Minifinders only were developed for the Mac because in the early days people were limited to 400K floppy disks. With a minifinder, you might be able to have the System + file launcher + an applicaiton on one disk, and thus avoid the "Mac Floppy Tango".
MiniFinders died out pretty much once hard disk became common. Why? Because nobody really wants to spend their time reinventing this base level stuff when the built-in one is good enough. 3rd Party Windows File Managers have been assigned to the same dustbin of history. (Anyone remember TabWorks?)
Unix filemanagers are different story, if only because nobody's invented a really good one yet that fits everyone's licence/widget/API political agenda. There's something about Unix culture that demands that the same wheels get reinvented time and time again, rather than just extending someone elses work like people in the Mac and Win communities do. I don't know if the user base really wants 10 different XTerm programs or file managers or window managers. You seem to be trying to impose the defacto Unix confusion onto the general user base. What they would really like is one really good set of tools that can be extended...
Maybe once KDE and/or Gnome 'finish', people can move onto more productive work, like cloning MS Office. However that's probably wishful thinking on my part. --
A few years ago, I heard the editor of the "Weekly World News" speak on C-SPAN. (For those that don't know, the WWN is a supermarket tabloid that prints stories about UFOs and Hitler being alive.) Apparently the WWN staff is pretty educated, all having gone to Harvard and the like.
Their point was that the Weekly World News uses the same journalistic "standards" as any other media outlet -- repeating the same stories that have been reported elsewhere as fact. Your local paper or the TV news happens to be mindlessly repeating AP stories or whatever, while the WWN is mindlessly repeating UFO and Flat Earth stories printed in South American or Eastern European newspapers.
Slashdot gets flack because an unsubstantiated rumor story will get 250 comments from people treating it as fact. Is that really any different from other journalistic outlets? Look at cable stations like MSNBC -- during their "crisis in the white house" period, they would have 2-3 hours of panel discussions and phone calls per day, often based on completely unsubstantiated rumors. And this is a matter of gross national importance, unlike some story about the Amiga or whatever. AM Talk Radio also does the same thing every day, breeding a political culture where flames are shooting out of people's eyes.
Slashdot is really just a part of the new interactive news/entertainment genre, leaving the real 'journalism' to someone else. (And hopefully the NYT and AP and ZDNet and IDG will stay in business providing this base content.) The net result is far more political that fact oriented, but that's what the viewers want... --
(1) Without an application line-up, there will be no reason for Windows Inc to have an undocumented or obscured API. They should be more than happy to provide complete documentation. With a breakup, that problem will solve itself.
(2) The Apps company will still have no incentive to provide open file formats. The MSOffice document problem is not going to go away, as much as you might like it to. (The Govt. case did not directly address Office, and no evidence was presented about the document lock-in as far as I know.) Hell, Unix office suite vendors haven't even standardized on open formats with their fractional marketshare - why should MSApps do it with a 90% monopoly.
There is some light at the end of the tunnel, though -- The Office formats are documented on MSDN, as some might know. The big problem is that they rely on some OLE Stream on-disk format that isn't documented, and might require a port of COM to achieve. The Windows company would own COM, and might document this disk format enough that it could be reverse engineered.
Of course, there is also a big problem that I alluded to. XML file formats are the future, and pretty soon corporations and the government are going to require them from vendors. However, right now the DOJ plan has all of the XML stuff being owned by the Apps company, which means that they will have the incentive to twist the standards to support their Office monopoly. Internet Explorer, HTML, DOM, XML, and so on are really an API, and should be controlled by the Windows company, which will have an interest to keep these specs open and in conformance. Politically, that ain't going to happen, though. --
I was a little puzzled when I first heard of the two company breakup plan. Like a lot of other people, I was sure that there was going to be at least three companies, although some really blood thirsty people wanted 10 or 32 companies all destined to go out of business.
But upon some further reflection, the basic plan makes sense -- The only two significant profit centers they have are Windows and Office, and there's quite a bit of cross-subsidies going on between product lines. In the early days, Office subsided Windows (remember when Windows came free with Excel?), but now days the both stand on their own with billions of dollars of revenue, supporting the rest of the product lineup. There is not a third company (like "Internet") that could reasonably be as successful by itself.
Without OEM 'bundling' contracts, the Apps side would be unlikely to make all of those cheesy multimedia and game titles, for example. Without a 'content' business, the OS side wouldn't be making investments in cable tv systems, etc etc. The division can get murky -- to what extent does SQL Server and Exchange subside Windows 2000 or visa versa? Without the OS business, will Apps even bother taking on Oracle and IBM? Without the Apps business, will OS worry about scalability on server hardware? The price lists are going to be up in the air if a breakup happens, although both companies will still make plenty of money in the short term.
However, in the long run the Windows company faces several very unfair provisions. The big one is that Dev Tools is going to the Applications side, not the Windows side. Every other OS provider (including 'GNU') seems to feel that development tools are essential to OS development, but now the Windows corporation is going to have to figure out how to expand the API without good dev tools support. Like or not, things like MFC and COM would not have happened if VisualStudio wasn't part of the OS business. My guess is that Windows Inc. goes and buys Borland or someone or starts building their own (gcc-based?) development environment first thing if this goes through.
And while I want to see MS broken up as much as any persecuted nerd, I have to agree that in the long run Netscape and Microsoft were right. Web APIs are the platform of the future, and Win32 will eventually be a stagnant, commodity product much like POSIX. The Windows company should really be able to keep IIS and IE -- the future of the platform (DCOM, SOAP, XML) depends on it; although with the pretexts of the case that solution is impossible. Without a web application framework, Windows Inc. will be gone soon enough, maybe replaced by a Linux solution where Apache and Mozilla are seen as intregal parts of the total solution. --
Hmmm, it looks like the DOJ is trying a two track strategy -- go for a number of conduct restrictions while at the same time going for the structural breakup.
Now, while the structural remedy is being appealed to high heaven, the DOJ might be able to convince a judge that the conduct remedies (some of which MS already agreed to in settlement talks) are reasonable enough that they should be implemented immediately. Thus the DOJ has 'won' in the short term, even if the case gets politically sidetracked or overturned a couple years down the road. --
First of all, Microsoft could open their file formats tomorrow, and Unix users would still be up the creek. The reason is that they all rely on the OLE Structured Stream (or something) on-disk format, which may require a port of some or all of COM. The big picture is that binary files suck, and must be gotten rid of whenever possible.
It would be an outstanding idea if the government/corporations created a procurement process that required vendors to have open file formats. The cost of file format interchange probably runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars, especially in the government, where they've standardized on some weird stuff.
Even corporations, who use the MS Office "standard" file formats have suffered during the Office 95 to 97 transition, and also whey trying to integrate other widely deployed products like Lotus Notes or RDBMSs. It's disgusting how much 'business critical' data is locked up in Excel spreadsheets on some person's C: drive.
A good solution would be an open XML standard that reflects the feature set of modern office suite programs. (This would be a great feature even in an all Windows environment. For those not up-to-speed on XML, it would allow programmatic access to office suite data without having to go through an interface like COM or the app libraries.) However, nobody's invented the DTDs yet. Until somebody does, Microsoft is still writing the specs.
Right now, not even the Unix office suite vendors have standardized on open formats. There's the log in our own eye. The KDE, Gnome, Sun StarOffice, Applix, and WordPerfect people should get their acts together, define open formats, submit to the W3C or whatever standards body. Once approved, start lobbying the government to make their standards part of the procurement process. Until that happens, all the kvetching about closed MS Office formats is hot air. --
If an independant applications company would necessarily produce for all platforms, then where is Lotus SmartSuite for Macintosh/Linux? Where is WordPerfect Office for the Mac?
MS Office for Linux is not necessarily right around the corner in a breakup situation. For one, it's hard to port from Windows to Unix (see WordPerfect on Wine and IE on MainWin or all of the COM infrastructure MS ported to the Macintosh).
For two, there's no assurance that market is big enough or that the user base even wants your product (see WordPerfect and Lotus getting their butts kicked by MS on the Macintosh). So, MSOffice Incorporated might spend millions of dollars porting to Linux only to find that the user base has standardized on WordPerfect or that KOffice is not a bad deal for the price ($0).
Personally, I think the advent of JavaScript is a Good Thing...
No, I like the idea of the DOM API, XML/XSL, CSS and so on. I want people to use it, especially for intranet projects where you can control the browser and the security issues. I wish I could enble Javascript and browse the public web without worrying too much. I want to have mouse-overs.
What I don't like is JavaScript's half-hearted sandbox. First of all, the navigator object and it's ilk should not exist. Becuase it does, JavaScript goes beyond scripting DOM objects in the page, and starts to control the browser (and thus my computer) itself.
Second, we have Microsoft's retarded security implementation in Outlook and Outlook Express. I certainly don't want to grant e-mail scripting control over my mail client. But the only way to prevent this is to disable scripting in the "Internet Zone", because of the way IE looks at the world.
Check the security lists. There are numerous "get your e-mail address" and "browse local files" exploits in both IE and Netscape for which the only solution is to disable Scripting. Should I grant this sort of access to my machine just to get some mouseovers and open() links? Is it really worth it? Maybe you think so, but I'll just surf somewhere else, or once in a while, use IE's zones feature.
The only real solution to this is a JavaScript implementation that sticks to the DOM and only the DOM. I already know of one large IE5 rollout where scripting is disabled for the general case to prevent 'virus' problems. If all of this next generation DOM/XSL/CSS stuff is going to get anywhere on the public net, the scripting engine needs to be fixed first.
(BTW, Netscape does suck hard. I generally use IE, including on an intranet site where there is between 1K and 5K of JavaScript on each page. Works fine.) --
And the worst is people who use JavaScript open() calls on links instead of just having an HREF property! I was ranting about this and some 'web designer' wannabes I know were certain that JavaScript links were faster than HTML ones. Faster? How slow can an HREF be?
I browse with JavaScript disabled for security reasons, and in Netscape, to just try to keep the damn thing running. However, the writing is on the wall for us anti-scripters. Look at the DOM specification, XML/XSL, CSS2, and so on. Scripted pages are the future. And it's going to be a huge disaster until someone figures out a better way of sandboxing javascript. --
LILO's approach of jumping to a predetermined block generally works OK, but it will always be as problematic as the retarded PC BIOS forces it to be. I've had some difficulty with a system that had about 5 SCSI disks hanging off two controllers with their various BIOS defects.
On the other hand, NT has an interesting kludge to work around this situation. It allows you to load a disk driver (the NT.SYS file) from a "C:" FAT partition. This lets you avoid the BIOS entirely and get at partitions that aren't recognized at boot time for whatever reason.
Of course, NT4's boot process has it's other annoyances, particularly on IDE drives (which MS seemed less keen on supporting than the Linux folks), not to mention that it doesn't try to support a good number of motherboards.
The real solution would be a OpenFirmware type system, instead of the continual series of "large disk" IDE kludges. Maybe, some day, the whole BIOS/Disk Geometry issue will be transparent to the user, but we may need something like IA64 to get there. --
Actually, it goes a little deeper than that. Linus often decides to change X so that it is better/cleaner/different knowing full well that Y, Z, Q, A, B and a unknown other things will break and need to be fixed.
This is the basic deal with the Linux kernel -- nobody is guaranteeing internal compatibility, especially at the expense of better code. On the other hand, a commercial vendor such as Microsoft would implement an new X, but also at the same time keep the old X working. This is why Windows 98 can do mysterious things like run SCSI drivers from 1986. --
Wow, your users actually understand highlighting text? Mine grab the mouse, click at the end of the selected text field and then proceed to use the backspace key!
One delusion that we computer users and the industry as a whole holds is that the WIMP UIs are so intuitive that eventually everyone will figure it out. A walk through any random grouping of cubicles will prove this assumption incorrect. Maybe people don't care, maybe they are stupid, or maybe the interface just fails to inform the user how to perform non-obvious functions.
How many workers had to sit in a Windows 101 class for 4 hours before they got their new $2500 PC? My guess is, not many. Maybe if they did, they wouldn't be sitting there five years later not knowing what selected text is, or how to navigate in dialog boxes, or why the mouse has two buttons. And meanwhile, the IT Department's reaction is to snicker at them and roll their eyes at all these people ineffeciently futzing around, instead of actually trying to solve the problem.
A manufacturing company wouldn't put someone in front of an unfamiliar machine without training (because the science of rationalizing those environments for maximum efficiency has been perfected for years.) Yet, we do this everyday -- caught up in our personal prejudices and "you luser" mentalities. --
Yes, some years ago Microsoft transitioned from IBM-style keybindings (F3, shift-insert, etc.) to Macintosh-style bindings (Ctrl-F, Ctrl-V, etc.).
The problem is that they never really completed the transition. (Well, maybe they have finally with Windows2000 Notepad.) The main people to complain are the small set that use the IBM bindings. Sometimes Sh+Insert works, sometimes it doesn't. (The same way Unix users complain when an X app doesn't support the middle button paste.) --
Life would be simpler the way you state if (IF) everyone thought like us *nixers did, and like having a bunch of little tools that all mesh together.
Uhh, those tools are already here. It's called (XP)COM, and it allows application developers to embed a IE/Mozilla web browsing component into their applications.
Now, if Real includes a full seperate copy of Mozilla with their player, that'd be pretty stupid. They should just 'integrate' the Microsoft way and require that Mozilla/NS6 be preinstalled.
(The big monolithic applicaiton is already near dead in Windows land. Soon the Unix desktops will be there too, and Mozilla is a key piece.)
AOL is already developing a settop box using Linux and Mozilla. (The URL is probably too contorted to post, but you can go here and search for Linux.) One thing to note is that Linux is a Tier 1 Mozilla platform, where Be is not.
As for "multimedia", BeOS can do some interesting things, but I'm not sure if they are applicable in a settop situation. Most of what you need to do is done in the video hardware. There's never the need to play 8 simultanious quicktime movies, or whatever Be is capable of.
I used to have a demo album called THE ELECTRIC COW GOES MOOG. Very funny to the extent it was trying to be funny. Too bad I gave it away, it's probably worth something by now. (Of course, this was also the days when you could buy Moog Synths at garage sales for $10.) --
Well, give the ASM and the enormous number of Palm applications out there, maybe a good solution would be to licence Apple's 68K emulator.
The ARM ought to be fast enough to run it, and done correctly the transition could be as transparent as when Apple switched off of 68K. Hopefully, unlike Apple, they will be able to rewrite the OS to be 100% native and therefore the emulator would be optional, given the tight storage space. --
No, G400 Duel Head support sucks ass in Win NT/2000. Matrox says that it's a Microsoft problem. I take it that G400 Duel Head is actually far better supported in XFree than NT. --
One thing to realize is that Microsoft currently doesn't make any money on 'services', preferring to farm that business out to third parties. This makes them almost unique in the computer business, and is one reason that MS has so many loyalists.
Compare this to IBM, where the service is great, but you are paying through the nose for it. IBM makes more money off the services than the hardware or software. Now look at the IBM VARs -- generally unhappy because IBM is their biggest competitior.
So, a broken-up Microsoft is almost assuredly going to be a bigger services player. Lots of third parties will be pissed off. Service might improve, but it will also be more costly. (Some people think this areadly might be happening -- MS is in a deal with Andersen Consulting, MCSEs are being decertified, and good ActiveDirectory documentation is almost impossible to come by without signing an NDA.)
I suppose the Linux folks might not care about this situation, but in the long run it will serve to make Windows 2000 a more 'closed' platform with a 'closed' culture surrounding it, much like IBM products such as the AS/400. This, of course will only serve to help Linux, with it's very open culture and extremely VAR friendly business terms. --
Right -- a free product like Internet Explorer probably would never have come to be, except as the product of a monopoly.
And while Microsoft has done a pretty good job 'integrating' IE into Windows, to the point where it would almost make more sense for the Windows company to take IE instead of the Apps company. But politically, that's not likely to happen.
So, IE goes to the Apps company. Their first big licencee is the Windows company, because almost nothing in Win2K will work without IE installed, and unlike "98lite", this will take quite a bit of time to fix. Furthermore, IE is a good browser and almost a standard feature for Windows users, so big OEMs like Dell and Compaq would likely be happy to licence it at $10/PC.
Furthermore, IE is currently being 'integrated' into MS Office, MS Exchange/Outlook, and numerous other application platforms. The apps company will not be able to complete their groupware plans without control over the client (IE). So, there's a huge incentive for them to keep developing it.
If anyone is going to have trouble, it's not the Apps company, but the OS company. Operating Systems have essentially become a low value product. Apple and Sun give them away to sell hardware. RedHat gives one away to sell services. Microsoft makes money on the OS, but the real point is to develop a platform for the applications, which are the real profit centers. --
Well, I would expect a company whose primary business is operating systems to publish full specifications no matter what the developers are doing. Think about Apple or Sun. Then think about Microsoft, whose primary business is now really applications, and not the OS.
In fact most VB programmers are corporate types that couldn't leave in droves if they wanted to (well, they could, but Windows and VB would live on without them).
I think that your game theory analysis is correct. Right now, many new features developed by the "OS" wing are really there at the request of the applications groups. Microsoft can afford to spend money on projects like COM+ and ADO and so on, because they know that the next versions of Office and IE will use that technology.
Now think of a situation where the OS group actually has to evangilize their features. What happens when they develop a wizzy new feature like "SuperCOM++", and the Office, Inc and WordPerfect and everyone else decide not to use it. It's a loss. The Windows corporation will get burned this way, just as Apple did with OpenDoc, and the result is that they will be very careful about adding new featuers. The Win32 API might even stabilize, like Unix's has.
They probably could support 480i today for only a small extra cost.
The big cost is large, high resolution tubes. Of course, this gives the TV manufacturers a huge opportunity to upsell. I wouldn't expect 1080 (or whatever the high definition res is) to be a standard TV feature for some time. --
Yeah, the TV stations are really crying about this one -- All they need to do is beta test High Definition broadcasts for a couple years, declare it a failure, and then start rolling out paging and data and other services in that extra bandwidth space. Or better yet, broadcast 4 standard definition channels, quadrupling their ad space they have to sell.
Meanwhile, when Analog TV is about to be killed, all they need to do is roll out some little old ladies who watch PBS all day and can't afford a $100 converter box. Congress loves little old ladies, and Analog TV won't be killed for another 10 years.
So, where they once had 1 analog channel, they soon will have 1 analog, 1 digital, and some additional channels and services to make money on. And all for free. Poor guys, Congress has been so mean to them. --
Power Computing did not make 'open' PREP or CHRP machines. Their machines used Apple designed and Apple licenced boards with the Apple ROM. They were as closed as Apple boxes, because they essentially were Apple boxes. As for destroying jobs, I doubt it -- Apple's market share is now greater with one manufacturer than when there was dozens of clones.
Other companies like Umax made both Apple and PREP machines, as well as bare PREP boards. --
Slashdot Mirror
Minifinders only were developed for the Mac because in the early days people were limited to 400K floppy disks. With a minifinder, you might be able to have the System + file launcher + an applicaiton on one disk, and thus avoid the "Mac Floppy Tango".
MiniFinders died out pretty much once hard disk became common. Why? Because nobody really wants to spend their time reinventing this base level stuff when the built-in one is good enough. 3rd Party Windows File Managers have been assigned to the same dustbin of history. (Anyone remember TabWorks?)
Unix filemanagers are different story, if only because nobody's invented a really good one yet that fits everyone's licence/widget/API political agenda. There's something about Unix culture that demands that the same wheels get reinvented time and time again, rather than just extending someone elses work like people in the Mac and Win communities do. I don't know if the user base really wants 10 different XTerm programs or file managers or window managers. You seem to be trying to impose the defacto Unix confusion onto the general user base. What they would really like is one really good set of tools that can be extended...
Maybe once KDE and/or Gnome 'finish', people can move onto more productive work, like cloning MS Office. However that's probably wishful thinking on my part.
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A few years ago, I heard the editor of the "Weekly World News" speak on C-SPAN. (For those that don't know, the WWN is a supermarket tabloid that prints stories about UFOs and Hitler being alive.) Apparently the WWN staff is pretty educated, all having gone to Harvard and the like.
Their point was that the Weekly World News uses the same journalistic "standards" as any other media outlet -- repeating the same stories that have been reported elsewhere as fact. Your local paper or the TV news happens to be mindlessly repeating AP stories or whatever, while the WWN is mindlessly repeating UFO and Flat Earth stories printed in South American or Eastern European newspapers.
Slashdot gets flack because an unsubstantiated rumor story will get 250 comments from people treating it as fact. Is that really any different from other journalistic outlets? Look at cable stations like MSNBC -- during their "crisis in the white house" period, they would have 2-3 hours of panel discussions and phone calls per day, often based on completely unsubstantiated rumors. And this is a matter of gross national importance, unlike some story about the Amiga or whatever. AM Talk Radio also does the same thing every day, breeding a political culture where flames are shooting out of people's eyes.
Slashdot is really just a part of the new interactive news/entertainment genre, leaving the real 'journalism' to someone else. (And hopefully the NYT and AP and ZDNet and IDG will stay in business providing this base content.) The net result is far more political that fact oriented, but that's what the viewers want...
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I think you are mixing up a couple things.
(1) Without an application line-up, there will be no reason for Windows Inc to have an undocumented or obscured API. They should be more than happy to provide complete documentation. With a breakup, that problem will solve itself.
(2) The Apps company will still have no incentive to provide open file formats. The MSOffice document problem is not going to go away, as much as you might like it to. (The Govt. case did not directly address Office, and no evidence was presented about the document lock-in as far as I know.) Hell, Unix office suite vendors haven't even standardized on open formats with their fractional marketshare - why should MSApps do it with a 90% monopoly.
There is some light at the end of the tunnel, though -- The Office formats are documented on MSDN, as some might know. The big problem is that they rely on some OLE Stream on-disk format that isn't documented, and might require a port of COM to achieve. The Windows company would own COM, and might document this disk format enough that it could be reverse engineered.
Of course, there is also a big problem that I alluded to. XML file formats are the future, and pretty soon corporations and the government are going to require them from vendors. However, right now the DOJ plan has all of the XML stuff being owned by the Apps company, which means that they will have the incentive to twist the standards to support their Office monopoly. Internet Explorer, HTML, DOM, XML, and so on are really an API, and should be controlled by the Windows company, which will have an interest to keep these specs open and in conformance. Politically, that ain't going to happen, though.
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I was a little puzzled when I first heard of the two company breakup plan. Like a lot of other people, I was sure that there was going to be at least three companies, although some really blood thirsty people wanted 10 or 32 companies all destined to go out of business.
But upon some further reflection, the basic plan makes sense -- The only two significant profit centers they have are Windows and Office, and there's quite a bit of cross-subsidies going on between product lines. In the early days, Office subsided Windows (remember when Windows came free with Excel?), but now days the both stand on their own with billions of dollars of revenue, supporting the rest of the product lineup. There is not a third company (like "Internet") that could reasonably be as successful by itself.
Without OEM 'bundling' contracts, the Apps side would be unlikely to make all of those cheesy multimedia and game titles, for example. Without a 'content' business, the OS side wouldn't be making investments in cable tv systems, etc etc. The division can get murky -- to what extent does SQL Server and Exchange subside Windows 2000 or visa versa? Without the OS business, will Apps even bother taking on Oracle and IBM? Without the Apps business, will OS worry about scalability on server hardware? The price lists are going to be up in the air if a breakup happens, although both companies will still make plenty of money in the short term.
However, in the long run the Windows company faces several very unfair provisions. The big one is that Dev Tools is going to the Applications side, not the Windows side. Every other OS provider (including 'GNU') seems to feel that development tools are essential to OS development, but now the Windows corporation is going to have to figure out how to expand the API without good dev tools support. Like or not, things like MFC and COM would not have happened if VisualStudio wasn't part of the OS business. My guess is that Windows Inc. goes and buys Borland or someone or starts building their own (gcc-based?) development environment first thing if this goes through.
And while I want to see MS broken up as much as any persecuted nerd, I have to agree that in the long run Netscape and Microsoft were right. Web APIs are the platform of the future, and Win32 will eventually be a stagnant, commodity product much like POSIX. The Windows company should really be able to keep IIS and IE -- the future of the platform (DCOM, SOAP, XML) depends on it; although with the pretexts of the case that solution is impossible. Without a web application framework, Windows Inc. will be gone soon enough, maybe replaced by a Linux solution where Apache and Mozilla are seen as intregal parts of the total solution.
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Hmmm, it looks like the DOJ is trying a two track strategy -- go for a number of conduct restrictions while at the same time going for the structural breakup.
Now, while the structural remedy is being appealed to high heaven, the DOJ might be able to convince a judge that the conduct remedies (some of which MS already agreed to in settlement talks) are reasonable enough that they should be implemented immediately. Thus the DOJ has 'won' in the short term, even if the case gets politically sidetracked or overturned a couple years down the road.
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First of all, Microsoft could open their file formats tomorrow, and Unix users would still be up the creek. The reason is that they all rely on the OLE Structured Stream (or something) on-disk format, which may require a port of some or all of COM. The big picture is that binary files suck, and must be gotten rid of whenever possible.
It would be an outstanding idea if the government/corporations created a procurement process that required vendors to have open file formats. The cost of file format interchange probably runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars, especially in the government, where they've standardized on some weird stuff.
Even corporations, who use the MS Office "standard" file formats have suffered during the Office 95 to 97 transition, and also whey trying to integrate other widely deployed products like Lotus Notes or RDBMSs. It's disgusting how much 'business critical' data is locked up in Excel spreadsheets on some person's C: drive.
A good solution would be an open XML standard that reflects the feature set of modern office suite programs. (This would be a great feature even in an all Windows environment. For those not up-to-speed on XML, it would allow programmatic access to office suite data without having to go through an interface like COM or the app libraries.) However, nobody's invented the DTDs yet. Until somebody does, Microsoft is still writing the specs.
Right now, not even the Unix office suite vendors have standardized on open formats. There's the log in our own eye. The KDE, Gnome, Sun StarOffice, Applix, and WordPerfect people should get their acts together, define open formats, submit to the W3C or whatever standards body. Once approved, start lobbying the government to make their standards part of the procurement process. Until that happens, all the kvetching about closed MS Office formats is hot air.
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If an independant applications company would necessarily produce for all platforms, then where is Lotus SmartSuite for Macintosh/Linux? Where is WordPerfect Office for the Mac?
MS Office for Linux is not necessarily right around the corner in a breakup situation. For one, it's hard to port from Windows to Unix (see WordPerfect on Wine and IE on MainWin or all of the COM infrastructure MS ported to the Macintosh).
For two, there's no assurance that market is big enough or that the user base even wants your product (see WordPerfect and Lotus getting their butts kicked by MS on the Macintosh). So, MSOffice Incorporated might spend millions of dollars porting to Linux only to find that the user base has standardized on WordPerfect or that KOffice is not a bad deal for the price ($0).
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Personally, I think the advent of JavaScript is a Good Thing...
No, I like the idea of the DOM API, XML/XSL, CSS and so on. I want people to use it, especially for intranet projects where you can control the browser and the security issues. I wish I could enble Javascript and browse the public web without worrying too much. I want to have mouse-overs.
What I don't like is JavaScript's half-hearted sandbox. First of all, the navigator object and it's ilk should not exist. Becuase it does, JavaScript goes beyond scripting DOM objects in the page, and starts to control the browser (and thus my computer) itself.
Second, we have Microsoft's retarded security implementation in Outlook and Outlook Express. I certainly don't want to grant e-mail scripting control over my mail client. But the only way to prevent this is to disable scripting in the "Internet Zone", because of the way IE looks at the world.
Check the security lists. There are numerous "get your e-mail address" and "browse local files" exploits in both IE and Netscape for which the only solution is to disable Scripting. Should I grant this sort of access to my machine just to get some mouseovers and open() links? Is it really worth it? Maybe you think so, but I'll just surf somewhere else, or once in a while, use IE's zones feature.
The only real solution to this is a JavaScript implementation that sticks to the DOM and only the DOM. I already know of one large IE5 rollout where scripting is disabled for the general case to prevent 'virus' problems. If all of this next generation DOM/XSL/CSS stuff is going to get anywhere on the public net, the scripting engine needs to be fixed first.
(BTW, Netscape does suck hard. I generally use IE, including on an intranet site where there is between 1K and 5K of JavaScript on each page. Works fine.)
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And the worst is people who use JavaScript open() calls on links instead of just having an HREF property! I was ranting about this and some 'web designer' wannabes I know were certain that JavaScript links were faster than HTML ones. Faster? How slow can an HREF be?
I browse with JavaScript disabled for security reasons, and in Netscape, to just try to keep the damn thing running. However, the writing is on the wall for us anti-scripters. Look at the DOM specification, XML/XSL, CSS2, and so on. Scripted pages are the future. And it's going to be a huge disaster until someone figures out a better way of sandboxing javascript.
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LILO's approach of jumping to a predetermined block generally works OK, but it will always be as problematic as the retarded PC BIOS forces it to be. I've had some difficulty with a system that had about 5 SCSI disks hanging off two controllers with their various BIOS defects.
.SYS file) from a "C:" FAT partition. This lets you avoid the BIOS entirely and get at partitions that aren't recognized at boot time for whatever reason.
On the other hand, NT has an interesting kludge to work around this situation. It allows you to load a disk driver (the NT
Of course, NT4's boot process has it's other annoyances, particularly on IDE drives (which MS seemed less keen on supporting than the Linux folks), not to mention that it doesn't try to support a good number of motherboards.
The real solution would be a OpenFirmware type system, instead of the continual series of "large disk" IDE kludges. Maybe, some day, the whole BIOS/Disk Geometry issue will be transparent to the user, but we may need something like IA64 to get there.
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Actually, it goes a little deeper than that. Linus often decides to change X so that it is better/cleaner/different knowing full well that Y, Z, Q, A, B and a unknown other things will break and need to be fixed.
This is the basic deal with the Linux kernel -- nobody is guaranteeing internal compatibility, especially at the expense of better code. On the other hand, a commercial vendor such as Microsoft would implement an new X, but also at the same time keep the old X working. This is why Windows 98 can do mysterious things like run SCSI drivers from 1986.
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Wow, your users actually understand highlighting text? Mine grab the mouse, click at the end of the selected text field and then proceed to use the backspace key!
One delusion that we computer users and the industry as a whole holds is that the WIMP UIs are so intuitive that eventually everyone will figure it out. A walk through any random grouping of cubicles will prove this assumption incorrect. Maybe people don't care, maybe they are stupid, or maybe the interface just fails to inform the user how to perform non-obvious functions.
How many workers had to sit in a Windows 101 class for 4 hours before they got their new $2500 PC? My guess is, not many. Maybe if they did, they wouldn't be sitting there five years later not knowing what selected text is, or how to navigate in dialog boxes, or why the mouse has two buttons. And meanwhile, the IT Department's reaction is to snicker at them and roll their eyes at all these people ineffeciently futzing around, instead of actually trying to solve the problem.
A manufacturing company wouldn't put someone in front of an unfamiliar machine without training (because the science of rationalizing those environments for maximum efficiency has been perfected for years.) Yet, we do this everyday -- caught up in our personal prejudices and "you luser" mentalities.
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Yes, some years ago Microsoft transitioned from IBM-style keybindings (F3, shift-insert, etc.) to Macintosh-style bindings (Ctrl-F, Ctrl-V, etc.).
The problem is that they never really completed the transition. (Well, maybe they have finally with Windows2000 Notepad.) The main people to complain are the small set that use the IBM bindings. Sometimes Sh+Insert works, sometimes it doesn't. (The same way Unix users complain when an X app doesn't support the middle button paste.)
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Life would be simpler the way you state if (IF) everyone thought like us *nixers did, and like having a bunch of little tools that all mesh together.
Uhh, those tools are already here. It's called (XP)COM, and it allows application developers to embed a IE/Mozilla web browsing component into their applications.
Now, if Real includes a full seperate copy of Mozilla with their player, that'd be pretty stupid. They should just 'integrate' the Microsoft way and require that Mozilla/NS6 be preinstalled.
(The big monolithic applicaiton is already near dead in Windows land. Soon the Unix desktops will be there too, and Mozilla is a key piece.)
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AOL is already developing a settop box using Linux and Mozilla. (The URL is probably too contorted to post, but you can go here and search for Linux.) One thing to note is that Linux is a Tier 1 Mozilla platform, where Be is not.
As for "multimedia", BeOS can do some interesting things, but I'm not sure if they are applicable in a settop situation. Most of what you need to do is done in the video hardware. There's never the need to play 8 simultanious quicktime movies, or whatever Be is capable of.
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I used to have a demo album called THE ELECTRIC COW GOES MOOG. Very funny to the extent it was trying to be funny. Too bad I gave it away, it's probably worth something by now. (Of course, this was also the days when you could buy Moog Synths at garage sales for $10.)
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Well, give the ASM and the enormous number of Palm applications out there, maybe a good solution would be to licence Apple's 68K emulator.
The ARM ought to be fast enough to run it, and done correctly the transition could be as transparent as when Apple switched off of 68K. Hopefully, unlike Apple, they will be able to rewrite the OS to be 100% native and therefore the emulator would be optional, given the tight storage space.
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Unlike the old days, any product can call itself "UNIX" if it meets The Open Group's Single UNIX Specification.
I don't think that you have to pay to licence the trademark, but the conformance testing costs money.
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No, G400 Duel Head support sucks ass in Win NT/2000. Matrox says that it's a Microsoft problem. I take it that G400 Duel Head is actually far better supported in XFree than NT.
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Service: The poor service and arrogance ...
One thing to realize is that Microsoft currently doesn't make any money on 'services', preferring to farm that business out to third parties. This makes them almost unique in the computer business, and is one reason that MS has so many loyalists.
Compare this to IBM, where the service is great, but you are paying through the nose for it. IBM makes more money off the services than the hardware or software. Now look at the IBM VARs -- generally unhappy because IBM is their biggest competitior.
So, a broken-up Microsoft is almost assuredly going to be a bigger services player. Lots of third parties will be pissed off. Service might improve, but it will also be more costly. (Some people think this areadly might be happening -- MS is in a deal with Andersen Consulting, MCSEs are being decertified, and good ActiveDirectory documentation is almost impossible to come by without signing an NDA.)
I suppose the Linux folks might not care about this situation, but in the long run it will serve to make Windows 2000 a more 'closed' platform with a 'closed' culture surrounding it, much like IBM products such as the AS/400. This, of course will only serve to help Linux, with it's very open culture and extremely VAR friendly business terms.
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Right -- a free product like Internet Explorer probably would never have come to be, except as the product of a monopoly.
And while Microsoft has done a pretty good job 'integrating' IE into Windows, to the point where it would almost make more sense for the Windows company to take IE instead of the Apps company. But politically, that's not likely to happen.
So, IE goes to the Apps company. Their first big licencee is the Windows company, because almost nothing in Win2K will work without IE installed, and unlike "98lite", this will take quite a bit of time to fix. Furthermore, IE is a good browser and almost a standard feature for Windows users, so big OEMs like Dell and Compaq would likely be happy to licence it at $10/PC.
Furthermore, IE is currently being 'integrated' into MS Office, MS Exchange/Outlook, and numerous other application platforms. The apps company will not be able to complete their groupware plans without control over the client (IE). So, there's a huge incentive for them to keep developing it.
If anyone is going to have trouble, it's not the Apps company, but the OS company. Operating Systems have essentially become a low value product. Apple and Sun give them away to sell hardware. RedHat gives one away to sell services. Microsoft makes money on the OS, but the real point is to develop a platform for the applications, which are the real profit centers.
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Well, I would expect a company whose primary business is operating systems to publish full specifications no matter what the developers are doing. Think about Apple or Sun. Then think about Microsoft, whose primary business is now really applications, and not the OS.
In fact most VB programmers are corporate types that couldn't leave in droves if they wanted to (well, they could, but Windows and VB would live on without them).
I think that your game theory analysis is correct. Right now, many new features developed by the "OS" wing are really there at the request of the applications groups. Microsoft can afford to spend money on projects like COM+ and ADO and so on, because they know that the next versions of Office and IE will use that technology.
Now think of a situation where the OS group actually has to evangilize their features. What happens when they develop a wizzy new feature like "SuperCOM++", and the Office, Inc and WordPerfect and everyone else decide not to use it. It's a loss. The Windows corporation will get burned this way, just as Apple did with OpenDoc, and the result is that they will be very careful about adding new featuers. The Win32 API might even stabilize, like Unix's has.
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They probably could support 480i today for only a small extra cost.
The big cost is large, high resolution tubes. Of course, this gives the TV manufacturers a huge opportunity to upsell. I wouldn't expect 1080 (or whatever the high definition res is) to be a standard TV feature for some time.
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Yeah, the TV stations are really crying about this one -- All they need to do is beta test High Definition broadcasts for a couple years, declare it a failure, and then start rolling out paging and data and other services in that extra bandwidth space. Or better yet, broadcast 4 standard definition channels, quadrupling their ad space they have to sell.
Meanwhile, when Analog TV is about to be killed, all they need to do is roll out some little old ladies who watch PBS all day and can't afford a $100 converter box. Congress loves little old ladies, and Analog TV won't be killed for another 10 years.
So, where they once had 1 analog channel, they soon will have 1 analog, 1 digital, and some additional channels and services to make money on. And all for free. Poor guys, Congress has been so mean to them.
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Power Computing did not make 'open' PREP or CHRP machines. Their machines used Apple designed and Apple licenced boards with the Apple ROM. They were as closed as Apple boxes, because they essentially were Apple boxes. As for destroying jobs, I doubt it -- Apple's market share is now greater with one manufacturer than when there was dozens of clones.
Other companies like Umax made both Apple and PREP machines, as well as bare PREP boards.
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