Apple started out with the Apple I. It only sold to hobbyists, a small market. Apple learned.
They quickly moved on to the Apple II on the 6052. That grew the company sereval times. Apple learned.
The less said about the Apple III hardware the better. There were lots of manufacturing problems. Apple learned.
Then came the Lisa. There were lots of marketing problems. Apple learned.
The Mac started as a cute, slightly runky-dink 680x0 machine. They tossed out compatibility. Cost them their entire existing software base. Apple learned.
The original Mac lap-top was an embarrassment. Apple learned.
Then Apple became the leading manufacturer of RISC machines in the world when they went to the 60x hardware architecture. This was accomplished without repeating the previous mistakes. (What Apple learned was purely internal politics that time.)
NeXT failed as a hardware manufacturer but it had great software. It was the NeXTStep... Jobs came back and Apple learned.
Apple did the iMac because Apple had learned: Ugly, beige is boring "office-ware."
Apple did the PowerPC, the colored iBook, the Titanium and the white iBook because Apple had learned.
Apple did the sexy, "fold-out completely open" towers because Apple had learned: Hard to maintain is, uh, hard to maintain.
Apple went to OS X. It could even attempt this because it had SUCCESSFULLY migrated CPU hardware platforms before. It had SUCCESSFULLY migrated form factors (Mac, desk-top, towers, laptop.)
Look at the Newton. Carefully. With time-lines, feature-lists, internal structures and compared with what else was out there and what spun off.
Apple has survived more changes, flops, failures, created more products that are a delight to use, been imitated by more companies regardless of industry, than almost any other company I can think of BECAUSE it DOESN'T listen to its customers UNTIL they start saying "No We don't buy it." (*)
It will soon have shiped more BSD/Darwin (OpenSource) RISC (G3/G4[/G5 soon?]) boxes than the sum total of Unix/Linux boxen out there.
This is a GOOD THING.
Will Apple grow to dominate the desk top?
Get a grip. It doesn't even want to go there.
That may be where the money WAS but growth is flat, the competition is outrageous, Linux is already there, its darn near (as in beer,) carving out its own space and has an enormous developper base.
The OS wars are OVER. Unix is going to win hands down.
Linux runs on EVERYTHING!
Unix is used for every serious, mission critical system.
OS X is locking up the creative market place.
Windows has NEVER migrated to ANY other platform than the x86. Its not for want of trying. They have already failed at it.
The new PC chip architectures (Intel/HPs & AMDs) are already Linux playgrounds. The chip makers are tired of the x86 architecture and want to get on to the next stage. But windows is holding them back.
Windows is extremely vulnerable to security breaches and even more vulnerable to the processing requirements of biometric security data.
The changes M$ themselves are fostering (DRM, and securing their sieve-like OS) are going to be their undoing. Entire countries are rebelling at having to get on and stay on the upgrade tread-mill. The day Linux becomes "good enough" (and OpenOffice is almost there,) M$ sales will start a downward curve faster than the supporting economy.
Remember. Desktop machines are OVERHEAD. Reducing overhead is how M$ got to be where it is today. Its how Linux will get to where its going. Its been happening time and time again. (Read "The Innovator's Dilemma.")
*) That is one thing Jobs and Linus share: The ability to say, "Lets do this because its cool (least I think so!)" And then tweak, fiddle and put in the hours fixing things until they damn well work. If they don't... "Well lets see what we can learn from this."
While biometric identification through a trusted, controlled and monitored source might satisfy me for everything and using my biometric keys to provide retrieval-only access to my data might satisfy me, there is no way that I would blindly trust the network, never mind the machine for update.
The consequences are too horrific.
I've been a victim of identity theft and it cost some one her LIFE, such as it was, because she chose suicide instead of a long jail term.
This is SERIOUS SHIT. It happens. It happened to some body I knew. But she ripped me off. I turned her in and she funkin' offed her stupid cowardly self. ("People Who Died" by the Jim Carroll Band is running through my head...)
There is NO FUCKIN' WAY I'd trust my Macs or my Linux PC to reveal information on my behalf.
This should scare the ever lovin' crap out of lots of people when the see what a pullulating dish of agar their office, SOHO and home systems are.
Its not just M$, (though people will be throwing a few of these out the window when they see sheer size of the system "vulnerability list",) but this should be part of the connection "pre-flight" process for everybody who is connecting to the net.
I use this machine to screen my calls and I may or may not be at home and there may or may not be a recording device attached so at the tone clearly say your name, your phone number and very, very brief message.
The neo-Luddites and the troglodites will call totally unrelated acts (such as the legitimate creation of non-commercial software,) as examples of hacking.
"Paranoid? Faced with the kid's 'New Math' when you never understood the 'old math? Don't like the neighbor, don't trust him and saw a funny looking box blinking in his basement?"
"Well call the toll-free HackerHotLine. The HHH. Two letters away from the old KKK. Seen a "bugaboo" on your street? We're on the look out for those too! Our operators are standing by!"
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure but it costs in "paying attention" so we criminalize something instead of doing anything but the cheapest, fastest knee-jerk reaction and leave it all to "the experts."
Yeah. This is America! We gots freedom of speech here. Now shut the fuck up!
Advertising doesn't work above a certain level of exposure.
Its called saturation.
For a while, the audience efforts to reduce the ambient noise, the ads, got more effective.
VCRs, Tivo, channel hopping, Zappers etcetera have saved commercial TV from exceeding the saturation point for years. But now the advertisers are becoming more desperate and more strident.
Attempting to increase the time per pair of eyeballs becomes counter productive and people will turn to any channel with fewer ads and more content. As long as they can that is...
People go to sports events because there's fewer ads and interruptions for non-content.
My tolerance for BS, uh, ads was merely lower than most people's but I think that when the ads and obvious product placement in the content exceeds 30% of the on-air time, people are just going to stop and read a book or go play outside or talk to each other or maybe NOT talk. (Mariages are going to either be ruined or a lot more fuckin' fun.)
Man, you must not install software, write software, or USE software. No BSoD. WOW!
I'be had GPFs (daily for a while, and alsways at the worse time too,), BSoDs (at least monthly,)from windows 3.1 to NT 4.0 svcpk 5. Registry screw ups, re-installs when the system started to exhibit "rot".
I use Macs and while Epson printer driver support still sucks, OS X 1.0 only crashed on me ONCE on al old machine that I shouldn't even have installed it on.
Now I'm using Mac 9.1 (Beige G3/300 & iMac,) 9.2 (occasionally &,) OS X 1.x (Titanium Powerbook,) and Slackware 8.1 (x86 architecture,) and it all WORKS.
for the Mac & Windows. Some are "blessed" by the OS Distributor and some are crafted according to written guidelines provided by the OS Distributor. The OS X installer is GREAT in that respect.
The situation MUST become the same for Linux. There must come to be some "blessed" slick GUI installer that can also run "headless" from a command line.
It should implement a state transition engine and run from a state machine which goes from an initial state "not-installed", through paths for the distros, dependencies to a terminal state of "software registered."
To make the situation complete, it must detect the distro (and therefore the install paths, dependencies and destination directories,) the GUI in use, if any, and be able to completely install AND UNINSTALL by walking backwards through the installer log undoing what was done and cleaning up all debris.
The installer "experience" is standard for the user because everybody is using the same packages or near clones of these packages to install any and every ol' thing.
And this is a lot easier for a user (or a SysAdmin,) to deal with than the ideosynchratic and often badly written readme.txt files written by somebody who just doesn't "get it" and can't remember what he didn't know when he first started out.
And the excuse that "it wasn't easy to write so it shouldn't be easy to install" is the refuge of lazy-ass, elitist, nerdy schmucks who don't have friends to watch over their shoulder, correct their grammar and actually try and test out their installation instructions to detect all the "missing" information.
Its called QA folks and you'd better get used to it or you're wasting your time pretending that you're IT pros.
You have a mesh of wireless NAN (Neighborhood Area Nework) where every packet is tagged from request to reply.
Takes care of the "last mile" problem.
Whoever controls the medium (the wire itself) can rake it in PER PACKET from the actual owner of the actual client device.
The infrastructure owner can be cablecos, which are area segregated monopolies, telcos, virtual monopoly on coerced-shared infrastructure or Fred's coops using carrier pigeons.
With telco COs being less then a mile apart in urban areas, I can imagine the addition of Watt capable 802.11 antennas to the building eating the lunch of wireless router manufacturers.
You're going to pay PER PACKET just like the users of Bell Canada's X.25 network did in the late 80s, early 90s (when IPv4 was "good enough.")
If they don't know where to send the bill or from which bank account to draw the money, the packet gets dropped from the infrastructure owner's routers.
The closer you cozy up to the provider (the more you pay per month,) the better your bandwidth.
ISPs which piggybacked on top of the existing infrastruture will disappear shortly after the deployment of IPv6.
Having owning/operating a server would become a cheap no-brainer because the cost of the transmission could be borne by the client requestor.
More likely the the curent cell phone business model of charging both ends of the n-alog will be used to multiply revenue for the carrier.
The The NT Culture was supposed to be based on "Portability, Reliability, Security, and Extensibility" ingrained as the teams top priority.
Portability? Apart from the x86 platform, does it run on any other platform?
Reliability? I still got the occasional blue screen of death in NT 4. (svcpk5) as of last year.
Security? We had regular virus sweeps and updates were NEEDED every time script kiddies got a new mod and would hammer at our systems.
Given the fact that the company serfs were still using NT4 and that they weren't allowed to put in multimedia extensions, Flash and other "Sturm und Drang" sillyness while the Solaris boxes ran Oracle for the databases, I'd say that the extensibility wasn't an issue either.
File formats (Word) expire even faster.
on
Digital Dark Ages?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Given the propensity of M$ & others to use proprietary file formats in an effort to lock in the client base and to lock out competition. (And don't tell me about standards like because XML [tagged data storage & transport streams] without DTD [document tag definitions aka data context] is pretty damn useless [the difference betweeen data & information.])
I have quite a few files that I can no longer access except as raw byte streams because the applications that created them no longer exist or because the meta data information that controlled that creation is no longer available.
Even printing sh.., uh, stuff, out is pretty useless because most paper is acid based and turns to ash over a very short time. The inks are not much better.
I have books printed in the 17th century that are still quite readable (high rag content acid free paper,) and a 1901 Sears catalog (acid washed wood pulp paper,) that I accidentally put my thumb through in the late '80s.
The studios, MPAA and other AAs are killing original art by recycling comic books into movies into DVDs/CDs into TV shows and back again.
Why not just shoot the artists and get it over with. They're not paying them dirt as it is anyway...
The best fuckin' thing so far at the cinema is MIIB. They tried that shit with "Scooby-fucking-Do" and "Spiderman." For Christ's sake.
You KNOW how its going to end from the opening sequence, before you've even got halfway through the "Bucket 'O Pop Corn" and the "Gallon 'O Pop." I bet some exec is having wet dreams about "Anova." They wouldn't even have to pay her a salary.
This SUCKS. It REALLY, REALLY SUCKS.
AND NONE OF YOU BRAIN-DEAD, JOLT COLA ADDLED, WITHERED SOULED, DICK-HEADS GIVE A SHIT.
And I no longer want to have all these damn cables.
I've had a LAN in my house (and the next house, and the next appartment, and the next appartment, and the next appartment, and the next appartment and I'm putting one in my store,) since Apple came out with the Mac in '84.
I'm really getting sick of running cable, digging through walls, running cable races and tying up cable with TieWraps every time I move (absolute,) and every time my wife changes the decor (if the equipment position moves.)
I LIKE 802.11.
If the signal bleeds and my traffic goes up a bit, who gives a fuck? I'm paying for it anyway.
Its not like the ISPs and carriers AREN'T geting their money. They ARE.
Actually half of the people on this planet have never set foot in a bank. Some have never even seen a bank and millions more wouldn't be too clear on the very concept.
We are the affluent first world. The one apart from those second (many European Postal Services are also banks for their constituency, like in Belgium,) and third worlds (where they have an annual income equal to the average geek's soft-drinks expenditures,) and China (who play by their own rules,) and Islam (where they just want to buy Kalashnikovs and come to America and Kill Kill Kill.)
Now imagine that you're running a business and somebody's sale techniques immediately reduces your market share by 10% Would you be happy?
Imagine being told that you can reach 100% of your market by print ads, phone, mail (snail & e) and 100% of you market can reach you by walking in, phone, mail (snail & e) but you have to turn away 1 customer in 10.
But it will come to pass. M$ minions will tout their service as the best, most secure thing in the world since nobody can buy a friggin' thing because the server in Redmond has crashed after being cracked by the 11,111,111,111,111 script kiddie trying a new exploit.
and their repeated use of backward IN-compatibility to force people to upgrade or lose access to their old data, this phrase from "Cringely's Pulpit" scared the fuckin' crap out of me: "then encrypting the data EVEN INSIDE YOUR COMPUTER PROCESSOR."
Its the ultimate in Big Brother technology. The eradication of memory or of access to memory.
Ever seen people with disorders of the hipo-thalamus? They can't form short term memories. Their lives are hard and extremely confusing since the world is a new mystery every damn day. They are extremely vulnerable to being scammed from one minute to the next.
Whoever proposed this inside of M$ is an absolute diabolical monster. A human being (given the events of the last two centuries and the incredible slaughter perpetrated on each other, that is NOT a compliment,) with delusions of god-hood. One that looks bad even compared with the most the megalomaniacal tyrant to slaughter people in order to change their minds about something.
At least when you kill people, you're show for the sub-simian scum you are and/but your victims a're well and truly safe from further predation.
But this deliberate creation of the potential for maiming of the aggregate memory of an entire culture makes the death camps is so utterly base, so vile, so despicable, so... I'm a loss to find words to describe the enormity of the evil.
And M$ will find enough "Judas Goats," enough imbeciles to plunge mankind into a second dark ages. Would that the road to the coming Hell was not paved with moot intentions and banal disregard.
Slavering drooling monsters and utter despicable despots, we can overthrow. But our doom will come in the form of some utterly reasonable man in a suit who's just doing his job.
There are a hundred million graves prematurely filled by the victims of some utterly reasonable men in some (uni)form of suit, who's just doing his job.
The ultimate triumph of Voltaire's bastards will be even more thorough and degrading than the patrician nightmare of the religious maniacs who merely preach evil and bring subjugation and death.
There is no justification for loading a company PC with speakers, a web-cam, a ridiculously oversized drive and a 21" monitor.
The software should all be on one server. The data files should all be on another. These are company assets. They should be treated as such.
Files should be checked-out and only to the user that should be authorized to use/modify them, checked-in again, journaled stored for check-out again and backed up.
What the hell are we doing with multi-media capable machines in an accounting department? Singing spread sheets announcing how deep you're in the red?
What's with all these CD-ROM drives? The files should be on the company server. If they aren't, you don't need them. If you do have IT put 'em there.
NOBODY needs diskette drives anymore. The PC should consist on one CPU, only enough RAM as required to run the permissible apps, a NIC, a sensible flat screen monitor so it doesn't eat up all the desk space.
Printing, faxing, communication connection, storage are all shared corporate resources and should reside on networked servers.
Who needs Windows with all the damn bells and whistles?
A bare-bones geegaw-less Linux distro with OpenOffice or StarOffice and whatever specialized software tools the each user really needs to do their job, pulled off the LAN, should be all a business allows.
The rest is expensive distractions and productivity sinks.
Makes the Apple Mac ad seem prescient...
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Analyzing Palladium
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· Score: 2
M$ is shaped in Bill Gates' image.
He's a bully. Because he managed to strong arm the OEMs he a rich and arrogant bully but he has no idea how arrogant and bulling people can be.
If he was smart, he'd start his own church and proclaim itself as God and get it over with.
Palladium, Microsoft�s future. I hope so.
on
Analyzing Palladium
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· Score: 2
Unique IDs went over real good when Intel tried a few years ago.
As for M$ having wont the desk-top battle. There are 50 million machines opned by people who WANTED to buy them rather that the 250 million machines bought by people who were'nt using them, looking for the >st ROI and st cost.
Linux is gaining %-age in the flat desktop market and that's coming out of M$s %-age.
The web sever market is definitely not IIS.
There's 25,000,000 Mac users out there and they bough their machines because they wanted it.
There's 25,000,000 Linux users out there and they bough their machines because they wanted it.
There's 250,000,000 M$ users out there and the machine was bought by the company they work for because it was cheaper, not easier to use or better.
Palladium (a toxic metal and a mythical calamity ending in the sac or Troy,) is based on trust.
Given the hunk of Swiss cheese that M$ has created and shilled all these years, would YOU trust them?
The GPL applies to opening the SOURCE code.
on
Analyzing Palladium
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· Score: 2
The SOURCE code which shouldn't be in a vulnerable place on the server anyway.
They belong and should reside on development machines and on distribution servers which us MD5 to verify the veradicity of the sacrosanct code. Like they do now!
If M$ minions think that this will give them a lever to oust the Linux community, they'd better look again. If they think somebody will hand them the keys to the kingdom and say sure, you decide who we should trust, when nobody trusts them, they must be listening only to their own lawyers argue at the anti-trust trial.
The http protocols are open source. The whole infrastructure is open-source.
Unix/Linux servers number in the millions and serve over half the web.
There are 25,000,000 Mac OS 6..9.x and X users out there. There are 25,000,000 Unix and Linux boxes out there. As much as M$ might want to try, they can't balkanize the 'Net that way. There is NO posible excuse for suddenly locking out 50 million users.
Nobody's gonna buy it. The class-action lawsuits, the criminal investigations, will begin before we even have a total count of the clients, servers and hosts.
Too many systems would suddenly go missing for it to go unnoticed. You can't sneak this one under the radar and hope the Justice Department won't notice.
This is not something that businesses and politicians can rally around. Specially given the fact that it would be so fuckin' obvious that not even a lawyer could deny it. Well okay. Maybe a lawyer could deny it, they can deny that the earth goes around the sun, but getting a judge to buy that argument would be a real stretch.
That would launch an anti-trust suit by prople with serious weaponry since many the many police and military sites would suddenly become unreachable. And when these people don't trust you, they tend to shoot.
Redmond might not become a smoking crater but it would certainly become a ghost town.
And the Antitrust trial is even over yet.
on
Analyzing Palladium
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· Score: 2
That takes "cojones". Does he think everybody's an idiot?
Slashdot Mirror
Apple started out with the Apple I. It only sold to hobbyists, a small market. Apple learned.
They quickly moved on to the Apple II on the 6052. That grew the company sereval times. Apple learned.
The less said about the Apple III hardware the better. There were lots of manufacturing problems. Apple learned.
Then came the Lisa. There were lots of marketing problems. Apple learned.
The Mac started as a cute, slightly runky-dink 680x0 machine. They tossed out compatibility. Cost them their entire existing software base. Apple learned.
The original Mac lap-top was an embarrassment. Apple learned.
Then Apple became the leading manufacturer of RISC machines in the world when they went to the 60x hardware architecture. This was accomplished without repeating the previous mistakes. (What Apple learned was purely internal politics that time.)
NeXT failed as a hardware manufacturer but it had great software. It was the NeXTStep... Jobs came back and Apple learned.
Apple did the iMac because Apple had learned: Ugly, beige is boring "office-ware."
Apple did the PowerPC, the colored iBook, the Titanium and the white iBook because Apple had learned.
Apple did the sexy, "fold-out completely open" towers because Apple had learned: Hard to maintain is, uh, hard to maintain.
Apple went to OS X. It could even attempt this because it had SUCCESSFULLY migrated CPU hardware platforms before. It had SUCCESSFULLY migrated form factors (Mac, desk-top, towers, laptop.)
Look at the Newton. Carefully. With time-lines, feature-lists, internal structures and compared with what else was out there and what spun off.
Apple has survived more changes, flops, failures, created more products that are a delight to use, been imitated by more companies regardless of industry, than almost any other company I can think of BECAUSE it DOESN'T listen to its customers UNTIL they start saying "No We don't buy it." (*)
It will soon have shiped more BSD/Darwin (OpenSource) RISC (G3/G4[/G5 soon?]) boxes than the sum total of Unix/Linux boxen out there.
This is a GOOD THING.
Will Apple grow to dominate the desk top?
Get a grip. It doesn't even want to go there.
That may be where the money WAS but growth is flat, the competition is outrageous, Linux is already there, its darn near (as in beer,) carving out its own space and has an enormous developper base.
The OS wars are OVER. Unix is going to win hands down.
Linux runs on EVERYTHING!
Unix is used for every serious, mission critical system.
OS X is locking up the creative market place.
Windows has NEVER migrated to ANY other platform than the x86. Its not for want of trying. They have already failed at it.
The new PC chip architectures (Intel/HPs & AMDs) are already Linux playgrounds. The chip makers are tired of the x86 architecture and want to get on to the next stage. But windows is holding them back.
Windows is extremely vulnerable to security breaches and even more vulnerable to the processing requirements of biometric security data.
The changes M$ themselves are fostering (DRM, and securing their sieve-like OS) are going to be their undoing. Entire countries are rebelling at having to get on and stay on the upgrade tread-mill. The day Linux becomes "good enough" (and OpenOffice is almost there,) M$ sales will start a downward curve faster than the supporting economy.
Remember. Desktop machines are OVERHEAD. Reducing overhead is how M$ got to be where it is today. Its how Linux will get to where its going. Its been happening time and time again. (Read "The Innovator's Dilemma.")
*) That is one thing Jobs and Linus share: The ability to say, "Lets do this because its cool (least I think so!)" And then tweak, fiddle and put in the hours fixing things until they damn well work. If they don't... "Well lets see what we can learn from this."
And then the Vatican, the MPAA's own web site, the RIAA's site, Disney machines, NYSE's machine.
I'd scorch the heiney of the moron who allowed this drivel so totally that the closest he'd get to papents again is shining shoes.
I think that the patent office should go back to being a not-for-profit organization or government departement, ASAP.
This was a STUPID idea from the get go.
without bothering with campaigns, expensive time consuming crap, polls, platforms and shit like that.
Think of it like buying a "preferred position" in a search engine return.
I pay the voting machine manufacturer more than the other guy, I win. Simple.
Its always been "Whoever has the most dough wins!" Its the Ameri-Canadian way.
And it worked for Mike Bloomberg and a whole bunch of other people too.
While biometric identification through a trusted, controlled and monitored source might satisfy me for everything and using my biometric keys to provide retrieval-only access to my data might satisfy me, there is no way that I would blindly trust the network, never mind the machine for update.
The consequences are too horrific.
I've been a victim of identity theft and it cost some one her LIFE, such as it was, because she chose suicide instead of a long jail term.
This is SERIOUS SHIT. It happens. It happened to some body I knew. But she ripped me off. I turned her in and she funkin' offed her stupid cowardly self. ("People Who Died" by the Jim Carroll Band is running through my head...)
There is NO FUCKIN' WAY I'd trust my Macs or my Linux PC to reveal information on my behalf.
This should scare the ever lovin' crap out of lots of people when the see what a pullulating dish of agar their office, SOHO and home systems are.
Its not just M$, (though people will be throwing a few of these out the window when they see sheer size of the system "vulnerability list",) but this should be part of the connection "pre-flight" process for everybody who is connecting to the net.
Hello.
You have reached (555)555-1212.
I use this machine to screen my calls and
I may or may not be at home and
there may or may not be a recording device attached
so at the tone clearly say your name, your phone number and very, very brief message.
Then, if I'm home, I'll have a decision to make.
The neo-Luddites and the troglodites will call totally unrelated acts (such as the legitimate creation of non-commercial software,) as examples of hacking.
"Paranoid? Faced with the kid's 'New Math' when you never understood the 'old math? Don't like the neighbor, don't trust him and saw a funny looking box blinking in his basement?"
"Well call the toll-free HackerHotLine. The HHH. Two letters away from the old KKK. Seen a "bugaboo" on your street? We're on the look out for those too! Our operators are standing by!"
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure but it costs in "paying attention" so we criminalize something instead of doing anything but the cheapest, fastest knee-jerk reaction and leave it all to "the experts."
Yeah. This is America! We gots freedom of speech here. Now shut the fuck up!
Bwahahahaha. I threw my TV set out years ago.
Advertising doesn't work above a certain level of exposure.
Its called saturation.
For a while, the audience efforts to reduce the ambient noise, the ads, got more effective.
VCRs, Tivo, channel hopping, Zappers etcetera have saved commercial TV from exceeding the saturation point for years. But now the advertisers are becoming more desperate and more strident.
Attempting to increase the time per pair of eyeballs becomes counter productive and people will turn to any channel with fewer ads and more content. As long as they can that is...
People go to sports events because there's fewer ads and interruptions for non-content.
My tolerance for BS, uh, ads was merely lower than most people's but I think that when the ads and obvious product placement in the content exceeds 30% of the on-air time, people are just going to stop and read a book or go play outside or talk to each other or maybe NOT talk. (Mariages are going to either be ruined or a lot more fuckin' fun.)
Bjork's Icelandic Moron...
This purported article was a flame troll based on M$ trying to complain that the industry (who's?) isn't keeping up with M$ Windows.
Apple is in the hardware business. They give away the OS of their choice (X with 9.x for compatibility,) on the machines they make and sell.
M$ is in the coercion business.
To OEMs: "Sell your PCs with the latest version of Windows... Or else watch you proces hit the ceiling and your sales go through the floor..."
To businesses: "Upgrade to the latest version of Office, or kiss your data goodbye..."
Consumers buy the hardware and the OS is not an option in either case. Choice doesn't exist.
At least Apple uses pretty candy-colored/flavored lubricated condoms. M$ just rams it up the end-user's poop chute.
Man, you must not install software, write software, or USE software. No BSoD. WOW!
I'be had GPFs (daily for a while, and alsways at the worse time too,), BSoDs (at least monthly,)from windows 3.1 to NT 4.0 svcpk 5. Registry screw ups, re-installs when the system started to exhibit "rot".
I use Macs and while Epson printer driver support still sucks, OS X 1.0 only crashed on me ONCE on al old machine that I shouldn't even have installed it on.
Now I'm using Mac 9.1 (Beige G3/300 & iMac,) 9.2 (occasionally &,) OS X 1.x (Titanium Powerbook,) and Slackware 8.1 (x86 architecture,) and it all WORKS.
for the Mac & Windows. Some are "blessed" by the OS Distributor and some are crafted according to written guidelines provided by the OS Distributor. The OS X installer is GREAT in that respect.
The situation MUST become the same for Linux. There must come to be some "blessed" slick GUI installer that can also run "headless" from a command line.
It should implement a state transition engine and run from a state machine which goes from an initial state "not-installed", through paths for the distros, dependencies to a terminal state of "software registered."
To make the situation complete, it must detect the distro (and therefore the install paths, dependencies and destination directories,) the GUI in use, if any, and be able to completely install AND UNINSTALL by walking backwards through the installer log undoing what was done and cleaning up all debris.
The installer "experience" is standard for the user because everybody is using the same packages or near clones of these packages to install any and every ol' thing.
And this is a lot easier for a user (or a SysAdmin,) to deal with than the ideosynchratic and often badly written readme.txt files written by somebody who just doesn't "get it" and can't remember what he didn't know when he first started out.
And the excuse that "it wasn't easy to write so it shouldn't be easy to install" is the refuge of lazy-ass, elitist, nerdy schmucks who don't have friends to watch over their shoulder, correct their grammar and actually try and test out their installation instructions to detect all the "missing" information.
Its called QA folks and you'd better get used to it or you're wasting your time pretending that you're IT pros.
You have a mesh of wireless NAN (Neighborhood Area Nework) where every packet is tagged from request to reply.
Takes care of the "last mile" problem.
Whoever controls the medium (the wire itself) can rake it in PER PACKET from the actual owner of the actual client device.
The infrastructure owner can be cablecos, which are area segregated monopolies, telcos, virtual monopoly on coerced-shared infrastructure or Fred's coops using carrier pigeons.
With telco COs being less then a mile apart in urban areas, I can imagine the addition of Watt capable 802.11 antennas to the building eating the lunch of wireless router manufacturers.
You're going to pay PER PACKET just like the users of Bell Canada's X.25 network did in the late 80s, early 90s (when IPv4 was "good enough.")
If they don't know where to send the bill or from which bank account to draw the money, the packet gets dropped from the infrastructure owner's routers.
The closer you cozy up to the provider (the more you pay per month,) the better your bandwidth.
ISPs which piggybacked on top of the existing infrastruture will disappear shortly after the deployment of IPv6.
Having owning/operating a server would become a cheap no-brainer because the cost of the transmission could be borne by the client requestor.
More likely the the curent cell phone business model of charging both ends of the n-alog will be used to multiply revenue for the carrier.
The The NT Culture was supposed to be based on "Portability, Reliability, Security, and Extensibility" ingrained as the teams top priority.
Portability? Apart from the x86 platform, does it run on any other platform?
Reliability? I still got the occasional blue screen of death in NT 4. (svcpk5) as of last year.
Security? We had regular virus sweeps and updates were NEEDED every time script kiddies got a new mod and would hammer at our systems.
Given the fact that the company serfs were still using NT4 and that they weren't allowed to put in multimedia extensions, Flash and other "Sturm und Drang" sillyness while the Solaris boxes ran Oracle for the databases, I'd say that the extensibility wasn't an issue either.
Given the propensity of M$ & others to use proprietary file formats in an effort to lock in the client base and to lock out competition. (And don't tell me about standards like because XML [tagged data storage & transport streams] without DTD [document tag definitions aka data context] is pretty damn useless [the difference betweeen data & information.])
I have quite a few files that I can no longer access except as raw byte streams because the applications that created them no longer exist or because the meta data information that controlled that creation is no longer available.
Even printing sh.., uh, stuff, out is pretty useless because most paper is acid based and turns to ash over a very short time. The inks are not much better.
I have books printed in the 17th century that are still quite readable (high rag content acid free paper,) and a 1901 Sears catalog (acid washed wood pulp paper,) that I accidentally put my thumb through in the late '80s.
The studios, MPAA and other AAs are killing original art by recycling comic books into movies into DVDs/CDs into TV shows and back again.
Why not just shoot the artists and get it over with. They're not paying them dirt as it is anyway...
The best fuckin' thing so far at the cinema is MIIB. They tried that shit with "Scooby-fucking-Do" and "Spiderman." For Christ's sake.
You KNOW how its going to end from the opening sequence, before you've even got halfway through the "Bucket 'O Pop Corn" and the "Gallon 'O Pop."
I bet some exec is having wet dreams about "Anova." They wouldn't even have to pay her a salary.
This SUCKS. It REALLY, REALLY SUCKS.
AND NONE OF YOU BRAIN-DEAD, JOLT COLA ADDLED, WITHERED SOULED, DICK-HEADS GIVE A SHIT.
And I no longer want to have all these damn cables.
I've had a LAN in my house (and the next house, and the next appartment, and the next appartment, and the next appartment, and the next appartment and I'm putting one in my store,) since Apple came out with the Mac in '84.
I'm really getting sick of running cable, digging through walls, running cable races and tying up cable with TieWraps every time I move (absolute,) and every time my wife changes the decor (if the equipment position moves.)
I LIKE 802.11.
If the signal bleeds and my traffic goes up a bit, who gives a fuck? I'm paying for it anyway.
Its not like the ISPs and carriers AREN'T geting their money. They ARE.
I'm paying.
It's MY connection and I'M PAYING.
What the fuck is their complaint?
Actually half of the people on this planet have never set foot in a bank. Some have never even seen a bank and millions more wouldn't be too clear on the very concept.
We are the affluent first world. The one apart from those second (many European Postal Services are also banks for their constituency, like in Belgium,) and third worlds (where they have an annual income equal to the average geek's soft-drinks expenditures,) and China (who play by their own rules,) and Islam (where they just want to buy Kalashnikovs and come to America and Kill Kill Kill.)
Now imagine that you're running a business and somebody's sale techniques immediately reduces your market share by 10% Would you be happy?
Imagine being told that you can reach 100% of your market by print ads, phone, mail (snail & e) and 100% of you market can reach you by walking in, phone, mail (snail & e) but you have to turn away 1 customer in 10.
But it will come to pass. M$ minions will tout their service as the best, most secure thing in the world since nobody can buy a friggin' thing because the server in Redmond has crashed after being cracked by the 11,111,111,111,111 script kiddie trying a new exploit.
and their repeated use of backward IN-compatibility to force people to upgrade or lose access to their old data, this phrase from "Cringely's Pulpit" scared the fuckin' crap out of me: "then encrypting the data EVEN INSIDE YOUR COMPUTER PROCESSOR."
... I'm a loss to find words to describe the enormity of the evil.
Its the ultimate in Big Brother technology. The eradication of memory or of access to memory.
Ever seen people with disorders of the hipo-thalamus? They can't form short term memories. Their lives are hard and extremely confusing since the world is a new mystery every damn day. They are extremely vulnerable to being scammed from one minute to the next.
Whoever proposed this inside of M$ is an absolute diabolical monster. A human being (given the events of the last two centuries and the incredible slaughter perpetrated on each other, that is NOT a compliment,) with delusions of god-hood. One that looks bad even compared with the most the megalomaniacal tyrant to slaughter people in order to change their minds about something.
At least when you kill people, you're show for the sub-simian scum you are and/but your victims a're well and truly safe from further predation.
But this deliberate creation of the potential for maiming of the aggregate memory of an entire culture makes the death camps is so utterly base, so vile, so despicable, so
And M$ will find enough "Judas Goats," enough imbeciles to plunge mankind into a second dark ages. Would that the road to the coming Hell was not paved with moot intentions and banal disregard.
Slavering drooling monsters and utter despicable despots, we can overthrow. But our doom will come in the form of some utterly reasonable man in a suit who's just doing his job.
There are a hundred million graves prematurely filled by the victims of some utterly reasonable men in some (uni)form of suit, who's just doing his job.
The ultimate triumph of Voltaire's bastards will be even more thorough and degrading than the patrician nightmare of the religious maniacs who merely preach evil and bring subjugation and death.
There is no justification for loading a company PC with speakers, a web-cam, a ridiculously oversized drive and a 21" monitor.
The software should all be on one server. The data files should all be on another. These are company assets. They should be treated as such.
Files should be checked-out and only to the user that should be authorized to use/modify them, checked-in again, journaled stored for check-out again and backed up.
What the hell are we doing with multi-media capable machines in an accounting department? Singing spread sheets announcing how deep you're in the red?
What's with all these CD-ROM drives? The files should be on the company server. If they aren't, you don't need them. If you do have IT put 'em there.
NOBODY needs diskette drives anymore.
The PC should consist on one CPU, only enough RAM as required to run the permissible apps, a NIC, a sensible flat screen monitor so it doesn't eat up all the desk space.
Printing, faxing, communication connection, storage are all shared corporate resources and should reside on networked servers.
Who needs Windows with all the damn bells and whistles?
A bare-bones geegaw-less Linux distro with OpenOffice or StarOffice and whatever specialized software tools the each user really needs to do their job, pulled off the LAN, should be all a business allows.
The rest is expensive distractions and productivity sinks.
M$ is shaped in Bill Gates' image.
He's a bully. Because he managed to strong arm the OEMs he a rich and arrogant bully but he has no idea how arrogant and bulling people can be.
If he was smart, he'd start his own church and proclaim itself as God and get it over with.
Unique IDs went over real good when Intel tried a few years ago.
As for M$ having wont the desk-top battle. There are 50 million machines opned by people who WANTED to buy them rather that the 250 million machines bought by people who were'nt using them, looking for the >st ROI and st cost.
Linux is gaining %-age in the flat desktop market and that's coming out of M$s %-age.
The web sever market is definitely not IIS.
There's 25,000,000 Mac users out there and they bough their machines because they wanted it.
There's 25,000,000 Linux users out there and they bough their machines because they wanted it.
There's 250,000,000 M$ users out there and the machine was bought by the company they work for because it was cheaper, not easier to use or better.
Palladium (a toxic metal and a mythical calamity ending in the sac or Troy,) is based on trust.
Given the hunk of Swiss cheese that M$ has created and shilled all these years, would YOU trust them?
The SOURCE code which shouldn't be in a vulnerable place on the server anyway.
They belong and should reside on development machines and on distribution servers which us MD5 to verify the veradicity of the sacrosanct code. Like they do now!
If M$ minions think that this will give them a lever to oust the Linux community, they'd better look again. If they think somebody will hand them the keys to the kingdom and say sure, you decide who we should trust, when nobody trusts them, they must be listening only to their own lawyers argue at the anti-trust trial.
The http protocols are open source. The whole infrastructure is open-source.
Unix/Linux servers number in the millions and serve over half the web.
There are 25,000,000 Mac OS 6..9.x and X users out there. There are 25,000,000 Unix and Linux boxes out there. As much as M$ might want to try, they can't balkanize the 'Net that way. There is NO posible excuse for suddenly locking out 50 million users.
Nobody's gonna buy it. The class-action lawsuits, the criminal investigations, will begin before we even have a total count of the clients, servers and hosts.
Too many systems would suddenly go missing for it to go unnoticed. You can't sneak this one under the radar and hope the Justice Department won't notice.
This is not something that businesses and politicians can rally around. Specially given the fact that it would be so fuckin' obvious that not even a lawyer could deny it. Well okay. Maybe a lawyer could deny it, they can deny that the earth goes around the sun, but getting a judge to buy that argument would be a real stretch.
That would launch an anti-trust suit by prople with serious weaponry since many the many police and military sites would suddenly become unreachable. And when these people don't trust you, they tend to shoot.
Redmond might not become a smoking crater but it would certainly become a ghost town.
That takes "cojones". Does he think everybody's an idiot?
:-)
I hope CKK kicks Gates in the "cojones."