You missed the main point. No one bothered to write native OS/2 applications because Windows applications ran under it just fine. In some cases even better!
It's hard enough getting native commercial Linux applications today. Think how much worse it will be when Wine/WineX matures and there's no need for native applications.
I was a TeamOS/2 guy myself. OS/2 faced two major hurdles in gaining mass acceptance, and unfortunately, they're the same hurdles that Linux is facing today.
1) The vendors don't have a clue. "We want to be a desktop distro. No wait! A server distro. No wait! An "enterprise" distro. No wait! We need a one-click installer. No wait! We need a remote installer. No wait...
2) Windows emulation. No one bothered to write OS/2 applications because native Windows applications ran just fine under it. Then Microsoft changed the APIs, and OS/2 finally sunk under the frigid waters. Why should I run my applications under Linux/WineX when I can run them under Windows?
3) Arrogant advocacy. This is the worst one. OS/2 died in part because most people in Team OS/2 were assholes. Linux advocates are no less impolite. Face it, no matter how much you argue the point, the average consumer will NEVER believe that Linux is the holy salvation of mankind. Yet you still continue to argue that. "Linux? Oh yeah, that's the OS with all the arrogant jerks..."
The other half of the problem
on
Exploiting Software
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
There's another side to the problem. It's insidious. And while Microsoft is fully embedded in this tar pit of insecurity, Open Source projects are rarely better.
This problem is "feature requests from users." If very few developers understand security well enough to write secure code, think about how much less end users know. Yet it is the end user who pays us. They're our ultimate boss, even on the free-beer Open Source side of things.
At work I've had feature requirements come to me from marketing that would absolutely eviscerate the product's security. I've also seen bug reports elevated to top priority that that would reduce or eliminate product security.
Here are some hypothetical (I hope) examples to show the dangers of this in the Open Source arena. While some of these might have been absurd a few years ago, with today's hyper-concern of usability, it wouldn't surprise me if they actually got implemented.
"It's too much work changing file permissions by hand, so we need a way to automatically execute arbitrary files."
"It's too much work remembering passwords, or remembering the master password for a password manager, so there needs to be a daemon running that will remember for us."
"Messages in XYZ email client should be automatically rendered in HTML/CSS/Javascript."
"The interface is too cluttered! Hide file name extensions!"
This new governmental policy of letting the corporations dictate public policy has just got to stop.
"As goes California, so goes the rest of the nation." The Attorney General, Bill Lockyer, is the classic California Democrat. He's one of the Gray Davis crowd. The recent election my have put the Governator in office, but it didn't replace the rest of the Democrat officeholders selling California to the highest bidding corporation.
They're not "forcing" them. These manufacturers signed a contract with Microsoft for a large discount in return for shipping "PCs with an OS".
Re:A-Team rocked!
on
Retro Vision
·
· Score: 4, Funny
I remember once getting bored and channel surfing. This was before the days of remote controls, so I surfed the old fashioned way by turning the dial.
Anyway, I stumbled across this bouncer competition. It's not every day that you get to see a televised competition of big ugly dudes hoisting drunks out the saloon door. I can't remember if this was the nationals or internationals. Anyway, this especially ugly dude named "Mr. T" won.
That was his fifteen minutes of fame. But that was too short for him, so he stretched that fifteen minutes into half a decade. First he fights Sylvester Stallone in Rocky. Very cheesy. I was thinking, "Hey, your fifteen minutes are over!" Then he shows up on A-Team. Come on! This guy couldn't act his way out of a paper bag!
His career finally stuttered, stalled, and crashed into Florida swampland after a particularly atrocious Barbara Walters interview.
Epilogue: I thought the ghost of Mr. T had been laid to rest. But I was wrong. An CS professor with a bad sense of humour was describing an algorithm to my class, when he suddenly jabbed his pointer at the chalkboard, right at a meta-variable, and loudly announced: "I pity da foo!"
Well, if they would stop trying to replace their reliable FreeBSD and Solaris servers with their own "dog food", they wouldn't have this problem. Just continue with their current practice of having the visible servers running WS2003 so no one knows about the others, and Bill and Steve can sleep easily at night.
The trick with building Gnome for FreeBSD (or any other platform), is to stick with a well publicized even.dot.oh release. Use 2.4.0.0.0. Or 2.6.0.0.0. Anything else will shatter under mild impacts. So wait for the FreeBSD Gnome team to make an even.dot.oh announcement on Daemonnews, and go grab it right then. Wait a few days and a minor bug fix will happen to some dependency and you're screwed.
Blame Fedora. I use FreeBSD, which by all accounts is difficult to use, but getting Flash plugin to work was as simple as installing it. Using it in Konqueror was almost as simple, but I had to follow the directions and uncomment a line libmap.conf (readable directions provided automatically).
Why a hand-holding distribution like Fedora couldn't do this automatically is beyond my comprehension. It should be a part of the RPM. Heck, we could do this in FreeBSD but for the religious taboo that ports can't touch anything in/etc.
Hee hee! My company used to be a 100% Sun shop. Twice a year we had a "UNIX Basics" class, and twice a year we also a a Framemaker class. Other than the first few days of panic at the start of their employment, no one had a problem.
Now we're a 100% Microsoft shop. We have "Windows Basics" classes every quarter, along with quarterly classes in Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Access, Internet Explorer, and Outlook. We've had to hire additional training coordinators to handle it. And everyone has problems.
X11 is, by design, policy-free. It doesn't draw your buttons, for example, but it does give you the tools to draw your buttons. Looking at it from the Windows perspective, it's sort of like the gdi with a bit of win32 thrown in. It most certainly is NOT MFC or.NET. It's a low level toolkit for graphical drawing and display.
Take a step up to GTK+, Qt or GNUstep, and you certainly can write a good interface. Gnome and KDE prove it. While they still lack the high gloss polish that corporate megabuck provide for Microsoft and Apple, it's simply amazing what they have done with the code donations of free software developers.
Remember your history. Remember how long it look for Windows to get accepted by the large corporations. Heck, even the desktop PC was a "courageous" decision by some one.
Windows "trickled" up from the home into the small business, and from there to the medium and large corporations. Don't worry about the big buys.
Slashdot Mirror
You missed the main point. No one bothered to write native OS/2 applications because Windows applications ran under it just fine. In some cases even better!
It's hard enough getting native commercial Linux applications today. Think how much worse it will be when Wine/WineX matures and there's no need for native applications.
I was a TeamOS/2 guy myself. OS/2 faced two major hurdles in gaining mass acceptance, and unfortunately, they're the same hurdles that Linux is facing today.
1) The vendors don't have a clue. "We want to be a desktop distro. No wait! A server distro. No wait! An "enterprise" distro. No wait! We need a one-click installer. No wait! We need a remote installer. No wait...
2) Windows emulation. No one bothered to write OS/2 applications because native Windows applications ran just fine under it. Then Microsoft changed the APIs, and OS/2 finally sunk under the frigid waters. Why should I run my applications under Linux/WineX when I can run them under Windows?
3) Arrogant advocacy. This is the worst one. OS/2 died in part because most people in Team OS/2 were assholes. Linux advocates are no less impolite. Face it, no matter how much you argue the point, the average consumer will NEVER believe that Linux is the holy salvation of mankind. Yet you still continue to argue that. "Linux? Oh yeah, that's the OS with all the arrogant jerks..."
There's another side to the problem. It's insidious. And while Microsoft is fully embedded in this tar pit of insecurity, Open Source projects are rarely better.
This problem is "feature requests from users." If very few developers understand security well enough to write secure code, think about how much less end users know. Yet it is the end user who pays us. They're our ultimate boss, even on the free-beer Open Source side of things.
At work I've had feature requirements come to me from marketing that would absolutely eviscerate the product's security. I've also seen bug reports elevated to top priority that that would reduce or eliminate product security.
Here are some hypothetical (I hope) examples to show the dangers of this in the Open Source arena. While some of these might have been absurd a few years ago, with today's hyper-concern of usability, it wouldn't surprise me if they actually got implemented.
"It's too much work changing file permissions by hand, so we need a way to automatically execute arbitrary files."
"It's too much work remembering passwords, or remembering the master password for a password manager, so there needs to be a daemon running that will remember for us."
"Messages in XYZ email client should be automatically rendered in HTML/CSS/Javascript."
"The interface is too cluttered! Hide file name extensions!"
Or my all time favorite...
"Linux needs a InstallShield clone!"
I'm no great fan of Java, but I do like the way that there is One True API for most things I might want to do.
.NET, I greatly fear that this "One True API" will be "Microsoft" only.
In the case of
This new governmental policy of letting the corporations dictate public policy has just got to stop.
"As goes California, so goes the rest of the nation." The Attorney General, Bill Lockyer, is the classic California Democrat. He's one of the Gray Davis crowd. The recent election my have put the Governator in office, but it didn't replace the rest of the Democrat officeholders selling California to the highest bidding corporation.
Or read a different way, would you rather program to a uniform API for GUIs
Not everything in the software world needs a GUI. Only end-user applications do. In the broad scheme of things, that's a pretty thin slice.
They're not "forcing" them. These manufacturers signed a contract with Microsoft for a large discount in return for shipping "PCs with an OS".
I remember once getting bored and channel surfing. This was before the days of remote controls, so I surfed the old fashioned way by turning the dial.
Anyway, I stumbled across this bouncer competition. It's not every day that you get to see a televised competition of big ugly dudes hoisting drunks out the saloon door. I can't remember if this was the nationals or internationals. Anyway, this especially ugly dude named "Mr. T" won.
That was his fifteen minutes of fame. But that was too short for him, so he stretched that fifteen minutes into half a decade. First he fights Sylvester Stallone in Rocky. Very cheesy. I was thinking, "Hey, your fifteen minutes are over!" Then he shows up on A-Team. Come on! This guy couldn't act his way out of a paper bag!
His career finally stuttered, stalled, and crashed into Florida swampland after a particularly atrocious Barbara Walters interview.
Epilogue: I thought the ghost of Mr. T had been laid to rest. But I was wrong. An CS professor with a bad sense of humour was describing an algorithm to my class, when he suddenly jabbed his pointer at the chalkboard, right at a meta-variable, and loudly announced: "I pity da foo!"
Well, if they would stop trying to replace their reliable FreeBSD and Solaris servers with their own "dog food", they wouldn't have this problem. Just continue with their current practice of having the visible servers running WS2003 so no one knows about the others, and Bill and Steve can sleep easily at night.
Gee, and "In-N-Out Burger" still cuts theirs by hand...
Analogy: I own a legal copy of Linux. Does this mean I can download another off of the internet and disregard the GPL?
Why should violating the copyrights of Nintendo be any different than violating the copyright of Linux?
So far, there's a surprising enthusiasm for Mono and C#
Latebreaking news flash! A reporter attends a Mono lovefest and discovers that the attendees are having a lovefest!
The trick with building Gnome for FreeBSD (or any other platform), is to stick with a well publicized even.dot.oh release. Use 2.4.0.0.0. Or 2.6.0.0.0. Anything else will shatter under mild impacts. So wait for the FreeBSD Gnome team to make an even.dot.oh announcement on Daemonnews, and go grab it right then. Wait a few days and a minor bug fix will happen to some dependency and you're screwed.
.NET is designed to be and sold as a "cross platform" solution
Don't bogart that joint, my friend. It sounds like good shit!
.NET has trippled my productivity (on the Windows platform)
Anything other than MFC would triple your productivity.
Sheesh! It's a one dollar tax to vote in Canada!
ln-s /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.5 /usr/lib/libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3
/etc.
Blame Fedora. I use FreeBSD, which by all accounts is difficult to use, but getting Flash plugin to work was as simple as installing it. Using it in Konqueror was almost as simple, but I had to follow the directions and uncomment a line libmap.conf (readable directions provided automatically).
Why a hand-holding distribution like Fedora couldn't do this automatically is beyond my comprehension. It should be a part of the RPM. Heck, we could do this in FreeBSD but for the religious taboo that ports can't touch anything in
Hee hee! My company used to be a 100% Sun shop. Twice a year we had a "UNIX Basics" class, and twice a year we also a a Framemaker class. Other than the first few days of panic at the start of their employment, no one had a problem.
Now we're a 100% Microsoft shop. We have "Windows Basics" classes every quarter, along with quarterly classes in Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Access, Internet Explorer, and Outlook. We've had to hire additional training coordinators to handle it. And everyone has problems.
Actually X11 is pretty damned good.
.NET. It's a low level toolkit for graphical drawing and display.
X11 is, by design, policy-free. It doesn't draw your buttons, for example, but it does give you the tools to draw your buttons. Looking at it from the Windows perspective, it's sort of like the gdi with a bit of win32 thrown in. It most certainly is NOT MFC or
Take a step up to GTK+, Qt or GNUstep, and you certainly can write a good interface. Gnome and KDE prove it. While they still lack the high gloss polish that corporate megabuck provide for Microsoft and Apple, it's simply amazing what they have done with the code donations of free software developers.
Or KDE with Baghira and KSmoothdock...
Yes, Slashdot. Where everyone is a socialist claiming to be a libertarian but voting for Kerry.
The BM Foundation doesn't make grants to the US Military. Really now, when since the days of General Washington has the US Military needed grants?
On the other hand, these free CDs are a violation of the ethics rules. It's considered bribery. "Baksheesh" for those of you in Redmond...
Why download? You own the CD, so just rip it.
Remember your history. Remember how long it look for Windows to get accepted by the large corporations. Heck, even the desktop PC was a "courageous" decision by some one.
Windows "trickled" up from the home into the small business, and from there to the medium and large corporations. Don't worry about the big buys.
I think the old cliche about Germans not having a sense of humour is spot-on.
p.s. Stop watching US news outlets. They think everything is a calculated propaganda. They have even less humour than you guys...