Do you think Microsoft will make Linux illegal?

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well there is also the thing about science preferring to use utilities where they can audit the source code, *nix is probably the only thing that makes sense if they want the most verifiably accurate results possible.

Bing runs on Linux. You can look at Netcraft to see what I'm saying.

But what kind of support is it? Can they set up a system so it can replace an MS Win2003 box totally? Probably not. What do they do, besides offering installing server stuff like Apache and MySQL services and IPTables firewalls? When do we get to important, world "turn upsidedowner" thing - the client itself?

People at home are not running Apache and Snort. They are running World of Warcraft and Photoshop Elements. <---- Can we finally see the f*****g point i am making yet?




Yes i do actually since i am one of the people who have actually worked with the stuff unlike some younger people here with zero professional experience.




No, not every one. And Linux Isn't Unix. Its not like you can take a HPUX box and get it to run Linux Apps.

You talk about "home" and sciense/academia installations, well, what kind of "home user" is that? Do they play games? Do the scientific community run with the same QoS and uptime requirements as the business world? No, we are talking about home tinkerers and "Hey, lets set up something in the Uni Lab"-users - that are not representable for the real world.

Again, i am not pro MS and will never be, but you have to stop self indoctrinating yourself that Linux is ready to "take over the world". Wasting time on forums reassuringly yourself and peers is not helping your cause.

For the moment, Linux is NOT ready for primetime.


...And with that i'm done with this thread. If a reader of this thread havent gotten the point by now, then matey, its lost on you forever.

Now, you see this is why people think you are crazy.

If it is better for you then I am happy for you. When it is better for the other 99.9% of users maybe they'll install it.

Close to all of them, yes. I can pull up the numbers if you like.

And Linux is UNIX-like. Oddly enough, I have no trouble taking Linux software and compiling it on my uni's AIX cluster, or conversely taking software that's generically marked for "UNIX" and compiling it on my Linux Mint install on this laptop. I can even use the same makefiles in OS X and Ubuntu.


What happened to your talk about businesses? Running away from the inconvenient fact of Linux/UNIX penetration in business applications to go back to talking about the home market?

And you really want to talk uptime? Lemme check my Red Hat cluster down in the physics lab...
uptime: 185 days

And the scientific community aren't just tinkering with Unix. They rely on it to do their jobs. Most of them don't care at all about proprietary vs open source, MS vs anyone else, etc. They use UNIX because it is by far the best tool for the job, and Windows just plain does not cut it for real work in science.

I for one, dont use world of warcraft or photoshop elements (both of which work GREAT in wine btw). Pretty sure there are others.

But im getting tired of hearing the straw men personally. Fanboys will argue till the end of time "well it still cant do this" and as soon as it can they will move back to say it doesnt do something else, it just gets more and more irrelevant every day yet there they still are saying xyz sucks and abc is so much better at everything because xyz doesnt have said feature or application of abc and until it does it sucks, etc, etc, etc.

I don't know about that. Windows NT and Unix have pretty much the exact same feature set (multi-user, paging and memory protection, etc.). A properly configured Windows installation isn't any more unstable than a properly configured UNIX installation (though granted most windows users would not know how to properly configure a server for security and stability).

Now I agree that Linux is infinitely better than Windows in terms of benefit/cost. I believe the reason a lot of scientists and engineers use UNIX (though there is a lot of widely used windows engineering software these days) is because it is standardized and runs on lots of platforms other than 386s and PA-RISC. And tradition of course, no need to switch to Windows if it doesn't do anything better than UNIX.

The usual command-line utilities, remote login via ssh, the available software library in scientific applications... sure, maybe these things (or something similar) are possible on Windows NT systems, but they aren't as cleanly implemented as in UNIX systems. And we're talking about very powerful systems used for major research projects. These systems have a lot more than 3GB of RAM, and Microsoft didn't have a realistic 64-bit implementation of their OS until pretty recently.

There's cygwin for all that! I use all Microsoft products at work, but I still do pretty much everything from bash.

What I'd really like to see is Microsoft and PC manufactures ditching the 386 altogether (too much legacy support nonsense). Sadly doesn't look like its going to happen though, as now even Apple has switched :/

Ah, cygwin. Almost like linux's version of wine for windows.

The crappy attempt at UNIX emulation? At that point, why not just run UNIX? And this still isn't a solution on the server/supercomputer side.

Because it's my work computer, and I need to run windows binaries. Honestly almost every UNIX program you would ever want has a direct windows port, but cygwin is extremely convenient because I can compile most linux code with no modification. I think it does what it does pretty well, what problems have you had with it?

Yeah, it wouldn't really be a smart business decision for Microsoft to try to make windows available for the vast amount of platforms out there. That's one of the reasons I gave in my first post for why scientists and engineers use UNIX. My point was that other factors the same, UNIX is not inherently more suited to scientific computing.

Quite possibly true. At the moment, UNIX is certainly more suited to the type of high-throughput data analysis that scientists need, but I'm sure the Windows NT platform is also capable of doing those things if it were designed to do so. Similarly, Windows is not inherently more suited to gaming.

Indeed. One thing about UNIX is that the vast amount of different implementations pretty much force programmers to follow the spec if they want their code to be able to run on any UNIX implementation. Additionally, UNIX programmers tend to not make stupid assumptions like that all their users will be able to run their code as root (which you shouldn't do even if you can). A lot of (bad) Microsoft programmers have bad habits that make it impossible to run their code in a securely-configured environment.

Standards are a very important thing. There is no technical reason why Windows could not adhere to open, published standards (even while remaining proprietary) but it seems unlikely that Microsoft will move in that direction. Poor security practice is quite often a user-level problem, but UNIX is set up in a way where such poor practices are made more difficult.

Ichinin says hes done. I guess thats conceding defeat, but I am positive hes still reading.

What you said, mcg, is the coming problem for windows.

The desktop market is shrinking in the face of the laptop market. Meanwhile, the netbooks ate into the laptops from the other side, but only for a while. Now the phones are edging into the netbooks. You might also recall that basically vanished technology the PDA. It crunched between laptops and phones, and has just about completely disappeared by the time of the netbooks.

The trend of course is that the machines are all getting smaller and moving away from the intel style hardware and windows hasnt matured on anything but x86 technology. It doesnt make sense for MS to develop for a dozen different hardware sets, and the growth just isnt there(as I will show).

For example, the only places MS plays a noticeable part is in the phones and xbox. The MS phones are a distant third runner to iphone and android, with little chance that will change. The phones(baring also-ran windows) of course use opengl.

On the console market xbox does ok, but its certainly not first. Things like wii eat it for lunch, market wise. Yeah, wii supports... opengl. PS3? A form of opengl. So as computing, pervasive computing, moves away from x86 machines, expect to see more opengl based games. More portability. Opengl is all over the console market, so as OSX grows, you'll start seeing many more games.

What Microsoft counts on is that people will iterate to the next version of windows. So whatever windows 8 is, its going to have to be a radically different package which means MS would then be in the position of chasing everyone else. New research, new development, and many many bugs.

But the looming problem(from the MS viewpoint) with the intel style architecture is that maximum memory has grown much faster than the ability of operating systems(read windows) to use it. It used to be that they could bump the requirements for ram to force people to trade up in machines. But now they cant bloat fast enough. They also use a new directx as a carrot to get the gamers moving. Hence, directx9 only on xp, dx10 only on vista, and now seven introduces dx11.

But as is apparent, the hardware is making a shift. But windows and direct x were never designed for anything but x86/64 technology. What little headway has been made into the phone market has failed to match the competition.

http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php

You can see by this chart(follow the link) that xp still commands almost half the market. Vista never reached 20%, and seven, after a year, is only just catching vista. It only has 1/3 the installs that xp has. On the other hand, OSX has half as many users as seven. Even geeky linux is closing in on 3%.

On the browser side, you can see that explorer is doing a slow decline to firefox. Firefox users tend to adopt new versions faster, and even though explorer 6 is officially dead, some people just wont give it up. A nice colorful graphic in the link above shows it well. If average people just wanted their explorer, it would match relatively closely to the totals of the windows versions... about 82%. But its half that, speaking loudly of the untruth of average people not being willing to adopt new things.

The view trends button in the upper right on that page http://www.w3counter.com/trends will show the trend over 3 years. Explorer is dropping at about the same rate as firefox rises. Its fairly simple reasoning that those explorer folks are crossing over to the other browsers.

Whats shocking though, is if you add the windows numbers up. From a lifetime high of around 97%, windows has fallen to 82% or so, a plummet of 15% or so. Neither vista nor seven seem to have prevented this. New versions of windows explorer steal market from the old windows browser and lose it to the open source ones in turn.

What then, is the magic at work here? Why, despite Ichinin's fervent desire that windows reign supreme, is he wrong?

Note that this site doesnt accurately track the use of the smart phones. They tend to be used to access social media, while w3 is tracking web site browsing. Blogs and the like, and not twitter, email or facebook.