Very Worried at MS .net

MJ Ray markj at cloaked.freeserve.co.uk
Wed Jul 18 08:06:02 UTC 2001


John Peter Tapsell <tapselj0 at cs.man.ac.uk> writes:

> However, take a look at some of the projects in trying to catch with
> a lot of MS's stuff..  do you have any idea have far behind we on
> the network neighbourhood file sharing stuff?  One of the main
> programmers was saying in a conference that they approximetly 500
> man _years_ ahead..  just think about that.

We can never catch up on "Network Neighbourhood" per se, as that's
doing the same mistake as the .net wannabes.  Yes, the specifications
are published (at least for parts of .net), but ultimately it's a
Microsoft-led technology and all anyone else can do is follow.  What
we *should* be doing is completing our toolkits with other tools.

For example, where is the remote ssh file space browser that we need?
(Hopefully it does exist as a plugin for some file manager, or better
still a XDragNDrop/XDirectSave-supporting application, and I'm just
ignorant.)

> Our gtk widget set is still buggy, and far behind, our X server is
> starting to show its age (again, in the infrastructure.  Check X.org
> ) But then we do have some kick-ass development, some most respected
> apps, and developers that love to develop it :)

Well, the MS widget set also seems to be buggy and don't get me
started on the insanities of various infrastructures ;-)

> I don't know if anyone has even attempted to see how far behind/ahead we, if
> that is even possible.. anyone?

It's probably too contentious and depends very much if you're looking
for equivalents or exact like-for-like replacements, but I'd also be
interested in such a study.

> > Sendmail?  Exim, maybe.
> Nope.  Reverse engineering the key would be illegal [...]

I was just mentioning that a GPL MTA might be a better choice than a
BSDSL one.  Nothing more meant, sorry.



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