I dunno, but having public transportation and ADSL, *and* being able to live out in the woods seems mutually incompatible, but that's a fundamental American schizophrenia. Most people settle in your typical 1/2 acre suburban nightmare and hope that traffic isn't too bad.
Personally, I think corporate culture is the #1 issue. Look at the Bay Area -- outside of a 5x5 block area in San Francisco, no one wears a tie. Compare this to the buttoned-down cultures of the Auto industry in Detroit, or (?) the steel industry in Pittsburg.
Furthermore, companies in the bay area are willing to spend *lots* of money on new and unproven technology. (Some of this is a culture of technical optimism, but a good part can be explained by the fact that your executives are playing golf with the executives of HP, Netscape, various startups, and so on.)
I've seen quite a few companies complaining that they can't good techs. Usually two problems are immediately apparent:
(1) They are letting the HR people do the hiring. These people are usually trying to find salaries from some mythical "regional average study". Sometimes they are even low-balling the average. They also tend to have silly requirements like "MSCE Required" or "5 Years Java Experience", and throw out the resumes that don't qualify without reading them.
(2) Their technology is old and boring -- Windows NT 3.51, old Sun machines, cc:Mail, giant mainframe report printers and so on. When prospects come in, this sends the message that they are too cheap or stratified to try anything new. Consequentially, the internal IT culture is often retrograde and incapable of providing any added value to the company.
(It seems like the SE part of the US is the worst for corporate computing culture. I've known some pretty sharp people who had to beg for $10/hour MS Access jobs and the like because the corporations are willing to spend no money on this sort of thing.) --
You are correct that Novell 3.12 + 5 Page Long Patch List is a very stable configuration.
However, back in the day when Novell 3.x was a current product, I don't quite remember it that way. Our servers seemed to abend about once a month - more often if they were running non-standard stuff like CD drivers or backup software. --
You can prefer a data-only digital disk format, but remember that one big reason for CD- and DVD-ROMs is the economy of scale in manufacturing computer drives with the same mechanisms as the consumer a/v models.
There's been plenty of computer-only WORM solutions, but they've never come close to the $/MB value of CD-ROM (and soon DVD-ROM). --
Actually, I think "rip" has a legitimate meaning of "to encode" or "to compress" a data stream. I've heard audio engineers use the term.
During a previous incarnation of this battle, the recording industry put a similar onus on the word "dub" (as in "I dubbed a tape of this LP"). They had slogans like "Stop dubbing" and "Don't dub this record" -- entirely unwarrented because dub (and rip) is in fact a neutral word.
Personally, I think trying to censor ourselves ("rip-er-I-mean-legally copy for archival purposes"), is a concession that the recording industry doesn't deserve. --
Here's another version I heard some place: IBM was designing a PC/workstation based on the 68K and running a version of Unix (Xenix?).
However, they became convinced that they had to move very quickly before Apple had a lock on the market. So they planned get a commodity-style 8080 + CP/M box on the market and introduce the "real" 68K PC later. (In the design phase they switched to the 8088 and MS-DOS.)
Of course the 8088 PC was such a hit that they began planning the 286-based AT and either cancelled or moved the 68K machine up-market (can't remember which.) --
Knowing a couple shops that had some pretty large applications built on DBase, I can tell you that that they are happier that the product is on "the backbenches of the Internet" and is maintained by a knoweldgable group of consultants and developers.
It might be a legacy market (and one that doesn't interest Open Source developers), but that doesn't mean it is irrelevant or not profitable. Lookit IBM -- they do quite a bit of business on non-sexy legacy systems. --
Considering that the trial is in Santa Clara County California (aka Silicon Valley), I would imagine that the court system there is used to technical and IP disputes. --
You are correct that people's attitudes about 'targeting' their web sites to a relatively small pool of specific browsers is going to have to change.
Right now web design is easy because you can write crappy HTML and let it through as long as it tests OK on (Windows | Mac) & (Netscape | IE) & Version 4 or better with default configuration. A small minded approach, but one that currently gets you to 95% of your audience without thinking too hard.
But, this is going to change fast. Even without special formats like WAP and AvantGo, we are already seeing an explosion of alternative browsers: iCab, Opera, KDE, WebTV, Sega Dreamcast, Playstation 2 and so on. When Mozilla goes gold, it's going to be ported to virtually every device from a wristwatch to a Buick, with slightly different capabilities on every platform. IE shops are already universally disabling Internet JavaScript and ActiveX. The If-Then-Else = "Garbage" approach is going to have to disappear very quickly, and people are going to have to start writing common HTML and forgetting about the little differences.
What happens when Fox starts pushing "Enhanced TV", and those embedded enhanced TV viewers can't get to their web site? Big fuck-up. These embedded browsers are going to far out number the Unix users very soon (if they haven't already), but the Unix users will benifit from a more open and less client-dependant web.
If you are not careful when installing RealPlayer, it will grab all sorts of non-native file types too. It also tries to sign you up for all sorts of spam lists, tracks your viewing habits from a central server, and is generally shoves much more advertising in your face than any other player. On top of that, installing RealPlayer for Windows also installs "RealJukebox" which automatically grabs the *.MP3 and other audio file types. Real has just become a sad company trying to squeeze every last bit of revenue out of it's shrinking customer base.
(Of course the real problem is MS Windows' crappy file type association mechinism, but all of these media players have gotten in the habit of smashing everyone else's file types for political reasons.) --
Yes, I'm speaking of Windows For Workgroups (that was Win 3.11, wasn't it?) It was not a completely different animal than normal Windows 3.1, it was just Win 3.1 plus protected mode networking support. Nor was it "Win95 with the old interface", although Win95's networking was based on WfW's.
I can't recall a MS supplied PPP dialer tho, the WfW RAS system supported NetBEUI only.
(And, even so, most home systems didn't ship with WfW even after it was introduced, so home users still ususally used Trumpet or whoever.) --
there's only 100% of the market to go around, and if we don't take from someone else, we don't grow
If Microsoft thought this way, they wouldn't be where they are now. The real key is to grow the market and capture the new growth. The price model for Linux is perfect for this.
(Example: Windows NT Server. Most old Novell and Unix shops still run Novell and Unix. NT's market is primarily new installations or Novell/Unix installations that had atrophied for many years.) --
Re:Is this really an area that needs filling?
on
IceWM 1.0.0 released
·
· Score: 1
Yes, and don't you think that trying to get the box to cover as much of the bell curve as possible a more interesting and daring problem?
It seems that Apple, MS, and commercial Unix all passed the buck on moving outside their core user base. What's facinating about the Linux community is they've got the gusto to take on pretty much every aspect of the user base 'problem' -- clueless newbies, mouse-weilding artists, UNIX wizards, small and midsized servers, and so on.
I think a big problem with the confusion over this story is the definition of a PC.
Yes, PC week has an interesting definition of the PC, one that's directly aimed at the perspective of their reader base of IT managers and LAN administrators (and of course their advertisers). They aren't really considering the PC as a specific thing, but instead a social phenomena.
What they consider the "PC revolution" is the growth of commodity hardware and software and decentralized IT management structures as opposed to the traditional "glass house" approach of (UNIX et al) minis and mainframes. For them, it's really a social revolution in terms of how most corporate computer systems are managed and controlled more so that the fact that "IBM Compatible" hardware has ruled the day.
It's shameless, but they are playing up to their reader and advertiser base. These are people who by-in-large came up the ranks with the PC revolution (hacking on Lotus 1-2-3 and DBase, managing departmental Novell networks, and now finally running mission critical systems on 8-way Xeon Compaqs and managing worldwide PC networks.) The old MS slogan "a (personal) computer on every desk and in every home" has pretty much been achieved, and this article is (personal) vindication for the readers and companies that made it happen.
Who they are not talking to is the old time academic and glasshouse mini users that have moved 'down' to the PC. (Example) The fact that UNIX has always been the core of the Internet best left by them to publications like "ComputerWorld". What they are interested in is the fact that their readership and their advertisers (errm, Microsoft) are now right in the middle of the most profitable and exciting 'revolution' going on. --
Name the TCP/IP driver that was supplied with Windows 3.11
Are you trying to suggest that there wasn't a TCP/IP driver included in Win 3.11? (There was, although it didn't appear until 1993-ish, and it didn't support PPP. Check a NT 3.5 CD or MS's FTP site and you'll find it. I've heard it's BSD-based.) --
From a technical or 'community' standpoint (think ebay feedback ratings), e-commerce and e-games face a similar security and trust issues.
But, the fundamental basis of e-commerce is still several hundred (thousand?) years of laws governing contracts and commercial transactions. If the technical security model breaks (as it has many times on Ebay), the legal security model will jump in, along with various police agencies, courts, lawyers, banks, collection agencies, insurance firms, and so on.
When the "e-game" model breaks, there's no real higher power you can beseech. Thus, people are more likely to break the rules, because there are few if any negative consequences. So, while you can put preventative mechanisms in (reputation systems, certificate verification, signed binaries, and so on), it really comes down to the other users, and how much you are willing to trust them.
(Think of blackjack -- you might play in Las Vegas where the Casino is supposedly trusted, or you might play your trusted friends, but you would be less likely to go into some random basement and play an illegal game because the deck could be loaded and you have little recourse if it is.) --
Yes, I can see that if some company wants to sell value-adds to their modifed version of Quake. (One of the value-added bits would be player verification and fair games.)
But, I strongly suspect that a good number of Quake modifications will entirely be freely distributable. After all, one of the reasons that Id is open sourcing it is because it doesn't have much commercial value any more, which means their marketers must know that the number of potential paying customers for a modified Quake 1 is very limited. The Q1 fan base will probably happily keep it alive in the traditional open source free download model.
Furthermore, there will probably be so many modified versions that it would be difficult to gain a "community" for a particular company's commercial security scheme. (Admittedly, my ideas about player certificates have the same problems.)
Maybe your idea would work commercially if the price was $5 or something, but then it would very easy for cheaters just to buy a new key when they are discovered. --
A real solution would be to build an actual community
You are correct that the only real solution here is to verify people rather than trying to verify binaries. There's plenty of tools to do this (X509 certificates, etc.)
Real personal verification might be necessary, because a 'reputation' system can fall apart with a few bad apples. There's plenty of horror stories from ebay users with enormous feedback ratings, for example. However, personal verification will require a few things that might not go over well.
(A) You would need some all-powerful certificate authority that would verify people by credit card #, birth certificate, and so on. People would hate going through this verification process, paying VeriSign (etc.), and minors or people not trusted by the US banking system might be left out. Even with all of that, fraud is possble -- at least in the US, it's quite easy to get a fake SSN and birth certificate.
A simple login/password system would only work about as well as slashdot's negative karma system does.
(B) You would need an authority to mediate disputes and invalidate cheaters' certificates. This could quickly devolve into "Did not!" "Did too!". For e-commerce we have a mechinism to resolve disputes -- the court system. Obviously hiring lawyers or inspecting people's computers for evidence is far too much for Quake game.
The bottom line is real verification of people is difficult, and the era of public Quake games and cash prize tournaments might be over. People can still have a lot of funny playing with their buddies, though. --
Mac OS X is based on BSD (and basically the same as any BSD)
Not entirely true. MacOS X is based on a Mach microkernel, which is entirely different that the classic-style Unix kernels used by the BSDs. This is going to give it very different performance characteristics as a web server than any BSD.
The *BSD stuff is in there to provide Unix compatiblity in the user space (to run Apache with, for instance.) From what I've heard, the "Yellow Box" GUI environment sits directly on Mach, and the whole BSD bit will probably be an optional install on OS X Client. --
Interestingly, one of IIS 5's most touted features is to run ASP out-of-process. ZDNet has already honked on this in their glowing review of Win2000. --
if you have existing business logic, such as pricing strategies, written in Visual Basic...
That's a good point -- who has core business logic written in VisualBasic? By that logic, any web server supporting COBOL would probably be more applicable. (Even MS's "DNA" strategy is to componentize business logic, allowing it to be language independant, so even from a Microsoft mouthpiece, this is bizzare.)
Reading between the lines, what I think they are implying is that Microsoft's environment allows low-end VB developers to be converted to web developers without them having to learn a new language. That might be a consideration in some places, but it's hardly a huge point in IIS's favor. And you can't exactly take your typical VB client-server front end and push the "Recompile as Web Page" button. --
Unfortuantely, printing is one of those things in Linux which was inherited directly from the Unix world. Nobody engineered Linux printing, it just sorta came with the package, along with the good luck that someone reverse engineered PostScript.
And the UNIX model of printing was always $20000 workstations running $10000 software printing to $7000 printers, so PostScript was obviously acceptable. After all, who was to know 15 years ago that Adobe intention was to price PostScript out of the hands of the average PC user. It probably seemed like a good general purpose solution at the time.
I would imagine that sooner or later, someone will extend X so that it provides GDI- and QuickDraw-like printing abilities in it's rendering engine, and then reverese engineer some common drivers. It won't be industrial strength like traditional Unix printing, but it will be good enough for single user workstations and small networks and lowend printers. (Note that I don't expect any particular innovation from the X Consortium -- it's too dominated by Big UNIX companies that aren't really interested in your inkjet printer.) --
Correct, Microsoft has been using app vendors to distribute service packs (updated DLLs) for them for years. The world would be a much happier place if apps just required "at least Windows 95 Service Pack 16" instead of automagically upgradeing/downgrading your OS for you. Perhaps Windows 2000 will take this route.
However, this would only work because Microsoft is the single vendor for system DLLs. Just look at how slashdot goes ballistic whenever a commercial package is only supported under "RedHat 6.1" and how even experienced Gnome users seem to have trouble getting the right library versions.
The Linux Standards Base could be a solution, but for now I don't see anything coming from them, and if it does it could either be obsolete or so minimal that it won't see much vendor support. Basically, I don't see a solution until much of the Linux OS core stabilizes -- glibc will need to stop breaking backward compatibility at some point, and perhaps the KDE and Gnome APIs will stablize too. The solution is to wait until things stabilize to the point that most programs will run on an average box without requiring a bunch of library upgrades. (For example will require RedHat 6.0, but will run without problem on RedHat 8.0.) --
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno, but having public transportation and ADSL, *and* being able to live out in the woods seems mutually incompatible, but that's a fundamental American schizophrenia. Most people settle in your typical 1/2 acre suburban nightmare and hope that traffic isn't too bad.
Personally, I think corporate culture is the #1 issue. Look at the Bay Area -- outside of a 5x5 block area in San Francisco, no one wears a tie. Compare this to the buttoned-down cultures of the Auto industry in Detroit, or (?) the steel industry in Pittsburg.
Furthermore, companies in the bay area are willing to spend *lots* of money on new and unproven technology. (Some of this is a culture of technical optimism, but a good part can be explained by the fact that your executives are playing golf with the executives of HP, Netscape, various startups, and so on.)
I've seen quite a few companies complaining that they can't good techs. Usually two problems are immediately apparent:
(1) They are letting the HR people do the hiring. These people are usually trying to find salaries from some mythical "regional average study". Sometimes they are even low-balling the average. They also tend to have silly requirements like "MSCE Required" or "5 Years Java Experience", and throw out the resumes that don't qualify without reading them.
(2) Their technology is old and boring -- Windows NT 3.51, old Sun machines, cc:Mail, giant mainframe report printers and so on. When prospects come in, this sends the message that they are too cheap or stratified to try anything new. Consequentially, the internal IT culture is often retrograde and incapable of providing any added value to the company.
(It seems like the SE part of the US is the worst for corporate computing culture. I've known some pretty sharp people who had to beg for $10/hour MS Access jobs and the like because the corporations are willing to spend no money on this sort of thing.)
--
You are correct that Novell 3.12 + 5 Page Long Patch List is a very stable configuration.
However, back in the day when Novell 3.x was a current product, I don't quite remember it that way. Our servers seemed to abend about once a month - more often if they were running non-standard stuff like CD drivers or backup software.
--
You can prefer a data-only digital disk format, but remember that one big reason for CD- and DVD-ROMs is the economy of scale in manufacturing computer drives with the same mechanisms as the consumer a/v models.
There's been plenty of computer-only WORM solutions, but they've never come close to the $/MB value of CD-ROM (and soon DVD-ROM).
--
Actually, I think "rip" has a legitimate meaning of "to encode" or "to compress" a data stream. I've heard audio engineers use the term.
During a previous incarnation of this battle, the recording industry put a similar onus on the word "dub" (as in "I dubbed a tape of this LP"). They had slogans like "Stop dubbing" and "Don't dub this record" -- entirely unwarrented because dub (and rip) is in fact a neutral word.
Personally, I think trying to censor ourselves ("rip-er-I-mean-legally copy for archival purposes"), is a concession that the recording industry doesn't deserve.
--
Here's another version I heard some place: IBM was designing a PC/workstation based on the 68K and running a version of Unix (Xenix?).
However, they became convinced that they had to move very quickly before Apple had a lock on the market. So they planned get a commodity-style 8080 + CP/M box on the market and introduce the "real" 68K PC later. (In the design phase they switched to the 8088 and MS-DOS.)
Of course the 8088 PC was such a hit that they began planning the 286-based AT and either cancelled or moved the 68K machine up-market (can't remember which.)
--
Actually, I don't know about FTP, but certain addresses like postmaster are reserved by the RFC for administrative issues.
Be a good nerd and follow the RFCs!
--
Knowing a couple shops that had some pretty large applications built on DBase, I can tell you that that they are happier that the product is on "the backbenches of the Internet" and is maintained by a knoweldgable group of consultants and developers.
It might be a legacy market (and one that doesn't interest Open Source developers), but that doesn't mean it is irrelevant or not profitable. Lookit IBM -- they do quite a bit of business on non-sexy legacy systems.
--
Considering that the trial is in Santa Clara County California (aka Silicon Valley), I would imagine that the court system there is used to technical and IP disputes.
--
You are correct that people's attitudes about 'targeting' their web sites to a relatively small pool of specific browsers is going to have to change.
Right now web design is easy because you can write crappy HTML and let it through as long as it tests OK on (Windows | Mac) & (Netscape | IE) & Version 4 or better with default configuration. A small minded approach, but one that currently gets you to 95% of your audience without thinking too hard.
But, this is going to change fast. Even without special formats like WAP and AvantGo, we are already seeing an explosion of alternative browsers: iCab, Opera, KDE, WebTV, Sega Dreamcast, Playstation 2 and so on. When Mozilla goes gold, it's going to be ported to virtually every device from a wristwatch to a Buick, with slightly different capabilities on every platform. IE shops are already universally disabling Internet JavaScript and ActiveX. The If-Then-Else = "Garbage" approach is going to have to disappear very quickly, and people are going to have to start writing common HTML and forgetting about the little differences.
What happens when Fox starts pushing "Enhanced TV", and those embedded enhanced TV viewers can't get to their web site? Big fuck-up. These embedded browsers are going to far out number the Unix users very soon (if they haven't already), but the Unix users will benifit from a more open and less client-dependant web.
--
If you are not careful when installing RealPlayer, it will grab all sorts of non-native file types too. It also tries to sign you up for all sorts of spam lists, tracks your viewing habits from a central server, and is generally shoves much more advertising in your face than any other player. On top of that, installing RealPlayer for Windows also installs "RealJukebox" which automatically grabs the *.MP3 and other audio file types. Real has just become a sad company trying to squeeze every last bit of revenue out of it's shrinking customer base.
(Of course the real problem is MS Windows' crappy file type association mechinism, but all of these media players have gotten in the habit of smashing everyone else's file types for political reasons.)
--
MS had a FTP site up long before their WWW site. Does anyone know what that ran on? (OS/2 perhaps?)
--
I know it's a joke, but I believe Apple's TCP/IP stack was developed by Mentat, so other OS's TCP/IP stack may also be vulnerable.
--
Yes, I'm speaking of Windows For Workgroups (that was Win 3.11, wasn't it?) It was not a completely different animal than normal Windows 3.1, it was just Win 3.1 plus protected mode networking support. Nor was it "Win95 with the old interface", although Win95's networking was based on WfW's.
I can't recall a MS supplied PPP dialer tho, the WfW RAS system supported NetBEUI only.
(And, even so, most home systems didn't ship with WfW even after it was introduced, so home users still ususally used Trumpet or whoever.)
--
there's only 100% of the market to go around, and if we don't take from someone else, we don't grow
If Microsoft thought this way, they wouldn't be where they are now. The real key is to grow the market and capture the new growth. The price model for Linux is perfect for this.
(Example: Windows NT Server. Most old Novell and Unix shops still run Novell and Unix. NT's market is primarily new installations or Novell/Unix installations that had atrophied for many years.)
--
Yes, and don't you think that trying to get the box to cover as much of the bell curve as possible a more interesting and daring problem?
It seems that Apple, MS, and commercial Unix all passed the buck on moving outside their core user base. What's facinating about the Linux community is they've got the gusto to take on pretty much every aspect of the user base 'problem' -- clueless newbies, mouse-weilding artists, UNIX wizards, small and midsized servers, and so on.
--
I think a big problem with the confusion over this story is the definition of a PC.
Yes, PC week has an interesting definition of the PC, one that's directly aimed at the perspective of their reader base of IT managers and LAN administrators (and of course their advertisers).
They aren't really considering the PC as a specific thing, but instead a social phenomena.
What they consider the "PC revolution" is the growth of commodity hardware and software and decentralized IT management structures as opposed to the traditional "glass house" approach of (UNIX et al) minis and mainframes. For them, it's really a social revolution in terms of how most corporate computer systems are managed and controlled more so that the fact that "IBM Compatible" hardware has ruled the day.
It's shameless, but they are playing up to their reader and advertiser base. These are people who by-in-large came up the ranks with the PC revolution (hacking on Lotus 1-2-3 and DBase, managing departmental Novell networks, and now finally running mission critical systems on 8-way Xeon Compaqs and managing worldwide PC networks.) The old MS slogan "a (personal) computer on every desk and in every home" has pretty much been achieved, and this article is (personal) vindication for the readers and companies that made it happen.
Who they are not talking to is the old time academic and glasshouse mini users that have moved 'down' to the PC. (Example) The fact that UNIX has always been the core of the Internet best left by them to publications like "ComputerWorld". What they are interested in is the fact that their readership and their advertisers (errm, Microsoft) are now right in the middle of the most profitable and exciting 'revolution' going on.
--
Name the TCP/IP driver that was supplied with Windows 3.11
Are you trying to suggest that there wasn't a TCP/IP driver included in Win 3.11? (There was, although it didn't appear until 1993-ish, and it didn't support PPP. Check a NT 3.5 CD or MS's FTP site and you'll find it. I've heard it's BSD-based.)
--
From a technical or 'community' standpoint (think ebay feedback ratings), e-commerce and e-games face a similar security and trust issues.
But, the fundamental basis of e-commerce is still several hundred (thousand?) years of laws governing contracts and commercial transactions. If the technical security model breaks (as it has many times on Ebay), the legal security model will jump in, along with various police agencies, courts, lawyers, banks, collection agencies, insurance firms, and so on.
When the "e-game" model breaks, there's no real higher power you can beseech. Thus, people are more likely to break the rules, because there are few if any negative consequences. So, while you can put preventative mechanisms in (reputation systems, certificate verification, signed binaries, and so on), it really comes down to the other users, and how much you are willing to trust them.
(Think of blackjack -- you might play in Las Vegas where the Casino is supposedly trusted, or you might play your trusted friends, but you would be less likely to go into some random basement and play an illegal game because the deck could be loaded and you have little recourse if it is.)
--
Yes, I can see that if some company wants to sell value-adds to their modifed version of Quake. (One of the value-added bits would be player verification and fair games.)
But, I strongly suspect that a good number of Quake modifications will entirely be freely distributable. After all, one of the reasons that Id is open sourcing it is because it doesn't have much commercial value any more, which means their marketers must know that the number of potential paying customers for a modified Quake 1 is very limited. The Q1 fan base will probably happily keep it alive in the traditional open source free download model.
Furthermore, there will probably be so many modified versions that it would be difficult to gain a "community" for a particular company's commercial security scheme. (Admittedly, my ideas about player certificates have the same problems.)
Maybe your idea would work commercially if the price was $5 or something, but then it would very easy for cheaters just to buy a new key when they are discovered.
--
A real solution would be to build an actual community
You are correct that the only real solution here is to verify people rather than trying to verify binaries. There's plenty of tools to do this (X509 certificates, etc.)
Real personal verification might be necessary, because a 'reputation' system can fall apart with a few bad apples. There's plenty of horror stories from ebay users with enormous feedback ratings, for example. However, personal verification will require a few things that might not go over well.
(A) You would need some all-powerful certificate authority that would verify people by credit card #, birth certificate, and so on. People would hate going through this verification process, paying VeriSign (etc.), and minors or people not trusted by the US banking system might be left out. Even with all of that, fraud is possble -- at least in the US, it's quite easy to get a fake SSN and birth certificate.
A simple login/password system would only work about as well as slashdot's negative karma system does.
(B) You would need an authority to mediate disputes and invalidate cheaters' certificates. This could quickly devolve into "Did not!" "Did too!". For e-commerce we have a mechinism to resolve disputes -- the court system. Obviously hiring lawyers or inspecting people's computers for evidence is far too much for Quake game.
The bottom line is real verification of people is difficult, and the era of public Quake games and cash prize tournaments might be over. People can still have a lot of funny playing with their buddies, though.
--
Mac OS X is based on BSD (and basically the same as any BSD)
Not entirely true. MacOS X is based on a Mach microkernel, which is entirely different that the classic-style Unix kernels used by the BSDs. This is going to give it very different performance characteristics as a web server than any BSD.
The *BSD stuff is in there to provide Unix compatiblity in the user space (to run Apache with, for instance.) From what I've heard, the "Yellow Box" GUI environment sits directly on Mach, and the whole BSD bit will probably be an optional install on OS X Client.
--
Interestingly, one of IIS 5's most touted features is to run ASP out-of-process. ZDNet has already honked on this in their glowing review of Win2000.
--
if you have existing business logic, such as pricing strategies, written in Visual Basic...
That's a good point -- who has core business logic written in VisualBasic? By that logic, any web server supporting COBOL would probably be more applicable. (Even MS's "DNA" strategy is to componentize business logic, allowing it to be language independant, so even from a Microsoft mouthpiece, this is bizzare.)
Reading between the lines, what I think they are implying is that Microsoft's environment allows low-end VB developers to be converted to web developers without them having to learn a new language. That might be a consideration in some places, but it's hardly a huge point in IIS's favor. And you can't exactly take your typical VB client-server front end and push the "Recompile as Web Page" button.
--
Unfortuantely, printing is one of those things in Linux which was inherited directly from the Unix world. Nobody engineered Linux printing, it just sorta came with the package, along with the good luck that someone reverse engineered PostScript.
And the UNIX model of printing was always $20000 workstations running $10000 software printing to $7000 printers, so PostScript was obviously acceptable. After all, who was to know 15 years ago that Adobe intention was to price PostScript out of the hands of the average PC user. It probably seemed like a good general purpose solution at the time.
I would imagine that sooner or later, someone will extend X so that it provides GDI- and QuickDraw-like printing abilities in it's rendering engine, and then reverese engineer some common drivers. It won't be industrial strength like traditional Unix printing, but it will be good enough for single user workstations and small networks and lowend printers. (Note that I don't expect any particular innovation from the X Consortium -- it's too dominated by Big UNIX companies that aren't really interested in your inkjet printer.)
--
Correct, Microsoft has been using app vendors to distribute service packs (updated DLLs) for them for years. The world would be a much happier place if apps just required "at least Windows 95 Service Pack 16" instead of automagically upgradeing/downgrading your OS for you. Perhaps Windows 2000 will take this route.
However, this would only work because Microsoft is the single vendor for system DLLs. Just look at how slashdot goes ballistic whenever a commercial package is only supported under "RedHat 6.1" and how even experienced Gnome users seem to have trouble getting the right library versions.
The Linux Standards Base could be a solution, but for now I don't see anything coming from them, and if it does it could either be obsolete or so minimal that it won't see much vendor support. Basically, I don't see a solution until much of the Linux OS core stabilizes -- glibc will need to stop breaking backward compatibility at some point, and perhaps the KDE and Gnome APIs will stablize too. The solution is to wait until things stabilize to the point that most programs will run on an average box without requiring a bunch of library upgrades. (For example will require RedHat 6.0, but will run without problem on RedHat 8.0.)
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