From: johnsk2 (johnsk2@rpi.edu)
Date: Sat Mar 11 2000 - 14:05:44 MST
>Now, I thought it was supposed to be the evil Micro$ofties that tried to
>treat vaporware like a current feature. :-) I could say the same thing
>about Windows with equal accuracy (after all, it runs POSIX applications,
>DOS programs, and all the major Unix shells, and Microsoft could
>easily slap
>other interfaces on top if they wanted to). The questions are:
>
>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).
>
>2) Is there reason to think that X years of improvement in Linux UIs will
>yield better results than X years of improvement in Microsoft UIs? (And it
>would be nice if the reason amounted to more than 'oh, open source will
>automatically make everything wonderful'.)
>
>> I don't see this changing anytime soon. I expect that the vast
>> majority new applications rolled out in the near future will reuse
>> parts of the existing XML/HTTP infrastructure and be platform neutral.
>> Some will even be truly innovative.
>
>For the client, probably. But for apps that interact with a database you
>can get about a factor of five cost savings by writing the server
>app on top
>of COM+ and running it across clusters of cheap boxes, as opposed to going
>with the one-big-box approach or trying to hand-code a distributed app on
>Unix.
>
>Billy Brown
>bbrown@transcient.com
>
The whole point of a Unix-based system is the stability that it has. Having
a great UI and crashing every other day (at the very least) is completely
missing the point of having a decent box to begin with. After X years of
improvements in Linux UIs will yield better result than x years of develop
for microsoft because the Linux UIs will remain stable. Microsoft continues
to build features onto its UIs over buggy software, and in that great cludge
of code you only manage to develop more and more bugs to build upon later.
Already, scripts are being developed that installation as easy as windows.
Look at BSD for ease of use installation right now (for many things at
least). If you're connected to a network, you can run a ./configure which
will automatically download and install any dependencies that the program
you're trying to install requires as well as install the program that you
want. Unixes are coming at a reasonable towards challenging MS on the user
market. While they won't be here next year, the open-source projects are
moving quickly and are gaining a large following.
Open source doesn't make linux and its "pals" all hunky-dory, but it does
force people to be bug and security conscious in a lot of their code.
- Kirsten Johnsen
johnsk2@rpi.edu
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