Things M$ have borrowed from linux

[Crackmunch]

I was working the other day and was thinking there has to be a virtual desktop program for windows. I had 6 things open on one screen and its just a pain to alt + tab or go down to the bottom and click on the program you need.

I did a goole search for virtual desktop for windows and low and behold MS has a add on (if you will) that creates 4 virtual desktops.

Linux has has this for as long as I have been using it. I was just curious of what other tools MS has borrowed from linux.

[ph34r]

Fairly common knowledge that the MS TCP/IP stack was taken from BSD...

[hard candy]

I do not agree with the whole article but Mr. Dvorak does have some points to ponder:
Microsoft, Innovation, and Linux (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,768274,00.asp)

[Loki3]

The next version of window is supposed to have transparency and "3D-Effects"... KDE has had that for years :rolleyes:

Not to mention virtual desktops

[Dark Ninja]

Very interesting article, hard candy. And, yes, actually...I do feel sometimes that parts of Linux (and especially its tools) are copies of what's already out there. This is one major reason I avoid KDE -- it *is* Windows in the sense that it FEELS like Windows.

Now, granted, that's not necessarily a bad thing for someone who is new on the Linux scene. In fact, it's a great thing. But, for someone who is trying to escape the rules laid down by Microsoft, there needs to be new (radical, perhaps) alternatives to the Linux world.

So, in that sense, Linux *could* improve. However, I don't entirely agree with the article -- there are things open source programmers have come up with entirely on their own.

And, in the end, development and change is all about taking what already exists and improving upon it -- allowing it to evolve into something much better.


[/mini-rant] :rolleyes:

[rocketpcguy]

The next version of window is supposed to have transparency and "3D-Effects"... KDE has had that for years

kde? it uses fake transparency and no 3d-effects. longhorn is completely hardware accelerated. can kde have transparent windows?

longhorn copied it from mac, NOT linux. virtual desktops was there since X UNIX.

linux and innovation don't mix much.

[GaMMa]

Microsft hasn't been known to be innovative. They generally buy companies that have software or features they like. Didn't they buy some company that had a web browser and turned it into what we know today as Internet Explorer? I'm not out to bash Microsoft or anything, but they like to copy things already out there or steal from things already out there :D.

[jrbishop79]

a lot of UNIX stuff found it's way into Windows 2000... IPSec comes to mind...

[Icarus]

Originally posted by GaMMa
Microsft hasn't been known to be innovative. They generally buy companies that have software or features they like. Didn't they buy some company that had a web browser and turned it into what we know today as Internet Explorer? I'm not out to bash Microsoft or anything, but they like to copy things already out there or steal from things already out there :D. Kind of simular to what Linux apps do? Except OSS project usually reverse engineer and reimplement the apps...I don't know of any OSS group that totally bought out a project and then claimed it for themselves...unless Transgaming. CodeWeavers and the like count...but they were allowed to

Linux is not full of original, innovative apps...it's just a collection of them :)

[thermite]

i seem to remember that DOS was copied off of something called qDOS...something named like that...

and Linux is really minix remade (in its early early years) (i read the book by torvalds!).

Every side does it tho. I mean it makes sense, if somone innovates something that is a brilliant new way of looking at the same problem then of course you are going to use it. You would be dumb not to.

Hard candy: I agree partially with dvorak, some linux distros are pushing to be like windows. But this can be a good thing. Because not everyone wants to be hardcore and memorize commands. Since baby boomers have the market control pretty much, that is where the money is. And there aren;t many baby boomers that are computer literate. And plus for people to walk (use real linux distro's) they have to crawl (use easier linux distros). In my opinion i will always still use freebsd, gentoo and the like. But i think dvorak should stress the difference between them.

did anyone else notice the absence of UNIX in dvoraks article??

I bet dkeav felt a disturbance in the force when dvorak wrote that article w/o giving unix some love. :P

[DSwain]

yes, well, you are correct about MS-DOS in a sense. Originally, QDOS was created by another company (i forget who it was.) QDOS at the time stood for Quick-and-Dirty Operating System believe it or not (or as far as I have read.) The company went out of business, and MS bought it for realitvly cheap i believe, which then was created MS-DOS (Disk Operating System, neat change right?)

I can't say anyone "stole" or "took" any ideas. I believe that innovation should be passed throughout whatever it can be, even if the idea isn't original it can still be applied to other things. It's all an idea of sharing idea's, and building things off of them really, or so it seems.

As for the Longhorn GUI, from screenshots/video's I've seen, and people have told me, it seems to be much more than transparent windows and things like that. It is pledging to a full 3D desktop enviorment, which isn't exactly present in Linux, or MacOS for that matter. How it functions will be far different. As for, well things like transparentsy, yeah, it sounds like a borrowed idea to me.

[El_Cu_Guy]

Originally, QDOS was created by another company (i forget who it was.)

Seattle Computing. It was actually called 86-DOS. Think of QDOS as a codename. SC was actually the distributor of CP/M. CP/M-86 was taking awhile to develop so Tim Paterson wrote QDOS and borrowed quite a bit from CP/M.

The company went out of business, and MS bought it for realitvly cheap i believe, which then was created MS-DOS (Disk Operating System, neat change right?)

Microsoft licensed QDOS for "research purposes" (failing to tell the they were in talks with IBM). They then licensed it to IBM under the name MS-DOS. They would later buy the rights to 86-DOS from Paterson for a rumored $50,000. Paterson would later find employment at Microsoft.

It is pledging to a full 3D desktop enviorment,

Wish in one hand and...well you know the rest.

[DSwain]

See, its a good thing we have people like El_Cu_Guy here, if we didn't, posts like mine would be confusing, unclear, and valueless. Thanks for the clarifcation on those things. I learned what I knew in 7th grade, so I just picked up what I probably could understand.

[bwkaz]

Originally posted by DSwain
It is pledging to a full 3D desktop enviorment, which isn't exactly present in Linux, or MacOS for that matter. Don't look very far, do you? :p

http://desk3d.sourceforge.net/

That's not really full 3D, but it's still an interesting 3D way to switch 2D desktops.

http://wwws.sun.com/software/looking_glass/details.html
http://wwws.sun.com/software/looking_glass/demo.html

Project Looking Glass -- looks really nifty, runs on Sun's Java Desktop System (which runs Linux).

http://www.3dwm.org/

(If it's responding for you by the time you read this: it's currently down for me. Try http://www.advogato.org/proj/3Dwm/ for a brief overview, though it doesn't have any pictures or anything.)

Fully immersive 3D workspace manager (NOT window manager; it is entirely independent of X11, though it is supposed to have an X server in it to satisfy "legacy" 2D programs).

And those were just the first two hits on Google (desk3d and Project Looking Glass), plus one project that I remember from a while ago (3dwm).

[cybertron]

Originally posted by rocketpcguy
kde? it uses fake transparency and no 3d-effects. longhorn is completely hardware accelerated. can kde have transparent windows?

longhorn copied it from mac, NOT linux. virtual desktops was there since X UNIX.

linux and innovation don't mix much.

Funny, none of the longhorn screenies I've seen have even fake transparency like KDE. And I don't have any idea what they mean by 3d effects, because my wm (fluxbox now, but applies to KDE as well) looks about as 3d as I would ever want. If stuff starts jumping out of the screen at me I'm going to be upset (think the paperclip in Office:rolleyes: ).

Not to mention longhorn is still a minimum of 2 years off from what I've heard and by then I wouldn't be surprised at all if Linux has true transparency like Mac, although in some ways I prefer the fake transparency anway (not speedwise of course). Besides, technically Linux already has this but XFree86 doesn't support it so it's just not mainstream (yet).

And of course, as El_Cu_Guy mentioned:

Wish in one hand and...well you know the rest.


BTW, is anyone else thoroughly unimpressed with the Longhorn screenshots they've seen? To me it looks comparable to my default KDE setup, before I've added any of the eye candy stuff.:confused:

[DSwain]

Don't look very far, do you?


haha... sometimes looking is just far too much. I know about Looking Glass project and that it DOES have it, i'm just saying that it isn't built in to many distro's as it is claimed to be for Windows. Of course I know why it isn't, but still...

yeah i'm not going to bother arguing, cause i'm just going to be proved wrong easily. haha, that's what its bad to get into these types of posts. Oh well, either way, my point was that Longhorn is sporting the whole advanced 3d concept and KDE and other WM's don't really support it well for whatever reason or another.

[Loki3]

Originally posted by rocketpcguy
linux and innovation don't mix much.

That's right I forgot... the tooth fairly and santa clause were behind the whole thing. :D

[psi42]

Originally posted by Dark Ninja
This is one major reason I avoid KDE -- it *is* Windows in the sense that it FEELS like Windows.

Okay, I just have to disagree here.

KDE is not windows. I have heard often that it is supposedly easier for "windows people" to learn; personally, considering the geek types that are currently representative of those moving to linux, they will all do fine with KDE, IceWM, or blackbox, pretty much anything with a GUI.

For those more comfortable with an "easy" GUI, I'd suggest GNOME...


KDE does not feel like windows. If it did I would never use it. Suffice it to say that the panel/kicker model is a good design, and it has been replicated countless times, even in fluxbox and IceWM, and the windows taskbar pales in comparison...

KDE is built to be better than windows; XPDE is built to be exactly like windows...

(If you couldn't tell, I love KDE :D)

:)

~psi42

[thermite]

Originally posted by cybertron

BTW, is anyone else thoroughly unimpressed with the Longhorn screenshots they've seen? To me it looks comparable to my default KDE setup, before I've added any of the eye candy stuff.:confused: [/B]


from the ones i have seen they appear to be XP with the bar on the side and some minor changes to the menu.

[psi42]

Originally posted by cybertron
BTW, is anyone else thoroughly unimpressed with the Longhorn screenshots they've seen?

No, not at all. I think they're quite good.

Personally, I think longhorn is going to be almost as much an improvement over XP as ME was over 98. :)

[gehidore]

shh dont tell but,

ive used longhorn and frankly its lame.
windowsxp meets me meets MSN dialer meets MAC0SX meets god only knows what.

not to mention that after two hard resets i fried this greatly inproved FS of theirs.

[rocketpcguy]

mac osx is 3D, in the tech sense. but the windows don't jump around, they are stored and displayed with the 3d capabilities of the graphic card. that's what 3d desktop really is useful for, not for jumping around like longhorn or sun.

transparent windows was ther since 2000:
http://www.chime.tv/products/glass2k.shtml

longhorn may not look good, but all the best artists work for windows. look at this XP screen and compare it with luna.
http://skins4.wincustomize.com/b0se/guio2004/opulence.jpg

heh, you are right, linux is innovative, but it's just the kernel. linux apps aren't that much.

[micro]

Microsoft didn't just copy the tcp/ip stack from BSD.

Issue the command: strings ftp.exe | grep Copyright
inside the windows directory of the mounted partition that has windows installed.

Microsoft is the biggest example of benefiting from the open source world as well of other companies work.

Ms-Dos is an example.

Then the creation of Windows was highly motivated on the existance of MacOs.

But even for the development of Windows NT, they hired the team that developed VMS.

Right now, the "Microsoft Services For Unix", Microsoft's big promotion today, is based on OpenBSD pure code.

It is not considered as theft, just like Apple's borrow of BSD is not, because the BSD licence permits such a commercial transformation of projects.

What annoys me though is that they do not give the appropriate credit to the communities that did such a work.

Ok, Apple has given some credit, but will Microsoft do the same? I don't think so.

[cybertron]

Originally posted by rocketpcguy
mac osx is 3D, in the tech sense. but the windows don't jump around, they are stored and displayed with the 3d capabilities of the graphic card. that's what 3d desktop really is useful for, not for jumping around like longhorn or sun.

transparent windows was ther since 2000:
http://www.chime.tv/products/glass2k.shtml

longhorn may not look good, but all the best artists work for windows. look at this XP screen and compare it with luna.
http://skins4.wincustomize.com/b0se/guio2004/opulence.jpg

heh, you are right, linux is innovative, but it's just the kernel. linux apps aren't that much.

Darn, wish I had seen glass2k back when I used Windows. It would have been a really cool computer geeky thing to show people. Of course, now I can just select Linux from my lilo prompt and 99% of the people I meet are guaranteed to be convinced of my computer geek status.:)

That opulence screen does look pretty nice, although I bet you could come pretty close to having the same thing in Linux WM's. It's also too bad that to use it you have to buy another piece of software from MS or someone else. In Linux you're free to customize just about everything.

So MacOS is just hardware accelerated, not so much 3d. That will be nice because all of the window moving will be super smooth, but I suspect I won't notice that much of a difference. Somehow I can't help thinking that hardware acceleration for a wm is overkill, but I guess you have to keep up with the Jones's:)

Originally posted by gehidore
shh dont tell but,

ive used longhorn and frankly its lame.
windowsxp meets me meets MSN dialer meets MAC0SX meets god only knows what.

not to mention that after two hard resets i fried this greatly inproved FS of theirs.

:)
I read somewhere that WinFS won't even be ready for the initial release of Longhorn. It's going to come out in an upgrade or something later, which you'll probably have to purchase. Microsoft just keeps trying to get their hand deeper and deeper in the consumer's pocket.:rolleyes:

[saturn-vk]

Originally posted by Icarus
Kind of simular to what Linux apps do? Except OSS project usually reverse engineer and reimplement the apps...I don't know of any OSS group that totally bought out a project and then claimed it for themselves...unless Transgaming. CodeWeavers and the like count...but they were allowed to

Linux is not full of original, innovative apps...it's just a collection of them :)

blender my friend :)

[thermite]

Originally posted by psi42

Personally, I think longhorn is going to be almost as much an improvement over XP as ME was over 98. :) [/B]

please tell me that you used sarcasm in saying ME was an improvement over 98...

[psi42]

Originally posted by thermite
please tell me that you used sarcasm in saying ME was an improvement over 98...


Perhaps I should have used put in a </sarcasm>? :D

[psi42]

Originally posted by rocketpcguy

longhorn may not look good, but all the best artists work for windows. look at this XP screen and compare it with luna.
http://skins4.wincustomize.com/b0se/guio2004/opulence.jpg


That looks quite nice, but it's nothing compared to Mosfet's Liquid. :D

[cybertron]

I've actually seen computers with the little "Designed for Windows ME" sticker on them. Where I work we wonder if that means that they intentionally included bugs so that everything would work equally bad.:D

[terribleRobbo]

Originally posted by Loki3
The next version of window is supposed to have transparency and "3D-Effects"... KDE has had that for years :rolleyes:

You're a bit behind the ball, sorry. Win2k has had it since the beginning (transparent forms, and the like).

Edit: Whoops. Note to self, read entire thread before posting.

[rocketpcguy]

but it's nothing compared to Mosfet's Liquid.

what, this?
http://kde-look.org/content/preview.php?preview=1&file=2247-1.png&name=KDE3+%2B+Mosfet%27s+Liquid