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Re: More trouble for Microsoft: The OS is becoming irrelevant

In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Ramon F Herrera
<ramon@xxxxxxxxxxx>
 wrote
on Mon, 18 Aug 2008 08:59:13 -0700 (PDT)
<6fc22a9c-57bd-4e98-837f-5e69c657d1e6@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
>
> We all know the "secret" of Redmont's success: leverage the monopoly
> power on the Operating System marketplace in order to force clueless
> user towards MS applications. Never mind that some (most?) of the
> strategies used are of an illegal nature.
>
> Fortunately, the eyes of the world an onto you, MS.

I wish this were so, but I strongly suspect the DoJ
is paralyzed and partially blinded because of other
issues...check out Goodling in 2007, for example.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/23/AR2007052300728.html

This is admittedly peripheral to Redmond's foibles (or for
that matter the advocacy of Linux), but it's clear that
DoJ might be a little busy right now, but please leave
your name and case number at the sound of the beep and
we'll get right back to you... ;-)

I do hope they eventually do what's needed there.

The good news: the EUC is on the case, and the DoJ is
maintaining a webpage.  I can't say it's the best organized,
but then, how does one sue a $60B/year company (revenues)
without getting into minutiae?

http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/ms_index.htm

And then there's groklaw, of course:

http://www.groklaw.net/
http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2005010107100653

> Your bag of dirty
> tricks is open for everyone to see. That's why BG concluded: "I better
> retire now than I am still -and barely- on top".

I hope for his sake he diversified his holdings. ;-)

>
> "The operating system may be losing its luster. In fact, you could
> argue that the operating system?Linux, OS X and Windows?will become an
> application that just happens to boot first. And hardware vendors are
> on to the OS?s diminishing importance.

The OS is inherently multilayer anyway.  Even as far back
as 1983 minicomputers had "boot monitors" -- Apollo DOMAIN
could even run SALVOL (their version of fsck) therein,
to ensure volume integrity.  I forget what the VAX 11/750's
could do; it wasn't quite as featureful in the boot monitor.

Granted, for most devices Linux bypasses most of the BIOS,
eliminating part of, if not most of, a layer.

POST/BIOS:
- very low level stuff such as INT 13 = read floppy sector,
  INT 10 = various simple video stuff, INT 0AH = keyboard;
  most OSes probably don't even bother with this anymore,
  and certainly Linux doesn't ;-)
GRUB or LILO:
- boot loader
Linx kernel:
- basic resource management
X:
- display resource management (displays/screens/windows/fonts/events)
GNOME or KDE:
- modules, utilities, and libraries that can be leveraged for
  various forms of GUI, such as menus, window management,
  dialogs, styles, etc.

>
> Let?s connect a few dots:"
>
> [...]
>
> http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=9682&tag=nl.e539
>
> -RFH
>

"Without booting the operating system"?  Heh.  They have
to boot *something*, and the Mac and Amiga already had
ROM software to handle a lot of the core stuff -- the
Amiga's Exec in particular was quite featureful, though
a little lacking in security perhaps -- the new Acer stuff
feels a lot like those old-timers.

Not a new idea, but intelligently designed one might
get to a point where the Commodore 64 was more than
25 years ago (!), albeit with far more functionality
(the Wikipedia article for the C-64 doesn't mention
networking, for example, though undoubtedly someone's
hacked a card for such by now; the Web was arguably
invented by Mosaic, which was developed in the early 1990s:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.infosystems/msg/65bf3af73709c672?dmode=source
HTTP/1.0 was later standardized in 1996:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1945.html Basically, almost
a decade later.  :-) ).

Even the PC has its BIOS, and very early PCs had a Basic
interpreter.  (No doubt they took that idea from the
Apple ][, or perhaps the C-64.  The actual code for
BASICA, I don't know.)

I've already pointed out elsewhere regarding what
appears to be a "wake on LAN" reincarnation.

In short, color me unimpressed, though I could
think of far worse scenarios. [*]

As for Firefox's successor, that's simple: something along
the lines of Google's gadgets, though without the sidebar
(unless that's simply another gadget).  At some point
Glade's XML, whatever KDE/kdevelop uses, Windows' XAML,
Windows' .rc files [+], [X]HTML/Javascript, Motif's UIL,
and .Xdefaults or .Xresources [%] will simply all merge
together into one big happy chunk o' goodness, or at least
acknowledge each other's existence and include bits from
each other in a seamless (FSVO) whole.

As for virtualization -- everyone's been using it since
before Win 3.1 came out, in some form.  Virtual memory was
existent on the VAX since the early 80's (the very name
VAX stands for Virtual Address eXtension), and probably
existed before that on OS/360 equipment -- certainly in
college the documentation suggested we all had "our own
bootable machine".  (It wasn't quite that, but OS/360 on
our 4341 was useful anyway.)  AFAICT, all we've really done
with the current round is virtualize device ports as well,
and improve monitoring of certain regions of virtual memory
so as to display the results.

[*] No doubt it will be useful, of course; the wheel may be
    ancient but no one's seriously suggested a
    replacement. ;-) But we'll see.  As for the scenarios:
    think a very perverted variant of DRM and Palladium,
    where Microsoft has to bless every executable before
    a smidge of code even thinks about wandering into the
    microprocessor -- a variant of Joseph Heller's Glorious
    Loyalty Oath Crusade in Catch-22, and probably about
    as successful, ultimately (in other words, not very).

[+] these are compiled into .res files and then incorporated
    into either the executables or the registry, AIUI.

[%] actually, the merged content of about a half-dozen
    files, including
    /usr/share/X11/app-defaults/[someappname] and
    [locale]/[someappname].  The latter makes for some
    interesting customization possibilities for those
    X apps that still honor XrmDatabase, such as xterm,
    xeyes, and xedit.  The XrmDatabase is falling into
    disuse, which is a pity, but given the inherent
    multisystem desires of KDE and Gnome, probably somewhat
    understandable.  For details, I'd have to refer you
    to one of the volumes in the O'Reilly X Windows System
    series -- and I would forget which one. ;-)

-- 
#191, ewill3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Useless C++ Programming Idea #7878218:
class C { private: virtual void stupid() = 0; };
** Posted from http://www.teranews.com **

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