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."
<
http://lwn.net/2000/features/ESR/>
He predicted their eminent demise again in 2002.
<
http://insight.zdnet.co.uk/software/linuxunix/
0,39020472,2105202,00.htm>
In 2003 though, he seems to have decided that it is Sun, not MS that is
doomed:
<
http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2003-10-02-014-26-OP-BZ-SW>
> ---
>>
>> 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.
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