It was a major step in the direction that all OS' follow now. Without that history, much of the device layer we are accustomed to today, wouldn't be there.
MS-DOS came out in 1981. At that time, people were using 4.1BSD and Smalltalk (including GUIs and IDEs). The BSD systems not only had a flexible driver architecture, they had been ported to many different systems. Some versions of them even ran on 16bit PDP-11's. This was several decades after the first multiuser operating systems were developed. Silicon Graphics was founded in 1982. 4.2BSD came out in 1985, X10 came out in 1986, and X11 in 1987. You could get 386 PCs running UNIX around that time as well, for about $2000. People were using UNIX workstations.
There was nothing that MS-DOS did for the industry other than do grave damage for two decades. MS-DOS was an anachronism, as was every system ever built on it.
In fact, except for a bit of window dressing and faster hardware, fairly little of substance has happened in the last two decades in software: UNIX and Smalltalk from the mid 1980's are thoroughly modern systems, and people were doing pretty much the same things with the Internet they are doing today: chatting, discussing things, exchanging pictures, etc.
He stole another person's idea (i.e. CPM/86) and tried to make money off of it
CP/M was a decent OS for what it was, but let's not get carried away here: it wasn't much of an idea. This was about two decades after multiuser operating systems, three decades after Lisp. People were using UNIX, the Internet, supercomputers, Smalltalk. Kay had designed his dynapad.
All the microcomputer hacking (CP/M, MS-DOS, Apple, etc.) was engineering--it was implementing and bringing to market other people's ideas. Many of the people who did it were "learning on the job". There was no rocket science anywhere in the microcomputer business, just people buying up cheap microcontrollers and building small, affordable computers around them and simple software for it. Sometimes they did a good job, and often, they did a poor job.
MSDOS does not do much compared to VMS or VM/CMS but what it does it does on an 8/16 bit processor running at a few MHz.
UCSD Pascal was a better designed system and ran on a 64kbyte Apple II at the whopping speed of 1MHz with a pathetic little chip called the 6502 that had three (count'em: three) one byte registers.
People were running multitasking operating system with tree-structured directory trees on hardware less powerful than what MS-DOS required before MS-DOS even appeared on the scene.
MS-DOS was a disaster, an embarrassement, a testament to ineptitude and inexperience. MS-DOS was IBM's attempt to cripple the PC so badly that it wouldn't compete with their real computers. They succeeded at the crippling part--too bad it got popular anyway and the plan backfired.
Yours is a predictable but incorrect resopnse. The G4 cube is also a fairly small machine, but it uses vertical boards and a vertical drive. The G4 Cube lasted less than a year in the market. Not until Apple copied the design of the various compact PCs did they succeed in this form factor. It's actually evidence that Apple had a previous chance at this market and screwed up.
While I think that VoIP blocking is really bad, calling it "censorship" has the wrong connotations. The term "censorship" suggests that a government prohibits a publication because it does not like the content; sometimes it is used for closely analogous private actions, but it really implies and organized effort by a very powerful entity to suppress ideas and ideologies. Censorship is not the suppression of technologies that might ruin one's business.
What VoIP blocking is is reprehensible anti-competitive behavior. Even if it is carried out by a government, it is not censorship.
Now, the same technology used for VoIP blocking can also be used for censorship. But there is no "slippery slope" there--the technology already exists and it will become a standard part of the Internet. The question is how it is going to be used, but confusing "censorship" and "anti-competitive behavior" is not going to help us in that debate. For example, while I don't like anti-competitive behavior, I still prefer a government telecommunications monopoly to private censorship, and those are choices we could face.
Apple didn't invent the "little form factor" machine. With the Mac Mini, Apple has just been following a trend that has existed in the PC world for years now, towards smaller and smaller form factors, with a general arrangement of a DVD drive stacked on top of a motherboard. And while I don't know when Apple engineers looked at the Nanode, the Mac Mini is so close in its design to the Nanode that if anybody knocked off anybody, the Mac Mini is a knock off of the Nanode.
Apple's marketing department is really to be admired: when the PC world sells neat little PCs in novel form factors, it's considered as something that a bunch of weirdo case modders do. When Apple finally gets around to doing the same thing years later, from then on, anything else is a knock-off of "their" idea.
Does ACPI suspend work on more laptops? Inability to suspend is a major problem with Linux on laptops right now, as there are more and more ACPI-only laptops. The situation is considerably worse compared to APM, in my experience.
Polyamorous alien within 1003.2 light years (same galactic arm only please) with prime number of piercing into tentacle sex and black hole bondage wanted by endoskeletal ape descendant (some hair) with XY sex chromosomes and external genitalia (tentacle-like but not prehensile). Please be between 3'2" and 10'7" along your longest dimension, weigh no more than 500 pounds (no prejudice against big boned aliens, but there are physical limitations), have skin pigmentation that absorbs IR and fluoresces under near UV light. I still live with my evolutionary relatives, so you must have your own spacecraft.
Plan 9 has a lot of good ideas in it, and I hope that many more of them make it into Linux.
However, unionfs did not originate with Plan 9--other UNIX systems have had it, too. I don't think it even came from Bell Labs.
It's a shame that novel OS's like Plan 9 are largely ignored, only for some of their features to be introduced later into mainstream OS's as "new" ideas.
Plan 9 was/is a research system; that's it's function in life. As long as the developers of other systems don't falsely claim that they invented it, and as long as they reference the inventors in publications, it's OK. Some large computer manufacturers are not quite honest about this sort of thing, though, and claim that they are constantly "innovating" when in reality, they are just copying.
Sure, COM has problems, but show me a still-viable object interop system that's 14 years old that doesn't.
There are two sets of problems, one resulting from the fact that COM is C++-based and the other from the fact that it is vtable based. The first set of problems is shared by anything you do in terms of COM-like functionality for C++ (in fact, the whole reason for something like COM is because the C++ object model sucks). The second set of problems is specific to COM: using vtables as an abstraction is just a bad idea, and Microsoft should have known better. When they came out with COM, there were already much better designs around; my first thought when I saw it was "how can they be so stupid", and I was hardly alone in that reaction.
But what it does have is a pretty simple design, and it scales.
No, it does not scale--it becomes a huge headache for large software systems.
How can one do better? Objective-C does this one right--Objective-C is probably the best job you can do on COM-like functionality for C-like languages: it's simple, it's fast, and it's powerful.
There's no point in acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display in your local planning department on Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you've had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it's far too late to start making a fuss about it now. What do you mean you've never been to Alpha Centauri? For heaven's sake mankind, it's only four light years away you know. I'm sorry, but if you can't be bothered to take an interest in local affairs that's your own lookout. Energise the demolition beams.
Oh, I think the COM model is fundamentally broken from a programming point of view. But it is one thing: it's pretty fast. I think that was the overriding design goal, and it shows.
But, even if Linux has a better GUI from GUI designer's point of view, people are used to Microsoft's IE, Outlook, Office, etc., so they expect all software to look like that.
Yes, and Linux accomodates that. KDE can look and feel so much like Windows that it makes me want to puke.
There is no AOL for Linux, so nobody can use the same program to connect to the internet, visit web pages, and check their email.
No program, that is, except for Mozilla, for example, which also offers calendaring and chat. Of course, the Linux desktops are so well integrated that you don't need to stuff everything into a single program.
...from those in the linux community who already insist everthings perfect
When people say that Linux is fine, they aren't saying that it's perfect, they are saying that it works well enough.
At this point, both Windows and Linux have comparable levels of annoyances for desktop users, but the fact that Linux is open source and all that entails (lower risks, faster turnarounds, lower purchase cost and lower TCO) tips the balance for many users....from the myriad developers who wanna do it 'their way' rather than supporting a existing project...from all those who are so focused on making Linux 'like windows'... without thinking about making it BETTER than windows...
See, the nice thing is that Linux does both: you can choose to run it as a Windows look/work-alike, or you can choose to run a nifty next generation environment on it. And that's the real strength of Linux: it gives you choices and ability to determine where you want to go today and tomorrow. With Windows, it's whatever Microsoft tells you is good for you.
Even if people aren't that attached to Windows programs, many Linux programs look very different and are much harder to use than Windows equivalents.
And many Windows programs look very different and are much harder to use than Linux equivalents. The point is: both platforms have crappy software. In fact, there is probably a lot more crappy software on Windows than on Linux.
What matters is whether you can get enough non-crappy software on Linux to get your work done, and you most certainly can. And, unlike Windows, you won't even have to pay an arm and a leg for it.
Having installed a few Windows XP installations from scratch recently (off-the-shelf Windows on bare hardware), I can say from first hand experience that drivers on Windows are a big problem, more so than on Linux.
Linux comes with many more drivers out of the box and most reasonable hardware just works. On Windows, you usually have to go hunting on the web for the right drivers (included CDs are usually out of date with respect to Windows), and then it's still a game of chance whether they are actually going to work.
Deep down, COM just dispatches through something pretty much like vtables. That makes COM many things: unsafe, bug-prone, hard to program, version dependent. But it should at least be fast.
There's nothing unique to proprietary source about that, though. I could just as easily release some code under the GPL, wait, then go after anyone releasing code that does something similar too.
No, the two situations differ.
Open source licenses satisfy explicit requirements (see www.opensource.org) that protect you from such claims; the nature and aims of open source software almost make that necessary.
Shared source licenses, on the other hand, usually impose restrictions that cause legal problems if you are going to work on something similar. I have yet to see a shared source license (i.e., a "source available" license that doesn't meet the definition of "open source") that doesn't expose you to significant risk, although they may exist.
My point is if you're going to be paranoid about "shared source" stuff,
It's not paranoia: it is common and customary to exclude people from both commercial and open source projects if they have looked at proprietary source code under many non-open source agreements (community source, shared source, etc.). You may think it's unreasonable, but those are the real-life facts, and it's not just because the people running the projects think it's the right thing to do, it's also because some originators of shared source licenses have actually demanded it.
Nevertheless, you should always be careful to read and understand any license agreement, whether it is for binaries, open source software, or shared source software, before you agree to it.
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It was a major step in the direction that all OS' follow now. Without that history, much of the device layer we are accustomed to today, wouldn't be there.
MS-DOS came out in 1981. At that time, people were using 4.1BSD and Smalltalk (including GUIs and IDEs). The BSD systems not only had a flexible driver architecture, they had been ported to many different systems. Some versions of them even ran on 16bit PDP-11's. This was several decades after the first multiuser operating systems were developed. Silicon Graphics was founded in 1982. 4.2BSD came out in 1985, X10 came out in 1986, and X11 in 1987. You could get 386 PCs running UNIX around that time as well, for about $2000. People were using UNIX workstations.
There was nothing that MS-DOS did for the industry other than do grave damage for two decades. MS-DOS was an anachronism, as was every system ever built on it.
In fact, except for a bit of window dressing and faster hardware, fairly little of substance has happened in the last two decades in software: UNIX and Smalltalk from the mid 1980's are thoroughly modern systems, and people were doing pretty much the same things with the Internet they are doing today: chatting, discussing things, exchanging pictures, etc.
He stole another person's idea (i.e. CPM/86) and tried to make money off of it
CP/M was a decent OS for what it was, but let's not get carried away here: it wasn't much of an idea. This was about two decades after multiuser operating systems, three decades after Lisp. People were using UNIX, the Internet, supercomputers, Smalltalk. Kay had designed his dynapad.
All the microcomputer hacking (CP/M, MS-DOS, Apple, etc.) was engineering--it was implementing and bringing to market other people's ideas. Many of the people who did it were "learning on the job". There was no rocket science anywhere in the microcomputer business, just people buying up cheap microcontrollers and building small, affordable computers around them and simple software for it. Sometimes they did a good job, and often, they did a poor job.
MSDOS does not do much compared to VMS or VM/CMS but what it does it does on an 8/16 bit processor running at a few MHz.
UCSD Pascal was a better designed system and ran on a 64kbyte Apple II at the whopping speed of 1MHz with a pathetic little chip called the 6502 that had three (count'em: three) one byte registers.
People were running multitasking operating system with tree-structured directory trees on hardware less powerful than what MS-DOS required before MS-DOS even appeared on the scene.
MS-DOS was a disaster, an embarrassement, a testament to ineptitude and inexperience. MS-DOS was IBM's attempt to cripple the PC so badly that it wouldn't compete with their real computers. They succeeded at the crippling part--too bad it got popular anyway and the plan backfired.
Right, but the guy has a point that it was in many, many ways completely unlike CP/M
Yeah, in all the ways that mattered...
Yours is a predictable but incorrect resopnse. The G4 cube is also a fairly small machine, but it uses vertical boards and a vertical drive. The G4 Cube lasted less than a year in the market. Not until Apple copied the design of the various compact PCs did they succeed in this form factor. It's actually evidence that Apple had a previous chance at this market and screwed up.
Windows NT: thank god he's not from the Darkside of the Force...
Well, as opposed to Satan, I suppose he may then be just Phil, the prince of insufficient light, ruler of Heck.
While I think that VoIP blocking is really bad, calling it "censorship" has the wrong connotations. The term "censorship" suggests that a government prohibits a publication because it does not like the content; sometimes it is used for closely analogous private actions, but it really implies and organized effort by a very powerful entity to suppress ideas and ideologies. Censorship is not the suppression of technologies that might ruin one's business.
What VoIP blocking is is reprehensible anti-competitive behavior. Even if it is carried out by a government, it is not censorship.
Now, the same technology used for VoIP blocking can also be used for censorship. But there is no "slippery slope" there--the technology already exists and it will become a standard part of the Internet. The question is how it is going to be used, but confusing "censorship" and "anti-competitive behavior" is not going to help us in that debate. For example, while I don't like anti-competitive behavior, I still prefer a government telecommunications monopoly to private censorship, and those are choices we could face.
Apple didn't invent the "little form factor" machine. With the Mac Mini, Apple has just been following a trend that has existed in the PC world for years now, towards smaller and smaller form factors, with a general arrangement of a DVD drive stacked on top of a motherboard. And while I don't know when Apple engineers looked at the Nanode, the Mac Mini is so close in its design to the Nanode that if anybody knocked off anybody, the Mac Mini is a knock off of the Nanode.
Apple's marketing department is really to be admired: when the PC world sells neat little PCs in novel form factors, it's considered as something that a bunch of weirdo case modders do. When Apple finally gets around to doing the same thing years later, from then on, anything else is a knock-off of "their" idea.
What's wrong with it?
It violates just about every GUI convention of Gnome and KDE, and it is dog slow compared to viewers like xpdf.
Does ACPI suspend work on more laptops? Inability to suspend is a major problem with Linux on laptops right now, as there are more and more ACPI-only laptops. The situation is considerably worse compared to APM, in my experience.
I forgot the most important part at the end: "No weirdos, please."
Polyamorous alien within 1003.2 light years (same galactic arm only please) with prime number of piercing into tentacle sex and black hole bondage wanted by endoskeletal ape descendant (some hair) with XY sex chromosomes and external genitalia (tentacle-like but not prehensile). Please be between 3'2" and 10'7" along your longest dimension, weigh no more than 500 pounds (no prejudice against big boned aliens, but there are physical limitations), have skin pigmentation that absorbs IR and fluoresces under near UV light. I still live with my evolutionary relatives, so you must have your own spacecraft.
Plan 9 has a lot of good ideas in it, and I hope that many more of them make it into Linux.
However, unionfs did not originate with Plan 9--other UNIX systems have had it, too. I don't think it even came from Bell Labs.
It's a shame that novel OS's like Plan 9 are largely ignored, only for some of their features to be introduced later into mainstream OS's as "new" ideas.
Plan 9 was/is a research system; that's it's function in life. As long as the developers of other systems don't falsely claim that they invented it, and as long as they reference the inventors in publications, it's OK. Some large computer manufacturers are not quite honest about this sort of thing, though, and claim that they are constantly "innovating" when in reality, they are just copying.
Her piece looks an awful lot like astroturf...
Sure, COM has problems, but show me a still-viable object interop system that's 14 years old that doesn't.
There are two sets of problems, one resulting from the fact that COM is C++-based and the other from the fact that it is vtable based. The first set of problems is shared by anything you do in terms of COM-like functionality for C++ (in fact, the whole reason for something like COM is because the C++ object model sucks). The second set of problems is specific to COM: using vtables as an abstraction is just a bad idea, and Microsoft should have known better. When they came out with COM, there were already much better designs around; my first thought when I saw it was "how can they be so stupid", and I was hardly alone in that reaction.
But what it does have is a pretty simple design, and it scales.
No, it does not scale--it becomes a huge headache for large software systems.
How can one do better? Objective-C does this one right--Objective-C is probably the best job you can do on COM-like functionality for C-like languages: it's simple, it's fast, and it's powerful.
But, it's real easy for him to come up with a reason if he has to
If they don't enforce that law consistently, you can probably challenge it as selective enforcement.
But COM itself doesn't necessarily have to suck.
Oh, I think the COM model is fundamentally broken from a programming point of view. But it is one thing: it's pretty fast. I think that was the overriding design goal, and it shows.
But, even if Linux has a better GUI from GUI designer's point of view, people are used to Microsoft's IE, Outlook, Office, etc., so they expect all software to look like that.
Yes, and Linux accomodates that. KDE can look and feel so much like Windows that it makes me want to puke.
There is no AOL for Linux, so nobody can use the same program to connect to the internet, visit web pages, and check their email.
No program, that is, except for Mozilla, for example, which also offers calendaring and chat. Of course, the Linux desktops are so well integrated that you don't need to stuff everything into a single program.
...from those in the linux community who already insist everthings perfect
...from the myriad developers who wanna do it 'their way' rather than supporting a existing project ...from all those who are so focused on making Linux 'like windows'... without thinking about making it BETTER than windows. ..
When people say that Linux is fine, they aren't saying that it's perfect, they are saying that it works well enough.
At this point, both Windows and Linux have comparable levels of annoyances for desktop users, but the fact that Linux is open source and all that entails (lower risks, faster turnarounds, lower purchase cost and lower TCO) tips the balance for many users.
See, the nice thing is that Linux does both: you can choose to run it as a Windows look/work-alike, or you can choose to run a nifty next generation environment on it. And that's the real strength of Linux: it gives you choices and ability to determine where you want to go today and tomorrow. With Windows, it's whatever Microsoft tells you is good for you.
Even if people aren't that attached to Windows programs, many Linux programs look very different and are much harder to use than Windows equivalents.
And many Windows programs look very different and are much harder to use than Linux equivalents. The point is: both platforms have crappy software. In fact, there is probably a lot more crappy software on Windows than on Linux.
What matters is whether you can get enough non-crappy software on Linux to get your work done, and you most certainly can. And, unlike Windows, you won't even have to pay an arm and a leg for it.
Having installed a few Windows XP installations from scratch recently (off-the-shelf Windows on bare hardware), I can say from first hand experience that drivers on Windows are a big problem, more so than on Linux.
Linux comes with many more drivers out of the box and most reasonable hardware just works. On Windows, you usually have to go hunting on the web for the right drivers (included CDs are usually out of date with respect to Windows), and then it's still a game of chance whether they are actually going to work.
Deep down, COM just dispatches through something pretty much like vtables. That makes COM many things: unsafe, bug-prone, hard to program, version dependent. But it should at least be fast.
I wouldn't call 15% growth in 5 weeks a "plateau"...
There's nothing unique to proprietary source about that, though. I could just as easily release some code under the GPL, wait, then go after anyone releasing code that does something similar too.
No, the two situations differ.
Open source licenses satisfy explicit requirements (see www.opensource.org) that protect you from such claims; the nature and aims of open source software almost make that necessary.
Shared source licenses, on the other hand, usually impose restrictions that cause legal problems if you are going to work on something similar. I have yet to see a shared source license (i.e., a "source available" license that doesn't meet the definition of "open source") that doesn't expose you to significant risk, although they may exist.
My point is if you're going to be paranoid about "shared source" stuff,
It's not paranoia: it is common and customary to exclude people from both commercial and open source projects if they have looked at proprietary source code under many non-open source agreements (community source, shared source, etc.). You may think it's unreasonable, but those are the real-life facts, and it's not just because the people running the projects think it's the right thing to do, it's also because some originators of shared source licenses have actually demanded it.
Nevertheless, you should always be careful to read and understand any license agreement, whether it is for binaries, open source software, or shared source software, before you agree to it.