A) I agree with you that FrontPage/Word etc. are "moronized" by letting the extended characters through as WinANSI characters rather than the HTML escapes. (Especially because the HTML escapes work on both Netscape and IE, on all platforms.)
B) I have the sneaky suspicion that the HTML Form text box only accepts single byte characters. If so, this makes impossible to post smart quotes without typing the HTML escapes yourself. This is a seperate case than FrontPage.
Now, smart quotes in the original post you replied to are clearly unnecessary, or should be entered as correct HTML. But I've seen a couple unsuspecting/. users get flamed as Windows Sympathizers for cutting-and-pasting text from a web page. (Including one poor guy who was using Netscape/MacOS.) This makes me think the real solution is an Extended ANSI-to-HTML parser in Slashdot's comments.pl script.
And, while I agree that standards are standards, it just seems like bitch that while 99% of the world wants to think ANSI 147/148 are smart quotes, 1% is going to insist that it is a little meaningless blob. It's such a sad, small thing to make a stand over, and as you point out, looking at the little blobs is clearly annoying to Linux users.
(Of course, I will retract my opinon if someone can show that defining extended ANSI characters would break any Unix application. And, I just want to say that despite this post, I'm not a Bill Gates catamite or anything, just trying to point out how small this issue really should be.) --
My understanding is that's incorrect -- the SQL backend is planned for Exchange 7. Ex2000 (v6) does allow you have mutiple Jet databases, however.
(I am a little confused at the "web store" feature -- as far as I can tell it's exchange stuff stored as XML documents in the traditional Jet backend. It does, however, allow Lotus Domino-like webserving of groupware content.) --
Question -- Why don't Unix font sets just include smart quotes in the extended-ANSI positions?
The characters are otherwise undefined, and the only other way to display them is through Unicode. Both Windows and MacOS seem to handle this situation by just extending the ANSI spec to define common characters that ANSI forgot to define.
“For Example, these quotes are using the correct HTML Unicode codes, not Windows extended characters.” I'll have to check later from a Linux box to see if they show up correctly. (If, however, I were to copy and paste them from this Windows box, they would be inserted into the buffer as Windows ANSI characters.)
Yes, and including a blatent troll at slashdot.org, is a sure way that your column will be 'slashdotted'. And sure enough, Slashdot posts the link, and IDG gets the page views.
I hate to think that VAndoverTaCo would do it, but if I were them I would be thinking seriously about demanding a kickback from places like IDG, TimeWarner and ZDNet for linking to one of their pages. --
I dunno, I always thought that the IIgs was a cool machine, but it's existence allowed Apple to price Macintoshes in the stratosphere.
Along the way, Apple developed a Mac-like GUI for the IIgs, "HyperCard" for the IIgs, AppleTalk networking, a GUI word processor, and so on. Most of these things were developed before anything was running on MS Windows -- there were only two consumer GUI computers available at the time, both incompabible, and both from Apple Computer.
I know quite a few people and schools who invested heavliy in the IIgs -- only to be disappointed when it was dropped a few years later. Of course, it was smart to to consolidate development on one platform (Mac), rather than having double R+D costs, but it would have been smarter not to bait-and-switch with the IIgs to begin with. Most of the IIgs users I knew never bought another Apple.
I can't help thinking that history might have been different if there was a cheap, color Macintosh available starting in 1987, and if the IIgs never came into existence. -- The Macintosh would probably have quite a bit more mindshare and marketshare today, if only because an entire generation of people could have afforded one early on, when it was the only GUI system available.
(They finally got it sorta right in 1990 with the Mac LC with the Apple ][ card.) --
You have to remember that after Steve Jobs left, the new management was in a rush to obliterate his legacy. They didn't want a high end Lisa/MacXL machine -- they needed everyone to forget about it so they could start moving 128K/512K Macs in volume.
This is all about the time that JL Gasse was driving around with his OPEN MAC licence plate, and the Mac II design was being planned. --
It isn't just the secretary of the Navy -- Microsoft has been doing a bunch of customer research into Lotus Notes operations, as well as prepackaged web-based solutions, and they've heard about a million reasons why MS Groupware sucks.
Microsoft's answer to groupware is Microsoft Exchange. But what do you think of Exchange as being? An expensive Email server.
It sounds to me like they've gotten the message that Exchange (as it stands) will never be more than a half-assed e-mail/calendar server. The problem is changing directions.
They've been running around whispering about some vaporware called "Tahoe" for a while now. The goal is to make MS Office the groupware 'client', and to make extended versions of IIS and MSSQL the groupware 'server'. Exchange only fits into the picture as an MTA -- it's unstable Jet databases are going to fade quietly into the night.
Note that if they can pull this off, they will strike at a big weak spot in Lotus. Notes has always had pretty poor integration with MS Office because they've chosen to sold the integration features as a value add in Lotus SmartSuite. The problem is that 95% of their customers use MS Office and have to fumble around with file attachments, etc.
You know, as long as version numbers are coming out of the marketing departments, there's no sense in trying to justify them at all. Maybe "Version 6" makes sense, maybe it doesn't -- who cares.
If you are the kind of person that is impressed by larger numbers, then you probably don't understand or care to understand what the number is supposed to mean. You also may be impressed that "Tide" laundry detergent has been "New and Improved!" continually for the last 20 years.
On the other hand, if you know the history of Mozilla/Netscape and are just happy to have the software, you are probably smart enough to ignore the version number or realize that it's like an automobile's model number -- only useful as a piece of nomenclature. You don't care if it's Netscape v. 32.5 or IE 3000 -- you will use the product that meets your technical need. The marketers know this, and consequentially ignore you and your archaic ideas that version numbers have anything to do with the engineering process.
(Put another way, you can only gain sales by inflating the version number, you will never lose them.) --
Yup, reading down the page, there's apparently 10,000 items in Debian's list. However, does that mean that Debian has 2x to 6x less bugs than Windows 2000. (I can't say because Debian won't install on my machine and Win2000 [and Mandrake] will -- and I haven't logged it as a 'showstopper'.
Note that Open Source uses a different (and IMO, better) methodology than Microsoft. If I find a bug in a particular package, I'll probably report it or send a patch to the package maintainer and let him/her deal with Debian. Debian/RedHat/etc are primarily concerned with the packaging issues, and aren't intended to be a be-all-end-all like MS's database. --
for the sake of some degree of objectivity let's assume there are 20,000 actual "bugs" in Window 2000 ... This is in spite off the resources they are claiming they have used to beta test the product!
Note that one thing you will get from an extended (>1 Year!) beta/QA cycle is a large number of detected bugs and other issues. When you pay a large number of testers and have several thousand unpaid testers, you'd better have a pretty big database after the fact.
The important thing is that we don't have a metric to compare the 65,000 or 20,000 number with -- We don't know how many 'open' issues exist in Sun's Solaris BugBase or IBM's OS/2 BugBase, or even RedHat's internal BugBase. 65,000 could be a small number in comparison (depending on methodology, etc.)
It's like saying that the Linux kernel only has 23 bugs because that's all Alan Cox bothered to write on the back of a cocktail napkin when someone asked him after a few rounds -- the number is purely dependant on amount of effort put into finding the number.
Send an army of QA testers at RedHat or Debian for a couple years, and see what they come up with, then start talking numbers (And don't forget to pay bughunt bonuses like MS does!) I know that I can find about 30 little UI glitches in 15 minutes in front of a Linux OS. --
Somewhere around, I have a three port Farallon dongle-hub that does this. (Two ports 10BT, one port Mac AAUI.)
Since the Farallon unit was pretty cheap when it was in production, I always thought it was strange that more hubs don't autodetect a crossover cable. Nice to know this might become a standard feature. --
Hah, yes. Occassionally there's a segement on the news-- Did you know that your company can read your E-Mail! Even if you delete it! And, believe it or not, it's totally legal! (Fortunately for them, their e-mail content is profoundly boring and contains about 10,000 copies of the same stupid jokes.) One just has to chuckle at the folks who take the phrase "personal computer" a little too seriously. --
*What* server hardware is bundled only with Windows? You might have an argument with preloads on desktops and 'workstations', but I have never seen a server machine that you couldn't order 'bare', or with NetWare. --
Very well put. I always thought that Sun is going to rue the day that they abandoned the low-end and the desktop. Especially when they wake up and notice that Linux or BSD is running on a significant number of workstations and small servers.
They'll realize that Unix isn't the big boogeyman on the low end that everyone thought it was 5 years ago, and they abandoned a valuable segment of the market. Of course, they could keep moving Solaris up-market, but pretty soon it's mindshare will be about as great as OS/390's (which is not to say that it won't be profitable.) --
Yeah, but the problem was that they strong armed the retailers to make up for their total lack of production control -- "For every Ms. PacMan you order, you need to order at least one surplus Outlaw or SpaceWar cartridge at full price.", things like that.
Atari was the only game in town, so they got away with this for a while. But when the 2600 was winding down on it's lifespan, the retailers realized that they were massively overstocked with old games nobody wanted to buy. When they dumped the supply and told Atari where to stick their computers and the 5200 (Winter '84), game prices dropped rapidly from $30 to $10 to $5 to $2 to $1...
This put Atari in a pretty poor position, revenue-wise, and is also the reason why every 2600 you find is always accompanied by the same common games (Asteroids, PacMan, Defender, etc.) which the original owner probably picked up from the surplus bin later on for cheap. --
Like many discussions on this board, the problem with this one is that everyone is assuming that Intel versus AMD is a zero sum game. This isn't at all true -- the market for PCs, laptops and x86 servers has been growing by a huge percentage every year for more than a decade, and it shows no sign of stopping.
The point I infer from Vaxman's post is that AMD is never going to beat Intel, and if AMD plays their cards right, Intel will never beat them either. Both companies can be very profitable and successful at the same time -- so spread your bets a little. --
Been there, done that! Note there's a big distinction between the "Tramiel" years at Atari (post-crash: ST + Jaguar), and the "Warner" years (pre-crash: E.T. and the 5200). I can't decide which is worse myself!
Too bad Warner Bros. sold Atari long ago, or it could just be another part of the big AOL conglomorate. --
Nope, Atari got their ass kicked in the console market because they flooded the market with really bad games, and big new Atari 5200 had horrid joysticks.
Then, they got their ass kicked in the home computer market because the Commodore-64 was essentially the same thing as the Atari 800, except several hundred dollars cheaper. --
Actually, one reason your company buys only Intel machines is because most "Business Desktops" lines from the major companies are Intel only (with AMD sneaking in on the consumer lines). At least where I work, the purchasing policy has nothing to do with the CPU manufacturer, and only with what our vendor of choice (Dell) will sell at a particular price point and expected delivery date.
"Intel Inside" is really a marketing program aimed at the OEMs, not consumers, and reinburses OEMs for making an entire model line-up Intel only. This is a tough nut to crack for AMD, and it will take time before these contracts start to expire and OEMs can start taking bids from AMD across their model line-ups. --
"That's why you have Solaris, AIX, IRIX, etc.. [...] That was back when proprietary and closed was a good thing; funny how they've changed their tunes isn't it? "
One minor nitpick -- UNIX was always considered an "Open" system because the API was controlled and documented by a multi-vendor consortium. This is opposed to proprietary systems like IBM OS400, DEC VMS, and HP VME(?). To this day, anyone can implement a system and call it UNIX if it passes the tests and they pay the money (see Microsoft Interix), which is a pretty good definition of "Open".
Your definition that "Open System" = "Open Source" is a new one and one that really only plays in places like Slashdot. --
"It is no secret that the top brass wants to kill the 9x line, they just have not been able to execute it. "
Fah -- In theory, they want to cut their R+D spending and support only one OS. In practice, they can't stop looking at the revenue stream from Windows 9x.
As long as Windows 9x keeps getting new features before NT/2000 (DirectX 8?), Microsoft's "unified Windows" strategy is a bunch of crap. Let's look at the record:
1989: "Windows 3.0 is a transitional environment until customers are ready for the powerful OS/2." 1991: "OS/2 is the wrong decision, we encourage customers to use Windows 3.1 until we ship our own replacement." 1993: "Windows NT 3.1 is finally the replacement for Windows 3.1. We encourage all customers and developers to switch to NT 3.1" 1994: "We have this great new 'Chicago' OS coming out that doesn't contain DOS. You might want to hold off on your NT plans." 1995: "Windows 95 is the replacement for Windows 3.1. We encourage customers to deploy Windows 95 until they are ready for the power of Windows NT." 1996: "Windows NT 4 is finally the desktop replacement for DOS/Windows. We encourage all customers and developers to switch to NT 4" 1997: "We have this great new 'Memphis' OS coming out that doesn't contain DOS. You might want to hold off on your NT plans." 1998: "Windows 98 is the replacement for Windows 95. We encourage customers to deploy Windows 95 until they are ready for the power of Windows NT." 1999: "Windows 2000 is finally the desktop replacement for DOS/Windows. We encourage all customers and developers to switch to Windows 2000." 2000: "We have this great new 'Millennium' OS coming out that doesn't contain DOS. You might want to hold off on your Win 2000 plans."
You see, this could continue forever... --
Re:Drag into trash is *still* a bad UI design.
on
PPCLinux.Apple.Com
·
· Score: 1
I stand corrected then. (I actually use MacOS 9 now and then, but dragging to the trash is ingrained for me.) --
Slashdot Mirror
A) I agree with you that FrontPage/Word etc. are "moronized" by letting the extended characters through as WinANSI characters rather than the HTML escapes. (Especially because the HTML escapes work on both Netscape and IE, on all platforms.)
/. users get flamed as Windows Sympathizers for cutting-and-pasting text from a web page. (Including one poor guy who was using Netscape/MacOS.) This makes me think the real solution is an Extended ANSI-to-HTML parser in Slashdot's comments.pl script.
B) I have the sneaky suspicion that the HTML Form text box only accepts single byte characters. If so, this makes impossible to post smart quotes without typing the HTML escapes yourself. This is a seperate case than FrontPage.
Now, smart quotes in the original post you replied to are clearly unnecessary, or should be entered as correct HTML. But I've seen a couple unsuspecting
And, while I agree that standards are standards, it just seems like bitch that while 99% of the world wants to think ANSI 147/148 are smart quotes, 1% is going to insist that it is a little meaningless blob. It's such a sad, small thing to make a stand over, and as you point out, looking at the little blobs is clearly annoying to Linux users.
(Of course, I will retract my opinon if someone can show that defining extended ANSI characters would break any Unix application. And, I just want to say that despite this post, I'm not a Bill Gates catamite or anything, just trying to point out how small this issue really should be.)
--
My understanding is that's incorrect -- the SQL backend is planned for Exchange 7. Ex2000 (v6) does allow you have mutiple Jet databases, however.
(I am a little confused at the "web store" feature -- as far as I can tell it's exchange stuff stored as XML documents in the traditional Jet backend. It does, however, allow Lotus Domino-like webserving of groupware content.)
--
Will Windows NT / Unixware / Solaris run on the "32-bit only" chip? Or just Linux?
--
Question -- Why don't Unix font sets just include smart quotes in the extended-ANSI positions?
The characters are otherwise undefined, and the only other way to display them is through Unicode. Both Windows and MacOS seem to handle this situation by just extending the ANSI spec to define common characters that ANSI forgot to define.
“For Example, these quotes are using the correct HTML Unicode codes, not Windows extended characters.” I'll have to check later from a Linux box to see if they show up correctly. (If, however, I were to copy and paste them from this Windows box, they would be inserted into the buffer as Windows ANSI characters.)
More info at http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/latin 1.utf8
--
Yes, and including a blatent troll at slashdot.org, is a sure way that your column will be 'slashdotted'. And sure enough, Slashdot posts the link, and IDG gets the page views.
I hate to think that VAndoverTaCo would do it, but if I were them I would be thinking seriously about demanding a kickback from places like IDG, TimeWarner and ZDNet for linking to one of their pages.
--
I dunno, I always thought that the IIgs was a cool machine, but it's existence allowed Apple to price Macintoshes in the stratosphere.
Along the way, Apple developed a Mac-like GUI for the IIgs, "HyperCard" for the IIgs, AppleTalk networking, a GUI word processor, and so on. Most of these things were developed before anything was running on MS Windows -- there were only two consumer GUI computers available at the time, both incompabible, and both from Apple Computer.
I know quite a few people and schools who invested heavliy in the IIgs -- only to be disappointed when it was dropped a few years later. Of course, it was smart to to consolidate development on one platform (Mac), rather than having double R+D costs, but it would have been smarter not to bait-and-switch with the IIgs to begin with. Most of the IIgs users I knew never bought another Apple.
I can't help thinking that history might have been different if there was a cheap, color Macintosh available starting in 1987, and if the IIgs never came into existence. -- The Macintosh would probably have quite a bit more mindshare and marketshare today, if only because an entire generation of people could have afforded one early on, when it was the only GUI system available.
(They finally got it sorta right in 1990 with the Mac LC with the Apple ][ card.)
--
You have to remember that after Steve Jobs left, the new management was in a rush to obliterate his legacy. They didn't want a high end Lisa/MacXL machine -- they needed everyone to forget about it so they could start moving 128K/512K Macs in volume.
This is all about the time that JL Gasse was driving around with his OPEN MAC licence plate, and the Mac II design was being planned.
--
It isn't just the secretary of the Navy -- Microsoft has been doing a bunch of customer research into Lotus Notes operations, as well as prepackaged web-based solutions, and they've heard about a million reasons why MS Groupware sucks.
Microsoft's answer to groupware is Microsoft Exchange. But what do you think of Exchange as being? An expensive Email server.
It sounds to me like they've gotten the message that Exchange (as it stands) will never be more than a half-assed e-mail/calendar server. The problem is changing directions.
They've been running around whispering about some vaporware called "Tahoe" for a while now. The goal is to make MS Office the groupware 'client', and to make extended versions of IIS and MSSQL the groupware 'server'. Exchange only fits into the picture as an MTA -- it's unstable Jet databases are going to fade quietly into the night.
Note that if they can pull this off, they will strike at a big weak spot in Lotus. Notes has always had pretty poor integration with MS Office because they've chosen to sold the integration features as a value add in Lotus SmartSuite. The problem is that 95% of their customers use MS Office and have to fumble around with file attachments, etc.
--
You know, as long as version numbers are coming out of the marketing departments, there's no sense in trying to justify them at all. Maybe "Version 6" makes sense, maybe it doesn't -- who cares.
If you are the kind of person that is impressed by larger numbers, then you probably don't understand or care to understand what the number is supposed to mean. You also may be impressed that "Tide" laundry detergent has been "New and Improved!" continually for the last 20 years.
On the other hand, if you know the history of Mozilla/Netscape and are just happy to have the software, you are probably smart enough to ignore the version number or realize that it's like an automobile's model number -- only useful as a piece of nomenclature. You don't care if it's Netscape v. 32.5 or IE 3000 -- you will use the product that meets your technical need. The marketers know this, and consequentially ignore you and your archaic ideas that version numbers have anything to do with the engineering process.
(Put another way, you can only gain sales by inflating the version number, you will never lose them.)
--
Yup, reading down the page, there's apparently 10,000 items in Debian's list. However, does that mean that Debian has 2x to 6x less bugs than Windows 2000. (I can't say because Debian won't install on my machine and Win2000 [and Mandrake] will -- and I haven't logged it as a 'showstopper'.
Note that Open Source uses a different (and IMO, better) methodology than Microsoft. If I find a bug in a particular package, I'll probably report it or send a patch to the package maintainer and let him/her deal with Debian. Debian/RedHat/etc are primarily concerned with the packaging issues, and aren't intended to be a be-all-end-all like MS's database.
--
for the sake of some degree of objectivity let's assume there are 20,000 actual "bugs" in Window 2000
...
This is in spite off the resources they are claiming they have used to beta test the product!
Note that one thing you will get from an extended (>1 Year!) beta/QA cycle is a large number of detected bugs and other issues. When you pay a large number of testers and have several thousand unpaid testers, you'd better have a pretty big database after the fact.
The important thing is that we don't have a metric to compare the 65,000 or 20,000 number with -- We don't know how many 'open' issues exist in Sun's Solaris BugBase or IBM's OS/2 BugBase, or even RedHat's internal BugBase. 65,000 could be a small number in comparison (depending on methodology, etc.)
It's like saying that the Linux kernel only has 23 bugs because that's all Alan Cox bothered to write on the back of a cocktail napkin when someone asked him after a few rounds -- the number is purely dependant on amount of effort put into finding the number.
Send an army of QA testers at RedHat or Debian for a couple years, and see what they come up with, then start talking numbers (And don't forget to pay bughunt bonuses like MS does!) I know that I can find about 30 little UI glitches in 15 minutes in front of a Linux OS.
--
Somewhere around, I have a three port Farallon dongle-hub that does this. (Two ports 10BT, one port Mac AAUI.)
Since the Farallon unit was pretty cheap when it was in production, I always thought it was strange that more hubs don't autodetect a crossover cable. Nice to know this might become a standard feature.
--
On 100 Mbit ethernet, a crossover cable will usually only give you 10Mbit.
Turn off autodetect in the driver settings, and explicitly set it to 100Mbit, full duplex.
--
Hah, yes. Occassionally there's a segement on the news-- Did you know that your company can read your E-Mail! Even if you delete it! And, believe it or not, it's totally legal! (Fortunately for them, their e-mail content is profoundly boring and contains about 10,000 copies of the same stupid jokes.) One just has to chuckle at the folks who take the phrase "personal computer" a little too seriously.
--
*What* server hardware is bundled only with Windows? You might have an argument with preloads on desktops and 'workstations', but I have never seen a server machine that you couldn't order 'bare', or with NetWare.
--
Very well put. I always thought that Sun is going to rue the day that they abandoned the low-end and the desktop. Especially when they wake up and notice that Linux or BSD is running on a significant number of workstations and small servers.
They'll realize that Unix isn't the big boogeyman on the low end that everyone thought it was 5 years ago, and they abandoned a valuable segment of the market. Of course, they could keep moving Solaris up-market, but pretty soon it's mindshare will be about as great as OS/390's (which is not to say that it won't be profitable.)
--
Yeah, but the problem was that they strong armed the retailers to make up for their total lack of production control -- "For every Ms. PacMan you order, you need to order at least one surplus Outlaw or SpaceWar cartridge at full price.", things like that.
Atari was the only game in town, so they got away with this for a while. But when the 2600 was winding down on it's lifespan, the retailers realized that they were massively overstocked with old games nobody wanted to buy. When they dumped the supply and told Atari where to stick their computers and the 5200 (Winter '84), game prices dropped rapidly from $30 to $10 to $5 to $2 to $1...
This put Atari in a pretty poor position, revenue-wise, and is also the reason why every 2600 you find is always accompanied by the same common games (Asteroids, PacMan, Defender, etc.) which the original owner probably picked up from the surplus bin later on for cheap.
--
Like many discussions on this board, the problem with this one is that everyone is assuming that Intel versus AMD is a zero sum game. This isn't at all true -- the market for PCs, laptops and x86 servers has been growing by a huge percentage every year for more than a decade, and it shows no sign of stopping.
The point I infer from Vaxman's post is that AMD is never going to beat Intel, and if AMD plays their cards right, Intel will never beat them either. Both companies can be very profitable and successful at the same time -- so spread your bets a little.
--
Been there, done that! Note there's a big distinction between the "Tramiel" years at Atari (post-crash: ST + Jaguar), and the "Warner" years (pre-crash: E.T. and the 5200). I can't decide which is worse myself!
Too bad Warner Bros. sold Atari long ago, or it could just be another part of the big AOL conglomorate.
--
Nope, Atari got their ass kicked in the console market because they flooded the market with really bad games, and big new Atari 5200 had horrid joysticks.
Then, they got their ass kicked in the home computer market because the Commodore-64 was essentially the same thing as the Atari 800, except several hundred dollars cheaper.
--
Actually, one reason your company buys only Intel machines is because most "Business Desktops" lines from the major companies are Intel only (with AMD sneaking in on the consumer lines). At least where I work, the purchasing policy has nothing to do with the CPU manufacturer, and only with what our vendor of choice (Dell) will sell at a particular price point and expected delivery date.
"Intel Inside" is really a marketing program aimed at the OEMs, not consumers, and reinburses OEMs for making an entire model line-up Intel only. This is a tough nut to crack for AMD, and it will take time before these contracts start to expire and OEMs can start taking bids from AMD across their model line-ups.
--
"That's why you have Solaris, AIX, IRIX, etc.. [...] That was back when proprietary and closed was a good thing; funny how they've changed their tunes isn't it? "
One minor nitpick -- UNIX was always considered an "Open" system because the API was controlled and documented by a multi-vendor consortium. This is opposed to proprietary systems like IBM OS400, DEC VMS, and HP VME(?). To this day, anyone can implement a system and call it UNIX if it passes the tests and they pay the money (see Microsoft Interix), which is a pretty good definition of "Open".
Your definition that "Open System" = "Open Source" is a new one and one that really only plays in places like Slashdot.
--
Basically it is a catch-up to Linux version of Windows.
More like the catch-up to Solaris version of Windows. Linux wasn't even on MS's radar when they planned the feature set a few years ago.
--
"It is no secret that the top brass wants to kill the 9x line, they just have not been able to execute it. "
Fah -- In theory, they want to cut their R+D spending and support only one OS. In practice, they can't stop looking at the revenue stream from Windows 9x.
As long as Windows 9x keeps getting new features before NT/2000 (DirectX 8?), Microsoft's "unified Windows" strategy is a bunch of crap. Let's look at the record:
1989: "Windows 3.0 is a transitional environment until customers are ready for the powerful OS/2."
1991: "OS/2 is the wrong decision, we encourage customers to use Windows 3.1 until we ship our own replacement."
1993: "Windows NT 3.1 is finally the replacement for Windows 3.1. We encourage all customers and developers to switch to NT 3.1"
1994: "We have this great new 'Chicago' OS coming out that doesn't contain DOS. You might want to hold off on your NT plans."
1995: "Windows 95 is the replacement for Windows 3.1. We encourage customers to deploy Windows 95 until they are ready for the power of Windows NT."
1996: "Windows NT 4 is finally the desktop replacement for DOS/Windows. We encourage all customers and developers to switch to NT 4"
1997: "We have this great new 'Memphis' OS coming out that doesn't contain DOS. You might want to hold off on your NT plans."
1998: "Windows 98 is the replacement for Windows 95. We encourage customers to deploy Windows 95 until they are ready for the power of Windows NT."
1999: "Windows 2000 is finally the desktop replacement for DOS/Windows. We encourage all customers and developers to switch to Windows 2000."
2000: "We have this great new 'Millennium' OS coming out that doesn't contain DOS. You might want to hold off on your Win 2000 plans."
You see, this could continue forever...
--
I stand corrected then. (I actually use MacOS 9 now and then, but dragging to the trash is ingrained for me.)
--