From: Eugene Leitl (eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Fri Mar 10 2000 - 04:19:08 MST
Mike Linksvayer writes:
> I wasn't arguing that Windows sucks or that Unix is great because in
> a year or three it will have x, y, and z. I was arguing against the
In fact, given the development dynamics vector, that's a perfectly
valid argument. There is great stuff in the OpenSource
pipeline. There's not nearly as much great stuff at proprietary end;
gentlemen, draw your own conclusions.
> notion that it would be a horrible thing if most computers ran Unix
> at some point in the future.
Ach, it would be a such a GHASTLY thing INDEED. Only 100% installed
base Win2k would be so much WORSE.
> I'll admit to knowing basically nothing about Windows internals, but the
Believe me, you're better off innocent of having descended into that
particular tar pit. (I didn't, either, (I'm not crazy) but I heard war
stories). Architecture? Which architecture? Gee, and what a nice
upgrade philosophy. Active X control overwriting DLLs when visiting a
website without even prompting user for acknowledgement. Having to
have your software sanctioned by Microsoft (for a fee, of course)
orelse it wouldn't install on win2k. Office 2k, which _requires_
online registration, even if legitimaly purchased, or it will cease
function after a 20-30 starts. Excuse me? I must really admire the
blind trust users still put into the big momma Microsoft. Gag me with
a pitchfork (excuse my French).
> conventional wisdom is that the OS is pretty tightly coupled to the UI,
> otherwise why would doing anything on a Windows machine remotely be such
> a pain? And even if technically Microsoft could slap completely new
Try BackOrifice 2000. Free remote administration kit (and a hacker's
best friend, but you don't need to tell that your boss, if
any). Markedly, not a Microsoft product.
Microsoft, the black hole of great minds. How can so many brilliant
people produce so few, submediocre products? I suspect an evil alien
conspiracy...
> interfaces onto Windows easily, they couldn't do anything non-incremental
> for business reasons. The installed base is overwhelmingly important.
> Same applies to Apple.
Your Apple pie//doesn't taste too nice//you better wise up//Steven Jobs.
Still, better him then that Sculley creep.
> > 1) Is there anything decent you can use now (and if you have to compile it
> > yourself, you've completely missed the point as far as the mass market is
> > concerned).
>
> Sure, you can use Gnome <http://www.gnome.org/> or KDE
> <http://www.kde.org/> right now. Most Linux distributions ship with one
> or the other as the default desktop, and easy to install binary packages
> are available. To the extent that I care, they already look and feel
Particularly Debian (with it's 2k odd packages) is beautifully easy to
upgrade.
> Well, Gnome and KDE have only been around for a few years and are already
> quite slick. I will predict that more UI innovation will come from
Full agreement here. In fact properly configured Gnome/Enlightenment
is fucking spectacular. The changeable skin approach is entering the
desktop with a vengeance. Of course nobody likes flash desktops, no
more than people still stick to ~0.6 MBytes RAM in their machines.
> the open source camp than Microsoft or Apple in the future. Unix is a
> platform anyone can innovate on, Windows and MacOS are platforms only
> their corporate owners can innovate on. However, I'd guess that any
> real UI innovation won't originate on the traditional desktop (perhaps
> video games or mobiles).
Almost 1 Mio of Playstations2's have been already sold in Japan, just
after introduction. Despite hardware troubles, memory card shortages
and recalls. Wowie.
> Hand-code what? Use CORBA. From my limited vantage point, forget about
> COM and CORBA, Windows and Unix. Write everything in Java (now there's
Java would be so very cool indeed, if it didn't crash my browser after
a while, with nigh 100% high reliability. Speaking of browsers, that
Netscape piece of offal with it's insidous memory leaks is probably
the most buggy piece of software, er, software I'm still using right
now. While you don't have to reboot periodically to keep your machine
minty-fresh (as with Certain OSses We All Know And Love Well But Won't
Mention), having to restart the browser (or losing lots of ephemeral
state due to a crash) sucks bigtime. Mozilla, you're really overdue.
> a real cost savings vs. C++), abstract your transport, and you can easily
> plug into COM, CORBA, some fancy message queue, or whatever, easily.
>
> Mike
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