Linux and Innovation [modified]
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Is this just an impression, or are Linux releases and distros mostly about eye candy? I can't remember a single Linux thing that wasn't about the UI in the last years. In the meantime, windows has moved to a microkernel, introduced (and reworked) volume shadow services, the file classification infrastructure, Transactional NTFS, UAC, GDI+, WPF, Address Space Layout Randomization, Kernel Patch Protection, bitlocker, system management through WMI, powershell, DirectAccess, kernel VHD support, and I'm missing a lot here.
modified on Friday, April 30, 2010 2:28 AM
Well, the eye-candy is... visible. You have to kinda seek out the other stuff... Back when using Linux meant configuring and building your own kernel, it was a bit more obvious to casual users when new stuff made it into the mainline - of course, "casual Linux use" meant something else then. Just installed a build with this on my phone. Good times...
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Is this just an impression, or are Linux releases and distros mostly about eye candy? I can't remember a single Linux thing that wasn't about the UI in the last years. In the meantime, windows has moved to a microkernel, introduced (and reworked) volume shadow services, the file classification infrastructure, Transactional NTFS, UAC, GDI+, WPF, Address Space Layout Randomization, Kernel Patch Protection, bitlocker, system management through WMI, powershell, DirectAccess, kernel VHD support, and I'm missing a lot here.
modified on Friday, April 30, 2010 2:28 AM
Michel Godfroid wrote:
microkernel
Mach? BSD?
Michel Godfroid wrote:
UAC
OS X has had a UAC equivalent that works since 10.1. *nix systems have had the lovely and effective sudo forever.
Michel Godfroid wrote:
introduced (and reworked) volume shadow services
LVM snapshots?
Michel Godfroid wrote:
Address Space Layout Randomization
Michel Godfroid wrote:
bitlocker
Hordes of other OSs have had full disk encryption long before bitlocker.
Michel Godfroid wrote:
powershell
:) Bash, zsh
Michel Godfroid wrote:
Transactional NTFS
Journaling File-systems introduced transactions in the 90s. BeOs had a particularly awesome file system for the time.
And above all things, never think that you're not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning. --Isaac Asimov Avoid the crowd. Do your own thinking independently. Be the chess player, not the chess piece. --Ralph Charell
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Michel Godfroid wrote:
microkernel
Mach? BSD?
Michel Godfroid wrote:
UAC
OS X has had a UAC equivalent that works since 10.1. *nix systems have had the lovely and effective sudo forever.
Michel Godfroid wrote:
introduced (and reworked) volume shadow services
LVM snapshots?
Michel Godfroid wrote:
Address Space Layout Randomization
Michel Godfroid wrote:
bitlocker
Hordes of other OSs have had full disk encryption long before bitlocker.
Michel Godfroid wrote:
powershell
:) Bash, zsh
Michel Godfroid wrote:
Transactional NTFS
Journaling File-systems introduced transactions in the 90s. BeOs had a particularly awesome file system for the time.
And above all things, never think that you're not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning. --Isaac Asimov Avoid the crowd. Do your own thinking independently. Be the chess player, not the chess piece. --Ralph Charell
Exactly my point. Most of the stuff you mention doesn't come from Linux, but can be traced to BSD or Mach lineage. Oh, and journaling file systems do not equate to NTFS Transactions. NTFS has had journalling since windows2000 if I remember well. Transactional NTFS[^] is quite different.
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peterchen wrote:
since the late sixties.
Hah bloody hah. Linus Torvalds started pissing code in 1991 :laugh:
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Is this just an impression, or are Linux releases and distros mostly about eye candy? I can't remember a single Linux thing that wasn't about the UI in the last years. In the meantime, windows has moved to a microkernel, introduced (and reworked) volume shadow services, the file classification infrastructure, Transactional NTFS, UAC, GDI+, WPF, Address Space Layout Randomization, Kernel Patch Protection, bitlocker, system management through WMI, powershell, DirectAccess, kernel VHD support, and I'm missing a lot here.
modified on Friday, April 30, 2010 2:28 AM
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Exactly my point. Most of the stuff you mention doesn't come from Linux, but can be traced to BSD or Mach lineage. Oh, and journaling file systems do not equate to NTFS Transactions. NTFS has had journalling since windows2000 if I remember well. Transactional NTFS[^] is quite different.
Don't move the goal posts. You claimed that MS was the one innovating the low level stuff when really it had already been done in one form or another before NT was even usable (Win2K). Your example of innovation with transaction NTFS is still not completely honest since transactional/atomic operations on a file system is hardly novel; what NTFS did that was cool imo was allow it to span disks and machines easily but still hardly new.
And above all things, never think that you're not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning. --Isaac Asimov Avoid the crowd. Do your own thinking independently. Be the chess player, not the chess piece. --Ralph Charell
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Don't move the goal posts. You claimed that MS was the one innovating the low level stuff when really it had already been done in one form or another before NT was even usable (Win2K). Your example of innovation with transaction NTFS is still not completely honest since transactional/atomic operations on a file system is hardly novel; what NTFS did that was cool imo was allow it to span disks and machines easily but still hardly new.
And above all things, never think that you're not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning. --Isaac Asimov Avoid the crowd. Do your own thinking independently. Be the chess player, not the chess piece. --Ralph Charell
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Don't move the goal posts. You claimed that MS was the one innovating the low level stuff when really it had already been done in one form or another before NT was even usable (Win2K). Your example of innovation with transaction NTFS is still not completely honest since transactional/atomic operations on a file system is hardly novel; what NTFS did that was cool imo was allow it to span disks and machines easily but still hardly new.
And above all things, never think that you're not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning. --Isaac Asimov Avoid the crowd. Do your own thinking independently. Be the chess player, not the chess piece. --Ralph Charell
Point taken. Still, even if invented elsewhere, not a lot of this stuff seems to make it to Linux distro's ? Is that because Linux is too much of a collective decision-making project? The UI stuff is usually done by the distro vendors, who use it to market THEIR distro, but in the meantime I don't see a lot happening on the kernel side of things. Is this because kernel features do not give the vendors competitive advantage? After all the Open-Source nature of Linux means that if you develop some cool kernel feature, all the others get it at no cost. The UI on the other hand, is usually heavily branded to the distro, so stealing it is not a good idea.
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Point taken. Still, even if invented elsewhere, not a lot of this stuff seems to make it to Linux distro's ? Is that because Linux is too much of a collective decision-making project? The UI stuff is usually done by the distro vendors, who use it to market THEIR distro, but in the meantime I don't see a lot happening on the kernel side of things. Is this because kernel features do not give the vendors competitive advantage? After all the Open-Source nature of Linux means that if you develop some cool kernel feature, all the others get it at no cost. The UI on the other hand, is usually heavily branded to the distro, so stealing it is not a good idea.
Michel Godfroid wrote:
Still, even if invented elsewhere, not a lot of this stuff seems to make it to Linux distro's ?
It does, like on windows it doesn't get the press. No one talked about the improvements to the networking stack or the NTFS between win2k and XP but those of us who cared knew all about it.
Michel Godfroid wrote:
The UI stuff is usually done by the distro vendors, who use it to market THEIR distro, but in the meantime I don't see a lot happening on the kernel side of things.
Actually, there is some statistic out there in the wild that states that the preponderance of the kernel land work is being done by the distributions (SuSE, RedHat, Canonical) but for some reason it doesn't get the press they way KDE and Gtk do. Personally, I don't care for any of that stuff.
And above all things, never think that you're not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning. --Isaac Asimov Avoid the crowd. Do your own thinking independently. Be the chess player, not the chess piece. --Ralph Charell
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That's an interesting question.. I have no special knowledge about linux; I only use it here an there, but I have quite the same impression. The only thing that I observed, is that the support for (internal) devices got better and better, no more need to search for a special solution for a specific soundcard :) Have a nice weekend everyone! Phil
I won’t not use no double negatives.
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Yeah, and they pack the whole into Vista for the results that we know. I think the Linux guys have a better understanding orf marketing.
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Is this just an impression, or are Linux releases and distros mostly about eye candy? I can't remember a single Linux thing that wasn't about the UI in the last years. In the meantime, windows has moved to a microkernel, introduced (and reworked) volume shadow services, the file classification infrastructure, Transactional NTFS, UAC, GDI+, WPF, Address Space Layout Randomization, Kernel Patch Protection, bitlocker, system management through WMI, powershell, DirectAccess, kernel VHD support, and I'm missing a lot here.
modified on Friday, April 30, 2010 2:28 AM
Sorry to say I disagree. I'm a big fan and user and developer on both systems. Linux has come on a long way, and not just in eye candy. For example, the latest Linux kernel already supports USB 3.0. Windows doesn't yet, though there are rumours it'll be added in Win 7 SP1.
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Sorry to say I disagree. I'm a big fan and user and developer on both systems. Linux has come on a long way, and not just in eye candy. For example, the latest Linux kernel already supports USB 3.0. Windows doesn't yet, though there are rumours it'll be added in Win 7 SP1.
Yes, But that's just device support. I agree that Linux has come a long way on device support, and are currently quite good at it. But this has always been the same problem. Manufacturers release their new devices with windows support (and probably with some help from Microsoft), and Linux is not a target market. But supporting higher USB speeds can hardly be called an innovation, can it? What I'm after is real added functionality in the kernel, new (and more efficient) ways of doing things, reliability and security API's, that kind of thing. Anything that extends the developer or architects palette...
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probably it was more that "Linux and marketing" thing. You can mention them in one sentence, e.g. "Company X, completely unlike the Linux guys, understands marketing".
Agh! Reality! My Archnemesis![^]
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