On Jan 13, 2004, at 4:39 PM, Craig White wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-01-13 at 12:01, Chris Gehlker wrote:
>> On Jan 13, 2004, at 9:27 AM, Craig White wrote:
>>
>>> On Tue, 2004-01-13 at 09:08, Chris Gehlker wrote:
>>>> On Jan 13, 2004, at 7:40 AM, Bill Lindley wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I'm reading Eric Raymond's "Art of Unix Programming" now, it
>>>>> definitely shows the technical reasons why the Unix Way is
>>>>> better...
>>>>> and those *do* come out at the user end of things.
>>>>
>>>> ESR is certainly a very smart, interesting and thought provoking guy
>>>> but he is also very often wrong. Take what he says with a grain of
>>>> salt.
>>> ---
>>> Are you content to just shoot from the hip here or did you care to
>>> give
>>> meaning to this by illustration?
>>
>> I certainly don't intend to be cryptic. It's just that so many have
>> reviewed Mr. Raymond's prognostications in general and "The Art of
>> Unix
>> Programming" in particular that that I have little to add. I'm sure a
>> little googling will provide all the illustration that anyone could
>> want.
>>
>> I will give a few examples off the top of my head:
>>
>> The obvious one is that he made very public predictions that MS would
>> be bankrupt by now. He had a nice argument built on the premise that
>> consumer level computers would break through the $1000 barrier, that
>> therefore Windows would become too significant a part of the total
>> cost
>> of the computer, that one computer retailer would move to Linux, that
>> the cost advantage would force the rest of the industry to follow
>> suit.
>>
>> Well the price of consumer PCs did fall below $1000, Lindows did go on
>> sale at Wal-Mart, but it has yet to drive Dell and HP to the wall.
> ---
> I don't see this prediction in the book - can you give me an idea of
> which chapter this is or does this prediction exist somewhere else
> outside of that book?
In 2000 he predicted that MS would fall "within five or six months."
He predicted their eminent demise again in 2002.
In 2003 though, he seems to have decided that it is Sun, not MS that is
doomed:
> ---
>>
>> Another illustration is that at one point in the book he seems to
>> realize that the general lack in *nix of some single standard for
>> program automation corresponding to COM and it's descendants is a real
>> problem. There are several competing technologies from bonobo to that
>> KDE thingee to XML/RPC and the result is that end user programs on
>> *nix
>> aren't written to support automation the way that programs on Windows
>> are. So Raymond seems to 'get it' there but he doesn't draw the
>> obvious
>> conclusion that until Unix in general has a substitute for Visual
>> Basic
>> it will not receive serious consideration from some businesses. In
>> fact, it needs a VB Clone to be at all workable for many businesses.
> ---
> all OS's could use a vb clone - it is one of Microsoft's better
> efforts.
It's lack is simply a deal killer for many enterprises. MS seems to get
that. They are encouraging folks to migrate to C# and .Net but they
aren't going to take away their VB automation.