Perhaps, but at the expense of a competitive market and interoperability. Sure, the shitty architecture won out in the end, and it had the unfortunate side effect of pretty much killing the OS market, both of which I wish didn't happen, but the uniformity of hardware that the IBM clones made allows for us to have several interchangeable vendors in the market and thus levels out the PC playing field. Now OEMs actually have to compete with each other on a level that resembles more of a perfectly competitive market than an oligopoly. In my opinion it's much like how having one standard audio or video format has allowed player manufacturers to focus more on quality and features than having to worry about compatibility. It also helps the more computer illiterate. Grandma doesn't have to worry as much whether or not her new hard drive will work with her particular PC model. The same PCI card can potentially work with a Gateway, a Sony, a Dell, a Toshiba, and now even an Apple. The best part of this near universal support is that people like myself can now build our own PCs instead of settling for an OEM model. My ~$700 Pentium 4 I built back in 2004 was probably worth at least twice as much back then (and is still worth that much to me now). I don't have preinstalled bloatware issues and I have the peace of mind that the hardware inside was personally chosen by me and not by some OEM who most likely threw the parts together haphazardly in some Chinese factory. If IBM compatibles never appeared I would probably have to actually make my own hardware to appreciate this much freedom, a pricey, difficult, and possibly illegal process. If IBM wasn't so lax about their PC design the microcomputer market would be much like the console market, with some programs being exclusively made for certain vendors in an attempt to force the consumer to buy the expensive hardware possibly just to enjoy that one piece of software. Household adoption would never have happened on the scale that it has today because it would just be too costly to have to own two or three different machines to get access to all of the software you would want or need. It could also give software manufacturers de facto monopolies on each respective machine, since their competition might either find it too difficult or expensive to port their software or there might even be legal barriers put in place to make porting impossible. Imagine having to have to own an IBM, an Apple, an Atari, and an Amiga just to get all of your work done. I'd quit before that and settle for a typewriter and a telephone before I'd buy four different machines.
Thanks for the tip, but I've already gotten it taken care of.:)
I suppose I could have also unplugged the keyboard before turning the PC on so as to get the same error. Easier than pressing all those keys at the same time in my opinion, although that of course wouldn't have worked for a laptop.
Well most Apple devices have slot drives, while most PCs have tray drives. It takes longer to get the tray open, closed, and the CD or DVD recognized, combined with the temporary disabling of the eject key immediately after powering on, than to just slide it into a slot drive.
I do wish Apple would put a real eject key on their drives though.
ME also removed a lot of legacy DOS stuff save for the DOS parts in the kernel that were absolutely necessary. It makes more since to say that XP was 2000 with Luna, product activation, a 9x compatibility layer, and much more resource consumption (although I imagine that the last one might just be a consequence of the first three).
I've actually found that 3.1 was more stable for me than 95, especially once I found out that the majority of my 3.1 headaches were actually caused by a faulty CD-ROM drive on the 3.1 machine. This machine also had 95 on it, and suffered from the same CD-ROM woes, but 95 on this machine also had trouble with programs that were strictly on the hard disk.
Ditching the BIOS will only save a few seconds at best. In my experience most of the time spent waiting for Windows to be usable is not waiting for the drivers to load but waiting for all of those (mostly unnecessary) background processes to start up after logging in. And in any case those few seconds are vital if someone wants to boot from a CD. The American Megatrends BIOS in my built computer literally loads the OS almost immediately after being turned on when the quick test is used instead of a full POST. I found this so annoying that I had to actually enable the full POST along with a custom boot image to slow it down enough to be able to get those precious seconds back, which was not an easy task since I had pretty much a half-second to enter the BIOS setup.
The above argument of course is more about public betas as opposed to private ones, but the argument applies even more to in-house private betas since there are even fewer testers of these betas than the public ones due to artificial barriers set up by the company.
The concept of first adopters as beta testers isn't unique to proprietary software; free software developers do it too. That being said, it's pretty naive to assume that all developers do this on purpose. Rather it's because the standard end-user wants stable and reliable software. Knowing that beta means potentially buggy, many end-users avoid it like the plague, but when they see the word release they assume that means stable and safe for use and are far more willing to embrace it and use it. While these definitions are true in theory, in practice the significantly smaller number of beta testers compared to the early adopters of release software makes it much more difficult for bugs to be found in the beta stage as opposed to the release stage. Free software's bazaar model allows for many more beta testers than proprietary software's more selective and sometimes backwards process (indeed, in some cases the testers actually have to pay the developers to provide them with the service of assisting them in finding bugs during the early stages of the beta phase) and so it has that advantage, but both forms of development suffer from the same principal fault; the mere label of beta has the potential to scare away more testers than the label release.
I'm not suggesting that developers start lying and calling their betas "releases" just to get a higher testing populace, but the much larger base of end-users who can't be bothered with unreliable software because they have more important things to do in their minds compared with those who are willing to use bleeding edge software even if it may still be buggy ironically seems to have the effect of punishing the former group as much as the latter.
"No DRM" does not necessarily mean "share my stuff." It could just mean "listen to my music on any player you want," given that that is probably the loudest anti-DRM argument at the moment.
Of course, a lot of artists, indie and major, don't explicitly address whether or not they actually mind others sharing their works on P2P networks. It could be that they abhor the practice but don't want to publicly admit it for PR reasons, or it could be that they secretly condone the practice and would encourage it but are silenced by their labels. The law requires that permission to distribute be explicitly granted by the copyright holder for it to actually be legal. The question is whether or not the artist or label (or whoever holds the copyright) will exert their legal authority or turn a blind eye, and such ambiguity makes the question of whether or not to share a difficult one.
From what I recall Radiohead has been on both sides of the P2P issue. They were glad for the Napster publicity that they got for Kid A but several years later were pissed that an unfinished album (I can't remember the album's name at the moment) was physically stolen from the studio and leaked.
The difference there is that the distributions are explicitly licensed to be distributed freely. The Radiohead album was not. If someone really wanted to help Radiohead out with their album distribution he or she could have just asked them if they wanted to set up a tracker.
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Perhaps, but at the expense of a competitive market and interoperability. Sure, the shitty architecture won out in the end, and it had the unfortunate side effect of pretty much killing the OS market, both of which I wish didn't happen, but the uniformity of hardware that the IBM clones made allows for us to have several interchangeable vendors in the market and thus levels out the PC playing field. Now OEMs actually have to compete with each other on a level that resembles more of a perfectly competitive market than an oligopoly. In my opinion it's much like how having one standard audio or video format has allowed player manufacturers to focus more on quality and features than having to worry about compatibility. It also helps the more computer illiterate. Grandma doesn't have to worry as much whether or not her new hard drive will work with her particular PC model. The same PCI card can potentially work with a Gateway, a Sony, a Dell, a Toshiba, and now even an Apple. The best part of this near universal support is that people like myself can now build our own PCs instead of settling for an OEM model. My ~$700 Pentium 4 I built back in 2004 was probably worth at least twice as much back then (and is still worth that much to me now). I don't have preinstalled bloatware issues and I have the peace of mind that the hardware inside was personally chosen by me and not by some OEM who most likely threw the parts together haphazardly in some Chinese factory. If IBM compatibles never appeared I would probably have to actually make my own hardware to appreciate this much freedom, a pricey, difficult, and possibly illegal process. If IBM wasn't so lax about their PC design the microcomputer market would be much like the console market, with some programs being exclusively made for certain vendors in an attempt to force the consumer to buy the expensive hardware possibly just to enjoy that one piece of software. Household adoption would never have happened on the scale that it has today because it would just be too costly to have to own two or three different machines to get access to all of the software you would want or need. It could also give software manufacturers de facto monopolies on each respective machine, since their competition might either find it too difficult or expensive to port their software or there might even be legal barriers put in place to make porting impossible. Imagine having to have to own an IBM, an Apple, an Atari, and an Amiga just to get all of your work done. I'd quit before that and settle for a typewriter and a telephone before I'd buy four different machines.
Because he doesn't work at Apple anymore.
Thanks for the tip, but I've already gotten it taken care of. :)
I suppose I could have also unplugged the keyboard before turning the PC on so as to get the same error. Easier than pressing all those keys at the same time in my opinion, although that of course wouldn't have worked for a laptop.
Well most Apple devices have slot drives, while most PCs have tray drives. It takes longer to get the tray open, closed, and the CD or DVD recognized, combined with the temporary disabling of the eject key immediately after powering on, than to just slide it into a slot drive.
I do wish Apple would put a real eject key on their drives though.
My mistake. I've never had the misfortune of having to use ME so I didn't know for sure.
ME also removed a lot of legacy DOS stuff save for the DOS parts in the kernel that were absolutely necessary. It makes more since to say that XP was 2000 with Luna, product activation, a 9x compatibility layer, and much more resource consumption (although I imagine that the last one might just be a consequence of the first three).
I've actually found that 3.1 was more stable for me than 95, especially once I found out that the majority of my 3.1 headaches were actually caused by a faulty CD-ROM drive on the 3.1 machine. This machine also had 95 on it, and suffered from the same CD-ROM woes, but 95 on this machine also had trouble with programs that were strictly on the hard disk.
Ditching the BIOS will only save a few seconds at best. In my experience most of the time spent waiting for Windows to be usable is not waiting for the drivers to load but waiting for all of those (mostly unnecessary) background processes to start up after logging in. And in any case those few seconds are vital if someone wants to boot from a CD. The American Megatrends BIOS in my built computer literally loads the OS almost immediately after being turned on when the quick test is used instead of a full POST. I found this so annoying that I had to actually enable the full POST along with a custom boot image to slow it down enough to be able to get those precious seconds back, which was not an easy task since I had pretty much a half-second to enter the BIOS setup.
The above argument of course is more about public betas as opposed to private ones, but the argument applies even more to in-house private betas since there are even fewer testers of these betas than the public ones due to artificial barriers set up by the company.
The concept of first adopters as beta testers isn't unique to proprietary software; free software developers do it too. That being said, it's pretty naive to assume that all developers do this on purpose. Rather it's because the standard end-user wants stable and reliable software. Knowing that beta means potentially buggy, many end-users avoid it like the plague, but when they see the word release they assume that means stable and safe for use and are far more willing to embrace it and use it. While these definitions are true in theory, in practice the significantly smaller number of beta testers compared to the early adopters of release software makes it much more difficult for bugs to be found in the beta stage as opposed to the release stage. Free software's bazaar model allows for many more beta testers than proprietary software's more selective and sometimes backwards process (indeed, in some cases the testers actually have to pay the developers to provide them with the service of assisting them in finding bugs during the early stages of the beta phase) and so it has that advantage, but both forms of development suffer from the same principal fault; the mere label of beta has the potential to scare away more testers than the label release.
I'm not suggesting that developers start lying and calling their betas "releases" just to get a higher testing populace, but the much larger base of end-users who can't be bothered with unreliable software because they have more important things to do in their minds compared with those who are willing to use bleeding edge software even if it may still be buggy ironically seems to have the effect of punishing the former group as much as the latter.
If that's the case, I can imagine seeing robot rights activists popping up in the next 50 years or so.
"No DRM" does not necessarily mean "share my stuff." It could just mean "listen to my music on any player you want," given that that is probably the loudest anti-DRM argument at the moment.
Of course, a lot of artists, indie and major, don't explicitly address whether or not they actually mind others sharing their works on P2P networks. It could be that they abhor the practice but don't want to publicly admit it for PR reasons, or it could be that they secretly condone the practice and would encourage it but are silenced by their labels. The law requires that permission to distribute be explicitly granted by the copyright holder for it to actually be legal. The question is whether or not the artist or label (or whoever holds the copyright) will exert their legal authority or turn a blind eye, and such ambiguity makes the question of whether or not to share a difficult one.
From what I recall Radiohead has been on both sides of the P2P issue. They were glad for the Napster publicity that they got for Kid A but several years later were pissed that an unfinished album (I can't remember the album's name at the moment) was physically stolen from the studio and leaked.
The difference there is that the distributions are explicitly licensed to be distributed freely. The Radiohead album was not. If someone really wanted to help Radiohead out with their album distribution he or she could have just asked them if they wanted to set up a tracker.