Shouldn't their patent have run out my now--15 year limit or so? Of course, the royalty system might have nothing to do with patents. Could someone shed some light on that?
Very true, but it makes a huge difference whether you received it OEM or bought it retail. Certainly to MS, who gets much more money from the retail box.
> This weekend I ditched my Ultra/ATA drives, and replaced them with 6 year old Seagate Barracuda
> 4s. End result? Star office now loads in _9_ seconds as opposed to 30.
While no-one disagrees with the SCSI speed figures, this is a little hard to believe. A three-fold improvement with 6 year old technology--I don't think so. May I suggest that your IDE drives were hopelessly fragmented?
As an illustration, after a clean install of Windows 2000 and Office 2000 on a dual Celeron, Word started in a little over one second. A few weeks--and several software installations and much cluster mangling--later, this same machine took considerably longer to load Word. It's not just what you have, it's how you use it.
> Seems like there would also be motivation for
> option 3: Internal modem with third-party dial-up server
True, true. Of course, this option doesn't solve the one-line/multiple-use problem, but since the dial-up code is in there anyway, why not use it, right?
It seems to me that these companies should redefine what exactly they're charging you for: the content/service they provide, not the modem bank use. That way, it doesn't matter if you pull in their content via the Internet, or through their modems. In fact, they could give you a discount if you don't use their dial-up servers, because you're saving them money, but they still get something from you, so the pay-for-service model is not destroyed.
Like others have mentioned, I wouldn't mind paying for TiVO service even if I connected to them over the Internet, since they provide a service. In fact, with the potential of getting the content considerably faster over the Internet, that's actually a plus for me. Of course, this all assumes a universe in which you have to pay for that kind of service (TV listings). I could conceive of a future in which that information would eventually be free, since it's only meta-content anyway. But I digress...
Consider some alternative networking technology to tie in remote clusters of machine, like wireless, or phone line networking. So if you have a bunch of machines at one end of the house, and a bunch at the other, network just one machine from each cluster together via phone line or wireless. Phone line is becoming very viable because of phone line/ethernet bridges that are becoming available. Within the clusters though definitely use 100M, don't want to slow down EVERYBODY. So accessing machines from the other cluster will be slow(er), but also much less hassle. And chances are that you just need to tie them together for WAN access anyway, so the cluster link won't be the bottleneck anyway.
Your WAN router could dial out via good old analog, the connection is completely immaterial. It would be fairly trivial for the vendors to provide for two scenarios:
1. Internal modem with vendor's dial-up server
OR
2. Internal Ethernet card, with options for:
a. DHCP/BOOTP OR static IP
b. default gateway
c. optional proxy server
d. optional POP3 server
e. any other device-specific features
Setting up for these two scenarios could be easily accomplished with a simple wizard that makes it idiot-proof. The initial choice between vendor's ISP and Ethernet could be labeled in colorful ways such as EASY SETUP and ADVANCED.
Eventually vendors WILL have to take this approach, as appliances get more and more popular. Once you have a few appliances, say one in the kitchen, one in the living room (maybe set-top box), one in the bedroom/can/den/torture chamber, vendors will have to provide for the possibility of all/some of these devices being used simultaneously. With a single phone line that just ain't possible, guv.
Besides, as appliances become more popular, smaller and smaller vendors will start offering them, and many of them simply won't have the capital to set up their own ISPs. Including just Ethernet is an easy way for them to cheapen out, and still address a large audience. Home LANs are becoming a lot more popular than large companies are willing to concede (there are stats on that, I couldn't be bothered to look them up now), and sooner or later they'll wake up and smell the coffee and realize the money they could save.
Overall, though, I think the main reason there will be a move away from modems is the multiple appliance simultaneous access problem.
Incidentally, what did it take to o/c the 366 to 550? I cranked mine up to 460 no sweat, but it wouldn't boot beyond that. Did you increase the voltage on it? I never fooled with that, since I simply wasn't that desperate for extra power.
Yeah, I set up two machines with the BP6 and 500s for two friends, which they got on my recommendation--though I haven't followed my own preaching and stayed with an Epox and 366/460. But Win2K screamed on those duals, quantitatively they seemed the fastest machines I ever played with. I'm sure a PIII will benchmark faster, but I doubt they will FEEL much faster.
> Instead, get a dual P3-800 with minimum 128 megs of ram.
:-> Well, I think I'll stick with the BP6/Celeron combination for the price. I mean, under $300 for mobo+CPUs is hard to beat. How much would the P3-800s run for nowadays anyway?
Frankly, as I already said, the fascination of computers for me has shifted from the hardware itself to other things, such as communications infrastructure (i.e. Internet), media integration (MP3 music server) and such. The only hardware that has excited me lately is the final breakthrough of USB and 1394. I know USB gets a lot of flack because of crappy implementations, but I consider it a very exciting technology compared to what it replaces. And 1394 is simply its bigger brother. In fact I'm planning on playing around with a 1394 hard drive adapter one of these days. Would be cool to have 10 or 20 IDE drives hanging off one system, all hot swappable.
The time when I would still get excited about a new CPU has long gone. I'll admit, I'm not a hard-core gamer, nor do I run 3DMax or any other cycle-guzzling hog. However, I do some occasional video editing with my Canon ZR1 MiniDV and a Pyro card, and my Celeron 366->460 with 200MB suits me perfectly. I never find myself twiddling my thumbs or cursing the machine like in days gone by. One thing I might do one of these days, just for coolness or kicks, is get a dual-Celeron board with two 500s or 600s for Win2K.
Other than that, there will have to be a very significant shift in CPU capabilities for me to get excited again. In fact, it might have to be more than just a new CPU, though frankly I don't know what at the moment. Maybe finally DSL in this shithole? Anyone else feeling that pragmatic about CPUs lately?
What makes them deeply entrenched? One of the things I like most about Delphi is the way it encapsulates the Windows message passing mechanism, letting the programmer concentrate instead on program logic. I use the Win32 API as little as possible, except where there are no wrappers--such as Semaphores and other threading functionality. Whether I do this on Windows or on Linux doesn't matter too much. The resulting apps look and behave practically identically, at least from the screenshots and reports of those in the know.
And what exactly is that "lack of windows specific functionality"? Borland's new VCL usage survey will be very telling, but my feeling is that the vast majority of people mainly use VCL components and very little Win32 API. And the VCL is guaranteed to be portable, with the few noted exceptions.
Define "most people." In a commercial settings that statement couldn't be more wrong. People obsessed with the GPL and Open Source should stop and take a gander for a moment--the momentum of Linux is growing by the day in the commercial area. In that setting free softare is far from the primary consideration, and in fact turns many people off (ok, I don't share that feeling, but it's pretty much a fact). Being able to churn out software in a productive environment such as Delphi on a robust platform such as Linux is a huge attraction.
We can argue this point till we turn Slashdot-green, only time will tell whether Kylix will be a success. But as I said, my strong conviction is that it will be an absolute smash, and in fact will advance Linux adoption probably more than anything else till now.
Like all things nano, we can laboriously put together a working subunit as a proof of concept--create a biochemical logic gate, write "IBM" on a pinhead--but mass production is still pie in the sky. We can all talk about shaking up a bottle and out comes a computer, but that's all day dreaming. The nano industry will probably have to be bootstrapped the hard way: build the first nano-factories laboriously by hand, atom by atom, molecule by molecule. Then have this factory build other factories, which build others, etc etc. Only once you have a critical mass of cooperating nano-factories in place can you actually build real things in finite amounts of time. Mass producing something like a full nano-scale computer will take shitloads of factory units and lots of production infrastructure that probably hasn't even been given much thought yet, like how to supply raw materials to the factories, how to mount all this stuff--you can't just bolt a nano-factory to the floor, etc, etc.
I think I'll be lucky to see nano-tech mature to industrial levels within my lifetime, and I'm 30. Still, along the way it can produce very interesting and useful evolutionary products, especially in the "near-nano" fields, such as the TI DLP chip, or the new accelerometers in airbags.
Just wait till Kylix ships. I predict there will be an explosion of apps for KDE (and Gnome), which in a couple of years will dwarf the number of apps for anything else. True, many will be trivial apps done by weekend drag-and-drop programmers, but there will also be great ones. Especially in the vertical industries, and internal home-made programs at a lot of companies, I think there will be a huge adoption of Kylix/KDE/Gnome.
Well, I haven't read any details on this, but once Borland ship Kylix, I'm sure they'll include some kind of licence that doesn't make you pay for Qt when writing and deploying commercial Kylix apps. So using Kylix might be a way of "using" Qt commercially without paying for it.
Most of the features could have been lifted straight out of Object Pascal as implemented in Delphi, including:
-strong typing
-interfaces & single inheritance
-properties
-method pointers
Sounds like Delphi also provides much better RTTI. The only thing Delphi lacks is the garbage collection, and I'm not sure I like that anyway. It does reference counting on strings with copy-on-modify, so that's something I guess.
Besides, Delphi is HERE, creates fast native code, and will soon be cross-platform between Windows and Unix. That alone makes it a winner over most other development systems out there as far as I'm concerned.
Well, since it's not derived from Win2K at all, I wouldn't even mention it in the same sentence. I'll think of it as a fattened Win98--fattened up to keep those wink-wink-nudge-nudge deals with storage and memory manufacturers alive and well.
I'm sorry, I'll have to re-read your post, but I could swear you were pretty proud of Aussie telecom accomplishments there. All I was saying was "what accomplishments"?
No, I'm not American, I'm German but living in the US. The only thing I thought Oz was doing better than Europe was the non-metered local calls--with only a 20c per connection charge. That was in the early 90s, so things might have changed.
I'll agree with you, digital coverage is quite bad in the US, some places worse than others. In some places competition is stepping on each other's toes, in others there's no service at all. Europe is a very far cry from that. Most European countries have close to 100% digital coverage, including low population density places like Sweden.
I'll still stand by my statement that not much tech comes out of Australia, and if, it's often that of foreign companies. You'll have to back up your claims to the contrary with some kind of evidence.
I was under the impression that their official line was that 98SE was going to be the last iteration of non-NT Windows. I thought ME was some sort of fat-free version of 2000, without a lot of the Enterprise stuff (networking, security, etc). With all the work they seem to have put into making 2000 a semi-decent games platform, it seems that it would have made more sense to move 2000 towards the consumer, rather than 98 towards the entrprise. You know, without the 800 MB installation footprint and 128 MB RAM requirements.
But instead it's just another Win98 sibling, 98TE maybe. I guess Win98 is too lucrative a platform to let go of. Oh well...
nice troll, but Australia hardly "invents half the technology" that others use. They jumped later than average on the GSM bandwagon, they were still reveling in good old analog and priding themselves of the seamless coverage from Melbourne to Cairns along the east coast when I left in 1992. Yeah, things have changed since then, but only relatively recently. When I lived in Brisbane ISDN was only a glint in someone's eye there, Australian PC magazine used to always write about all the great services you could one day get via ISDN, and that was already in the 90'. At which time ISDN was quite common in Europe.
You're running away with some agenda in that last paragraph there. Please do enlighten us as to who actually developed the mouse, then. Regarding the rant about the first commercially available GUI/mouse/etc, never mind that a lot of your facts are hardly that. I was really only referring to the optical mouse in my post, and I'm having a hard time seeing how Apple could take credit for anything in its development. What, the whole-mouse-button thing? Please!
I heeded your advice about five years ago, so my prescience is quite amazing really.
Regarding what serious computer scientists recognize as genius, we'd have to establish the definitions of "serious" and "genius" to have a meaningful discourse. Since I'm not inclined to do either with an AC, I'll just consider you a being delightfully unencumbered by facts and leave it at that.
I guess the question is what exactly you mean by distributed. At one extreme you could consider DOS a distributed OS if it is set up to use shared drives on another machine. At the other extreme, you could try to distribute even intimate bits of the OS, such as the MM, the dispatcher, etc. The question is what you're trying to achieve: increased performance, or just being able to do it? If it's performance, you have to look into maximizing the bandwidth of the OS entities that communicate the most, and whether it would even make sense to put them at the other end of a network connection. If you just want to do it because you can (e.g. X-Windows), anything goes. All you really need on any machine is the particular entity you're trying to distribute, some network communications capabilities along with a marshalling mechanism, and some glue to make all the distributed entities make sense of it all. Of course, this "glue" is going to be what keeps you up at night when designing this thing.
For a lot of applications, many of today's OSs can be considered distributed. Both CORBA and DCOM (or is it DNA nowadays?) provide mechanisms to abstract the location of a particular service, which in the end is what "distributed" really is all about, right? A lot of enterprise apps nowadays are quite highly distributed and often use OS capabilities to achieve that (certainly in the case of Windows).
In the end, the question is how highly you want to distribute the OS, and what the benefits and tradeoffs are. If you want to achieve smaller unit sizes, eventually the unit might be not powerful enough to do much useful work--like a Beowulf cluster of 386 machines. If you just want to make it fault tolerant, it might be worth it anyway. And so on...
1. Any modern mouse needs a wheel. I got so used to scrolling pages (code, web pages, email) with my index finger, I feel positively handicapped when a mouse doesn't have a wheel. Of course, the sensitivity and speed need to be set up correctly for it to feel right, but whizzing up and down in a document with the hand on the mouse and without dragging scroll thumbs is a breeze.
2. The whole one-versus-many buttons argument is moot. For the ones that have never used more than one button for extended periods, a single button is all that seems to be required. For the ones that are used to right-click for context menus (the most logical and time saving application of the right button IMO), going to one button is handicapping. The orignal thought behind the three button interface in XWindows seemed logical enough, except they had a more cumbersome idea of how editing should work, and the use of the two right buttons has been historically inconsistent anyway. I think Windows has finally gotten it right enough. Going to a Mac and first having to select an object, then moving up to the menu for its properties, or alternatively command-clicking, can be a pain. There are tons of computing activities that can be done very efficiently single-handedly with a context menu, my favorite being browsing the web and right-clicking on pictures to save them.
3. While Sun's optical mouse was primitive by the new standards, it WAS an optical mouse. If all Apple claims is that they are the first to bundle an OPTICAL mouse, they're plain wrong, period. They have to qualify that statement to be correct.
4. Let's give Microsoft credit for that technology, shall we? I haven't read the Apple blurb, but if they don't mention MS anywhere, they're being two-faced. Then again, Apple is hardly disappointing in that respect. I'm sure someone will come out and claim that it wasn't really Microsoft who developod the technology (probably Xerox, right?). Even if that were true, they marketed the first commercially available product, so Apple is an also-ran in any case.
> Too bad a GUI doesn't make up the whole > operating system, huh?
Actually, the original Mac OS used to be derided as a Program Loader Frontend. Which it pretty much was, because as soon as you started an app, it couldn't do anything else until you exited. Then they tacked on the Desk Accessory concept (ok, maybe it was in there from the start), which essentially was a GUI-ized version of a TSR.
There are few hacks out there bigger than the MacOS. It's been hacked to such an extent that what they call nowaways the MacOS is one huge collection of patches and hacks. Try running one of the earlier Mac apps from the Fat Mac days on System 9.x. I always get the biggest kick out of Mac fanatics that gush over the great design of their OS. As long as all it takes to install a device is to drag an icon into a folder, plug it into the SCSI bus and go, that qualifies as a great OS. Never mind the rest.
Slashdot Mirror
Shouldn't their patent have run out my now--15 year limit or so? Of course, the royalty system might have nothing to do with patents. Could someone shed some light on that?
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
Very true, but it makes a huge difference whether you received it OEM or bought it retail. Certainly to MS, who gets much more money from the retail box.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
Yeah, they should hire Klinger's uncle from Chicago, for $100 he'll kill for anybody, even Sony.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
> This weekend I ditched my Ultra/ATA drives, and replaced them with 6 year old Seagate Barracuda
> 4s. End result? Star office now loads in _9_ seconds as opposed to 30.
While no-one disagrees with the SCSI speed figures, this is a little hard to believe. A three-fold improvement with 6 year old technology--I don't think so. May I suggest that your IDE drives were hopelessly fragmented?
As an illustration, after a clean install of Windows 2000 and Office 2000 on a dual Celeron, Word started in a little over one second. A few weeks--and several software installations and much cluster mangling--later, this same machine took considerably longer to load Word. It's not just what you have, it's how you use it.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
> Seems like there would also be motivation for
> option 3: Internal modem with third-party dial-up server
True, true. Of course, this option doesn't solve the one-line/multiple-use problem, but since the dial-up code is in there anyway, why not use it, right?
It seems to me that these companies should redefine what exactly they're charging you for: the content/service they provide, not the modem bank use. That way, it doesn't matter if you pull in their content via the Internet, or through their modems. In fact, they could give you a discount if you don't use their dial-up servers, because you're saving them money, but they still get something from you, so the pay-for-service model is not destroyed.
Like others have mentioned, I wouldn't mind paying for TiVO service even if I connected to them over the Internet, since they provide a service. In fact, with the potential of getting the content considerably faster over the Internet, that's actually a plus for me. Of course, this all assumes a universe in which you have to pay for that kind of service (TV listings). I could conceive of a future in which that information would eventually be free, since it's only meta-content anyway. But I digress...
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
Consider some alternative networking technology to tie in remote clusters of machine, like wireless, or phone line networking. So if you have a bunch of machines at one end of the house, and a bunch at the other, network just one machine from each cluster together via phone line or wireless. Phone line is becoming very viable because of phone line/ethernet bridges that are becoming available. Within the clusters though definitely use 100M, don't want to slow down EVERYBODY. So accessing machines from the other cluster will be slow(er), but also much less hassle. And chances are that you just need to tie them together for WAN access anyway, so the cluster link won't be the bottleneck anyway.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
Your WAN router could dial out via good old analog, the connection is completely immaterial. It would be fairly trivial for the vendors to provide for two scenarios:
1. Internal modem with vendor's dial-up server
OR
2. Internal Ethernet card, with options for:
a. DHCP/BOOTP OR static IP
b. default gateway
c. optional proxy server
d. optional POP3 server
e. any other device-specific features
Setting up for these two scenarios could be easily accomplished with a simple wizard that makes it idiot-proof. The initial choice between vendor's ISP and Ethernet could be labeled in colorful ways such as EASY SETUP and ADVANCED.
Eventually vendors WILL have to take this approach, as appliances get more and more popular. Once you have a few appliances, say one in the kitchen, one in the living room (maybe set-top box), one in the bedroom/can/den/torture chamber, vendors will have to provide for the possibility of all/some of these devices being used simultaneously. With a single phone line that just ain't possible, guv.
Besides, as appliances become more popular, smaller and smaller vendors will start offering them, and many of them simply won't have the capital to set up their own ISPs. Including just Ethernet is an easy way for them to cheapen out, and still address a large audience. Home LANs are becoming a lot more popular than large companies are willing to concede (there are stats on that, I couldn't be bothered to look them up now), and sooner or later they'll wake up and smell the coffee and realize the money they could save.
Overall, though, I think the main reason there will be a move away from modems is the multiple appliance simultaneous access problem.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
It's like buying a Ford, measuring its 0-60 times, and publishing them in a magazine. Hmm, I wonder if anybody does that.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
> Abit BP6 w/ 2x Cel 366 o/c to 550
Incidentally, what did it take to o/c the 366 to 550? I cranked mine up to 460 no sweat, but it wouldn't boot beyond that. Did you increase the voltage on it? I never fooled with that, since I simply wasn't that desperate for extra power.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
Yeah, I set up two machines with the BP6 and 500s for two friends, which they got on my recommendation--though I haven't followed my own preaching and stayed with an Epox and 366/460. But Win2K screamed on those duals, quantitatively they seemed the fastest machines I ever played with. I'm sure a PIII will benchmark faster, but I doubt they will FEEL much faster.
> Instead, get a dual P3-800 with minimum 128 megs of ram.
:-> Well, I think I'll stick with the BP6/Celeron combination for the price. I mean, under $300 for mobo+CPUs is hard to beat. How much would the P3-800s run for nowadays anyway?
Frankly, as I already said, the fascination of computers for me has shifted from the hardware itself to other things, such as communications infrastructure (i.e. Internet), media integration (MP3 music server) and such. The only hardware that has excited me lately is the final breakthrough of USB and 1394. I know USB gets a lot of flack because of crappy implementations, but I consider it a very exciting technology compared to what it replaces. And 1394 is simply its bigger brother. In fact I'm planning on playing around with a 1394 hard drive adapter one of these days. Would be cool to have 10 or 20 IDE drives hanging off one system, all hot swappable.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
The time when I would still get excited about a new CPU has long gone. I'll admit, I'm not a hard-core gamer, nor do I run 3DMax or any other cycle-guzzling hog. However, I do some occasional video editing with my Canon ZR1 MiniDV and a Pyro card, and my Celeron 366->460 with 200MB suits me perfectly. I never find myself twiddling my thumbs or cursing the machine like in days gone by. One thing I might do one of these days, just for coolness or kicks, is get a dual-Celeron board with two 500s or 600s for Win2K.
Other than that, there will have to be a very significant shift in CPU capabilities for me to get excited again. In fact, it might have to be more than just a new CPU, though frankly I don't know what at the moment. Maybe finally DSL in this shithole? Anyone else feeling that pragmatic about CPUs lately?
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
What makes them deeply entrenched? One of the things I like most about Delphi is the way it encapsulates the Windows message passing mechanism, letting the programmer concentrate instead on program logic. I use the Win32 API as little as possible, except where there are no wrappers--such as Semaphores and other threading functionality. Whether I do this on Windows or on Linux doesn't matter too much. The resulting apps look and behave practically identically, at least from the screenshots and reports of those in the know.
And what exactly is that "lack of windows specific functionality"? Borland's new VCL usage survey will be very telling, but my feeling is that the vast majority of people mainly use VCL components and very little Win32 API. And the VCL is guaranteed to be portable, with the few noted exceptions.
Define "most people." In a commercial settings that statement couldn't be more wrong. People obsessed with the GPL and Open Source should stop and take a gander for a moment--the momentum of Linux is growing by the day in the commercial area. In that setting free softare is far from the primary consideration, and in fact turns many people off (ok, I don't share that feeling, but it's pretty much a fact). Being able to churn out software in a productive environment such as Delphi on a robust platform such as Linux is a huge attraction.
We can argue this point till we turn Slashdot-green, only time will tell whether Kylix will be a success. But as I said, my strong conviction is that it will be an absolute smash, and in fact will advance Linux adoption probably more than anything else till now.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
Like all things nano, we can laboriously put together a working subunit as a proof of concept--create a biochemical logic gate, write "IBM" on a pinhead--but mass production is still pie in the sky. We can all talk about shaking up a bottle and out comes a computer, but that's all day dreaming. The nano industry will probably have to be bootstrapped the hard way: build the first nano-factories laboriously by hand, atom by atom, molecule by molecule. Then have this factory build other factories, which build others, etc etc. Only once you have a critical mass of cooperating nano-factories in place can you actually build real things in finite amounts of time. Mass producing something like a full nano-scale computer will take shitloads of factory units and lots of production infrastructure that probably hasn't even been given much thought yet, like how to supply raw materials to the factories, how to mount all this stuff--you can't just bolt a nano-factory to the floor, etc, etc.
I think I'll be lucky to see nano-tech mature to industrial levels within my lifetime, and I'm 30. Still, along the way it can produce very interesting and useful evolutionary products, especially in the "near-nano" fields, such as the TI DLP chip, or the new accelerometers in airbags.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
Just wait till Kylix ships. I predict there will be an explosion of apps for KDE (and Gnome), which in a couple of years will dwarf the number of apps for anything else. True, many will be trivial apps done by weekend drag-and-drop programmers, but there will also be great ones. Especially in the vertical industries, and internal home-made programs at a lot of companies, I think there will be a huge adoption of Kylix/KDE/Gnome.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
Well, I haven't read any details on this, but once Borland ship Kylix, I'm sure they'll include some kind of licence that doesn't make you pay for Qt when writing and deploying commercial Kylix apps. So using Kylix might be a way of "using" Qt commercially without paying for it.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
Most of the features could have been lifted straight out of Object Pascal as implemented in Delphi, including:
-strong typing
-interfaces & single inheritance
-properties
-method pointers
Sounds like Delphi also provides much better RTTI. The only thing Delphi lacks is the garbage collection, and I'm not sure I like that anyway. It does reference counting on strings with copy-on-modify, so that's something I guess.
Besides, Delphi is HERE, creates fast native code, and will soon be cross-platform between Windows and Unix. That alone makes it a winner over most other development systems out there as far as I'm concerned.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
Well, since it's not derived from Win2K at all, I wouldn't even mention it in the same sentence. I'll think of it as a fattened Win98--fattened up to keep those wink-wink-nudge-nudge deals with storage and memory manufacturers alive and well.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
I'm sorry, I'll have to re-read your post, but I could swear you were pretty proud of Aussie telecom accomplishments there. All I was saying was "what accomplishments"?
No, I'm not American, I'm German but living in the US. The only thing I thought Oz was doing better than Europe was the non-metered local calls--with only a 20c per connection charge. That was in the early 90s, so things might have changed.
I'll agree with you, digital coverage is quite bad in the US, some places worse than others. In some places competition is stepping on each other's toes, in others there's no service at all. Europe is a very far cry from that. Most European countries have close to 100% digital coverage, including low population density places like Sweden.
I'll still stand by my statement that not much tech comes out of Australia, and if, it's often that of foreign companies. You'll have to back up your claims to the contrary with some kind of evidence.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
I was under the impression that their official line was that 98SE was going to be the last iteration of non-NT Windows. I thought ME was some sort of fat-free version of 2000, without a lot of the Enterprise stuff (networking, security, etc). With all the work they seem to have put into making 2000 a semi-decent games platform, it seems that it would have made more sense to move 2000 towards the consumer, rather than 98 towards the entrprise. You know, without the 800 MB installation footprint and 128 MB RAM requirements.
But instead it's just another Win98 sibling, 98TE maybe. I guess Win98 is too lucrative a platform to let go of. Oh well...
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
nice troll, but Australia hardly "invents half the technology" that others use. They jumped later than average on the GSM bandwagon, they were still reveling in good old analog and priding themselves of the seamless coverage from Melbourne to Cairns along the east coast when I left in 1992. Yeah, things have changed since then, but only relatively recently. When I lived in Brisbane ISDN was only a glint in someone's eye there, Australian PC magazine used to always write about all the great services you could one day get via ISDN, and that was already in the 90'. At which time ISDN was quite common in Europe.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
You're running away with some agenda in that last paragraph there. Please do enlighten us as to who actually developed the mouse, then. Regarding the rant about the first commercially available GUI/mouse/etc, never mind that a lot of your facts are hardly that. I was really only referring to the optical mouse in my post, and I'm having a hard time seeing how Apple could take credit for anything in its development. What, the whole-mouse-button thing? Please!
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
I heeded your advice about five years ago, so my prescience is quite amazing really.
Regarding what serious computer scientists recognize as genius, we'd have to establish the definitions of "serious" and "genius" to have a meaningful discourse. Since I'm not inclined to do either with an AC, I'll just consider you a being delightfully unencumbered by facts and leave it at that.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
I guess the question is what exactly you mean by distributed. At one extreme you could consider DOS a distributed OS if it is set up to use shared drives on another machine. At the other extreme, you could try to distribute even intimate bits of the OS, such as the MM, the dispatcher, etc. The question is what you're trying to achieve: increased performance, or just being able to do it? If it's performance, you have to look into maximizing the bandwidth of the OS entities that communicate the most, and whether it would even make sense to put them at the other end of a network connection. If you just want to do it because you can (e.g. X-Windows), anything goes. All you really need on any machine is the particular entity you're trying to distribute, some network communications capabilities along with a marshalling mechanism, and some glue to make all the distributed entities make sense of it all. Of course, this "glue" is going to be what keeps you up at night when designing this thing.
For a lot of applications, many of today's OSs can be considered distributed. Both CORBA and DCOM (or is it DNA nowadays?) provide mechanisms to abstract the location of a particular service, which in the end is what "distributed" really is all about, right? A lot of enterprise apps nowadays are quite highly distributed and often use OS capabilities to achieve that (certainly in the case of Windows).
In the end, the question is how highly you want to distribute the OS, and what the benefits and tradeoffs are. If you want to achieve smaller unit sizes, eventually the unit might be not powerful enough to do much useful work--like a Beowulf cluster of 386 machines. If you just want to make it fault tolerant, it might be worth it anyway. And so on...
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
1. Any modern mouse needs a wheel. I got so used to scrolling pages (code, web pages, email) with my index finger, I feel positively handicapped when a mouse doesn't have a wheel. Of course, the sensitivity and speed need to be set up correctly for it to feel right, but whizzing up and down in a document with the hand on the mouse and without dragging scroll thumbs is a breeze.
2. The whole one-versus-many buttons argument is moot. For the ones that have never used more than one button for extended periods, a single button is all that seems to be required. For the ones that are used to right-click for context menus (the most logical and time saving application of the right button IMO), going to one button is handicapping. The orignal thought behind the three button interface in XWindows seemed logical enough, except they had a more cumbersome idea of how editing should work, and the use of the two right buttons has been historically inconsistent anyway. I think Windows has finally gotten it right enough. Going to a Mac and first having to select an object, then moving up to the menu for its properties, or alternatively command-clicking, can be a pain. There are tons of computing activities that can be done very efficiently single-handedly with a context menu, my favorite being browsing the web and right-clicking on pictures to save them.
3. While Sun's optical mouse was primitive by the new standards, it WAS an optical mouse. If all Apple claims is that they are the first to bundle an OPTICAL mouse, they're plain wrong, period. They have to qualify that statement to be correct.
4. Let's give Microsoft credit for that technology, shall we? I haven't read the Apple blurb, but if they don't mention MS anywhere, they're being two-faced. Then again, Apple is hardly disappointing in that respect. I'm sure someone will come out and claim that it wasn't really Microsoft who developod the technology (probably Xerox, right?). Even if that were true, they marketed the first commercially available product, so Apple is an also-ran in any case.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
> Too bad a GUI doesn't make up the whole
> operating system, huh?
Actually, the original Mac OS used to be derided as a Program Loader Frontend. Which it pretty much was, because as soon as you started an app, it couldn't do anything else until you exited. Then they tacked on the Desk Accessory concept (ok, maybe it was in there from the start), which essentially was a GUI-ized version of a TSR.
There are few hacks out there bigger than the MacOS. It's been hacked to such an extent that what they call nowaways the MacOS is one huge collection of patches and hacks. Try running one of the earlier Mac apps from the Fat Mac days on System 9.x. I always get the biggest kick out of Mac fanatics that gush over the great design of their OS. As long as all it takes to install a device is to drag an icon into a folder, plug it into the SCSI bus and go, that qualifies as a great OS. Never mind the rest.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu