My understanding is that the trial is more about Microsoft's marketing practices than any particular technical issues. Specifically MS 'bundled' DOS and Windows and encouraged/forced OEMs to not support any OS other than DOS/Windows, shutting DR and Novell out of the market. (In addition Windows 95/98 disables DR-DOS during the upgrade for no real good technical reason.)
Even if the evidence that Micrsoft had DR-DOS detection code built into a Windows 3 beta is thrown out, it probably won't make that much of a difference in the trial.
Besides the DRDOS detecion code is hardly evidence of the supreme evil of Microsoft, as some folks here on/. keep reiterating:
A) The code was only in certain closed betas. (It's wasn't like today where any schmuck who MS hasn't carpetbombed can buy a beta of Windows XYZ for $75).
B) The code was discovered, disassembled, and documented by a major computer magazine (either Byte or Dr.Dobbs?)
C) Lots of people ran DR-DOS under Windows 3.1. I don't think that there ever was perception that it didn't work.
D) Much worse than the beta detection code was a text file in the *released* version of Windows 3.1 saying that DR-DOS was not supported. --
"Information Technology" to me sounds like a meaningless buzzword..
Har. Wait until you get a job. Virtually every corporation has a "Information Technology" or a "Management Information Systems" or in sillier places, even a "Client-Server Integration" department. In short it's the folks who run the computers.
The proper "gender-nonspecific" form for a singular person is he/him/his.
Not to be nitpicky, but the rules have changed. The spec now to switch alternately between he/him/his and she/her/hers, or better yet avoid these contructs as much as possible.
(At least when I went to college in the early 90s, using he/him/his exclusively would incure the wrath of those handing out the grades!) --
Yes I know Mac Zealots in the real world. I just avoid discussing computers with them. Plenty of other things to talk about. The corporate Mac users I've known usually have a legitimate gripe. Like one place that removed everyones Macs in the middle of the night and replaced them with slower PCs and then told them to open their Illustrator files in CorelDraw. Call it Anti-Mac advocacy.
The ongoing challenge of corporate MIS departments is to provide solutions. When you've got someone there yelling "Product X sucks! Use Product Y!", you've got someone with different interests, and it's just best to get the hell out of their way. And you're right about Microsoft - if someone says they've got a problem, Microsoft will try to build a solution for it. --
5. Network interoperablity. Until recently, Apple refused to build Novell and MS/IBM client support into the OS. This forced network administrators to load semi-stable AppleShare extensions on their servers and leading to a Mac ban at many corporations.
6. Production Capablities. In the 80s and early 90s, Apple couldn't make enough Macs to meet demand (even with their 50% profit margin). A chunk of this missed opportunity probably ended up as Windows users.
7. Apple// Forever. Apple pushed the//gs as it's low end solution in the 80s rather than making a cheap color Mac. Lots of schools and new users ended up on a technological dead end.
PS - I never understand why people say "Platform X failed because their advocates are such Assholes!" I mean, the only place you see OS advocates is if you go to a flamey place like comp.*.advocacy or slashdot, and then you basically asking for trouble. It's not like OS advocates are running around keying your car or stealing your girlfriend or anything like that. --
The high end gaming market is a pretty signifcant profit center for all these companies, so Quake numbers will certainly help AMD a little.
However, the real money and market share in the PC business is volume, and that means business desktops and low-end home machines. These machines ususally ship with really cheap video systems such as S3 or the Intel one. --
Re:Two households, both alike in dignity...
on
Intel Undercuts AMD
·
· Score: 2
Hey, actually/. is a place for the kind of computer enthusiasts who brag about keeping their 386s in service with Linux!
Actually, the problem that both Intel and AMD face is the declining returns of faster CPU speeds. I run a P5-133 at home and a PII-350? at work, and other than than booting NT, there's almost no perceptual difference between the two. Of course the home machine has SCSI, better video, and more memory, but by spec, the CPU in the PII should be 3-4x faster. (Other than MAME, I don't really play any games however.)
The real problem here is that Intel is squeezing the OEMs by the balls. The "Intel Inside" marketing lock-in ensures that the big vendors have their offerings up to Intel's latest clock speeds, but the market demands a $1200 PC. Well, if you're Compaq or Dell, how are you going to to build a $1200 PC with a $700 CPU and still try to make any money? Cut corners, that's how. Hence, crappy video and disk subsystems, and a bunch of crap components ready to die and get thrown away in 2 years.
Even for the price difference between a PIII-450 and a PIII-550, they could more than double the memory or get a better video accelerator. Hell, even Windows 98 is going to work better and play better with 128MB of RAM instead of the standard 64MB.
Compaq, Dell, et al have been sucking at Intel's teet for so long that they haven't been serving their customers, and they haven't realized that they've consigned themselves for making a 2% profit margin screwing hard drives into essentially Intel-manfuactured systems. If it hadn't been the rise of big high-profit x86 servers (thank NT for that!), all of these clowns would be out of business. (And watch while Intel destroys the server profit center by driving commodity machines into that market.)
Hopefully, people will get past these magic megahertz numbers and realize that the only difference between this year's K7 or PIII and a Pentium Pro from three years ago is an barely perceptable increase in Quake frame rate or RC5 or kernel complies or whatever. I know everyone on slashdot loves the latest and greatest, but we're way beyond the point where any of this stuff makes any real difference.
(End of rant - too much coffee consumed already.) --
Also, it has to be noted that Intel provides more of a 'package' to it's OEMs...
Also, part of the package Intel has is long term contracts and marketing arrangements such as the Intel Inside campaign, which locks OEMs into using Intel chips in return for sponsored advertising.
This pretty much consigns AMD to the home/consumer and white box market. The major vendors such as Dell and Compaq probably couldn't used AMD chips in their "Business Desktops" without some serious renegotiation. --
You're right - Shift+Restart is the same as exiting Windows to DOS and then typing WIN to restart Windows. This is usually OK because most Windows users will have no drivers running in DOS. --
XFree is fast enough for normal applications. Maybe you're worried about games and the like, but there market share considerations are always going to outweigh raw speed.
Personally, I think that the lack of an as-good-as-Windows web browser is more of a problem. --
Ah - but here's the problem. (My understanding is that any 'compound document' whether OLE or OpenParts is potentially an executable.) Sometimes you actually might wish to have scripts running automatically. (Think of JavaScript web pages for example.) As Microsoft has proved, flashing a "Do you really want to do this?" dialog box is no protection against stupid users.
You can get around this by sandboxing, but the solution in Lotus Notes and MS Office 2000 is the ability to have all script macros cryptographically signed. An administrator-controlled excution control list defines what runs and what can't run. A client-server approach might also work, but it's looking like both Gnome and KDE are pretty much desktop-oriented, and some sort of controlling server might not jibe with Linux culture.
Anyways, the standard Unix security answer of "it's a user space issue" ain't going to be good enough here. All MS Office viruses running under NT are user space only, and they're still raising plenty of hell.
It's great to see that minds are converging on this issue. This give open projects a chance to develop a much better implementation than Microsoft, as well as develop an alternative to OLE/COM, which is pretty much the only game in town as far as user apps go. --
Re:The license killed Mozilla
on
Browser news
·
· Score: 2
Doesn't Netscape have various commercial products which include Navigator? Wouldn't putting Mozilla under GPL also mean they would have to put the AOL client, their proprietary calendaring software, and their WebTV-like firmware under GPL?
Don't forget that Navigator/Mozilla was always intended to be a loss-leader for Netscape's commercial products. They're still a corporation seeking profit on intellectual property. They could still do that with a GPL licence, but it would be harder. --
The reason anyone cares at all is that many Lotus cc:Mail shops run on NetWare. Since Lotus is (finally!) killing cc:Mail in favor of Domino, this puts NetWare shops in the position of possibly installing Windows NT, something they do not want to do. Hopefully they'll give the Linux option a run.
(cc:Mail sucks eggs, but until very recently had 30-40% of the corporate e-mail market.)
BTW, not only is this old news as far as the press is concerned (annouced in 1998), it's ancient news in the Lotus world. Domino for NetWare has been a undead product for years. Furthermore, Domino has been running on Solaris x86 for a long time, so Linux support is somewhat obvious. --
Actually, old IBM Selectric typewriters came in a wide variety of interesting colors like dark blue, dark red, and dark black. (None of these fruity iMac colors!). These sold pretty well, so perhaps there's a pent up demand for non-beige.
On the other hand, I got a free IBM monitor and keyboard because they were black and someone thought they clashed.
Right. Don't forget that Microsoft orginally intended to replace DOS/Windows 3.1 with Windows NT. This failed largely due to backwards-compatibilty problems.
Windows 95/98 are just big piles of design comprimises designed to give the customer what they want (with some DirectX stuff added to kill the DOS game market). On the other hand, I have seem some really f*ing old DOS drivers loading successfully under 9x. --
Actually, Novell knew they had a case, but was too chickenshit to spoil their 'relationship' with Microsoft.
And you're right about DR-DOS being a somewhat valuable product. Millions of PCs still run DOS, and Microsoft still charges $50 for it, so there's definatly a market. --
Consider that there's been a bunch of SMP improvements done the Mindcraft test, and that it took an unreleased SMP kernel to beat a released Uniprocessor kernel. (Are the "special patches" in 2.2.10).
No intent to spread FUD, but perhaps Linux's SMP support isn't quite ready for prime time. The numbers seem to look that way.
(Perhaps this could explain the cognative dissonance between the Mindcraft/ZD results and the average Slashdotter testimonial? How much better would Linux have done if they just turned off the SMP support?) --
Unless you are serving to an Intranet, in which case you might actually have a switched 100Mbit network.
Multiple NICs might not be that common for web serving, where speed can be gained through HTML+application design more easily, but it's used all the time for other things. --
Using SP 4 instead of 5 makes sense, because Service Pack 5 was intended to be more of a bugfix release than anything. It's more stable (IMO) than SP4 or SP3, although there are known problems with RAS and a couple other things.
However, the tests used Service Pack *3*, which not only is seriously old, also misses several enhancements and security holes along the way.
They did manage to upgrade the Linux kernel to 2.2.9, noting that the stock 2.2.5 kernel in their distribution was slower. --
They're planning to make life difficult (although not impossible) even for that plan. Here's the direction Sony seems to be going in:
1) Use a universial digital interconnect like Firewire. 2) Encrypt the data on that wire. 3) Put the amplifiers inside of the speakers 4) Seal up the speakers so that you have to damage them to get to the actual speaker leads.
There's always going to be analog-out on certain systems, but I could see walking into a Good Guys in a few years and seing consumer rack systems that have no user-accessible analog or non-encrypted digital outputs. --
Slashdot Mirror
My understanding is that the trial is more about Microsoft's marketing practices than any particular technical issues. Specifically MS 'bundled' DOS and Windows and encouraged/forced OEMs to not support any OS other than DOS/Windows, shutting DR and Novell out of the market. (In addition Windows 95/98 disables DR-DOS during the upgrade for no real good technical reason.)
Even if the evidence that Micrsoft had DR-DOS detection code built into a Windows 3 beta is thrown out, it probably won't make that much of a difference in the trial.
Besides the DRDOS detecion code is hardly evidence of the supreme evil of Microsoft, as some folks here on
A) The code was only in certain closed betas. (It's wasn't like today where any schmuck who MS hasn't carpetbombed can buy a beta of Windows XYZ for $75).
B) The code was discovered, disassembled, and documented by a major computer magazine (either Byte or Dr.Dobbs?)
C) Lots of people ran DR-DOS under Windows 3.1. I don't think that there ever was perception that it didn't work.
D) Much worse than the beta detection code was a text file in the *released* version of Windows 3.1 saying that DR-DOS was not supported.
--
"Information Technology" to me sounds like a meaningless buzzword..
Har. Wait until you get a job. Virtually every corporation has a "Information Technology" or a "Management Information Systems" or in sillier places, even a "Client-Server Integration" department. In short it's the folks who run the computers.
--
The proper "gender-nonspecific" form for a singular person is he/him/his.
Not to be nitpicky, but the rules have changed. The spec now to switch alternately between he/him/his and she/her/hers, or better yet avoid these contructs as much as possible.
(At least when I went to college in the early 90s, using he/him/his exclusively would incure the wrath of those handing out the grades!)
--
Yes I know Mac Zealots in the real world. I just avoid discussing computers with them. Plenty of other things to talk about. The corporate Mac users I've known usually have a legitimate gripe. Like one place that removed everyones Macs in the middle of the night and replaced them with slower PCs and then told them to open their Illustrator files in CorelDraw. Call it Anti-Mac advocacy.
The ongoing challenge of corporate MIS departments is to provide solutions. When you've got someone there yelling "Product X sucks! Use Product Y!", you've got someone with different interests, and it's just best to get the hell out of their way. And you're right about Microsoft - if someone says they've got a problem, Microsoft will try to build a solution for it.
--
5. Network interoperablity. Until recently, Apple refused to build Novell and MS/IBM client support into the OS. This forced network administrators to load semi-stable AppleShare extensions on their servers and leading to a Mac ban at many corporations.
6. Production Capablities. In the 80s and early 90s, Apple couldn't make enough Macs to meet demand (even with their 50% profit margin). A chunk of this missed opportunity probably ended up as Windows users.
7. Apple
PS - I never understand why people say "Platform X failed because their advocates are such Assholes!" I mean, the only place you see OS advocates is if you go to a flamey place like comp.*.advocacy or slashdot, and then you basically asking for trouble. It's not like OS advocates are running around keying your car or stealing your girlfriend or anything like that.
--
By your argument, you could say that Microsoft has a community of users.
This may be shocking to your Linux-addled brain, but Microsoft does have several gigantic user and technical communities. Community != Open Source.
--
The high end gaming market is a pretty signifcant profit center for all these companies, so Quake numbers will certainly help AMD a little.
However, the real money and market share in the PC business is volume, and that means business desktops and low-end home machines. These machines ususally ship with really cheap video systems such as S3 or the Intel one.
--
Hey, actually /. is a place for the kind of computer enthusiasts who brag about keeping their 386s in service with Linux!
Actually, the problem that both Intel and AMD face is the declining returns of faster CPU speeds. I run a P5-133 at home and a PII-350? at work, and other than than booting NT, there's almost no perceptual difference between the two. Of course the home machine has SCSI, better video, and more memory, but by spec, the CPU in the PII should be 3-4x faster. (Other than MAME, I don't really play any games however.)
The real problem here is that Intel is squeezing the OEMs by the balls. The "Intel Inside" marketing lock-in ensures that the big vendors have their offerings up to Intel's latest clock speeds, but the market demands a $1200 PC. Well, if you're Compaq or Dell, how are you going to to build a $1200 PC with a $700 CPU and still try to make any money? Cut corners, that's how. Hence, crappy video and disk subsystems, and a bunch of crap components ready to die and get thrown away in 2 years.
Even for the price difference between a PIII-450 and a PIII-550, they could more than double the memory or get a better video accelerator. Hell, even Windows 98 is going to work better and play better with 128MB of RAM instead of the standard 64MB.
Compaq, Dell, et al have been sucking at Intel's teet for so long that they haven't been serving their customers, and they haven't realized that they've consigned themselves for making a 2% profit margin screwing hard drives into essentially Intel-manfuactured systems. If it hadn't been the rise of big high-profit x86 servers (thank NT for that!), all of these clowns would be out of business. (And watch while Intel destroys the server profit center by driving commodity machines into that market.)
Hopefully, people will get past these magic megahertz numbers and realize that the only difference between this year's K7 or PIII and a Pentium Pro from three years ago is an barely perceptable increase in Quake frame rate or RC5 or kernel complies or whatever. I know everyone on slashdot loves the latest and greatest, but we're way beyond the point where any of this stuff makes any real difference.
(End of rant - too much coffee consumed already.)
--
Also, it has to be noted that Intel provides more of a 'package' to it's OEMs...
Also, part of the package Intel has is long term contracts and marketing arrangements such as the Intel Inside campaign, which locks OEMs into using Intel chips in return for sponsored advertising.
This pretty much consigns AMD to the home/consumer and white box market. The major vendors such as Dell and Compaq probably couldn't used AMD chips in their "Business Desktops" without some serious renegotiation.
--
You're right - Shift+Restart is the same as exiting Windows to DOS and then typing WIN to restart Windows. This is usually OK because most Windows users will have no drivers running in DOS.
--
XFree is fast enough for normal applications. Maybe you're worried about games and the like, but there market share considerations are always going to outweigh raw speed.
Personally, I think that the lack of an as-good-as-Windows web browser is more of a problem.
--
Ah - but here's the problem. (My understanding is that any 'compound document' whether OLE or OpenParts is potentially an executable.) Sometimes you actually might wish to have scripts running automatically. (Think of JavaScript web pages for example.) As Microsoft has proved, flashing a "Do you really want to do this?" dialog box is no protection against stupid users.
You can get around this by sandboxing, but the solution in Lotus Notes and MS Office 2000 is the ability to have all script macros cryptographically signed. An administrator-controlled excution control list defines what runs and what can't run. A client-server approach might also work, but it's looking like both Gnome and KDE are pretty much desktop-oriented, and some sort of controlling server might not jibe with Linux culture.
Anyways, the standard Unix security answer of "it's a user space issue" ain't going to be good enough here. All MS Office viruses running under NT are user space only, and they're still raising plenty of hell.
It's great to see that minds are converging on this issue. This give open projects a chance to develop a much better implementation than Microsoft, as well as develop an alternative to OLE/COM, which is pretty much the only game in town as far as user apps go.
--
Doesn't Netscape have various commercial products which include Navigator? Wouldn't putting Mozilla under GPL also mean they would have to put the AOL client, their proprietary calendaring software, and their WebTV-like firmware under GPL?
Don't forget that Navigator/Mozilla was always intended to be a loss-leader for Netscape's commercial products. They're still a corporation seeking profit on intellectual property. They could still do that with a GPL licence, but it would be harder.
--
The reason anyone cares at all is that many Lotus cc:Mail shops run on NetWare. Since Lotus is (finally!) killing cc:Mail in favor of Domino, this puts NetWare shops in the position of possibly installing Windows NT, something they do not want to do. Hopefully they'll give the Linux option a run.
(cc:Mail sucks eggs, but until very recently had 30-40% of the corporate e-mail market.)
BTW, not only is this old news as far as the press is concerned (annouced in 1998), it's ancient news in the Lotus world. Domino for NetWare has been a undead product for years. Furthermore, Domino has been running on Solaris x86 for a long time, so Linux support is somewhat obvious.
--
Actually, old IBM Selectric typewriters came in a wide variety of interesting colors like dark blue, dark red, and dark black. (None of these fruity iMac colors!). These sold pretty well, so perhaps there's a pent up demand for non-beige.
On the other hand, I got a free IBM monitor and keyboard because they were black and someone thought they clashed.
--
Hey! You turned a perfectly good Linux versus BSD flamewar into a Linux versus Windows flamewar!
--
Oops!
--
Right. Don't forget that Microsoft orginally intended to replace DOS/Windows 3.1 with Windows NT. This failed largely due to backwards-compatibilty problems.
Windows 95/98 are just big piles of design comprimises designed to give the customer what they want (with some DirectX stuff added to kill the DOS game market). On the other hand, I have seem some really f*ing old DOS drivers loading successfully under 9x.
--
Actually, Novell knew they had a case, but was too chickenshit to spoil their 'relationship' with Microsoft.
And you're right about DR-DOS being a somewhat valuable product. Millions of PCs still run DOS, and Microsoft still charges $50 for it, so there's definatly a market.
--
I found it kind of strange that Linux performed better with SMP turned off than with it turned on, unless you applied "special patches".
http://www.heise.de/ct/english/99/13/186-1/pic1
Consider that there's been a bunch of SMP improvements done the Mindcraft test, and that it took an unreleased SMP kernel to beat a released Uniprocessor kernel. (Are the "special patches" in 2.2.10).
No intent to spread FUD, but perhaps Linux's SMP support isn't quite ready for prime time. The numbers seem to look that way.
(Perhaps this could explain the cognative dissonance between the Mindcraft/ZD results and the average Slashdotter testimonial? How much better would Linux have done if they just turned off the SMP support?)
--
Unless you are serving to an Intranet, in which case you might actually have a switched 100Mbit network.
Multiple NICs might not be that common for web serving, where speed can be gained through HTML+application design more easily, but it's used all the time for other things.
--
I don't know if the processor-NIC affinity is so ridiculous. It actually does make alot of sense for those bizarre moments when you will have >2 NICs.
Apparently it will be enabled by default in Windows 2000, so I wouldn't call it cheating either.
--
Do you have a URL that indicates that Microsoft used SP4 instead of SP5 for the ZD tests?
--
Using SP 4 instead of 5 makes sense, because Service Pack 5 was intended to be more of a bugfix release than anything. It's more stable (IMO) than SP4 or SP3, although there are known problems with RAS and a couple other things.
However, the tests used Service Pack *3*, which not only is seriously old, also misses several enhancements and security holes along the way.
They did manage to upgrade the Linux kernel to 2.2.9, noting that the stock 2.2.5 kernel in their distribution was slower.
--
They're planning to make life difficult (although not impossible) even for that plan. Here's the direction Sony seems to be going in:
1) Use a universial digital interconnect like Firewire.
2) Encrypt the data on that wire.
3) Put the amplifiers inside of the speakers
4) Seal up the speakers so that you have to damage them to get to the actual speaker leads.
There's always going to be analog-out on certain systems, but I could see walking into a Good Guys in a few years and seing consumer rack systems that have no user-accessible analog or non-encrypted digital outputs.
--