"Dr. Yasha Karant" wrote:
> internals, including Linux). In their gainful employment, they
> are given access to specific undocumented calls in MS Win (that
> change depending upon MS Win 9x, MS Win NT, MS Win current) that
> are required in order to develop applications.
Sure, but we do tend to find these calls eventually, by various
means. My point was the pace of change is slowing... I suspect
that Win 98/Millenium (which are essentially the same) will be
around for a /long/ time and application vendors will continue
to support them because they can't afford to limit their market.
> work. Wine working at the 90% level is worthless -- if the MS Doc
> file with a set of MS graphics does not appear identical when printed
> as it does on the MS Win environment.
Right now, if you have an app working under wine and use the same
fonts, it will print identically.
> A grad student doing his thesis
> in MS Word (I cannot *FORCE* the student to use LaTeX or LyX)
Although I'm not a proponent of forcing anyone to use anything, I
also can't buy this specific argument... as a thesis advisor you
most certainly /could/ force your students to use some particular
system/software for doing their thesis. Schools have been doing
that all along. Also some scientific puplications in Math/Physics
certainly require the use of TeX specifically. (Or at least did
until recently.)
But again, I'm not a proponent of forcing people to use any one
thing, which is precisely one of the main reasons I'm an oponent
of Microsoft! ;-)
> gave me
> his doc files -- and only under VMWare running MS Win using MS Word was
> I able to view and print precisely what he intended.
You could have had him submit his MS Word doc as an Acrobat file, then you
could have seen and printed it exactly as intended under Linux.
> Point of fact:
> Sun abandoned Wabi (Sun's Wine) because even they could not get all of
> Gates' undocumented material at any reasonable cost. (I know that
> Wabi included an IA-32 PC architecture emulation -- but this is the
> easy part because the IA-32 and related BIOS and bus instructions
> are documented.)
Open Source, while not good at /everything/, nonetheless has been able
to do things at times that industry didn't find cost effective. Such
as develop a whole operating system that could compete with Microsoft for
example. Where even the most powerful, wealthiest corporations (like
IBM) gave up (good bye OS/2) the Open Source community succeeded wildly.
Linux may not have won the desktop, but by taking a large chunk of the
server market from MS and holding it, it succeeded where IBM, Sun, SGI,
and other big corporations have failed.
Sun abandonded Wabi because it wasn't cost effective... the Open Source
community doesn't care if it's cost effective or not. Wine has been under
development for a long time... and although it may accelerate or slow at times
it will never stop due to its Open Source nature. So long as it solves some
problems for some people someone will continue to improve it. That is the true
power of Open Source... where proprietary software disappears without a trace
with the fortunes of its developers, Open Source never dies; at worst it slows
to infinitesimal movement if not enough people get any use out of it to put
more effort into it. But I believe that Wine is getting close to solving a
lot of problems for a lot of people... it is likely to run Office 2000 quite
well soon. How long will Office 2000 remain the "standard" format? My guess
is well through the middle of this decade, and longer if the current economic
slowdown turns out to be even a little more protracted than just into the
middle of next year.
Once again my point is that MS ability to keep Windows a moving target
is decreasing because the change of hardware is slowing. If people
don't need to upgrade hardware by and large they won't upgrade OS,
that is a well documented fact.
And all that is just half of the story... in the meantime there is of
course also the fact that MS may well lose some of its market dominance
simply because people are fed up with it. More and more large organizations
(big corporations and governments, especially outside the US) are wondering
if the enormous cost per seat of all this MS software they are seemingly
forced to buy can really be justified. The average office worker/clerk
could do just fine with a Linux based appliance running Star Office and
an e-mail client. Inertia makes it hard to move in that direction, but
as MS squeezes harder and harder and hardware has gotten cheaper and
cheaper the cost difference and economic pressures may have finally
gotten to the point that inertia will be overcome here and there. I'm
not saying MS is about to be toppled, but once some significant percentage
of organizational users make the move, the PERCEPTION of MS Office as a
standard that one simply can't work without will get toppled.
:j
--
J�rgen Botz | While differing widely in the various
[EMAIL PROTECTED] | little bits we know, in our infinite
| ignorance we are all equal. -Karl Popper
