I've been on a bit of a personal campaign to get MS to see sense and support OpenDoc.
This is good news - although a bit late (and sadly not in the box).
At present, Monad-MSH is planned to be part of E12 and WinFX SDK - both of which should RTM next summer, at/around Longhorn time. MSH _will_ run _on_ Longhorn just fine (just like.NET Framework 1.1 runs on XP). But it may not be distributed within the box. Hopefully, this is an anomoly that will get sorted out once Longhorn Beta 1 ships this summer.
In the meantime, if you're a Windows ADMIN, I'd recommend you get the beta now and start playing with it - it has value today, let alone on a years time!
An interesting point of view. If you look at the Unix shell, there are some really great aspects, but some really horrible ones too. The concept of the pipeline is fantastic, but having to do prayer based parsing on the raw text output is a pain.
So in this case, MS has undetstood Unix very well, and has gone one better.
Rather than just sticking with what you know, why not try it?
You raise some great points about MS's curent CLI strategy. Let's face it, the current strategy is just plain broken - but Monad-MSH fixes that.
Through the inheritnce functionality, cmdlets can be a lot more consistent. The provider architecture allows some fantastic data management capabilities. And you have much better tab story.
Yes, the language is curious, but very powerful. And often, it's the result of compromise. Consider the escape character in strings: well the idiot who decided to use the "\" in file names present us with a very difficult problem: either ALL file path references use "\\" (e.g c:\\dir1\\dir2) and all programs be capable of working seamlessly with providers who do not provide the escape characters natively. Or you change the escape character for monad - which is what they've done. The Escapse character is the ` key. On my UK keyboard, this is no problem. At the end of the day, this is one of the compromises they've had to make for backwards compability.
Bottom line: you can do an awful lot with just a few lines of script. MSH rocks!
You say: I don't even think Monad will ever be part of the Longhorn Client, just the server editions in a future. I'm actually surprised Microsoft is making a new shell at all -- I thought they were moving away from it.
Managing a clinet system is actually more important than managing server systems since there are a lot more of them. Monad makes as much sense inside the Longhorn client as in side server.
I can't wait for this new drop! The demos at TechEd were awesome!
All Jeffrey has to do now to totally make my day is to convince the Longhorn people that MSH should be in Longhorn. I can't image why a feature that will be in WinFX would NOT be in Longhorn.
Requiring MS to ship a version of XP without Media player is not really of any help to anyone. If you want another media player, it's trivial to get one. For example, I use Winamp to play my quite considerable library of Grateful Dead live concerts - something the other players don't do for me. It takes but a few minutes to download the latest copy of Winamp and the needed plugins each time I reinstall my workstations. It's not really hard.
As a consumer, how does a MP-less OS really help me? First, if I'm buying a new machine, I might now have two OS choices to make (I'm not clear on how the OEMs will react to two versions of the OS, so this might not be an issue for all OEMs). Presumably both versions are charged at the same price - so what would most (non-clueful) consumers do? Tick the box with the most free toys of course!
Secondly, If I don't chose the right box, I now have to do something to get a media player - which means confusion for the more novice user. These days most consumers would expect media playing from XP - after all, the whole ad campaign around XP (in the consumer space at least) emphasised the ability to do digital media.
And finally, assuming the user has some decent Internet connection - pretty much as they hit Windows Update, they'll be given a chance to download the next version of MP anyway!
And of course, requiring two versions of XP is also of no help to corporates. Corporates who care about media players have long ago dealt with this. Those that don't care, well they don't care.
It seems to me that there were remedies that might have promoted choice but this does not seem one of them.
The fine is big - nearly 500m. But I'm unclear as to how that fine will help consumers? Who gets the money? If the fine was to be paid back to every consumer who bought XP, or the money used to fund the free disrtibution of Winamp, it might make some sense.
Finally, on the point of requiring MS to release stuff. That too is not as cool as it sounds at first sight! Microsoft has been gradually opening the kimono for years now. Most folks have probably missed it, but the openness (compared with 5 years ago) is awesome.
You want code access? Just about anyone who relly needs it can get it. MVPs have code access, for example as to universities, and pretty much any firm over 1500 people. No - the judgement does not call for source code - but as most slashdot readers will know, source code access can help.
What the judgement asks for is access to the protocol definitons. Well, there's the huge library of the protocols that MS now license - some for free, although most for a fee. As I understand the legal talk - the judgement does not call for these specs to be free free but rather "on reasonable and non-descriminatory terms". These seem to me to be some of the key protocols needed to satisfy the judgement. The judgement does call for the server-server protocols, such as the details of AD replication. See http://members.microsoft.com/consent/info/Default. aspx for some details of what's currently on offer and http://members.microsoft.com/consent/info/Default. aspx for cost details. But don't try going there with Firefox - the navigation appears not to work. According to the EU, a grand total of 17 licenses have ben delivered - so there's not really an overwhelming demand for this stuff!
But who really benefits from this ? I suppose some of MS's biggest competetors might benefit and of the lawyers will have a good Christmas bonus. But at the end of the day, I can't see how this helps the consumer, the industry at large or Microsoft.
As I noted above, the Microsoft and the market of today is much different to the one of 5-10 years ago. The company today is far more open. And I'm not sure how the consumer has truly been harmed, and having read the judgment, I'm even less clear.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been on a bit of a personal campaign to get MS to see sense and support OpenDoc. This is good news - although a bit late (and sadly not in the box).
I hope so!
In the meantime, if you're a Windows ADMIN, I'd recommend you get the beta now and start playing with it - it has value today, let alone on a years time!
http://tfl09.blogspot.com/2005/06/getting-msh-beta -1.html
An interesting point of view. If you look at the Unix shell, there are some really great aspects, but some really horrible ones too. The concept of the pipeline is fantastic, but having to do prayer based parsing on the raw text output is a pain. So in this case, MS has undetstood Unix very well, and has gone one better. Rather than just sticking with what you know, why not try it?
You raise some great points about MS's curent CLI strategy. Let's face it, the current strategy is just plain broken - but Monad-MSH fixes that. Through the inheritnce functionality, cmdlets can be a lot more consistent. The provider architecture allows some fantastic data management capabilities. And you have much better tab story. Yes, the language is curious, but very powerful. And often, it's the result of compromise. Consider the escape character in strings: well the idiot who decided to use the "\" in file names present us with a very difficult problem: either ALL file path references use "\\" (e.g c:\\dir1\\dir2) and all programs be capable of working seamlessly with providers who do not provide the escape characters natively. Or you change the escape character for monad - which is what they've done. The Escapse character is the ` key. On my UK keyboard, this is no problem. At the end of the day, this is one of the compromises they've had to make for backwards compability. Bottom line: you can do an awful lot with just a few lines of script. MSH rocks!
You say: I don't even think Monad will ever be part of the Longhorn Client, just the server editions in a future. I'm actually surprised Microsoft is making a new shell at all -- I thought they were moving away from it. Managing a clinet system is actually more important than managing server systems since there are a lot more of them. Monad makes as much sense inside the Longhorn client as in side server.
I can't wait for this new drop! The demos at TechEd were awesome! All Jeffrey has to do now to totally make my day is to convince the Longhorn people that MSH should be in Longhorn. I can't image why a feature that will be in WinFX would NOT be in Longhorn.
Requiring MS to ship a version of XP without Media player is not really of any help to anyone. If you want another media player, it's trivial to get one. For example, I use Winamp to play my quite considerable library of Grateful Dead live concerts - something the other players don't do for me. It takes but a few minutes to download the latest copy of Winamp and the needed plugins each time I reinstall my workstations. It's not really hard.
As a consumer, how does a MP-less OS really help me? First, if I'm buying a new machine, I might now have two OS choices to make (I'm not clear on how the OEMs will react to two versions of the OS, so this might not be an issue for all OEMs). Presumably both versions are charged at the same price - so what would most (non-clueful) consumers do? Tick the box with the most free toys of course!
Secondly, If I don't chose the right box, I now have to do something to get a media player - which means confusion for the more novice user. These days most consumers would expect media playing from XP - after all, the whole ad campaign around XP (in the consumer space at least) emphasised the ability to do digital media.
And finally, assuming the user has some decent Internet connection - pretty much as they hit Windows Update, they'll be given a chance to download the next version of MP anyway!
And of course, requiring two versions of XP is also of no help to corporates. Corporates who care about media players have long ago dealt with this. Those that don't care, well they don't care.
It seems to me that there were remedies that might have promoted choice but this does not seem one of them.
The fine is big - nearly 500m. But I'm unclear as to how that fine will help consumers? Who gets the money? If the fine was to be paid back to every consumer who bought XP, or the money used to fund the free disrtibution of Winamp, it might make some sense.
Finally, on the point of requiring MS to release stuff. That too is not as cool as it sounds at first sight! Microsoft has been gradually opening the kimono for years now. Most folks have probably missed it, but the openness (compared with 5 years ago) is awesome.
You want code access? Just about anyone who relly needs it can get it. MVPs have code access, for example as to universities, and pretty much any firm over 1500 people. No - the judgement does not call for source code - but as most slashdot readers will know, source code access can help.
What the judgement asks for is access to the protocol definitons. Well, there's the huge library of the protocols that MS now license - some for free, although most for a fee. As I understand the legal talk - the judgement does not call for these specs to be free free but rather "on reasonable and non-descriminatory terms". These seem to me to be some of the key protocols needed to satisfy the judgement. The judgement does call for the server-server protocols, such as the details of AD replication. See http://members.microsoft.com/consent/info/Default. aspx for some details of what's currently on offer and http://members.microsoft.com/consent/info/Default. aspx for cost details. But don't try going there with Firefox - the navigation appears not to work. According to the EU, a grand total of 17 licenses have ben delivered - so there's not really an overwhelming demand for this stuff!
But who really benefits from this ? I suppose some of MS's biggest competetors might benefit and of the lawyers will have a good Christmas bonus. But at the end of the day, I can't see how this helps the consumer, the industry at large or Microsoft.
As I noted above, the Microsoft and the market of today is much different to the one of 5-10 years ago. The company today is far more open. And I'm not sure how the consumer has truly been harmed, and having read the judgment, I'm even less clear.
We sure do live in interesting times"
Thomas