[KLUG Advocacy] Re: [KLUG Members] Re: Nautilus in RH 7.3 and Samba shares...revisited... -- Miguel is good and bad ...

[Adam Williams]

>>I'm a big fan of the UNIX model, but it isn't canonical absolute truth, 
>>sometimes it is wrong.  See Miquel Icaza's (sp?) paper: "Let's make UNIX
>>not suck", http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/bongo-bong.html
>I agree with Miguel, for the most part, on the non-networked desktop. 
>He's got a lot of great idea, greater code, and the Mono Project (Open
>Source .NET Development Platform) is on of the most mis-understood
>projects by anti-Microsoft people.
>*BUT* he's a bit "screwed up" IMHO when it comes to network services and
>clients.  Internet Explorer is one.  Internet Explorer is a bloated
>application embedded in the OS, with many hooks at the kernel level. 
>That's just damn unreliabile, and one damn big security hole.  Add in
>Outlook and you're dead.

I tooks his comments about IE, etc... to be in reference to the
architecture (modularity, component-ness, etc...) and not that it was an
ideal implementation of those ideas.  So many things (GUI, etc...) are
tied into the kernel in Win32 it seems obvious that they would have
trouble doing a truly component based AND secure implementation.  Linux
(IMHO) has an advantage there that many things (GUI, etc....) are
already distanced from the kernel.  And from the applications I've used
Bonobo is a great success.  Much of the same code that is Bonobo is
going into Mono.  GNOME's equivalent to ODBC for generic database
access, as well as data-awate widgets, GNOME-DB; is the database
provider for the Mono implementation.

>He's commented on some .NET stuff and is too much of an "idealist," just

I think a few idealists around is a good thing,  they come up with great
concepts,  which are realizable to about 90%, and everyone benefits. 
I'm a pessimist and quite cynical,  thus the universe has balance.

>Simply put, you gotta keep a lot of the core OS away from the
>applications, the network services away from the applications, and those
>network services piecemeal for reliability and security (let alone
>flexibility).  

Sure, thats the point of CORBA, Bonobo, GNOME, Mono, etc...  Emphasis on
flexibility;  as the main problem with Linux/X/GNOME applications is
still that they don't play together without real work.  GNOME
applications less so then straight X/Linux apps,  but thats because many
Open Source developers don't "get it";  they can't blame the technology
any more.

>Need I mention the "Registry"?

You can, but your going to get it one way or the other.  What is gconf? 
A registry.  I don't like M$'s implementation of their registry,  but in
the end every workable system has to have one.  Applications to be truly
useful must inter-operate, components must be located so they can be
used, etc...  User's preferences need to be published in some global
way.  I like GNOME's move to an XML registry, almost as a volatile
database.  And in another sense LDAP is very much a "registry", just a
network one.  Now if gconf could store all those settings in the user's
LDAP object we would have the ultimate in "roaming profiles".  My
profile could follow me to any GNOME desktop IN THE WORLD with the help
of a few SRV records.  That would be fantastic.

>But on a home network, go ahead, have at it!
>But on a corporate network, no way man!  You aren't doing that to me!
>>If one sets "user" any user can mount/unmount.  We use that on laptops, 
>>the NFS volume can be mounted/unmounted via the GNOME background and a
>>right click.
>Correct.  For _single_ users it's great!  Note I said _single_!

How many uses are using the typical desktop/laptop/workstation?

>Look at the mindset, Microsoft comes from "single-user" land, Sun comes
>from "multi-user" land.  Microsoft's technologies are easy-to-use, Sun's
>technologies are best for corporate networks. 

I agree, except that M$ is easy-to-use.  I can easily more time farting
about with stupid M$ problems, then it would take me to build a
corporate E-mail infrastructure.