[Wine] Windows Genuine Advantage
Francesco Pietra
frapietra at alice.it
Tue May 2 02:18:20 CDT 2006
I forgot to say that Windows as an OS has a fundamental drawback for a
scientist: as an imperscrutable OS, it makes inperscrutable any application
on it. Well, doing, say, quantum mechanical computations blindly (as it
occurs with Windows applications) in no more then driving blindly. Would you
like to drive your car blindly? I do not.
_____________
I am not answering the technical aspects of wine, which I am unable to do. I
am rather at a philosophical issue, that is what do you expect from wine. A
scientist - like I am professionally - sees at wine as a temporary solution
to the lack of a few programs on free unix-type environments he was used at,
or which are absolutely necessary for presentation to the editor of for
lecturing.
A case in point is xdrawchem. The project is to have a mirror of Windows
chemdraw. Unfortunately, xdrawchem is still far from becoming the equivalent
of openoffice in unix as to the language of chemistry. Imagine unix without
openoffice: how to correspond with coworkers and editors? So that one
attempts to run (legally) something that allows to exchange files with
chemdraw and editors. The final goal, however, is to have xdrawchem working.
There is not much else needed today for an organic
chemist/biochemist/natural_product_chemist/any_scientist_dealing_with_molecules
to work fully on unix.
At that point one can easily forget about wine in science because the most
serious programs (for computation up to quantum mechaniscs) are best
available on unix, and they are free and under further development. Here,
Windows has nothing to say; its computer language is too naive (or too
intricate) to deal with our tasks of coping with mainframe or simply working
on a partition far away.
This is not to underevaluate the wine project. It is a great project, it has a
great future (I hope) and science does not cover all aspects of the world,
there are many aspects where wine will continue to be of high interest and
personally I thank wine for the time being for allowing me to work fully
(actually nearly fully, as I have not yet solved the problem of presentation
of chemical structures) on debian.
Cheers
francesco pietra
On Tuesday 02 May 2006 09:07, justin at rtechguys.com wrote:
> If this is off subject or has already been addressed, sorry. "Windows
> Genuine Advantage" looks like a move to make wine worthless. What I
> mean is that M$ development API pushes windows developers' applications
> to require you install IE 6.0 (soon 7.0) or later, making IE a key part
> of wine. If IE requires Genuine MicroSoft (Windows Genuine Advantage)
> to install, then most if not all applications will not work, making
> WINE Worthless.
>
> Thanks and hope this is helpfull.
>
> Justin
>
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