Actually, the default security on NT 4.0 is loose because they need to account for braindead Windows 95 programs that think they can write all over the filesystem and the registry.
Win2000 supposedly fixes this by being tight enough to refuse to run poorly written Win95 programs when running as a member of the "Users" group. Unfortunately, certain popular programs (errh, Office 97) won't run for "Users".
Even today, software is being developed that is not compatible with NT's multi-user security model (ERRRHHMM, Mozilla -- go vote for bug 6464), even when a Unix port is designed correctly.
So, it looks like that NT Admins will need to go on granting local "Power User" or "Administrator" authority to their users, negating any security advantages of NT's design. --
IMO, with my PII and 256MB RAM, it is nearly as fast as IE. Only that the damn thing takes 55 MB of RAM, which pushes my normal working environment into swap, which slows everything else down. (IE uses about 5.5 MB per browser process.) Plus pulling Netscape 6 out of swap space is a long, disk grinding experience.
My biggest complaint, however is the ugly and non-functional "skin" they shipped. Most people at work who seem me running Netscape 6 just say "Euuwww!" at the UI. Plus things like broken "Back" behavior, no dropdown history, right-click doesn't do anything in most places, and so on. --
Unlike Slashdotters, the vast majority of world's web designers don't know about the new W3C DOM features that Mozilla is implementing. They are are writing their "DHTML" using 3 year old books, Dreamweaver (etc), and various cross browser libraries.
Someone needs to smack them on the side of their head to get them to rewrite their scripts, and the brand name Netscape is a big enough stick to do so. (A few people posted on Mozilline that Netscape 6's DHTML support sucked. They were re-educated that their scripts were the ones doing the sucking.) --
Well, Microsoft took the correct approach and designed their scripting engine to be language neutral.
This nicely avoids arguments on whether JavaScript should be the be-all-end-all web scripting language, or whether you should use it for system scripting. (Is it really worse than VBScript? Well, no alert(), but VB has MsgBox().)
Meanwhile JavaScript is apparently hardcoded into Mozilla. Not a huge problem right now where the public net runs on JavaScript, but in the future it would be nice to have more options when using Mozilla as an "application platform". --
The State government of Lousiana has been going out of their way to make trouble for the groups organizing residents near toxic facilities. These residents are nearly universally poor and black, and it probably isn't a coincidence that the toxic facilities are where they are. Furthermore, Lousiana is a pretty corrupt place. I don't think it's a strech to say that the government is pretty much for sale there. The fact that you might not have been aware of this might justify the underreportedness of this story. (In fact right now, a former Lousiana Governor is on trial for Federal corruption charges. This case isn't getting any national coverage -- except in the sport pages because the former owner of the 49ers was involved.)
"NATO Deliberately Started the War with Yugoslavia" isn't pathetic and wasn't underreported at all -- it's a fact and was headline news for many months. Of course, NATO was reacting to the ethnic clensing policies of Yugoslavia, and this was explained by Clinton and Albrecht and everyone else in the government. I think what you are reacting to is the liberal, antiwar tone implied by calling this story "underreported".
But generally, your points are on - "Pharmaceutical Companies Put Profits Before Need" isn't so much news as a fact of life, and so on. --
Re:Cost for PPC Systems
on
SuSE For PPC
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, but even though used macs are plenty that's still a 5 year old advantage.
If you wanted to buy a new machine today to run Linux, there really isn't a compelling reason to use PowerPC, with laptops being the big exception. (Another exception might be an application which makes particular use of the G4's vector processor.)
--
Re:Cost for PPC Systems
on
SuSE For PPC
·
· Score: 2
The cost of Macs are usually in the same ballpark with IBM, Dell, and so on. However, the common Slashdot objection is that they can't go buy a $100 motherboard, a $200 PPC CPU, and screw the thing together themselves. People are working on this problem, but nothing yet.
The question is not that PPC systems cost more (IBM designed the platform to be competitive with Intel), it's that they don't really offer a compelling price/performance advantage over Intel-based systems. (The one exception is the Powerbook and iBook which offers a price/performance/battery life combo that kicks dust all over Intel.) The only really compelling thing about current PPC hardware is that it runs MacOS, and of course comes in cool looking cases.
This is a major letdown for a product that promised to always "scale" better than Intel. (Think back to when Apple was selling 604e chips, and all Intel had was Pentium Pros.) People will deal with various incompatibilities and minor hassles on platforms like the Alpha to get the enormous speed advantage. I just don't see the 'win' with PPC based systems right now.
--
Re:Please answer these questions?
on
SuSE For PPC
·
· Score: 1
"I've been looking forward to a ppc board market similar to the x86 board market for awhile."
You will probably need to keep waiting. The PC Board market really doesn't exist to serve hobbyists - it exists because Intel's distribution strategy allows anyone from IBM to the guy in the corner store to become a "PC Manufacturer". Most of these bare boards end up under someone's desk running Windows 98, never to be tweaked, overclocked, or upgraded ever again. The fact that hobbyists and upgraders can get cheap parts is just a nice side-effect of this model.
IBM originally intended the PowerPC platform to rival the Intel platform in bredth and size. In the early days dozens of MBs were available, as well as lots of prebuilt non-Mac PPC systems. Unfortunately, the market never took off, and Apple has been the only significant customer for lower end computers. Still, it would be nice if someone could get IBM's reference boards into production -- it's just that the price will probably always be higher and the selection less diverse than the Intel market.
They did get the Mac running on x86. Note however, that this was more a test of their 68K emulator technology than a real platform consideration. (And when PPC finally shipped, the OS was running 90% under emulation.)
They were looking at IBM, Sun Sparc, MIPS, and so on as options for their new processor. The theory was that if ran on a (ugg) PC, it will run on anything. --
I remember an old Wired article. Gasse personally shot down the OS licencing proposals. He also bewilderingly insisted that Macs would have proprietary networking and would not interoperate with other systems. (He wanted the vendors to run Apple protocols. When Novell released their buggy MACFILE.NLM, the server crashes were the single greatest thing booting Macs out of corporations.) IIRC, Gasse even quashed a proposal where Apple was going to buy Sun Micro (don't even think about their current market valuations, and the fact that Apple *still* doesn't have a modern OS!)
The only thing that Gasse is remembered fondly for is his OPENMAC licence plate, meaning he was pushing the move to make an expandable system with slots and such. Of course, that came at a price. As you mentioned, $10,000, and the abandonment of the original vision of the Mac as a consumer toaster, a computer for everyone. --
It is different. 10 years ago Macs were twice as expensive as PCs and the hardware was much, much better. This has extended their life by quite a bit. I've used Quadra 950s. I've used the fanciest 486 server that Compaq ever made. Given the choice, I'd take the Quadra in an instant.
(And as for a generic 486 clone -- totally useless except as a DOS machine, a novell print server or some masochist's linux box. 16MB Max, you'll never find a hard drive that will work, 9600bps serial, cheezy VGA video. Ugh.)
Note that Apple hasn't made superior hardware for quite some time. Their modern boxes are pretty much the same thing as modern PCs, and probably will have the same lifespans. --
Yes, this is going to be a tough transition, not only for the admins, but also the Mac users that support themselves (most corporate IS departments refuse support to Macs.)
These folks have 16 years of inbred training that they should never have to edit a configuraiton file, that everything can be done by the GUI, and that most problems can be solved by deleting your prefs file and rebooting. You already see posts on the Mac boards about OS X -- "How come I can't arrange my folders the way I want" and "Where's the Extension Manager?". It's a combination of very high expectations and complete ignorance of what a 'modern' operating system looks like.
Either Apple has done a perfect job GUI-ifing Unix, or people aren't going to be happy. I can already hear the cries of "(gasp) That sounds like something you would have to do on Windows!".
One light at the end of the tunnel is that apparently OS X will ship without the BSD command environment installed by default. That will put some serious pressure on Apple and 3rd parties to ship Macintosh applications, not unix applications. --
One thing I realize about Slashdot is that it functions as sort of a base outlet for the flamier passions of the moment. The Opinion Makers (whether that be Bruce Perens or just some well spoken slashdotter) make the long-winded official proclamations On How The Community Should React To This, and then those views are repeated endlessly by various karma monkeys and flamebots until the end of time.
One thing I wish would happened during these Darwin/APSL discussions is that some members of the Mac/Next developer community would step up to the plate and articulate why these events are a good thing for the Mac/Next developer community. It's happened, but it usually gets buried by 300 Linux Advocate condemnations and of course the assorted "One Button Mouse", "Drag Floppy to Trash?", and "I'm still pissed about the Mac IIvx" posts. Even this page seems to have a large number of people that don't even know what Darwin is, much less why they should care.
Anyway, you are right -- Big Corporation Releases Open Source Unix should be applauded by a group of people that are nominally Open Source fans and Unix fans. However, the ideology ends up being a wash, and the true colors come out where everyone is defending their specific interest (whether that be Linux, or the GPL, or that they don't like Apple).
But, do you what? Screw 'em. If Darwin is a worthwhile project, people will pick up the ball and run with it. These people are probably going to have to come from the Mac/Next side of the fence - I don't see much interest here. When it gets a X server, and KDE, 282 CD rippers compile, and a real 'distribution', people will start to take notice. If it stays up and puts in respectable benchmark numbers, people will really start to take notice. Remember that Linux has got where it is because of the pragmatists who have implemented it for real work, not the ideology involved in opinion shaping. --
It seems that the business plan of Be from day 1 was to get bought by Apple. PowerPC-based OS, single user, ran on Macs, secret Mac-like UI mode, and so on. The fact that they failed at this task kinda makes you wonder about their sanity.
Meanwhile, NeXT was sitting there with what was arguably the greatest end user OS of all time, and they were EOLing it because basically nobody wanted it. Deal of the century for Apple -- I wonder why someone else didn't grab them first -- maybe the OS/2 debacle scared them off.
I have a lot of respect for BeOS technically. As for Gasse, however, I've never heard anything really positive about him. While Jobs isn't exactly the greatest in the 'openness' department, Gasse was the single-handed mastermind behind the closed, proprietary Mac of the late 1980s.
now, i've never seen anyone say, "if Apple opened their GUI, i'd work to improve the Mac OS."
Meaning you've never heard anyone on a Linux board like Slashdot say that.
The substantial MacOS hacker community has been working to extend the Mac UI since the thing shipped in 1984. There's a giant library of freeware/shareware GUI extensions out there right now -- more and better than the Windows add-ons you might have seen. There's also a group of NeXT developers still around. These folks would *love* to get source access to the GUI, and they probably wouldn't kvetch and moan about it not being under GPL either.
Check the newsgroup archives - it's been discussed at length and Mozilla won't do it. You could of course roll your own, but that's kinda pointless except for testing purposes. --
One important fact is that companies are turning to "Application Service Providers" more and more to outsource their application hosting. This can be anything from websites to ERP systems.
While a medium size corporation might not be able to handle a mainframe (or even a Unix midrange) system, the ASPs certainly can get this expertise. They only need to worry about maintaining one 'frame, and each of their customers can have their own secure Linux partition which is firewalled from the other customers.
This is a way of extending IBM's TCO numbers to even smaller shops. Linux on a mainframe looks like it will be huge in the application hosting/ASP market. --
Any statements that AOL may have made are constrained by the anti-trust trial. "Microsoft won't even let us ship our own product. Boo hoo."
I'm sure (like many people) AOL was hoping that Microsoft would settle the case, and then they would be able to go back and negotiate a better deal. Now that's up in the air, and AOL might have to stay with IE for a number of years.
In the long run, however, Mozilla is a pretty important project for AOL. They can't stay on a closed Win32/Mac binary client forever - at some point they will want to move to a DHTML-based true web interface. Mozilla with it's skins and other features is the obvious platform to get them there. --
Most computer users actually believe that bigger number = better.
The more savvy computer users (say, Slashdot readers) don't really care about version numbers and will use the product that works the best for them.
A smaller group of Netscape defenders will parrot some bogus story about Netscape 5 being released a couple years ago. Unfortunately, they are lying -- there was never anything called Netscape 5 released.
So -- 1) Lusers use Netscape 6 because bigger is better. 2) Savvy users use Netscape 6 because better is better. 3) Netscape Fans have plausible deniability. 4) Microsoft renames IE 5.5 to IE 6.0
It's unfortunate that Microsoft didn't start supporting document.getElementById until version 5 of IE.
And even though it's now supported, most IE-specific DHTML that I've seen still uses document.all (which is apparently a VisualBasic-ism that MS grafted onto the DOM spec.) Understandable because IE 4 shipped with Windows 98 and will probably need to be supported on public websites for the next several years.
<controversial> One easy solution for this problem would be for Mozilla to suck it up and support document.all. Yes, it's proprietary MS embrace+extend junk. But, unfortunately, 99% of the "almost compliant" DHTML code out there uses document.all, and because of the IE 4 issue.
If Netscape suported document.all, developers could have one code path that supported IE4, IE5, and Netscape 6. Because they won't, it means multiple code paths, 'libraries', and browser sniffing will need to continue for the forseeable future. </controversial>
(On the other hand, as soon as Netscape 6 ships, I can see sites deprecating their Netscape 4-specific DHTML code. It's non-standard, Netscape had the tendency to blow up while running it, and it's too different to be maintainable over a long period. ) --
A PCI Matrox Millenium runs about $20 on eBay. That's a super affordable upgrade for any box with bad video. I use one in my P-133, and KDE and Gnome work great. (But I also have SCSI-2 and 112 MB RAM, so who can tell.) --
The rumor seems to be that Apple has axed OpenStep/Cocoa on all platforms except for MacOSX. (I haven't actually seen an Apple statement on the topic, but the old Next folks seem pretty pissed.)
On the face of it, this seems bizarre. For one, NeXT was actually kinda profitable before Apple bought them. For another, OpenStep/Cocoa for Windows and Unix would only help to increase the software base for MacOS X. --
But what if we want to use them under our rights of fair use?
The law is clear on this -- you don't have normal "fair use" rights with a system that uses CSS, Macrovision and Region Coding.
So, you have two choices: 1) Don't use DVDs. Use an open format. 2) Live as an outlaw with DeCSS. If you are going to do this because the system is immoral, you might as well go all the way and start warezing DVDs.
There is no moral middle ground with DeCSS, at least not under US law. --
Re:This is not the point at all ...
on
More on LinDVD
·
· Score: 1
I thought that the DVD could disable the 'frame grab' features in Windows players... If so, you can only do this if the movie studio wants to let you do it.
One thing that strikes me is that Personal Computing is all about the user controlling the information flow on his/her machine. But now someone has introduced hardware and software that bounces encrypted data around your system that you can't manupulate (legally). The idea is frankly disgusting and hopefully not a precedent for future technologies. --
Well, comparisons to a complete kludge like Win98 are a little unfair to Linux, so let's look at "business-class" "modern" OS, Windows NT:
More fine-grained locking - Windows NT has only had this since Service Pack 4 - only a year ago or so. USB support - Only shipped last month for WinNT P&P - Only shipped last month for WinNT WinModems - Many are still not compatible with WinNT khttpd - When did IIS ship? raw I/O - Still not in WinNT (or if it is, who uses it?) rewritten networking - SP4 again. Still behind in firewalling and other network infrastructure type things.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the default security on NT 4.0 is loose because they need to account for braindead Windows 95 programs that think they can write all over the filesystem and the registry.
Win2000 supposedly fixes this by being tight enough to refuse to run poorly written Win95 programs when running as a member of the "Users" group. Unfortunately, certain popular programs (errh, Office 97) won't run for "Users".
Even today, software is being developed that is not compatible with NT's multi-user security model (ERRRHHMM, Mozilla -- go vote for bug 6464), even when a Unix port is designed correctly.
So, it looks like that NT Admins will need to go on granting local "Power User" or "Administrator" authority to their users, negating any security advantages of NT's design.
--
ZDNet actually gave it a pretty good review.
IMO, with my PII and 256MB RAM, it is nearly as fast as IE. Only that the damn thing takes 55 MB of RAM, which pushes my normal working environment into swap, which slows everything else down. (IE uses about 5.5 MB per browser process.) Plus pulling Netscape 6 out of swap space is a long, disk grinding experience.
My biggest complaint, however is the ugly and non-functional "skin" they shipped. Most people at work who seem me running Netscape 6 just say "Euuwww!" at the UI. Plus things like broken "Back" behavior, no dropdown history, right-click doesn't do anything in most places, and so on.
--
Unlike Slashdotters, the vast majority of world's web designers don't know about the new W3C DOM features that Mozilla is implementing. They are are writing their "DHTML" using 3 year old books, Dreamweaver (etc), and various cross browser libraries.
Someone needs to smack them on the side of their head to get them to rewrite their scripts, and the brand name Netscape is a big enough stick to do so. (A few people posted on Mozilline that Netscape 6's DHTML support sucked. They were re-educated that their scripts were the ones doing the sucking.)
--
Well, Microsoft took the correct approach and designed their scripting engine to be language neutral.
This nicely avoids arguments on whether JavaScript should be the be-all-end-all web scripting language, or whether you should use it for system scripting. (Is it really worse than VBScript? Well, no alert(), but VB has MsgBox().)
Meanwhile JavaScript is apparently hardcoded into Mozilla. Not a huge problem right now where the public net runs on JavaScript, but in the future it would be nice to have more options when using Mozilla as an "application platform".
--
The State government of Lousiana has been going out of their way to make trouble for the groups organizing residents near toxic facilities. These residents are nearly universally poor and black, and it probably isn't a coincidence that the toxic facilities are where they are. Furthermore, Lousiana is a pretty corrupt place. I don't think it's a strech to say that the government is pretty much for sale there. The fact that you might not have been aware of this might justify the underreportedness of this story. (In fact right now, a former Lousiana Governor is on trial for Federal corruption charges. This case isn't getting any national coverage -- except in the sport pages because the former owner of the 49ers was involved.)
"NATO Deliberately Started the War with Yugoslavia" isn't pathetic and wasn't underreported at all -- it's a fact and was headline news for many months. Of course, NATO was reacting to the ethnic clensing policies of Yugoslavia, and this was explained by Clinton and Albrecht and everyone else in the government. I think what you are reacting to is the liberal, antiwar tone implied by calling this story "underreported".
But generally, your points are on - "Pharmaceutical Companies Put Profits Before Need" isn't so much news as a fact of life, and so on.
--
Yeah, but even though used macs are plenty that's still a 5 year old advantage.
If you wanted to buy a new machine today to run Linux, there really isn't a compelling reason to use PowerPC, with laptops being the big exception. (Another exception might be an application which makes particular use of the G4's vector processor.)
--
The cost of Macs are usually in the same ballpark with IBM, Dell, and so on. However, the common Slashdot objection is that they can't go buy a $100 motherboard, a $200 PPC CPU, and screw the thing together themselves. People are working on this problem, but nothing yet.
The question is not that PPC systems cost more (IBM designed the platform to be competitive with Intel), it's that they don't really offer a compelling price/performance advantage over Intel-based systems. (The one exception is the Powerbook and iBook which offers a price/performance/battery life combo that kicks dust all over Intel.) The only really compelling thing about current PPC hardware is that it runs MacOS, and of course comes in cool looking cases.
This is a major letdown for a product that promised to always "scale" better than Intel. (Think back to when Apple was selling 604e chips, and all Intel had was Pentium Pros.) People will deal with various incompatibilities and minor hassles on platforms like the Alpha to get the enormous speed advantage. I just don't see the 'win' with PPC based systems right now.
--
"I've been looking forward to a ppc board market similar to the x86 board market for awhile."
You will probably need to keep waiting. The PC Board market really doesn't exist to serve hobbyists - it exists because Intel's distribution strategy allows anyone from IBM to the guy in the corner store to become a "PC Manufacturer". Most of these bare boards end up under someone's desk running Windows 98, never to be tweaked, overclocked, or upgraded ever again. The fact that hobbyists and upgraders can get cheap parts is just a nice side-effect of this model.
IBM originally intended the PowerPC platform to rival the Intel platform in bredth and size. In the early days dozens of MBs were available, as well as lots of prebuilt non-Mac PPC systems. Unfortunately, the market never took off, and Apple has been the only significant customer for lower end computers. Still, it would be nice if someone could get IBM's reference boards into production -- it's just that the price will probably always be higher and the selection less diverse than the Intel market.
--
They did get the Mac running on x86. Note however, that this was more a test of their 68K emulator technology than a real platform consideration. (And when PPC finally shipped, the OS was running 90% under emulation.)
They were looking at IBM, Sun Sparc, MIPS, and so on as options for their new processor. The theory was that if ran on a (ugg) PC, it will run on anything.
--
I remember an old Wired article. Gasse personally shot down the OS licencing proposals. He also bewilderingly insisted that Macs would have proprietary networking and would not interoperate with other systems. (He wanted the vendors to run Apple protocols. When Novell released their buggy MACFILE.NLM, the server crashes were the single greatest thing booting Macs out of corporations.) IIRC, Gasse even quashed a proposal where Apple was going to buy Sun Micro (don't even think about their current market valuations, and the fact that Apple *still* doesn't have a modern OS!)
The only thing that Gasse is remembered fondly for is his OPENMAC licence plate, meaning he was pushing the move to make an expandable system with slots and such. Of course, that came at a price. As you mentioned, $10,000, and the abandonment of the original vision of the Mac as a consumer toaster, a computer for everyone.
--
And this is no different in the X86 vs mac world
It is different. 10 years ago Macs were twice as expensive as PCs and the hardware was much, much better. This has extended their life by quite a bit. I've used Quadra 950s. I've used the fanciest 486 server that Compaq ever made. Given the choice, I'd take the Quadra in an instant.
(And as for a generic 486 clone -- totally useless except as a DOS machine, a novell print server or some masochist's linux box. 16MB Max, you'll never find a hard drive that will work, 9600bps serial, cheezy VGA video. Ugh.)
Note that Apple hasn't made superior hardware for quite some time. Their modern boxes are pretty much the same thing as modern PCs, and probably will have the same lifespans.
--
Yes, this is going to be a tough transition, not only for the admins, but also the Mac users that support themselves (most corporate IS departments refuse support to Macs.)
These folks have 16 years of inbred training that they should never have to edit a configuraiton file, that everything can be done by the GUI, and that most problems can be solved by deleting your prefs file and rebooting. You already see posts on the Mac boards about OS X -- "How come I can't arrange my folders the way I want" and "Where's the Extension Manager?". It's a combination of very high expectations and complete ignorance of what a 'modern' operating system looks like.
Either Apple has done a perfect job GUI-ifing Unix, or people aren't going to be happy. I can already hear the cries of "(gasp) That sounds like something you would have to do on Windows!".
One light at the end of the tunnel is that apparently OS X will ship without the BSD command environment installed by default. That will put some serious pressure on Apple and 3rd parties to ship Macintosh applications, not unix applications.
--
One thing I realize about Slashdot is that it functions as sort of a base outlet for the flamier passions of the moment. The Opinion Makers (whether that be Bruce Perens or just some well spoken slashdotter) make the long-winded official proclamations On How The Community Should React To This, and then those views are repeated endlessly by various karma monkeys and flamebots until the end of time.
One thing I wish would happened during these Darwin/APSL discussions is that some members of the Mac/Next developer community would step up to the plate and articulate why these events are a good thing for the Mac/Next developer community. It's happened, but it usually gets buried by 300 Linux Advocate condemnations and of course the assorted "One Button Mouse", "Drag Floppy to Trash?", and "I'm still pissed about the Mac IIvx" posts. Even this page seems to have a large number of people that don't even know what Darwin is, much less why they should care.
Anyway, you are right -- Big Corporation Releases Open Source Unix should be applauded by a group of people that are nominally Open Source fans and Unix fans. However, the ideology ends up being a wash, and the true colors come out where everyone is defending their specific interest (whether that be Linux, or the GPL, or that they don't like Apple).
But, do you what? Screw 'em. If Darwin is a worthwhile project, people will pick up the ball and run with it. These people are probably going to have to come from the Mac/Next side of the fence - I don't see much interest here. When it gets a X server, and KDE, 282 CD rippers compile, and a real 'distribution', people will start to take notice. If it stays up and puts in respectable benchmark numbers, people will really start to take notice. Remember that Linux has got where it is because of the pragmatists who have implemented it for real work, not the ideology involved in opinion shaping.
--
It seems that the business plan of Be from day 1 was to get bought by Apple. PowerPC-based OS, single user, ran on Macs, secret Mac-like UI mode, and so on. The fact that they failed at this task kinda makes you wonder about their sanity.
Meanwhile, NeXT was sitting there with what was arguably the greatest end user OS of all time, and they were EOLing it because basically nobody wanted it. Deal of the century for Apple -- I wonder why someone else didn't grab them first -- maybe the OS/2 debacle scared them off.
I have a lot of respect for BeOS technically. As for Gasse, however, I've never heard anything really positive about him. While Jobs isn't exactly the greatest in the 'openness' department, Gasse was the single-handed mastermind behind the closed, proprietary Mac of the late 1980s.
--
now, i've never seen anyone say, "if Apple opened their GUI, i'd work to improve the Mac OS."
Meaning you've never heard anyone on a Linux board like Slashdot say that.
The substantial MacOS hacker community has been working to extend the Mac UI since the thing shipped in 1984. There's a giant library of freeware/shareware GUI extensions out there right now -- more and better than the Windows add-ons you might have seen. There's also a group of NeXT developers still around. These folks would *love* to get source access to the GUI, and they probably wouldn't kvetch and moan about it not being under GPL either.
--
I don't know about "won't";
Check the newsgroup archives - it's been discussed at length and Mozilla won't do it. You could of course roll your own, but that's kinda pointless except for testing purposes.
--
One important fact is that companies are turning to "Application Service Providers" more and more to outsource their application hosting. This can be anything from websites to ERP systems.
While a medium size corporation might not be able to handle a mainframe (or even a Unix midrange) system, the ASPs certainly can get this expertise. They only need to worry about maintaining one 'frame, and each of their customers can have their own secure Linux partition which is firewalled from the other customers.
This is a way of extending IBM's TCO numbers to even smaller shops. Linux on a mainframe looks like it will be huge in the application hosting/ASP market.
--
Any statements that AOL may have made are constrained by the anti-trust trial. "Microsoft won't even let us ship our own product. Boo hoo."
I'm sure (like many people) AOL was hoping that Microsoft would settle the case, and then they would be able to go back and negotiate a better deal. Now that's up in the air, and AOL might have to stay with IE for a number of years.
In the long run, however, Mozilla is a pretty important project for AOL. They can't stay on a closed Win32/Mac binary client forever - at some point they will want to move to a DHTML-based true web interface. Mozilla with it's skins and other features is the obvious platform to get them there.
--
Most computer users actually believe that bigger number = better.
The more savvy computer users (say, Slashdot readers) don't really care about version numbers and will use the product that works the best for them.
A smaller group of Netscape defenders will parrot some bogus story about Netscape 5 being released a couple years ago. Unfortunately, they are lying -- there was never anything called Netscape 5 released.
So --
1) Lusers use Netscape 6 because bigger is better.
2) Savvy users use Netscape 6 because better is better.
3) Netscape Fans have plausible deniability.
4) Microsoft renames IE 5.5 to IE 6.0
Everyone Wins!
--
It's unfortunate that Microsoft didn't start supporting document.getElementById until version 5 of IE.
And even though it's now supported, most IE-specific DHTML that I've seen still uses document.all (which is apparently a VisualBasic-ism that MS grafted onto the DOM spec.) Understandable because IE 4 shipped with Windows 98 and will probably need to be supported on public websites for the next several years.
<controversial>
One easy solution for this problem would be for Mozilla to suck it up and support document.all. Yes, it's proprietary MS embrace+extend junk. But, unfortunately, 99% of the "almost compliant" DHTML code out there uses document.all, and because of the IE 4 issue.
If Netscape suported document.all, developers could have one code path that supported IE4, IE5, and Netscape 6. Because they won't, it means multiple code paths, 'libraries', and browser sniffing will need to continue for the forseeable future.
</controversial>
(On the other hand, as soon as Netscape 6 ships, I can see sites deprecating their Netscape 4-specific DHTML code. It's non-standard, Netscape had the tendency to blow up while running it, and it's too different to be maintainable over a long period. )
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A PCI Matrox Millenium runs about $20 on eBay. That's a super affordable upgrade for any box with bad video. I use one in my P-133, and KDE and Gnome work great. (But I also have SCSI-2 and 112 MB RAM, so who can tell.)
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The rumor seems to be that Apple has axed OpenStep/Cocoa on all platforms except for MacOSX. (I haven't actually seen an Apple statement on the topic, but the old Next folks seem pretty pissed.)
On the face of it, this seems bizarre. For one, NeXT was actually kinda profitable before Apple bought them. For another, OpenStep/Cocoa for Windows and Unix would only help to increase the software base for MacOS X.
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But what if we want to use them under our rights of fair use?
The law is clear on this -- you don't have normal "fair use" rights with a system that uses CSS, Macrovision and Region Coding.
So, you have two choices:
1) Don't use DVDs. Use an open format.
2) Live as an outlaw with DeCSS. If you are going to do this because the system is immoral, you might as well go all the way and start warezing DVDs.
There is no moral middle ground with DeCSS, at least not under US law.
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I thought that the DVD could disable the 'frame grab' features in Windows players... If so, you can only do this if the movie studio wants to let you do it.
One thing that strikes me is that Personal Computing is all about the user controlling the information flow on his/her machine. But now someone has introduced hardware and software that bounces encrypted data around your system that you can't manupulate (legally). The idea is frankly disgusting and hopefully not a precedent for future technologies.
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Well, comparisons to a complete kludge like Win98 are a little unfair to Linux, so let's look at "business-class" "modern" OS, Windows NT:
More fine-grained locking - Windows NT has only had this since Service Pack 4 - only a year ago or so.
USB support - Only shipped last month for WinNT
P&P - Only shipped last month for WinNT
WinModems - Many are still not compatible with WinNT
khttpd - When did IIS ship?
raw I/O - Still not in WinNT (or if it is, who uses it?)
rewritten networking - SP4 again. Still behind in firewalling and other network infrastructure type things.
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