort of works:
iTunes 4 will install and run, but you are prohibited by Apple from using it with the iTunes store, which severely constrains its usefulness. We hope to support a newer version of iTunes in a future release of CrossOver."
how do they handle data transfer from one program to the other?
In a word: badly. The two primary formats for data exchange are STEP and IGES, and they both suck pretty hard. They usually only import the solid or drawing primitives, and none of the parametric data or such that was used to define/create the solids in the first place. You lose tons of information, and if you ever want to modify the 3D models in the new program you will pretty much have to recreate them from scratch.
Actually, it is not that obvious until your first experience of a catastrophic cup collapse
It's not obvious to you that the cups are pretty flimsy, and you ought to be pretty careful when handling them? Anyway, I'm not sure what your basing the "catastrophic cup collapse" on, according to the Wikipedia description of the case "She placed the coffee cup between her knees and pulled the far side of the lid toward her to remove it. In the process, she spilled the entire cup of coffee on her lap." No mention of a "catastrophic cup collapse," just someone being not particularly bright.
They are, however, much more rigid that a styrofoam cup filled with very hot liquid, and they do not dramatically become less rigid when the contents are hot, so the customer is less likely to get an unpleasant and scalding surprise.
Again, according to the case description the cup strength didn't seem to have much to do with the accident. It's likely that the result would have been the same if the cup was made out of cardboard.
And I don't think anybody suggested that the woman in question was sitting in a hot puddle for 90 seconds
Actually, the case descriptions say this very thing. From Wikipedia and the Overlawyered link: "Liebeck was wearing cotton sweatpants; they absorbed the coffee and held it against her skin as she sat in the puddle of hot liquid for over 90 seconds, scalding her."
As I understand it, however, the hot liquid soaked into her clothes and undergarments.
Yes, as the link says, she was wearing cotton sweat pants, which absorb and hold liquid very well. This is unfortunate, but it is hardly McDonald's fault.
So how fast can you strip off all of your clothes, starting out belted in an automobile?
Sitting in the passenger seat of a parked car? I haven't timed myself, but I'm sure it'd be way faster than a full minute and a half!
The cup is stabilized by the rigid lid, and is fine as long as the lid is firmly in place, but it has a tendency to suddenly collapse with even fairly gentle pressure on the sides if the lid is removed.
It is fairly obvious that the cup is soft and that the lid is helping to keep it rigid, a warning to that effect really shouldn't be necessary. AFAIK, cardboard cups suffer from the same problem, they are also not very rigid without the lid. However, most people are bright enough to not open a container containing hot liquid directly over their genitals. I don't know about you, but I usually lean forward and hold the cup over the vehicle floor, or the center console, or anywhere else that is not directly over my body. Furthermore, most people won't sit in the hot liquid for 90 seconds while it is burning them. Millions of people deal with hot liquids in flimsy cups in vehicles every day without problems, indicating that there really isn't an "unreasonable danger" associated with it. The woman spilled her coffee. It happens, but it really is no one's fault but her own.
From a practical perspective there is absolutely no reason to serve coffee at a tissue-destroying temperature.
From a practical perspective, if you spill something hot on yourself, you probably shouldn't just let it sit there for 90 seconds. Even if the coffee temperature was reduced, the woman would still be seriously burned. Any hot food (or anything hot, really) has the capacity to burn, yet people still manage to eat and drink hot things regularly without serious injury. Did you miss the statistic that only 1 in 24 million people a year complained about the coffee being too hot? The other millions apparently could deal with it just fine.
The argument that people like hot coffee makes so [sic] sense since no one can drink coffee at that temperature without suffering serious burns. No one! People have to wait before drinking, and time of waiting represents exposure to a hazard, since any spill will scald them.
So what? Pretty much all heated food or drink is prepared and usually served at temperatures higher than it can be immediately consumed. If McDonald's hands you fresh french fries which just came out of the fryer they will likely burn you too if you try to eat them immediately. Most people are smart enough to let hot food cool down before eating or drinking it, or if they do manage to burn themselves they don't blame others for their own mistakes.
Despite the case's standing in popular culture, it really didn't go down like that. Though the woman was found partly responsible, the coffee was indeed defective as argued.
Try reading Overlawyered for a different take on this. Basically, the popular belief that the suit was ridiculous is pretty much correct. The coffee was not defective, many other restaurants (such as Starbucks) still serve coffee that hot. Besides, McDonald's even had a warning label on the cup.
I was with you all the way up to here... Too much bandwidth is just unpossible!
I think the parent is refering to the stupidity of having multiple wires (such as phone and cable) coming into your home. Unless you are purchasing both DSL & Cable internet, at the highest data rates available for each, then you are not taking advantage of that extra bandwidth.
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Application Compatibility - Wine can never offer as much compatibility as ReactOS. Since ReactOS actually shares Wine's code base, it is highly unlikely that ReactOS will have significantly better compatibility than Wine.
Speed - Wine, since it is an emulator, can never be as fast as ReactOS, a dedicated OS. This is usually advanced without any sort of benchmarks or other proof to back it up. First, Wine Is Not an Emulator, it is just an implementation of the win32 api. There is no technical reason why Wine couldn't be as fast as other "native" Linux APIs, such as QT or Gtk+. Furthermore, there have long been reports of Windows programs running faster on Wine than native Windows.
Driver Compatibility - ReactOS can use native Windows drivers. Projects like NdisWrapper have shown that it is possible to use Windows drivers on Linux too, if enough people are interested. Of course, Linux already has drivers available for a great deal of hardware. There is also the huge issue of using binary drivers in an open source kernel. It still hasn't been settled whether or not this is ultimately a good or bad thing. However, it is generally accepted that open source drivers are much better than binary, and ReactOS would provide absolutely no motivation for hardware vendors to ever open their drivers, or even to target ReactOS as a platform.
User Interface Familiarity - Windows users would feel right at home, with virtually no learning curve. This ignores the fact that anyone who has been through Win 3.1 -> Win 9x -> Win XP -> Vista will know that Window's interface is anything but consistent, things move around and change quite a bit between major releases. Also, if one desired you could rework something like KDE to be VERY similar to Windows, I believe that there are already distro's who try to do this (such as Linspire). There are still differences, but not really significantly more than between Win 98 & XP.
Don't get me wrong, I think ReactOS is a pretty cool project, and it would be kind of neat to have an open source Windows clone, however as I said I can't really find much practical reason for it beyond the coolness factor. It seems like one would be better off just integrating Wine into Linux better. Please feel free to enlighten me. ;)
Compatibility: Sure, one scientific institution may have standardized on a specific type of tape, but what about all the rest? Pretty much everyone in the world can read a standard HDD formated with a well known filesystem.
Price: what is the cost of HDDs vs. tapes per gigabyte? What is the cost of the hardware to read them? What are the actual differences in shipping costs between the two?
Hard drives are shipped all the time, how do you think they get to stores in the first place? Besides, if the price difference is great enough, and damage is infrequent, perhaps you can afford to re-send damaged HDDs when necessary, and still come out ahead of tape. They have removable trays for disks. Or you could use something external like firewire. Or you could do what has been suggested elsewhere, and just ship a standard configuration of PC loaded with drives, so that you just have to plug it into your network to get at the data.I'm hoping that KPDf (along with a lot of other great KDE software) will come to Windows with KDE 4.
I'm pretty sure that the GP was talking about a graphical shell, such as Explorer, not a command line shell.
And I have two eMachines which have been happily plugging away for years now. The plural of anecdote is not data.
"What sort of works:
iTunes 4 will install and run, but you are prohibited by Apple from using it with the iTunes store, which severely constrains its usefulness. We hope to support a newer version of iTunes in a future release of CrossOver."