On Feb 23, 5:16 am, ahmet alper parker <aapar...@gmail.com> wrote: Hi,
> I think one of the main idea behind developing a real alternative for Magma, > Matlab, Mathematica etc. is their license costs and restrictions on altering > the source code etc. Personally, if I had chance to not to use windows, I > won't. Let me give an example, last night I read an article about backward > compatibility issues of windows 7 and I understand that they will not > provide binary compatibility to previous windows versions, but they will > supply an abstraction layer and api for previous versions which will run > programs like a virtual machine like apple did for previous osX > compatibility Do you mean the OS 9 compat layer in OSX? That is quite different than the VMWare image in concept. > (if I understand it right). Which article was that? I am pretty sure you misunderstood something since Microsoft is extremely interested in keeping old applications working on new Windows releases. I.e. they bend over backwards to keep code running that for example *writes* global registry entries or opens global config files rw. All these things are rather obvious mistakes not to make, but there is a lot of code out there written in the assumption that you have admin rights or can write to various system files. This is an obvious design pattern flaw in that user code. The fact that the Windows ABI is stable is the greatest strength and weakness simultaneously IMHO since it one hand keeps old binaries running (modulo bugs :) and at the same time keeps cruft in the APIs that people keep (ab)using. Windows did not only become dominant on the desktop just because Microsoft played hard ball with hardware vendors (Any other vendor in the same position would have abused their monopoly in a similar way, i.e. all the Unix vendors got nearly killed or badly hurt because they did the same tactics of abusing their market position and tie their users into their system. Along come Windows NT and ten years later had eaten nearly everyone's lunch except that Linux also happened in the server space), but because it had the software people wanted. Windows pre W2K and not based on the NT core was *terrible*, but if you know what you are doing Windows is a stable and securable operating system. The default config for say Vista is still pretty insecure, but I recommend to install W2K8 and use the build in IE in default mode. You will be surprised how locked down it is. These days an amazing number of linux boxen get rooted as can be seen if you look for example defacement statistics. There are excellent and secure MS products, i.e. compare the security holes of IIS and Apache for example. MSVC also creates significantly better code than gcc on Windows, specifically the 64 bit target. This should not be misunderstood that Windows is the better OS, in general different tasks require different tools, but it would be idiotic of use to ignore the 90+% of the desktop pie that is running nearly all XP or higher. > My personal observation is that > virtualization is going to be (of course they are not 100% the same thing) > the future. I doubt that. Some of the useful bits will be tightly integrated into main stream OSes, i.e. I would not be surprised if in the future you could start a XP instance in a post Winows 7 release. > So maybe, not a vmware version but a version built on a fast > linux (with no necessary options of os) and a fast and lightweight virtual > machine with an msi installer to run it, can be better. This will still leave numerous issues, i.e the file system not being integrated into the local filesystem transparently. There are various Linux projects that provide linux as a process in Windows, but all of them require admin access, which is a show stopper IMHO. You also end up using way more space for example that way and Sage is fat enough as it is. People in general are unwilling to switch from what they know and even 5 years ago I thought I had to be out there convincing people to use Linux on the desktop because it is better. I have long given up on that desire and am perfectly happy to let people use what they want. It is the best tool for the job, not some politically motivated inferior solution in many cases. > Also, maybe not > today, but when a new windows come to scene, again we need to alter our > codes to recompile it to work with the new os, which is a waste of time and > effort (although ms is promising for win 7 for backward compatibility). That is not your call at all. I can work full time on Sage in part because of the sponsorship of Microsoft Research. And you can ask people around here what they would chose between me working on Sage full time while also working on various ports or having to get a real job and spending significantly less time on Sage. Also: Every time you port to a new OS or compiler you find plenty of bugs and issues in the codebase. The Solaris port shook out a lot of build bugs as well as issues in the code itself, so the port increased the quality of Sage. The same will happen to a much larger extend while porting to MSVC. I have ported major projects to MSVC from gcc and I can tell you that the resulting code was cleaner and some serious issues gcc did not detect were fixed. This kind of cleanup happens regardless if you go MSVC to gcc or vice versa, but since nearly all code in Sage as well as it components are developed using gcc this is just the way it is going to be. > Anyway, > these are just a user's opinion, so don't get too much angry on me :) I am not angry with anyone in this threat. If I had flame anyone in this thread I am sure other people would have noticed ;) > AAP Cheers, Michael --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
