No, it's not; the external RCS being *strictly better* at management of changes is the valid reason.
As I explained in my other comments, traditional RCS doesn't do the the same thing as change tracking. RCS will only manage
Not exposing yourself to risks is a bonus.
It's a similar risk to using white-out on paper.
In my view, a document should be treated as a token, and modifications to that token should be handled by external systems.
Involving an external central repository is a lot more complex than storing changes inside a document, which can be easily copied, sent via email, etc. And as described in my earlier comment, RCS doesn't provide anywhere near the level of change detail and metadata-dependent approve/deny/comment abilities as integrated change tracking.
Inline change tracking allows me to write a document, enable change tracking, save it, give the document to someone else, and have them change the document and save it. This file could be sent via email, saved to a system that provides simple history functionality (like Dropbox), or even commited to a traditional RCS. If changes were exclusively tracked by an external system, this process would be a lot more difficult.
Yes change tracking is most definitely better served by revision control systems... Many organisations have had the change tracking systems in programs like word come to bite them in the ass pretty badly as comments they thought had been removed were still visible...
Sometimes people want to easily communicate changes and comments with others. Accidental use of change tracking features is not a valid reason to prescribe the use of external RCS instead.
but this seems like something better handled by revision control systems anyhow.
Integrated change tracking is a form of revision control system, embedded into some document formats and applications. It serves a different purpose than a traditional revision control system, and is useful in combination with a traditional RCS or a document management system with its own file-level revision tracking and approval systems (such as SharePoint or Alfresco).
Change tracking systems log a sequence of actions that led to the new state, store time and user metadata inline with these changes, and allow out-of-band content (comments) . The current state of a document with change tracking is (approved content + not yet approved changes + comments). In a traditional RCS, the current state of the document is just the approved content, as there's no approve/deny mechanism for individual changed sections and no metadata at the section level. ("section" here is the unit the RCS uses when differencing files - usually lines in a RCS used to manage source code changes, but in document change tracking, this is often just the part that was changed - could be a single character, could be an entire page of content, could be the metadata for a sentence, etc.)
In my view, a document should be treated as a token, and modifications to that token should be handled by external systems.
Changes should be tracked as they are made by the user. A traditional RCS tracks the differences in an entire file between the last change and the next commit, so it can't... unless every single change results in a separate (local) commit, and saving results in those commits being pushed to a new branch. But doing this requires the application to have support for change tracking, just with the backend being a RCS instead of inline metadata in the file. And then the individual changes can only be obtained and displayed to the user by getting all of the commits in the branch and replaying them, starting with the original state in-memory.
Using RCS in this way still doesn't solve the approve/reject feature of change tracking, it doesn't solve comments, and it makes showing individual changes a lot more difficult than just storing the changes with inline metadata.
Traditional RCS doesn't know how a change was made; the application does. Changing "this is GREAT" to "that is great" could be a single change (overwrite using paste from clipboard) or many changes in the order they were performed (change "this" to "that", change "GREAT" to "great", adding bold formatting to "great"). The application knows, and it can save this data.
Traditional RCS can be used to atomically track the file-level changes to a document, but it doesn't provide anywhere near the level of detail as change tracking. I don't use MS Office, but I believe it supports both embedded (in-file) change tracking and versioning at the document level (using SharePoint or something that can pretend to be close enough, which I think Alfresco might be able to do).
I guess its an "official support" type of deal, not as if anything in the tech has changed.
Performance of the virtualized machines was great, the management of the VMs, however, is why you want VMWare if you're serious.
"support" is probably in the form of first-class integration software and drivers, possibly for improved I/O performance, time synchronization, shutdown, disk shadow support, etc.
Other example: Apple introduced random playlists on iPods years ago. Now people noticed that some songs got played more than once before all others were played. Can't be random! There's a bug! Well, no. Still, Apple had to modify their software to make the choice actually LESS random (by have no song being played twice) to make it appear "really" random to the users.
I've never had an iPod with a random feature. However, it does have a shuffle feature, which implies that each song will be played once (assuming repeat is not enabled), and this is exactly what the feature does.
iTunes has a random Smart Playlist feature that can randomly select songs from a selected set of songs.
Who's talking about kernels here.
You are. You said:
They should get on with the program and scrap the pile of shit they call Windows and build something around the UNIX kernel
You backpedaled quickly when I called you on something you must have known was wrong. There's nothing Microsoft could implement on a Unix kernel they couldn't implement on a Windows kernel.
You are dishonest, arrogant, and deluded.
Honestly, these things are completely unnecessary now, because desktop is not where it's at. Your comment and thinking is still stuck in the 90s desktop mentality (kind of like entire Microsoft).
Did you read the first half of my comment? I mentioned modern OS features used by all kinds of systems - whether it be a iOS device, desktop computer, web server, whatever - and described how these are not exclusive to Linux at all.
I'm talking about the Web 2.0 startup world, where Microsoft is literally dead (in the sense that no new Web startup is afraid of Microsoft or is worried Microsoft is going to destroy them).
Outside of Netscape and Opera, who has ever had this fear?
But you won't see Google or Facebook or any new Web startup deploying on their tools or OSes.
Of course not. But they do that because there are better and cheaper alternatives - not because Microsoft tools are fundamentally uncapable of running modern applications, and not because the unix way is the only way to run modern applications.
I'm 40 now, I learned my way around UNIX 25 years ago and kept at it.
I think your narrow focus on UNIX has blinded you.
You are definitely doing it wrong. My MacBook Pro (running Mac OS X or Windows 7) resumes from sleep in about two seconds.
Google didn't create Android in reality, either.
Because customers call all the time to tell you that their 5 year old system is still working fine, right?
There are some damn nice features that 7 has I wish my Mac would copy. Namely: snap to sides.
This feature is in BetterTouchTool, which I recommend if you use a Magic Mouse or a mutlitouch trackpad on a Mac (even without the snap to side feature).
They should get on with the program and scrap the pile of shit they call Windows and build something around the UNIX kernel and run legacy apps in VM like they virtualize XP now.
And what is so different about a modern Unixlike kernel compared to the Windows NT kernel?
The major differences are in the kernel level APIs. The Windows API is a lot more verbose (
POSIX can be implemented on top of Windows (as in Services for UNIX or whatever they call it now, and as in Cygwin) because Windows NT isn't that different in functionality than Unix. All of the major kernel level operating system features are in both.
Meanwhile everyone else that matters in post Microsoft world uses open OSes, leveraging their investment is stable APIs, great free tools and go on about innovating with the only cost being hardware and (usually smarter) people.
The Windows API is one of the most stable for certain types of applications. The same Windows graphics APIs used to build basic applications are still supported a few decades later and still get new/additional features (without breaking backwards compatibility). Compare to the many toolkits for X over the years; the switch from Gtk+ 1 to Gtk+ 2; switches between the various versions of Qt...
Windows's device driver interfaces are also much more stable, and better yet, the old interfaces don't get removed when new interfaces are made (allowing old drivers to be used even when the APIs have been replaced). Compare to Linux, which considers unstable kernel APIs a good thing.
Microsoft should just keep pushing good stability features for their crappy OS. Every single OS release is an "oh we got this new x and that new y (both available in other decent OS for ages, except for the occasional innovation)" moment
The Windows 7 graphics stack is still more capable than anything in Linux when it comes to features like switching between GPUs and replacing GPU drivers without closing programs, logging out, or rebooting. This feature greatly reduces the impact of graphics driver crashes, as the graphics driver can be restarted without losing any work, and reduces power usage on laptops with discrete GPUs, as low-power integrated graphics can be used when high-power graphics are not needed.
The audio system is also more stable and more capable than Linux's.
Linux can't get video and audio working with the features and stability seen in Windows or Mac OS X in the mid 00s, let alone today.
That's what Windows should do -- add powerusers to their marketshare (I mean real powerusers).
Of course we all know that No true power user would use Windows right now, right?
Fedora and Debian both provide a core repository and non-core repositories. I'm not familiar with Ubuntu.
The Debian and Fedora repositories are huge.
OpenBSD does the same, and my memory is that freeBSD does, as well. The difference is primarily one of scale. openBSD, for instance intentionally keeps the core repository much smaller than most other distributions, and not just because the team is (intentionally) small.
The base OpenBSD and FreeBSD distributions (without ports) are designed to be an operating system to themselves (usually with all of the source for this core checked into the same repository), similar to what passed for a commercial UNIX system two decades ago. They both happen to provide "ports" systems on top of this. Linux distributions are generally build scripts/SPEC files/whatever used to patch, compile, and package source from upstream in a certain way, and most distributions (RHEL/SLE excluded) seem to have no problem adding lots and lots of packages.
The problem with the Mac, and it's a real problem, is that there is no official repository. Well, wasn't.
Now there is, but it's neither free nor open, as near as I can tell from the outside. (I'm not interested in being on the inside right now, so I'm judging it by the reports.)
The App Store works quite well for end-user facing applications, most of which are written specifically for Mac OS X.
But the app store still doesn't solve the underlying problem of dependency.
The dependency for programs in the App Store is Mac OS X. Generally, the core libraries in Mac OS X are rich enough that applications written for OS X don't need dependencies.
Apple really let us down when they dropped the ball on this one. They have enough money, they could be supporting all three unofficial distros, so that you aren't as restricted by which package manager you've loaded a package by. And they could be encouraging, with financial encouragement, those guys to learn interoperability.
Apple does support one: MacPorts, which is hosted by Apple at MacOSforge. The packages in these distributions are almost all for developer/UNIX power user use, and serve a completely different purpose than the Mac App Store.
$ uname -a ; java -version
Darwin mac.local 10.7.0 Darwin Kernel Version 10.7.0: Sat Jan 29 15:17:16 PST 2011; root:xnu-1504.9.37~1/RELEASE_I386 i386
java version "1.6.0_24"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_24-b07-334-10M3326)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 19.1-b02-334, mixed mode)
You were saying?
Anyone can make an omelet with eggs. The trick is to make one with none.
