InfoWorld: Top News reports WINHEC – Microsoft slams XP in call for Longhorn support. “SEATTLE – Microsoftæon Tuesday badmouthed its own work on networking and hardware support in Windows XP in order to sell hardware makers on new technologies it has planned for Longhorn, the next version of Windows due late next year.”
Later in the article… “Khaki then called Microsoft employees on stage to demonstrate how Microsoft plans to do better in Longhorn”
Amazing.
The monthly meeting of CentraLUG, the Concord/Central New Hampshire chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux Users Group, recurs the first Monday of each month on the New Hampshire Technical Institute campus starting at 7 PM.
Directions and maps are available on the NHTI site at http://www.nhti.edu. This month, we’ll be meeting in the Library/Learning Center/Bookstore, http://www.nhti.net/nhtimap.pdf , marked as “I” on that map. The main meeting starts at 7 PM, with Ed Lawson presenting Scribus, an open desktop publishing system. Open to the public. Free admission. Tell your friends.
Scribus is available from http://www.scribus.org.uk and is not just another pretentious word processor, but an entire pre-press system for producing high-quality documents suitable for publication. It will generate PDF. It has a new “Scriptor” API for scripting in Python. Imports and exports SVG. Bells! Whistles! It runs natively under Linux and under X11 on Mac OS X and CygWin on Windows. Scribus is distributed under the GPL.
More details at about this meeting and the group are available at http://www.centralug.org and http://www.gnhlug.org.
Hope to see you there!
OSNews points to Of Course Macs Are More Expensive… Aren’t They?. “So, I went out to at least partially test this theory, and to do appropriate comparisons between Dell computers and Apple computers. I’m hardly the first one to take this challenge but I’ve decided it’s time to stop talking and taking other peoples’ word for it, and go get some concrete facts to put on (digital) paper.”
This looks like a well-reasoned, well-researched study. Take a look and see if you come to similar conclusions.
A strange article at InfoWorld: Top News titled Microsoft: Let the 64-bit era begin. Microsoft was one of the companies that started the Windows 64-bit era with Windows NT running on the PowerPC, MIPS, and Alpha chips in the early 90s. DEC produced the Alpha chip and went on to port UNIX to the chip as Tru64 UNIX. Sun responded with the UltraSPARC in 1995, also 64-bit. For reasons unclear to me, Microsoft dropped all but the Intel 32-bit version of their Windows products in 1999, effectively ceding the 64-bit market to to Sun, DEC, Compaq and HP. Linux has run on 64-bit chips since they were available. A recent post on the GNHLUG board indicates that Linux will run on an AMD64 laptop as well. Wow, 64 bits on a laptop!
The article mentions the 64-bit release of Windows XP, but seems focused on the long-promised “Longhorn” release of Windows, and has a couple of strange paragraphs claiming that the Longhorn flavor Windows Explorer can provide much of the search capabilities of the oft-promised (but not included in Longhorn) WinFS database-as-file-system:
The various transparencies, shading, and richer animation capabilities of Longhorn’s graphical interface that will be featured in the demo are not glitz for glitz’s sake, because these improvements are designed to help users to “collect, organize, and visualize data in a way that is not possible today,”
Uh, hunh.
I don’t think this column is coincidentally timed with the release this Friday of “Tiger,” Apple’s latest OS X version 10.4, including the built-in “Spotlight” desktop search feature. Can’t wait to see how Tiger delivers!
Scripting News asks You think?. Steve Gillmor: “I’m really suffering from Post Gillmor Gang Disorder.” Dave Winer responds: “Tell me something I didn’t know. “;->”Note to universe. Please get Steve and his pals back on the air. I’m suffering.”
Same here. These guys are good. The final session, with Dan Bricklin, was tops. Hope they get the chance to try to top it.
Andrew MacNeill asks Isn’t Source Control part of programming 101 yet?
Source code control, change management, modeling, testing and project planning are skills that distinguish professional programmers from “coders.” When the PC revolution displaced the entrenched bureaucracy of the mainframe and mini computer of the “Data Processing Department,” there were lots of babies thrown out with the bathwater. Every Tom, Jane or Mary who could code a macro in 1-2-3 then worked out hex codes for 132-column print, batch files, then created dBASE tables. One day they were brave enough to try to change the printer ribbon, the next they are writing multi-tier, distributed, transactional, multilingual applications. So, many folks didn’t have the advantage of computer science training that teaches methodical software development. The last twenty years has been a thrashing attempt to bring back the reliability (without the cost and time delay) of committee-driven waterfall development methodologies in a Rapid Application Development, Extreme Programming, Cyclic Development or another Personal Software Process.
One of the many ugly truths that IT doesn’t like to admit is that most of the folks out there delivering applications are amateurs. It’s why, in 1997, I presented “It’s the Process, Stupid!.” Because there is not one “generally accepted practice” of software development, there are huge variations in the amount of care, professionalism and engineering that’s brought to bear on software development tasks. In many of the shops I consult with, the line workers often know there ought to be a better way, but getting middle- and upper-management buy-in to invest in tools and training is difficult. Solo practitioners are on their own to work it all out. Some fly by the seat of their pants and get away with it; others dive in too deep and get bogged down with complexities of managing the tools. Another bunch decide against anything Not Invented Here and whip up their own source code control techniques, making daily ZIP files and hoping to add the right arguments to their copy commands. Rarely do these tools support branching, labeling, rollback, point-at-time images, reporting or the other key SCC features.
SCC may be part of Programming 101 now, but when did your client take the course?
Scripting News points to David Weinberger’s post on doing 90-second blurbs on “the blogosphere” for MSNBC: David Weinberger: “I quit.”
and “I’m in the blogosphere to escape from this degradation of values.”
Excellent and insightful post. If the topics of blogs vs. mainstream media (the insiders are abbreviating it MSM in some of the posts), follow a few of the links for some thoughtful back-and-forth, I think Jeff Jarvis nails it {link gone}: “Blogs don’t need mainstream media. Mainstream media needs blogs.”
Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley notes “Windows 2000 Users: The Clock Is Ticking. June 30 marks the end of mainstream support for both the client and server Windows 2000 releases. A Windows 2000 rollup pack is still due by midyear.”
Time to start evaluating your options for your next operating system. There are lots of good choices out there. Me? I’m thinking Tiger, Ubuntu, Fedora and perhaps a little SuSE ought to do me.
OSNews also points to Linux Insider: How Linux Saved Microsoft. “Rob Enderle has an commentary at LinuxInsider discussing the effect Linux has had on Microsoft. An excerpt: “As I look at how Microsoft is changing to address the Linux threat, one that may actually turn out to be no more real then Netscape’s was, I can’t help but see how Microsoft has dramatically benefited from it — and much more broadly so than they did from the rise of Netscape.”
I think Enderle is right on when he talks about the effect that Open Source is having with Microsoft. “Competition breeds Innovation.” However, I think he falls off the deep end in his last section “False Threat?” where he tries to explain what Open Source is.
… “open source” which, in turn, is based on a false concept. This concept is that people actually want to look at source code. No, it’s that people want the security of knowing that the code is there for a community to maintain, support and enhance, that a monopolistic code owner can’t take away the freedom to run the code they have.
Finally, we know that what is largely holding the open-source community together is a dislike for Microsoft. Little holds the community together! 🙂 But the individuals who choose Open Source each choose it for their own reasons, often freedom of choice, freedom to experiment, freedom to extend, integrate, modify and hack together the solution to their own problem. It’s not about Microsoft, nor Computer Associates, nor IBM, nor any other one target.
… unless something dramatically changes, by 2015 we’ll be largely wondering what all the fuss surrounding Linux was really about. Perhaps, Rob. See you in 2015 and we can compare notes.
OSNews points to a Fortune magazine story Microsoft’s New Mantra: ‘It Just Works’. “Microsoft’s Jim Allchin says that the number one design goal for Longhorn has been: “it just works.” In other words, a lot of the fiddly, annoying tasks that computer users have become accustomed to (or never quite got the hang of) such as searching for files, defragmenting, changing network configurations, and tweaking security settings, will happen automatically.”
It’s an interesting piece, especially reading between the lines on the marketing message Allchin is trying to deliver. Microsoft has at least another year before they deliver the OS they have been talking about for a long, long time. Watch how the message changes.