Monday, August 27, 2001

The Death of BeOS -- 7:51 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Scot Hacker (an appropriate name) has an article on Byte.com on the death of the Be operating system. Be's assets were recently purchased by Palm. Hacker blames Microsoft's anticompetitive practices for Be's failure. While the article is interesting, here's a bit I take issue with:

So here we are in 2001, and guess what? It's still not possible to purchase a dual-boot Win/Linux machine. Doesn't that seem kind of odd? With all of the hype Linux has gotten, and with the technical simplicity of shipping dual-boot machines, not a single PC OEM is shipping such a beast. The technology marketplace is glutted with options. Vendors use even the smallest opportunities to trumpet their differentiating factors. Linux is free. And yet there are no commercially available dual-boot machines on the market. Not one. The silence of the marketplace speaks volumes. There is no other way to explain this phenomenon other than as a repercussion of the confidential Windows License under which every hardware vendor must do business.

The emphasis is the author's. While the Windows License does indeed suck and is almost certainly anticompetitive, there is more to this issue. PC manufacturers don't want to have to support Linux. They have a hard enough time finding people who form a half-decent tech support for Windows, much less trying to do it with Linux.

I never used BeOS, but trying to make an OS that will compete financially with Microsoft is utter foolishness. It reminds me of the Dilbert cartoon where a programmer asks Dogbert for money to write a Windows word processor. Dogbert offers $20--to have the waitress hit him upside the head. The reason why Linux has a chance is because it is open source, so it is not subject to the financial pressures M$ can exert. Thanks Linux Today.

IE 6.0 Released -- 6:00 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Well kids, Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 6.0 on the unsuspecting masses. Now Windows machines will have a new and improved way to GPF! I suppose I'll have to download it eventually to my Windows partition so I can make sure The Haus displays correctly. Hopefully I can push it off until the inevitable 6.1 release.

UPDATE! Redwood reports that his Win2K system would blue screen like crazy after he installed IE 6.0. Fortunately he was able to go to safe mode and remove it. Caveat emptor.

Sunday, August 26, 2001

Weird -- 9:53 pm CST, Update by J.t.Qbe

Just when you thought you'd seen it all. . .

Since A.T.'s been fascinated with Doom lately (again), I fired it up myself last night and ended up playing for an hour. This evening I found Doom 2D, a side-scroller conversion of Doom. Yep, you heard what I said, and it even looks good. Site's in Polish, but you can read a good review at Home of the Underdogs.

And if you haven't seen it before, check out Textmode Quake. It's crazy, it's weird, and it's written by a guy who works at the same place I do. Don't miss the "screenshots."

Fear of a GNU Universe -- 10:51 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

An article on Linux.com entitled Fight the GNU/Future shows how completely different the goals of the Free Software Foundation are from Open Source and why it is not in the best interests of Open Source advocates to follow the FSF. The author does a great job of explaining why I'm all for Open Source, but I'm not in agreement the FSF's philosophy. Thanks Linux Today.

J.t.Qbe comments: This is some good stuff, and don't forget to read the comments too--far better than the stuff you'll see on Trashdot. This article does a good job and lays out the issues pretty clearly.

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