__/ [ Paul Hovnanian P.E. ] on Saturday 14 April 2007 05:26 \__
> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>>
>> Dear Mr. Gates: save Vista, open-source it
>>
>> ,----[ Quote ]
>> | Although Microsoft may claim otherwise, Vista, from both from a
>> | technical and business point of view, is proving to be a failure. Why
>> | not turn it over to people who have shown time after time that they can
>> | deliver the goods?
>> `----
>>
>> http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS2930812631.html
>>
>> He has plenty of links there to show that Vista is indeed a major flop.
>
> I doubt that this would save Vista. It might, however, save quite a few
> Microsoft apps.
>
> Odds are that if Vista's inner workings are published, the Wine folks
> would have a much easier time incorporating the API than the OSS
> community would have chasing bugs around a crummy OS architecture. Screw
> Windows and save the applications.
A more rational, decent (and maybe even honest) poposal was this:
An Open Letter to Microsoft: Re-Release Windows XP
,----[ Quote ]
| It's time to sober up on Windows Vista. This just isn't working out,
| and your users are getting frustrated to the point where they're souring
| on Windows altogether. In case you haven't seen some of the more
| noteworthy blog posts on this topic, I refer you to Chris Pirillo,
| Scot's Newsletter, or Spend Matters. Or check out the recent bug
| reports regarding product activation and security flaws. This is all
| stuff I managed to dredge up that was written yesterday.
|
| People are unhappy with Vista. Really unhappy. And though I know Microsoft
| has its own form of Steve Jobs' reality distortion field, it certainly
| can't keep you from seeing at least some of the sobering sales figures and
| the crush of disappointing reviews of Vista. I don't want to dredge up all
| the reasons people are unhappy with Vista in this letter. I want to talk
| about what you ought to do stop a mass migration to Linux and the Mac.
| ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
`----
http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/18428/an-open-letter-to-microsoft-re-release-windows-xp
Save the _applications_, rubbish the O/S. But I believe that now more than
ever Microsoft has a reason to look at Wine and plan 'radical operation'
(electronic surgery), plugging together bits and pieces. Apple did this
quite some time ago and its O/S is light years ahead of Vista (applications
and games aside, but that's not the fault of the O/S).
Building an O/S is like science. 1+1=2. It's not as though Gates wanted to do
things differently, but could still get things right. They deviated from the
correct answer and it's costing them now. Singularity, which turned out to
be more of an experiment, is too little too late. It pretty much imitated
the UNIX way. There are too many homebred and third-party applications that
cling onto the O/S's (Windows) and software bugs (think OOXML 'leap year')
using hacks and workarounds, so radical change won't do the trick either.
It's like collapsing a wall, which is something that Vista has already done
anyway (partly by having pseudo-security bolted in on top). NVidia's excuse
for lagging driver development is that they underestimated the burden of
rewriting for Vista. If NVidia don't do it, who will? Microsoft has killed
decades of software, which might only be usable if one virtualises or
emulates an O/S with many known "highly critical" vulnerabilities.
--
~~ With kind regards
Roy S. Schestowitz | Useless fact: A dragonfly only lives for one day
http://Schestowitz.com | GNU is Not UNIX | PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
roy pts/3 Sat Apr 14 00:22 still logged in
http://iuron.com - proposing a non-profit search engine
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