Orlando Andico wrote:
Hey guess what -- my Win2k desktop lasted *THREE YEARS* until some dratted winmodem driver broke it. :P
LOL... how unbelievably ironic!
It's not as pretty as XP though. But it works fine.
Main con of 2K is it takes 5 times or longer to boot up than XP...
First thing I do with XP is turn off the 'enhanced' visual styles... :-D
As I was telling a
Windows-centric acquiantance of mine -- Wilson Chua, actually.. :P for most competent people it's not an either-or, Linux or Windows. I could work on Windows very well (heck, I have the useless certification).
I am very much convinced a mixed solution offers the best price / performance / friendliness. Linux (or FreeBSD) as the primary server platform and Windows for the client platform... and open source as core technologies (like for your DBMS engine, languages, etc...).
Windows is confusing enough for most people as I've discovered... so I shudder at the training time and cost you'd incur when you use Linux on the client...
Maybe a RedHat/Mandrake/Suse desktop will one day demolish that argument but if you're familiar with Windoze' very rich plumbing and are aware of what's coming up in .NET/Longhorn, you might reconsider your optimism.
And speaking of plumbing... allow me to drift back into the topic which has been occupying my thoughts lately...
The COM 'binary object interoperability plumbing' which has been so central to Windows' evolution (and is what's evolving into .NET) is still in its infancy in KDE and GNOME. DCOP and Bonobo have vastly fewer objects and interfaces and consequently, DCOP/Bonobo maturity can be considered fairly untested...
Now to digress yet again... if you look at DirectFB, it apes DirectX's interface, but the crucial difference is unlike DirectX, DirectFB is not leveraging off of any standard binary object communications protocol on Linux... so as far as I can tell, you're still going to have to code your own bindings to DirectFB if you want to use it with a scripting language as opposed to having any DCOP (or other such protocol)-fluent client be able to call DirectFB code directly (i.e. without custom-written language-specific bindings).
[ It's is worth noting how DirectX is exposed as a set of COM-interfaces and yet besides VB and VC++, there don't seem to be any other languages which talk to it via COM... For example, I'm still trying to figure out how to get Python to see DirectX and wondering why no one has ever tried doing it... ]
[ Another thing to note is that, for all its theoretical advantages, COM is a pain bec. it was developed primarily to work with C++'s byzantine object model... As you can see, in order for them to evolve COM, they had to make the .NET CLR revolve around a new, improved object model - that of C#'s. ]
Like COM, DCOP (not sure about Bonobo) was almost surely built with C++ in mind (Mozilla XPCOM also smells C++-centric to me), so I think if DirectFB exposed via DCOP or Bonobo is going to give you similar grief, maybe its just as well we stick to coding language-specific bindings for DirectFB. Such native bindings should also be more able to take full advantage of the semantics of the native language they are targetted to as opposed to a cross-language protocol. (hmm... what if they made one based on Ruby's/Smalltalk's object model...?)
Anyway with Mono, Ximian are eschewing DCOP/Bonobo/XPCOM and telling us to go with .NET CLR instead, the reasoning being that it is the one being proferred as the next wave by the architect of the most successful (in terms of usage and not necessarily best designed) binary object protocol in use.
But I work in a UNIX environment, and I am MOST productive there, and I like the freedom. But given an unlimited budget (or unlimited MSDN..) anything is possible. And Windows is really better at some things.
It finally is. :-D
-- reply-to: a n d y @ n e t f x p h . c o m
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