Everyone knows what Microsoft does by now. What some people do not know is that Microsoft releases a system integration software named Windows services for UNIX. The purpose of SFU is so that people who must administer UNIX server with a Microsoft Windows PC can do it with ease, it also serves as an application migration platform as well as way to run legacy UNIX applications from within a Windows environment.
SFU is a UNIX subsystem that is not emulation, it will allow you to run some legacy UNIX apps with native speeds and performance. What SFU is not, SFU is not a Linux distribution. SFU is not a UNIX variant. I recently got a chance to test Windows Services for UNIX 3.0. And I have to say I was mildly suprised with it.
System Requirements
SFU needs Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP Professional or Windows NT 4.0 with Service Pack 6. It will not run on Windows 9x or Windows ME. You will also need at least 128 mb of RAM and 182 mb of Hard Disk space in order to have a full installation.
Installation
SFU installs like a common Windows application. Nothing special about it. The one thing I found counterintuitive, is that you have to agree to three different licenses at 3 different times throughout the installation, so if you install it you have to stay with your machine you cannot do an automated install.
Features
SFU is a very full featured application. You have a native Windows application installed that allows you to administer and create NFS shares. It comes with ActiveState Perl and a wide range of tools. It comes with the standard UNIX shells CSH and KSH, CRON and much more. The networking tools included with SFU were very good and I was able to do a lot with the other machines on my home network. Microsoft says that SFU will only support HP-UX, Solaris 8 and Red Hat Linux 7.0. I was able to administer SuSE Linux 8.1, along with Solaris 9 x86 and Red Hat Linux 9 along with FreeBSD. I was also able to do a remote installation of FreeBSD with SFU. You can access Mac OS X shares with the NFS tools.
The networking tools included are telnet, PING, Traceroute, netstat, SSH. With crontab you can set up times for any kind of maintence runs for the entire system not just the Interix subsystem. Scripting is also a strong point with SFU. You can run many UNIX scripts with very few modifications on the system. Perl Scripts can be run with ActiveState Perl. They also include Python with the system, but there is a native Windows port of Python available from the Python web site. The way that the Interix subsystem is set up reminds me of a UnixWare/Xenix setup, in terms of directory structure and the way things are setup The directory structure while running SFU is totally UNIX, all of the directories, /, /usr,/bin,/usr/bin,/lib,/dev all of them are under the SFU directory structure. For a wealth of UNIX command line tools SFU has them all and then some more.
The development environment consists of GNU Tools. GNUMake, GCC 2.0.7, and GDB. The development environment is extremely outdated so compiling and updating system libs and Applications was hard, I was able to compile bash as well
as lynx and some other text based applications but I was unable to compile recent graphics apps. KDE 3.1.2 was not going to happen, neither was GNOME 2. I called Microsoft support to find out if there was some place I could get updated packages and I was told that SFU was a migration tool only, its sole purpose is to make it easy for UNIX admins who wanted to come to Microsft Windows to help them port their Applications and services from UNIX to Windows as well as run some legacy UNIX apps and that SFU was in no way meant to be used as an Operating Environment. So no
help was on its way from Microsoft.
A while back when I used Interix, I was able to compile XFree86 and KDE 2 and GNOME 1.4 those services are no longer feasible in 3.0. While Interix 2 relied on many Cygnus functions you could just compile your source for Cygwin and use it on Interix. Microsoft has refined those functions and have taken out all of the Cygnus functionality so now a total port of the application is the only way anything will work.
Other system Integration tools that are much better are available. The prime candidate is Cygwin. Cygwin is available from Red Hat software. You have two versions of Cygwin that you can get. GNU Pro or it can be had for free, download from Red Hats website . If you are looking for a tool to help you work in a UNIX environment that is up to
date and has many of the creature comforts of Linux or UNIX, or if you are a Linux or UNIX hacker that must work with Windows and you want a familiar interface with which to work than Cygwin is the way to go. There are native ports of KDE 3.1.2 and GNOME 2 for Cygwin and all the major tools are available.
AT&T marketed a product a few years ago called UWIN, But that is also very out of date and is no longer enhanced.
Conclusion
While SFU has some good qualities about it I cannot justify the $99.00 price tag. If you are migrating to MS Windows then yes SFU is a good buy and is very helpful. If you are not migrating and just want to run UNIX /Linux tools and Applications then get Cygwin and save your cash.
Performance 10/10
Features 5/10
Affordability 6/10
Total 7/10
The interesting thing is that some of the components included in this package are licensed under the GNU GPL.
the NIS/Activedirectory user/password synchronization and the Gateway services for NFS are slightly more exciting. of course, I doubt anyone would want to use that shaky NIS server for any real load, but it is kind of cool that you can synch up passwords. that’s kind of convenient when you have 400+ users with windows workstations + terminal accounts and you’re watching your helpdesk pull their hair out because people can’t remember two passwords.
clients services for NFS and the NFS client are cool for people that can’t quite understand using a ftp session, or manipulating files through a terminal.
if they ever expect it to be a migration tool like Services for Netware was, they’ll learn the hard way. no one wants to migrate terminal services from unix to a windows telnet server(not even if it came with ssh).
another interesting feature is that the telnet server that comes with it seems to support NTLM authentication, but again telnet + windows = next to useless.
“The interesting thing is that some of the components included in this package are licensed under the GNU GPL.”
believe it or not, MS is not above that. the posix(lol, another useless MS tool, the posix subsystem) tools that shipped with the NT4 service pack were all GPL’d. the shipped the source and had a copy of the GPL on the CD.
I believe it. Microsoft has always included GPL apps. It is not in their best interest anymore to advertise that they actually make money by selling apps licensed under the GPL.
There used to be a page of GPL’ed apps that were hosted on Microsoft servers, but since the story broke all of the links are down. I image that there are still internal developers that use the GNU toolset and probably a few kernel developers that use emacs.
the only thing I enjoyed about ht eposix tools under nt4 at work was that I could use the unix commands to get through the file system…much nicer and muchmore productive (imo) than windows commands.
I do with they had a better directory scheme to make command line navigation feel better.
did they even have one in the dos days or did it just start at / and you had to make a new dir for your self and set env to that new dir? I can’t recall.
If one is smart enought to control a *nix from winders then they might not need this, this ought to be a free product to compete if at all.
Hopefully, the would be doing much better than they have done with their Frontpage Server for Unix. At the moment, that really sucks.
Unix vendors should also be working Unix Services for Windows Servers. I love Samba and Eric’s tsc client, for example. Things like that make it much easier to use your linux workstation, instead of running about and dual-booting all the time. Now, if only we can another client for MS SQL!!!!
there is mingw, cygwin and numerous little bundles of the basic *nix utilities for dos/windows floating around on the net. just download a set and stick them in your path somewhere. cygwin is a pretty extensive set of tools, so you find a lot of what you’d find in an average Linux distro. the base commandline tools, at least.
the directory scheme as I remember got a lot better after Windows 98, but it really depended on the person. some people kept it clean, but there were tons of people that didn’t. you’d type dir and get like 20 files in the root dir, then there would be about 20 directories with aps and games and stuff. at least there is a structure to it now, as compared to a dos(and windows, later) folder and people going wild with junk.
if you ever get to a see eComstation running, you’ll see how much of a mess things were in those days.
The ratings are based on how good it is a migration too or how good it is compared to Cgywin as an Integrated Environment?
Bastards, very soon they’ll be integrating GNU/Linux tools into Winsucks and selling it. :rollseye:
Regards,
Mystilleef
How about less anti-Microsoft, and more grammar?
Check out “UNIX Tools Community” at http://www.interopsystems.com/tools/index.htm to find a lot of Interix ports of GNU Tools.
Btw. it seems there is some confusion with SFU 3.0, Interix 2 and POSIX. SFU 3.0 includes Interix 3.0 which is based upon POSIX.
I really like it, but it could be even better
Does anybody still use Unix? I know Linux is getting some use since it is a stripped down free version of Unix. You can tell when a technology is obsolete is when the free clones take over the real thing. Look: FreeDOS takes over DOS market from MS, Linux takes over Unix. It seems free software cannot innovate fast enough to overtake prooprietary (Windows 2003 .net server)
their previous version of Unix services was so sucky they had to buy Interix to stuff their 3rd party implementations ?
Just have a look at http://ftp.exe in winntsystem32… Using a hexeditor, you will kindly see:
(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. in the binary?
Also check out some of the other CLI tools… for some of the other copyright notices…
Microsoft has always done everything to prevent others from accessing their platform. The Samba and OpenOffice teams (among others) must go through hoops just to make sure their products work with Windows or MS Office. Now, we’re told that people should pay 99 $ for what would be better achieved with free software, had Microsoft really cared for interoperability ? That’s sick.
Yesterday, the GPL was viral, anti-capitalist, communist, anti-american. Today, all of a sudden, it is good for business. My goodness, even whores have more dignity than Microsoft executives.
“Progressive Strategies offers no warranty either expressed or implied on the information contained herein and shall be held harmless for errors resulting from its use.”
This legalese surely sounds like this : “Buy this product, it’s better than the competition. But we are not sure of what the previous sentence means”.
All day, every day. I have a Red Hat and an HPUX desktop here at work and I do tons of work on both of them. I prefer the Red Hat box if I am going to have to do a whole lot of work just because the toolset is better and it is already installed and configured but hpux is stable and fast.
You guys know beleive it or not Microsoft has one mission and one mission only. That is to make money and they will go about it the easiest way possible and if that includes including works that other people have put out on the internet and put out there for free, they will use it. Because it saves them time and licencing costs. That is one of the big problems with GPL’ed software there is no way to get money for it if a huge company like Microsoft starts using it and selling the software that is was bundled with for a huge profit.
This is one of the big problems with GPL, it’s free for everybody to use so you can restrict somebody if they are going to use the software and make a bundle of money selling it. Personally I beleive that once you make a peice of software GPL you have given up all rights to bitch about who uses the software and for what purposes they use it, because it no longer belongs to you, it belongs to the OSS community.
“That is one of the big problems with GPL’ed software there is no way to get money for it if a huge company like Microsoft starts using it and selling the software that is was bundled with for a huge profit.”
No open source license can successfully prevent big companies like Microsoft from making money off an app without paying the creator. Not the GPL/LGPL, BSD, or any other license, as long as the source code is available to the general public. No free software authour could afford to challenge the likes of Microsoft. The great thing about open source is the way the programs evolve, evolution isn’t controlled by the balance sheet.
A bit of History, Softway Systems wrote the NT DDL POSIX compatablity Layer in 1995,
http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix01/invitedtalks/walli.pdf
and Microsoft aquired Softway in 1999. The OS level was written to the POSIX standards,
http://www.pasc.org/#POSIX
which insure royalty-free patent access via decades of prior-art.
Microsoft’s SFU and Interix products are in no way dependent upon the intellectual property that SCO holds.
Should that not be GNU/SFU?
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=57316&cid=5526040
If Microsoft just wanted to extend SFU without further violating either SCO’s ( now claimed as Novell’s ) intellectual property or the GPL, it can do exactly what it did with the NT/2000/XP TCP/IP stack – embrace and extend the source from the unencumbered BSD varients.
Just like my last statement Microsoft is in the business for one purpose, and that is to make money. There is no money in opening their source, or opening their standards, because it leaves options open to the customer. I may not agree with some of their practices, but I do understand them.
Microsoft called GPL a virus because all that it does is take jobs away from people that could have their time better spent programming for a company that sells software instead of working for McDonalds waiting for the next job to come along in a job epidemic like we see now. That is why Microsoft called it a virus years ago, and now it is comming to look like they aren’t going to be wrong.
Also as a side not I have a couple things to bitch about while I am on the topic. How many people are getting sick and tired of seeing the cutsey “M$” all over the place. We all know Microsoft is in the business for money you don’t have to be so dimwitted in trying to say you dislike Microsoft. Come up with better ways write an article, create a “Better” OS, but anyway that you do it just stop your whining.
Also stop all the freakin bashing of Microsoft it just comes of as envy of Bill Gates. We all know he came to the market with a simple OS 20 years ago that anymore could put together. But here is the thing, Bill Gates wasn’t a great programmer or anything, but he is probably one of the greatest businessmen you are likely to encounter, he was a better businessman, with out a doubt, than Steve Jobs or the “Great” Linus T. Because he was able to sell his OS to the right companies and didn’t want to control everything right down to the hardware like Jobs did. In addition I don’t know of anybody that wouldn’t trade spaces with the guy even for as little as an hour. So stop b***hing about the OS all you guys that are old enough to have been around back when MS DOS was introduced should have made your own OS and sold it to IBM.
Last statement I promiss: This next statement might come as a surprise, but if you really think about it and not dismiss it as soon as you read it you might see the GPL in a different light.
Open Source = Communism
Closed Source = Capitalism
Now lets think about this, inorder to have communism you everybody in the community has to work together to make it work. Communism is derived from community. Everybody is working on the same OSS project as a community, so you really have to agree that it is communism. I don’t think I have to explain how Closed Source is Capitalism, because basically if you sell something you are contributing to capitalism. Now we all know why communism doesn’t work because the majority of the people only want to do as little work as possible inorder to complete a goal, with the minor exception of a few. And I know the big thing about OSS is that people use it because they can look at the source code and fix it, but really how many people do you know really look at the source code or fix it — I don’t know any. That is because the majority of the people are following the rule of doing as little as possible to get by. Now on the other hand if you are paying a select few to create a product they are going to be more apt to develop a product and if there are problems with it they are going to need to fix it else no body will buy the software. So capitalism forces software to being better while communism forces software to move at a slower pace, because people don’t want to put the time in to do things right.
Sorry about the rant I just had a lot to get off my chest. Tell me what you think I would be itnerested in hearing your comments. And before you go off and start saying I am obviously a Microsoft Lover, I am going to admit it strait up “I AM”. I have tried Linux and FreeBSD, but they just don’t measure up to Microsoft, I am sorry but that is the truth no matter how it is spun.
Sincerely,
Nick
well nick thats your opinion and your entitled to it.. no one said you aint, but the fact is microsoft was in the right place at the right time.. no im too young to have invented my own os and sold it to ibm.
but as it stands its not as straight forward as what you make out.. its not a case of capitilsm was communism.. thats just in your opinion, its more than that..
you just have to look at the kernel currently there are 400 coders working on it. look at other arease kde has literally thousands of volunteeers look at the whole of debian that has thousands of volunteers too.. the main difference is that yes people do the least they can to get by.. but one thing i have noticed with linux is this
u start off and learn how it works how to go around how to make things work.. but being grateful for the hardwork people have put in to make the software, and for them to distribute it freely, makes u wanna give something back ( atleast thats the way i felt about it and im not the only one) so i started helping with documentation about things that people were struggling with and i gave how i did it.. it doesnt necessarily have to be in doing coding it can be in any number of ways.. most isps with enough bandwidth provide mirroring.. they have the bandwidth spare and can afford to mirror the software so they provide it. thats how things work in the linux world.. Then their are big companies like ibm who stand to gain from linux and so they pump in money and support.. Other companies like redhat and suse who are for profit distribution vendors who hire coders to get specific things done that they need and release the code out as gpl.. the linux community is a lot more complex than just encapsulating it as communism.. communism failed because at the source you had greedy dictators, hell bent on power. Microsoft if u look at it maybe a captilist company but in many ways its like a dictatorship government while certain projects for linux are dictatorships others are completely democratic an example of democracy working well within linux is the debian distribution.
Where linux has not worked for you. Where you say linux just doesnt measure up to microsoft i would disagree, i would say microsoft specifically windows does not measure up to linux.. specifically because it cant handle the load of my day to day usage.. Linux may not be great but its great for me.. and if it doesnt work for you, but windows does.. then use what works.
sorry for the spelling/grammatical errors.
“Microsoft called GPL a virus because all that it does is take jobs away from people that could have their time better spent programming for a company”
Shame on those Linux developers for releasing code that they wrote in their spare time under the license of their choosing! They should instead have released it under a license that gives MS exclusive rights to the technology! Gee, if you’re so worried about GPL contamination, WRITE YOUR OWN GODDAMN CODE.
“That is because the majority of the people are following the rule of doing as little as possible to get by. Now on the other hand if you are paying a select few to create a product they are going to be more apt to develop a product and if there are problems with it they are going to need to fix it else no body will buy the software.”
This is not true. Commercial software companies will add as little functionality and fix as little as possible so that users still buy the next version. I mean they’re in the business to make money, and not to write good software, right?
“So capitalism forces software to being better while communism forces software to move at a slower pace, because people don’t want to put the time in to do things right.”
So explain why open source moves at a quicker pace than commercial software. In terms of ease of use, the gap between 1995-circa Linux and Windows 95 is much greater than current Linux versions and Windows XP.
And as far as kernel technology is concerned, Linux has always been ahead. Remember that Linux already had a network transparent GUI, memory protection and full multitasking, at a time when Windows users were hit by “general protection faults” if they tried running more than a handful of programs at a time on their 16-bit OS? Only recently MS managed to write an OS that doesn’t crash for no reason (XP). Even though MS is playing catchup, Linux is not standing still. Kernel 2.6 is an amazing improvement.
the gap between 1995-circa Linux and Windows 95 is much greater than current Linux versions and Windows XP
Rubbish.
“Open Source = Communism
Closed Source = Capitalism ”
I think you mean socialism, it’s closer to your analogy. Anyway, question: What about BSD style licensing?
“Btw. it seems there is some confusion with SFU 3.0, Interix 2 and POSIX. SFU 3.0 includes Interix 3.0 which is based upon POSIX.”
yes, but it is not based on the POSIX subsytem. that’s been removed in Win2003, because it was weak and useless. kind of funny that they added the POSIX subsystem so they could be tested for C2 certification, but the system isn’t C2 compliant unless the POSIX subsytem was disabled.
yes, the article started the confusion by talking mostly about the Interix tools rather than dealing with the networking aspect(the actual services). after having tried out SFU 2 and 3, all I can say is this review chose to critique the most insignificant part, considering the basic tools themselves are readily available from numerous sources. I seriously doubt anyone would purchase this package just to use ls.exe.
Care to back up your claims? UI-wise Windows XP is a minor consmetic facelift of Windows 95; basically the only thing that’s changed is they’ve made the file manager a function of the web browser, and added cheezy gradients and ‘task oriented’ crap everywhere. Whereas in 1995 KDE and GNOME did not even exist.
and study economics. Here are some facts:
1) Bill Gates and Steve Balmer are NOT campitalists, they are technocrats at best
2) OpenSource ISN’T communist, in the most purist definition, OpenSource, especially GPL can be classified as perfect competition. Perfect competition is defined as having many players in the market with perfect information. Perfect information means that on one company has a information advantage over another. GPL ensures that there is perfect information.
3) OpenSource praises the individual and values their contribution more highly than the closed source model. For example, in Red Hat the provide migration services. Who makes the difference? the organisation or the people? of course, it is the people. It is the people who make the difference and not the organisation itself, where as the close source model assumes that all coders are equal and that any idividuality should be squashed at all costs.
The GPL is probably closer to socialism than communism. But both have the same fault anyways. Not that it’s not a nice idea. Communism was also a nice idea, and countries that practice it are not ‘evil’ as a particular superpower’s government would have you believe right now.
The examples you give acutally support Nick’s argument. Let’s take KDE for example. There may be many volunteers, but only a few key people (who have the luxury to spend time coding KDE) actually drive the development. So you see it’s really not a democracy. Neither is gnome.
Debian may be, but Debian is also a perfect example of minimal work. It has thousands of volunteers, yet it’s stable distribution is so outdated it’s not even funny. The unstable version is just that, very unstable. Also, these people don’t really create new products, rather they simply do mantinence type work. Much easier.
Let’s look at some of the other ‘stars’ of the open source world. GNOME only became really good once Sun got in on the act. They helped introduce the HIG and many other usability features. OpenOffice was completely born of a proprietary company.
Many of the successul open source projects have main developers who are paid by companies dealing with propietary software or hardware. These people do most of the work. Look at linux, jfs, xfs, smp, all these were donated and were originally proprietary. The really free stuff? It’s taken *years* to develop. Linux was started before or at the very least at the same time as windows NT. Look at where the two are now. The mere fact that GPL software has produces appoximately zero innovations should tell you something. Most projects are playing catchup perpetually.
You say GPL’d software has zero innovation, but what innovations does Windows XP have? An animated dog in the find file tool? There is very little innovation in the software world, and most of it takes place in academic environments where it is usually open source.
BSD software is a different story. Ownership doesn’t dissapear with BSD software as it does with GPL software. Rather ownership is granted to anyone who wants to take it and modify it. In other words, BSD licensed code can migrate to other licenses. This can help propietary startups. It can also help open source projects.
One of the things BSD style software is best at is promoting new standards. For instane, the TCP/IP stack was so quickly adopted largly because a free prototype stack was avaliable. Undeniably, this code has helped the entire computing industry.
Of course, GPL software can still have stars as well, notably gcc has had a great impact on the world. But notice that most gccisms have not been adopted into other compilers. Neither has the GNU extensions to the UNIX toolchain been incorporated into every UNIX.
When I wrote this review I was going by the technical aspects of SFU. This is in no way an Anti MS review and I do think that MS did pour alot of time and did some good work with this product. If you are looking to Migrate then yes I would invest in SFU, but those of you that wish to run KDE and GNOME and a variety of other Linux apps then go Cygwim. Microsoft support for this product is great and with some of the issues that I had with this app they were a tremendous help. But they made it clear, this is not Cygwin. It is not intended to offer the same functionality as Cygwin. SFU is intended for ystem migration and porting of Applications, point-blank-period. I would suggest this app for migraters because of the price $99.00 gets you unlimited support, GNU Pro from Red Hat is expensive costing hundreds of dollars.
You made the statement so you need to back it up, not me. But I don’t think we have to go that far, since you already have gone so far as to infer that your comparison of a ‘gap’ is merely UI appearance. Which really amounts to perhaps 5% of the entire OS if you intend to compare apples and oranges (as you do).
“SFU is intended for ystem migration and porting of Applications, point-blank-period.”
I disagree. it’s not the way MS has operated in the past when dealing with a rival in the server market. this is phase I – embrace. it’s an integration product, “point-blank-period”. you chose to focus on the applications side of it, but it’s fairly obvious that porting commandline apps and scripts is not going to help MS win against *nix. they integrate the network services first, so they can eventually move people away from what they see as “legacy” services.
>yet it’s stable distribution is so outdated it’s not even funny
The Debian project doesn’t have the money nor the resources as such a large commercial company have to put into making their OS stable, functional, and available for mass consumption.
Sure the stable distribution may be updated, but it *works*. Update the debian system if you want. That’s what apt-get is for.
And hence why it isn’t viable
Dysprosia, I’m not saying Debian shouldn’t exist or people shouldn’t use it. I know they don’t have the money to make new releases often. In fact, that is exactly what I’m pointing out.
I agree. Most innovation does take place in academic environments. And while it academic projects are often open source, they are not necessarily GPL. Some are of course, but historically most have not been. These days it also seems like many projects are ‘free for academic use only’.
I don’t want to be overly harsh on open source. I do in fact like such software and use it daily. Windows XP may not in of itself have many huge innovations, but then it really is a maintenance release anyways. Microsoft does innovate though. Obvious examples are .NET and C#. The upcoming WinFS sounds like a good idea as well. Apple innovated with Quartz extreme. The idea of a windowing environment and the mouse were both born from a company, Xerox. Granted those ideas were given away free it seems. Apple did evolve the windowing environment and many UI concepts can likely be attributed to them. Also consider that many academic concepts and prototypes are not particularly usable. Whether you can call it an innovation or not may be questionable, proprietary companies do a great job of bringing these technologies into usable and (mostly) well designed systems.
I guess I should also point out that I am not considering academic works to be part of the GPL software community since these don’t follow the general model being described. They have one or two paid specialists working on a topic, not an army of volunteers. Academic positions are also difficult to get and limited in nubmers. In other words a special case.
What all does SFU3.0 provide that isn’t provided by Cygwin?
“The development environment consists of GNU Tools. GNUMake, GCC 2.0.7, and GDB. The development environment is extremely outdated so compiling and updating system libs and Applications was hard, I was able to compile bash as well as lynx and some other text based applications but I was unable to compile recent graphics apps. KDE 3.1.2 was not going to happen, neither was GNOME 2…”
GCC 3.3 for Interix is right here, my friend, along with plenty of other goodies you don’t know about:
http://www.interopsystems.com/tools/warehouse.htm
Cygwin is my favorite personal productivity tool on wintel machines, I believe that the author should have mentioned what I see as the natural niche for WSFU : hooking the unix servers in corporates for heavy lifting (like SAP) into MS where the suits trust Microsoft, even for things like DNS.
WSFU is good at allowing *nix machines and services (eg NFS and auth protocols) to use services running on MS. Yes, I know about Samba, but using WSFU allows you to point the blame for failed services TOTALLY on MS.
Actually, this reminds me that MS products overcome one of the longest-standing rules in computer science, the one first stated by Turing: the halting problem: you cannot know if a program will halt or not unless you run it. Not true for MS – if its from MS you know it will halt 😉
{ GCC 3.3 for Interix is right here, my friend, along with plenty of other goodies you don’t know about:
http://www.interopsystems.com/tools/warehouse.htm }
Good, someone notify MS so if someone else calls Microsoft support will know where to direct them.
Actually no.. thats not entirely true u say debian unstable is just too unstable infact the unstable ive been running for years every now and then maybe for a few weeks a year it might go into a bit of turmoil.. when the turmoil starts u just stop updating till they sync everything again.. which takes tops a couple of weeks.. the volunteers put in a lot of hard work.. not just in making packages some of them do bug fixing etc.. like branden who is also one of the key members in xwin.org.
U say only a few core do the majority for kde their is nothing wrong with that.. except youll find that your key core may consist of several hundred.. if not more.. ultimately what goes into the kde bundle is up to a select few.. but a heck of alot of people contribute from suse to individuals.
“Microsoft does innovate though.”
name me one thing they have innovated. or one thing new they have released..
well for linux atleast biggest innovation is the gnu/gpl itself.. what more can be said.. that in its own rights has brought more to the computing world than anything microsoft has.
http://slicker.sourceforge.net is a new style taskbar for kde in development which is innovation.. resier 4 is innovation. the list of innovations aint minute im sure there are people here who can expand this list.
infact linux has advanced so rapidly in the past few years that windows xp borrowed idea from gnome and kde.. can u imagine it by 2005 ?
at the end of the day.. universities and research centers are where new ideas are born.. maybe if ms spent half as much on creating new innovations instead of working out ways to crush competition then maybe they would have their first new thing that they bring to the computer world.. currently they still have brought nothing new..
Ideas like “closed source = capitalism versus open source = communism” are not very thoughtful.
Firstly, it plays into the myth that there are two types of economic systems and capitilism, being the lesser of two evils, has prevailed. Hogwash — there have been several models of non-market economic systems with checks and balances and incentives for individuals to be economically productive. Just do a google search for Michael Albert and Participatory Economics.
Secondly, I would say that Microsoft is extremely inefficient. If the Open Source (Free Software as well) development methodologies and the closed source development methodologies (as represented by MS) were abstracted from the present market system, and both camps were given equal economic resources, the former would win by a land slide. I would argue that Open Source does a whole lot with very little, were as MS does very little with so much.
Yet they don’t really innovate much. They implement existing technologies, hijack standards and market the hell out of there products. (Exchange, Terminal Services, Active Directory, MS-SQL — nothing innovative here, tweak it, rebrand it).
But MS really does embody capitallism. It is likely most people in the world (and certainly true for all people in developed world) have paid MS in one way or another. Just about every product and service paid for has a trickle up effect filling the MS war chest. Next time you buy gas, toilet paper, food, prescriptions and so forth, just remember that for every penny you spend, a small percentage is trickling up to MS — not once but at multiple steps of production, distribution, sales and so forth — its a little thing we call licensing fees
Like what was said before you look at Microsoft as a developer. When really you should look at them as a commodity of small companies all contributing to one goal of producing software under the name of Microsoft. Microsoft is the parent company of so many smaller companies that have contributed massive amounts of inovation to the industry and with out the backing of that money they would have never come around. For instance as much as I detest FrontPage and the extentions it has given everybody and their mother the ability to create and publish websites. Lets not forget the innovation of marketing and user friendly interfaces which facilitates the growth of the computer industry and having a computer in “everyones” home. The problem is that you are thinking of innovation in a small box that only deals with coding. Basically there is no innovation anymore if you just think of it that way because all that these “inovaters” are doing is improving on a “perceived problem”.
“http://slicker.sourceforge.net is a new style taskbar for kde in development which is innovation.. resier 4 is innovation. the list of innovations aint minute im sure there are people here who can expand this list.”
If you actually look at this they aren’t inovating anything they are just improving a process on “perceived problems”. If you want to take it back the real innovater was Xerox with the windowing environment. Now that was an inovation not just changing the look of menu bar like slicker is doing.
Also it was funny that you mentioned just a new interface and a new file system, because if I remember right Microsoft is doing that with Longhorn and WinFS. So I guess Microsoft is innovating, despite popular beleif.
“Yet they don’t really innovate much. They implement existing technologies, hijack standards and market the hell out of there products. (Exchange, Terminal Services, Active Directory, MS-SQL — nothing innovative here, tweak it, rebrand it). ”
I like this part the most, because this is another problem I have. What really is a standard, is it something a governing body sets forth or is it something that everybody adopts. I tend to lean twords the latter because if nobody is using your so called standard it is not much of a standard is it. Because I could create a standard called TCP/IP-2 where all bits are inversed when sent over a LAN, but if nobody is using it for communication over the internet and they are all using TCP/IP, what kind of communication standard is it? Answer, it’s not one because nobody uses it.
Now if Microsoft decides that they don’t like something from the W3C such as a couple tags in HTML and they don’t include it in IE, and they include others such as IFrame. What is the standard for HTML now, is it the W3C standard that only has about 10% of the population using it to it’s fullest or is it the other 90% of the population? Now this is a real life example because back in the day of HTML 3.2 there was no IFrame in the definition of the standard but IE had one. Also IE had not Blink tag, and this pissed off alot of Netscape users. But if you look at what the XHTML standard has and the HTML 4.01 standard has they both of a IFrame tag, but no Blink tag.
Now you may be scraching your head saying how can this be, you mean the W3C “standards board” incorporated IFrame? Yes not because they wanted to but because they had to because 90% of the market supported it and it was being used in their so called HTML “standard”. Because IFrame was a standard part of the majority of the users on the planet.
The word “standard” gets thrown around alot but we all have to remember, standard is in the process that gets used the most, by the most people. If this wasn’t true we would all still be using UNIX and communicating by dial up BBS’s.
The sad fact is nick.. microsoft doesnt innovate it hasnt come up with any good idea it just buys out companies that do have these good ideas and claims it as its own work. thats the truth..
yeah my last two “innovations” were not brilliant.. but talking about winfs their “new” filesystem ill think it will turn out to be reiser4 even eugenia mentioned this a while back.. its the way it looks to me.
if u call frontpage an innovation i have to laugh sorry that is the single most crappiest wysiwyg out there.. macromedia have been releasing anything decent on this front.
the fact of the matter is even though microsoft did manage to get computers so widely used.. if they hadnt done it some one else would have it was just a matter of time.. but what they provided was by no means brilliant they provided a hacked up operating system.. with serious instability but just were able to market the shit as something new and brilliant.. woe the pains with windows 95 infact i liked 3.11 more. (i was a young kid then)
I will give them one thing they have one of the best marketing and business brains out their working for em.. that their is no doubt of.. how else can u market complete crap and make so much money out of it.
also to comment on your thing about standards.. thats the exact thing people sit long and hard with many different companies and come up with set standards to keep interopability between different vendors, what happens ? microsoft does their damndest to make it not work.. java is a good example of this.. sun creates java to be platform independant ms create their own virtual standard machine and start shipping it which happens to only work on windows.. sun get pissed off and sue em.. what do they do in response ? ahh fuck it well create our new and innovative development platform “.net” should be .bollocks.. im just wondering what microsoft will do when mono actually picks up and starts being used within linux.. i wonder what their response will be.
the fact is it will never replace java development platform as its not platform independant.. how big will the uptake of this new development platform ? it maybe huge.. but i doubt it.. every company is looking for platform independance and microsoft needs vendor lock in, to maintain the monopoly.
I pay Microsoft $100 for a collection of tools, most of which are free, and VERY out of date. I mean, Korn Shell ’88, for crying out loud, when ksh93 has been freely available for over
3 years? GCC 2.0.7 ? That goes back to early ’92.
Okay, you can get updated stuff from Interop Systems but I don’t see why I should have to pay the world’s largest software company for outdated stuff and then spend time updating from a third party.
Way to go, M$ but I’ll stick with Cygwin.
Is it me or does this guy have very poor grammar?