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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!nntp.coast.net!news-peer.gsl.net!news.gsl.net!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!news.maxwell.syr.edu!news.bc.net!unixg.ubc.ca!van-bc!n1van.istar!van.istar!west.istar!ott.istar!istar.net!gateway.qnx.com!not-for-mail From: doug@qnx.com (Doug Santry) Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.os.linux.networking,comp.os.linux.setup,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.unix.bsd.misc,comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy,comp.os.os2.advocacy Subject: Re: Betting on Unix Date: 4 Feb 1997 15:16:37 -0500 Organization: QNX Software Systems Lines: 69 Message-ID: <5d85f5$9k2@qnx.com> References: <5d3sr2$44n@nntp1.best.com> <E50rGo.K3n@nonexistent.com> <nLVF2tL@quack.kfu.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: gateway.qnx.com Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.misc:156732 comp.os.linux.networking:67552 comp.os.linux.setup:95901 comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:5915 comp.unix.bsd.misc:2346 comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy:52097 comp.os.os2.advocacy:266200 In article <nLVF2tL@quack.kfu.com>, Nick Sayer <nsayer@quack.kfu.com> wrote: > >Those predictions are too focused. I think more broad predictions >are called for. > >It is not difficult to predict that PCI is going to be the bus of >choice. Maybe. >I see the PPC CHiRP platform being the next industry platform of choice. >Look at the past: The success of a platform has in large part been >directly proportional to the number of manufacturers that have made the >hardware (yes, Apple is the one glaring exception to this). A countless >number of vendors make x86 machines, a perhaps not so countless, but >non-trivial number of manufacturers make sparc machines. By contrast, >one manufacturer makes Alpha machines, one manufacturer makes PA-risc >machines. HP has teamed up with intel with its PA-RISC arch. in hand. It will be interesting to see what they do with it. >As for OS, there was an article in one of the magazines that opined that >vis-a-vis NT, "The honeymoon is over." I have heard many a nightmarish >tale about NT4.0 being unable to run on otherwise perfectly good >hardware, and huge mountains of software that runs under win95 but >refuses to under NT4. I may be a unix bigot, but if NT is the answer, >it must be a stupid question. > >What would make Unix' future? Scott MacNeily can whine about Microsoft >desktops wasting monumental amounts of admin time and energy if he >likes, but unix will die without applications. If WABI or Wine can >run Office-95, then that's one way. If not, then Sun or someone else >needs to make an office productivity suite for Unix. It is in the >application arena that an OS lives or dies. If applications are Here I think you are dead wrong. Unix doesn't want to be on your secretary's desk, nor in every den in the world. It is for serious programming projects/research. It doesn't want, not is it well suited for, day to day office typing. >as plentiful and priced equally ($300 for Word and $1500 for >Framemaker?!), then at long last the OS wars will be fought on >even footing. W95 and Unix were conceived for different applications from the get go and both are happy where they are. They aren't meant to compete with each other. >But Unix' achiles heel is that its compatability is only at source >level. Each CPU requires its own compiler, and each OS requires its As with NT et al. >own libraries. This, truly, is POSIX's next task - Application >independence at the shared library level. If I have an x86 ELF >binary, it should not matter what OS it was compiled on, I should No way. >be able to run it without modification or without fetching the >libraries from somewhere. Unix is heading in this direction, >but the quicker it gets there, the quicker it will be seen as an >equal platform. And the quicker the applications will be ported >to it. I don't know what you are saying here. Equal platform? To what? DJS