Repeat after me: Windows device drivers are not the same as Linux device drivers, even when running on the same CPU. Not every Linux machine is based around an x86. Device manufacturers who write drivers often want to keep some of their APIs secret. They will not therefore give you the source code for their drivers. They do not care whether you are happy about this or not, because they would have already written a driver for you if your happiness had any importance to them whatsoever.
"The thing that bothers them, is that they do not want the user to have access to the source because programmers could also make private (possibly better) drivers for windows as well."
Baloney. They stand to to gain from letting somebody else develop drivers that makes their hardware work better on its primary platform, especially if said developers do it for free. As I've said above, the reason they don't release their driver source is because they want to protect certain secret APIs from competitors, who could utilise such information to build cheap work-alike hardware that reduced demand for the original.
"I have no objection to OEMs choosing to distribute just Windows, based on it's merits."
It isn't so much a matter of merits nowadays as one of brand recognition. Microsoft and Windows are household names that people recognise without necessarily knowing that much about them beyond the fact that they are related to computers, and boxes of software and games in stores seem to insist on them being there.
"However, Microsoft structure their deals with OEMs to force those OEMs to distribute and push Windows exclusively on the desktop otherwise they can't compete with the OEMs who *are* in bed with MS."
They would not however be able to do this if consumers weren't already demanding Windows in huge numbers. OEMs are forced to play by Microsoft's rules because that's what the market they are serving dictates -- if there were enough people out there who didn't want Windows, then Microsoft would have a lot less leverage on OEMs.
"Of course Microsoft isn't the only company to do this. Walkers buy up all the shelf space in shops so competing brands can't display new products."
Nearly every company out there does everything in its power to trounce the competition whenever it can. We get all worked up over Microsoft's antics because computers are an important aspect of our lives, but most of the people who actually buy the things couldn't care less about how MS behave towards their competitors and OEMs. They want Windows because it's what they use at work, or what Larry next door is running some great games on, or what the software their accountant recommends works with, or a whole host of other reasons that are purely pragmatic, just like most of their other buying decisions are based on a pragmatic evaluation of products rather than an in-depth study of the way their manufacturers behave towards competitors and suppliers.
"In fact I would say the biggest threat to Microsofts monopoly is OpenOffice and the pro "open-document-standard" lobby groups, whom, if they are successful, might break part of the MS monopoly."
OpenOffice itself isn't a threat to MS because it is constantly chasing their coat tails. The latest version is inferior in almost every respect to an the ageing Office-2000 system that sits on my Windows lap-top (I am not a fanboi: this response it being written on a Mac, and I also have a system which runs SUSE Linux), and cannot hold a candle to subsequent ones. You do not defeat a massively entrenched piece of software like Office by being nearly as good as it was 5 years ago -- you have to be better than it is now, and capable of importing documents that contain macros, VBA scripts, Access databases, and all the other assorted gubbins. I actually use OpenOffice fairly regularly because its multi-platform nature suits my rather mixed computing environment, but this is the only thing it has going for it besides the price when compared to Microsoft's offerings.
As for the open document lobby groups, I wish them every success, because despite the cynical tone of my comments, I am just as sick of Microsoft's constant attempts to lock users in to their closed proprietary formats as anyone. However, I am a realist, and recognise that (a) MS have a massive arsenal of dirty tricks that they will use to try and derail such efforts at every opportunity, and (b) even if these fail, they can simply give their apps the ability to read and write said standards, and then tell the world how benevolent and standard-compliant they are. Net loss for Office: zero, net loss for Windows: zero.
"If Sony had laid off the DRM a bit, then the small music player industry might look a lot different."
But they didn't, because they are Sony, so it failed everywhere except Japan. European and American buyers are not in the least enthusiastic about a recording system which refuses to record things, irrespective of how small it is or how long it runs on a set of batteries. Perhaps the Japanese were content to listen to recordings of themselves doing some Karaoke or whatever, but Europeans and Americans expected to be able to transfer music _that they legitimately owned_ on to it, and couldn't. So they didn't buy it, despite some concerted attempts to market it in many countries.
NB: there is a lesson in Mini-Disk that manufacturers have apparently still not learned, i.e. that people will not spend money on new technology which is better than what they already have in some ways, but prevents them from doing other things that their older gear permitted. As long as any DRM schemes are effectively invisible to Joe Public, then they'll be accepted without question, because most people won't ever know they're there. The word will however get around pretty quickly the moment anything breaks the expected "put thing in slot, listen to cool sound or dig great video" formula that they already have from today's gear: degraded video or sound quality, messages about unauthorised equipment, time-shifted shows that erase themselves after a certain time, and other such measures will result in the new DRM-encumbered stuff being seen as "crap", just like Mini-Disk was.
Of course it's promoting it for its own interests, just like the people on the Blu-Ray side are promoting it for their interests. Nobody on either side of the table has our interests at heart, because they see us as a collection of mindless ambulant wallets that will open and spew money at them whenever they tell us to.
Only a small sector has HD-capable TVs because there aren't a whole lot of compelling reasons for most people bothering with them. Most broadcast and even satellite / cable TV is standard definition (and what isn't is often only available as an extra paid-for service), DVDs are standard definition, video cameras that ordinary mortals can afford are standard definition, etc., etc.
However, a Playstation with Blu-Ray in it together with some of Sony's content catalogue in HD could give the HD TV market a kick-start, and Sony stand to gain more from that than merely selling Playstations and media -- they do after all manufacturer quite a lot of TVs and other video-related hardware.
"People aren't given a fair choice between running the Windows and Linux *OS* since the software,drivers and support for Windows is not available for Linux."
And why is this? Could it be due to the fact that manufacturers are reluctant to expend vast amounts of time and effort supporting a huge number of incompatible distros whose total number of desktop users put together is dwarfed by people still using Windows-95, who those same manufacturers have also stopped supporting?
"It's what we call a vicious circle".
No, it's what's called an insignificant and hopelessly fragmented market. OS X has a similar market share to the sum of desktop Linux, but it is far better supported by hardware and software manufacturers. This would not be the case if there were hundreds of different variants, each incompatible with all the others in subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) ways, with different desktops and window managers, different versions of core libraries, update cycles that are not synchronised with those of any of the other variants, etc., etc. If you want manufacturers to support Linux, then give them a fixed target to aim at, not hundreds of annoyingly different little targets flitting around like starlings in a hurricane.
"Microsoft also uses unethical and possibly illegal deals with OEMs as one of it's many methods of what I and various anti-trust lawyers consider are illegal practices to ensure they maintain their monopoly."
1. The legality or otherwise of deals they made with OEMs has no bearing on anything, because said OEMs would not have been coerced into such deals if there was not a significant consumer demand for Windows. Big companies don't get pushed into positions that aren't favourable to them without having a very good reason for it. In Microsoft's case, it was the fact that consumers were overwhelmingly demanding Windows at a time when it still had several commercial competitors (OS/2, GEM, etc.) that they could also have bundled, but _chose_ to sign exclusive deals with MS instead.
2. Microsoft were convicted of leveraging _an existing monopoly_ in desktop operating systems to obtain monopolies in other sectors. Note the term "existing monopoly", because it is very important. Where did that "existing monopoly" come from? You can't claim it was from DOS, because MS had been trying to push Windows for years to DOS users without any notable success. The turning point came with Windows 3.X, which people started buying in large numbers because it was a compelling product that _they wanted to use_.
"There have in fact been several high profile anti-trust cases that Microsoft have basically lost."
See above. They lost because they illegally used _an existing monopoly_ to establish new ones. They still had to gain that existing monopoly in the first place, and they could not have done so if they were selling something people didn't want.
"It's just that none of the proposals to open up the software market to fair competition and stop the Microsofts monopoly abuses have been successful."
And they won't be, because (a) the law moves far too slowly for a rapidly changing ecosystem like computing, and (b) when legislation gets mixed up with high tech. markets, the end result is almost inevitably worse than if they'd simply left things alone. The current "hand content producers everything they demand, and treat consumers like criminals" trend by Western governments is an excellent example of this.
NB: a lot of Microsoft's success can be traced back to the general incompetence of the competition. Some examples:
1) Apple pissed away a large market share because "professional management" kicked out the original company founders, and then ran things as if there was no difference between selling computers and soda (there is an important one: computers cost a lot more than soda, so people aren't anything like as willing to buy one just to see what it's like).
2. Netscape's founder shot his mouth off about how the browser was the new pla
Ah, but you've missed the point entirely. Bill Gates isn't considered a hacker by most of/. because he lacks several important attributes that are vital to hackerdom:
1) Be heavily associated with open source software (preferably Linux). 2) Have a healthy contempt for copyrights and patents. 3) Believe that Microsoft is the root of all evil, and say so _a lot_. 4) React with vitriol and contempt to anyone who suggests that open source is not a universal panacea to all that ails the world.
Dell already have a no-OS option for corporate customers. This is not due to the fact that said corporates won't be using Windows, but because they (a) already have bulk licensing deals with MS, and (b) use custom installations that are compliant with their internal IT policies. These people are already paying for Windows on all their computers directly from MS, and would simply take their business elsewhere if Dell insisted that they pay for it again.
"Look at IBM where they were bragging about the billions invested in Linux, all while taking a huge loss on each PC sold due to overhead."
And none of their PCs or lap-tops shipped with Linux installed by default -- they came with Windows, just like those from everyone else. The only place Linux had any prominence was in their server line, but even that was nothing particularly distinctive: HP and yes, Dell (to name but two) were also offering servers with Linux pre-installed, because it is a viable and cost-effective alternative for those looking to buy a UNIX-like system.
"There's a reason there hasn't been any sort of mass-movement towards Linux despite all the optimistic predictions -- the numbers are bogus."
There has been a mass movement towards Linux, but not from Windows. It is the commercial UNIX market that has been steadily losing ground to Linux (with the notable exception of Apple), while the desktop market has seen Windows commanding a pretty constant 90% (of yearly sales, which is not of course the same as actual usage) for years.
And while the/. crowd's pervasive anti-Microsoft sentiment leads to all manner of theories which attempt to explain why MS continue to command such a massive share of the market (usually involving one or more pieces of pure distilled evil together with the fact that everyone out there is an idiot), the most obvious (and thus most likely) explanation is that 90% of the people who buy computers _want_ one with Windows on it. If this were not the case, then somebody out there would have cottoned on to the fact, and be making vast sums of money selling systems with desktop Linux on them, while all those vendors who are locked into the oft-mentioned diabolic pacts with MS lost vast swathes of market share to this new, customer-centric tech. leviathan. The fact that this hasn't happened _could_ be due to some yet to be discovered conspiracy that prevents anyone selling PCs anywhere in the world without Microsoft's permission, or be an indication that there isn't any real demand for desktops and laptops with Linux on them.
NB: the fact that desktop Linux has actually lost significant ground to Apple's computer offerings over the last year or two says a lot about how much people actually want it. Desktop Linux does after all have a number of advantages over Apple's stuff: it runs on cheap, plentiful commodity hardware instead of expensive proprietary systems that (currently) use non-standard CPUs, memory, peripherals, and software; upgrades are in many cases available free of charge instead of being sold for $120 a pop; Linux often comes on the "free" cover CDs that come with magazines, whereas OS X only comes "free" when you buy a computer from Apple; Linux distros commonly include vast quantities of software, while Macs come with a few bundled applications, plus some development tools that don't get installed by default; etc., etc., etc. It would therefore seem like all the advantages are in Linux' favour, but people still don't seem to want it.
"I would venture to guess that the majority of their sales come from home/small business field"
Dell has a large number of corporate accounts as well. I don't know what percentage of their overall sales are corporate versus domestic and small business, but they do sell a lot of machines to the corporate world. And people who buy computers in large numbers from Dell are able to negotiate a completely different set of options from those that the rest of us are offered: if you want 10,000 lap-tops with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed and working instead of Windows, then Dell will supply them, and they'll either support you themselves, or put you in touch with someone who can support you. In this, they are no different from any other vendor of computers or for that matter anything else: companies that buy fleets of 10,000 vehicles can also negotiate a far wider variety of options than customers who want to buy a single car, van, etc.
I know they're not doing it yet, because as I said, doing it now would be economic suicide for whichever nation did it.
However, I'm pretty convinced of one thing: this will not fly in the server world, because servers live in hot-pluggable fault tolerant environments where pieces of hardware including disk drives are routinely swapped around. That's why MS Server 2003 doesn't have hardware validation routines that disable it when things change like XP does -- a server OS that could not cope with regular hardware swapping is quite simply not a server OS. And this means that software which uses TPM to encrypt data in ways that are unreadable without the same module being present, or looks for a specific module when starting will also fail to fly, because hot-swapping means that said module is liable to change at any time, and people who operate major server installations will get really pissed if they get locked out of their data, or half the system software refuses to run.
As to the rest of it: yes, some very smart people have invested huge sums of money in this, but that does not change the fact that there is no such thing as an un-crackable cypher, and nobody has yet managed to come up with a security measure that cannot be bypassed. That this rule is as applicable to TPM as it has been to everything else is borne out by a real-world encounter between TPM and hackers...
When Apple released their developer version of OS X for Intel, they tied it to a TPM module so that people couldn't run pirate versions on systems other than those supplied to members of their development community. A very small number of hackers managed to bypass this in a matter of days. Determined not to let this happen again with the next release, Apple tied all manner of subsystems to TPM so that they would look for it on a regular basis. This was also bypassed, although it took a little longer (a couple of weeks of work mostly done by one person). Score: hackers 2, TPM 0.
The next big test will be the XBox-360, which uses a TPM module to implement a multi-layered security system that looks like it will present some interesting challenges. If the hacking community manage to crack this one (and more than one MS engineer has been quoted as saying that this _will_ happen eventually), then there's an excellent chance that they'll also be able to crack whatever TPM shennanigans end up in future PC operating systems, and also "spoof" software running on non-TPM computers in to believing that a TPM module is present (something which has already been done in some parts of the OS X hacks).
Boy, did you hit the nail squarely on the head. The article was a dull litany of completely unsurprising things that seems to be an attempt by a fanboi to generate excitement about a bunch of totally unexciting events. Yet he missed two rather notable surprises from MS that happened quite late in the year:
1) The XBox-360. It is an entirely new hardware platform running a new OS with a new UI that was launched on time, and ended up being surprisingly good if the reviews are to be believed (overheating problems with the massive external PSU notwithstanding). I'm not a console lover (I don't own a single console, and am not planning on buying one) so this is not due to me simply finding surprises in a field that interests me particularly.
2) Visual Studio Express editions being offered free of charge. MS often make SDKs available as free downloads, but they have customarily charged for their IDEs (at least after they stopped shipping a version of BASIC with their OS offerings). They were indicating that this trend would continue with the the VS Express editions that were slated to sell for $49.95 each up until very recently, but seem to have decided at the last minute to make them available for free.
Me too. I live in Europe, which seems to be determined to pass as many "content-provider"-centric laws as the US, is also becoming ever-more dependent on China, and has at least as big a problem with companies re-locating strategic resources to places where labour is cheaper, and environmental laws more lax. It seems as if the people at the helm of the entire Western world are doing everything in their power to destroy it, and hand the keys to the future over to countries like China and India, both of which are poised to become economic super-powers, while we wither to nothingness under the weight of ever more stupid legislation that is designed by lawyers to make lawyers rich.
Do these homeland security idiots and media-industry shills have any idea of the economic fallout that would result from legislating to make TPM mandatory for internet connections? Only a very small minority of the equipment out there even has one of these chips in it, and none of them are running an OS that "knows about" TPM at the moment. Legislation of this sort would therefore render nearly every existing computer system obsolete overnight, meaning that huge numbers of people would have to replace their computers or be locked out of the Internet entirely. The cost to businesses, schools, and other large organisations would be astronomical, while the majority of domestic users will simply kiss the Internet good-bye because they cannot justify the cost of replacing a perfectly good, working computer on a government whim.
US Internet usage will thus plummet to levels where ISPs are no longer economically viable propositions. Companies like Google, Yahoo, and others who depend mainly on ad revenue for income will suffer terribly because the value of Internet advertising will plummet; likewise for businesses like EBay, the Apple ITunes store, Napster, Dell (who still depend on on-line sales for the bulk of their income), and all those other companies big and small for whom domestic Internet sales are either a significant proportion of their income, or the entirety of it.
They should also consider the fact that corporate Internet connections tend to go through gateway or proxy servers that are running lots of different operating systems on a wide variety of hardware. These cannot simply be replaced overnight with TPM-compliant gear running a completely different OS, because they are often part of an overall system that hosts a large number of strategic resources. Add to this the fact that TPM-compliant systems will do things that are at variance with most corporate IT policy (e.g. encrypt data so that it cannot be accessed from another computer if that one fails for some reason; send information about the host system to third parties; etc., etc.), and you have a recipe for massive off-shoring of strategic IT resources to countries that do not have such legislation.
Again, the fall-out for the US economy would be huge: not only would a significant number of corporate IT jobs disappear, but there would also be a mass exodus from traditional hardware and software suppliers who only make TPM-compliant systems to others who will give big customers what they want instead of telling them what they can have. And that will probably mean the Chinese, who will take up the slack by manufacturing systems without TPM, others that have special TPM modules which let users get at and change their keys while completely bypassing the data-encrption stuff, etc., etc., etc. If traditional suppliers such as HP, IBM, MS, Apple, etc. don't respond by providing stuff that's capable of exactly the same things, then they'll simply disappear, because nobody outside the US will want their TPM'd crap, and the domestic market will have diminished to the point where it is incapable of supporting even a single large supplier, let alone several.
I thus really hope that the US can subsist entirely on what the **AAs produce, because that's about all you'll have left if this legislation gets passed. The domestic software industry will collapse under the twin burdens of stupid patents and being required to use TPM validation, the latter of which will preclude its use in the newly off-shored corporations who will have policies that forbid procuring any equipment with standard TPM modules in it. Those that survive will therefore do so by moving their entire operations abroad, thereby ignoring TPM altogether; whether they'll still bother supporting the US market is questionable, as that market will have shrunk to the point where it may not be financially viable anymore. Biotech, drug companies, and all sorts of other IP-producing organisations are heavily IT-dependent, so they will also be likely to move most if not all of their operat
If the US is so concerned about what China may or may not do in a military sense, then why is it letting the Chinese gain such strong control over its economy? They are already in a position where they could do significant amounts of damage to the US by simply dumping all those bonds on the market, and then calling in the debts they're owed: if the US didn't pay up, they'd be classified as effectively bankrupt by international markets, who would start dumping bonds and dollars like there was no tomorrow. The dollar would be worthless within weeks, giving rise to massive domestic inflation because the country has become so dependent on imported goods and materials (what price would a gallon of gasolene sell for if there were $300 / Euro?).
So why would the Chinese bother with something like a war when they could do at least as much effective damage without firing a shot? Is the US government so locked in to an obsolete cold-war mentality that they're actually blind to where China's real strength lies, or is all this martial drum-banging an attempt to blind the public to it? Whatever the case, the fact of the matter is that China does not require the Galileo system to throw the US economy down the toilet, so why are nearly all the arguments about the strategic threat that it presents to the US so sino-centric?
England (or rather, the UK) already has a "giant fucking oil field" in the North Sea (it is shared with several Nordic countries). It's been under heavy commercial exploitation since the 1970s, and is a big source of revenue to the UK government.
"I don't think F/OSS quite gets the scale of this challenge."
It isn't so much that they don't get the scale of the challenge as the fact that most of the people capable of writing such an application have little incentive for doing so. They aren't being paid, and those who are capable of managing and coding for major projects of this sort have no need or desire for that sort of program. There are many very large and complex FOSS projects that have been running for years, are pretty well managed, and result in high-quality products that are very competitive with commercial offerings in terms of features, stability, efficiency, portability, etc. However, a disproportionate number of these tend to be things that programmers want for themselves such as IDEs, specialist text editors, language compilers and related tools, application frameworks etc., etc.
Even when this isn't directly the case, a lot of effort gets put into things that most programmers think are generally useful (office productivity software, image manipulation stuff, multimedia apps, operating systems and utilities, web browsers, EMAIL programs), while a lot less is invested in things they aren't interested in at all. And stuff like Exchange falls squarely into the "yawn" category unless it is combined with the offer of ulare large sums of money.
And MS have patched Outlook (all versions AKAIK, including oldies like Outlook-97) to make it pop up a dialogue telling users that something is trying to get at their address books etc. OE still doesn't do this, and while its COM objects aren't accessible to active scripting, they can be used by executables (I know this, because OE is one of several programs that I've written address book importers for). Thus, at the time of writing, Outlook is actually more secure because it warns users whenever its COM objects are instantiated, while OE will let any executable instantiate COM objects that can silently both get at and modify its data.
I think Apple also have a fairly big professional market: Macs have a substantial presence in the sciences, art and design, animation, music production, etc. However, most of these users (with the likely exception of scientists) tend to take advantage of specialist software that incorporates all the necessary workflow stuff, so they have little need of AppleScript. Windows power users on the other hand are frequently working with rather more generic applications that can benefit greatly from custom work-flows, which is great as far as MS are concerned, because it effectively ties those users to Office for ever (note that this is not a criticism, but merely a statement of fact).
NB: I also think that the lack of user Mac scripting has a lot to do with Apple's marketing (or in this case, lack thereof). The first time they made any real commotion about Mac scriptability it in recent years was when pushing Automator as one of the significant new technologies in OS X 10.4. Before that, most potential and existing Mac users were probably unaware of the fact that there is a powerful and pretty easy to use scripting environment sitting there waiting to be used. Perhaps more people would be inclined to experiment with it if they actually knew it was there, and didn't have to hunt around for information on how to use it.
Oh, they'll agree to do all sorts of things to stop piracy, just like the Chinese did. And like the Chinese, they will then do sod all about it. After all, if you are a Russian govt. official who is tasked with stamping out piracy while being paid sod all, would you:
a) Come down like a ton of bricks on the heads of people who have a known talent for making those who annoy them appear on the ingredient lists of dog food cans, or
b) Raid a few places that you know are occupied by some dweebs who downloaded a Madonna song to show that you're doing your job, while leaving the really serious (i.e. life-threatening) pirate gangs alone.
My comment was based on the Java language rather than how certain implementations of it work (not all Java compilers target byte code for a VM -- some directly emit native codes).
And in any case, Smalltalk was far from being the first language to use a VM. LISP and some COBOL systems had them in the late 1950s, and a wide variety appeared during the 1960s and 1970s. Note that I am not talking about interpreters here, but compilers that emitted byte codes which are run by a "software CPU" that is then implemented on a variety of platforms. As for JITs, those found their way into some Smalltalk implementations _after_ they appeared for Java, not before.
I would therefore contend that Java owes little if anything to Smalltalk. Its syntax and semantics are based on C++, which in its turn was heavily influenced by Simula-67; its use of a VM can be traced back to systems that predate Smalltalk by decades; and it uses a traditional "edit in any text editor, save the file, compile it, repeat" cycle rather than the Smalltalk method of programming by environmental extension.
I think it's the fact that Apple's primary market is desktop users, whereas the primary Linux market is servers. Servers tend to be managed by system administrators, and system administrators are accustomed to scripting using the shell, awk, sed, etc., so powerful scripting languages such as Perl and Python fit naturally into their way of doing things. And a lot of those servers are web servers of one sort or another, which means LAMP, and part of that is again powerful scripting languages.
The situation is pretty much the same in the Windows world. Microsoft ship Office with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), but how many users (as opposed to programmers) actually take advantage of it? Its main claim to fame seems to be as a vector for viruses, not a technology that allows people to write entire workflow applications in much the same way as AppleScript does. About the only thing even power-users tend to take advantage of is Excel macros and the sort of very simple Access stuff that can be constructed entirely by wizards, no programming required.
The interface can exist as separate code, though. All the stuff that IB serialises is available through the Cocoa API (check out the docs on NSView and NSControl, for example), and can be instantiated directly with programming statements if you wish. Using IB to keep the UI code separate from the stuff that interacts with it is however a better way to work, as it allows modifications to be to made the UI without having to recompile the application (separation of concerns).
MS recognise the above, and will themselves be following a similar route in the future with XAML, which is set to replace WinForms as the UI-building methodology of choice once Vista is launched (XAML will be one of the Vista technologies back-ported to XP). WinForms is thus in life-support mode at the moment: they will fix bugs, but not add more features to it because it is considered to be a deprecated technology.
NB: I've adopted a mixed-mode approach to Mac programming that seems to work very well from a productivity viewpoint. I do a lot of the main stuff in AppleScript or F-Script, and "drop down" to Objective-C for performance-critical stuff, custom Cocoa sub-classes, Darwin-related tasks, and other things that AppleScript or F-Script either isn't good at, or does too slowly. One could of course do this equally well using (for example) Python with the PyObjC bridge, and I believe that there is something similar for Ruby (don't quote me on that, though!), so the scripting languages I use are just one of the options available to Mac developers. And XCode happily manages all the different language files from a single project, ensuring that Obj-C code is compiled before running the interpreted stuff, managing CVS repositories, and generally making the experience pretty holistic.
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Repeat after me:
Windows device drivers are not the same as Linux device drivers, even when running on the same CPU.
Not every Linux machine is based around an x86.
Device manufacturers who write drivers often want to keep some of their APIs secret. They will not therefore give you the source code for their drivers. They do not care whether you are happy about this or not, because they would have already written a driver for you if your happiness had any importance to them whatsoever.
"The thing that bothers them, is that they do not want the user to have access to the source because programmers could also make private (possibly better) drivers for windows as well."
Baloney. They stand to to gain from letting somebody else develop drivers that makes their hardware work better on its primary platform, especially if said developers do it for free. As I've said above, the reason they don't release their driver source is because they want to protect certain secret APIs from competitors, who could utilise such information to build cheap work-alike hardware that reduced demand for the original.
"I have no objection to OEMs choosing to distribute just Windows, based on it's merits."
It isn't so much a matter of merits nowadays as one of brand recognition. Microsoft and Windows are household names that people recognise without necessarily knowing that much about them beyond the fact that they are related to computers, and boxes of software and games in stores seem to insist on them being there.
"However, Microsoft structure their deals with OEMs to force those OEMs to distribute and push Windows exclusively on the desktop otherwise they can't compete with the OEMs who *are* in bed with MS."
They would not however be able to do this if consumers weren't already demanding Windows in huge numbers. OEMs are forced to play by Microsoft's rules because that's what the market they are serving dictates -- if there were enough people out there who didn't want Windows, then Microsoft would have a lot less leverage on OEMs.
"Of course Microsoft isn't the only company to do this. Walkers buy up all the shelf space in shops so competing brands can't display new products."
Nearly every company out there does everything in its power to trounce the competition whenever it can. We get all worked up over Microsoft's antics because computers are an important aspect of our lives, but most of the people who actually buy the things couldn't care less about how MS behave towards their competitors and OEMs. They want Windows because it's what they use at work, or what Larry next door is running some great games on, or what the software their accountant recommends works with, or a whole host of other reasons that are purely pragmatic, just like most of their other buying decisions are based on a pragmatic evaluation of products rather than an in-depth study of the way their manufacturers behave towards competitors and suppliers.
"In fact I would say the biggest threat to Microsofts monopoly is OpenOffice and the pro "open-document-standard" lobby groups, whom, if they are successful, might break part of the MS monopoly."
OpenOffice itself isn't a threat to MS because it is constantly chasing their coat tails. The latest version is inferior in almost every respect to an the ageing Office-2000 system that sits on my Windows lap-top (I am not a fanboi: this response it being written on a Mac, and I also have a system which runs SUSE Linux), and cannot hold a candle to subsequent ones. You do not defeat a massively entrenched piece of software like Office by being nearly as good as it was 5 years ago -- you have to be better than it is now, and capable of importing documents that contain macros, VBA scripts, Access databases, and all the other assorted gubbins. I actually use OpenOffice fairly regularly because its multi-platform nature suits my rather mixed computing environment, but this is the only thing it has going for it besides the price when compared to Microsoft's offerings.
As for the open document lobby groups, I wish them every success, because despite the cynical tone of my comments, I am just as sick of Microsoft's constant attempts to lock users in to their closed proprietary formats as anyone. However, I am a realist, and recognise that (a) MS have a massive arsenal of dirty tricks that they will use to try and derail such efforts at every opportunity, and (b) even if these fail, they can simply give their apps the ability to read and write said standards, and then tell the world how benevolent and standard-compliant they are. Net loss for Office: zero, net loss for Windows: zero.
"If Sony had laid off the DRM a bit, then the small music player industry might look a lot different."
But they didn't, because they are Sony, so it failed everywhere except Japan. European and American buyers are not in the least enthusiastic about a recording system which refuses to record things, irrespective of how small it is or how long it runs on a set of batteries. Perhaps the Japanese were content to listen to recordings of themselves doing some Karaoke or whatever, but Europeans and Americans expected to be able to transfer music _that they legitimately owned_ on to it, and couldn't. So they didn't buy it, despite some concerted attempts to market it in many countries.
NB: there is a lesson in Mini-Disk that manufacturers have apparently still not learned, i.e. that people will not spend money on new technology which is better than what they already have in some ways, but prevents them from doing other things that their older gear permitted. As long as any DRM schemes are effectively invisible to Joe Public, then they'll be accepted without question, because most people won't ever know they're there. The word will however get around pretty quickly the moment anything breaks the expected "put thing in slot, listen to cool sound or dig great video" formula that they already have from today's gear: degraded video or sound quality, messages about unauthorised equipment, time-shifted shows that erase themselves after a certain time, and other such measures will result in the new DRM-encumbered stuff being seen as "crap", just like Mini-Disk was.
Of course it's promoting it for its own interests, just like the people on the Blu-Ray side are promoting it for their interests. Nobody on either side of the table has our interests at heart, because they see us as a collection of mindless ambulant wallets that will open and spew money at them whenever they tell us to.
Only a small sector has HD-capable TVs because there aren't a whole lot of compelling reasons for most people bothering with them. Most broadcast and even satellite / cable TV is standard definition (and what isn't is often only available as an extra paid-for service), DVDs are standard definition, video cameras that ordinary mortals can afford are standard definition, etc., etc.
However, a Playstation with Blu-Ray in it together with some of Sony's content catalogue in HD could give the HD TV market a kick-start, and Sony stand to gain more from that than merely selling Playstations and media -- they do after all manufacturer quite a lot of TVs and other video-related hardware.
"People aren't given a fair choice between running the Windows and Linux *OS* since the software,drivers and support for Windows is not available for Linux."
And why is this? Could it be due to the fact that manufacturers are reluctant to expend vast amounts of time and effort supporting a huge number of incompatible distros whose total number of desktop users put together is dwarfed by people still using Windows-95, who those same manufacturers have also stopped supporting?
"It's what we call a vicious circle".
No, it's what's called an insignificant and hopelessly fragmented market. OS X has a similar market share to the sum of desktop Linux, but it is far better supported by hardware and software manufacturers. This would not be the case if there were hundreds of different variants, each incompatible with all the others in subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) ways, with different desktops and window managers, different versions of core libraries, update cycles that are not synchronised with those of any of the other variants, etc., etc. If you want manufacturers to support Linux, then give them a fixed target to aim at, not hundreds of annoyingly different little targets flitting around like starlings in a hurricane.
"Microsoft also uses unethical and possibly illegal deals with OEMs as one of it's many methods of what I and various anti-trust lawyers consider are illegal practices to ensure they maintain their monopoly."
1. The legality or otherwise of deals they made with OEMs has no bearing on anything, because said OEMs would not have been coerced into such deals if there was not a significant consumer demand for Windows. Big companies don't get pushed into positions that aren't favourable to them without having a very good reason for it. In Microsoft's case, it was the fact that consumers were overwhelmingly demanding Windows at a time when it still had several commercial competitors (OS/2, GEM, etc.) that they could also have bundled, but _chose_ to sign exclusive deals with MS instead.
2. Microsoft were convicted of leveraging _an existing monopoly_ in desktop operating systems to obtain monopolies in other sectors. Note the term "existing monopoly", because it is very important. Where did that "existing monopoly" come from? You can't claim it was from DOS, because MS had been trying to push Windows for years to DOS users without any notable success. The turning point came with Windows 3.X, which people started buying in large numbers because it was a compelling product that _they wanted to use_.
"There have in fact been several high profile anti-trust cases that Microsoft have basically lost."
See above. They lost because they illegally used _an existing monopoly_ to establish new ones. They still had to gain that existing monopoly in the first place, and they could not have done so if they were selling something people didn't want.
"It's just that none of the proposals to open up the software market to fair competition and stop the Microsofts monopoly abuses have been successful."
And they won't be, because (a) the law moves far too slowly for a rapidly changing ecosystem like computing, and (b) when legislation gets mixed up with high tech. markets, the end result is almost inevitably worse than if they'd simply left things alone. The current "hand content producers everything they demand, and treat consumers like criminals" trend by Western governments is an excellent example of this.
NB: a lot of Microsoft's success can be traced back to the general incompetence of the competition. Some examples:
1) Apple pissed away a large market share because "professional management" kicked out the original company founders, and then ran things as if there was no difference between selling computers and soda (there is an important one: computers cost a lot more than soda, so people aren't anything like as willing to buy one just to see what it's like).
2. Netscape's founder shot his mouth off about how the browser was the new pla
Ah, but you've missed the point entirely. Bill Gates isn't considered a hacker by most of /. because he lacks several important attributes that are vital to hackerdom:
1) Be heavily associated with open source software (preferably Linux).
2) Have a healthy contempt for copyrights and patents.
3) Believe that Microsoft is the root of all evil, and say so _a lot_.
4) React with vitriol and contempt to anyone who suggests that open source is not a universal panacea to all that ails the world.
Dell already have a no-OS option for corporate customers. This is not due to the fact that said corporates won't be using Windows, but because they (a) already have bulk licensing deals with MS, and (b) use custom installations that are compliant with their internal IT policies. These people are already paying for Windows on all their computers directly from MS, and would simply take their business elsewhere if Dell insisted that they pay for it again.
"Look at IBM where they were bragging about the billions invested in Linux, all while taking a huge loss on each PC sold due to overhead."
/. crowd's pervasive anti-Microsoft sentiment leads to all manner of theories which attempt to explain why MS continue to command such a massive share of the market (usually involving one or more pieces of pure distilled evil together with the fact that everyone out there is an idiot), the most obvious (and thus most likely) explanation is that 90% of the people who buy computers _want_ one with Windows on it. If this were not the case, then somebody out there would have cottoned on to the fact, and be making vast sums of money selling systems with desktop Linux on them, while all those vendors who are locked into the oft-mentioned diabolic pacts with MS lost vast swathes of market share to this new, customer-centric tech. leviathan. The fact that this hasn't happened _could_ be due to some yet to be discovered conspiracy that prevents anyone selling PCs anywhere in the world without Microsoft's permission, or be an indication that there isn't any real demand for desktops and laptops with Linux on them.
And none of their PCs or lap-tops shipped with Linux installed by default -- they came with Windows, just like those from everyone else. The only place Linux had any prominence was in their server line, but even that was nothing particularly distinctive: HP and yes, Dell (to name but two) were also offering servers with Linux pre-installed, because it is a viable and cost-effective alternative for those looking to buy a UNIX-like system.
"There's a reason there hasn't been any sort of mass-movement towards Linux despite all the optimistic predictions -- the numbers are bogus."
There has been a mass movement towards Linux, but not from Windows. It is the commercial UNIX market that has been steadily losing ground to Linux (with the notable exception of Apple), while the desktop market has seen Windows commanding a pretty constant 90% (of yearly sales, which is not of course the same as actual usage) for years.
And while the
NB: the fact that desktop Linux has actually lost significant ground to Apple's computer offerings over the last year or two says a lot about how much people actually want it. Desktop Linux does after all have a number of advantages over Apple's stuff: it runs on cheap, plentiful commodity hardware instead of expensive proprietary systems that (currently) use non-standard CPUs, memory, peripherals, and software; upgrades are in many cases available free of charge instead of being sold for $120 a pop; Linux often comes on the "free" cover CDs that come with magazines, whereas OS X only comes "free" when you buy a computer from Apple; Linux distros commonly include vast quantities of software, while Macs come with a few bundled applications, plus some development tools that don't get installed by default; etc., etc., etc. It would therefore seem like all the advantages are in Linux' favour, but people still don't seem to want it.
"I would venture to guess that the majority of their sales come from home/small business field"
Dell has a large number of corporate accounts as well. I don't know what percentage of their overall sales are corporate versus domestic and small business, but they do sell a lot of machines to the corporate world. And people who buy computers in large numbers from Dell are able to negotiate a completely different set of options from those that the rest of us are offered: if you want 10,000 lap-tops with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed and working instead of Windows, then Dell will supply them, and they'll either support you themselves, or put you in touch with someone who can support you. In this, they are no different from any other vendor of computers or for that matter anything else: companies that buy fleets of 10,000 vehicles can also negotiate a far wider variety of options than customers who want to buy a single car, van, etc.
It also failed in Europe. In fact, it seems to have failed everywhere except Japan.
I know they're not doing it yet, because as I said, doing it now would be economic suicide for whichever nation did it.
However, I'm pretty convinced of one thing: this will not fly in the server world, because servers live in hot-pluggable fault tolerant environments where pieces of hardware including disk drives are routinely swapped around. That's why MS Server 2003 doesn't have hardware validation routines that disable it when things change like XP does -- a server OS that could not cope with regular hardware swapping is quite simply not a server OS. And this means that software which uses TPM to encrypt data in ways that are unreadable without the same module being present, or looks for a specific module when starting will also fail to fly, because hot-swapping means that said module is liable to change at any time, and people who operate major server installations will get really pissed if they get locked out of their data, or half the system software refuses to run.
As to the rest of it: yes, some very smart people have invested huge sums of money in this, but that does not change the fact that there is no such thing as an un-crackable cypher, and nobody has yet managed to come up with a security measure that cannot be bypassed. That this rule is as applicable to TPM as it has been to everything else is borne out by a real-world encounter between TPM and hackers...
When Apple released their developer version of OS X for Intel, they tied it to a TPM module so that people couldn't run pirate versions on systems other than those supplied to members of their development community. A very small number of hackers managed to bypass this in a matter of days. Determined not to let this happen again with the next release, Apple tied all manner of subsystems to TPM so that they would look for it on a regular basis. This was also bypassed, although it took a little longer (a couple of weeks of work mostly done by one person). Score: hackers 2, TPM 0.
The next big test will be the XBox-360, which uses a TPM module to implement a multi-layered security system that looks like it will present some interesting challenges. If the hacking community manage to crack this one (and more than one MS engineer has been quoted as saying that this _will_ happen eventually), then there's an excellent chance that they'll also be able to crack whatever TPM shennanigans end up in future PC operating systems, and also "spoof" software running on non-TPM computers in to believing that a TPM module is present (something which has already been done in some parts of the OS X hacks).
Boy, did you hit the nail squarely on the head. The article was a dull litany of completely unsurprising things that seems to be an attempt by a fanboi to generate excitement about a bunch of totally unexciting events. Yet he missed two rather notable surprises from MS that happened quite late in the year:
1) The XBox-360. It is an entirely new hardware platform running a new OS with a new UI that was launched on time, and ended up being surprisingly good if the reviews are to be believed (overheating problems with the massive external PSU notwithstanding). I'm not a console lover (I don't own a single console, and am not planning on buying one) so this is not due to me simply finding surprises in a field that interests me particularly.
2) Visual Studio Express editions being offered free of charge. MS often make SDKs available as free downloads, but they have customarily charged for their IDEs (at least after they stopped shipping a version of BASIC with their OS offerings). They were indicating that this trend would continue with the the VS Express editions that were slated to sell for $49.95 each up until very recently, but seem to have decided at the last minute to make them available for free.
Me too. I live in Europe, which seems to be determined to pass as many "content-provider"-centric laws as the US, is also becoming ever-more dependent on China, and has at least as big a problem with companies re-locating strategic resources to places where labour is cheaper, and environmental laws more lax. It seems as if the people at the helm of the entire Western world are doing everything in their power to destroy it, and hand the keys to the future over to countries like China and India, both of which are poised to become economic super-powers, while we wither to nothingness under the weight of ever more stupid legislation that is designed by lawyers to make lawyers rich.
Do these homeland security idiots and media-industry shills have any idea of the economic fallout that would result from legislating to make TPM mandatory for internet connections? Only a very small minority of the equipment out there even has one of these chips in it, and none of them are running an OS that "knows about" TPM at the moment. Legislation of this sort would therefore render nearly every existing computer system obsolete overnight, meaning that huge numbers of people would have to replace their computers or be locked out of the Internet entirely. The cost to businesses, schools, and other large organisations would be astronomical, while the majority of domestic users will simply kiss the Internet good-bye because they cannot justify the cost of replacing a perfectly good, working computer on a government whim.
US Internet usage will thus plummet to levels where ISPs are no longer economically viable propositions. Companies like Google, Yahoo, and others who depend mainly on ad revenue for income will suffer terribly because the value of Internet advertising will plummet; likewise for businesses like EBay, the Apple ITunes store, Napster, Dell (who still depend on on-line sales for the bulk of their income), and all those other companies big and small for whom domestic Internet sales are either a significant proportion of their income, or the entirety of it.
They should also consider the fact that corporate Internet connections tend to go through gateway or proxy servers that are running lots of different operating systems on a wide variety of hardware. These cannot simply be replaced overnight with TPM-compliant gear running a completely different OS, because they are often part of an overall system that hosts a large number of strategic resources. Add to this the fact that TPM-compliant systems will do things that are at variance with most corporate IT policy (e.g. encrypt data so that it cannot be accessed from another computer if that one fails for some reason; send information about the host system to third parties; etc., etc.), and you have a recipe for massive off-shoring of strategic IT resources to countries that do not have such legislation.
Again, the fall-out for the US economy would be huge: not only would a significant number of corporate IT jobs disappear, but there would also be a mass exodus from traditional hardware and software suppliers who only make TPM-compliant systems to others who will give big customers what they want instead of telling them what they can have. And that will probably mean the Chinese, who will take up the slack by manufacturing systems without TPM, others that have special TPM modules which let users get at and change their keys while completely bypassing the data-encrption stuff, etc., etc., etc. If traditional suppliers such as HP, IBM, MS, Apple, etc. don't respond by providing stuff that's capable of exactly the same things, then they'll simply disappear, because nobody outside the US will want their TPM'd crap, and the domestic market will have diminished to the point where it is incapable of supporting even a single large supplier, let alone several.
I thus really hope that the US can subsist entirely on what the **AAs produce, because that's about all you'll have left if this legislation gets passed. The domestic software industry will collapse under the twin burdens of stupid patents and being required to use TPM validation, the latter of which will preclude its use in the newly off-shored corporations who will have policies that forbid procuring any equipment with standard TPM modules in it. Those that survive will therefore do so by moving their entire operations abroad, thereby ignoring TPM altogether; whether they'll still bother supporting the US market is questionable, as that market will have shrunk to the point where it may not be financially viable anymore. Biotech, drug companies, and all sorts of other IP-producing organisations are heavily IT-dependent, so they will also be likely to move most if not all of their operat
If the US is so concerned about what China may or may not do in a military sense, then why is it letting the Chinese gain such strong control over its economy? They are already in a position where they could do significant amounts of damage to the US by simply dumping all those bonds on the market, and then calling in the debts they're owed: if the US didn't pay up, they'd be classified as effectively bankrupt by international markets, who would start dumping bonds and dollars like there was no tomorrow. The dollar would be worthless within weeks, giving rise to massive domestic inflation because the country has become so dependent on imported goods and materials (what price would a gallon of gasolene sell for if there were $300 / Euro?).
So why would the Chinese bother with something like a war when they could do at least as much effective damage without firing a shot? Is the US government so locked in to an obsolete cold-war mentality that they're actually blind to where China's real strength lies, or is all this martial drum-banging an attempt to blind the public to it? Whatever the case, the fact of the matter is that China does not require the Galileo system to throw the US economy down the toilet, so why are nearly all the arguments about the strategic threat that it presents to the US so sino-centric?
England (or rather, the UK) already has a "giant fucking oil field" in the North Sea (it is shared with several Nordic countries). It's been under heavy commercial exploitation since the 1970s, and is a big source of revenue to the UK government.
"I don't think F/OSS quite gets the scale of this challenge."
It isn't so much that they don't get the scale of the challenge as the fact that most of the people capable of writing such an application have little incentive for doing so. They aren't being paid, and those who are capable of managing and coding for major projects of this sort have no need or desire for that sort of program. There are many very large and complex FOSS projects that have been running for years, are pretty well managed, and result in high-quality products that are very competitive with commercial offerings in terms of features, stability, efficiency, portability, etc. However, a disproportionate number of these tend to be things that programmers want for themselves such as IDEs, specialist text editors, language compilers and related tools, application frameworks etc., etc.
Even when this isn't directly the case, a lot of effort gets put into things that most programmers think are generally useful (office productivity software, image manipulation stuff, multimedia apps, operating systems and utilities, web browsers, EMAIL programs), while a lot less is invested in things they aren't interested in at all. And stuff like Exchange falls squarely into the "yawn" category unless it is combined with the offer of ulare large sums of money.
And MS have patched Outlook (all versions AKAIK, including oldies like Outlook-97) to make it pop up a dialogue telling users that something is trying to get at their address books etc. OE still doesn't do this, and while its COM objects aren't accessible to active scripting, they can be used by executables (I know this, because OE is one of several programs that I've written address book importers for). Thus, at the time of writing, Outlook is actually more secure because it warns users whenever its COM objects are instantiated, while OE will let any executable instantiate COM objects that can silently both get at and modify its data.
Indeed. Or if not actually a member, are receiving "incentives" from them.
I think Apple also have a fairly big professional market: Macs have a substantial presence in the sciences, art and design, animation, music production, etc. However, most of these users (with the likely exception of scientists) tend to take advantage of specialist software that incorporates all the necessary workflow stuff, so they have little need of AppleScript. Windows power users on the other hand are frequently working with rather more generic applications that can benefit greatly from custom work-flows, which is great as far as MS are concerned, because it effectively ties those users to Office for ever (note that this is not a criticism, but merely a statement of fact).
NB: I also think that the lack of user Mac scripting has a lot to do with Apple's marketing (or in this case, lack thereof). The first time they made any real commotion about Mac scriptability it in recent years was when pushing Automator as one of the significant new technologies in OS X 10.4. Before that, most potential and existing Mac users were probably unaware of the fact that there is a powerful and pretty easy to use scripting environment sitting there waiting to be used. Perhaps more people would be inclined to experiment with it if they actually knew it was there, and didn't have to hunt around for information on how to use it.
Oh, they'll agree to do all sorts of things to stop piracy, just like the Chinese did. And like the Chinese, they will then do sod all about it. After all, if you are a Russian govt. official who is tasked with stamping out piracy while being paid sod all, would you:
a) Come down like a ton of bricks on the heads of people who have a known talent for making those who annoy them appear on the ingredient lists of dog food cans, or
b) Raid a few places that you know are occupied by some dweebs who downloaded a Madonna song to show that you're doing your job, while leaving the really serious (i.e. life-threatening) pirate gangs alone.
My comment was based on the Java language rather than how certain implementations of it work (not all Java compilers target byte code for a VM -- some directly emit native codes).
And in any case, Smalltalk was far from being the first language to use a VM. LISP and some COBOL systems had them in the late 1950s, and a wide variety appeared during the 1960s and 1970s. Note that I am not talking about interpreters here, but compilers that emitted byte codes which are run by a "software CPU" that is then implemented on a variety of platforms. As for JITs, those found their way into some Smalltalk implementations _after_ they appeared for Java, not before.
I would therefore contend that Java owes little if anything to Smalltalk. Its syntax and semantics are based on C++, which in its turn was heavily influenced by Simula-67; its use of a VM can be traced back to systems that predate Smalltalk by decades; and it uses a traditional "edit in any text editor, save the file, compile it, repeat" cycle rather than the Smalltalk method of programming by environmental extension.
I think it's the fact that Apple's primary market is desktop users, whereas the primary Linux market is servers. Servers tend to be managed by system administrators, and system administrators are accustomed to scripting using the shell, awk, sed, etc., so powerful scripting languages such as Perl and Python fit naturally into their way of doing things. And a lot of those servers are web servers of one sort or another, which means LAMP, and part of that is again powerful scripting languages.
The situation is pretty much the same in the Windows world. Microsoft ship Office with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), but how many users (as opposed to programmers) actually take advantage of it? Its main claim to fame seems to be as a vector for viruses, not a technology that allows people to write entire workflow applications in much the same way as AppleScript does. About the only thing even power-users tend to take advantage of is Excel macros and the sort of very simple Access stuff that can be constructed entirely by wizards, no programming required.
The interface can exist as separate code, though. All the stuff that IB serialises is available through the Cocoa API (check out the docs on NSView and NSControl, for example), and can be instantiated directly with programming statements if you wish. Using IB to keep the UI code separate from the stuff that interacts with it is however a better way to work, as it allows modifications to be to made the UI without having to recompile the application (separation of concerns).
MS recognise the above, and will themselves be following a similar route in the future with XAML, which is set to replace WinForms as the UI-building methodology of choice once Vista is launched (XAML will be one of the Vista technologies back-ported to XP). WinForms is thus in life-support mode at the moment: they will fix bugs, but not add more features to it because it is considered to be a deprecated technology.
NB: I've adopted a mixed-mode approach to Mac programming that seems to work very well from a productivity viewpoint. I do a lot of the main stuff in AppleScript or F-Script, and "drop down" to Objective-C for performance-critical stuff, custom Cocoa sub-classes, Darwin-related tasks, and other things that AppleScript or F-Script either isn't good at, or does too slowly. One could of course do this equally well using (for example) Python with the PyObjC bridge, and I believe that there is something similar for Ruby (don't quote me on that, though!), so the scripting languages I use are just one of the options available to Mac developers. And XCode happily manages all the different language files from a single project, ensuring that Obj-C code is compiled before running the interpreted stuff, managing CVS repositories, and generally making the experience pretty holistic.