Intel probably doesn't care much about overclockers and others who will run dual (or quad... or...) Celerons. They are out to protect their lucrative server market. The possibility of cut-rate dual Celeron servers would probably scare them enough to disable the Celeron's SMP ability.
It's kind of sad. I heard the same thing happened in the car industry. All through the 50's, 60's, and 70's people would tinker and tune their cars, fiddles with the carburators, etc. Meanwhile, the car industry strived to make "tinker-proof" cars, since they saw the home mechanic as some sort of threat (not sure why).
Now, we have the same thing going on in PC's (well, there were always PC tinkerers... now, though, it's gone big time). People tinker with clock speed, improve cooling, and push their systems. Meanwhile, Intel tries it's best to throw up roadblocks.
It's a shame, really. Intel has little to fear from overclockers and people who will use Celerons in SMP systems. I doubt that there are businesses out there that would trust overclocked hardware, or hardware not offically rated for SMP use in their mission-critical servers. It would be nice if they just relaxed and let people do what they want with their products. Or, perhaps, they are just making offical noises so that if you smoke your new PIII while trying to overclock it, you won't have them to run crying to. It seems they haven't done as much as they could to prevent Celeron overclocking.
Personally, I'm ramping up to purchase that dual celeron board and a pair of Celeron 466's.
Uhh... young? Star started business in 1985, not that long after Sun. Innovative? I don't think Star is particularly innovative. In playing with Star Office, I got the impression that it was trying really hard to be Microsoft Office (down to the authentically slow assedness). Not much innovation there.
I'm taking a wait-and-see attitude towards this. Sun may be trying to position itself as a thin-client market leader. I think personally think this is pretty stupid. Many people have written off the thin-client concept in this age of fast, powerful, $500 desktop systems. Why bother struggling with a client-server architecture when having the aps on the client side is about as cheap, and can be as easy to administer?
Will it suck if StarOffice is removed from the Linux scene? A bit. A lot of people had problems with its bloatedness. I don't think we're guaranteed that Sun will axe it, though. We'll have to wait and see what Sun will do, before calling them bastards.
While we wait, perhaps we can just marvel at the fact that now, we're not faced with wondering if we'll have an office suite for Linux, but which of the office suites that are available (or are soon-to-be-available) we'll use (for those of us that need an office suite. Me, I'm a writer, and I'm happy to have WordPerfect).
I'll chime in with the rest that are saying that the show's best days were behind it. The early Mike episodes were OK, but after Frank and Dr. Forrester left, things started to slide. I watched maybe a half dozen new episodes, and nothing really stuck out at me as being hilarious, as oppsoed to the Joel days, when we had "Master Ninja Theme Song," "Rock climbing, Joel," "They tried to kill him with a forklift!" and of course, "Hikiba!"
None of the new shows had anythingthat memorable, for me at least. So, I say, 10 years is a nice long run, let's let it go.
Eh. I had an MP 100 for a while. It was a nice machine, but the form factor sucked. It was more on the order of something I had to remember to lug with me rather than something I could just slip into a pocket and forget about until I needed it.
And, of course, the cost of a Newton was too high. The Palm slipped under my Geek Gadget budget threshold (especially since I bought it as a Palm 1000, and as an unopened box return at Microcenter, so the price was steeply discounted). I could make a case to myself that I'd find a good use for it, whereas if I'm laying out the cash for a Newton, I need to know that I absolutely need it.
Maybe the later Newtons were different, but I find my Pilot a lot more usable than my Newton. Especially when it comes to synching data with the PC.
I think color is a bit overrated. I'd rather have a much higher resolution screen than a color one at the same resolution. I would make text reading easier on the eyes, and give more space for things like web pages and whatnot.
Of course, I wouldn't complain about Color AND higher resolution...
Ahhh... yes, we must make sure the techies are as ethical as the graduates from Liberal Arts Schools like... erm... Political Science majors? Nono... Marketing people? Uh... Lawyers? Hm. Maybe not.
The school I went to ( WPI) does emphasize the "squishy stuff" so that engineers turn out better capable of working within society, not just within their technical discipline. In theory, anyhow. Personally, I don't think any amount of schooling will teach you ethics. A sense of ethics is something that you choose to develop or not. Schooling in it can guide amd mold your ethics, but if you're a jerk, you'll be a jerk, no matter if you have a B.S. or a B.A.
Domain names can be useful if they are used in conjunction with other mediums, such as print, radio, or TV ads. Since there's currently no direct way to go from one of those mediums to the web, you have to nab a memorable domain name, so it will stick in people's minds until they sit down by their PC...
But... trying to figure out just *what* memorable URL that would make sense for an ad compaign that also doesn't infringe on a company's trademark is difficult to impossible, I think. By the time that, say, Sun's "we're the dot in.com" ad compaign becomes public, they've probably nabbed the dotin.com (and variations thereof, I bet) for themselves already. It's easy to either come up with a new "catch URL" or find a minor alteration of the URL to use.
I sorta doubt any major company is going to use "Suck my pole" as a catch phrase anytime soon...
Hmm, well, I know that Network Associates has been selling my name far and wise since I bought a domain name... perhaps these guys are on their mailing list. It'd be in NA's best interest to sell this info... if bozos are willing to buy up "neighboring properties" in cyberspace, NA's going to make that much more profit.
More likely, they somehow watch the DNS service to see when new domain names come online. After all, your domain name has to make it into the DNS databases.
Heh... so, people with PC's will be able to use the "Amiga" OS before people on actual Amigas will?
Kinda neat looking UI, but it doesn't seem so radically different than any other desktop out there... isn't there anything really *new* out there these days? Windows n' buttons. Yawn.
Oops. Well, it looks like I managed to undo my moderations by somehow posting as myself... D'oh! It did say it was undoing the moderations, though... which meant it recorded them. But it didn't reflect it in teh moderation score. Weird.
Hmm... I just hit this dweeb with another negative moderation point, but for some reason he's not -2 now. Perhaps it's because I didn't choose "flamebait" as the original moderator did, but instead chose "Troll."
My last moderation point was gobbled up. so it should have docked him another point...
(I'm posting as AC because, of course, I can't post to a topic I've moderated...)
I don't know who came up with this quote, but it seems to fit. Seems that bloated software is mostly for people who don't "get" computers, but who *do* use them every day. This accounts for over 90% of the computer-using populous.
Trust me, I work with people who don't know computers. This is not the reason for bloatware. People who aren't nerds don't give a damn about bells and whistles, as far as I can tell. They really care if the can use the software. If they can open it up and start using with the least amount of fuss, then they are happy. Things like wizards are what they crave, not the latest bell and whistle. Wizards aren't all that bloaty... they are basically scripts that just sit on the application, taking the user through steps he or she wouldn't be able to figure out by themselves.
In addition, the vast majority of people in this situation do not have a choice as to what they use. They have to follow along what their IS department or computer manufacturer installed on their system. Blaming them is like blaming drivers for poor highway design.
The major reason for bloatware is, of course, to continue the cashflow of the manufacturer. Force people to ugrade by selling them bug fixes (which they should get free) or make the file formats incompatible.
Of course, there is also the programmer's seeming inability to declare a project "done." Take EMACS for example. It used to be a text editor. Now... it's... well... more. A lot more. Creeping featuritis is a disease that can be caught by OSS, as well as the commercial sector.
Personally, I think that every application gets to an ideal point of features/bloat. Wordprocessors, for the most part, reached that level years ago. To hammer on them more is counterproductive. Other applications, such as some 3D programs I use, have plenty of room to grow... there is always more things you can do that will add realism, for example. These I don;t think of as bloat, as long as they are easily accessable from the main application. When you start to create obscure little corners of your application that take the user minutes of hunting to find... that's when you've gone into pur bloat mode.
Re:So that's why my baby brother keeps growing...
on
All Hail Bloatware
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· Score: 1
Heck yeah, Linux is fat enough to fit 'em all. Just get DOSemu and WABI (or WINE) and you're all set for your backwards compatibility. I guess you could add both to the kernel, though... and add in VMware while you're at it. Oh, and why not add in Quake... kernel-based Quake would rock!
On a side note, having seen a bunch of Microsoft's easter eggs (including a pinball game and a doom-like VR thing in the Office products) one wonders how much of the bloat is just crap that the programmer's felt like putting in...
Hmm... the URL doesn't work, even though I cut and pasted it exactly. Damn Yahoo. Anyhow, it's http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/ap/science/st ory.html?s=v/ap/19990628/sc/comet_lander _1.html
if they owned it before, then they own it now, but they can't just change it on people in midstream.
Not unless they state that the contract between the user and GeoCities can be amended at any time, which they probably do (and usualy saying that no notice has to be offered). I'm not sure how enforceable this is, in RL, but I suspect it would be difficult to even get them to court.
What if you put an bootleg copy of somebodys song in mp3 on your site, do they own it?? NO WAY! What if you are talking about a Ford automobile? Do they own the Ford name?
Of course not. Basically, they state that you are responsible for any copyright/trademark/whatever infringement. Anything left after that they own. Sweet, innit?
GeoCities may be able to repost or redisplay your content, but for them to make a profit on it, mmmm, sounds like it could be LawyerCities to me.
Err... what do you think they are doing now? Giving out webpages out of the kindness of their hearts? Nope, they are selling ad space around your content. That's making a profit.
What they are saying now is that they can repackage that content into, say "a best of GeoCities" CD or something.
I find it ironic that people screaming about their IP rights when their sites are chock full of copyrighted images they scanned in, audio files they recorded off of videos and TV, and often buttons and other images they ripped off of other sites.
Whenever graphics artists complain that someone is ripping off their stuff, someone inevitably says "dude, take it as a compliment." Well, maybe you should take it as a compliment that Yahoo thinks they can make money off of your web page... What comes around, goes around.
if they owned it before, then they own it now, but they can't just change it on people in midstream.
Not unless they state that the contract between the user and GeoCities can be amended at any time, which they probably do (and usualy saying that no notice has to be offered). I'm not sure how enforceable this is, in RL, but I suspect it would be difficult to even get them to court.
What if you put an bootleg copy of somebodys song in mp3 on your site, do they own it?? NO WAY! What if you are talking about a Ford automobile? Do they own the Ford name?
Of course not. Basically, they state that you are responsible for any copyright/trademark/whatever infringement. Anything left after that they own. Sweet, innit?
,i>GeoCities may be able to repost or redisplay your content, but for them to make a profit on it, mmmm, sounds like it could be
LawyerCities to me.
Err... what do you think they are doing now? Giving out webpages out of the kindness of their hearts? Nope, they are selling ad space around your content. That's making a profit.
I find it ironic that people screaming about their IP rights when their sites are chock full of copyrighted images they scanned in, audio files they recorded off of videos and TV, and often buttons and other images they ripped off of other sites.
Whenever graphics artists complain that someone is ripping off their stuff, someone inevitably says "dude, take it as a compliment." Well, maybe you should take it as a compliment that Yahoo thinks they can make money off of your web page... What comes around, goes around.
I think, more importantly, that Jobs made the PC accessable to people who couldn't build their own my his "crass commercialism." If it just remained Woz handing out schematics for free to his buddies in the homebrew computer club, how many PC would have been made? Very few. Only the hardcore EE nerds would have built them. By selling them, Jobs actually spread Woz's vision of a PC to the masses. I think many people who got into computers in the late 70's and early 80's, and later went on to get jobs in the industry, have to thank Jobs as well as Woz. Well, OK, we'll thank Woz a whole lot more than Jobs;)
The same can't be said of Gates. Granted, Microsoft did create an early monitor system for one of the first PC's, but that didn't really trigger the PC revolution. By the time he scored his major coup, tricking IBM into buying his non-existant DOS, the PC revolution was set to happen anyway. Whether he or someone else (such as Gary Kildall) supplied the DOS was irrelevant.
PS. Can anyone else think of a another M$-developed product that was burned into ROM?
Well, there's the aptly-named WinCE, the early versions of which were ROM, rather than flashable. I'm not sure if whatever Microsoft wrote for the... (Altair? I've gotten my early PC history mixed-up, I think) was ROM or just paper tape or disk.
iPS. Can anyone else think of a another M$-developed product that was burned into ROM?
Well, there's the aptly-named WinCE, the early versions of which were ROM, rather than flashable. I'm not sure if whatever Microsoft wrote for the... (Altair? I've gotten my early PC history mixed-up, I think) was ROM or just paper tape or disk.
The one thing I feared was that it would be purely Gates vs. Jobs. It's good to see that WOZ, at least, came off looking good. As someone who cut his teeth on an Apple ][+, I always looked up to WOZ as a real hero. Back in those days, Jobs was just the guy who seemed to handle the business stuff.
I do think they overplayed the threat that Windows posed to the Mac early on. Windows at that point was just a joke. It was there mainly so IBM could say "Yeah, our stuff can do that pretty graphics thing, too... but hey, who needs it to run 1-2-3?" The movie made it seem that the introduction of Windows was the beginning of the end for Apple. The reality of mismanagement, bad marketing, and who knows what else that caused Apple to poop out is a much more complex story, and ill-suited to a movie of the week.
It would have required a miniseries (such as, say, Triumph of the Nerds) to tell the whole story... the downfall of IBM (including the OS/2 debacle), Apple's faultering, Microsoft finally getting it right (enough) in Windows 3.0.
I suspect they didn't go into the later 80's and early 90's because of a nostalgia factor. There was still this naive sense of wonder with computers back in those days. Nowadays, they are boring beige appliances that most people pound on during the day at work.
Windows NT Server Enterprise Edition ships with a full complement of Internet services, including Web, proxy, index, messaging, database, transaction and firewall services. With Linux, these services will soon be available as a multivendor product.
Errr... soon to be? Every distribution I can think of ships with most, if not all of these components.
I saw Empire the first day it came out... I remember tagging along with my brother and his friends to see it. I forget, but I also think I saw Jedi the first day it came out, too. There's an added excitement, I think, in seeing the film opening day. You get to hang out, waiting in line with other fans. There's the anticipation of wondering exactly what the film will be like. That, and no one can spoil the surprises for you.
Not sure if I'll do it this time around. I tend to go to matinees more than anything else, since I hate crowds. But there's still something to be said for the energy of an opening day...
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Intel probably doesn't care much about overclockers and others who will run dual (or quad... or...) Celerons. They are out to protect their lucrative server market. The possibility of cut-rate dual Celeron servers would probably scare them enough to disable the Celeron's SMP ability.
It's kind of sad. I heard the same thing happened in the car industry. All through the 50's, 60's, and 70's people would tinker and tune their cars, fiddles with the carburators, etc. Meanwhile, the car industry strived to make "tinker-proof" cars, since they saw the home mechanic as some sort of threat (not sure why).
Now, we have the same thing going on in PC's (well, there were always PC tinkerers... now, though, it's gone big time). People tinker with clock speed, improve cooling, and push their systems. Meanwhile, Intel tries it's best to throw up roadblocks.
It's a shame, really. Intel has little to fear from overclockers and people who will use Celerons in SMP systems. I doubt that there are businesses out there that would trust overclocked hardware, or hardware not offically rated for SMP use in their mission-critical servers. It would be nice if they just relaxed and let people do what they want with their products. Or, perhaps, they are just making offical noises so that if you smoke your new PIII while trying to overclock it, you won't have them to run crying to. It seems they haven't done as much as they could to prevent Celeron overclocking.
Personally, I'm ramping up to purchase that dual celeron board and a pair of Celeron 466's.
Uhh... young? Star started business in 1985, not that long after Sun. Innovative? I don't think Star is particularly innovative. In playing with Star Office, I got the impression that it was trying really hard to be Microsoft Office (down to the authentically slow assedness). Not much innovation there.
I'm taking a wait-and-see attitude towards this. Sun may be trying to position itself as a thin-client market leader. I think personally think this is pretty stupid. Many people have written off the thin-client concept in this age of fast, powerful, $500 desktop systems. Why bother struggling with a client-server architecture when having the aps on the client side is about as cheap, and can be as easy to administer?
Will it suck if StarOffice is removed from the Linux scene? A bit. A lot of people had problems with its bloatedness. I don't think we're guaranteed that Sun will axe it, though. We'll have to wait and see what Sun will do, before calling them bastards.
While we wait, perhaps we can just marvel at the fact that now, we're not faced with wondering if we'll have an office suite for Linux, but which of the office suites that are available (or are soon-to-be-available) we'll use (for those of us that need an office suite. Me, I'm a writer, and I'm happy to have WordPerfect).
God, I'll be glad when this Y2K hoopla is over and it'll be safe to go back to using two digits for dates again...
I'll chime in with the rest that are saying that the show's best days were behind it. The early Mike episodes were OK, but after Frank and Dr. Forrester left, things started to slide. I watched maybe a half dozen new episodes, and nothing really stuck out at me as being hilarious, as oppsoed to the Joel days, when we had "Master Ninja Theme Song," "Rock climbing, Joel," "They tried to kill him with a forklift!" and of course, "Hikiba!"
None of the new shows had anythingthat memorable, for me at least. So, I say, 10 years is a nice long run, let's let it go.
Eh. I had an MP 100 for a while. It was a nice machine, but the form factor sucked. It was more on the order of something I had to remember to lug with me rather than something I could just slip into a pocket and forget about until I needed it.
And, of course, the cost of a Newton was too high. The Palm slipped under my Geek Gadget budget threshold (especially since I bought it as a Palm 1000, and as an unopened box return at Microcenter, so the price was steeply discounted). I could make a case to myself that I'd find a good use for it, whereas if I'm laying out the cash for a Newton, I need to know that I absolutely need it.
Maybe the later Newtons were different, but I find my Pilot a lot more usable than my Newton. Especially when it comes to synching data with the PC.
I think color is a bit overrated. I'd rather have a much higher resolution screen than a color one at the same resolution. I would make text reading easier on the eyes, and give more space for things like web pages and whatnot.
Of course, I wouldn't complain about Color AND higher resolution...
Do you have actual evidence that antialiasing causes eyestrain? Have any studies been done on this?
Oh, I can just imagine the office assistant software running these:
Astronaut: OK, Houston, I'm going to replace the TCB-315 unit now...
Ball: Hi there! It looks like you're trying to floss your teeth! Would you like some help?
Astronaut: Um, no... please go away.
Ball: (dances about, and wanders off)
Astronaut: OK, Houston, got the main housing off, I'm going to detatch the primary...
Ball: Hi there! Would you like to learn about primary robotic arm operations?
Astronaut: No! Go away!
Ball: (winks and departs)
Astronaut: Ok, got the primary connector...
Ball: Hi! It looks like you're trying to floss your teeth! Would you like some he--
(some smashing sounds)
Houston: Columbia, please confirm, we've lost telemetry on PSA 3.
Astronaut: Confirmed. Now, about this connector...
Ahhh... yes, we must make sure the techies are as ethical as the graduates from Liberal Arts Schools like... erm... Political Science majors? Nono... Marketing people? Uh... Lawyers? Hm. Maybe not.
The school I went to ( WPI) does emphasize the "squishy stuff" so that engineers turn out better capable of working within society, not just within their technical discipline. In theory, anyhow. Personally, I don't think any amount of schooling will teach you ethics. A sense of ethics is something that you choose to develop or not. Schooling in it can guide amd mold your ethics, but if you're a jerk, you'll be a jerk, no matter if you have a B.S. or a B.A.
Domain names can be useful if they are used in conjunction with other mediums, such as print, radio, or TV ads. Since there's currently no direct way to go from one of those mediums to the web, you have to nab a memorable domain name, so it will stick in people's minds until they sit down by their PC...
.com" ad compaign becomes public, they've probably nabbed the dotin.com (and variations thereof, I bet) for themselves already. It's easy to either come up with a new "catch URL" or find a minor alteration of the URL to use.
But... trying to figure out just *what* memorable URL that would make sense for an ad compaign that also doesn't infringe on a company's trademark is difficult to impossible, I think. By the time that, say, Sun's "we're the dot in
I sorta doubt any major company is going to use "Suck my pole" as a catch phrase anytime soon...
Hmm, well, I know that Network Associates has been selling my name far and wise since I bought a domain name... perhaps these guys are on their mailing list. It'd be in NA's best interest to sell this info... if bozos are willing to buy up "neighboring properties" in cyberspace, NA's going to make that much more profit.
More likely, they somehow watch the DNS service to see when new domain names come online. After all, your domain name has to make it into the DNS databases.
Heh... so, people with PC's will be able to use the "Amiga" OS before people on actual Amigas will?
Kinda neat looking UI, but it doesn't seem so radically different than any other desktop out there... isn't there anything really *new* out there these days? Windows n' buttons. Yawn.
Oops. Well, it looks like I managed to undo my moderations by somehow posting as myself... D'oh! It did say it was undoing the moderations, though... which meant it recorded them. But it didn't reflect it in teh moderation score. Weird.
Hmm... I just hit this dweeb with another negative moderation point, but for some reason he's not -2 now. Perhaps it's because I didn't choose "flamebait" as the original moderator did, but instead chose "Troll."
My last moderation point was gobbled up. so it should have docked him another point...
(I'm posting as AC because, of course, I can't post to a topic I've moderated...)
Trust me, I work with people who don't know computers. This is not the reason for bloatware. People who aren't nerds don't give a damn about bells and whistles, as far as I can tell. They really care if the can use the software. If they can open it up and start using with the least amount of fuss, then they are happy. Things like wizards are what they crave, not the latest bell and whistle. Wizards aren't all that bloaty... they are basically scripts that just sit on the application, taking the user through steps he or she wouldn't be able to figure out by themselves.
In addition, the vast majority of people in this situation do not have a choice as to what they use. They have to follow along what their IS department or computer manufacturer installed on their system. Blaming them is like blaming drivers for poor highway design.
The major reason for bloatware is, of course, to continue the cashflow of the manufacturer. Force people to ugrade by selling them bug fixes (which they should get free) or make the file formats incompatible.
Of course, there is also the programmer's seeming inability to declare a project "done." Take EMACS for example. It used to be a text editor. Now... it's... well... more. A lot more. Creeping featuritis is a disease that can be caught by OSS, as well as the commercial sector.
Personally, I think that every application gets to an ideal point of features/bloat. Wordprocessors, for the most part, reached that level years ago. To hammer on them more is counterproductive. Other applications, such as some 3D programs I use, have plenty of room to grow... there is always more things you can do that will add realism, for example. These I don;t think of as bloat, as long as they are easily accessable from the main application. When you start to create obscure little corners of your application that take the user minutes of hunting to find... that's when you've gone into pur bloat mode.
Heck yeah, Linux is fat enough to fit 'em all. Just get DOSemu and WABI (or WINE) and you're all set for your backwards compatibility. I guess you could add both to the kernel, though... and add in VMware while you're at it. Oh, and why not add in Quake... kernel-based Quake would rock!
On a side note, having seen a bunch of Microsoft's easter eggs (including a pinball game and a doom-like VR thing in the Office products) one wonders how much of the bloat is just crap that the programmer's felt like putting in...
NASA cancelled the comet-landing probe earlier this week:
Hmm... the URL doesn't work, even though I cut and pasted it exactly. Damn Yahoo. Anyhow, it's http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/ap/science/st ory.html?s=v/ap/19990628/sc/comet_lander _1.html
Not unless they state that the contract between the user and GeoCities can be amended at any time, which they probably do (and usualy saying that no notice has to be offered). I'm not sure how enforceable this is, in RL, but I suspect it would be difficult to even get them to court.
Of course not. Basically, they state that you are responsible for any copyright/trademark/whatever infringement. Anything left after that they own. Sweet, innit?
Err... what do you think they are doing now? Giving out webpages out of the kindness of their hearts? Nope, they are selling ad space around your content. That's making a profit.
What they are saying now is that they can repackage that content into, say "a best of GeoCities" CD or something.
I find it ironic that people screaming about their IP rights when their sites are chock full of copyrighted images they scanned in, audio files they recorded off of videos and TV, and often buttons and other images they ripped off of other sites.
Whenever graphics artists complain that someone is ripping off their stuff, someone inevitably says "dude, take it as a compliment." Well, maybe you should take it as a compliment that Yahoo thinks they can make money off of your web page... What comes around, goes around.
Not unless they state that the contract between the user and GeoCities can be amended at any time, which they probably do (and usualy saying that no notice has to be offered). I'm not sure how enforceable this is, in RL, but I suspect it would be difficult to even get them to court.
Of course not. Basically, they state that you are responsible for any copyright/trademark/whatever infringement. Anything left after that they own. Sweet, innit?
Err... what do you think they are doing now? Giving out webpages out of the kindness of their hearts? Nope, they are selling ad space around your content. That's making a profit.
I find it ironic that people screaming about their IP rights when their sites are chock full of copyrighted images they scanned in, audio files they recorded off of videos and TV, and often buttons and other images they ripped off of other sites.
Whenever graphics artists complain that someone is ripping off their stuff, someone inevitably says "dude, take it as a compliment." Well, maybe you should take it as a compliment that Yahoo thinks they can make money off of your web page... What comes around, goes around.
I think, more importantly, that Jobs made the PC accessable to people who couldn't build their own my his "crass commercialism." If it just remained Woz handing out schematics for free to his buddies in the homebrew computer club, how many PC would have been made? Very few. Only the hardcore EE nerds would have built them. By selling them, Jobs actually spread Woz's vision of a PC to the masses. I think many people who got into computers in the late 70's and early 80's, and later went on to get jobs in the industry, have to thank Jobs as well as Woz. Well, OK, we'll thank Woz a whole lot more than Jobs ;)
The same can't be said of Gates. Granted, Microsoft did create an early monitor system for one of the first PC's, but that didn't really trigger the PC revolution. By the time he scored his major coup, tricking IBM into buying his non-existant DOS, the PC revolution was set to happen anyway. Whether he or someone else (such as Gary Kildall) supplied the DOS was irrelevant.
The one thing I feared was that it would be purely Gates vs. Jobs. It's good to see that WOZ, at least, came off looking good. As someone who cut his teeth on an Apple ][+, I always looked up to WOZ as a real hero. Back in those days, Jobs was just the guy who seemed to handle the business stuff.
I do think they overplayed the threat that Windows posed to the Mac early on. Windows at that point was just a joke. It was there mainly so IBM could say "Yeah, our stuff can do that pretty graphics thing, too... but hey, who needs it to run 1-2-3?"
The movie made it seem that the introduction of Windows was the beginning of the end for Apple. The reality of mismanagement, bad marketing, and who knows what else that caused Apple to poop out is a much more complex story, and ill-suited to a movie of the week.
It would have required a miniseries (such as, say, Triumph of the Nerds) to tell the whole story... the downfall of IBM (including the OS/2 debacle), Apple's faultering, Microsoft finally getting it right (enough) in Windows 3.0.
I suspect they didn't go into the later 80's and early 90's because of a nostalgia factor. There was still this naive sense of wonder with computers back in those days. Nowadays, they are boring beige appliances that most people pound on during the day at work.
Errr... soon to be? Every distribution I can think of ships with most, if not all of these components.
I saw Empire the first day it came out... I remember tagging along with my brother and his friends to see it. I forget, but I also think I saw Jedi the first day it came out, too. There's an added excitement, I think, in seeing the film opening day. You get to hang out, waiting in line with other fans. There's the anticipation of wondering exactly what the film will be like. That, and no one can spoil the surprises for you.
Not sure if I'll do it this time around. I tend to go to matinees more than anything else, since I hate crowds. But there's still something to be said for the energy of an opening day...