life after Windows....

William Black wrote:

You should have been around a few years ago when Windows wasn't the only
choice arounf the place.

I rather liked an operating system called GEM made by Digital research, but
Microsoft killed it, and I don't mean outsold it, I mean sued them and
stopped them selling it under very strange circumstances.

I remember GEM, but it was a GUI (or, in those days, a WIMP system), not
an operating system.

aracari writes:

Duh! Because neither are GUI op/systems.

So?

MS-DOS did have GUI-like add-ons.

The GUI is grafted on after development. That is one reason why
many functions exist in the op/sys which are not supported by the
GUI.

Yes, for some operating systems and configurations.

See above. You don't quite understand how op/sys are developed
...although I agree that GUIs take a lot of system resources.

I've developed operating systems; I know a great deal about how they are
designed. I've also seen the source code of just about every operating system
I've used.

In message , John Stubbings
writes
On Thu, 26 Mar 2009 13:20:46 +0000, Chris H wrote:

In message , John Stubbings
writes
On Thu, 26 Mar 2009 00:01:46 +0000, aracari wrote:

'Mxsmanic' wrote this:

aracari writes:

That depends on whether developers get their act together and
bring it to prime time.

That will never happen. If it were going to happen, it would have already
done so.

I don't agree. It has taken MS since the halcyon days in mid
1980s to arrive at XP. Too bad they lost the plot after that...

Idiot, in the real world, smart people are using Vista

In the real world Business ignored Vista. The sales figures for Vista
are appalling without taking into account that the majority of business
users promptly "downgraded" to XP

This is why XP is STILL available and will continue to be so until
Windows7 is released. There are Beta's about now.

I think this is the first time MS has kept the old OS running and
available until the launch of the next OS after the current one.


I said, "smart people are using Vista"... the world moves on

Then your definition of "smart" seems to be equivalent of most smart
people's definition for "stupid"

But what would I know? My degree is in Operating Systems and I have 30
years SW engineering behind me. Though it is in high reliability
systems not Windows or Linux.

getting ready for
Windows 7,

That is true.

yes, bloody exciting, it's 95% Vista

Quite so. SO it will be interesting to see what happens.


--
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
\/\/\/\/\ Chris Hills Staffs England /\/\/\/\/
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/

Mxsmanic wrote:

White Spirit writes:

I often run FreeBSD as well but to say that it is a real UNIX(tm) as
opposed to a fake UNIX(tm) is ridiculous. Beyond POSIX compliance, what
more do you want?

FreeBSD and the other freeware BSDs are actual descendants of UNIX, whereas
Linux has a kernel that is a clone of UNIX functionality.

Additionally, the BSD operating systems are complete operating systems that
are functional "out of the box," whereas Linux is just a kernel around which a
great deal of additional software must be added in order to get anything
resembling a functional operating system. And since everyone adds something
different, there are zillions of different "distributions" of Linux, whereas
there's only one FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc.

That's an accurate description, aside from the meaningless 'zillions'.
It certainly conveys more meaning than 'real' or 'fake' Unices.

William Black writes:

Almost all users do almost nothing with their computers.

Not true. There are two basic types of users: Those who have a computer for
the sake of having a computer (the geeks), and those who have a computer in
order to do productive things that interest them that just happen to require a
computer. The latter group represents the vast majority of computer users.
The former group represents the vast majority of Linux users.

The major problems only turn up when people write their web pages in such a
way as to only work on Microsoft products, as is currently the case with
the British government's 'Government Gateway' system.

I thought the British government was supposed to be using Linux?

As for the musician who couldn't get software, very few professionals in
the music business use Windows products. They're almost all using Apple
products, including software. Indeed, when Apple bought 'Logic' and
insisted on stopping manufacturing the PC version it caused something of a
stir in the industry.
.
Now, this being the case, there's little reason why people shouldn't use,
for example, Ubuntu on their computers.

There are other users besides musicians.

It's free, reasonably easy to install, something which most Windows users
find hard work anyway, runs a friendly GUI and finds just about everyone's
hardware with remarkably few problems.

Apart from not being free, all of this is even more true of Windows.

Already there are larger numbers on Linux computers about than ever before.
The Asus 'eeepc' type devices the shops are currently full of almost all run
Linux in some form or other, with a software fit that is remarkably like
the one I mentioned above for the home user.

As the public become educated (an inevitable result of computer education in
schools), and as government departments in Europe abandon Windows for legal
reason, the user base will expand.

At some point in the reasonably near future I fully expect Unix and its
variants will become dominant.

I've been hearing this for years, and it is no more true today than it was
when fanatics first started saying it.

"erilar" wrote in message
...
In article ,
dest wrote:

Linux is way to much
customizable.

Now that strikes me as an advantage. One of my complaints about some
"up"grades I've been forced to accept is that they chop out customizable
features I found very useful in favor of supposedly idiotproof clunky
features. And that's from a Mac point of view! At least with pre-OS X
Mac I could keep using old versions for quite a while.

OS X of course squares the circle, by making a Unix type operating system
that runs with a GUI and is usable by the sort of people who have 'technical
issues' with plugging something into a USB port (not you Mary)

The problem is that it only works with a very constrained hardware set, but
if Apple could make their product work with a reasonably wide range of
hardware they'd probably have a product that would kill most of the other
operating systems on the market and make bloody sure what was left did
actually work when you used it...

Who isn't sick of 'Don't buy any Micro$oft product until after Service Pasck
2 is released?

--
William Black

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.
Barbeques on fire by the chalets past the castle headland
I watched the gift shops glitter in the darkness off the Newborough gate
All these moments will be lost in time, like icecream on the beach
Time for tea.

White Spirit writes:

Yep. I often complain that user-friendliness has now become
idiot-friendliness. Mainstream operating systems and programs are
targeted at the lowest common denominator ...

That is the only way to enlarge the user base ... something Linux advocates
don't seem to understand.

Every other mass-market consumer gadget works this way, and computers are
increasingly working this way, too.

White Spirit writes:

What a load of rubbish. I do far more with Linux than I ever did (or
could) with MICROS~1. I'll also give Mac OSX a miss, thank you very much.

So what exactly do you do with your computer? I have roughly 100 applications
on mine that I use (under Windows).

On Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:51:15 +0100, Mxsmanic wrote:

White Spirit writes:

I often run FreeBSD as well but to say that it is a real UNIX(tm) as
opposed to a fake UNIX(tm) is ridiculous. Beyond POSIX compliance, what
more do you want?

FreeBSD and the other freeware BSDs are actual descendants of UNIX, whereas
Linux has a kernel that is a clone of UNIX functionality.

Additionally, the BSD operating systems are complete operating systems that
are functional "out of the box," whereas Linux is just a kernel around which a
great deal of additional software must be added in order to get anything
resembling a functional operating system. And since everyone adds something
different, there are zillions of different "distributions" of Linux, whereas
there's only one FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc.

Indeedy, that's pretty much the crux of the matter. Both approaches have
their strengths and weaknesses. As a generalisation it means BSD is more
stable but the diversity of GNU/Linux development makes it more cutting
edge wrt features and hardware support.

You can argue that all you like of course...


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economics, energy, education, politics, etc .... no tits
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SMS writes:

Unless there is a convergence of all the different versions of Linux,
with applications and hardware being as easy to install as in Windows or
OS-X, it will remain an OS mainly for servers.

Even for servers, the lack of coherency in Linux versions works against it.
That's one more argument in favor of full-service, single-version operating
systems like FreeBSD or commercial UNIX systems, or even Windows servers.