J�rgen, I politely must disagree concerning the ABI. I have worked with professional MS Windows applications programmers (who are also my students and who are quite knowledgeable about a number of unix 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.
It is likely that Mr. Gates, out of avarice, will continue to hide these ABIs unless entities such as the EU (US Dept of Justice under Bush is a Gates supporter) force Mr. Gates to level the playing field and document all calls to everybody. The "free market" will not do this; it never did it for DEC (Closed)VMS nor for much of IBM nor Apple; declining market share simply caused a change in approach. If these calls were documented, then the Wine approach might work. As it stands, only the VMWare approach (and VMWare has to keep changing to support Mr. Gates) will 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. A grad student doing his thesis in MS Word (I cannot *FORCE* the student to use LaTeX or LyX) 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. 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.) Comments? Best regards. Yasha > > "Dr. Yasha Karant" wrote: > > Thus, one is forced to use MS Windows applications. These > > applications can run under three environments: MS Windows native (in > > control of the platform), MS Windows in a sandbox (Plex86, VMWare, > > SoftPC), or MS Windows ABI emulation (the Wine/Wabi approach). > > Given that Mr. Gates keeps enough of the real ABI secret, and > > changes it often enough, only the first two are viable, [...] > > I don't believe that... I believe that the Wine approach is viable > (and that Wine is getting close to solving the 90% use case). As > for MS keeping the ABI secret and changing it often enough... they > are losing their flexibility in that regard. Secrets are short > lived and although they'd love to keep it a moving target, the > simple fact is that they can't keep forcing people to upgrade. > > The pace of change of PC hardware is slowing. Not yet so much > because Moore's law is hitting the limits of physics (that will > happen over the next decade, after which /really/ different > tech will start to pick it up again) but simply because the > typical PC is already so rediculously powerful that the software > industry is having a hard time coming up with new applications > to soak up all that power. MS has been making a valiant > attempt to fill the spare capacity with bloat, but let's be > honest... the only thing that's been driving more power on the > desktop has been games, and even those are now at a level where > the hardware is up to just about anything the game designers > can come up with. > > If people don't upgrade their hardware they won't upgrade their > OS. If they don't upgrade their OS, MS can't change the ABI or > they'd be fragmenting their own market. That's why they're so > eager to move to subscription models and time-limited licenses, > but the public is not going for it. Neither Joe Gamer nor > Jim CIO are that stupid! > > In short, the Windows ABIs as a target may still be moving, but > quite slowly now. And we've learned how to keep up. > > Don't get me wrong... I think Plex86 is a great project and > VERY important. But not for running Windows applications on > my Linux box. It's important because virtualization has a > hundred uses. > > :J.B/2001.10 > > -- > 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 > > >
