Let's face facts: Linux/Gnome + Staroffice is indistinguishable from MS+Office for the AVERAGE user. MS needs to do all it can to prevent the majority of users from realizing this, and ceasing to PAY MS.
True, but the average ser uses many applications based around Office/Windows etc - since they are all extensible products. And the average windows develop would tell you star office has a long way to go to catch up with Office;)
The kernel APIs aren't part of Win32. The other APIs aren't documented, therefore aren't part of Win32. I'm sure Star Office exports many functions in it's DLLs, but I don't see Sun documnting them - and how dare they use those functions! If you could prove to me (source code would be nice) that MS uses these 'secret' apis in order to gain an advantage over a compeitor please do.
Um, I think that second demonstration was done on a Windows 2000 Beta machine. Windows 2000 'knows' of many devices thru the inf files, and it doesn't prompt you for drivers it knows i has. It just searches it's driver database and if it finds something, it installs it.
I disagree, Windows 2000 is a HUGE advancement over NT4. It is by no means an incremental change. Lets see, there's the Active Directory, there's Terminal Servers included, unlimited clustering, up to 32 processors per machine (well 8 in the current release), quotas(about time), QoS, Power Management, DirectX7...actually I could go on and on listing new features but I'd get flamed for being a Microsoft marketing guy. Well, anyway, I disagree:P Windows 2000 is a HUGE improvement and deserves to be recognised than just an incremental upgrade.
Example: PowerPoint only creates presentations that will work correctly with IE4.x or higher; KPresenter creates (albeit static) presentations you can even view with G!zilla and/or KFM, Konqueror, mozilla, IEx.x, NSx.x... any web browser that supports images, basically. I like that.
Well that's the cost of using DHTML and other cool things, webbrowsers not bothering to support newer standards. I wouldn't be suprise if Microsoft started making more use of VML, which again, is a standard that other browsers refuse to support (hell, none even support XML like IE).
Also, when was the last time that you saw Explorer embed a Word document? Uh, today? It's been done FOR YEARS. IE has been an OLE container since IE3, and OLE and VBX etc has been around since the very early nineties. COM/OLE is one of the key technologies that makes up modern Windows. BTW, can you embedd KDE's media player into a website? You can with media player:).
In a frame? Uh, ofcourse, why would that make a difference? It's just an object in the HTML DOM. Here's a few links to images to demonstrate the power of COM and IE. Tis quite shocking how many people still think Windows is in the win2.0 days:|
Example 1 Word document inside IE. Notice how IE's menus are integrated with Word's menus. MS Word is acting as an ActiveX Document in this example.
I don't have an example for postscript cause I don't use it, or know of a viewer for windows. But you get the idea...it's not that difficult to add support. Note that the opposite is generally true, eg. you can host IE inside Word & Excel to display HTML/XML etc. I don't think ADOBE's pdf viewer is an OLE container, but they could make it one.
Microsoft is going to have to worry about people wanting these cool features- I already show them to my friends and they drool, because they want a desktop that can do what mine can. No they don't, cause they came up with this kind of stuff and implemented it before Linux did, and have made it basically upbitquous(no sleep, bad spelling) in the windows world. This kind of thing is an extension to java applets - but it's been done by Microsoft in client side apps (well before the WWW become popular). Now you know, care to show your friends this?:P
Windows has a heck of a lot of applications (including low level system tools) for something that's got these "hidden apis".
you're full of crap.
APIs are only APIs when they're documented. If there's a DLL shipped with windows that exports a DoEx function, that's not an API just cause it's exported. The reason being is that it's not part of Win32 as Microsoft sees it, and is NOT garunteeed to be supported in future versions of Windows. These exports are usually documented by 3rd parties (and they are free to do so).
I wouldn't consider myself a troll. Just as I wouldn't consider most people around here who heavily advocate linux trolls (unless they bashed mirosoft mcneally/sun exec style). I try to keep things "on topic" when discussing microsoft. And tend to only go off on Microsoft tangents in response to a post I see as wrong, or unfair. I won't bring up Microsoft out of the blue for example - on an article about beanies.
Ah, so we're no longer trying to argue that Windows does package management better, eh? I gotta hand it to you, TummyX, you know what you're doing. Looks like you're going to lose the debate? Answer a different question! A move from the Bill Gates playbook itself.
No! I really was just being facetious. Debian indeed does have a kick ass package managing system. I don't even think windows has what you call "package management". It comes with some install APIs, and has cool stuff in other areas (windows 2000's self healing applications for example).
However - I do think that it's easier to setup programs (in general) on windows than linux tho.
The point is both linux and windows have problems, and neither is perfect. So by my example I was showing how your example meant very little.
And why do you have to associate "microsoft-loving" with "troll" all the time?
This is an 'open geek' forum, and you can be a geek and like (or not hate) microsoft at the same time. Admittedly, it is heavily biased to linux, but microsoft stories always gets the most postings:) and insteresting debates.
Yeah, just pull it all out of context, windows is easier for most people by a long shot.
Windows
1. Download self extracting exe. 2. Double click on exe. 3. Read dialogs, go with defaults. 3. Wait for install to occur.
Red Hat Linux
1. Download archive 2. Read RPM documentation to figure out how to use RPM. 3. rpm -ivh foo.rpm 4. Get obscure errors about dependencies you need. 5. Goto redhat.com to try to find the other RPM you need. 6. Eventally find them on some other website. 7. rpm -ivh foodepend.rpm 8. rpm -ivh foo.rpm 9. Get obscure errors about dependencies you need. .... 89. Finally installed, you have to figure out where the binaries were installed. 90. Manually make your KDE links to the files. 91. Finally, execute the application only to find that it depends on some other application to get XXX feature enabled.
Bah don't be such a troll. Torvalds Computer Science Building. Oooooh Torvalds rocks man, he's the (self proclaimed) best programmer in the world, stanford ROCKS, i'm going to stanford, I'd love to see a beowulf cluster of linus torvalds computer science buildings! The point is, SO WHAT?
Not, how do you explain the thousands of drivers for NT? Why don't you look at the DDK for once, much nicer than what linux has...which is take the code and if you can't do it you're a stupid idiot.
LOL IE take out a machine? What a ridiculous thing to say. As if. I wasn't talking about it taking down the OS anyway (wtf kind of OS is that?). I'm talking about the browser CRASHING.
Um, so you're saying that Linux doesn't need a decent driver model and abstract because they can always get the source? Uh no. Manufacturers just want a nice DDK, read the docs, get some examples, and do it.
NT has a very nice driver model. So like if a new device were to come along, the manufacturer could write a driver without any NT source. As an example (this is 2.0.x) I had to recompile with ipfw options to get ipmasq and ipfwadm to work. with win95 and an unmodified kernel, you can write NAT. Anyway....my point was not to say that Linux "can't" do these things, but was to say that just cause you don't have NT source doesn't mean you can't "optimize" the "kernel/drivers". I know Linux has kernel modules.
Linus is not senior management, but it's the 'big' open source boy. And if transmeta is doing something that he likens to prostitution (software is like sex it's better when it's free) maybe he should consider working with alan at redhat. Either that or changing his views.
Firmware is software. Would be if i said, who the hell needs source to the kernel! noone needs that.
And the crusoe is optimized for windows (at least the more expensive one is).
And Metcalf a troll? Uh huh, he didn't exactly post it here on/. did he? It's his column and he can say and do whatever he wants. Unless everyone who dares say anything bad about Linus or Linux (even off/.) is now considered a troll.
Now lets be facing it, Bob Metcalfe is not a stupid man. He knows as well as you and I that Linus does not own or control Transmeta, the very suggestion that a commercial company should give away it's prized possession for free goes against every principle of the free market. It's also completely silly to suggest that should be done just because one Linus Torvalds is currently employed there.
Point is that Linus has hardly been a quiet pundant. How did he put it? "Software is like sex, it's better when it's free". Ok, I want "free" code morphong please. Point is, Linus shouldn't be bashing MS (he does it all the time in his speeches) to gain beenie points. It certainly makes him look 'arrogant' to me. And Metcalkfe is totally right about Linus' changing views. Now commercialsm is GREAT, and fragmentation can be GOOD...what's next? This man is just trying to start an argument. Linus has done a vast amount of good for the open source community, should we really be attacking him for being involved in a closed source project for his current employer?
Not for contributing heaps to open source projects. Attacking him because he's been such a propronent for open source with a "holier than thou" attidude to non open source projects/companies. This project is hardly a small project for transmeta, it's huge, and it's hugely software - so Linux is now working for a proprietry 'software/hardware' company. What a pity it's only stylish to bash the other software company.
Explain, what is a default kernel in linux "moron". NT kernel is optimized all the time, we have ring0 drivers, vxds etc. We don't have a monolithic kernel you know. That's what this thread was about...not installing the right drivers. There's this amazing thing, we don't have to recompile the kernel to remove a feature!
Slashdot Mirror
Let's face facts: Linux/Gnome + Staroffice is indistinguishable from MS+Office for the AVERAGE user. MS needs to do all it can to prevent the majority of users from realizing this, and ceasing to PAY MS.
;)
True, but the average ser uses many applications based around Office/Windows etc - since they are all extensible products.
And the average windows develop would tell you star office has a long way to go to catch up with Office
The kernel APIs aren't part of Win32. The other APIs aren't documented, therefore aren't part of Win32. I'm sure Star Office exports many functions in it's DLLs, but I don't see Sun documnting them - and how dare they use those functions!
If you could prove to me (source code would be nice) that MS uses these 'secret' apis in order to gain an advantage over a compeitor please do.
Um, I think that second demonstration was done on a Windows 2000 Beta machine. Windows 2000 'knows' of many devices thru the inf files, and it doesn't prompt you for drivers it knows i has. It just searches it's driver database and if it finds something, it installs it.
I disagree, Windows 2000 is a HUGE advancement over NT4. It is by no means an incremental change. Lets see, there's the Active Directory, there's Terminal Servers included, unlimited clustering, up to 32 processors per machine (well 8 in the current release), quotas(about time), QoS, Power Management, DirectX7 ...actually I could go on and on listing new features but I'd get flamed for being a Microsoft marketing guy. Well, anyway, I disagree :P Windows 2000 is a HUGE improvement and deserves to be recognised than just an incremental upgrade.
And I think Microsoft's Windows 2000 beta News groups were run on a dual P100.
Example: PowerPoint only creates presentations that will work correctly with IE4.x or higher; KPresenter creates (albeit static) presentations you can even view with G!zilla and/or KFM, Konqueror, mozilla, IEx.x, NSx.x... any web browser that supports images, basically. I like that.
:).
:|
:P
Well that's the cost of using DHTML and other cool things, webbrowsers not bothering to support newer standards. I wouldn't be suprise if Microsoft started making more use of VML, which again, is a standard that other browsers refuse to support (hell, none even support XML like IE).
Also, when was the last time that you saw Explorer embed a Word document?
Uh, today? It's been done FOR YEARS. IE has been an OLE container since IE3, and OLE and VBX etc has been around since the very early nineties. COM/OLE is one of the key technologies that makes up modern Windows. BTW, can you embedd KDE's media player into a website? You can with media player
In a frame?
Uh, ofcourse, why would that make a difference? It's just an object in the HTML DOM.
Here's a few links to images to demonstrate the power of COM and IE. Tis quite shocking how many people still think Windows is in the win2.0 days
Example 1
Word document inside IE. Notice how IE's menus are integrated with Word's menus. MS Word is acting as an ActiveX Document in this example.
Example 2
Excel document inside IE.
Example 3
PDF document inside IE
I don't have an example for postscript cause I don't use it, or know of a viewer for windows. But you get the idea...it's not that difficult to add support.
Note that the opposite is generally true, eg. you can host IE inside Word & Excel to display HTML/XML etc. I don't think ADOBE's pdf viewer is an OLE container, but they could make it one.
Microsoft is going to have to worry about people wanting these cool features- I already show them to my friends and they drool, because they want a desktop that can do what mine can. No they don't, cause they came up with this kind of stuff and implemented it before Linux did, and have made it basically upbitquous(no sleep, bad spelling) in the windows world. This kind of thing is an extension to java applets - but it's been done by Microsoft in client side apps (well before the WWW become popular). Now you know, care to show your friends this?
Please name some of these undocumented API calls.
Windows has a heck of a lot of applications (including low level system tools) for something that's got these "hidden apis".
you're full of crap.
APIs are only APIs when they're documented. If there's a DLL shipped with windows that exports a DoEx function, that's not an API just cause it's exported. The reason being is that it's not part of Win32 as Microsoft sees it, and is NOT garunteeed to be supported in future versions of Windows. These exports are usually documented by 3rd parties (and they are free to do so).
I wouldn't consider myself a troll. Just as I wouldn't consider most people around here who heavily advocate linux trolls (unless they bashed mirosoft mcneally/sun exec style).
I try to keep things "on topic" when discussing microsoft. And tend to only go off on Microsoft tangents in response to a post I see as wrong, or unfair.
I won't bring up Microsoft out of the blue for example - on an article about beanies.
Ah, so we're no longer trying to argue that Windows does package management better, eh? I gotta hand it to you, TummyX, you know what you're doing. Looks like you're going to lose the debate? Answer a different question! A move from the Bill Gates playbook itself.
No! I really was just being facetious. Debian indeed does have a kick ass package managing system. I don't even think windows has what you call "package management". It comes with some install APIs, and has cool stuff in other areas (windows 2000's self healing applications for example).
However - I do think that it's easier to setup programs (in general) on windows than linux tho.
I was parodying your example for fun.
:) and insteresting debates.
The point is both linux and windows have problems, and neither is perfect. So by my example I was showing how your example meant very little.
And why do you have to associate "microsoft-loving" with "troll" all the time?
This is an 'open geek' forum, and you can be a geek and like (or not hate) microsoft at the same time. Admittedly, it is heavily biased to linux, but microsoft stories always gets the most postings
Possibly cause there's more NT servers out there than there are novell servers?
:P
You should tell your friends not to play quake on their NT servers
Aren't native threads allowed to preempt? I think there are garunteed atomic operations too like (a = b);
Although I agree with you. I'd like to know what you compile that takes 5 hours?
You're not using GCC are you? Use precompiled headers and incremental compilation.
In my experience GCC is slower than VC++ or BCB on large projects.
Games/3D
VMWare
99.999% acurrate Voice Recognition
Super Servers
Realtime compression of video/audio
Netscape 4.x
etc.
Yeah, just pull it all out of context, windows is easier for most people by a long shot.
....
Windows
1. Download self extracting exe.
2. Double click on exe.
3. Read dialogs, go with defaults.
3. Wait for install to occur.
Red Hat Linux
1. Download archive
2. Read RPM documentation to figure out how to use RPM.
3. rpm -ivh foo.rpm
4. Get obscure errors about dependencies you need.
5. Goto redhat.com to try to find the other RPM you need.
6. Eventally find them on some other website.
7. rpm -ivh foodepend.rpm
8. rpm -ivh foo.rpm
9. Get obscure errors about dependencies you need.
89. Finally installed, you have to figure out where the binaries were installed.
90. Manually make your KDE links to the files.
91. Finally, execute the application only to find that it depends on some other application to get XXX feature enabled.
Last I looked the Windows Media server was free. It's free in windows 2000, and i think it's downloadable for NT4.
Bah don't be such a troll. Torvalds Computer Science Building. Oooooh Torvalds rocks man, he's the (self proclaimed) best programmer in the world, stanford ROCKS, i'm going to stanford, I'd love to see a beowulf cluster of linus torvalds computer science buildings! The point is, SO WHAT?
Not, how do you explain the thousands of drivers for NT?
Why don't you look at the DDK for once, much nicer than what linux has...which is take the code and if you can't do it you're a stupid idiot.
LOL IE take out a machine? What a ridiculous thing to say. As if. I wasn't talking about it taking down the OS anyway (wtf kind of OS is that?). I'm talking about the browser CRASHING.
Um, so you're saying that Linux doesn't need a decent driver model and abstract because they can always get the source? Uh no. Manufacturers just want a nice DDK, read the docs, get some examples, and do it.
NT has a very nice driver model. So like if a new device were to come along, the manufacturer could write a driver without any NT source. As an example (this is 2.0.x) I had to recompile with ipfw options to get ipmasq and ipfwadm to work. with win95 and an unmodified kernel, you can write NAT. Anyway....my point was not to say that Linux "can't" do these things, but was to say that just cause you don't have NT source doesn't mean you can't "optimize" the "kernel/drivers". I know Linux has kernel modules.
yes, oversight on my part.
Linus is not senior management, but it's the 'big' open source boy. And if transmeta is doing something that he likens to prostitution (software is like sex it's better when it's free) maybe he should consider working with alan at redhat. Either that or changing his views.
/. did he? It's his column and he can say and do whatever he wants. Unless everyone who dares say anything bad about Linus or Linux (even off /.) is now considered a troll.
Firmware is software. Would be if i said, who the hell needs source to the kernel! noone needs that.
And the crusoe is optimized for windows (at least the more expensive one is).
And Metcalf a troll? Uh huh, he didn't exactly post it here on
Now lets be facing it, Bob Metcalfe is not a stupid man. He knows as well as you and I that Linus does not own or control Transmeta, the very suggestion that a commercial company should give away it's prized possession for free goes against every principle of the free market. It's also completely silly to suggest that should be done just because one Linus Torvalds is currently employed there.
Point is that Linus has hardly been a quiet pundant. How did he put it? "Software is like sex, it's better when it's free". Ok, I want "free" code morphong please. Point is, Linus shouldn't be bashing MS (he does it all the time in his speeches) to gain beenie points. It certainly makes him look 'arrogant' to me.
And Metcalkfe is totally right about Linus' changing views. Now commercialsm is GREAT, and fragmentation can be GOOD...what's next? This man is just trying to start an argument. Linus has done a vast amount of good for the open source community, should we really be attacking him for being involved in a closed source project for his current employer?
Not for contributing heaps to open source projects. Attacking him because he's been such a propronent for open source with a "holier than thou" attidude to non open source projects/companies. This project is hardly a small project for transmeta, it's huge, and it's hugely software - so Linux is now working for a proprietry 'software/hardware' company. What a pity it's only stylish to bash the other software company.
Explain, what is a default kernel in linux "moron".
NT kernel is optimized all the time, we have ring0 drivers, vxds etc. We don't have a monolithic kernel you know. That's what this thread was about...not installing the right drivers. There's this amazing thing, we don't have to recompile the kernel to remove a feature!