Actually, the IBM Brand was seriously tainted at that point. A lot of people (and companies) saw OS/2 as part of a naked attempt to force PCs into a proprietary hardware model -- which not only had huge fees associated with it (much larger than Microsoft's) -- it would also limit the development of things like PC server systems. If we're just talking about "branding", Microsoft had a lot more going for it at that point than IBM.
On top of that, OS/2 2.0 came with a very poorly executed UI in an era when people were just starting to use GUI systems.
Other BSD distros never used Mach and never had this problem. (Of course, they never had a software stack like OpenStep either.)
At this point, everything else on the OS depends on Mach, which makes it expensive to "switch kernels". And since 90% of Apple sales are consumer desktops where I/O isn't that important, it's probably just not worth it.
Mach is really cool. Mach IPC makes signals, sockets, pipes, shared memory, SysV IPC, etc. look positively clumsy
This is interesting, but I strongly suspect that Mach won for OSX primarily due to time-to-market and legacy considerations. If they were to "do it from scratch", would anyone use Mach?
Apple allows 64 bit processes on Tiger without breaking everyone's hardware.
Hey -- that was the great thing about Windows 95 too! Well, not really.
Given the history of "thunking layers" and the horrendus 16/32-bit endless migration on the PC side, I can understand why Microsoft in particular went right to 64-bit native.
(Although I heard that Apple uses a special PPC mode to support 64-bit on G5 chips, so I'm not sure if Tiger will have any 64-bit support when 'Woodcrest' or whatever ships in six months.)
These are low-power chips that are based on the laptop models. The real "Core" Xeons are coming in a few months and will have a bus at double that (IIRC).
If you're using Windows Explorer, SMB is extremely glacial compared to FTP or HTTP/DAV/Web Folders in the same environment -- over a 128K ADSL link, which would have been blazing in the bitnet days.
Admittedly it's better from the CMD line, so that's not entirely the protocol's fault. But it is slow -- probably a ton of error-checking and authentication overhead.
If anything, I'm suprised it took them this long to take "UNIX" seriously.
One of the biggest thing that's been going on in enterprise computing is the widescale dumping of UNIX/RISC in favor of Linux on cheap x86 boxes. Microsoft has almost entirely missed out on this movement. If they can make Windows into a half-decent *nix, there's certain a big growth opportunity for them.
And while the usual crowd is suspicous of MS's motives, I'm sure there's some developers out there excited about Microsoft embracing* a non-proprietary "industry standard" API. It's a big step for them. No longer would you need special Windows ports of software like Apache and Postgres --- in theory, you could just "make install".
Your entire story is make-believe. WordPerfect for OS/2 PM was released and it was a complete steaming pile -- even worse than the Windows version (which started with 5.1, not 6.0).
For 2D work (Photoshop etc), the older Intel Extreme graphics is perfectly adequate -- unless you are running through Aero/Quartz/etc, but as of yet Photoshop uses the classic APIs on both Mac/Windows.
The Core Solo is of course a newer, improved P-M chip (also has a faster bus). But the difference in availability and pricing should be considered a temporary supply issue. In a matter of a couple months, the MIni's chip will have filtered into all the low-mid level Dell laptops.
(That process may seem rather quick if you are used to PowerPC vendors, but hey, welcome to Intel!)
You're comparing a previous-generation CPU and chipset (Pentium M and 915G) to the Mac mini's current-gen (Core Solo/Duo and 945G)
Maybe that means a couple percents in benchmarks, but they're basically identical.
I have a 3 year old laptop with a Pentium-M 1.5Ghz CPU, and that was a lower-end model at the time. In otherwords, pretending that the bottom Mini model is bleeding edge in anyway is false. (Although kudos for them for FW and digital audio.)
The heyday of Iomega was like 10 years ago, and Syquest 15 years ago. How many people owned PCs at all, much less high-end ones who needed removable storage? A lot less than today.
Great link, and thanks for the correction. I'm curious about the US market figures though, those numbers contradict something else I possibly read somewhere at sometime.
Re:NES for the 21st Century
on
Flashback NES
·
· Score: 1
I would categorize all the games you listed as cartoony/cutesy except possibly Iron Sword. At least compared to Galaga etc on the Atari systems. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Presumably, Managed Copy could have a policy of "Copy this as much as you'd like", and the software would just popup a button or something -- which isn't currently possible with standard DVD software.
Anyway, the goal of Managed Copy is to make the disks slightly more useful, in order to discourage honest customers from cracking the copy protection (as with DVD).
About 5-6 years ago, Intel had a spec for something called "Device Bay", which was a standardized slot for removable hard disks. If something like this could catch on, the disk industry would probably respond with cheaper, smaller, more durable drives.
Re:NES for the 21st Century
on
Flashback NES
·
· Score: 1
Pretty much all of them? Before the NES showed up, the videogame world was dominated by "Kill The Aliens, Save The Earth" type stuff. NES games were mostly colorful and cartoony and looked very different from Atari-style games.
I don't know this. DVD CSS was roundly criticized as being defective before DVD even hit the market, by Disney and other studios. I don't see anyone saying things like that about the next-gen copy-protection layers.
People remember the betamax affair, and know that this could ultimately get messy. Everyone will wait until companies solve their petty squabbles.
This is a misreading of what happened with Betamax. IIRC, the marketshare figures went something like this:
Year 1: 40% VHS 60% Beta (Beta was out first) Year 2: 50% VHS 50% Beta (Tie -- either format could win!) Year 3: 90% VHS 10% Beta (Cheap VHS players destroy Beta quickly)
So, it's not that consumers waited. Once VHS was established, they all just went and bought it because it was cheaper.
(Also, Hollywood was also "neutral" in the VHS/Betamax war, which they certainly aren't in this format war.)
From MS's perspective, it's probably easier to work with the US "last mile" companies than japanese consumer electronics folks.
SBC/AT&T is already talking about a special DSL service that will provide 10mbps for SBC Video-On-Demand content, but remain at 1.5mbps for usual Internet stuff. If they go ahead with this plan, they'll need someone to sell them the software, and MS is an obvious choice for that.
There's no doubt that 90% of the support for Blu-Ray is not due to technical factors, but instead based on the plan that Sony will be massively subsidizing it with the Playstation 3.
But, from Microsoft's perspective, the disk battle isn't really that important. In fact it barely makes a difference to them -- they're just involved to fuck shit up.
For MS, having the XBox360 succeed is much more important than having HD-DVD succeed. And now it looks like XBox360 will be on the market 1.5 years eariler than PS3 and be substantially cheaper to build. That might not be the decisive factor in the video game wars, but it certainly helps them. So, I think they made the right decision to not wait for HD-DVD and just sell video games while Hollywood&Japan has their idiotic format war.
(Note, I don't play console games [made after 1988], I don't really care who "wins", and I'm going to avoid any fanboy arguments. Just stating what MS's strategy seems to be.)
(5) True. But what the IT industry really needs is another Syquest or Iomega to come along and define a storage-centric format -- without all the bullshit politics surrounding Hollywood and video game consoles, and the enormous license royalties involved.
The deal apparently is that certain parts of HD-DVD will be included "for free" in Windows Vista -- including the iHD navigation software and the MS VC-9 codec -- that someone would otherwise have to pay for with Bluray.
There's also the argument that MS is up-in-arms about Blu-Ray's requirement of a JVM, but I think HP/Dell/etc all already bundle Sun Java.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the IBM Brand was seriously tainted at that point. A lot of people (and companies) saw OS/2 as part of a naked attempt to force PCs into a proprietary hardware model -- which not only had huge fees associated with it (much larger than Microsoft's) -- it would also limit the development of things like PC server systems. If we're just talking about "branding", Microsoft had a lot more going for it at that point than IBM.
On top of that, OS/2 2.0 came with a very poorly executed UI in an era when people were just starting to use GUI systems.
Other BSD distros never used Mach and never had this problem. (Of course, they never had a software stack like OpenStep either.)
At this point, everything else on the OS depends on Mach, which makes it expensive to "switch kernels". And since 90% of Apple sales are consumer desktops where I/O isn't that important, it's probably just not worth it.
Mach is really cool. Mach IPC makes signals, sockets, pipes, shared memory, SysV IPC, etc. look positively clumsy
This is interesting, but I strongly suspect that Mach won for OSX primarily due to time-to-market and legacy considerations. If they were to "do it from scratch", would anyone use Mach?
Apple allows 64 bit processes on Tiger without breaking everyone's hardware.
Hey -- that was the great thing about Windows 95 too! Well, not really.
Given the history of "thunking layers" and the horrendus 16/32-bit endless migration on the PC side, I can understand why Microsoft in particular went right to 64-bit native.
(Although I heard that Apple uses a special PPC mode to support 64-bit on G5 chips, so I'm not sure if Tiger will have any 64-bit support when 'Woodcrest' or whatever ships in six months.)
Thanks for the correction!
I don't believe that any common OS treats 2x or 4x Opteron systems as NUMA.
Re: 667 Mhz bus
These are low-power chips that are based on the laptop models. The real "Core" Xeons are coming in a few months and will have a bus at double that (IIRC).
If you're using Windows Explorer, SMB is extremely glacial compared to FTP or HTTP/DAV/Web Folders in the same environment -- over a 128K ADSL link, which would have been blazing in the bitnet days.
Admittedly it's better from the CMD line, so that's not entirely the protocol's fault. But it is slow -- probably a ton of error-checking and authentication overhead.
It is news because it is now built into Windows 2003 Server.
The Unix features will also be built into certain versions of Vista later this year.
If anything, I'm suprised it took them this long to take "UNIX" seriously.
One of the biggest thing that's been going on in enterprise computing is the widescale dumping of UNIX/RISC in favor of Linux on cheap x86 boxes. Microsoft has almost entirely missed out on this movement. If they can make Windows into a half-decent *nix, there's certain a big growth opportunity for them.
And while the usual crowd is suspicous of MS's motives, I'm sure there's some developers out there excited about Microsoft embracing* a non-proprietary "industry standard" API. It's a big step for them. No longer would you need special Windows ports of software like Apache and Postgres --- in theory, you could just "make install".
* word used with caution
Your entire story is make-believe. WordPerfect for OS/2 PM was released and it was a complete steaming pile -- even worse than the Windows version (which started with 5.1, not 6.0).
For 2D work (Photoshop etc), the older Intel Extreme graphics is perfectly adequate -- unless you are running through Aero/Quartz/etc, but as of yet Photoshop uses the classic APIs on both Mac/Windows.
The Core Solo is of course a newer, improved P-M chip (also has a faster bus). But the difference in availability and pricing should be considered a temporary supply issue. In a matter of a couple months, the MIni's chip will have filtered into all the low-mid level Dell laptops.
(That process may seem rather quick if you are used to PowerPC vendors, but hey, welcome to Intel!)
You're comparing a previous-generation CPU and chipset (Pentium M and 915G) to the Mac mini's current-gen (Core Solo/Duo and 945G)
Maybe that means a couple percents in benchmarks, but they're basically identical.
I have a 3 year old laptop with a Pentium-M 1.5Ghz CPU, and that was a lower-end model at the time. In otherwords, pretending that the bottom Mini model is bleeding edge in anyway is false. (Although kudos for them for FW and digital audio.)
The heyday of Iomega was like 10 years ago, and Syquest 15 years ago. How many people owned PCs at all, much less high-end ones who needed removable storage? A lot less than today.
Great link, and thanks for the correction. I'm curious about the US market figures though, those numbers contradict something else I possibly read somewhere at sometime.
Basically the same argument as Sony and Blu-ray.
I would categorize all the games you listed as cartoony/cutesy except possibly Iron Sword. At least compared to Galaga etc on the Atari systems. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Presumably, Managed Copy could have a policy of "Copy this as much as you'd like", and the software would just popup a button or something -- which isn't currently possible with standard DVD software.
Anyway, the goal of Managed Copy is to make the disks slightly more useful, in order to discourage honest customers from cracking the copy protection (as with DVD).
About 5-6 years ago, Intel had a spec for something called "Device Bay", which was a standardized slot for removable hard disks. If something like this could catch on, the disk industry would probably respond with cheaper, smaller, more durable drives.
Pretty much all of them? Before the NES showed up, the videogame world was dominated by "Kill The Aliens, Save The Earth" type stuff. NES games were mostly colorful and cartoony and looked very different from Atari-style games.
I don't know this. DVD CSS was roundly criticized as being defective before DVD even hit the market, by Disney and other studios. I don't see anyone saying things like that about the next-gen copy-protection layers.
People remember the betamax affair, and know that this could ultimately get messy. Everyone will wait until companies solve their petty squabbles.
This is a misreading of what happened with Betamax. IIRC, the marketshare figures went something like this:
Year 1: 40% VHS 60% Beta (Beta was out first)
Year 2: 50% VHS 50% Beta (Tie -- either format could win!)
Year 3: 90% VHS 10% Beta (Cheap VHS players destroy Beta quickly)
So, it's not that consumers waited. Once VHS was established, they all just went and bought it because it was cheaper.
(Also, Hollywood was also "neutral" in the VHS/Betamax war, which they certainly aren't in this format war.)
From MS's perspective, it's probably easier to work with the US "last mile" companies than japanese consumer electronics folks.
SBC/AT&T is already talking about a special DSL service that will provide 10mbps for SBC Video-On-Demand content, but remain at 1.5mbps for usual Internet stuff. If they go ahead with this plan, they'll need someone to sell them the software, and MS is an obvious choice for that.
There's no doubt that 90% of the support for Blu-Ray is not due to technical factors, but instead based on the plan that Sony will be massively subsidizing it with the Playstation 3.
But, from Microsoft's perspective, the disk battle isn't really that important. In fact it barely makes a difference to them -- they're just involved to fuck shit up.
For MS, having the XBox360 succeed is much more important than having HD-DVD succeed. And now it looks like XBox360 will be on the market 1.5 years eariler than PS3 and be substantially cheaper to build. That might not be the decisive factor in the video game wars, but it certainly helps them. So, I think they made the right decision to not wait for HD-DVD and just sell video games while Hollywood&Japan has their idiotic format war.
(Note, I don't play console games [made after 1988], I don't really care who "wins", and I'm going to avoid any fanboy arguments. Just stating what MS's strategy seems to be.)
(1) Who cares.
(2-4) Possibly true, but the hype circa 2002-2003 didn't reflect this. (eg http://tokyopia.com/tk/archives/000094.php)
(5) True. But what the IT industry really needs is another Syquest or Iomega to come along and define a storage-centric format -- without all the bullshit politics surrounding Hollywood and video game consoles, and the enormous license royalties involved.
The deal apparently is that certain parts of HD-DVD will be included "for free" in Windows Vista -- including the iHD navigation software and the MS VC-9 codec -- that someone would otherwise have to pay for with Bluray.
There's also the argument that MS is up-in-arms about Blu-Ray's requirement of a JVM, but I think HP/Dell/etc all already bundle Sun Java.