The end of the world is near. At last that of the Unix world. That's the prediction of Donald Feinberg, vice-president of Gartner. "Linux is coming, Unix is dead." But there's no need to panic. Not just yet. The end is not going to come overnight or even in next week or year, but it is certain, or as he puts it, "an absolute".
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Member since:2005-09-25
"Irix, AIX, and HP-UX have pretty much already been put into an almost deprecated status by their respective vendors in favor of Linux."
Not at all true for AIX. All of IBM's new hardware features are available first on AIX, and IBM essentially considers AIX part of the DB2 software stack.
Member since:2005-07-08
You're really mixed up in your understanding of the UNIX space. Tru64 has been deprecated by HP-UX, which in and of itself is beginning to die along with the Itanium architecture. Windows Server doesn't fit anywhere in the UNIX space. If you have UNIX applications, you don't run them on Windows Server. IBM pSeries is the biggest selling and fastest growing enterprise server platform in the UNIX space, and while IBM is pushing Linux on POWER (OpenPOWER), there is no roadmap that calls for offering Linux on pSeries. Similarly, Sun is committed to Solaris on SPARC, and even positions Solaris (alongside Linux) on x86-64.
Many of the OS names you pulled from the graveyard have no relevence to the discussion, historical or otherwise. Multics was written for the GE mainframes in assembly and wasn't portable. VMS runs on three dead or nearly dead architecturs: VAX, Alpha, and Itanium. OS/2 is a desktop OS that was created as an IBM fork of MS-DOS with the cooperation of Microsoft. It is officially EOL at the end of 2005.
The point is, proprietary UNIX (including Solaris, which is still proprietary to Sun even though it is open source) lives or dies on the back of its hardware platforms. HP-UX depends on Itanium, Solaris depends on SPARC, AIX depends on POWER. Linux (adoption) depends on x86. Despite its support for all of the previous listed architectures and more, corporate IT won't choose Linux on anything other than x86. Linux has been so successful because x86 has been the fastest growing segment of IT for years, while the proprietary UNIX vendors largely ignored it.
Member since:Very well put, except one thing. Linux and now apparently OpenSolaris is not centric to only arch by any means. Right now I have an ibook and an amd64 box both running Linux. I just read that OpenSolaris has been ported to ppc. Also IBM has big stakes in getting Linux happy on their hardware, such as their work with the 970FX power management in Linux.
Member since:
Member since:Solaris running on commodity hardware is a geek's wet dream. (It's real UNIX open sourced!)
This may be the case in a few years if community developers get involved, but for now, I hate using Solaris. It has a lot of power, but it lacks a lot of the great tools that come standard in a Linux distribution. At least that's my view.
Member since:2005-09-25
Member since:2005-08-10
"Well, technically some of them have ripped drivers and networking code and the csh out of them, but there is no UNIX code in the BSDs"
Ahem. (c) UNIX System Laboratories, Inc.
http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/sys/timeb.h?v=RELENG6
There are other files with the USL copyright in them. I'll leave finding them as an excercise for you.
Do your homework next time. The BSDs damned well do have UNIX code in them, although not much.
"In the first episode of Microsoft's new film series 'On the Whiteboard', Editor Pamela Woon chats with two-time Oscar winner Randy Thom about the (often underestimated) importance of sound in human-technology interactions. Thom, the lead sound designer at Skywalker Ranch who worked on films such as The Incredibles, Castaway and Forrest Gump, says that people rarely consider the significance of those signature sounds that come from their trusty devices, whether it be a cell phone, a computer or a tablet."
"Microsoft has sensationally abandoned its controversial plans to restrict the sharing of XBox One games, and has also removed daily online authentication requirements for its forthcoming console", reports The Guardian. They had no choice. Still a good move."A snippet of code in the Steam digital distribution platform has revealed that Valve may be planning to let users easily share their games with friends in the future. The Verge has verified the code's authenticity, which was originally spotted by a member of the NeoGAF gaming forum; the code references a 'shared game library' and a notification that would alert a user when their games are currently in use by a borrower." This would change the, uh, game.
Official Apple statement on PRISM and privacy: "Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities. In fact, from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it." This is basically Apple re-publishing their earlier statement in a more official manner. You either believe it, or you don't.
The open source Contiki operating system and its commercial Thingsquare distribution are making strides towards the connected home. According to a Computerworld article, a new LED light bulb manufacturer is putting small computers into their light bulbs. Each computer runs the Contiki OS, which gives each bulb an IP address and allows them to be controlled with a smartphone application. To connect the bulbs to the application, the bulbs use both Wi-Fi and the much lower power IEEE 802.15.4 mesh technology.
"Google asked the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday to ease long-standing gag orders over data requests it makes, arguing that the company has a constitutional right to speak about information it's forced to give the government. The legal filing, which cites the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech, is the latest move by the California-based tech giant to protect its reputation in the aftermath of news reports about sweeping National Security Agency surveillance of Internet traffic." Draining the ditch after the cow has drowned in it."I can't find one person who has been using the Nexus 7 for an extended period of time, and hasn't seen a massive downgrade in performance. Just what kind of downgrade are we talking here? I cannot pick up my Nexus 7 without experiencing problems like a lag of ten seconds, or more, just to rotate the display; touches refusing to acknowledged; stuttering notification panel actions; and unresponsive apps." Fully and utterly agreed. My Nexus 7 was blazing-fast and awesome for a few months, and at some point, it just started sucking. Just like that. I've tried loads of ROMs, and nothing helps.A new release of the hobby operating system MenuetOS! The release notes are a bit non-descript, but you'll have to take what you can get: "updates and improvements (picview, httpc, ehci, ...)"."The Internet is one of the most transformative technologies of our lifetimes. But for 2 out of every 3 people on earth, a fast, affordable Internet connection is still out of reach. And this is far from being a solved problem. There are many terrestrial challenges to Internet connectivity - jungles, archipelagos, mountains. There are also major cost challenges. Right now, for example, in most of the countries in the southern hemisphere, the cost of an Internet connection is more than a month's income. Solving these problems isn't simply a question of time: it requires looking at the problem of access from new angles. So today we're unveiling our latest moonshot from Google[x]: balloon-powered Internet access." Insane."MineAssemble is a tiny bootable Minecraft clone written partly in x86 assembly. I made it first and foremost because a university assignment required me to implement a game in assembly for a computer systems course. Because I had never implemented anything more complex than a 'Hello World' bootloader before, I decided I wanted to learn about writing my own kernel code at the same time. Note that the goal of this project was not to write highly efficient hand-optimized assembly code, but rather to have fun and write code that balances readability and speed. This is primarily accomplished by proper commenting and consistent code structuring." Just cool.
Member since:
2005-07-07
I probably shouldn't reply to you because you smell disturbingly like a troll, but they meant "real" big-iron traditional UNIX.
HP-UX, AIX, Irix, SCO, Tru64 and Solaris. Of these, Tru64 is unfortunately pretty much already dead. SCO, well we all know where their software is going. Irix, AIX, and HP-UX have pretty much already been put into an almost deprecated status by their respective vendors in favor of Linux. Solaris will probably co-exist for a long time, especially if their OpenSolaris initiative takes off. I'll admit, if I had a computer capable of running it, I'd seriously think about switching away from Linux. Solaris running on commodity hardware is a geek's wet dream. (It's real UNIX open sourced!)
The BSDs (which Apple's Darwin and Mac OS X are derived from) are for all intents and purposes their own special branch of the *nix family tree. Think of them as extremely close cousins of UNIX, but not really having any UNIX "blood" in them anymore. They are very much along the same vein as Linux, UNIX work-alikes that share absolutely no source code with their System V-derived cousins. (Well, technically some of them have ripped drivers and networking code and the csh out of them, but there is no UNIX code in the BSDs.)
So, despite what Apple wants to tell you, Mac OS X is not really a UNIX. Neither is Free/Net/Open/DragonFlyBSD or Linux.
Ultimately, the UNIX space will be partitioned among the open source *nixes and Windows Server, with most of the pie going to Linux. UNIX will live on in a niche role, much like OS/2, Multics, and VMS before it.
This is a pretty uninteresting article all and all. Kind of a "Thank you Captain Obvious" thing.
I also predict that OS/2 and VMS use will continue to decline as well. Big whoop.