The reason that you don't see bootable images for removable media on PCs is because the PC boot process is br0ken. (Hopefully they'll fix that 'legacy' issue.) Not to mention that the lack of a good standard expansion bus has lead to -ugh- parallel port devices.
It's quite common for Macs to have bootable ZIP or JAZ disks, and programs like 'Norton Utilities' offer an option to build bootable recovery disks. --
You make an excellent point -- The old DEC user base is mostly likely already using Unix, and therefore going to be more comfortable with Linux. In addition, Compaq has always been a premium partner with SCO, and the SCO customer base is certainly looking at Linux
However the vast majority of Compaq Proliants are probably in NT/NetWare shops which might be using Linux here and there but would be less likely to standardize on it. --
This is an old trick in the antitrust world: define the market so narrowly that there is only a couple of companies selling in it, and use that to "prove" that the company has a monopoly
Yes, the market was defined so "narrowly" that it includes 90+% of the computers sold.
(However, I think Apple should have been taken under consideration. They considered porting MacOS to Intel, and dropped OSX/Intel, neither of which are technically deficient products. Apparently they felt there was a barrier to entry there.) --
The problem is that if their were hidden API calls in MS Office, they would be discovered, and the information would be all over the net in an instant.
This actually happened, BTW, in circa 1990 - I have not heard of it since.
In my book, the issues is more of timing than of disclosure. Microsoft usually ships an API with a commercial product. If you are competing with Microsoft, you don't find out about the API until it ships, but by that time Microsoft already has a full product running on it. This puts you at a competitive disadvantage.
The net affect is that 3rd parties are constantly playing catch up to the latest Microsoft API. Hypotetically, if the company were split in half, there would be less incentive to use new APIs (for both MS-Apps and competitors), and Windows' API would stablize quite a bit. Kind of like commercial UNIX, for example. --
Basically the Cable companies and the governement have consipired to create an extremely inefficient use of the bandwidth they do have.
In my area, the gov't mandates thatstandard cable contains about 10 UHF channels that I couldn't get with rabbit ears if I tried, three of which are really bad QVC ripoffs. On top of that, there are several "community access" channels, whose only programming seems to be really ugly videotext announcing various public library programs with the radio playing as a soundtrack. Add to that the two channels which do nothing but promote pay-per-view movies, the four slots for showing PPV, the scrambled pornography, and the standard free over-the-air channels, there is only about 12 slots left for normal commercial cable programming (TNT, USA, CNN, etc), which besides pro wrestling, is nothing to write home about. Internet and Phone access can only be cutting into the limited bandwidth ppol
My fear is that an expanded digitial spectrum is going to be used this way also - as an effort to maximize pay-per-view profits (and kill the corner video store) or 'extended services' over "the public good" of better picture quality or more free entertainment, such as princess diana death dirges and wrestling. (And, no, I'm not a mark - I don't buy the PPVs or commerative plates.)
Then again, my TV is a Commodore 1702 monitor, so maybe I'm not the target market for these ploys. --
Those "vulnerabilities" were all due to basic design errors -- in short, bad developers assumed that hiding a document would make it inaccessible. The documentation is clear that this it doesn't work that way, and implementing document level security is quite easy. --
Note that with Notes 4.x, they supported clients on Solaris (Sparc and x86), AIX, and HP/UX. The upshot was that not many people were all that interested in running the Notes client on UNIX operating systems. It wasn't worth losing money for the infintesimal number of desktop unix users that would need Notes (rather than standard IMAP & NNTP stuff).
Now, I know that Linux has lead to a resurgancy in desktop Unix, but unfortuantly the development cycle moves in years, not months. I'm sure that if Lotus could have forseen a demand for Linux on the desktop, they might have planned an R5 client from the get go, but instead the chose to use MFC and target Mac and Windows only. It probably would be impossible for the IBM buearacracy to change course that quickly.
(If there were a NotesR5/UNIX client, it would be same thing on both Linux and commercial UNIX -- that means Motif. Sorry KDE and Gnome fans.)
Lotus/IBM looks at the market as a series of deployments of tens and hundreds of thousands of clients. In short, they aren't that worried about the single IT guy who wants to format Windows off his machine. If you are a big shop, and you plan to deploy a few thousand Linux seats, then maybe IBM will listen to you. Otherwise any demand for a Linux client is going right to/dev/null. --
The documentation indicates what you need to do to get Domino running on other distributions. I believe that RedHat 6 and OpenLinux are the only ones that work 'out of the box', and therefore are the only systems that can be 'certified' --
wonders how much better of a product Navigator would be at this time if they'd not had to deal with M$'s embrace and corrupt policy on html/java/javascript standards.
What? Netscape invented embrace-and-extend HTML. Take a look at the the whole layers thing in Netscape 4 -- entirely not standards compliant. To some extent, MS has been just going from the Netscape playbook, but generally IE is far closer to the standards than Netscape is currently.
If IE had been written as a competitive application, by a company _other_ than m$, without m$'s specific advantages as a monopoly (which I firmly belive it is), it's my opinion that Netscape Corp. never would have sold out.
Here you are probably right -- At one time it was reported that Microsoft had more employees in it's IE and IIS groups than Netscape had employeed in total (and Netscape was developing mail, directory, and groupware servers also). Microsoft realized no direct profits from that move - it was only done to ship a superior product for free than Netscape was shipping for a price.
Is IE a better product than Netscape? It'd had better be, since more resources were poured into it. --
Both browsers have outstanding security holes if JavaScript is enabled. IE may in fact have many more, but you only need one hole to create an exploit.
(Basically, both companies have a de facto admission that JavaScript is not a secure technology. The only thing IE gives you is "security zones", which allow you to define which sites JavaScript is enabled for.) --
Note that by-in-large the complaint is not that Microsoft integrated IE, but that they used their monopoly position to limit market access for Netscape.
KDE isn't going to make any ISP dump navigator in favor of the KDE browser. KDE isn't going to force websites to use KDE-specific features in return for space on the KDE Channel Bar. And, if the day comes that KDE has 90% desktop market share, we can worry about it then. (they currently have maybe 0.5% market share). --
Yes, I wouldn't be suprised if MS offered 'special access' to Windows 2000 in return for burying the whole OS/2 thing - MS does this kind of thing all of the time.
Now, the managers at IBM could be smarter than both of us put together -- better IBM Windows 2000 software products limit the adoption of MS BackOffice and put customers in a better position to buy high profit IBM midrange solutions. That strategy is probably more profitable than suing MS over a product (OS2) that's not really important to IBM's current strategy.
As for a shareholder suit, they would need to prove that OS/2 diminished IBM's share value. Considering that the mainframe business was losing billions a few years back, and the PC company is currently losing billions, that would be hard - OS/2 lost money but not that much money. --
What would be an answer is to have a trusted organization, which would audit code, put its stamp of approval AND serve as the distributor of said code.
In the open source world, Debian functions this way. There doesn't need to be a 'for hire' auditing agency. --
Microsof t  i s  i n f a m o u s  f o r  s e n d i n g  U n i c o d e  o v e r  t h e  w i r e  -   b l o a t i n g  b a n d w i d t h  r e q u i r e m e n t s. --
Also, relative to other businesses, law firms spend far less on IT. One big reason that WordPerfect is still in use is that many lawyers are still running 386s/486s and DOS/Win31, and couldn't switch to Word 97 if they wanted to. (As others have said in this thread, there's no reason to have anything more than a 386 if you are word processing 100% of the time.)
Another reason, besides the "standard verbiage" libraries is older document management systems that plug into WordPerfect. Many lawfirms have all their documents tied up in such systems, and it would be very difficult to move to something that was compatible with, say, WinWord 2000 or WordPerfect for Linux. --
NT Workstation 4 is already a better (business) desktop OS than Win 9x in most ways, but that hasn't got it much market penetration. Windows 2000 is not that much different.
Little things, like USB and better ISA PNP support, might convince businesses to deploy Windows 2000, but many will just stay put with 9x. Sometimes old DOS and Win3.1 applications force the use of Win9x, but mostly it's voluntary. --
I've looked at the betas of Windows 2000, and removing IE would not be trivial. Not only does it have the 'ActiveDesktop' shell (with no option to not install it), HTML content is all over the OS, including such common dialogs as "Configure your Server" and "Add Hardware Wizard". It's clear that MS thinks the future is a user interface written primarily with DHTML.
And yes, EXPLORER.EXE still sucks memory and crashes... --
I would think that IBM probably does have a legitimate case against Microsoft over OS/2, although it would be a tough one to win.
I know of several graybearded IT pros that went throught OS/2 v2 pilot programs and actual deployments. Suffice it to say that MS isn't the only reason that OS/2 didn't become the standard business operating system. Microsoft could muster thousands of witnesses and internal corporate reports showing this. Of course, this doesn't address preloads and bundling, but OS/2 wasn't marketed as a consumer operating system until "Warp".
Not to mention other, political issues, such as the buddy-buddy relationship between the MS Windows 2000 group and IBM's server application team. I'd think a IBM v. MS lawsuit is very unlikely.
The Intel product was some sort of desktop video system, I believe. --
CP/M didn't come on your IBM PC - it was a line item extra, just as was IBM/MS DOS.
In the early 90s (when MS established most of their market dominance), OS/2 and WordPerfect did indeed cost the prices I quoted. OS/2 didn't even include TCP/IP -- that was an extra $300. --
At one point Microsoft had more employees working on their free IE and IIS products than Netscape had employed in total. What paid these employee's salaries? Monopoly profits perhaps? Get it?
Slashdot Mirror
The reason that you don't see bootable images for removable media on PCs is because the PC boot process is br0ken. (Hopefully they'll fix that 'legacy' issue.) Not to mention that the lack of a good standard expansion bus has lead to -ugh- parallel port devices.
It's quite common for Macs to have bootable ZIP or JAZ disks, and programs like 'Norton Utilities' offer an option to build bootable recovery disks.
--
You make an excellent point -- The old DEC user base is mostly likely already using Unix, and therefore going to be more comfortable with Linux.
In addition, Compaq has always been a premium partner with SCO, and the SCO customer base is certainly looking at Linux
However the vast majority of Compaq Proliants are probably in NT/NetWare shops which might be using Linux here and there but would be less likely to standardize on it.
--
This is an old trick in the antitrust world: define the market so narrowly that there is only a couple of companies selling in it, and use that to "prove" that the company has a monopoly
Yes, the market was defined so "narrowly" that it includes 90+% of the computers sold.
(However, I think Apple should have been taken under consideration. They considered porting MacOS to Intel, and dropped OSX/Intel, neither of which are technically deficient products. Apparently they felt there was a barrier to entry there.)
--
nm
--
The problem is that if their were hidden API calls in MS Office, they would be discovered, and the information would be all over the net in an instant.
This actually happened, BTW, in circa 1990 - I have not heard of it since.
In my book, the issues is more of timing than of disclosure. Microsoft usually ships an API with a commercial product. If you are competing with Microsoft, you don't find out about the API until it ships, but by that time Microsoft already has a full product running on it. This puts you at a competitive disadvantage.
The net affect is that 3rd parties are constantly playing catch up to the latest Microsoft API. Hypotetically, if the company were split in half, there would be less incentive to use new APIs (for both MS-Apps and competitors), and Windows' API would stablize quite a bit. Kind of like commercial UNIX, for example.
--
Basically the Cable companies and the governement have consipired to create an extremely inefficient use of the bandwidth they do have.
In my area, the gov't mandates thatstandard cable contains about 10 UHF channels that I couldn't get with rabbit ears if I tried, three of which are really bad QVC ripoffs. On top of that, there are several "community access" channels, whose only programming seems to be really ugly videotext announcing various public library programs with the radio playing as a soundtrack. Add to that the two channels which do nothing but promote pay-per-view movies, the four slots for showing PPV, the scrambled pornography, and the standard free over-the-air channels, there is only about 12 slots left for normal commercial cable programming (TNT, USA, CNN, etc), which besides pro wrestling, is nothing to write home about. Internet and Phone access can only be cutting into the limited bandwidth ppol
My fear is that an expanded digitial spectrum is going to be used this way also - as an effort to maximize pay-per-view profits (and kill the corner video store) or 'extended services' over "the public good" of better picture quality or more free entertainment, such as princess diana death dirges and wrestling. (And, no, I'm not a mark - I don't buy the PPVs or commerative plates.)
Then again, my TV is a Commodore 1702 monitor, so maybe I'm not the target market for these ploys.
--
Or you could just download the software from http://notes.net.
--
Those "vulnerabilities" were all due to basic design errors -- in short, bad developers assumed that hiding a document would make it inaccessible. The documentation is clear that this it doesn't work that way, and implementing document level security is quite easy.
--
Note that with Notes 4.x, they supported clients on Solaris (Sparc and x86), AIX, and HP/UX. The upshot was that not many people were all that interested in running the Notes client on UNIX operating systems. It wasn't worth losing money for the infintesimal number of desktop unix users that would need Notes (rather than standard IMAP & NNTP stuff).
/dev/null.
Now, I know that Linux has lead to a resurgancy in desktop Unix, but unfortuantly the development cycle moves in years, not months. I'm sure that if Lotus could have forseen a demand for Linux on the desktop, they might have planned an R5 client from the get go, but instead the chose to use MFC and target Mac and Windows only. It probably would be impossible for the IBM buearacracy to change course that quickly.
(If there were a NotesR5/UNIX client, it would be same thing on both Linux and commercial UNIX -- that means Motif. Sorry KDE and Gnome fans.)
Lotus/IBM looks at the market as a series of deployments of tens and hundreds of thousands of clients. In short, they aren't that worried about the single IT guy who wants to format Windows off his machine. If you are a big shop, and you plan to deploy a few thousand Linux seats, then maybe IBM will listen to you. Otherwise any demand for a Linux client is going right to
--
The documentation indicates what you need to do to get Domino running on other distributions. I believe that RedHat 6 and OpenLinux are the only ones that work 'out of the box', and therefore are the only systems that can be 'certified'
--
Doesn't NeoPlanet send a record of every site you go to back to their tracking server?
--
wonders how much better of a product Navigator would be at this time if they'd not had to deal with M$'s embrace and corrupt policy on html/java/javascript standards.
What? Netscape invented embrace-and-extend HTML. Take a look at the the whole layers thing in Netscape 4 -- entirely not standards compliant. To some extent, MS has been just going from the Netscape playbook, but generally IE is far closer to the standards than Netscape is currently.
If IE had been written as a competitive application, by a company _other_ than m$, without m$'s specific advantages as a monopoly (which I firmly belive it is), it's my opinion that Netscape Corp. never would have sold out.
Here you are probably right -- At one time it was reported that Microsoft had more employees in it's IE and IIS groups than Netscape had employeed in total (and Netscape was developing mail, directory, and groupware servers also). Microsoft realized no direct profits from that move - it was only done to ship a superior product for free than Netscape was shipping for a price.
Is IE a better product than Netscape? It'd had better be, since more resources were poured into it.
--
Both browsers have outstanding security holes if JavaScript is enabled. IE may in fact have many more, but you only need one hole to create an exploit.
(Basically, both companies have a de facto admission that JavaScript is not a secure technology. The only thing IE gives you is "security zones", which allow you to define which sites JavaScript is enabled for.)
--
Note that by-in-large the complaint is not that Microsoft integrated IE, but that they used their monopoly position to limit market access for Netscape.
KDE isn't going to make any ISP dump navigator in favor of the KDE browser. KDE isn't going to force websites to use KDE-specific features in return for space on the KDE Channel Bar. And, if the day comes that KDE has 90% desktop market share, we can worry about it then. (they currently have maybe 0.5% market share).
--
Yes, I wouldn't be suprised if MS offered 'special access' to Windows 2000 in return for burying the whole OS/2 thing - MS does this kind of thing all of the time.
Now, the managers at IBM could be smarter than both of us put together -- better IBM Windows 2000 software products limit the adoption of MS BackOffice and put customers in a better position to buy high profit IBM midrange solutions. That strategy is probably more profitable than suing MS over a product (OS2) that's not really important to IBM's current strategy.
As for a shareholder suit, they would need to prove that OS/2 diminished IBM's share value. Considering that the mainframe business was losing billions a few years back, and the PC company is currently losing billions, that would be hard - OS/2 lost money but not that much money.
--
What would be an
answer is to have a trusted organization,
which would audit code, put its stamp of
approval AND serve as the distributor
of said code.
In the open source world, Debian functions this way. There doesn't need to be a 'for hire' auditing agency.
--
Microsof t  i s  i n f a m o u s  f o r  s e n d i n g  U n i c o d e  o v e r  t h e  w i r e  -   b l o a t i n g  b a n d w i d t h  r e q u i r e m e n t s .
--
Also, relative to other businesses, law firms spend far less on IT. One big reason that WordPerfect is still in use is that many lawyers are still running 386s/486s and DOS/Win31, and couldn't switch to Word 97 if they wanted to. (As others have said in this thread, there's no reason to have anything more than a 386 if you are word processing 100% of the time.)
Another reason, besides the "standard verbiage" libraries is older document management systems that plug into WordPerfect. Many lawfirms have all their documents tied up in such systems, and it would be very difficult to move to something that was compatible with, say, WinWord 2000 or WordPerfect for Linux.
--
NT Workstation 4 is already a better (business) desktop OS than Win 9x in most ways, but that hasn't got it much market penetration. Windows 2000 is not that much different.
Little things, like USB and better ISA PNP support, might convince businesses to deploy Windows 2000, but many will just stay put with 9x. Sometimes old DOS and Win3.1 applications force the use of Win9x, but mostly it's voluntary.
--
I've looked at the betas of Windows 2000, and removing IE would not be trivial. Not only does it have the 'ActiveDesktop' shell (with no option to not install it), HTML content is all over the OS, including such common dialogs as "Configure your Server" and "Add Hardware Wizard". It's clear that MS thinks the future is a user interface written primarily with DHTML.
And yes, EXPLORER.EXE still sucks memory and crashes...
--
I would think that IBM probably does have a legitimate case against Microsoft over OS/2, although it would be a tough one to win.
I know of several graybearded IT pros that went throught OS/2 v2 pilot programs and actual deployments. Suffice it to say that MS isn't the only reason that OS/2 didn't become the standard business operating system. Microsoft could muster thousands of witnesses and internal corporate reports showing this. Of course, this doesn't address preloads and bundling, but OS/2 wasn't marketed as a consumer operating system until "Warp".
Not to mention other, political issues, such as the buddy-buddy relationship between the MS Windows 2000 group and IBM's server application team. I'd think a IBM v. MS lawsuit is very unlikely.
The Intel product was some sort of desktop video system, I believe.
--
I was actually referring to a $300 add-on to OS/2 2.x -- not Warp.
--
I was speaking of OS/2 2.0, not 3.0 -- note the comparision to Windows 3. Yes, IBM did cut the price. No, that doesn't make my statement FUD.
As a side note, Windows For Workgroups did ship with a fully protected mode TCP/IP stack, but that wasn't until 1994 or so.
--
CP/M didn't come on your IBM PC - it was a line item extra, just as was IBM/MS DOS.
In the early 90s (when MS established most of their market dominance), OS/2 and WordPerfect did indeed cost the prices I quoted. OS/2 didn't even include TCP/IP -- that was an extra $300.
--
At one point Microsoft had more employees working on their free IE and IIS products than Netscape had employed in total. What paid these employee's salaries? Monopoly profits perhaps? Get it?
--