Re: @AC 16:36GMT - Yes, Microsoft!!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/03/microsoft_linux_kernel_contributions/
Do ANY of you people actually read The Register or do you just come here to snipe on the forums?
While Microsoft is happy with the “appification” of Windows, and prepares to go-live with Windows 8.1 on October 18, it's created a gap between present and future that could be a stumbling block for a bunch of small ISVs. The kind of company that lives between the consumer and the enterprise will still be able to create and …
SMB *is a proprietary protocol* - thereby MS can modify it at its will. But what it does is documented - so what's the problem? That SAMBA project needs to keep its code updated? SMB2 and SMB3 are welcome improvements, they are much faster and less complex.
Anyway today being a decent domain controller means an "Active Directory Domain Controller", not an "NT Domain Controller". There's much more to implement than the SMB protocol.
Anyway why SAMBA moved to GPLv3 to cut out Apple? It looks everybody attempts to play its own game.
"LOL
Now that is pretty serious misinformation.
Cluelessly ignorant or malicious liar, YOU be the judge. "
OK, we've judged. And YOU, sir, are a COMPLETE AND IGNORANT FAILURE.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/03/microsoft_linux_kernel_contributions/
Next time someone states a fact you may wish to confirm the details before spouting off.
The reason is simple but the Gnuliban do not like it:
It's cheap!
Running an external website on say Solaris means you have to buy a licence. Imagine the big "cracked Linux box for Botnet control" providers like 1&1 in germany running all their boxes on it and the 9€/month V-servers are gone. There is a reason they typically do not offer RedHat for these boxes either
The same goes for the admins that are more often than not "just out of university" (or even "still student") personal that manages it's "pet distribution". With the well known problems and with quite a few distributions offered that are "past shelf life"
Companies like Amazon (AMI) take a different route as does Google with Android. They select "best of breed", castrate it so it does not mutate and use that "Linux Kernel" for a long time. With a limited environment they can risk decoupling themselfs from the "quarterly changes"
Why is Microsoft aping Apple? Apple has always been a consumer electronics company (it took them a couple of decades to realise this mind). Microsoft on the other hand has always been business and developer focused. The bits which made Microsoft strong were the openness of their systems, compatability and relative ease of development and deployment with low entry costs which created a big third party infrastructure.
The Apple model doesn't work for business customers because businesses need the flexibility to tweak, customise and innovate to stay ahead of the competition, and they need volume-based administration, security and management specific to the business needs to keep those systems running. When Microsoft tries to apply consumer logic to businesses and to wall-in users or programmers, more often than not their products fail.
"The bits which made Microsoft strong were the openness of their systems, compatability and relative ease of development"
Sorry, open? Yes, they were real nice to Novell and the samba project. Oh, and Borland, Lotus, etc. They were never nice unless you used their tools. Having killed off most of the big players (on the desktop) this is the next push to total control.
I don't mean open as in open source or open as in friendly, but open as in opposite to 'closed' or 'walled-in' in that you could dig around the innards and tinker and make things work. Want a different graphics card, load in a new driver and away you go. Want to automate some Excel, tinker in the back with VBA. Not pretty (and often not secure) but it allowed for a lot of mix-and-match hardware and a lot of custom in-house programs and scripts to get things bolted together.
"This is where ISVs will find themselves temporarily stranded between the old world of desktop .exe install and the new world of apps: .. that's where Microsoft has been trying to herd us all for a year now".
I would have thought that Microsoft is happy to herd the ISVs on, but only after Microsofts own offering are firmly entrenched in the market place.
MS has grown big, it has eaten into both small and big ISVs, they have the resources and know-how to kill entire industries if they focus their attention to, and the inclination to.
MS has grown big because it let people do what they wanted with the platform (more or less), so it allowed the spawn of the largest ecosystem of software and hardware the IT industry has ever had. They killed most if not all the big players who owned the industry before them.
As everybody points out MS's main bacon is business, essentially AD + Exchange + Windows client, they have such a grip on the market with this combo that they can afford poking a finger on their customers and they ask for more. People is just used to windows and the windows way of thinking.
The only part of the whole ecosystem MS doesn't control completely is 3rd party applications, any vendor with sufficient "push" like google, mozilla can come and build something that runs on windows better than a windows component ie: chrome, firefox.
Suddenly all this work of producing a cohesive end-to-end business environment (or one that MS can control) is gone. You do not need IE anymore, loses the grip on the most desirable tech ever... the internet.
How do they prevent this? well, Apple had a nice idea with their wallet garden, and a brilliant implementation: Their APP store, if they were to produce one for Windows, they can A) close the door to 3rd parties disrupting their environment, b) get even more money c) Control the main or universal windows communication mecanism, your windows screen to push MS messages, ads, etc. d) offer to the windows-addicted masses even more control over the application delivery mecanisms, eventualy disabling the ability of the user to install software locally if not via the windows app store, esentially reducing the likelyhood of getting viruses or unsactioned apps.
Resuming, this is all part of a 10 year plan to transform the windows ecosystem into something were no-one else but Microsoft can tell what to run where and how much you have to pay.
If you're an ISV and want to play ball on Windows, you complay and pay your share to MS, if your app proves to be popular, or you discover a profitability niche, Microsoft will have that information on their database, and who knows they could even use it to their advantage.
People, the PC platform is only good if open, if turned into a walled garden the PC is nothing more than a remote terminal, a sort of distributed mainframe always dependant on the mothership.
And the reason this is happening is because MS as a business runs on what Gates and Ballmer learn during the 80's if you let competition thrive eventually you wither away because somebody else will come with the next best thing.
You have to realise that there are a lot of penguins out there, some are very clumsy, some are doing nice tricks, they are evolving at a fast rabid pace, most of the time for free (It has a cost I know), eventually one of them will become popular, and we do not want people to discover that it is good enough.
that doers not compute.
They are killing off their own penguin competition.
For small apps, its getting to the stage where a systems house will say 'windows based app, $500 a month and most of that goes to Redmond..
..or have our penguin badged version that runs faster, crashes less and its only $200 a month which goes to us to keep it running.
Thank god for a proper comment without the rabid fanboism from the Linux contingent (yeah, yeah, I run Mint on my home desktop and am a RHCE).
That's the thing, though - in an enterprise environment, there really is no replacement for AD + Exchange + desktop management.
The big thing in the enterprise is managing thousands of desktops and thousands of user accounts accessing hundreds of resources - mailboxes, files, devices, apps, etc etc. How do you manage that in Linux-land for the typical userbase?
Sure, for less than a hundred users, baking your own in Linux-land may well make better sense now. But I don't see it for the big enterprises, unless they have extremely minimal software requirements.
Q; Who really uses a custom programmed APP? What is the benefit on Win/x86 of those things outside say weather and messenger?
Custom jobs are more likely either "classic application" or even "Java based" (to get MacOS, Unix and that 1.x percent thingy(1)) with Webapplications thrown in for added variety.
(1) Assuming you find a Fosstard willing to pay for software
Oh, was a nice time back in 1987/89 (2 years, Lance Corporal / Stabsunteroffizier as an exit rang). Reserve callups post cold war where less and less interesting and then came to an end. I do miss Reforger.
Still you are further off target than the average GI at 350 meters. A lot further. Never worked for MS, haven't used their languages in a decade.
Assuming you find a Fosstard willing to pay for software
Change the record. It's getting so old it's stststststarting to skiskiskiskip.
This post has been deleted by its author
"Q; Who really uses a custom programmed APP? What is the benefit on Win/x86 of those things outside say weather and messenger?"
People like my company do. We make our living doing support, ranging from individuals to medium-to-large businesses. We have little custom apps on smartphones and laptops to do things like call ticket management, so that our remote techs (and some of our techs are so remote that they're not even in the same country) can get job info, and report in, and well, get paid for doing the job. We have (considerably) more than one app 'cause we have different sorts of techs, who do different sorts of jobs. No, one size does not fit all. Putting our stuff onto Android and Apple phones, and onto Mac and Windows 7 desktops/laptops, depending on the exact nature of the app, is trivial. Making them work with MetroSexual ain't so simple, and frankly we can't be arsed to try. At one point, back when Windows phones actually had significant marketshare and Microsoft didn't go out of their way to screw with us, we had actually standardized on Windows phones. Then came WinPhone 6.5, and 7, and 8... and we tossed 'em and went with Apples and Androids. _It was easier, faster, and above all *cheaper* to build iOS *and* Android apps than to fap around with WinPhone 8._ And, besides, starting with WinPhone 7 most of the techs hated Windows Phone, anyway, and were screaming at management about the problems they were having in the field.
You have to know it's bad when an _Apple_ solution is the _cheap_ solution.
Apps on Smartphones is okay. I can understand those for some jobs (other can be done with a Webpage) if you use smartphones for remote data entry(1). But that was not discussed, the question was Win/x86.
And while I am a BIG Win8 fan, I still can not see the benefit of apps on Win8/x86. They do not start that much faster than an application, they offer no benefits for anything remotely complex.
As for "putting stuff on x platforms is trivial": How do you handle the UI? Logic can be done, can be shifted to the backend on a server etc. But UI is the big killer even then. And if you can't shift the logic it gets worse since Android and iOS do not share a common language and Google "going cheap" (Dalvic) does not help either (A full JRE would have been a better choice IMHO)
(1) I admit I won't. A 10'' Atom based Windows unit, even a slow Q550 is way easier to program and use.
> Q; Who really uses a custom programmed APP?
This is Microsoft's bread and butter. People don't run Windows because of the stupid word processor. They run Windows because of all of the obscure little apps you've never heard of. Some of these might not even be targeted for the current version of monopolyware.
...and plenty of companies use customized and custom software.
Custom APPLICATIONS are my "bread and butter" for the last 25 years and 5 operating systems. But those are not the point since:
They are installed as they have been for the last 15 years and do not need "sideloading"
They are not Modern UI programs anyway
The article deals with Apps based on the Modern UI that can only be delivered by the Store or the "Sideloading". A concept that until Oktober 2012 did not exist on Windows. So the question remains who uses THOSE in a business environment
one of the reasons people hate TIFKAM is because it imposes a control freak business model.
so what is Microsoft doing? locking it down even tighter by the sounds of it.
One can only hope this is a sign they want to kill it off / diminish the popularity to the point where nobody is using it and they can safely kill it off without anybody complaining too much (like the Vista Gadgets..) otherwise it's just another utterly clueless move.
Actually the only people really hating "Modern UI" where the software equivalent to Taliban. The rest have been served lies and lousy tests by "quality journalists" like iHeise and, once given the chance to really test the UI. had options between: "Works as good as W7" to "great".
I am currently convincing our "data security officer" to set up proper sandbag bunkers and checkpoints on the building entries in case a Gnuliban with Dynamite sticks(1) tries to blow up the building screaming "Stallman is great"
(1) Must be dynamite since it is "open source" unlike say Semtex
once given the chance to really test the UI. had options between: "Works as good as W7" to "great".
I know this is only anecdotal, but the only person I've found who liked the Metro thing, was someone who had never, ever had a computer before. This was their first PC. A laptop if you must know. He asked me what I could possibly dislike about the phone interface that comes up when you hit the TIFKAM Windows button. No, no I hadn't walked in the room, saw the godawful squares and had a Pavlovian reaction, before you start on that. Just like yes, yes I really do pay for my software, despite having various Linux partitions dotted around the place and an extreme dislike of shitty DRM like Steam or WGA.
After bringing my own, six year old, crusty old AMD64 laptop around one time, and after a few "but can you do thi... oh, yes you can" comments, he had to concede that there is absolutely nothing he wants to do with his machine that I can't do better.
FTFA :- "Side-load license keys only come in packs of 100, and they're not transferrable........ Microsoft's Michael Niehaus agreed that this isn't an ideal state of affairs. “That's certainly something that we need to fix. We've been studying for future updates to this process"
FFS, how much "study" does it need to remove a restriction of 100 ? Niehaus's comment unwittingly reveals frustration with his own company. The fact is that MS is a company of arses and elbows in a state of serious disconnection. Mostly arses.
MSFT may be trying to freeze out small ISV's, but they will just freeze themselves out as vendors simply produce applications that are consumable via a browser. SaaS solutions aren't being produced on the Azure platform, they are running on AWS or others, so how do MSFT expect to get back into the stack? Given how far behind MSFT are here, they need to be more open and reduce the barrier to adoption, not increase it.
They aren't preventing the software to be loaded, but what GUI APIs it can use. The application that loads the old way isn't allowed to be an "app." If you want your software to use the new GUI, then it has to be an "app" and play in the Microsoft system. If you don't care about the new GUI, then none of this matters.
In common "Register" fashion the article lumps together
Win/RT
Win8/x86
Applications
Apps
to satisfy the Pawlow Reflexes of the Fosstards. When cut appart it becomes
Win8/x86 Applications - Install as usual
Win8/Modern Apps - Either use the shop or pay for the extra (maybe unneeded) licences for side loading
Win/RT - I do not care
So a corp that has made it their business model to abuse their monopoly suddenly wants you to pay to install software on their OS? HAHAHA. This is worse than COSTO or Sam's charging you to shop at their "WAREHOUSE". I guess M$ thinks their monopoly is so strong that they don't care.
Linux CAN do everything MS can and more. This IS the TIME to switch. I use Linux on ALL my boxes, although sometimes in VirtualBox. I even had one computer that had a legal windows license that wouldn't load windows, yet Linux installed quickly w/o any problems. MicroSucks knows the desktop is fading and their main business is enterprise environments. Normally I say Good Luck with that, but this time merely you reap what you sow.
Can Linux do (reliably, no matter what distribution, any kernel 4 years and younger) do:
Voice recognition
Handwriting recognition
Current generation games of all types
Support for common small business software like sage KHK
...
If not - It can not do everything Windows can do
> Can Linux do (reliably, no matter what distribution, any kernel 4 years and younger) do:
>
> Voice recognition
>
> Handwriting recognition
...probably does it better than Microsoft products considering what platform is the mobile market leader.
Although even on the desktop, that's all down to 3rd party products anyways. So you're basically crowing over the fact that Microsoft is the defacto standard. Says squat about the actual OS.
Voice and HWR are part of MS Windows (HWR since XP, Voice since either Vista or Win7). And unlike the stuff on iOS and Android (that is actually based on Dragons engine) it works totally off-line. Add ons like "Dragon Natural" offer some nice specialities but the integrated stuff works fine for speech
And having compared the HWR in Android (Note) to the one in Windows: Nope, Android does not even come close in capabilities.