I dunno, MS-DOS 1 was a virtual clone of CP/M, and 99% compatible DR DOS is actually based on CP/M code. It's not like people bought the IBM PC for the wonderful operating system features.
BTW, CP/M-86 actually shipped for the IBM PC, just at 3x the cost for IBM (MS) DOS --
Right on. The case was specifically about Windows 95/98 - in this context Solaris is also a fringe operating system - it's just that if MS brought up Solaris in the trial, Sun would have been all over their asses. --
Depends what your definition of 'helping the consumer' is. Don't forget that Microsoft got where they are by undercutting the competition: DOS for $49 when CP/M was $149, Windows 3 for $99 when OS/2 was $500, Word for $300 when WordPerfect was $600, (and just the other day) Windows 2000 at half the cost of Novell 5.
MSFT has been willing to undercut the compeition because they know that an expanding market is better than short term profits. They've able to sell at a relative loss because of the strength of their OS position. (Linux is seen to have a chance against Microsoft because by-in-large it's immune from this process.)
Has the consumer benefited from cheap ubiquitous Microsoft software products over the years? You would have to agree unless you really enjoyed IBM and DEC's pricing models. Did the consumer benefited from MS's recent antics with Internet Explorer - most certainly not. --
Pearl Harbor Day, 1995 -- Shortly after the successful launch of Windows 95, Microsoft announced that it was going to integrate Internet Explorer directly into the Windows operating systems.
At the time I worked at a heavily pro-MS shop (all NT even back in that day), and my co-workers and I were pretty stunned and confused by the announcment.
First of all, IE was unusable at that point, and it was hard to imagine that it ever could becoming a good product. (I was wrong there, I admit.)
Second, the immediate reaction was - "Who would want a web browers as a file shell/UI front end? It's slow, hogs memory, and crashes all the time." Well true to form, Microsoft took the fairly well done COM/Explorer Windows shell and turned it into something that was slow, hogs memory, and crashes all the time.
For fucking up the most basic interface a users has to deal with alone they should be sentenced to purgatory. Anyway hearing a non-technical federal judge issue the following words is like music to these ears:
... at the cost of increased confusion, degraded system performance, and restricted memory...
... Microsoft created confusion and frustration for consumers, and increased technical support costs for business customers...
... with a PC system that ran slower and provided less available memory than if the newest version of Windows came without browsing software.
... pay a substantial price (in the forms of downloading, installation, confusion, degraded system performance, and diminished memory capacity)...
The NetWare client worked poorly under Windows 3.1 because Novell didn't really care about writing a good Windows driver. Eventually it got sorted out, and it worked OK.
The other problem was that many NetWare admins were unaware that they even had to install Windows drivers for client. Many installs were done by hand or with batchfiles and didn't get all the *.386 files in the right places. This would cause Windows 3.1 to choak on network access. --
Hmmm, I always thought that the reason was that most law offices like to spend very little money on computer systems, and consequentally just missed the big DOS->Windows and WordPerfect->Word conversion everyone else underwent in the early 90s. Note that the format is WP 6 and not WP 7, 8, or 9.
Anyway, lawyers use WordPerfect for the same reason everyone else uses Word - because if they send a document they want to be sure the people they work with (other lawyers) can read it.
As a side note, the Starr report was posted in either WordPerfect 5 or 6 format. When the media converted it to HTML with a modern version of WordPerfect, several deleted footnotes reappeared, including one with comprimising information about Walter Mondale's daughter. (To be fair, MS Word has had the same kind of problem over the years.) Not the kind of thing you want to have happen in a legal document!
It is possible to be UNIX branded and not use a single line of the original AT&T source code
In other words, "UNIX" is now a specification, no longer an operating system. "Gnu's Not Unix" is at least partially a joke, because the goal all along has been to meet the UNIX specification without royalties and proprietary code.
However, the irony seems lost on a certain portion of the slashdot population who sit here waving their fingers lecturing "No, no - GNU really isn't Unix..." --
Anyone here remember the Apple Pippen? When it was announced, the specs looked pretty decent (basically a PowerMac 6100 minus the keyboard), however by the time it shipped it looked pretty weak compared to the then current 604 Macs. The titles that shipped for Pippen were largely edutainment, not games.
A 500Mhz machine might look appealing to developers right now, but what about in 2 years when games target 1 Ghz CPUs and Voodoo 6000s? Would it worth it for developers to downgrade their PC games for the XBox? Only if the installed base is really large.
(Of course, they could solve this dillema by making the box upgradeable, but then you have a PC again, with no savings in cost or simplicity.) --
If it's simple, and it's text parsing (XML), the open source community will have no problem mastering it.
If anything the "commitment" to CORBA is "disastrous" because it's likely to be outclassed and incompatible with quasi-proprietary commercial implementations, and thus worthless as a standard. Open Source works best with simple, baseline protocols - HTTP, DNS, and potentially XML-RPC. --
Interestingly, one of the big sells that DIVX had with the content industry was that DVD encryption was crap and would be easily broken. This was dismissed as FUD in some corners, but was enough to get a few studios to commit to DIVX over DVD early on.
DIVX hasn't been turned off yet - it would be interesting to see if a modified version is brought back to life. It's the only starting point they've got right now.
(Of course, they would have to sort out the pricing, quality, and retail channels issues that killed DIVX in the first place.) --
For a company that makes such nice server stuff and decent corporate desktops, it's a shame that Compaq insists on putting so much cheap consumer crap.
Compaq should do what IBM did and drop their retail computer line. You see comments like guacamole's, and you realize that they are just dragging their once well regarded brand name through the mud with those ugly and cheap Presario computers. If it's impossible to make a good consumer machine and a profit, leave the market to eMachines or whoever.
The current generation of IT purchasing people think of the well built Compaqs going back to the original luggable, the Deskpro 386, and the early Proliant servers which were way beyond any other PC server. Eventually, however, burned home users are going to get these purchasing jobs, and they are just going think of Compaq as just another Packard Bell. It's going to be hard to sell a $100,000 Alpha system to that crowd. --
Don't you think MS v. Linux flamewars here are pretty much a chicken and egg problem? When you post 30 stories on the Mindcraft Benchmark Scandal, you're going to attract a crowd. When the crowd is there, you're going to have keep feeding them to keep them happy.
Blaming the Windows advocates is a little silly, although I've seen some rather direct AC astroturfing here. Any and almost every thread on slashdot can and does turn into a NTSuxfest. Even this one - there is some rational discussion of the impact of MS's pricing on IT organizations, but by-in-large it's "$666?! Linux is free!!!", as if that fact wasn't known by every reader here. Boooring. --
I've seen a situation where 20,000 Netware 3.x seats were pulled in favor NT. Internal study found that management costs of Novell 4.x were lower, but once Microsoft cut a deal, the per seat cost for Novell was so much higher that it was cheaper to go NT. (Although the conversion ended up going waaaaaay over budget, so it might have been a wash in the end.)
Anyway, in that situation, Novell was minus 20,000 seats purely due the licence costs. --
Compelling link -- Now I understand why land is so cheap out in rural Arizona - Phone service is $300,000!
Is it "for good for society" to give individuals $300,000 or $2400 of real estate subsidies so that they have the 'freedom' can live in a retirement community far away from anything? (I'm not even including federal water subsidies, and so on.) I'm pretty dubious at that proposition - it defies basic economies of scale and leads to unnatural economic situations.
It's unfortuate that we don't believe in universal telephone service anymore, but I can't see the argument for Internet service. If like you say, "eventually everything will be broadband", it's not going to happen by stringing a wire out to everyone's house in the US's largely unpopulated countryside and sparsely populated outer suburbs. Better hope for a wireless solution.
Elsewhere in this thread, people noted that broadband penetration is high in Canada. There's a reason for that -- Canada has development controls that have lead to a much higher population density in urban areas. Consequently it's cheaper and easier to rollout all services, from mass transit to broadband Internet. Density matters, especially in an unregulated Internet economy. --
When the telephone system was being created, the thought was that it was such an essential service that the generally more well-off high density cities should subsidize the wiring to the generally depressed rural communities. This system worked wonderfully, providing universal access that was still affordable.
However, like many other rural subsidies (such as the highway programs), the net effect was that millions of Americans found it reasonable to move to areas of very low densities for quality of life reasons.
You have to realize that low density communities and anything that comes in on a wire do not mix well. The cable companies almost drove themselves out of business in the 1980s trying to provide universal service, and you can be damn sure that the DSL companies won't do the same thing.
Considering the short range of DSL, if you live in a community with 1 acre lots, I'd be suprised if you ever got the service. You made a lifestyle choice and you don't deserve it. And if you do get broadband, I hope you are paying the real cost -- not relying on subsidies from higher density areas that far cheaper to provide service to.
Actually, *you* are the one who is not comparing apples to apples. Certainly NetWare is more stable and faster than NT, but it also does a hell of alot less, and 99% of NetWare installs are File+Print+NDS only.
NT Enterprise is only needed if you are using their clustering technology or have greater than 4 CPUs. (Novell, AFAIK is stuck at 1 CPU for most things.) Does Novell's custer software come included in the standard NetWare box? --
"Millennium" has apparently been repositioned as Windows 98 Service Pack 2, rather than Windows 2001 (or whatever).
However even with NT-based Windows 2000, expect consumer machines to continue shipping with Windows 98. Windows 2000's big push on the desktop will be at corporations. --
From ZDNet: On the server side of the house, Microsoft is claiming it will charge half of the estimated street price that Novell Inc. charges for 10-user configurations. For Windows 2000 Server, a 10-user version will cost $1,199 and a 25-user SKU will run $1,799. Upgrading from older versions of NT or from Novell NetWare will cost $599 or $899, for 10- and 25-user versions, respectively.
Makes me wonder how Novell is going to survive this. They're selling a file+print system for twice the price of a full application server. Is NDS worth twice the price of AD? Perhaps -- but if AD works and is 'good enough', it's going to be compelling for shops that haven't implemented a global directory scheme.
The other point is that Microsoft obviously sees no real threat that Linux is going to steal their bread and butter file&print market. If they did, they would be more aggressive with 'unlimited connections' pricing schemes --
Right now, Microsoft charges for SMB ("Windows Networking") seats only. That means if you run Oracle or Lotus or any other application, connections are 'free' as far as MS is concerned.
The 'authenticated web user' makes sense. Otherwise you could just dump SMB and have all of your users connect with "web folders" or FTP, still get all of the security infrastructure, and save a boatload of money. --
NEC shipped Versa laptops with defective motherboards from about 1995 to 1998. They've quietly admitted to the problem, but have not issued any general recall or settlement. Some larger customers got discounts on new equipment, but people had to go through warranty service, where they replaced one defective motherboard with another defective motherboard. I've even been told that power management is "unsupported" on these machines - all of which are supposedly Windows logo certified, which at the very least should mean that APM works.
This is not an isolated example -- there's been millions of fundamentally defective systems dumped on the public over the years. Furthermore, there's very little government protection in this area, mostly because the PC parts market is made up a large number of obscure and offshore companies. Most users rarely expand their memory or run an intensive operating system which might uncover hardware stability or data loss problems, or if they do, they are content to just blame Microsoft Windows. (I see people on Slashdot doing this all of the time. "NT Sucks - I keep getting memory parity errors!")
Toshiba should be given credit for rectifying a minor problem with what have been generally good machines. I'd like to see this huge settlement bring the sharks out of the water -- it might get these clowns to clean up their act and stop peddling defective merchendise.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno, MS-DOS 1 was a virtual clone of CP/M, and 99% compatible DR DOS is actually based on CP/M code. It's not like people bought the IBM PC for the wonderful operating system features.
BTW, CP/M-86 actually shipped for the IBM PC, just at 3x the cost for IBM (MS) DOS
--
Right on. The case was specifically about Windows 95/98 - in this context Solaris is also a fringe operating system - it's just that if MS brought up Solaris in the trial, Sun would have been all over their asses.
--
OS/2 would be properly catagorized as a "legacy" operating system - that is too good to get rid of, but not good enough to implement on new systems.
(If IBM thinks differently about OS/2, I'd like to hear about it.)
--
Depends what your definition of 'helping the consumer' is. Don't forget that Microsoft got where they are by undercutting the competition:
DOS for $49 when CP/M was $149, Windows 3 for $99 when OS/2 was $500, Word for $300 when WordPerfect was $600, (and just the other day) Windows 2000 at half the cost of Novell 5.
MSFT has been willing to undercut the compeition because they know that an expanding market is better than short term profits. They've able to sell at a relative loss because of the strength of their OS position. (Linux is seen to have a chance against Microsoft because by-in-large it's immune from this process.)
Has the consumer benefited from cheap ubiquitous Microsoft software products over the years? You would have to agree unless you really enjoyed IBM and DEC's pricing models. Did the consumer benefited from MS's recent antics with Internet Explorer - most certainly not.
--
Pearl Harbor Day, 1995 -- Shortly after the successful launch of Windows 95, Microsoft announced that it was going to integrate Internet Explorer directly into the Windows operating systems.
... at the cost of increased confusion, degraded system performance, and restricted memory ...
...
...
At the time I worked at a heavily pro-MS shop (all NT even back in that day), and my co-workers and I were pretty stunned and confused by the announcment.
First of all, IE was unusable at that point, and it was hard to imagine that it ever could becoming a good product. (I was wrong there, I admit.)
Second, the immediate reaction was - "Who would want a web browers as a file shell/UI front end? It's slow, hogs memory, and crashes all the time." Well true to form, Microsoft took the fairly well done COM/Explorer Windows shell and turned it into something that was slow, hogs memory, and crashes all the time.
For fucking up the most basic interface a users has to deal with alone they should be sentenced to purgatory. Anyway hearing a non-technical federal judge issue the following words is like music to these ears:
... Microsoft created confusion and frustration for consumers, and increased technical support costs for business customers
... with a PC system that ran slower and provided less available memory than if the newest version of Windows came without browsing software.
... pay a substantial price (in the forms of downloading, installation, confusion, degraded system performance, and diminished memory capacity)
Amen!
--
The NetWare client worked poorly under Windows 3.1 because Novell didn't really care about writing a good Windows driver. Eventually it got sorted out, and it worked OK.
The other problem was that many NetWare admins were unaware that they even had to install Windows drivers for client. Many installs were done by hand or with batchfiles and didn't get all the *.386 files in the right places. This would cause Windows 3.1 to choak on network access.
--
The Nvidia drivers are actually under the XFree licence, not the GPL.
--
Hmmm, I always thought that the reason was that most law offices like to spend very little money on computer systems, and consequentally just missed the big DOS->Windows and WordPerfect->Word conversion everyone else underwent in the early 90s. Note that the format is WP 6 and not WP 7, 8, or 9.
Anyway, lawyers use WordPerfect for the same reason everyone else uses Word - because if they send a document they want to be sure the people they work with (other lawyers) can read it.
As a side note, the Starr report was posted in either WordPerfect 5 or 6 format. When the media converted it to HTML with a modern version of WordPerfect, several deleted footnotes reappeared, including one with comprimising information about Walter Mondale's daughter. (To be fair, MS Word has had the same kind of problem over the years.) Not the kind of thing you want to have happen in a legal document!
--
It is possible to be UNIX branded and not use a single line of the original AT&T source code
In other words, "UNIX" is now a specification, no longer an operating system. "Gnu's Not Unix" is at least partially a joke, because the goal all along has been to meet the UNIX specification without royalties and proprietary code.
However, the irony seems lost on a certain portion of the slashdot population who sit here waving their fingers lecturing "No, no - GNU really isn't Unix..."
--
Anyone here remember the Apple Pippen? When it was announced, the specs looked pretty decent (basically a PowerMac 6100 minus the keyboard), however by the time it shipped it looked pretty weak compared to the then current 604 Macs. The titles that shipped for Pippen were largely edutainment, not games.
A 500Mhz machine might look appealing to developers right now, but what about in 2 years when games target 1 Ghz CPUs and Voodoo 6000s? Would it worth it for developers to downgrade their PC games for the XBox? Only if the installed base is really large.
(Of course, they could solve this dillema by making the box upgradeable, but then you have a PC again, with no savings in cost or simplicity.)
--
If it's simple, and it's text parsing (XML), the open source community will have no problem mastering it.
If anything the "commitment" to CORBA is "disastrous" because it's likely to be outclassed and incompatible with quasi-proprietary commercial implementations, and thus worthless as a standard. Open Source works best with simple, baseline protocols - HTTP, DNS, and potentially XML-RPC.
--
Interestingly, one of the big sells that DIVX had with the content industry was that DVD encryption was crap and would be easily broken. This was dismissed as FUD in some corners, but was enough to get a few studios to commit to DIVX over DVD early on.
DIVX hasn't been turned off yet - it would be interesting to see if a modified version is brought back to life. It's the only starting point they've got right now.
(Of course, they would have to sort out the pricing, quality, and retail channels issues that killed DIVX in the first place.)
--
For a company that makes such nice server stuff and decent corporate desktops, it's a shame that Compaq insists on putting so much cheap consumer crap.
Compaq should do what IBM did and drop their retail computer line. You see comments like guacamole's, and you realize that they are just dragging their once well regarded brand name through the mud with those ugly and cheap Presario computers. If it's impossible to make a good consumer machine and a profit, leave the market to eMachines or whoever.
The current generation of IT purchasing people think of the well built Compaqs going back to the original luggable, the Deskpro 386, and the early Proliant servers which were way beyond any other PC server. Eventually, however, burned home users are going to get these purchasing jobs, and they are just going think of Compaq as just another Packard Bell. It's going to be hard to sell a $100,000 Alpha system to that crowd.
--
Don't you think MS v. Linux flamewars here are pretty much a chicken and egg problem? When you post 30 stories on the Mindcraft Benchmark Scandal, you're going to attract a crowd. When the crowd is there, you're going to have keep feeding them to keep them happy.
Blaming the Windows advocates is a little silly, although I've seen some rather direct AC astroturfing here. Any and almost every thread on slashdot can and does turn into a NTSuxfest. Even this one - there is some rational discussion of the impact of MS's pricing on IT organizations, but by-in-large it's "$666?! Linux is free!!!", as if that fact wasn't known by every reader here. Boooring.
--
I am using Netscape Enterprise Server, authenticating via NS Directory Server (without using the NT-bind feature), will I need the extra CALs?
No. Buy the base NT, pay AOL, be happy.
--
In related news, VINES finally died just last week!
--
I've seen a situation where 20,000 Netware 3.x seats were pulled in favor NT. Internal study found that management costs of Novell 4.x were lower, but once Microsoft cut a deal, the per seat cost for Novell was so much higher that it was cheaper to go NT. (Although the conversion ended up going waaaaaay over budget, so it might have been a wash in the end.)
Anyway, in that situation, Novell was minus 20,000 seats purely due the licence costs.
--
Compelling link -- Now I understand why land is so cheap out in rural Arizona - Phone service is $300,000!
Is it "for good for society" to give individuals $300,000 or $2400 of real estate subsidies so that they have the 'freedom' can live in a retirement community far away from anything? (I'm not even including federal water subsidies, and so on.) I'm pretty dubious at that proposition - it defies basic economies of scale and leads to unnatural economic situations.
It's unfortuate that we don't believe in universal telephone service anymore, but I can't see the argument for Internet service. If like you say, "eventually everything will be broadband", it's not going to happen by stringing a wire out to everyone's house in the US's largely unpopulated countryside and sparsely populated outer suburbs. Better hope for a wireless solution.
Elsewhere in this thread, people noted that broadband penetration is high in Canada. There's a reason for that -- Canada has development controls that have lead to a much higher population density in urban areas. Consequently it's cheaper and easier to rollout all services, from mass transit to broadband Internet. Density matters, especially in an unregulated Internet economy.
--
Yes. If they need broadband Internet, let them pay the real cost of getting it.
Otherwise they are screwing me. Nice attitude, huh?
--
When the telephone system was being created, the thought was that it was such an essential service that the generally more well-off high density cities should subsidize the wiring to the generally depressed rural communities. This system worked wonderfully, providing universal access that was still affordable.
However, like many other rural subsidies (such as the highway programs), the net effect was that millions of Americans found it reasonable to move to areas of very low densities for quality of life reasons.
You have to realize that low density communities and anything that comes in on a wire do not mix well. The cable companies almost drove themselves out of business in the 1980s trying to provide universal service, and you can be damn sure that the DSL companies won't do the same thing.
Considering the short range of DSL, if you live in a community with 1 acre lots, I'd be suprised if you ever got the service. You made a lifestyle choice and you don't deserve it. And if you do get broadband, I hope you are paying the real cost -- not relying on subsidies from higher density areas that far cheaper to provide service to.
--
Actually, *you* are the one who is not comparing apples to apples. Certainly NetWare is more stable and faster than NT, but it also does a hell of alot less, and 99% of NetWare installs are File+Print+NDS only.
NT Enterprise is only needed if you are using their clustering technology or have greater than 4 CPUs. (Novell, AFAIK is stuck at 1 CPU for most things.) Does Novell's custer software come included in the standard NetWare box?
--
"Millennium" has apparently been repositioned as Windows 98 Service Pack 2, rather than Windows 2001 (or whatever).
However even with NT-based Windows 2000, expect consumer machines to continue shipping with Windows 98. Windows 2000's big push on the desktop will be at corporations.
--
From ZDNet: On the server side of the house, Microsoft is claiming it will charge half of the estimated street price that Novell Inc. charges for 10-user configurations. For Windows 2000 Server, a 10-user version will cost $1,199 and a 25-user SKU will run $1,799. Upgrading from older versions of NT or from Novell NetWare will cost $599 or $899, for 10- and 25-user versions, respectively.
Makes me wonder how Novell is going to survive this. They're selling a file+print system for twice the price of a full application server. Is NDS worth twice the price of AD? Perhaps -- but if AD works and is 'good enough', it's going to be compelling for shops that haven't implemented a global directory scheme.
The other point is that Microsoft obviously sees no real threat that Linux is going to steal their bread and butter file&print market. If they did, they would be more aggressive with 'unlimited connections' pricing schemes
--
Right now, Microsoft charges for SMB ("Windows Networking") seats only. That means if you run Oracle or Lotus or any other application, connections are 'free' as far as MS is concerned.
The 'authenticated web user' makes sense. Otherwise you could just dump SMB and have all of your users connect with "web folders" or FTP, still get all of the security infrastructure, and save a boatload of money.
--
NEC shipped Versa laptops with defective motherboards from about 1995 to 1998. They've quietly admitted to the problem, but have not issued any general recall or settlement. Some larger customers got discounts on new equipment, but people had to go through warranty service, where they replaced one defective motherboard with another defective motherboard. I've even been told that power management is "unsupported" on these machines - all of which are supposedly Windows logo certified, which at the very least should mean that APM works.
This is not an isolated example -- there's been millions of fundamentally defective systems dumped on the public over the years. Furthermore, there's very little government protection in this area, mostly because the PC parts market is made up a large number of obscure and offshore companies. Most users rarely expand their memory or run an intensive operating system which might uncover hardware stability or data loss problems, or if they do, they are content to just blame Microsoft Windows. (I see people on Slashdot doing this all of the time. "NT Sucks - I keep getting memory parity errors!")
Toshiba should be given credit for rectifying a minor problem with what have been generally good machines. I'd like to see this huge settlement bring the sharks out of the water -- it might get these clowns to clean up their act and stop peddling defective merchendise.
--