It is not that FOSS developers hate ABI compatibility. It is that the value of such compatibility for important projects (FOSS ones) is very near zero, thus why should they have extra work to achieve it?
Not at all, the value of ABI compatibility is so great that RedHat is a billion dollar company. (Everyone around here thinks RH sells phone support, but their real product is a stable Linux OS that isn't going blow up in the next three years.) There is a real economic angle here. RedHat employs developers who are busy breaking Fedora every six months. Then they employ other developers who save you from those crazy FOSSies by stabilizing and QAing things. It's a good racket.
Everyone discusses this as if it were just a matter of pure ideology. But ABI compatibility, regression testing, etc is an expensive proposition to provide. FOSS developers in general don't do it mostly because it's hard, boring work. It's much more fun to rewrite things and let the Enterprise customer deal with the aftermath.
When it comes to the Linux desktop, I think if the users were "serious", 90% of them would be on something like CentOS or Ubuntu LTS, not dealing with OS breakage and just getting their work done. But the users aren't serious, they're largely hobbyists who like to screw around with the latest and greatest toys. That's why there's 10 new distros to install every six months.
I've seen Firefox rendering issues that weren't even specific to an OS, it turned out to be video card related or something. Try disabling FF's hardware acceleration options and see if makes any difference.
Both were only crippled by lack of software. They were good OS/S that actually had excellent performance on systems of that era - OS/2 was much faster on the same hardware than Windows of the time, and Be/OS did many things faster than anyone.
OS/2 was so poorly designed that IBM was already doing a major rewrite in the mid-1990s. (WorkplaceOS, it failed.)
Sorry, but this still seems like the myopic POV of someone trying to squeeze every last cycle out of his Pentium. The operating systems that survived were the ones which didn't skimp on the fundamentals and were designed for the future: NextStep/OSX, NT, and Linux.
more or less a Wintel monoculture in the 90s, where the only points of distinction between different computers was numbers of MHz, and MBs. The 90s in computing was horrible.
From a pure 'computing' perspective, I'd agree. However, there were huge advances in commodification, manufacturing scale, and user adoption. I'm not sure where we'd be without that monopolistic "dark age" which pushed computers into the hands of billions. I don't think we would have necessarily gotten here had we stuck with the grotesque incompatibility of the 1980s.
Both your examples had some interesting ideas with their UIs. But they were both also extremely crippled to get them to run acceptably on the limited hardware of the eras. Now that you can run full-fledged Unix OS on your cellphone, it's hard to shed a tear for stuff that was obsolete almost on arrival.
Recall, if you will, all the build-up to the "Grand Alliance" that gave us today's ATSC (HDTV) standard. There was politicing on...
Not to mention that the consumer electronic people insisted on interlaced resolutions (1080i), that were practically obsolete by the time HDTV actually rolled out to the mass market.
The angst over XP's DRM didn't die down that quickly, especially at places like Slashdot. Remember when Microsoft banned the one particular corporate key every other pirate was using? Or when they snuck some new form of activation through Windows Update? Eventually it was cracked wide-open, but people were moaning about it for years.
I remember the internet as it was before advertising became so widespread. I rather liked it. If everyone starts using ad-blockers, perhaps I can have it back?
No problem, just lobby your University to raise your tuition in order to build a special network where you can discuss Star Trek in peace.... Oh wait, you're no longer a University student? Well, there's this other service where you can discuss Star Trek for $1 per minute.
That's obviously not his concern. Google offers free analytics (previously an expensive service) because they can use his traffic to advertise to his users, based on his own site's content. If you happen to be against the whole idea of ad-supported sites, it's kinda silly to hand over user behavior data to an advertising company.
The other aspect of this is that if you block ads, you drop out of Google/Doubleclick's statistics, and your traffic just fades into the noise level along with the bots. In most cases, nobody will ever know what you're interested in looking at, or that you visited at all.
But realistically, unless you're YouTube or someone, the cost of hosting/bandwidth is insignificant relative to the other costs. Junk traffic is just part of the cost of doing business. The bigger issue is that people will produce less content that you like (and yes techies already have this reputation).
They should just go back to the "good" old days and just charge a flat price and be done with it. Incidentally, those were the monopoly days, too, so obviously something was going well for Microsoft with that plan.
Sorry, that was never the case. Even their various BASICs had OEM discount pricing.
If you look at Apple's revenues, they barely make any money off their store. The only way that will change is if people start using these stores to deliver real applications instead of 99 cents casual games. Just because Valve might be a little vulnerable on the games side does not mean it's going to be a huge revenue stream for MS.
You do have a point about adoption though. MS makes most of their money from OEMs and corporate licenses. However, it was the "PC enthusiast" home builder-type guy who effectively FUDed Vista to death. So it does make sense to try to market directly to those (us) people, because that's where the word-of-mouth comes from. (And in typical MS fashion, it's rather hamhanded.)
Sure, Apple is fundamentally very solid. However, there's tons of negative hype about Windows 8 going on in various investor forums, specifically regarding Apple, so I do think that's a big factor in the recent runup. (Along with iphone 5 anticipation.)
And some of that is "real"; specifically there's going to be a battle for enterprise tablet adoption between iPad and MS Surface-type hardware, which imo Apple has a very good chance of winning.
I can't see how this really matters. The price of Win8 is low already primarily for the reason they want you to adopt it. The reason they accept a lower price to increase adoption is that they feel they'll be making up the difference in that 30% they are going to be charging for their software store.
It doesn't even require any nefarious motives, MS simply finally woke up and realized their was a huge disparity between their retail prices and the far lower volume prices. If Dell is only paying $30 a copy, why were they even trying to get $300 from joe home builder? It was stupid and they finally figured it out.
Not to mention that Microsoft's old price sheet literally dates back to the 1980s and OS/2. People used to pay $300 for Windows NT Workstation and install it on their $2500 PC, pretty good deal compared to Unix, eh? But it's 2012 now and nobody is paying that kind of money to install an OS on their $400 laptop.
Only in the last few weeks have investors started to think "hmm, perhaps this Apple company has something going" and is suddenly starting to accelerate the stock price to match other popular company P/E values.
Actually IMO it's more "Only in the last few week, investors realized Windows 8 is going to bomb hard". (Semi regretfully, if I cared about day-trading, predictable money could have been made.)
The GUI look-and-feel that has more-or-less been unchanged since MacOS System 1.0, even through OS X, is not a sign of lack-of-innovation. Rather it is part of the consistency that makes users happy.
Naw, its true the the classic Mac GUI completely stagnated after System 7. Most of the additions were simply bolting on various popular freeware/shareware hacks such as 'window shades'. It was pretty clear that nobody had really thought through how various tasks should work; for example there was a toolbar which allowed you to turn off networking with one click, but it took two clicks to switch applications with the menu. Likewise, you had the Apple Menu functioning as a launcher, but adding programs to it was like four step process.
One of the nice things about OS X is that Apple is no longer wedded "how it's always worked" and have actually done quite a great job of filing off the sharp edges of the old Mac experience. For example, Expose. Or that some people actually want "maximized" (full screen) applications. Or that an app with no open windows should automatically quit.
ArsTechnica tried it - it works but Windows' scaling can be janky. They didn't test battery life, but judging by my plain old MBP, it's probably worse.
Brand loyalty arises when you interact with a company, and they give you a positive experience whether through sales, support, returns, customer service, etc.
I think you're absolutely correct about that, and Microsoft's strategy here might be more about the support & customer service channels than just the shiny hardware. On slashdot, we may mock the "Genius Bar", but Apple absolutely owns the "Geek Squad" in terms of support experience for the average user. Of course, there's only a handful of Microsoft Stores right now, but that will probably change quickly.
CUA was an IBM/Microsoft thing, so you really are splitting hairs. But I guess to be technically correct, Motif claimed to be based on OS/2 Presentation Manager 1.x, which looked pretty similar to Windows 3.1.
The conspiracy theorist in me believes the Unix vendors wanted Microsoft to design the look&feel to avoid being sued by Apple. (MS had a licence from Apple for GUI technology, and had already beaten them in court.)
Yep, that pastel color scheme may have looked really high-tech during the Reagan administration, but even by the mid-1990s it was seemed like a museum piece.
However it's too bad the source code wasn't released back in the 1990s, people could have modernized the look and possibly avoided much of the KDE versus Gnome nonsense.
> They didn't even pre-load it on their *own* computers. To this day I can't figure out why
Here's why:
I worked at a company which had standardized on DOS/WFW and bought a lot of ThinkPads. One day the ThinkPads show up and surprisingly boot into OS/2. Long-story-short, the company's IT managers flipped out and cancelled all the ThinkPad orders until IBM started shipping them with DOS again.
Oh, and OS/2 was completely worthless on these machines, as unlike WFW, it didn't include any networking software.
This arrangement lasted into the NT era. First real IT job I ever had was in a huge corp which managed PCs on the department level. You could walk around and see one group of people on DOS/Novell, the next group on Macs, the next running X11 Unix apps on Windows, and even some NT 3.5 and Citrix. Total chaos.
Of course, the whole reason I was there was to assist with the IT standardization effort.
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Sure it is, or at least should be. Security fixes are backported, otherwise any given RH release does not change.
It is not that FOSS developers hate ABI compatibility. It is that the value of such compatibility for important projects (FOSS ones) is very near zero, thus why should they have extra work to achieve it?
Not at all, the value of ABI compatibility is so great that RedHat is a billion dollar company. (Everyone around here thinks RH sells phone support, but their real product is a stable Linux OS that isn't going blow up in the next three years.) There is a real economic angle here. RedHat employs developers who are busy breaking Fedora every six months. Then they employ other developers who save you from those crazy FOSSies by stabilizing and QAing things. It's a good racket.
Everyone discusses this as if it were just a matter of pure ideology. But ABI compatibility, regression testing, etc is an expensive proposition to provide. FOSS developers in general don't do it mostly because it's hard, boring work. It's much more fun to rewrite things and let the Enterprise customer deal with the aftermath.
When it comes to the Linux desktop, I think if the users were "serious", 90% of them would be on something like CentOS or Ubuntu LTS, not dealing with OS breakage and just getting their work done. But the users aren't serious, they're largely hobbyists who like to screw around with the latest and greatest toys. That's why there's 10 new distros to install every six months.
I've seen Firefox rendering issues that weren't even specific to an OS, it turned out to be video card related or something. Try disabling FF's hardware acceleration options and see if makes any difference.
Both were only crippled by lack of software. They were good OS/S that actually had excellent performance on systems of that era - OS/2 was much faster on the same hardware than Windows of the time, and Be/OS did many things faster than anyone.
OS/2 was so poorly designed that IBM was already doing a major rewrite in the mid-1990s. (WorkplaceOS, it failed.)
Sorry, but this still seems like the myopic POV of someone trying to squeeze every last cycle out of his Pentium. The operating systems that survived were the ones which didn't skimp on the fundamentals and were designed for the future: NextStep/OSX, NT, and Linux.
more or less a Wintel monoculture in the 90s, where the only points of distinction between different computers was numbers of MHz, and MBs. The 90s in computing was horrible.
From a pure 'computing' perspective, I'd agree. However, there were huge advances in commodification, manufacturing scale, and user adoption. I'm not sure where we'd be without that monopolistic "dark age" which pushed computers into the hands of billions. I don't think we would have necessarily gotten here had we stuck with the grotesque incompatibility of the 1980s.
OS/2 -- aka "Half an operating system".
Both your examples had some interesting ideas with their UIs. But they were both also extremely crippled to get them to run acceptably on the limited hardware of the eras. Now that you can run full-fledged Unix OS on your cellphone, it's hard to shed a tear for stuff that was obsolete almost on arrival.
Recall, if you will, all the build-up to the "Grand Alliance" that gave us today's ATSC (HDTV) standard. There was politicing on ...
Not to mention that the consumer electronic people insisted on interlaced resolutions (1080i), that were practically obsolete by the time HDTV actually rolled out to the mass market.
The angst over XP's DRM didn't die down that quickly, especially at places like Slashdot. Remember when Microsoft banned the one particular corporate key every other pirate was using? Or when they snuck some new form of activation through Windows Update? Eventually it was cracked wide-open, but people were moaning about it for years.
On that note, Microsoft had secret easter eggs in their BASIC interpreter:
http://www.pagetable.com/?p=43 (bonus confirmation by Bill Gates in the comments)
I remember the internet as it was before advertising became so widespread. I rather liked it. If everyone starts using ad-blockers, perhaps I can have it back?
No problem, just lobby your University to raise your tuition in order to build a special network where you can discuss Star Trek in peace. ... Oh wait, you're no longer a University student? Well, there's this other service where you can discuss Star Trek for $1 per minute.
That's obviously not his concern. Google offers free analytics (previously an expensive service) because they can use his traffic to advertise to his users, based on his own site's content. If you happen to be against the whole idea of ad-supported sites, it's kinda silly to hand over user behavior data to an advertising company.
The only sites which need revenue are the ones which don't know how to monetize their brand in other ways.
Hey, I think we finally found the guy who bought a Slashdot Cruiser.
> ...doesn't understand how the Internet works.
The other aspect of this is that if you block ads, you drop out of Google/Doubleclick's statistics, and your traffic just fades into the noise level along with the bots. In most cases, nobody will ever know what you're interested in looking at, or that you visited at all.
But realistically, unless you're YouTube or someone, the cost of hosting/bandwidth is insignificant relative to the other costs. Junk traffic is just part of the cost of doing business. The bigger issue is that people will produce less content that you like (and yes techies already have this reputation).
They should just go back to the "good" old days and just charge a flat price and be done with it. Incidentally, those were the monopoly days, too, so obviously something was going well for Microsoft with that plan.
Sorry, that was never the case. Even their various BASICs had OEM discount pricing.
If you look at Apple's revenues, they barely make any money off their store. The only way that will change is if people start using these stores to deliver real applications instead of 99 cents casual games. Just because Valve might be a little vulnerable on the games side does not mean it's going to be a huge revenue stream for MS.
You do have a point about adoption though. MS makes most of their money from OEMs and corporate licenses. However, it was the "PC enthusiast" home builder-type guy who effectively FUDed Vista to death. So it does make sense to try to market directly to those (us) people, because that's where the word-of-mouth comes from. (And in typical MS fashion, it's rather hamhanded.)
Sure, Apple is fundamentally very solid. However, there's tons of negative hype about Windows 8 going on in various investor forums, specifically regarding Apple, so I do think that's a big factor in the recent runup. (Along with iphone 5 anticipation.)
And some of that is "real"; specifically there's going to be a battle for enterprise tablet adoption between iPad and MS Surface-type hardware, which imo Apple has a very good chance of winning.
I can't see how this really matters. The price of Win8 is low already primarily for the reason they want you to adopt it. The reason they accept a lower price to increase adoption is that they feel they'll be making up the difference in that 30% they are going to be charging for their software store.
It doesn't even require any nefarious motives, MS simply finally woke up and realized their was a huge disparity between their retail prices and the far lower volume prices. If Dell is only paying $30 a copy, why were they even trying to get $300 from joe home builder? It was stupid and they finally figured it out.
Not to mention that Microsoft's old price sheet literally dates back to the 1980s and OS/2. People used to pay $300 for Windows NT Workstation and install it on their $2500 PC, pretty good deal compared to Unix, eh? But it's 2012 now and nobody is paying that kind of money to install an OS on their $400 laptop.
Only in the last few weeks have investors started to think "hmm, perhaps this Apple company has something going" and is suddenly starting to accelerate the stock price to match other popular company P/E values.
Actually IMO it's more "Only in the last few week, investors realized Windows 8 is going to bomb hard". (Semi regretfully, if I cared about day-trading, predictable money could have been made.)
The GUI look-and-feel that has more-or-less been unchanged since MacOS System 1.0, even through OS X, is not a sign of lack-of-innovation. Rather it is part of the consistency that makes users happy.
Naw, its true the the classic Mac GUI completely stagnated after System 7. Most of the additions were simply bolting on various popular freeware/shareware hacks such as 'window shades'. It was pretty clear that nobody had really thought through how various tasks should work; for example there was a toolbar which allowed you to turn off networking with one click, but it took two clicks to switch applications with the menu. Likewise, you had the Apple Menu functioning as a launcher, but adding programs to it was like four step process.
One of the nice things about OS X is that Apple is no longer wedded "how it's always worked" and have actually done quite a great job of filing off the sharp edges of the old Mac experience. For example, Expose. Or that some people actually want "maximized" (full screen) applications. Or that an app with no open windows should automatically quit.
ArsTechnica tried it - it works but Windows' scaling can be janky. They didn't test battery life, but judging by my plain old MBP, it's probably worse.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/windows-and-os-x-boot-camp-running-redmond-at-retina-resolution/
Brand loyalty arises when you interact with a company, and they give you a positive experience whether through sales, support, returns, customer service, etc.
I think you're absolutely correct about that, and Microsoft's strategy here might be more about the support & customer service channels than just the shiny hardware. On slashdot, we may mock the "Genius Bar", but Apple absolutely owns the "Geek Squad" in terms of support experience for the average user. Of course, there's only a handful of Microsoft Stores right now, but that will probably change quickly.
CUA was an IBM/Microsoft thing, so you really are splitting hairs. But I guess to be technically correct, Motif claimed to be based on OS/2 Presentation Manager 1.x, which looked pretty similar to Windows 3.1.
The conspiracy theorist in me believes the Unix vendors wanted Microsoft to design the look&feel to avoid being sued by Apple. (MS had a licence from Apple for GUI technology, and had already beaten them in court.)
Yep, that pastel color scheme may have looked really high-tech during the Reagan administration, but even by the mid-1990s it was seemed like a museum piece.
However it's too bad the source code wasn't released back in the 1990s, people could have modernized the look and possibly avoided much of the KDE versus Gnome nonsense.
> They didn't even pre-load it on their *own* computers. To this day I can't figure out why
Here's why:
I worked at a company which had standardized on DOS/WFW and bought a lot of ThinkPads. One day the ThinkPads show up and surprisingly boot into OS/2. Long-story-short, the company's IT managers flipped out and cancelled all the ThinkPad orders until IBM started shipping them with DOS again.
Oh, and OS/2 was completely worthless on these machines, as unlike WFW, it didn't include any networking software.
This arrangement lasted into the NT era. First real IT job I ever had was in a huge corp which managed PCs on the department level. You could walk around and see one group of people on DOS/Novell, the next group on Macs, the next running X11 Unix apps on Windows, and even some NT 3.5 and Citrix. Total chaos.
Of course, the whole reason I was there was to assist with the IT standardization effort.