The Tech Journal

Steven Vaughn-Nichols wrote another opinion piece on eWeek that sounds more like a 15 year old cheerleader waving her pom-poms around more than anything of substance.  Although I will concede that Steve would look terrible in a cheerleader outfit with a big penguin on front.  Here’s his pipe dream:

“I oversaw a PC Magazine feature on Unix on Intel. My team and I reviewed at Unixes from Consensys, Dell, Interactive, SCO, Univel, Sun, and NeXT.”

The only problem with those versions of UNIX that you mentioned  is that A) most of em were new, didn’t have any userbase and offered nothing particularly exciting in terms of a desktop OS.  Suns x86 offering was a joke and SCO then was to expensive and wasn’t suited as a desktop OS.  OpenServer 6 is, but nothing from that time frame.  NeXT was the only exception.  NeXT had its own problems namely Steve Jobs who is a real son-of-a-bitch who wanted then to run everything and if you didn’t agree with him he either cussed you out or refused to do business with you.  Steve has been successful now at Apple because of Avie Tevanian, who is a great guy, and who is a people person.  Apple now has other people that run it mostly and Steve Jobs does what he does best now, he sells.

“It wasn’t that Windows was better than Unix. You can argue that today, but in 1993, Unix’s competition, if you can call it that, was Windows 3.1 and NT 3.1.”

Nope, Windows didn’t hold a candle to UNIX at the time.  What Windows offered then was what it offers now, a consistent user experience.  You didn’t have to learn 3 or 4 disparate flavors of UNIX or god forbid NetWare to run your business.  That’s what Windows winning points were and people were willing to put up with its faults and focus on the benefits.

“Linux came into the field though with two big advantages over the Unixes. The first was that it was open-source.”

Nope, Linux came into play because the UNIX community pretty much didn’t want to bend and play ball.  UNIX companies wanted to control everything and didn’t give a shit about developers.  It wasn’t because of lack of standards it was because no one knew how to manage the asset there were too many chiefs and not enough Indians.  People either jumped ship or sank.  If the UNIX companies were more flexible than the developers would have stayed on.  Open Source gave them the flexibility and integration of stolen code and concepts gave them the ability to recycle their skill sets.

“The second advantage was it had Linus Torvalds.”

Umm Steve a little to your right, I think your tongue missed that little spot on his far right ass cheek.  Linus is not the most brilliant guy in the IT industry and I think you are forgetting that it’s the community that made Linux popular, similar to Apples community.  Most brilliant guy in IT now?  I would have to say Jordan Hubbard, the FreeBSD committer.  Most of the FreeBSD guys do much better work and are far more down to earth than most of the raging, rabid pack of Linux fanatics in the world.

“There are other open-source Unix operating systems: the BSDs. “
“ None of them, though, have had even a fraction of Linux’s success. “
Because at the time the UCB was getting sued similar to the SCO suit against IBM and since the BSD’s didn’t indemnify and didn’t have a raging, rabid community that continuously did anything even illegal to protect them they were screwed.  That’s okay, the BSD’s survived and if you look at the actual statistics aside from Google, most of the biggest websites and development houses run FreeBSD or NetBSD.  And lets not forget Apple and Microsoft who use BSD code in their products, come to think of it.  I would have to say BSD has had more commercial support than Linux has had.
“Because Torvalds is the single leader of Linux, it has avoided the old Unix trap of in-fighting, which continues to bedevil the BSDs. “
Dude, I subscribe to the BSD mailing lists and yes I read them, and I subscribe to the kernel.org mailing list and which one has more drama?  OMFG, its kernel.org who seems to have a fight started every couple of months.  The last good, noteworthy fight from the BSD communities happened about 2 years ago.  Quit kissing ass.
“If all Linux had was Torvalds, I’d worry about the operating system’s future. Linus is a wonderful person and a great programmer, but if that’s all there was to Linux’s success, we’d be one bad car accident away from its end.”
Oops a little to the left there, you missed a little around the rim.
“That’s why the LSB (Linux Standard Base) 3.0 release is so important.  
This is not just another standard. This is the standard that will make sure that ISVs can write programs for one Linux rather than half-a-dozen Linux distributions.
All the major Linux consortiums and companies— Asianux, the Debian Common Core Alliance, Red Hat and Novell—have agreed to make their distributions LSB 3.0 compliant. “
And I guess the LSB is so great and has been around for years, that’s how come we still have thousands of packages that are the same individually packaged for hundreds of different Linux distributions.  You have to bring the developers on board and since even a Red Hat developer condemned the LSB, I don’t see that happening in the future
“As someone who suffered through the Unix wars, I can’t tell you how pleased I am with this development.
Bring it on, Microsoft. Linux is ready for you. “
And I can tell you that very little has changed.  In 3 to 5 years when the LSB is a distant memory of your “community” will you be pleased?  Your diatribe is nothing else but amusing Steven.

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Apple once again is trying the one size fits all routine with .Mac, hmmmmmmmmm.  Stevie, my boy, take a hint.  Why in the bloody bluest blazes of hell is anyone going to pay $100.00 US for something they can have for free

The only winning point here is that its Mac centric.

Intellext is set to release a replacement for the Google sidebar.  Much more secure, supposedly much better.  I don’t particularly care for the Google offerings, they don’t appeal to me.  The only thing I see at fault here is that Watson costs, where Google doesn’t charge a dime for their tool.

Microsoft to reorganize and Allchin, Windows Chief, to retire once Vista launches.

IBM has posted a tutorial on Mono development on Linux.  They also cover some Windows Mono usage.  When I get more time I will probably write a better one

Interesting Article for first time users of OpenBSD,  OpenBSD is the ultra secure BSD implementation that’s used in the Windows Services for UNIX product as well as in Mac OS X

Windows Audio to be moved out of the kernel space.  This will be introduced in Windows Vista.  

ZDNet had this excellent blog entry on whether the Firefox honeymoon is over.  It was a pretty good and yes, it shows that popularity effects security of any given product.  Joseph Huang on the other hand put up a blog entry where he wishes to dispute that fact.  He gives some online statistics from Secunia but Mr. Huang misses the point altogether from the original article.  All software is vulnerable, Firefox since its popularity began has been targeted and vulnerabilities found. .  The zealots and Firefox developers can point to anything they like but as a software product grows to be popular the malicious side of the internet will turn its ugly head.   The developers of these products need to keep security in mind when developing these applications, those who falsely believe their product to be superior or invulnerable to exploits are the ones who will seriously get bit on the ass in the future. BTW I use Netscape so I’m neither on the side of the IE team or the Netscape and Firefox guys on this one.  

Microsoft has updated its Windows Vista homepage

In other Windows Vista news, Monad Beta 2 has been released

Channel 9 has published a shitload of Windows Vista videos

What does Windows Vista mean to me.  Well to me it seems that Windows Vista is the light at a long tunnel.  For years I have had to fight Windows security problems, Microsoft’s broken promises as well as the outside punks and dickheads who have nothing better to do than to cause problems and headaches.  Luckily most of the time I was ahead of em so I was more diligent.  I was using security practices that Microsoft’s security teams are now starting to preach.  But now Windows Vista is within our grasp.  Its not vaporware, it doesn’t look like another over ambitious project.  The new security models are great, usability, reliability look vastly improved.  Its in Beta while yes, betas are typically slow I find this beta to be better than most others I have participated in (Mac OS X Public Beta –Ungodly slow, you could go make breakfast, take a shower, and eat breakfast and it would just about be done loading.  The final release was a lot better. 10.2 was actually the first major stable release).  Vista is not just another pretty face but it appears to be the first major release since Windows 2000 that I can call great.  It wont be a UNIX or Linux killer, but it will be the release that Microsoft can truly be proud of.  To all the nay Sayers, you can have your opinion but that doesn’t mean that I have to agree with it.