Trying to blame the CPU iteself for Windows 2000 incompatibilties with a laptop is a little strange. Windows 2000 has all sorts of known issues with buggy ACPI and APM BIOS implementations.
Check for a BIOS update and try the release version of Winders. I would imagine that Microsoft would take Compaq support fairly seriously. --
Yup, I remember tearing apart my Blip as a kid and just watching the gears and pinions move around. (It was pretty easy because the 'ball' only moved in a straight line and only changed angles in the middle, and there were only three end points on each end. It also was kinda buggy, iirc.)
It is a strange relic though, especially because electronic games were already popular (ohhh, Mattel Football..) --
One thing you might want to try is www.thinkfree.com. They have a Linux-compatible Java clone of MS Word that did a pretty good job converting my files. --
DataViz allowed Apple to ship their converters in an attempt to get more users on their upgrade treadmill.
It didn't work, and in fact less people paid for their software because it was free with the OS.
Face it -- being able to open Ami or WPG files on the Mac is a extremely small nitch market. As a Mac user, I've got worse problems (like these damn FreeHand 3 files I made long ago, now unopenable by anything except FreeHand 4. Meanwhile, FreeHand 9 is shipping.) --
First of all, I don't think that the next version of Word's format will be pure XML. Probably more like HTML4 + CSS2 + Some made up or unapproved parts of CSS3 + Some extra stuff MS invented + XML. I would expect it to be able to somewhat gracefully devolve and be somewhat viewable on IE4/5 and NS4.
If I'm right, then Unix users are in better shape than they are today. Of course, I could be totally wrong - it could be pure XML voodoo, or worse, require some special IIS-only middleware software before being viewable on the web.
serializing objects in XML format will not necessarily result in formats that are significantly more readable, accessible, or backwards compatible
Well, this is pretty much certain, given their current architecture. Ugg, I can see it now:
Every new release of the Word format (6.0, 97), there's been a semi-working converter released for the old versions of Word.
Plus, once you apply the service pack to Word 97, the default format becomes 6.0/95, unless you add some 97-only feature, in which case Mr Clipass warns you. (Microsoft added this behavior after some huge heat from their own customers.)
you have bought a license for that piece of software, and you should be able to install it on whatever machine you want.
Perhaps you should look up the definition of "license". You only have the rights that the licence allows you to have. I can't tell if you are being idealistic about licences, or just stupid.
The machine-locked versions of Windows are sold at a discount. You save money, you have less rights. Is that so difficult?
As far as the tax goes, you are right on -- Not only does this screw non-Windows users, it also screws Microsoft's paying corporate customers. We have a Windows NT/2000 site licence at work. But we buy machines with 98 pre-installed because it saves us $100/machine. We could save another $100 if we bought 'bare disk' machines, but Dell won't sell them to us because we're too small.
Whether or not Microsoft gets broken up, it's a sure bet that the OEM contract restrictions will get put in place. Hopefully this will give Microsoft's biggest customers (Dell/Compaq/IBM) the balls to actually stand up for their own customers. Some day we might actually see a dropdown on a web site which reads like: OEM Windows 98 [Can not be transferred] ($0) / Bare Disk (-$92) / Retail Windows 98 [Can be transferred] (+$102) --
Microsoft learned from the Copy Protection Backlash in the early 80s -- As long as the big, corporate customers don't feel any pain, it's OK.
That licence is a little strange -- an MSDN subscription is not that expensive. Certainly cheaper than site licencing, and apparently legal to install on all your company's PCs and servers. --
No, they're going to get really pissed off and borrow someone else's copy.
The idea is to dry up the supply of the 'real' CDs. If all your friends only have Recovery CDs, and you don't have access to someone with IT connections, you are up the creek.
What's intersting about this policy is that in the past, Microsoft has been horrible about updating their retail products. Until 1998, if you wanted to buy Windows 95, you had to buy the ancient 9/95 version. Meanwhile, the only practical way to get the 1997 "OEM 2.5" version was with an OEM system. This new policy is going to go to hell if they aren't better about updating their retail products. --
I have an IBM Intellistation from last year, and it did not come with a recovery CD. Standard OEM copy of Windows NT Workstation and a second driver CD.
I recall an IBM recovery CD from a couple years back that would install SmartSuite, whether you wanted it or not. Compaq and Gateway also install tons and tons of crap on their consumer systems. I suspect that's why OEMs are going along with this policy -- not only does it lower their support costs (Problem of any sort? Use the recovery CD!), but it also ensures that users are properly spammed with the OEMs software and marketing tie-ins. --
Microsoft has traditionally been one of the least anti-piracy companies. After all, if users are running around installing bootleg Windows 98 (or whatever), it's only a matter of time until the IT department buckles under the pressure and buys the upgrade. Maybe they think they've finally reached market saturation, and it's time to crack down.
What sucks about these changes is that they are carefully crafted so that the burden doesn't fall on the corporate customers at all. Dell can do whatever, but I would imagine that a good number of their corporate customers reformat and install a disk image. Microsoft is still happily spamming my workplace with all sorts of MSDN CDs, all unlocked (you don't even need to enter a registration code), which we IT goons all happily burn copies and install at home. That's OK with them because we are in a position to influnce purchasing, but apparently someone reselling their OEM CD on eBay or at a computer show is a huge revenue loss.
Meanwhile, the small vendors, small business that buy things preinstalled, and home users are the ones getting the shaft. The question is how much pain users are willing to go through before the backlash starts. Only that MS has the lowend market locked up so tight, there's not much people will be able to do, short of real warezing (as opposed to casual piracy like borrowing someone's CD). --
I heard somewhere in the early 90s that IBM made about $5 per PC sold, on licences for things like the ISA bus and VGA hardware. The key was that all of this tech is being licenced by the Microelectronics division, which wasn't interested into getting into PC brand politics with things like MicroChannel.
I would suspect that some of those patents have expired, but for other (like VGA), IBM is still making a few cents per video card sold.
The lesson of Apple is that no matter how good your tech is, the computer industry is always expanding faster than your production capacity. Libreral licencing of PC tech was a smart move, and IBM has made out much better than if the PC was closed. (Although, Microsoft, another open licencer, has made out far better than IBM has.) --
What's the real difference between an IBM PC AT and a CP/M machine? Not that much, it seems. Especially since the PC AT came with schematics, Intel and IBM Microelectronics would happily sell you the parts, and you even had the (C) IBM BIOS source code to burn on your personal eprom.
Of course, the hardware chaos of the CP/M days really brought out the "open standard" of IBM PC AT clones. It was a pain in the ass when everyone had incompatible floppy drives, character sets, and BIOS tweaks. So we do it the way IBM said to, and lug around 19 years of backward compatibility to this day. --
There is also something which I've heard called the "Osborne Effect" (after the ill-fated lugable PC maker of the late 70s), which says that the more customers here about the next great thing, the less likely people will buy your existing products.
Of course, this never hurt Microsoft, who was telling anyone who would listen about Windows 2000 way back in 1997. --
I'm sorry, but I shall have to disagree with you: a file manager is NOT a HTML browser!
One thing that's remained absurdly constant over the last 12 years or so is that regular (l)users have real trouble understanding "Shared Drives" (as they call it in DOS-space) or mounted directories or network paths or whatever. The concept of a "hard drive" being somewhere "on the network" just eludes them.
On the other hand, most users take to webpages like water. Back on "Pearl Harbor Day" in 1995, when Microsoft announced that they were going to integrate IE into Windows, my third thought was that there was lots of potential in the idea. (My first thought was that it would be bloated and slow and crash a bunch, and my second was that this was going to put Netscape out of business, but that's another Slashdot story...)
Imagine a system, which instead of presenting a dull list of file attributes and creation dates, presented metadata about there in, or one which could provide instructions along with the files, to help the users share their information, or which allowed quick searching and sorting from a GUI interface, or one which could provide simple document managment and versioning.
Of course, Microsoft hardly implemented any of the application-level features to make web integration really anything more than slower, crashier, more illegal version of the same thing. Part of the reason is that they sell products like Exchange that do many of these tasks. On the other hand, a open source infrastructure which provides web integration would be more likely to be expanded to support some really useful applications that run above the filesystem.
Call me old fashioned, but I happen to think that for file management
You're not old fashioned, you're just a geek. Users don't manage 'files', they manage information. --
One way to get around it thoough would be for MS to just document it all.
It's highly unlikely that Microsoft has a "Secret Win32 API" manual floating around it's headquarters. In many cases, I'd bet the source code (and the comments therein) is the documentation.
Microsoft shall disclose to ISVs, IHVs, and OEMs in a Timely Manner, in whatever media Microsoft disseminates such information to its own personnel, all APIs, Technical Information and Communications Interfaces that Microsoft employs
The court probably knows that a major part of this media is source code access, and therefore MS will need to provide source code to it's competitors until it goes back and rewrites all of the published documentation so that it's good enough for their own developers.
The Office formats are documented, but the OLE Structured Stream format that they rely on are not.
See http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/books/inole/S118 1.HTM --
1 Microsoft licenses the ANSI C++ source code for Compound Files as a reference implementation for those who want to use the technology on other platforms such as UNIX and OS/2. Microsoft provides the implementation for Windows and Macintosh as part of OLE. --
An other effect is that higher rents will make more people share apartments
One thing that's happened in San Francisco is that not only have the rents been going way up, the lease conditions have been greatly tightened. Six years ago, I lived in a place with between 3 and 6 other roommates (varying), a dog, with only a verbal lease between the landlord and one of the roommates, and only a $500 deposit.
Nowdays, it's virtually universal that all residents have to be on the lease, the deposits are very high (up to 2x a months rent), there are credit checks up the wazoo, and of course no pets.
So, there's lots of ancedotal evidence that the population density has actually decreased in the last couple years. I can count several roommate houses that have been replaced by a nice professional couple or a couple well-off young computer guys.
As far as "supply and demand", rent control does not except the housing market. It only postpones or accelerates the supply and demand mechinisms. Where the average rent of a 1-bedroom in SF might be $800, when one opens up, the landlord feels he has to charge $1500, because he might not be able to raise the rent again for many years. Meanwhile, others are paying $300 for the same apartment.
People adjust to how the market works (in SF, that means don't move if you can help it). When these mechinisms get changed, the 'supply & demand' equalibrium gets thrown into a turmoil. Obviously, when the listing prices for housing is going up 30% a year, people with apartments are holding on to Rent Control as the only way they can stay in they place they want to. --
Santa Clara thought that they could put in a light rail system without mandating the land use changes necessary to go with it.
The rail lines primarily wander through low density industrial and residential areas. They terminate in a very sleepy downtown (despite the hot real estate everywhere else). Meanwhile, San Jose is approving huge office complex developments that are not on the rail line. Their rail system doesn't connect with BART or CalTrain.
So, yes, it's a boondogle that was put in politically as part of freeway expansion deal. Well, Santa Clara's freeways are at 100% capacity, and there is no expansion or improvements that are going to solve that problem. The fact that it can take 90 minutes to drive from one side of San Jose to the other and that is still more convienent than taking the train is pretty sad. --
The company I work for has Mac OS site licenses... Microsoft could never get away with that, since their entire revunue model is to get people to buy their software any way they can
Microsoft makes bundles of money with site licences. In fact, if you work at a company with more than 200 Microsoft software users, you'd be stupid to not have a site licence.
In fact, it's rather stupifying that you'd think that Microsoft makes the kind of money they do off of retail/OEM sales. The key to Microsoft's business model is to sell site licences to large corporations.
The scam is that they sell OEM copies of Windows, even for the 'corporate' PCs, and then they go back and sell the corporate purchasers a site licence for all of the copies of Windows they already own. (Well, they do get a different support phone number to call, but it's probably same idjots answering the phone.) --
The 'PC World' will not prevail. There's no market incentive for it to prevail. [...] Businesses are tired of writing off entire fleets of PC hardware at the half point in the depreciation cycle
Wait a minute -- you just gave the reason that the PC model will prevail. "Open" hardware standards have led to a situation where the obsolesce cycle is 18 months and dropping. Businesses might not like it, but they do like the fact that only one tenth of their IT budgets are end user hardware (the rest being labor, software, networks, and servers), and new machines are just a drop in the leaking bucket for them.
Trust me, the DVD Forum would love to have a situation where you go out and buy new hardware and media every two years. Their turnover is barely around 10 years now. But they'll never get their -- and if the PC Industry buys into their closed hardware model, their revenues are going to go through the floor.
PS - With a PC Junior from 1983 you can surf the web and can still write your great american novel. If the PC Junior would have shipped with a 386, I'm positive that Linux would be running on it right now. --
Yup, the idea is that you have to go out and buy all new equipment when you decide to upgrade to Digital. It could be that they are planning to associate FireWire with the upcoming HD-DVD format. It also could be that they haven't worked out the copy protection stuff yet.
I know someone who has a HDTV set. It uses proprietary inputs and not 1394. So, there appears to be some sort of connector war going on.
It's really too bad that the computer industry is letting Hollywood drive the specs on this whole convergance thing. Hollywood wants a stratified format that they can control, something that has never gone over in the PC world. Maybe someday the computer people will realize this and come up with more open and flexible alternatives. --
The recording industry has convinced themselves that Digital Copy = Perfect Quality and Analog Copy = Bad Quality.
Except for the fact that you can get a CD-Quality dub with even good cassette equipment, not to mention the analog inputs on a DAT. And the digital 'copy' might be a real low bitrate MP3.
But I shouldn't fool myself that this is about principles. The industry gets a cut of cassette and minidisc media sales. They can't get that from MP3, so hense the hysteria. --
Before DVDs came out, there was quite a bit of hype about their capabilities. The claim was that there would be enough space on one disk for both the Pan-N-Scan version and the Letterbox version. Another claim was that DVD included some sort of on-the-fly editing feature that would use a cut list on the disk to do the pan-n-scan in the player, as well as other crazy tricks such as editing a R movie down to PG.
I don't know much about what's out there, because I don't own any DVDs, but it seems like that Widescreen and Pan-n-scan versions of movies are usually sold on separate disks, despite was claimed. And the on-the-fly editing stuff appears to be complete vapor.
The computer multimedia industry seems pretty much dead commercially. But, since many DVD owners end up playing discs on their computers, it might have been nice if the DVD designers would have learned a thing or two from the computer multimedia people. (The menu system is almost funnily primitive, for example.) --
Microsoft is using its desktop monopoly to deadly effect to ensure that it controls the servers too
You are absolutely right, of course, but that's a seperate case, so it's probably a long way off, even if there's any willpower left after this is over.
Restructuring the company might help the situation -- currently it's probably the case that Windows 2000 subsidizes the BackOffice applicaitons, allowing them to do things like sell SQL Server at far lower price than other RDBMSes.
Also, Microsoft has the tendancy to try to tie their server applications to their Windows/Office monopolies, which usually means that the server product is braindamaged in some respects. (Case in point, the whole Windows DNA perversion of a real intranet infrastructure.) A smaller company might not be so arrogant and would be more accepting of open protocols. --
Slashdot Mirror
Trying to blame the CPU iteself for Windows 2000 incompatibilties with a laptop is a little strange. Windows 2000 has all sorts of known issues with buggy ACPI and APM BIOS implementations.
Check for a BIOS update and try the release version of Winders. I would imagine that Microsoft would take Compaq support fairly seriously.
--
Yup, I remember tearing apart my Blip as a kid and just watching the gears and pinions move around. (It was pretty easy because the 'ball' only moved in a straight line and only changed angles in the middle, and there were only three end points on each end. It also was kinda buggy, iirc.)
It is a strange relic though, especially because electronic games were already popular (ohhh, Mattel Football..)
--
One thing you might want to try is www.thinkfree.com. They have a Linux-compatible Java clone of MS Word that did a pretty good job converting my files.
--
DataViz allowed Apple to ship their converters in an attempt to get more users on their upgrade treadmill.
It didn't work, and in fact less people paid for their software because it was free with the OS.
Face it -- being able to open Ami or WPG files on the Mac is a extremely small nitch market. As a Mac user, I've got worse problems (like these damn FreeHand 3 files I made long ago, now unopenable by anything except FreeHand 4. Meanwhile, FreeHand 9 is shipping.)
--
First of all, I don't think that the next version of Word's format will be pure XML. Probably more like HTML4 + CSS2 + Some made up or unapproved parts of CSS3 + Some extra stuff MS invented + XML. I would expect it to be able to somewhat gracefully devolve and be somewhat viewable on IE4/5 and NS4.
e ct>
If I'm right, then Unix users are in better shape than they are today. Of course, I could be totally wrong - it could be pure XML voodoo, or worse, require some special IIS-only middleware software before being viewable on the web.
serializing objects in XML format will not necessarily result in formats that are significantly more readable, accessible, or backwards compatible
Well, this is pretty much certain, given their current architecture. Ugg, I can see it now:
<object type='msword10voodoo' encoding='base64' id='{ACF0-415BC...}'>150873AB32456CDA1AC4...</obj
--
That's not true, they do TRY, sorta.
Every new release of the Word format (6.0, 97), there's been a semi-working converter released for the old versions of Word.
Plus, once you apply the service pack to Word 97, the default format becomes 6.0/95, unless you add some 97-only feature, in which case Mr Clipass warns you. (Microsoft added this behavior after some huge heat from their own customers.)
--
you have bought a license for that piece of software, and you should be able to install it on whatever machine you want.
Perhaps you should look up the definition of "license". You only have the rights that the licence allows you to have. I can't tell if you are being idealistic about licences, or just stupid.
The machine-locked versions of Windows are sold at a discount. You save money, you have less rights. Is that so difficult?
As far as the tax goes, you are right on -- Not only does this screw non-Windows users, it also screws Microsoft's paying corporate customers. We have a Windows NT/2000 site licence at work. But we buy machines with 98 pre-installed because it saves us $100/machine. We could save another $100 if we bought 'bare disk' machines, but Dell won't sell them to us because we're too small.
Whether or not Microsoft gets broken up, it's a sure bet that the OEM contract restrictions will get put in place. Hopefully this will give Microsoft's biggest customers (Dell/Compaq/IBM) the balls to actually stand up for their own customers. Some day we might actually see a dropdown on a web site which reads like: OEM Windows 98 [Can not be transferred] ($0) / Bare Disk (-$92) / Retail Windows 98 [Can be transferred] (+$102)
--
Right, that's what I said.
Microsoft learned from the Copy Protection Backlash in the early 80s -- As long as the big, corporate customers don't feel any pain, it's OK.
That licence is a little strange -- an MSDN subscription is not that expensive. Certainly cheaper than site licencing, and apparently legal to install on all your company's PCs and servers.
--
No, they're going to get really pissed off and borrow someone else's copy.
The idea is to dry up the supply of the 'real' CDs. If all your friends only have Recovery CDs, and you don't have access to someone with IT connections, you are up the creek.
What's intersting about this policy is that in the past, Microsoft has been horrible about updating their retail products. Until 1998, if you wanted to buy Windows 95, you had to buy the ancient 9/95 version. Meanwhile, the only practical way to get the 1997 "OEM 2.5" version was with an OEM system. This new policy is going to go to hell if they aren't better about updating their retail products.
--
I have an IBM Intellistation from last year, and it did not come with a recovery CD. Standard OEM copy of Windows NT Workstation and a second driver CD.
I recall an IBM recovery CD from a couple years back that would install SmartSuite, whether you wanted it or not. Compaq and Gateway also install tons and tons of crap on their consumer systems. I suspect that's why OEMs are going along with this policy -- not only does it lower their support costs (Problem of any sort? Use the recovery CD!), but it also ensures that users are properly spammed with the OEMs software and marketing tie-ins.
--
Microsoft has traditionally been one of the least anti-piracy companies. After all, if users are running around installing bootleg Windows 98 (or whatever), it's only a matter of time until the IT department buckles under the pressure and buys the upgrade. Maybe they think they've finally reached market saturation, and it's time to crack down.
What sucks about these changes is that they are carefully crafted so that the burden doesn't fall on the corporate customers at all. Dell can do whatever, but I would imagine that a good number of their corporate customers reformat and install a disk image. Microsoft is still happily spamming my workplace with all sorts of MSDN CDs, all unlocked (you don't even need to enter a registration code), which we IT goons all happily burn copies and install at home. That's OK with them because we are in a position to influnce purchasing, but apparently someone reselling their OEM CD on eBay or at a computer show is a huge revenue loss.
Meanwhile, the small vendors, small business that buy things preinstalled, and home users are the ones getting the shaft. The question is how much pain users are willing to go through before the backlash starts. Only that MS has the lowend market locked up so tight, there's not much people will be able to do, short of real warezing (as opposed to casual piracy like borrowing someone's CD).
--
I heard somewhere in the early 90s that IBM made about $5 per PC sold, on licences for things like the ISA bus and VGA hardware. The key was that all of this tech is being licenced by the Microelectronics division, which wasn't interested into getting into PC brand politics with things like MicroChannel.
I would suspect that some of those patents have expired, but for other (like VGA), IBM is still making a few cents per video card sold.
The lesson of Apple is that no matter how good your tech is, the computer industry is always expanding faster than your production capacity. Libreral licencing of PC tech was a smart move, and IBM has made out much better than if the PC was closed. (Although, Microsoft, another open licencer, has made out far better than IBM has.)
--
Did you write your own BIOSes back in the day?
What's the real difference between an IBM PC AT and a CP/M machine? Not that much, it seems. Especially since the PC AT came with schematics, Intel and IBM Microelectronics would happily sell you the parts, and you even had the (C) IBM BIOS source code to burn on your personal eprom.
Of course, the hardware chaos of the CP/M days really brought out the "open standard" of IBM PC AT clones. It was a pain in the ass when everyone had incompatible floppy drives, character sets, and BIOS tweaks. So we do it the way IBM said to, and lug around 19 years of backward compatibility to this day.
--
There is also something which I've heard called the "Osborne Effect" (after the ill-fated lugable PC maker of the late 70s), which says that the more customers here about the next great thing, the less likely people will buy your existing products.
Of course, this never hurt Microsoft, who was telling anyone who would listen about Windows 2000 way back in 1997.
--
I'm sorry, but I shall have to disagree with you: a file manager is NOT a HTML browser!
One thing that's remained absurdly constant over the last 12 years or so is that regular (l)users have real trouble understanding "Shared Drives" (as they call it in DOS-space) or mounted directories or network paths or whatever. The concept of a "hard drive" being somewhere "on the network" just eludes them.
On the other hand, most users take to webpages like water. Back on "Pearl Harbor Day" in 1995, when Microsoft announced that they were going to integrate IE into Windows, my third thought was that there was lots of potential in the idea. (My first thought was that it would be bloated and slow and crash a bunch, and my second was that this was going to put Netscape out of business, but that's another Slashdot story...)
Imagine a system, which instead of presenting a dull list of file attributes and creation dates, presented metadata about there in, or one which could provide instructions along with the files, to help the users share their information, or which allowed quick searching and sorting from a GUI interface, or one which could provide simple document managment and versioning.
Of course, Microsoft hardly implemented any of the application-level features to make web integration really anything more than slower, crashier, more illegal version of the same thing. Part of the reason is that they sell products like Exchange that do many of these tasks. On the other hand, a open source infrastructure which provides web integration would be more likely to be expanded to support some really useful applications that run above the filesystem.
Call me old fashioned, but I happen to think that for file management
You're not old fashioned, you're just a geek. Users don't manage 'files', they manage information.
--
One way to get around it thoough would be for MS to just document it all.
It's highly unlikely that Microsoft has a "Secret Win32 API" manual floating around it's headquarters. In many cases, I'd bet the source code (and the comments therein) is the documentation.
Microsoft shall disclose to ISVs, IHVs, and OEMs in a Timely Manner, in whatever media Microsoft disseminates such information to its own personnel, all APIs, Technical Information and Communications Interfaces that Microsoft employs
The court probably knows that a major part of this media is source code access, and therefore MS will need to provide source code to it's competitors until it goes back and rewrites all of the published documentation so that it's good enough for their own developers.
--
The Office formats are documented, but the OLE Structured Stream format that they rely on are not.
8 1.HTM --
See http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/books/inole/S11
1 Microsoft licenses the ANSI C++ source code for Compound Files as a reference implementation for those who want to use the technology on other platforms such as UNIX and OS/2. Microsoft provides the implementation for Windows and Macintosh as part of OLE.
--
An other effect is that higher rents will make more people share apartments
One thing that's happened in San Francisco is that not only have the rents been going way up, the lease conditions have been greatly tightened. Six years ago, I lived in a place with between 3 and 6 other roommates (varying), a dog, with only a verbal lease between the landlord and one of the roommates, and only a $500 deposit.
Nowdays, it's virtually universal that all residents have to be on the lease, the deposits are very high (up to 2x a months rent), there are credit checks up the wazoo, and of course no pets.
So, there's lots of ancedotal evidence that the population density has actually decreased in the last couple years. I can count several roommate houses that have been replaced by a nice professional couple or a couple well-off young computer guys.
As far as "supply and demand", rent control does not except the housing market. It only postpones or accelerates the supply and demand mechinisms. Where the average rent of a 1-bedroom in SF might be $800, when one opens up, the landlord feels he has to charge $1500, because he might not be able to raise the rent again for many years. Meanwhile, others are paying $300 for the same apartment.
People adjust to how the market works (in SF, that means don't move if you can help it). When these mechinisms get changed, the 'supply & demand' equalibrium gets thrown into a turmoil. Obviously, when the listing prices for housing is going up 30% a year, people with apartments are holding on to Rent Control as the only way they can stay in they place they want to.
--
Santa Clara thought that they could put in a light rail system without mandating the land use changes necessary to go with it.
The rail lines primarily wander through low density industrial and residential areas. They terminate in a very sleepy downtown (despite the hot real estate everywhere else). Meanwhile, San Jose is approving huge office complex developments that are not on the rail line. Their rail system doesn't connect with BART or CalTrain.
So, yes, it's a boondogle that was put in politically as part of freeway expansion deal. Well, Santa Clara's freeways are at 100% capacity, and there is no expansion or improvements that are going to solve that problem. The fact that it can take 90 minutes to drive from one side of San Jose to the other and that is still more convienent than taking the train is pretty sad.
--
The company I work for has Mac OS site licenses... Microsoft could never get away with that, since their entire revunue model is to get people to buy their software any way they can
Microsoft makes bundles of money with site licences. In fact, if you work at a company with more than 200 Microsoft software users, you'd be stupid to not have a site licence.
In fact, it's rather stupifying that you'd think that Microsoft makes the kind of money they do off of retail/OEM sales. The key to Microsoft's business model is to sell site licences to large corporations.
The scam is that they sell OEM copies of Windows, even for the 'corporate' PCs, and then they go back and sell the corporate purchasers a site licence for all of the copies of Windows they already own. (Well, they do get a different support phone number to call, but it's probably same idjots answering the phone.)
--
The 'PC World' will not prevail. There's no market incentive for it to prevail. [...] Businesses are tired of writing off entire fleets of PC hardware at the half point in the depreciation cycle
Wait a minute -- you just gave the reason that the PC model will prevail. "Open" hardware standards have led to a situation where the obsolesce cycle is 18 months and dropping. Businesses might not like it, but they do like the fact that only one tenth of their IT budgets are end user hardware (the rest being labor, software, networks, and servers), and new machines are just a drop in the leaking bucket for them.
Trust me, the DVD Forum would love to have a situation where you go out and buy new hardware and media every two years. Their turnover is barely around 10 years now. But they'll never get their -- and if the PC Industry buys into their closed hardware model, their revenues are going to go through the floor.
PS - With a PC Junior from 1983 you can surf the web and can still write your great american novel. If the PC Junior would have shipped with a 386, I'm positive that Linux would be running on it right now.
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Yup, the idea is that you have to go out and buy all new equipment when you decide to upgrade to Digital. It could be that they are planning to associate FireWire with the upcoming HD-DVD format. It also could be that they haven't worked out the copy protection stuff yet.
I know someone who has a HDTV set. It uses proprietary inputs and not 1394. So, there appears to be some sort of connector war going on.
It's really too bad that the computer industry is letting Hollywood drive the specs on this whole convergance thing. Hollywood wants a stratified format that they can control, something that has never gone over in the PC world. Maybe someday the computer people will realize this and come up with more open and flexible alternatives.
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The recording industry has convinced themselves that Digital Copy = Perfect Quality and Analog Copy = Bad Quality.
Except for the fact that you can get a CD-Quality dub with even good cassette equipment, not to mention the analog inputs on a DAT. And the digital 'copy' might be a real low bitrate MP3.
But I shouldn't fool myself that this is about principles. The industry gets a cut of cassette and minidisc media sales. They can't get that from MP3, so hense the hysteria.
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Before DVDs came out, there was quite a bit of hype about their capabilities. The claim was that there would be enough space on one disk for both the Pan-N-Scan version and the Letterbox version. Another claim was that DVD included some sort of on-the-fly editing feature that would use a cut list on the disk to do the pan-n-scan in the player, as well as other crazy tricks such as editing a R movie down to PG.
I don't know much about what's out there, because I don't own any DVDs, but it seems like that Widescreen and Pan-n-scan versions of movies are usually sold on separate disks, despite was claimed. And the on-the-fly editing stuff appears to be complete vapor.
The computer multimedia industry seems pretty much dead commercially. But, since many DVD owners end up playing discs on their computers, it might have been nice if the DVD designers would have learned a thing or two from the computer multimedia people. (The menu system is almost funnily primitive, for example.)
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Microsoft is using its desktop monopoly to deadly effect to ensure that it controls the servers too
You are absolutely right, of course, but that's a seperate case, so it's probably a long way off, even if there's any willpower left after this is over.
Restructuring the company might help the situation -- currently it's probably the case that Windows 2000 subsidizes the BackOffice applicaitons, allowing them to do things like sell SQL Server at far lower price than other RDBMSes.
Also, Microsoft has the tendancy to try to tie their server applications to their Windows/Office monopolies, which usually means that the server product is braindamaged in some respects. (Case in point, the whole Windows DNA perversion of a real intranet infrastructure.) A smaller company might not be so arrogant and would be more accepting of open protocols.
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